Noa Izumi: Pun intended, Noa ended up being not much more than dead weight and I blame a lack of solid planning on my part. Long story short, Noa was around to give me someone to send on ZFPD plots who was actually a cop. The biggest problem is that's all she did; she didn't go on non-cop plots and didn't even go on all the ones she was in Olympia for. Zeldoten ended up being more fun to send on cop plots because she could riff on them while fixing their booboos. Noa's main thing was that she piloted a mech in her anime to thwart mech-related crimes. There was only really one of those though, so she ended up being an unarmored, poorly-armed normie for most of the plots she went on and suffered for it: two plot deaths and one near-death that I didn't just push into being death.
She made a brief appearance in Season 8 when the Deadly Six used Reaverbots to kidnap Susie from a prison and I decided to try bringing her in for a bigger role. I forgot to really give her that role though so the only real splash she made was dying. She's retiring, going back to Kuwahawi, and I've brought in a couple of OCs that ought to do better both on plots and in doing non-cop things. :V
The Curse
King Biruritchi: Like the Globglogabgalab before him, this is a guy whose name was hard for me to remember how to spell so I will be glad for the chance to no longer need to! King B (no relation to Miror B) was originally conceived of as a "Just here to Brawl" guy back when Harpy was playing the Pokemon Trading Card Game video games and I got to have a smug chuckle at another world of people obsessing over a children's card game to the point that they were having wars and stuff over them. I began thinking how he would actually be able to use those cards in battle and not just be a total normie, starting by borrowing the YuGiOh staple of holographic monsters fighting each other and going from there to other cards having other effects.
As we got closer to the year, I decided I needed a way to introduce Wildfire as a costumed crimefighter and not Eadis the talking head. King B ended up being useful for that and I was able to make him my first member of The Curse, allowing me to mention the King Dice Gang as a totally different group. He'd go on to Brawl alright and JRM wrote some incredible stuff (as he always does) with clever uses of King B's deck. He later organized trying to frame King Dice for killing Kobbers in an F-Zero race, but I goofed and....really didn't have much of consequence occur during that except to have the Wildfire/King Dice encounter.
With the Brawl out of the way and his one scheme to get the Kobbers off of the Curse's back done, King B ended up being sacrificed for the greater good of the Space Police. I forget what exactly happened then to make me think they were starting to get the Jobber treatment (Maw stuff, I think) but I offered him and his crew to Chao as a big arrest the Space Cops could make to start rebuilding their cred and thus he and most of his Go-Bot henchmen got arrested.
Go-Bots: I'd intended to talk about Robbie next, but the Go-Bots are relevant after that last comment. Go-Bots! Not Decepticons! I specifically wanted to avoid using the more popular robots in disguise because I'd already done years of Decepticon plots, including bringing Borodan back for the Brawl. So I grabbed a handful of Renegade Go-Bots and used them as fairly disposable henchmen. Stretch/Tux got the honor of being slightly more important, a spy in the King Dice gang that would be totally incognito while hearing every plan so the Curse could keep tabs on him. They also made great opponents for Volfogg during their arrest and bringing Tux and the truck guy back for Don Genie's race was a great to show that the Curse were getting desperate by pulling in any potential racers they had.
I enjoyed using them. They were a good bunch of disposable Curse guys.
Robbie Rotten: Originally conceived of as just another "there to Brawl" character, though he was considered for awhile before actually being locked in, unlike King B. I was happy to oblige JRM's wishlist to include Borodan and Moltar in the Brawl, but nobody else really stuck out to me as someone I wanted in there, so giant meme that he is and me with a history of including stupid memes in RP picked Robbie Rotten for it and decided what the heck he was a Curse member too! He ended up being a good fit for the Sumidoten Pairing Confirmation event as a potential bad guy too. I wanted someone who wouldn't just have a big fight with Zeldoten - she was originally meant to be a sneaky person, not someone who really enjoyed fisticuffs and I wanted an opponent who would she would have to outsmart, someone whom she couldn't just go crying to the KoB to beat up.
Yes, he ended up getting beat up, but that wasn't until they'd engaged in a contest of wits. He didn't have much use story-wise so he ended up arrested after getting over some very painful and severe injuries.
A lot of his dialogue was inspired by "We Are Number One" lyrics and I drew a lot of ideas from it for the event, but I wanted to put an RP spin on it - like making his "Dream Team" dinosaurs instead of just three guys dressing like him.
