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lassieposting · 1 year

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So this was meant to be a little headcanons post about Vesemir's main relationships over the years, but it got wildly out of control so here have five little ficlets instead

ILLYANA

Vesemir is six when he decides he's going to marry Illyana.

He's never known a life without her in it. She's four months his junior, his playmate practically from birth. He pulls her pigtails and chases her with worms, and she doesn't tell his father. He plays house with her for countless hours, letting her henpeck and berate him the same way her mother henpecks her father, and doesn't complain. When they're nine, her father succumbs to the wasting sickness, and she's forced to grow up; she takes on chores of her own, becomes mature and responsible and levelheaded in all the ways Vesemir is not, but her eyes still light up when he leaves stolen honeycake beneath her cot in the indentures' dormitory.

He's not giving up on her - he's not - when he runs away to join the witchers. He always intends to return to her, like he promised that day by the frozen lake. He'll take the most dangerous contracts, make the kind of coin they could only have dreamed off as impoverished brats, and she'll have her lake house, her painting, her wine and food and whatever else she's decided she wants in the intervening years. It never occurs to him that she might not be there when he gets back.

She isn't.

She writes before his Trial of the Grasses, and isn't that just a note and a half to go out on? Forget me, Vesemir, she says, as he's fucking throwing up his own insides in a pit surrounded by dead and dying boys.

(He's not a complete moron. He knows she didn't write that letter - not by her own hand, at least. The old master never taught any of his indentures to read or write. Vesemir's learned at Kaer Morhen, but Illyana's not had that opportunity, and she's got real elegant handwriting for someone who's only just learning to write a few words. No - at best, she dictated it. He's...not surprised, in the end, to hear that her new master's family had a son who cared for her. He's just surprised that a pampered nobleman was thoughtful enough to give a servant girl that kind of closure.)

He doesn't expect to survive the Trial, but he does. Mutagens burn through his blood and remake him from the ground up. Four survivors, in his training class. Him and Luka. Rennes and Sven. The lucky few.

He goes out on the Path, and he does his best to do as she asked; forget me, Vesemir.

Since he was six, he believed he'd marry Illyana.

He doesn't.

FILAVANDREL

Vesemir is in his late twenties when he meets Fil, barely out of Kaer Morhen. He's got two or three years out on the Path, and he thinks he's a seasoned hand, because he's young and dumb and overconfident.

It's his first time going after a higher vampire without Deglan backing him up. He's not a dullard, he's done his research, but he's inexperienced, and he stands his ground where he should've dodged. It happens. He feels his ribs break, feels something puncture, chokes on blood. Sheer animal panic takes over, and for the first time in his life, he turns tail and flees from a fight. The bastard laughs, jeers, as he runs for his fucking life.

(He'll go back and take the fucker's head, later, better prepared and with a plan. He's paid well for it, but he comes away from that hunt with a hefty coin purse, a livid new scar, and a whole new respect for the lethality of his chosen career)

Fil stumbles upon him toppled facedown in the dirt at the side of the road with his horse huffing nervously at him as he bleeds out in the muck. Devastatingly romantic, as first meetings go.

It'll be a while yet before the Great Cleansing, but Fil already has every reason to hate humans. He's only marginally less hostile towards witchers. He's got shit to do. Somewhere to be.

He stops anyway.

He saves Vesemir's life. Nurses him back to health, such as it is. Hunts for him. Cooks for him. Straps up his ribs so they'll mend clean. Watches over him while he sleeps. Helps him lift his head up to drink a vial of Swallow whenever he needs it - the round bottle, he asks for, since Fil doesn't know shit about witcher elixirs. Bullies foul-tasting, fouler-smelling elven remedies down his throat that dull the agony to a bearable pain and make it hard to keep his eyes open.

He's...touched, might be the word. Fil is aloof and prickly and pretty bossy for a guy who looks like one punch could lay him out, but he's also...well. He's kind.

And fiercely intelligent, when Vesemir manages to get him talking in the evenings. And funny, in a serious kind of way. And oddly striking in a certain light.

Which, no, wait - that's probably the blood loss talking.

...right?

They part once Vesemir has healed enough to be able to stay in the fucking saddle without keeling over, and honestly, he's a little disappointed. He likes Fil. Fil's company, he means. The - the conversation. You know.

He...maybe realises a few things about himself on the way home.

He speaks to Deglan about Fil when he gets back to Kaer Morhen. Or. Freaks out a little at Deglan about Fil, might be more appropriate? He'll laugh about it, one day, looking back - Deglan doesn't do feelings, and he spends the entire conversation looking like he'd rather feed his own dick to a manticore than hold Vesemir's hand through any kind of emotional revelation, but when Vesemir runs out of steam, the old buzzard heaves a heavy sigh, throws back his entire glass of wine, and - like it pains him - grits out, "Look, young feller, if it's bothering ye this much, just fuck the elf and get it over with. Ye'll either enjoy it or ye won't. Either way, problem solved."

Which makes sense, actually. So when he runs into Fil again, several months down the line, that's exactly what he does.

Well, sort of. Fil knows what he's doing and Vesemir doesn't, and also Fil is a bossy pain in the arse, so he sort of...takes the reins and then just never gives them back. But it turns out Vesemir is - hm. Kind of into that, actually. It's educational, and fun, and apparently wins Sven thirty crowns in a betting pool Vesemir didn't even know existed, so whatever.

(He'll repay his life-debt eventually, in Cintra. He's just finished killing a territorial and directionally-confused water hag who found her way into the bowels of the castle through a fucking sewer tunnel. He emerges via the castle's gaol, and he's following a Cintran guard to his sizeable reward - royal contracts are always lucrative - when he catches Fil's scent coming from one of the cells, overlaid with sickness and infection and fear, and the strange scents of a dozen other elves crammed into the same cell. Witchers aren't supposed to get involved in political conflicts, but...it's Fil. Political neutrality be damned. He rips the door off its hinges with a blast of aard, and guides the captive elves out of the city via the tunnel he's just oh-so-helpfully de-hagged for them. The guard...well, he gets rowdy, and Vesemir deals with him, fast and efficient. Deglan, when he finds out, is furious, which is fine, because Vesemir isn't proud of it either. He knows he's broken the guild's code.

He'd do it again anyway.

Of course he would. It's for Fil.)

LUKA

Luka is the first friend Vesemir makes when he arrives at Kaer Morhen. He's a few years younger; a scrawny, loudmouthed runt of a kid, angry at the world and everything in it, with an unfortunate habit of starting shit with boys twice his size. He calls Vesemir a stupid son of a bitch, that first night in the stables when Sven asks for his story, because he's the only one in their initiate group who volunteered to become a witcher, and Vesemir bristles, lunges up and knocks him flat, and Luka grins savagely at him from the floor, wipes his split lip on his ragged sleeve and tells him, "You hit like my Ma. Learn to throw a punch, and maybe you'll live long enough to get out of here."

They're in the same training group - Vesemir is older, but he's never held anything more dangerous than a butter knife and he can neither read nor write, so they're in the same boat. He throws himself into training with the kind of motivation that only comes with wanting to be there, hours upon hours of drills and tracing letters with his pointer finger while he sounds them out like a small child, memorising monster features and alchemy ingredients, hanging on his tutors' every word. Barmin pairs him with Luka for sparring, and Vesemir tends to pull his punches against smaller opponents because it's, you know, unfair, but Luka is stabby and bitey and so fierce that he can take Vesemir two bouts out of four, and well, Vesemir can respect that.

He saves Luka's life in the Red Swamp, and something changes; Luka becomes his friend. When Luka wakes, Vesemir is perched on the end of his bed reading Illyana's letter. Luka rasps, "You saved my life," and Vesemir says, "Nah. Ghoul got in the way, I was aiming for you," and from that moment, they're inseparable.

They start sharing a bed early. It's purely common sense at first - Kaer Morhen is cold for unmutated boys even in summertime, Luka is skinny and underfed; it makes sense to let him burrow into Vesemir's side and share body heat. Then, after the Trial of the Grasses, the survivors are moved into a dormitory and...well. Luka is far from the only one having night terrors. Vesemir doesn't mind Luka crawling in beside him, shaking, pressing close like he's trying to get under Vesemir's skin. He thinks he's dead half the time, poor bastard, trapped in his own rotting corpse, and that's a lot worse than any of the nightmares Vesemir has, so he lets Luka sprawl over him and listen to his heartbeat and they get through those fucking months together.

Luka has known he liked other boys since he was small, and Vesemir has known Luka likes other boys since...gods, sometime before the Trial. It's not a big deal, and he's far from the only one in the keep who'd rather tumble other witchers. But when some of the older boys, newly-minted witchers back from their first year alone on the Path, let Vesemir tag along to go drinking and whoring in Ard Carraigh when he's about eighteen, Luka is weird and awkward about it for days, almost like he's sulking, as though he doesn't go about stinking of sex half the time himself.

Vesemir is highly intelligent, see. But it's...it's kind of a witcher thing to not be very bright, about all that feelings nonsense. It never crosses his mind that Luka is jealous.

He gets older. Deglan takes a personal interest in his training; he's an arse, but he's one of the best, and Vesemir hears him bragging to the other witchers occasionally - my lad this, my lad that. Vesemir's own father never bragged about anything he did. It's nice, to be worth that kind of pride.

And before he knows it, he's old enough to apprentice, and Deglan takes him out for his first year on the Path. It's tough for him and Luka, that year, to suddenly be separated from someone they've been joined to at the hip for near on a decade, but for Vesemir there's the distraction of the job - Deglan has him doing all the work an adult witcher would be doing, claiming that he's "only there to keep ye from gettin' yerself killed, young feller", and it turns out witchering is exhausting. But he's earning decent coin for the first time in his life, and Deglan teaches him some smart cons for when times are hard, and...he's good at it. Really, truly good at something, like he always wanted. Deglan has to intervene a few times, when a monster's about to eat him, but not half as much as he expected to need to, and Vesemir comes back to Kaer Morhen that winter with a new confidence and independence that make him feel like a seasoned warrior compared to Luka and Sven.

Luka missed him, desperately. And it turns out they don't quite know how to be two halves of a whole, anymore. That's...a tough few years, figuring out how to be two people, instead of one. And somewhere in the middle of it, Vesemir meets Filavandrel, and that's a whole fucking journey of self-discovery, and suddenly a few quirks of Luka's, in the way he acts around Vesemir, that he's never thought twice about start making sense.

When Luka is ready to apprentice, Vesemir starts hassling Deglan early - let me take him. Deglan is wary - Vesemir hasn't been a grown witcher that long himself, after all, but he has enough of Deglan's favour and trust that the old buzzard gives way. "If he gets killed because ye're arsin' about, or showin' off, ye'll carry that for the rest of your life. Take. This. Seriously."

And Vesemir does. He works Luka hard, but he steps in sooner than Deglan did for him when Luka needs help, and they spend their evenings flashing hard-earned coin in taverns. They work well together - not as two halves of a single whole, but as...like good food and fine wine. Both serve perfectly well alone, but...they're better together.

And he's less oblivious now than he was, when they were younger. He notices the little sideways glances Luka shoots him when he's bathing or changing his shirt, the light-hearted comments hovering just on the safe side of flirtatious, the sulking and the cold shoulder whenever he spends the night in a barmaid's bed. He brings it up after Luka cockblocks him for the third night in a row, chasing off the blacksmith's daughter with scowls and barbed remarks, because...well, because as it turns out, Luka has never been particularly subtle about his feelings; Vesemir has just been blind. He asks if there's anything Luka wants to tell him.

There is.

NENNEKE

After Kaer Morhen is sacked, he looks for somewhere safe to take the four leftover brats Deglan charged him with. He tries Kaer Seren first, because the Griffins aren't the worst, as other schools go, and they'd have all the facilities necessary for training young witchers, but that's a bust. He turns to Fil, who's hospitable enough when Vesemir shows up on his doorstep with four skinny, hollow-eyed little wretches trailing behind him like every man's worst nightmare, but he's barely got enough resources to feed his own people, and witchers eat like horses. It's Fil who points him to the temple, actually - the one place he knows of that will take in pity-cases longterm, even freaks like elves and mutants.

Nenneke is a mere junior priestess when Vesemir shows up with the boys. They're a fucking mess, he knows that - it's a little over a year that they've been on the road, never staying in one place for long, trying to always stay one step ahead of the rampant anti-witcher sentiment sweeping down from the north. The boys are twitchy and skittish - that's his fault, he knows that; he's been working while they travelled, because he has to, nobody else is going to earn coin to put food in their damned mouths, and that means he has to leave the whelps alone and vulnerable in a rented room somewhere for days at a time, where it's a benefit to them - no, where it's essential to their fucking safety - to be wary of humans. And he's become a brusque, grouchy bastard in that year, hard on them and harder on anyone else who comes near them, because it's -

It's been a lot. To - to deal with. Humans and - fucking mages - they all look like threats now. And he's the only thing between those kids and getting strung up in the fucking street like the vermin the humans think they are.

Anyway, the temple takes them in, because Melitele is a sucker for punishment, he guesses, and he's introduced to...gods, a whole fucking host of priestesses and acolytes, none of whom particularly stand out as anything other than probably not dangerous, and one of them is Nenneke. She's bald and beautiful and speaks with a strong accent he can't quite place, and apparently she likes brats, because she goes down on one knee to introduce herself to Lambert, and - well, with the benefit of knowing her a little better, he can surmise she was probably going to magic him a fucking...flower, or something, to win him over, but at the time...she opens her hand, palm-up, and he smells the scent of magic, and he reacts. It's not as bad as it could've been - he seizes a fistful of Lambert's little cloak, drags the boy back behind his own body and snarls at her to back off in a tone that sounds half-feral even to him, but he doesn't attack her or anything - but that one interaction is enough for them to take an instant dislike to one another.

It stays that way for a while.

She inserts herself into their lives in a truly infuriating way, always offering to teach the boys or play with them or take them down to dinner, and - it's not that he doesn't want the time alone, he does, he really does, but they're his fucking kids and he hates letting them out of his sight, hates leaving them with anyone, especially a gods-damned sorceress.

