#i keep saving my game but for some reason she keeps giving crits in the tutorial

[snowyteal]

If someone calls out on my bias of purple/lavender characters and or clerics, I'm-

[febrainrot]

What build would you make for Mozu or Hinoka?

Okay so keep in mind that when I build units I don't really do it in a "normal" manner, I kind play the game almost solely to make stupid builds no matter the time it takes even if I have to farm a lot. Furthermore I have a few savefiles so I often use some amount of skill transfer, not a lot but sometimes I grab a few skills on another save to not waste levels on another. I'll still give more reasonable builds after detailing my 20 steps plan to make a godkiller. Knowing that:

Mozu is very fun because of both her growths and her easy access to profiteer. She can be a good multi use units, with resource utility and offensive power. Her main weakness is that she is fairly frail, and will probably not be able to survive too many hits.

My last run had her as a Kinshi knight for a few reasons: it has the same solid luck as merchant, second highest outside of strategist (hardly viable considering that magic is the one stat she has a growth below 10). While it has an inferior strength compared to other classes, kinshi knights have both great speed and massive range (flying movement + bow range). And because they use the same weapons as the merchants, the transition after you get profiteer isn't too hard. I wanted to give her a special niche along that so I decided to be very stubborn and farm her in a class she is absolutely not good at: sorcerer.

By befriending Nyx, she get access to the dark mage, which objectively doesn't work for her, but I have too much free time. I got her to level 15 in the sorcerer class (because of how the game works you only need to spend 4 levels in that class if you swap at level 11) solely for one skill: bowbreaker. That along the speed she gets as a kinshi and her great luck makes her near impossible for bow users to hit. That made her a weird case of flying archer killer which I thought was very funny, I could throw her in the middle of a bunch of archers and they'd all have 0%. Kinshi knight provides the highest luck cap, which she'll reach pretty easily. With this she'll have at least 30% chance of producing money every turn for 7 turn. If you are lucky/willing to grind the DLCs, you can get Anna's bow which gives a massive +5 luck for a skill and strength debuff every attack (her skill should be solid by now, and she doesn't need to kill or even attack to activate her skill so you can just equip it on her if there is a turn she doesn't have anything to do). Along with that, I gave her a bamboo yumi that gets her +10 avo, further enhancing her dodgetanking despite its weakness (it's not the rarest weapon to get at the lottery or on lucky spaces, you'll always end up having at least one and you will probably get to forge it to have it stronger). Along with Air Superiority she'll get as a kinshi knight, she'll also be able to avoid flyers and especially other kinshi. From there, she has the speed to rarely get doubled, the most precise enemies will have at best 20% or so hit rates with her, and she'll be producing lots of money while also providing decent supportive damage. If you go that way aptitude isn't gonna help you much as you'll be at equal or higher level than enemies, so you can drop it. From there there isn't much to add, you can grab life and death from Master of Arms and bowfaire to increase her damage output dramatically using a bow, both are accessible with second , add a longbow to increase her range if you fear she can't dodge everything or chip an enemy she can't reach.

If you want a less time consuming and more "realistic" build (aka "for someone who isn't as obsessed as me and doesn't have too much free time), Mozu's main advantage is her high speed and luck naturally leading her to dodgetanking. The most avoidant class is swordmaster (innate +10 avo along a nice +10 crit): marrying Ryoma will let her access it along with giving aptitude to an already powerful second gen unit. Between a whooping 85% speed growth with aptitude, 60% strength, 50% HP and skill, she'll be a reliable dodgetank, especially considering her personal skill let her regain HP on forest tiles (among other tiles), which makes her a good bait. She'll have the skill to activate Astra fairly reliably, and life and death from the master of arms class would again make her damage output insane, along with swordfaire that she'll get while progressing as a swordmaster. If you're in Conquest though, the next best option is probably marrying Arthur to get her to be a berserker. She doesn't get the avo bonus of the swordmaster but nearly as much speed, insane strength, and her innate skill growths counters the poor accuracy of axes, along with a 20% crit bonus that goes well with her good skill. Her sniper line can help her in that class: certain blow alleviates the axe inaccuracy. I wouldn't say gamble is really worth it but you can try it if your Mozu has a consistent enough hit rate, and since she'll be using only that weapon axefaire is good. Now if you want to have her solely as a player turn based unit, once again, life and death will have her obliterate people. If you want to use her good speed and strong HP as bait however, getting strong riposte and sol can help with that. Sadly since Conquest doesn't allow much grinding outside of DLCs, you can't go too insane, but her only friendships options there are Effie which gives class that'll probably affect her speed negatively, or Nyx, which. Yeah, without even more grinding the skills that could work with her aren't accessible. If you count the Heirs of Fates DLC rewards, you can get speedtaker or strengthtaker, preferably the first for swordmaster and the second for berserker (those skills cannot be used at the same time so no use getting both on her), and if you make a revelation berserker, befriending Oboro

Now, for Hinoka. She's a bit trickier because she's the balanced "jack of all trades master of none" type of character. Her growth rates are all around 40 without class bonus beside her magic at 15 and her defence being a little lower than the rest at 35. That means she isn't really bad anywhere, but she doesn't really stand out either. She is the kind of characters that you might have on the map but realise soon that whatever she can do, others will do better despite having more glaring weaknesses than her. However her base skill, resistance and speed stats are good, and she always joins with a guard naginata which is a pretty rare weapon. So for her, we have solid bases

[celestialholz]

What's an interesting yet not very well known Forgotten Realms fact that you would like to share?

Hello, dearest anon. I'm about to do to you what I've done to many people over the years and deeply disappoint you 🤣 I'm not especially familiar with the D&D setting outside of BG3 - I actually play WFRP in some of my spare time.

But in lieu of a Forgotten Realms fact, a handful of BG3 facts you may not know and that I think are very interesting, learned from my three and a half playthroughs. :)

1. Minthara's battle phrase 'sussun egg oloth' is Drow for 'light slays darkness', which is funky and appropriate for a paladin who has been exiled from her Underdark hometown. This is also written on Isobel's tomb - and Aylin is the source of both Ketheric's immortality and, potentially, his downfall.

2. Astarion's Persuasion check to stop him ascending is literally half of Shadowheart's not to kill Nightsong, provided you have to use her Persuasion check anyway. Which is absolutely wild to me.

3. A Storm Sorceror using Chain Lightning on a Wet target with Destructive Wrath and the Killer's Sweetheart auto-crit will do 320 damage in one turn if it isn't saved, assuming a 'normal' hit - i.e. lack of resistance/not being vulnerable.

4. Gortash's name is a play off the theme of radiance, hence his crossbow doing Radiant damage when he's my favourite bastard. :) His Hellfire Watcher-in-chief also carries Gontr Mael, the legendary longbow of this game that also does Radiant damage.

5. Gale is the only one of the tadfools whose guardian has a specific gender - he refers to them as she/her.

6. There's a second Dark Amethyst for the Necromancy of Thay in Mystic Carrion's basement.

7. There's a really cool axe behind the Illusion door in Sorcerous Sundries, but only if you destroy the door.

8. If you take one of the Drow twins in Sharess' Caress with you upstairs and Minthara is your partner, she will threaten to kill them if your sordid act goes ahead. Ignore her and go anyway, and Initiative will roll the second you speak to them in their quarters. (On god this is the funniest shit I've seen in a game crammed full of really funny shit.)

9. On arriving in Baldur's Gate, if you speak to a romanced Gale he'll tell you he's happy to support you if you're finding city life a bit overwhelming. This is supremely cute.

10. The Light of Creation doesn't stun you if you're naturally immune to Lightning.

11. An Embrace Durge can be targeted successfully by Hold Monster, even in humanoid form.

12. The Sunwalker's Gift doesn't work on console. My githyanki and dragonborn disapprove.

13. Ketheric's Netherstone is pink, the colour of feminity and adoration - presumably because he turned to the darkness after losing two women he loved.

14. If given free choice, even as a Selûnite Shadowheart will choose to kill her parents in the House of Grief.

15. Lorroakan keeps the best staff (and arguably the best robe) in the game in his basement, and uses a reasonable variant of both himself instead. A delightful showcase of his incompetence.

16. In Balanced, the Steel Watch are weak to lightning, and default Durge is a Storm Sorceror. This one's just fun. :)

17. Tactician Raphael has 865 health. Ew.

18. If you fight Gortash whilst the Steel Watch are still active, and try to give yourself an easier life by Arcane Locking the door to the three Watchers outside so they can't help, when the fight starts all three of them will be inexplicably surrounding Gortash.

19. You can pickpocket Withers. And he does not care how many times you fail it.

20. If you're struggling with the House of Grief fight, a Light Cleric can dispel magical darkness up to four times in the fight with the Amulet of the Devout.

:)

[thestobingirlie]

We talk a lot about what we love about Steve, what do you love about other characters that you don't post about as often?

okay, here we go!! (this got pretty long lmao, i’m sorry, i’ve just got a lot of love to give and this show has too many characters)

starting with the kids:

lucas is my baby boy, okay? he’s so brave and dedicated and he just wants to protect and do right by his friends. i will never forgive the others for not going to his game.

max deserves so much better than what she’s got! she just loves her friends so much, and the strength it took for her to stand up to billy in s2! her fear about ending up like him kills me, but that moment with lucas on top of the bus is so sweet!

i think dustin and dart are so cute, like he really found this weird worm and decided he would protect it with his life. and i love how passionate he is about everything, d&d, and my little pony, and how willing he is to die for his loved ones. the fact that lucas told him he was in terrible danger and he said, who gives a fuck, it’s max!! and dustin’s insecurity about being on the edge of the group makes me want to cry.

and once again, mike, willing to throw himself off a cliff for dustin. he just loves his friends, and he struggles with showing it sometimes, but he really would do anything to keep them safe. and i actually really love his more bitchy moments. oh, and mike sobbing into hopper’s arms in s2 gets me every single rewatch.

i love will’s little comments, he’s just a bitchy as mike but he hides it better. and he’s just kind! like that little story about him giving away his toy when he was little, and the way he just instantly takes el in and calls her his sister. his love is what helped bring him out of the mind flayers clutches and he was ready to die to save them.

el is my girl!!! watching her develop her style and decide who she wants to be, outside of the lab and hopper and mike. it’s about her. what makes her happy. and once again!! all these kids just ready to die so young!! she met these three kids and they showed her basic kindness and she just instantly sacrificed herself for them. she just has so much love.

and erica!!! my little nerd! i love her little snappy comments, and i love how much she obviously loves lucas but she’s such a little sister about it! the fact that she stayed with him in the hospital with max. oh god, and the moment she smacked andy with a flashlight and literally said “crit hit”!!! i love how we’ve really seen her grow into her interests, and her friendship with dustin is so cute!!

now the teens, i speak a fair bit about nancy and steve, so i’ll focus on the others:

robin is my girl!! okay. the way she hears two crazies talking about invading russians and immediately said, i will involve myself in this, and i will brag about my ears. and then she did!! her bravery in the coming out scene makes me sob every time, her reaction to steve’s crush, but deciding to tell him the truth even though she could just lie! the way she made just as much of a sacrifice when she decided to hold the door shut as steve, knowing these kids even less time then he did, thinking she’s gonna die down there. and the way she’s the reason they know anything about vecna and saved max, but it’s only nancy called a genius, where is robin’s appreciation?

now eddie! love that a girl went to him for drugs and seemed anxious and he said, okay, time to throw myself on the floor and hit some trees!!! he was ready to do anything to try to make her feel better, and that’s so cute! and then he literally went up against hundreds of monsters in her honour. and he met steve, immediately decided to involve himself in his love life and change everything about the way he viewed the world. he’s just so…. he’s rigid in his world views, but the second he meets someone outside of them he just welcomes them in, and tries to make them happy, and protect them, and i love that.

you can’t mention jonathan’s name without talking about his dedication to his family. he would do anything to keep will safe, and the way jonathan protected him from the worst of their parents. a lot of stuff i love about jonathan also just makes me sad. the way he’s ready to just throw away all his hopes and dreams for the people he loves. his own college dreams don’t even factor in.

and argyle, we didn’t get much of him, but i love the way he just rolls with all the shit thrown at him, he’s saving lives, finding el, pulling girls. the way he managed to get jonathan to open up about his issues in a few months when others have had years and failed!!! no one is doing it like argyle baby.

i’m not doing the adults, this is getting too long lmao. but, uh, if i’ve forgotten someone, tell me?

[crystalelemental]

Unit Teambuilding - Sygna Suit Hilda

Remember when Reddit made all those speculation pairs, and kept putting Nate with Victini?  Did anyone else always have the feeling this would be the outcome?  Like, it's battle princess Hilda, man.  Of course she gets the god of victory.

General Overview At this risk of pointing out my own hypocrisy, remember when SST Red dropped, and it's like wow, what do you offer to the man who has everything, this is so boring?  It's like that but slightly less ridiculous.  She doesn't get gauge acceleration, passive healing per action, guaranteed defense drops, and a two-bar spam that's AoE and bypasses damage reduction.  Instead, she has to settle for capping every stat and having Rising Tide, with a 200BP move to back it up as DPS.

SS Hilda is nothing short of a perfect unit.  On entry she caps attack, and a single use of trainer move gives capped special attack and crit.  +15 in one action.  Cap for Rising Tide is 18.  So you use V-Create once, and thanks to Downside Up, which I thought was going to be a Steven-specific ability but I guess just goes to everyone nowadays, and you get +18.  In two actions.  If you can fast-ramp with your teammates, she wins.  Congrats.

Hilda has other moves, in Searing Shot and Confusion for...some reason. They're useless.  All they accomplish is burn and confusion, if you put the energy in on grid.  It's to check Gauntlets.   She's SS Serena tier, in that her backup stuff is just for show and preventing her from getting walled.  Oh and in case anyone was expecting lower stats, I think this is the new cap at like base 520.  Victini's insane.

So why don't I love this?  Honestly, it's because Emboar.  SS Kris may have been the same type twice, but Suicune was a support to Ferligatr's striker.  Lyra had a similar deal.  Elesa’s got two supports, a Tech debuffer, and a damage dealer.  Usually, when you keep to a similar type, you at least alter up their battle role.  Hilda does not do that.  This is the equivalent of dropping your starter for the major legend in post-game.  Hilda's Emboar has exactly no reason to exist now, not even by Hilda metrics, and I doubt grid expansion will save it.  It is worse in every meaningful way, and that bothers me so much.  I'm not saying I wanted her to have Genesect, but I am saying we could've done better here.

Move Level and EX? EX on a striker is great for CS stuff, but honestly 1/5 no EX is probably fine just given the absurd DPS of V-Create.  Legitimately consider this: it's better DPS than Leon's Charizard and Inferno.  It's that good.   Hilda wants for nothing in her grid, unless you desperately need that sync nuke from EX to be at maximum value.  But trust me, it's overkill. Her DPS gets things done just fine.

I will make a note that 5/5 actually does have at least some value.  4/5 gives guaranteed burn, and accuracy buffs each successful attack to respond to something like Latias or Cresselia.  Not super worth it.  But 5/5 can debuff both defenses when attacking a burned foe, which is...something.  You can also get Propulsion, which...no.  Not super worth it.

