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some days you're the hero, other days you're the other thing
Guess who ran out of executive function and never got around to posting the remainder of their Fallen Hero: Retribution liveblog notes? This guy!
Below the cuts: my remaining two characters (so far), plus some poking around for alternate scenes and secrets afterwards.
I think it's high time I tried someone more decidedly orange, so: Meet Ariel Contreras, a.k.a. Deliverance. Noted former hero and soon to be far more noted nexus of controversy, if they have their way. Someday soon, the mere words "Deliverance was right" will be sufficient to sentence any discussion to the same incendiary end as Deliverance's enemies.
Back in the day, Ariel quickly grew into and thrived in the heroic role they'd created for themself, and—contrary to appearances—felt increasingly optimistic that they would continue in it for the rest of their life. Needless to say, they did not, but they've done their best to roll with the setbacks to their career/sanity/ability to ever trust again. The loss of their naïve faith in humanity was painful, yes, but better that they learn and mature than the alternative. It certainly hasn't dampened their ambitions.
Ariel would be the first to assure you that she's not a misanthrope, just a realist. She retains a fondness for many of the people around her, though it's a lonelier, more distant kind now that she knows the futility of relying on them for anything. To hold humanity's nature against them would be unreasonable, and Ariel is an eminently reasonable person. Instead she's learned to handle people more proactively when she needs something from them. Thankfully, after years of training and practice she's confident in her ability to persuade others to her cause without the slightest need for telepathy… though that option's always at the ready, just in case.
Very high Arrogance — if there's one thing Ariel knows, it's that the best liars tell the truth. Ruthless, calculating, and adept at rationalizing harm to innocents if it's for the cause, though their strategies only rarely call for that. You never use force when persuasion will do — and to admit there's anything their powers of persuasion can't do would be to admit there are things outside of their control.
Nonbinary trans woman, they or she pronouns — unless you deliberately misgender her, in which case it's definitely "she" to you, or share your hot takes on nonbinary identities, in which case it's definitely "they". Fortunately, few people these days need to be reminded twice…
Man, it's always a weird feeling for the first few scenes when I start a file with m!Ortega.
While mob boss Ariel would be, frankly, perfect, there is absolutely no way she's passing up the anarchist option for that. LET'S GO.
Only getting this after seeing every other career path's distraction tactic is amazing. Anarchist villain best villain.
That's extremely Ariel of you, Ariel.
Well that's a heck of a worldbuilding detail to learn in passing. I mean, not as much as LASER DOLPHINS, but still.
Huh, and here I always assumed it was specifically to humanize Argent. (…Although I guess Herald would be diplomatic enough not to put it that way regardless.)
Huh, until now I'd just figured he was private about his personal life. Runaway with family still looking for him, maybe? He did start as a teenager, and while he projects the aura of Normal Nice Young Man so effectively it hadn't jumped out at me before, he's never even vaguely indicated he has anyone in his life outside of being a hero, not even when he's off-duty and looking at art. That could be strict personal/professional boundaries like I've assumed, but it could also indicate that he doesn't actually have much of a personal life… I mean, when he said he preferred "Herald", wasn't his exact wording something like "that's who I am now"?
Not that he makes a secret of how important being a hero is to him, I mean, but it's funny that that angle hadn't even occurred to me until now. It's a very powerful aura of Normal Nice Young Man.
please share this footage with me
I will offer literally anything
Cracking up at Ariel just happening to pick the exact question I've been hoping for a chance to ask since Rebirth.
That's a really good character note, in the worst way possible. I love the moments that shine a light on the less obvious ways the MC's fucked-up background skews their frame of reference. Obviously they struggle to remember that the kind of abuse they suffered as a matter of course is unthinkable by most people's standards, but they also have no way of easily distinguishing the parts that are "normal". In this case, it's not even that they had illusions a human would never be treated that way; they just naturally assumed that Re-Genes were subjected to painful mods for the same reason they were subjected to everything else, not that severe chronic pain was an underdiscussed side effect of all major modwork.
No wonder they're so surprised every time they realize someone can relate to their experiences.
Pretty sure the word you're looking for is dependent, not addicted. :/ The problem is that they're in constant pain, not that they're treating the pain.
…You know, that does make me wonder—what's it like trying to get your meds in the Free Western Territories? I mean, the point is probably moot unless you're rich enough to afford whatever they charge, and quality control is probably non-existent, but… you probably don't have to jump through a million hoops to prove you absolutely, definitely need your pain treated with actual medicine and aren't just a drug-seeking addict.
Anyway, love how Ortega's health turns out to be worse than we knew literally every time it's mentioned. (And by "love" I mean the opposite of love, to be clear.)
I love all the individualized dialogue Rosie and Bo get in this game.
Huh, that's interesting, Ariel isn't bothering to go after the regenerator? Too focused on politics for personal goals, or is there a prerequisite for learning about it that didn't happen this playthrough?
I... see*?????
* I do not see.
Oh, good for him. (His main stat is CHA, Ariel, what did you expect?) You know, I always appreciated how in Rebirth, Herald won't even consider fighting a villain with hostages until you start hurting them—it's one of those nice little characterization details that just doesn't quite gel with the MC's assumptions. Their PoV is so determined to read Herald as cocky and reckless that it's easy to view his actions through that lens, and the way Ortega describes him seems to back that up, but when viewed in a vacuum it always looked less like overconfidence and more like he just doesn't consider self-preservation an option when there's a day to be saved. Which is an adjacent character archetype, but one with some pretty key differences.
Well, that's horrifying! What would he even have been, late teens?
Could definitely explain some things about Herald, in any case.
Jesus christ that's even younger than I was thinking. That's barely out of middle school!
I see why he doesn't talk about them.
(This scene: "And now, gamers, please open your textbooks to Chapter 8: Language and Social Class. This will be on the quiz!")
Huh. So keeping his name private might be "hiding from family" like I first guessed, but it could also be more of a "not inviting trouble by using the family name" thing.
Oh my god.
I love that he's fully aware it's obvious.
…Hm. Ariel's actual first response would be to very pointedly remind him he's attracted to a visibly trans, queer person and see if it makes him squirm or say anything stupid, but if that's not an option… Well, why not, it can be a date. That's hardly a commitment to anything; it could end up being useful and/or fun.
LMAO it actually changes your relationship status to that. Amazing.
Hm, okay, looks like the game assumes by default that trans MCs pass as cis and can't discuss the subject without it being a big coming out moment? Really hadn't expected that for a character who's already openly nonbinary (most NB transmasc/transfem people I've known aren't open about being NB with people they wouldn't want to know they're trans), but I guess obviously the game can't account for every conceivable variation, and the MC is such a private person in general that I can see why that's the default approach? So we'll just call it a night with that frankly incredible new relationship status.
Interestingly, this is the first playthrough where I've never actually done anything to piss off Hollow Ground, even if I've made some threatening comments in the general direction of their status quo. Wonder if that changes much? (I suspect the answer is no—which would be very telling, if true.)
In any case... Hm. I could make a case for either response to the invitation, but I think Ariel's ambition and confidence in their ability to use people would have to win out. They're not all that keen on Hollow Ground finding out their identity—people who already know and like Ariel, they're less concerned about, but potential enemies just looking for leverage? Ugh—but if they have to, they can at least act like they wanted it that way.
That's interesting, Hollow Ground will actually shut off the dampeners if you ask? I suppose they're a powerful enough telepath they figure it'll be fine.
Oh, I think this is the first time I've been able to select that third one! Presumably because Ariel's gotten better with Ace's powers than in any of my previous runs?
Oooh boy, woke up in the hospital with dampeners on. Someone's figured it out, then.
God, this is really good.
Oh, Ortega didn't suspect? Interesting.
—Wow, I didn't expect playing dumb to actually work. I actually feel a little bad now!
…
I… I think the CHA/WIS build might be slightly OP. Holy shit.
(Especially in a world of people who never fucking communicate.)
Presented without comment.
Oh, honey. :(
So, what it sounds like is… His brother told him what was going on with their family—that he was being abused, I'm guessing, possibly with a more dramatic class of dark family secret involved as well. Daniel was fourteen and unprepared to handle anyone in so desperate a situation, let alone his own brother claiming awful things about their family, and unsurprisingly didn't handle it that well; at the time, he was more focused on convincing his brother not to leave him behind than on the fact that he was desperate enough to turn to almost-certain suicide. (While Daniel's said they were too young and stupid to recognize it as that at the time, I wonder if that was really true of his brother.) And so of course he blames himself for not doing anything to help his brother. A hero would have saved him.
(Really liking this parallel between Daniel's brother and the MC, incidentally.)
Anyway, uh... I guess Ariel lives with Daniel now! Not really something they were planning on when they agreed to one date, but... well, I guess unforeseen eventualities like this are why you network in advance, right? He doesn't suspect them of anything, respects boundaries, and lives a fairly privacy-conscious lifestyle, so really this is a better option than they'd have expected to have.
Wow. Maybe Ariel really has prepared for everything.
Welp, that's a loaded comment if I've ever heard one.
Oh, well okay!
Anyway congrats on your new regenerator, Ariel was too busy making The Man's life difficult to notice it I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Being friends with Argent really is just like being friends with Sidestep was. :')
Weird! What could possibly be causing a thing like that???
While this is hardly my first time seeing it, I want to state for the record that the "Project Director" part makes me laugh every single time.
Fifth playthrough should be my last proper one for now, since I've reached the last of my properly fleshed-out characters, so: Meet Cassidy Morse, a.k.a. Quietus.
Compared to some of my MCs, Cassidy's basic personality has changed very little since their* hero days. They remain incurably cynical and so quiet they tend to jump-scare people just by speaking, but beneath the resting bitch face, a caring person with arguably overactive empathy. Their biggest scars are more deeply buried: these days, the power of their self-loathing is matched only by that of the small, white-hot ember of spite that refuses to let their enemies win by dying, and it's that spite that's kept them alive all these years.
Quietus is Cassidy's diametric opposite: a flashy, menacing, and thoroughly unignorable monstrosity. Every facet of their appearance and persona is calculated to be as terrifying as possible, in the hopes of preempting the need for bloodshed through sheer intimidation. …That said, in the course of their debut, they wound up getting far more into the role of sadistic, unstoppable terror than they'd ever planned for. They are deeply disquieted by this self-discovery.
Cass's puppet, Canan, is essentially their humansona—the person they like to imagine they'd be if they'd been born a normal human with a normal life. She and her friendship with Dr. Mortum serve as an important outlet for Cassidy, whose efforts to sever old attachments have been complicated by their desperate desire for human connection and feelings for their old friends. As of the end of Rebirth, they've made the conscious choice to resolve that internal conflict by sublimating their enduring feelings for Ortega into Canan's new friendship with her.
* This is also another of my gender-questioning characters, and since essentially the only part of that I'm sure about yet is that "he" is the wrong pronoun, I guess I'll default to neutral "they" for lack of a better idea? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As far as I can tell, Ortega thinks this solely because she suspects Cassidy is Quietus, which is the most painfully Ortega thing I've ever heard. I mean, sure, Quietus didn't actually make any points unless you count "fear me" as a point, but they did make that one pretty convincingly! And yeah, they did land half Ortega's team in the hospital with broken bones, but… I'm sure Cass had a good reason for that! He even seemed to feel bad about one of the broken bones! It's fine. In this house we stan the artist formerly known as Sidestep, even when they break our arm and dump us to become a mob boss.
