Chase Trinaeste POV Shepherds of Haven fic? Yeah………….. Chase x MC fic? Yeah.......
And another friend’s OC is also mentioned in here? …..Yeah…………… dw about it..........
Listen though. L-listen:
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You gotta learn to braid.
Thinking about it, your head is immediately gifted with images of him irritatedly brushing it out in the morning and chewing you out for bad technique. Better yet, he wears it to breakfast, thinks it’s good, and then chews you out only after Trouble makes some no-brained comment and he looks in a mirror for the first time. After all, you’ve got nimble fingers, makes sense to assume you were trustable.
Rock’s head is in your lap.
And his hair is going everywhere, and he’s always clearly taken his time with it (at your best guess he uses five different products at least), so that’s why you’re thinking about it. Don’t people with long hair sleep with braids, sometimes? Lavinet would probably teach you, and do you the favor of not announcing that you’re about to use your skills for evil.
He’s been like this since about five in the morning. You’re a light sleeper. As needs be, you rise either with the sunset or with the sun. Or elsewise, if you’ve got to— you have what some might call an uncanny sense for a well-timed catnap.
So you’re up again, working out the couple little kinks in your back from dozing upright like that. It’s another of the perks of the job: learn to sleep anywhere. You have a lot of little resume filler skills like that, just a tragic lack of resume to put it on. Idly, you wonder over the nonsensical notion of putting one together for the Order once your writing gets good enough to, and you’re kind of attached to the idea now. Blade wouldn’t read it, especially considering you’re already in, but there’s some small giddy joy you get out of the idea of putting it in his possession anyway. Maybe Trouble would read it. Maybe Shery would think it’s juicy enough that she can’t keep her hands off it, and then roll in the guilt about it for a few weeks after. ...No, you can’t do that to her. Funny as that is, she could read with permission. You might be cruel, but she’s a horrible choice of target.
Anyway— So you’ve been watching him be like this since about five in the morning, and thus have evidence of him being like this since about five in the morning. You remember falling asleep late last night, though. Waiting for him to drift first. It was probably one, two AM.
When six-thirty rolls around, you’ll have to wake him, you have a bright and early morning dose of espionage on the schedule today (it’s why the two of you are all the way out here, plus Lavinet and Ottilie graciously hosted in another wing) and you can’t have a grouchy Hero of Haven who hasn’t had a good hour or more awake to put his silver tongue back on.
Something something joke about that tongue’s many talents.
Head in lap is a surprise at all. It’s one of those things— Rock has done this thing to you where all your defenses are the ones that keep coming down first.
It feels a little like getting grifted. When you’ve caught onto a grift, though, and you’re playing along to see what or whom or where they take you to, you don’t feel like you’re in danger, because you’re good. You’re in as much danger as you want to be, or more like: when there are unpredictable variables, you know more or less where they’re going. Rock makes you feel like you’re teetering on the edge of something you don’t fucking play with, and it doesn’t help that he likes to open his mouth sometimes just to remind you you’re rolling off a cliff.
Anyway. Then you get this, and you wanna be a charming shit about it, as usual (and you intend to), you just also wonder how much he’s falling off a cliff.
He gets bad nightmares. You know that because of the trip to the Reach. You do also know it because of the tightness in Blade’s lip when you mentioned it offhand later— there’s history there; they’ve been worse than that. You also know it because you picked the brains of a couple recruits who were standing around griping after Trouble sent them for something like twenty laps around the compound (not a real intuitive head for numbers on that man): apparently, it was Captain Nomura they’d been gossiping about, and Trouble was a hardass about it.
It’s the one thing that makes you feel borderline… even. If not even, then at least okay with it.
That’s a lie, you’d probably feel okay with it anyway, you got down to being okay with whatever he’s doing to you the minute you realized you were this invested. It’s just something you use to put things in perspective. There are things you didn’t exactly expect to peel open for him, about you. But there are also things he’s not asking to broadcast publicly to every hard-luck-fleer who wanders onto the Shepherds compound to recruit. Rumors about the head of the Thieves Guild abound, but the unflattering ones are usually less true, and the untrue ones abound so plentifully that no one knows heads or tails of that, anyway.
Feels fair he should have secrets from someone. You’re still gonna fucking dig your way into them before they bury him alive, it’s just. Yeah, you haven’t had your brain pulled open onto a projection screen.
So he has nightmares. You’re not actually sure how often. Technically, you don’t have proof they haven’t gotten better since you last heard. But since you’re not bound to the same evidence requirements as a court of law, and since it’s become a roulette game of how grouchy Rock’s gonna be minute-to-minute, he was dodgy about the prospect of rooming with you or anyone on this mission at all, and he’s recently had a god or demon or trick of the light try to tell him (plus all of the rest of you) that he’s less Mage and more something else’s torn out rib, you can look at two plus two plus two and say probably.
You’ve learned how not to dream. It’s basically the same as learning how to wake up when you want to. When you did dream, you dreamt of mutiny, imaginary holes you left and getting torn down through them. You were always yourself in your dreams—some people are characters, tropes, or other people they know, apparently; you wouldn’t know. Now you keep that in the waking world, and you keep ten paces ahead of it.
That’s the thing you’re deadly sure about in him. That he’s keeping ten paces ahead of something. You—your whole tether to his side—account for anything from like one to like eight of them, as far as you can tell. That’s all you know.