(Druid, she tells him firmly, the first time he calls her that. Apparently the difference is that she wasn't trained at Aretuza. She learned magic from...well, a fucking dream, or something, he doesn't know. He doesn't really see much of a difference, not for a long time.)

And she has a lot of opinions about his - he's loath to call it parenting - how he deals with the whelps. He's too hard on them, she insists. Too cold, too detached, too grumpy, too heavy-handed, too, too, too. He doesn't let them 'be children', whatever that means. Hovers too much. Doesn't show them he loves them enough. As if she could do any fucking better, in his place.

(She can. She does. He kind of hates her for it)

And the thing is - the temple is good for them. He's not so up his own arse that he can't see that. Geralt used to go days at a time without speaking a word, and now he talks to the priestesses in the halls. Eskel is less stressed, less overwhelmed with the pressure of keeping order while Vesemir works. Lambert is -

Lambert is Lambert. But he's Lambert a bit less offensively and a bit less angrily than usual.

He doesn't settle as quickly as they do. He's still prickly and tense and tired all the fucking time, because he doesn't really sleep. He catnaps, but...someone needs to be on guard, to protect the boys. He spends a lot of the night hours pacing the temple's empty, candlelit corridors like a wraith or brooding on a balcony with a decent vantage point over the temple grounds, and the rest of them in the hallway outside the bedroom the boys are sharing, meditating or reading or - or just staring blankly at the fucking pages of some ancient manuscript because he's read the same sentence five times already and the voices of his ghosts are too loud to keep out any longer.

Nenneke likes the late hours. She volunteers to go around lighting all the candles in the evenings, and he's...he's not sure if she just doesn't go to bed, or if she gets up multiple times in the night, but it's not unusual for her to amble past him in her house robe and slippers. She claims to enjoy the quiet. The peace.

Vesemir barely remembers what peace felt like.

One day, she catches him on the edge of dozing off on the bench outside the boys' door. He startles, lurching to his feet and taking a step to the side, blocking the way into their room, as she appears in the archway, the candlelight blurring around her like a halo. She stops there for a moment, looking at him like she's trying to figure him out. "They are safe here," she tells him. "And so are you."

That's all she says to him that first night, but over time, they get closer. She finds the gaps in his armour and pokes at them, and bit by bit, he lets her in. She does what she can to heal them - all of them. She teaches Eskel to control his signs. She works with Lambert on his temper. Does her best to mediate between Lambert and Vesemir, and teach them both some communication skills. When Vesemir can't sleep, she sits up with him, lets him exorcise his demons bit by painful bit until he doesn't have to clench his jaw to keep from welling up at Luka's name or flinch at Deglan's anymore.

(She'll tell him, eventually, that she's been skimming his surface thoughts when she spots him late at night. She's watched him replay it over and over: the moment he realised he'd as good as murdered Illyana, a hundred torturous scenarios where Luka dies alone and terrified, your fault your fault your fault. She'll tell him he's torturing himself, that he wasn't to blame for half the things he's laying at his own door, that he shouldn't be so hard on himself. And - he hasn't cried, hasn't let himself cry, since he heard Illyana's heart stop beating, because someone has to keep their shit together in this pack and it's not going to be the kids, but he will then, with his face buried in her shoulder like a child.)

They'll never be fixed, not really. Wounds like these don't ever truly heal. But they get to a point where Eskel starts laughing again, and Vesemir's smiles reach his eyes, and he starts sleeping again - in his room, on good days, or with his head in her lap while she fusses with his hair on bad ones.

Lambert even calms down some, which is nothing short of a fucking miracle.

Eventually, he gets to a point where he's able to focus on properly training the boys, and that's not something he can do at a temple. She - sensible and levelheaded as ever - points out to him one night, as they're sprawled out together in the dark, that the best place to train young witchers is probably a witcher keep. Has he ever considered returning to Kaer Morhen?

And that's what they end up doing.

MIGNOLE

He goes out on the Path again once all the whelps are done with their training, because he doesn't know what to fucking do with himself in Kaer Morhen anymore without them. He's not the only surviving witcher from before the sacking - there are stragglers, a few of them, who hadn't been home for the attack, and who'd made their way back once they heard that the keep was occupied again - but he's the only one who's been basically chained to the castle for the past...oh, however many years. And now his manacles are all grown up and witchering independently, and he realises that at some point, they'd become his whole fucking life.

He was someone before he became a single father of four. He'll just...adapt, like he always has.

For all that he's been out of the game for what feels like a lifetime, he hasn't changed that much. He's still fit, still strong, still fast, still startlingly handsome even if he does say so himself. There are some changes, of course. He's grown his hair out some. He's less picky about his contracts, because he hasn't had that luxury in years. And maybe he keeps an ear out in taverns for any stories of one of his boys passing through this way. So what? He's still him.

Getting back out there feels like coming home.

There's this one Oxenfurt nobleman he takes a job from, proud owner of most of the properties in an outlying district that's crawling with barghests. He's harmless enough - what Deglan would've called a killing lord (the ones who get you killed out of stupidity or inexperience, rather than a murdering lord, the ones who get you killed out of cruelty or greed) - but he's got a daughter who's a fucking menace. She's young and studiously inclined, and the first time he sees her she's chasing him out of the house with ink on her nose and several rolls of parchment tucked under her arm.

She plans to come with him, she announces, like it's a fucking given. She's never seen a barghest up close. She means to draw one for a paper she wants to submit to some academic journal. Perhaps he would be so kind as to identify its organs for her.

Which. Fucking what

He refuses point-blank, and she argues with him in what must be the most amusingly upper-class way anyone ever has - he's "terribly vexing", apparently, and he swears she actually stamps her foot in frustration under those long skirts at one point. She's got this thing where she seems utterly oblivious to just how dangerous that kind of excursion would be. Why would she be in any sort of danger from a living, hungry barghest? She'd have protection.

Him. The big strong witcher.

That's. Hm. Well, he's flattered, if nothing else.

He does not take her to draw living barghests, because he is not a fucking idiot. But he does return with a corpse slung across the back of his horse's saddle - a whole one, rather than just a head ("Gods, how frightfully unsettling it is!"). Because - because she has a pretty little button nose and long eyelashes and she looks up at him like she has no fear of him at all, and he's charmed, damn it.

He's wondered, over the years, what might have been different if he'd sought Illyana out sooner. She was only in her forties when her husband died. All those years, they might've -

Well, maybe Mignole reminds him of a road not travelled, is all.

Her father pays him generously, though he bemoans Vesemir's having brought "that gods-awful thing" back to the house, and Vesemir goes out to fill up on expensive Redanian brandy and equally expensive tobacco. It's the little things, see. The small luxuries he's had to miss out on, bringing up kids.

It's still early when a matronly woman approaches him at the bar, hooded and cloaked, and delivers a note penned in an elegant, swirly hand. It's Mignole, of all people, asking if he might be so kind as to return to her father's townhouse to identify some barghest organs that don't match anything found in a normal dog.

His eyebrows make for his fucking hairline, because that is a blatant lie. Barghests have no such unidentified organs. Either Mignole doesn't know what a kidney looks like or she doesn't want to see him about the beast.

He goes, because he's never been one to turn down an opportunity, and honestly her determination to go after what she wants is refreshing in the mincing, swooning world of noble ladies.

He hops the wall into her father's lavish garden, because he's 90% convinced this is not intended to be the kind of visit she'd want her father to know about, and spots her, reading a book by candlelight on the window ledge in one of the upstairs rooms. She startles when he tosses a pebble at the glass, but her face lights up when she spots him. He's able to climb the trellis right up to her window, and she opens it to let him in.

He doesn't leave until dawn. She doesn't ask him about the fucking barghest once.

#the witcher #netflix witcher #nightmare of the wolf #vesemir #the witcher headcanons #long post #the witcher fic #canon? idk her #catch me happily splashing in the kiddie pool that is notw despite all its flaws #i take liberties with monster lore

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grace-nakimura · 5 months

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whoops. (1/2)

rating: pg-13 at the most, and most of it is for language. pairing: past - and kind of present - grace nakimura/gabriel knight. trigger warnings: pregnancy. mentions of the occult. grace's lack of brain cells (affectionate). not beta'd. summary: eight weeks after the events that took place in rennes-le-château, grace finds her hopes into being a big damn hero put on a hold. also known as, no one is going to write it, jane has left us on read about it, so i'm going to do it.

eight weeks.

In hindsight, she should’ve known something was amiss; no, it wasn’t her being late, either. Grace had dealt with irregular periods since she was thirteen. After the first month of nothing, she didn’t think much about it. She was too busy settling into a flat in Mumbai and chalked it up to her body working like it usually did—coffee and those powdery doughnuts convenient stores like to sell—to pay too much attention. Then the second month went by, and Grace said, “well, might be stress,” because she was once again going halfway around the world trying to be a Big Damn Hero.

Better reasons this time around, but the same story.

Her jeans fit a little tightly. Her breasts were sore, tender really. It was the heartburn—Christ. She was thirty. Surely, thirty was too young to worry about heartburn? Especially after eating a jalapeno, when she grew up eating spices that were way warmer—that made her suspicious. Maybe she was sick; maybe it was some sort of stress of moving across the world, with only a letter to a man she would always love more than he’d love her, and a short phone call to her parents in New York.

Sometimes she thought about e-mailing Gabriel.

She never did. Not because she hated him, but because she was afraid he hated her.

I wouldn’t blame him if he did, was what she told herself, because for all his faults, she wasn’t always innocent either.

“You’re young,” Gerde had told her when Grace chalked up the courage to give her a real, sincere apology. Grace had bristled at that at first—twenty-four wasn’t young; she was a grown woman—but Gerde just gave her a knowing look that said, see? Then they shared a beer and spent most of the night talking about history, about philosophy, and for a rare time she saw how Gerde spoke about the late Wolfgang without hedging on sadness, but a sort of fondness, and Grace remembered thinking, wow, I hope I love someone like that one day.

She had a photo of him, of Gabriel, in her wallet. Of course, it wasn’t only him, but Mosley was there, too. Gabriel had his arm around his best friend while looking into the camera with a smug grin.

Out of all the things she missed about Gabriel Knight, it was that smug grin of his.

Eight weeks. Eight weeks passed and she spent it making her small flat livable, while pouring herself in whatever Chandrel threw at her. Mostly, it was meditation—apparently, she had trouble centering herself and opening her mind, ergo, she was stubborn—and research. Which was fine. Learn how to count before you could add or subtract. Didn’t stop her from being restless and wanting to advance when she was four, and it was still the same at thirty.

What gave it away, what finally made her think, huh, my body has been acting weird so I should investigate it, was the smell of incense. It was during a meditation with the other initiates when something when she got a whiff of something so foul, so unimaginably rancid, she shot up from the pillow she saw on to throw up her breakfast in a potted plant.

“Meditation isn’t for everyone,” a Nigerian undergrad named Aretta joked, but her brown eyes were sympathetic when another wave of nausea hit.

That day she purchased three pregnancy texts. She realized a little too late where she purchased from did not have an English translation so, with swallowing her pride and humiliation, and because she felt she needed to apologize for what happened earlier, she handed the sticks to a baffled Chandrel who was outside, trimming the weeds on his knees.

“Sorry about...” she trailed off, not wanting to allow the word ‘vomit’ to escape her mouth, ‘else if she thought about it too much, she might repeat it. Chandrel was proud of his garden, and he had been nothing but a good friend; he didn’t deserve that. “Um. I don’t... I know a few words in Hindi, but I don’t know if this is Tamil, or...”

“Marathi,” Chandrel said with bemusement. Sometimes, when he spoke to her, it felt like he was speaking to a child, and while a part of her wanted to bristle like she did when Gerde called her young, a larger part of her allowed herself to be humbled. Maybe the meditation thing was working, or maybe she was simply growing up. He took the tests—a brow quirked knowingly—with brown eyes staring at the results for a moment, before handing them back to her. “Congratulations are in order, I assume. Or condolences.”

Whoops.

twelve weeks.

She had typed out an e-mail to Gabriel about, oh, five thousand and twenty-two times. Sometimes she just ranted at him, blamed him, as if she wasn’t a willing participant; as if she hadn’t thought about what happened—although maybe she would’ve wanted the situation to be a bit different—a thousand times before it did. Sometimes she gave into self-flagellation and apologized to him. For envying him. For wanting to be him at some point, even if half of that want was merely her doing her best to ignore the growing unrequited feelings that blossomed without her saying so. For leaving without a proper goodbye because, despite it all, he changed her life for the better.

She went to New Orleans to grow up, to make her own choices, and applying for that job at Saint George’s did exactly that.

The ones that she’d never send were the ones to which she told him she loved him. That it was fine that he didn’t feel the same, she heard him tell Mosely as much, and what happened, while it meant a great deal to her, probably wasn’t the wisest idea for either of them. That wouldn’t change how she felt and maybe, someday, they could continue being friends. Just friends with a Whoops in their lives.

Sometimes she wrote letters, actual handwritten letters, even if the new millennium was dawning and no one wrote letters anymore. Hell, it took Grace weeks to convince him to use a computer than his typewriter.

She knew she could call. At least, she could call Gerde, who was a good friend, had been a supportive friend even if their initial meeting was awful, if only to reassure her that she was fine. She hadn’t spoken to her since returning briefly to Rittersburg to collect her things. They had hugged, Gerde had wished her well, and while the woman wanted to pry, she had the grace to keep any questions silent.

Every e-mail was deleted; every written letter was crumbled up and tossed in the bin.

“I have bigger fish to fry,” she had told herself, unconsciously rubbing the small bump. Most women don’t show their first time around, or not really, but Grace found herself rubbing that spot where the smallest of bulges formed more and more as of late. “I still have to tell my parents.”

