#loosely follows canon lore

[tagzpite]

I’ll see you in a lifetime.

Ganondorf doesn’t know when the blue spectre begun to appear anymore.

All he knows is that he’s perhaps more bothersome than when he bore a beating heart.

Smouldering golden eyes did their best to avoid the icy blue of the ghost. Or is it truly one? The king is unsure. Wishing nothing but to be able to focus on his maps and tracking the movements of the princess. Hoping to somehow reclaim her piece of the Triforce.

He already has Courage after all.

Shallow breaths left a barely lifting chest, a heartbeat so slow. Scarlet blood flowing onto the cold stone in rivers. Colouring golden hair a murky, muddy colour. A poor imitation of the Dark King’s own bright crimson. Ganondorf emerged victorious, the hero unprepared, not truly ready for the confrontation. Eyes the shade of the sky itself so blank, so dull.

An irritated sigh left through dark lips, sharp teeth grit as the large man slammed the pen down onto the table. Blue light illuminating the room. He turned his glare to the perpetrator. Gold meeting blue.

Despite the light, the eyes still look dull. Lifeless. The shattered Master sword held by a pale hand. Once a sun kisses tone.

He’s victorious over Courage. So why does his chest feel so tight? Why are his lungs squeezed ever so tight? Blood drips down his blade; joining the droplets already staining the castle’s floors. He should be feeling nothing but the glory of his success. His final win against a warrior who had emerged to fight time and time again. Life after life. Memory or not.

So why does he feel guilt?

No. He doesn’t. He cannot feel guilt for a decision made in full consciousness. One he made a long time ago. Back when the sound of the Knight’s armor sounded down the halls alongside laughter. Mingling with Ganon’s own, booming note. Moments shared and held over Zelda in a teasing manner as the business of men. Urging rolls of eyes and huffs.

“Alright. Keep your secrets. I have my own!”

He refuses to acknowledge the deep ache. The tightening rope wound around his lungs.

His inkwell had fallen over.

Yet he does not pick the small container up. Instead he opts to watch the ink drip down; staining the papers and the wood, trailing along until they fall to stone tiles.

Blood slowly ran down his blade. Soon to dry. The body still. Link did not stand up. The Zoian arm did not glow, did not stop time nor created machines and weapons never seen before by anyone of Hyrule.

Ganondorf feels numb.

“Why.”

Soft hands slowly pulled knots apart. Fixing the crimson locks that had been spilled over his lap. Here and there brushing against the scalp of the dark skinned man. Sun kissing their skin as the sounds of flipped pages gently interrupted the songs of birds. Horses grazing along the hills. Epona a few ways away.

“Why are you here?”

Armor long abandoned in favour of cotton and leather, the sound of a strangely familiar instrument soothing the Gerudo. The melody strangely haunting yet new.

Link always had a talent for the Ocarina.

“Why must you haunt me?!”

If anyone had been alerted by the sounds of a table meeting the ground, bottles shattered and papers flying through the air, they did not come to interrupt the king within his his study. Teeth grit Ganondorf’s chest heaved with heavy breaths. Sucking a breath in before straightening up. Watching as the apparition walked by. Eyes still numb. Still dull. The only difference between him and his corpse the lack of a gash through his chest. A dark skinned hand very nearly raised itself towards the voe. Stopping halfway as Link disappeared.

He does not feel guilt. His heart does not ache. He does not long for something that could have been.

He is a liar.

“Until next life.”

[glamrockbee]

okay okay so like vague au idea: 2014-era night guards but security breach

[barblaz-arts]

This new AU was inspired by a number of things, one them being, well, Lilo and Stitch. Very, very loosely inspired. With a fantasy twist! Also inspired by all the theories from my lovely followers thinking that Vega was made through witchcraft. It isn't necessarily canon in Vega's main storyline, but it is here.

Lookit me, putting Wenclair in another AU where they're in a custody battle. Mostly because I've also been in a Once Upon a Time mood lately, which is the kinda vibe I'm going for when it comes to the fantasy aspect(i.e. a lil bit lazy and lore 90% pulled out of my ass)

[narzissenkreuz-ordo]

ok im loosing my mind at this theory? canon connection? from twitter

1.2 spoilers/theories / luocha companion quest mentions / leaks(?)

i was ALSO under the assumption that dan feng is dead and dan heng is just a Fucked Up On Purpose reincarnation of himself. but these TWO screenshots fuck it all up

(apparently this was data mined from the game and hasn't been deleted but im unsure if its 1.3 leaks for imbibitor lunae's companion mission or not)

and this is just a screenshot from Luocha's companion mission where March is talking about a novel that has a molting/de-aging story beat and said novel is a main focus throughout the mission

the clear use of "molting" is. super telling especially since Luocha is a follower of the abundance and has unclear motives on the Luofu that havent come to light yet compared to Dan Feng's gay gay homosexual gay immortality sin

and boy does hyv like to drop hints like this in the patches leading up A Big Reveal

this makes the lore EVEN MORE complicated than it already WAS trying to figure out whats going between these two(?) characters and if Dan Feng was actually just de-aged its honestly So Much More Tragic than just Dan Feng dying because Dan Heng IS Dan Feng. Blade ISN'T as delusional in thinking they're the same person, though Dan Heng isn't trying to gaslight gatekeep girlboss by pretending not to know Blade because he GENUINELY doesn't. Dan Feng isn't dead, Dan Feng just doesn't exist anymore in the capacity that his loved ones can remember . And it hurts SO much more.

This also explains why Jing Yuan was acting so fucking insensitive to Dan Heng in the 1.2 trailblaze mission. Jing Yuan is a long-life species and not a stranger to the death of people around him, he is familiar with the Vidyadhara reincarnation cycles & him repeatedly referring to Dan Heng as Dan Feng is unwarranted and not in character IF Dan Feng is actually dead. If Dan Feng was de-aged & grows into being Dan Heng that throws a huge fucking wrench in the already messy & convoluted Vidyadhara reincarnation. His friend did not die and move on to their next incarnation that is to be expected of Vidyadhara, Dan Feng NEVER died but his existence was so altered to the point that his death would have been kinder

bonus me trying to explain to my non-hsr friend this shit;

[thefirstknife]

I'm gonna be 100% real with you in that this is an entirely earnest question and not meant to be me throwing shade or being obtuse in any way.

Osiris is Jewish? I missed this in lore somewhere probably?

Yep! In the opening cutscene to Curse of Osiris, Osiris briefly curses in a non-English language when trying to arrange the cubes. The language spoken is Hebrew! This is due to his voice actor, Oded Fehr, who is Jewish and from Israel and naturally speaks Hebrew. Here's my other post about it!

If it had been just his VA being Jewish, we could speculate about it, but Osiris speaking Hebrew is canon due to this cutscene; they let Oded say this and also kept the line in. This makes him Egyptian Jewish and canonically speaking at least three languages: English, Hebrew (cutscene) and Arabic (the word "sagira" is Arabic for "little one"). Here's also a link to the old Curse of Osiris reveal stream where the devs said that "really early on we made a commitment, we wanted to make sure he was Middle Eastern and he's actually even voiced by Oded Fehr." This shows that his heritage and little details surrounding him are very much relevant.

A lot of Destiny storytelling about heritage is told through names and languages as little details to pick up on. For example, Elsie Bray is very much heavily implied to be Muslim. Back with Beyond Light lore, we got a lot of details about the Bray family, including Sylvie Bray, the mother of Elsie, Willa and Alton. She was shown speaking English and French (+ a single Italian word), and Elsie was shown replying to her using French and the specifically Muslim term "inshallah" which is Arabic. This is repeated in Lightfall's Collector's Edition in Elsie's booklet, showing that Elsie followed the same faith as her mother, or at least honored it:

"Oh daughter," Mom squeezes me tight "You can't make them love you, inshallah. You have to let go."— The horror consumed her as easily as the Stasis. She felt like a frightened child cast loose in the wind. Alone. Every assertion of control met by a temper tantrum in the face of a hurricane…. "Inshallah." She half-remembered her mother's words, and let go.

Words hadn't saved her, or her mother's faith.

Adding this mostly to show how details about names and languages are used to tell us information without having to spell it out directly, but rather to add to the storytelling. This means that these details about Osiris aren't just random, or at least their outcome isn't, now that it's been allowed to become canon through one of the most important cutscenes.

[archetypal-archivist]

One thing today's stream highlighted is that Pomme and Dapper are fully fledged characters by now. We know exactly what their desires and fears are, we know their methods, their thoughts. We know them as people and we don't have to make assumptions about them or extrapolate all that far if we want to write them. People will make big text posts analyzing Leo's behavior to see if she's truly beefing with Sunny or just a little jealous, we have whole fics drawing up personalities for the dead eggs that are so loosely based in canon that they're more collective headcanon than not, but the Dapple duo? We have their diaries, Dapper and Pomme time, entire streams dedicated to following them around; there is no ambiguity.

And that's really cool.

These are characters, people who can stand alone without their parents to play off of. They have lore beyond just their relationships, like Dapper's Soul Vultures and Pomme's diary and their acting? Incredible. And they've had so many chances to practice! So, so much screen time! These are people! We've gotten to know them!

I dunno, I just think it's neat.

[starry-pierrot]

Sleeping Critters

So I'm not the biggest fan of Poppy...at least until CH3 had come out. Don't get me wrong I still dislike the creators and I'll never pay for the game but the smiling critters and Dogday got me. So have this super indulgent fic! Also this is canon divergent so not 100% accurate to the lore!

Warnings: Mention of cannibalism, death. Kissy Missy is dead (Hoping she's alive in CH4)

Characters: Dogday, Reader, Poppy, Smiling Critters

After defeating the prototype you, Dogday and Poppy try to rebuild what you can of PlaytimeCo to offer whoever is left a safer home.

===================

You were tired. 

Very tired. 

About a month ago you had finally defeated the prototype, freeing whatever toys that were left in PlaytimeCo from its claws. But that also left you with a lot more work to do. You could have just left it all behind and maybe taken Poppy and Dogday with you but that wouldn’t be fair to the rest of them. 

Not to mention you did not have the space to house a partially giant dog. 

And he had wanted to stay to watch over the rest of the smiling critters…wherever they are.. Now that Catnap was out of the way they might see some reason. Which is why you were so tired. After everything had been dealt with you agreed to help Poppy and Dogday find the others, to build a new home in PlayTime Co, even if it was temporary. 

Who knew when whoever owned the damn buildings would come and legally claim them someday. Sure it’s already been years but you wouldn’t be surprised if the titles were transferred to someone else after so long. But until then rebuilding would at least make everyone more comfortable. 

The problem was that…you three had hardly found anyone just yet. Poppy knew there probably wasn’t much of the toys left but still she encouraged you to check every nook and cranny you could. So far you’ve only found a few Mini Huggy’s, a Cat-bee and a Candy cat. It’s not much but it's cute to see them all snuggled on some of the beds in the orphanage. 

 “Angel, are you sure? I can go by myself.” Dogday asked as he looked at you, the two of you were standing at the entrance to Playhouse. “You haven’t been sleeping much lately.” 

“No, I can do it. Besides I’d rather not leave you to potentially cannibalistic little fur balls if I can help it.” You manage to hold back a yawn before reaching for the door. “I’ve handled them before, I got the flares.” 

Meanwhile Dogday only had his hands and a pipe you had torn off from the wall when it was loose, you’d be more worried if you hadn’t closed his lower half with a sewing kit. And now he seems to get around alright on that little bright yellow gym scooter. But still you worry he might get overwhelmed. 

“If you say so. Just please don’t go too far from me.” Dogday urges as you open the door and slip inside. Much like the last time you visited the place was a mess, meaning those wheels on Dogday’s scooter aren’t going to be much help. 

“Seems the dog is gonna have to do a trick to get around.” You tease as you step over some toys that were left on the ground.” 

“Har har, Angel.” There was no malice in the fake laugh, planting his hands on the ground he hauled himself up into a handstand he began to follow behind you as you searched. If it was one thing that was annoying it was all the crawling you had to do, your knees weren't meant for all this crawling!

“Hey Little critters! We have food back in the orphanaaaggee!” You try to draw them out but so far the two of you haven’t seen any of them. You don’t remember seeing many on the prototype, it couldn’t have killed all of them could it? No, there were far too many. 

“Catnap is gone, you don’t have to listen to him anymore!” Dogday called out as he crawled around on his belly, “Come on you little fellas!” 

Where the heck could they be hiding? This play house wasn’t that big! Maybe if-

CRACK!

“ANGEL!” 

Suddenly the floor snapped under you, you would think you would have remembered to check that considering what happened the last time. But suddenly you were tumbling down and down..and down-what did you find a secret deep tunnel or something?!

“Ooof!” Hitting the ground hard you could help but gasp as the wind was knocked out of you, your already tired body screaming in pain from the impact. 

“Angel!?” You could barely hear him calling from the top of the hole, “ Angel are you okay?? Say something!” 

It took you a moment but eventually you turned over, “Yeah…y-yeah I’m alive.” With a groan you sat up noticing that you seem to have fallen into a hidey hole. It looked like it had been dug out, there was another hole further up but there was no way you could reach it. 

“Stay there I’ll…I’ll come find you!” Dogday said, “That or I’ll find some rope.” 

“Nowhere I can go!” You call up and after a few more moments of talking Dogday was off to find something to pull you up with. Which just left you here…alone…in a dark and quiet spot. Oh this was going to be terrible. You didn’t even have your phone or heck even a book on you. 

Sure you were fine when you were moving around but now that you had to sit here and wait in an admittedly comfortable little spot…your eyes were drooping after the first ten minutes. You knew you should have listened to Poppy when she told you to get more rest. Jerking your head up you shook yourself trying to wake yourself up a little more. But that didn’t seem like it was working much. 

“Dogday?” you tried calling up hoping that he was still nearby but with no response you had no choice but to sit and stay. “Well shit..” Your eyes grew heavier and soon against your will your eyes closed as your head dipped into the crook of your shoulder. 