…Well that’s the quick way to tell it. He’s keeping ten paces ahead of something inside the Shepherds. Could be Blade, but you’re not sure why. Could be the Autarchy, but that’s too simple for you. Doesn’t feel like it. Could be Ottilie’s God-given plans for a pretty obvious heathen, but your nose also says it’s not that easy.
He looks dead asleep right now. Comfy, you’d kind of go so far as to hope. And anyway you look at his face, still waters, and you’re a little afraid to even brush his hair out of it.
You don’t even know if he meant to lay his head down on you at all, if that’s a cliff he made his shaky peace with (or if it’s a cliff at all, if means anything to him, Hael if you know) or if he was just miserable.
You don’t know if it’s you, like the stillness might be the effect of having another body in the room that he’s willing to lay his head against— …or if maybe he just doesn’t get them every night. Or if there is one under there. But you hope he’s not dreaming.
You try to bask in it, for now. Try to pose like a king with a sweet little kitten in his lap, like a guy painted on the front of a romance novel with the sweet, innocent angel he’s seduced to lay over him, nightgown slipping down her shoulder. You spend an hour with only walls to watch, dutifully still so he can finish sleeping, and it’s only a small handful of times that you have to stop and breathe through a creep of bile up your throat.
Six-thirty hits.
“Good morning, Sunshine.”
“Mmf. What.” Rock spits a strand of hair out of his face. Yeah, you probably could have done him a favor on that instead of leaving it there for him to wake up to. But it’s funny, so, you know. Win-win.
“The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, Ottilie’s slaughtering her morning chicken—” (she is not).
Rock seems to parse the reality of where he is, and peels himself up from you, sitting facing away from you— and then he glances at you over his shoulder, for a moment, and everything about it is horribly, disressingly raw.
He looks at you a little too long. The thing about Rock is his rules are a lot like yours, and you are not supposed to say anything about it, but he’s looking at you, like he’s asking you to, and it lasts a long time.
Then he goes to brush his teeth.
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I know you said you need to stop screaming first but I am EAGERLY awaiting your thoughts on Essek in the teaser
OKAY OKAY HERE GOES.
The thing is, there's no real reason to include him.
Yes, he's very popular, but he has never historically been included as a default, validly! He occupies a very interesting space mechanically and narratively, but he is still not a PC. Yes, he's part of the Mighty Nein as a group, per canon, but not until the end, which in theory would be well beyond the first season, and so is Cad, who is not present in this teaser—presumably to preserve the mystery around [INSERT MAJOR SPOILER WARNING HERE].
I would imagine that Cad is not present because having Taliesin's voice twice is too much of a tipoff for anyone watching LoVM but not the campaigns, whereas simply having Matt voice someone is not.
HOWEVER.
There are a decent number of lines that you could choose for Essek that are about the Nein—personally, my favorite, that I've thought previously would make a really stellar trailer line, is from 124: "You certainly carve a unique destiny, don't you?" Everything down to the way Matt delivers it (which you can see here) would make it a really viable option.
But the line they went with isn't about the Nein—it's very much a line about Essek himself. "I want to unlock these mysteries. I want to dive as deep as I can into that ocean of the unknown and see what is possible." It's a line that is very specific to Essek and his actions and goals, even beyond his involvement with the Nein.
And it's placed in the middle of the pack, which frames him on the same level as the rest of the Nein! Someone who is not familiar with the campaign would hear that as simply another protagonist. But of course, he's not—unless there is some serious restructuring (more even than the restructuring present in LoVM, which, aside from introducing a few of the initial less plot-bearing aspects later, like the Slayer's Take, it's thus far structured in order), he won't come into the show for quite some time, and almost certainly not in the first season.
But we don't really have any idea how this show will be structured. There are different comments on the beginning from different sources; notably, Gizmodo mentions Calianna being present in some way initially, while no one else does. The logline most outlets are reporting revolves the Nein "prevent[ing] the kingdom from plunging into chaos when an arcane artifact capable of reshaping reality falls into the wrong hands," presumably the beacon (my beloved).
So it makes sense to mention Essek, for, you know, the obvious reasons, as comment on the beacon itself. (I'm going to guess they're simplifying it to one beacon, per the press release, for ease lol.) But this line, while about dunamancy as a whole and the powers of the beacon, is not about it directly. It's still about Essek's interest in it. It is an excellent line, and on its face, it has nothing to do with the Nein or the plot of the first fifty episodes of the campaign.
There's plenty of speculation to be done about how this might be structured, and I'm sure I'll do plenty of it because, let's be honest, I do not shut up about adaptation and translating stories between formats, it is one of my absolute favorite subjects, and this is the Nein, babey!!!
So my point here being: I think there is a lot of room with the nature of Wildemount politics to get a little wild with structure in the translation from D&D game to TV show that, while not impossible in LoVM, wouldn't really have added anything to the story, and honestly, might've taken away from it. Because the point is to watch Vox Machina become the big damn heroes! We do see tidbits of Brimscythe and the Briarwoods beyond the purview of the heroes, but mostly in ways that feel very '80s cartoon villain cameo' which fits the feel of the show perfectly.
But there are a lot of political players and forces in Wildemount that the Nein navigate whether they're aware of them or not, one of whom of course becomes a member of their party, and that's part of what makes their story so interesting. The Nein are the heroes that no one knows, who are always playing within and against the system and are hyper aware of that, and I think expanding how much of that we get to see now that the format allows for it (not necessarily a lot, not to the point of adding whole plotlines, but at least some of it) would only add to the tension and stakes, and Essek's presence in the trailer makes me wonder if they will.
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