Thinking about telling Gabriel made her heart hurt; telling her parents made her heart go into overdrive into a flat-out panic attack. Not good for Whoops, the doctors had said, so she decided not to tell them. At least, not yet. Maybe when she could look her very, very traditionalist parents, who came to America when she was three so she could have the best life possible, in the eye and say, “well, you always wanted to be grandparents!” without dying from sheer terror.

“What are you going to do about Whoops?” Aretta had asked, braids placed in a bun on top of her head as she walked with Grace arm and arm toward some hole-in-the-wall food joint that Grace had been constantly craving, regardless of heartburn. While low-rise jeans were becoming a style, Grace enjoyed the high-rise variety, especially when she knew soon most of her blouses would not fit. They were already snug at the bust area, much to both her horror and slight amazement. “Have you considered—”

“Everything,” she told the younger woman with a great big sigh. “I even started to make an appointment at the clinic like you suggested, but...”

Aretta did not, nor would she ever, judge, and merely offered a small smile. She and Gerde would’ve gotten along a lot quicker than she and Gerde did. Then again, that was Grace’s own blunder, not Gerde’s. “It was only a suggestion, Grace,” Aretta soothed, “the choice is yours alone. It is your body, after all, not mine.”

Grace nodded and offered a small smile.

Having their fill of samosas with chola, they spent the rest of their time going over the bestiary sitting crisscross-applesauce in the middle of her flat, that still had yet to be fully unboxed, scribbling their own experiences—well, Grace’s, anyway, since all Aretta knew was what her mother had taught her—in the margin of their notebooks.

Whoops still hovered in the background. Hard not to when all she felt was bloated, gassy, or rarely—and she counted herself grateful since her mother had often said that carrying Grace meant she was spending more time over the toilet than having any sort of pregnancy glow—throwing up. Tucking her raven hair behind her ear, thinking she ought to give it a trim because it was growing too long, she blurted out, “What if I keep it? Whoops? I mean, it shouldn’t be too hard, right? Women have kids alone all the time.”

Aretta made a noncommittal sound, and Grace continued, “I don’t need Gabriel. He always said he was terrified of settling down, anyway, so, me not telling him is just honoring his wishes.” Another noncommittal sound came from Aretta who, if Grace was anywhere but her head, would think it almost sounded amused. “He compared me to a nagging Ikea furniture, anyway, so there’s no loss there. Really. Also, my parents? Well, they can’t kill me if I show up in Manhattan in a year from now just, you know, shoving a baby at them and say, surprise! I can say I adopted it!”

“Mmm,” and for being younger than Grace, with those dark discerning eyes and a patient grin. “It is your choice, like I said,” and this would be when she finally would take her eyes from the notebook she had been scribbling on, a toothy grin that showcased her gapped teeth she wore proudly. Not like Grace. Grace begged for braces to correct hers. “You do not need to convince me, Grace, but I think you need to convince yourself.”

Which, when Grace came down from the neurotic burst, she had to release it like the gas that kept her up all night, she allowed. And after a long moment, after deliberating every pro and con, imagining every sort of scenario, Grace was left with this. “I want to keep Whoops.”

Aretta snorted, “You might need to figure out a name other than Whoops, then.”

twenty-four weeks.

It was closing in at the cut off where she could travel internationally. The midwife she had been seeing so far had told her she was pushing it, but since her pregnancy was going on without a hitch, then it should be fine. The old woman even gave her a doctor’s note in case there was any trouble.

Aretta drove her to the airport. Chadrel had to run the academy but gave her his blessing. “The both of you are always welcome back, Grace,” he had told her.

“It’s not forever,” she reassured him with a laugh. She never got to get her hair trimmed, decided to wear it in a braid because it was the easiest thing she could do in the mornings. “We’ll be back soon. Just need to tie up some loose ends.”

A knowing look, “I take it you aren’t going to the States?”

“Not until Whoops is born and I can hide behind her, because I’m pretty sure my mother won’t kill me if I’m holding a baby.” It was the only thing that kept her nerves at bay, really, when it came to telling her parents. They were traditional, yes, but Grace knew they loved her more than life itself. She was their only one, after all. They never understood her wanting to go to New Orleans, or wanting to go to Germany, or even India, but they had supported her, nonetheless.

Mostly, she just didn’t want to disappoint them.

Just like she hoped her daughter, her Whoops, wouldn’t be disappointed by her.

Funny. For a while, she had thought she was carrying a boy; she had assumed that most of the Ritters were males, anyway.

She had written to Gerde a week before she bought her ticket. She hadn’t told her about Whoops, yet—which was a bit mean, really, just showing up pregnant, but for all Grace wanted to be a big damn hero she was mostly a big damn coward—but did ask if she could stop by. This sort of thing was a conversation one had in person, not phone or e-mail or letter.

Of course, Gerde had written. We left your room the same. Gabriel has been out a lot, recently, but I know he would be happy to see you.

“You’ll call, or write, when you get there.” No questions, but straight facts as Aretta pulled her into a hug, which she returned as best as her bump allowed. Although small, it still made moving around difficult. “You gave me the address to that big fancy castle. If you don’t write, you bet your ass I will.”

And with that, Grace boarded the plane, not yet waddling like a duck, thank God.

While Mumbai wasn’t as cold as Germany, and she would spend a great deal of the flight burning up, she dressed in her warm maternity clothes. Rittercastle was in the mountains and while she remembered it being picturesque and almost something out of a fairytale, she also remembered how cold the castle was even with heating installed, and how she spent more nights next to a fire than not. New Orleans spoiled her. She grew up with the cold. Now she couldn’t stand anything below fifty degrees.

Two things that were fortuitous when Grace Nakimura made it to Rittersburg Castle: one, light snow which made finding a cab to take her to her destination rather easy; two, when she arrived, Gabriel wasn’t there, which would give her even more time to explain herself.

She used that time to explain to Gerde who, when she opened the door to greet her, noticed her bump as soon as Grace walked inside.

“You’ve been busy.”

Grace smirked, “you have no idea.”

And that was how she spent the first night in Rittersburg after many months; sipping hot cocoa, sitting on the couch beside Gerde, telling her everything that happened. From Chadrel, to what happened in France, telling her about Aretta, and then to Whoops. Gerde snorted into her own cup of cocoa at the nickname. “Whoops?”

“It felt appropriate,” Grace defended, “and nothing seems to fit her.”

Gerde’s blue eyes twinkled. “Her?”

Grace gave an almost shy smile, nodding. She felt ridiculous for being so bashful about Whoops. From the moment she felt her fluttering about inside her, letting Grace know that under no uncertain terms she was there, to even showing everyone at the academy the sonogram photos she had taken. It was ridiculous. She knew this was ridiculous, entertaining raising a child, but as every single day went by, she couldn’t see a life without Whoops.

“You haven’t told Gabriel,” Gerde surmised. Grace nodded, causing the blonde woman to place her cup on the coffee table in front of them, and gave her a look that was far older than a woman of her age. Sometimes Grace forgot she was technically older than Gerde with how she carried herself. Just like Aretta. “I am going to be honest with you, Grace, he’s been—sad.” Gerde made a face as if saying, no, that wasn’t the right word for it, and began again. “He still jokes, he still writes, but there is something missing. He still talks to his grandmother, but that seems to be the only thing that really makes him happy.”

Well. Shit.

“You think Whoops would make him happy?” Grace asked, incredulously; easier to be obtuse than understand that, with how Gerde sounded so somber, Grace had to at least be partially the reason for his moods. Grace wasn’t arrogant enough to assume she broke his heart, but she knew that, while he’d never return her feelings, he still cared about her. That they were friends.

Gerde allowed Grace to take the easy way out, if not for now, with how she snorted once more. “For a man who swears he is terrified of the idea of family, he keeps his own close to his heart,” which was fair. Rebecca Knight all but raised Gabriel, after all; if Mosley and Grace were his friends, Rebecca was his best friend, his world at that. And the fact he did mourn Wolfgang, even if he only knew him a brief time, the reason why he began the journey was to honor him in some way. A sense of duty.

Well, that was how Grace saw it, anyway.

She also remembered how he would always make time to visit his grandfather’s, his mother’s, and his father’s tomb, too.

“I’m afraid,” Grace admitted, still sipping on her beverage. “Not...not just for me, you know, but her. I know Gabriel can be the world’s biggest ass, so can I, and I am not worried about him being an ass to her—damnit.” A groan. “I chose to be a Schattenjäger. Gabriel had to become one.”

“And you are afraid that your daughter will not have a choice?” Gerde summed up effortlessly. “We all have a choice, Grace. That is one choice she will not have to make for many years yet. If I were you, I would focus on telling Gabriel—”

“Tellin’ me what?” A heavily accented voice accompanied by boots on the castle ground.

Grace began to choke on her cocoa, causing Gerde to move and pat her back.

#myfic #based off my hc & my hc from my rp blog #gabriel knight #grace nakimura #tho it's mostly about rekindling their friendship and a maybe #whoops actually holds the braincell #icb i am tagging this but the fandom is small its ok #also splitting this up into two parts bc its over 5k #i don't know how to do small one shots anymore i guess

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mvsicinthedvrk · 2 years

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halloween event plotting & starter call for hwevent14!

hello! please LIKE this call and i’ll send you a message about plotting if we haven’t talked event stuff yet. or if you’d rather, please REPLY to this call and request halloween ball event starters-- but tell me who for, who from, & please limit yourself to requesting only three total per mun so i can write with everyone. unless there’s more than three you really want in which case it’s a soft limit

also, fully said “fuck it” and am only describing their costumes/outfits in words rather than images, because pinterest is my personal hell and i am lazy when it comes to graphics

even though i’m a mess i’m excited to plot!!! so here’s the info!!!!!

wei wuxian-- (6/?) -- for lan wangji (tragcdysewn), childe (masqce), the corinthian (softsliders19), jester lavorre (circleofstarrs), lan jingyi (coreofgold), victor salazar (hiddenpxpercuts)

halloween is wei wuxian’s season. since the ball’s only on the 8th, it’s not technically his birthday yet, but he’ll be treating it like it is. you won’t find him alone at this ball; he will inevitably have plenty of company from people he’s dragged onto the dance floor or over to the bar. he is NOT the designated driver for the evening, because he can’t drive. therefore, he will be drinking. a lot.

he will definitely be in some kind of mix of costume-and-formal? costume that could pass as formal if you squint. costume but elevated. he’d pick something from movies and i’m currently thinking he’d be jareth from labyrinth-- flowy shirt, tight trousers, tall boots, and some kind of super wild, shimmery mask with horns.

martin blackwood-- (3/?) -- for elphaba thropp (tragcdysewn), satine kryze (mischiefmuses), kenna de poitiers (hxartbreaker)

social events still make him feel uncomfortable and like he doesn’t really know what to do with himself. martin finds parties supremely awkward if no one talks to him so please bring him some chill company. otherwise, he’ll just wander around glass-in-hand and desperately pretend like he has somewhere to be.

he’s dressed as a pirate, re-using some of the costume pieces that he’d gotten at the renn faire, and his mask is like a wesley-from-the-princess-bride sort of eye cover deal.

yuri plisetsky-- (3/?) -- for elizabeth midford (drvcxrys), katie gardner (stcrlvght), yuuri katsuki (hiddenpxpercuts)

city events that yuri’s previously attended have not, historically, ended well, so he’s a little apprehensive about the situation. however, he has enough acquaintances in the city at this point that he’s sure he can find people to keep company with. he’s also good at dancing, actually, so he might check out the dance floor for a bit.

he’s wearing an old ice skating costume that was bird-themed, so it’s mostly black-and-silvery fabric that looks like feathers-- it’s sort of a one-piece situation, with trousers and long sleeves all connected. and his mask will be feathery as well. he’d be more comfortable if they let him wear his ice skates in the white house as well but unfortunately he’s in dress shoes.

orpheus-- (2/?) -- for eurydice (youllalwaysbemyporcelain), annabeth chase (drvcxrys)

he loves this! how exciting! so many people and things to look at! honestly he’ll probably get overwhelmed with how much visual stimulation there’ll be inside and will end up out in the gardens sooner rather than later, but he’ll really enjoy himself regardless.

he’s dressing as the scarecrow from the wizard of oz. his mask will be decorated with straw and bits of flowers. his whole outfit is all very handmade and chaotic.

wen kexing-- (1/?) -- for zhou zishu (youllalwaysbemyporcelain)

this is the kind of high-class nonsense that wen kexing fucking adores. a place to look great, rub elbows with powerful people, and have an audience for all of his chatterbox bullshit. he is the kind of person who will come talk to you for two minutes and then you turn around and he’s already moved on to his next target, the only exception being zhou zishu, who he will probably end up dragging around with him.

it’s hard to dress up when you already dress your best every day (lmao i hate him), but he’ll pull out all the stops for this formal outfit, and his mask will be shiny and elaborate, with lots of large ornamentation.

noah czerny-- (2/?) -- for blue sargent (irresistiibles), emmett cullen (stcrlvght), josie saltzman (hiddenpxpercuts)

he’ll be looking for his friends and roommates in the crowd, most of the time, and making his way through the white house, since he’s never been here. he’s pretty quiet company for the most part but if a good song comes on, he’ll definitely jump on the dance floor

he’s not really in costume??? or dressed up, either??? but he’ll be doing his best to keep a basic masquerade mask on, in the nature of participating in the event

xie lian-- (5/?) -- for sophie hatter (mcrcki), thanatos (tragcdysewn), xiao lanhua (tragcdysewn), mu qing (masqce), hua cheng (coreofgold)

on one hand, too many people in masks makes him distinctly uncomfortable for bai wuxiang-related reasons, so he’s not 100% loving that aspect of the ball. but on the other hand, this sounds like such a lovely event, and he’s really looking forward to the opportunity to celebrate. he’s going into it with a forcibly positive attitude: everyone in the city that he cares about is here, so that’ll be fun!! definitely!!

he was in town last year for halloween but still doesn’t totally understand the concept? so i think he’ll try to borrow a nice formal suit from someone, probably in a color other than white for once, and find a mostly-wire half-mask to wear.