Only for you to jerk awake once more which quickly turned into a little spat with your body as you tried to stay awake. Too bad your body had won out eventually. 

You had fallen asleep.  --

“Angel!” 

“Angel!!” 

You cracked your eyes open to the darkness, feeling awfully comfortable in the little hole you had fallen in. Was it always this warm down here? 

“Angel!” Dogday yelled whispered at you, frantically trying to get your attention. Looking up you could see him erratically moving a hand only to stop once he’s realized you were awake. “Oh thank god! Don’t move! I’ll l-lower the rope down!” 

He must've found some rope. Good thing because your legs were starting to cramp from the curled position you were in, “How long was-” 

“SHHHH!” He quickly hushed you. “I said don’t move! Be quiet!” 

What? “Wh-why?” 

“Sh! Sh! Just-quiet! And..don’t look down.”

 Well now you had to look down. And when you did you had to force every bit of nerve in your body to stay still, a squeak just barely escaping your lips. Even stuck in the dark you could make out a Catnap Smiling Critter sitting right on your chest, sleeping. Little growling snores filled the space and when you looked around you could see at least one of every single smiling critter either sleeping next to you or outright on top of you. 

Something touched your head and looking up revealed the rope Dogday had lowered down to you. Craftycorn had taken your right arm hostage but luckily the left one was free. 

“Just hang on…gonna t-tug you up alright?” It wasn’t much of a game plan but the idea of being tugged out only to have to run was better than staying down here in a potential feeding hole. Lifting your free arm up you almost grip the rope when you feel movement. 

Looking back down your eyes stare into the little Catnap’s eyes alight with their white pupils. The two of you stared at one another for a moment. It wasn’t attacking. But if you broke the spell that seemingly had overtaken the two of you…would it? You did come here after all to try and get them to go back with you, to save them. 

Best case scenario Dogday pops your shoulder out of your socket while pulling you up to get you away from the man eating plushies so the both of you can run. 

Worst case you become a meal. 

Taking a breath you lick your dry lips “T-the prototype is dead....we can feed you. At the orphanage.” You whispered, “I can fix you up.”  You knew the Critters were experiments made from children but did they even know that anymore? Dogday had made it sound like they still could understand what was going on like most normal children but would the years of being down here change their view point to follow the strongest out of the pack? 

Still the little creature stared at you for a long while before it bumped its head against your cheek making a little sound. 

You felt your heart beat hard in your chest as you stayed still, soon it became apparent that the little critter wasn’t going to hurt you. Lowering your arm down you carefully petted between it's ears, “Um…ya know what just let them nap for a moment.” You say while looking up at a panicked and still nervous Dogday.  --

It took almost an hour before the other Smiling critters in the hole woke up and much like the Catnap one they all just stared at you. It was a little unnerving in the dark but once Dogday pulled you up and the little critters climbed up behind you, you couldn’t help but coo a little bit at them surrounding your feet. 

“Ohh who’s an adorable little monster?” You smile as you pick up a Hoppy Hopscotch and scratch right under it's chin. Catnap had climbed up onto your shoulder and a Dogday one had been attached at your ankle. 

“Angel…please don’t tease them like that.” Dogday’s voice was flat, clearly unamused at you acting like they were adorable little creatures and not the monstrous flesh eating plushies they were. 

“But look at them!” Holding out Hoppy you pouted at the dog, “They’re harmless!...at least now they’re harmless!” 

Dogday’s eye twitched at that, “I question how much self preservation you have. Lets just get them back to the orphanage. I’m sure Poppy will be happy we found more toys.” Seems the dog still had some nerves about the critters, but it was only right considering what had happened down here.

"Okay okay, I'm coming!" Pulling Hoppy back you began walking behind the dog and the smiling critters followed closely behind. 

“I’m cooking all of you some beef.” 

--- Please like and reblog if you like!

[1moreff-creator]

DRDT + Milgram AU: Undercover (Introduction)

Finally succumbed to the Urges and came up with ideas for a full Danganronpa Despair Time - Milgram AU, and now I feel like sharing. This means giving each character a MV + VD concept (not a full VD though I ain’t writing that much dialogue, and not a full MV because who do you think I am), plus this Undercover post! I’m not sure if I’ll commit to this for a full three trials, or I’ll just drop it after just one, but I can guarantee I’ll do this trial in full. Feel free to make analysis posts (no pressure obvs), but also obvs don't expect this to be that good, I'm doing this for fun.

And if you come from the Milgram side, uh... have fun? I am curious about what people with no prior conceptions of these characters would think, but I do recommend DRDT if you haven't watched it (the overlap between the fandoms is non-trivial, I imagine you'll like it). If not, you should probably look up the character designs at least, but be wary that there will be DRDT spoilers.

As an obvious disclaimer just in case, I am not affiliated with either DRDT or Milgram in any way, this is just a fanmade AU done entirely for fun.

Basic Concept

Pretty simple. What if the 16 students of DRDT were prisoners in Milgram? This means they're all "murderers" by some loose definition of the word, implying most of their backstories must be changed to acommodate for that. For the prisoner pairs, I just paired them based on the Chapter 1 recap. The rest is pretty self-explanatory provided you know how Milgram works; three trials, vote Forgiven/Unforgiven, etc. I won't repeat it all here. You can go to the official Milgram YT channel for more information if you're not familiar.

Meet Es

Although they are of unspecified adult age, this universe’s Es is very similar to canon Es from the main series, at least in appearance. The only differences are red highlights in their hair, as well as sharp yellow eyes and taller height. They also wear arm sleeves on both their arms, being particularly adverse to people touching the left one, and their voice is slightly higher pitch. As for their personality… well, you’ll have to wait for the VDs, right? But as a heads up, they’re quite a bit nicer than canon Es, though they can still get pretty strict with the prisoners. 

(Can you tell who they’re connected to yet?)

Their uniform is the same as canon, including the band thing which in Milgram runes reads “reciffO eciloP”. The only difference is that their other band thing is longer and has the following runes:

(As a heads up, since there's no rune for 'q' I just used the rune for 'c/k' in its place. You probably don't need to translate it all to know what this says if you're familiar with DRDT lore)

Jackalope is replaced by DRDT canon MonoTV, no big changes to its personality. It still breaks the fourth wall and talks to an audience,which is odd for the prisoners (and Es) seeing as there is no audience in-universe (at least, that's what it claims). 

*Es’ VD is mostly the same, besides changes in dialogue caused by the difference in personalities. The only real difference is that there is no ‘extra cell.’

*Cover is still Hibana. 

Alright, let's get to the fun stuff.

Undercover

(It is highly recommended you know what the canon Undercover looks like before reading this, since a lot of it is pretty similar)

The opening is still the same minus Es' different appearance and MonoTV replacing Jackalope, and only starts changing when the prisoners begin showing up.

(Don’t- Don’t expect this to actually work as a song btw. I’m not insane enough to make that work)

UNDER Split in between decisions, my conscious is made up of torn stitches

Levi (01) holds a mostly neutral expression as he holds up his prisoner card, which displays his face alongside an image of an alleyway. His pose keeps changing slightly in smash cuts. Levi’s face darkens right before there’s a switch to the next prisoner.

(Note: I won’t mention the pose switching and the face on the card all the time, since that’s part of canon Undercover. Just assume it always repeats)

UNDER The beauty in simplicity, wilting with rising complexities

Arturo (02) has his chin up arrogantly at first, showing a prisoner card with a picture of a bathroom. He scoffs and turns around before the switch. 

UNDER A liar? No, that’s wrong! My honesty shines like a star in the night

David (03) (speaker persona) smiles nervously, rubbing at his cheek with a finger. His card shows a bedroom. He covers his face with his free hand, sighing before the switch.

UNDER A sinner? No, you’re kidding! I’m innocent as can be, just don’t mind the gaps

Whit (04) throws a cheeky grin to the camera, doing a finger gun with his free hand. His card shows a park. He nervously rubs the back of his neck before the switch.

(Note: Yes I gave him 04 because of the tetraphobia thing sue me-)

UNDER With a fury and a passion, unstoppable, show them your fangs

Ace (05) snarls at the camera. His card shows a city street. He throws it to the floor angrily before the switch. 

(Note: Sometimes I wasn't quite able to tie their talent to their murder, so it's either tangential to their story or has been replaced with something similar. I am mentioning this with Ace for... no reason in particular, sure, you'll believe that)

UNDER Your fears and anxieties, Respond to the stress, show me fight or flight

Nico (06) hides under the part of their cloak which looks like a scarf, peeking out nervously. Their card shows a locker room. They take a step back as the scene switches.

INSERT CHORUS HERE

UNDER Each existence is like no other, Lucky, unlucky, showtime reaches all

J (07) holds up her card with an unsatisfied expression. It shows a bridge surrounded by camera equipment. She rolls her eyes as the scene switches.

UNDER And yet, it’s all the same In the end, this wretched still life goes on

Rose (08) yawns as she holds up her card lazily. It shows a large dining room. The card slips from her hand as she falls asleep.

UNDER It’s too much, too much, I’m high strung, please forgive my sins

Hu (09) looks nervous, glancing around as if to find a place to hide. Her card shows a zither in a non-descript room. She drops her card, and closes her eyes with a pained expression, a hand on her chest. 

UNDER Please do condemn me, Bloodletting, the horror inside us is what makes me feel.

Veronika (10) spins and gives the camera a bright smile as she pulls out her card. It shows a rooftop. She throws the card in the air dramatically, laughing as it spins around and falls beside her. Her eyes fall back on the camera, and she smirks menacingly. 

UNDER  Unopposable, incontestable Merry kings, life’s queens, for me they bow down.

Arei (11) is sticking out her tongue and looking to the side dismissively. Her card shows a bowling alley. She laughs into her hand before the scene switch.

UNDER My weakness haunts me, Alarm bells are ringing, there's no going back.

Eden (12) fidgets with her hands, shaking nervously. She hides her face behind her card as she shows it, but her teary eyes are still visible over it. The card shows a bedroom full of clocks. She cries into her hands before the switch. 

INSERT CHORUS HERE

[The music winds down, a bridge of sorts. As it plays, a few scenes are shown, where only the characters’ silhouettes are visible, white noise covering them]

[01: A steaming kettle covers most of the foreground. In the background, Levi is seen sitting at a table, head slumped forward. Most of the table is visible, but no one else is in the frame]

[02: Arturo is seen to the left, holding a white turtle neck shirt in his hands. Behind him, an open suitcase sits on a bed, clothes splayed haphazardly around it]

[03: David stands alone on an empty stage, arms wide out. The spotlights are all on him. The entire stage and some of the front row seats are visible, with David’s silhouette only covering a small part in the center of the frame]

[04: A computer monitor covers almost the entire frame. There are countless photos and words, but they’re all too blurry to see, with the exception of a small message on top which reads “Analyzing profiles…” Whit is reflected on the screen, resting his head on one of his fists]

[05: Ace sits on a motorcycle, looking up and admiring the night sky which takes up most of the frame]

[06: Nico is crouched beside a cat, holding out a pink mouse toy for it to play with. Only their legs are visible, but there is a puddle of water under Nico]

[07: J has her palm spread out all over the screen, as if blocking the camera. There are flashes of light behind her, but the source is impossible to see]

[08: Rose sits slumped in a chair, hands on her face. All around her, dozens of canvases can be seen, painted entirely in black. Small bits of color poke out at the bottom, but no full paintings are visible]

[09: The camera is entirely focused on the top of a zither. Hu’s hand is visible, touching the strings with her plectra]

[10: Only Veronika’s footwear is visible over a dark floor. The rest of the scene is filled entirely by blood]

[11: Arei stands in front of a bathroom mirror. She’s holding the right side of her hair, the only part that’s visible. It looks very unevenly cut]

[12: Eden is holding her head in her hands, slumped over a work desk full of small machinery. Behind her are a multitude of analog clocks of various designs, all showing the same time; 6:00]

[13: Min is sitting on a chair, slumped forward and apparently collapsed over a notebook. A pen sits just beside her right hand. A bit of the writing can be seen, showing this:]

[The brown part being Min's hair. Don't make fun of me I'm using Paint and have zero art skills]

[14: Xander, the focus of the shot, stands in front of a crowd, standing on a simple chair. His fist is in the air, and so are the fists of everyone in the crowd]

[15: Charles is kneeling over a grave, the name on it hidden behind the silhouette. Charles is pulling at his hair with his hands. Other graves are visible around him, but the edges of the screen are darkened and it’s impossible to see them well]

[16: Teruko’s hand is reaching out to a black figure, this one without white noise. The figure is completely non-descript, more a simple shadow than a proper silhouette. Blinding white light surrounds this figure] 

UNDER No mistakes, no corrections, 100% Perfection, results shall not vary. 

Min (13) wears a neutral expression, and she holds her card perfectly upright. Her pose changes only to match the exact angles actual mugshots use. Her card shows an untidy bedroom. Before the switch, she lowers her hand, and looks briefly to the side, before turning back to the camera. When she does, her left eye flashes magenta behind her hair. 

UNDER Fighting for true justice, Stand strong, a reflection of the will of the many

Xander (14) is glaring at the camera, moving his card around flippantly. Said card shows a window overlooking an entire city. Xander throws the card away before throwing a punch at the screen.

UNDER Leave no room to hide, No hesitation, a chain reaction of truth unfolds

Charles (15) looks serious, if a bit annoyed as he holds up his card. It shows a laboratory table with several test tubes. He turns his back to the camera, adjusting his goggles, but gives one last, softer look behind him as the scene switches. 

UNDER Or shall the secrets remain? What lies beyond the lies, armageddon untold

Teruko (16) looks at the camera with cold eyes, but a hint of a frown on her lips. Her pose never changes; unlike everyone else, her segment is one continuous shot. It starts with her holding her card at an angle such that only her face is visible on it. She closes her eyes solemnly, before finally flipping her card around so only the backside is shown. It has the Milgram logo combined with the DRDT logo. She never shows the rest of the front of the card, as the scene switches moments after. 

