Storm on the Horizon is a crossover fanfic between Horizon Zero Dawn and Life Is Strange by Shisumo, set at the start of a New Game Plus playthrough of the former and after the "Save Arcadia Bay" ending of the latter.
After the events of Zero Dawn, Aloy wakes up in her adoptive father Rost's cabin, as though the last six months of her life never happened. Rost is still alive, and the Proving Massacre is still two days in the future. How did she get here? Does she dare to try to change the future? And what does any of this have to do with the teenaged girl in Old Ones clothing, carrying something called an "instant camera," who literally just appeared in front of her?
This fic can be read on Archive of Our Own here
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Tropes:
- Action Girl: Aloy, of course, but Max also finds a way to put her powers to combat use despite how small she is. Aloy is quite impressed when she finds that Max, through trial and error, managed to take down a Scrapper with only a knife.
- Actor Allusion: The fact that Ashly Burch voiced both Chloe Price and Aloy is mined a fair bit, with Max noting how similar Aloy's voice sounds to Chloe's. This turns out to be a clue that Elisabet Sobeck was Chloe's daughter.
- The Ageless: Max has been permanently eighteen years old ever since her suicide attempt.
- Blood Knight: Max enjoyed killing Mark Jefferson, and rewound five or six times just so she could do it again. Between that, her use of a knife as her melee weapon, and her eagerness to learn how to fight and defend herself, Aloy is reminded of Nil. In truth, Max is a lot more conflicted about killing people who aren't Mark Jefferson, even Eclipse soldiers.
- Cosmic Deadline: At the end of Chapter 9, Max learns that they have only 72 days before HADES reactivates the Faro Plague. That said, Aloy suspects that the accelerated time frame compared to the six months it took in the original timeline is because she'd spent those six months disrupting the Eclipse's activities by raiding its facilities and killing its soldiers, and that without her intervention, HADES would've accomplished its goal much sooner.
- Death by Irony: Almost happens to Max. Upon seeing Aloy jump and rappel down from a Tallneck, she's reminded of Kate's suicide, thinks Aloy's about to kill herself, and uses her power to put herself up there. The Tallneck's pulse, however, causes her to faint, and she nearly falls to her death before Aloy saves her.
- Driven to Suicide: Chloe's death left Max despondent, desperately searching for a way to save her without dooming Arcadia Bay. Eventually, she finally found one: go back in time and kill herself before she ever met Chloe. She wound up coming back as an ageless, immortal 18-year-old whose time travel powers are stronger than ever, though she can never come into contact with Chloe lest she cause the apocalypse.
- Everyone Is Bi: According to Aloy, concepts of hetero- and homosexuality don't exist in her world, and everybody just flirts with everybody they're attracted to until they find someone who likes them too. Subverted in Aloy's case when Max starts talking with her about her own attraction to women and the Old Ones' ideas about sexuality in general, which causes Aloy to realize that the only people she's ever been sexually attracted to (Talanah, Vanasha, and now Max) were all women.
- Fish out of Temporal Water: Max, one of the Old Ones, finds herself a thousand years into a post-post-apocalyptic future.
- The Fundamentalist: Bast grows increasingly disturbed by Aloy and Max's use of machines and technology, a violation of basic Nora teachings, and asks to be let go from Aloy's mission as a Seeker because of it.
- Happy Ending Override: Or rather, a Bittersweet Ending Override. When Max went back in time to let Chloe die and save Arcadia Bay, Chloe promised Max that, even though she may be dead, Max would still have the memories of the amazing week they spent together. Chloe was right, and Max came to regard those memories as a curse, spending the rest of her life knowing that that moment of happiness was cruelly yanked away by Chloe's fate.
- Identical Grandson: Elisabet Sobeck, and by extension Aloy, was Chloe Elizabeth Price's daughter. Upon hearing her voice, Max initially thinks that Aloy is Chloe, and remarks on the resemblance even before she figures out the truth.
- It's All My Fault: After Aloy tells her everything she knows about how the world ended and was rebuilt, Max's first thought is that her meddling with time is to blame. She becomes especially sure of this after finding out what Chloe's daughter Elisabet had been up to in the ensuing years.
- The Lost Lenore: Chloe for Max. Even after she found a way to save her, they could never be together without causing a disaster. Even meeting Chloe's daughter Elisabet Sobeck turned out to be enough to fling Max a thousand years into the future.
- Love Father, Love Son: Max winds up falling in love with Aloy, who is revealed to be Chloe Price's daughter's clone. Whether than means she's in love with her "daughter" or "granddaughter" depends on how you look at it.
- The Masquerade Will Kill Your Dating Life: After the events of Life is Strange and her "suicide", Max moved to San Francisco and became a barista and photographer. While she was able to cover up her powers, her eternal youth was a different story entirely, making her romances with people her age increasingly skeevy. What's more, the nature of how she saved Chloe means that she can never be with the one person she truly loves.
- Mundane Utility: Between the events of Life is Strange and her arrival in the world of Horizon, Max used her powers to get rich in Las Vegas and pay off her RV. In the future, she also uses her powers to give herself roughly six months to work out and train in various combat and survival skills, as well as correct her aim with the bow and give herself time to heal any wounds.