blathers-- (4/?) -- for rowena ravenclaw (mcrcki), binx choppley (irresisiibles), missandei (impcrfct), vision (dcpravities)

blathers is another character of mine who is in his element when surrounded with potential conversationalists. he’ll probably spend a good deal of time out in the gardens, because how are you meant to chat when the music on the dance floor is so incredibly loud?

blathers, the art enthusiast, is dressed as “the son of man” painting by magritte? the one with the man in a top hat with a lime in front of his face. so he’s mostly wearing formal wear, with a lime-themed mask. it’s a little obscure but he will definitely tell you all about it if you ask.

he xuan-- (1/?) -- for shi qingxuan (irresistiibles)

he’s not having a great time in general lately, but what else is he going to do but get dragged along to this thing? if he’s got to be trapped in the middle of an existential crisis, at least there’ll be free food here, which is definitely where he will be spending most of his time: by the banquet tables.

he’s wearing an all-black ensemble that is slightly more formal than what he wears every day, and his mask is black with a few hints of shimmery gold. he would mostly blend into the crowd.

sha hualing-- (3/?) -- for sprig plantar (youllalwaysbemyporcelain), attina (circleofstarrs), kang sae byeok (impcrfct)

she will be sneaking around and trying to cause trouble, because to restrain her to do otherwise would be an exercise in futility. good luck if you try to deal with her.

will be wearing as little clothing as possible, because apparently despite the chilly weather, this is the part of the year where she can get away with that. is it a costume? is it formal wear? who knows. it’s some see-through fabric and ribbons held together with a hope and a prayer, more than anything. and her mask will be see-through as well, because she’s got too good a face to cover up.

liu qingge-- (2/?) -- for jacen solo (impcrfct), jessica hamby (hxartbreaker)

this man is tense. he does not want to be here, and he is not having a good time. probably spending most of the night monitoring the other peak lords from a distance so that they don’t embarrass themselves, because someone’s got to do it.

will be wearing his normal everyday hanfu etc, except wearing a paper mask he bought on the street corner outside for a dollar, because apparently you’re supposed to wear masks for this thing

loid forger-- (1/?) -- for diana holland (youllalwaysbemyporcelain)

he is here because his family is here, so obviously he had no choice but to come. will spend most of the night eavesdropping on all of the esteemed guests here and monitoring the situation rather than having fun, because he wouldn’t know how to have fun if it killed him.

he will be dressing formally in a tux and dress shoes, and his masquerade mask is black and white and doesn’t particularly stand out but still looks nice.

dongfang qingcang-- (2/?) -- for henry creel (mischiefmuses), edward teach (softsliders19)

will be staying only as long as functionally necessary to make an appearance. his relatively haughty demeanor probably intimidates a number of people to stay away, which is what he would prefer. no one in their right mind would want his company anyway, because he is terrible at conversation lol

will also be dressing formally, and wearing a fairly ostentatious mask that’s a very deep purple.

again, thanks in advance for your starter requests!!!!!!!!!

#hw: plotting call #long post tw #food mention tw #alcohol mention tw #drinking mention tw #swearing tw #hwevent14 #hw: starter call

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autolenaphilia · 1 year

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Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned

Now this is a game cover. Look, game developers, if the promotional art for your game doesn't have this kind of energy, what are you even doing? Why aren't you this level of cool?

Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned is as you might guess the follow-up to the original Gabriel Knight game and it's sequel (My reviews can be found via the links). Like those it was written and designed by Jane Jensen and developed by Sierra.

It moves the series into 3D, yet tries to retain point-and-click gameplay with this new dimension. The plot is again about our heroes Gabriel Knight and Grace Nakimura investigating a supernatural mystery. Yet plot and gameplay has been overshadowed by this game’s reception. So more on that later.

It was both the last Gabriel Knight game and Sierra’s final adventure game overall. Their offices closed after developing this game, partly due to its lack of sales compared to its budget. This is very significant for this game’s reception. Sierra was the studio that practically invented the graphic adventure game with Roberta Williams’s Mystery House in 1980. They and Lucasarts dominated the mainstream adventure game market in the 90s. Gabriel Knight 3 and Escape from Monkey Island being the last adventure games from these successful studios was seen by American video game media as the “death of adventure games”.

A famous article by game website Old Man Murray (whose writers would later write Valve’s Portal series) would use the now infamous cat hair moustache puzzle from the beginning of Gabriel Knight 3 as an argument for how “adventure games committed suicide” with illogical puzzles and blamed Jane Jensen. So Gabriel Knight 3 became the posterchild for “why adventure games died”, the game that was such a failure that it killed a genre.

Of course reports of the adventure game genre’s death were greatly exaggerated. And reports of Gabriel Knight 3’s badness are greatly exaggerated.

Gabriel Knight 3 is very much worthy of being played and enjoyed today. Not that it’s easy to do so with modern computers. I had major technical issues with lag and slowdown starting up my copy I got from GOG. The only way I could conquer those was through downloading DGVoodoo. You can find some instructions here for setting it up. That mostly got rid of my technical issues, but even then cinematics can be fucked up. The previous two games in this series can easily be played with Scummvm, and you realize what a valuable piece of software Scummvm really is during the efforts trying to get this game to run.

About the story, the actual game and its intro movie drops you in media res and it’s very confusing. That’s because the intro cinematic is not the actual introduction to the story. A comic book that came in the game box was. And there are inexplicably no scans included of that comic with the GOG copy. And you need it to fully understand the story. It’s a good comic too that naturally has aged better than the 3D animated cinematics. So download it from other sources, like this one.

Now that you done all that, you can finally enjoy the story of Gabriel Knight 3. Gabriel and Grace have been invited to the Parisian home to the leading heir of the once royal Stuart family, now called Stewart. His name is prince James and he wants Gabriel in his capacity of schattenjäger to protect the prince’s toddler son, Charlie, from the vampires that have haunted his family for ages. Despite Gabriel’s and Grace’s best efforts, the baby is kidnapped by mysterious figures. Gabriel follows the kidnappers to the Languedoc village of Rennes-Le-Chateau, where the game begins.

Now GK3 is the first 3D game in the series, and it’s a technological leap that the point-and-click adventure game genre had difficulty with. The problem is that the gameplay of point-and-click games consisted of viewing a 2D image and clicking on interactable hotspots on that image. It’s hard to transition that type of gameplay into 3D, as the extra dimension doesn’t add much to that experience. The solution that most adventure games adopted was animating 3D characters but have them move on 2D backgrounds with fixed camera angles. So it’s not really 3D, as the image you are viewing and interacting with is still essentially 2D.

Now Jane Jensen did something far more ambitious with Gabriel Knight 3. The idea here is what if you could explore a 3D environment just as freely as you could explore a 2D image in 2D adventure games?

And the solution was to keep basic point-and-click controls, but with true 3D environments and allow you to explore those environments with a completely free camera. It’s the most free camera I’ve ever experienced in a video game, as it is not in any way tied to the player character (Gabriel or Grace) but can move independently anywhere you want to in the “room” that you are currently in. It can’t move through solid objects, or leave the space the character is in, but that’s the only restriction you have. You mainly control it with the keyboard. And then you make Gabriel/Grace interact with things by clicking on them with the mouse and bringing a verb menu. They have the ability to teleport when the camera isn’t looking at them, so you won’t have to wait too long if you left them far behind the camera and want them to interact with something.

It’s a bit awkward and a very weird game engine/control system, but honestly, it’s not bad. Frankly being able to freely explore the environments with the camera and then clicking on the hotspots to interact with it is probably the most genuinely 3D translation of traditional 2d point-and-click adventure gameplay I’ve come across. Most 3D adventure games are fake 3D, this feels like the real 3D deal.

There is some pixel hunting in this game, but that’s inherited from its 2D forebears, and isn’t that bad. Of course it’s 1999 3D, so it looks like shit today, and hasn’t aged as well as the original game’s pixel art. The free camera enables you to get close-up so you can really see how grainy and low-res the textures are. But again, that’s because it’s from 1999. And the art direction is good.

There is still a points system, where successful actions and conversations get you points. Interestingly the amount of points you get is actually more variable than in previous games.

The player can get more points for doing optional actions while investigating which sometimes reveal further minor plot points. Some of the actions are missable, and can only be done during a certain section of the game or are even timed. So there is missable content, but like in the first game, I don’t think there is any danger of making the game unwinnable in classic Sierra fashion.

The sections are divided into “timeblocks” of certain hours of the day, so “Day 1, 10 Pm to 12 PM”, but they are not timed in any way beyond the optional missable content. The times are for the characters and plot, not the player. Instead you only progress to another timeblock, another set of hours, when you complete certain actions. This is how the day system in the first Gabriel Knight game worked and it works the same here.

The puzzles vary in quality widely. But it’s far from as bad as you might expect. The bad reputation of GK3 is built on the infamous cat hair mustache puzzle. And while the game doesn’t deserve to be judged by its worst moment, the puzzle itself honestly deserves its reputation. It is truly bad. If it is good in any way, it is by being the perfect example of illogical adventure game puzzles. You literally create a fake moustache by getting some cat hair stuck to tape and glue it to Gabriel’s face with syrup. The solution is so unlikely to occur to a logical mind. And Gabriel Knight is not like Monkey island, it’s not a surreal comedy but a broadly serious supernatural mystery thriller, so it stands out even more.

It’s the low-point both for the game and the series as a whole. It got its own wikipedia page, it’s that infamous.But it was not the creation of Jane Jensen, but actually the game’s producer Steven Hill. He devised the puzzle as a replacement for a puzzle developed by Jensen that wasn’t able to be implemented due to time and budget constraints. So while it’s understandable to blame Jensen, this insane puzzle was not her idea. So the rest of the game was developed by the actual creative mind behind the series. And while it’s far from a perfect game, the bulk of it is a lot better than that low-point.

There are some other flawed puzzles in this game, but even those are far above the level of cat hair moustache. And there are some rather good ones too. The other famous puzzle from this game is the famous “Le Serpent Rouge” which is so well-regarded that it also earned its own wikipedia article. Gabriel Knight 3 is probably the only game where two of its puzzles got their own wikipedia articles, and for opposite reasons.

I don’t know if “Le Serpent Rouge” is the best video game puzzle ever made, but it sure is a highlight of the game. It’s a treasure hunt where you have to solve a long poetically written riddle that hides the instructions to find the treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau, adapted from a real such riddle-poem. It’s a concept that I love, ever since I read The Musgrave Ritual. And the implementation of the idea into a video game puzzle is good too. It’s a very good example of how to design a long over-arching puzzle. It’s long, but it’s broken up into digestable segments, you solve one paragraph of the riddle at a time. It also has a good built-in hint system where Grace gives hints in dialogue on what to do. The method of solving it is original, where the bulk of it is Grace using an in-game computer to solve the riddle and apply it to a map.

The mystery and treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau is probably obvious to the well-read player, since that small town in the Languedoc is famous for specifically one thing: it’s place in Jesus bloodline conspiracy theories. And unsurprisingly that turns out to be the secret of the town in this game too. Jesus had kids with Mary Magdalene, and his bloodline survives to the modern day. It’s all borrowed from the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. And it’s obvious. Why else would Gabriel and Grace be in this otherwise unremarkable small town if it wasn’t about that? Also part of the game's title is Blood of the Sacred.

GK3 predates the most commercially successful work of fiction to use Jesus bloodline ideas, The Da Vinci Code, but it’s far from the first work of fiction to borrow from it. It’s not even the first graphic adventure game to explore such ideas. Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars did not feature a Jesus bloodline but was clearly inspired by such templar conspiracy theories and alludes to it with character names like Lobineau and Plantard.

Yet Jane Jensen does her best to make the theory interesting again. The theory is complete nonsense of course, but it’s useful raw material for fiction.The game’s plot mixes the idea of vampires with this Jesus bloodline theory in an original fashion and the game does some inventive worldbuilding with this. And the game is far better written than the likes of Dan Brown.

There is clearly a great deal of effort gone into researching Rennes-le-Chateau and the other historical facts that is commonly brought into this theory. Out of idle curiosity I watched one of the factually dubious documentaries Henry Lincoln made about Rennes-le-Chateau in the 1970s before co-writing Holy Blood, and the town in the game does really look like the real deal.

Jane Jensen must have been aware that players would guess. Grace finds out that holy grail is the Jesus bloodline thing not by doing some investigation into occult secrets, but by being given and reading a popular book that is clearly Holy Blood, Holy Grail in all but name. It’s advertised in the local bookshop aimed at tourists. It’s anti-climactic but funny and makes perfect sense. This theory is not some deep hermetic secret in our world, so why should it be this otherwise realistic world?

On a character level, the game finally explores the Grace/Gabriel relationship that has been hinted at in the previous two games. It is treated more maturely in this game than ever before. The relationship is predictably a mess, but that actually feels intentional this time around. Gabriel’s faults as a person, how he has treated Grace and why a relationship would have problems is actually discussed by the characters for the first time. It feels more believable in this game than it was in previous games, as the problems are fully acknowledged.

The voice acting is good too. Tim Curry is back as Gabriel. And there is no Mark Hamill as Mosely this time, yet there is plenty of major voice acting talent in the cast list, like Jennifer Hale, Billy West and Corey Burton and they do deliver. I loved the old movie star Samantha Eggar as the aging aristocratic lesbian Lady Howard, she is a lot of fun.

Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned is far from a perfect game. No game with the cat hair moustache puzzle can claim perfection. Yet it’s highly unfair to judge it by its worst moment. The rest of the game is a solid adventure game. There are much better puzzles in this game, such as Le Serpent Rouge.The move to 3D is not entirely successful, but it shows a far greater imagination in adapting point-and-click adventure gameplay to a 3D environment than most other adventure games ever dared. Jane Jensen’s character writing is if anything more mature than in previous games in this series. And she manages to tell an inventive horror-fantasy story while still using old tropes and stories like the Jesus bloodline and vampires.