Team 1: SS Hilda, Anni Raihan/SS May, literally who cares it's not like she needs anything Fast ramping!  Anyone who watches Zinfogel's channel knows the deal: Anni Raihan at 3/5 has Propulsion on Sandstorm and can fast-ramp with Head Start 1 lucky skill.  Really any combination that results in -3 cooldown works.  In fact, another immaculate combo is SS May.  That's two people and I can pretty much promise success.  All you want is any support that can't die in one move, and congrats, you got turn-2 sync, and I cannot image a stage surviving Hilda.

Team 2: SS Hilda, Blaine/Tech Ninetales/Kukui, Skyla SS Hilda's interesting, in that her only real hiccup is gauges early on.   In a CS context, this means she needs some help with it.  But an F2P budget isn't just possible, it's dominant.  Blaine or Tech Ninetales sets Sun, Skyla buffs speed as well as some defense and healing support, and Hilda just goes.  But honestly, if you don’t want to use Sun because it’s optional, defense debuffs will do just fine.

Team 3: SS Hilda, Flannery, Support Seadra Anti-Cobalion.  SS Hilda is more than capable of blitzing Cobalion’s fight, and truth be told, Flannery’s here just because 4/5 Hilda isn’t going to be a common thing.  But you can still take risks with Searing Shot to get the burn by herself.  Seadra buffs speed.  I am making the assumption this is preferred, though if not, Support Weezing is another good option for defense buffs.

Team 4: SS Hilda, Summer Hilda, Hilda Next update will let us do this, and Hilda's one of a few that actually has a good combo.  Summer Hilda covers defense and is a solid tank, keeping the team alive, and also being able to debuff defense of the foe at 3/5.  Base Hilda is here to help gain speed for gauges, but also kicks off theme skill multipliers with matched Fire to Victini, who is the real damage dealer here.  This is a thing we can reasonably do soon.

Final Thoughts SS Hilda's outrageous.  Even with other possibilities, I feel like it's just slight variation on what's already present.  SS Hilda gets her buff game in just two turns, and can explode stages like nobody's business thanks to four sync damage nodes and Rising Tide alone.  She's a striker, so CS is dead, and most Gauntlet stages can't handle her raw DPS either, with Burn and Confusion being fairly decent answers to gimmicks.  Hilda...really doesn't have a clear flaw.

[lostacelonnie]

Truly. School festival? Wild i dont think ive ever been to one of those. Not sure mine ever had them but im glad you had so much fun! Its not completely finished yet i get that done next week but its very cool i love it. I have like. 12 piercings now with still more i want. They were a slippery slope from getting two to all the ones i have & want but i hope you're able to get some in the future. I think i like my eyebrow & lip piercings best. Thats a wild difference damn. Its been sunny mostly cool days right now but we keep going from warmer days to rain/snow warnings here. Oh hell yeah congrats! Strange but positive is the best combination to have honestly. Id also love to check out carnivale if that still happens in italy or mardi gras over here down in louisiana if i had time. Just love the idea of big celebration with cool stuff. Oh sparkle is quantum support with action advance & crit damage (?) boost. She's real good for seele or many teams really. I got archeron! Just need to get her light cone but damn was she cool in the 2.1 story. Not gonna spoil if you havent played through yet. Congrats on your archeron pulls! I think i might save for topaz now & get adventurine later? I do like how he plays but ill grab him later i don't think i have use for him yet. Swarm is so annoying i gave up on it for now terrible fuckin enemies. Mood what set are you usin on archeron? I love her talent too just. Insta enemy kill what a time saver. Really did give her a great & interesting kit. Hm ill have to continue & see how complex she is. Been busy with other games & like. Cosmodyssey & the bartender event in star rail. Oh thats fun i love it keep doin that. Ohh congrats on the writing energy!

yeah school festivals are also pretty rare over here but [thanks to a complete coincidence, i didnt even Know we had those] i ended up in a school that actually organizes one JSDKFJG. would tell you what it is but i feel doxxing my school on tumblr.com is not a terribly good idea. AND HEY THATS AWESOME!!! also yeah i heard it Really Is Like That with piercings shdjfg all my friends said so at least. tbh the only reason i dont have any yet is bc when i was the age when everyone gets their first one [around 8-9 among my peers] i was very physically active and didnt wanna deal with the whole healing process while trying to not get the shit beaten out of me in aikido. so thanks!!! i REAAALLLY wanna get snake bites theyre So cool. AND FOR REAL LIKE???? can the weather Please decide what it wants to do with its life. it was literally raining the whole day today and yesterday i cannot keep dealing with this. esp since today was my first day back to school after the easter break so waiting for my bus was just. miserable. And my classbestie didnt come to school today so i guess i cant have nice things. Oh Well. and for real for real im actually so glad my school doesnt seem to have a single normal person in it because everything is just so much more. chill. and the gossip is Insane i tell you. ever since this year i befriended a bunch of cool alt girls my life had been so much more interesting because they know like everything about everyone. and oh good luck with all that!! i totally agree, tho i definitely have to be mentally prepared for such occasions. Due To The Autism. but yeah theyre SO fun. and oh that sounds like. a very good kit actually. might get her in the future but ahh i still cant quite decide who im gonna pull for next..... only time can tell i suppose. CONGRATS ON GETTING MEI #3!!!!! i maxed out her talents already [thank god for how little time that calyx takes] so i just need to get relics for her now. Auugghhhg. but i decided im just gonna wait for the triple drop event to save myself some sanity and am currently focusing on ruan mei's talents rn since i run her with acheron <- guy who has no welt and his pela is lvl 50 not built. ah thats understandable!!! i was initially Completely uninterested in aventurine but used his trial as a march replacement in my clara team and it all fits together so nicely. speaking of which i literally got clara TWICE yesterday, one pull apart, without pity on standard. the universe loves me i guess. so shes e4 now. FOR FUCKING REAL but at least using acheron in sim uni lets one skip the non boss battles so thats a massive timesaver and also makes dealing with the swarm a lot less problematic. since you only have to deal with the big guy at the end and not trouble yourself with the occasional encounter on the way. seriously tho acheron is so cracked in sim uni. she let me get the achievement for finishing every battle with all allies at 100% hp. im currently using band of sizzling thunder + inert salsotto [LOL] on her!!! as i said. scuffed but does the job for now. but im gonna get her pioneer diver of dead waters + izumo gensei and takama divine realm since i heard thats whats best on her. and yeah her kit is super fun!! and have fun with that!! honestly fair, tho im just stuck in my holy trinity of hi3 - hsr - noita. also i love the bartender event a lot both story and gameplay wise. very very cool. and thankies!!!!!!!

[stupidlildumby]

You know Berry has rain dance right?

As much as it hurts, we have a new party comp to take the rest of route 205.

We run into a mountain man trainer with many a rock type, all of them getting permaflinched out by Baby's bite...we used up most of the pp but that rng was weird.

With two routes to take we go the way east. Prince takes out the ladies Hitmonlee by pecking it and learns Metal claw

It is a dead end, save for a heal bell, and another trainer who quickly loses to a few moves from Cashew

We take a quick trick back to the pokemon center to get Baby's PP back so they can bite some more.

A bridge is guarded by a trainer's Speed Boost Quilava which is knocked out swiftly with no damaging moves that can hurt Baby.

Okay maybe Baby took a bit of damage from Quilava, but Masquerain surely can't hurt her.

Masqerain uses water sport and I get worried it knows water gun and swap to prince. It instead uses sweet scent into Prince and Prince eats them whole.

Our enemy from 201 returns, stronger... Prince really is the answer for most of these trainers, baby learns Rock Slide by playing in the rocks while Prince hoses down a monkey.

There is a lil house along the way, might as well check it out. Inside a lady offers to let me rest, and you know what, Baby needs a nap, we tuck Baby in and talk to a kid about repels, before continuing along the route.

Eterna Forest quickly comes up, and a kid warns me about needing antidotes...hoping for alls well that ends well we enter.

A lady named Cheryl accosts us as we enter and tells us we are her bodyguard. She is holding a lot of antidotes so I don't say no.

For some reason this means that pokemon come at us in groups of two. We can get a Buizel or a Slowking.

According to some online sources, I could have repelled through this area then come back for a single encounter where I didn't have to worry about Cheryl killing a pokemon and ruining my catch. But I don't know what that means, or how they knew I would meet Cheryl. With all the water on the field, Baby needs to switch out.

A peck and a Vital throw takes out Buizel, we catching the KING (queen?) . I can't trust this Hariyama so I just start throwing balls.

It takes 7, luckily Hariyama can't hurt Queen.

We get into a double battle with random trainers.

You would think that they would have better things to do with their day. What type even is that thing. Hariyama takes out the Steel Types the one trainer throws out, keeping them in check, while I swap to Roll and thunder wave to stop dialga from doing too much. Then Hariyama dies. I need to beat an Aaron, a Dialga, and whatever else they throw out all 1v2. We focus the Aaron with thunders till its gone, and now to chip at Dialga. Paralyze keeps us in the game against its Draconic breath, but we have to swap when Roll gets low.

Prince does nothing and loses half his health, we swap again. Rock's Icy Wind takes out the last half of Dialga's health with a crit and we breathe a sigh of relief.

The next pair of trainers is more reasonable, and swiftly fade away.

In fear of double battles I try to avoid trainers as I leave the area, passing by a quaint little house behind trees just too big to walk around. Cheryl thanks me by giving me a bell. Cool.

We pass the last bit of 205 making it to Eterna City.

Finally we can see her in her full glory.

She reminds me of Roll somehow.

You know, town is crawling with these guys. Little worrying.

We go to take a look around and Weekly kidnaps us.

Brings us to a statue

A guy who very obviously has something to do with the hoodlums talks some crazy shit about pokemon. He approaches me, walks up and looks me dead in the eyes and tells me to move. Nice.

Weekly tells me a secret of how to be a great trainer, but he said its a secret so im not gonna tell it here.

A pretty lady walks up and hands me an HM, I didn't hear what she said.

Wow...cut....

With a gym here, its time to get set to fight the leader, destroy their grunts.

The first gym trainer has Baby's mom

I can't bear to make them fight so I send out Rock. Then I find out Ice isnt super effective and I send out Prince to bubble, mommy dealt with.

The anorinth they send out next is not worth talking about.

The next trainer sends out a Golem, a rock type gym got it. Bastiodon, Omastar, second trainer dealt with.

The final trainer before the leader has only a Magcargo.

With that, its gyming time, we get three pokemon with an ace at 22, to deal with the rock type gym leader Gardenia.

Who are we bringing (top three go)

Apparently polls don't allow as many choices as we have pokemon, so Dirt isn't coming, I hate dirt.

[inkdemonapologist]

[BatIM Call of Cthulhu Masterpost]

WE STARTED.... A NEW SCENARIO..... as you may have read in Boo’s summary post, for some unknown reason aLL MUSICAL AND PERFORMANCE ABILITY SEEMS TO BE??? GONE??? Sammy woke up, realised he couldn’t hold even the simplest tune in his head, and immediately lost THIRTY-ONE SANITY in one hit

..... YOU KNOW THAT MAKES SENSE HONESTLY

 anyway i have a some out-of-context quotes from the game for u all under the readmore if ur into that kinda thing!!!

[Sammy is played by me, Joey is played by Boo (inkyvendingmachine), Henry is played by Maf (inkcryptid), Jack is played by Mochi (whatyouwantedmetosee) and Thren (haunted-hijinxer) is our GM!]

[GM] It's a tough voice to do, so you can't be as choosy, and your resident Bendy cannot act to save his life, so that's no good-- [Joey] Uh-oh. [Jack] Sorry, Lurks. [Joey] I'm just so worried he's going to have to act now... [Jack] Clearly, he should've used the time between scenarios to train that! [GM] Yeah, that's just what everybody wants I'm sure, is the Lurker training in LYING. That sounds like a great idea!

[GM] *asking for dice rolls to see how well our actual jobs are going* We can do a little bit of mundanity to, to treasure, and keep you warm later!

[Henry] Should I spend Luck points on this? No, I'm not spending Luck on work. [Sammy] That's a good general life policy

[Jack] Does Jack have any contacts? [Joey] No, he has glasses! :D [Jack] noooo that's my job! It's my job to make Jack's puns! ....Contacts probably didn't exist in the 1930s, that's okay. [Sammy] No, don't say that! Boo's going to have to look it up now!

[GM] What spell is Joey working on? [Jack] (Spell of Make Investor Like You)

[Joey] I think he probably has filing cabinets specifically to put occult stuff in and lock. And then the rest of his office is just piles and tables of animation stuff that you're like "...shouldn't this??? be??? in the filing cabinet???"

[GM] Allison remarks, "The companions of our childhood always possess a certain power of our minds, which hardly any later friend can obtain." [Sammy] Y'know, normal, just nORMAL CASUAL CHATTER, [GM] Tom, working on the pipe, just kinda mutters, "I enjoy friends, dear not only by habit and association, but from their own merits." And she gives him a look! [Jack] ...love at first whATEVER THIS IS,

[Sammy] ...Sammy's not amused. [GM] The band's amused! [Jack] Jack is probably amused.

[GM] So far things are going very well, but y'know, [Jack] Only so long until we crit fail something! [Sammy] NEVER TOO LATE TO MESS IT UP!

[GM] Allison's vibe is like, I Didn't Study This Exactly, But I Was Hoping It Could Just Work Out! [Jack] ...She has a lot of practice at just... making things work out, huh.... 

[GM] Is there anything else Joey would try to show off? [Joey] Tries to think... what else is at the Studio... [Jack] "Do you wanna talk to our janitor? He's really cool!"

[Joey] I roll to see if Joey can put two brain cells together,

[Jack] I have to appreciate that Bendy said he didn’t have the keys today. He’s been stealing them before, but THIS TIME isn’t his doing!

[Sammy] If there’s anything he needs to do himself, then he’ll come in early, but I don’t know what state we’re in -- [Joey] Uh, New York. [Sammy] ...what? [Joey] You didn’t know what state we’re in. :) [Sammy] [Sammy] thanks

[Joey] Oh Joey’s absolutely coming in early. Joey woke up, and felt great, so he’s going to menace every other department today, because he has the energy to get his fingers into everything! [Sammy] *distressed sounds in the background*

[Sammy] Hey how come when we did a Halloween cartoon, we all went to Haiti, but we’re doing a cartoon about a fair and we’re not going to a fair? [Jack] [Jack] I think we all know why.

*trying to decide who goes to Joey’s fancy dinner with an investor* [Sammy] I don’t know if Sammy will help you... [Sammy] Unless you bring Sammy and put him on a piano, like a small child that needs to be immediately handed crayons.

