Falerin Arcita

First expansion where I've done every single step of the relic on something other than a DPS. Kinda glad they made me revisit all those DT dungeons; I only went through most of the level 100s once, and I think I may have judged some of them too harshly.

...Except Strayborough Deadwalk. That place still sucks. It makes me want to find Tim Burton and give him a swift kick in the butt. I know its not his fault but... I still want to.

The shorts give like… -1 butt though. And Fal never had a lot of butt to spare in the first place, in-game or otherwise. Look at it, its practically concave.

((Work has been very slow this week so I wrote a poem about a griffin.))

Oh children born of blood, listen well to this refrain, of the proud Ala Mhigan griffin and the cruel Garlean chain

The Mad King's hands did push us all 'neath fortune's crushing wheel allowing the cursed men of Garlemald to bring us all to heel

But twas not just men who lamented when Theodric's war was lost For the palace's royal griffins also paid a hefty cost

They too were sentenced to toil beneath the Emperor's rule Overworked and underfed as a pauper's lowly mule

Faced with pain and torture, one by one they bowed But one would not forsake her birthright, as she was just too proud

She was tall and strong and vicious, her feathers white and clean Among the palace stable boys, she was known simply as The Queen

The Empire's beast-breaker gloated "I've never once been bitten For all your bluff and bluster, you're as helpless as a kitten!"

He lassoed her about the neck with a constricting clockwork chain That would choke and strangle all the more with every muscle's strain

He taunted "Should you try to maul me while this chain is in my grasp This collar will tighten round your neck until you've gasped your last!"

Ferociously he yanked the chain to bring her from her stall And she stumbled and bowed her head as if held within his thrall

But the Queen was crafty, her servility a lie She trailed behind obediently until she saw the open sky

And when at last she felt the touch of a zephyr's gentle hand She knew the time had come for her to make her final stand.

Suddenly her wings sliced the air with one single thunderous beat And her talons seized the breaker's flesh, gouging through the meat

You have sealed your doom this day, cried the soldier to the beast but the griffin did not relax her grip, and took wing toward the east

The chain now cutting off her breath, the Queen choked and coughed But the wounded man was helpless as she bore him high aloft

With her dying breath she carried him beyond the palace wall Though she could not kill him herself… he did not survive the fall

Some say that when she fell, a bolt of lightning struck the ground And indeed many believed it when her corpse was never found

In that moment, perhaps the Queen knew the great Destroyer's grace Raised up by holy levinbolt into his strong embrace

To this day many tell the Queen's tragic, noble tale To show all Ala Mhigans that their courage could prevail

I expected I'd eventually be defeated and give up on my FSH progression due to RNGesus forsaking me, but I thought it'd be while I was angling for a worthy and notorious foe like Problematicus or Cinder Surprise or the Ruby Dragon or some fishing boat spectral bullshit, but this... this fucker is what made my head collapse like a rotten jack-o-lantern, apparently. A Heavensward fish with 23 minute long windows and daily uptimes. The dishonor of it all.

I cast for this thing over 300 times before I lost count. I was beginning to wonder if it even existed until it bit and immediately slipped me around cast #175.

A bit late, but I made an in-character pride glamour for Fal.

Fal is an out and proud pansexual poc man with blue eyes. And, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I am a closeted asexual white woman with brown eyes, I absolutely adore him.

I uploaded 7 more of my Fal stories on Ao3 (I'm up to 46k total words and am 6 stories into a new chapter) but going through them all and ordering them is (still) really painful and difficult from a practicality standpoint. The fact that its 10 years worth of material that jumps all over the place chronologically is (and always has been) a huge problem. 

A couple of years ago I renamed every story for its exact subject matter/happenings and made a .txt file with all of them listed in their in-universe chronological order.  For the most part its accurate and its helped a lot, but I'm still finding inconsistencies and omissions and plot holes that feel like popcorn shells lodged in my gums.  I knew that sort of thing would be inevitable since I wrote an (still) incomplete story out of order. I can't help being annoyed at myself. 

But, I have to remind myself that I wouldn't have written anything at all if I'd tried to go in order. As far as creative endeavors go, its better to churn out a bunch of jumbled nonsense than nothing at all. Writing about Fal has helped me a lot on my journey to unlearn my gifted kid burnout perfectionism, and its been very healing.

Anyway, further complicating things is the fact that the stories were originally written mostly in .wps format, which is not supported by the thoroughly enshittified Windows 11 PC I currently have. I have to run every file through a .wps ->  .txt converter before I can even look at/read it, and I have to do a lot of back and forth with several files open at once to verify where in the Fal timeline each story falls to sort out ambiguities. 

And as if operating with the sole aim of getting things in order wasn't infuriating enough on its own, I keep questioning the validity of each piece because so many of them are just fluff pieces. They vary greatly in quality and very little happens in them.   This has me asking myself if I should just leave them out. But... I told myself I was doing all of this uploading FOR ME and it would include every story and it didn't matter if it wasn't interesting to other people.  But if even I don't like them, why upload them?

And on the topic of "I'm doing this for myself," I also can't help but be fixated on the idea that I might be alienating people, even though I know that I shouldn't expect much.  My kind of writing just isn't what the average Ao3 reader is looking for and I know it. Just the same, I just can't help but look at those hits and kudos and wonder what could be if I just made everything more presentable and consistent.