A few people have said they liked how menacing and dangerous RP Robbie ended up being an I appreciate that. I like taking jokes and making legitimate bad guys out of them. Worked for Globby!
I have more things to say about Robbie, but I'm saving those for discussing the plot itself.
Big Band: Robbie Rotten is a very weird and quirky guy. He needed an equally quirky sidekick who was there to support his flamboyant personality and also ended up being a tough guy too. I was familiar with Big Band prior to Season 9 and I'd seen a few videos of people playing songs using his game attacks, so I thought it'd be great fun to have this big, hulking juggernaut of a warrior there mainly to play Robbie's theme song.
And then he got to be big and scary too, an opponent Zeldoten could never beat without either help or her tools but one she HAD to fight or else there would be dire consequences. Writing the small war that took place between him and Nibbles was fun since it was a chance to show off what it means to have a Giant Friend Crab on your side.
He might end up reappearing in Season 10 as a member of ZFPD or just Olympia's police. I'm undecided since as of right now I don't have great plot ideas for him.
Robbie's Dream Team: Not too much to say except I wanted to avoid using Velociraptors, so I went to Wikipedia and found other raptors that weren't Velociraptors to make for a cunning enemy that Zeldoten would have to outmaneuver and outsmart since trying to match them head-on would be a very painful proposition. It would've been nice to have a picture of them dressed up, but there was definitely not time to make that happen.
The Beagle Boys: Another group that doesn't have much to talk about. I hadn't even thought of using them until the day Goops and I actually did Sumidoten. They were a great group to use in Robbie's plan though because they were goofy cartoon animals perfect to convince a passing-by Kobber that some low-key, easily-solved mischief was going on that required a hopeless romantic of a do-gooder to take care of.
Vic Hoskins: This seems like a good time to transition to the bad guy of Jurassic World, the ambitious jerk who wanted to weaponize dinosaurs. In an RP season involving InGen and weaponized dinosaurs, SOMEBODY had to bring him in in his role as InGen's security guy. I'd recently gotten a great idea for a plot to do...in Season 11, because Olympia was not a great place for the idea, but I wanted to start foreshadowing it and Goops recently introducing the idea of InGen creating a kaiju for Lord Dominator gave me a great place to start. Thus the tag-team of Vic Hoskins and Melissa (sometimes Madeline) Bergman was born, with him giving her InGen funding to make a kaiju so he could get bumped up a few ranks in the Curse.
Well, that obviously failed and helping Robbie try to get the Valhalla recipes also failed. Meanwhile, Bergman was climbing the Curse ranks because all the other important geneticists were disappearing while his position stagnated because, well, bad things were happening in InGen under his watch.
I originally had a different ending for him in mind! He was going to escape the Curse with Bergman and reappear with her in Season 11, either as himself or having gotten injured somehow to the point of his brain getting placed in a big, powerful, Commie-fighting robot body as Bergman's watchdog.
When Chao mentioned Weaselby's rebellion though, it seemed to fit ol' Vic a lot better than what I'd intended. It was another huge opportunity for him to take the power and position he'd wanted and was denied due to his blunders and missteps. I wouldn't consider him a "Major Curse elimination" (as Chao put it) but I was happy to throw a named, established Curse member into the plot to give it gravitas and it gave us a better, more karma-tastic way for Vic to be eliminated from the Curse.
Paul Blart: Whoops! Thought I was going to talk about Bergman? Not yet. Paul Blart is another great meme that I threw into the Curse, mainly for some laughs, but having this dopey, happy guy whose thing is riding around on a Segwey lends credence to the idea that some people actually thought Plague was a pretty good guy to work for. We saw it under Sub-Slizer and Cordie, folks who weren't villainous or sinister, just working for the "bad" guy. Goops did a great job of portraying Plague as a man with a vision who didn't really seem all that evil and having people like Futo following him makes the transition to the Cure seem genuine. Anyway, back to Blart, he was funny and got to have some good moments in actual plots. I wrote his appearance in the Screenslaver Part 1 event as to way to give folks an "encounter" with him and a way to give him a formal dismissal from the Curse. He'll be patrolling Olympia Mall in Season 10 for sure.
