P̷r̴a̵i̸s̷e̷ ̴T̵h̸e̵ ̴D̵e̷m̵o̴n̶ ̵D̶r̴a̷g̸o̵n̸ ̶K̵i̴n̵g̸

[Em623]

Now look, I never planned for everything to end up going the way they went. What this journal amounts to is some of the greatest improv and Animal Crossing head canon I’ve had in a long time, maybe ever. Of course I can chalk that up to the new features and heavier emphasis on customization, but I never would have anticipated my island’s ‘lore’ going this way.

As with any modest town, it all begins with moving in. I designed a placeholder ‘Em’ character, and would soon discover that the villager of New Horizons has the disturbing ability to magically transform their flesh however they wish. Awesome, this means my villager could cover multiple roles, and so I have four main characters here so to speak, Catherine, Rachel, Cody, and Aerith.

My first two villagers were Hamlet, who I never met, and Shari, who I distinctly remember from Chuggaaconroy’s New Leaf playthrough. For the uninitiated, Chugga either A) messed with his time settings or B) forgot to save properly, probably the former, which resulted in some kind of time split where Shari just appears in his town and he accuses her of being a time zombie. She continued being weird, starting up some strange conspiracies or something, but he gradually warmed up to her and, in the end, they were best friends. Of course, that was his Shari, and even though I loved that version of Shari, it didn’t mean I had to follow the same formula.

Exterior: The islanders are tasked by Tom Nook to place their tents somewhere in town. Shari proceeds to take a stick and throw it in a random direction. This leads her to a tight peninsula cloaked in dense trees and weeds. Catherine finds Shari amidst the dense vegetation, staring from within with blank, dead eyes.

Never mind, she’s crazy.

Then came the big moment, after Catherine and the gang set up their tent and escorted Shari back to the service tent, it came to the big moment in which they would vote to name their island. Timmy and Tommy look at each other appraisingly, it would seem they have an excellent idea. At once, they both declare:
NOOKLAND!

TOMMYLAND!​

Clearly that didn’t pan out well. However, this leads to Rachel coming up with an idea for branding: take a preexisting well known resort spot, twist it around a little, and try edging in on the profits to be had! Naturally Nook was all up for it, and so he agreed to petition the new bootleg name for their island.

And so, the island would be called ‘Bahamut’.

Those fools had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

 

[Em623]

Ok, something very important came to my attention. The bulletin board only holds 30 messages at a time, at which point the last updated message is automatically discarded. This is very unfortunate as I have been creating comic slides as a pass time on the board and a slew of them were erased. This was very important stuff, the bulletin board was meant to chronicle the history of our people, and now that history is gone. Here’s some of what I was able to salvage.

It’s a good thing I found out about this journal stuff when I did, as I can chronicle these doodles before they get erased by something mundane like “Today we hit 10,000 followers on FaceNook! #BigThanks!”

Of course I could keep creating content for the billboard for visitors and then just snap a pic whenever I have something for the journal, but what’s even the point of going through all that trouble when I could just

Artist’s reconstruction, circa 2020, colorized.

So I will be making more I guess, just not as often due to the increased production value. I’ll also be posting the remaining shots as necessary in their current form without redoing them, except for maybe Limberg’s portrait for reasons that will become apparent soon.

With that out of the way, here’s more info on the happenstances of my villagers/islanders.

Hamlet, by my personal understanding, is very conscious about his weight. I’ve seen him spending upwards of an entire hour sitting at a bench on the plaza drinking a can of soda. The same can of soda. As such, he’s happy to receive a protein shake mix and various other health foods in an attempt to get himself into a shape where his legs don’t literally merge into his body when he sits down. He’s a buddy.

Skye spends a lot of time out and about, doing various calisthenics, interacting with other villagers frequently, and then going back home to read from her massive collection of books. Seriously, after having made the DIY furniture it seems that all she had brought with her was books. I like her a lot as well, and she has shown herself to have a sort of straight wolf attitude.

Sprinkle I already knew from my second town in New Leaf. She was pretty typical for her kind, easy going (compared to Bunnie anyways) and generally fun. Here though, in her sequel form, she seems to have become a lot more insightful, maybe picking up reading from Skye (is it because they’re both cyan?) and having developed an interest in space, talking about the moon, it’s distance from earth, the sun’s distance from earth, and starlight. This can’t be a coincidence, it’s actually become a reoccurring trend.

And then there’s Broccolo.
I’m holding off on Broccolo for a number of reasons.

..... please don’t sue me Ringo Starr, I love you.

