though she be but little, she is fierce

Shang Qinghua: I want that twink destroyed

WIP

"Please, Shizun! Only one more round!"

Shen Yuan in the not-too-distant future plays an immersive virtual reality MMO, a revolutionary one of its kind that offers unprecedented customization options, called YGGDRASIL. While the basic game inclines itself most strongly to western fantasy TTRPG tropes, it's so flexible that players can create a wide range of fantasy archetypes.

Shen Yuan ended up falling in with, and eventually taking over, a guild that was focused on xianxia tropes and workshopping character classes and race types to create them. The guild had pretty strict rules on what players could do racially and aesthetically to fit in -- stuff like secret dragons and demons and aesthetically-swapped paladins were in, elves were allowed as long as the character lore steered more towards nature spirits and less towards tolkien, and undead were taken on a case-by-case basis.

Over the course of several years, the Cang Qiong guild rose to prominence on their server as one of the strongest good-aligned roleplay groups, to the point of even having some dedicated copycats and rivals. The original twelve founding members each built a different segment of the guild's base, styling it as a mountain range with twelve peaks, and a lot of energy was poured into constructing NPCs to defend the peaks from the frequent incursions of rival player factions.

But over time, other games like YGGDRASIL started to appear and pulled players in. Some were more complementary to the eastern fantasy genre, some had better immersive features or superior tech, more hype, and etc. Other plays began to filter out as different aspects of their lives took over and they started families, got too busy with work, found other hobbies, and so on.

Twelve years after its launch, YGGDRASIL announced rather unceremoniously that it would be shutting the game down, with everything on it destined for the deletion bin. By then, the only players left in Cang Qiong guild were Shen Yuan and Xiang Fei, the latter only ever logging on occasionally to goof around and build extra NPCs for his novel ideas, while Shen Yuan kept maintaining the guild out of nostalgia and a firm belief that the game would be getting some kind of renewed interest any day now.

Accordingly, Shen Yuan was pissed to learn it was just going to be shut down, without even any word of a possible YGGDRASIL 2 or if players would get any bonuses for carrying over their accounts.

Shen Yuan decides to stay online until the last possible moment as the server goes dark. Xiang Fei joins him and nearly has to log off to go to sleep and get up in time for work in the morning, but decides to tough it out for his bro. As Shen Yuan laments, the two gather up all the major NPCs in the sect, head for the peak lords hall on Cang Qiong, and arrange the "Peak Lord" NPCs around the table with them. The NPCs can't talk, but each was styled as the lord and defender of a different peak and as brethren of a united sect, deferring only to their ancestral masters and creators, the godlike players of the setting.

Shen Yuan also insists on bringing along Luo Binghe, the secret demon emperor and trump card for the sect's defenses. Binghe was, in Shen Yuan's opinion, the pinnacle of Xiang Fei's creativity. Though with the appearance of a humble (read: ridiculously beautiful) disciple, in reality Binghe was a top level max skill demon lord, who had taken so many resources and quests to bulk out that it was ridiculous. His programming was fussy, to the point where he had once gone on a rampage and wiped out the actual guild players -- sort of the last interesting thing to have happened before another more popular game was released, and their guild activity plummeted.

Xiang Fei had often teased Shen Yuan about liking Binghe so much, especially since, in his opinion, he was a less interesting secret demon than the one defending his home peak of An Ding. As a final gesture, Xiang Fei reprograms Binghe to be a disciple of Qing Jing (Shen Yuan's peak) in specific, and chuckling to himself deletes the line about him being a playboy and replaces it with a line that says he's madly in love with Shen Qingqiu (SY's avatar).

As the players and their NPCs sit around the table, the game servers go dark. Shen Yuan closes his eyes, braces for the forced log-out...

Then feels himself draw a lungful of cool mountain air, instead.

Ensue Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua freaking out as they realize that they've apparently transmigrated into some sort of reality based on their game. At first the other "Peak Lords" (the NPCs who have suddenly come to life) are confused as to why their sect brothers are acting so erratically, but then they go out and discover that their entire mountain range has seemingly been displaced from its geographical location in YGGDRASIL, to some unfamiliar spot in a totally different world.

Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua double freak out because not only have they somehow become real in the context of the game, they've also brought their mountain range wholesale to yet another fantasy world?!