Cass's choice to move into a management role, incidentally, is as much a matter of preventative self-care as it is of ambition. A major factor in the decision is the hope that working with a team will provide them with a more appropriate outlet for their social needs—and curb the worst of their fears about what they might do (to themself or others) with no one watching.
Oooooh. She has Cassidy absolutely dead to rights; I couldn't have planned this scene better myself. Perfect.
Wow, I wonder why Dr. Mortum might know about Ortega's private medical issues! 🤔
Aaaaaaaah??
Oof, it's never a good sign when we split into simultaneous plain and italic.
—Also holy shit, did that drain all my willpower in one go?? That's certainly new. Fuck.
Holy shit, Cassidy.
(I am so thrilled it was the shy, mousy character with the PG-rated swears that got this scene.)
Huh. That's interesting. Very pretty name, in any case.
Oof at the bit about m!Mortum being treated as a feminist traitor when he came out. Too real.
Ah, I see this is our first time reading the mind of someone with ADHD. :P
(…I typed that as an offhand joke, but actually, now that I think about it Mortum absolutely has ADHD. Such a clear case that I'm surprised it didn't occur to me earlier.)
Also lol, of course they're blue and orange.
Man. A part of me wishes I hadn't met HG for the first time with an MC who could detect their mind control, because I'm really curious to know whether I'd have caught on in the slightest.
The whole thing is so subtle and cleverly implemented, in particular the fact that the handshake is the deciding factor. It's right there in plain sight in the text—your choices are literally just two versions of "Shake their hand" and two versions of "Don't shake their hand"!—and yet even if I'd realized something was off, I doubt I'd even have considered that the handshake itself was important without having my attention explicitly drawn to it. It's just such obvious shorthand for "Be diplomatic"/"Be hostile", and it's such a standard set of choices for Fallen Hero that my mind passes right over it without stopping. I'm genuinely kind of stunned at how well-crafted it is to hide in plain sight!
Aside from that, what actual text changes I can discern from memory seem subtle enough that I can't imagine I'd have noticed anything weird—so far, the MC has rationalized their reactions thoroughly enough that I'd be more likely to question their judgment, if anything, than the integrity of their mind. The fact that it removes the option to refuse should be the biggest giveaway, but at the same time… Not only does that come right after their initial offer-you-can't-refuse (which the story justifies without mind control), but even players who do find it weird will almost certainly attribute it to uncharacteristically railroad-y game design, not something with an in-universe explanation. I assume I'd notice if it changed on replay (…although there's a nonzero chance it could slip by me if I didn't seriously consider refusing on either run), but without anything to compare it to…
Can't believe all the potential we were missing out on without height options.
Ooh, this is new! So if you reject the body you're currently in, you wake up in the other one? That could get very interesting, given Cass's own body is still presumably in the hospital…
"You feel nothing" is a really cute use of the standard willpower blurb.
He sounds delightful.
It took the simultaneous achievement popups for both "Kidnapper" and "Kidnapped" for me to consider the sheer WTF of this scenario from the Rangers' point of view. At least Ortega already suspects Cassidy's a villain, so… maybe that will make it a liiittle less worrying to her…?
Fascinated to see how the final epilogue scene plays out, given that both bodies are in our custody for once. Will that last?
Huh, interesting. Because Canan looks Middle Eastern, I'm guessing?
Oh, damn. I wonder if this dialogue changes if you fought the Re-Gene at the warehouse?
;_;
"Also signs of a concussion and broken leg from when Quietus attacked him, but eh, he'll live."
Oh honey.
(God, can you imagine getting this scene before learning about Ortega's theories?)
New Dr. Halabi epilogue! :D
Very interesting—we don't get to the big cliffhanger reveal at all in this ending, since our body is in too dire condition to pose for a mirror. Given the context of the other endings, though, it does suggest that whatever consciousness had nightmares in our puppet's body in Rebirth is the same one that gets custody of our other body in Retribution.
"Juggle two bodies and three identities," says the game's blurb. "And let's not even get started on how many minds…"
Like, a top-of-my-head list of people who have at least briefly, in one form or another, been in our hero's mind:
• The artist formerly known as Sidestep
• Seven years ago, the source of the Heartbreak incident—which itself could mean one or both of:
- The (wo)man experimented on
- Another entity that entered their body during the experiment
• Likely some lingering remnant, if not more, of said Heartbreak incident source(s)
• Ace, whose memories (at least) seem increasingly inseparable from their body
• Anathema, every time we get knocked out doing something stupid
• Possibly Argent's sharks, in some cases?
• Hollow Ground, potentially
• The Rat King, a.k.a. the only guest on this list who's actually welcome
This is not even counting the many people who only metaphorically live rent-free in our head, although I'm not ruling those out as relevant either. For a telepath, is there a clear-cut difference between the face you still see in your nightmares, the familiar voice that encourages you in your lowest moments, and a literal psychic ghost? I'm not altogether convinced there is.
And at this point, I've run out of well-defined MCs, so the rest of this will just be exploration for exploration's sake + occasional additions to my conspiracy board.
Ortega being hero/villain RPF bait is the least surprising thing I've ever heard, but I'm still delighted to learn that it's explicit canon.
Every time I see the scene about Norma Lee I have the urge to speculate about her identity, and every time my brain tries to jump to Nocturne. Which is almost certainly not true (for starters, Nocturne is one of the only characters noted to have a non-local accent!), but when there's enough pins on your corkboard your brain just wants to connect them anyway.
I have found it. The least self-aware line of dialogue in this entire series.
Oh my god...... ;__;
These two continue to be A Lot.
I feel really bad about killing Blaze. :( Which is unsurprising given how fond I am of him, but also… I think this is the first time we've even had the option to kill a named character who isn't a minor plot device? That always hits different.
"MC gets momentarily distracted by their own internal monologue's wording" is always the best type of conditional text, but this one is a work of art even by those standards.
Oh. Ohhhhhh no. God, I'd never even considered this was a possibility so it blindsided me in the worst (best) way possible. Fuck.
The entire ensuing conversation is so good, god, I want to roll around in it and play with different options forever.
Interesting that Zephyr's POV section refers to them by their civilian name; Blaze's didn't. Different relationships with their hero identities? (Also cute how one of the first things we're shown is that their instinct when surprised is "punch" rather than "protect".)
One moment, I just want to string together a few passages on my corkboard…
(Oh, and on a separate note re: one of the above excerpts—
Steel sitting on the floor of an elevator trying to talk your puppet down from suicide might just top the list of weirdly specific scenes I didn't know I needed from this game.
The knowledge that Ortega swears exclusively in Spanish to maintain a PG-13 rating retroactively enhances the entire experience.
Wow, this version of the reveal is a treasure trove of new information. I don't have time to properly update my conspiracy board, but some quick bullet points to come back to:
• Confirmation that HGsib was below the age at which Re-Genes are decanted.
• Based on our apparent ages, HGsib's juvie records are probably from the early-to-mid 2000s. (1999 at absolute earliest, since HG was already kingpin.) Some nearby dates for reference:
→ Regardless of whether their physical and chronological ages are the same, HG has been around for twenty-some years at minimum.
• It's unclear if Ortega has seen any of the other siblings. If not, it's theoretically possible that they resembled us equally closely.
→ Also unclear if HGsib resembles us more closely than HG themselves does. (While the narration notes it's not a perfect likeness, it's not clear how much difference that entails, and the only specific differences mentioned are age and hair.)
• We don't know for sure that the name Ortega looked into was really Hollow Ground, although it probably was.
→ "The name they used to go by" suggests that Ortega doesn't believe it's their original/legal name.
→ Ortega first looked into it after meeting us, meaning even if they found the siblings through existent official records, HG could have long since made sure those records said what they wanted. In other words, these aren't necessarily siblings in a traditional legal or biological sense.
→ (If you want to get real nitpicky, technically we don't even know for sure that these siblings existed, just that records of their existence do. That said, the fact that HGsib was in custody while HG was kingpin suggests they were in fact a separate person who existed, which makes it more likely the others were as well.)
• "Died in government custody" is absurdly suspicious. Implies any of the following, in rough order of likelihood:
→ Didn't really die but was disappeared for shady government purposes
→ Disappeared under other suspicious circumstances that were covered up
→ Died for other reasons that were covered up
• No mention of how the other siblings died or if there was any perceivable pattern or connection to HG's own activities. Ortega doesn't talk as though the circumstances of the youngest's death were especially remarkable, but who knows.
• Ortega has met Hollow Ground in person multiple times.
oh my god it's actually explicit canon that she always does this
I can't believe the way this game keeps on giving to me
I love Ortega so much. What a fucking disaster of a person <3
—ohhhhhh.
How did I never put that together? The narration even makes that comment about the strobe lights in HG's club to remind you Ortega is both epileptic and a recognized threat to HG in the same breath! And still I just forgot to consider that their immunity to telepathy might be relevant to anyone but us.
…lol, that's why Ortega has met Hollow Ground. Because they tried the handshake routine like normal and it just…didn't work. W h o o p s.
EDIT: It just occurred to me… The other point I hadn't given proper consideration to is that, since Marshal Hood wasn't immune, Hollow Ground had an easy way to counter the threat he posed while he was alive. In fact, it's entirely possible it was Ortega that threw a wrench in that status quo by catching on and alerting Hood to the fact that his mind had been tampered with… Which, now that I think of it, would have given HG an even more urgent reason to want Hood out of the picture. (That last point is the strongest evidence: if that's what happened, then Marshal Hood was essentially killed because of Ortega.)
Well, we've all learned a lot today, but not about communication!
Like, yes, they're entirely right that this needs maximum caution, but in what world is the risk that Ortega would give it away?? She'd probably start lecturing us on opsec the moment we finished telling her! What even is our concern here, that she's not paranoid enough? Too bad a liar to keep a secret? Too much self-preservation not to crack under torture? Too vulnerable to mind reading? All hiding it does is ensure she'll be pissed when we tell her, reduce our chances of finding a good time to do so, and increase the risk that she'll be acting on incomplete information until then.
I am captivated by this brief flashback, because it's such a unambiguous little piece of pure Heartbreak POV.
Being the person I am, I of course then went into the code to see the versions for all the other scars, and for the record they're all equally beautiful. The derealization one, and the heartbreaking way it closes the loop on Rebirth's Everyone wants to go home to die, just haunts me:
Interesting. If true, this story would be the one chink in my assumption that HG is lying about their powers—since they obviously couldn't have had Hood mind controlled in their basement back then, they'd have to have had some other way to accomplish this. Of course, there's no guarantee it is true—it could just be part of the mythology HG has built around themselves (which would explain why Nocturne's trying not to laugh)—but it does feel like the way they choose to tell it should have some importance regardless.
I suppose the galaxy brain conspiracy theory take would be that this is an elaborate metaphor and the "turf" in question is their body, or something. :P
(Inexplicably enough, my first thought when I heard the name was "what, like… a razor blade?" before I stopped for five seconds and caught the obvious "hallowed ground" pun. I do not understand my brain sometimes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
So Hollow Ground denies their closest allies the ability to meaningfully consent to a relationship with them, even those they're personally intimate with? Yikes. Can't imagine what sort of person would do that.
