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dragons-bones · 2 years

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FFXIV Write Entry #4: With Ice Cold Hands

Prompt: defile (free write!) || Master Post || On AO3

A/N: My goal this FFXIV Write is that for free write Sundays, I’m going to specifically write scenes from Endwalker as they occurred in Squadverse, which is unusual because I normally prefer to write the bits between canon. So naturally, I started here.

I’d say I’m sorry, but I’m not.

WARNINGS: Spoilers for Endwalker. Body horror, dysphoria, Fandaniel, Zenos. Mentioned alcohol and drug use, blood, violence, gore, panic attacks, close calls with vomiting.

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Rereha isn’t a stranger to not knowing where she wis when she wakes up, and trying to blink herself awake now, she certainly doesn’t recognize the table before her. No design she’s ever seen, and ugly as shite to boot, which is impressive to someone who grew up in Ul’dah and has seen all the “fashionable” trends come and go. But that isn’t what seemed different.

The headache isn’t the throbbing behind her eyes that was indicative of her having drunk to excess the night before, nor was there the sour taste in her mouth that accompanied a hangover, either. No particular tingle or burn in her sinuses or the back of her throat, either, that would suggest she’d been very stupid indeed and backslid into bad habits from her days as a bored heiress. Her limbs, however, feel oddly heavy, like they were too long, and even sitting down, her sense of balance feels off.

Her vision isn’t quite right. Is there something on her head? Gods, where even is she, the last thing she remembers is…

Is…

…Oh no.

A voice, familiar in a way that sent ice down her spine:

“The experiment was a success, but I fear our time is short.”

Rereha blacks out again, but she isn’t sure for how long. In the next blink of consciousness, there is a full dinner service in front of her, but any appetite she might have vanishes when she raises her head further and sees fucking Zenos sitting on the opposite end of a banquet table from herself, eating baked salmon as if nothing is out of the ordinary.

Fandaniel’s grating voice draws her attention, and she whips her head to the side to stare at the Ascian, only half-aware of what he is saying until: “Take a moment, too, to familiarize yourself with that borrowed flesh.”

Ice runs through her whole body, except it isn’t her body, is it, as she looks down, at fingers too long attached to palms too wide attached to wrists too thick attached to arms too no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no—

Fandaniel is monologuing, fucking monologuing, what is it with Ascians and Garleans and monologuing, and Rereha is only idly aware of what the bastard is going on about. If she gets out of this—when she gets out of this—she will be able to recall everything verbatim; it’s a handy trick her grandmama taught her, useful for any Ul’dahn socialite to acquire gossip and blackmail, and it’s served her well as both bard and intelligencer for the Scions. Who expects the hedonist deep in her cups to be paying attention, after all? Even with panic choking her, she knows with a certainty deep in her bones she won’t lose a single drop of information the Ascian is feeding her.

Aulus, though. Son of a fucking bitch. Alakhai and Thancred and Tataru had been worried they couldn’t confirm whether any of that bastard’s research had made it out of Ala Mhigo. Here’s the answer, too little, too late.

She wants to be pithy, to be snide, but all that escapes her mouth is, “Give me back my body!” in a voice that isn’t hers. Not high enough, not smooth enough, not female enough, distorted further by the helmet’s vocoder, the words rumbling in someone else’s throat oh gods oh gods oh gods whose skin did they put her in, did they rip out some poor tempered boy’s soul and shove hers in, or was this a shell—

Zenos watches without speaking, with his cold, dead eyes. Somehow, that’s worse than Fandaniel’s manic gloating.

The roar that echoes the room sends a different kind of shiver down her spine, and there’s the skinstealer going off on another tangent and—oh.

Oh.

No one deserves that.

Not even Varis zos Galvus.

And then his accursed son finally deigns to speak.

Revulsion mixes with the horror that already lurks on the back of her—this body’s—tongue, and she swallows back bile. Vomiting in a helmet would just make an already shitty day even worse. Gods, but she loathes what this monster in a man’s skin assumes about her and her sisters, that they are exactly like him, deriving pleasure and meaning from bloodshed and violence just because they managed to give him a fucking challenge.

Rereha remembers her arm dangling by tendon and a strip of muscle, her heart pumping her life’s blood onto the sands of Rhalgr’s Reach as she screamed and screamed and screamed. Rereha remembers Alisaie’s hands on her tying a tourniquet and shoving what little conjury she knew into her traumatized body. Rereha remembers intimately finding out what it feels like to have her brachial artery forcibly knit itself together bit by bit by bit, until the blessed relief of oblivion finally claimed her.

Her arm twinges with the memory and bile rises anew in her throat because that is not her arm.

It’s not until he gets up and begins strolling away, still spewing his bullshite even as Fandaniel stands prim and proper in his tailed suit with a bottle of wine ready to serve (the vintage is one whose even she would wheeze at, where she not trying not to have a hysterical fit of terror), that she sees the chair.

(Helmets are fucking stupid, especially Garlean ones with their absolute shite peripheral vision.)

That is her body, slumped over like she’s merely fallen asleep on an airship ride. Even her hat is still in place.

Adrenaline is the only reason she doesn’t fall flat on her—his—this face as she attempts to race towards Zenos, her center of gravity too far off the fucking ground and fuck being tall this is fucking awful and for the first time tonight Zenos is emoting, that disgusting feral smile on his face GET AWAY FROM M—

Too late. Zenos’s body drops like a marionette with its strings cuts, and he—she—he raises her head and she just barely keeps from retching because that look. That expression.

That doesn’t belong on her face.

If she lives through this, she knows that will haunt her dreams for the rest of her life.

And then he’s fucking gone, of course, he’s in a godsdamn body, HER godsdamn body, which is capable of using aether which means he can teleport which means oh god oh god oh god he can teleport he can teleport her friends what about her friends—

“Oh dear!” Fandaniel’s gleeful malice draws her attention. “Whatever would happen if my lord were to greet your friends as you? I shudder to imagine what carnage he would wreak!”

She can’t decide if she wants to scream or to punch that faux innocence off Fandaniel’s stupid stolen punchable face maybe she can do both shut up you rat shut up shut up shut up not her friends not her sisters not her family no no no no no—

Rereha doesn’t have time to panic or punch his stupid stolen punchable face only because Fandaniel yanks her across space-time or however the fuck it is Ascians teleport and makes her the star of his newest little game.

It is hell.

Her legs are too damn long and so are her arms and her center of gravity is utterly fucked because while she is in her proper body, she has the arms and shoulders of a god from all her archery work, she’s still bottom heavy. Her ass is amazing, thank you. And this poor damn dead victim she’s been summarily stuffed into like cream filling into an éclair has no fucking ass and no fucking hips and his shoulders and chest are fucking huge and all of his armor is on his head and chest and what the fuck. What the actual fuck.

And of course, because the body is Garlean infantry, that means sword and board. The soldier before her might be tempered, but he hasn’t last any of his skill, and she has none; this is Heron’s realm. She stumbles over her feet, is barely able to bring her dinky little round shield up in time to prevent her-his-this head from being knocked off her-his-this shoulders.

