Event || Custom Fit

[eternitymods]

Who: All
When: September 10th to September 30th
Where: Curti Center and mines around the world
What: Characters assist Ganeshan in developing Custom Jobs.
Warnings/Notes: OOC Post

A. The Lab

As much as Ganeshan requires supplies to create Custom Jobs, he need help at home base. With the large number of potential applicants, outworlders and Curti Center employees are invited to help out in the lab, not only with testing transfer of Jobs to crystals, but in developing the abilities and running safety tests.

Easier said than done when all of these cats aren't roaming throughout the center and claiming everything to be their sitting spot. The interns are trying their best to catherd to little avail.

B. Job Development

The break room contains formal submission papers and pamphlets describing the steps required to develop a Custom Job. Senior employees are available to help characters workshop the abilities, but they mostly want to remain in the break rooms to avoid Ganeshan's constant Job mania. His booming voice is muffled through the doors, interspersed with allergic sneezing.

A room has been prepared for those to practice using their basic job abilities, primarily in making sure they're stable yet not too weak. There is a chance that an improper ability extraction can go wrong and hurt the user, so Ganeshan has group of White Mages are on standby in case things go south.

For those that would rather have all the fun without the work, there is the Ability Simulation and Modeling Room, where characters can design their abilities on the computer and see them play out on the screen before them. There's no limit here, and since Jessie is too busy to keep an eye on everyone, the outfits and visual effects have the potential to get...very, very silly.

C. Heigh-Ho

It's off to work you go. Those crystals won't mine themselves, and anyone strong enough must enter the mine in search of the necessary material. It's tedious, difficult work, and some of these are embedded so deeply in the rock that they might be more trouble than they're worth. Not to mention those gross bugs might not like their homes to be disturbed.

There's also the fact that monsters have a tendency to wander inside and attack, so they'll need some reliable body guards.

There should be more crystals deeper inside, but someone else will have to scout the area...

D. Explore the Dungeon

Which is where this team comes in. All the good stuff is deep in this mine, and reliable navigators are necessary to map out the tunnels without getting lost. There's also the fact that the previous owners of a time long ago didn't want opportunists to take their precious resources and outfitted the rooms with puzzles.

Door Locks are puzzles. Pressure plates activate traps. It's the ultimate test of critical thinking. Some of these don't make sense if you think for too long. Why did they go through all the trouble to program time-based puzzles with falling blocks and symbols? The Pupu are strange. At least the bats here are easy to fight, and the mine cart rides are fun.

Comments

[garyoutensei]

"Who the hell is Chara?" Baiken spoke between bites, her mouth full.

[sassafrisk]

"One of my friends here, and sort of a sibling if you count weird alternate universe stuff," Frisk says, shrugging. "They're really good with knives and stuff, and offered to help me out in learning how to properly fight against human-ish things instead of just monsters."

[garyoutensei]

Baiken gave a sort of... flat look.

"You said this kid is around your age?" Because by the sound of it...

[sassafrisk]

"Yeah. They somehow had even more of a shitty life than me back home," Frisk says, raising an eyebrow at Baiken's dubious look. "Hence the knives." And lots of other stuff, too.

[garyoutensei]

"Aren't any of the kids around here just normal kids?" Baiken groaned. "Then again, I was younger than you when..."

Actually. Probably best to not talk about that. She stopped herself, sort of... staring at her empty sleeve for a moment before filling her mouth with another slab of meat.

[sassafrisk]

"You know, I have a theory about that," Frisk says, gesturing vaguely with their fork at themself and Baiken. "So. The reason why all of us came here at once is because the world's about to end, right? This place needs heroes, or at least people who are willing to try to save the world. If absolutely normal people were showed up, they'd just sorta... blend in with the rest of Vaikuntha. Adjust to new lives. They wouldn't do weird adventuring bullshit. If I was an absolutely normal kid with no trauma, do you think I'd be down here fighting monsters for the better part of the month? There's a reason why we, specifically, were all brought here, as screwed up and weird as it may be."

[garyoutensei]

"If that's at all true, and it sounds a little farfetched, I have a few words to share with whatever entity decided all this. Unkind ones," Baiken groaned. Because the last thing she wanted to deal with was some kind of cosmic force of destiny.

[sassafrisk]

"Agreed. In the grand scale of things, I guess what I was trying to do back home was pretty small time, but, y'know. Still. Would've been nice to actually break the barrier," Frisk grouses, stabbing their meal particularly violently.

