09 – First and Last
By Chronic Guardian
Written for Twelve Shots of Summer: Nine Tales, Week 8 – Red Dawn, Bonds of Brothers
"Gogo" was not her real name. There was not much "real" about her in any sense anymore besides that fact that she was alive. Her heart beat, pulsing red blood through her veins. Her body moved the way she asked it to. That was real.
There had been days before, days when she hadn't been eking out a living inside a sandworm's belly, but those all seemed to be part of some far distant dream now. What mattered was the present. What mattered was the person she found herself with now and the one she was becoming.
Her fellow maroon had been an Imperial conscript at one point, as well as a merchant, a messenger, a sailor, a beggar. He had mined the mountains of Narshe and serviced the great engines of Figaro. He had even been an opera star once near Jidoor, the town of the west horizon, as well as a fisherman in Thamassa of the East. He was everyone and no one, a vessel for the world.
He was a mimic.
"Mimicry is the art of emptying the self to take in the essence of another," her new friend told her, perfectly mimicking the movements of their dinner as it cautiously sniffed around the sandworm's innards. Thankfully, the creature holding them seemed to most often swallow its meals whole, allowing for surviving scavengers to "earn" a living. Today's catch was a lumbering bear with gold tinged fur. She watched as her companion rolled his joints and padded along in the same way. He looked like a scrawny shadow compared to the specimen, but the motions themselves were exact.
Mimicking creatures was an advanced technique, however. Apparently, the only other being to have mastered the technique in living memory was a child living in the eastern wilds. In her own case, she spent the days becoming all those that her teacher had become before her.
"Do not rely on any one sense," he told her as she mirrored his movements to carve up the felled bear later. "Anticipate. Watch and listen for what is happening beneath the surface. Drink in the details and let them nourish your own embodiment."
Gogo did her best to mimic her mentor's relish for the bear meat, and decided she would need more practice.
-V-
Gogo found life inside a sandworm interesting, namely in that it was possible at all. The worm sustained itself on large amounts of raw materials. She had found her own way into it when it swallowed a ferry she was riding to south Figaro. While most of the vessel moved down the digestive tract, she had stayed high enough to avoid the process, along with a blessed supply crate from the ship's galley.
From there, she had survived off of whatever else the worm swallowed. Granted, she wouldn't have made it half so long if she hadn't met her fellow maroon and mentor, but he was more of a catalyst down the road she was already taking than a game changer. He taught her the key to surviving here: whatever life brought, you became.
When the sandworm wandered close enough to civilization to swallow the library wing of a house, they became scholars. When the sandworm swallowed animals, they became hunters. And in the rare event that the sandworm swallowed a campsite's cookpot or—heaven forbid—a kitchen, they became chefs.
"This is so different from my life outside!" Gogo exclaimed once, breaking the mimic code in taking the initiative. She had not yet fully acclimated to the grand tradition, despite her master's best efforts. "Out there I was a beggar. Just before this, I was trying to get into the Chocobo Post delivering to Figaro Castle. But this?"
"This is no different," her master, also dubbed Gogo, responded evenly. "Before you accepted from the world and sought to carry its words. Now, you do that, but more so. You are discovering the beauty of becoming."
And she reflected his smile, fully embracing its warmth as her own.
-V-
She took to calling herself Gogo the Younger.
She didn't actually know if she was older or younger than her master, but she assumed so. He didn't say much about himself, and what he did say was borrowed. He was named Gogo just as his master before him and his master's master and so on and so forth. To become Gogo was to become a member of the Brotherhood of Mimes, for all shared in becoming what they saw.
To that end, Gogo the Older wouldn't approve of the distinction. In perfect mimicry, they would both be just Gogo: the first and last mime, the embodiment of the world. And yet, despite his incredible training, they would always be different. There was a world beyond this worm's belly where they had been born to different families and met different people and watched the sun rise with different feelings. Even if they only ever took their response from the next person over, they must have absorbed different dawns from their different company.
"Not if we absorbed the dawn itself!" Gogo the Older would retort, as if intending to ignite himself and rise along the worm's stomach lining in pale imitation of the sun.
Gogo the Younger smiled wearily. "I suppose we could find a way to try."
Somewhere outside, red rays of light crept over the horizon in a majesty their bodies would never match.
-V-
New arrivals in the worm were not an entirely foreign concept, but they did not often last long. Some tried exploring further than Gogo the Older advised, some tried escaping through the rows of teeth lining the sandworm's maw. Nobody really took the time to slow down and learn the way of the worm. Nobody took the way of the Mimic.
Nobody, until the woman from the airship.
They almost didn't believe her. Surely the worm would have swallowed an airship given the chance. And yet, following her movements, Gogo the Older begrudgingly confirmed her claim. If she hadn't been an airship captain, she at least knew how to embody one.
She wore a red coat and green flight suit. Her long, golden hair was tied back in a messy ponytail. Given the facilities inside the worm, they weren't likely to see a wash soon and Gogo the Older recommended a trim for practical purposes. While he usually remained entirely shrouded in his red Mimic robes, Gogo the Younger caught him on occasion with his hood down, shaving a reddish fuzz from his scalp.
The airship captain—Darryl, she called herself—merely crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes at the advice. "We're getting out of here," she told them both. "We're getting back to civilization and then I'm taking a long bath and not leaving until I've undone every tangle."
She was fiery like that, daring and foolhardy. She didn't wait to see what the world would do, she struck first. She roamed the entirety of the worm's belly searching for supplies and assets to engineer an escape.
And Gogo the Younger watched.
