TEEN: Once a Thief

[Spiteful Murkrow]

Author’s Note: This trivia section was written under the assumption that readers had caught up with the full length of the story up to this point. If you’re stumbling across this from before Chapter 16, strongly consider revisiting it sometime after catching up.

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What inspired you to write Once a Thief?

Spoiler: Answer

Once a Thief originated as a thought exercise during a creative rut in May stemming from a series of DMs with @VeniaSilente in May 2019 about a throwaway premise for a shorter story with a more simplistic plot following Outlaws being forced to carry out an escort mission while being pursued and having to use their skillsets as thieves in the pursuit of a task more conventionally reserved for heroes.

The premise was revisited in an initial elevator pitch doc and progressively built on an on-and-off basis over the rest of the year, with the explicit goal of creating a work that would stand apart from Fledglings to avoid worrying about tripping over continuity and worldbuilding details due to it being a collaborative work and to experiment with different tones and atmospheres. As it so happened, those initial opening drabbles were being created in the backdrop of playthroughs of a few games from the Xenoblade series, which wound up influencing stand-in names and characters during the initial outlining phase, and eventually larger story themes after I started seeing resonance between their atmosphere and the one of the plot I wanted to tell.

Thanks to obvious events in 2020, I had a bit more idle time than normal that year, and opted to experiment with NaNoWriMo writings, which were primarily devoted to a script-level outline of the story as a whole that by the spring of 2021 added up to one that was largely complete. Looking over the work that I had built up up to that point ultimately convinced me it was worth setting aside worries about being overburdened and to take a leap of faith with actually publishing the story.

As recently as six months prior to initial publishing, a number of major structural details of the story were in flux, with concurrent readthroughs of other fics at the time helping to shape the final product. In particular Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rebirth along with a revisiting of Knightfall’s general body of work helped to zero in on setting details by coincidentally happening to touch on similar themes and tones, while one of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Path of Valor was ultimately what convinced me not to airbrush out the Xeno series references that had piled up during draft development, but instead to indulge my inner hack and lean into them in order to share what I enjoyed about my experiences with that franchise with a new audience.

How did you come up with Lyle?

Spoiler: Answer

Lyle’s origins are a two-part story, with his role in the story originating as a stand-in character role from a “Freudian Trio” of Outlaws that was used to initially cast the main characters outside of Irune, with Lyle being the “Ego” of the party and arbiter between a competing “Id” and “Superego”. Species was the next major detail of the party to be settled, with trios built around complementing types considered and Quilava chosen after settling on a fire-electric-ice trio.

Lyle’s underlying character significantly predates the process of building out the party roles, with him being a take off a character that I used in PBP RPs in the early 2010s. Said character was a bit of a troublemaker that was named as a throwaway after a character from Animal Crossing: Wild World. After fine-tuning his present portrayal to ebb towards being more withdrawn and cynical, he was a relatively natural fit. Lyle’s name ultimately kept unchanged due to it semantically meaning “the island”, which happened to fit thematically with the premise of a withdrawn character being forced to open up to others over the course of the story, and the rest was history.

How did you come up with Kate?

Spoiler: Answer

Kate was the last of the “Freudian Trio” to be cast, and filled the role of the group’s “Id” that was primarily in Outlawry to indulge her own impulses, which still reflects in her depiction as a freewheeling and impish spirit. Her species was left floating for several months into development, with Sneasel ultimately settled on due to a mix of playing to type well with a thief character and wanting to try something different as an author.

If Kate’s personality happens to read familiar to you, then you likely have read fairly deep into Fledglings, since in the earliest drafts of the story, Kate was a fairly transparent stand-in of Alice the Sneasel from that story’s supporting cast. While she to this day shares a healthy number of character cues, she evolved in a more grounded and less optimistic direction as development continued on, which reflects in her name, a clipping of “Katherine” that ironically is associated with “pure” as a meaning.