[Pre-chorus, as the prisoners hold their hands to their mouths before a scene of them smiling plays. At the end, for a few frames, a white camellia blooms, before there’s a sudden shift in scenery as we hit the final chorus. All the prisoners’ silhouettes have a still shot each with Es, with a blood splatter always under the latter. The scene starts to focus on each individually]

[Levi’s punching Es in the face, Es thrown to the floor from the impact. Brass knuckles are barely visible on his hand. Levi’s shouting, as are all the other prisoners]

[Arturo is kneeling, facing away from Es. The latter is laying on the floor behind him in what would be a pretty uncomfortable position. Arturo is holding his head in his hands, his mouth visible from the side and open in a shout. One of Es’ shoes is off]

[David is holding Es by the neck of their shirt, shouting at their face (from now on I’ll stop clarifying that they’re shouting). The following symbol appears over where his eyes would be, glowing yellow: 正] EDIT: I forgot to mention one of Es’ shoes is off. RIP to the theorists I’m so sorry-

[Whit is pointing what looks to be a gun at Es, who is recoiling as if they’ve been shot in the heart]

[Ace is seen running, Es’ body falling to the ground beside him and twisting as if they’d been bumped into]

[Nico sits on top of Es’ back. With one of their hands, they’re grabbing onto Es’ hair and apparently pushing it forward. With the other they’re holding two ends of a wire firmly planted on Es’ neck]

[J stands normally, pointing what seems to be a remote control at Es. The latter is face-up on the floor, their limbs contorted in unnatural angles]

[Rose is standing, facing away from Es, who is kneeling and grabbing at their throat. A small jar sits beside them, the cap taken off]

[While standing, Hu is grabbing Es by the throat with both hands, blood coming from the Warden’s throat]

[Veronika is kneeling besides Es’ face-up body. Her hands are on her chest, and there is blood under her as well as the Warden. Meanwhile, Es’ limbs are contorted in unnatural ways, and one of their shoes is off]

[Arei is violently swinging a bowling ball at Es’ head, causing their body to twist around as it falls]

[Eden is standing, covering her eyes. Her right hand has a Ⅵ symbol glowing bright yellow. Es is uncomfortably laying face-up on the floor]

[Min is standing with her back turned to Es, who is kneeling on the floor and grasping at their neck. Min is shouting into a landline phone. Along her arm, an equation glows bright yellow:

ln(x³ - 2 . 13) = 0]

[Xander is grabbing Es’ shoulder, plunging a knife into their stomach]

[Es is standing neutrally, but there is still blood on the floor. A glowing yellow question mark floats above them. Charles is nowhere to be seen]

[Teruko is kneeling calmly besides Es, who is lying face-up with their hands crossed over their chest as if in a coffin. A question mark glows on Teruko's left hand. Teruko is the only prisoner besides Charles who is not screaming]

[The song winds down while a sped up and translucent version of the video plays in the background. A shadow begins growing in the middle, and for just a moment, two sharp yellow eyes stare at the camera from the center of the screen. The finale simply has Es exiting to the left as they do in canon Undercover]

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And there's Undercover! How we feeling? Hope you enjoyed! Take care!

[blueskittlesart]

any thoughts on how once again zelda was robbed of her agency because her "father figure" didn't listen to her? even if rauru was kinder to her than her father. and that she had sonia who was patient and loving for a little while before she died (just like her mother). i know rauru apologizes for his hubris but still, i wish we saw zelda be upset about it. and even if zelda was such a big part of the quest she still literally sacrificed her humanity once again because of someone else's mistake- because rauru literally didn't listen to the girl from the future that warned you that shit was going to go down. o know nintendo just loves putting zelda inside crystals and stones but i wish we got something better. even if it was her decision to become a dragon... did she have any other choice? it really just feels like they robbed her of agency again just like botw and the games before

i've been trying to figure out how to answer this one. because there are two ways i could analyze this plot point, either from a writer's perspective or an in-story perspective, but neither of those lead to me fully agreeing with your interpretation? I think there's definitely something to be said about zelda consistently being pushed aside in these games, but. well. ok let's get into it ig

from a writer's perspective, I do honestly have quite a bit of sympathy for the zelda devs as they attempt to navigate the modern political landscape with these games. The cyclical lore, though canonized relatively recently, holds them to a standard of consistency in their games in terms of certain key elements. one of those key elements is that there has to be a princess, and that princess must somehow be the main macguffin of the game. The player must chase her, and the end goal of the game must be to reunite the player and the princess. In 1986 this was an incredibly easy sell. women didn't need to be characters. players were content with saving a 2-dimensional princess whose only purpose was to tell them "good job!" at the end. but as society advances, that princess becomes a much more difficult character to write while adhering to the established overarching canon. (as a side note: i don't necessarily believe that the writers SHOULD be held to the standards of that canon. I think deviating from it in certain areas would be a good change of pace. but i also recognize that deviations from the formula are widely hated by the loz playerbase and that they're trying to make money off these games, so we're working under the established rule that the formula must be at least loosely adhered to.) Modern fans want a princess who is a person, who has agency and makes decisions and struggles in the same way the hero does. but modern fans ALSO want a game that follows the established rules of the canon. so we need a princess who is a real character but who can ALSO serve as a macguffin within the narrative, something that is inherently somewhat objectifying.

the two games that i think do the best job writing a princess with agency are skyward sword and botw (based on your ask, our opinions differ there lol. hear me out) in both games, we have a framing event which seperates zelda and link, but in both games, that separation was ZELDA'S CHOICE. skyward sword zelda runs away from link out of fear of hurting him. botw zelda chooses to return to the castle alone to allow link the time he needs to heal. sksw kinda fumbled later on by having ghirahim kidnap her anyway, but. i said BEST not PERFECT. botw zelda I think is the better example because, with the context of the memories, she's arguably MORE of a character than link is. we see her struggles, her breakdowns, her imperfection, specifically we see her struggle with her lack of agency within the context of the game itself. when she steps in front of link in the final memory, and when she chooses to return to the castle, those are some of the first choices we see her make almost completely free of outside influence; a RECLAMATION of her agency (within the narrative) after years of having it stripped from her. from an objective viewer's standpoint, this writing decision still means she is absent from 90% of the game and that she has little control over her actions for the duration of the player's journey. however I think this is just about the best they could have done to create a princess with agency and a real character arc while still keeping the macguffin formula intact--you're not really SAVING zelda in botw. SHE is the one that is saving YOU; when you wake up on the plateau with no memories, too weak to fight bokoblins, let alone calamity ganon. the reason you are allowed to train and heal in early-game botw is because SHE is in the castle holding ganon back, protecting YOU. When you enter the final fight, you're not rescuing zelda, you're relieving her of her duty. taking over the work she's been doing for the past hundred years. in the final hour, you both work in tandem to defeat ganon. while this isn't a PERFECT example of a female character with agency and narrative weight, i think it's a pretty good one, especially in the context of save-the-princess games like loz.

as for totk, you put a lot of emphasis on rauru not believing zelda and taking action immediately, which, again, from an objective standpoint, i understand. but even when we're writing characters with social implications in mind, those character's actions still need to... make sense. Rauru was a king ruling over what he believed to be a perfectly peaceful kingdom. zelda literally fell out of the sky, landed in front of him, claimed to be his long-lost granddaughter, and then told him that some random ruler of a fringe faction in the desert was going to murder him and he had to get the jump on it by killing him first. the ruler which this girl is trying to convince rauru to wage an unprompted war on has the power to disguise himself as other people. no one in their right mind would immediately take the girl at her word. war is not something any leader should jump into without proper research and consideration, and to rauru's credit, he DIDN'T ever outright dismiss zelda. he believed her when she said she was from the future, he allowed her to work with him and he took her warnings as seriously as he could without any further proof. but he could not wage an unprompted war on ganondorf. that's just genuinely not practical, especially for a king who values peace among his people as much as rauru seems to. as soon as ganondorf DID attack, giving rauru confirmation that zelda's accounts of the future were real, he began making preparations to confront him. remember that zelda didn't KNOW that rauru and sonia were going to be casualties of the war--she didn't make the connection between rauru's arm in the future and rauru the king until AFTER sonia's death, when rauru made the decision to attack ganondorf directly. I think the imprisoning war and the casualties of it were less an issue of zelda being denied agency and more an issue of no one, including zelda, having full context for the events as they were unfolding. if zelda had KNOWN that sonia and rauru were going to die from the beginning and was still unable to prevent it that would be a different issue, but she didn't. none of them did.

I think another thing worth pointing out with rauru and his death irt zelda is that rauru is clearly written specifically as a foil to rhoam. this is evident in how he treats both zelda and link, with a constant kindness and understanding which is clearly opposite to rhoam's dismissiveness and disappointment. consider rhoam's death and the circumstances surrounding it. He died because, in zelda's eyes, she was unable to do her duty; the one thing he constantly berated her for. Rhoam's death solidified zelda's belief that she was a failure, a belief which she KNEW rhoam held as well. his death was doubly traumatic to her because she knew he died believing it was her fault. Now contrast that to the circumstances surrounding rauru's death. Rauru CHOSE to die despite zelda's warnings, because he wanted zelda and his kingdom to live. rauru's death was not agency-stripping for zelda; in fact, it functioned almost as an admission that he believed her capable of continuing to live in his place. With him gone, the fate of the kingdom fell to her and the sages. he KNEW that he would die and still went into that battle confidently, trusting zelda to make the right decisions once he was gone. where rhoam believed zelda incapable of doing ANYTHING without link, rauru trusted zelda COMPLETELY with the fate of his kingdom. several details in totk confirm that when rauru died there was no plan for zelda to draconify, that all happened after rauru was gone. it was HER plan, the plan which rauru trusted her to come up with once he was gone. and I think it's also worth noting that zelda's sacrifice with the draconification parallels rauru's!! Rauru gives up his life trusting the sages and his people to be able to continue his work in his place. Zelda gives up her physical form trusting link and the sages in the future to be able to figure out what to do and find her. these games in general have this recurring theme but totk specifically is all about love and trust and reliance on others. zelda relies on link, link relies on zelda, they both rely on the champions and the sages and rauru and sonia and they all rely each other. reliance on others isn't lack of agency, it's a constant choice they make, and that choice is the thing which allows them to triumph.

The draconification itself is something i view similarly to zelda's sacrifice in botw--a choice she makes which, symbolically & within the confines of the narrative, is a demonstration of her reclaimed agency and places her at the center of the narrative, but which ALSO removes her from much of the player's experience and robs her of any overt presence or decisionmaking within the gameplay. again, I think this is a solution to the macguffin-with-agency dilemma, and it's probably one of the better solutions they could have come up with. Would I have liked to see a game where zelda is more present within the actual gameplay? yes, but I also understand that at this point the writers aren't quite willing to deviate that much from their formula. the alternative within the confines of this story would be to let zelda DIE in the past, removing her from gameplay ENTIRELY, which is an infinitely worse option in my opinion. draconification allowed her to be present, centered the narrative around her, and allowed the writers to reiterate the game's theme of trust and teamwork when she assists the player in the final battle, which i think was a REALLY great choice, narratively speaking.

In any case, I don't think it's right to say that zelda was completely robbed of her agency in botw and totk. Agency doesn't always mean that she's unburdened and constantly present, it means she's given the freedom to make her own choices and that her choices are realistically written with HER in mind, not just the male characters around her, and I think botw/totk do a pretty good job of writing her and her choices realistically and with nuance.

[cakeboxie]

Hey, since you seem to be the local Zevlor expert, I have a question for you. I've seen a lot of people referring to him as an Oathbreaker. Is that just popular fanon or is there an in-game basis for it? Bc I definitely remember noticing him having the Aura of Devotion buff, which only Devotion paladins get, but he may not have that later I don't recall

Not really a lore expert I just really want to [REDACTED] and [REDACTED]

But.

He does get both aura of protection and aura of devotion, the latter being specific to oathsworn paladins, during act 2, however characters stats and what have you in game are not generally the best resource for what is well and truly canon. Halsin has 12 strength which is just, wrong. Astarion is missing almost all of the usual vampire spawn shit and is not classified as an undead (where caz and the other spawn all are) Wyll stays classified as human after sparing karlach.

If you ditch him in the act 2 pod then use speak with dead on his body after Orin dumps it in your camp you can ask him what the absolute promised him he says, quote, “to be… paladin again… protect… my people…”

There’s also two little supporting things, I’m sure there’s more I can’t remember (if someone wants to tell me I’ll add em)

The sword in his chest with the deity and holy order scratched off

The hellriders pride gauntlets blessed with Helm’s Protection (helm being the patron of many a paladin, god of guardians and what have you, and particularly the primary god of the hellriders)

The hellrides pride one may feel like a stretch initially but I see it as supporting mainly bc if he was oathsworn he’d have no reason to give them up. They’re a great piece to give to paladins bc it makes lay on hands (one of the things you loose when oathbroken) even better than it already is

In the context of the refugees being mostly civilians, being able to heal someone and bolster their resistance to damage would be huge, especially for a high level paladin with an impressive lay on hands pool, following 5e logic where it’s a pool instead of charges, assuming he was level 12 it would be a total of 60hp worth of damage he could heal. I would be unsurprised if he was higher level though, commander is a very high rank and he is very clearly been it for a while.

But it’s not effective if you don’t have a means of healing.

