#ICLI

[scrumpygoat]

>:) no refine.... only post

[eluviannaa]

Porple

[captainqster]

Karma police, arrest this man

[eluvianna-ooc]

The absolute giggles for the week

[cklukilutz]

Without taking new pics, post one of your OCs as a:

Romanceable NPC

Questgiver NPC

Final Boss NPC

[cyberneticlagomorph]

They should invent cybernetics that don't overheat

[A short video

Jack's face is drenched in sweat, sticking her hair to her scalp and neck.

She moves her hair aside and points the camera at the vents on the back of her neck.

They're pretty small but all of them are leaking steam. After a second there's a loud whooshing and even more steam pours out of her neck vents with a hiss.]

[dogicrimsonofficial]

6 days until Nameday! Next Friday, Tale is having mini-RP event -- namely in their little tavern. Music, drinks, meet-cutes etc to celebrate... Including some sketches from yours truly. Because there is no stopping me if I spot a character with a neat design, or if inspiration hits.

If you want to join in, we're having the bash on June 6th, 6 PM Central at Mateus, Empyreum, Ward 14 Plot 4.

Keep in mind; We might have some canon characters roaming about! Please be respectful towards them, Tale!Haurchefant for example has a full storyline that expands all the way to Endwalker. We offer the same courtesy to any visiting canon-character roleplayer -- it would not be the first time Tale has accidentally pulled in people from other dimension or timelines.

Only thing I will ask is to be nice to one another, and avoid all EW / Post-ShB spoilers. (I am in EW, and friend is in Post-ShB). Don't even have to bring a gift, just good vibes!

Alcohol and snacks will be supplied by the FC!

[longlaz1972]

Neset Icli

[punchelf]

[Airship (landing)]

Junelezen, Day 16

(I just love the windows in the Gridania airship landing)

[syn0vial]

man, i was having doubts about romancing wyll as astarion (mostly bc karlach is also RIGHT THERE) but then i had astarion confess he was a vampire spawn and wyll's answer made me laugh so much. does this mean he knew the whole time in my tavs' playthrus as well? literal monster hunter immediately clocked that tav was traveling with a vampire spawn and just went, "eh, he's cute though so i'll let it slide." that's perfect. romance activated.

[avampyone]

Junelezen Day 24: Lost

Couple Torrian and Revien, who are longtime friends of Hemlocke, invite him on a trip to Radz At Han. Torri claims to know of a delicious spot for cuisine, but they get lost along the way. Tired and hungry, they end up at the Meyhane to rest. It appears Torri had brought a map of Tural, looking for tacos..

[eluviannaa]

A priestess in the wrong cloth, some might say. And a sight among the gleaming plate and ceremonial gold—both somehow deemed *absolutely essential* for slaying nerubians.

Her attire was elegant but functional, the hood of her cloak drawn up, casting violet eyes into a band of shadow. Since the Arathi were not known for turning away staff or blade, the sidelong glances that followed her through Aegis Gate could stare all they liked.

She was to become familiar with the Dawntowers, and eventually, investigate the compromise that had taken a particular one in Mereldar.

Yet, the nerubians still burrowed. And new allies made their introductions to Hallowfall.

@dawn-blossom

I like to imagine the Richard Armitage × Tilda Swinton voiceclaim banter is nothing short of wonderful thespian drama.

[wishmaker-astra]

Honest question, how many of you know who my friend I'm now dating is?

[leastworstwizard]

>>You've never been able to consider yourself a meditative person. You think about specific things, but you... brood over a subject. Bellamy Balder likes to worry in the best of cases, obsess in the worst, and panic the whole time. You get too comfortable, and BOOM, you're asleep. It's a real pain in the ass to you, and remains the hardest parts of some of the trickiest spells you've ever learned. Not that a lack of skill is currently stopping you from trying to mentally feel your way around the controls to the physical shape of the tower.