The details of Kate’s character were largely fine-tuned in her presence in Thousand Roads’ Blacklight PBP RP campaign. That’s not to say that every detail of her portrayal there is canon, since it was primarily used as a beta test for the Sneasel thief that you’ve come to know and love, though most of the details of her depiction were nailed down by the end of that campaign, and having knowledge of it might make a few details in this story stand out a bit more.

How did you come up with Dalton?

Spoiler: Answer

Dalton was the second member of the original “Fruedian Trio” of Outlaws to be cast as its “Superego”, and intended to be a spirit from a once-privileged background who was led into a life of crime by loftier ambitions than merely grabbing ill-gotten loot and who’d use his profession as a means to chase after them. Dalton is the member of the core trio of Outlaws that was the most “just because” in casting, with his species initially chosen because I needed an Electric-type to fill my targeted dynamic and liked Heliolisk, and his name chosen initially because it sounded a bit more bookish and “stuck-up”, which survived into the final cut due to growing attached to it.

How did you come up with Alvin?

Spoiler: Answer

Alvin from the very beginning was cast in mind for being a character that could have a sense of camaraderie with Lyle with the pair balancing out parts of each other’s personality traits, to the point where in initial development, his working name was “Ego’s Friend”. His fate as depicted in the earlier chapters was a detail that was settled very early on in development in order to give more of an emotional punch to Lyle and his teammates’ loss of normalcy, even if there are things in Alvin’s future that are not yet written and a story for when this tale reaches them.

Character-wise, Alvin originates from a character concept for a companion that was meant for Lyle back in my PBP RPing days that was a bit on the naive side, just retooled and aged up a bit and given a less envious backstory. His name in this story was drawn in mind for his meta role as a character, which is a name descended from the Ancient Germanic “Adalwin”, with a meaning of “noble friend”.

What PMD Games Did You Base Wander On?

Spoiler: Answer

All of them and none of them, as Wander is a setting that grabs bits and pieces of canonical PMD games to inform its mechanics, while not being beholden to them. Of them, Wander leans heaviest on Super and DX to inform its mechanics, and in general, it uses item designs that follow after the ones in DX with only modest, if any alterations. Keen eyes will likely be able to discern that there is also a good deal of trainerverse influence in this setting as well, along with shades of influence from various Xeno series games.

You mentioned Xeno game influences earlier, what's that all about?

Spoiler: Answer

As mentioned in the first question of this trivia, Once a Thief was cooked up in a backdrop of being written while I was playing games from that series and took influence from Path of Valor with regard to how to handle its references. Namely to throw caution to the wind and bring in elements from that series wholesale adapted to fit into a Pokémon context with varying degrees of blatantness, as you have likely noticed if any of the characters, places, terms, or general concepts floated in this story strike you as familiar.

Once a Thief attempts to represent elements from across all branches of the Xeno series in it while rearranging them into a (hopefully) unique combination, though some entries are leaned on heavier than others. Of them, Xenoblade X is thus far the most drawn-upon source of inspiration from the series by virtue of it emphasizing a sense of exploration in a large and dangerous world and being the only game in the series that is built in mind with a campaign centered around an OC character, which seemed appropriate for a plot centered around OCs. Xenogears is also homaged more prominently than most other entries of the series by virtue of it being an ur-template for recurring plot points and characters in the series as a whole, which felt only fitting to lean on in a setting that attempts to borrow the nuts and bolts of the franchise as a whole.

Why is there so much German?

Spoiler: Answer

For a mix of homaging and meta reasons. On the homaging side, German language terminology is fairly prominent in older Xeno games, especially among Xenosaga games, and as a story with a setting that draws influence from the series writ large, incorporating German language content prominently felt like a decent way to incorporate that dynamic.

