swordliliesareawesome

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I drew my dnd character Harmony! I haven't been able to yap about this so take the art and go if you want, but gosh darn it is there a story to this one.

Tldr, she was betrayed by one of her friends and put into a trance of serenity after being reassured that her friends wouldn't betray each other by the betrayer.

Harmony doesn't deal with betrayal well.

So. The party went to a bar. Things have been rough latley, so Harmony decided to have a drink or three. One party member took a power enhancing drug that gave them bloodlust and then blamed Harmony when she broke the door down to chdck on the thumps and thuds going on in the room.

Harmony's efforts only ended up with Rouwen nearly killing Ardie.

Once things did calm down, everyone went to the bar. Ardie went outside and Harmony went to check on him. All she found was a sticky note claiming that he wenr home.

Harmony goes home to meet him at their shared house becauae she has a wee bit of seperarion anxiety and Ardie had already gone missing earlier.

She finds the house empty.

Harmony messages the others and begins desperatly searching for him. She was feeling worried out of her mind. Harmony swears that she see's Ardie right around every corner, but he isn't there.

Eventually she finds him outside of the bar, greviosly injured. Apparently, he had been kidnapped and only just released after questioning.

Harmony ends up going home with Ardie despite being loath to split the party. The others had apparently done quite a number on a new bird villian named Koreano who had kidnapped Ardie the 1st (and second...?) time while she was apart from them.

Harmony opens up to Ardie about her fears of the party fighting each other and someone becoming seriously hurt.

Ardie comforted her with the song he always sings when brading her hair ("What We Have Is You") and a hug.

The panic attack receeds and Harmony decides to start prunning some trees in her garden so they could have s'mores later.

Ardie starts singing, and there are harminies present despite Harmony never joining in. This is the last thing she remembers before falling into a serene trance.

Ardie sets a can playing music on the ground. He walks inside and rememerges as Koreno, the metallic wings apparently only a prop. Grabbing his things and Harmony, he flies off. On his way, he grabbed Aul, who was hanging wanted posters for Koreno at Rouwen's request, with a song about being asked to do impossible tasks.

The next thing Harmony rembers is being woken from her trance by being smacked by one of those metal wings flying off to hit her in the face and break her nose. (Taking 20 whole points of damage)

"Whats going on?" Harmony desperatly asks, not knowing where to go or how to protect her precious friends. No one awnsers. Their ears are all blocked so that they don't get trapped by Koreno's song.

Harmony slips back under, lullled back into serenity.

When she wakes up again, Sebation (one of her party members) was pulling her close with his grappling hook. The damage woke her from her trance.

And she see's Koreno the supposed dark elf looking more like a beloved tiefling. A spellbook picked up from a defeated villian in hand and removed gloves showing Ardie's skins.

Harmony feels anger boil up inside her. She wants to hit him, to kill him for hurting her friends. "Why?" She asks.

Ardie is subdued and the can's of entrancing music destroyed.

Aul, a goblin npc who is just a kid who idolizes are party, sees Rouwen standing over a bloodied Ardie and panics, frantic to heal him.

But he was stuck up in Koreno's nest, the same place Harmony was before Sebation pulled her down.

Harmony rushes to his side to provide comfort. It isn't enough to calm him.

Rouwen, seeing just who he had nearly killed, sacrificed his own health to the point of passing out to heal Ardie.

Ardie rushed up to comfort the distressed Aul sang song after song to try to heal him.

Harmony doesn't offer her healing to him this time.

Ardie told Aul not to be mad at Rouwen because "he didn't know."

Harmony pursed her lips. While Aul was right by Ardie's side, Harmony is a bit off. She was hugging Aul, but she backed up once Ardie showed up.

She is there to comfort the panicking Aul, not Ardie. And Ardie was doing a better job then her anyways.

"But you knew," Harmony almost whispered, her voice soft, but her betrayal leaked through.

"...I did." Ardie abashedly admitted.

Caspian, who acts like a big brother to Aul, climbed up to the nedt to give his own comforts the goblin child.

Harmony stayed silent. This told her everything she needed to know. It was time to redraw the lines in the sand of who she would give her undying loyalty to and who apathy if not hatred. It was the bargain she made. It was the only way to care so deeply and to protect what was hers.