[Joey] Joey will say that they’re essentially the second hands in each of the departments-- [Jack] Yeah, Abby, the second hand… entire Art Department director, [GM] Uh-huh. [Joey] She… she knows,, [GM] Joey, [Joey] She knows that Joey… is … Big Gay for Henry,,, [GM] This is true, but I think she likes nominal acknowledgement that she holds a position, [Jack] He can just say that they’re high-ranking, and not-- [Joey] No I rolled badly, Joey’s going to say that Sammy and Henry are busy, so he brought his second-best! :) [GM] Abby is massaging her temples. [Joey] Sorry, Abby. He is,, an idiot,,, [GM] I think she’d be a lot more bothered if she couldn’t go and commiserate with Henry about it. Like, “why can’t he keep it straight?” [GM] ……………….well. She knows why he can’t keep it straight.

[GM] It’s about midnight, and something... strange.... happens. The trumpet player, who is leading the band -- [Joey] -- has a trumpet for a head! [GM] what no

*Joey succeeds a sanity check, Jack fails it* [GM] Joey, roll 1d10! [Joey] Uh, 3? [GM] Okay, you’re only down three sanity, that’s not so bad! [GM] Jack, roll 6d10! [Jack] what? [Joey] Six??? SIX d10s????? [GM] Yeah! [Joey] nICE KNOWING YOU, JACK!!! It’s time for Sillytime Jack.

[Jack] Smash cut to Henry, curled up in bed, nice and cozy,

[GM] I will also note, you cannot seem to Fast Talk. [Joey] ...what else can I do? [GM] Just normal talk. Like a normal person.

[Jack] I feel like Jack probably has a hunch that it’s weird nightmarish horror nonsense, on account of he just lost nineteen sanity,

[GM] Abby’s gonna try to take him to the hospital. [Jack] Jack’s just going to let that happen, because he’s shaken enough that he doesn’t have any significantly better ideas! Other than AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA,

[Sammy] *rolling sanity damage* 9… 9, stop that…. 4, [Jack] You’ve already lost more than Jack! [Sammy] 2, ...6, and 1! [Joey] That’s 31. [GM] Okay, Sammy has six sanity! [Sammy] eXCUSE ME?????

[Joey] Joey does want to head home… what day is it? [GM] Friday, the 13th! [Jack] HM, [Sammy] I GUESS IT IS, ISN’T IT… I wasn’t keeping track, but I guess it sure is! [GM] A delightful treat for myself, when I was looking up days in July, in 1934, [Sammy] WAIT, NO, ITS ACTUALLY A COINCIDENCE? Oh my gosh, [Jack] Because Friday the 13th wouldn’t even be a spooky day at this point in time! [GM] It is now! [Jack] It’s spooky, but just for us!

[Sammy] Sammy would try to call Jack, he’d try to call Joey, he’d try to call Henry -- probably several times, [Henry] sammy gets jack’s cat [Henry] phone is answered with meows [Jack] That does seem fitting for a really bad luck roll; the phone gets answered, and Sammy’s really relieved -- and it’s just the cat. [Sammy] Sammy, at 6 sanity: “jack’s tuRNED INTO A CAT,”

[Joey] The phone kept on ringing, so the cat just batted it off the cradle, [Jack] I feel like Jack probably doesn’t usually get a significant number of calls, so like, this many calls in a row is just obnoxious! [Jack] Cat’s having none of it. [Jack] Phone ring isn’t breakfast! [Jack] Where is the soft provider of food.

[GM] Oh no, you know what’s going to happen? Henry’s gonna get through to Jack, and then when Sammy calls it’s busy! [Sammy] cALLS JACK IT’S BUSY, CALLS HENRY IT’S BUSY, [Jack] I was gonna say maybe Henry would call Sammy first, because Sammy was one of the original three. [Jack] …Henry calls Sammy, Sammy is busy because SAMMY is trying to call someone, and then Henry calls Jack, and Sammy tries to call Jack again-- [Sammy] *laughing* THE HORROR, The deep, bone-chilling horror of A TIME BEFORE CALL-WAITING!!

[Henry] Is Joey there? [Jack] Yeah. [Henry] Are you guys alright? [Jack] ……………….hm,

[Jack] Cat is just sat on Joey, purring. Something is wrong with the human. Purr to fix the human.

[Henry] I called Sammy to make sure he’s okay, but-- [Abby] Was he? [Henry] No.

[Joey] Joey is going to be… obstinate feels like the wrong word? [Joey] He’s being the cat where you put the leash on, and the cat just sits down. [Joey] That is the Joseph mood right now.

[Sammy] *muttering* First one boyfriend turns into a cat, now the other boyfriend’s voice is wrong, today is terrible,

[Joey] This is Joey’s everything. [Sammy] That’s Joey’s contribution to the party! That’s like, your bard can no longer play music. [Sammy] ……….which is also true, but Sammy contributes other things. [Jack] Like Intimidate! [Sammy] Right now he contributes paranoia!

[feralphoenix]

HOWMST BELL THE CAT? - A treatise on one aspect of how the Pale King sealed the Radiance

sup hollow knight fandom, i’m back with the picante takes again after having Noticed A Thing.

as with my previous essays i’ll put this guy up on dreamwidth later for accessibility purposes, since my layout text may be too small for high-res pc users. i will attach that in a reblog at a later point.

CONTENT WARNINGS FOR TONIGHT’S PROGRAM: This essay discusses canon-typical body horror and bodily boundary violations, with some side mentions of colonialism.

all game screencaps are mine. the screencap of the wiki is from the “developer notes” (style guide) section of the “cut content” page.

ALSO: if youre from a christian cultural upbringing (whether currently practicing, agnostic/secular, or atheist now), understand that some of what i’m discussing here may challenge you. if thinking thru the implications of this particular part of hollow knight worldbuilding/lore is distressing for you, PLEASE only approach this essay when youre in a safe mindset & open to listening, and ask the help of a therapist or anti-racism teacher/mentor to help you process your thoughts & feelings. just like keep in mind that youre listening to an ethnoreligiously marginalized person and please be respectful here or wherever else youre discussing this dang essay, ty

HOWMST BELL THE CAT? - A treatise on one aspect of how the Pale King sealed the Radiance

We understand more or less how the Pale King’s plan was supposed to work. Stuff Radiance into a no-thoughts-head-empty and silent Pure Vessel to trap, isolate, and silence her, both putting an end to the Infection and killing her for good. Stick that vessel in the Black Egg, which harnesses Void BS to both keep the vessel alive indefinitely and to cover Hallownest (and its neighbors) in a time-defying stasis so that the Pale King could successfully hoard his favorite shiny FOREVER, threatened by nothing. Then put a seal on the Black Egg to prevent anyone from getting inside and harming said vessel while it’s strung up and helpless. And THEN, put protective seals on the anchors (the Dreamers) to the Black Egg seal to protect them from any external harm: The stasis means the Dreamers won't die of old age or starvation.

All in all, a pretty foolproof plan!

...except that the Dreamers are still vulnerable to having their minds breached with the moths’ magic... and the Pale King failed to take into account that his Pure Vessel was a person actually and the amount of toxic stress his training/upbringing put on them made them REALLY POORLY SUITED FOR THEIR JOB... and also that killing 99% of his million children and turning the Abyss into a landfill for baby corpses would take enough of an emotional toll on his wife and #1 enabler the White Lady that she would walk out on him, ensuring he’d only ever have one shot at this whole deal...

Basically it’s the sort of plan that an emotionally constipated, low-empathy sort of guy who pours all his points into INT and has a big fat zero for WIS might think is foolproof. It has big holes in it that the Pale King did not consider to be big holes until he got owned by the various consequences of his actions and fell down said big holes, making the shocked pikachu face all the while. Rip in die, my guy.

Anyway, there’s a lot of incidental information scattered about the game that gives us more insight into the stages of TPK’s plan. Looking at Monomon’s notes in the Archive suggests that she was probably involved in designing the Black Egg; the hidden room in the Weavers’ den points to their being the ones to blueprint the Dreamer seal; the White Palace’s hidden rooms reveal both TPK’s morbid fascination with the Void and his mea culpa wrt his motives and the Path of Pain is certainly suggestive of a lot of things. The White Lady tells us straight out that she walked out on the Pale King because she wanted no part in a second vessel batch, but how TPK didn’t handle that is only revealed via map design and some incidental dialogue from the Old Stag.

This stuff presents us with, if not a full picture, then at least a decent connect-the-dots of certain aspects of crater politics and Pale Court drama at the time, and how exactly TPK’s plan came together.

But there is still one glaring question that these cookie crumbs do not provide us an answer to:

Who shall bell the cat?

How did TPK et al manage to stuff Radiance into Hollow in the first place?

This is the subject of a lot of memes and jokes within the fandom because it's so absurd. Radiance fuckin hates that dude! She’s probably gonna be pretty wary of him considering how he stole her people in the first place! And considering the anti-colonialism slant of the writing - beyond the general sympathetic view Team Cherry gives of each indigenous bug society, Seer makes it very clear that Radiance has very good reason to take violent action against Hallownest - the answer is probably not something like “she’s just that stupid” or “she rolled a crit fail”.

Well... I have an idea of how TPK managed to get Radiance in there. It raises about as many questions as it answers, mind, but it may be someplace to start.

[desc: the hollow knight's entry in the hunter’s journal. top text/ghost’s comment reads: “Fully grown Vessel, carrying the plague’s heart within its body.” bottom text/hunter’s comment says: “The old King of Hallownest... he must have been desperate to save his crumbling little world. The sacrifices he imposed on others... all for nothing.”]

Here we have Hollow’s bestiary entry. Most of what we’re concerned with here is the top text, which says the seal has literally trapped Radiance inside their body. (First of all, ew, TPK.)

We already knew Radiance is literally actually inside Hollow, though: The Infection is leaking out of their body, and to get to fight Radiance, Ghost has to go traipsing into their sibling’s mind. So what’s significant about that here?

[desc: screencap of the outside of the black egg temple, post-infected crossroads. there are large infection blobs in the foreground and background, connected to each other by veins that come from inside the temple.]

The infection blobs are weird and get weirder if you kill enough Lightseeds for the Hunter to tell you their origin story, i.e. that the literal actual sun has been having a very long bad day and cried a lot, and some of the liquid coalesced into living flesh, and some of that living flesh took on a mind of its own to become Lightseeds. (Hollow Knight is a WILD place.)

Lightseeds are Radiance’s accidental children and share a lot of her traits: They are harmless creatures that try to avoid conflict if possible but if pushed will get creative and find ways to fight regardless of their physical limitations. (For the Lightseeds this involves hiding inside Broken Vessel’s corpse and puppeting it around to try to stab you.) They even have her same distinctive yell. And according to the Hunter, they’re born from the infection blobs. These enemies only ever appear in the Ancient Basin, which both Radiance and the Void have ransacked, and in the Infected Crossroads.

The infection blobs are connected to and sort of a weird extension of Radiance because the Infection itself is sort of a weird extension of Radiance. In the game’s internal style guide Team Cherry explains that the Infection started as an accident, not her original intention but what happened when Hallownest tried to block her out.

[desc: screencap from the wiki of style notes attached to seer that describe a sketch of radiance’s finalized backstory. text reads: “The moth tribe were (perhaps) descended from Radiance. However, the King convinced them somehow to seal Radiance away. I guess so he could rule Hallownest with his singular vision, as a god/monarch with no other gods. The moths sealed Radiance away by forgetting about her. Hallownest was born and flourished. However, the memory of Radiance lingered (eg [sic] the statue at hallownest’s crown) and soon she began to reappear in dreams and starting [sic] exerting influence. The King and the bugs of Hallownest resisted this memory/power and it started to manifest as the Infection. Thus the first attempt to seal Radiance failed, and the King had to try another method - the Vessel.” emphasis mine.]

Some fans have posited the blobs as deposits of pupa juice, but given Team Cherry's description of the Infection’s origins I don’t know how likely that is. Since the Void also sticks its squamous tentacles into things via veiny looking things and the Nightmare’s Heart has similar veiny nonsense in the Nightmare Realm, I wonder if it isn’t just a Meddly God Shit thing in general.

Whatever the case, the blobs are very much connected to/a part of Radiance.

And when you’re hanging around them, you will notice two things: They pulse like they’re part of a circulatory system, and you can hear Radiance's heartbeat emanating from them.

[desc: screencap of the game’s title screen with the infected menu theme in use: a glowing orange ball at the center of a lot of black tendony webbing.]

Let’s also think of the Infected menu theme, which you unlock after getting either of the endings where Ghost takes over from Hollow and absorbs Radiance out of them. Ghost is infected and then sealed inside the Black Egg in Hollow's place. It’s suggested by the animation’s staging that Radiance briefly struggles to get out of Ghost after absorbed but is ultimately stuck in them, at which point the seal is reestablished.

If you haven’t used the Infected menu theme yourself, the... interesting thing about it is that it moves organically. The light ball expands and contracts - y’know, sort of like a living organ - and so does the black webby stuff around it.

Also, Radiance’s heartbeat is included in the theme's ambiance.

[desc: hollow’s bestiary entry again]

To cut to the chase, this part of Hollow’s bestiary entry that says “the plague’s heart”? I don’t think that’s just Ghost/Team Cherry being poetic. I think there’s a good chance it’s LITERAL.

I think TPK is the sort of person who could cram a native woman’s literal living beating heart inside his own child’s body so they can use it as... say, a focus to absorb and trap her mind/spirit inside their body, too. Mr. No Cost Too Great is capable of a lot in the name of keeping other people’s claws off his Big Shiny kingdom. This is kind of his whole brand.

But also, like, yuck.

This fits the worldbuilding too; generally speaking Hollow Knight is Body Horror City. Also there’s the case of Grimm: While he and Radiance are loose counterparts at best with WILDLY disparate outlooks and ethoses, his existence serves as precedent that a Higher Being’s heart specifically can be separate from the rest of them.

As I said before, though, this DOES raise as many questions as it answers. If this is another piece in the puzzle of how TPK belled the cat, we’re now left wondering how he got Radiance’s heart to use as Hollow's focus to begin with.

We know he has access to the Dream Realm because that’s ultimately where he hid when Hollow’s seal failed, but who did he send to do the stealing and how did they get away with it? (TPK certainly wouldn’t have gone; his own life’s the one cost too great for him to willingly pay.) Was Radiance’s heart separate from her like the Nightmare’s Heart, or was it a part of her body? (I think the latter is more likely just from her personality; Grimm’s hidden heart makes sense because of how he keeps even his own servants at arm’s length emotionally, whereas Radiance is all heart all the time. I think this makes more sense with their equal opposites schtick too. But this would make for a WAY riskier mission.)

I can imagine all kinds of possibilities. None of them are definitive, but the thing they have in common is that they are all Awful... and how on-brand that is for Hollow Knight as a whole is, maybe, the most persuasive argument for It’s Literally Actually Her Real Physical Heart there could be.

[mylordshesacactus]

An Exhaustive Blow-By-Blow Analysis Of The ‘To Catch A Jedi’ Warehouse Duel That Was Definitely Asked For And Desired By People Other Than Us: An Essay By Alex And Jo

Or: It Is The Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand FUCKING Twenty, And Yet Here We Are, At The End Of All Things, Still Analyzing Barriss Offee’s Terrible Life Decisions.