Shang Qinghua takes some of the other peak lords and goes to check on the actual peaks, to confirm if the other NPCs have come to life and that everything from the guild has made the inexplicable transfer. Shen Qingqiu sets out to check the surrounding area, while tentatively agreeing to let Liu Qingge, Yue Qingyuan, and Qi Qingqi go check in other directions. Luo Binghe ends up insisting on accompanying him, much to Shen Qingqiu's bewilderment, but he just ends up going with it. Outside the unfamiliar world is in its night cycle. Most of the exterior wards are still functional, although they've lost some of the alert arrays from the further outposts. Shen Qingqiu flies up for as high of an aerial view as he can get, surveying the situation, and musing that it really does seem that they've been transported to a totally new world. Also, using all his cool cultivator/class abilities is even more exciting in the flesh.

Anyway, Shen Qingqiu warns Luo Binghe that this unknown world could also contain unknowable threats, they don't know how their respective abilities would stack up here, etc etc, and Luo Binghe privately vows to bring this world to heel and lay its treasures safely at his shizun's feet.

Additional thoughts under the cut:

Loving the idea of it being mid-canon. Wei Wuxian is just like hey. Where did. Why's there...? And yet he can't just ask because obviously anyone should know the deal about the Mysterious Mountain of Cultivators that appeared sometime in the years he was dead.

And SY and Airplane do have to stay in their identities, yup! It would probably destabilize too much for the NPC characters who've newly spawned into actually being alive for them to try and add the additional layers to it, and who knows how they might react? They're all now very powerful cultivators, some even more powerful than Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua, so it's safer just to go along.

I think Shen Qingqiu's probably got no actual backstory that he settled on for himself, beyond a few sentences about being the Qing Jing peak lord and being important enough as a strategist and political player that even the sect leader defers to him on many matters. Then when everything becomes Real he somehow finds that he's Shen Jiu's twin brother and Yue Qingyuan defers to him because of trauma reasons, by some alchemy of the system trying to work out the most reasonable explanations.

🌈 Iris concept

When We Were Young (Birth of the Sky) Ouranos and Gaia

I love drawing the primordials because I feel like I can go more abstract and elemental in design with them, same thing goes for certain titans. Since Ouranos is the personification of the sky, I think it's fun to portray him as various sky phenomena.

the thing about homer’s helen (aside ‘she’s mostly not there’) is that she’s all self-recrimination, dramatic self-recrimination. and people get tied up in that; older translations have her basically offering to fling herself off the parapets because she’s so guilty and ashamed. but it’s such careful recrimination, is the thing. homer doesn’t give her much text, and while that’s partly just because his priorities are elsewhere, the text that is there is parsimonious and deliberative and careful. homer’s helen is difficult and elusive and at least in part that is on purpose.

she’s talking to king priam and what she says, the very first thing we get from her after she gives him his honorifics, is:

I wish bitter death had been what I wanted, when I came hither following your son, forsaking my chamber, my kinsmen my grown child, and the loveliness of girls my own age. It did not happen that way.

which is—so vastly different than the slick, maudlin “i wish i’d killed myself rather than come” lavinia successor we usually get in that translation? (i picked up an older translation to double check and, yeah. victorians and their heirs decide she wished she’d killed herself. unsurprisingly. who likes lavinia like victorians?) what she actually says is careful, that is nuanced, that is helen talking about what she wishes she felt, rather than what she feels. not that she wants to die—that she wishes she wanted that. she gets to wear the mask of shame, her unhappiness with the duration and fatalities of the war are treated as genuine. she calls herself the most awful things—a bitch, a slut, whatever. and she says, later, to hektor:

I wish that on that day when mother my first bore me the foul whirlwind of the storm had caught me away and swept me to the mountain, or into the wash of the sea, deep-thundering where the waves would have swept me away before all these things had happened.

again, she wishes she could unmake the war, and she knows the words for wishing an honorable death. knows death is more honorable than the life. but doesn’t call it down upon herself now. and again, implicitly, calls back to the choice: to choose something other than what led her to troy, she would’ve had to be swept into the sea at birth. thinking breathing sensible adult helen hasn’t any other option. she offers to take back her whole life, but she doesn’t take back what she did.

basically, she doesn’t say she wants to die for it now, and she doesn’t offer her own present death as punishment. and she knows the right words, so plainly! with priam, she outright wishes she could say that she deserved to die for this. but she never has, she never did. it did not happen that way.

homer doesn’t give us a good grasp on helen before the war, because that’s not where the poem is. but while the war is happening, we get this much out of our narrow window into her heart: whatever her situation in troy‚ she stands by it. picked this. even as it can make her profoundly unhappy, even though paris is a languid idiot and she’s in thrall to a thoughtless goddess, it’s hers. and she takes the culpability for its happening and cannot wholly condemn herself for it, even though she knows the right words to do so inside and out.