>>Inside the darkness of closed eyes and swirling thoughts, you feel as though you're body, though firmly sat on a pillow, swims through a dark space, a void anchored around some core. You described this thing as an obstacle, an obstacle to your control of the tower, but you're more sure that it's actually a means to control it. The presence is as invisible as anything else in this meditative void of noise and nothingness, but it's inanimate, still, a sphere amid the swirl of memories and concerns you glue together with what-ifs and if-onlys.

>>An image flashes through your mind, scenes from old movies, of sci-fi devices and ancient technology engaged with by the touch of fingertips. You figure that, seeing as how this meditative session is leaning hard on the tactile imaginings of a meditative space inside your own mind, this sci-fi inspiration is as good as any. Your imagine is an overactive beast, more chatty even than your familiar, but it's been silent on the mysteries of your pocket plane until now. You imagine your palms placed against that cold, form-without-form, before attempting to wrap your fingers around it's massive surface, to get each finger tip placed flush against the anchored core.

>>There's a sudden hum, physical, imagined, maybe both, emanating up your arms. Your palms feel icy cold, your fingers numb. You realize with a sudden start that your body will not answer you, your eyes are glued shut. Your mental panic grinds like sparking gears against your body's continued level breaths, as if you've been trapped inside of your own, still-breathing corpse.

>>And then you lose all physical sensation, just in time for that black space, the break in the torrent of thoughts around you, to explode with light.

>>Your eyes are blinded with white light, tinted ever so slightly in blues and yellows and reds, greens and purples. The lights move like a great school of fish, crashing forward against each other in a rushing horde. Only they are endless currents, carrying the faint echoes of memories, of words said, words received, words never delivered. In the nearest tangled beam of light, you swear you see the face of a woman you thought you loved. In another, you see your mother how you remember her, not how she is. There again you see the memory of your father, or the memory of a dog.

>>As the surprise, the bedazzlement, fades from your eyes, your attention turns quickly from the memories raging around you, whose bright lights only highlight the sticky black anxieties between them all. Then it turns to that anchored, foreign presence you'd been tangling with. Once grappled, now visible, the thing reveals itself to be a truly massive sphere, made of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of tiny, flat planes. The work of master-craftsmen, or of some arcane ritual. You recognize enough of the arcane art to understand this thing is no mere crystal, no artifact.

>>It occurs to you that might be holding onto the very heart of your very small pocket plane, the power source that keeps the walls propped up around your little tower. Your hands pull away from it, and you watch with wonder as fading strands of light follow from the specific facets your finger-tips had contacted. The object suddenly animates, detaching itself from you, leaving your disembodied spirit to float aimlessly in the thoughtscape. You're not actually sure that the thing even IS a crystal, to be honest, doubly so when it splits in half.

>>Less of a crystal and more of a carved stone, made of some alien mineral, the great big ball, which you've already named the Myriahedron, splits itself cleanly in half, horizontally at the center, parting seams where not even the suggestion of one had been previously. As its bottom half drops further apart, machinery emerges from the exposed base of both halves, antenna of a sort, emerging from some boxed device; seconds before the Myriahedron finishes opening, the antennae flash with light, and the separated pairs reconnect with golden beams of light.

>You manage to will yourself forward, remembering finally that you're a researching wizard and not on a hallucinatory trip, as the very air between the two beams begins to shimmer with gold light of their own, faint and translucent. Once the full sheet of light is formed, a single golden dot, strong as the framing beams, appears against it, projected by the emerging, machine arm, copper-colored like the projector equipment casing. Your brain suggests "paper," as you watch that gold light trace it's way down the paper in a continuous left-to-right motion, as if creating lines to write by.

>>You reach out to touch the sheet, but the Myriahedron shudders at your response, the light turns a deep, ocean-green color. The entire thoughtspace loses its ambient light in response to your meddling, your thoughts muting -finally muting- in the process. Your hand looks ghostly pale in the sudden, stark light, but your eyes are draw quickly back to the projected sheet of paper by further noise. The upper half of the Myriadhedron opens further, two more compartment doors near the projector, which drop a pair of copper-colored devices, tethered to the carved heart of the pocket plane by newly-green threads of light. One is a nearly weightless pen, carved of the copper-like alloy the whole machine is made from in the shape of an elaborate writing quill, the other item is a thick book, bound in some alien-looking leather, more like flexible scales than proper hide, and studded with more copper-like alloy.

