Chapter Text
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Intro
The idea for The Meadowtron came about simply while I was noodling around in Serpent Isle—a favorite pastime of mine for decades now. Basically, the gist is this: Everyone knows the Eight Companions are great, iconic even! But I always liked the companions you get to travel with in Serpent Isle too, even if some of them are only with you for (literally) a minute or two. Thus the idea of the Avatar’s “B-Team” has been floating around in my head for almost twenty years now: Gwenno, Boydon, Stefano, Selina, Mortegro, Sethys, Petra, and Wilfred.
With the exception of Gwenno (while technically not one of the Eight “Virtue” Companions ala Ultima IV, she does join in later games), everyone’s a bit of a misfit, eh? Hell, Selina outright tries to murder you! Twice! Probably even more than that! Still, the idea of that lot trying (and likely failing miserably) to work together to save their already mostly demolished world is kind of cute, so here we are.
Who knows, maybe it’ll even be funny?
In the game, some of these characters ended up being bit thin on development in places so I took it upon myself to fill in the blanks and flesh them out a bit. I tried to refer to canon/in-game information wherever possible, even turning to the Beta USECODE to search for any cut dialogue with relevant story in it (Stefano, in particular, had a lot of material that did not make it to the final). Also, because The Meadowtron is a kind of “Fix It-AU” about the B-Team, you won’t see Iolo, Shamino or Dupre around as much. Of course, that’s not to say they aren’t relevant at all! While minor artistic liberties have been taken with some small parts of the story and its characters, the overall sequence of events is still pretty much the same as canon. One major exception is that Mortegro and Sethys do not expire immediately after joining you and thus become permanent party members.
As for the title, I don’t remember how it came about for this series, only that’s how I started referring to it long ago and the name stuck; aside from being a play on the word “Metatron”, it was a song title in We Love Katamari. Though I guess the Great Earth Serpent’s constant moaning in your head counts as a sort of Metatron…
The stories in this installation were first posted to my Tumblr and also include my original notes (where possible). I really tried to keep these short at first but you can kinda tell they just got longer and longer as I went on. Still, I did try to punch these up a little for AO3, with at least one story being more or less completely rewritten. These tales specifically came about to accompany some pixel art that I did just as a fun project. I always loved the individually drawn paperdoll gumps for your companions in Black Gate, so I decided to draw some for the Avatar’s companions in Serpent Isle. Each story is accompanied by a mock-up screenshot featuring the paperdoll and how it might look in a real game.
❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧❧✤☙☙☙☙☙☙☙☙☙☙☙☙☙☙☙☙