[garyoutensei]

"The barrier?" Had Frisk told her about this before and she'd just forgotten?

[sassafrisk]

"Ah, right. Sorry, long day." Frisk shakes their head, trying to clear away the fatigue-induced fog. "Long story short, because humans are terrible, they trapped a race of monsters under a mountain and sealed 'em in there with a barrier. A friend of mine back home told me he had a plan to free them when I fell into the cavern, and considering how terrible life is down there and how... okay, to be fair, some of the monsters are pretty high-grade jerks, but nobody deserves to look up at night and see nothing but rock."

[garyoutensei]

... Hm. Baiken had mixed feelings about that, herself, not really responding at first, but her expression read as... complicated.

"If they were dangerous, they were probably better off staying separated, rocks or not."

[sassafrisk]

Frisk opens their mouth to bite back and say that monsters weren't dangerous to humans at all, but they deflate at the last question. "Yeah. Situation's kinda... complicated." They sigh, listlessly skewering some lettuce from their salad. "Hypothetically, monsters have the ability absorb human SOULs and get ridiculously powerful. That's why people were so afraid of them. But the catch is that without that power, they're wet tissue paper to anybody with enough killing intent. Hell, a single kid was able to take out more than thirty monsters in a few days down there. But despite that fusion thing never actually, you know, happening, humans got paranoid and decided to get rid of the monsters. There wasn't a single human casualty in the war, that's how one-sided it was.

"Thing is, though, things got super screwed up down in the cavern once a human fell down and got adopted by the royal family. They somehow got through the barrier with the prince a little while later, but both of 'em got killed by a human village up above. That was kind of the breaking point for the king. He snapped, declared a war on humanity, and decided to collect seven human SOULs from anybody else who fell down to shatter the barrier. I don't think he expected to be able to actually follow through on that, but when another kid fell down, a kid just weak enough that he could kill 'em... the dude understandably flipped out and disappeared for parts unknown, leaving his wife who was NOT on board with the plan at all in charge. She tried to calm people down, but...

"Shit happened. Primarily that previous thing I mentioned about a single freaked-out kid who got enough killing intent to slaughter all of those monsters. It got... bad, after that. The queen had to section off a village on the border of the cavern as a human safe-zone because everybody else was clamoring to murder the next human who fell down. Then some tapes about the adopted kid went public, at least the parts that made them out to be super terrible because the person who released them has a serious hate-on for humanity, and everybody wanted blood. As luck would have it, I was the next unlucky kid to fall down.

"So... yeah. I admit, breaking the barrier without turning around public opinion would be a hugely dumb move since it'd get all the monsters killed. Which is why I had to be Charmer McCharmypants the entire time I was down there, to try and make people see reason. I was actually about to be put on trial for some crap the person who got all the hate going framed me for, which was probably going to be my big chance to turn everyone around."

[garyoutensei]

More than anything else, there was a very loud thought burning in her mind in response to, well. All of that.

"Don't you think that's a lot of responsibility to shoulder? You're still a kid."

[sassafrisk]

"I mean, if not me, then who?" Frisk takes a large bite out of an apple, expression thoughtful. "There's no guarantee that the next person who fell down there would want to try and get the monsters out. Hell, if things went really bad, there might be another Waterfall Incident. Plus..." Ah, fuck it. They'd already told Kuja, why not Baiken? "I had this... power down there. Basically, every time I died, I'd go back to a point in time and space, fully healed, just because apparently I'm too stubborn to die. I could manually reset too, if I tried hard enough. The ability to retry and fix my mistakes, plus survive if Undyne got a few lucky shots in, is basically the only reason I made it as far as I did. There's no guarantee that whoever fell down next would fall assbackwards into SAVE-ing, and no guarantee that they'd use it for good. So, if not me... then who?"

[garyoutensei]

... "I guess I can't argue with that, only having your word to go on, and no reason to think you're only giving me half the story here," Baiken sighed.

"You're stuck in a pretty bad situation, kid. No one your age should have to go through all that... But sometimes life isn't fair. Hell, I'm living proof of that..."

End soon?

[sassafrisk]

"Life isn't fair, we're all going to die, and the world is ending. What else is new?" Frisk says, snorting. "We just gotta deal with it." Like they always have. Or haven't, in some cases.