On the meta side, part of the prominence of German-language content is that my own headcanon about Pokémon is that they do not have a unified language among themselves, which reflects in the worldbuilding of my stories in general. Since hey, Game Freak paid good money coming up with a number of language localizations for their media, and I’ve always liked putting them to good use. In Once a Thief’s case, German is used as a tool for dealing with things from the setting’s past or particular social circles in it, which is why a number of names are German terms that have been phonetically corrupted in an attempt to mimic language drift. In addition, nuances for certain words and phrases in German can often have subtle but important differences from their English counterparts, which for those either with a knowledge of the language or else willing to dig a little deeper, is a handy tool for hinting at things to come in the story.

What’s with the teasers?

Spoiler: Answer

They are a flourish that I got the idea from from Knightfall’s writings and then Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rebirth, which are in turn based off a similar style of opener used in Incarceron. It was a flourish that I originally had considered using for Fledglings but ultimately backed out on thanks to a lack of inspiration and revisited for this story as a means of helping to differentiate it from my other works.

The decision to render the teasers in German was settled on within the last 4 months prior to initial release as a vehicle for showing glimpses of the world through the lens of old texts and social circles well outside those of the Outlaw protagonists’. Initial scripts for these teasers are written in English, and then translated by TorchicBellow from FFN into German along with edits to reflect any changes made to keep the German-language prose from reading like the lyrics to a Sawano song. He has my eternal gratitude for his hard work and support he puts into every chapter, and this story wouldn’t be the same without it.

 

[Spiteful Murkrow]

Author’s Note: This trivia section was written under the assumption that readers had caught up with the full length of the story up to this point. If you’re stumbling across this from before Chapter 22, strongly consider revisiting it sometime after catching up.

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Why is the world of this story called ‘Wander’ anyways?

Spoiler: Answer

Well, I suppose that the more accurate answer to this is that it’s what the Pokémon of Varhyde call their world, but it was named as such because it sounded like a plausible-enough corruption of ‘Wunder’ from German, which as explained in the Prologue, carries the semantic meaning of ‘wonder’ or ‘miracle’ depending on how one chooses to translate that. Which felt like it’d be fitting for a world with some trippier topography and little pockets where the fabric of reality is a bit screwier than normal that was built on the remains of a bygone civilization capable of fantastical-sounding feats to its present day inhabitants.

As for why I chose to call the setting that in the first place, the early phases of this story’s outlining were done concurrent to a playthrough of Xenoblade X, which led to the working name for the setting being the same as the setting planet of that game—‘Mira’. ‘Mira’ happens to be a word in Latin that means ‘wonderful’ or ‘astonishing’, thus the choice for a name that was a sly nod to it for a world that draws on it in terms of vibes and features.

What’s with those Mystery Dungeons in this story?

Spoiler: Answer

As readers of Fledglings likely might have gathered, there was a good deal of worldbuilding in this story that I didn’t bother to reinvent the wheel for a secondary story, with much of the nuts and bolts being shared between them, if sometimes under different nomenclature like ‘Pockets’ in this story.

That’s not to say that everything was a straight lift from Fledglings. As a story that in initial development aimed to be shorter and more fast-paced than my main work, Wander’s Mystery Dungeons are significantly more interlinked than the typical Mystery Dungeon in Fledglings’ setting, which allows them to function as handy spatial shortcuts for those sufficiently strong or desperate enough to try and take advantage of them. The auroras that appear over and nearby Mystery Dungeons are also exclusive to this story, mostly because aberrations of spacetime felt like they might plausibly cause disruptions in a planet’s magnetic field, and it was a handy excuse to put in the surreal and dreamlike night skies that one might encounter in various Xenoblade titles.

Wait, but I swear that I’ve seen these Mystery Dungeons somewhere… why do they sound and feel so familiar?

Spoiler: Answer

That would be because the Mystery Dungeons in this story draw a good deal of influence from more memorable bits of topography from different Xeno titles, and usually are named as a reference or play off of different location names from the series. In no particular order:

- Waterhead Cave is a fairly transparent semantic rename of Headwater Cavern from Xenoblade X, even if its aesthetic was drawn from elsewhere by virtue of Headwater Cavern being on the blander side. Instead, Waterhead Cave looked back further in the series at the Vilia Lake area to inform its aesthetic, so if the blue bioluminescent water and cave illumination reminded you of anything… yeah, that was where it was coming from.