The fact that what bothers him is not being trusted is a really interesting character note. A couple of the MC's Farm flashbacks expressed a similar sentiment, IIRC—that almost worse than the actual denial of agency was the assumption that they couldn't be trusted with it. Every moment of their life was scripted before they were even born to ensure they'd know nothing but obedience, and still they were assumed untrustworthy from the very start. (The exact same sore point Steel hit.) There's a special kind of indignity to someone relying on your unique personal strengths and simultaneously not trusting you with them.
Also interesting that, while Jake is fully aware he's the third wheel in this relationship, he's more inclined to assume Nocturne is a fellow victim than a co-conspirator. Because he doesn't trust Hollow Ground to treat her as an exception, or because he likes her and doesn't (or doesn't want to) believe that of her?
(Were this real life, I'd also assume that of course HG has used their trust compulsion on Nocturne; that they appear to genuinely love her is no evidence against that. But that's much less interesting than the actual dynamic the text implies—namely, that Nocturne is the kind of person who realizes her SO is mind-controlling her and responds with "okay but have you considered the potential applications of this, like curing my anxiety?" I seriously can't wait for both Nocturne and their relationship to get more screentime.)
God. That callback to the first-chapter Nanosurge flashback hits so perfectly.
(Two different words that were powerful enough to stop it. Sidestep's no, and Ximena's help.)
…Wow. That's a lot of information at once after the breadcrumbs we've been dealing with up to now. Let me try to sum this up—bullet points, so I don't get lost:
• They want telepaths so they can use them as hosts for whoever/whatever "he" is. Emphasis on "whoever", I think—they sound worried it's disrespectful to give him a Re-Gene body, not that it won't work—but the entire process seems volatile enough that their last try resulted in the Heartbreak incident.
→ (Not 100% sure I'm right about their attitude towards this "him"—everything other than those couple lines above has read more like your standard "sealing away some great and terrible power" schtick, so it's possible I'm putting too much weight on them. Will keep a pin in this.)
→ (Was the procedure we saw in that flashback the standard body transfer one, or was it something else? Unclear; I need to take another look.)
• The Heartbreak incident subject (whom I'll just call Heartbreak for simplicity's sake) seemed to take it about as well as we do in this dream. Perhaps they also knew the word "no".
→ (Note for reference: there's no explicit reference to Heartbreak being a Re-Gene or indication of whether they had tattoos, but what little we know about them strongly points to a human who once had a normal life and childhood. That said, they certainly weren't being treated like a person by the time that experiment happened.)
• The nature of our power to possess people has been an open question for ages, especially since it's treated as both unprecedented (at least to most people's knowledge) and distinct from our preexisting telepathy. Heartbreak had it, and now we do. Seeing as the sole thing we know about "him" is that he lives rent-free in telepaths' heads, it seems reasonable to assume he's the source of that power.
→ The game specifically suggests that the compulsions Hollow Ground places are more akin to the possession than to our other powers. Do they come from the same (or a similar) source?
→ The text also makes a point of mentioning that HG shares our distinctively "wrong" smile, and we encounter significant aquarium-centered memories in both our and HG's heads (though it's hinted that in the latter case the memory may actually have come from either us or some shared presence in our minds)—specifically, a memory of imitating a shark's smile…
→ The other telepathic power the game has been pointedly weird about is the kind Shroud has: eating thoughts/memories. Parts of the Heartbreak flashback suggest Heartbreak also did this, and the narration when reading Carter's mind suggests we can now do something akin to it as well.
→ (The prominent existence of a power that lets one person remove and absorb others' thoughts/memories obviously opens up yet more opportunities to go full conspiracy theory about the nature of our identity/existence, but what else is new?)
• "He" ≠ Heartbreak, clearly—our narration is very pointed about the pronouns it uses to refer to Heartbreak, and she was a woman in this file. So we do indeed have three entities in play here, but the third one—"him"—doesn't seem very personally present in the narrative compared to the others. I think he must still be here, though; the bodyjacking power is too clear a connection. Is the fact that he's not driving an accomplishment on our/Heartbreak's part, or is that the result the Farm intended?
→ (Tangential: on the subject of pronouns, there's also one conspicuously invariant "she" in Rebirth: "When I felt her inside my head, changing[…] How I felt. Who…I…" I'm assuming that refers to Dr. Siepen.)
• Our scars from the Heartbreak incident, regardless of their nature, are our point of connection—empathy—with Heartbreak. Are they what's allowed us to coexist with Heartbreak in our mind? (Because I mean, by this point I think we can safely remove the "maybe" from that assumption.)
→ If so, the MC's fear that their scars are the only thing "holding [them] together" may in fact be rather literally true…
→ (This whole scenario has very similar vibes to Argent and her friends, incidentally.)
• Something about imitating vs. being goes here. Merely puppeting vs. truly resurrecting vs. truly inhabiting a body; a person living rent-free in your head in a metaphorical vs. a literal sense. "Nothing is truly dead if it is remembered." A new body, the same ghosts that haunt it. Anathema is dead, yet they remain a living presence in the narrative. Ace is dead, yet it often feels as if reviving their body has awoken their mind. Each monster that failed to kill us has been repurposed as the literal source of our strength. Sidestep is dead, yet here we are.
→ (The literalized trauma metaphor of "what doesn't kill you becomes a part of you that makes you stronger, at a cost" seems like a common thread through the cast. MC and Argent are the most blatant examples, but it's basically baked into the foundation of the superhero worldbuilding.)
...
I finally caved and just looked up what the final achievement I'm missing is, and... I cannot fucking believe the answer is "open the ninth gate". Like—I need to stress that since literally the first time I saw the Heartbreak flashback and the line "I think we should open the ninth gate," it has been a running joke between my brother and I that you should very obviously never open the ninth gate. I don't even know what the ninth gate is, but it is blatantly obvious from the name alone that it is something you should not open. The only appropriate response to someone saying, "I think we should open the ninth gate," is to send them to immediate remedial workplace safety training and do a thorough audit of your workplace culture to see what contributed to someone thinking that was a good idea.
And now I'm going to have to do it anyway.
Words cannot describe how vindicated I feel by the fact that the achievement for opening the ninth gate is literally just called "don't". :')
Below the cuts: my remaining two characters (so far), plus some poking around for alternate scenes and secrets afterwards.
I think it's high time I tried someone more decidedly orange, so: Meet Ariel Contreras, a.k.a. Deliverance. Noted former hero and soon to be far more noted nexus of controversy, if they have their way. Someday soon, the mere words "Deliverance was right" will be sufficient to sentence any discussion to the same incendiary end as Deliverance's enemies.
Back in the day, Ariel quickly grew into and thrived in the heroic role they'd created for themself, and—contrary to appearances—felt increasingly optimistic that they would continue in it for the rest of their life. Needless to say, they did not, but they've done their best to roll with the setbacks to their career/sanity/ability to ever trust again. The loss of their naïve faith in humanity was painful, yes, but better that they learn and mature than the alternative. It certainly hasn't dampened their ambitions.
Ariel would be the first to assure you that she's not a misanthrope, just a realist. She retains a fondness for many of the people around her, though it's a lonelier, more distant kind now that she knows the futility of relying on them for anything. To hold humanity's nature against them would be unreasonable, and Ariel is an eminently reasonable person. Instead she's learned to handle people more proactively when she needs something from them. Thankfully, after years of training and practice she's confident in her ability to persuade others to her cause without the slightest need for telepathy… though that option's always at the ready, just in case.
Very high Arrogance — if there's one thing Ariel knows, it's that the best liars tell the truth. Ruthless, calculating, and adept at rationalizing harm to innocents if it's for the cause, though their strategies only rarely call for that. You never use force when persuasion will do — and to admit there's anything their powers of persuasion can't do would be to admit there are things outside of their control.
Nonbinary trans woman, they or she pronouns — unless you deliberately misgender her, in which case it's definitely "she" to you, or share your hot takes on nonbinary identities, in which case it's definitely "they". Fortunately, few people these days need to be reminded twice…
Man, it's always a weird feeling for the first few scenes when I start a file with m!Ortega.
While mob boss Ariel would be, frankly, perfect, there is absolutely no way she's passing up the anarchist option for that. LET'S GO.
Luckily you've still got time; everything is right on schedule, and this time you have made sure that Lady Argent is busy on the other side of town.
Out of your hair.
It wasn't hard to set up Lady Argent as the recipient of this year's Los Diablos University Women's Studies Inspirational Leader award. It was harder to ensure she attended the dinner, but you know how team pressure works; she wouldn't be able to avoid it.
And it's on the other side of town.
Only getting this after seeing every other career path's distraction tactic is amazing. Anarchist villain best villain.
Of course you're lonely, but it's not like you can tell people the truth. If you did, you'd lose the last comforts you have, the illusion that maybe some people don't mind spending time with you.
They're nice illusions; you'd hate to break them. They are good at distracting you from the truth: that they are nothing but puppets you can use to achieve your goals.
That's extremely Ariel of you, Ariel.
Mayor Alvarez is ostensibly an elected official, but with the high income required to vote, she's all but handpicked by the powerful corporations that have made Los Diablos their home.
Well that's a heck of a worldbuilding detail to learn in passing. I mean, not as much as LASER DOLPHINS, but still.
"I thought you and Lady Argent were a couple?" The oldest tactic in the book, turn the situation around. Make Herald explain himself so you can get a moment to think.
"Oh no, that was just for the media." He looks embarrassed. "The Rangers needed a bit of human interest."
Huh, and here I always assumed it was specifically to humanize Argent. (…Although I guess Herald would be diplomatic enough not to put it that way regardless.)
"[…]Had to call in D…Herald to find him."
"I know his name. You can call him Daniel."
"I wasn't sure." The unspoken question is enough of an accusation to make you groan.
"You know I'm helping him train. He told me. It's less awkward that way." Easier to get him talking.
"I see. He's trying to keep it out of the news." No apologies. As always. "Try to stick to Herald in public. We don't advertise his identity needlessly." Interesting. Is there any reason for that?
Huh, until now I'd just figured he was private about his personal life. Runaway with family still looking for him, maybe? He did start as a teenager, and while he projects the aura of Normal Nice Young Man so effectively it hadn't jumped out at me before, he's never even vaguely indicated he has anyone in his life outside of being a hero, not even when he's off-duty and looking at art. That could be strict personal/professional boundaries like I've assumed, but it could also indicate that he doesn't actually have much of a personal life… I mean, when he said he preferred "Herald", wasn't his exact wording something like "that's who I am now"?
Not that he makes a secret of how important being a hero is to him, I mean, but it's funny that that angle hadn't even occurred to me until now. It's a very powerful aura of Normal Nice Young Man.
"They made it look worse afterward, you know?" You don't, but you nod anyway, and she continues, "Cut away the middle, so it just looks like he accosted the Marshal in the middle of the funeral. You can still see what really happened on the original live footage. Not that it's easy to get hold of."
please share this footage with me
I will offer literally anything
No, you'd better find a different subject fast.
"So how good are you at modwork then? Ever cut someone up?"
