Dr. Elisabet Sobeck — founder of Zero Dawn and the woman who saved mankind from extinction by the Faro Plague — sacrificed her life in order to protect what remained of her friends when the protective doors to GAIA Prime wouldn't close, leaving the remaining Alphas exposed to the Faro Plague. Rather than wait out what's left of her life at her family's farm like in canon, she makes the long, arduous trek to the Project: Zero Dawn facility where they kept cryogenic pods, making out last-ditch effort to live to see a thriving Earth again.
A thousand years later, her clone Aloy discovered her cryogenically preserved body in the facility beneath Sunfall, and she returns to awaken her genetic progenitor after HADES is defeated and the Shadow Carja are driven off.
Choosing Life Verse is a Horizon Zero Dawn Series Fic written by mr_jaybird_619
, set in a continuity where Elisabet survived into the events of Horizon Forbidden West. The series can be read on Archive of Our Own here.
This fanfic series provides examples of:
- Adaptational Nice Guy: Aloy always was The Hero, but in the games she was The Stoic and The Aloner compared to some of the more lively personalities she encounters along her journey, having developed this kind of outlook due to her upbringing. Here, she'd more willing to accept help and companionship, even if she has to be convinced, after spending enough time with her biological mother Elisabet.
- Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Elisabet seems to take no small amount of satisfaction teasing Aloy on her crush on Ikrie.
- Animal Motifs: ARTEMIS seems to have glommed onto wolves as its way of seeing things. It describes itself being a part of GAIA as a "pack", using the same word to describe Aloy, Beta and Elisabet's family unit. It even punctuates the word with a howling wolf sound-bite.
- Ascended Extra:
- In Forbidden West, Vanasha only appears in the opening, helping rebuild Meridian at the Battle of the Alight and looking after Prince Itamen as his nanny. Here, she enters into a relationship with Elisabet and tags along with them into the West.
- AETHER in canon was perfectly willing to return to GAIA as it once was. Here, it prefers its autonomy (even in its limited capacity) and only agrees to return to GAIA and work with them if its allowed to keep its sapience.
- While Talanah only appears in one side quest in Forbidden West, here she joins the gang as Aloy's girlfriend.
- While ARTEMIS in canon was taken and integrated into the Zenith's version of GAIA off-screen, here they're the second AI Aloy finds, having escaped into the San Diego Holo-Zoo.
- Brutal Honesty: Aloy admits that she's not much of a politician, finding the whole idea of tactfully getting around to the meat of the matter eventually frustrating, but a skill she needs to learn eventually. In the meantime, her family and allies usually do the talking when it calls for it.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: It's lampshaded multiple times that Aloy's feelings of jealousy and resentment she has when Elisabet prioritizes Beta's safety or attention is not unlike a child who resents their new baby sibling because of all the attention their parents give them.
- Exact Words: Aloy and Elisabet go along with the Quen's belief that Aloy is Elisabet reincarnated while Elisabet is her birth-mother, both fact technically true in the loosest sense. It's after Thebes collapses and Ceo dies when they tell Bohai the actual details.
- For Want Of A Nail:
- Forbidden West opens with Aloy traveling to the old Far Zenith facility to find a copy of GAIA. Here, that moment is replace by her waking up Elisabet in the Zero Dawn Facility, bringing her to the Sacred Lands and then to The Cut. While Aloy procures AETHER in the Tenakth Capital, Elisabet and Vanasha visit the Far Zenith Facility to try and learn more about the Zeniths and Beta.
- While in canon Aloy, Varl and Zo failed to sway the Chorus to allow them into the Sacred Cave, here Elizabet successfully convinces them that their resignation to die is born out of faulty logic, encouraging them to actually try and fight off their deaths using their own plant-based way of thinking things.
- In Forbidden West, Aloy and Kotallo had to kill a Tremortusk and blow a hole in The Bulwark with its cannon in order to convince Tekotteh to come to the Kulrut. Here, Aloy, Varl and Kotallo manage to reframe Tekotteh's strategy of waiting out Regalla's rebellion behind The Bulwark as a sign of cowardice. Because the Tenakth are a Proud Warrior Race, he's forced to allow his soldiers to compete at the Kulrut or else lose the respect of his men.
