XSYS Arena
Because balance is overrated.
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Preshow 2/3: FF7 Disc 2 - Paper Cut
03 Feb 2024 - XSYS Team
Open backstage at the arena. Most of the crew is already in their costumes: Dr. Okazaki is reprising her role as Aeris in a pink leather jacket, and Massime is squeezing into some kind of cardboard armor. Exime is shepherding staff around, pointing with her arm-blade, but Loa is sitting this one out, clearly distracted and worrying over Marlow’s orders to supervise the repairs to Dr. Okazaki’s ship. Conversely, the doc is all-in on her role.
- EXIME: Places, people! We’re on in fifteen!
Magus barges through a door, panicked.
- MAGUS: I have terrible news, folks. We’re going to have to scrap the Gold Saucer sequence entirely– the dress-up scene, Don Whatshisface, all of it.
- DR OKAZAKI: What? Why? Didn’t you say you spent like two weeks figuring out how to make it not creepy?
- MAGUS: Yeah. I did. But I just took a straw-poll of the audience, and guess what! None of these synths know what sex is!
Awkward, confused silence falls over the room.
- EXIME: …What are you yelling about?
- MAGUS: See?! It’s worse than I thought!
- DR OKAZAKI: …Okay, but like, we don’t have time to do anything else. What’s your plan?
- MAGUS: Just get out there, and follow my lead. I have an idea.
With the house full and the lights dim… a banner unfurls over the stage.
Magus steps onto a balcony to the right of the stage, his face obscured by a featureless white mask. In the center, a scale model of a skyscraper towers over the stage. With some frantic gesturing, Magus gets the members of Avalanche to stand dramatically in front of it, looking up at the tower.
- MAGUS: [as narrator] The heroes had crashed a train into a mako-refining plant, destroying it in a bloom of blue and green that filled the dark sky. But that could only slow down Shin-Ra’s plans. The real purpose was to get people on their side, to see the damage these machines were doing to the planet… all to strike at the core of Shin-Ra’s operation.
From behind the building, a model of an actual gold saucer chained to the ground slowly revolves to the front.
- MAGUS: And so the brave members of Avalanche snuck aboard the luxury hovership Gold Saucer, an exclusive club for the city’s highest rollers, with only one thing in mind: taking over, and using it to strike at the center of the city, taking a thousand complicit hostages in one fell swoop!
Gold lights spill over the stage, reflecting scrap metal probably meant to represent casino chips or coins.
- MAGUS: But what they never expected to find there, as they announced their capture of the ship… was the CEO of Shin-Ra herself! She swallowed a materia she’d kept on her for just this purpose, and her body grew and mutated, into…
Magus slings an elaborate cardboard marionette over the side of the balcony. It has massive white-feathered wings, long white hair, and a long bladed polearm…
- MAGUS: The White Raven herself, Nael Vandarnus!
- DR OKAZAKI: [tilting head] (…Magus, I don’t think that…)
- MAGUS: (She’s part of the 7th Imperial Legion in FF14! Those plots are based off their respective games, aren’t they? She must be in this game somewhere.)
- DR OKAZAKI: (…That’s not… You don’t think Gaius is in here too, do you?)
Off-stage, Massime, now dressed in golden cardboard armor, starts to step onto the stage, but clears their throat and backs off while the other two settle this.
- NAEL VANDARNUS: [clearly just Magus throwing his voice down an octave through a filter, while the cardboard silhouette wiggles] Ah, the last Ancient finally shows herself!
- AERIS: [clearly confused but rolling with it] …What do you know of the Ancients?
- NAEL VANDARNUS: I know that my greatest experiment lives thanks to them! Every last one, we tracked down, captured, and extracted their souls to create the mako we’d inject into him… the ultimate weapon… the ultimate life-form… my son, Sephiroth!
Dr. Okazaki is deeply confused, but swallows it. She twirls Aeris’s trademark steel staff behind her back before leveling it at Nael.
- AERIS: Then after I get my revenge on you… so my family can rest easy, and return to the lifestream… I’ll take care of him too!
Dr. Okazaki charges at the cardboard, and the drum sound effect of the battle starting makes the whole arena-building shake!
That’s right, this fight will be against the White Raven herself! You can see her moveset with !class White Raven. She doesn’t have much HP, but she hits hard. She can drop meteors on her foes (!class Astral Debris), and if you don’t deal with them quickly, they’ll use Debris Burst and deal damage to the whole hero team!
In addition, once the fight reaches overtime, she’ll “enrage”, using a limit break every turn! So, play fast, keep up the pressure, and get Aeris her revenge!