>>They merely GOT your attention, though. In the eerily comfortable light, this aquatic green, that seems to carry both the warmth of sunlight and the cold of the depths, your eyes are suddenly riveted to the paper. You wouldn't think the solid light designed, or even capable of showing your reflection, so your mind honed in on it for a second. The Bellamy on the other side of the paper sheet looks back at you with dead eyes and a sneer, until you blink, and see nothing again. The harsh shadows suddenly feel less than comfortable, and you close your eyes tightly, hoping to see something that might help you make quick, disposable sense of what you think you saw when they open.

>>When you open your eyes again, though, they are blurry, syrupy, the results of smoking weed for ten straight hours. Not blurry enough to hide the sudden trick of the light. For a fraction of a moment, there's nothing in front of you but green light, and the black shadow of an impossibly massive hand, closing around you. Again your eyes snap shut, your hands swinging wildly through the air, as your free-floating through thoughts suddenly makes you feel like a sitting duck to... what, though.

>>That sudden fear is halted by that thought, and your flailing is abruptly shut-down by clapping your own hands together. You open your eyes in time, only to find yourself in your meaty, meaty body again. The room is unfamiliar to you, but it's clearly some place in your tower that wasn't there before, or perhaps was simply inaccessible to you. Then you realize your body really HAD been floating, at which you fall six feet into a bed of extremely YOU-coded pillows, all colored in blues and greens, with the odd yellow here and there, all in a myriad of shapes.

>>As you pick yourself up from the mess of pillows, you realize they're filling in a recession in the floor of this cylindrical chamber, at the center of which is the Myriahedron. Either you summoned it to this new chamber, accidentally, or else you figured out how to get into this room. Also accidentally. Either way, yours quickly lock in on a staircase, one leading upwards, which gives you pause, makes you wonder if this is some new sub-level of the tower, under the unwelcome water flooding your plane. Regardless figuring out how to get back to the main entrance to the tower is your most pressing goal, and you can wonder if that weird reflection was just your depression or something later.

>>You know you won't, because dealing with it means processing some new grief, and you're SO over that. Especially with cool wizard shit to do, you think, trying and succeeding at prying the Myriahedron's book from its light tether. You'll take this with you instead, and read it before bed, instead of wondering what the fuck was even all of that.

[interdimensionalburnout]

>>You're not actually sure where you are, anymore. Far beyond anything you've done. No contours touch your hand that you, at some point, set up for you later enjoy. You've fallen through every safety net you ever laid, no in fact you laid down so many nets, you attempted so many contingencies, that the ground below you is gone from sight. You've fallen through those redundancies and into dead earth. The great, dark sea of the self, of your self, has consumed you. No one could ever save you from you, no matter how many precautions you take.

>>So the sea of self has consumed you. You let go of the mask of Hermes, that little thing you hadn't expected to get, to then want, to then be too terrified to let go of. But that mask was just driftwood you were holding onto, you're a creature of self, Baines, you know that you can't breathe free air, not without the rest of you.

>>Pulled below a surface, pulled into a reflective, malachite ocean, by grasping hands, cloying for you to come back, to not leave everything you've done behind. You feel invisible hands, individual digits around your throat, around your lips, your eyes, grasping your hair and pulling on your naked form as you leave some perceived light-of-the-surface behind.

>>The halo of light vanishes before you can think on it, and suddenly the pulling has stopped. You haven't drawn a breath in this place yet, your body tense and your mouth dry. You come to rest on some floor, some black, loose material that doesn't scatter like sand under the sea. Fractions of seconds occasionally flash dull light from above; you have a purpose for being here, they tell you. You have brought yourself to this depth for a reason, do not waste it.

