After Desmond finished his speech, I went “wait a minute, that sounds familiar”. There’s a lot of similarity there with Glenn Yarbrough’s It’s So Easy Not to Try.
Chapter title from Beta-senpai (who is still not beta’ing this whole story as he’s not familiar with Assassin’s Creed but is lending a hand here and there). I also sent him part of the speech and he went “I’m sensing some well-earned hostility there...”
compilation of weirdly 10x more relevant to Desmond than your average TSW character dialogue from Krieg:
“Are you here for a signature? I'll make it out to "Christ almighty," since you're so intent on dying for our sins.”
(He did also mention ‘the buzz fades’. That’s less Desmond-specific, though.)
“I’m a writer. I make millions repeating myself. What’s your excuse?”
“Who would you be, what would you be, without this, without your precious war on evil, without your secret world, your sacred brotherhoods, your ranks and titles and rituals. You’d be just another rat stuck in the race with a dead-end job, living for a paycheck and the weekends.” (...not that Desmond would think that was a bad thing.)
“You soak in it so others don’t have to. You take one for the team.”
“Maybe it’ll be different this time. Maybe you’ll save everyone.”

the lair area is actually near the Park, not the black goat woods. I think I just included it before the Filth pool because it felt like something important to include and I wasn’t going to have it pop up again—except now it has, so now it’s non-euclidian with two different entrances far away from each other and absolutely no explanation. Random non-euclidian geometry is perfectly in-character for this game.
Also almost named this Outside the Story, but the next chapter’s title is more concrete, so I thought I’d go for contrast.
 

Phoenix you and Edgeworth are entirely made of dramatic gestures

I also wonder if the strong ‘opt-in concrit’ stance goes alongside the heavily minority-based nature of Ao3 writerbase. Because yeah, if you’re getting a lot of unsolicited ‘you’re living wrong’ criticism in real life, you’re hardly going to want that from your escape.

for those of you who make fun of the idea that all lowercase fiction is an artistic choice, I would like to share the reasons why I did this for a few stories, because I suspect others might be doing it for the same reasons but be unable to articulate why. And yes, I had to do it deliberately, because the word processor I was using kept capitalizing letters so I had to delete the letter and uncapitalize it or undo the autocorrect. For the few fics that I did it for, it was an artistic choice. In my case, the few it made sense for were dreamlike or dissociating, so it communicated a feeling of being unmoored from reality or the usual standards of reality. I can also point to the culprit as to who gave me the idea in the first place: E. E. Cummings, though the ‘common knowledge’ that he never used capital letters might have been a misunderstood exaggeration.

Warning: this might be a feels chapter.

Andrew briefly considered buying Xander a pack of smokes and went ‘that’s not going to help’.