Cracking up at Ariel just happening to pick the exact question I've been hoping for a chance to ask since Rebirth.
"[…]Besides, toys are easier on the upkeep than mods, not to mention the amount of pain involved…."
"Pain?" That surprises you. You know that was true back at the Farm, but the pain was not seen as consequential. Surely it can't be the same for real people?
That's a really good character note, in the worst way possible. I love the moments that shine a light on the less obvious ways the MC's fucked-up background skews their frame of reference. Obviously they struggle to remember that the kind of abuse they suffered as a matter of course is unthinkable by most people's standards, but they also have no way of easily distinguishing the parts that are "normal". In this case, it's not even that they had illusions a human would never be treated that way; they just naturally assumed that Re-Genes were subjected to painful mods for the same reason they were subjected to everything else, not that severe chronic pain was an underdiscussed side effect of all major modwork.
No wonder they're so surprised every time they realize someone can relate to their experiences.
"I haven't met a mod who wasn't addicted to some sort of pain medication." Dr. Mortum looks grim. "There's only so much you can put the human body through before it rebels."
Pretty sure the word you're looking for is dependent, not addicted. :/ The problem is that they're in constant pain, not that they're treating the pain.
…You know, that does make me wonder—what's it like trying to get your meds in the Free Western Territories? I mean, the point is probably moot unless you're rich enough to afford whatever they charge, and quality control is probably non-existent, but… you probably don't have to jump through a million hoops to prove you absolutely, definitely need your pain treated with actual medicine and aren't just a drug-seeking addict.
Anyway, love how Ortega's health turns out to be worse than we knew literally every time it's mentioned. (And by "love" I mean the opposite of love, to be clear.)
"I'm glad I never ended up in the spotlight like that." [Bo] flexes his hands, movements quick and jerky, then takes another sip of beer to settle down. "Can you imagine me giving interviews?"
"You could be the cool and silent type," you tease. "Or just never give interviews, like the Crack did. Pointing a gun at the camera cuts any interview short."
"I'm not cool under pressure." A nervous laugh and his beer nearly spills.
"That's a lie. You're fearless behind the wheel; I've never seen you flinch."
"That's different. No cameras." Another laugh. "I'm not you."
"That's why we make a good team," you clink your whiskey with his beer. "Different skill sets."
"Now driving bank robbers, that was relaxing. Wore a ski mask. Waited in the car. Good times." He sips his beer with a dreamy look on his face.
I love all the individualized dialogue Rosie and Bo get in this game.
Huh, that's interesting, Ariel isn't bothering to go after the regenerator? Too focused on politics for personal goals, or is there a prerequisite for learning about it that didn't happen this playthrough?
Achievement: Paint It Black
A door has opened.
I... see*?????
* I do not see.
"There was a hostage situation." He actually has the gall to look embarrassed about the whole thing. As if being a hero was something he was trying to avoid tonight. Sucks to be him; it's not like he can turn off that part of himself. Not like you. "I managed to clear it up before the LDPD arrived. Nobody was killed."
"And if the LDPD had got involved, chances are that wouldn't have been the case." They are notoriously trigger-happy when less-important people are involved.
"Shoot first, ask questions later, especially with powered perps." Daniel shakes his head, and you can feel his unease. Like Steel, he's not fond of the police force in this city. Another thing to remember, what made him feel like that? Nothing is revealed in his surface thoughts, and you have no time to dig deeper.
"How did you take him down?" you ask instead, wondering what tactics he would have used on his own. Probably rammed him, maybe picked him up. He's got a limited power set with his flight. If he had been smart, he would have carried a gun.
"Talked him down," he admits with a soft laugh. "He was a mess."
"Huh." You blink.
"What?" Daniel blinks back, not a wink, just shared confusion.
Oh, good for him. (His main stat is CHA, Ariel, what did you expect?) You know, I always appreciated how in Rebirth, Herald won't even consider fighting a villain with hostages until you start hurting them—it's one of those nice little characterization details that just doesn't quite gel with the MC's assumptions. Their PoV is so determined to read Herald as cocky and reckless that it's easy to view his actions through that lens, and the way Ortega describes him seems to back that up, but when viewed in a vacuum it always looked less like overconfidence and more like he just doesn't consider self-preservation an option when there's a day to be saved. Which is an adjacent character archetype, but one with some pretty key differences.
"I'm just trying to do my best. I owe it to—" He breaks off, face gone placid, mind pulling in on itself like a threatened turtle.
"Are you…okay?" you ask because you should, but you know he's not. You can feel it.
"Yeah." Daniel straightens up, looking down at his half-eaten dinner as if he's just lost his appetite. "Just haven't thought about him for a while."
"Who?" The "him" has a weight to it you don't like. This is sharing, like normal people do. Not something you usually indulge in.
"My brother," he admits with a sigh. He drags his fork through the food, making distracted patterns. You keep eating; this really is delicious. "We decided to get boosted together. Become heroes."
Well, that's horrifying! What would he even have been, late teens?
Could definitely explain some things about Herald, in any case.
"Younger. My brother had just turned sixteen. I was almost fifteen."
Jesus christ that's even younger than I was thinking. That's barely out of middle school!
"You don't sound like most people from there."
"Oh…" His cheeks flush. "I mean, I'm not…I mean, my parents didn't talk like…I mean, we were encouraged to talk civilized." He looks ten years younger, trying to explain himself to a person of authority, and you suppose that's you. "My parents were strict. And when I moved to Los Diablos, there were speech coaches."
"Speech coaches?" You pause, the fork halfway to your mouth.
"They wanted me to be relatable, so I needed to sound like I came from the West Coast. I couldn't be a snob from back East…or a Masshole."
"That's a term I haven't heard in a long time." You do your best not to laugh.
"Me neither. My parents hated it. As did my speech coach, I suppose." You don't need to pry to see the way his mind squirms around the fact that he's been groomed to be what he is. Someone's been telling him how to act, how to look, how to talk, how to dress. It should have stopped when he left home, but it didn't.
I see why he doesn't talk about them.
(This scene: "And now, gamers, please open your textbooks to Chapter 8: Language and Social Class. This will be on the quiz!")
"How did you end up here?" There are not many heroes back East, and they all tend to be government-approved or part of television shows, but he could have made a killing being either one.
"The same way everybody else did." The food is finished now, so he picks up a piece of bread, picking at it. Breaking it into smaller pieces. "Because it was the only place where I felt I could be myself. Once I got out of the hospital, my family…" The memory is too close in his mind, staring at you, staring at him. Black accusations and disappointment.
"Did they disown you?" You shake your head, trying to get him out of your mind.
"I couldn't stay." He avoids the question, so the answer might be yes. "My brother had been the only thing keeping me there. So I went west. Where my heroes were."
Huh. So keeping his name private might be "hiding from family" like I first guessed, but it could also be more of a "not inviting trouble by using the family name" thing.
"I shudder to think what you imagined." You've seen how they portrayed you in the movies. Heroic. A good jaw. Clear skin and a twinkle in your eye.
Oh my god.
"Never mind." He shakes his head, straightening his back as he gives you a concerned look. "You know I'm attracted to you, right?"
I love that he's fully aware it's obvious.
…Hm. Ariel's actual first response would be to very pointedly remind him he's attracted to a visibly trans, queer person and see if it makes him squirm or say anything stupid, but if that's not an option… Well, why not, it can be a date. That's hardly a commitment to anything; it could end up being useful and/or fun.
Ariel's Relationship with Herald: Kissing wasn't part of the plan.
LMAO it actually changes your relationship status to that. Amazing.
Hm, okay, looks like the game assumes by default that trans MCs pass as cis and can't discuss the subject without it being a big coming out moment? Really hadn't expected that for a character who's already openly nonbinary (most NB transmasc/transfem people I've known aren't open about being NB with people they wouldn't want to know they're trans), but I guess obviously the game can't account for every conceivable variation, and the MC is such a private person in general that I can see why that's the default approach? So we'll just call it a night with that frankly incredible new relationship status.
Interestingly, this is the first playthrough where I've never actually done anything to piss off Hollow Ground, even if I've made some threatening comments in the general direction of their status quo. Wonder if that changes much? (I suspect the answer is no—which would be very telling, if true.)
In any case... Hm. I could make a case for either response to the invitation, but I think Ariel's ambition and confidence in their ability to use people would have to win out. They're not all that keen on Hollow Ground finding out their identity—people who already know and like Ariel, they're less concerned about, but potential enemies just looking for leverage? Ugh—but if they have to, they can at least act like they wanted it that way.
That's interesting, Hollow Ground will actually shut off the dampeners if you ask? I suppose they're a powerful enough telepath they figure it'll be fine.
• I keep running, but from what?
• Am I dying?
• It's finally here. This moment.• I've been here before, haven't I?
Oh, I think this is the first time I've been able to select that third one! Presumably because Ariel's gotten better with Ace's powers than in any of my previous runs?
Oooh boy, woke up in the hospital with dampeners on. Someone's figured it out, then.
"I wanted to," you admit. "I planned to, but it never…" That's when it's starting to sink in. You'll never have the chance now. It's not your choice anymore. Taken from you like everything else.
"Hey…" Ortega's voice is soft and insecure as if he's not sure what to say. You recognize that tone, the one when he'd want to cart you off to a hospital but knew you wouldn't stand for it. The worry. The fear of spooking you.
"It doesn't matter," you blink fiercely. It's not tears, it's frustration. Didn't you do this to take control of your life? Make your own choices? Not to find out that Ortega has been writing your life's story without your input. Making up who he thought you were. Your secrecy never gave you control. All it did was hand the reins to others to write you as they saw fit.
God, this is really good.
"I guess you're right about that." A deep breath, gathering courage as he stares at you. "Chen told me something else once I got patched up. Something I don't want to believe, but…" Ortega sounds like he doesn't want to say this but is doing it anyway. "He told me that you're Deliverance."
Oh, Ortega didn't suspect? Interesting.
—Wow, I didn't expect playing dumb to actually work. I actually feel a little bad now!
"Bullshit." Daniel's mouth has settled into an angry line. "You're more human than most people I've met." You don't know what he feels. He doesn't know what he feels.
"You're just seeing what they want you to see," you retort, tapping the center of your chest. "Got a barcode under here with my recipe on. I was never human. They made me this way." Hurting people is easy. You've had enough practice on yourself.
"Really? They made you?" Daniel's mouth twitches, but whether in a grimace or a smile, you don't know. It can't be a snarl. He's too soft for that. "Did they make the scars you scratch when you think I'm not looking? Did they make you pet dogs when their owners aren't looking? Did they make you sleep too little, and drink too much coffee? Did they make your stupid sense of humor? Did they make your friends? The people that care about you?"
"My sense of humor is not stupid…." You try to interrupt the flow of words, but he's reaching for your hand, and this time you let him take it.
"It really is. I think Ricardo is the only one that gets it. But it doesn't matter. I'm in love with you, and nobody made me feel that."
…
I… I think the CHA/WIS build might be slightly OP. Holy shit.
(Especially in a world of people who never fucking communicate.)
"Just bruised," you lie, staying in control. You can't afford to panic. You need to think.
"Your legs are broken," Daniel points out,
Presented without comment.