Yes we’ve been saying we’d do this for the past five years minimum yes we’re girls what about it.

Before we begin, a moment of acknowledgement. Of all the people she’s faced, with all her skill and cunning and strength in the Force, the one and only character we have ever seen completely get the drop on Asajj Ventress--take her out without even giving her time to go for her lightsabers, stone cold, no duel no banter no challenge—

Is BARRISS FUCKING OFFEE. DEPENDABLE BARRISS™. LUMINARA UNDULI’S KID. THE NERD WHO MEMORIZED THE ENTIRE INSIDE OF A GEONOSIAN LABYRINTH, YOU KNOW, JUST IN CASE.

WITH A PIPE.

In the library.

And once she’s done that, this happens:

...and Jo and Alex spend the next seven years going absolutely feral. 

A brief moment now where we drag Ahsoka for failing to notice that in the last ten minutes Asajj Ventress has somehow managed to lose about six inches of height. But of course she doesn’t; the entirety of To Catch a Jedi is spent establishing that Ahsoka is firing on zero cylinders. She’s exhausted—she’s probably been awake for over 24 hours at this point—she’s confused, she’s scared, her entire world is crumbling all around her and she doesn’t understand why. So we see her make slip-up after slip-up, making a lot of stupid mistakes that get her noticed by the Coruscant police, and also briefly forgetting how elevators work.

“I, uh, guess I’m not exactly on my game these days.”

So...yeah. She doesn’t notice Asajj’s height loss or the real damning difference: Barriss is completely silent the entire fight, and Asajj never shuts the fuck up.

Of course, Barriss doesn’t need this deception to be perfect. She just needs to make it believable enough. This little Makashi salute—a duelist’s formality, something that screams Dooku—is the first little Ventress-y quirk she throws in, and that’s relevant, because it’s central to her entire motivation for this fight.

Barriss isn’t here to kill Ahsoka.

Barriss is here to save her life.

...Like, she’s bad at it. She’s making horrible decisions that keep getting worse. But there’s a reason she’s disguising herself as Ventress—Ventress is the perfect catspaw, and Barriss desperately needs a catspaw right now, because Ahsoka was never meant to take the fall for the bombing.

Letta went off-script and came within inches of naming Barriss—who, going by the timing, was almost certainly already infiltrating that secure facility (which...gotta respect the skill that took, at least) to silence her—or free her, we don’t know what Barriss intended but we’re not giving her that much benefit of the doubt right now. If she hadn’t called for Ahsoka as quickly as she did, Letta would have died alone in her cell, killed by a nameless Force-user, and the trail would have gone cold.

Instead Ahsoka was there, and when Barriss was faced with a choice between her actions being exposed and letting Ahsoka take the blame, she took the latter. But then Barriss breaks her out, with every indication being that something...went very wrong, as the situation spirals out of control. It’s obvious that Barriss is in the vents during that escape because the clones in Ahsoka’s path keep mysteriously dying and their wounds are fresh, and also there’s no more convenient interference once she gets outside. So now Ahsoka’s free but the subject of a planetwide manhunt that makes her look even MORE guilty…which wasn’t meant to happen.

Remember that Ahsoka is the one who contacted Barriss for help, and Barriss clearly wasn’t expecting it. She spends most of this episode desperately flailing for something, anything to do to fix all this, and she’s lost until she discovers Ahsoka is now with Ventress.

Ventress. Ventress is a darksider. If Ventress is linked to this at all, people will believe it. Ventress could easily have gotten into that prison—through the vents, someone would inevitably have suggested, and probably discovered whatever lightsaber sabotage Barriss used to get in. Case closed. 

So all Barriss has to do to fix this without coming clean is frame Ventress believably. Then the person being executed will...well it’ll only be Asajj Ventress, and she deserves it, right? 

(Asajj Ventress--and all those clones Barriss killed in the breakout. And that’s very telling. Barriss who memorized 800 junctions of a Geonosian labyrinth for one singular mission, because “other people’s lives” depended on her success, doesn’t seem to have factored in the lives of those clones. They don’t seem to be registering in these calculations.)

The point is that Ahsoka’s name will be clear and Barriss’ will never have been in danger.

If you watch that short opening bout, before Ahsoka kicks her away, it’s...well, in Luminara’s words, amateurish and sloppy. All the blows, including that ostensibly fatal double-overhead strike, are DRAMATICALLY telegraphed. In a few cases, she is visibly missing on purpose:

This strike right here? This strike is HILARIOUSLY transparent in slow motion. She has an opening and instead sweeps her lightsabers ALL THE WAY back on the opposite side; and when she brings them down again…

Apologies for the motion blur but—Ahsoka moves to block and MISSES, which doesn’t matter because the blades were like a full foot away from actually making contact with her body. Barriss is striking at her lightsabers half the time for this first flurry of action, before letting Ahsoka break away for that salute. And this is not an animation error. TCW has plenty of those, but they know how to choreograph a lightsaber duel.

So the goal of this fight is very clearly not to kill Ahsoka. It’s to LOOK like she’s trying to kill Ahsoka, while mostly just trying to attract attention and act as much like Ventress as she possibly can.

As a result, Barriss spends a lot of the fight creating space. She pulls a sheet of metal down at Ahsoka, while gesturing dramatically to telegraph her intentions and give Ahsoka plenty of time to dodge:

And then she runs away to a higher level, letting Ahsoka pursue and then hiding.

This fucking pipe trick is NOT a Ventress thing, mind. This is 100% Mirialan using-the-environment bullshit and also, Barriss, a massive bitch move. We’re pointing it out mostly because of how dramatically Ahsoka JUMPS here. Because...listen, she’s better than this. She’s a wartime Padawan. She’s Anakin Skywalker’s wartime Padawan. She has way more duelling experience than a Jedi of her age normally would, and in a vacuum—in a normal sparring situation, where they’re both rested and prepared for it—Ahsoka would probably beat Barriss nine times out of ten in a duel.

This is anything but a vacuum. As we established, Ahsoka is firing on zero cylinders, she’s exhausted, she’s in the midst of a complete mental breakdown, she’s lost her offhand blade, and she doesn’t know the layout of the area like Barriss does. Ahsoka may be a more skilled and experienced duellist, but in this situation that means exactly fuckall. So Barriss runs rings around her.

So after the pipe trick—again a “cinematic” detail, something to ramp up the tension and sell the deception that otherwise has massive holes in it—Barriss gets in ONE solid blow.

Ahsoka’s off-balance, she’s blocking with both hands, Barriss could use her primary to slice under her guard—

At which point she does a FUCKING CARTWHEEL over the point of contact, which is not REMOTELY a Ventress thing, that is all Luminara Unduli all the time. That is the Mirialan Unnecessary Acrobatics Bonus Action.

And then again, a sloppy midsection slash that was nowhere near connecting and serves entirely to create space. A few more standard telegraphed blows.

And then what we generally refer to as the first turn in this duel.

Barriss roundhouse-kicks Ahsoka in the ribs hard enough to send her flying through a stack of boxes and bounce off the wall behind it. And that was an actual, solid injury. Ahsoka takes a moment to get back to her feet, clutching her side like she’s broken ribs, and her already-poor form takes even more of a dive after this. If Barriss wanted to, she easily could have killed Ahsoka here, but instead...

She backs off. Slowly and deliberately, making what’s very nearly a come-hither gesture with her offhand lightsaber. 

And again—Ahsoka is better than this. She is smarter than this. This is such, such glaringly obvious BAIT. She’s being drawn deeper into the factory; Barriss is absolutely herding her, and she falls for it, because she’s not doing great right now.

(And of course Barriss is herding her. Thus far, there’s no actual evidence that Ventress was here except for Ahsoka’s word. For this deception to work there have to be witnesses. She has to attract attention.)

So she does a bunch of flippy bullshit (#Mirialans) to knock those barrels off, slowing Ahsoka down and tiring her out some more.

And when Ahsoka’s done playing Donkey Kong, she COMPLETELY crits on her spot check and does the exact thing that will get Anakin brutally dismembered in about a year. She flips onto the upper level, right past Barriss, who’s just sort of politely waiting for her to land and get her feet under her.

It...is genuinely heartbreaking, honestly, how out of it Ahsoka is during this fight.

And this is actually the second turn, because while it’s impossible to get a high-quality screenshot, this is the first moment where Barriss begins to show that she’s...getting a little too into this. Ahsoka flips onto the platform, and for several seconds she’s slashing wildly around herself while Barriss dodges...completely unarmed.

There’s a few more halfhearted exchanges of blows, culminating in Ahsoka’s only near-hit in this episode. And it comes CLOSE, too; she’s still Ahsoka Tano, after all. Barriss dodges this blow by inches, and Ahsoka impales her saber to the HILT in that support column.

At which point Barriss dodges around the other side of the column and, again, just...waits, for Ahsoka to come at her again.

(We honestly have no idea how so much of the fandom misses how INCREDIBLY staged this whole thing was, because it’s not subtle. The animators are brilliant. It’s fast-paced enough that it’s believable that AHSOKA would believe it, but when you actually watch what’s happening...)

Barriss does ANOTHER FUCKING backflip and they exchange a few more strikes, at which point Barriss pulls what’s actually the bitchiest move she pulls in this whole fight. But it’s also...one of the most interesting and lowkey AWFUL things. Because right now, she is still trying to be Ventress.

She slashes the gas canister open to set up the upcoming explosion, but she also times it so that Ahsoka gets blasted in the face with hot compressed gas that staggers her and briefly impairs Ahsoka’s vision. And that is...a move that we have seen Asajj Ventress use, onscreen, before.

Against Luminara.

The only possible way Barriss could know about this little compressed-steam trick of Ventress’ is through her master. 

Barriss was not there for this fight. Barriss did not see this happen. But Luminara has, out loud, credited Ahsoka for saving her life in this fight—and rightly so, because Ventress came within inches of killing her multiple times during that fight and this was one of them. And Barriss would have to know that. And she just used it against Ahsoka.

In a fight, Luminara is a graceful Lady of War. Barriss Offee, on the other hand, is a stone-cold fucking bitch.

By the time of this arc Barriss is convinced that all of the Jedi have fallen, that they’re all in service to the dark side and just don’t see it, and in a lot of ways she’s right. But the fact is that Barriss Offee herself has fallen to the dark side personally in a way that most individual Jedi have not, and what happens next shows it.

Barrels Offee over here uses the Force to shove a bunch of explosives over the red-hot wounds left by her lightsabers and gets the pyrotechnics she was looking for.

And this is the final turn. Earlier, we noticed Barriss getting a little too into this fight, toying with Ahsoka, taunting her with that unarmed dodging; but she was still focused on her objective, still laying a stage for the most part.

And this is it. This is the objective.

By creating that explosion, she caught the attention of local authorities. There will be witnesses any moment now who will see her, wearing Ventress’ mask and holding Ventress’ lightsabers, standing in a munitions factory that Letta Turmond can be tied to. Ahsoka will testify that she went to investigate and Ventress came from behind to kill her, and suddenly everything will make sense.

Ahsoka...is out of the fight. She’s barely stirring, she’s not getting up. She doesn’t even have the strength to lift that sheet of metal; the only reason she’s able to BARELY get onto her hands and knees is that Barriss uses the Force to lift it off her.

Barriss got what she wanted.

And then she keeps going.

This is Barriss in the FULL grip of the Darkside Tango over here. She’s angry and scared and angry and something about that explosion was cathartic, and this is the point where the duel takes a sharp turn. Something...has changed, about Barriss’ demeanor, here.

She doesn’t appear to be thinking anymore.

This is the point at which this fight is...honestly, just hard to watch. It’s a beatdown. Barriss is now hurting Ahsoka on purpose, and for no other reason than to hurt her. She puts her ALL behind flinging a ragdolling, half-conscious Ahsoka into the wall so hard it shakes some of the steel loose. It’s brutal, and Barriss’ body language is cold and confident the whole time.

She is completely lost in the sauce on the Dark Side at this point.

The absolute worst thing from here on in is the way Ahsoka just…Keeps. Getting. Up.

She can barely stand at this point. She’s got her saber up trying to hold a guard position and she physically can’t. This is legitimately the worst Ahsoka’s ever gotten beaten in a fight in her life, and she knows it. She’s staggering. Her eyes aren’t even fully in focus.

Barriss doesn’t bother with actually fighting, because she doesn’t need to. She hits Ahsoka with a casual Force push to knock her back off her feet, and Ahsoka just cringes in anticipation of it because she knows she can’t defend herself properly.

And then there goes her lightsaber, tumbling over the edge, and she never holds it again until the Siege of Mandalore. That Weapon Is Her Life, and we never see it in its current form again.

And Ahsoka GETS UP AGAIN.

Ladies and gentlemen, our hero.

She is DOWN. She’s dead on her feet, she can’t even walk; she just sort of stumbles across the floor with her own momentum. But she is still SOMEHOW trying to square off with “Ventress.”

And this, right here? This is how we know exactly what Barriss’ mindset is right now, because Ahsoka never gives up. She just doesn’t. She’s the biggest cockroach in a universe containing Darth “Just A Flesh Wound” Maul. Ahsoka doesn’t just lie down and accept her fate. She doesn’t just let people win.

And Barriss...has.

There’s a viciousness in the way she ends this fight. Like, it’s Barriss—all of her fights are a little bit vicious. She is a BITCH when the chips are down. But this is...vindictive. From the moment Ahsoka trembles to her hands and knees after that explosion, the overwhelming cold cruelty Barriss shows from that moment until she spin-kicks Ahsoka down like two and a half stories of broken slats onto solid concrete is raw, bitter:

Will you just STAY DOWN for once in your FUCKING life?!

And we want to take a moment to give Ahsoka the dignity of acknowledging that she still doesn’t.

And then the GAR shows up, and Barriss really shows her true colors. Because the moment she hears Republic forces arriving...

Barriss runs.

We worry sometimes that because Barriss is our favorite character, people will think that means we think she’s justified in her actual actions in this arc, or that her worst actions are somehow not her fault. But let us be very clear: Barriss Offee fucked up royal and is entirely responsible for that. 

The fact that it’s very clear she didn’t come into this fight with intent to kill, the fact that her actions are calculated to clear Ahsoka’s name, is the FURTHEST thing from absolution. Even as she tries to find a solution throughout this episode, it all stems from her original decision to frame Ahsoka for Letta’s murder rather than let Letta spill the beans. There’s a very, very simple solution to this mess, a simple way to clear Ahsoka’s name and make amends for the attack that Barriss regretted almost the moment it happened. But she consistently refuses to even consider it as an option.

Barriss Offee does not want to face the consequences of her actions.

She came into this to fix things, but when push comes to shove—she wants to save her own life. She wants to be a radical dissenter and still get to be the Jedi Padawan poster girl, and the security that comes with it. She doesn’t stick around to make sure she’s seen by witnesses because as evidenced by that brutal beatdown, she’s...stopped caring, that much. She doesn’t value Ahsoka’s life enough to risk her own anymore.