- Primordial Woods is a play off of the full name of ‘Makna Forest’ in the Japanese version of Xenoblade: マクナ原生林, or semantically ‘Mak(u)na Primeval/Primordial Forest’, which was the placeholder name of the Mystery Dungeon at large. The fundamental premise of the area was “large fossil revival lab overtaken by a jungle”, with explicit influences drawn from Blackmoon Forest from Xenogears, Makna Forest from Xenoblade, Noctilum from Xenoblade X, with Torigoth Forest from Xenoblade 2 being a late addition for cues in the leadup to its chapters’ publishing.

- Raptor Rock is a composite of ‘Talon Rock’ and the name of the same area in Xenoblade X’s German localization: ‘Raubvogelstiege’, or roughly ‘Raptor/Bird of Prey Steps/Stairs’. As a location, it is based off the namesake rock formation and some of the more surreal-looking plateau areas of Bionis such as Gaur Plain.

Though hey, I can’t really argue with a practice if it worked. While the location design hopefully wasn’t too on the nose, drawing influence from the other half of this story’s well of inspiration worked quite well for grounding where I wanted to take things thematically, including for places outside of Wander’s Mystery Dungeons.

How did you come up with Rankar?

Spoiler: Answer

Rankar as a minor antagonist started out life as a fairly transparent stand-in of Captain Tarquin from Fledglings, only to undergo retooling past the earliest of draft phases to differentiate him and go off in the direction of a leader figure well past his prime who secured his power through sordid means and was staring down an uncertain future as a deliberate thematic parallel to Varhyde’s broader problems in the present. While Rankar’s characterization changed quite a bit during development, the core of him being a Tyrantrum Wilder did not, to the point that his primary working name for much of the Primordial Woods arc’s development was ‘Grandpa Tyrantrum’.

Rankar as a name was chosen about a month out from the start of the Primordial Woods arc, and is a transparent reference to Xenogears’ ‘Rankar Dragon’. An early boss from that game which is more or less a giant robot-sized tyrannosaur. While this story’s Rankar is significantly smaller and more dangerous of a fight for the protagonists, the parallels felt too good to pass up even if the name was a bit on-the-nose.

How did you come up with Team Pathfinder?

Spoiler: Answer

Team Pathfinder were developed to fill a meta role as an “archetypical zero to hero protagonist team”, cast as a recurring comedic relief antagonist akin to a more competent Team Rocket from the anime which reflected in their earliest working title of ‘Goldfish Poop Gang’. Around the time that the story came down hard on leaning into the Xenoblade-themed placeholders that had cropped up here and there in development, the idea came to me to make the team a character cameo of some of characters that were from the broader series. Between the protagonists of the numbered Xenoblade games being a bit too recognizable for my liking and it being on my mind, that took me in the direction of Xenoblade X’s characters, just portrayed further down the power scale and in a more comedic light. So if some of their lines struck you as familiar… yeah, that was pretty deliberate. More specifically, the characters were cast as follows:

- Cruz is a semantic rename of ‘Cross’, the default name for Xenoblade X’s player character. His personality leans particularly hard on the ‘Male Joker’ VA option you can select in that game, and while he’s hardly alone as the ‘Rook’ of his team, it informed his portrayal for team dynamics.

- Vilma is a semantic rename of ‘Elma’, who is one of your first party members in the game and is generally accepted in the fandom to be the narrative’s proper protagonist. Vilma fills the same role for Team Pathfinder, even if she leans a bit heavier on her “dual swords” than projectile attacks compared to her source of inspiration.

- Nellie is the stand-in for ‘Lin’, with her name being a lazy anagram of ‘Lin Lee’ since my original angle of attempting a non-Mandarin reading of the character used for her name resulted in options that either sounded too similar to ‘Lin’ or else didn’t quite roll off the tongue. True to form, she’s also the team youngster with a cute little Xeno-themed hairclip of her own.