"They're not…" But he stops when he sees the look on your face. Your fear. He doesn't believe things are as bad as you say, but he does believe your fear. "I'm not going to let you kill yourself," he says, slowly as if he were talking to a child. You can feel it. He's a hero. He saves people. He thinks he can save you. "That doesn't fix anything. I'm going to get you out of here."
"What?" You hadn't expected that. Neither the decision nor how quickly he arrived at it.
"You heard me. If you're wrong, we can talk about things later, and if you're right…" His eyes flash to your hand, the hand he's holding. There's more here. You can feel it simmering under the surface. He looked away last time. It couldn't be that bad, could it? He could have, he should have…not this time. This time he'll listen.
Oh, honey. :(
So, what it sounds like is… His brother told him what was going on with their family—that he was being abused, I'm guessing, possibly with a more dramatic class of dark family secret involved as well. Daniel was fourteen and unprepared to handle anyone in so desperate a situation, let alone his own brother claiming awful things about their family, and unsurprisingly didn't handle it that well; at the time, he was more focused on convincing his brother not to leave him behind than on the fact that he was desperate enough to turn to almost-certain suicide. (While Daniel's said they were too young and stupid to recognize it as that at the time, I wonder if that was really true of his brother.) And so of course he blames himself for not doing anything to help his brother. A hero would have saved him.
(Really liking this parallel between Daniel's brother and the MC, incidentally.)
Anyway, uh... I guess Ariel lives with Daniel now! Not really something they were planning on when they agreed to one date, but... well, I guess unforeseen eventualities like this are why you network in advance, right? He doesn't suspect them of anything, respects boundaries, and lives a fairly privacy-conscious lifestyle, so really this is a better option than they'd have expected to have.
"Here, I found some painkillers." Daniel enters cautiously, but there's no need for him to be careful. Even with your headache, you picked him up before he entered the room. The pills end up on the bedside table, next to the water. In easy reach. "I had some prescription ones left from when I ended up in the hospital after fighting Deliverance, they should help once what's in your system wears off."
Wow. Maybe Ariel really has prepared for everything.
"[…]Fire boosts are common, but not many survive. Not many around them survive. You're lucky to be alive."
"I always was the lucky one." A soft sigh.
Welp, that's a loaded comment if I've ever heard one.
Angela Smith. Lady Argent.
Oh, well okay!
Anyway congrats on your new regenerator, Ariel was too busy making The Man's life difficult to notice it I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"Come on, you like Angie as much as I do. Ask her yourself." He still worries about why she pulled her project from his workshop that fast. There is a dog buried there that he wants to unearth, but he can't push too hard.
Being friends with Argent really is just like being friends with Sidestep was. :')
[Rahim] wishes he could talk to someone, but he can't trust his colleagues. Too many have changed their minds in strange ways, stopped investigations that would have brought convictions.
Have they been bribed? Threatened? In some cases, certainly, but in others, it just feels strange. Off somehow. As if they just decided that their investigation would lead nowhere and stopped.
Weird! What could possibly be causing a thing like that???
Regina Siepen. Project Director.
While this is hardly my first time seeing it, I want to state for the record that the "Project Director" part makes me laugh every single time.
Fifth playthrough should be my last proper one for now, since I've reached the last of my properly fleshed-out characters, so: Meet Cassidy Morse, a.k.a. Quietus.
Compared to some of my MCs, Cassidy's basic personality has changed very little since their* hero days. They remain incurably cynical and so quiet they tend to jump-scare people just by speaking, but beneath the resting bitch face, a caring person with arguably overactive empathy. Their biggest scars are more deeply buried: these days, the power of their self-loathing is matched only by that of the small, white-hot ember of spite that refuses to let their enemies win by dying, and it's that spite that's kept them alive all these years.
Quietus is Cassidy's diametric opposite: a flashy, menacing, and thoroughly unignorable monstrosity. Every facet of their appearance and persona is calculated to be as terrifying as possible, in the hopes of preempting the need for bloodshed through sheer intimidation. …That said, in the course of their debut, they wound up getting far more into the role of sadistic, unstoppable terror than they'd ever planned for. They are deeply disquieted by this self-discovery.
Cass's puppet, Canan, is essentially their humansona—the person they like to imagine they'd be if they'd been born a normal human with a normal life. She and her friendship with Dr. Mortum serve as an important outlet for Cassidy, whose efforts to sever old attachments have been complicated by their desperate desire for human connection and feelings for their old friends. As of the end of Rebirth, they've made the conscious choice to resolve that internal conflict by sublimating their enduring feelings for Ortega into Canan's new friendship with her.
* This is also another of my gender-questioning characters, and since essentially the only part of that I'm sure about yet is that "he" is the wrong pronoun, I guess I'll default to neutral "they" for lack of a better idea? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ortega thinks Quietus has made some good points.
As far as I can tell, Ortega thinks this solely because she suspects Cassidy is Quietus, which is the most painfully Ortega thing I've ever heard. I mean, sure, Quietus didn't actually make any points unless you count "fear me" as a point, but they did make that one pretty convincingly! And yeah, they did land half Ortega's team in the hospital with broken bones, but… I'm sure Cass had a good reason for that! He even seemed to feel bad about one of the broken bones! It's fine. In this house we stan the artist formerly known as Sidestep, even when they break our arm and dump us to become a mob boss.
Cass's choice to move into a management role, incidentally, is as much a matter of preventative self-care as it is of ambition. A major factor in the decision is the hope that working with a team will provide them with a more appropriate outlet for their social needs—and curb the worst of their fears about what they might do (to themself or others) with no one watching.
Lady Argent takes a single, deliberate step forward.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you." You tighten your grip, the woman limp in your grasp, fighting for breath. You loosen your grasp slightly; you don't want her passing out.
"But you're not me." She moves closer, so slowly, hands relaxed, looking at you with disconcerting interest. "You're a villain. A criminal." The smallest smile on her lips. "You're pretending to be a monster. A terrifying nightmare. But—" she stops before she gets within reach, "—you're not. I know monsters, and you haven't killed anyone yet."
Crap. Is Lady Argent calling your bluff? Is she ready to make a move? Right now, she is close enough to be on you in a single breath, and all that's separating you is the fragile human shield in your arms.
Oooooh. She has Cassidy absolutely dead to rights; I couldn't have planned this scene better myself. Perfect.
"[…]My armor performed splendidly, although…" Dr. Mortum pauses, giving you a discerning look.
"Although?" You lean closer, interest piqued.
"I always did get the impression that it was designed to deal with Charge personally. The added insulation, the extra…tricks…"
Wow, I wonder why Dr. Mortum might know about Ortega's private medical issues! 🤔
"At least the rats are well behaved." Pelayo can't hide the grin. "You always leave out doughnuts for them too?"
"Got to keep the neighbors friendly." You smile back because you can feel what they don't, the Rat King reconnecting with their kin, making friends. "They're good guests."
Aaaaaaaah??
The emotions clash against your shields, tearing at your very soul. The Rat King keeps you upright, keeps you dodging attacks, keeps your mind on your goal. It's just pain. It's just fear. You've seen worse than the people here can imagine. You've felt worse.
A soft laugh, unfamiliar. …familiar…
Oof, it's never a good sign when we split into simultaneous plain and italic.
—Also holy shit, did that drain all my willpower in one go?? That's certainly new. Fuck.
You can feel your hand twitch, almost involuntary.
Falling. You keep falling, the chaos around you reflecting the chaos within. Why aren't they dead? They've suffered horrors…seen…things.
You've seen things.
They do too.
The first one screams and drops his gun, clawing at his eyes. Strong fingers. There's blood. There's…
The second one just freezes. Suit soiled. There's nothing behind his eyes. Escape is the kinder solution…
Just fall…
ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ!!! \(°Ω°)/ !!!
The Rat King digs their paws into your imaginary shoulder and BITES and PULLS, and you scream and blink.
Bodies surround you, but you are still standing, arms wrapped around yourself. Your heart rate has raced into the red, but it is slowing down, the room coming into focus once more.
Crap.
Holy shit, Cassidy.
(I am so thrilled it was the shy, mousy character with the PG-rated swears that got this scene.)
"Believe it or not, but I know what you mean." Her eyes shift downward. "I'll keep your secrets."
"Thank you." You believe her. "So do I get to know your name now?"
"Ximena," she says, after the briefest of hesitations.
Huh. That's interesting. Very pretty name, in any case.
Oof at the bit about m!Mortum being treated as a feminist traitor when he came out. Too real.
Fuck, you can see his mind lights up in annoyance, then surprise as he looks up and starts to connect the dots.
You…weren't prepared for this.
You weren't prepared for what his mind would feel like, one perception tangent taking note of your face, recognizing you, Cassidy Morse, heading off toward paranoia that maybe you are working with the Rangers and is this an elaborate trap? For him?
At the same time, another tangent, connecting your name to Quietus, a list of possibilities, and you had been on it, for reasons you see as legit and still surprising because where did he come by this information?
At the same time, a third tangent, a spike of regret, hard enough to make his face blank, drowning out the other tangents, making him stare you down, hard, in control, push the other tangents to the side because they are less important, secondary.
[…]
He keeps his eyes and thoughts focused squarely on you, and it's like watching fireworks. Part of you wants to tell him that it's okay, the numbers don't matter, because his mind is already a ball of yarn that would take hours to pry apart.
Ah, I see this is our first time reading the mind of someone with ADHD. :P
(…I typed that as an offhand joke, but actually, now that I think about it Mortum absolutely has ADHD. Such a clear case that I'm surprised it didn't occur to me earlier.)
He pulls out a small box, smooth rounded plastic, and opens it to pick out one of the pills in there. You get a hint of pale blue, a bright orange N, and then the good doctor puts it in his mouth and washes it down with whiskey.
Also lol, of course they're blue and orange.
Man. A part of me wishes I hadn't met HG for the first time with an MC who could detect their mind control, because I'm really curious to know whether I'd have caught on in the slightest.
The whole thing is so subtle and cleverly implemented, in particular the fact that the handshake is the deciding factor. It's right there in plain sight in the text—your choices are literally just two versions of "Shake their hand" and two versions of "Don't shake their hand"!—and yet even if I'd realized something was off, I doubt I'd even have considered that the handshake itself was important without having my attention explicitly drawn to it. It's just such obvious shorthand for "Be diplomatic"/"Be hostile", and it's such a standard set of choices for Fallen Hero that my mind passes right over it without stopping. I'm genuinely kind of stunned at how well-crafted it is to hide in plain sight!
Aside from that, what actual text changes I can discern from memory seem subtle enough that I can't imagine I'd have noticed anything weird—so far, the MC has rationalized their reactions thoroughly enough that I'd be more likely to question their judgment, if anything, than the integrity of their mind. The fact that it removes the option to refuse should be the biggest giveaway, but at the same time… Not only does that come right after their initial offer-you-can't-refuse (which the story justifies without mind control), but even players who do find it weird will almost certainly attribute it to uncharacteristically railroad-y game design, not something with an in-universe explanation. I assume I'd notice if it changed on replay (…although there's a nonzero chance it could slip by me if I didn't seriously consider refusing on either run), but without anything to compare it to…
"I have to say," he admits after a moment's consideration. "You're not quite what I expected."
"A lot shorter for one thing," Jake pipes up from the background, but Hollow Ground shushes him.