So when this fails, when the clones don’t see her and there’s no evidence to back up Ahsoka’s story that Ventress was the one behind it, when three words from Barriss would save her from a death she doesn’t deserve, Barriss says absolutely nothing until she’s compelled at lightsaber-point.

At the end of the day, this whole elaborate deception was only ever about one thing, and it wasn’t Ahsoka. It was the fact that Barriss Offee doesn’t want to get caught.

[walkingshcdow-a]

Things That Happened in the Last Three Days at D&D, According to My Notes

Finnegan’s mage hand carried one of Victor (Trevor’s) molars down into a castle ruin because Victor can use his hexblood magic and own body parts as “bugs” to spy on others. There was minimal, “Mmm, that’s gross, babe,” from Finnegan. 

Once Victor relayed all the info, Carlotta went down alone while Finnegan waited for his BF to come out of his magically induced blindness. This meant Lotta taunted the guards into fighting her and killed one almost immediately, then, looked up and said, “Next?”

Finnegan and Victor join for battle. Victor slices a guard in half. Finnegan, hanging back (because sorcerer and also asshole) is very impressed with his boyfriend’s display of swordsmanship.

For a few rounds, Finnegan fails to hit anything. This wouldn’t have sucked so much if one of the Grells didn’t get its poison tentacles in Lotta. And then Victor. Victor passes his con save, but Lotta doesn’t. Incensed, Finnegan begins to firebolt the shit out of the Grell and critical rolls. That son of a bitch is dead and not hurting his loved ones anymore. 

We go back to fighting cultists but that other Grell is around and Finnegan decides it’s going to be his problem as it comes towards him, except Victor rushes it to defend him and stabs it hard. Finnegan puts the cursed thing out of its misery with a swift Chill Touch and rots it on sight with another crit. 

Victor heals Lotta, who is the only one very damaged. Finnegan? Not a scratch. The perks of speciailizing in ranged fire magic. 

Victor realizes the weird symbology the cultists wear match nothing recognizable. 

We find a study and look for useful things. Lotta and Finnegan study a book call “Retribution of the Ancients” and Finnegan gets to tell the party religious facts that don’t have to do with the Selandrine for once. He still defers to Victor for more knowledge because of course. 

Victor finds a chime of opening... and a secret passage full of a cult sweatshop. No thanks. 

We go the other way and find a room with a very dodgy summoning canvas and dozens of bones upon it. While Lotta runs back upstairs to get the book, Victor and Finnegan move the bones off the canvas and discuss the horrors of the cult. They agree Finnegan should take the canvas to disrupt the ritual, since none of us can figure out how to make it summon a friendly god instead. 

We go down the hall and find a prison filled with townsfolk and the knight we met at the beginning of the game. There are also students under instruction by a cultist. One of them looks familiar - the innkeeper’s son! Victor tells him his father wants him to come home and rolls a Nat 20 persuasion. The young man is ready to come with us... but his teacher refuses to let him. We fight.

It’s a short fight. Lotta kills the teacher and hits a cultist. Finnegan “holds” (re: paralyzes temporarily) the other two cult students and tries to persuade them that if they stop fighting, they will let them live. Somehow that works! 

Finnegan asks the baby cultists their names. One, Tayathanu almost refuses to give her name because she sees it as a sarifice for her god. Victor tells her that any god worth serving will never ask her to give up her identity because that god will see the value of her. The other one, Steven, just came for the free spaghetti dinner and has been stuck here. He’s glad to leave. We try to reason with Teyathanu but she has gulped down some of that Kool-Aid. We also try to heal Steven, but we’re not good at it, so Victor tells the innkeeper’s son to take everyone to the healer. Lotta opens the cell with the chime of opening. 

Finnegan recognizes one of the women as the mayor’s sister, Yaeda and she probably has pneumonia and is #Done with this shit. He tells her that her sister is waiting for her and she says, “No doubt with a lecture.” Lotta accuses her of being pregnant with the cult leader’s baby. She (probably?) is not but is definitely insulted. 

As they go through the halls, Victor keeps finding rooms full of bones. Somewhat petulantly, Finnegan says he doesn’t want to go into another bloody room of bones - mostly because he’s carrying the summoning canvas. However, it almost sounds like he thinks Victor trying to perform funeral rites isn’t worthwhile so they squabble. Finnegan has instant regrets, but what’s he gonna do? Overexplain and apologize? Of course not. Instead, he snarks with Lotta in the hall, asking what witty one-liners she plans to use when she kills Vialis. 

The go into a small room and find chests filled with weapons and personal artifacts from the prisoners. Victor takes Sir Veckan’s longsword, the money, and the fancy earrings. 

In the hall, Finnegan invokes his Inspiring Leader Feat and tells the other two essentially that they are badass and there is no one he’d rather kill cultists with. (I didn’t write down what he said). This gives everyone temporary hit points. 

Lotta invokes her Master of Intrigue Feat to disguise herself as a cultist.

Finnegan makes himself and Victor invisible and then sends him a quiet message: “I’m sorry.” Victor finds his hand and holds it in the quiet before battle. 

Finnegan and Lotta stealthed into the "chapel”. Victor went unnoticed by the sheer distraction of the cult leader and his followers. 

Victor shoves a long sword into Lord Vialis, the cult leader. Lotta shanks Vialis. Finnegan shoots scorching ray at Lord Vialis, a Grell, and Faerl, his archenemy who wanted to byuy his house. Vialis is barely standing and Faerl passes out. 

The fight continues until Vialis stuns the party, blinding Lotta in the process.

The effects of the stunning wear of and Finnegan casts scorch ray at the fanatics and Faerl and kills Faerl. He then turns to the cultists and grins menacingly. “That was satisfying,” he says. “Don’t try me.” He successfully intimidates them. 

The battle continues for a few rounds. Lotta stabs Lord Vialis with her rapier and pins him to his own altar. “This is for Sarah,” she hisses. “Sarah?” he sputters and then dies. 

The cultists and grells continue to fight the party, even without a leader and are shown no mercy. 

When the enemies are nothing but blood and corpses, Finnegan takes Faerl’s hat as a spoil of war and heads north. As he leans against a wall, hoping to look cool for his boyfriend, Lotta rings the chime of opening and he falls backwards into a library. Everyone sees him look like an idiot. Then, Lotta and Victor explore another secret library that opened up. The find Vialis’ journals and his family’s ashes, which he’d been using as an arcane focus. Finnegan finds books. 

Over the next few days, there are celebrations in Greenfast for those who have been freed from the cult. While the party clean out the libraries for interesting books, Finnegan asks Victor about vacationing in Greenfast one day and they joke about building a summer home. Funerals are held for those sacrificed by Vialis. Then, upon returning to Waterdeep, the party hosts a funeral for Sarah and the Yellowcrests. Their ghosts appear to say silent thank yous.

Victor says to the party, “If anyone should ask what happened, we shall tell them the greatest story of how Sir Veckan of the Broken Helm defeated the Cult of the Burnt Tongue.” and Lotta and Finnegan, who have too much vested interest in no looking like they killed a Waterdhavian noble eagerly agree. 

@professor-of-predators - DM

 @tinfoiltemplar​ - Victor Trevor

@dirusso - Carlotta Dirusso

@walkingshcdow - Finnegan Silverguard

[iiasha-archived]

genshin anon! finally lol. i keep meaning to respond - tab has been open with your last response for two weeks now... lol. oh i put a lot of work into my weapons. especially if i use them a lot. oo the 20k+ is nice though! apparently i have hu tao built semi decently so when she gets a vaporize crit it goes quite well for me haha. yeah agree. and they have updates every 6 weeks. yeah not every update is the biggest thing ever but like... its okay. no need to rush. game development takes time.

hihihi lmao again no worries!

(2/5) oh oops I spend several hours a day on the game (when i have time). to be fair, i genuinely enjoy going into coop and finding lower ar people to help with bosses and world exploration and stuff. so i can spend a long time doing that. i know i appreciated the help when i was low. plus its fun to get to chat with others occasionally. oh yeah genshin def ripped off of botw very well lol. they took botw's complaints and went yeah i can fix that. but then made it gacha.

(3/5) i saw you say you have c6 noelle now lol. i am so so sorry ): you did get keqing though? was that on the banner? so are you guaranteed the banner character next beCAUSE ZHONGLI RERUN YES. oh yeah it was so cool seeing everyone! bennett and razor were just adorable i love that friendship. loved getting to see albedo again. hes like.. my fav and of course i missed him :/ rerun plz.. ahh yeah a lot of the claymores are more for their skills i guess. except razor. so i get that.

(4/5) i also tend to use the elemental stuff a bit more but just idk claymores are SO SLOW and im just not overly fond. oh yeah polearms do less damage ahha. i like their fighting styles though. theyre faster and just idk it just -works- for me. oh that is SO CUTE they wear friendship tassels )': ooo yeah the rosaria/kaeya/diluc trio is quite fun. would def love to see more of them! rosaria grew a lot on me over 1.4 and seeing her... not be so rude all the time... lol.

(5/5) also im super excited, i did end up pulling childe! IT WAS SO CRAZY. I DID THE MAGICAL TWO 5*S IN A ROW. mona decided to give me c1 because i can never win the 50/50 and then childe was like its okay i know youve been working your butt off getting everything ready for me so here you go <3 and like )': i love him lol his playstyle is so fun and he works great with hu tao. also got rosaria and fischl (who i didnt have) which is great! were you pulling on childes banner at all or just saving?

ALSO thoughts on the 1.5 stuff??? I haven't gotten to watch completely everything yet but it all sounds so good! Zhongli rerun!!! And the housing thing seems super cool? And lower resin for weekly bosses! New world boss too! All the events seem pretty interesting as well so I'm pretty excited! -genshin anon (pretty sure tumblr still only lets you send 5 anon asks an hour or else i would've added this earlier lol)

genshin anon. lol it's okay! everyone is free to like whatever characters they want! yeah diona is.. not involved at all. although she is getting a hangout in 1.5! might be the first one i actually do. her story is pretty sad though from reading all of her profile. yeah you with noelle was me with diona. i was so mad at her at first since i pulled her like... 10 times on xiaos banner. after i got over it i tried her out and now i love her. also its okay! i took like two weeks to respond :P

but omg how do you have tabs open for two weeks.... i get stressed if i don’t leave my computer with everything closed LMAO. i mean yeah it definitely makes sense to put a lot of work into weapons bc they can be used by multiple characters so they’re a good investment!! i should start thinking about that as well......

nice!!! i’m guessing you’re having a good time with hu tao then eh :D my xiao is. okay lmao probably not doing the damage as expected of him but eh whatever <3 

if i’m like really in the mood i can invest a couple hours but most days it takes some self-convincing to even log in asfjdkldsaj like once i’m in the game it’s fine but for some reason the action of opening and loading it up is like hmm.... also most days by the time i do get to play i’m so exhausted from work </3 

omg that sounds fun!! personally i don’t like... playing with strangers that much afjdklasj so i tend to avoid co-op... but one of my friends might start playing genshin so i totally get what you mean about helping lower AR people with bosses and stuff because i wanna do that with her lmao :D 

lmao traded botw faults for the gacha system... you really can’t have it all unfortunately </3 speaking of botw my friend got my the expansion past like. literally last year lmao i’ve been meaning to play it. ugh i’m just so behind in general on all video games unless it’s genshin lmao

i wouldn’t have minded c6 noelle if i had GOTTEN ANYBODY ELSE WHEN I WAS PULLING ON THAT BANNER ;_____; like at least they could have given me a sucrose who i don’t have!!! but i did get keqing on my pity from that banner!! wait omg i didn’t realize that was how it works... i have a vague idea but if that’s true YES ZHONGLI PLEASE COME HOME GOD PLEASEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE i’m 100% skipping childe’s banner for zhongli sorry dude ajkdlfaj

ahhh yes getting to see albedo was nice too!!! even if only for a bit hehe it’s nice how they tried to rope in all the mondstadt characters somehow (except. diona jaklsdfja) 

okay mood. i love chongyun to bits but i admit after maining xiao for a while i’m definitely like why is chongyun so... slow asjfkldj but that’s literally just how it works </3 and same about rosaria!!!! she was still pretty like.... moody idk but she’s definitely better when she’s not just being straight up mean lmao

OMG CONGRATS!!!!! you seem to have much better gacha luck than me LMAOOO i envy that but i’m so glad you got everyone you wanted!!! and nah now that zhongli is definitely confirmed i’m DEFINITELY saving for him like actually the last time it was childe than zhongli’s banner was when i just started playing and i wasted all my beginner primogems on childe not knowing who was coming next........ i’m not making that mistake again LMAO

i didn’t watch the livestream but i did see the trailer and AHHHHHHH SO EXCITED omg with the housing i thought we were just getting a house but no it looks like they’re giving us a WHOLE FUCKING VILLAGE like as if i didn’t spend enough time in this game they’re introducing this like you KNOWWWW the hours about to be put into customizing our little house/villages.... 

ohhh i didn’t see the thing about resin!!! wow they really are giving it all. the previews for inazuma were also super pretty!!! and while the new characters have been known for a while this teaser definitely made me more excited for them hehe eula is so prettyyy

and yayyyy diona hangout! is she the only one coming in this version? but i’m glad to see they’ll probably add hangouts for all the characters (or at least the less story-critical ones like zhongli already has his story quest so idk if he’d get a hangout). it’s just nice to see more love given to those characters hehe <3

[jarmes]

Beating Pokemon Sapphire with (almost) no damaging moves

Last year, I decided to beat Pokemon Leafgreen without using any damaging moves. It was hard, but doable. A few weeks back, I decided to try and find out if you can beat Pokemon Sapphire under the same ruleset. The answer is no. You can’t. It is physically impossible. Let me explain why.

I started the game up, fast-forwarded through the introduction, and chose Mudkip as my starter. Unlike Leafgreen, which features Bulbasaur, one of the best stall Pokemon in Gen 3, all of the starters in Hoenn are terrible for this run, lacking any real way to stall. I went with Mudkip because it’s the most defensive. Tackle is a damaging move, so Mudkip is unable to use anything but Growl. Fortunately, the Poohcheyana is programmed to run away before it beats you.

I named Mudkip GarbageBoyStinkman (technically GBSM because of character limits) and traveled to Route 103 to meet with May. Having no way to deal damage, I ran from all wild Pokemon along the way. Unfortunately, this is the point the run becomes unwinnable.

You cannot beat May without dealing damage. It cannot be done. None of the starters have any moves that can take out opponents through status moves. Now, you may be thinking, what if I caught another Pokemon on the route? Well, you can’t. You can’t buy Pokeballs until after you beat May. And you can’t trade because you only have one Pokemon. We can’t beat May because her Torchic takes us out in a few hits, and we can’t level up before May because all of the wild Pokemon around do the same. So, the run is over. Game over.

Hence the “almost” in the title. Because May is impossible, we’ll try to beat the game without attacking anyone else. It takes four tackles to take out her Torchic. Technically, because criticals do double damage, two criticals could take May out in two hits, setting our minimum attacking moves at two. Getting two crits in a row only happens one percent of the time, but it is possible. I opted for four hits because the battle was already a wash and moved on.