- Bel if it wasn’t already obvious from his speech pattern and devil-like aesthetic, is Team Pathfinder’s equivalent to L, with his name formed much in the same way his inspiration character’s full name of L’cirufe is a play off an epithet for the devil. In this case, from a clipping of ‘Belial’ that is done much in the same style of how his shortened and full names are handled in Xenoblade X’s Japanese version.

I will decline to comment as to what the future holds for Team Pathfinder’s future morphs ather than that they still had other appearances in the pipeline in the story planned at the time of writing and that future plans involving them did take their gameplay portrayals from Xenoblade X into mind.

As for the team name, that went through a few rounds of revision, with the original name settled on them being ‘Team Blade’, after the name of the organization that gives out missions in Xenoblade X and its individual operatives. I ultimately felt that the name didn’t quite work with half the team not having fighting styles leaning on fighting with sharp implements, which sent me back to the drawing board. One glance through the different Divisions from Xenoblade X later, I realized that the one responsible for expanding the game map, the ‘Pathfinders’ had a snappy enough name and more or less was a perfect thematic fit for an Exploration Team staffed by fish-out-of-water rookies.

More observant readers likely saw this one this one coming, since if the trident design of Team Forager’s pilfered scarves or the reworked design that Team Pathfinder popped up in in Errberk Village seemed familiar to you, there’s a good reason for that: they’re tweaks of the logo of the Pathfinders Division in Xenoblade X.

Wait, those symbols in this story are based on things? Like what?

Spoiler: Answer

Well, some of them are sigils cooked up whole cloth, but a good number of them are references to various designs that feature prominently in different games from the series. In no particular order:

• The Schild der Wirklichkeit and Schwert der Wünsche are based off the “triangle with circles at vertices” visual motif that shows up from time to time in Xenoblade titles in both upward (e.x. 1 and 3’s Chain Attack icons) and downward (multiple major character designs from 1) orientations.
• Nellie’s clip that she wears is based off the design of “ye olde Xeno cross with shortened arms”, specifically the shape of a Lifehold.
• The sigil of Vector ‘Ah-ghee’ should be immediately familiar to you if you’ve played Xenosaga or else played far enough into Xenoblade 3: Future Redeemed. That is all I will say about it for now other than if you recognize it, you might have some ideas of what it’s pointing towards.
• The sigil of Sophia’s Ritterorden as seen on the keep in Errberk Village is a Nisan Cross, a very prominent sigil from Xenogears that is intimately associated with her namesake character.
• The symbol of Universität von Wahrheit is based off of Addam’s Crest from Xenoblade 2
• The scarves Lyle and Kate wind up wearing after stealing from the clothesline are based off the frame of a Flame Clock lit up in Agnian colors.

There are also a few that originate from within the Pokémon franchise such as the sigil used for the clinic in Errberk Village and the Drachensiegel, but I’ll leave those for readers to figure out since the latter of those two is for another day.

How did you come up with Moonturn Square?

Spoiler: Answer

Moonturn Square actually went floating in terms of location design up until fairly late in development, with the oh-so-creative name of ‘Chapter 3 Town’ for a good chunk of development. The big break for coming up with a design came after the decision to go full referential hack with regard to the Xeno series and set a goal of drawing vibes from Colony 9 from the first town, which some readers likely pieced together from the big tri-legged tower that looms over everything and the former Sheriff off campaigning in battle named after Colonel Square-tache in a disguised fashion.

From there, it was just a matter of finding a way to make things make sense in the setting, with the angle that I settled on being that Moonturn Square had been built on the ruins of a larger stadium complex akin to those that appear in the anime’s once-a-region League Conferences, which isn’t far removed from how some medieval towns in Europe were built in the remains of ancient Roman amphitheaters like Medieval Arles, which with a couple collapsed sections provided a way of roughly echoing the footprint of Colony 9’s Commercial District: marketplace in the west, big tower in the center, large military installation in the north, and residential district with a transparent stand-in for Tranquil Square in the south.