She can’t subdue him. There are no waiting squads of Contingent soldiers ready to swoop in with restraints and bring him back to camp to reverse his tempering. Fandaniel is right there, providing color commentary because he is a raging dick, and there’s zero doubt in her mind he wouldn’t do something to get the soldier back on his feet. The killing blow she lands is lucky, and the blood that steams out into the frigid air is red, red, red.

Rereha isn’t a stranger to killing; she’s Twin Adders, for gods’ sake, and while she likes to think she’s better than her Gridania-born compatriots in trying to give Keepers and Duskwights the benefit of the doubt, she has still had to put down poachers or bandits who threatened innocent lives, or her own. She’s had to kill tempered before. She’s had to kill before period, and she doesn’t like it, not a bit, no matter what Zenos thinks is true in his deluded, blood-addled mind, but that’s the world she lives in, though she’s trying to make it a better place so that it isn’t such a world.

But she hasn’t had to kill in a long while now.

She’s at least pathetically grateful that the sight of a man run through and bleeding out still makes her want to be sick. Her soul might not be in the right place at the moment, but she isn’t what Zenos claims she is.

She isn’t his fucking mirror.

“Not bad at all, given your diminished capacity!” Fandaniel laughs and claps from his perch. The urge to throw her sword at him is so high right now. “Nevertheless, ‘twould perhaps be prudent to keep to the shadows, scurrying about like a rodent!”

He vanishes into void again, thinking he’s being cute. Yeah, well, fuck you, Fanny-boy, one of her sisters is a rogue, like Alakhai’s never taught her to be a sneaky bitch, she just doesn’t usually want to be a sneaky bitch.

Rereha knows she’s under a time crunch, so she pushes down her panic and hysteria in favor of moving as quickly and as softly as she can, ducking behind broken walls or climbing over piles of debris, sometimes staying as still as possible while waiting for tempered soldiers to turn a corner. She scavenges medical kits from the dead, tending to her wounds as she walks because fuck fuck fuck she can’t even draw on ambient aether to speed up her healing, a trick anyone who signs up with the Adventurers’ Guild is taught.

She stumbles across a crossroad full of magitek, but of course it’s the most direct route she needs; there’s no telling how long it’ll take her to find a less dangerous path going around. But there’s a reaper close enough with its weapons intact, even though the leg is damaged; it can’t walk but it sure as fuck can shoot. All right, there’s her way through.

The pilot is nearby and by some miracle, both still alive and untempered. She shares some of her medical kits with him as he explains what happened, quickly helps him set his hand so the bones don’t heal wrong and makes mental note of all the surrounding landmarks as he presses the reaper’s keycard into her palm. The least she can do is send him help once she’s back at Broken Glass.

Of course she can’t find an undamaged, somewhat full ceruleum fuel tank close by, though. Of fucking course. Her fucking luck, she wants a word with the manager. She wastes precious time tracking one down, and then hauling it back, but for a moment she is grateful the body she’s in has the upper body strength to carry the fuel tank.

Fuck but she misses her tits, though. She really, really wants her tits back.

It is…deeply satisfying using the reaper to tear through the waves of magitek guarding her path home. The explosions rock the Region Urbanissma, and at one point, out of the corner of her eye, she sees the pilot peering over a hole in the wall of his hideaway, cheering her on.

The magitek stop coming, eventually, and she hops down and continues on, her success giving her a burst of energy as she sneaks behind more tempered soldiers.

But then there are civilians.

“You there, please! Help us!”

Pragmatism says she should continue on her way. Idealism dictates she doesn’t.

Rereha is a Warrior of Light. Even in the depths of her terror, she won’t forget that. Fandaniel and Zenos won’t take that from her.

Now, she sets aside Alakhai, and draws on Dancing Heron, her literal and figurative big sister. She has watched Heron dance with a sword for decades, listened to her lecture students about form and stance and footwork, and when she bends her mind to recalling those details, this unwanted body responds. Whoever he was, he was a fine warrior before Fanny-boy dug his claws into his soul, and his muscle memory is smooth.

She just hopes it doesn’t become her own, too.

She channels Heron further, rallying the civilians, taking the attention of the wildlife, as hungry and desperate as the people, letting the civvies attack from the back and flanks while she harasses from the front. They’re smart, capable, and holy hells, one of them found a working reaper.

But that’s when a platoon of tempered, led by a soldier so corrupted that Anima’s influence has warped them into a hulking brute identifiable only as a former person because they walk on two legs, arrive. There are many, and they keep coming. There are not enough medkits to go around.

The corrupted soldier begins channeling his aether, and Rereha recognizes a suicide tactic. So does one of the civvies, who calls out to them to duck back behind the magitek reaper—

—and that’s how they find out the tanks littering the area aren’t empty.

The explosion sends her and the civvies into the air. She hits the ground first, and likely the only thing that saves her life is this stupid, cumbersome, blinding, heavy armor. The civvies finish falling next, with sickening crunches.

There are wet, choked gasps around her. And then there is silence.

Does she lose consciousness? She doesn’t know. She’s aware of the blackness of her vision. Maybe she took a hit to the head that blinded her. Blinded this body.

There’s a heartbeat in her ears.

If there’s a heartbeat, there’s hope.

Rereha forces herself awake, forces the eyes of this body open. This body is broken. She has lost all sense of time.

She cannot give up.

She reaches forward, hooks the body’s fingers into the ground, pulls as she pushes off with the knee. A sob hitches in her-his-this chest, and tears pour down her stolen face. Reaches forward with the other arm, hooks that hand into the ground, pulls as she pushes off with the other knee. And again.

And again.

She chokes on her sobs, shattered ribs protesting and shattering further, and she crawls.

She crawls, because she cannot give up.

At some point, she’s able to force herself up on both legs, limping, sword dangling almost uselessly in the body’s hand. She stumbles through snow, somehow manages to avoid the hungry wildlife. She thinks she’s getting closer to Camp Broken Glass; she doesn’t see any patrols, but there aren’t any tempered, either.

She hears her name.

Rereha looks up.

She’s wandered off the path, but managed to still stumble mostly in the right direction. There are G’raha and Alisaie.

They are not looking at her, in this broken body.

They are looking at Zenos, in her body.

She runs. Every step is agony but she runs because she can’t do anything else, and there’s some creature rising into the air above her stolen head and it’s going to attack her friends and NO.

NO.

The creature’s sickle is knocked aside by the sword she’s just thrown, and heads turn in her direction as she keeps stumbling forward.

“Get away from them, you FUCKING BASTARD!” she howls, ramming into her body.

Oblivion.

Rereha isn’t a stranger to not knowing where she wis when she wakes up, but trying to blink herself awake now, she thinks she has a vague inkling of where that rug belongs. A design she’s only seen in this frozen shithole, and ugly as shite to boot, which is impressive to someone who grew up in Ul’dah and has seen all the “fashionable” trends come and go. But hey, she doesn’t feel too tall anymore.

“Thank goodness. She’s awake!”

Memory rushes back, and her eyes snap open.

The Scions and her sisters and Lucia and Maxima are clustering around her; they’re in the room she shares with her sisters in Camp Broken Glass. It was Alphinaud who spoke, and the naked relief on his face is a stark contrast to the cheerful madness of Fandaniel.