- Has a Type: It's lampshaded that Elisabet seems to have a thing for Femme Fatale Spies, having dated Tilda and later Vanasha.
- Hereditary Homosexuality: Elisabet only seems to have a thing for women — first Tilda, then Vanasha — and her clone/daughter Aloy winds up having a thing with Ikrie in their brief time in The Cut before moving on with Talanah.
- Hollywood Atheist: Learning the science behind her world's mysticism, not to mention having been a personal victim of the Nora's beliefs, Aloy has very little patience or respect for the beliefs of those she encounters in her travels. This makes her come across as insensitive, something Elisabet (who herself is a scientist that discourages superstition) tells her is not a proper way to handle things.
- Innocent Innuendo: When Aloy remarks that they should look for "something wet" as a sign of POSEIDON, Talanah can only give her a cheeky smirk.Aloy: [Blushing] Wet like a busted pipe! Maybe some kind of infrastructure the Old Ones left behind. I don't know, there doesn't seem to be much of a city left.
- Mundane Utility: The enemy pathing feature of The Focus was used by Elisabet... to avoid annoying co-workers in the Old World.
- Nature Is Not Nice: When the Chorus make the argument that the Utaru should do nothing but let themselves die as nature intended, Elisabet manages to convince them out of this mindset by pointing out that plants have evolved ways to keep them from extinction.Elisabet: ...nature isn't passive [.] Nature fights. It scraps and claws and does everything it can to survive. There IS one thing that ties all living things together—the will to live. ...A nettle stings so that predators won't eat it. Plants send their seeds out on the wind, so that if they are dying in ground that cannot sustain them, at least their descendents can take root somewhere else and flourish. They take care of their children by changing and sending them somewhere new—would you do less for your own? Would you condemn all your innocent children to die, because you won't even risk as much as a dandelion?
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Elisabet gives out a glorious and satisfying one to Lansra when she starts accusing Elisebet of abandoning Aloy when really it was her and the Nora for doing it.Elisabet: I never abandoned Aloy! Your goddess did create her, out of my blood, in your damn mountain, but I never knew! The ones who abandoned Aloy are you, you and your superstitious, fearful tribe!Lansra: [Started stammering] I…we…the Nora are not fearful, we are the chosen people of the goddess… How could you not know of a girl of your blood?Elisabet: G—the goddess made her in my image. The goddess and I were close, but long ago a tragedy left me unaware for many years, and the goddess thought I was dead. When the goddess decided to…to have a child, one who could help her heal the earth, she made one using blood from me. There was no father, and Aloy has every right to go inside the mountain where she was born. And so do I.Lansra: [voice shaking] How…how could the goddess have not known you lived? She is all-knowing and all-powerful, but if you say you knew her…Aloy: The Metal Devil hid Elisabet from All-Mother. But Elisabet is right. She has just as much right to go behind the Sacred Door as I do.Lansra: Chosen, Chosen of the goddess. Forgive me for doubting you, Anointed, please, forgive! Forgive!Elisabet: Maybe instead of asking for forgiveness, you should stop doing things that make you have to ask for it in the first place. You never should have treated her this way. Your entire tribe shouldn't have. You should all be ashamed.Aloy: She’s right. It would be better for the Nora, all Nora, if you worried less about what was tainted and more about what is right.
- Rummage Sale Reject: Elisabet helps Beta pick out a new set of clothes from Aloy's spares to help her acclimate to Earth. The result is a mishmash of fashion that, while simple and practical, looks ridiculous to her friends and sister.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Elizabet has a PTSD flashback — or "Warrior's Shock" as Kotallo calls it — after she finds out that Ted Faro used a code she had written when she worked for him to program the Chariot line, making her tangentially responsible for the Faro Plague.
- Spared by the Adaptation:
- The whole plot hinges on Elisabet surviving to present day, rather than dying before the events of the first game.
- While the Zeniths kill Varl at Cauldron GEMINI in canon, here Tilda managed to save him by transferring her nanites into him.
- Stress Vomit: When Elisabet learns about what became of Ted — turning himself into a Genetic Abomination — her first reaction is throwing up. Not out of pity or disgust (having already lost what little respect she ever had for him by then), but from the shock of it.