Can't believe all the potential we were missing out on without height options.
You tear back into consciousness, the shreds of whatever nightmare that consumed you still sticking to the edges of your mind. The nausea is strong. Too strong. You barely have time to roll over before throwing up all over the floor.
"Guh…hk…," you cough, trying to clear your throat, but your body is too busy turning itself inside out. Get it out. Get it all out. Involuntary reaction, voiding your stomach of all contents, continuing to convulse until there's nothing left but bile and spit, but you're still not able to stop cramping.
get it out. get it all out.
Another cough, and you blink away the tears, taking note of the floor. Neat. Polished. Splattered. No bucket, because you never throw up when you slide into Canan, only when you return to your own body. Her hands. Yours. Shaking.
Blood? No blood there, though your mind had made up visuals of great black sticky gobs of half-digested blood, even intestines. As if you were trying to hollow yourself out in prep—
Ooh, this is new! So if you reject the body you're currently in, you wake up in the other one? That could get very interesting, given Cass's own body is still presumably in the hospital…
Stamina: You are unconscious.
Willpower: You feel nothing.
Injuries: You are hurt, with probable major injuries.
"You feel nothing" is a really cute use of the standard willpower blurb.
Sky-Raider lands a moment later.
The armor is massive, military style, the blue-gray color scheme helping to camouflage him against the skies. The skull and bones on his helmet are cartoony enough to look almost friendly; the rotors are small, supplemented by jets. The prehensile metal tentacles erupting from his chest are gently wrapped around a stretcher with an unconscious body strapped to it.
He sounds delightful.
It took the simultaneous achievement popups for both "Kidnapper" and "Kidnapped" for me to consider the sheer WTF of this scenario from the Rangers' point of view. At least Ortega already suspects Cassidy's a villain, so… maybe that will make it a liiittle less worrying to her…?
Fascinated to see how the final epilogue scene plays out, given that both bodies are in our custody for once. Will that last?
"Pleased to meet you," she says, hesitating a moment as she looks you over. "Adab arz hai," she adds, after making some internal decision, hand raised to her face as she lightly bows. "Call me Noor, please."
"Pleased to meet you, too." You echo the gesture by reflex, old training rising back to the surface.
Huh, interesting. Because Canan looks Middle Eastern, I'm guessing?
"You have treated Re-Genes before, then." Not a question. A statement.
"Briefly." She straightens her back, turning to you. "I work at the Memorial Hospital. We have specialists in treating boost-related injuries. There was a Re-Gene patient I treated a year or so ago. Had been grievously injured during a battle against…Psychopathor, I think it was." There's a frustrated sigh; the memory doesn't look like a pleasant one.
"She's humble," Dr. Mortum says. "She's the specialist."
"What happened?" you ask, to make sure she doesn't change the subject. This you want to hear.
"She had been hurt pretty badly. Psychopathor had torn off two of the modded arms. She was regenerating, but her body kept wanting to grow over the broken junctions. I can't believe they put mods on someone with that kind of power. That was a bit…complicated. They already had one operative killed; I guess they didn't want to ruin another by risking transport before treatment."
Oh, damn. I wonder if this dialogue changes if you fought the Re-Gene at the warehouse?
Canan's Relationship with Dr. Mortum: best friends.
;_;
She has known Eric Deveraux for years, trusts him as much as she trusts anybody in the murky waters of Los Diablos politics, but he is starting to show worrying signs of stress.
"Also signs of a concussion and broken leg from when Quietus attacked him, but eh, he'll live."
Sky-Raider. That doesn't make sense. One, he doesn't have the guts, and two, he has no reason.
Except for money.
Someone must have paid him to kidnap Cassidy, and if someone moved this fast, that means they have contacts within the building.
Hollow Ground? It would make sense, considering what has happened leading up to this. Of course. She should have known.
Blood is thicker than water.
Now, the only question is if she can get out of bed without alerting someone. She doesn't have time to rest and recuperate, not now.
She can't lose him again. Won't.
Oh boy, Chen is going to kick her ass for this.
Oh honey.
(God, can you imagine getting this scene before learning about Ortega's theories?)
New Dr. Halabi epilogue! :D
Very interesting—we don't get to the big cliffhanger reveal at all in this ending, since our body is in too dire condition to pose for a mirror. Given the context of the other endings, though, it does suggest that whatever consciousness had nightmares in our puppet's body in Rebirth is the same one that gets custody of our other body in Retribution.
"Juggle two bodies and three identities," says the game's blurb. "And let's not even get started on how many minds…"
Like, a top-of-my-head list of people who have at least briefly, in one form or another, been in our hero's mind:
• The artist formerly known as Sidestep
• Seven years ago, the source of the Heartbreak incident—which itself could mean one or both of:
- The (wo)man experimented on
- Another entity that entered their body during the experiment
• Likely some lingering remnant, if not more, of said Heartbreak incident source(s)
• Ace, whose memories (at least) seem increasingly inseparable from their body
• Anathema, every time we get knocked out doing something stupid
• Possibly Argent's sharks, in some cases?
• Hollow Ground, potentially
• The Rat King, a.k.a. the only guest on this list who's actually welcome
This is not even counting the many people who only metaphorically live rent-free in our head, although I'm not ruling those out as relevant either. For a telepath, is there a clear-cut difference between the face you still see in your nightmares, the familiar voice that encourages you in your lowest moments, and a literal psychic ghost? I'm not altogether convinced there is.
And at this point, I've run out of well-defined MCs, so the rest of this will just be exploration for exploration's sake + occasional additions to my conspiracy board.
It's not an uncommon thing with some heroes, they revel in the headlines, and if the media wants to imagine attraction between them and the villains, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Ortega joked about it in the old days; she tended to be the one landing in the news for nearly making out with villains. You had been in some of those fights and knew there wasn't really anything going on, but get a picture from the right angle, and it could look very suspect. Especially since she tends to smile when she fights.
Ortega being hero/villain RPF bait is the least surprising thing I've ever heard, but I'm still delighted to learn that it's explicit canon.
Every time I see the scene about Norma Lee I have the urge to speculate about her identity, and every time my brain tries to jump to Nocturne. Which is almost certainly not true (for starters, Nocturne is one of the only characters noted to have a non-local accent!), but when there's enough pins on your corkboard your brain just wants to connect them anyway.
"Don't listen to Ortega," you protest. "She's not a reliable narrator. Also, she's an asshole."
I have found it. The least self-aware line of dialogue in this entire series.
The Rat King. Five sisters. One pack.
ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ1 Lost. Lonely. Searching? Empty space? No contact, gone, gone?
ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ2 New minds. Not listening.
ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ3 One. Perhaps. Listening. Taken care of. Understanding but not understood.
ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ4 Safe. Fed. Still searching. Lonely. Still searching.
ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ5 Will find. Will find Kira.
Oh my god...... ;__;
"You don't have to be nice to me just because I'm hurt," Kira mutters, despising being hurt, despising her weakness, maybe even despising Ortega. Who knows? It wouldn't be undeserved.
"I'm not nice," Julia chuckles, helping Kira adjust her pillows, ignoring the grunt of pain and gritted teeth. "I never had to be nice. I'm charming. People forgive you easily then." Probably more than they should.
"Then don't start now, idiot?" The insult might as well be her nickname by now, and it makes her smile. There's no bite to it, at least not more than is caused by pain and discomfort.
"I think I want to, though." It's hard to admit that maybe you don't like yourself very much. She suspects neither of them do. No wonder they end up arguing half the time.
These two continue to be A Lot.
I feel really bad about killing Blaze. :( Which is unsurprising given how fond I am of him, but also… I think this is the first time we've even had the option to kill a named character who isn't a minor plot device? That always hits different.
That's when you feel the dampeners start to kick in, little pins and needles in your mind, like licking a battery. No. You shake your head. You do not need to think about the pictures that come to mind there. This is business. Not pleasure. Trust Ortega to torment you even when he's not there.
"MC gets momentarily distracted by their own internal monologue's wording" is always the best type of conditional text, but this one is a work of art even by those standards.
"Where is he?" Ortega's words slip from his lips, breaking against your skin, forming bruises where they hit. "Is he alive? ¡Por Dios! Please let him be alive…." He doesn't believe that. You can see it in his eyes, looking at you like you are a stranger. A monster.
But he's wrong, and you need to tell him.
"I'm not—" you start but are interrupted again, his voice drowning yours. It feels like drowning, your senses not firing right. Telling you everything is wrong but not how, and his energy makes everything worse.
"I know you're not him, but you have to know something." Voice cracking. "Who made you? Did they make you? Did they send you back to hurt us?" Hurt me? The last words were only spoken with his eyes, but you heard them.
His eyes tell you many things. They look at you as if you're not human, no worse, as if you're a copy of the man he loves brought back to wreak havoc and sully every memory you had together. As if you're not real, no worse, as if what you did together the other night was nothing but a mockery of real emotions, a way to hurt him in ways he hadn't even imagined he could be hurt.
Oh. Ohhhhhh no. God, I'd never even considered this was a possibility so it blindsided me in the worst (best) way possible. Fuck.
The entire ensuing conversation is so good, god, I want to roll around in it and play with different options forever.
Interesting that Zephyr's POV section refers to them by their civilian name; Blaze's didn't. Different relationships with their hero identities? (Also cute how one of the first things we're shown is that their instinct when surprised is "punch" rather than "protect".)
One moment, I just want to string together a few passages on my corkboard…
Heartbreak experiment flashback, Rebirth ch.4 ("her" = puppet's pronouns)
Eyes jerking open (no this is not me), flickering back and forth in a vortex of blue on black. A tongue extended, slowly at first, then faster, as if tasting the air for scent.
(antiseptic. ozone. rust. you know this but you should not.)
Lips pulling back, nostrils widening in a baleful grimace, gums stained with tiny blisters.
(i know this because these are her memories. i see this because these are her memories. because she ate them.)
Extracting info from Carter's mind, Retribution ch.12 ("déjà vu" moment and final sentence require high puppet individuality)
Pain makes it easy to slip inside because that's the brain's priority alarm. Unlike panic, which can shut things down, or fear, which can lock things into loops, pain opens everything up. All the gates. All the hidden rooms. Enough pain, and it's impossible to focus on anything but, leaving defenses crumbling and hidden secrets crawling out.
Carter is hurting. A little pressure from you to fan that pain, and the only reason he doesn't scream out loud is that you have his chin in a tight grip.
Information. Facts. Contacts. Connections. Names. Dates. Faces.
You can't focus on the details, not right now. You have to save it for later, make a little box in your memories that you can peruse when you have time. It's not the way you usually use your powers; you never used to be able to keep hold of anything. It just faded.
These days it feels like you're finding new tricks every time you try.
You push Carter back once you're done; he collapses into an unconscious heap. Alive. There's a moment of something like déjà vu, looking at your hand, looking at the body, not sure why this feels so disturbingly familiar.
Probably what you just did. Residual memories. You shake them off, can't allow them to linger.
You have no idea how this has affected his mind. Or yours.
Wiping Dr. Finch's memory, Retribution ch.17 (last few lines require >90scarand >50 Ruthlessness)
Counting backward, you quickly exit the room, closing the door behind you while still holding her mind in tow. Three. Two. One, and you yank the last memories of yourself out by the roots, leaving her with a migraine and an urge to take a week off to recover. She's coming down with something.
