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Smoke and Mirrors║ Seven: Ontogenetic Niche Shift + Epilogue: Post-Mortem ⤳

Chapters: 7/7 + epilogue
Fandom: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Author Chose Not To Warn
Relationships: Genesis Rhapsodos/Sephiroth
Characters: Cloud Strife, Zack Fair, Claudia Strife, Sephiroth, Genesis Rhapsodos
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eventual Smut, Medicinal Drug Use, Recreational Drug Use, Nibelheim Incident (Compilation of FFVII), Graphic Depictions of Illness, Degradation (Compilation of FFVII), Averting the Nibelheim Incident With:, Weed, Blowjobs, Threesome - M/M/M, featuring C/G/S, Praise Kink, Bottom Sephiroth (Compilation of FFVII), Top Genesis Rhapsodos, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Timeskip, Other Characters Not Mentioned in Tags, Other Ships Not Mentioned in Tags, See Epilogue for Details

Finding the end of the journey.

———

And that’s a wrap, folks. This update is actually two in one, as it’s the final chapter (15k words) and the epilogue (7.5k words). And with that, Smoke and Mirrors is officially complete.

Thank you all for coming along on this ride with me. I hope it was worth the wait.

———

Contemplating what multichapter fic I want to focus on when I finish Smoke and Mirrors. I have two planned out, both loosely outlined pretty much from start to finish, the trick is sitting down to write them.

OPTION 1: Turn Out the Light (and What Are You Left With?)

Summary: Vincent Valentine went missing in late 1977. In early 1984, so did Professor Gast. When Veld winds up back in Nibelheim searching for leads on the professor’s disappearance, he instead finds himself solving a missing persons case seven years cold—and one that hits much closer to home. Vincent may not have survived his assignment in Nibelheim, but he’s back all the same, and without decades of isolation to process what was done to him, that may not be the best idea.

Features: VinVeld, body horror, major character death, Sephiroth, Professor Hojo, Lucrecia Crescent, deconstruction of Vincrecia, SOLDIER Vincent, SOLDIER Hot Innkeeper Broden, Genesis Rhapsodos, eventual background Sephesis, eventual President Lazard Deusericus, an egregious number of timeskips, and Sephiroth as Vincent’s son.

OPTION 2: Trample Your Roses (aka the Neroheim AU)

Summary: Following an incident in Sector 0 and subsequent repeated failure at permanent neutralization, Nero is relocated to Shinra’s most distant satellite facility for containment and monitoring. The distance from Midgar’s massive mako wells and closer proximity to what his files refer to as “the source” helps him to stabilize, but it’s up to Nero to figure out how to socialize—and he’d better figure it out quick, because he really likes talking to that blond boy from town who keeps showing up at his window.

Features: Nero/Cloud (which I’m calling sablestrife), childhood friends to lovers, Claudia Strife, Sephiroth, minor character death, Veld of the Turks, Genesis Rhapsodos, Vincent Valentine, Vincent as breeding stock used to sire both Sephiroth and Nero, eventual background Sephesis and eventual background VinVeld.

Which of these sounds more interesting to you personally?

Turn Out the Light (and What Are You Left With?)

Trample Your Roses

See Results

Both are pretty niche and I’m very aware of that, and this poll will probably not be a genuinely deciding factor, I’m just curious about which would be the most likely to get readership. I am really waffling between them because I know I won’t be able to focus on both at the same time.

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Okay so. Veld fights using his prosthetic. This is The Lore.

In this single scene, the arm he uses to cast switches mid-fight, starting with his left when he’s fighting along the vertical axis and then switching to his right when his sprite turns to fight along the horizontal axis.

Because Before Crisis would flip sprites and portraits from left to right as needed, I would assume the point that we’re looking at him from behind would be the most accurate, leading me to the assumption that it’s his left—which is why I illustrate him that way.

However.

The Madhouse trailer explicitly shows Veld’s left hand, as it’s the one he’s using to hold his phone, and it appears to be normal.

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HOWEVER.

Studio Madhouse also portrays Veld with the wrong color eyes, portrays Two Guns as only using one gun, gives Rude the same skin tone as Elena’s sister, and in Last Order they literally spell Tseng’s name wrong. All this to say that, in my opinion, work created by Madhouse can’t be considered canonical in pretty much any capacity—this is further validated by the fact that Last Order has literally been declared to be noncanon.

So, we’d probably wanna stick with the game itself as an indicator of canon. And according to the game…Veld’s prosthetic literally switches sides mid-combat. Which is impossible.

I don’t really have any intention of changing my personal portrayal unless I’m proven wrong when/if BC hits Ever Crisis, but I’m curious about the general fandom take on this.

Which of Veld’s arms is prosthetic?

Right

Left

See Results
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Updated (correct) colors on the left; original (incorrect) colors on the right.

See, the issue is that I can’t just change out a handful of colors and be done with it; the way I color, I utilize the base palette of the character(s) in question throughout the piece to give it a sort of balance. It defines not only the colors directly associated with the character, and not only clothing and accessories, but also things like what colors I use to shade and highlight both the character and the rest of the piece.

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Not only does Veld’s updated color palette mean I have to completely rework how I color him from the ground up, because the colors I usually utilize no longer work, but I also have to rework how I color everything around him.

Like, in the piece above, I had their boxers colored to use the same base hue as each other’s eye color, to help draw those colors out of the final piece—but Veld’s corrected skin tone doesn’t work as well with the rust of Vincent’s eyes, and Veld’s corrected eye color doesn’t stand out at all against Vincent’s uniform so it’s basically invisible. If I were willing to go to the effort, I would honestly redo the colors for the entire background to work better with the magenta tones in Veld’s hair, because that desaturated aquamarine is not doing it any favors.

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I’m getting the hang of it, and I do really like the corrected palette, but it’s gonna take some time. Mostly it’s just a matter of reworking some base shades, moving some hue sliders over and calling it good, but that’s not always the case.

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There are some instances where I lose something pretty key in changing colors over; in this one, the highlights on the leaf and stem of the flower were based on the (incorrect) hue of his eyes—that can’t be swapped over to his corrected palette, where his eyes are purple, so I just lose that touch entirely.

If I colored my work differently, this probably wouldn’t be that big a deal, but…this is how I do it, and that means I have to basically start over and completely relearn how to color a character I’ve been drawing for more than half my life. I’ve been doing it wrong this entire time, and having to start over is really fucking hard.

The corrected palette is objectively better, mind you. The colors work together well and are definitely going to be a lot easier to work with in the long run—I can’t even tell you how many pictures of Veld I just never colored at all because I couldn’t get his palette to behave. I have a digital tomb full of half-finished artwork that I just gave up on entirely because his palette was so difficult to work with. The corrected palette is so much better I can’t even quantify it.

I just have to start over, I have to build new habits and standards and find new preferences for coloring a character I’ve been drawing for twenty years, longer than some of the people who like my art have been alive. That’s really disheartening.

Just so everyone understands why I’m losing my goddamn mind over finally getting a clean copy of Veld’s character portrait from which to sample colors, I wanna show you a comparison.

Here’s the palette I was using, sampled from scans and screenshots and a copy of his character portrait originally sourced sometime before 2007:

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Top half is all skintones, while the bottom half is three shades used for hair and three shades used for eyes.

…And here’s the new one, sampled from that shockingly clean copy of his character portrait sourced in 2019:

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I’m getting over it (I like the updated palette, I really do) but I still kinda want to jump into the sun.

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