Here’s the stats for his sword also with its flavour text

[y-rhywbeth2]

Gods & Clergy: Selûne

Link: Disclaimer regarding D&D "canon" & Index [tldr: D&D lore is a giant conflicting mess. Larian's lore is also a conflicting mess. You learn to take what you want and leave the rest]

Religion | Gods | Shar | Selûne | Bhaal #1 | Bhaal #2 | Mystra | Jergal | Bane #1 | Bane #2 | Bane #3 | Myrkul | Lathander | Kelemvor | Tyr | Helm | Ilmater | Mielikki | Oghma | Gond | Tempus | Silvanus | Talos | Umberlee | Corellon | Moradin | Yondalla | Garl Glittergold | Eilistraee | Lolth | Laduguer | Gruumsh | Bahamut | Tiamat | Amodeus | The rest of the Faerûnian Pantheon --WIP

I should probably compile some lore on gods who aren't evil messes for a change... Then right back into the evil nonsense with Shar.

Worshippers & Clergy: All are equal and personal freedom and tolerance of other ways of life is very important. Also something-something motherhood. Now if you'll excuse me: "o, White Night Lady, guideth mine eye to wherever the hells mine keys that I had literally five seconds ago art?"

Silverstars: You can make an amazing amount of things out of moonlight, really.

Selûne: The Anti-Shar. She's kind of a spoonie.

-

"Let all on whom Selûne's light falls be welcome if they desire. As the silver moon waxes and wanes, so too does life. Trust in Selûne's radiance, and know that all love alive under her light shall know her blessing. Turn to the moon, and she will be your true guide. Promote acceptance and tolerance. See all other beings as equals. Aid fellow Selûnites as if they were your dearest friends." - Selûne's Dogma.

Selûne's worshippers come from all sorts: people who work the night shift, and other people seeking protection from Shar; travellers and navigators who will be navigating using the night sky; sailors; female mages; diviners and people hoping for a glimpse of the future; and lycanthropes who want to resist the influence of their curse. Selûne is also considered associated with femineity and is something of a mother goddess, and is worshipped by women, particularly mothers and couples trying to conceive.

In every day life one might call on her if they're lost, or to find misplaced objects and such - for example, where the hells have the house keys gone?

Female mages born under a full moon are considered to carry her blessing.

The moon waxes and wanes and may show itself in a vast array of colours and shapes; so is the moon goddess as inherently mercurial. Her faces are many and never the same, and so her follows are many and no two are the same.

There are only a few concrete rules of the faith. All people are equal and should be made welcome and treated with dignity. Shar's predations must be combated wherever you uncover them. One should always give healing freely to those who need it. The lonely and ostracised should be offered friendship and care.

The faith is extremely, proudly diverse, and Selûne places very few demands upon her followers in exchange for her blessings. There is no "right" way to worship the Moonmaiden, individuality and customisation in religious practices in encouraged.

-

Her clergy promotes acceptance of different ways of life and follows a lose hierarchy with emphasis on personal freedom.

The clergy have no uniform, save their holy symbol (a pair of eyes surrounded by seven stars, in silver), and they dress how they see fit. Moonstones are popular. When dressed for battle they can often be recognised by the iconic weapon known as the moon's hand - a footman's mace with a smooth head.

Even her temples follow no set structure, one may find a temple of the Night White Lady is a massive cathedral, a small roadside shrine, or a circle of standing stones on top of the village hill where her followers go to dance under the moonlight. "Anywhere the full moon shines is a place for [worshipping] Selûne."

Clergy are known collectively as Mooncloaks (informally) and Ladyservants (formally). A variety of titles exist within the church. The loose ranks of experience are as follows: those who are interested in joining but have not yet entered training are Postulants, Novices are referred to as the Called. Runrae (singular: Runra) are fully trained priests.

One of the Called becomes a Runra when they are assigned a simple task in the form of a low-level quest where they're expected to show that they have learnt the lessons of their faith. When successful, Selûne contacts them in their dreams via a vision, and they are a priest.

Ranks ascend into Alrunrae, Tenembrae, Sartembrae, Trintelrae, Aumrae, and finally the Calunalae.

A Calunala is an independent agent who maintains close personal ties with the goddess, essentially serving as her secret agents in the war against Shar.

Priests tend to wander Faerûn, making a living by offering their services as navigators (especially if you're traveling by night) and fortune tellers (there are no diviners more accurate than a Selûnite). There are no restrictions about whatever work they want to do to support themselves, and travelling mooncloaks can be found in part time jobs blacksmithing, weaving, farming, serving tables... They're also prepared to fight against Sharrans and lycanthropes, whenever and wherever they cause harm.

Not infrequently, a mooncloak will receive missions and holy duties - sometimes from higher ranking priests, and often from Selûne herself. Whenever she sets them a task, the Moonmaiden usually grants them temporary spells and abilities to aid them. With their siblings in the faith alway ready to aid them, and their goddess personally lending her aid, Selûne's clergy often give the optimistic opinion that "The Moon waxes and wanes, and fortunes of the holy folk of the Moon rise and fall - but the Moon is ever with us, sailing on no matter how dark the sky."

Selûnites traditionally charge very little for their services, save for a place to sleep for the night and a warm meal, and maybe any few coins you can afford to spare. They have a reputation for kindness, open-mindedness and generosity that makes their faith very popular.

Selûne personally encourages her clergy to be self-reliant, kind and humble, but also wants to see them live lives they're happy in.

As stated, Selûnite rituals are highly customised and tend to be unique to the priest in question. Generally they are performed in the open under the moonlight and involve dancing and meditating. Offerings of milk or wine are poured on Selûnite altars during the full and new moons. If the priest is in the godess' good graces then she will cause the libation to transform into moonfire - an "opalescent, glowing fluid with the consistency of custard." It's described as feeling silk-soft to the touch. The touch of the moonfire as it flows down the altar may enchant objects or bestow powers upon the things and beings it touches, as per the will of Selûne (it can also destroy undead). On ritual nights, her priests cast commune in order to socialise with their goddess and reaffirm their personal connection with her.

There are two holy days: the Mystery of the Night and the Conjuring of the Second Moon.

The Mystery of the Night is performed once a year by every priest (it has no set day, it occurs whenever the priest in question holds it). The priest lies before an altar of the Moonmaiden and slips into a trance. They fly upwards and spiral the moon, communing with Selûne via an exchange of visions. This ritual is extremely taxing, but the priest will quickly recover with rest.

The Conjuring of the Second Moon occurs once every four years during Shieldmeet, and is generally a day when the church goes to war with the church of Shar. To aid them, priests summon Shards to do their beings - celestials who take the form of blue-haired, winged warrior women who serve Selûne (equivalent to planetars in power). At the end of the day, one mortal priestess will leave with them to join their ranks.

Religious orders in service of the Moonmaiden include the Swords of the Lady (also known as "Lunatics" behind their back). They're a fanatical order of warriors dedicated to combating Shar and her worshippers.

The Oracles of the Moon are an organisation of female mages, specialising in divination, who dedicate themselves to Selûne's service.

The Order of the Sun Soul is a monastic order that worships Selûne and Lathander.

Specialty priests are known as Silverstars.

They can see in the dark perfectly for up to 30ft.

They can create blades made of moonlight, wieldable only by the silverstar that made it. The blade causes no visible damage to living beings, but it does sap their life force and disrupt magic, preventing mages from casting. The flesh of undead visibly melts away under its touch.

They can raise or lower the levels of bodies of water, akin to the effects of the tide.

They can fire small meteors (shooting stars) from their hands, in an effect much like fireballs. They explode on impact.

A Silverstar infected with lycanthropy has control over their transformations, and Selûne protects them from being damaged by silver.

They can also shape moonlight into a wall - the wall is intangible, but it illuminates its surroundings, dispelling magical darkness. It will cause harm to any with evil intent, and followers of Shar (or Umberlee), as well as any undead being that passes through it. Magical items on the person of an individual who passes through will glow red, drawing attention to them, and magical potions will explode.

Stairs and bridges can also be crafted from moonlight, which can reach up to 15ft in length. While standing on the bridge, individuals are protected from enchantments, life-draining effects and missiles. It's impossible to knock them off of the bridge.

Finally they can shape the light into a net that protects a specific area. The strands are visible only to the priests, the goddess and those under the spell's protection. Everything else - intruders, weapons and magic - that enters the area is forced back to its point of origin. Attacks will be rebounded.

-

Selûne is a Chaotic Good deity. Her realm is in the Gates of the Moon, on the plane of Ysgard.

She doesn't care about ritual and dogma or how observant of these practices her followers are, as long as they are able to support themselves, fulfilled in life and will offer kindness to others. The spirit of faith is more important to Our Lady of Silver than the scriptures of religion.

Sometimes she is taken by a joyful, energetic mood. Sometimes she is a quiet, caring and maternal figure, prone to poetic moods. Whichever mood she's in, she carries herself with an underlying sense of grief that seems millennia old. Selûne is slow to anger and prefers to avoid fights, but that changes rapidly when she comes into conflict with her sister, and there she displays a side to herself that is much more warlike. She also opposes Umberlee on behalf of sailors and others who live by the sea. When in conflict with her enemies Selûne is merciless.

Selûne was (apparently) born of the primordial essence of the universe, one half of the Two-Faced Goddess with her twin, Shar. Together they created the planetary bodies of the solar system, including the Earthmother, Chauntea.

When Chauntea begged for warmth to nurture life upon her, the Two-Faced goddess experienced conflicting desire for the first time. Selûne was willing to grant the Earthmother her wish, but for Shar, the very concept was a horrifying antithesis to her very being.

The argument between the two spawned the concepts (and gods) of destruction; such as war, disease and death/murder. Eventually, Selûne reached into the Elemental Plane of Fire and drew a portion of it into Realmspace, and fashioned it into the sun - a process that burned her.

Shar's rage doubled, and she began to snuff out every light she could find in the universe, causing Selûne to tear out a part of her own essence and fashion it into a weapon that she threw at Shar in defence of the newborn life of Realmspace. This portion of Selûne passed through Shar and formed itself into the Weave - the goddess Mystryl (who would one day be called Mystra). Mystryl sided with Selûne, and Shar was forced to concede defeat now that she was utterly outnumbered.

This battle has left Selûne permanently weakened, and her strength waxes and wanes much like the phases of the moon. The two sisters continue their argument - and Shar is boldest when her sister is at her weakest.

The Moonmaiden's avatar takes the form of a human woman, with various appearances, her age generally conforming to one of the maiden, mother, crone concepts. In one of her more matronly, middle-aged forms she enjoys walking the realms, and curiously has decided to open an inn in Waterdeep using this form, unbeknownst to many. Her apparent health depends on the state of the moon, while it wanes she appears sicker and closer to death. Regardless of its phase, she glows faintly with moonlight in the darkness.

Her lesser manifestations include dancing trails of little lights known as "moondust" or "moon motes." She manifests these to people who are lost at night, or traveling over dangerous ground that they can't perceive. She will also provide them for her faithful, when they require a light source to perform an important task but have no way to see.

Her messengers and servants include owls, weredragons and other lycanthropes and shapeshifters, and her Shards.

For a while, prior to the Time of Troubles, she worked under the goddess of love, Sune. She later went her own way and resumed operating as an independent deity, but maintains a close relationship with Sune and Lliira.

[atthebell]

what happened w bolas today i was busy touching grass

tldr cellbit and baghs were hunkered down underground after the nuke went off and the watcher tasked them with fucking with the purgatory 2 participants-- it gave them op gear and set them loose on everyone and they ran around trying to (and occasionally succeeding at) killing people

important roleplay moments:

they said they'd been relying on each other to cope with the loss of the eggs & their loved ones (they both believe all the eggs died in the earthquake/because of the nuke and got mad at bad for trying to tell them otherwise)

they're somewhat listless and, in OG bolas fashion, set in the idea that this is the only option, so they want to follow whatever actions the eye/watcher gives them, as it's kept them alive and gives them things to do and they desperately need direction.

baghera killed brunim for having phil's face but not actually being him (iconic)

cellbit had several fun fuga throwback moments with pac and jvnq, and he got into it with natalan who claimed he'd been married to roier before (somewhat true in chafa lore (they were married for about five seconds and natalan Did Not Reciprocate roier's feelings) but not accurate to his own actual interest in the relationship, clearly said to piss cellbit off, we'll see if it comes up with qroier and whether he considers chafa canon to his character or not)

baghera's chainsaw wants to eat people tbh baghera popped off as she always does with the craziness fr pls watch her pov the way she killed bagi was so fucking funny

at the end they were led to a different place with a sharestone that had an error, and found the camp where richas and pomme had been staying when they were on egg island. they read a bunch of their signs, checked out their little house, and talked about missing their kids and how they wish they could've saved them (again, in rp they both believe the eggs are dead, and when seeing evidence to the contrary seemed confused. i think this was partly them genuinely believing the kids are dead and also bc they dont want to use their meta-knowledge that the eggs ARE alive when they're not supposed to know that).

they decided to go to bed, but the watcher told them they had one last mission-- to kill all the sinners. and then it gave them a sharestone back to the bolas bunker. they decided to go to bed anyway and ignored the mission. the watcher may have wanted them to kill each other, unclear exactly what the deal was

not clear if they're going to be back later this week to fuck with participants again or not-- i got the vibe of not really, but we'll see. they might return but do something different, cellbit said something about wondering if their gear was too op or not, but i don't know if he meant they'll be back and he wants to make sure they talk to admins about nerfing them a bit or if he just was chatting about it a little bit

also cellbit went live on his alt and talked a bit of meta, and said they sent some ideas to the admins and then were told they'd work something up but wanted to surprise them on the specifics. he talked about it being more rp than lore, and that purgatory 2 doesnt have to be entirely canon if people don't want it to be.

[moodymisty]

Hi absolutely love your primarch fics

Could i request a corvus corax x reader. The poor bird boy needs more love. Maybe something fluffy i do adore the fics where the primarchs are more human and they get a break.

[ 𝕸𝖔𝖔𝖉𝖞𝕸𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖞'𝖘 𝕸𝖆𝖘𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖑𝖎𝖘𝖙| 𝕬𝖔3 ]

Author's Note: Ok so I decided to kind of combine these two also, since they both seemed to work together. This isn't fully NSFW, but there is some lewd elements. I hope that is acceptable to you both.