She looks down at her hands: the right size. She pats at her face, down her body, stops perhaps a moment too long on her tits because oh thank fuck she has her tits back before going further down to stomach and hips and legs, wonderful short legs.

Her hat is on her head. Her hat is on her head.

She looks around frantically, at her friends, at her family, looking for wounds or injury or anger, something rising hot and sour in her throat. “Is everyone all right?” she says in her voice. Her voice, high-pitched with a lilting Ul’dahn drawl hiding in the vowels.

It’s G’raha who answers, saying soft and soothing, “Perfectly fine, yes. I hope the same can be said of you.”

He’s a good boy, but oh. Oh, that was the wrong thing to say.

She stares at him for a long moment, and then that hot-sour feeling bubbles over, and she is sobbing. Deep, huge, heaving, retching sobs, and she hurriedly buries her face in her hands and keens.

It’s Thancred who gathers her up into a hug, humming an Ul’dahn lullaby. Rereha clutches his shoulders and bawls into his coat, breathing in the familiar scent of sword oil and his favorite shitty cologne as she fights to breathe. There’s someone pressing up behind her—Synnove, definitely, and the way she’s being smooshed forward into Thancred, Heron’s right behind Synnove. A snuffling sound, and Tyr’s shoving his head into the pile, face pressing into her stomach, and his big boof rattles her teeth in her head and every bone in her body and she never knew how much she loved that feeling.

There’s a big Scion group hug forming around her, she can sense the weight of so many bodies. Even Estinien, though he’s less cuddling and more placing his hand atop her head, the heat of him evident even through her hat.

Thancred keeps humming in her ear, her dumbass bar crawl buddy who wusses out over cactus liquor but can still beat her at darts even when he’s downed a bottle and a half of goblin motor oil masquerading as brandy, and doesn’t tell her she’ll be all right. It isn’t what she wants to hear right now. He’d know almost better ‘n anybody, wouldn’t he?

Eventually, she’ll get her shit together. She’s a Warrior of Light, and she has a job to do.

But right now, Rereha sobs.

It helps.

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#ffxivwrite2022 #final fantasy xiv #ffxiv #oc: rereha reha #fandaniel #zenos yae galvus #dt's writing

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echthr0s · 2 years

Text

< Do you remember? Being Anansi, that is. >

Dayir halted mid-step, nearly overbalancing and dropping the serving plate she was carrying. Ishan looked up at the sound of teacups rattling on their plates and raised an eyebrow; Shai huffed impatiently, itching to get her fingers on the macarons Ser Aymeric had gifted them.

"Oh, a fine time for more Echo bullshit!" Shai complained at Dayir's eerily vacant gaze. Ishan easily retrieved the tray from Dayir's still hands and set about serving tea himself. In the space between worlds, Dayir stared incredulously at Talan.

"Do I remember being whom?"

< Anansi, of course. The Grey Warden. Or, I suppose, I should not call him that. He never much behaved like one… >

"Who is this? Someone from your world? What is he to do with me?"

< Well, naturally, you were him. Or, he was you. Or, you are each other. …Ah. You don't remember. >

It wasn't that, exactly. It was that Dayir felt very strange all of a sudden. Disoriented, impossibly light, a bit nauseated, as if she were close to fainting. In Fortemps Manor, her hands, still hovering in midair, had begun to tremble.

"Nidhogg…" Dayir whispered wonderingly, recalling a fateful confrontation that had felt oddly familiar.

< Nidhogg? >

< Well, yes, you see, that's exactly what made me think of it. > Hades appeared then, in his customary from-entirely-out-of-nowhere fashion. < The wrathful wyrm that harries Ishgard, the corrupted dragon-god that rises to blight Ferelden… > He raised his hands and his brow as if to say, 'you see?'

"Will you not speak plainly?" Dayir pleaded, teetering precariously on the edge of either revelation or madness.

< Do I ever? > Hades retorted, then huffed a sigh. < Obviously, it's not just about Nidhogg and Urthemiel. It's about tricksy Razikale, who created Talan's people; it's about the blood of Bahamut in yours. It's about death magic and life magic, one and the same; it's about the dancing; it's about that long, luscious mane of yours. It's about the way you both move through the world, doing things no one else can do, or would even think to do. >

< Hades drew a picture for me, a picture of two souls who are one soul, > Talan interjected. < Everything I told him about Anansi, he connected to you. He sees the things I do not, bound to your world as he is. >

< And it's countless, the things I've seen that are echoed elsewhere, in worlds I know nothing of but of which Talan and Aurene know much. > Hades waved his hands impatiently. < Oh, come now, surely you don't think this is the only life you've lived? Are living, will live? Have you listened to anything I've said since we've met? Unbelievable. >

"Wait. Aurene? Who is Aurene?"

Another impatient hand-wave. < Never mind that. As I was saying, the things you can do, the way your improbable and frankly absurd existence changes things, that is a quality that resonates throughout the cosmos. It's a signature, like an aetherial imprint. Something, some ineffable cosmic force even I can't fathom, creates You -- not you, Dayir, specifically, but that particular essence that makes you, you -- to be its scion. To disrupt stagnancy. To rewrite the book on what is possible. To make worlds anew. >

Despite the information overload, Dayir feels less and less unmoored as Hades elaborates. Her mental map is reordering. Things that didn't make sense before have begun to fall into place. She thinks she is beginning to understand.

"This is part of it. My ability to speak to you, Talan. And you, Hades… did I live a different life with you, on this world? Long ago, perhaps, or…?"

A strange expression flickers across Hades's visage. < Or. > He is gone before Dayir can press the issue.

Talan took up the expository baton. < I only met Anansi once, and that meeting was the catalyst to my departure from Thedas. The Blight was no longer a threat, but he was suffering from a new blight, some rampant primal magic that had taken root in the palm of his hand and was changing him the way that same magic had warped the sky. The Veil was the thinnest it had ever been. I went to the stronghold in the clouds, where Anansi was gathering people from all over Thedas to… to fix things. To make things right again -- not just in the sky, but in the land, too. The Veil was not the only thing that was crumbling.

I went to the stronghold in the clouds with some of my people and one day I saw him with my own eyes. He was… he was exhausted. He was in agony. He was having a heated conversation with someone, and all of a sudden, in a flash of insight, I knew who the other person was. He was the one responsible for everything, including what was happening to Anansi. He looked like an elf, but he was a god, and he was breaking the world. And Anansi was supposed to stop him, but how? How?

I left Thedas soon after. I do not know what has happened. I do know that Thedas is not destroyed, that the world still thrives, so Anansi must have succeeded. And you… you will, as well. It is how you are made. But you will not succeed by the methods of your fellows, by war or death or control. You have to trust yourself. They won't see until it's all done. You won't see until it's all done. Trust your heart. >

"I will, Talan." Dayir is overwhelmed, trembling with terror and awe and, strangely enough, hope. Renewed vigor for the trials ahead, of which there were sure to be many. "I would like to remember. Being Anansi, that is."

