#nnnnnngh

Edgeworth: Gnrk! Why do you have rough design sketches of me as a child?! And what is Wright doing there, blushing like that?!

Janet: …You’re going to have to ask your designer, Ms. Suekane, about that, because I’m not going to speculate.

Edgeworth: This entire entry has been one abominable trick from start to finish!

Janet: Maybe for you, but just remember: one person’s trick is another person’s treat!

Initially, they’re just shocked to see each other again. And in the realm. They haven’t crossed paths since they were kids. But then almost immediately things are uncomfortable.

Élodie is the one who got the kids to go into the internment camp, /and/ who personally activated the sigil that brought the Entity to them all. She is directly responsible for the loss of her own parents and Felix’s and all the others. So, seeing him again, her first thought after surprise and relief at a familiar human is “Oh no. He hates me.” And she immediately becomes reactively and agressively defensive of herself and her past actions, predicting hostility that isn’t there yet.

Since Felix’s paragraph never even mentions Élodie, I have to assume she does not play super majorly into his own trauma memories actually and he doesn’t harbor intense resentment towards her, and probably both doesn’t blame her for being the one to push them into that trek, and simply know she activated the sigil. So, he’s surprised and relieved (even though it’s kind of awkward), and then kind of just hurt because she’s immediately reactive around him and almsot seems to resent him. He probably gets kind of pissed (understandably) like “Well you were the one who sent us down there—I don’t know why you’d hate /me/ over it” and that only makes stuff worse.

Felix is very easy to push around and terrified and takes a long time before he gets used to the realm. He is a cautious and hesistant man in general, and very very very out of his depth, both from being kind of rich and cushioned against life, and just by nature. He takes a long time to adapt and is miserable and scared, but he really does try.

Claudette, who is also miserable and scared, and Dwight, who was long the same before adapting, are especially nice to him and work to help him adapt. So are Tapp, Jane, Jeff, and Ace, who also try—especially Jane, who is well versed, and Tapp, who has experience—to comfort and reassure him about his wife giving birth without him there and his family waiting back home.

Felix misses his wife deeply and would never cheat on her and abandon her and his infant child back home on favor of a steamy realm romance. (I hold Felix ships in contempt >.> my boy has no reason to be regarded a cheater fuck off leave him alone. He’s a decent enough fellow.)

Élodie is a lot braver than Felix. She adapts to the realm quickly for average, as she is used to danger, pain, and hardship. However, unlike Felix, who is afraid and weak initially due to his complete lack of hardship experience, but is team-oriented, Élodie is used to working alone, and is not a great teammate for a while. She doesn’t mean to be cruel, and she’s not like, unfeeling or unsympathetic. But her own experience is so rooted in self-preservation and operating solo, she takes time to get used to having to share that burden with others. And kind of is resistant to it at first. It’s just...not what’s in her programming. It’s been a long time since other people were aside from in a trade and at arm’s length at best.

The survivors are such a big family though eventually Élodie is overtaken by their genuiness and affection. I think Jane and/or Kate and maybe Dwight talk to her at least once, about how this is affecting teams, or about the group’s way of operating and relationships, but I think really it’s just being saturdated in Claudette asking her for help gardening and explaining new poultices, and Meg doing movie scripts theatrically and asking her questions all the time like an (endearingly) annoying little sister, and Jeff and Tapp and Adam always there to save her and take a hit in a trial, people singing together at camp, Dwight passing her supplies to help her get started. It the family. She gets so slowly warmed up to being genuinely cared for and wanted that her walls start to go down, and she starts unlearning her instinctive reactions and begins fighting to save not just her but them too, them before her sometimes, just because it truly becomes what she wants.

Élodie is fasinated by learing any kind of information that could be useful and very dedicated, so she spends a lot of time with Dwight, Claudette, Jane, Adam, Zarina, and Tapp especially, trying to track down any information that could help them escape eventually and stuff to help then survive in the meantime. Bc of her previous life and knowledge, she is extremely useful at this.

Also gets along well with David/Kate/Laurie and Yui and Zarina. After dying, she really really wants to pick up as much fighting skill as she can.

Felix gets along pretty well with everyone, but hangs out more with the chiller activites people like Adam, Ace, Tapp, Jeff, Jane, or Dwight/Quentin/Claudette.

After arriving in the realm, Felix feels bad most of his skills seem less useful. After Dwight talks to him, he decides to so the little he can, and that even if he’s not got worlds of skills for fighting or escaping the realm, it matters at least a little he /can/ make peoples’ lives better. So he adds some rudamintery shelters to the campfire area so they have a few little actual kind of partial buildings now. He’s not the most personally skilled with tools, but he has an expansive knowledge of how to make things function well and last and be given proper support, so he and Jake make a good team when it comes to home construction.

Things with Felix and Élodie are tense for a while. They don’t fight, per se, but because she anticipates that he hates her and is automatically basically hostilely defensive towards him in preperation for that, Felix feels very disliked by her as well. With some interveigning from the others—especially Jane and Dwight—things get a little more cordial. And Felix starts trying to work hard to make things work and dedicatedly saving her in trials. Élodie hates this, she thinks/tells herself because he’s trying to be superior/sanctimonious towards her, but in reality because she is crippled with guilt over what happened a long time ago. Still, after a while, she starts trying to save him hard too to be just as good, and it’s hard to hate somebody who has rescued you from death, so unintentionally this ends up tricking them both into starting to be chill with and enjoy each other again.

Eventually, there is a breaking point when they’re alone—maybe it’s late at night and Élodie or Felix asks the other to step away to talk. Maybe it’s in a trial, and Felix is offering to die so she can take the hatch, and she just can’t take it anymore. But it happens, and Élodie breaks down and asks why he’s doing this and says she knows he must hate her, and tries to apologize and defend herself viciously at the same time, and it’s a mess, and Felix never knew she actually summoned the thing at all and it’s like getting kicked in the stomach, and he doesn’t even know what to say or think. For so long he’s blamed himself; he’s never blamed her. But he didn’t know it was her fault, and it kind of is, and she’s falling apart, and he’s so overwhelmed, and what is he supposed to say? Is he supposed to forgive her? Supposed to hate her? But. He thinks for a second. He lost everything, but so did she—so did all of them. And she didn’t know. Nobody warned them, their parents could have, and didn’t. And she was a kid. Kids make mistakes—that’s living, that’s growing up. Adults do too. And he doesn’t hate her, and it doesn’t matter if he blames her, because it doesn’t matter who /is/ to blame. They were all kids, and it was a tragedy, not an act of hate or maliciousness, and that’s all that matters. They both lost everything, and all that matters is they do the best they can with what they have now.