#oc: gnathe

[krahka]

14, 19, 26 and one of your choice from the character ask prompt!

14: What hobbies does your Tav have?

Back in Limbo, Gnathe liked to make things that were outside their duties as an anarch. Toys for children, tiny models of buildings and creatures, sculptures of the people they cared for, that sort of thing. On the material plane, matter isn’t as responsive, and for a while they thought they couldn’t shape it at all. They’ve figured out something like it though, carving, painting, smithing. Shaping with their hands instead of their mind. The disconnect from their materials is unpleasant, but it forces them to look at things differently. Limits can keep you fresh, keep you from becoming complacent.

Zirseth likes looking out at the sky, tracking the clouds, keeping an obsessive eye on the weather. He finds both the unpredictability and the inevitability comforting. This is part of his devotions to Talos, so not exactly a hobby, but aside from all the murder, Talos is all he’s got.

19: How do you think they'll meet their end?

Gnathe’s post-game goal is to figure out what Orpheus does that disrupts the illithid hive mind, harness it for themself and use it to free every last mind flayer in the multiverse from the elder brains’ control, and basically be to them what Gith was to the People. I can see a lot of people wanting to kill them once they knew of this plan (maybe even Orpheus, lol), and a whole lot more wanting to kill them once they actually start doing it.

Zirseth would like to die by a thousand lightning bolts. Kneeling in a burning building, thanking Talos with his few remaining breaths as he asphyxiates in the smoke. Nothing would make him happier than to stand outside in a tornado as the winds flay the skin from his unworthy flesh. What Zirseth wants doesn’t matter; it never has.

26: What animal best represents your Tav?

Gnathe is an octopus. Constantly shifting, moving, planning, squeezing through the smallest holes imaginable to escape to freedom.

For Zirseth, I think a Pallas cat? He's a poor little meow meow, but also he’s always thinking about arson.

28: Is your character the de facto leader of the party? Or do they consider someone else to be the leader?

Gnathe is incredibly stubborn. Once they’ve picked a course of action, they will pursue it without doubt or hesitation. If you want to complain, that’s nice, but it’s not going to change their mind. Best you can hope for is that they trust you enough to take advice sometimes.

Zirseth does not consider himself in charge, like, in a cosmic sense, but also, anyone trying to keep him under control or direct him on any particular path is going to find it extremely difficult. Even if the plan is “kill them all,” he might end up including you in the “all” plan, and it won’t be something he can tell you about ahead of time. He gets to be the leader entirely because everyone else is afraid of him, not because he wants to be or has anything resembling good ideas.

[astrology-bf]

Some WoL/Ardbert thoughts because I enjoy making myself and my OC suffer. Spoilers for Post-Heavensward below the cut.

Ifan and Ardbert encountered each other prior to the first showdown at Loth ast Gnath. Ardbert wanted to scope out Ifan for himself, and what was intended to be discreet observation ended up turning into a conversation over drinks, then to a one night stand. Both men parted feeling extremely conflicted; Ifan because he was still in mourning for Haurchefant, Ardbert because he knew he'd have to fight and possibly kill Ifan at Elidibus' behest.

Though it was only a few hours conversation and a few hours of other activities, it was the sort of night that one looks back on in hindsight and realizes that one has met their soulmate. Ardbert realized this shortly before the plot to kill Ifan was hatched. Ifan took a little longer.

Sidurgu would later remark to Ifan that Fray's simulacrum (as manifested through Ifan's possession of his soul crystal) isn't entirely accurate to what the dark knight was in life; his voice was different, and Fray had gold eyes rather than blue. It was then Ifan realized that "Fray" has Ardbert's voice and eyes.

There's a definite "Second Circle of Hell" vibe to Shadowbringers wherein Ifan is reunited with Ardbert but is unable to physically touch or be intimate with him. The one occasion when Ardbert manages to touch him (by pushing the remainder of his aether to its limits) was to comfort Ifan after he awoke after Mount Gulg. It was barely a touch on the cheek, but it kept Ifan from utterly breaking in that moment.

Elidibus possessing Ardbert's body was enraging for Ifan (especially due to the similarity to Thancred and Lahabrea), more than a little bit of which was motivated by self-loathing over an intrusive desire to pretend that Elidibus was Ardbert - if only so Ifan might be able to hear his voice and feel his touch again.

