#pir101

THESE ARE TWINS

YOU CAN TELL THEY'RE TWINS BECAUSE THEIR FACE AND ALSO THEIR HAIR

IN CHARACTER CREATION WE GET TO PICK HOW THE PIRATE LOST THEIR PARENTS, WHERE THEY WERE RAISED AS A RESULT, AND HOW THEY GOT ARRESTED AND LOCKED INTO THE BRIG OF THE ARMADA™

MEET THESE TWO SPITE-POWERED CHILDREN WHO HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF THE OTHER ASIDE FROM RECENTLY:

THEY BOTH LOST THEIR PARENTS IN SEARCH OF TREASURE

ROSLYN WAS RAISED IN GRIZZLEHEIM (BEAR SCANDINAVIA) AND AMBER IN MOOSHU (ASIAN STEREOTYPES THROWN IN A BLENDER)

THEY WERE ARRESTED FOR DUELING/BRAWLING WITH EACH OTHER (OVER A MISUNDERSTANDING), THEN RESISTING ARREST TOGETHER WHEN THE ARMADA™ SHOWED UP

IN THE GAME DUELING AND BRAWLING DO NOT OVERLAP BUT I DO WHAT I WANT

ANYWAY THEY GO THROUGH THE TUTORIAL LEVEL AND COLLECT THEIR FIRST COUPLE CREWMATES (WHICH WERE DETERMINED BY THE REASON THEY WERE ARRESTED)

INSERT WIZARD HERE

NO LIKE. JUST PAST THE END OF THE FIRST WIZ101 STORY ARC

YEAH LIKE THAT

so through a series of Events that aren't made clear until waaay later on, (and aren't particularly relevant to this specific backstory except they kinda are??? look up the zafaria boxes event and just know that, as far as daygem is concerned, that happens AFTER the rest of this madness. and it's inadvertently the reason somebody got it in their head to yeet her) daygem gets picked up right before the wiz plot can start thickening up again, and she gets yeeted into skull island a short while before the pirate plot reaches capt gunn's gold

for those who do not have brainerotte101, both games happen more or less simultaneously. the characters do not realize this until they figure out the series of Events that culminated in the yeeting of daygem, but she was yeeted all the way back to the moment she was isekai-ed into the spiral in the first place

oh yeah the wizard isn't a spiral-born human

this is an important detail for the delightful hurt-comfort that is to come

so anyway daygem just got isekai 2-ed: pirate boogaloo-ed and is kinda freaking out. it's never mentioned anywhere in either game's canon but i'm making the captwins 14-ish and daygem a few years older when they first meet. so.

anyway daygem winds up joining up with the captwins to find a way back (i can't port home or to the commons or ANYWHERE AAAAAAA)

i do not see the transportalers. they did not exist when i started playing pirate and they shoot this entire plot in the foot just by existing

so the squad goes through the pirate101 canon more-or-less the same as a regular player would, just with a high-powered wizard who...kinda can't do physical battle. like at all. not a "oh i don't like fighting" though that's part of it. she's just very bad at hitting things without magic. this way she doesn't blow up half of the first world with one attack

i could go on about plot points such as daygem going off to do some research while the rest of the crew is off breaking mustang sally out of jail, and the subsequent "i'm a healer but" punching of a cat, but the backstory just kinda simmers in the background for most of it

some interesting tidbits here:

one time daygem remarks that the captwins get up in the morning like clockwork. this draws horrified shudders, an explanation that any comparison to The Clockwork Armada™ is a bad one, and a frantic apology on daygem's part

daygem and one of the companions that every pirate gets, old scratch, start off on the wrong foot. their magic is very different from each other and daygem is gun-shy after dealing with malistaire mcnecromancy so having an undead person on the boat is A Time. she kinda goes overboard on things though. like. there's avoiding someone and then there's antagonizing them. one of the subplots is that daygem gets over herself and figures out that old scratch is really trying and could she PLEASE do the same??? once things settle down on that front they become ride or die magic bros though. everybody on the ship is pleasantly surprised by this. until the two of them start waking people up with magic explosions on the deck but that's another story

over the course of the story roslyn works out that he's trans. i still haven't thought of a new name for him though so for for the time being he'll still be referred to as roslyn. anyway daygem is supportive of this and says that no matter what happens, she's behind the twins all the way

"but rosie," you may be thinking, "what do all these have in common?"