This is also my first time writing Corvus, and I haven't delved into his lore like I have with some of the other legions. So I apologize in any deviations from his canon and any inconsistencies in this fic apart from the obvious 'primarchs in love' ooc-ness.

Summary: Diplomacy has always been dreadfully boring.

Relationships: Corvus Corax/Fem!Reader

Warnings: NSFW but it's pretty vague, I dunno what to call this I guess fingering? But it's not? hand grinding/rubbing I guess It'll make sense I promise, Voyeurism kink, General 40k mentions so war death all the usual

Word Count: 1714

"You shouldn't have brought that thing here."

The rattly, nearly wheezing voice comes from somewhere out of your sight, and you don't pay any mind to it from how mumbled and furious it seems. You assume it's directed at another, and not yourself. No one has any possible reason to speak with such anger at you, after all; At least as far as you're aware. The fabric of your clothing is wrinkled at the front, and you brush it to flatten it. Perhaps you shouldn't have walked ahead.

"Are you deaf, girl?"

Suddenly you look up, and see someone standing to your side. The source of the voice earlier, you presume, judging by it's similar rasping tone.

Head to toe they are adorned in various cybernetic enhancements, even more so than what is visible to you, judging by the odd, inhuman bulging beneath his ornately decorated copper robes. The metal, hooked fingers of his left hand gesture to the raven perched comfortably atop your left shoulder.

"That, shouldn't be here."

The small metal tubings coming from his neck seem to muffle his speech in some way, and there is a distinct tremor to both his motions and his speech. You don't know if it's the sheer volume of his anger like an engine overheating about to explode, or simply something his extensive cybernetic work has yet to or is unable to fix.

The raven, still unnamed by you, snaps it's beak in the direction of the man's metal finger getting too close to itself and it's keeper, letting out a squawk when the man instantly retracts his hand back close to his peculiarly shaped torso. The raven only then returns to preening your hair, or at least attempting to.

"I think I can bring it where ever I want, thank you."

With no surprise he seems completely shocked by your adamant refusal to listen, no doubt not expecting it in the slightest. You don't know if he hasn't noticed the Aquilla and the symbol of the XIXth on your clothing, or if he just simply doesn't care.

"Unbelievable; You embarrass yourself acting such a way- And where did that, thing, even come f-"

"It was a gift."

The sharp corners of this fortress's halls effectively hid Corvus for a good while until he was quite close, the pitch black of his armor seemingly almost eating the light that shined onto it instead of reflecting it. His hair does the same, flowing down past his jaw and laying against the collar of his armor. He is followed by a retinue of seven, Nykona included among them. Despite all the other Astartes leaving their jetpacks behind because of such tight quarters, Nykona elected to still wear his. The advantage of his skill with it is too great for him not to have for any possible scenario.

Even if this world seems intent on coming peacefully, someone like Corvus is going to take no chance on the matter. You would be of no surprise to find out that there with Raven Guard scattered across this fortress, and along the rocky faces surrounding it.

The man looses color like a draining sink, what little blood left in his body leaving his face and worsening his pallid complexion. He instantly moves to bow, before rising, pointing towards you and instantly breaking any previous respect he might have gained.

"Lord Primarch?! What is your r-"

"That raven was my first courting gift to her."

As if his face couldn't get any paler, it somehow seems to upon the realization that he'd just insulted the new lover of the Primarch who holds this world's neck in a noose trap. The Shadow of the Emperor sits moored just in the planet's outer atmosphere, ready at any moment. Corvus need only give the word.

Had Corvus the desire, he could simply level this rock until it was nothing but ash beneath the treads of his boots. But he was perhaps a bit more human than some of his brothers, and given the planet had relatively vast infrastructure and plentiful resources, he had elected diplomacy. To make use of said infrastructure, rather than simply leveling it and starting over.

You hear a soft sound; The crackling of a vox channel being used between the Astartes helmets. It's a subtle sound you've gotten keen to. They're talking to each other on their private channel, but about what you have no idea.

The one left of Corvus, not Nykona, is who speaks up.

"What are our orders, My Lord?"

Corvus gestures down the hall at the end of which lies the grand meeting room you had been moving towards, before getting interrupted. The counciler that once had the intent to scold you now stands frozen, fearful of the Primarch's lack of interest in his existence.

"Two post at the door. The rest with me."

The Primarch begins walking forwards and nearly through the man, had he not stumbled out of the way.

Corvus need only take one look at him, to send the man scuttering back towards his peers. You follow beside Corvus, and one of the Astartes slows his gait ever so slightly to allow you to do so.

The four Astartes spread across the meeting room once you enter, all placing themselves near points of entry like windows. It's nowhere near as large as something you would see on Terra, but it's more than sizable to need a few Astartes to cover it's corners.

However, you had entered the room with five- you notice a group of candles almost blow out from an invisible wind, but you elect to look away from it.

A myriad of profuse apologies on behalf of and from their compatriot fill the air, mixed between bowing and spouting of enough titles to fill a stew pot; Only once it concludes do you finally sit. They must've heard the altercation from moments ago, and you struggle not to show amusement at the theatrics. But after that moment, only a feeling of boredom remains.

In the deep recesses of your mind, perhaps one sicker than you might wish it, you lament Corvus's choice of diplomacy.

It's longer, far more tedious, and has you spending all of your energy speaking with stuffy priests and diplomats that has your mind aching in either boredom or annoyance. Or at worst, anger. Like moments ago in the hall. With something such as war, the goal is at least on first impression, simple and obtainable. Diplomacy requires a firm hand, yet gentle, and results in having a legion of Astartes figuratively chomping at the bit.

Thankfully, Corvus has Imperium agents and his own diplomats to do most of the gentle talking. Corvus is far too blunt and tight lipped for these sorts of things, and you aren't on your best behavior after the incident in the hall. You swear that man might actually just collapse dead if Corvus spares him one more glance.

But the Primarch seems disinterested, though not much to your surprise. What is a surprise however, is when he seems to decide to find a way to occupy his mind elsewhere. On matters perhaps a bit more interesting to him.

His hand lays on your thigh. It's heavy; The ceramite of his armor adds a considerable heft. You look up at him curious and receive nothing back in return. He has always been impeccable at hiding his emotions behind an mask of complete indifference, and only sometimes does it fall off. You only catch his dark eyes for a moment before he looks elsewhere, the sunlight colored through the stained glass and shining on his pale skin.

His hand trails further up your thigh, though it doesn't much have to given the sheer size of his hand in comparison to your body. He might perhaps not be the largest of all the Primarchs, but that doesn't mean his body is any less gargantuan compared to your own.

The raven, which has been largely silent since sitting, shifts from your shoulder to his, content with it's higher perch. Your clothing bunches and wrinkles underneath his armored fingers, before the outside of his armored palm presses against your cunt. You feel a jolt of lighting go up your spine, and it's a struggle not shift your shoulders forward as he applies a non-stop pressure to your most sensitive areas.

You put a hand on his fingers and attempt to peel them away, but they stay firm. It's like trying to pry away the fingers of a marble statue. There is absolutely no chance in doing so and now you sit at the mercy of whatever he wishes to do to you. A question that will get no answer, as you glance upward again his watch his stoic face glance from person to person. As if completely unaware or uncaring of what he is doing.

He is intent to try your patience, it seems. You lean slightly forward as your nerves make you fear of anyone being able to see what's happening beneath the table; As you know there is at least one cloaked Raven Guard somewhere in the room. If he was behind you, he would be easily able to see. Especially as The Primarch's hand begins to move, unsatisfied with simply forcing his way into the front of your mind with just his still pressure. Each movement he makes makes your body feel hotter, like you're going to boil alive despite the cool air

"And mandatory requisitions..."

Negotiations seem to be doing well, from what murmurs you pick up. But you're too busy tensing your thighs as Corvus rubs the side of his hand against your clothed cunt to notice. His armor is unyielding, pressing against you firm and forcing your thighs apart slightly no matter how hard you fight it. You'd be hard pressed to have anything come to mind at this point. Slowly and with every muscle in your body tensed, you attempt to let out a deep, heavy sigh without casting any interest your way.

You cross your ankles, and put your chin in the nook of your index finger and thumb, placing fingers over your lips in an attempt to simply look bored. Your other hand grasps onto the first two fingers of his hand for dear life, desperately trying not to even make a single movement out of place let alone make a noticeable sound. You can feel the way your undergarments slide against your cunt, soaked and crying for it to stop, and for it to continue until you finally come.

"We can construct a new harbor..."

You've completely lost the path of what's happening around you, thighs quivering from how tight you have them pressed together around Corvus' hand. But his hand still moves between them up and down against your clothed cunt, unimpeded.

A harsh breath is all you let out of your nose as you feel your stomach tense as you come against him through the layers of fabric, feeling like you're being watched by a million eyes. But none are, except for him.

Through that flawless, neutral expression, he glances downward at you before he pulls his gauntlet from between your thighs and rests it back against the massive wooden tabletop. You could tell the look in his eyes. He lets you settle down from the high in silence, in a room that feels like a stage. You have no possible idea of how long you'll be stuck here, as your clit throbs in aftershocks.

You look away from his dark eyes before they trap you for good, and lament the wet, sticky feeling against your undergarments as you shift in your seat.

[neonscandal]

The "Honored One"

Genre: Angst, Reflection

Tags: Satoru Gojo-centric, Angst, Canon-Compliant, Character Study, Student Gojo & Geto

Chapter Word Count: 5.4K

Status: Completed

Summary: Gojo spent his life alone until he didn't. The time burns bright in his memory despite how short lived it was because the bookends of his youth were marked with burdens known only to the Honored One.

A/N: I'm squeezing your cheeks and demanding that you humanize Gojo more.

EXCERPT

Gojo was ill-equipped to deal with such friction, especially in a social environment. It scratched at his pride and riled something with him. He'd always been prepared to fight for his stake in life but he'd never really been challenged to do so. Every conversation with Geto, however, felt like a fight that he was soundly losing. Desperate, he yelled after Geto's retreating back. "Maybe we should settle this all in a fight!" Geto threw a smug look over his shoulder. "Are you sure about that? I'm a special grade, after all," he purred knowingly.

Silence was a common bedfellow for Satoru Gojo. It wasn't so much a matter of preference as it was a simply a reasonable occurrence. That's not to say his life was without chaos or complication. Bounties, curses, threats on his life; all cause for irritation but seldom got close enough to disturb his peace.

Not a lot of people joked around Gojo. Rumors that he could see through any lie and pierce through facts at lightning speed took the fun out of any hyperbole or turn of phrase. Still, whispers followed everywhere he went. Talk of being spared from the judgement of the "infamous Six Eyes". Even those unfamiliar with the technique knew it wasn't one to trifle with as who could hold a candle to the sorcerer who tipped the scales?

The Gojo clan was small but its influence was mighty with the birth of the Limitless and Six Eyes user. One would think that'd create a lot of noise and hub-bub but, in truth, that seemed to only be in the wake of the clan heir. Heavy was the head that wore the crown and that often meant navigating and inhabiting narrow political spaces. For a long time that meant that anywhere Gojo went, he went alone. Even in the company of others, he found that he always had to lead the charge, be the first to speak decisively. The guiding voices ahead of such meetings tended to blend with the pleading voices within them, so Gojo tuned them all out in equal measure. They were merely muffled white noise so his flippancy therein caused quite the stir. Never before him, fearing what such an unruly child might do.

He couldn't quite understand such cowardice. He'd always just said and done as he felt, braced to take the consequences head on. Finding there seldom were any, he got more brazen, bolder. In a head that's constantly going a mile a minute, he churned out the rationalization that those who are strong could always say and do as they pleased. It was sound logic with evidence from every interaction he'd had. So the boundless wall between him and the people in those private rooms seemed to grow exponentially. He tolerated the stuffiness of them less and less and found himself inadvertently creating space between him and anyone else for that matter.

Gojo spent time chasing his sweet tooth, or rather, one of his very few delights. For some time, there was lore about how the sugar kept him in peak condition to bear the weight of his curse techniques. But that was more an observation in jest that simply found traction among the small population who still held curiosity for the loose cannon. By now he was a teenager, his perspective of the world cemented around where he fit into it as "The Strongest".

He spent more days in his head than trying to fit in with those who failed to keep up with his long strides forward. The crowds of people seemed to part any time he left the clan estate which reinforced the idea that he had a greater stake in the world than they did. After all, he was prepared to defend his rightful place where they seemed to lack resolve to even defend theirs. Subsequently, their faces bled together in a haze. There was never anyone who captured his interest until-

Jujutsu High promised more people his age and an education that wasn't provided by private tutors. He wasn't a stranger to the institution but was finally old enough to attend. He didn't bother setting any hope that there'd be anyone even remotely like him. Afterall, if there were, wouldn't he already know them? Wouldn't people who changed the natural order of things tend to run in the same social circles? He prepared for indistinct voices and blurry faces but hoped the environment would be less stifling than the manor were everyone seemed to walk on eggshells around him.

His first introduction was to a sorcerer who could manipulate Reverse Cursed Energy. Gojo's eyes widened at the prospect. He'd heard of it but could never manage to execute it and here he was faced with someone who mastered it. Puckishly, his interest was piqued.

"Now we're talking! Tell me something I don't know. What's it like? How do you do it?" he rubbed his hands together in speculation.

"You just kind of... 'fwoo, hyoi,'" she drawled while moving a lollipop from one side of her mouth to another to speak clearly and waving a pointed finger aimlessly in the air.

Gojo tilted his head unimpressed and pouted, dramatically. "Clearly, I'm not gonna be able to use that nonsense any time soon..." he thought dryly as he cut his eyes at her. "Are you messin' with me or somethin'?" he asked, one eye focused on the young girl. He'd heard of hazing when he prepared for leaving his life of homeschooling but hardly believed it would happen so soon and, least of all, to him.

"As if she'd have a reason," another student laughed cooly.

Gojo turned to get eyes on the offending party and was struck immediately by their tonsorial choices. "Bangs."

