Chapter Text
⸺The Lighthouse Keeper⸺
I live on the lighthouse island, but nobody knows.
My job is to keep the lighthouse. That’s why I’m called the lighthouse keeper.
At night I turn on the light, in the morning I turn off the light.
When it’s foggy out, I turn on the foghorn.
I do these things, and then the Divine One brings me food and attention. It feels nice to have them talk to me. They’re my only friend, so I really like them.
On the big island, I can see miis walking around and talking to each other. But they can’t see me, which hurts my feelings.
I had a dream about getting on a boat and crossing the water to the big island. I took off my shoes and put my feet in the sand, feeling the soft, fine grains. The other miis surrounded me on the beach and their warm hands grabbed mine. We sat down together at a big table made for a lot of people, where they looked in my eyes and talked to me. I talked so much that my throat got dry. I told them everything about myself, because I’ve been waiting a long time to tell somebody these things. It was like I was putting a part of my soul into their hands, to keep safe. And if I lost my soul, they could give it back to me because they still had the pieces. The dream was warm all around and I was laughing and smiling.
But then I woke up alone on the cold third floor of the lighthouse. I do that every morning. I don’t know if it’s the sea air or the loneliness that makes my island so cold.
I don’t know why the Divine One won’t let me talk to the other miis, but I think about it all the time.
Maybe they’re dangerous.
Maybe I’m dangerous.
Maybe the lighthouse is too important and I need to be here at all times.
Maybe I’m a bad mii.
I try not to think about that last one. But the less I want to think about a thought, the more I think about it anyway.
One day I go out and look at the vast, flat sea. It’s a dead blue block that goes all the way into the distance, keeping me away from things I’ll never get to see. But all of a sudden there’s a shiny golden thing in the air casting a shadow on me.
IT’S A MII
OH MY GOD
I shake all over. I should say something, but there are too many things to say, and all my thoughts crowd at the back of my throat and get stuck.
And then he’s gone.
The Divine One dragged over a knight in golden armor, and then put him back after a few seconds. I could only see one of his eyes through the darkness behind his helmet, and it was looking at me.
I’ve been looked at, the way I look at other people.
I want to ask the Divine One why they did that, but they aren’t here anymore. They went back to wherever their home is, probably.
I run to the edge of my island and look at the big island, but I can’t see the knight. So I just sit down with my knees to my chest, back to business as usual.
Maybe he wasn’t real.
I dream of crossing the water again, but this time I’m still awake.
⸺D3rLord3⸺
There’s someone living on the lighthouse island, and I’m the only one who knows.
That fella with the tired little eyes and the blue hat looked just as shocked to see me as I was to see them. Not an ounce of color in their skin. I just kinda figured the lighthouse was automatic, or the player was activating it, but no. A mii has been doing that. That lighthouse has been there for a while, so they’ve been there all alone this whole time. Holy cow.
Avery is waving his green hand in front of my face, but I’m a little preoccupied. Did the player bring me over by mistake? Probably not. The way they waved me in front of the mii was too taunting, too psychopathic. So if I was brought there on purpose, what was the purpose? The player kept a secret and then revealed to me the secret? Do they want it to be a secret or not!?
“Heeeeeey,” Avery asks, “You alright there?”
I take a deep breath and let my body relax, still tense after being dragged through the air by my cape. “Yeah. The player just felt like taking me on a joyride.”
“Well, was it joyous?”
“No. Come on, let’s get ice cream.”
But not even delicious, sweet ice cream and the company of my boyfriend can stop me from thinking about that mii, all alone. Apart from everyone. Shaking. With nothing but the company of the crashing waves and cold sea spray. So when we’re done eating I say goodbye to Avery, and start hatching a plan.
I’m not sure what the player wants me to do, but what they’re gonna get is me finding a way to talk to the lighthouse keeper. An enigmatic deity of unknown scale isn’t enough to stop me from making sure that guy’s okay. Something about this feels familiar.
That night when the player leaves, I tap my armored fingers on my windowsill and watch the silhouette of the lighthouse against the cartoonishly large white moon. (If it were really that close, we’d all be dead.) My eyes trace the spinning beams of light as I work the problem through.
The first challenge is the fact that the player will know I’ve met the lighthouse keeper. As far as I can tell nobody else can see it, but when the player talks to us they pull up this floating gui, reversed to our view, with all sorts of options and information. For one, it has the relationship status of everyone on the island. You can bet I learned pretty quickly how to read mirrored text. I’ve passed by people, nodded to them on the street, hung out in a group with them and listened to them talk, and still seen us marked as “strangers” on the player’s gui. The lighthouse keeper and I looked right at each other for a good few seconds, and our status didn’t change at all. It’s fair to infer that “meeting” means you have to talk face to face. If I don’t meet the lighthouse keeper in person, the player might not find out we’ve been talking.
Letters are an option, but they’re also evidence that can be left behind and discovered by the player. I can’t totally trust that the lighthouse keeper wants to be spoken to, or that they’ll be willing or competent enough to help me destroy any sign of our communication. But morse code is another option. I might just be picking this because I love secret codes, but every mii comes into this world with a flashlight. We could communicate by flicking our lights on and off in morse code, which allows us to never see each other and start or stop “talking” very quickly, with no evidence left behind other than eyewitness testimony. But how would the player think to ask the miis specifically if they’ve been seeing random light flashes? I’ll try not to think about the possibility of a mii seeing the flashes and blabbing to the player. No plan is that fool proof, so I’ll adjust as I go along.
Ugh, but how would I teach the lighthouse keeper morse code? I think I’d need to send at least one letter. I grab a pen and paper and write down a guide to the morse code alphabet, using the moonlight to see. I don’t really want anyone knowing I’m up, and it’s hard enough to be sneaky with my armor clattering all the time. Then I turn the paper over and write:
Memorize this, then destroy it. Use your flashlight. Don’t get caught.
