New theory: the first time through this event, Stocke said, “Thank Queen Protea. She’s probably been plundering the city’s public works budget because there are no lesser nobles with jurisdiction over the area, so she won’t step on anyone’s toes and risk alienating any of Count Selvan’s bloc in the Assembly. In theory, the mayor could veto her requests to force them to go through the Assembly for review, but she’s probably installed someone in her pocket to the position, and Selvan would ensure it got rubber-stamped if it did reach them.”
Raynie and Marco looked at him like he just grew a second head.
Stocke was very surprised. He had assumed this was common knowledge.
He had to go back and try again because they missed meeting their contact in the city because he ended up spending the next several hours teaching Granorg Civics 101 to Raynie and Marco.
(He thought this was obvious. Several monarchs who were strapped for cash have done or tried to do the same thing. That’s why the mayor has veto power over budgetary changes from the monarch, he said. Raynie and Marco were like, “…Granorg has a mayor?”)
He also has an encyclopedic knowledge of the industries and exports of tiny provinces in rural Granorg and thinks this is normal, and is weirdly informed about the history of ballroom dance trends.
Raynie and Marco assume he’s just such a good secret agent that he learns everything about everywhere he goes.
Rosch stopped making assumptions years ago when Stocke explained the historical context of and political commentary in a 300-year-old poem to him after Hugo quoted it out of context in a speech.
Hugo: *uses famous quote from famous poet to imply it’s their moral duty and divine mandate to liberate X place from the Foreign Oppressors*
Stocke, when Rosch asks why he’s making that face: “…The work that quote is from is about a nobleman in eastern Granorg who hired Gutral mercenaries in a dispute with a neighboring fief, violating several treaties and disobeying a royal decree. The queen refused to impose any sanctions on him because her mistress owed him money. The statement that the gods will intervene was an allegorical dig at the queen’s inaction, since a prominent religious school at the time held that nobility were divinely appointed to rule. General Hugo obviously hasn’t read the original text, if he’s quoting it like that.”
He is a spy who habitually wears bright friggin’ red, and his clothes are commented on as being weird even by the other characters.
He spends half of every single conversation going “……” and then walks off in the middle of it and five minutes later knows the intimate life problems of half a dozen people and has agreed to find someone’s mother’s lost wedding ring that was eaten by a bear. (Then he hands it to them. Apparently he had it on him already. How? WHO KNOWS, Raynie and Marco sure don’t.)
He gets near-fatally stabbed and no one can figure out when it happened.
He keeps taking total goofballs completely seriously, except then he sometimes switches to mocking them with absolutely no warning.
He gets dragged into a castle in chains and when the guy sitting on the throne asks him what his name is he snarks that it’s rude not to introduce yourself first. After he’s informed he’s talking to the king, he tells him his jokes suck.
He casually mentions information he knows via time travel and gives people stuff he has no physical way to get and just sort of assumes no one will question it.
He talks about thousands of tons of rocks falling on his head with
about the same amount of emotion as someone speculating on whether it
might rain.
He sees a vivid mystical vision of Raynie and Marco dying horribly and goes, “Eh, I’ll worry about it later.”
It’s canonical that his conversations with Lippti and Teo look like he’s standing in the corner staring at nothing and mumbling to himself.
He just kinda… decides that random things are his problem now even when no one’s actually asking him to do anything, and then acts as if there is absolutely nothing odd about a random stranger turning up on your doorstep to hand you medicine saying it’s from your wife, when your wife insists she never bought you anything like that and has no idea who this guy is.
He keeps manifesting bizarrely specialized skills and magic powers that nobody suspected he had and giving no or minimal explanation for them.
He agrees to help make the Desert Crows feel better and then spends the entire sidequest saying stuff like this:
He gets chased out of Alistel after committing some light treason, and within a week openly waltzes right back in, still wearing fire-truck red.
His social skills vary based on circumstance from “incredibly insightful” to “amazingly dense,” and he’ll give a dramatic speech that inspires someone to change the entire direction of their life’s work and then turn around and “that sounds fake but okay” people saying they like him and don’t want him to die.
He constantly knows things he has no reason to know, takes completely absurd things in stride, and wanders off to have involved conversations with complete strangers and/or thin air, and I will totally believe that the rest of the group were like, “He’s a time-traveling amnesiac undead prince? Sure, I’ll buy it, it’s as good an explanation as I can think of.”
The only reason people sometimes don’t recognize that he is an incredibly strange person is that he’s the viewpoint character. If we saw it from absolutely anyone else’s perspective, he’d be that weird party member in a Tales game who keeps going, “Oh, nothing” and you are 900% sure has an ulterior motive and is going to turn out to have been lying to you the entire time. And this would, in fact, be true. :::PPP
I think the only time anyone DOES seriously question him doing something like that is when he pulls part of the crown jewels of Granorg out of his pocket.
I think everyone must have just written him off as “The laws of physics and reality do not apply to this man, so there’s no point questioning anything he does, ever.”
(It’s even worse if you take the sidequest availability windows literally- “Can you help me get an interview with Field Marshal Viola?” “I am carrying her diary right now. Pay no attention to the fact that the last entry is dated two months from today.”)
Observation: Selvan 100% said this. And every time he hears Protea quote it, he is filled with deep, existential ennui, because it reminds him that the only reason his head is still attached to his neck is that she’s so goddamn stupid that she thought he was serious.
Reblogging to commemorate the one-year anniversary of accidentally creating the most popular post in the RH tag, which half the notes are mistaking for real dialogue.
Two years! It’s still a Buffy quote, guys, no matter how accurate it is.
So a while back I accidentally had a quote that I thought was Radiant Historia (it wasn’t) but I’d only played the game a little at that point and thought it was real?? Apparently it was just a real good quote from this blog,
Some actual canon RH lines just for you, as apology:
Plot Designing 