Doctor Melissa/Madeline Bergman: Looking back, I'm not sure why I would sometimes use Melissa and Madeline for her first name. It wasn't intentional. Oops. In any case, she ended up being one of my favorite Curse members to RP as; I just wish I'd had her interact with other Curse members more often. She was introduced as a way to set up my planned Season 11 plot by creating some kaiju to try impressing Lord Dominator and I think that plot event went very well. Through a series of un/fortunate events, she ended up becoming the top geneticist in the Curse at a time when they were running out of ways to keep making monsters, but it was better than Vic did and she dumped him. Once InGen was put out of business, she really didn't have much to do though so...I gave her things to do. She ended up putting on power armor and joining plots as a foot soldier and I think it worked out pretty good for her, especially after Janga died and she could fill in for him as a way to give her stuff to do. Goops was nice enough to let her have a big role in the finale.
I really enjoyed having her stick around to the end of the Curse though. I kept wondering if I should have her leave Olympia to start doing her plans, but I liked the idea that she could have left at any time but really wanted to see how Plague and the Curse would end up. I feel she got frustrated having so many encounters working with the Kobbers and promising that they'd had a huge fight only to be denied at every turn, frustrated to the point where she preferred sneaking into Cray to blow up the Doomsday Device rather than join in the Plague Plague. I really like calling that part of the finale the "Plague Plague" so deal with it.
I've tried to give some hints as to what Bergman actually is. We'll find out in Season 11. How did she come about though? When I started getting those plot ideas, I wanted a character who was an evil scientist lady that would definitely not have been used yet. Metroid Other M was a great resource in that regard because I know our resident Metroid fan prefers to avoid using things from that game, evidenced by him suggesting I used the Ferrocrusher for Deb in Brawl 8, so I took that game's scientist, Melissa Bergman, and adapted her for ZFRP. The "Agent Black" codename she ended up using towards the end of the year was inspired by Iconoclasts, a game Chao has talked about and I've seen videos of. Long story short, there's an angry special agent in that game who opposes the player; her real name is Madeline (probably why I accidentally called Berman that a few times) but everyone calls her by her code name, Agent Black.
I really enjoyed having her there when it was revealed that Screenslaver was a member of the Delegation. Integrating that into Melissa Bergman canon was a great boon and I hope y'all will enjoy her in years to come.
Looking back, she's a lot like a Doktor DeMonde except she got to do monster stuff full-time instead of sticking to medicine.
Zilla: The Curse really WAS a neat way to introduce all kinds of random concepts. I threw the Zilla species into RP as a way to give Bergman a cheap, expendable, Zerg Rush-style kaiju she could create and make a lot of to use as her own henchmen. The one fought on plot put up a pretty decent fight, I think. They'll be back.
Shin Godzilla: Not including Zilla, the kaiju design for Shin Godzilla is, in my opinion, the most radical departure from the traditional Godzilla design. The weird-looking larval forms, the shriveled forearms, that stubby mouth with the chaotic arrangement of teeth...all of that to me just screams "something went WRONG", and that ended up being the basis for Shin Godzilla: a Godzilla clone that was pulled out of the oven too early and still ended up being a serious threat. Skeiron claims teleporting Shin Godzilla away was a victory, but I consider it more of a tie.
You haven't even seen his final form. ;V
I've enjoyed throwing kaiju into RP, but I've always fretted a bit about putting GODZILLA into modern RP. He made a few appearances in the early years and a cameo during Halloween Creep, but I've been reluctant to try putting him in as an antagonist, because one way or another I think the outcome would be unsatisfying: either he goes in at the power level I think he has and is a disappointing draw of a fight or he gets defeated because that's what happens to antagonists. Shin Godzilla gave me a way to have Godzilla be fought somehow and be powerful but with an avenue where it's okay to me to have Godzilla lose - because it wouldn't be GODZILLA but a faulty clone.
He's still out there in Antarctica though. If you felt like you missed out on fighting the final form of Shin Godzilla, just...um...wait a couple years, okay?
Chimairamon/Kimeramon/That Digimon That Was Greymon With Some Other Parts Bolted On: I don't know the proper way to spell this guy's name. Anyway, I threw him into Sheep's Digimon plot as a way to participate and be another Doctor Bergman creation to show she'd been playing around with Digimon after finding out they existed. He might've been neat to bring back for future events, especially after Bergman wasn't able to create flesh and blood monsters, but Sheep wrote a great death scene for the icky bugger. Combine that with him existing solely for that event and I was happily content to let him be dead.
Yohane/FAY: I'm pretty sure Chao's told the story of how Yohane came to be in RP. Now to tell my more-complete version of it.