Merging souls with Ardbert has had its upsides; Ifan genuinely felt more at ease with himself post-Shadowbringers, and since then occasionally has comforting dreams of Ardbert in vivid and lucid detail. But it turns out that while "being one with your soulmate" is more fun as a poetic hyperbole than actual fact; every new adventure since Shadowbringers has had Ifan ask himself what it would have been like if a certain warrior was at his side.

As of Endwalker, Ifan (in his canon incarnation) sports a tattoo of the Bravura axe on his right wrist; along the haft of which are five stars, one each for Lamitt, Renda-Rae, Branden, Nyelbert, and Ardbert.

[eggsdreamjournal]

30/03/22

Copy/pasted from Discord.

I dreamt a new oc

A female lancer who's in the employ of house fortemps and is friends with paulecrain. she has a kind of similar story to him in that she has no real family and was poor af but is very good at stabbing things. main difference being she's not a COMPLETE asshole so she didn't get almost immediately kicked out of the fortemps roster lmao

but she IS drunk about 90% of the time which is most of why they are friends lmao. they were, however briefly, "thank god my shift's over time to go spend my whole paycheck on booze" buddies

.....this is the second female character who is inexplicably fond of paulecrain despite him being like the worst person ever that I have dreamt into existence

damn sir. dick too bomb (even tho in this case I mean fond of in a non-romantic/sexual way)

she just saw him and was like "wow this guy's awful. maybe it's because he needs a friend" (it wasn't because he needed a friend)

(but by the time she figured that out she was already attached)

I should mention the rest of the dream was also kinda nuts. the two of them were on a bodyguard mission out in the dravanian forests (I guess this was set during the time before paulecrain got booted lol) for this house fortemps scientist who wanted to talk to a specific community of gnath who had a reputation for knowing lot of traditional magic. and they lived in an area that had been fucked up by the calamity in a similar but smaller scale way to coerthas, in this instance the balance of wind aether having been thrown out of balance which caused the air and as a flow on effect also their drinking water to be polluted

(I was in the pov of the scientist guy)

I was like a member of the nobility who happened to have an interest in natural science and aetherology etc

a cousin of edmont or something idk

anyway the head shaman gnath dude was like yeah so we found records of a spell that's supposed to be able to help with this but we can't get it to work. and I looked over the records and asked them to explain to me what they'd been doing, and then recognised that one of the herbs they were using also grew further north across a mountain range, but over there it more closely matched the leaf colour and shape described in the recovered text. so we went and collected some of those and brought them back and they tried the spell again with them and it worked

and I was like o shit. so maybe we can use this to figure out a way to fix coerthas

(it was like... much smaller in range and more "superficial" an imbalance that got corrected so I was like well trying to use this as is is almost definitely not gonna do much. but if we can figure out exactly how it works maybe we can reverse engineer it to devise a new, more powerful spell that will help)

lancer lady was also super excited about this and the last thing I recall before waking up was her trying to get paulecrain's attention (who was busy faceplanting on the bar of the nearby establishment) to show him that the spell had worked and the water out of the well was clean

paulecrain like well ok cool but have you considered who cares bc these bug guys already figured out how to make it drinkable. by making strong-ass bug booze

oh yeah the spell itself in my dream was also rly cool. they took a square of vellum and set it on the ground and laid out the leaves of this herb across it in a specific pattern, and then they had 1. a special kind of oil and 2. the blood of some animal. and they dripped the oil all across the page first on top of the leaves until it was mostly coated and then put a drop of the blood in each corner and where the blood touched the oil it spontaneously caught fire, which spread out across the page and the fire itself stayed very small and close to the ground and was this pinkish magenta sort of colour but it made heaps of white smoke that billowed out really aggressively and everyone had to sit in a circle around the spell with no gaps (like, there had to be a ring of people that were all touching each other with no spaces on the ground between them for the spell to "escape") so we all had to like shield our faces from the smoke with our arms and afterward my arms were coated in a thin layer of this shiny waxy brittle stuff that almost made it look like I had a clear iridescent insect carapace

[krahka]

kicking my feet in the air with an enormous owo 23 24 29 one of those d20s rolled like shit on all three rolls anyway tell me about gnathe

What are your Character's thoughts on the dream visitor?

Bad! Don’t trust! There are only two beings of sufficient psionic power to grant visions over the multiverse that Gnathe trusts, and that’s neither Zerthimon nor Menyar-Ag, and no matter how much this gith mystic in the Astral Sea seems to be trying to play on that trust, she’s definitely not them. They would never ask anyone to betray themselves by drawing on the power of the illithids. If they would, Gnathe would renounce them in an instant.