Talan smiled. < You will. The first path to remembrance is knowing something exists to be remembered. It will come, like a trickle or like a flood. Give it time. >

"I swear, if she doesn't snap out of it in the next minute, I'm just going to scarf her macarons and say it was Emmanellain," Shai was saying when Dayir returned to her body, blinking the stare of the dead from her eyes.

"Oh, like when Ishan drank all the arak that Meffrid sent you and blamed it on Estinien?" Dayir said sweetly, and Shai squeaked and spilled tea down her front.

#EXPOSITION TIIIIIME <3 #litcherally just an excuse to finally do a scene with todash!hades #who ofc hasn't said a WORD about what he's about to put dayir through in the very near future LMAOOO #ffxiv #oc: dayir #writing an actual fic? nah. writing random slice of life scenes that are 90% dialogue? yeaaaaaaa #webspinning #(aurene is from gw2 btw. so that's three worlds we've confirmed dayir existing in)#(there are others! bc of course there are)#also isn't it so rude when your transuniversal friends just straight up interrupt your teatime to have a conversation #about the nature of the multiverse and your role in it. like. hello. i'm trying to have some macarons here.

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blackestnight · 2 years

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wait can I come back for round 2 of relationship ask meme but also be a lil selfish and ask for any fun thoughts / details about hanami and nini friendship for any verse

KICKS DOWN DOOR

DO YOU WANT TO GO TO SPACE

WE'RE GOING TO SPACE

or: hi, i'm going to talk about starfinder au. apologies for the sequence of words i am about to put on your screen but i think nini would have a great time as an akashic lorekeeper mystic (but like...intelligence-based. i wish starfinder had more straight spellcasting classes.) imagine her with a MIND PALACE full of BOOKS. and sometimes she can PHYSICALLY WALK INTO HER MIND PALACE. bookshop au but it's magic and in space!!!!!!

with that established, time for shenanigans:

nini's a jack-of-all-trades, good-for-those-random-skill-checks-no-one-took-ranks-in type, probably does a lot of background research/support for SCION (a networking hub for Space Mercenaries who Fight Evil). hanami's more a charge-in-swords-blazing type but whenever she's going on assignment somewhere she's not familiar with she's knocking on nini's door. nini knows everything, and if she doesn't know she can find out.

when nini's not doing research for SCION she's looking for information on the Gap, a weird universe-wide event that spanned multiple millennia during which all memory—living, (un)dead, digital, divine—was erased. no one knows what happened during the gap or even exactly how long it lasted, but somewhere in there an entire planet kind of went missing, so it's a fairly big deal.

nini and hanami go on expeditions together to a moon called Salvation's End, which is (fittingly) actually a man-made moon, run by an AI that maintains multiple simulations of different pre-Gap civilizations that have since either been wiped out or forced to leave their home worlds. they never manage to get into the same sim twice but it's always a good time, in the "oh shit we might die" kind of way, and it's also an anthropologist's wet dream. hanami runs guard duty while nini walks around taking notes and chatting up the locals.

nini's mind palace has blankets and a steaming pot of tea in it so sometimes she calls it up and wanders inside just to have a nap. it's really not big enough to fit a couch built for a seven-foot-tall dragonkin but by god she tries, so hanami can also come in and nap after a long day of getting chased around a moon.

nini, unlike hanami, actually is an Official Starfinder(TM). she hasn't taken on many society missions in the last few years due to society drama (that resulted in, like, 75% of its membership going missing) but it's where she met estinien.

and they were from rival factions (oh my god they were from rival factions). nini's a dataphile, estinien was an exo-guardian (before he left the starfinders for good in the wake of the Oops We Fucked Up And 75% Of Our Members Went Missing incident). "rival" is used loosely here since for the most part the different factions work together fine/don't have any direct conflicts of interest.

i haven't done any organized play adventures for this year but from what i know about the story nini would be all over it, it's all about a series of data and information heists conducted against the starfinder society. anyway.

nini and hanami are both telepaths (hanami comes by it naturally, nini's is magical). nini's specific brand of telepathy can work very similarly to the echo, in that she can voluntarily view scenes from a person or place's past. this means they both join krile in actively harassing him.

estinien, indignant: that's not how that WORKS hanami: not for me. but it does for her nini: :)

(she only rarely actually uses her power for evil)

hanami travels outside of the pact worlds a lot for different jobs and ALWAYS comes back with a new snack or drink for nini to try. their, uh, edibility is usually up for questioning, because alien food, but none of it will outright kill them (probably). it's definitely better than anything that comes out of a culinary synthesizer.

once a year nini and hanami try to schedule a week or two off missions and drag their respective beaus out to arkanen for the yearly lightning festival. it's mostly a draw for technomancers, who study at the local university, but the gang loves it because something about being on a moon rocketing through a lightning storm older than some stars never gets old.

#ask #ask meme #nuclearanomaly #THANK YOU JAYNE #oc: hanami hagane #ninira #starfinder au

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autumnslance · 3 years

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Has Thancred ever slipped back into his charmer, flirtatious, ways when speaking to other people since being with Aeryn? How would Aeryn feel about that should it happen?

That is an interesting question! And I’m going to end up rambling about my reading of lore, observations, and headcanons for them.

Thancred acts like a flirtatious charmer all through ARR; he’s rather infamous for it. His intro in 1.0 Ul’dah, seen briefly in Echo flashbacks in 2.0’s Ul’dah intro, certainly show him succeeding at charming two women at the same time. We also have the multiple girlfriends incident in 2.5 between the first Steps of Faith and the Bloody Banquet. And after we get Thancred back in 3.1 from the Dravanian wilderness, he acts more or less like his usual charming, flirty self, making quips about women digging scars and bantering with Hilda (the WoL and Y’shtola can even remark on it when talking privately about Thancred, after Vidofnir’s dramatics).

That all stops after the Antitower. Thancred spirals down hard afterwards, and there’s no more flirting, no more stories of charming his way into ladies’ favors. There’s barely any jokes or smartassery at all, even. It’s not until later 4.0 he starts to sound like himself again, what little we do see him in Stormblood. In Shadowbringers, Urianger always speaks of Thancred’s randier antics as being in the past when he was younger.

Even before ShB, I was of the opinion that much of Thancred’s flirting and charming was part of his bardic persona, a demeanor adopted to gather information and seem harmless (if annoying). While the man probably has a healthy libido, and gods know he has Bisexual Disaster* energy, it still felt more like an act that he rather enjoyed playing for a time, and probably a handy escape besides, until the weight of his losses and traumas overwhelmed him.

That said, he IS still naturally charismatic and charming. Even at his grumpiest he has his ways of talking and connecting with people, though not always successfully (like Magnus initially).

I do headcanon that when Thancred wants, or needs to, he can turn on the charm and use that silver tongue to convince people to give him the information he’s looking for, or maybe just a good deal at the market. Harmless, complimentary flirtation would be something habitual and easy to slip back into, especially if it leaves a mark flustered enough; Thancred’s been a rogue running cons his whole life, even if he does it now for purposes other than base survival.