 

[Em623]

Here on the waning hour of the bug-off, I am faced with a choice. Finish my 300 word discussionmagig on a story about promiscuous mormons (I know I’ve been joking around with religion and such but no, really, that’s what my instructor is making us read. And then she has problems with pirate stories...) or close out my first editions of the journal by recapping all that has led up to the rise of Bahamut before heading to bed. Look, it’s due tomorrow, I always send my work in on the last day anyways, what is she going to do? Judge me to death? (... asking me why I hate discussion posts when she goes and starts using that tone with me...)

Here’s how my rag-tag group of maniacs came to be under one house. Aerith is a fashion designer, Rachel is practicing design philosophy. The two friends sort of agreed to join in with Tom Nook’s build-a-resort project, with Rachel bringing along her brother Cody and Aerith bringing along Catherine to help split a lot of expenses. Catherine was really aching to get out of the city to someplace more open and free... like a square kilometer island. Cody also sought out to catalogue the history behind the island, referenced by certain stone glyphs.

As for our remaining villagers... look, Broccolo has just been gross. The things he says about squishiness may be fine in isolation, but put into context with his talk about weird smells and the consumption of questionable sources... I don’t like him. It doesn’t help that he reminds me of the toads.

Lopez is a classy guy. He has a really snazzy place, dark wood interiors, fireplace, a... moose head over his doorframe, I caught him sitting down and reading with eyeglasses that didn’t even fit on his face like a snack. Also he apparently patented log stakes. Only log stakes. I keep telling him not to pawn his business card onto me but he insists I spread the brand. After I saw him reading on the chair, I gave him a ‘not now son, eat your peas’ voice.

Then we have Judy. Or, well, we had Judy, for five days. I had this whole thing going in my head where Judy was some Shirley Temple child star, but then she hit her thirties and never stopped looking absolutely precious, started getting severe imposter syndrome, I planned for this bit where she was on a talk show with Dr. Shrunk talking about voices from the cosmos, but then she just left. The island was that bad. She moved in after Lopez, and he moved in right around the time when Bahamut rose, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

Now Limberg I have a much better history with. He was also in my second village. He may not be a pretty mouse, but have you seen his interior? The man has culture. In my canonicity, he never actually owned a home, he was a raggedy hermit living in an autumnal garden he had constructed himself, coming off as a simpleton and a loner. What he didn’t reveal to outsiders was that he is an old ninja master, running a dojo for students. You see, Snake also lived in my town, and was hovering around that critical role of my mayor character’s best friend. Eventually, the mayor… Eric? Something like that? He came upon a ninja outfit, and from then on was enlisted with the dojo, where Limberg revealed he was not all that he seemed. Don’t believe me? You should have seen him today sprinting after a banded dragonfly. In his small body is the spirit of a flaming tiger. So why is Limberg here in Bahamut?

I don’t think he has the will.

Admiral has just settled in as well, and I give him the voice of a Scottish war veteran. He seems rather easy going for now, but I don’t have much to go off of. Since he lives right next door to Lopez, I might have some kind of arc between them, they’ll either be best buds or the bitterest of rivals.

While not official yet, Muffy is going to be moving in to fill the void left by Judy. She was in town one I believe, and was as snooty as snooty villagers got. She was, miraculously, in the same town as Pietro, which is just a match made in hell. She wasn’t very fond of him, mind you, but I don’t think he cared. Also can we talk about how she seems to have literally formed a rug of her own wool? Like she sheds it or trims it off and just leaves it lying on the floor. I mean, if you were a sheep, would you do that? Make a pillow out of... you? No, that would be ridiculous.
......... or would it?
*piano chord*

Let’s talk about Isabelle. I noticed she’s become more confident since her last iteration, more adept at her line of work, maybe even getting in three hours of sleep. The community has, well, taken her places. First she was a meek secretary, probably passed the role of being a full fledged mayor to some other person, then she was revealed to be communist, then she got invited to Smash, and then there was Doom day. For one: the psychopathic child’s wonderland is my thing. I’ve been working on a project around that premise for like four years, but apparently that’s just too long for Nintendo to step on my toes with the most meticulously planned PR stunt of the decade. But yeah, like Shari, I wasn’t going to focus too much on the common archetype until she up and starts being unnervingly intimidating when I sicked her on Broccolo. Several times.

Speaking of Shari, we were talking before and she brought up digging around the island. Something specifically about ancient dragon burial sites and dinosaur spirits.
Huh.

 

[Em623]

On that uplifting note, now that we’ve set up the casting call, we can get into the thick of things... how did we get to having a demon cult?

