Good Guy Tucker

2nd of Ashan 718

Here are all threads from before the Fall of Emea in 719 and all threads pertaining to the Fall. As of Ymiden 719 (1st June 2019), this forum is locked for new threads and is a repository for old content.

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Good Guy Tucker

2nd Ashan 718

Fiona remembers a story she once heard a long, long time ago.

It goes like this: Once upon a time, there was a family of three living in a mansion by the… she couldn’t remember what it was. A lake? A castle? A cave filled with treasure? Don’t know. Let’s say it was a administration building. Okay, once upon a time there was a family of three living in a mansion next to an shoddy administration building. Sure why not. They consisted of a mother, a father, a daughter, and a series of interchangeable dogs that came into and out of their lives like used candy wrappers. The daughter took the departure of each dog very hard.

Fiona was never sure why they subjected themselves to that kind of heartbreak for something as banal as a canine companion but, again, it was a story. It didn’t have to be realistic. Maybe these people were masochists. Maybe the original scribe who penned the story had the intent to showcase the mental frailties of the kind of people who would feed, wash, and care for a creature just to inject a bit more love into their life. Or maybe the scribe was just like the rest of them: seeing no perversion in loving something for the sake of loving something.

A shepherd dog’s she could understand. A guard dog she accepted. A dog dog that only existed to dog? A dog warped into some twisted parody of a wolf and forced to live out its life as a stout, heaving, disease-riddled creature with limited mobility, no utility, and to serve as some kind of inexplicable trophy? No. An ornament was easier to maintain. A tree would live for centuries. A body honed to martial perfection would at least carry you through decades. But a dog? A dog was slobber and energy and a disruption in all home activities of the day-

Nope. Going off track again, Fiona. The sensibilities of pet caring were of no concern to the narrative here.

The father was an alchemist. A pretty good alchemist actually. He was a respected member of the state’s leading alchemy program, the head of Alterations and Special designs. His wife was… Really, scribe? Just dead? That’s conveniently disposable. Yes, she died a few years before this story or whatever. They were a happy family, then they were not. The daughter was, like, all little children, a complete dipshit. Fiona remembers the story telling her how cute, how adorable, how endearingly squeaky she was - and it completely broke her suspension of disbelief.

You could call shit gold but the smell was there for everyone to sniff.

Anyway, she wasn’t quite clear of the sequence of events by virtue of the fact that she didn’t really care, but apparently the dad fell on hard times. Whatever juice he was cooking up for the alchemy program wasn’t cutting it anymore. His daughter begged him to play, she begged him to read her bedtime stories, she begged him for whatever it was with people with parents did, but he could no longer afford that lifestyle of alleged happiness. Once upon a time, he had the mother to do that heavy lifting - but she was gone now.

He didn’t know what to do.

His career was failing, his remaining family member was uncontrollable, there was a shitty dog in his house that he may or may not be able to afford in the coming seasons. It was all quite a bit of a mess.

So he did the one thing he could do to solve his problem.

He did the one thing that would enhance his career, quiet his daughter, and keep the dog out.

He dunked the daughter and dog into a vat to create an entirely new experimental breed of creature. What was the name again? A chime-? No, Fiona remembered it was called an Edward. Anyway, the Edward was received very warmly by the alchemy program. The father was called a pioneer, a genius of his time, a man who had managed to breed intelligence into an animal and gave it the ability to talk, to solve problems, to have a conversation, to, to, to, it was simply a remarkable creature.

Then a bunch of meddling kids showed up. A bunch of meddling kids that were apparently amateur detective sleuths and very keen on finding out what happened in that mansion and, well...

Well, turns out mixing your kid and a cute puppy into a blender was frowned upon by the ethics committee.

Ain’t that just a bitch?
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The story concludes with this:

The Father is house arrested, locked away from the rest of humanity for he was deemed to have none left. The Edward was sequestered in a separate room, her fate to be decided by a tribunal of alchemists who would take too long to decide on anything, if ever. She could have been trapped in that state for arcs for that was how long they could bicker. The boys, thrill-seeking sociopaths that they were, moved on to their next mystery, happy to be part of the revelation but completely unwilling to participate in the cleanup. The mother was later discovered to have been his first victim or, if one would rather see it the other way, his first breakthrough in his late career. And then some bloke with red eyes broke in and killed them both? She wasn’t completely sure where that came out from but it happened, and they both died happily ever after.

She really hated that story.

She really hated that story because it demonized innovation in favor of the cheap commodity called morality, prioritized family in favor of progress, rewarded rogues that refused to follow up on the job, and worse of all, leveraged on the idea that every single puppy’s life was precious.

It made her gag when Finn said he sometimes cried thinking about it.

It made her gag because he was so concerned with the story of an supposedly innocent child and her wonderful dog being torn away from their idyllic, careless life that he was never able to see the real story:

A man trapped chasing success in an institution that would discard him the moment he wasn’t able to give them enough of the same.

A man forced to marry a wife and raise a child just to uphold some kind of socially mandated image of a healthy, happy family.

A man who saw a way out and was punished for it by mysterious strangers that had nothing to do with him.

A man having the idea of conventional morality beaten and beaten and beaten into his head until he was little more than a sobbing wreck in a house that was his treasure trove but now only served as his prison.

A man who should have known dogs were disgusting beasts.

A man who was, at the end of the day, had a great career, contributed probably a dozen and one things to the advancement of alchemy, but was reduced to his one so-called sin: the death of a child who was clearly an addled, untamed mess that created more messes.

It was cruel.
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She rewrote the story in her head every once in awhile. A trace, a ghost of the story enters her mind every other season or so and she can’t help tearing it apart and replacing it with something else.

The father does everything up to the point where he throws the daughter and dog into the special blending machine. No ‘dragging a homeless urchin out from the gutter who nobody will remember and investigate’ addition, no ‘there are so many dogs out there, why use your own?’. No, that dog needed to die. He grinds them in, coughs up his Edward, submits it to the committee for approval, goes on to gain international accolades as an alchemist who broke through the ceiling that had prevented so many others for arcs who have failed to accomplish what he had accomplished-

And then he wins.

He simply wins.

He wins and he never looks back. There were no detective youths to uncover the blood beneath the tree that was his triumph - and even if they did, the institution helped him cover it up, not out of cheap sentiment for his long years of service, but because what he accomplished outweighed the life of a single, petty child.

He wins and he feels no guilt for it.

Maybe he gets another family. Why? Who knows, but he gets it. Maybe he spends a moment, when he is weak and stupid, where he feels deep sorrow for his actions… and then he shrugs it off because he’s a better man for it now. His light on the world is a tangible one, undeniable, and he has nothing else to prove for it.

There’s no guarantee legacy in something as frail and as useless as a Finn.

As a child, she meant.

As a child.
was, at the end of the day, had a great career, contributed probably a dozen and one things to the advancement of alchemy, but was reduced to his one so-called sin: the death of a child who was clearly an addled, untamed mess that created more messes.

It was cruel.
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Alistair
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Good Guy Tucker

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Comments: As always, a wonderful dream; I love that you essentially change your style for each dream, painting a wholly different narrative with different emotions within each. Good stuff!
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