Summary: I meet one of the greatest characters in FF as we take on the fourth Cardinal Virtue. All hail Giott the Aleforged.
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Traditions and Travails
-Here we are. Healer is my last Shadowbringers role quest. It starts at a dwarf named Giott.
Presumably a reference to FFIV’s King Giott.
-Hee! In the First, dwarves are basically lalafells with beards. Before hearing I’m from another culture, she chastises me for my shameless lack of a helm. Like a Victorian woman showing her ankles.
-oh my god I love her. She tests my skill by having us fight a wolverine, and her battlecry cracks me up.
-We’re hunting a Cardinal Virtue named Sophrosyne, originally a dwarf healer named Lamitt.
The dwarves have asked Giott to hunt her down since she’s apparently sullying dwarf rep.
GIOTT: “The problem I’m having is that Sophrosyne keeps healing itself and it’s… well, deeply annoying.”
LOLOL. She just keeps strolling around resurrecting sin eaters.
-Giott is especially spiteful towards Lamitt because she shunned dwarven tradition. I mean, we saw her sans helmet, like me. How else did she go against dwarf kind?
Prediction: by the end of this questline, we’ll see Giott sans helmet.
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Affronts and Allies
-She’s SUPER dwarfy. Drinking and fighting before our hunt continues.
-We kill a few lesser sin eaters to lure her out. She comes and resurrects them.
-Echo flashback time. I see a dwarven healer, beard and hat and all. She stumbles on a fallen Ardbert, healing him up. An adorable meeting, followed by a montage of them adventuring together.
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Scientific Method
-Giott
wants to learn more about what makes Sophrosyne unique. Wants me to
test out healing some lesser sin eaters myself and see what happens.
-My standard healing magic doesn’t do anything. Maybe Sophrosyne does something like filling them with that Light?
-Even
stranger, Sophrosyne doesn’t show up to resurrect the sin eater we just
killed. She is selective. Like, we killed a TON of sin eaters in the
Holminster Switch (an early Shadowbringers dungeon), and she never came
there. Do the sin eaters she resurrects somehow remind her of Team
Ardbert?
-I love how we wrap up each of these quests by going back to the Crystarium to drink. XD
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The Lost and the Found
-Sophrosyne
was spotted in Rak’tika and we’re off. Not like we have a plan beyond
“get a few whacks in and run away when she heals up.” Gotta admire
Giott’s honesty and persistence.
-We kill a couple of sin
eaters and she shows up. Interesting… she only resurrects one of them.
The other she intentionally leaves alone.
-Finally, we get to engage the Cardinal Sin. It’s pretty quick. I take her out while Giott handles the resurrected Sin Eater.
But of course, no way it’ll be this easy (I say as she rezzes her self).
GIOTT: “<sigh> Of course not. Healing magic is so annoying… er, no offense intended.” I absolutely adore Giott.
-As Sophrosyne rises, another Echo flashback hits me.
-The
flashback takes us to Team Ardbert attacking an owl guardian of
someplace. Looks like the final boss of… what place was that, Great
Gubal Library? Lamitt is still bearded.
LAMITT: “I’ve come this far, and I will claim the legacy of Ronka.”
-I get another of these wonderful scenarios where I play as another character. I play as Lamitt, healing up the party through the fight against this owl guardian.
-She came here to get the lost restorative magic of Ronka.
-Lamitt places some golden owl medallion on a nearby dais. An owl statue glows with light, and pours power into Lamitt. A crystal.
LAMITT: “I- I did it. The spell is mine at long last…” What spell? Some white magic version of Meteo?
“I can save my sister!” …ah shit. No way this ends well.
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Never to Return
-Giott does some research, learning that Lamitt’s sister was in Tomra.
-A sin eater emerged from the town’s tunnels and attacked Giott.
And… yeah. Shit. It looks like the specific types of sin eaters that Lamitt was reviving.
-There used to be an illness in this town called “stoneblight.” It petrified victims over time, and to isolate them, they were locked in this tunnel called the Blightwarrens.
-Echo flashback time once more.
-We see Lamitt trying to enter the Blightwarrens, presumably to save her sister from the disease. But the dwarven elders guarding the place won’t let her break quarantine. They shun her for even TRYING to go against their custom, even though she’s doing to with a possible cure.
-Or… hm. I’m not quite sure what’s happening. It seems like she DID get into the Blightwarrens, and DID cure the others, her sister included… but that because she broke some kind of rules to do so, she was a pariah.
And it’s here that she tosses off her beard and hat.
-Aha! The dwarves tossed into the Blightwarrens took off their hat and beards because it was hot and stuffy as hell down there. Makes sense.
The now cured former-stoneblighted take this new style as a symbol of their breaking free of dwarven tradition and will leave. Faces shown.
-Their mission now changes. What’s the origin of the stoneblight? It must be related to the coming Flood of Light, since the petrification so closely resembles someone transforming into a sin eater.
-She also mentions that it might be a Shadowkeeper. Like, FFXI’s Shadowlord?
-Oh god. An elf watches the happy Lamitt and Ardbert from a distance, smiling EVILLY.
-Ququshu wakes up from the vision. The sin eater was revived and fled.
I share the story. It (understandably) shakes Giott and her hardcore traditionalism.
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The Soul of Temperance
-The intro to this quest is a shock. “Giott… isn’t drinking.”
-So
it’s not that Lamitt kept trying to revive her dead sister. Rather, the
now-exiled dwarves and those with Stoneblight got hit by the Flood.
They couldn’t take refuge in the dwarf tunnels.
Sophrosyna is healing helm-less dwarves on instinct, her formerly cured comrades.
-We take on the Cardinal Virtue again, this time with a new strategy. Giott shoves a helm on the different sin eaters.
AND IT WORKS. She stops resurrecting them once they are helmeted.
Sin eaters look super goofy with helmets.
-Giott rushes up to try popping a helmet on Sophrosyna in case that stops her, but she blasts the helm out of Giott’s hand.
GIOTT: “If we had even one more helm, I could try again, but…” USE YOUR HELM! DO THE THING!
-I LOVE THIS!!! SHE RUSHES UP AND SHOVES HER OWN HELM ON THE CARDINAL VIRTUE
Giott unmasked.
-We take out Sophrosyna now once and for all. Her helmet stops her from resurrecting herself, and she drops a crystal.
???: “Tradition wouldn’t have saved her. That’s why I left.” It’s the freed spirit of Lamitt.
-Giott feels TERRIBLE about having called her a disgrace, and I love it.
[Later edit: No, this was the level 80 quest. Not sure why I didn’t notice that lol.]
OH MY GOD GIOTT TRIES GIVING HER A COMFORTING HUG BEFORE SHE DISAPPEARS
“Rest well, Lamitt. You were the best of us.”
-Back at the Crystarium, Giott reveals that her great-grandfather is the one who exiled Lamitt. That makes her decision to go helmeless now even more personal weight.
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The Wisdom of Giott
A series of screenshots collected over the course of this questline to illustrate why Giott is the literal best.
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Next time: A quest to cap off the Shadowbringers role quests with Team Ardbert’s mysterious sixth member.
