Here we are at the end of another chonker of an “Arc.” This was really at least two arcs woven together and it shows; I managed to find the gdocs character limit again.

There were a few things I wanted to do in this arc, since it was the end. I needed to save Earth from the World Eaters and stop the Mimir; those were the twin forces driving Serenity since the beginning of the series and I wanted to resolve them by the end. I also wanted to tie together a bunch of different plot threads that had gotten lost. I managed that for a lot of them, but I missed a few.

I wanted to go back to Zon, but that didn’t really fit in anywhere nicely. I think we can assume that Serenity will head back there at some point, but who knows when or what he’ll find. There’s a lot of story there, between the issues happening in the human lands and the slow conquest of the demons (some of whom now technically sort of follow Serenity). There’s also an island named after dragons that Serenity never made it to. I could easily write a story there; what I couldn’t do was tie it into the overarching plot, so I left it to the side.

Serenity needed to come to understand more about himself and his past. I think I managed that; he’s learned how much he was deliberately crippled and how much he crippled himself in his past life. He’s also learned that a lot of the attacks that came from nowhere were indeed not his fault; they were orchestrated by someone else. He doesn’t know which was which, but that still leaves him more room to be himself in the future. I didn’t get much of his enchanting or healing training handled during the arc, but at least we can see that he’s starting (and even trying to get some formal training at some point).

I very much wanted to help Blaze out of the trap he was in because of his ancestry. I think I managed that; while he still has a lot of work to do on his self-confidence, he’s moving on and starting to do that work.

This arc tied together a lot of little bits and pieces about the universe’s history. I tried to do that throughout the series, but I think a lot of it came together here. The one thing I wanted to cover that I’m not certain I did well is WHY the Tutorials work the way they do. Here’s a snippet of a conversation that is canon but that I never found a place to slip into the action:

Serenity frowned and shook his head. Things were very different this time than in his memories as Vengeance. “I expected more destruction…”

[Destruction is not the point. The goal is to have as many as possible survive and grow. Once upon a time there were no invasions, but fewer people survived once the outside universe was allowed to reach the World. Too many people played it safe and didn’t grow enough to defend their World against the people that would come. With the invasions, more die early on but also more grow to meet the challenges. It is a difficult balance to reach]

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Every time I tried to add it, it tended to send the conversation spiraling the wrong way … and most of the time it simply didn’t come up.

As a special note on the World Eaters, I had several possibilities in mind; theoretically, “World Eaters” is a set of symptoms rather than a specific cause. That’s one of the reasons they are so hard to track down. One other top candidate was a World Serpent (e.g. Jormungandr) / serpent / dragon that eats the World Tree (Nidhoggr), where the World Tree is another name/visualization of the World Core. That was too close to dragons, though, so I nixed it. Another major contender was space whales with tentacles (creatures from the Origin), but tiger moms seem more … sympathetic and understandable. That’s part of the point, they’re doing this for a very understandable reason even if the result is bad for everyone else.

I could also have easily done this as part of a plot by the Memories (especially the Memory of Blood) to gather (and potentially preprocess) World Core Crystal, because it’s really shockingly useful. It was a little too indirect and didn’t lead into resolving the issue of the Lost Dragons, though, so I decided to leave the Mimir as a factor that nudged the tiger mom’s path as another attempt to deal with the consequences of Rissa’s survival rather than the direct instigator.

There are a few other things I had noted as events to deal with; I didn’t get to show them, so I’ll share my notes with you here.

Aide gets new stuff from the Tsarualk! Tech toys!

Kaasi and Amaia visit Tek (and maybe Xanthe Crystal?) on Tek’s space station to get Kaasi help with the issues she’s having. Also to take delivery on Aide’s toys and so Tek can show off her first iteration of magitech armor. Which is just as good as expected of a Tek First Prototype …. Possibly it blows up?

Mysterious elder from the Tutorial

Overall, despite the bits that didn’t make it in, I’m satisfied at this point. I’m also still really drained - finishing a project like this is surprisingly tiring (and I don’t just mean the work of writing it).

As I mentioned in the after-chapter note yesterday, the next story is The Broken Lands: Building Blocks. It’s about Serenity’s daughter Sophia. I could have used Serenity as the main character, but part of the point of the story is another reset-to-zero and I didn’t want to do that to Serenity right after he won. That’s simply too depressing.

So instead we get his daughter! In many ways, that makes more sense anyway, since moving to the kids for the next series is an easy transition. As you can probably guess, The Broken Lands is going to take us to another world with a whole new system.

I’ve been looking forward to it for a while, but I haven’t had time to work on it (beyond some basic system mechanics and a bit of early plotting) since I’ve been finishing Serenity. This will be a journey of exploration for all of us!

~Lillene