this story's title is a direct quote of some text from zero 3, where it is stated that those amounts died in the elf wars. because, like, it's set during them. this is one of the real big stories both for content and in terms of "i needed to make this anthology so i could write this".
I was really keen on having at least one story that depicted the Elf Wars because the games always depicted it as this terrible eldritch event in history and I just wanted to conceptualize what that even looks like. Hordes of fucked up robots modding themselves sketchily with the insane power of cyber elves and going crazy against society seems like an apt way to imagine the first half of the wars, before the mother elf “fixed” everything and then got corrupted and the dr. weil half of the wars happened. And, yeah, just to be explicit, the elf tomato had in the carrier was the mother elf.
penelope is another one of those "my favorite characters i never got to do much with" type deals. she started as a recurring background npc with tin can and i just kept enjoying throwing her into shit.
this is where i formally introduce cyber elves into this anthology and lay down the rules for my interpretation of them. really the main deviation for me is just that fusion elves can be used more than once, but need to be rejuvenated or they'll die. this already seemed to be the implication imo, with their single use nature being a gameplay conceit. like passy, ciel's elf in z1's intro, probably did a whole bunch before she died, and it seems implied she had a prior relationship with ciel. so my read was always that bypassing the energy shield, unfucking zero's arms, and starting him up just put her over the edge.
anyway this is one of those things i mentioned in a prior commentary about how it's sort of hard to build a relationship between two of your own characters in an rp setting. in my head tomato and tanuki man were pretty close friends but it was hard to ever do more than imply it before. well, here, i'm having tin can send someone a pretty far distance to save her from being consumed by war just as a favor. they gotta be close for that to make sense. also worth noting that penelope and tomato being buddies is a whole cloth invention of this story, though i always did imply that tomato had proven herself to tin can as a chill dude
this story is also here to state unequivocally that given how hard humanity fell off, tin can as a faction is very down to just start stealing shit out peoples houses again. five finger discount on cyber elf equipment, very nice.
god. rereading this shit rn and seeing the bit where tomato comes down off the top rope with a chair. that's actually so funny i can feel it like. in my nose. u ever get that? where ur like almost laughing so u feel it in ur nose? god. imagine her just fucking bopping penelope on the head and her head retracts like she's patrick star and it makes the meme metal pipe noise really loud and penelope screams like tom and jerry. imagine it. please
anyway so yeah do you remember how i said to remember that tomato married someone with a french last name? so uh the people that made the zero games were ouiaboos and named everything in french for whatever reason. also they wrote lore somewhere that one of ciel's ancestors created the mother elf. so uh. tomato's partner, a cyber elf scientist, could be the one ;3 ruminate on that one for a while i bet i just blew your fucking mind with that (if you are remotely into mega man lore)
anyway so theres lore that humans basically cannot see cyberspace shit. in zero 2, ciel is always doing research on cyber elves and she wears a little vr headset that flips down out of her hair band. so tomato's shades are like my shitty dollar tree version of that
the "giant horrible machine" in the far distance is a bit of a nod to the earthmover from ultrakill. kinda just imagining its a fucked up mix of a bunch of big construction bots.
meanwhile the weird amalgamate that attacks our protagonists is sort of in my head akin to the security robot from metroid fusion? like, with a dude sticking out of the top? and a bunch of guns strapped to it?
tomato getting cyber elf armor is a reference to the biometals from zx, by the way. if you don't know what that is, the zx games are ones where you gain these abstract little machines called biometals that house the souls of dead people (chiefly x, zero, the four guardians, and totally not axl guys trust us) and they can talk to you and let you wear their armor and use their weapons.
zx and zx advent are sort of stupid story wise but i like the idea of biometals. i also personally believe that they absolutely just house the cyber elves and keep them constantly full of energy. it would make a lot of sense given cyber elves are already explicitly the medium by which several people come back as ghosts, literally including x and phantom, who both have biometals. so basically i think it makes sense if "making temporary armor and weapons" is just already a cyber elf function
i think there's a kind of dark humor to penelope simultaneously being like "armor isn't good to rely on if you get shot" and also "okay let's go risk getting shot". and sure enough tomato literally gets shot. but she's fine so it's fine. if i was a more sadomasochistic writer i might have just outright killed tomato right then and there just to feel bad and hope you do the same. or like treated penelope's "advice" as a death flag and have her die instead. but i like these characters. and i don't generally want to make my reader miserable for no reason. so we're not gonna do that.
"crisis", the pilot, is adapted from a character in the medieval AU i mentioned that tomato originates from. edgy thief man, real name probably not crisis. i want this twink obliterated
and, yeah, explicitly, tomato's family, or bare minimum her kid, make it.