So it is something he still does, as part of the job and his role as the Scion’s master infiltrator and scout, and probably definitely helped him and Ryne get around and survive on the First for years, especially when they had to dodge Eulmoran searches. Off duty, when just hanging around Revenant’s Toll or the Crystarium, out to dinner or among friends? It probably still happens now and then as a habit—again, maybe because he wants or needs something, but it’s something he’s far more conscious of, too, since Heavensward, and especially since traveling with Ryne (having a kid around can change a lot).

As far as his relationship with Aeryn specifically, he knows she gets jealous (and that she hates that she does). So he does attempt to keep it toned down when “off duty” and around town. He keeps his flirting directed on her most of the time. And if he is charming and flirtatious for work purposes, he doesn’t let it get very far, and if she’s around especially, makes sure afterwards she’s reassured. Aeryn, for her part, tries to remain calm and remind herself that for all his flirtations, Thancred is a man of very deep emotion and care to the people who mean something to him, and intentionally hurting them is not something he likes to do, especially since the mess of things in 5.0 and the lessons he learned there. There is some tension, and at least one fight, about his flirty background and some fears and assumptions—especially finding out he’d been on the First for five years, and their romantic relationship was still very new at that point—but they’re both making an effort to be better at communicating those things like adults (lest their comrades get involved, or worse, Ryne). One of Aeryn’s fears is that due to her own minimal needs—sex is fun, and/or decent stress relief, but isn’t a priority for her, not something she wants or needs outside a romantic relationship—eventually there’s going to be incompatibility issues and his attentions will wander when someone just as charming flirts back.

So Aeryn doesn’t like it, but she also knows it’s just part of who he is, part of his deflections and survival tactics, and that it means nothing. It’s convincing her emotional responses of what she rationally knows that’s the problem, mostly. Thancred meanwhile is trying to be better at being conscious of what and how and to whom he says things and making sure his lady is aware of his constancy in the now.

—

*Bi with maybe a lean toward women but there’s no one in this game setting that matches modern Western concepts of “straight” sexuality and gender, and the best part is, from Ishikawa-san’s own mouth, that’s pretty intentional to let players ship who they wanna ship.

#Final Fantasy XIV #Aeryn Prompts #Thancred Waters #Thancred x WoL #Shippy Nonsense #lore #Aeryn Striker #headcanon

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alvaar-aldaviir · 4 years

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Wondrous Tails: First “I Love You” (replacement) / Bandaging Wounds

("First "I Love You"" is a replacement for "Going on a Cruise")

Time Frame: Post Canon (years after Shadowbringers(?)), Minimal Spoilers for 5.0 end. Notes got long so they are under the cut.

Notes:

I continue to refer to Alphinaud as a Scholar instead of Academician for no reason but laziness and bad habits.

I understand the ‘time bubble’ issue of MMO’s, but for writing I subscribe to time actually passing between expansions. I don’t keep a hard and fast rule, but sort of lean toward roughly 1 year per expansion if not longer. Otherwise everyone would be mired under so much PTSD I don’t know how the Scions would get anything done, and please let my WoL breathe?

Somehow, someway, Alvaar has gotten the better of me and it’s eventual committed relationship polygamy with the Leveilleurs up in here. After actual months of telling myself no, I give up. If you hate that, pass on my stuff and have a great day.

Just for posterity, there will never be twincest. I don’t have a personal stance on people’s fiction about fictional people, but it just doesn’t make sense for the twins to me.

The first time Alphinaud hears Alvaar utter those words, he’s seventeen. Seventeen and full of fire and determination to help right the wrongs of a thousand-year war and maybe redeem some of his own foolishness.

Seventeen and half scandalized to catch his Warrior of Light buried against Lord Haurchefant’s chest before they readied to infiltrate the Vault after Ser Aymeric.

It wasn’t as if he’d gone looking of course. Such things would have been kept a better secret behind a closed door and not front and center to whomever strolled into House Fortemps expecting an audience. But romantic subtly wasn’t... exactly Lord Haurchefant’s forte and neither was it Alvaar’s. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t known when it was the talk of Camp Dragonhead and the house servants anyway.

But it is perhaps the first time the Arcanist had seen any hint of the word “love” meaning something beyond dutifully repeated and expected phrases. Spoken as if it’s some personal secret, or more of a promise than just a response. Something alive and wild instead of the light and flippant ways he’d heard it used in Sharlayan and among nobility.

There’s a weight to those words that’s like aether humming in an incantation.

It means something when Alvaar says it and the Lord’s sharp features soften as he nuzzles into blond hair, and it means even more when Haurchefant answers in kind and some of the tension in the Bard’s shoulders ease. There’s a thousand words held in that phrase, like pages and pages of information distilled in a single line of arcane shorthand. History condensed into a lone footnote.

He never had to ask why Alvaar’s wails of pain as he’d held his dead lover mere hours later sounded like a heart breaking in two.

The next time he hears them, it’s not quite the same.

He’s twenty (or was it twenty-one?) and farther from home than he’d ever dreamed. Fresh from facing off against Emet-Selch as they’d fought to save the First from destruction. Twenty and exhausted and content to doze quietly in the newly returned night alongside the beds two other occupants, arms draped over Alisaie and Alvaar both. He remembers feeling Alvaar’s knuckles brush his cheek, tiredly meeting the Bard’s gaze in the dark and hearing those words again.

They don’t mean the same thing, but it doesn’t overly bother him after the torture Alvaar had endured for the worlds. After the last several months Alphinaud had spent fighting sin eaters, stubborn short-term mindsets, and bitter loneliness in Kholusia.

Being called family, being called ‘home’ had only echoed what he’d felt too. The Scions, his Sister, and Alvaar, were what felt most like home. Not a large but empty feeling manor back in Sharlayan, cut off and indifferent to the world.

It’s a different kind of love but it doesn’t mean any less nor is it remotely insincere.

And even if there’s a faint disappointment in his heart he would never admit to, it’s fine. More than anything he’s simply happy that they’re still together. Still alive. Still able to fight and produce another miracle for the people of the First and the Source.

He’s twenty-two and he knows Alvaar loves him deeply. He’s said it in every other conceivable way. Let poetry and sweet words fall from his lips or sent the meaning across in those brushes of familiar contact. Had the feeling burned into his body and mind more times than he could ever hope to keep track of...

But Alvaar hadn’t ever said it.

It’s silly and he knows it. He has no reason to doubt Alvaar and truly he knows the way the Bard feels for him isn’t anything less than his previous lover. That there was room enough in that gentle heart for all three of them. Jealousy is a terrible thing after all, so he convinces himself it doesn’t matter. Comforts himself and chides Alisaie gently when she inquires on it herself. Alvaar had been through a great deal of hardship and pain. And as they both didn’t doubt the depth nor truth of his feelings, the specific words should hardly matter.

He’s twenty-three, and when Alvaar finally says them he barely notices. There’s too much blood, and Alvaar’s laugh is too weak and lilting from it. His mind is too busy on spells and incantations to register it as he works quickly.

Alvaar is fine. He’s always fine. He comes back beaten and bloody and smiling and laughing and visibly delights in being doted upon and taken care of. A routine scouting of the border wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near as deadly as the hopeless situations he’d been sent into before. He’s fine.

The Scholar is internally utterly terrified of course, but he knows from too much firsthand knowledge that there’s no room for panic as a healer. If he panicked, things would quickly turn into ‘not fine’ and neither of them had time for that.