"Bangs." In a rare occurrence, his thoughts seemed to spill out of his mouth simultaneously.

The student snorted, mildly annoyed at the jab. "I prefer 'Suguru', actually," he sneered. "... but you? Can call me 'Geto'."

The attitude, the audacity. Gojo locked in, mercilessly. This was a new kind of excitement, a new kind of curiosity. "Heh, I didn't mean anything by it! Just couldn't help but notice!" his eyes narrowed as his lips curled upward.

"Typically, one would extend their own introduction but I suppose that's aiming a bit too high for someone so crass," Geto quipped, unamused.

Gojo's eye seemed to twitch in disbelief. He tried to recall whether there had ever been a time that his name or reputation hadn't preceded him. Maybe not the girl before but surely this guy was messing with him, he was certain. "Am I being Punk'd?"

Barely allowing time to process, Geto took an ushering step toward the girl with a confident, "I think we're meant to gather in the classroom for the opening ceremony." while casually dismissing Gojo.

It was enough to make Gojo's jaw drop. He sputtered in this newfound dynamic but not for long. "Just who are you, anyway?" he called after, confoundedly.

Geto's stride was unbroken and he didn't even make an attempt to respond to Gojo as he continued his path forward, interested to meet his new teacher.

--

Whatever misconceptions Gojo may have had about high school life were dashed by the fact that his class consisted only of the girl who never once offered him one of her many lollipops and the boy who, while interesting, seemed to only speak derisively toward him after their initial conversation. Even with low expectations, he still hoped that he'd find... something more than what he'd found. The first few days dragged on without incident or interest and Gojo was largely of the mind to begin tuning everything out again. The missions, the routine, everything felt negligible. Except he seemed to be grated by every negative interaction he had with Bangs. He seemed hell bent on disliking him on principle which was incredibly uncommon and not at all the experience he'd had growing up. He was well liked, beloved even. Right?

Geto was as quick-witted as Gojo and openly opinionated, even announcing his thoughts on Gojo's lack of respect or just general disposition. The observations were as unsolicited as they were bold and no one seemed to have half a mind to correct him. Gojo himself didn't fear the idea of doing so, moreso the occasions when it would happen would leave him faltering in shock. Until one day, leaving the classroom with the promise of a joint mission with both of his classmates, Geto seemed to blow a raspberry at the idea of partnering up.

"Hey, you gotta problem with me?" Gojo scrunched his face up in accusation as he pulled Geto's shoulder to look at him.

Geto dusted his grip off forcefully while rolling his eyes as if the question was a bother. "A problem? Several, in fact. From your seeming inability to consider collaborating cohesively with others on missions to the way you speak to Yaga-sensei, Ieri-san and myse-"

"Ieri-san?? Who's that?" Gojo interrupted, incredulously.

Geto sighed, belabored, "Exactly."

Gojo was ill-equipped to deal with such friction, especially in a social environment. It scratched at his pride and riled something with him. He'd always been prepared to fight for his stake in life but he'd never really been challenged to do so. Every conversation with Geto, however, felt like a fight that he was soundly losing. Desperate, he yelled after Geto's retreating back. "Maybe we should settle this all in a fight!"

Geto threw a smug look over his shoulder. "Are you sure about that? I'm a special grade, after all," he purred knowingly.

"I-I'm a special grade!" Gojo countered defiantly. He did not fear Geto's assertion, he simply hadn't fathomed it. To his knowledge, he was one of only three special-grade sorcerers. What were the odds that one of the others was the one giving him so much grief? Moreover, how dare he act as though he didn't already know that Gojo was a special grade in the first place. Did he really not know!?

"Hm, might be an even fight then. Meet you outside by the track," Geto shrugged, pleased with Gojo's stammering reaction. Geto's pace seemed to pick up toward the exit before Gojo could even realize it was a race.

"Oh, hell no," he gritted as an unexpected mischievous smile spread across his face. "You're not gonna know what hit you," he threatened as he caught up to Geto with a jog.

"No running in the halls," Geto chided, dismayed that he had to explain the unspoken rules of the competition. He threw a long arm ahead of Gojo to slow him down as they both fought to remain in the lead. They were a mess of limbs and suppressed laughter, speed shuffling down the long, empty hall. "You're supposed to say 'going to', by the way. Would it kill you to not speak so casually?"

Gojo scoffed as they each threw open one of the double doors leading to the track and field. Both shot daggers at one another having not had a clear winner in the race outside. "Who's gonna-" Gojo felt the weight of a judgmental eye cast upon him. He tensed his shoulders and corrected his speech, mockingly. "Who's going to be the judge of the fight?" he stuck his tongue out for good measure, his eyes dangerously close to bringing his brain into focus with how far back they rolled.

"Ieri-san," Geto answered matter-of-factly as he pointed across the field to where their other classmate rest against a tree reading a book, a cigarette tucked behind her ear.

"Ohhhhhh, that's Ieri."

Geto pushed out a deliberate breath of annoyance before walking over to the young woman sitting by herself.

Gojo, uncertain what to do with himself while he waited primed for a fight, watched as Geto nimbly dropped into a squat and began explaining the situation. He appeared to tilt his head to rest on his shoulder as he listened intently to her, a soft laugh and smile breaking across his face which Gojo noticed for its sincerity. He certainly hadn't seen this side of his rival. The girl seemed to huff while Geto continued to bargain. Just when it looked like negotiations were breaking down, Geto stretched his hand out and plucked the cigarette from behind her ear with his index finger and thumb while using his pinky, ring and middle finger to tuck the hair that had been tousled back into place. "They seem... close." Gojo surmised, watching curiously.

Geto's smile broke even wider at Ieri's indignation, teeth gleaming in what was left of the afternoon light. His laughter carried over to where Gojo stood which prompted him to walk over and figure out what could inspire such a laugh from such a serious stick in the mud.

Geto lightly pressed the cigarette between Ieri's pouting lips before reaching into his pocket for a lighter. From Gojo's vantage point, her eyes still looked unimpressed but, as he got closer, he could hear her half-hearted groan as Geto begged for her objective opinion. Even his pleas seemed to be too dramatic to be authentic which made Gojo chuckle... a little.

Realizing they were no longer alone, Geto glanced up at Gojo, the look in his eyes burning confidently. "Thank you for joining us. It seems, Ieri-san has agreed to be an unbiased judge."

"Are you polite when you're talking shit, too?" Gojo inquired, offering a hand to help his opponent to his feet.

"Mmm, maybe in front of Ieri-san." Geto hummed, popping up unassisted. He lowered both hands to Ieri who took them daintily as she rose.

"Tch." It felt like Gojo had closed some ground between them only to be rudely dismissed again.

Ieri looked from one classmate to the other as she took her cigarette between two fingers. She pointed at each of them, mildly threatening, as she acted out the caricature of a boxing ref. "I want a good, clean fight."

--

At first, Gojo was curious why most of Geto's attacks were short range and hand-to-hand in nature. Nothing his Limitless couldn't stop but only as he timed it correctly and, as the fight pressed on, he didn't want to remain on the defensive against his onslaught. Even so, why wasn't Geto using his curse technique and what was it, anyway?

There weren't many people Gojo had had a reason to use the Six Eyes on. He'd take the extrasensory capability any day but, in a dangerous fight or one for his pride, as it were, there were some risks to activating them. He was still working on developing his stamina for long term use as they actively burned out his cursed energy reserves. Limitless was already a draw on resources so it seemed like quite the gamble to whip out the big guns before he truly knew what he was fighting. Plus, he hadn't quite worked out how to control how much information he'd let in when activated. What people never seemed to understand about Six Eyes was the fact that, in use, they were much like opening the aperture in a camera.

To let in too little "light" or information was a waste of the film, too much "light" and the entire shot is ruined plus he's left standing there like an idiot processing everything in a limbo state. Gojo hadn't quite honed in on controlling the aperture speed just yet, though he'd been actively working on it, but who could he really train against? Inversely, to contradict all that logic, to not use them would prevent him from seeing Geto's cursed energy or, ultimately, to read and understand his cursed technique.

If Geto wasn't going to show his technique, this fight could drag on and a war of attrition against his physical attacks would wear Gojo down eventually. He cursed the fact that he'd never bothered a cursory glance at his classmate, even once, with the Six Eyes.

"Are you going to take the offensive or am I just meant to keep swinging at you, Gojo-san?" Geto smirked, rebounding after another blocked punch. "You're surprisingly quiet during this exchange. I could have sworn we'd hear a lot more talk out of you."

Gojo, realizing he'd been burrowed in his thoughts since the fight began, felt something unfamiliar bubble up in his stomach. He decided, finally, to take the initiative for a decisive win. "Yea, yea, try and hide from these." Gojo's eyes gleamed menacingly as his Six Eyes activated.

Raw, unfiltered information presented itself as he began plotting the flow of Geto's cursed energy. Originating in his stomach, as all cursed energy did, it seemed to be densely concentrated in a way that he hadn't seen before. Was this because he was a special grade or was this specific to his technique? Time passed slowly as he parsed through all the reasonable applications of such cursed energy. He considered countless permutations, dispelling them one by one as he, outwardly, stood cockily before his opponent.

Geto, not realizing what was happening, witnessed this brazen opening which didn't seem off brand with Gojo's ego and took it. He closed the distance between them drawing his arm back for a punch just as some recognizance came back to Gojo's eyes.

"Cursed Manipulation!?" Gojo yelled just as the punch connected with his chin. He activated Limitless a sliver too late which sent him stumbling off balance from the surprise hit. His eyes were wild as he caught himself from falling.

"You got it! Wow, that's really something. Sounds like you're ready to go toe to toe now," Geto grinned, briefly relishing in the minute break he'd caused in Gojo's impenetrable defenses. Wordlessly, he summoned a second grade curse from his arsenal, it's dark cursed energy rolling across the space that separated them.

Gojo was awed by the technique he'd only heard about sprinkled throughout history. Even in the Big Three families, no one had the ability to subjugate curses, at least not like this. Further, he was still shocked by the smarting pain on his chin from his assailant's well placed punch, grateful Six Eyes had made relatively quick work of the situation. Not before getting him hit but at least he was still standing. The appearance of a curse excited him as he could freely attack without worry of killing his adversary and he hadn't been able to use his Reversed Limitless Technique... at least not successfully.

Just as a puckish grin broke across his face, he could hear the bounding of several teachers closing in all around them as if an alarm had been sounded. Only one seemed to ease up as soon as they saw who was at the center of the fray.

As the teachers gathered warily around the fight, Yaga parted through them with his apologies. "False alarm. It was my student, my apologies, our apologies." Yaga grabbed both students by the scruff of their collars and forced their heads in a bow to those assembled having been put on high alert unnecessarily. As his colleagues slowly departed, he eyed his careless students sharply. "What on earth were you think-"

Gojo crossed his arms, bored and impudent, still hanging by his collar, "I'm sorry."

"-ing, Geto!?" Yaga finished, shaking Geto's collar sternly.

"That was careless, sensei. I apologize, it won't happen again without your knowledge. Gojo-san and I just thought it valuable to train," Geto explained calmly.

"I expected better from you! And you!" Yaga, short for words for the embarrassment his two students had brought upon him, settled with dropping them and clobbering both over the head. "I don't get paid enough for this..." he muttered as he retreated back to the school. "Ieri, put that cigarette out!" he hissed over his shoulder as an afterthought.

Ieri, who tried to make herself scarce once she saw teachers coming out of the woodwork, begrudgingly removed her cigarette and ashed it directly on the tree she'd hidden behind while her classmates laid with large knots forming on their heads. "Congratulations, I declare you both... idiots," she sighed as she triumphantly gestured with her hands. She walked back to her dorm room leaving Gojo and Geto in her wake, neither of whom could stifle their laughter at the situation.

"Why'd he blame you!? Like I wasn't even there!" Gojo questioned, arms sprawling on the plush green lawn of the school grounds. So used to being the center of attention and ire, he was delighted and bemused.

"... I was told before coming here that I have to clear my training with the faculty as unknown cursed energy raises some sort of signal to all personnel that there's a threat. Since I subjugate curses, I don't have a specific cursed energy signature. But I went and pulled one out with you anyway."

"HUH!? You were going to try to fight me without using your cursed technique?" Gojo shot upright to round on his classmate.

"Almost worked, too. Kinda got a hit in!" Geto grinned, his eyes forming crescents as he folded his hands behind his head.

For a moment, Gojo considered whether anyone had ever landed a hit on him while tempering an inexplicable rage having been somewhat bested. His eyebrows furrowed as he forcefully blew air from his nose. "'Kinda', huh? What happened to that 'polite speech' speech, huh? Hmph! As a matter of fact, why do you have a lighter? You don't follow rules at all!"

Geto paused to consider the question before breaking out into a full on guffaw while clutching at his stomach. "You look stupid when you're upset," he huffed between giggles.

So thoroughly caught off guard by the whole situation, Gojo couldn't help when his souring mood melted into laughter. He fell backward, sprawling his arms back out. Almost close enough to touch Geto with his finger tips. "Yea, well you look stupid all the time, Bangs."

"You're still on that? By the way, Shoko wasn't messing with you before, either... that's exactly how she explained it to me when I asked her, too. 'Fwoo, hyoi'... I still don't get it either." A large tanned hand blotted tears from his fit of laughter as Geto relaxed into the conversation. "Surprised your old Six Eyes didn't pick up on that," he teased.

"Wait, so you did know who I was!"

"Hardly. Since coming here, a little. I mean, after all, we're the strongest. Yaga-sensei had to explain everything when I was recruited."

"The strongest, huh? I like the sound of that..." For the first time in a while, Gojo's smile was sincere having been properly spun up by this new classmate of his. Hearing someone else echo a title he'd carried unilaterally for so long created a unique sense of understanding between them. Moreover, it felt like there was someone else who had a place in the world not unlike his own and he'd seen the brazen way he'd defend that place, too. While not a full on fight, he wondered, had they had enough time and Geto were to unabashedly apply his technique, who would have actually won. A small voice deep, deep down knew it'd be him but he'd rather stoke the excitement of not knowing.