I don't know if Chao was just getting into Love Live or if he'd been a fan for a long time, but he was sharing Love Live images with me over Discord and wanted to show me his favorite from Sunshine. We got to discussing her a bit and wondering how she could be squeezed into RP. I'd already had plans for some new characters and was reluctant to take more on.
So initially, my first idea for Yohane was that she was actually Koakuma using magic to disguise herself. Olympia, having heard about these strange Kobber people, would have news reporters camped outside for awhile, hounding anyone who even looked like they might work for Zoofights Corp. so Koa would use a disguise to be able to slip in and out of Valhalla without being hounded by reporters.
I'd later watch some clips of Yohane to see what she was like, particularly a dubbed version of her introduction in her native series and a "All instances of Yohane in Love Live Sunshine" video where she was constantly correcting people on her chosen name. So she was quirky and Honoka's friend. Great. I decided she could be her own character and began thinking of ways to actually be a character and not just Fallen Angel Yohane purple prose, because writing that would be boring eventually.
Purpose prose and insisting on being called a Fallen Angel do not a character make, so I slowly started to think of ways to make her more interesting. She lives in Olympia; what does she do? She does computer stuff. Great. Cornwind having Dawn look into who a Fallen Angel Yohane was gave me the perfect opportunity to plant some reveals without having to go into detail about them, so she was a hacker.
Yohane was kind of latched to Honoka, so when the Bubble Bass crisis arose, I had the chance to do more with Yohane and tie her into the overarching Curse plot, by making her FORMER Curse. She got out of the organization prior to Season 9 at some point but hadn't forgotten things, so she came out of her rabbit hole a bit. I'd originally envisioned her just flat out quitting the Curse like she would a normal job, but then Janga was introduced, so later in the season I had to do a small retcon saying she'd faked her death with computers convincingly enough to not be hunted down.
The computer hacker stuff also gave her reasons to go on plots sometimes! She wasn't a fighter; she'd done Shrapnel training, but c'mon. I think I threw in a mention that she'd been a Shrapnel for a whole one day before becoming noncombat Shrapnel. Anyway, hacking gave her a reason to go on plots like the Subway Scandal and Don Genie's tower where tractor shenanigans...were not kind to her.
I think she ended up being one of my best characters this year thanks to not relying on Honoka to be around for interactions and keeping the Fallen Angel Yohane prose to when it would be funny or when she needed a coping mechanism. I can barely even remember her actual first name is Yoshiko, Chao and I have been just calling her Yohane for so long.
My one Yohane regret is her interaction with the M Bison finale. It didn't feel organic that she'd somehow be able to hack into the exact spot where the fight was a minute or so after learning about the fight at all. Oh well. She'll be back for Season 10!
Mosasaurus: Not sure where else to take about her, so why not here? Originally appearing in Brawl 5 as interrupting the Brawl, I still enjoy the fact that my rejected Secret Fiter eliminated one of my actual entrants, Waldorf and Statler. With InGen shenanigans happening, I couldn't NOT bring her back in some capacity. Even though she couldn't go to Olympia itself, she was a good McGuffin for my Curseplot and helping to expand upon why Zeldoten kept capturing dinosaurs. Not much else needs to be said about her except that despite what some fan-made Mosasaurus size chart says, she's not 100 meters long.
Hatate: She's a Touhou. I brought her in for the sole purpose of doing my Brawl votes because I'd known at the end of Season 8 that Moltar was joining Brawl 9. She was convenient for a gag during the finale of Lodgeplot. I briefly considered her for the Curse for the sole purpose of a Curse member doing some votes, but she didn't really add to the Curse as a whole, so...just there to vote. Good job, Hatate.
Wildfire/King Dice Plot
Originally, I'd planned to do two plots: one for Wildfire and a smaller one for Zeldoten. They would have had some overlap but were intended to be separate plots. In hindsight, I think it worked out for the best. The Zeldoten plot would've been meant to highlight her past a bit more, but there's not much that hasn't already been talked about before. The one big revelation there was was that her parents essentially sold her to a goddess in exchange for eternal vitality. A scene I never got around to writing was a flashback where Zeldoten was negotiating with one of Draco's agents, revealed to be Emma Drachen, to go to Earth and spy for him, going through a portal to Earth moments before Malizza and Gujarek attacked and were scared off by dragon form Emma. The one Zeldoplot event that did happen gave me an excuse to make a callback when she fought Eadis to a job she took in Kuwahawi to find the missing lightsaber of Keiran Ijaat.