>>But you haven't exactly moved in hours. Or what feels like hours. Whirling through invisible landscapes, rolling down unseen planes and being hurled through storms of inky blackness, a boiling storm of unseen emotions that condensed before your eyes, a rising moisture of some idea given a form, for the visual learner to float across the raging surface of.

>>You blink, and stare back at yourself. There's a young person suspended above you, laying parallel and looking closely at your face. The glimmer of youth hasn't faded, hasn't been subsumed by... "Time?" The voice is yours, scratchy, thick with an accent from a city you haven't seen in eons. It chokes when it speaks, just as your silent voice chokes in your throat, "History? What's it got on us? I thought we were bad motherfuckers." You can merely shrug, in the black sand, seemingly paralyzed only by emotional exhaustion, you can move, but you can't move, only look away from the search gaze of yourself. Two good eyes stare down at you.

>>After a long, heavy silence, you steal as much of a glance at your self, at this moving photo of your past as you can, afraid that he'll speak before you can find the missing words in your own younger freckles, before you can tell yourself, Berri Baines, "Did you know that you're queer?" The apparition of yourself shuts a pre-opened mouth, but not before you see two silvered canine teeth, brand new. You couldn't have been more than twenty. "Well, we're queer," you correct yourself with a grunt, forcing energy that isn't there through a body that just wants to lie in repose for a minute longer; the deep aches make your grunt into a laugh, and in a second you're sitting upright, still looking at the ghost of yourself, "If we were as smart as we think we are, we'd've worked on that before real life got to be too far out of scope."

>>You move to dust your shoulders off, and find a coat draped suddenly across them. Your ratty old duster, hooded, fur-lined; it smells vaguely like strawberries, the fur an alien-blonde color that contrasts against some fantastic creature's leather hide. You-, "We got a bad habit of treating things like people, too." You mention, once again cutting off your younger self. Their expression goes neutral as they mirror your position on the floor, "And vice-versa, also. Kinda worse in reverse, actually. I'd work on that before you get older and it gets out of hand."

>>The apparition of yourself looks up, beyond the "surface" of yourself, beyond the dream, and then back down to yourself, "You keep goin' at this pace and we'll be here all day." A hand picks up black sand and throws it into the air. This time, it actually acts as if its under some kind of water, the way it dissolves. "Picking at these scabs is all performance, B. You know that."

>>You wave your hand through the air in front of you, suddenly aware of the density of it all. You frown, unhappy at how much you've become. You denied yourself all this... substance, all of what it means to be a person. It's why you felt like you slid into being an AI, or a wizard, or a demigod, or even HERMES, so easily; you didn't feel like there's anything to BEING Berri. There wasn't anything inside of you that would take up the room of something else. "Except it's killed you." The image of you interjects again, "You pretended this didn't exist," it says, waving around at the cool darkness all about, "And it's consumed you."

>>This intervention sucks, you think to yourself. Unfortunately, you thought to yourself, and yourself says, "Yeah, well, you don't listen to anyone, especially not yourself." The image of a younger man softens his gaze as the time scrawls across their body, 20... 24... 26... The body itself changes too. Androgynous features win out over the years, until a long-haired, little woman stares at you. The image of Hermes. The mask of a person you were, and then had to stop being. "Imagine how I fucking feel, dealin' with you, I sure as hell didn't wanna have to do this."

>>You're not sure what the answer is, here. You've done so much, seen so much, surely the answer's gotta be SOMEWHERE in your exp- "Is it though?" You suddenly feel the warm-and-cold grasp of your own hands, one metal and one natural, on your cheeks. Glowing eyes sear into your own; this image of you still has light left, still has life. "If you figured out the answer, you'd HAVE it by now!" You're pushed onto your back, via your face, as your reflection looks down over you. "You rely too much on what you've done, and even more on what you've done wrong, that you're just retreading the same mistakes and masochisms you always do."

>>Your eye closes and you stare into the much more comforting darkness of your eyelids, as opposed to the depths of yourself. After a second, you hear a frustrated sigh, and a soft thud while you're laid out on the sand a second time. "What do I do, then? With the time?"