"Are you ready to play nice on missions, now? Shoko wasn't particularly impressed by your performance during your last one. Now that this will be the three of us, perhaps you'll consider working together this time," Geto lightheartedly chastised, offering Gojo a red lollipop from his pocket.

Gojo practically squealed as he stretched to receive it. "You're where the lollipops come from? No wonder she never had any left to give. She could have just said that."

"She probably did but you're always talking over people and going a mile a minute, at that. I wouldn't be surprised if you missed it."

"'Fwoo, hyoi', huh?" Gojo waved the candy in the air like a conductor, thoughtlessly, before greedily opening it. "I look forward to working with you, I'll be in your care from now on."

A light blush warmed Geto's cheeks at the out of context concession but he supposed this was better than the negative silence between them.

--

Noise seemed a common byproduct of being surrounded by people who understood Satoru Gojo. Mostly, noise from him as he was much more apt to laugh and tease, needy for the attention of those he spent the most time with. Eyes always fell heavy on him growing up but now he found that it didn't quite feel the same as the comfort of whatever he, Suguru and Shoko had created.

Suguru wasn't quite as mercurial as Gojo had once thought. He could still be stern when it came to issues he felt were important and required Gojo's observance but would occasionally, and quite puckishly, wind him up for the fun of it. Just as he had when they first met. Gojo was still a bit awkward and unable to tell the difference but Suguru couldn't help but break character in the face of Gojo's earnestness to which Gojo would pout and glower, also in jest.

Still, there were times where they didn't quite see eye to eye. Both too headstrong, both too set in their ways. But if it meant enough that they would have it out, it was enough for both of them to consider the other's opinion. Even though much of Gojo's experience with others was a bit on the muffled and blurry side, Suguru starkly changed his outlook on glossing over others. In a world of monotony, he'd found someone so vibrant and textured, he could not possibly be ignored.

They trained relentlessly, Gojo getting the hang of his inherited techniques and assisting Suguru in amassing his arsenal of curses while out on missions. Perfecting Gojo's training at school and Suguru's training in the field. They'd come back to the dorms to rinse and repeat. They worked symbiotically to refine one another and they fervently backed one another up. When facing threats of varying degrees, they were all they had with Shoko in reserves to patch them up if the occasion called for it. They developed a confidence as The Strongest that went unchecked as the only special grade sorcerers as far as they were concerned.

Outside of training, they traded their most intimate secrets: the drawbacks of Gojo's techniques, Suguru's strained homelife that he hoped to one day remediate by being someone his parents could be proud of. Their insecurities were no longer their burden alone when shared and no longer felt like a weakness with the reassurance the other could offer.

Gojo still spent a lot of time in his head but it was to tinker. To solution how to optimize his own technique, how to better help Shoko cheat her way through a medical degree eventually (while hopefully also picking her brain for RCT mastery), what nicknames suited Suguru's latest curse acquisition and their subsequent battle application, what prank to pull on Yaga-sensei, the only reasonable end for Digimon, etc. He'd spend a prolonged period of time quiet and pensive, turning problems over in his head like a Rubik's cube, until he would suddenly come back to himself with some off the wall output of his deliberations. More often than not, he'd be strewn about Suguru's room locked in contemplation and, with a decisive break in the silence, Suguru would beam and welcome him back warmly, "I see you've found your way back to us." Moreover, he'd try to pick up wherever Gojo's thoughts left off even if the subject matter was completely out of his wheelhouse. The simple attempt of understanding and having a place that felt so safe to simply... drift warmed something within him that didn't have a name yet, until -

There would come a time where even The Strongest could fly too close to the sun. Perhaps there would always be a reckoning for the scales to one day tip out of Gojo's favor. Never one to stay down, Gojo's temporary failure saw a massive power up, finally getting the hang of the "fyoo, hwoi" that had stymied him for so long. Such was the fate of The Strongest, to shatter the ceiling of his limits but only after a devastating loss.

He picked up the pieces of their failed mission, avenging his initial loss, reclaiming the body of their slain charge and came face to face with Suguru. He'd never seen Suguru so downtrodden and, for whatever reason, when asked if Shoko had patched him up, he felt to answer honestly would break his confidence irreparably.

He'd experienced his own foundational upset with his inability to defeat Toji in the first place. It was the first time his Six Eyes had failed him. This failure, which he continually tried to diminish in his mind, shattered the assumption that he was the strongest, that he was infallible. Years would pass where he'd avoid ruminating too long on his own passing which, only by miraculous happenstance, he was able to revive himself from. But in that moment, locked eye to eye with his best friend, he tried to lessen the burden as he always had. As a kindness, he lied, not knowing that one didn't need Six Eyes to spot a lie or that even white lies can cause more harm than good when you intrinsically trust someone.

It wasn't necessarily resilience that inspired Gojo's determination to circumvent the vulnerability Toji was able to exploit. The Invisible Man managed to instill a fear previously unrealized into Gojo's spirit. Stubbornly, he refused to concede to such language but that's what would explain his night terrors following the events of that fight. How, on the few nights he was able to sleep, his rest would be punctuated by cold sweats and waking up to the sound of his own screams or cries. This was not the behavior of The Strongest, it couldn't be. Every breakdown felt like a betrayal to everything he and Suguru had built their identities upon. So, like a coward, he hid what he could and worked relentlessly to never be caught unawares again as, he feared, the next time it would cost him or Suguru their lives and not just their confidence.

It didn't matter, the means nor the motivation, sometimes a small voice would still tell him he was losing something in the process though he could never comprehend what until the day came that everything finally shifted into focus. As curses spawning became relentless, he and Suguru could no longer afford to be a two man team. There were just too many curses to exorcise though the separation felt more and more like a punishment for their failure. Gojo came back from his mission to find that Suguru hadn't returned from his. Fearing the worst when Yaga approached him, he was relieved then horrified to learn of what transpired.

Suguru, Fearless in the Face of the Strong. Suguru, Defender of the Weak. Suguru, Moral Voice of Reason. Suguru, His One and Only Best Friend.

Suguru had committed too great a transgression to be an accident. Soundly broken laws too sacred to be ignored and disappeared into the night leaving Gojo without so much as a word. How long had he been struggling before the dam within him finally broke? Why hadn't he said anything? How did Gojo miss this? To add insult to injury, as the only other special grade sorcerer, Gojo bore the burden of carrying out his execution.

His life had been defined by the burdens he'd had to carry because of his strength and the blessing of his birth. Never before had they all felt so heavy, though. Suguru's departure created a vacuum within him that never quite found peace.

Years would pass and Gojo would still wordlessly carry the bitter turmoil of his childhood, how unfair it all was. To have felt the warmth of companionship after so long alone only to feel a greater frigidity in its absence. He now found the silence unbearably loud compared to the self imposed quiet before knowing Suguru.

On yet another day marked by nondescript loneliness, he found his thoughts drifting once again to the better days of his youth. Classes long since dismissed, he sat in the desk he'd once occupied as a student.

“You still haunt the dark corners of this high school, Suguru. Not your body but your soul. How your laugh would bounce off of every wall before reverberating through us. Maybe it's because I can't leave the place where I continue to mourn you. But what can I do, you left me alone first,” he murmurs to no one. For a moment he holds onto the quiet. As if protecting it would allow Suguru himself to respond, regardless of the dirty work that had, without a doubt, seen to his end. "But... that's ridiculous, isn't it?" he added. He stood up abruptly, the scratch of his chair inflicting violence on the peace before he strode out of the classroom, determined to fill his time with chaos to avoid his lingering thoughts.

"Yes, but that doesn't make it feel any less true," Shoko mused aloud, leaning against the external wall of the classroom, bypassed by Gojo's departure. "But you were never alone... were you?" she pondered reaching for the cigarette behind her ear as Gojo disappeared from sight.

--

A/N: They were a trio but Geto was the glue. I also didn't say Gojo wasn't still an oblivious idiot. This story was just as much about Shoko regardless of her seeming absence in it and that breaks my heart too? So I hope that was adequately conveyed. But really this was just in defense of my silly, goofy lil guy who was just as ill-equipped to deal with everything that happened. Excuse the self indulgence.

[overnighttosunflowers]

The Lore of Every Thought’s a Possibility, or: What The Fuck Is Up With the Planes? A Really Long Post About All My CR Theories

This post is ostensibly about the lore of every thought’s a possibility, an Imodna fake dating fic I wrote that has a canon-divergent continuation of the campaign’s main plot humming along in the background. BUT, just as LOTR was kind of a vehicle for Tolkien to play with linguistics, this fic was really kind of a vehicle for me to explore lore thoughts I’d been having anyway. (I am not actually comparing myself to Tolkien. A much more apt comparison would be a lore gremlin hiding under the bed to gnaw furiously on a thousand pages of transcripts and then offer a sheepish pile of scraps loosely formed into a heart.)

Basically, this should hopefully be accessible and interesting regardless of whether you’ve read the fic.

So! In building out my fic’s B-plot, I spent a lot of time combing through existing CR lore and synthesizing my thoughts into a single multi-pronged theory. What follows, then, is basically 80% theorizing to a degree I feel is supported by canon, and 20% extrapolating those theories a bit further in a direction that would let me resolve my fic.

I started writing Every Thought after episode 57, right before Team Wildemount entered Ludinus’s tower in Molaesmyr. So, the very first thing I had to do was invent what it was that they found there. I decided that, for my purposes, they’d found a shattered dodecahedron—something they’d seen before once, at the Key during the solstice—as well as Ludinus’s notes indicating that it was called a beacon and had to do with a type of possibility/fate/time magic called dunamancy. 

I went in this direction because I’ve long been convinced that the Luxon has a bigger role to play in this story than we know, for these reasons plus others that I can’t as easily reconstruct:

First, the Luxon, the Primordials, and Predathos are the only beings described as existing outside of Exandria’s standard planes/people/gods construction. The Luxon was said to exist before the Founding, and to have created the Primordials. Predathos was said to have arrived from beyond the known universe after the gods, during the Founding*, and been banished by the gods and Primordials working together. Although perhaps tenuous, this links the two in my mind. 

*(ie the period of history starting with the gods’ arrival in Exandria and ending with the Schism, where the Prime Deities defeated the Primordials and Betrayers)

(I’ve been wondering if perhaps Predathos and the Luxon are a Raava/Vaatu situation, or if perhaps one split off from the other. We already know the Luxon broke itself into pieces (the beacons)—what if Predathos is also a piece of it, containing all the darkest parts?)

In any event, to my mind, there has always been a possibility that Imogen’s storm at the end of episode 33/beginning of episode 34 is related to not just Predathos but also the Luxon. When Imogen is pushed to her breaking point, everything around her goes deep red—and then white. The Hells are each swept up in a storm of previously unaccessed memories and seem to perhaps be somehow shifted out of that space and/or time for the duration of the explosion that follows, being restored unharmed immediately thereafter.

(C3e34)

To me, this very much has flavors of dunamancy—not least because in The Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount, the Luxon’s original form is described as “a colossal, shapeless body of impossibly bright light.”

The other time a similar white light is described is at the end of episode 51, when the Hells are bamfed to Wildemount and Issylra. The light is described as “familiar,” so presumably similar to the light from episodes 33/34.

The only other unexplained spatial displacement we have seen (beyond the other solstice-powered ones at leyline nexuses) was Ashton’s, during his parents’ Hishari ritual. He had a sense of watching everything tear apart—"wind, and light, and air"—and then they found themself suddenly in the Hellcatch desert. So I decided—half conjecture, half invention—that Ashton was transported by this same white light.

(Perhaps interestingly, the light has appeared 1) when an Exaltant of Predathos was pushed to the brink; 2) when a beacon was used in the Malleus Key, and—in my conjecture—3) during a ritual we later learned involved a shard of a Primordial, legendarily a creation of the Luxon. Could all three be related?)

All the Primordial stuff we learned from episode 58 onwards exists outside the scope of my fic, so I didn’t know about that shard while I was writing, and it isn’t fic-canon to my story. But I was absolutely positive that the Hishari stuff would be coming back in a big way; Matt had been dropping those hints for quite a while.

So, in my fic, Team Issylra (who at the time we didn’t know would land in Issylra—I guessed well!) encountered someone who had, for a time, been romantically involved with a member of the Hishari who had defected. (It had to be someone able to fill the group in on the Hishari without having known Ashton’s parents, because there’s a whole additional layer of emotional weight to that which this fic wasn’t equipped to contend with. As is, this defector’s ex, who I named Jesmaine, is mentioned like once.) Team Issylra learns the following:

The Hishari derive their name not from the Ashari but from the Gau Drashari.

The Gau Drashari were trying to keep Avalir from moving from plane to plane, which would have been dangerous to Exandria.

The Hishari were a modern group that discovered this information and came to believe that the Gau Drashari’s mission had been mistaken; far from keeping the planes separate and protected (a legacy we still see in the Ashari and their elemental rifts), the true mission should have been to reunite the planes, collapsing them all back down into the single plane from which they’d originally sprung.

(Technically they don’t get this much detail, but I’m giving it in full here for context.)

Now, in my fic, we go on to learn that Ludinus was working with the Hishari to help them collapse the planes. The Hells’ understanding, and mine, is that either the Hishari were already on this path and Ludinus realized he could benefit from helping, or—more likely—the group and/or its mission are themselves his own creations, shaped to help him achieve a goal.