The four appointed Resident Representatives, or approximately 2 3/4, set out to build up the infrastructure of Bahamut island. Aerith focused on home matters while Rachel set up new services, scouring the nearby archipelago for iron, not aware that the severe lack of iron was due to her being hopped up on cherries while whacking rocks (I really didn’t see what the problem was for a while). However, she took the ‘whatever’s in the fridge’ approach and dumped everything in one room, two beds and a bedroll, a table, toaster, microwave, coffee maker, oven, fridge, dining table, and by the time half the room was a kitchen they only had a small corner in which to put a dresser and a bidet. It was a gift from Shari, along with the trash bin she gave Aerith for catching her a salmon, that is when she wasn’t working day and night on a mystery project.

In a mere day we managed to get Blathers enough resources to open his museum. Words cannot express the joy I felt when I learned that Blathers was no longer being gagged. I can now say with joy in my heart that, amongst all the owls I hate in video games, two stand out as exceptions. The other one is the Conductor, I mean c’mon. We also got to hook up Mabel with her own tailor shop, as well as meet Redd and Lief.

I used to give Nook a voice similar to the one he had in the Animal Crossing movie. However, I ended up using that voice for Blathers instead, and then Nook got something more like Robert De’Nero. Redd has a staten accent. He successfully sold me an authentic painting, convincing Rachel to let him return on his boat. After Aerith bought a fake jolly painting, it awoke a dragon from within Catherine’s usually calm heart. Redd had the gall to return on another day with another jolly painting, for Catherine to come in with the illicit copy to use as a reference. He was absolutely shook. Mabel’s voice just comes naturally, she already has an incredible animalese accent in this game. I gave Lief a weird voice in New Leaf, originally it was supposed to be like Bonzi Buddy, but I progressively lost the will to do it and it sounded more like Bane. For this game I wanted him to sound more like Bob Ross with a deeper voice. While still sounding like Bane. Now Bane sounds like Morgan Freeman, which is not the crossover I think anyone was expecting.

The week to come consisted of gathering resources, bridging the island with out patented StickThing™, making new friends and projects, and Cody progressively trying to reverse engineer how material drops and Dodo code speech work until we ran out of storage. In an emergency stroke of brilliance, Aerith takes out all the clothes in the closet and cloaks the walls of their single room in pantyhose. Any time they wanted a change, they must challenge the wall. The little Nook ninjas (who do you think moves buildings and evaluates house layout around here?) got their shop, and residential services expands to include Isabelle, who opts to set up an intercom to stay out of the rain. It really was raining all week, maybe except one day, but it turned out to be some serious foreshadowing.

And so I continued observing villager behavior all the while in a wholesome fashion. I decorated homes in shrubbery, repaired Gulliver’s receiver, realized Gullivarrrr wasn’t meant to be a celebration of Talk Like a Pirate Day, and bought a hamster from the Nooklings and gave it to Hamlet. The end result was... catastrophically uninteresting. Yadda yadda, more renovations and people showed up, Aerith absolutely slayed Label’s fashion evaluation, and we got our second room paid off. It ended up becoming the room where everything that wasn’t kitchen based got shoved into, as well as a robot toilet.
𝔸𝕝𝕤𝕠 𝕗𝕣𝕠𝕞 𝕊𝕙𝕒𝕣𝕚

And then, on the 21st of September, it happened.

---

Time out real quick.

When I named this island after Bahamut, the uber death dragon end boss, it was just a one off joke about tropical naming conventions. Then there’s all this talk about ancient burials, I erected a bunch of stone glyphs, Luna has her own dream realm now, the Isabelle Doom thing seemed all the more plausible, all of this resonated with me. Next thing you know I open Nook’s mile catalogue and see he’s selling FREAKING GODZILLA and the schematics required to construct a Gundam Warrior.
And then, all at once, like 74 gears in my brain clicked together and started rapidly gyrating.

---

So now the entire island is tasked with keeping a lord of destruction appeased and adhering to the old ways.

In all honesty... it’s not that bad really. I was expecting a lot more death and devotion. He just likes it when we grant him spare DIY recipes and other doodads every now and again and leave a bunch of record players lying around. Other than the frequent glimpses of other worlds, not much changes.
Although Flick did stop by trying to convert everyone to Shamanism. I hope this isn’t a reoccurring thing.

 

[Em623]

Have I mentioned how much I love the degree of expression on every character in this game?

Since Judy ran away from our island screaming, K.K. Slider decided to come visit and play us a song because he just doesn’t give a solitary... something that won’t get eaten by forum bot or whatever ghastly presence watches the boards. I swear I wasn’t censor dodging. Bahamut, now on the map, is a site of tourism among the morbidly curious who wish to see just how depraved this cursed land is, only to see a giant lizard chilling on the beach playing with a duck decoy and several piles of trash.

3 stars.

3 stars.