With the Wildfire/King Dice plot, I wanted to do something that wasn't so...dire. Something that wasn't affecting too much of what was happening, just another small group of villains doing little evil things while doing their best not to provoke the Kobbers, because they'd get smushed. Unfortunately for them, while they escaped the notice of the Kobbers (even after that time I'd meant for them to pay attention to King Dice) they were being chased by a different hero, Eadis, who tried very hard to be a genuine super hero with a secret identity. Turns out having a character with a secret identity is tough to do in RP when you have both identities hanging out in the same place at different times. Pitohui did it better because Elsa Kanzaki only ever did her shows and stayed in her room except for one of SK's plots. So I eventually just had Zeldoten blurt it out to go ahead and get rid of that.
Nothing in particular got CUT per se, but
Eadis/Wildfire: Eadis was, I admit, an attempt to come up with a character who could take over as my "main character" for a few years so the Zeldoten crew could take a year or two off from being in the thick of RP. I think I did an alright job of portraying her as a young woman new to her profession and having doubts about it while not having her be a total idiot about it, no matter what Joy says. The rivalry she ended up having with Joy was a good avenue to show that she was trying hard to do things right even when she sometimes felt like she'd screwed things up. Her encounter with King B on Day 1 was a nice way to introduce her and show right off the bat she had some idea of how to be a super hero while not being perfect about it too; I remember Cornwind had some funny commentary on her that first night.
I kicked myself every so often though because I feel I was inconsistent with how powerful her fire abilities are supposed to be and how naturally heat-resistant she should be.
Malizza/The Swarm Master: I think I overemphasized how villainous Malizza actually was in her Character Bio. At some point I had it in my head that she'd be an actual super villain while living in the same apartment with Wildfire and having them acknowledge each others' secret identity, but aside from chasing Zeldoten a few times, she didn't do a lot of actual villainy. I could've talked about her in the Curse section, but she didn't really do much for the Curse. She helped fight the Ravage once and watched the Brawl with them. In hindsight, I think I would've just not included her in the Curse if I'd known then that I'd have guys like Vic and Robbie in there. If I ever use Eadis and Malizza in some other RP, I'll try bringing back the super hero/villain roommates schtick.
She's effectively Eadis' best friend/social worker, hanging out and encouraging her to do positive things with her life by day and chasing after Zeldoten to take her soul by night. I enjoyed RPing her even though AFAIK she didn't make a big splash with anyone else. She did bad things and knew she was doing bad things, so she tried to minimize how bad her things were to other people, like when she told Megalon not to smash buildings and stuff.
Like a lot of my OCs, Eadis and Malizza were characters I made for tabletop games. Malizza is technically still in it, the game being her backstory, but we haven't played that adventure in awhile so she feels almost as abandoned as the tabletop Eadis and Zeldoten. :V
Gujarek: Goops mentioned he thought Gujarek's design was cute and I think he said he was disappointed that Gujarek was an even asshole. I liked his design too. It's cool. And he's an asshole because he enjoys killing and really, REALLY hated failing to kill Zeldoten. He was friendly with Eadis but not above manipulating her to get another shot at murder.
Megalon: Megalon's great! Godzilla vs. Megalon was the first Godzilla movie I'd ever seen and I was glad to be able to squeeze him into RP at last. He was actually cut content from Season 7 or 8, I forget which exactly, and it was great to have an event focuses around him with a cameo by the Seatopia weirdos and their dancing in togas. Chao asked me to include Cirral in the set-up post since he said he wouldn't be able to make it to the actual event. Malizza shared my concerns and deliberately held Megalon back from causing property damage and I'm glad Gigan was there to talk everyone else down from actually killing Megalon. He'll be fine.
Gyronna: Actual Pathfinder Gyronna is a Chaotic Evil goddess who probably ought to be destroyed. There's not a ton of information on her though, so I made up some new backstory for RP. When characters began expressing interest in finding Gyronna and destroying her and similar sentiments, I'd considered having Eadis go "Okay, I'll take you to her." just to see how people would respond to an old woman going "Here I am. I won't fight back. Go ahead and take me out." but that would've been a really dickish thing to do and not what I wanted to do with either Eadis or Gyronna. Even as dim as Eadis is, she wouldn't have stuck around if Gyronna had been blatantly evil and I didn't want to put anyone in the "murder a helpless old woman" corner.