Gabriel Knight 3 did not kill the adventure genre, the death of adventure games has been greatly exaggerated anyway. The market for it just grew smaller, especially in the US, but far from non-existent. And what remains is a flawed but very enjoyable adventure game. If you are able to overcome both the technical issues in getting to run on modern systems and design issues like the outdated graphics and The Bad Puzzle, you will find much to enjoy in it. Perhaps it can even be defined as a flawed gem.

#my writings #gabriel knight #adventure games

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home-of-renn · 1 year

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When Jazz had first gotten back from her week-long summer camp for gifted children, she’d expected an empty fridge and a sink full of dirty dishes and a living room that would desperately need to be vacuumed. She had expected the empty driveway and the overgrown lawn and the fresh new graffiti that tagged the side of their mailbox in neon green paint and crude, mocking words.

Most of all, she had expected her little brother to be there at the front door when she knocked. She’d expected it to swing wide open before she could even set down her belongings and fish out her own set of keys. She’d expected her baby brother to be standing there to greet her, clad in socks that had worn thin across the heel and had holes where his big toe stuck out, with hair that hadn’t been brushed in a week and still wearing clothes he’d slept in the night before.

What she hadn’t expected was the pungent, metallic odour that hung in the air. Stale and sour, overwhelming her every sense as she stepped past the threshold - suffocating what little oxygen not yet taken up by the foul stench of burning flesh and hair.

She hadn’t expected the strong, chemical smell that wafted from the second storey of the house.

Or the bloody footprints leading up the basement stairs.

Or the dark, patchy stains sinking into the living room rug.

Or her brother’s friends to come racing from the back of the house with wide, watery eyes and ashen faces, tripping over gallon bottles of bleach and haphazardly strewn cleaning supplies.

But most of all, she hadn’t expected to find her little brother, rumpled and glassy-eyed, staring into the swirling green light of her parent’s latest failed invention.

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smash-64 · 1 year

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2022 Game of the Year Countdown 4. The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero Nihon Falcom Nintendo Switch, 2022 (orig. 2011)

The Crossbell saga is finally being officially localized and I was highly anticipating this release since I was not able to play a proper translation of the games. There was a highly polished fan translation, but I was unable to play it as they originally promised PSP support, only to change course once work got underway on the PC versions. So, I was stuck with a mostly unedited machine translation that was only passable. When I first played Zero a few years ago, I had a good time and would have said that the poor translation didn’t really affect my enjoyment. However, after playing a proper translation, I can see how it severely limited many of the best aspects of the Trails series.

The NISA version brings the same level of detail and immersion that was lacking in my last playthroughs. In fact, I would say it was almost like playing Zero for the first time again, which is an experience I wish I could have with every game in the Trails franchise. The characters are unique and fun, well designed, and accentuate the tropes they fit by growing instead of just fitting a label and never moving from it.

There are aspects of the combat that I enjoy in later Trails installments, but Zero has the best of the classic combat in the entire franchise. Complex arts system (magic) that is fully customizable? Yes. Flexibility of roles in combat? Yes. A party that compliments each other? Yes. I never got tired of combat in this turn-based JRPG, and sought out as many special/hidden monster fights as possible. Planning out your attack is really fun, and by swapping specific accessories, you can create really powerful units. And unlike later Trails games, it’s not as easy to break the game with 100% evasion or guaranteed critical hits on characters with an already double boosted attack stat. Do I like those things? Absolutely. But I also like the challenge of not being able to do that, or at least not as easily.

Zero gives you a full party of four characters right from the start, and they all fit together so well that it feels only natural for these complete strangers to form a powerful bond as a group. I think part of why Crossbell is such a beloved pair of games comes down to how the initial party fits together so well, supports each other, and grows to form a group that becomes emblematic.

In addition to the new characters from Zero, we see a few returning characters from the Sky trilogy, including my two favorites in the entire franchise: Estelle and Renne. Their storyline was actually the driving force that kept me playing during my first playthrough a few years ago, and to see it fully realized with a proper translation was amazing. I cannot get enough of these two and the way that Falcom was able to write them into the story without overshadowing the new cast was phenomenal.

One negative about Zero is that the start of the game can be a bit slow, and maybe even a bit boring if you don’t immediately fall in love with the city of Crossbell or your party of characters. Very little of consequence really happens until you pass the halfway point, which can turn some people off. I’m down for this sort of thing, especially in the Trails series, so it wasn’t a big negative for me, personally, but I can see it being a speed bump for others.

Falcom is well known for having great music, so of course this soundtrack is filled with bangers. Inevitable Struggle is an all time great when it comes to boss fights. Afternoon in Crossbell is a calm and relaxing location tune. Firm Strength has a creeping sense of confidence to it. Even Get Over the Barrier is a great tune, despite how overplayed it is.

Trails from Zero is an all time classic. If you haven’t yet jumped into the Trails series, I might not recommend this as your entry point since there is a lot of background knowledge you’d need to fully appreciate the plot, characters, and overarching setting, but I cannot stress enough how JRPG fans absolutely need to play the Trails series. It’ll ruin RPGs forever for you because nothing else can even compare, but it’s absolutely worth it.

#trails from zero #falcom #crossbell #game of the year #2022 #countdown

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parf-fan · 11 months

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This blog is still in a coma (as opposed to dead) for an indeterminate amount of time, but I need to make this one post. If you don't feel like reading it all, just go look through the links at the end. It's about a piece of theatre that is being streamed just this weekend.

There is precedent for me shouting excitedly on here about non-Faire theatre done by Faire actors, with particular precedent for the non-Faire theatre of Michael Stahler (Horace Tanningrove c.2019). There is also precedent for me mentioning that I am Autistic, albeit possibly not in so precise a term, at least not outside of tags. There is not, however, precedent for combining those two things in one post. But there will be now.

I cannot say as much about this as I'd like, for making words is exceptionally mentally taxing for me right now, and I'm also thoroughly out of practice at writing. But I'll do my best.

I am Autistic. Amongst other things, this is what enabled me to so keenly observe and so thoughtfully analyze and so deeply keep track of so many things about PARF, allowing me, in turn, to make so many informed and understanding memes, jokes, headcanons, analysis, and occasional fics about the characters and events of PARF: it was my primary Special Interest for several years, and remains an ongoing dormant one now. (The shifting of Special Interests is, conversely, also part of what rendered this blog so barren of late, but we won't go into that.) Being Autistic is more than only having Special Interests, of course, but that's the part that relates directly to this blog, and thus directly to you. Being Autistic is a bigger part of my life and more important to me than can ever be stated, for I would quite literally be a fundamentally different person, with a different personality, if I were allistic (not Autistic).

Michael Stahler is also Autistic, and would be a fundamentally different (probably less interesting, in my opinion) person if he were allistic. And while he has sometimes coded some of the characters he plays as Autistic, he has never before the last few months had the opportunity to play a role explicitly written as Autistic. This is in part because so few examples of characters intentionally written as Autistic are remotely accurate or respectful; and even factoring in the poor examples, there are just so few.

From the 17th of May through the 4th of June, Michael starred in the world premier of playwright Juliette Dunn's “The Puzzle” at Hedgerow Theatre (don't worry, the title does not refer to Michael's character; in fact, as one of the articles I'll be linking below states, his role is “the most whole character in the story”). I had the immense privilege and joy of attending it twice. I cannot do it justice in my current state of writing, and I frankly will not try. Rather, I will link some of the many pieces of news coverage about the show below, and plead and entreat you to read at least some of them. What I will say is that it was the most incredible play I've ever witnessed, and might even be the most amazing theatrical experience I've ever had – including all things Renn Faire and Theatre In the Mansion, which is no small feat. I wanted to shout excitedly about it on this platform back before and during the run, but I didn't have it in me at the time to make the words, not even in writing. As established, I still only kind of have it in me to make words, but I seem to have hit the point at which I'm willing to make words even though it is costing disproportionate spoons and the words are sub-par.

For those of you who missed the show entirely (which is most of you), and those who wish to witness the show again, you have one more chance. Thanks to the League of Live Stream Theater (which I did not realize was a thing that exists, and am delighted to be informed is), you can stream a performance of “The Puzzle” on June 16th (7:30pm EST), 17th (7:30pm EST), and 18th (2pm EST). That's this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, respectively. In each case, the stream starts at the indicated time, and is available on-demand for twenty hours after the performance ends. Tickets are $44 (that's the regular $35 ticket plus $9 for the platform fee).

If the antics of Horace Tanningrove ever brought a smile to your face or laughter to your lips; if PARF-fan's posts have ever enhanced your life; if you enjoyed the performance of sundry other Autistic actors at PARF, both Bacchanalian and Blackfryar (none of whom I can specify, as I did not ask their permission to namedrop them and their Autism on here), then I ask, I beg, indeed, I charge you to stream this show if it is in your budget. Hell, have some friends or family over and split the ticket cost. You will not be disappointed. You will be treated to an astounding piece of theatre, a story about human connection and communication, and you will walk away from it wiser and a more developed person.

Here is the link to the show on Hedgerow Theatre's website.

Here is the streaming link.

Here is the link to view or download the program. Even if you read nothing else from it, you really need to read the playwright's note (page three, four if you include the cover) before seeing the play, for context and definitions (particularly if you know little about Autism, but it's still important even if you're already informed).

The photos in one of the “artist spotlight” posts from Hedgerow's facebook page include pictures of the display that the audience had to walk past in the theatre to get to the house (put together by the dramaturg). As with the playwright's note, it is very important to read this display for further context and explanations, particularly if you know little about Autism (and you'll likely learn something new even if you're already informed; I certainly did). I am having difficulty making the “embed post” thing work, so I have instead attached the pictures I took of that same display (the text is more readable in these ones, anyway). While I received permission to photograph the display, I did not ask about posting the pictures, and will remove them if Hedgerow asks. The first five images are closeups of (most of) the relevant text (hence being more readable). The remaining four are wider shots, intended to showcase the display more than the text.

And here are the many pieces of news coverage which do a far batter job than I currently can of describing the show and why you should see it.

Broadway World's initial article, a well-rounded introduction to the play.

Broadway World's followup article about the extended run and the streaming option. Much directly from the first article.

NBC10 Phillidelphia's video reporting on the show. It's 2:37 long. Good supplement to the well-rounded Broadway World article.

NPR and PBS WHYY: Mostly a behind-the-scenes angle, about the acting and the writing of it. Definitely worth a read.

Li'l interview with Michael on KYW news radio.

Delco Culture Vultures: A review that provides a more detailed look at the content of the story and somewhat at the setup of the show. Contains traces of info about the plot, and is thus to be avoided if you are as neurotic about anything that could be considered a spoiler as I am (so probably literally everybody will be fine to read it).

Broad Street Review: Discusses the title, takes us on a bit of a journey with the writer to go see the show, brings in additional perspective. Contains very detailed description of the flavour of the play, relates more events within the play than any other article. Very good article, definitely worth a read if you're at all concerned about the content of the play, or otherwise unsure whether or not you want to see it.

Delco Times article. Looks to be mostly rehashing of parts of the Broadway World article, but not wholly identical. Has an audio option.

Philadelphia Inquirer's “The thing of the week” blurb. The blurb is about halfway down the page.

The interview with the playwright referenced in the “Thing of the week” blurb; only available to paid subscribers (I thus have been unable to vet it or describe the contents), but it's not impossible that some followers here fall into that category.

Two short videos about a couple different aspect of the show, one from each of Michael's co-stars:

Daniel Passer

David Shiner

A wonderful post-show interview from WPPM with all three cast members. There's enough detail about the events within the play that I would recommend listening to this after seeing the show. Either way, you should definitely listen to it. The link actually opens part-way through the interview, but you will need a free Soundcloud account to pull it back to the start of the interview (37:33). If you don't, you will miss nothing about the show itself, but you will miss hearing Michael calmly and eloquently go off about the necessity of streaming theatre for accessibility.

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The Puzzle display (text closeups):

The Puzzle display (wide shots):

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hiddenwashington · 2 years

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winter has long faded into spring, and with spring fading into summer, the days grow warmer and the nights grow longer. laughter fills the streets as people spend more time outdoors, walking under lush green trees and through blooming gardens full of color that welcome summer with open arms. whispers fill the streets carried from person to person, stories of travelling faires filled with sparkling jewels, daring knights, and foods beyond belief find themselves on the lips of the residents. flyers are mailed to everyone, social medias are updated in preparation for the biggest event of the coming summer.

in preparation for the faire, rock creek park and the surrounding areas have been transported back in time. tents filled with trinkets, armour, and swords are raised allowing everyone a glance into goods and delicacies from travelling merchants and locals alike. stalls filled with varieties of food, snacks, and sweets are there to draw the crowds and bring people together. music and laughter fill the air as people dance and sing, and as children run along the grassy paths, pretending to be princesses, princes, knights, and dragons as adults watch on with smiles on their faces. people flood the streets in anticipation, dressed to the nines in costumes fitting of kings and queens, knights and villains alike as they descend on the park, seeing what the stalls and sellers have to offer in what will be a truly memorable and magical experience of a renaissance faire for the folks of washington dc.

~~~~~

OOC INFORMATION

hello, hello angels! now that spring has begun to pass into summer, we’ve decided to put out another mini-event! this is our second mini-event, and like before with the winter markets we’ve decided to create something new for the summer to help kick start some muse! this isn’t a full event though, as it’s only meant as something to perhaps prompt some new threads & give some interesting things to incorporate into your writing. just like before, this will work a little differently than our typical events. so keeping that in mind, please read on for the rules & information regarding the renn faire! as always, please have fun & we hope enjoy this little welcome to summer mini-event!! ♥

DATES :

june 11th - june 22nd !

this event will last 11 days in character and out of character !

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE FAIRE :

GENERAL SHOPPING :

this is ever influx !! if you think of a stall that could be here please feel free to message the main and we will add it !!

jewelry and finery - jewels and metals that would make any dragon jealous of your hoard! come see what pieces catch your eye!

clothing and apparel - find pieces to wear in every day life that will bring you a memory of your time here at the faire !!

footwear bazaar - looking for the perfect pair of boots to slay dragons in? make your way in !

ye olde portrait painting - make your way down to get a portrait to commemorate the day!

ceramic and glassware studio - purchase mugs, jugs, vases, plates, anything you may need for a home !! watch the glass blowers work their magic!

tarot card and palm readings with madame bronwyn - know your future or find the answer to any burning questions !! perhaps solve who you might have been in a past life, or why there’s so many sharing your face within the city!

weapons and armour at the smithy - purchase swords, shields, chainmail, anything that speaks to the knight within !!

crystal shop - any magic crystal that speaks to you can be yours here !!

ye olde costume rental - a place to purchase an entire outfit for an immersive experience

make your own potions and spells - a potions class that could result in some real magic if you’re not careful

ye olde arts and crafts - build sand bottles, make your own jewelry, decorate your own shield, etc !!

face painting - who doesn’t love a little extra magic of sparkles and creatures on your face !!

candle makers - watch the masters at work and purchase candles and carved candles as souvenirs !!