In her mind, Ardie is not someone safe anymore. Its not about trust, but it totally is. She can't take that Ardie would blatantly lie to her and purposefully hurt her friends.

So Ardie and those who put him before her friends aren't neccasarily her friends anymore. They are the out group.

Of course, this does depend on how the others react of course. But as far as Harmony's concerned, Ardie shouldn't even be a Sentinel anymore.

Thats why when Ardie said that he wanted to rest up at home, Harmony didn't insist to follow out of concern for his well being. No.

"Give us space," Harminy asked. "At least for a day."

So Ardie left. And Caspian, his lover, and Aul followed.

If Harmony cut Ardie out, she would lose all of them. And Sebation was basically Ardie's dad. So he might not stay either.

Its a good thing that Rouwen was already on the top of her list as the person she would sacrifice everything to protect. A part of her had always expected betrayal.

Now that it came, she knew just how much she was willing to give up to cut her losses.

Give and take. It was the bargain that she made.

So as everyone left the nest, Harmony stayed. Her arms still wrapped around her knees in a tight hug. Blood drips doen her face from a broken nose but she ignores the healing potion at her feet.

Ardie had rolled it to her when he saw how injured she was.

Harmony wasn't going to use it. Not if it came from him.

Instead she would stew in her thoughts and the betrayal that she always feared would happen.

When your friends are everything, the slope from enemy to foe sure is slippery.

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Me to my DM

haha. You did irreparable damage btw

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Agatha Moon after stabbing all her friends in the basement after the demon she guessed was in her friend finally came out and tried to ditch her after she saved his life since of course the others wanted to kill the literal demon so she got mad enough to stab everyone around her--repeatedly.

Somehow, 0 deaths.

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i am nooooot locked the fuck in. im locked the fuck out. call the locksmith

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You guys are lying. Don't let some vauge loyalty to minecraft make you choose that boring although vibrant blue over that layered green stone with geometric edges and the most perfect highlights ever.

Be real.

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I didn't know this before, but it makes sense. Its why people say that black people have been targeted by the church in the past when I know that Jospeh Smith welcomed them and tried to free them. I heard that Joseph Smith was welcoming to Native Americans, but I've also heard whispers that we have done them wrong.

This is why.

After Jospeh Smith, there was a corrupt leader just like it is so common to see in the scriptures. We aren't immune to corruption, so find the truth and hold onto it for dear life.

The Crimes of Brigham Young: the Briefest Introduction

If you're going to be LDS long term, one of the facts you have to accept and make peace with never trying to dispute, is that Brigham Young was a horrible person.

We don't openly talk about this as a community, so you can reach adulthood without ever having to wrestle with this too much. But that makes it all the more shocking when you discover how bad he was.

To say he was deeply flawed doesn't do it justice. Your uncle who says hateful stuff at the dinner table and disrespects his wife and children is deeply flawed. Brigham Young is so much worse than that, by several degrees of magnitude. He introduced and was complicit in extreme violence that was unnecessary and unjustifiable. By the standards of his day and ours, from the perspective of those inside the community and outside, he wasn't a good person. If what you imagine a good leader to be is the King Benjamin definition of someone who does good for his people and doesn't enrich himself from their labors, that's not a test Brigham Young can pass. At all. Not even a little bit.

There's too much history to get into, but here are the basics:

Brigham Young enriched himself constantly from other people. He gave himself the largest allowance of any Church leader in our history. He was living in finery when the rest of the Utah Territory was living in deprivation and squalor. He abused his position within the Church/consecration to make sure he never went without. D. Michael Quinn is the best authority we have on church finances and, to summarize his work, Church leadership has only improved over time in terms of leaders not abusing Church resources. But that was very easy to do because of how much Brigham Young abused them for his personal benefit.

The fact that he was openly racist and introduced slavery to the Utah Territory, undoing the work of Joseph Smith to put black and white Saints on more equal footing with each other is no secret. The Church openly admits to that one now, which is good. We need to be honest about the harm the institution has done in the past towards black people, and we're doing better on that front.