WELL I'M SO GLAD YOU ASKED

y'see, near the end of pirate101, we run into this dude called gazpaccio. it comes to light that gazpaccio:

went to el dorado (the place the pirate has been trying to get to before The Clockwork Armada™ can this whole time)

personally knew the pirates' mother, jenny, who was also on the crew that went to el dorado

took advanced technology from el dorado and created a clockwork son. however, he was extremely bitter at the time, and his son absorbed that bitterness and multiplied it tenfold

that son is kane. the leader of the armada.

yeah

well this is certainly a bunch of bombshells dropped in rapid succession

but wait! there's more!

you see, this is where my brain started going bananas.

in a near-endgame fight, i decided i would make everything a thousand times worse :)

one of The Armada™'s soldiers gets a lucky hit in on one of the twins.

this makes her head spin around like a cartoon character.

the other twin, gobsmacked, doesn't see the axe coming until it's buried in his chest, where crunched gears can now be seen under his skin

THAT'S RIGHT

I WENT THERE

this brings the fight to a screeching halt for a moment.

then bishop, this guy-

-the higher-up Armada™ guy that's there at the time, starts getting taunting at the twins. "all this time we had no idea how you kept up with us, when in reality it was because YOU ARE ONE OF US"

amber nichols's voice is just straight up muted after taking that one hit, and roslyn's is catching on itself on nearly every syllable, but both are horrified and having every possible existential crisis at once

except then daygem yells and draws all attention to herself

the twins use this time to shakily stand up

roslyn starts sloppily swiping at bishop

bishop backs up, still laughing because roslyn is twitching and on the verge of collapse

roslyn, in the cheekiest possible tone for the situation: i'm just the distraction, pinocchio! *knees give out*

nichols, leaping over roslyn and shoving/tackling an unsuspecting bishop over a rail and into the endless air because the spiral doesn't have oceans like a normal galaxy: >:OOO!!!

whether she overextends herself or bishop snags her, they both go falling.

mind you, the twins are both still having existential crises. they were just trying to buy their crew time to escape. they hadn't thought ahead to "we've endeared ourselves to these people too much and they won't just leave us when the being gets tough"

so when daygem curses in an earth language and dives over the side looking like this except lower-levelled-

-they're both pretty gobsmacked

then they pass out and the mechanic on the ship gets to work repairing them as soon as the remaining crew members collect all the pieces and run back to the boat

bishop can keep falling tho lol screw him

once awakened, the twins start Having A Time. they just found out they're Clockworks™, for pete's sake!

and daygem brings up that "not a spiral-born human" tidbit for the first time. outside of like, one person other than her own mental narration, anyway. they'll figure out why the twins are so different from the Armada™ and they'll make sure they stay that way, because they've got more soul than pretty much the entire Armada™ combined. except maybe kane but he's just an asshole regardless and the twins are Not

anyway many hugs are had and daygem just goes "guess i'm a big sister now"

and while there's a whole lot of Big Plot Hours between that scene and them figuring it out, i do have the explanation all thought out already:

i threw a little mini-crossover in for spice, way back when Jenny PirateMom was still sailing around, and i had stanford filbrick pines (age Sometime In The Multiverse) show up in the spiral and tag along for a bit.

he showed up after the el-dorado-ening, and he ends up striking a bargain with jenny and her crew: they'll let him tag along if he helps fix things and build things along the way

i also decided he's the one who finds tiny jack russell (the crewmate the player gets if their parents were lost in search of treasure, but like, babie form) and brings him into the crew because it would be funny if they ran into each other post-canons and did the spiderman point

eventually he gains their trust enough that jenny and her first mate bring him into one of their biggest projects: jenny brought home some el dorado tech, too, and she wants to build kids of her own with it. unlike gazpaccio, however, she isn't very bitter about things at all

also unlike gazpaccio, she is not a clockwork genius a la da vinci

between the three of them- jenny's love and designs, her first mate's insane amount of hand-eye coordination, and ford's interdimensional science and tech know-how, they build the prototypes

before they can finish activating them, however, something happens that i haven't thought of yet. might be an Armada™ attack, might be news of a treasure that would be helpful in building the kids, who knows. but it results in most of the pirates being lost, ford getting yeeted out of the spiral, and the few remaining pirates deciding they have to luke-and-leia the situation so the newly-made Armada™ can't get their hands on the kids' tech

and when the twins are finally powered on, they're on separate worlds with nothing of their parents but what their caregivers can tell them. the remnants of jenny's crew still have trouble seeing the kids as people instead of Clockworks™, though, so they don't tell the twins that they're twins when they really kinda have the right to know