I roll up the page and stuff it in an empty bottle of cider from when Avery beat me in a drinking contest. I challenged him. He didn’t know I put laxatives in his bottle. It was funny, trust me. In fact, he thought it was so funny that he tied me to a chair and made me watch Morbius five times in a row.
I stifle my laughter at the memory and take the message-in-a-bottle out of the room. But when I’m in the front doorway I think, What if the bottle is also evidence I can’t leave behind? So I go back into the house and grab a spool of fishing line. When I told the player I wanted a treasure nobody else had, that wasn’t really what I meant.
The lighthouse is big, but still dwarfed by the imposing rock it stands on. There’s a small beach at its foot, facing my way. Maybe the bottle will float there on its own. I step through the icy waves until they splash halfway up my shin guards. Having triple-tied the fishing line around the neck of the bottle, I swing it around on the string like a lasso and fling it across the water, letting the fishing line fly through my fingers. Then I quickly retreat off the beach, letting more line out, and hide behind a tree.
I can feel through the line when the bottle stops moving, and peek carefully out from behind the tree trunk to see it caught in the sand of the lighthouse island. I thought I’d have to find a way to signal to the lighthouse keeper, but it doesn’t take them long to notice a foreign object on their shore. They must spend a lot of time looking out the window at us. In that case they’ve spotted me already.
They stumble down to the water’s edge, unable to wait a single moment. Though I can’t see much but a silhouette backlit by moonlight, I can tell they have all the grace of a newborn deer. Obviously, nothing like this has happened before and they can’t contain themself.
They almost drop the cork in the sand, and have to do a little dance to catch it in the air while simultaneously dropping it repeatedly. After reading the letter they glance up, unable to see where the thin fishing line leads, but I don’t reveal myself. I’m sure they know it’s me anyway. They recork the bottle and awkwardly throw it back out, as if nobody’s taught them how to properly throw before. Then they store the note and start climbing back up the jagged rocks with the same directionless overenthusiasm they climbed down with.
As I reel in the bottle I watch to make sure they don’t fall and hurt themself in their emotional state, then I go home. All that’s left to do is wait. I’ve put a lot of trust in the lighthouse keeper to dispose of the letter and not reveal anything to the player. Maybe I’m a little bit scared that my trust has been misplaced and I’ll get caught. I’ve never seen the player “punish” anyone, after all, so I don’t know how bad it would be.
But what takes priority over all the risk is that I’m just really curious about that mii.
⸺The Lighthouse Keeper⸺
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
That was exciting. And scary. It’s like I’ve been shocked with electricity. It’s running through my veins.
The Divine One doesn’t know about this.
The knight wants me to send him secret signals.
Is it okay for me to do that?
My hands won’t stop shaking, so I put the letter on my small, one-person dining table on the windowless ground floor and use a cup and flashlight to hold it down. My sweat is already dripping onto the page and messing with the lines of the letter L.
This may be my only chance. If I want to ever talk to people, I have to learn this. And I have to learn it before the Divine One finds out I have it.
I’m so scared and I’m so happy. I think. Can I be both at once?
I feel like I’m gonna throw up.
I have to learn this code quickly.
But then again, it’s not like I’m doing much else with my time.
I spend the whole night quizzing myself, flashing messages at the opposite wall of my bedroom. The messages are a conversation with myself, or really between me and what I think the knight would say. I think he would say, “You are so cool Lighthouse Keeper,” and, “You are very good at talking to people, Lighthouse Keeper. Are you sure you haven’t done this before?”
Okay, I don’t really think he’d say that. But I wish he would.
I start out super slow, having to look at the page between each letter, but I get faster and faster with time. I start making up things about the letters to help me remember how to signal them. H is for horse, which gallops in short but fast steps. So H is (. . . .). My name has two parts: Lighthouse and Keeper. So when I signal I to refer to myself, it’s two dots. (. .). Sometimes it gets more complicated. G is (_ _ .) so I made up a story about blades of grass. Two are long and one is short, and the short one gets made fun of for being weird.
I hope he doesn’t make fun of me for being weird.
I practice so long that I start seeing the sky turn purple through the window. I should turn off the lighthouse light and go to bed, because I’m really sleepy. That also means I should get rid of this paper, because I’m afraid of it being seen by the Divine One, and the knight said to destroy it.
I hold it one last time. I don’t really want to get rid of it. It’s the only thing another mii has ever given to me. His hands held the paper and now my hands are holding the paper, and that’s kind of crazy to me because it’s like we’re holding hands. Like in my dream. But I have to let it go.
The Divine One gave me an oil lamp a long time ago. I don’t need it, but it matches the aesthetic of the lighthouse, they said. I turn on the little flame inside and carefully let it burn the letter. I watch my only gift from another mii turn into ash.
After turning off the lighthouse, I sleep so long that it’s sunset again when I wake up. The Divine One probably stopped by, but they’re already done taking care of the island for the day and they’ve gone away again. I don’t see the little white hand flying around anywhere.
I feed myself and I tap out the alphabet onto the table in code, over and over again, just to make sure I still remember all 26 letters without the paper. It’s like if I’m not actively practicing, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten.
When the sky goes dark all the way and the other miis disappear into their houses, I grab my flashlight and go to my bedroom window on the third floor. I don’t know which house is the knight’s, or if his bedroom window even faces mine, or if he’s hiding out there somewhere outside of his house entirely.
I set my flashlight on the windowsill because my hands are shaking again. I try to calm myself down but I don’t know how. I’m going to talk to someone.
From the first time I met him and said nothing, I’ve been thinking of what the best thing to say would have been in that moment. I’ve made my decision. I say it now.
HI