The Plight of Dragons
(First written from July 4th, 2025 to August 8th, 2025)
Glossary
This section details various relevant parts of the story. Underlined entries have links to pages that explain them in further detail.
- Daikokuten: A character from the 2018 video game Dragalia Lost. A dragon with traits of a mouse. Despite obviously being based on the Dragalia Lost character’s design and basic abilities, it was never confirmed if his past was related to the game.
- “End of Service”: The context used in the story pertains to certain video games, which may be designed to have some connection to online activities. For these games, “End of service” is one way of referring to when the game is no longer going to be made officially available to play. Dragalia Lost‘s “end of service” happened November 2022.
- Vanitas DS: Also known as “Vanitas“. A character from the 2010 video game Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep (where he was only known as “Vanitas”, and looked different). He has been caught up in a series of events that have left him confused about his beliefs and morals over the course of Chaos Zone, and is still struggling to find an answer by the start of this story.
Story
(The story begins sometime in May 2024, somewhere unknown and uninhabited on Earth)
Afterword
The writing process of this story was quite different from most of my prior Chaos Zone writing: For one, I was still accommodating for the lower activity among other writers since some time in 2024; “A Spirit’s Self-Reflection” was also written in such a context, though while I had been taking week-long pauses between consecutive updates for that story (and continued to do so for the first few segments of this story), I eventually reduced my limitation so updates were at least a day apart, which I think gave me a much better flow writing the story piece by piece.
Before I even started, there was the issue that Daikokuten and Vanitas DS were preoccupied in a multi-writer story that had yet to conclude, while I had the basic concept of this story on the backburner. With how long I was waiting to begin tackling the ideas of “The Plight of Dragons”, I eventually found the compromise of writing the story anachronistically; this story took place after the multi-writer story that was still in progress, but when that other story eventually resumed (shortly after “Plight of Dragons” finished, funnily enough), I made sure it concluded in a way that could lead into the beginning of this story.
Daikokuten was far from my first character to significantly diverge from the backstory of his source material, but the steps I had taken to try and figure out how to introduce him in Chaos Zone in the first place meant I had paid extra attention to the implications of his presence to those familiar with the original character, and decided to write a story that not only established how different Daiko was from his original Dragalia Lost counterpart, but also who he was in this continuity, all written around the initial idea of how he would react to learning of such a grandiose “past” that he never had.
I feel out of all the things I’ve written for Chaos Zone, this is the first time I really avoided having a super conclusive ending where the characters cleanly sorted out their conflict; a big part of this was because on top of Daikokuten having an identity crisis, Vanitas DS had always been a character who struggled with his own identity, and I always felt each attempt to find a conclusion ended up unfinished or inconclusive in some way. I decided to channel that into a unique end where, without someone else trustworthy to give them answers, the duo tried to deal with the situation best they could on their own, despite not being confident in their own wisdom.
Brash Buster 