Birch gives us five Pokeballs and we finally have a little breathing room. Our best strategy, for now, is going to be stalling until enemy Pokemon struggle themselves to death. Mudkip lacks the bulk needed to take a few dozen hits and would end up struggling before the opponent, so I need to get some reinforcements. I caught five Zigzagoon: Chocolate, Caramel, Taffy, Lolly, and Liquorice. Full party in hand, I marched to Route 102 and ran into Youngster Calvin, a six-year-old with a single level five Zigzagoon.

Calvin is the hardest trainer that I’ve ever beaten in any challenge run. Calvin is so insanely difficult that he made me question if the run is actually possible.

At level five, Calvin’s Zigzagoon knows three moves: Tackle, Tail Whip, and Growl. Combined, these two moves have 75 PP, meaning I need to stall for 105 turns before the Zigzagoon will struggle. Growl and Tail Whip are fine, but Tackle deals damage, and my team needs to shrug off 35 of them, plus however many struggles it will take for the Zigzagoon to knock itself out.

Even when my team has used Growl six times and Calvin has avoided all uses of Tail Whip, Calvin’s Zigzagoon can take a member of the Candy Squad out in five hits and GBSM out in six. Now, looking at those numbers, it seems that Zigzagoon should just barely be beatable. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Cal’s Zigzagoon is able to take out the first two of its brothers before they minimize its attack and tail Whip lowers the number of hits we can take. Plus, Struggle does just as much damage as Tackle but only does half as much in recoil, meaning that, if my math is right, it’ll take ten struggles for it to die, meaning that even in the absolute best circumstances, we’d need to survive 45 hits when we only have enough HP to take 36.

Now, there are a few random factors that make me think this battle may be technically possible at this point. Zigzagoon chooses its moves at random, meaning that it could in theory save all of its Tail Whips until after wasting its Tackles. And, as previously mentioned, Tackle can miss, which gives us a free hit to survive. But, at the same time, Zigzagoon can get criticals which effectively doom us. After two more tries, I decided that this battle wasn’t winnable, at least not yet.

So, we can’t beat a level five Zigzagoon. But, the question is, can we beat a level two Wurmple? Because if we can beat some wild Pokemon on Route 201, we can get some EXP and become strong enough to beat Youngster Calvin. Unfortunately, my team right now is just barely too weak to survive a single battle.

Fortunately, I bought a couple of potions. If I use a potion right before the Wurmple can take out Mudkip, I can just barely survive. Now, I only had a few potions, but I wasn’t too worried. After each battle, Zigzagoon has a 10% chance to give a random item after battle, including Super Potions, Rare Candies, and things like Nuggets and Full Restores that I can sell for money. With five Zigzagoon, I had a ~40% chance of getting an item after each battle I won.

But, luck wasn’t on my side. By the time Mudkip reached level eight, I was completely out of items. And Mudkip still wasn’t tough enough to survive a battle without a potion. Game over.

So I completely restarted. This time, I was smarter with my Pokeballs. Instead of throwing them willy nilly and having to buy ten more after running out, I saved and reset until I caught five Zigzagoon using the five balls Birch gave me. I also avoided Calvin until I was ready for him, because losing to him wasted money. The extra money this run gave me was enough to start my grind with ten potions instead of three. Also, I made sure that all of the Zigzagoon I caught were level three this time, hoping that the one extra HP would help. I made a save state and started grinding.

I also switched to hunting Poochyena instead of hunting Wurmple. They deal the same damage at level two and don’t know string shot, which made things go quicker. After my first Poochyena defeat, one of the Zigzagoon picked up a Full Restore, which I was able to sell for five extra potions.

Finally, after hours of grinding, Mudkip hit level ten and was able to survive a battle without a potion. I was ready. I marched up to Calvin and stalled. The battle came down to the wire, with Mudkip being the only team member standing when Calvin started struggling.

And then I ran out of Growls. I could not switch out, I could not attack. I was at full health from the last potion, so I could not use another. Calvin was struggling and I was without any means to beat him. Fortunately, one of the Zigzagoon picked up a Revive while I was grinding and I was able to use it to revive a Zigzagoon and switch to it. Still, I came dangerously close to losing.

After Calvin was defeated, I knew the run was possible. There were half a dozen trainers between me and Petalburg Woods, but fortunately, all of them could be avoided. Petalburg Woods contains two things that were useful for me: Cascoon and Silcoon, who only know Harden and can be trained on easily, and Shroomish, the first member of my actual team.

I caught the Shroomish with an Ultra Ball one of the Zigs picked up and named it Plus Ultra. Shroomish didn’t have any status moves yet, but it did have the ability Effect Spore, which could in theory be used to poison opponents. Effect Spore was too unreliable to rely on, though. I trained Shroomish up to level ten, where she learned Leech Seed. Finally, I had a consistent, controllable means to deal damage. Leech Seed drains one-eighth of the target’s health each turn, giving me a way to slowly whittle down opponents. It doesn’t work on grass types, and it’s slow, but it works well enough for now.

I stormed my way through the early game, beating Roxanne without issue. In Dewford Cave I got the TM for Flash and taught it to Shroomish. Flash is actually a decent stall move; the lowered accuracy does wonders to help Plus Ultra survive while waiting for Leech Seed to kill. I also grabbed the Everstone and gave it to Shroomish to keep her from evolving. Brawly was tough. His Pokemon hit hard, especially after a few Bulk Ups. I managed to get lucky and beat him on my second attempt. All of what I’ve said so far happened in a single six-hour play session, by the way. After beating Brawly, I saved the game and went to bed.

I booted up the game the next day and, for some odd reason I was back in Odale town. That’s weird. Also, I didn’t have any badges. And I didn’t have Shroomish. And all of my Pokemon were as weak as they were before the grind. That’s really weird.

I’m sure I saved after Brawly, but for some reason, it didn’t go through. I reverted to my last save before that. So, naturally, I did the only sane thing: redid everything until I got back to Brawly. It was...fun.

I went through Slateport without much issue; I ran out of Leech Seed PP against a Marill in the Seashore House and had to struggle it out, but that only took an eternity. North of Slateport I caught a new team member: Tex Mex the Gulpin. Gulpin had a decent bulk and comes with Poison Gas and Yawn, giving me a second way to take out opponents and a way to deal with Grass types.

I ran into a trainer with a Roselia on Route 110 and was reminded that Grass/Poison Pokemon are nightmares. Fortunately, I was able to walk around her. I mean, in theory, I could either take a Roselia out with a Zubat that knows Supersonic, by struggling it out, or getting it to kill itself by using Mega Drain on Gulpin because of her Liquid Ooze ability, but none of those plans are worth the effort.

May was, like before, annoying. I took out her Wailmer and Numel easily enough, but her Grovile took out Gulpin with Quick Attack. Fortunately, it poisoned itself thanks to Effect Spore. I made my way to Mauville, grabbed the Mach Bike, and made my way to the Day Care. I abused the Day Care to get both of my main team members up to Level 28. Gulpin evolved into Swalot and gained the new, fantastic moveset of Toxic/Poison Powder/Encore/Amnesia.

Leech Seed and Poison Powder both kill in eight turns. Toxic kills in five, making it our new method of taking things out. Also, I kept Poison Powder because it has a lot of PP making it a good move to waste time with.

I also evolved Mudkip, hoping the new Ground typing would help me beat Wattson. I ended up not needing it, because Shroomish and Swalot took him out with ease. I kept moving through the game until I reached a roadblock on Route 112. An unavoidable trainer with a Roselia. Fortunately, I had a plan.

In the Fiery Path, you can find wild Slugma. Slugma has the ability Flame Body, which has the ability to burn your opponent if they hit you with a contact move. The roadblock Roselia knows Poison Sting, which is a physical move. So I caught a Slugma and named it Sheers. Unfortunately, it has Magma Armor instead of Flame Body. So I caught a second one and named it Sheerz. It also had Magma Armor. The third Slugma, Shers, did have Flame Body. I took it to the Roselia, let it get pounded by Poison Sting, and...it fainted. Turns out Poison Sting doesn’t do contact.

So anyway I released the three Slugma and struggled out the Roselia. On Route 113 I caught a new team member: Punji the Skarmory. Skarmory is a famously bulky Pokemon, with great defensive stats, fantastic typing, and access to the interesting combination of Spikes and Whirlwind. Unfortunately, it doesn’t learn Spikes until level 42. And I caught it at level 16. So, he’s going to be wearing the EXP share and working as a tank for a while.

I stormed through the game until reaching Lavaridge. Lavaridge features cheap herbal medicine, which I used constantly throughout this run. Flannery’s fire Pokemon were a nightmare for Shroomish and Skarmory, but Swalot saved the day, using Amnesia to boost her Special Defence and tank Torkoal’s Overheat. After Flannery, I ran to the desert and grabbed the Sandstorm TM, which I taught to Skarmory to give him a way to deal damage. Sandstorm kills in sixteen turns, which isn’t great, but it does give us a way to take out Roselia. I also caught a Baltoy. I named it Tick because the first two I tried to catch Self Destructed. Baltoy doesn’t learn any status moves until 31, so I taught it Flash and kept it on the bench for a while.

Norman was tough. Poisoning his Pokemon allows them to decimate me with Facade, so I was forced to rely on Leech Seed for damage. Even then, he was able to use Focus Punch flinching, making the battle brutal. Fortunately, Truancy gave me time to heal my team and Norman eventually went down.

I ignored Wattson’s pleas for help and made my way to Fortree City. Along the way, I picked up an Absol I named Obama. His only good move at that point was Taunt, meaning that I had another near useless Pokemon to babysit. Wiona was tough, but Skarmory’s bulk and Swalot’s toxic helped me survive. I had my new Absol Taunt her Altaria to keep her from spamming Dragon Dance. Her Skarmory ended up being the most frustrating one to take out, because it kept killing Shroomish before I could get a Leech Seed off.

After Wiona, Baltoy learned Sandstorm and I taught it Reflect and Light Screen via TM, giving it a use. I caught a Duskull and named her M87. She started with Confuse Ray and Disable, making her a good Pokemon to shut down opponents while waiting for Toxic to kill them. Tate and Liza hit hard, but they only had two Pokemon, both of which Swalot was able to Toxic before going down. At the end of the battle, only Duskull and Baltoy were still standing, but the twins were down. I saved the game and ended another lengthy play session.

And I ended up back at Norman. It was at that point that I learned a fun quirk of my emulator. If you make a Save State, then play for a few hours, then make a battery save, it deletes the battery save and instead opens the save state next time. This also explains the weird issue with me ending up back at Odale Town.

This time, I didn’t have the patience to go through the game fighting trainers. Instead, I snuck past trainers until I caught Absol and Duskull again then abused the Daycare to get all of them up to level 42. This left the team without EVs, but I considered it a good sacrifice for not having to sit through dozens of slow battles.

After my Day Care abuse, I had a few new toys to play with. Duskull evolved into Dusclops, learning Will-O-Wisp and Curse along the way. Baltoy learned Cosmic Power and evolved into Claydol. Finally, Skarmory learned Spikes which, when combined with the Roar TM, gave him a reliable damage method. I also taught Obama Protect from a TM. I stomped the rematches against Wiona and the twins and made my way to the undersea cave.

The Undersea Cave was annoying, both because I had to leave Claydol and Absol behind for HM requirements and because the grunts kept using Taunt. Archie revived Kyogre and I went to Sootopolis to defeat it. Kyogre, the monstrous God of the sea, went down in four turns thanks to Dusclops’s Curse.

Wallace’s Milotic’s spamming of Recover was annoying, but I taunted it and stalled it out. With my eight gym badges, I was able to take on Victory Road. But I wasn’t ready, not quite. The late game battles had been getting harder and harder, so I decided to do a bit of prep work. I fought one hundred different Marill to give my team some HP EVs. I was going to do the same with Cascoon/Silcoon, but decided that I value my own time too much. I grabbed the Focus Band from Meteor Falls. I also made my way through the Ruined Ship because I remembered that the Leftovers were located in a trash can; they aren’t, they’re on the boat that you unlock by beating the Elite Four. Finally, I went back and fought some of the trainers I skipped so I could get money for healing items. My prep work done, I marched through Victory Road.

The trainers were tough, but beatable. I did have to keep leaving to heal my team at the Pokecenter, which was annoying. Waiting at the end of Victory Road was Wally. He sent out his Roselia, that devil, and I took it out with Dusclops’s Curse. I did some quick grinding before the Elite Four and Absol learned the move I caught it for: Perish Song. Perish Song essentially allows me to automatically win if I can get an opponent down to a single Pokemon. Going into the Elite Four, this was my team:

Plus Ultra (Shroomish)

Leech Seed/Flash/Stun Spore/Toxic

Tex Mex (Swalot)

Toxic/Amnesia/Protect/Attract

Punji (Skarmory)

Spikes/Sandstorm/Roar/Sand-Attack

Tick (Claydol)

Sandstorm/Cosmic Power/Reflect/Light Screen

M87 (Dusclops)

Will-O-Wisp/Confuse Ray/Disable/Curse

Obama (Absol)

Perish Song/Double Team/Taunt/Protect

I started out my battle with Sidney with some Spike/Roar comboing from Skarmory. After Skarmory went down, I switched to Swalot and took out a few Pokemon with Toxic. His last Pokemon, his Absol, went down to my Absol’s new Perish Song.

Phoebe’s team of Ghosts abused status moves, forcing me to keep switching out Pokemon. None of the team was knocked out, but the whole team had to step in to get rid of Phoebe.

Glacia was a challenge. Her super effective Ice Beams and Shadow Balls cut through my team. Worse, she managed to freeze Swalot twice. Her Walrein hit like a truck and would have taken out the entire team without Perish Song. At the end of the battle, all I had left was a red health Absol.

My plan for Drake was to have Swalot use Toxic then switch to Claydol. Unfortunately, I was out of Toxic when the battle started. Shroomish managed to take out Shieldon, but was one-shotted by Drake’s Flygon. I sent out Dusclops to use Will-O-Wisp, which missed three times in a row. Dusclops went down to a super effective Crunch, but I revived it and took out both Flygon and the Salamence with Curses and heal item spam. Altaria went down to a Perish Song, opening up the Champion battle, but I knew I was far from ready.

I used my Rare Candies I’d collected over the run, thanks to my Zigzagoon, to get a few last minute levels in. Shroomish finally learned Spore. I took off the Everstone and my boy finally evolved into Breloom. Would it have been easier to just forget about Spore and evolve at 23, as opposed to carrying around a near useless Shroomish for half the run? Yeah, probably. But whatever, I wanted the cool 100% sleep chance.

So, how did my fight with Steven go? Well, I recorded it and uploaded it here.

By the ingame timer, this run took 72 hours. But, I used superspeed. In reality, it only took 17 hours, mostly done during college lectures. I enjoyed this run, it was a fun challenge. I’ve already started on another run, this time in a much more difficult Pokemon game, so look forward to that. Thanks for reading.