~~~~~

CHARACTER RUN STALLS

this is something that is open to all members! if your character would like to work part time at a premade stall, or fully run a new one, please feel free to send the main a message and we will add them to the list linked right here! you’re welcome to add as little or as much detail , giving a name or anything like that !!

~~~~~

THINGS TO DO

outside of some general shopping, there are so many activities going on throughout the faire grounds !! all throughout the faire there are new events, different shows and games made to bring merriment to all who enter!

try your hand at archery down at the field

show off your sword skills in duels, and watch the masters at the shows

axe and knife throwing stalls

jousting competitions

try to pull excalibur from the stone

try your hand at winning a prize from the games stalls

have a go on one of the many carnival rides

visit the ye olde photobooth

visit the different stages for live performances of music, dancing, comedy and fire juggling and sword swallowing

participate in dancing or singing

follow the pirates for adventures throughout the grounds; tavern hopping, shanty singalongs, and more!

visit the mermaid cove

~~~~~

QUICK HOUSEKEEPING :

just the place to go for all of the necessary plotting, posting, & tagging information!

feel free to start plotting & planning right now! you can post your plotting calls, starter calls, musing posts, what your character will be wearing and get your muses ready to attend the ren faire! just like before with our first mini event, this isn’t our typical type of event!

unlike our full events, you DO NOT have to put other threads on hold! as previously stated, this is just something to help kickstart some muse and get the creative juices flowing!

just like before with our first mini event, we will still be offering one free starter per member, not per character! just keep an eye on the main for the start of the faire on the 11th!

please tag your posts with something along the lines of ‘ hwminievent2 ‘ or ‘ hw renn faire ‘ or whatever style you like, just something to indicate which threads are involved in the event and which aren’t!

feel free to share what your characters are wearing, do it in the form of a moodboard or in an edit or even just make a post and describe it!

again, this is a mini event & it is NOT MANDATORY!!

as always, please make sure to have fun & feel free to go wild besties!! we hope that you and your characters find something to enjoy in the renn faire! we cannot wait to see what different ideas you all come up with and cannot wait to see your threads on the dash! please do not hesitate to ask any questions that may arise & let us know if you have any suggestions or need help! with that all said, as always, please like this when you have read it all! ♥

#hw: event #hwminievent2 #hw: admin #hw: ooc

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theressomethinghappeninginparis · 1 year

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I found an article on the paintings, and I also got into the Louvre. I know it sounds strange, but hear me out.

Transcript of the first and second page: First of all the data on the art, which was found in an abandoned monastery with he help of Russian archeologists; Vasiley is located in Prague, yet his name is Russian or Ukrainian which could mean he was in the excavation team. Also, the title confirms that there are indeed 5 paintings with 5 sketches of each- the so called Obscura Engravings. The paintings are supposedly on top of black magic imagery to kind of seal them. There were also painting supplies and books in the remains of the building, but none knew they were in there since they were mentioned in history yet hidden away. It's also no coincidence I think that Brother Obscura- the monk who painted them- was put to rest in Paris. Something tells me he could be in/under the Louvre, couldn't he?

Transcript of the third and fourth page: So. The guy on the phone who was likely Bouchard or not told me if I ever need to use the ID he gave me I shouldn't use the official way in, but rather a less public one. There apparently was a woman talking to him that mentioned to blow up something where she needed a map- he suspects she meant the Louvre. It has to be Lara Croft, no doubt! it has to be her. She's onto something. So the map I have looks like a swer map, it fits exactly the one below the Louvre. So I'll bite the bait and assume he was sincere, so here's my plan:

Enter the Paris sewers close to the museum

Search for markings on the wall since the map is ambigous

Tricky part: slip inside the Louvre and pretend to work there

Find the archeological dig Carvier mentioned (and her office)

Search for Brother Obscura and the Obscura Paintings

What I'll take with me: rain boots, pepper spray, a first aid kit, and a fake ID that could very well be a real one, who knows where Bouchard gets his stuff from. I might have taken money from Rennes place and told my work place I am sick, but this is now more pressuring.

Transcript of the fifth and sixth page: Someone littered the place with corpses and I suspect it has to be...Miss Croft. The sewers were the correct clue, they lead to the cellar of the museum and she has blown a hole into the cellar to enter before me. There are so many photos of mystic symbols, paintings and sketched, I documented that all. There is also a really heavy metal door close to the dig leading...somewhere.

Here is the photos I could take. I was in a hurry and didn't have much time, but here is anything I found somehow important. People were lying on the floor and I didn't touch them. I just passed by and avoided them. It was the yuckiest thing ever and I am impressed to not have faced police yet. On the pcs of the excavation were writings and measurements open I couldn't tie to anything, only once I saw the Lux Veritatis symbol. If the door really leads to a tomb it could be one of them, or the monk's?

That's the most important ones I've taken. I found the office thanks to the signs and here's what I collected. Trust me, it feels like shit digging through a dead person's belongings while having to hurry up.

Transcript of the seventh and eigth page: The door to her office was unlocked. Croft was here, of course, before me. Whatever she took with her I don't know and I can only work with what I have. She has an ancient paper on a second desk, I think she examines her findings there. On the right there are five paintings, probably the Obscura ones. On the left are strange symbols with arrows pointing towards the paintings. I know I suspected the Sanglyph being hidden, and it is divided into five elements. Could these also be hidden in the art, one in each? Through her notes I can assume the LV have hidden them. But why hide the Sanglyph parts? Why not use it...well, do they know how to do that?

On her main desk was information on Brother Obscura and, more importantly, she had a file open with Vasiley's logo, there has to be a link in between all of this, somehow. It said the monk was ordered to paint over the art and then they were called after him. The paintings were also hidden away. So they hide parts of the Sanglyph in the paintings and hide them away...for what?

When I finsihed with her office I went back to the dig and tried to find somethink more in case I overlooked information. There's a bit more strange things I found, I'll take notes as soon as I can. I know I could have searched more thoroughly but I'm afraid of running into the police. They wouldn't believe me if I started with black alchemy and angels. Who would, for real.

#angel of darkness #classic tr #tomb raider #traod #tomb raider series #lara croft #journal #aod #tomb raider angel of darkness

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grace-nakimura · 5 months

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whoops. (2/2)

rating: pg-13 for language and some spicy moments. pairing: gabriel/grace. past malia/gabriel and von glower/gabriel. trigger warnings: pregnancy. mentions of the occult. gabriel and grace have no brain cells between the two. brief mentions of kidnapping. some sexual situations, but nothing graphic. not beta'd. also, i am not a native speaker of uchinaaguchi/ryukyuan, or even japanese. that isn't a trigger warning, just a heads up i'm not cool. summary: eight weeks after the events that took place in rennes-le-château, grace finds her hopes of being a big damn hero put on a hold. also known as, no one is going to write it, jane has left us on read about it, so i'm going to do it.

twenty-eight weeks.

Grace had expected a heated argument, or a noncommittal shrug, or even him telling her she was the worst sort of person to ever walk on the earth. Sometimes she felt that way. A lot of times she felt that way. Those were the times when she wished she had gone through with making an appointment for that clinic Aretta had told her about, or even taken more of an interest in the various adoption agencies she investigated. What happened was worse.

“Is it mine?” He had asked, staring at the bump known as Whoops for a good long while, and when Grace nodded, he started to nod, too. “Right. Well, damn, Gracie. You keepin’ it?”

“Her,” but there was no bite to Grace’s tone as they had stood in front of that roaring fire. Gerde had excused herself to give them privacy and they stood there, about five feet apart, both too insecure to meet each other’s eyes. “I wanted to tell you in person. I, um, I don’t want anything, or I don’t want to make you do anything...”

He nodded. He had been doing that a lot. “No, no, I get it,” even if Grace had a suspicion he might not. “I do.” He said again, as if he could read her mind, and then, “well, um, your room is still yours. Nice to see you, Grace.”

And he left. He turned around and left.

Then Grace broke down in tears.

For the past few weeks, she had been crying over anything, and it didn’t help Gabriel spent more time in his room than around her, and when he was around her, he walked on eggshells and avoided her stomach as if it were the plague. As if her womb was a gorgon and if those green eyes of his so much look at it, he would turn into stone.

“Have you told your parents yet?” Aretta had asked over the phone. Grace was an early riser and, while it was probably nightfall in Mumbai or later, Aretta still called as she promised. “Or are you really waiting for the baby to be born and then tell them?”

“It’s a good plan!” Grace defended.

“You’re going to be a mother,” Aretta scolded, “wouldn’t you want Whoops to be able to tell you anything?”

Fine, that was true, “I will tell them.” Aretta snorted. “I will! I told Gabriel, didn’t I?”

“Do you want a medal?”

“Shut up,” but Grace had to huff out a laugh regardless, reclining against the plush bed. It was true. Nothing changed. Cleaned, sure, and dusted, but everything was how she left it. “I think me telling him is kinda like his worst nightmare.”

“He’s only had, what? Four weeks? You’ve had six months, Grace.” Aretta reminded her, just like Gerde had reminded her, and just like Grace reminded herself when her hormones made her spend her night looking out the window to the expanse of snow-covered trees and sob like some heartbroken woman in an Opera. “Are you going to give birth there?”

“Kinda have to,” Grace responded, placing a hand over her bump. Her Whoops. Her Whoops began to flutter as she always did when she heard her voice. “Gerde is helping me find an OBGYN. Probably travel to Munich for one.”

“No more midwives?”

Grace made a face, “More I read about giving birth, more from what I’ve learned in school, I keep hearing about things that could go wrong—”

“It’s your choice,” Aretta reminded her as she always did, “but do not allow fear to ruin your joy. That’s what my mother told my sister when she gave birth.”

“And?”

“And my sister had to have a cesarian. Her baby boy was twelve pounds, and even worse than that,” Aretta snickered, “he was a Cancer.”

Grace got ready for the day, which was more like noon, since Whoops kept her up all night deciding to make good use of the indoor plumbing Gabriel had installed. Sometimes she still had awful heartburn—told Gerde she might give her the middle name of Heartburn in honor of it—but that sort of passed. Still, she was lucky in the fact she hadn’t had to deal with nausea as much as other expectant mothers had to. A win was a win.

Teeth brushed, hair in another side braid because, yes, she had yet to get it cut, with a cozy sweater underneath her maternity overalls. The overalls covered her chest area, or at least diverted attention to her stomach area, because something else was changing even more drastically than her bump.

Her breast. Were. Huge.

Sore—Gerde bought her some cream to prevent irritation—but huge. And standing in the ensuite, she turned to the side and gave herself a moment to appreciate it. At first, during her earlier months, it was horrifying, but now?

She kind of enjoyed it. Mostly, because she knew they wouldn’t be there forever. Breasts aren’t everything, but if her out-of-whack hormones allowed her to feel giddy about something as silly as this, she was going to enjoy it for while it lasted.

Grace kept her high spirits as she made her way out of her room, even having a pep in her waddle—she was waddling now—until she ran smack into Gabriel.

“Shit,” he swore under his breath, glancing down at her bump and swearing again, as if embarrassed for using crass language in front of a fetus. “I mean, um, are you okay?”

He was treating her just like how he treated her after they slept together: fragile. Awkward.

It’s only been a few weeks for him, she reminded herself. Swallowing a lump in her throat, Grace decided today would be the day they would have a conversation.

Well, she really didn’t want today to be the day, but they ran into each other, and neither of them had anything to do...

“We need to talk.”

“Kinda are, Gracie.”

At her deadpan expression he relented, and suddenly she was in his study where they stood six feet apart just like the night by the fire, staring anywhere but each other.

“Do you hate me?”

It came out without thinking, but as soon as it did, she found she needed to know.

“Where’d ya get an idea like that?” he asked, looking at her like she grew two heads.

She felt her eyes sting and, closing them tightly, she fought the urge not to burst into tears. “Do you?”

“Hell no,” and he almost sounded offended she’d think such a thing. “Hated that you left. Hated that I probably drove you to leave. Hated that I ruined my friendship ‘cause I wasn’t thinkin’, but I could never hate you, Grace.”

Oh, that did it, that made her fall on the chair in front of his desk, facing the back of his typewriter—he wasn’t fucking Hemingway; he could use a PC like the rest of the world!—and let out a loud sob. “You don’t want this,” and it came out, her free hands motioning to her bump. You don’t want me. You never wanted me, was another thought, but she pushed it away. That wasn’t the point of this discussion. This wasn’t about Grace’s feelings about an unrequited crush; it was about Whoops. “And I came here—I just wanted to tell you—I don’t expect anything—and you won’t look at me!” An irritated huff, before she finally looked up at his face, her own crumbling, “Is it because I’m fat?”

At that, Gabriel laughed. He let out a joyful, if not surprised, laugh where his whole-body shook. There was no malice in that laugh. In fact, it sounded like he needed a good laugh for quite a while, and she gave it to him. “Oh, Gracie, you’re somethin’ else,” he said with a fondness that made her cheeks redden even more. He bent down, wincing as he did, to be eye to eye with her. “I don’t hate you, Grace. I missed you.”