And still she feels better than you do. Hollowed out. As if yanking her memories had unsettled something inside you as well. Guilt? No. You know you did what you needed to do.
So why does it feel so familiar?
Watching Shroud "eat", Retribution ch.19
You can feel it happening, even through your shields. The way she drills into his mind like a mosquito, hollowing out his skull like an egg, draining him of everything he is. It's a telepathic attack that's familiar, too familiar, drowning in tar, feeling it consume you, and you want to throw up, and it's only your suit upping the oxygen content combined with the Rat King's paws that keeps you on your feet.
Sleeping in MC's body, Retribution ch.17 (emphasis not added)
Not. A. Dream.
What then? Hallucinations?
Specters haunting other minds? Some residue you picked up while dragging yourself through souls far more damaged than your own?
It sticks. Like mud. Like tar. Like a wound scabbed over but liable to tear open if you move.
Sleeping over at Daniel's, Retribution ch.22
Sleep finally lays claim to the both of you, despite your best intentions. The dreams come, like they always do, darkness creeping over the horizon, sticky-toffee tar dragging you down into a past from which there is no escape.
People who said that drowning was an easy way to go were liars. The body keeps fighting even when it's supposed to give up, even when pulling away sloughs the shields off your mind like skin from a burn.
You shouldn't know this. You shouldn't feel this.
You shouldn't sleep. Not in your head.
It's not safe.
And then Daniel turns over, a sleepy arm dragging you close like an escaped pillow, and the dream sinks back to the base of your skull where it belongs.
Flashback to Ace's final(?) moments, Retribution ch.23
Hands on your face. Withered. Skeletal. Slipping down a tunnel faster and faster, and oh god, it hurts so badly. Losing words. Losing memories. Losing yourself, thoughts disconnecting, lights flicking off one by one, and nothing makes sense. Nothing connects. It's the end, you're dying, but you also know with the same certainty that this is not the end.
Waking in MC's body after puppet crashes, Retribution ch.25 (female puppet)
You're ripped back into full consciousness, the shreds of whatever nightmare that consumed you still clinging to the edges of your mind. The nausea is strong. Too strong. You barely have time to roll over before throwing up all over the floor.
"Guh…hk…," you cough, trying to clear your throat, but your body is too busy turning itself inside out. Get it out. Get it all out. Involuntary reaction, voiding your stomach of all contents, continuing to convulse until there's nothing left but bile and spit, and yet you're not able to stop cramping.
get it out. get it all out.
Another cough, and you blink away the tears, taking note of the floor. The bed you're still on. Home. Your apartment. Dressed. Of course. Not as much vomit as you had thought. You were prepared for something like this and didn't eat much today. Missed the bucket though.
Blood? There's blood there. Not much; your mind had made up the visuals of great black sticky gobs of half-digested blood, even intestines. As if you were trying to hollow yourself out in prep—
[…]
> What was that dream?
Was that a dream? It must have been. Right? It's fading as you try to remember, spiderwebs torn by careless hands as you try to keep hold of what happened. So strange. Yet familiar.
No. It's not important. You don't…
[withscar≤ 80:]You don't want to remember. You never want to remember your dreams. Things are safer that way. Safer for your sanity. Enough terrors are haunting you in your waking hours; there's no need to add more.
Focus on what's important. The puppet. Ortega probably brought her to the hospital. If she is alive, you might as well leave her in a coma for now. Compromised. Looks like you've got to deal with Hollow Ground sooner rather than later. Ugh. You rub your face hard.
Too many things to deal with right now, you feel hollowed out. Empty.
[withscar> 80:]You don't feel it anymore. It. You close your eyes, fighting nausea. Terror is tearing at your nerves, but it's a physical reaction, residual overflow from the puppet. But inside, you feel…empty. Hollow. As if you threw up more things than your dinner.
Your hands are shaking. Not surprising. You make fists of them and press them hard against your eyes until the blackness of your eyelids starts to sparkle with light. You're here. You can feel yourself.
One breath. Then the next.
Waking in puppet's body after MC crashes, Retribution ch.26 (female puppet)
You tear back into consciousness, the shreds of whatever nightmare consumed you still sticking to the edges of your mind. The nausea is strong. Too strong. You barely have time to roll over before throwing up all over the floor.
"Guh…hk…," you cough, trying to clear your throat, but your body is too busy turning itself inside out. Get it out. Get it all out. Involuntary reaction, voiding your stomach of all contents, continuing to convulse until there's nothing left but bile and spit, but you're still not able to stop cramping.
get it out. get it all out.
Another cough, and you blink away the tears, taking note of the floor. Neat. Polished. Splattered. No bucket, because you never throw up when you slide into [Puppet], only when you return to your own body. Her hands. Yours. Shaking.
Blood? No blood there, though your mind had made up visuals of great black sticky gobs of half-digested blood, even intestines. As if you were trying to hollow yourself out in prep—
(Oh, and on a separate note re: one of the above excerpts—
Pain makes it easy to slip inside because that's the brain's priority alarm. Unlike panic, which can shut things down, or fear, which can lock things into loops, pain opens everything up. All the gates. All the hidden rooms. Enough pain, and it's impossible to focus on anything but, leaving defenses crumbling and hidden secrets crawling out.This would be a pretty straightforward reason to keep the MC without a pain gate.)
Steel sitting on the floor of an elevator trying to talk your puppet down from suicide might just top the list of weirdly specific scenes I didn't know I needed from this game.
"Guess what," an attempt at mirth that's bad, especially for Ortega. "I fucked up."
"Huh." That's an unusual turn of phrase. Usually, Ortega goes to Spanish for the real profanities, too used to being the Marshal, you suppose. Be presentable. "That bad?"
The knowledge that Ortega swears exclusively in Spanish to maintain a PG-13 rating retroactively enhances the entire experience.
"I've suspected it since you first revealed your face." Ortega walks over to the fridge as if she subconsciously wants to give you space. "You see, I've met Hollow Ground. More than once. The resemblance is uncanny." […] "So I looked into it. I had a suspicion what name Hollow Ground used to go by, and I found out that she had siblings. Several. All of them dead." She turns to look at you, or at the person she imagines you to be. "The youngest died while in custody. Juvenile detention. There was a picture."
"A picture." Your mouth is dry.
"Of you. Or, well, close enough. Younger."
[…]
"But you know I wasn't always…" You make a vague gesture toward your chest. You told Ortega about your transition, how did that work with whoever she thinks you were?
"That's why I was so surprised." Ortega shakes her head. "The picture looked like you, though I suppose at that age puberty hadn't really kicked in fully. And the files had her as female. But I suppose it makes sense that Hollow Ground would have been able to pull strings to make that kind of paperwork happen, even if you were a minor."
"Not hard for the kingpin of Los Diablos," you echo emptily. So the sibling in question had been a girl. You're not sure how that makes you feel.
"I lost track of her when she went into state care, if the gender change had been…reverted, it might explain why. I'm so sorry." She looks up, seeking to meet your gaze, but you avoid it.
Wow, this version of the reveal is a treasure trove of new information. I don't have time to properly update my conspiracy board, but some quick bullet points to come back to:
• Confirmation that HGsib was below the age at which Re-Genes are decanted.
• Based on our apparent ages, HGsib's juvie records are probably from the early-to-mid 2000s. (1999 at absolute earliest, since HG was already kingpin.) Some nearby dates for reference:
1997: Rangers established.→ Not sure how long MC was active as a Farm operative, but if they're decanted at adulthood and appeared ~20 in 2008, I'd assume 2–5 years at the very most. (If the SD was significantly reorganized circa 2005, it might make more sense to assume they were "born" after that.)
1999: Hollow Ground self declares as kingpin.
2002: Ortega joins the Rangers.
2005: Special Directive established, a year after a scandal drove the Re-Gene project underground.
2007: Marshal Hood's death.
2008: Sidestep's debut.
→ Regardless of whether their physical and chronological ages are the same, HG has been around for twenty-some years at minimum.
• It's unclear if Ortega has seen any of the other siblings. If not, it's theoretically possible that they resembled us equally closely.
→ Also unclear if HGsib resembles us more closely than HG themselves does. (While the narration notes it's not a perfect likeness, it's not clear how much difference that entails, and the only specific differences mentioned are age and hair.)
• We don't know for sure that the name Ortega looked into was really Hollow Ground, although it probably was.
→ "The name they used to go by" suggests that Ortega doesn't believe it's their original/legal name.
→ Ortega first looked into it after meeting us, meaning even if they found the siblings through existent official records, HG could have long since made sure those records said what they wanted. In other words, these aren't necessarily siblings in a traditional legal or biological sense.
→ (If you want to get real nitpicky, technically we don't even know for sure that these siblings existed, just that records of their existence do. That said, the fact that HGsib was in custody while HG was kingpin suggests they were in fact a separate person who existed, which makes it more likely the others were as well.)
• "Died in government custody" is absurdly suspicious. Implies any of the following, in rough order of likelihood:
→ Didn't really die but was disappeared for shady government purposes
→ Disappeared under other suspicious circumstances that were covered up
→ Died for other reasons that were covered up
• No mention of how the other siblings died or if there was any perceivable pattern or connection to HG's own activities. Ortega doesn't talk as though the circumstances of the youngest's death were especially remarkable, but who knows.
• Ortega has met Hollow Ground in person multiple times.
He lets out a sigh deep enough it might as well have been a laugh. "I should have been used to her dates turning out to be criminals by now."
"She does make a habit of it," you say, echoing his sigh. Classic Ortega. You've both seen it before
oh my god it's actually explicit canon that she always does this
I can't believe the way this game keeps on giving to me
I love Ortega so much. What a fucking disaster of a person <3
"Ortega's evidence is compelling. What she says makes sense," a brief grimace, "would make sense if Hollow Ground existed. […] The facts are there. Nobody is paying attention to them apart from Ortega. And Ortega—"
"Is immune to telepathy," you fill in, realization dawning at last.
—ohhhhhh.
How did I never put that together? The narration even makes that comment about the strobe lights in HG's club to remind you Ortega is both epileptic and a recognized threat to HG in the same breath! And still I just forgot to consider that their immunity to telepathy might be relevant to anyone but us.
…lol, that's why Ortega has met Hollow Ground. Because they tried the handshake routine like normal and it just…didn't work. W h o o p s.
EDIT: It just occurred to me… The other point I hadn't given proper consideration to is that, since Marshal Hood wasn't immune, Hollow Ground had an easy way to counter the threat he posed while he was alive. In fact, it's entirely possible it was Ortega that threw a wrench in that status quo by catching on and alerting Hood to the fact that his mind had been tampered with… Which, now that I think of it, would have given HG an even more urgent reason to want Hood out of the picture. (That last point is the strongest evidence: if that's what happened, then Marshal Hood was essentially killed because of Ortega.)
"Did you find anything?" Right to business, trying to ignore how rattled he is.
"Let's see if I did. What do you think about Hollow Ground?"
"That Ortega might have a point…," he drifts off, wincing slightly. "Shit."
"Yeah. She's going to be insufferable." Be proven right. By Chen.
"Neither of us are going to tell her. Yet." He lets out a breath and gets to his feet. Unfairly steady feet, cybernetic legs sure are handy.