King Dice: Again, I wanted kind of a smaller plot and needed an almost-mundane villain for it. I'd been watching Cuphead videos around that time and felt King Dice was a good pick for an almost-normie villain that would still be fun and villainous. I knew a few things were going to happen right from the start, like the Devil Gundam, but a problem I hadn't figure out right away was....WHY was Wildfire going after him? I took the idea of the Plavsky Crystal from the Gundam Build Fighters show (though mine is a LOT smaller) and had its powers be coveted by the Gyronna organization, but it wasn't until the day of the Wildfire vs Zeldoten fight that I had an idea of how King Dice got it and how Gyronna knew about it.
Hence King Dice went from just being a silly cartoon man to an evil, desperate deception god who stole the crystal and was using it to turn Olympia into the horror version of Toy Story. I wish I'd had him pop up a bit more often in non-event Srsposts but oh well. We got to see traces of his gang pop up doing things like attacking Joy and boxing Hibiki, but they (kind of appropriately, actually) didn't have a lot of presence compared to the Curse! I mean, if they're trying to avoid Kobbers, then we're really not going to see much of them, right?
He had a cool boss fight and died. That's more than I could've hoped for, I guess.
Just kidding.
Deb: Deb was originally supposed to have a much bigger role in King Dice plot, but I think it worked out pretty good that she ended up mostly supporting Wildfire and doing robot stuff. There's a line about Deb feeling a mom obligation to save Kaoruko (commonly referred to in Gundam Build Fighters Try as Gyanko but that nickname never really came up) as a way of setting up some stuff that would happen in plot later but never materialized. Namely, she was going to build another Gundam that I'd made a picture of in the previous off-season.
The concept was that she would get a couple of Gunplas for her birthday or Mother's Day that were built by her sons in the mail, but they'd be broken up so she'd combine them into one Gunpla and then build an actual Gunpla. She'd use it to fight Devil King Dice and get beaten around a bit and get slapped around a bit and then her phone would accidentally start playing a message from them where they sing Happy Birthday, encouraging her to use the Super Cool Shiny Gold Hyper Mode. I'm glad I didn't end up taking that route because it feels very forced and cheesy now. Deb using a different Gundam was a better idea.King Diceplot Finale: I wanted to really make the finale something special and show off all of my characters who'd been involved doing something to resolve it without taking time away during the actual plot, so....I spent a few hours writing up the biggest setup post I've ever done. It was definitely the longest single post I've ever done and I had a blast writing it and picking out music and finding pictures. I think the nicest thing said about it was when JRM said it actually felt like an episode of G Gundam, the source of the Devil Gundam. And like I said in Chatzy, Gyanko and King Dice teamed up to be my final boss.
Fun fact: If Noa Izumi hadn't died during SK's plot the day before, Eadis would've exploded herself into dust to weaken King Dice Devil Gundam enough to stop its regeneration and Gyronna would've had a line about how annoying it was to revive people from dust. I had some music picked out for it but it's really hard to time when you'll read that part of the post with the part of the song I had in mind and didn't want to link to two different parts of it, so it worked out that Eadis didn't have to kill herself.
I ended up tying King Dice into my Season 10 plot when I got the idea for it, because despite my best efforts I still ended up having giant robot and kaiju stuff in Olympia.
Sumidoten Plot
I kind of feel bad about this one, because Goops once told me he wasn't very sure about this pairing at first and I kind of feel like I forced him into it. I know I didn't, but oh well. I liked the idea and joked about it and eventually started teasing it during Season 8's Black Shadow finale when I had Zeldoten go back to Kuwahawi to help beat Black Shadow because of how much he'd frustrated Sumireko, using that as a spring board to start making Sumireko develop feelings for Zeldoten. It was also something for both characters to do that was specifically for them and not just tagging along on other folks' plots.
It was pretty obvious that this pairing would be official early on in the season. Goops and I had plenty of posts where they were admiring each other and didn't know why despite everyone around them knowing the score. Cornwind was even kind enough to offer to put Sumi in some kind of danger so Zeldoten could go rescue her, but we politely declined because 1. we didn't want a powerful, established Kobber like Sumireko getting captured too many times in one season (I'd mentioned to Chao that Pitohui seemed to suddenly tank in martial prowess all at once, leading to him and Hooded Pitohui giving the character a rematch with Kanade) and I'd already had plans to have Sumireko get captured later in the season.