So for right now, spells and aether humming in his veins, it’s fine.

“Did you get a haircut recently?” Alvaar asks, letting Alphinaud clean, tape, and bandage his wounds. Magic had healed the critical damage and stopped the bleeding, but it would take time to heal the rest and a few more applications of white magic tomorrow. Cleaning and bandaging would ensure a smoother transition through the process, so it’s a step he takes anyway, perched on the edge of the medical bed while the Bard sits propped up against pillows.

“You should be taking this more seriously,” the Scholar returns flatly, pushing Alvaar’s hand away from his hair gently so he can keep working.

“I am. But I’m just so... very happy,” Alvaar murmured, a smile stretching across his exhausted face. “I made it back this time, I’m here, and you’re here, and it will work this time.”

It’s said with such offhanded confidence it makes the Scholar blink. “What? Alvaar you’re delirious, stay still.”

A hum of agreement rings in the Bards throat as he nods. “Okay. Let me know when you’re done and listening. He said I didn’t say it enough... That when I made it back to be sure to tell you something.”

He wants to pay more attention to Alvaar’s curious words but there would be time for it later. Though he was comfortably stabilized and would no doubt make a full recovery in a matter of days with the Warrior of Light’s sometimes obnoxious recovery speed, it’s never something he likes to leave to chance. If he overlooked something now, it could be disastrous later.

“He?” The inquiry slides off his tongue in a distracted manner, during which his moonstone carbuncle chirps with interest where it’s bedded down along Alvaar’s legs.

“Don’t worry about it,” Alvaar replies, glossing over it as his attention shifts back to the carbuncle eyeing him expectantly. “Can I have my hand back now?”

Another deft turn of the roll of bandages, a swift snip of the medical shears, and a tidy tie off had him releasing Alvaar’s arm with a nod. “Sure. Other arm if you would.”

Swapping obediently, Alvaar quickly settled his freed hand into plush white fur, grinning brightly. “Hey Carbi... I missed you too,” he cooed, chuckling at the fond chirp and purr he got in answer. “You’re the best summon ever aren’t you?”

Snorting under his breath, Alphinaud keeps at his work until he’s finished, letting his summon keep up its job of distracting Alvaar’s focus from pawing at him so he can work in peace. Alvaar was always a good patient, but woozy with blood loss he sometimes got sillier than was helpful. It made his moonstone carbuncle an utter lifesaver, and there were few helpers he would rather have working beside him. Though he had long developed more potent summons, Alvaar’s preference and the sheer number of revisions and intricacies of its design had left moonstone as one of his masterpieces. The patient bedside manner and attentive nature had made it a nursemaid second to none, and given the way it was currently cozied into Alvaar’s side and subtly keeping him quiet and still as it soaked up affection like a sponge, it remained a staple of his repertoire for good reason.

Inspecting the last of his work, he gives a satisfied nod before starting to pack things away. After almost seven years of chasing Alvaar’s shadow and tending to his wounds, his first aid is as neat and tidy as an experienced chirurgeon. A far cry from his fumbled and panicked work the Bard had coached him through with grit teeth in Coerthas. It’s only once he sets the supplies back on the shelves that he finally gives himself leave to think about anything but healing.

He’s seated back at Alvaar’s side before he realizes he’s made the steps, a bandaged hand curling warm at his jaw and pulling him closer until they bump foreheads together. It’s a movement that he’s long used to, a familiar gesture that helps to quiet the panic that had boiled over in his chest if not the emotion that threatens its place.

“I would appreciate it if you would refrain from frightening me like that again,” Alphinaud murmured softly, a faint tremor in his voice but refusing to cry. Alvaar was fine! There wasn’t any reason to overreact!

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to. Was the best I could manage,” Alvaar replied in the stilted way he picked up when he was exhausted. Given how much harder he was leaning into the Scholar, none of it surprised him.

Making a thoughtful sound in the back of his throat he leaned the faintest bit back into the Warrior of Light, soaking up the steady warmth that wicked off him and the silent reassurance he was still there. “Just... be more careful next time. For now you should focus on healing.”

“Thank you for saving me Alphi,” Alvaar whispered with a heartfelt gratitude.

It was enough to make the Scholar flush. “I... Any other healer would have done the same.”

“Maybe. But any other healer wouldn’t be worth me dragging myself back to. Sides, Alisaie was too far,” he joked fondly.

Alphinaud tutted under his breath, pulling back to grip Alvaar’s face in his hands and press a featherlight kiss to his brow before burying his nose into soft golden strands. “Jokes aside, thank you for coming back. If scaring me half to death means that you’ll pull through, then I would take that burden every time.”

There’s something about the way Alvaar relaxes into him, the faint breath of a sigh before tension eases out of his neck and jaw, that has always meant the world to him. It was too many emotions to articulate clearly, but it always made his heart feel warm. Reminded him that even if he wasn’t able to command the same fear and awe as the Warrior of Light, to be a brilliant blade that cut through the dark and evil that threatened them, the rallying cry that brought their forces to victory, what he could do was no less important.

All great hero’s needed a home to return to, else they would eventually feel they had nothing left to fight for.

“Alphi?”

“Yes Alvaar?”

Pulling back enough to regard him a moment with scrutiny, the Bard leaned in with a purposeful ease, lips brushing against his chastely for a moment before murmuring something against his skin.

This time he heard them. Felt their movement and the warmth of them against his lips and burning against his skin. Poetry and promise and providence all in one.

“I love you.”

It was no big deal. It was a sentiment he’d always known from 1,001 things Alvaar did all the time. Something he had long convinced himself didn’t matter. A phrase used over and over until it’s meaning was practically lost.

But oh.

Oh...

How those words shook him to the depths of his soul and cut him in two regardless.

He’s twenty-one again for just a moment. Full of questions and a heart fuller still with longing, listening to Alvaar speak of love he’d known with that easy and sincere air of his. Brutally honest as ever.

Love was ruinous. Love would destroy you in ways you didn’t think were possible. Love was thirst and hunger. And all your days, when you’d known the taste of true love, of something that clutched past your heart and into your soul, you would always want for more of it.

In the present with his face buried against Alvaar’s shoulder, tears welling over and soaking into clean white bandages, he feels like a beast half starved.

“I would really like it if you stayed,” Alvaar murmurs, still running his fingers along the Scholar’s back soothingly. He’s infuriatingly casual for having just reduced his lover to tears. If he hadn’t just spent an hour healing and bandaging him up, Alphinaud would probably have swatted him.

Instead he just nods.

He’d never been very good at refusing that particular request anyway. Even when he was the one chastising Alvaar on why sharing a medical bed was in poor interest of his health.

But it’s late, and he’s tired, and nuzzling into the warm muscle of Alvaar’s shoulder he doesn’t want to leave anyway. So, he pulls himself up onto the bed fully, curling up beside him and keeping his cheek settled against the Bard’s shoulder that’s free of bruises. He knows he won’t sleep well but the situation is unfortunately familiar enough he knows that he’ll still get plenty of rest for tomorrow’s troubles.