There was something else, too, but Grace wasn’t going to push. They were talking and she didn’t want to jeopardize that.

Sniffling. “I missed you, too,” she may be stubborn and prideful, but she was also honest. Maybe not so much to herself, but she liked to think she was getting better at it. “You didn’t make me leave. Not really, anyway,” she owed him that much. With the long sigh he let out, and how his body began to relax, even as he crouched to look at her, she had a feeling he let go of something somewhat significant. At least, when it came to her. “I wanted to...”

“Be a big damn hero,” he said, fondness in every syllable, and it made her heart skip a beat.

“Life told me I needed to wait,” Grace said dryly, indicating to her bump. “Whoops decided she needed to beat me to it.”

Gabriel made a face. “Don’t name her Whoops.”

“It’s a good name.”

“And what’s her middle name gonna be? Daisy?”

“No,” Grace sat up, no longer sniffling, “Heartburn.”

This time, they laughed together.

Somehow, they made it on the floor, leaning against the wall, and they just talked. Bantered like they used to before everything. Before supernatural destinies, before romantic feelings, before... everything. Before Whoops.

“I don’t know if I’m the sorta guy she needs,” Gabriel confessed after a while. “My own daddy died when I was eight, Gracie. His daddy died ‘round the same time. I saw how that tore Gran up. It tore me up, even if I can’t really remember him that well.”

Grace had nothing to say to that. She just sat there, listening.

And then, “do you even want me in her life?”

“That’s up to you,” Grace said, “but it’d be nice not having to face my parents alone.” He made a face, but Grace continued. “It takes two, pal, and if I have to face my parents, then you’re coming along with me.”

“That reminds me,” realization dawned on him just then as his eyes widen, “I’ve gotta tell Gran.”

Another pause.

“We can always wait ‘til Whoops is born—”

“How ‘bout Gabirelle?”

“—and neither your Gran nor my parents can be mad at us if we hide behind a baby,” she continued over him, still proud of her sound reasoning. And then, “not Gabrielle.”

“It’s better than callin’ her Whoops.” Gabriel defended.

Grace snorted. “Gerde and I are going into Munich tomorrow to meet with an OBGYN.” Self-consciously, she chewed her bottom lip. “You could come if you wanted?”

He nodded and pulled her into a side hug. She forgot how much she liked his hugs. Resting her head against his shoulder, she cuddled into him, or as much as her bump allowed. “I don’t think I’m what she needs, what you need, but I wanna at least try. Gran raised me better.”

Grace snorted.

“I said she raised me better,” he remarked playfully, “not that I always listened.”

“You’re an ass,” she agreed, “but you’re a good guy deep down.”

“Well, shucks, Gracie, it’s almost like you care!”

I do, she thought. I just wish I told you that more often.

thirty-one weeks.

She still hadn’t told her parents yet.

He still hadn’t told his Gran yet.

No one is surprised. Annoyed, but not surprised.

While that was unchanged, everything else began to find some sort of flow; the two were rekindling their friendship, which was a huge step. She could dream of something more than all she wanted, and often did, but the bigger she grew the more she remembered that this wasn’t about her. It was about Whoops. Regardless of her feelings for him, and regardless of his lack of feelings for her, it was about the future of Whoops.

Wow. Maybe she needed a name other than Whoops.

While she never intended to stay in Germany, international travel was limited after twenty-eight weeks, somehow around her seventh month she found herself and Gerde taking on refurnishing the nursery. “We were going to turn it into another guest room, or even an armory,” Gerde confessed, huffing an errant strand of golden curls from her face as she looked at the instructions to assemble the crib. The old one, while quaint, didn’t seem very comfortable. There hadn’t been a child in the castle for more than a few decades, after all. “It’s a good thing we didn’t. Wait. I think that is supposed to go the other way.”

Grace made a face, kneeling on her knees, mostly because days of her being able to crouch, less stand without any help, were long gone. She had all but given up shaving. “That’s what it looked like in the photo?”

A small cradle—a moses basket, as the English would call it—was already set up in her room. It was Gabriel’s suggestion, hidden as an off-handed comment, about the nursery. He was in Scotland for a job. While she wanted to join him this time, all things considered, he flat out said no. “’Sides, no one will let you fly anyway.”

“Could drive,” but even as hard-headed as Grace was, that argument fell flat.

“When you gotta piss every five seconds?” Oh, he had to needle her because he won, and she knew it. “I’ll use my laptop and you can help research here. I mean it, Gracie. Not for me, but Whoops.” And then he made a face, “We gotta stop callin’ her Whoops.”

Gerde brought her back to the present when she tried to steady the legs of the crib, only for the half-assembled furniture to crumble like a house of cards. “Maybe we could hire someone?”

Grace considered it for a moment. She also considered the thought, and it was ridiculous, of watching Gabriel try to put a crib together. Hell, even Mosley and Gabriel, Dumb and Dumber, taking a hand at it. It made her laugh, which was an awful idea, because now she needed to pee.

“Gerde?”

“Hm?”

“Can you help me stand?” She had wet on herself a few times already, much to her embarrassment, but Gerde took it with a grace that, while she was named after it, Grace did not possess.

For the past few weeks since Gabriel had been gone been like this: wake up. Pee. Eat. Pee. Try to finish the nursery. Pee. Make the hour worth driving to Munich for her appointment. Pee. Drive back after eating somewhere. Pee at the restaurant. The bigger she became the more she had to pee. When she told Gabriel this when he called to check in, he only laughed. They made it to town, mostly to enjoy how nice the May weather felt compared to how cold March was.

They uploaded evidence on SYDNEY and exchanged e-mails back-to-back. Apparently, some Scottish locals have gone missing, which was a problem, but when a tourist child went missing it was a bigger problem, especially when that tourist was a prominent English politician.

A little girl, aged four, had been missing for three days when Gabriel arrived. Taken from a local park as if she vanished out of thin air.

_Never thought about kids before._ Gabriel had written. _Now *I’m* going to have a little girl. It kind of hits too close to home, Grace. Now it’s all I think about._

_Whoops is fine, Gabe. I get it, but that little girl isn’t going to be found if you spend all your time worrying about hypotheticals._

_Doesn’t stop me from thinking about it. Look, I uploaded a list of suspects, so just. Do your thing. Gotta go._

_Don’t be stupid._

Sent.

And then she regretted it.

Please don’t let him take that as a challenge, she asked the Universe.

And after eating dinner—peeing, too, of course, thanks Whoops—Gerde would sit with Grace and continue to scour tome after tome. With a furrowed brow, and from all the notes she’d written on her notepad as well as the evidence uploaded on SYDNEY, she asked, “Could it be witches?”

Gerde bit her lip in consideration. “Maybe,” she allowed, “but they aren’t known to be violent, or even malicious. They are very, um, what is a good word for it—docile? And most of them are human, too.”

“Aren’t humans usually the worst kind of monsters?” Grace asked with a single raise of her brow.

“Don’t listen to her, Whoops,” Gerde snickered, placing a hand on the bump. Gerde was one of the few people who were allowed to touch her bump without asking. Not that it stopped strangers in town, or even in Munich, from doing so. “There are plenty of good humans in the world. Don’t be fatalistic like your parents.”

That night, lying on her bed and looking at the ceiling, she felt her daughter move around. Not kicking. No, not really, she was probably sleeping. Which meant she should be sleeping.

“Not all of us are bad, Whoops,” she eventually told the bump, “Take your dad for instance? He’s a good guy. A real jerk with a capital J, but a good guy.” He was walking on eggshells with the prospect of fatherhood, but she didn’t blame him. Don’t know how to be a daddy given I don’t remember my own, he had told her once, long ago, when he was just her annoying employer who lived solely on coffee and meaningless one-night stands in New Orleans.

“No matter what happens,” because Grace knew she had to be realistic. She wouldn’t live here and playhouse forever. She knew she had to tell her parents. Not only that, but she knew she had a life to live without him. Having a life with him would be wonderful and, if he wanted to be in their daughter’s life, they would make it work, but motherhood did not mean she had to ignore her own dreams. She could continue studying with Chadral, with Aretta, in Mumbai; she could go back to school and get a Masters. Maybe even work for a Doctorate. It would be difficult, but so was anything worth it in life. One of the things her dad always drilled into her head: nothing that really mattered ever came easy. “I’m promising you this: you’re gonna have the best life. I know I’m bullheaded, that I’m unyielding, but regardless, I promise you that I’m gonna love the hell out of you. We’re gonna make this work, capishe? I’ll do right by you.”

And for the first time, ever, Grace didn’t just feel a flutter. She felt a pulse beneath her hands. Then another, and another, and a surprised laugh echoed across the bedroom causing an echo.

Of course, the moment ended when she ended up flailing out of bed to go pee.

thirty-five weeks.

It turned out the case was something everyone, from Gabriel, to Gerde, and even herself found it hard to swallow. The child was never missing; she was intended to be sacrificed by the girl’s own father. Apparently, he felt the only way to be elected as Prime Minister was to offer up his daughter.

It was a Witch, but it also turned out it was Witches—White Witches—that saved the day, too.

“They have him in custody,” Gabriel had told her over the phone, bitterly. “He should be six feet under.”

Grace agreed, personally, and yet, “You did the right thing.” Well, from the reports he had knocked the man out cold before calling Scotland Yard, but no one could really blame him. “Is the kid safe?”

A bone-weary sigh escapes from the other end of the receiver. While sometimes he had the same devil-may-care look on life, there were other times when it seemed like he was Atlas keeping the world afloat. “She’s with her grandparents. The wife was killed when she found out...” A huff. “I’m getting' real tired of all this death, Gracie.”

Whoops pressed her foot against her ribs as if saying, tell pops I agree! “Come back soon, Knight.”

“Later, Grace.”

That was days ago. As soon as Gabriel returned to Schloss Ritter, he holed himself up in his study. Grace had given him space—mostly on Gerde’s insistence in the guise of, think of the baby—and let him stew over what he needed to. She had only seen him this upset after Malia Gedde.

Well, Von Glower, too, if she remembered right.

He managed to bounce back, or he seemed to, or maybe she was just so focused on herself she didn’t pay much attention? She could be such an ass. She always knew she wasn’t perfect. She took up all those oil painting classes, Tai-Chi, and read countless self-help books because she knew she wasn’t perfect.

Malia was probably the first time Gabriel fell in love, and she died; Von Glower, from the bits and pieces she put together, could’ve been a great love, but Gabriel couldn’t live with the possibility of hurting innocent people, and the baron died for it. She was just an assistant-turned-unlikely-mother-of-the-Ritter-heir, but even she left him.

Grace didn’t really regret leaving him, but she only regretted not telling him she was, and at least offering a goodbye.

After six days of his self-imposed isolation, Grace came into his study to find him slouched over the typewriter—why couldn’t he just use the laptop?—with his head in his hands.

Grace sniffed the air and made a face, “Have you showered yet?”

“Go away, Grace.”

She ignored him and waddled into the study, carrying tray of bread and cheese. “Too bad.” She set the tray down on his desk and, nudging him with her hand, pointed to the plate. “Eat.”

“Grace.”

His voice tried to be stern, but it came out more petulant than anything.

Well, good time as any to prepare for motherhood, she guessed, so with one hand on her hip and the other pointing to the food, “Eat, Knight.”

“Not hungry.”

“Didn’t ask if you were.”

“Jesus, do ya gotta—”

“—look like nice Ikea furniture that nags?” She finished for him smartly, “I guess I do.”

And she plopped on the sofa in the room, which meant she was staying, because there was no way, with how her center of gravity was nonexistent, she could pop up like she used to. He finally had taken his head from his hands to stare at her. She stared back, crossing her arms over her chest, glaring.

“Why are you here, Grace?”

Why do you care, Grace?

She wanted to scream, isn’t it obvious? She wanted to throw up her hands and remind him about their predicament, about how she cared about him, about how she loved him! And then she remembered—she never really said as much before. She remembered when it hit her like a ton of bricks, that she loved him more than she envied him, while he laid there in pain, fighting the wolf curse with every inch of his life. She remembered thinking, I never want to see him hurt like this again, as she stroked his hair.

Not the hair, Gracie.

He was an open wound; might as well even the field and be vulnerable too.

“I love you,” and it was the first time she ever said it. He hitched a breath, and it caused her to wince, but she barreled through. “I get it, you know, that I’m bad at showing it, and I haven’t been the best—I'm a work in progress, okay? I do. I love you. Not just because of,” her hands waved toward the large bump hidden under her sun dress, because even overalls were a bit too much hassle to put on as she went into her last two months, “her, either. And I know you’ll never—I get it.”

His face began to soften, “Grace...”

But she raised her hand to stop him, “I get it, Gabe. I’m...a lot. I nag. I argue. I’m a freaking bull. I’m also humongous,” she didn’t even want to mention her breasts. It went from horror to delight, and now they just ache and hurt. “Don’t lie. I am. Even before—look, what I’m saying is, that I get it, you will never feel that way about me, but that doesn’t stop me from loving you anyway. From caring about you. That’s why.”

“Anythin’ else?”

Grace lowered her eyes and shook her head, placing her hands on her stomach to stroke the large bump almost to self-soothe. It was better for it to be all out on the table. She just hoped he wouldn’t walk on eggshells around her anymore. If she had the ability to stand by herself and not immediately fall back on the couch—which happened far too often for her liking—she would’ve left it at that.

She didn’t notice him move from the chair to sit beside her until she felt the sofa dip, his calloused fingers tilting her head up to look him in the eye, “What are you—?”

“Hush,” and he pressed his lips to hers.

The kiss was languid, unhurried, and slow; the peaceful rising and falling of an ocean tide, or two puzzle pieces finally sliding perfectly in place. It was everything that Keats wrote about, and the Beatles sang about. She opened her mouth the smallest bit and he dived in greedily, swallowing her sharp gasp, and pressed her closer, or, as close as she could be.

