30: "Aren't You Afraid The Fashion Police Will Come And Beat You With Their Fabulous Batons?"150 words

Accord's Reflections: A Drakengard Crossover

Author's Note:

A couple of years ago, I played Drakengard 3 from start to finish (including the final boss; yes, I beat it, and yes, it took me many tries and many days). Having already beaten both NieR games and played through the first Drakengard, I was pretty well invested in the series, and started sketching out an MLP crossover.

The story would have been set a thousand years after Drakengard 3, and its central conceit would have been that Egg Girls World was the same world as Midgard in the DrakenNier series. The Rainbooms awakening their power would have roused Mikhail from the long, long slumber that he slips into after losing Zero (detailed in the DLC diaries for Zero's campaign). Mistaking them for the Intoners, he instinctively tries to kill them, and Sunset and the girls have to determine whether to reason with and talk him down, or just put him down for good.

A central part of this story would have been Accord, and her relationship with Sunset, as she tries to steer events toward a reasonable outcome. Accord wants to preserve Mikhail, out of respect for Zero, but she also worries that Sunset Shimmer might be a reincarnation of Zero, or at least, another malevolent evil spawned by the Flower. Keeping Mikhail alive, the last dragon on Earth, means ensuring that this timeline still has a chance at a happy ending.

I ended up not pursuing the outline that I drafted, largely due to the same reasons which kept me away from writing the rest of my projects. Most of what I had planned ended up folded into Magica Ex, anyway, in both a thematic and a narrative sense.

What follows here is all that I ever wrote based on that premise: A series of prologues, written from Accord's perspective, narrating the events of the story (much as she did between missions in Drakengard 3). These would have gone at the beginning of each chapter, and would have worked to bring the events of each chapter into focus, and reconcile them with DrakenNieR lore.

If you've never played Drakengard, or NieR, and have no idea what any of this means, then this probably won't be up your alley. If you're one of the three or four follows I have who's into all the same media that I am, then read on, and ponder what might have been.

Why did I make contact with Sunset Shimmer? The answer's quite simple: It was all in the interest of my duties as a Recorder.

...

Don't believe that, huh? Would you rather hear that it was nothing more than simple, idle curiosity? Because I don't like the way that makes me come across – like some ditz with so much time on her hands that she has nothing better to do than flirt with extradimensional visitors. I'd rather not be thought of as just curious, for curiosity's sake, too. We all know what happens to androids who get too curious.

Not giving up, huh? Well, I told you the truth already. If you want me to elaborate, then...

...

...This is a lot harder for me to put into words than I thought it would be.

Okay. So. Imagine you're responsible for tending a garden – no, not even a full garden. Just one plant. A flower. Or a tree. Bonsai, I guess. You spend your waking hours watching that tree grow; you prune off the branches that are dead, or dying; you nurture the ones that look like they're flourishing. A little snip here, some water and sunlight there – do it right, and that tree grows up, healthy and strong.

I've started thinking of our roles as Recorders in similar terms. I mean, we do the same thing, don't we? Closing off branches that we know to be dead ends, while following the ones that show potential for positive outcomes. Fostering them, and helping them develop. We're basically cosmic gardeners, when you get right down to it.

I know what our role is supposed to be. Recorders are observers, no more and no less. We track the flow of history, monitoring the different branches and timelines, ever-vigilant for singularities and anomalies and all those other fun, cosmic gachas that make reality such a joy to behold. We're unbiased, objective, and utterly mechanical (heh) in our methods.

But a job like that... it's hard to do it without getting at least a little bit invested in the target of your observation. The other Recorders do their jobs, and they do them well, but that's all it is to them – a job.

Whereas, for me, tracking the history of that world for so long... it became something I felt responsible for. Somewhere along the line, I lost that mechanical (heh) sense of objectivity that all of us Recorders are supposed to have. Getting invested in the life, the growth, of a plant, was a pretty common thing among human horticulturists, so the way I see it, I'm following my programming... if, admittedly, in an different fashion from the other Accords.

Maybe that's why so many of my peers still refuse to speak with me after so long...

The current state of our world can be traced back to an incident in which visitors from another reality breached our own, bringing with them a host of cosmic issues and magical maladies from which we – despite our best efforts – have never fully recovered.

And that other reality owes its state to a cataclysm in which matter and energy from yet another reality suddenly manifested, completely upsetting the global order and throwing the natural world completely out of alignment.

Then, a thousand years later, having finally recovered (more or less) from that cataclysm, a visitor from another reality busts inside... and the whole thing starts all over again.

Do I need to illustrate the pattern for you?

The Intoners were doomed to destroy the very world they wanted to protect, an irony which most of them failed to grasp. When they were killed off, the threat should have ended, yet here's another colorful band of young, female songstresses, using borrowed magic to safeguard the world.

A distant colleague of mine once said that we were all trapped in an eternal spiral of life and death. I think she was just referring to her particular line of work – she's always been as self-involved as she is grandiloquent – but in hindsight, she may have been more right than she knew. If history is repeating itself, if these girls really are the second coming of the Intoners, then that means the Flower is still exerting influence over that branch.

Which means it's not just their world that's in danger.

...I really gotta hand it to 'em, though – "Rainbooms" is certainly a catchier name than "Intoners."

Once the Intoners were slain, and the Flower destroyed, the influence of magic waned in the world. Creatures of a magical nature – dragons, fairies, elves – gradually died out. Even the Cathedral City eventually crumbled to dust. Thus, the era of Midgard came to an end, its history relegated only to fragmented myth, and civilization developed on a track that's more or less parallel to our own civilization.

Except, you know, without that salty Armageddon wiping out humanity.

The upshot to all of this is that the Flower's only natural enemy – the dragon race – went extinct, alongside the rest of that world's magic, or so we've always assumed. With that in mind, the obvious solution to this renewed Intoner threat would be to seal off that branch, to prevent the Flower's influence from spreading. But that's a drastic step that nobody wants to take.

What luck, then, that there's still one dragon left in the world – coincidentally, the same one who ended the Intoner threat a thousand years before. So, talk of sealing this branch might just be premature. Because, if I'm right, and the Intoners have been reborn as the Rainbooms, then Mikhail can end them again – just as he did a thousand years ago.

...

I know... you asked me about Sunset Shimmer. So what am I doing, running my mouth about the Intoners?

Thing is... I can't talk about one without talking about the other.

It comes down to this: The Intoners and the Rainbooms are one and the same – I'm more certain of that now than ever. The only way to kill an Intoner is with the power of a dragon, and the only dragon left alive is Mikhail. But that's not something he'd ever do of his own volition.

Mikhail is a sword. And every sword needs someone to wield it.

That's why I made contact with Sunset Shimmer.

Zero...

It kills me to admit this, but I've never fully understood why you did what you did. Was it a sense of duty? Revenge against the Flower, for denying you the death you desired? Or could it be that there was still something in the world that you cared for, even after all the heartache and the hurt?

Whatever your reasons, you gave your life to save humanity, and you made that sacrifice without hesitating. If you had to do it again, I wonder if your decision would be the same, even if you had more to lose. If the thing you cared for most in the world was the very thing you had to kill to save it... would you still take up Mikhail as your sword?

I think you would. I'm staking everything on it, in fact. Whether or not you will is something we'll find out together.

Won't we, Sunset Shimmer?

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