“Alvaar?” he asks softly after they’ve both settled into the pillows, sheets, and each other accordingly.

“Yea?”

“You really need a shower.”

It has Alvaar laughing enough to make him wince, “Brat... don’t make me laugh that hurts.”

Alphinaud just smiles softly and hums an amused note as Alvaar settles further against him.

“Alvaar?” he asks again after a few minutes, getting a soft grunt of acknowledgement.

Shifting enough to study the soft and unguarded profile he’s sketched a hundred times before from memory, he presses a brief kiss to the Bard’s jaw and settles in for sleep.

“I love you too.”

#alphinaud leveilleur #alphinaud #wol #warrior of light #alvaar aldaviir #ff14 #ffxiv #mywriting #writing #wondrous tails #wondrous tails of ffxiv #sfw #oc #alphinaud x wol #wow. it finally happened. established relationship time. bless.

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mwritesink · 7 years

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Exalted Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War/Thracia 776, Part 1

Rationale and story are below the cut. One of the features in Genealogy of the Holy War and Thracia 776, as that there were characters who had “Holy Blood”, aka people who were descended from 1 of the 12 great crusaders who had been chosen by the Dragons and given power to defeat evil. Now try to tell me like that doesn’t also sound like a certain group in Exalted. These 12 Crusaders were Baldur, Noba, Fala, Naga, Tordo, Odo, Neir, Forseti, Ulir, Hezul, Blaggi, and Dain, and they were brought together to defeat the dark dragon Loptr. Part 1 features the folks that have Baldur and Noba Bloodlines. Sigurd, featured below, does have a wife in the game, Deirdre, but she will be featured in Part 2.

Sigurd/Siglud = Cathak Cacek Sigurd, Fire Aspect

Seliph/Celice = Cathak Cacek Seliph, Wood Aspect

Elthin/Ethlyn/Ethrin = Cathak Cacek Elthin, Fire Aspect

Oifey = Cathak Cacek Oifey, Earth Aspect

Quan/Cuan = Tepet Berel Quan, Earth Aspect

Altenna/Altena = Tepet Marek Altenna, Fire Aspect

Leif/Leaf = Tepet Berel Leif, Fire Aspect

The Rationalizations

The line of Baldur I’ve cast into House Cathak, becuase the line that resonates with me from the description of Cathak is that it is the “House of Heroes”. Of course, this isn’t to mean that scions of any of the other houses can’t be, or aren’t, heroic, but that particular phrasing with this house largely informs when I put it as the house a person is from. Baldur being assigned House Cathak is also influenced by the fact that Sigurd is the first hero/“Lord” character that is met in Genealogy of the Holy War. I further made it the line of Cacek, becuase they are noted as being Gateway players, the theoretical application of warfare, which ties to the certain amount of idealism that Sigurd, Seliph, and Elthin operate with.

the Noba holy line is assigned to House Tepet, specifically for the bad blood between them and their sibling bloodline, Dain. I can take that stife between them and mimic it as strife between different bloodlines within House Tepet after the House’s legions are destroyed by the Bull of the North’s army. The Berel line goes to the Noba becuase there are a more quartermaster/mercantile line and would have come out of the defeat with more of their people and in a position to gain leadership of their house. There is a reason though why the eldest daughter of the Noba line is “Tepet Marek” rather than “Tepet Berel”, but that will be explained more in the story section of this post and in the story section of the part that contains the other members of the Dain holy bloodline.

The resident Fire Aspects of this group are Sigurd, his sister Elthin, and Elthin’s children: Leif and Altenna. All of them are passionate, charismatic characters. Sigurd and Leif are the heroes of their games (the first half of Genealogy of the Holy War and Thracia 776, respectively) and I’ve found that being in that role pre-disposes the resulting character to being a Fire Aspect. For Elthin and Altenna, they’re both very bright in personality. Elthin takes a more “spritely” and “light” personality, while her daughter is more ferocious.

Seliph is one of the few main lords (he belongs to the second half of Genealogy of the Holy War) that doesn’t come off as as Fire Aspect to me. I found that being a Wood Aspect fit him better. His arc is strongly tied with rebirth, regrowth, in a way that the other “lord” characters aren’t, and through out the game, Seliph is hailed by others as being a personification of renewal. Additionally, many of the companions you can gain along his arc seem to join more because they are sympathetic to Seliph’s cause, rather than becuase they are impressed by the power of his personality.

Finally, the two earth Aspects: Quan and Oifey. For Quan I’ll quote @demoiselledefortune, who has been a truly invaluable and nothing of the Genealogy of the Holy War/Thracia 776 posts would have been completed without her input, “He's ambitious, scheming, an extremely reliable friend and loving husband, will go to the hilt for the people he loves, he can be snotty and contemptuous, i tend to view him as a bit schmaltzy, a little bit debonair”. As for Oifey, the strongest characterization that I’ve seen of him in looking around the game is that he is a tactician, and that he has a rather “down to earth” serious personality.

the stories

For this world of Exalted Emblem, there are a few changes to the canon setting of Exalted that had to happen so that the various plot lines and conflicts from GotHW and Thracia776 could make a little more sense. The first is that the Scarlet Empire has crumbled faster here than in canon. Yes, satrapies are sending back tributes as they should (for the most part) but it’s a little more obvious that loyalties are more residing with one’s House than with the Realm as a whole, and Tepet Fokuf is more obviously just keeping the Empress’ throne warm for her return. House Tepet has fractured even more after their legions were defeated by the Bull of the North, with the lines who lost more scions banding together against the sudden leadership of the lines who did not.

In adding the place settings, the places of note for the Granvelle Empire become cities on the Blessed Isle. Agustria and Silesia are satrapies in the threshold, representing larger areas than just one city state, and in both cases, the smaller cities have governors who send their tribute to the Satrap in the “capital” who then sends it along to the Empire (in a perfect world). Isaac is an outpost city-state that is allied with/ruled by Lookshy. Verdane is a roving nation/band of disenfranchised people who live on the Blessed Isle. Manster and Thracia are individual city-states that are also Satrapies sending money back to the Empire.

Sigurd’s tale is a tragedy. He is a bright, promising knight who, though well enough in fighting skills and putting together a battle plan, can’t imagine the effect that his actions have beyond their immediate effect. At the end of his story with being branded a traitor to the empire, a power-grabbing usurper making a power base in the Threshold when we know that the Empress will return any day, of course she will. It wasn’t what he was. The path of his life wasn’t anything he could imagine, but he could only go forward, even as his friends and allies are dragged down with him becuase they believe in him, in his innocence, in their view of the Empire. Of any of the stories, Sigurd’s is the one that remains the most unchanged in transferring it from Fire Emblem to Exalted. The largest changes are the nature of the locations, the exact details of how the different places and rulers all relate to each other, and how Sigurd’s actions impact those places and rulers.

Seliph’s story in the transfer of setting is also largely unchanged, especially since his story is, in effect, healing the rifts his father inadvertently made while also taking out a great evil and setting the lands to rights again. At the same time he is also being given lessons from other characters s that he will not repeat the same mistakes that brought Sigurd to his death.