Fortunately, this opened up terraforming for the gang on Nook’s behalf. There are already plans of creating Kori beach and the lost woods within the confines of this island. Who knows what else may develop over time, but we certainly have bright ideas. Rachel has been hard at work carving the island up like either a maimed turkey or an exquisite work of art depending on the perspective. As you can imagine, she’s very busy.

Muffy moved into one of the beachsides. Her character? Oddly sweet. She seems like the bashful sort about her image and helping others. She was telling Catherine about how she was a babysitter. It’s endearing, but... kinda off for my standards? I figured if anyone was suited for Bahamut, it was definitely her. Maybe there’s just some kind of counter-balance?

In case you worried that Muffy might end up stepping on Shari’s toes, well...

I’m just going to assume everything she says is a prophecy of some kind.

Apologies for the cam shots of screenshots, it’s much easier than having to manually upload the sd card into an adapter on my laptop that barely function. Also... why was this paragraph eaten by the editor? Strange...

We also now have our tenth islander residing in the cliffs where Judy used to live. I distinctly remember wanting to remove the lot so I could have space for when a camper came to visit, that way I could select any villager personality I wanted and not have a third cranky man. So anyways, we have a third cranky man now. If you recall my personal story for Limberg, you’d know he ended up being a ninja sensei. Deer God only knows how, by that logic, Dobie ends up coming to the island. I didn’t even know this guy, heck, I thought Dobie was a girl’s name. Next thing you know, Mr. Miyagi comes around, isolates himself on a mountain within eye-shot of Limberg’s place…

Admiral moved in as well, I just assume he’s a Scottish war vet. Based off his interior and tastes, it’s easily surmisable that he’s Japanese in heritage, but quite frankly that’s enough old sensei’s for one square kilometer.

Oh, and his nephew? Well, you aren’t going to believe this, he and Shari had some serious beef.

The dedication these two have to the script is absolutely endearing. You want to know what else couldn’t have possibly been scripted?

I haven’t laughed this hard in a good month.

One final addendum, of course, being that Halloween is on the rise. It’s very important for me to get this hunk of coarse, rough irritability in festive shape. The end of the month is the night I was born for, and lord knows I need some way to celebrate it. Aerith seems like she’s already on it. She fashioned a gold mask based around an Egyptian pharaoh. It seems overly gaudy and unbalanced, she keeps tripping all over the place. Despite that, she still seems to love her new mask. Rachel got a knight suit from Admiral and Cody is prepared to either become Shrek or Dracula. Whichever he can work with. That leaves Cathy with four zap suits that no one wants to wear with her. Maybe she’ll find a way to be struck with inspiration.

 

[Em623]

Well. It's November. Honestly I was in a rut and couldn't get content going like I could have otherwise. I was preparing one thing ahead of time, but...

Yeah, even for the sake of art I couldn't bear my own fictional politics for another geddan moment. More importantly though, I like being able to plan ahead for events rather than making improv around when things happen on short notice, so consider Bahamut Island on jetlag. I'll post events from a month earlier, and that should give me the time to turn these monkey typewriter poems into something beautiful.

I have sad news, as of October 13th, Skye has decided to move away from our island. Naturally I respect this decision, and allowed her to follow her dreams of going to a better island. Like Skye island.
Should have seen it coming honestly...

With an open slot in our village, I wanted some control over who ends up moving in. Fortunately, a benevolent user of the site was willing to broker Pekoe to me. Like some kind of human sapient lifeform black market. Oh wait, those are called orphanages. So yeah, I legally adopted Pekoe into our society. She's adorable, sure, but I needed to make sure this bear had some semblance of a personality I could write into my lore. As such, I struck a few conversations with her to try and understand her true essence. Just who is Pekoe?

... I mean, I get if Nintendo is mad that China banned Animal Crossing, but holy crap. They did not waste a single moment.

At least she and Muffy are cute together, like youthful optimism gazing into the abyss of a social outcast trying to get through college.

In preparation for pumpkin season, I established a farm by the homes of Admiral and Lopez, and I'm placing full faith in these level headed adults to maintain responsibility over the growth of our future crops.

And with that... I don't really have any logical way to string these shots together anymore, so here's a bunch more screenshots and my last set of bulletin drawings.

Muffy, on the topic of doing makeup.

Lopez, on the topic of Admiral's house.

Apparently he was teaching Sprinkle to cook. It was backed up by another conversation I don't have recorded.

So Bahamut Admiral is really into brewing tea.

The island bonding during a fishing tourney.

Muffy, refusing to conform to society's ideals on when is and isn't a good time to fish.

Lopez's inception.

Oh God oh no

... yeah, that's about it.