"Because whoever hacked your head once can do it again. If they realize the conditioning is broken." You lean back on your chair, watching him. "And you can't risk Ortega giving it away."
Well, we've all learned a lot today, but not about communication!
Like, yes, they're entirely right that this needs maximum caution, but in what world is the risk that Ortega would give it away?? She'd probably start lecturing us on opsec the moment we finished telling her! What even is our concern here, that she's not paranoid enough? Too bad a liar to keep a secret? Too much self-preservation not to crack under torture? Too vulnerable to mind reading? All hiding it does is ensure she'll be pissed when we tell her, reduce our chances of finding a good time to do so, and increase the risk that she'll be acting on incomplete information until then.
The churn of humanity that surrounds you is overwhelming. Everybody is connected by emotions you can't quite understand, battering against your shields.
touching.
you remember touching.
so much softer than you thought.
you didn't understand.
where did the warmth come from?
inside.
dig it out.
want it!
But it broke apart.Just Like You
I am captivated by this brief flashback, because it's such a unambiguous little piece of pure Heartbreak POV.
Being the person I am, I of course then went into the code to see the versions for all the other scars, and for the record they're all equally beautiful. The derealization one, and the heartbreaking way it closes the loop on Rebirth's Everyone wants to go home to die, just haunts me:
You find yourself crushed by the surrounding humanity. Overwhelmed, so close, and yet never one of them. You never liked crowds, their world seeping into yours, battering against your shields.
staring.
you remember staring.
the view so familiar yet you are not the same.
did you dream this?
home. no.
intruders.
go away.
now!
And they did.And You Fell
"Why 'Hollow Ground'?" You've heard a lot of guesses but precious few facts. Most villains pick their name with care, though some just let the media name them. This one is too odd to be blamed on the media, though. It's too unclear. "That's uncommon, as far as villain names go."
"I suppose it is," they admit with a shrug. It might be your imagination, but Nocturne is hiding a smile, have there been others who've asked the same impertinent questions? "It goes a long way back, before my rise to power." They gesture with their ringed hand, eyes growing wistful and unfocused. "The turf I took over was on badly damaged land, the quakes had left it unstable, and every aftershock destroyed it further. They laughed at me for building my castle there, so to speak." The hand clenches into a fist. "I stopped the quakes and then took the name as a badge of honor so they would never forget what I'm capable of."
Interesting. If true, this story would be the one chink in my assumption that HG is lying about their powers—since they obviously couldn't have had Hood mind controlled in their basement back then, they'd have to have had some other way to accomplish this. Of course, there's no guarantee it is true—it could just be part of the mythology HG has built around themselves (which would explain why Nocturne's trying not to laugh)—but it does feel like the way they choose to tell it should have some importance regardless.
I suppose the galaxy brain conspiracy theory take would be that this is an elaborate metaphor and the "turf" in question is their body, or something. :P
(Inexplicably enough, my first thought when I heard the name was "what, like… a razor blade?" before I stopped for five seconds and caught the obvious "hallowed ground" pun. I do not understand my brain sometimes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
"They keep people loyal somehow. Important people. People they can't risk betraying them. They'll probably bring me back into the fold soon, but in case shit hits the fan, if you can do what you did again, I'll be on your side." The smile is more like a grimace. "I like them, it's a good gig, but I don't like not being trusted."
"Is Nocturne the same as you?" An ace in the hole, this could be useful.
"Maybe. Probably." That disturbs him more than he wants to show. He cares about Nocturne, and the thought that Hollow Ground might have manipulated her is unforgivable.
[…]
"Why not leave while you can?" You keep your voice down and follow.
"Like I said. It's a good gig." Jake grimaces and looks down at the floor. "Things might work out." Nocturne. Does he care about her that much?
"But if the shit hits the fan…"
"Exactly. They are running the city, not going up against that. Not until there's someone else I can bet on."
"Me."
"If you live. If you go after them." A shrug as you get closer to the door. "Still the best job I've had." And the best sex. Fuck, time to stop snooping, you don't want those kinds of details.
So Hollow Ground denies their closest allies the ability to meaningfully consent to a relationship with them, even those they're personally intimate with? Yikes. Can't imagine what sort of person would do that.
The fact that what bothers him is not being trusted is a really interesting character note. A couple of the MC's Farm flashbacks expressed a similar sentiment, IIRC—that almost worse than the actual denial of agency was the assumption that they couldn't be trusted with it. Every moment of their life was scripted before they were even born to ensure they'd know nothing but obedience, and still they were assumed untrustworthy from the very start. (The exact same sore point Steel hit.) There's a special kind of indignity to someone relying on your unique personal strengths and simultaneously not trusting you with them.
Also interesting that, while Jake is fully aware he's the third wheel in this relationship, he's more inclined to assume Nocturne is a fellow victim than a co-conspirator. Because he doesn't trust Hollow Ground to treat her as an exception, or because he likes her and doesn't (or doesn't want to) believe that of her?
(Were this real life, I'd also assume that of course HG has used their trust compulsion on Nocturne; that they appear to genuinely love her is no evidence against that. But that's much less interesting than the actual dynamic the text implies—namely, that Nocturne is the kind of person who realizes her SO is mind-controlling her and responds with "okay but have you considered the potential applications of this, like curing my anxiety?" I seriously can't wait for both Nocturne and their relationship to get more screentime.)
People talking like you're not there. Over your head. A child. No. A thing. Shouldn't understand. Shouldn't know. Hasn't been implanted. Touching you. Examining growth. Lifting. Poking.
A needle.
And you flinch. And you say a word.
no
Confusion. A mistake? Words say one thing but you can feel it. They are afraid. And you shouldn't know that word either. And you shouldn't say it.
God. That callback to the first-chapter Nanosurge flashback hits so perfectly.
(Two different words that were powerful enough to stop it. Sidestep's no, and Ximena's help.)
"Are you sure?" Can't see who. Don't know that voice. Know the other voice. Too well.
"She pulled through, didn't she? Just like I said, she was always a strong one." A touch to your head. Fingertips on skin. They must have shaved you while you were under.
"That's not what I meant. A Re-Gene?"
"Beggars can't be choosers. It's not like he's in a position to complain."
"Dr. Siepen…"
"What? You know as well as I do that he's losing his grip. If it wasn't for the director, he'd be out already."
"Should I start prepping the body for insertion then?"
…Wow. That's a lot of information at once after the breadcrumbs we've been dealing with up to now. Let me try to sum this up—bullet points, so I don't get lost:
• They want telepaths so they can use them as hosts for whoever/whatever "he" is. Emphasis on "whoever", I think—they sound worried it's disrespectful to give him a Re-Gene body, not that it won't work—but the entire process seems volatile enough that their last try resulted in the Heartbreak incident.
→ (Not 100% sure I'm right about their attitude towards this "him"—everything other than those couple lines above has read more like your standard "sealing away some great and terrible power" schtick, so it's possible I'm putting too much weight on them. Will keep a pin in this.)
→ (Was the procedure we saw in that flashback the standard body transfer one, or was it something else? Unclear; I need to take another look.)
• The Heartbreak incident subject (whom I'll just call Heartbreak for simplicity's sake) seemed to take it about as well as we do in this dream. Perhaps they also knew the word "no".
→ (Note for reference: there's no explicit reference to Heartbreak being a Re-Gene or indication of whether they had tattoos, but what little we know about them strongly points to a human who once had a normal life and childhood. That said, they certainly weren't being treated like a person by the time that experiment happened.)
• The nature of our power to possess people has been an open question for ages, especially since it's treated as both unprecedented (at least to most people's knowledge) and distinct from our preexisting telepathy. Heartbreak had it, and now we do. Seeing as the sole thing we know about "him" is that he lives rent-free in telepaths' heads, it seems reasonable to assume he's the source of that power.
→ The game specifically suggests that the compulsions Hollow Ground places are more akin to the possession than to our other powers. Do they come from the same (or a similar) source?
→ The text also makes a point of mentioning that HG shares our distinctively "wrong" smile, and we encounter significant aquarium-centered memories in both our and HG's heads (though it's hinted that in the latter case the memory may actually have come from either us or some shared presence in our minds)—specifically, a memory of imitating a shark's smile…
→ The other telepathic power the game has been pointedly weird about is the kind Shroud has: eating thoughts/memories. Parts of the Heartbreak flashback suggest Heartbreak also did this, and the narration when reading Carter's mind suggests we can now do something akin to it as well.
→ (The prominent existence of a power that lets one person remove and absorb others' thoughts/memories obviously opens up yet more opportunities to go full conspiracy theory about the nature of our identity/existence, but what else is new?)
• "He" ≠ Heartbreak, clearly—our narration is very pointed about the pronouns it uses to refer to Heartbreak, and she was a woman in this file. So we do indeed have three entities in play here, but the third one—"him"—doesn't seem very personally present in the narrative compared to the others. I think he must still be here, though; the bodyjacking power is too clear a connection. Is the fact that he's not driving an accomplishment on our/Heartbreak's part, or is that the result the Farm intended?
→ (Tangential: on the subject of pronouns, there's also one conspicuously invariant "she" in Rebirth: "When I felt her inside my head, changing[…] How I felt. Who…I…" I'm assuming that refers to Dr. Siepen.)
• Our scars from the Heartbreak incident, regardless of their nature, are our point of connection—empathy—with Heartbreak. Are they what's allowed us to coexist with Heartbreak in our mind? (Because I mean, by this point I think we can safely remove the "maybe" from that assumption.)
→ If so, the MC's fear that their scars are the only thing "holding [them] together" may in fact be rather literally true…
→ (This whole scenario has very similar vibes to Argent and her friends, incidentally.)
• Something about imitating vs. being goes here. Merely puppeting vs. truly resurrecting vs. truly inhabiting a body; a person living rent-free in your head in a metaphorical vs. a literal sense. "Nothing is truly dead if it is remembered." A new body, the same ghosts that haunt it. Anathema is dead, yet they remain a living presence in the narrative. Ace is dead, yet it often feels as if reviving their body has awoken their mind. Each monster that failed to kill us has been repurposed as the literal source of our strength. Sidestep is dead, yet here we are.
→ (The literalized trauma metaphor of "what doesn't kill you becomes a part of you that makes you stronger, at a cost" seems like a common thread through the cast. MC and Argent are the most blatant examples, but it's basically baked into the foundation of the superhero worldbuilding.)
...
I finally caved and just looked up what the final achievement I'm missing is, and... I cannot fucking believe the answer is "open the ninth gate". Like—I need to stress that since literally the first time I saw the Heartbreak flashback and the line "I think we should open the ninth gate," it has been a running joke between my brother and I that you should very obviously never open the ninth gate. I don't even know what the ninth gate is, but it is blatantly obvious from the name alone that it is something you should not open. The only appropriate response to someone saying, "I think we should open the ninth gate," is to send them to immediate remedial workplace safety training and do a thorough audit of your workplace culture to see what contributed to someone thinking that was a good idea.
And now I'm going to have to do it anyway.
Achievement: …don't…
A pain. Migraine? It's suddenly hard to breathe.
Words cannot describe how vindicated I feel by the fact that the achievement for opening the ninth gate is literally just called "don't". :')