Since it was my insistent that this was going to be a pairing, I was entrusted with the task of coming up with a sufficiently excellent story for making it official between the two. It had to be cool and epic and something that was worthy of every character involved. This is a pairing between a Brawl Champion and an all-around awesome lady, after all. I'd been planning in advance some of the more general aspects for awhile: the Valhalla recipes and the Curse would be involved, Zeldoten would dress up in a cool costume (I'd commissioned some art in advance but despite making my requests months in advance, I didn't get all of it back in time), and there would be lots of different kinds of action.
Vic Hoskins wasn't involved at first, but only because he hadn't been brought into RP yet. He eventually got to join forces with Robbie Rotten to capture Sumireko and bring in Curse muscle in a battle truly worthy of Sumireko, showing that despite getting kidnapped, it took a lot of firepower and some classic Robbie Rotten tricks and disguises to actually take Sumi down. Throw in some Shrapnel and some unwitting bait like the Beagle Boys and I had an excellent kidnapping plot.
I think I tried way too hard to squeeze in lyrics from "Africa" to the part where Zeldoten showed DeMonde the ransom note. But I enjoyed that part anyway. Fun fact: this was delayed a week because I'd forgotten I'd let DeMonde be captured by Midwich and Del delayed the rescue event. Goops and I agreed that if it got pushed back again, I'd just swap DeMonde for Teacups in the dialogue. Anyway, I did some collaboration with Goops prior to actually posting it for Dana dialogue, but otherwise unless it was in a post by Goops, I wrote it all myself.
One of the most important things about this event was music. I'd been playing a lot of FF14's first expansion, Heavensward, prior to Season 9 and I fell in love with the music. They used variations of a single theme for a lot of the town music and some of the boss fights, so I knew that I really wanted to use it as part of this event because it was a cool, heroic theme.
Robbie Rotten was a great choice of villain I think. He'd gotten really popular in memes and frankly I don't think he gets enough credit for all the work he put in Lazytown trying to...do what he does. I haven't actually seen any of the show except We Are Number One music videos, but he does a lot of work for a guy in a place called Lazytown. I loved finding ways to use lines and ideas from the video without just directly copy-pasting them, like using raptors for the Dream Team instead of guys dressed like Robbie and rewriting the song for his Brawl effort.
Deadly Duplications was a great contributor to this plot as well, making it possible for Zeldoten to have a super realistic decoy of herself and the recipe book, two great ways for her to demonstrate a lot of her sneakiness that she doesn't generally get to show off in regular RP since there's rarely call for her services. I even checked with JRM to make sure "doesn't fall apart until opened three times" was a specific requirement that Elliott could make a duplicate do. We never DID see it actually dissolve so maybe it will crop up again someday.
The Dream Team was another great challenge to write, a trio of enemies she couldn't sneak past easily so she would have to outmaneuver them, using her powers and abilities against a pack of capable hunters that would rip her apart in a straight fight.
Big Band got to be the final labor in the trials of Zeldoten. I've always considered Zeldoten a stubborn person, a trait learned from her mother, and this was to be the ultimate test of just how stubborn she could be. Deprived of her alchemy and her weapons, armed only with her wits and claws against a walking mountain of brass. With no way to win in a fight against him, Zeldoten would be forced to stall and take a lot of punishment, a cruel one-sided battle with no way out. Except Zeldoten gave herself a way out.
Per Pathfinder rules, for every skill rank a character has, their familiar also gets. Master and familiar will have different bonuses for those skills due to things like attribute, class bonuses, size, and more, so Nibbles isn't as good at thievery as Zeldoten is, but he too is a Master Thief. He was utilized from the start in Zeldoten's plan because nobody pays attention to him. He's just a Perfectly Normal Crab and underestimated in some regards because he doesn't give interviews. But his mom knows what he can do and thus he was the real hero of the story, doing the actual work of breaking Sumireko out of the cell and removing the slave crown. Harpy was 100% on the nose with that; I'd based the device used to keep Sumi hostage on the slave crown used to control Terra in FF6.
Once Sumireko was free, there was nothing any of the Curse there could do. Nibbles took on Big Band and I told Goops to have Sumireko go nuts on Robbie. He got an ending worthy of his surprisingly-dangerous status and the nerds will live happily ever after! THE END.
Thank you all for your indulgence, especially Goops. ;p
Please let me know if there's anything I haven't discussed that you'd like to hear about.
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