The main portion of Leif’s story in Thracia 776 deals with his attempts to liberate his home from the evil empire, for translating this, it is less a liberation from an empire than it is putting a portion of it to rights. I confess that I don’t know a lot, if anything, about the exact plot points in Thracia 776, where I now more of GotHW, so I can’t add a lot here.

The story with Quan, Elthin, and how their story impacts that of their children, I’ll address in a more full manner when I get to the Dain holy blood characters, becuase of how closely they are intertwined.

#M splatters ink #ink spills #Exalted #Fire Emblem #fire emblem genealogy of the holy war #fire emblem thracia 776 #Exalted Emblem #long post under the cut

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biofunmy · 5 years

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How Ermanno Olmi Found Grace in the Daily Labors of Italians

Ermanno Olmi’s first fictional feature, “Il Posto,” shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1961, was released in the United States two years later with the incongruously noisy title “The Sound of Trumpets.” That name doesn’t entirely come out of nowhere; it echoes a phrase uttered by the mother of the main character, Domenico Cantoni, a young man starting out at the very bottom of a large Milanese firm and hoping to rise to the lower middle. If he stays up too late reading, she warns him, not even trumpets will wake him in time to get to his job.

In Italian, “Il Posto” more or less means “The Job,” but the faint biblical echo (of Jericho, of Judgment Day) in the English version isn’t entirely out of place, even though the film itself is notably quiet and gentle. If there is drudgery in store for Domenico, there is also music and subtle but striking intimations of divine grace.

Olmi, who died last year at 86, was drawn to the contemplation of work, to the rituals and routines of mid-20th-century clerks and welders, late-19th-century tenant farmers and early-16th-century soldiers. The marvelous retrospective that starts Friday at Film at Lincoln Center reveals a career and a sensibility at once wide-ranging and consistent. Olmi’s movies can be lyrical and impishly funny, passionate and scholarly, observant and impassioned. He had a documentary photographer’s eye for the specific and a painterly sense of composition. He retold Bible stories and directed literary adaptations.

The closest thing he made to an action movie, about Giovanni de’ Medici, who served the pope in the Italian Wars of the early 16th century, is called “The Profession of Arms,” and its depiction of early modern warfare includes a lot of meetings and paperwork. (A new digital restoration of this rigorous and ravishing film, shown at Cannes in 2001 and never released here, is a highlight of the 20-title Lincoln Center program.)

What links de’ Medici’s cavalry campaigns with Domenico’s desk-jockeying isn’t only the drudgery and occasional absurdity of the work, nor the often inscrutable nature of the cause it serves. (What does this enormous, highly regimented company actually do? Why is the pope at war with the German emperor? Such questions are above our heroes’ mortal pay grade, and our own).

Domenico, the oldest son of a small-town, working-class family who barely looks old enough to shave, is wary and diffident, equally flummoxed and fascinated by the ways of the adult, urban world. De’ Medici, the scion of an aristocratic line, is charismatic and decisive, a figure of legend among his contemporaries even before his death, at just 28, from a battlefield wound. Both men are oppressed by their responsibilities, and also brought alive by their devotion to duty. It’s not so much the labor itself. De’ Medici slogs through mud and snow in pursuit of his enemies. Domenico aspires to ascend from assistant messenger to junior pencil pusher. No, it’s the way submission to the work’s demands becomes a kind of spiritual discipline.

Olmi turned the prose of toil into poetry. If he is often, and correctly, classified as a next-generation neorealist — partial to nonprofessional actors, documentary techniques and everyday settings — his was a realism especially attentive to the ecstatic dimensions of quotidian experience. Formal religion is part of that experience, and so is politics. These are Italian movies, after all, directed by a man who came of age in the postwar ideological crucible defined by the Communist Party and the Catholic Church. Those institutions didn’t just influence Italians’ voting habits and social mores in the decades between Mussolini and Berlusconi; Marxism and Catholicism were cultural and aesthetic forces as well, integral to the language of Italian cinema in its boom years.

“Il Posto” is a product of that boom, and a landmark of 1960s cinema, latent with the rebellious impatience and irreverent energy that would ripple across every continent. Like the protagonists of “Billy Liar” and “The Graduate,” Domenico, played by the wide-eyed nonprofessional Sandro Panseri, seems imprisoned by a set of social expectations enforced by parents, bosses and the very architecture of his world. The first part of the film follows him through recruitment and what we would now call onboarding. Along with other candidates, he takes a written and physical examination, and then makes his way through a Kafkaesque series of corridors and waiting rooms.

But he is not just a rat in a maze. “Il Posto” is less a study in misery than an examination of a soul’s progress across a plane of existence that combines elements of inferno, purgatory and paradise. Domenico buys a new raincoat. He also meets a young woman named Antonietta (Loredana Detto, Olmi’s future wife), who is part of his entry-level cohort. On the day of the tests, they take advantage of the long lunch break that is a pillar of Italian civilization to drink espresso at a busy coffee bar and wander in a park. They are scolded for running on the grass, a singular moment of transgression in a film marked by good behavior.

Like the peasants in “The Tree of Wooden Clogs,” Olmi’s 1978 masterpiece, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Domenico and Antonietta find pleasure and even something like freedom within their highly constrained circumstances. “Wooden Clogs,” populated by real-life farmers and agricultural laborers rather than actors, has been accused of taking a nostalgic view of the cruelties of feudalism. Its stately pace and sensual images — it’s set in Olmi’s native region of Bergamo in northern Italy — do impart a sense of beauty, and there is a conservative aspect to Olmi’s evocation of family ties and rural folkways.

But there is also a palpable sense of injustice and strong currents of political disaffection. Power in the countryside and in the industrial city is organized in such a way as to undermine the dignity, curtail the pleasure and constrict the freedom of workers. Political action is one response to this situation, but Olmi’s Christian humanism, while hardly apolitical, points him in a different direction, toward the ineradicable dignity of the individual and the startling beauty of creation.

“Il Posto’s” Domenico intuits this, and the magic of Olmi’s realism is that we do, too, and don’t despair for the young man’s prospects. The movie generated a sequel of sorts, a short feature called “The Fiancés” that I saw for the first time at Lincoln Center and that hit me with the force of a revelation. “Il Posto” ends at a company holiday party, with dancing and forced but genuine merriment. Its successor begins with a similar scene, at a blue-collar dance hall where Giovanni, a metal worker, has gone on a date with his girlfriend, Liliana.

They are older than Antonietta and Domenico, and wearier — of their lives and maybe of each other. Work is both their trial and their salvation. Giovanni (Carlo Cabrini) has a chance to help build a new factory in Sicily, an opportunity that offers a boost in income and status at the cost of months of separation from Liliana (Anna Canzi). He finds loneliness, local color, alienation and intermittent satisfaction — an array of unspectacular modern experiences that Olmi renders with an intensity that never feels overstated.

What keeps you engaged isn’t a plot so much as an intellectually and emotionally awakened sense of what it is to be alive. The film reveals itself, in the end, to be a love story of a conventional and also a miraculous kind. It’s the tale of a working man in love, and it’s the testament of a man who loves his work.

“Ermanno Olmi” begins Friday at Film at Lincoln Center. For more information, go to filmlinc.org.

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