- New Game Plus: Aloy's loadout is consistent with all of the gear that carries over on a New Game+ playthrough. Furthermore, she also has foreknowledge of the events of the game, and is quite puzzled as to what happened to her, though she soon uses this to her advantage.
- No-Gear Level: In the Ring of Metal, upon seeing that Helis has a Focus and would immediately spot her if he merely scanned in her general direction, Aloy is forced to take hers off. When the battle begins, Aloy must fight without her Focus.
- Official Couple: As of Chapter 15, Max and Aloy are lovers, though they break up in Chapter 17 after Max tells Aloy that she knows Chloe is Elisabet Sobeck's mother.
- Peggy Sue: Aloy uses her foreknowledge of the events of Zero Dawn to try and prevent Helis, the Eclipse, and HADES from doing as much damage as before.
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: The pop culture references that Max peppers into her speech are naturally lost on hunter-gatherers in a post-apocalyptic future, who have no clue what Facebook, a Wilhelm Scream, chocobos, or Hidalgo are. It goes the other way, too; when Aloy nicknames Max "Snowflake" for her pale skin and bright blue eyes, Max cringes before explaining that "Fight Club didn’t ruin that word for you guys."
- Psychic Nosebleed: Aloy first finds Max suffering from a bad one thanks to overuse of her time travel powers, to the point where she falls faint.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Naturally, for a Life is Strange fic.
- After becoming immortal and officially dead, Max used her powers to set Arcadia Bay right. She killed Mark Jefferson (and seemed to enjoy it, since she rewound five or six times just so she could do it again), exposed Sean Prescott's financial crimes, and got Nathan and David into treatment programs. The butterfly effect also prevented the death of Chloe's father William as a pleasant side effect. As a result, both Rachel Amber and Chloe Price lived, with Chloe, instead of a rebellious punk whose life was falling apart, becoming an A student and even a member of the Vortex Club for a time. Unfortunately, Chloe giving birth to Elisabet Sobeck may have accidentally caused the Faro Plague by putting Faro Automated Systems, which became a MegaCorp on the strength of Elisabet's work, in a position to later build the Chariot line of robots. Oops.
- Max regularly uses her powers to "correct" herself. Aloy is initially quite disturbed, but gets used to it.
- Aloy uses her foreknowledge to prevent Olin and HADES from learning about her, which led to the massacre at the Proving and Rost's death in the original timeline, by having Max lead him away to drink and gamble. She instead gets made Seeker after winning the Proving and requesting, as her boon, to go into All-Mother Mountain in order to meet her mother, where the scanner recognizes her as Elisabet Sobeck just as it did in the original timeline. Without Olin spotting her and reporting her back to HADES, Aloy gets the jump on the Eclipse, killing Helis at the Ring of Metal instead of much later at the Battle of Meridian.
- Significant Green-Eyed Redhead: When Max sees Chloe and her daughter in 2022, she describes the latter as having very striking orange-red hair and hazel eyes. An important early clue that that girl is a young Elisabet Sobeck.
- Spared by the Adaptation: Rost, Bast, and Vala all survive thanks to the Proving never being attacked. Bast and Vala wind up joining Aloy, Max, and Varl on their journey.
- Stupid Sexy Friend: Aloy feels quite conflicted about her growing feelings for Max, and tries to push them aside just as she did her attraction to Talanah and Vanasha. Their brief fling in Chapter 15 only makes it worse.
- Time Master: Max Caulfield's "suicide" made her time travel powers far more potent in a manner that she compares to Slaughterhouse-Five, able to travel to any point in time just by picturing it in her head as opposed to needing a picture. What's more, she's gained the ability to teleport by picturing herself at not just a specific time, but also a place.
- Trauma Button: For Max, Mark Jefferson's kidnapping of her left her terrified of being held captive. When Apeph tries to pin her down and rape her while holding a knife to her throat, she turns into a berserker as she brutally murders him, picturing him as Mark. It was only the second time ever (the first being, of course, Mark) that she felt zero remorse for killing somebody.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: If Max hadn't gone back and saved Chloe, Elisabet Sobeck would never have been born. Without Elisabet's work, Faro Automated Solutions wouldn't have grown into a MegaCorp that built the Chariot line of robots that destroyed the world.
- Weaponized Teleportation: Max's enhanced abilities let her move through not just time, but also space, specifically to moments at an exact point in time. She uses this power to stealthily get the jump on enemies.
- Wham Episode:
- Chapter 5, where Max tells Aloy how her life went after the events of Life is Strange and how she wound up in the future. Specifically, she met Chloe's daughter. A red-haired, hazel-eyed girl who was two years old in 2022... a perfect description of Elisabet Sobeck.
- Chapter 9 ends with Max jumping back from the future to warn Aloy and Rost that they have only 72 days before HADES reactivates the Faro Plague.
- Chapter 16 reveals that Max knew all along that Aloy was a clone of Elisabet and, therefore, Chloe's biological daughter. She figured this out the moment Aloy mentioned Elisabet's name, though she suspected it before then. In Chapter 17, Max reveals this to Aloy, who is furious and feels betrayed.