>>There's a snort, you're no longer sure who made it, "What time? The time you think you wasted, the time you actually spent, or the time you're so sure you won't just randomly lose?" You have to shrug again, at that, focusing on the freshly-disturbed sand you feel under your coat. You hadn't considered that last point in a long time. You're... confident, at least in your own abilities. "When you're not having a mental breakdown, you mean." The image of you chimes in again, but when you turn your head to look at her, she's gone.

>>You've been doing stuff, you think to yourself, but you haven't been living. People live. You haven't seen yourself as a "People" in years and years. You're a machine, a servant, a power-player, someone who only exists to repay the kindness of people willing to not turn you away. Even at your swinging best, you can't bring yourself to see yourself as the equal of anyone, and so you treat them like gods and game pieces, to be appeased or thrown away at your discretion.

>>You're suddenly aware of redness of your eyelids, even the one with a thick patch under it. Opening your eyes to a stark difference in your surroundings, you find the blackness of the sea of self has broken like a storm against high mountains. There are bands of fading, wispy blackness against a bright, warmly-gray expanse; and you are laying in an inch of some reflective liquid, mirror-smooth like mercury and deep-green like malachite. A warm breeze, humid and salty, blows in on the breeze, and the thick black sand below you feels warm on your back and cool between your toes. Your eyes drift shut again.

>>When they open again, just a blink later, you're far from the Void, far from the mirror. Far from the visions. You gently bob forward, touching the soft grains of jostling sand, brick-red and shining with metallic grains, before a gently tug pulls you back with a rise. The sky is a dull blue here, the clouds in the sky are continental in their size, hanging incredibly high above the firmament. As the tide brings you back in, you rest more firmly against the reddish sand and experience the smells of land. Carried back to the salt air from the lands beyond is the faint smell of... gunpowder.

>>With a superhuman effort (or so it feels,) you move your arms to support your head, and kick one foot up and over your other ankle. Somewhere in the distance, up the coast perhaps, something metal explodes.

[cyberneticlagomorph]

[A video, somewhere dark and damp and terrible with drizzling rain and a pitch black sky where the stars tremble like wet dogs in the cold.

The moon is somewhere distant moving too fast, desperately trying to spread her light as far as it will go. The manic undulations of the impossibly large jellyfish creature that tugs the moon across the bitter-black sky casts wavering shadows across the ground.

The moon is leaking, spilling droplets of pearlescent milk almost like tears as she passes. The distant sounds of her chains ringing ominously in the near silence as she hurriedly fades from view.

On the ground something is steaming, surrounded by a surreal rainbow heat haze.

A deep, dark mass of... glass? Volcanic rock?? Charred bone? Sooty leathery skin??

What does the flesh of an extinguished star even look like? How can it be described in ways non stars can understand?

The Sun-in-Chains, Fairyland's captive star lay almost curled on the ground, somewhere dry and sandy. It's wheezing, inflating and deflating with each labored breath. Monstrous cracks and lichtenberg figures streak its hide, allowing what could be blood to dribble onto the ground.

The blood hisses as it falls, melting the sand around it into vicious looking blobs of rainbow glass.

What appear to be craters at first glance are in face eye sockets, sunken and covered by leathery lids. The eye closest to the camera opens very slowly, inch by inch. The sclera are black like Jack's almost but where there should be pupils are strange smoldering symbols surrounded by golden irises.

Jack's hand comes into frame, hesitantly reaching out to touch this fallen god-thing. The massive eye follows her hand, squinting a little to keep such a small thing in focus. Jack's hand rests on the star's steaming skin and gently pets it, her hand comes away covered in soot and ash.

The Sun-in-Chains makes a decidedly grumpy noise, like a dog that wasn't through being pet. It makes that sound repeatedly until Jack puts her hand back. The star squints its open eyes contentedly, rumble-purring so loudly the sand around them shudders.]

He likes to be pet