We also learn that the Hishari were trying to collapse the planes by supercharging threshold crests with a good old dose of possibility and potential, courtesy of a beacon presumably provided by Ludinus. This mimics the way that Ludinus was using a beacon to charge or power the key.  It also puts keys or threshold crests on all seven of the most “central” planes: canon’s Material, Fey, and Shadow, and my Earth, Water, Fire, and Air.*

*It's interesting to note that, per the Divine Gate article on the CR Wiki, you do not pass through the Divine Gate when traveling to the Fey Realm, the Shadow Realm, the Ethereal Plane, or any of the Elemental Planes. You also don't pass through it when entering the Astral Plane, which itself contains the Divine Gate, but you do pass through it on returning. I omitted the Astral Plane from my plane-collapsing theory for this reason, and omitted the Ethereal Plane because it already overlaps the Material Plane to a much more significant degree than any other. I discounted all the Outer Planes because they are beyond the Divine Gate, and because they mostly seem kind of vestigial from official D&D and Pathfinder lore anyway.

Now, there were a few reasons I’d been thinking that perhaps the planes were going to become more relevant to the lore of Exandria than we’ve seen thus far. First of all, there have been several attacks at the elemental rifts defended by the Ashari: first an attack from the fire plane in ExU Prime, then an attack on Terrah before the Solstice. 

(c3e49)

Now, Keyleth concludes that these were just “false front” distractions, but I’m not so sure.

(c3e66)

Coming from our current lore knowledge, I notice that it’s the earth and fire planes specifically that were targeted—the same as the two Primordial shards that ultimately come to reside in Ashton and Fearne. At the time, though, I didn’t know about the shards, and so I instead thought: could these groups perhaps have been trying to weaken the boundaries between the planes? Could Ashton’s parents’ ritual—the Hishari ritual—have been doing the same?

We also knew that for some reason in order to release Predathos it was essential to have Malleus keys on three separate planes. While Ludinus was able to proceed with the Fey key down, Predathos quite notably hasn’t emerged yet, so it’s entirely possible that having a Fey tether remains in some way essential. I also found it particularly notable that until Fearne was born, Ruidus didn’t show up in the Fey Realm, suggesting that her birth somehow anchored it there—a theory only strengthened by what we’ve since learned about Fearne’s parentage.

The biggest reason I’ve thought the planes would be important, though, is ExU Calamity. Calamity seems to have (likely intentionally) laid a lot of lore groundwork for Campaign 3, and planes—specifically travel between them, specifically as it relates to godhood—were essential to Calamity’s plot. 

Let’s go through the details there, starting with the Tree of Names. In Calamity, we learn that the Tree of Names was inscribing a spell of protection on the world: protection from  “all the things outside it.” We specifically learn that this protective barrier somehow enforced a separation between the planes:

(ExU Calamity episode 3)

The Tree does this through the power of names. Anything whose name it knows, it can guard against. Now, at first glance it seems like it specifically was meant to guard against the Primordials: after all, it was foretold that if the Primordials joined the Calamity, it would mean the end of everything, and it was by learning the names of and banishing the Primordials that the Ring of Brass was able to save a portion of the world. 

But, if the Tree was intended to guard primarily against the Primordials, why would the Arboreal Caelix have been added to protect it right after the Matron of Ravens ascended? 

We don’t know. But we do know that no one remembers the Matron’s name. That, therefore, very probably, the tree doesn’t remember it, either. And, therefore, that probably the Matron was able to evade the tree, giving her access to all the planes. 

From there, I hypothesized that there might be some connection between the Matron’s evasion of the tree and her ascension—between her planar travel abilities and her godhood.

Now, why did I zero in on collapsing the planes?

In Calamity episode 3, we learn that Laerryn had designed the Astral Leywright to “allow the city to travel not only across the face of Exandria, but to realms supernatural, where a city of mortals might walk as equals with the gods themselves.” In episode 4, we learn further that “Aeor opposed the gods and the Matron of Ravens and her ascension, and Laerryn's vision was, from whence do the gods come? By what token do they award themselves that title, and what realms beyond could we explore?” 

In summary: Aeor wanted the gods gone, and no more mortals ascending. Avalir wanted to one-up Aeor: why not make mortals themselves equal to gods? How better to do it than traveling as the gods travel—across the planiverse?*

*I didn't have space to address it in my fic, but I actually think that the most important part of all of this is "from whence do the gods come." The gods, the Luxon, Predathos: all came from somewhere beyond. Whatever and wherever that is, access to it is what truly separates mortals from gods. For the convenience of fic plot, I decided that where they came from is not an entirely separate place, but rather Everywhere All At Once. Put all the planes together and you get a sort of fourth-dimensional place that is simultaneously all of them and none of them.

In briefer summary: travel from plane to plane is the last thing separating mortals from gods. 

Now, one might immediately note that Plane Shift is a spell that exists, so this would have to be some kind of more complex planar travel. Calamity episode 4 enlightens us a bit on this: “[Laerryn’s] vision was not the simple magic of the threshold crests, not a quick move, not a one-way trip, not a single destination, but truly to take a leyline off of the face of Exandria and chart it to the stars, that we could go wherever we wished and be whatever we wished. [But] we didn’t know the spell the tree was writing.” 

So. The kind of planar travel Laerryn seeks—the kind that brings humans level with gods, the kind the Matron would’ve been able to execute as part of her ascension ritual—isn’t to a single destination. 

Could that mean that it’s to every plane at once? That part of what makes a god a god is the ability to exist on every plane simultaneously?

The Ritual of Seeding page on the CR Wiki offers some evidence to support this theory. Itself citing ExU Calamity, it tells us that one of the things that happens during an apogee solstice is that the walls between planes thin and the leylines move around. It also tells us that this was part of the Matron’s ritual of ascension:

(CR Wiki - Ritual of Seeding)

(I’ll note that I dropped the leylines lore from my fic for reasons of simplicity, choosing to focus on the adjacent planar lore. I avoided delving into Matron stuff for the same reason—the Hells haven’t learned a ton about her, so I would have had to do a lot of legwork to introduce and support theories about her. I was trying to operate within the realm of what we already know. I will note, though, that The Nine Eyes of Lucien tells us that the Matron of Ravens, as the goddess of fate, is very interested in Fate-Touched individuals; that the Fate-Touched feat closely mimics the effect of the dunamantic spell Fortune’s Favor, which can also be obtained from staring into a beacon; and that Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn alludes to the Fate-Touched feat being somehow connected to Ruidus… very interesting, is all I’m saying.)

Okay, so now we’re set up to move into the endgame of my fic plot: Artana Voe showing up to tell the Hells that the deaths of the gods Ethedok and Vordo created the Fey and Shadow planes. This theory originally comes from Rach @dadrielle (as do fragments of everything in here, because I developed 90% of this directly into her DMs, but I know that I got this one 100% from her; whether she got any pieces of it elsewhere I’m not sure).

I believe the first seed of this idea came from Ethedok and Vordo’s domains. Ethedok was the god of darkness and winter, and Vordo was the god of fate and order. The former calls to mind the Shadow Realm, while the latter calls to mind the Fey Realm (albeit in a more topsy-turvy kind of way). This was fueled by the vibes of a largely unrelated post about Spelljammer, which mentions that in that canon, the Astral Sea is full of the corpses of dead gods, some of which form entire cities. (Absurdly cool Spelljammer campaign idea there if you click through, by the way.) Of course, this has nothing to do with Exandria, but it did get us simmering on the idea of the deaths of gods creating locations, and Rach had the thought that perhaps planes could grow from the corpses of the gods in the astral sea.

Anyway, I hadn’t committed to using this in my fic—that aspect of its lore solidified rather late in the game—and then episode 68 rolled around in mid-August, and Keyleth casually dropped that the deaths of the Primordials caused the creation of the elemental planes:

Which, while not confirmation of anything about the Fey or Shadow planes, definitely made the Ethedok-and-Vordo’s-deaths-made-those-planes theory feel a lot more plausible. So I made it fic-canon!

I decided that the Grim Verity would’ve discovered this information, and used Artana Voe* to relay it to the Hells.

*In my earliest drafts, Artana Voe was going to relay information about the anti-resurrection poison being derived from a distortion of the Luxon--eliminating all potential worlds where someone came back to life--as well as the discovery that Potions of Possibility could therefore protect against it, and might even be able to someday reverse it. But this felt less consequential in a world where Revivify is offline anyway, and less thematically relevant than I wanted my finale lore drop to be, and by the time canon got to Keyleth's magical healing flowers, I'd more or less decided to scrap it and come up with something else.

It seemed entirely plausible that the Verity would make this discovery. They already know about Ethedok and Vordo, about them being eaten by Predathos, about Ruidus being formed to imprison Predathos afterwards—and they also know that something is brewing with the planes, per Campaign 2 Episode 129 when the Mighty Nein find Planerider Ryn’s notes:

So (and we are fully past theories into the realm of Fic Canon at this point), the Hells have learned that part of the ritual to create godhood is existing on every plane at once, and that Ludinus is aiming to achieve this by collapsing the planes. All that’s left is to put together that it’s not that he’s trying to ascend to godhood himself, it’s that he’s trying to feed the god-eater inside the moon by ascending that moon itself to godhood—bringing it to every plane at once by collapsing them, and topping it off with a dose of the Luxon’s infinite potential and (likely very significantly, although I wasn’t able to explicitly address it in the fic) the “sliver of divinity” itself that is Vax’ilorb. And that by releasing Predathos and killing the gods, he will create an entirely new set of planes to replace the ones he’s destroyed, giving him a whole new universe to rule over. 

Now, do I think that this will wind up being true in the campaign? Not in so many words, no. I’ve taken my hypotheses and theories, shaved them down a little bit to fit more tidily into the space of a romance fic’s B plot, and then extrapolated them outwards slightly past what I’d otherwise be comfortable conjecturing if this were purely a lore post. But the result is, I hope, both logically sound and consistent with stuff we know to be true of canon thus far. I’m pretty damn proud of it, and if any tiny glimmers of this end up coming true? Well, then I’ll be even damn prouder.

Some additional miscellaneous information that I couldn’t quite figure out what to do with, but sure felt relevant:

Regarding Ludinus and the Luxon:  Team Wildemount learns in episode 58 (i.e. after my fic diverges from canon) that Ludinus used a crystal found under Molaesmyr to open a “channel of consciousness” with Ruidus during a celestial solstice. The crystal was believed to have fallen from an ancient flying city… which tracks with the fact that we know from C2 that Aeor was experimenting with dunamancy. The cast hypothesized that the crystal under Molaesmyr was indeed a beacon.

Regarding the Astral Plane, which contains the Divine Gate: Per a map found in the Happy Fun Ball in C2, Ruidus—or some kind of “ruby circle” that seems likely to be Ruidus—existed in the Astral Sea before the time of the Calamity, ie at a time before the Divine Gate went up (maybe disappearing because of that gate?): https://www.reddit.com/r/criticalrole/comments/u24lzj/spoilers_c3e19_ruidus_mention_in_the_happy_fun/. Unlike everything else on the map, it is not tethered to anything.

The Happy Fun Ball is now owned by Yussa, who is a friend of Ryn’s and therefore may be affiliated with the Grim Verity.

The Astral Sea was the Somnovem’s destination of choice when they planeshifted the Cognouza Ward away from the crashing Aeor.

(c2e45)

Regarding the planes collapsing: Per The Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount (p134), “The extremely rare double eclipse, when the moons Catha and Ruidus overlap before the sun . . . [is linked to the fact that] seers and oracles warn of portents that speak of an uncontrollable planar crossover, where multiple planes might briefly collide.

Regarding the origins of Ruidus: The Tishtan ruins, where the Malleus Key is located, date back to around the time of the Schism, i.e. shortly after the imprisonment of Predathos. Tishtan culture vanished with no explanation prior to the Age of Arcanum. Could the Tishtans have somehow ended up on the newly created Ruidus and become Reilora? We know that the Tishtans built ritual sites around Exandria, and it seems reasonable to hypothesize that those sites were at leyline nexuses. Were they attempting some kind of early version of Ludinus’s ritual to communicate with the godeater inside the young red moon?

Regarding the “beyond” from which the gods initially came: Deanna describes the afterlife as something that “existed before [the Matron of Ravens] and that will exist after her . . . It’s like being a little kid, and you think that your parents are gods . . . and then you get old enough to start asking who made your parents, you know?”

The Matron of Ravens is responsible for death, but if what happens after you die is beyond the purview of the gods entirely, what implications might that have about godhood? 

[preservationofnormalcy]

I’m the guy that asked about other blogs, can I follow up with why you don’t feel you want to interact? And will you at least tell us what your verdict is when you come to it?

I have been giving this some thought. Hopefully this doesn’t seem selfish of me.

As much as I like things like SCP, there is a real issue of too many cooks. They’ve mostly solved this by outright stating that there is no canon, that SCP is more of a loose association of tropes and ideas that people can take in wild directions, as evidenced by "diverging canon" articles in the mainlist. There's a great thing for creative freedom and a collaborative fiction, but it's just not the approach I want to take. I like the term "interactive" fiction.

As one person more or less controlling OPN lore, I have control over what is and isn't canon. There's a few asks I haven't answered because they don't fit or that I've steered in order to fit my vision a little better. As an aside, basically every ask I've received has been an open question asked in good faith, so that's been really easy to do so. But the fact remains I have control over that. If someone asks something with a wildly different tone that I can't steer, I can simply not answer it.

I don't feel that I want to keep track of twelve other people and police their content - because I don't want to be the RP cop here! I don't want to finger wag that their post isn't canon to the Office and I don't want there to be confusion, so my ultimate conclusion is probably going to be to simply not interact. Other blogs inspired by mine can use my posts as a jumping off point, or even link to mine as an "inspired by" but I don't want to stifle others' creativity nor constantly check if their canon aligns with mine.

Now, there's something to be said about the OPN canon not really being fully public, and fair point. I like revealing it as I go, and that's sort of another reason why I think having a grouping of other blogs that I interact with is not ideal - I don't want an ask on this blog to suddenly reveal something about the setting that invalidates another blog completely. That would really suck for them and would put me in a position I dislike.

I could possibly see someone running a blog for one of the other non-OPN groups I've already said were canon, but I'd have to have a discussion with them.

That was long winded but hopefully it made sense, and doesn't seem overly selfish.