For so long, her mentor had been the only person who stuck around long enough for her to really study. Darryl was a new splash of life, a new dawn wrapped in a red coat. Gogo the Older had a patient confidence that the world would come to him, but Darryl… she showed a boldness that stepped without knowing whether the next step would be there. She didn't just become an embodiment of the world around her, she mastered it.
Gogo the Younger watched and let herself imagine soaring above the clouds beyond the rings of worm teeth.
-V-
"Be careful," Gogo the Older said one evening. It was hard to tell day and night in the worm, but today it had broke its burrow to breathe following the sun, allowing a rare sunset to shine through the hole to the outside and light the walls in red. Darryl was busy salvaging from the latest catch and had left them overseeing her makeshift distillery engine.
"Careful?" The Younger echoed, matching her master's gaze.
"Our friend..." The Older went on hesitantly, "She is boundless in her mind."
The Younger tilted her head. "Isn't that a good thing?" It would supposedly get them out of the worm, at any rate.
"She will become the impossible."
"The impossible is what we need."
"The impossible will not exist," The Older insisted, leaning forward. "We embody what is; Her arrogance will turn her into nothingness."
Gogo the Younger gave a silent measuring look and wondered what her teacher would say of the "impossible" feats he had forced his body to perform if only he remembered he were human.
"I believe her," she said at last, returning her eyes to the distillery engine. It chuffed and gurgled as it turned refuse into fuel.
Gogo the Older watched her a moment more before also turning. "Perhaps you are braver than I."
When Darryl returned, they greeted her with the same cheerfulness she showed them. Gogo the younger felt undue satisfaction noting her teacher still had more than he was shown beneath the surface.
-V-
The plan would require all of them. Darryl would show them exactly what she needed them to do and they would embody it perfectly. They had distilled oils and alcohols from gathered refuse to make a rudimentary combustion engine. They would chemically inflame and worm's innards and blast open the creature's mouth. The trick of it would be getting out before the whole thing collapsed.
It seemed simple enough, and whatever Gogo the Younger was unclear on she still had confidence in. Darryl believed it work, and thus so did she.
"On my signal," Darryl told them. Her golden hair was a wild mess now, but she had optimistically retained it. "I'll set things going in the stomach and then join you in the front. Set your charges and start moving when you hear my call."
They all nodded to each other and moments later they were going.
Gogo the Younger found her place and completed the same movements she had been shown before. Everything she did exactly as Darryl had done it: placing the package of explosive gasses, setting the fuse, opening her flintbox…
And following through with how Darryl had shown, Gogo missed striking her flints.
That was okay, though. It wasn't time yet. She smiled to herself and forced her hands to stop shaking. It was alright. When the time came, she would do it right. When the time came—
The call came up from the beast's stomach and Gogo felt her pulse quicken. She moved again and again she missed. She focused on her hands and clumsily forced them to break their memorized pattern.
The flints clicked, but not hard enough.
She could hear foot steps pounding now, then faltering, then a thud. She squeezed her eyes closed and struck.
The sparks caught the wick this time. She also caught the tip of her finger and cried out, dropping the flints and clutching her injured hand. Scrambling away, she fought her way down to the main tract leading back up to the mouth.
Somewhere in the distance, something boomed and the surroundings shook, sending her to her knees. Gogo the Older's explosive package had gone off. Hers would follow soon. She staggered up to her feet and kept going.
Ahead of her, Darryl lay sprawled, face obscured by her golden hair. Gogo the Older reached the fallen woman and slung her over his shoulders. "Hurry!" he called, starting toward the mouth.
"What's wrong with her?" Gogo the Younger called after her master, struggling to keep up. "Why—?"
She shook her head and cut herself off. It didn't matter. They needed to run, they needed to get out. They needed to get back to the world and take baths and wash the whole thing away. They would rise above the clouds and laugh.
Gogo the Younger was still thinking of the clouds when she tripped and fell into a saliva pool. And all she could do was listen as the world again shuddered and her master's footsteps disappeared.
-V-
Gogo the Younger became alone. Still alive, but alone.
Only in the physical sense, though.
"I am Gogo," she whispered to herself, shifting through the next round of refuse. "I am a member of the brotherhood of becoming."
She pushed through the trash until she found the fresh, nourishing pieces. Not just food, but the delicately carved ornaments, the reliably forged weaponry. All the good in the world she soaked in.
She drew herself up and stood as she had seen Darryl stand so many times. "I am alive," she said without prompting. She would declare into the world as many times as she needed to. "I am alive, and someday I will rise above the dawn."
-End-
Author's Note:
Gogo is a rare specimen in Final Fantasy VI in that s/he is given virtually no backstory, motivations, or even allusions in flavor text. However, in this abyss of identity, I recall reading a fan theory that Gogo is actually Darryl, Setzer's old airship buddy and former captain of the Falcon. For this one-shot, I thought it would be interesting to toy with a similar connection without fully stepping into the "everyone is someone you know" trap. Final Fantasy VI already does that beautifully enough with Shadow's story, so this had to be something different, if only marginally so.
Also, with Gogo the Mime showing up in Final Fantasy V, I figured it would be an interesting idea to make the Gogos more of a trade order than an individual. See above reasoning and a desire not to make Gogo a knock-off Gilgamesh. Even if we're miming what has already been done, we can still make it a new iteration, yeah?
Anyway, if nothing else, I hope this motivates you to go into the Zone Eater and rescue Gogo from its depths the next time you play Final Fantasy VI. Wrapped up in all that mystery is another character who deserves an ending happier than staying in a worm belly.
Thanks for reading!
-CG 8.4.22