Where we still fail is the overwhelming amounts of violence and genocide our people engaged in against various indigenous tribes across the Midwest and in the areas of pioneer settlement in the Intermountain West. You may have heard of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which is the event where John D. Lee murdered a group of innocent white travelers that were passing through Utah. What you may not know is that skirmish was part of the larger Black Hawk War against indigenous tribes that included over twenty years of violence, in which our people were consistently the aggressors. Mountain Meadows is the one you've heard of because, true to American form, we only acknowledge white wrongdoing when it hurts other white people. The number of indigenous people who were murdered in genocidal violence by the hands of our people, at the express orders of Brigham Young, is undeniable. It's well-documented history.

This is just one extermination order that exists in which senior Church leadership calls for the total extermination of entire indigenous tribes and nations. They used the Nauvoo Legion to do this.

You would think a group of people who were exterminated with orders like these would know better. But that's the trouble with unhealed trauma: it keeps you from learning from the worst things that happen to you and makes you repeat them instead.

Brigham Young didn't want to live adjacent to indigenous people in the Utah Territory and surrounding areas. He wanted their anhialation. He wanted to take their lands and their possessions. That's what he did to indigenous people who helped our people survive in terrain and elements they weren't prepared to live in. He rewarded them with violence, dishonesty, and betrayal.

There are many reasons you will hear me say that I want a one-on-one socker bopper fight with Brigham Young in a Wendy's parking lot. He has a lot to apologize for, to me and many other people. You cannot begin to understand what that means if you've never seen the scope of how much harm he did.

I love y'all. I'm sorry if I'm the one to tell you this, especially if your people were involved and you were lied to about it. You deserve the truth. That's why I'm telling you. We cannot heal from what we don't acknowledge, and so much of the way we are today as a community is a direct result of all this violence. It's why our people mistrust outsiders, attempt to solve problems with unnecessary violence, and discredit any criticism for their loyalties to the prophet and senior Church leadership. It's who our people have been for so long, there is real intergenerational fear in trying to be anything else.

But that healing is necessary so we can stop repeating the mistakes of the past.

The Book of Mormon teaches in 2 Nephi 9:40:

I know that the words of truth are hard against all uncleanness; but the righteous fear them not, for they love the truth and are not shaken.

We are comfortable acknowledging this to be true about outsiders. Do we believe it when it concerns our own? Do we actually care more about what is right, rather than who we want to believe is right?

Such examination requires faith, honesty, and courage. Truth doesn't have the power to destroy faith, only flimsy and undeserved certainty. And if your certainty was based in falsehood, then best to dispense with it so you can live more fully in the truth.

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"Why am I doom scrolling?" I wonder, disgusted with myself despite being delighted by my discoveries.

Managing to wrench myself away after hours, I laugh it off. Look around. At the mess surrounding me, demanding my attention.

My heart clenches in my chest. The deadline repeats in my head. Breathing is manual but controlled.

This needs to be done and dealt with. But I open my phone.

I can't do this alone, so I won't do it at all.

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The squeezing of my heart in my chest just won't go away but its already 11:30 and I have 7 am work tomorrow so can I reschedule this or--

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What did I get done today? Oh you know. Went to work. Actually cooked myself lunch. Showered. Had a small mental breakdown. Packed. Mental breakdown intensified. Ate dinner. Finished a fic and posted it.

Normal stuff :>

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You know when you get too stressed so you stop doing any of the things you need to and instead just spend 3 hours on you phone while knowing that the date all your things need to be packed up is steadily approaching, because soon you will be gone and moved out and this time you won't be seeing your things again, but at the same time don't you dare keep all that trash and clutter and toys because "what are you a child?" and besides "you should be spending time with the family you have so little left" and yet "don't forget your room; oh it makes you anxious when i bring it up well thats a good thing because you should be anxious because time is ticking and where have you been all day, is dnd really a good use of your time and most importantly why don't you spend more time with the family?"

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@ other writers: how the hell do you write short things????

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So, what started out as the idea for one drawing to get myself to work in my sketchbook and stay positive over the summer turned into a series of four Sanders Sides themed motivational posters because that’s who I am as a person…

Motivational Roman, India ink and colored pencil.