She said that they needed that power to save Toril. Well, in that case, let this plane burn. Whatever fate she's trying to get them to avoid, it's a kinder one than the fate they'd grant these people as a ghaik.

Was your illithid tadpole empowered by anything in Act 1? If so, how does your Character feel about that?

I guess the part where every time they try and get it out, it worms further in might count as making it more powerful, or at least, get it stuck in there further, and Gnathe took literally every opportunity offered to get it out. At least every opportunity, except with Priestess Gut. She was talking about how the parasites are a gift from her goddess, who speaks to her through them, but yeah, sure, drink this potion! It’s definitely not poison, and this is definitely not an illithid cult!

Even past trying everything they can to get rid of the parasite, Gnathe has also been destroying every single tadpole they come across. Fuck you, Dream Visitor!

It’s also a lesser, unintentional fuck you to Astorian, who is not impressed by their hypocrisy. They've made it clear that every path of power is acceptable when it comes to fighting the mind flayers, who haven’t held any power over the gith for generations, but when it comes to fighting Cazador, who has very directly been personally enslaving him for centuries, now there’s a line? Fuck you.

Did you adopt an owlbear? Do you have a name for your child?

Yes! Gnathe rescued him from the goblins who were chasing him around with the usual method they handled problems in the goblin camp, namely, by pretending to be in charge. The cub ran away, and they were content to let him go, but he came back to their camp because he had nowhere else to go, and their disguise self spell didn’t hide their smell. (Given that I’ve had multiple companions mention how their smell turns them on, I can only imagine what it is.) They fed him, over Lae’zel’s objections, and now he’s allowed to stay with them for as long as he likes.

They haven’t given him a name. He can choose one for himself, if he likes.

[krahka]

2, 3, 35, 44! 😁

Was there something about the character creator that just couldn't capture your Character? Please tell us about their hair, facial hair, tattoos, piercings, disabilities, their trans or intersex body, or anything else you're comfortable sharing.

I mean obviously the githzerai thing, but that still has them looking exactly the same, except with a different set of powers and abilities. (And frankly less useful ones, Astral Knowledge is stupid handy.)

Also, 5e just straight up doesn’t have psionic classes, because otherwise Gnathe would be a Sorcerer/Psion. Still primarily a Sorcerer because they do have some inherent talent as a result of unprotected exposure to raw chaos, but they’ve also definitely honed their psionic powers to be way more involved than just being able to cast Jump or Shield once per day.

As for cosmetic stuff, eh, they’re mostly fine. I prefer the early gith designs, where they have the fucked up skull faces over the Jim Carrey’s Grinch face, but that ship sailed long ago.

Also bonus Zirseth: He needs his extensive burn scars. He's naked without them, even if the tattoos he's got on his face that say "forehead" and "nose" distract from it. It’d also be nice if he could be full drow with his mustache, but I’m fine with him being half-drow. Doesn’t make a ton of difference anyway. His parentage is irrelevant. All that matters is the blood, the voice, the dream, and the cleansing flame.

Has your Character been using their illithid powers?

Exactly once: to open Shadowheart’s pod on the nautiloid, and that’s because they didn’t know what they were doing. It just happened, felt extremely wrong, like they weren’t even themself, and then they refused to use it ever again. The fact that this modified ceromorphosis seems to be going mind first, instead of body first is terrifying to them. They’d rather it takes them all out at once, rather than make them a party to their own self-subjugation.

Has your Character done anything that they regret in Act 1? (35)

Giving their left eye to Auntie Ethel in exchange for pretty much nothing. They were really eager to get the tadpole out of there, and it wasn’t so much that she was cheating them as that she literally couldn’t get it out. If she had been able to do it, the price would’ve absolutely been worth it, but since she wasn’t, yeah, the replacement she offered works worse than just not having an eye. It’s probably not cursed, right? Right?

How did the situation with the Grove, the Tieflings and the Goblins turn out for your Character?

Kagha got talked out of turning the Grove over to the Shadow Druids and the ritual was halted.

The goblins never got a chance to attack anywhere due to all their leaders dying from extremely targeted powder keg assassinations from an unknown source, and that left them too busy cleaning up the smoking craters in their camp to go on any raids.

The tieflings all cheered for this drow woman? Right, there was apparently a drow woman there, who knows what happened to her, definitely not a gith in a magical disguise. Anyway, her companions are still here, as is someone wearing her clothes, who has all their unpredictable magic powers, and they're all still heroes and can be celebrated before heading out on the now safe roads to Baldur’s Gate.