[yue-muffin]

I finished Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance for the first time and wow, am I impressed. Having only played the 3DS era games and started Sacred Stones recently, I came to expect a certain range of quality and reach in terms of story. There are games that I found not overly complex but executed well (Echoes) and ones with a good premise and sloppy execution (Fates). Sacred Stones, so far, is one I find with a simple story done well. I’m not terribly enthralled with it, but there’s nothing there to annoy me either.

Path of Radiance is one of those games that takes the ‘simple/standard FE plot’ path, but the execution is brilliant, filled with both depth and heart despite the story having the same basic beats as many other FEs. I was really impressed with the worldbuilding, the character writing, the gameplay/story integration...

My biggest gripe with Awakening and Fates was that the characters were colorful, but few of them were compelling and many lacked the depth to take them beyond their archetypes. Path of Radiance did a good job making me feel that its characters all had a stake in the outcome of the battles, that they had an actual cause to fight for and didn’t just join the army just because. There is always a bit of contrivance in an FE game, but the quality of the writing can lessen or emphasize that feeling.

The gameplay mechanics change from game to game, and I find it really fun to test out the unique features of each installment and see how they influenced each other. the shoving animations are amazing

People also say this is one of the easiest FE games and I have to say, the bonus exp mechanic is probably why. I love this mechanic because of the way it allows the game to reward the player for taking certain actions encouraged by the story (like wanting to spare as many of the enemy as possible = we’ll give you bonus exp if you do). I, uh, am never doing a stealth run of the prison break chapter again though.

I went ultra vanilla and restricted myself to using only the Greil Mercenaries for this run, and I’ll leave my impressions on this post because half the fun of a FE game is building up your team.

I went with the Greil Mercenaries (+ Mia, because she joins them for the second game) for my first playthrough because otherwise I would have no reason to use both Rolf AND Shinon at the same time and Rhys would just warm the bench the whole game lol. And I was really curious to see Rolf and Shinon’s support line and actually have a use for all of those light magic tomes.

Ike: My Ike didn’t get screwed over in any stat, so absolutely no complaints other than the fact that he refused to proc Aether more than once in the Black Knight fight, making Nasir bail him out at the end of the allotted turns. I supported him with Soren because I wanted to see their support line, and have to say that it worked out really well. I was between Soren and Oscar, but it worked better this way because Oscar was always riding off with Titania at the front and Ike just lags behind unless you dedicate several units + Reyson to shoving him to the frontline. And when you’re using Mist, Rolf, and Soren, that really cuts into the units available for shoving.

Oscar: He, uh, ended up the MVP and netted the most kills in the run. Oscar can become an amazing paladin, but mine was so screwed in the strength stat for much of the early game that I had to abuse the bexp mechanic at the base to ensure he didn’t keep lagging behind. His defenses were super good by the end, and the little damage he did take was mitigated by activating Sol every other hit. Also, I have a bias for calvary units, so. Oscar. Loved him.

Titania: I...I love Titania. I love her character. She plays her role perfectly as the super strong unit who is there to support you in the beginning and falls off a little towards the end. She can still hold her own in the endgame, however, and I have no regrets for relying on her early on. There is so much experience to be had in normal mode that she doesn’t really rob anyone else of it unless you go ham and let her destroy everything. In the end, I gave her Savior so she can help deliver chip damage and save Shinon’s ass, I mean, rescue drop people.

Boyd: Super frustrating and nerve wracking to train, super hard hitter who still keeps you on your toes by the end. He is the most lopsided unit I have ever used (comparatively low defenses, speed, and skill compared to his attack and HP) but he was definitely fun and made sure I didn’t get too complacent. I don’t normally use fighters/axe units in the modern games because their accuracy is shit, their defenses are even more shit, and why bother with the headache. Once you can forge Boyd a good iron axe, though, his performance becomes more consistent. I did keep Tempest on him for a while, because I find it fun to use the skills a unit comes with, but I took it off eventually. It does help in certain situations when his hit rate isn’t so good (having the biorhythm doubled then is helpful).

Soren: I have a bias for this little asshole, lol. He’s a standard mage, basically. Kind of annoying to train in the beginning because he can barely take a hit, his movement is low, and MAGIC MAKES THE EMULATOR CRASH SOMETIMES, but if you can stick it out, you’ll be rewarded in the end with a unit that doesn’t care about how physically bulky any enemy is and can take down dragons with ease (plus, he heals A LOT because of his high magic stat even with a basic heal staff). I will admit, he’s a walking liability if Ike isn’t his support partner and magic in this game is slightly annoying because each element has its own weapon rank. He basically ate all of my Arms Scrolls because he has FOUR ranks to build (including the staff rank) and all of them have their uses, so I didn’t have him concentrate in one or the other. Although he gets weighed down by a lot of tomes because he is a twig, mine capped speed and didn’t have a problem doubling the dragons in the endgame with Thoron.

Rhys: One of the reasons I did a Greil Mercenaries run haha. He’s not a bad healer. It’s just that there’s benefit to training Mist as your main healer for that one fight later on, and having a team with THREE HEALERS is overkill (unless for whatever reason you made one of your mages use knives...). The problem is that while Soren can take a hit and Mist can run away, Rhys can do neither. His magic stat is very good though, and he was objectively better than my Mist by the end except that he wasn’t on a horse. He was really useful for the endgame since I gave him the Purge tome. Finally, he didn’t have to risk his neck to actually fight. I lowkey love his character though. 

Mist: She is so cute, but mine was so screwed in the stats department. If not for bexp, it would have been a nightmare to train her and Rhys at the same time. I early promoted both of them, but getting her to level 10 was hard. Mine ended up getting magic on so few level ups, that I gave her two spirit dusts by the endgame and it was still amazingly low. Her strength stat was 13. 13!! I love the horse, though. Makes her a lot easier to use once promoted. She has no shoving capabilities, though, whereas Rhys (frail, sickly man he is) can shove like half the army. Go figure.

Mia: I love Mia. She can have my heart and run with it. In newer games I tend not to use mercenaries/swordmasters because their movement is kind of eh, their dodge-tank capabilities are not that impressive, and I don’t like relying on crits too much, but Mia was such an awesome addition to the team. It can be a bit difficult to train her in the beginning given her low defense, HP, and strength, but once she gets going, she wrecks things like nobody’s business. Would have liked to do some Wrath combos with her, but mine had Vantage and Adept and that worked just fine with a Killing Edge or a forged sword of some sort. The only issue is her super low strength cap (22?? really??) but the reliability of her crits and/or skill procs make up for that if you can get her past the early game.

Rolf: ROLF. Literally only viable because of bexp. I actually really love how they wrote his character, but what were they thinking by making him join so late, with such low bases AND his strength growth isn’t even that good (40%, less than Oscar’s). All else could be forgiven if his strength growth was at least 50% like his speed. If you can’t actually do damage, there’s no point. Once you pour exp into him like nobody’s business, he can actually be a good unit. I do really like using him, and mine got enough defense and resistance that he wasn’t a liability, but he definitely needs investment. On the other hand, his hit rates were so good that Gamble actually worked well on him.

Shinon: The racist asshole whose only redeeming quality is his relationship with Rolf. I loved their support chain, and actually I do like how the game put him on our team (after giving you a hard time recruiting him) because of how it brings an element of realism makes these characters more human, but yikes he’s potentially worse than Rolf to train because of how long he’s gone for. If you put aside the need for even more bexp to use him, he’s a pretty good crit unit. And he can surprisingly take a hit once trained. I left Provoke on him and BOY he nearly got himself killed in the endgame, but it is pretty nice to draw aggro in order to get some enemies closer for the foot-locked units to kill.

Gatrie: I miss tanks. Newer games make them so much less fun to use because they don’t tank very well (I’m looking at you, Fates...). Gatrie can’t get places fast and only laguz can shove him, but it was fun having someone who can take a million hits and soften enemies up for the others to take care of. He can’t really one round anything because he can’t double and leaves them with a few hit points left (except if he procs Luna) but he’s a worth while addition to the team. Takes a bit of bexp though, since he often doesn’t get as many kills as the rest.

Reyson: Not a Greil Mercenary, but like I was going to pass up a dancer singer who can refresh FOUR units. It was a pain in the behind to get the Knight Ring, but he does make really good use of it. He can also use the Full Guard ring so he can enter certain areas without being murdered by ballistas. I love his bird form, and the fact that frail heron man can SHOVE people who the tiny people in my army can’t (Mist, Rolf, Soren, I’m looking at you). no but really, Reyson’s character is actually really good too, I like him. 

It was, uh, interesting getting through some of these chapters without a flier. Absolutely not necessary to have one, and if it was a chapter where I kind of needed someone, I just used Tanith or Janaff (the Naesala chapter was the only one that was annoying without a trained flier).

I genuinely had no idea who to stick skills on, haha. This was an interesting system where you really had to think about who to give a skill since they’re like old TMs in Pokemon...one use only. I like to have some limitations in the skill system though, unlike Awakening and Fates where it’s a free for all. I just like the more limited set of options.

[make-it-mavis]

Homesick (Entry #35)

(cw: discussion of addiction) ----------

01/23/88   4:02 PM

Hey.

So. I’d admitted that I was an addict. 

Which was, as I’d realize in the days after, not just a sentence you could say and be over with. It was an admission to so many things, many of which I’d been trying so hard not to believe over the course of my addiction. That it really was that bad. That it wouldn’t just go away with time. That I could not stop of my own free will. That I couldn’t fix myself alone.

That counselling really was my one chance at beating this thing for good. 

Which, in itself, was a scary thought. If it was my last chance, I could not screw it up. And I’ve always loved screwing things up. It’s so, so important that I get this thing right, and it’s been really hard at points to picture myself doing that. Even as early as the second step, I felt doomed to fail.

The second step, of course, is Hope. 

Hope that a higher power could save us from ourselves.

Yeah. It’s not that I don’t believe in the Devs. I do, unfortunately. It’s just that I’ve always believed they’re fickle dickwads who don’t give a crit about any of us. They’ve only ever been a source of pain for me. Honestly, I outright hate the Devs. So being faced with this idea that if I didn’t find faith, I could not complete this extremely important counselling, I was understandably more than a little stressed. I didn’t get why that had to be part of the deal. So many of the steps are built around this faith. It’s integral. I had to beg the question: Do only Devout deserve saving?

Fix-it’s response to my spirited rants was to suggest that it did not necessarily have to be the Devs, just a higher power. Something bigger than him or me, some deeper meaning to life, something I truly believed in. Like he, himself, while he is a practicing Devout, places more importance on ‘duty’ than anything else. ‘Duty’ informs his actions, ‘duty’ colors his lens of the world. I probably don’t need to tell you the jokes I made out of that. He didn’t seem to get it.

That widened things up, I’ll give him that. But it widened them too much. I could either pick the Devs, or pull something out of my ass and make a religion out of it. The latter sounds like something I’d only enjoy doing while high, for cuss’ sake. I’ve never been too big on philosophies in general. Partying hard had always been enough of a philosophy for me, but then I went and partied too damn hard and wound up the mess that I was. A junkie with no rhyme or reason.

Step two was looking even more depressing than expected.

On the night before my third session, Fix-it brought out a surprise that he thought might help me relax or cheer up or what have you. He laid down a tarp, a few blank canvases, and gave me an assortment of tubes of paint and scraggly, used brushes. I was a little taken aback. I so rarely use normal, boring, non-magical paint. I was worried that using it would just make me feel worse about my brush still being on the fritz, but I was drawn to the naked canvases anyway. Fix-it sat at the table and watched as if he had put down food for a feral raccoon and wanted to give it space. Having him watch may have bothered me at one point in time, but he had done a genuinely pretty cool thing for me. I’d deal.

And let’s be real -- I am a feral raccoon.

It didn’t take me long to decide what to paint. The one thing that had been consistently on my mind: Revenge on Worluk. All in various gruesome ways. In one painting, I’d ripped her throat out with my teeth. In another, I crushed her with a giant fly swatter. The last one, which was my favorite, showed her dismembered and built into a chair that I was sitting on.

Fix-it said they were all beautiful, and they’d look so good on the shelf in the broom closet. I argued for a place in the kitchen, but no, he insisted that they’d look better in the closet.

As I worked, as I painted the gnarly details on that bug’s face, I couldn’t help but wonder what she had done for step two. What was her higher power? What could she possibly turn to for peace after what she had done to me? The Devs? Duty? Or are there just some things you can never make peace with? That is, if she even felt remorse for it at all. I couldn’t imagine a remorseful pixel in her body.

And then that led to me thinking, of course… What about me? What could ever really bring me peace? I knew for sure that I felt remorse. I definitely wished I had not gone down the path I did over the course of… well, ever since you left. I’d seen and done some really awful things. There was Tapper, there was that poor sap I threatened for a hit of GC, there was… everyone else I’d come in contact with, really. My actions had taken a darker turn than I’d ever gone down before, even in my past pits of depression. My mind was so haunted by then, I didn’t recognize it anymore. Relentless, nightmarish thoughts plagued me all the time. Trauma, guilt, hopelessness, existential questions without answers. Your death, and the blame I placed on myself. My Dev-given, meaningless lot in life. Hatred from what felt like the entire arcade over a crime I didn’t commit, enough to nearly get me killed. All this weighed down on me. It had trapped me. And the only escape I could ever see was in buffs. The thing that I felt the most fondness for, the thing that I had come to long for above all else, was a mind-numbing high. Buffs could save me from my mind, even if they ended up killing it in the process. 

That was my argument in favor of the addiction.

I had to find something, anything, that would bring a counter-argument strong enough to hold up. My guilt for hurting Tapper, while it was very deep and genuine, would only have so many legs to stand on. I even remembered my weird, buff-induced conversation with the river, wherein I realized I owed my own survival to you… and to myself. That had been a groundbreaking epiphany at the time. But it was not enough. I knew that.  Because I remembered what it felt like to be in the thick of my addiction, and I remembered how no one around me mattered anymore. Nothing I owed to anyone else would make a difference to me if I relapsed and fell back into that state of mind. Neither would anything I owed myself, certainly, not with my self-preservation offline. And in the face of all those facts... I was scared.

I didn’t feel safe. I felt like the floor beneath me could have broken at any moment, and I’d lose control again. I needed something to hold onto that could actually bear my weight, because I had become quite heavily burdened. But I had no idea what that thing could be.

It was so frustrating, nearly enough to bring me to tears as I painted. I kept remembering what Wreck-it told me when we fought, about how I didn’t actually want to get better, how I just wanted to keep using everybody, so there was no use helping me. That in particular stuck with me. I didn’t understand why at first. Maybe that was true when he said it. But it wasn’t anymore. 

I didn’t want to be miserable anymore. I didn’t want to be a plague on everyone around me, not really. I wanted to get better. But the means to do so felt like a cruel puzzle I couldn’t solve. Like a battle I had already lost.

Fix-it went to bed, but I stayed up into the night painting and pondering. Even after I was done, I took one of the paintings and began slowly and idly covering it with lazy patches of color. I did some serious soul-searching that night. I tried to harness whatever it was that drove me as a living being. Whatever it was, it must have been old. Older than my knowledge of the Devs, even. I tried to cast my mind back to my very first days and remember what inspired me then, before the Devs’ gospel tainted my life. But I couldn’t come up with anything substantial. Fun, mischief, laughter, all very important things, but no solid foundations for philosophies. Philosophies that could keep me away from substances, mind you.