That’s not to say that everything about Moonturn Square was taken straight from Colony 9 since it’s not a series of interconnected islands in a lake. The star fortification that encloses the town was based on various towns in Europe built in such a style, in particular Palmanova. While the aqueduct and water wheels are based off of similar constructions in Iberia and the Middle East used to ferry drinking water from rivers to raised settlements.

As for the name, it and the vast majority of location names in this story were developed with its German name first: Munternplatz, deliberately echoing the name of Pokémon Square in the German localization of the original Rescue Team games: Pokémonplatz, with the somewhat dippy and ironic semantic meaning of “Cheerful Square/Plaza”. From there, it was simply a matter of phonetically corrupting ‘muntern’ (which ‘Moonturn’ roughly approximates for Anglophones) and attaching the ‘Square’ to it and the rest was history.

How did you come up with Errberk Village?

Spoiler: Answer

Like many other locations in this story, Errberk Village started with an on-the-nose working name, which in its case was ‘Post Town Analogue’, its intended meta function in the earliest drafts of the story. Errberk Village wound up changing considerably during development due to a mixture of needing to pick a hometown for Sophia, which informed the decision to give the town a more martial character, and playing through Xenoblade 2 during the process of writing out the first couple arcs of the story, which wound up influencing the final depiction of the town.

More specifically, if the Sheriff spouting the very memeable lines didn’t already tip readers off, but Errberk Village is more or less the end result of putting Torigoth from Xenoblade 2 and Baram Town from PSMD into a blender. So if you thought that the description of the entrance arch into the village or the square with the fountain right outside the Green Dragonite sounded familiar, that was why. The primary departure in layout made for Errberk Village as a smaller settlement is that it has no “second bank” across the river dominated by a military presence unlike Torigoth in Xenoblade 2. That was kept closer to the village along with a lot more windmills thrown into the mix.

That’s not to say that there weren’t also wholesale additions thrown in. The Green Dragonite in particular is based on a Pokémon Center of the design used in XY that had been gutted and retrofitted into an inn with a more rustic facade. The shacks perched on the concrete pillar is based off the design of more old-timey gas stations in Germany, which felt like something that could be reasonably found not far away from a Pokémon Center for hosting travelers in a long-bygone time.

Much like Moonturn Square, Errberk Village was named by first coming up with a German name for it that would sound very “standard PMD settlement”, and then phonetically corrupting it. In its case, its name is a deliberate play off of the name for Serene Village in PSMD: ‘Ruhenau’, with ‘-au’ being a common toponymic suffix for towns built by rivers in the Germanosphere. As mentioned in an earlier author note, ‘Herbergau’ carries a semantic meaning roughly equivalent to “Hostel Village (by a River)”, with ‘Errberk’ just being the result of abruptly clipping a few sounds at the beginning and end of the name.

What’s with those song lyrics at the bar scenes?

Spoiler: Answer

They are cameos of songs from the Xenoblade X soundtrack. More specifically, the lyrics from the Moonturn Square tavern scene are from the opening stanza of Don’t Worry (with part of the stanza immediately following further cameoing in Chapter 9), while the ones from the Errberk Village tavern scene are the opening stanza of By My Side.

They won’t be the last such cameos you’ll come across in this story, even if I won’t go so far as to say that they’ll all appear in similar capacities or be drawn from the same soundtrack.

Do you have a headcanon OST for this fic?

Spoiler: Answer

Well, Don't Worry and By My Side, obviously. But more seriously, the soundtrack I associate with this story is a grab bag of music from titles from the Pokémon and Xeno series, with particularly heavy bias towards Xenoblade X and Xenoblade 3’s soundtracks by virtue of their source games being the closest in overall vibe to this story and them having more of an ‘artificial’ bent to them befitting a world built on the ruins of a not-too-distant future.