Drawing includes the phrase “You Will make your Dreams a Reality” in cursive lettering framed by a satin ribbon reminiscent of Roman’s princely sash. He’s a dreamer, but he’s also a go-getter so he seemed like the appropriate choice to start off the series.

Motivational Logan, Micron pen and colored pencil.

Drawing includes the phrase “EVEN A SMALL IMPROVEMENT IS STILL PROGRESS” in a no-nonsense, architectural drafting style font framed by a silky blue tie. Logan is the man with a plan and would understand that every little step toward a goal should be recognized.

Motivational Patton, Micron pen and colored pencil.

Drawing includes the phrase “dO whAt mAkEs yOUr InnEr chIld HaPPy” in a simple font that bounces between upper and lowercase letters (this is how I wrote as a kid) framed by Patton’s gray cardigan like a warm hug. He’s a lovable, wrinkly sorta guy who just wants what’s best for you.

Motivational Virgil, Micron pen and colored pencil.

Drawing includes the phrase “You have Fought your DEMONS, you can handle ANYTHING” in a wispy, sharp, Gothic style font (that was probably the most fun to make out of them all) framed by Virgil’s hoodie. He’s a bit of a self-deprecating edge-lord, so I don’t doubt that he’d say something like this in an attempt to be motivational, however, this is more based on how I personally view my anxiety.

I had a lot of fun with this, I hope you all enjoy and are motivated as well! Thanks to @thatsthat24​ for being my muse and @welcome-to-the-joangle​ for helping to create such wonderful characters!

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Pandora is wild. Polyphemus from Epic the Musical switched to Best Day of My Life by American Authors and I burst out laughing.

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I'm trying to draw my OC and am loseing motivation in proportion to my sanity. Halp.

It doesn't help that this is my first real attempt at digital art.

What does help is that I'm drawing a moment when one of Harmony's friends put her in a trance in order to go out as a villian that her party had to fight before. The lines are going to turn into the music notes of the song that Ardie sang to her for reassurance just moments before.

This is her last forced moment of serenity before her world came tumbling down.

Now if I can only motivate myself to draw her clothes... It doesn't help that the clothes in the refrence don't work very well for the campaign's style so I want to change them

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So I have this big fic idea I want to do but it scares me that my writing isn't good enough for extended/long stories and this one means a lot to me. Help me out please

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I've been comparing and contrasting my dnd characters and now I am even more pumped for my next dnd session.

Agatha explodes when she breaks. She makes it everyone elses problem because she is so used to being alone, and she is sick of it. She will hurt anyone caught in the cross fire.

Esmerelda implodes when she breaks. She is used to everyone else bending to her every need, that when she breaks she is incapable of giving herself that same grace. She has to deal with the fact that she is the root cause which leads to self blame and self hatred.

And now there is Harmony. She breaks quietly but completly while the other two have shards of themselves that cause them to bleed. She is constantly seeking out for reassurance, so when she breaks, she does it alone. She doesn't want anyone to see her break, even if they are oh so helpful from pulling her back from the edge of insanity when she does.

But when she breaks, she rebuilds herself as someone different instead piecing together a broken version of herself.

She is not afraid to cut people out if it means her friends stay safe, even if it means the boundary between friend and foe shifts.

You could say she implodes, but not in the same way as Esmerelda. Because Harmony just holds it in until she can use her anger as a flawed rightous fury to acheive a means to an end.

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I'm destroyed. Harmony had a heart to heart about fears of her friends turning on each other with Ardie.

Ardie charmed her with a song to put her in a trance and slipped into his disguise as Koreano, a current villian (but not bbeg).

Right after Arsie told Harmony it would be okay after she said, "If you turn on each other, you guys can really hurt each other."

Then she gets kidnapped to the birds nest. And apparenrly Aride's players dmed the DM this earlier:

Ardie now recognizes Harmony is a problem. Harmony is a thorn in his plans. …He’s sung to her plenty of times before. Surely this won’t be any different. And besides, this way, she can keep an eye on Aul.

I'M SO GLAD I MADE MY RANKINGS BEFORE THIS (its for my charachter's thing with bargaining). And Ardie is at the bottom. Things are about to go down.

For now, I need to pretend to be normal