It seemed hopeless. But I tried to relax with my painting. I took deep breaths and let the color flow, creating no image in particular. Just beautiful, abstract motions that felt self-soothing in the cleanest way I had attempted in a while. It really did feel great to have access to a full spectrum of color again, even if it was real, physical paint and not magical like mine. I so deeply missed having full functionality of my tools. All that time without it, I’d felt like I was hobbling around with a missing limb. I need my color. It’s just embedded in who I am. Always has been.

My very first coherent thoughts after being plugged in were about the color pulsing inside my code.

I froze.

Was that it?

Could that even work?

The force bigger than me, the deeper meaning to life, the one thing that had been with me since the very first second I remember entering consciousness… well, that was color. I see it and feel it in all things, and always have. It inspires me. It does guide my actions, in a sense. 

But color? It felt too obvious, almost. It was one of the most important things in the world to me. But could I really pull a philosophy out of it?

I felt cold, but not in a bad way -- more like a refreshing breeze on a sweaty day. But that breeze also felt hundreds of miles high, with me suspended on this one new idea that I had to strengthen before it could break. What if there was something even bigger than the Devs? Something that ignored games, roles, class, age, gender? Something that, if I played my cards right, could free me from the life I felt trapped in?

Something strong enough to weaponize against the Devs’ presence in my mind?

Even kill it for good?

I remember bursting into Fix-it’s room and scaring the bits out of him. I leapt onto his bed and stained the blanket with my paint-splattered hands.

“Color,” I said firmly.

Fix-it stammered, reaching to turn on the lamp. “Wha-- Wha-- What’s-- Mavy?”

“Color,” I repeated. “That’s my higher power. I think. The thing I believe in? I think it might be color.”

He was quiet for a second, his hands raised cautiously, his mouth open in hesitation to speak. “Mavy-- Mavy, settle down, now--” he said, not really registering my relatively controlled demeanor after my very aggressive entrance.

“Don’t tell me to settle down,” I told him. For some reason, I was shaking with adrenaline. I was so unsure. I wanted to be right, but I barely felt like I had an idea.

“Oh, it’s-- It’s just that last time you started goin’ on about color, you went and stabbed your hand with a fork, so, I just wanna make sure you’re not gonna--”

“Oh...” I said, the memories blowing up in my brain. “The kaleidoscope. In my dreams-- trips-- whatever-- the kaleidoscope… Me becoming color…”

I held my sticky wet glove to my forehead, my mind connecting more and more wires. Every thought and memory coming into my head was telling me that I was right. I stared past Fix-it, feeling my heart pound. “That can’t be a coincidence. There’s no way. That all has to mean something, right?”

“C-Color?” 

“Yes!” I jabbed him in the shoulder, at which he groaned in pain. “That’s it! My stupid higher power homework. I think I’ve got it!”

I heard him give vague and confused murmurs of encouragement as he sank back down to the pillows. “That’s great, Mavy, that’s wonderful… I’m so… so happy for you...” And he was out like a light, even with the light still on.

Whatever, I thought. Maybe he didn’t understand, but I… sort of did. That was what mattered.

The following night, though, I’d have to put that thought to the test. I went into my third session of counselling with a nervous sweat. I would have to explain my revelation to the group in words, when so much of it was just… how I felt. I’d been running through my speech again and again up until the moment I sat in that circle of chairs, and as I did, I began to doubt myself more and more. I don’t know anything about making solid philosophies, or if what I made could even be considered a philosophy. Maybe my idea was actually garbage, and they wouldn’t accept it. It was so vague. I hadn’t even worked out all the kinks in it yet. I just hoped I would understand it more as I said it out loud.

Stage fright has never been a problem for me. I’m a born performer. But this was not a performance. This was real life. I had trouble opening up like that even to you, and now here I was in a room with sprites I barely knew, including one who tried to kill me. I definitely didn’t like the idea of showing vulnerability in front of her. I didn’t want her to know anything about me.

But I knew the drill. Just deal with it.

When the turns eventually came to me, I introduced myself as an addict, and told everyone that I’d done some work on step two. There were a couple claps and nods.

“Except,” I told them, “I, uh, didn’t pick the Devs as my higher power. That’s not against the rules, is it?”

“No, no, of course not,” Clyde told me. “We have a few others here who also picked their own.”

“Charity,” someone said, waving slightly.

Another piped in, “Honor.”

Then, to my shock, the raspy voice of Worluk chimed in, with just about the most unexpected word I could think of.

“Friendship.”

Yeah. That threw me off. I tried not to raise my eyebrows so obviously at her, but I had to glance at least. I found her still not quite looking my way, but without a hint of shame in her body language. Who the hell was this chick?

I told myself to shake it off. The spotlight was on me, and I had no time to be tripped up by murderous mosquitoes. 

“What about you?” Clyde asked me. “Would you like to share?”

I swallowed. Now or never. “Sure. I picked, uh… color.”

Clyde’s featureless brows raised a bit, making my stomach clench in embarrassment. “Really? Well, that’s one we haven’t heard of before. What does color mean to you, Mavis?”

I looked out at the expectant faces. Except Worluk, who was still not looking, which I tried not to read into and just carry on. She could not ruin this for me. I had to be strong and confident, like I know I am. All I had to do was say a few words. It seemed like a simple thing to do, but I felt so damn seen, and I didn’t like it. I saw some impatient frowns from sprites who still didn’t want me there, I saw some eyes full of curiosity over what I’d say, but the rest just looked… neutral. Like I was just another part of the process. Like it didn’t matter to them either way if I fumbled or stuck the landing. 

Normally, I’d hate that. But in this context? It seemed to take so much pressure off. It wasn’t about them. It was my step to take, and they were just witnesses to it.

So I took a deep breath, and I just started talking.

“Color is… everything. I mean, it’s what I do, but it’s also who I am. Y’know, inside. Color is the first thing I remember from the moment I was plugged in. I don’t just see it, I feel it. And it’s… I mean, it’s in everything. Almost all of our games have color. That’s all we are at the end of the day, just blotches of color behind screens, and that’s… that’s kind of awesome, when you think about it. It’s something everyone has in common, no matter what game or role you’re programmed into. That makes things a bit simpler, y’know, to think of yourself not as a Good Guy or a Bad Guy or an Easter Egg, you’re just… a living splash of color.”

I wasn’t sure if I was actually making any sense, but to my surprise, I saw quite a few receptive faces even leaning in a bit to listen. They were intrigued, which was encouraging. So I took it a step further.

“As far as philosophies or things to live by, well… It just got me thinkin’ like... I’m an artist. And artists know that every color is useful. Any color can be mixed, or painted over, in any shade, in any shape. And usually…it takes a lot of different colors and shades to make a beautiful painting. So when you’ve been using the same color again and again, just monochrome, or even analogous, like I have… you’re not gonna be happy. There are so many things I’ve believed, so many things that I’ve thought to be absolute truths that have led me to take buffs. Like… I’ve never been into the whole Easter Egg thing. And I thought buffs were the only thing that could save me from that. But… maybe they’re not. Color, to me, feels like…”

I sighed, trying to pull the words out of myself. “...Flexibility. Possibility. An open mind, I guess. A new color is like a new way of thinking. And... there’s always another color. There’s always another way. And… y’know, it’s probably high time I started acting like it.”

There was silence for a moment. 

But then I saw smiles, and I heard claps, even some small words of encouragement. They were congratulating me and thanking me for sharing. Even some sprites that had given me standoffish looks before were giving me grudging nods.

I… did it. I did it right.

I could hardly believe it. I felt like I’d just spilled out some of my ugliest, most confusing guts, but they loved it.

I wanted to run. I wanted to scream. It was too heavy. I was too vulnerable. 

But all I could do was… grin.

“Mavis,” Clyde said, “thank you so much for sharing. That’s just fantastic to hear. You’re gonna do great things here -- and remember that even when you stumble, it’s that faith of yours that’s going to lift you back up again. You’re going to have to hold onto it from here on out. Don’t forget that.”

“Yeah,” I sighed so hard, it made me dizzy. “Yeah, of course.”

There was a bit more discussion, and the meeting carried on as usual, as if I hadn’t just done something incredible (for me, anyway). But I had a feeling I was going to have to get used to that. Bending myself in unnatural ways to reach this lofty goal of sobriety, and then carrying on as if everything was normal.

Because that was going to be the new normal, after all.

And my first night in that new normal, I tried to find ways to embody my colorful philosophy in whatever small way I could. I looked around at everyone in the circle, and I asked myself to examine the colors that each of them made me feel, beyond what I could see. Specifically Worluk, the one who had been giving me so much trouble, making me so much more nervous than I already was.

To me, she felt… like a toxic yellow. Barely touched with green. Just bright, garish, nauseating and impossible to ignore. While everyone else just blended into each other’s vague, muted tones. It became very apparent just how much I had been ignoring the rest of the group and honing in on her.

Surely, there was something I could do about that.

I wasn’t sure how effective it would be, but I dared to challenge myself with this: If I could not mute Worluk’s color in my mind, maybe I could at least let the rest of the group grow brighter.

[leidensygdom]

1, 2, 12, 13, 26!

OKAY SO I’m gonna try to focus on the campaign  I’m running myself (Gharmyra) because I’ve had so much RP over all these years and so on I wouldn’t ever stop talking otherwise. It’s gonna be a good way to talk a bit more on what has had Syg been invested into for the past half year!

1. A favorite character you have played.

I think that out of all the NPCs in the campaign I’m running, I’m enjoying Vest the most. He’s an old character of mine (Vor’kalth/Veth’shal, as he’s gone through many names in-character) who I really enjoyed back in the day but couldn’t RP since forever. While working on the campaign’s prep, one of the players mentioned he’d be multiclassing to warlock, and it was both a great way to introduce watchers early on (since Vest, as an undead, is a watcher) and getting to use him again. And I’m really glad I did that, because he’s been hella enjoyable and was probably a much better choice than a possibly edgy-brooding-patron instead.

2. Your favorite character that someone else has played.

oh god this one is just too hard to answer I hate playing favorites with other people’s characters. But p much if I’ve RPed with you I love ur character xoxo

12. Your in game inside jokes/memes/catchphrases and where they came from.

OH god so we have a few--

There’s a running joke over Yu’Yden, that cutie up above, being the BBEG. To the point we have an exclusive channel in which I keep track of the times he’s been called evil. So far, he’s been called evil 44 times

Another one of them is bacteria. It came up on accident, I think it was @eine-krone​‘s character (Hákarl) who mentioned it, and then we realized “shit, this is an industrial setting, bacterias aren’t a thing”. So canonically his... character, who’s an artificer, has invented a soap that kills bacteria. Except nobody knows what are they. Just a marketing thing.

Hákarl’s character also scores very bad in medicine, to the point he often gets crit-fails. As he put it, “he’s a machine-doctor, not a human-doctor”. Most times he checks for someone’s health, it leads to an “inconclusive analysis” on knowing if the person is either dead or alive. He’s currently writing a report on another party member’s defunction, despite how she’s alive. And well. And talking and so on

The monk eats about anything. Including magic items. Specially magic items. Anytime we come in contact with something edible-looking or just... shiny, he rolls a wisdom save to determine if he’ll eat it or not. This is getting problematic, since he once ate a puzzle piece, and he went through a room filled with poisonous pies and ate a couple of them (and he didn’t eat the rest because the party was examining those). One of the things he ate sometimes whispers him stuff. (and for the record, the character’s a human. A regular human)

The roguelock just never sleeps okay. Being a kalashtar, she should be able to have nice sleep, since she literally cannot have nightmares per se, but- She just doesn’t. This is also dice-rolled, and she rarely, rarely scores anything over 10. And if she does, seeing her feeling okay usually scares the rest of the party

Actually, she just has awful luck. Like, she defies all statics overall. A grand majority of her rolls are below 10, or even below 5. She has a +9 bonus to perception, but rest assured, she’ll never score more than 15 on it.

In the same manner, Vest (the roguelock’s patron) can use his own cantrips to do stuff, as long as it’s for comical purpose and not actually interfering with battles or the plot. He will use these for nefarious reasons. Or to steal shinies. Specially to steal shinies. 

There’s a cutie pink tiefling NPC, Isolde, who can be summoned at any point by holding chocolate. No matter what. She’s also effectively inmortal as far as we know.

One of the players has this sheet where he keeps track of all the incognitos, questions and theories about the plot. It’s two-sided, and he filled one side already. And I think the only item they have solved for now was because I officially confirmed “no, there are no aliens either”

I wanna mention Eine did a whole mind map to keep track of the plot too. It’s complicated

13. Introduce your current party.

Ok so lemme introduce my player’s characters!!

This cheerful guy here is Glar, the human monk. He was sold by his family to a thieves’ gang to settle down a debt, and was raised rough. The thieves’ gang kinda disbanded after the two guys in charge got in a big fight, and he’s been trying to figure out his life ever since. Chaotic to hell and beyond, often the comic relief of the group.

This guy here is Hákarl (Cousin Hákarl, legally), a dwarf-goliath artificer and @eine-krone​ ‘s character. Dwarf goliath means he has the proportions of a dwarf but the height of a goliath, and everything about him is pure cryptid fuel. He owns a business which invents all sort of weird gadgets: Everyday items made into weapons, soap, plushies, etc. In his backstory, he... Split his soul in half and put the other half in a warforged as his bachelor’s thesis. Except all the nice things about himself were in that side of the soul. So, the warforged (Ténn) is a sweet cinnamon roll, while Hákarl is certainly cursed. He also wants to destroy Gharda (one of the nations) and commit deicide.

And this one is Laestis Luvali, the rogue-warlock kalashtar. She’s baby, really. Born in the first caste (akin to nobles in this setting), she’s has been realizing her peers are actually pretty awful. Her and her family have now cut ties with the first caste and have moved with The Chain, the rebel ludite group that’s actively fighting against them. She’s a kalashtar because of the sword, a family relic passed down generations that their ancestor fetched from a war from a millenia ago, which... turned out to be sort of cursed. It has a watcher within, one of these crystal-undead beings. Vest, her patron, has been trying to reach the Luvali forever to maybe get himself out of there, and Laestis has been the first one to answer the call. And their friendship gives me life tbh

26. What was your favorite scene to write and show your characters.

oh gods i have so many i want to show them but HUH stuff I’ve done-

I really enjoyed when I introduced them to the first (enemy) watcher they had to deal with, Nilodus, and what happened after. 

It was just ominous as heck, and it was the point in which the players realized what kinda stuff were they facing. At the same time, I enjoyed a lot when one of the villains they had been facing (Uth’gaeel) transformed into some big crystal eldritch horror, with an animated battlemap and everything. The boss fights have been overall very fun, and I’m doing my best to homebrew them and make them interesting!! I have one planned I want to s c r e a m about. Overall I just have a lot of plans--

Anyways, thanks a lot for asking! And damn that was a long post