He was tender that night, too. She remembered how he eased himself in her bed, waking her up, and it was almost as if the two were magnets being pulled toward one another. In her fantasies prior, she always assumed it would’ve been dirty, raw, fast with a lot of sweat and even the occasional filthy words passing his lips. It wasn’t. There was hunger and passion—desperation—but also a sense of worship. It was almost as if it wasn’t just sex.

Well, she had thought that, anyway, until he had woken up and everything shattered.

This was the same; when she broke the kiss to breathe, he began to pepper almost butterfly kisses toward her neck, breathing in her skin, as his hands began to wander downward.

She’s had...urges. Very, very vibrant urges for the past few months. She was perfectly fine taking care of the urges herself, but as soon as she struggled to bend down, she struggled to... well, that. Which was a shame, because the other times were probably the best she ever had.

Grace felt those same urges bubbling up, especially when his hand softly traced her breast, causing her to let out a deep moan. Thank God for his experience, because she had been with too many men who thought grabbing her breast and squeezing them like a stress ball was sexy. Besides, if he did that, it would probably hurt.

“Don’t have to do much, huh?” She could feel his cocky smile as he snickered against her neck, now softly nipping, as his fingers gently caress her breast.

“Stuff it, Knight!”

“I thought I already did!”

Her brain knew he should stop. They should stop. Well, she wasn’t doing much, she only canted her head to the side to give him better access, and her hands were in fists by her sides as her chest heaved in a rapid staccato as his fingers teased her breasts, and soon softly, carefully, drawing circles around her nipples. She was about to say something, but as soon as his hand began to make its way down the large expanse of her stomach, Whoops beat her to it.

He nearly jumped out of his skin; a firm kick underneath his palm. “Holy—,” but before he could pry it away, probably thinking it was faux pas for him to feel it, she kept his hand where it was. Again, Whoops kicked, fully awake, and bringing her parents back to a sobering reality. “Well, hey there, sweetheart, you got my attention alright.” There was a sort of boyish amazement in those green eyes of his, his strawberry blond hair greasy—he really needed a shower—as it hung in his face, much like the jeans and crumpled shirt he wore that probably had stains on it. That smile, though, even throughout the smell of body odor and possibly Jack and Coke, made him even more handsome. Whoops kicked again, earning a bright and bubbling laugh from Gabriel, “Jesus. Does that hurt?”

Grace shrugged. “Sometimes,” especially at night when she wanted to find a comfortable spot to sleep and Whoops decided to be a Gymnast instead. “I can’t be too mad at her. It’s probably starting to get a little cramped.”

He whistles through his teeth, “Gonna be here before we know it.”

“Mmm,” she agreed, suddenly too tired to do much. “You know what you need to do in the meantime?”

“Hmm?”

“Eat,” she said, nodding to the tray that still sat on his desk, and then, “also shower. First, eat.” A pause. “Actually, first, help me up. I need to pee.”

thirty-eights weeks.

Grace felt awful.

Not just physically—which, yeah, she did; June decided to be especially stifling in Rittersberg, and all she had the energy for was, well, sleeping and eating—but mentally. Turned out, telling her very traditional, very proud—but loving—parents that their only daughter was unmarried and pregnant? That she was living with the father of said baby—they weren’t amused when she called her Whoops—when they weren’t official? Not good.

A slew of lectures in Uchinaguchi by her mother; nothing but stony silence by her father, who was normally far more loquacious of the two, only spoke of his deep displeasure.

The worst thing was, it wasn’t even her pregnancy that had them so disappointed—she wasn’t naïve to know it wasn’t the only thing, anyway—but because she waited so long to tell them.

“How would you feel if your child did this to you?” Her mother asked over the phone.

“Ayaa, please—”

“Chu uyamee ru duu uyamee!” Damn. If you respect others, they will respect you. How can someone make her feel three when she was thirty? “Have we not respected you? Supported you?”

And, according to Gabriel, the talk with his grandmother wasn’t as harsh, but it hit him where it hurt. After all, that was his girl.

“How’d it go?”

He made a face as if he were in pain. “Said that she was disappointed but loved me anyway. Misses me. She says you oughta’ call her, too.”

“Only if you call my parents.”

She had called, of course, but instead of a lecture she only got questions about—how she felt, how the baby was, if she thought of any names, but not once did she sound stern or even sad. Kind.

Which, of course, made her a sobbing mess.

As for her and Gabriel? Complicated. New. Did everything backwards, but neither of them was traditional. That was fine. It was nineteen-ninety-nine for pete’s sake! They did have a talk that wasn’t in his study, but her room, underneath her covers, but other than that they kept things PG. Somewhat. Well, if anything higher that happened—and it rarely did—they would have to improvise, which led to more laughter than getting off.

Most nights they just lay under her covers, staring at her, and they talk about...things. Not their feelings, or the future, but just things. Sometimes they reminisce about New Orleans. He missed it. She missed it. Missed it more than Manhattan. Honestly, New Orleans felt more like a home than Manhattan, and since she was only three when her parents took her to the states, she had no memory of Japan. She’d like to go back someday, sure, and she’d like to take Whoops with her, but when she thought of home, she thought of St. Geroge’s Books.

“I don’t wanna mess this up,” he confessed, his jaw tightening as he swallowed, resting against one of the pillows. Her back was to him, her body spooning the body pillow Gerde bought for her, but at a soft nudge, she craned her head around to acknowledge him. “No idea what I’m doin’, and I don’t know if I can be the man, the man you want me to be, or what she needs me to be...”

When she told him she didn’t want him to be anyone else, just him, he gave a rueful smile. “Maybe I don’t know if I can be the man I wanna be?” He corrected.

“Think I don’t wonder the same thing about me?” She asked. “I’m not asking you to marry me, Gabriel.” Going backward, maybe, but while she loved him, she wasn’t quite ready to say I do just yet. The way he visibly relaxed, neither was he. “Do you love me, though?”

“If I didn’t,” he began to misquote, but the sentiment was there all the same. “I might be able to talk about it more.”

Rolling over with more energy than she had in weeks, the body pillow was ignored as she cupped his face in her hands and kissed him. “Austen?” She teased during the playful nips, or how the fact his neck vibrated as he growled while she nipped at his jawline. “Could’ve sworn you were more of a Wuthering Heights guy.”

“Found out quickly in school, girls liked Jane Austen,” he snickered the possessive nip at his neck, all the while doing his best to situate his body to accommodate the bump between them. “Mean it, though,” he said, sobering a little bit as he reached for her hand to lay it on his chest. And then after a few moments, when they just laid there, he spoke: “Rebecca.”

“Hmm?”

“I, um,” he swallowed, causing his adam’s apple to bob, “I wanna—I would like—to name her Rebecca. After Gran.”

“Are you trying to earn brownie points when you see your grandma next?”

“Maybe,” but his smile was almost shy. “If you don’t like it, or if you wanna name her somethin’ else—long as it ain’t Whoops—then that’s fine, too, but...”

“I like it.”

An hour later, Grace’s water broke.

two days old.

She was here. On the ides of June, in the last year of the millennium, Whoops Heartburn Nakimura—or, legally, Rebecca Chiyo Knight, because that was the name of his parents, the name his grandmother took when she married his grandfather—decided the hour when she would be named something other than Whoops, would be the exact moment she would begin her journey to the outside of the womb. Ten hours. From the hour's drive to the Munich hospital to being wheeled back to a hospital room, to the six hours waiting to be fully dilated, to the three hours of pushing and somehow forgetting everything she learned in the Lamaze classes she had taken, Whoops was finally here.

And Whoops wasn’t very happy about the fact she wasn’t in a place that was warm, dark, where she was fed whenever she wanted and got to do whatever she wanted; instead all she saw were the bright overhead lights, felt the cold and sterile room, and the last thing she even thought about was food when she curled her fists in anger as the nurse laid the baby, all washed up, on her bare chest.

Didn’t notice the after birth. After pushing something the size of a watermelon out of something the size of a lemon, well, it nothing compared. She just held the angry infant close to her as her vision began to blur.

She wasn't crying; it was allergies. Gabriel, who was also misty eyed and mystified, said the same.

Two days later they were discharged. They had used Gerde’s car, seeing as how a car seat wouldn’t be ideal on one of Gabriel’s bikes, and drove twenty below the limit the entire way. Grace would’ve teased him, if not for the fact she kept looking over her shoulder to the newborn who only snored softly, fists bunched up near her face, a baby cap to cover her full head of thick raven hair.

Something told Grace she’d still have Gabriel’s eyes.

When she mentioned it, Gabriel huffed out a laugh, “That’ll be somethin’. Gran always said I got my eyes from my mama.” And then, with a sobering face as the light snoring abruptly stopped, panic set in. “Is she okay?”

Grace, just as panicked, checked behind her for the second time. The light snoring resumed, and both parents sighed with relief.

The anxiety didn’t stop there.

Whoops—or Bex, as Gabriel called her—slept most of the day. When she woke up, it was really to eat, shit or pee, stare, and sleep some more. Feeding was...eventful. Hurt. They had told her a bottle was fine, too, but Grace was nothing if not stubborn. “I feel like a cow,” she commented bitterly to herself.

It was at that moment, feeding the infant, Gabe had moseyed into her room. She had been propped up with a bunch of pillows and dressed in pajamas that made feeding easily accessible. He carried a tray of food for the both of them. Sausage, cheese, and bread—a delicacy, Grace thought bitterly, but with how her own stomach rumbled she wasn’t so ungrateful not to accept it.

“Might as well have a chance to eat,” he suggested with a shrug, “while our Bex here is eatin’.”

“Can you believe we’re actually parents?” And when she turned to notice how he snickered, shaking his head, she laughed too. When the suckling ended, Grace placed the baby carefully to lay on her chest as she gently patted her back. “I’m happy, but...”

“Scared shitless?” He offered, sitting beside her as he popped a piece of bread in his mouth, swallowing. “Ain’t alone there, sweetheart. I thought vampires, voodoo spirits, and werewolves were hard? Raisin’ a human being probably is gonna make ‘em seem like a walk in the park.”

Grace snorted, both at his words and the loud burp Whoops let out, in agreement. “Mostly happy,” she added shyly, passing the infant to her father who, while not the most comfortable holding her, accepted her in his arms, nonetheless.

For a moment he cradled the sleeping infant to his chest, just looking at her, while Grace all but devoured her food. It may be bland for her tastes, but it was leagues better than what they served her at the hospital. “Are you goin’ back to India, or school?” He asked after a moment.

It was a fair question. She prepared to go, really, and even prepared a way for them to maybe co-parent even if they were in different countries, or even continents, but...

That was before.

“I don’t want you to go,” he said, and it reminded Grace how she had stood beside him on that bridge as she leaned her head against his shoulder. “I meant it, what I told you before, you know, how I felt. I also know...I also know you have your own life, I get it, be your own damn hero and all.” He shifted when Whoops, or Bex, began to whimper, placing the infant to lay on his chest instead. Damn. Turned out that she was her mother’s daughter after all. “What I’m tryin’ to say is, um, if you gotta go, I get it, but I don’t like it.”

They were still new. Old, but new. They had done everything backward—he hadn’t even taken her out on a date—but there was time enough for that later. She would be lying if she said she didn’t want to continue her training, or even go back to school because she’d become too restless if she didn’t. Maybe even resentful.

That didn’t mean she couldn’t have those adventures with him, just like he shared his adventures with her.

The light snoring of the baby reminded her of another person, their joint adventure that was never planned, but obviously that neither regret.

“I’m in this if you are, Knight,” she commented with a sly grin as she scooted near him, noticing how his brows wiggled playfully, any sort of moroseness gone. And if it wasn’t gone, it was momentarily forgotten, or at least pushed down. He was more complex than the womanizer she pegged him as when she interviewed for the job so long ago. “Probably should finish the nursery before she outgrows the bassinette.”

It seemed as if all the tension, besides the nerves he got from holding the baby due to the fact he hadn’t held many in his life, seemed to ease out of him. Placing a kiss on the soft spot on the infant’s head, he began to rub circles on her back. He might not be comfortable yet holding her, or his—their—daughter, but that didn’t erase any sort of joy he felt doing so.

They might fizzle out like a pop that was left open, or they might not. One of them might go six feet under before their daughter hit double digits, or they might not. And Whoops—fine, Rebecca—might follow in the family business, even if she had mixed feelings about it and had a hunch Gabriel felt the same, or maybe not.

It didn’t matter. Not now.

“Could’ve named her Fuji,” came the sly tone after a moment, and Grace gave a low groan, which only goaded him further. “After all, both of you just melted—”

“Be glad you’re holding a baby, Knight.”

#myfic #gk #otp: if i loved you less; i might be able to talk about it more #gabriel knight #grace nakimura #okay this was semi self indulgent but i held myself back so much to make this slightly more canon-ish be proud #* whoops

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starryflix · 1 year

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An idea of the future

You know, the future has always quite scared me. I think because so much happened across the years it has become rather difficult to look out and plan ahead for a few years because I am so used to life throwing me a curveball every once so often. Now that I am 20 I think I finally am seeing something ahead of me that is somewhat steady. Steady and achievable.

I think the most interesting thing is that across the couple of months and the new environments I have found myself in people keep giving me the exact same idea as I personally have of my future. And it is rather interesting to see how close me and my best friend can get to each other's idea of the future without ever really talking about it in the first place. We tend to be on one line a lot regardless even if we haven't seen each other for a long while we still manage to have the same incentives and same ways of parroting.

It was good to talk to them about the future and ridiculously heartwarming and important to me to hear that they see themselves in my future as much as I see me in theirs. That hasn't always been the case for me and it was a silent reassurance that no matter what we will stay friends. Modern technology helps a lot but they also said that if I were to emigrate they'd send me letters with little trinkets they find everywhere that remind them of me and I'd send them back dried flowers and small stones found on a beach together with the letter.

I think that the one thing I have heard the most about what people envision me to do is to become a writer, and if that doesn't sustain me enough I'd have a teaching job on the side. They also all tell me I'd live in a small town, close to nature.

And I very much agree.

Me and my best friend tend to speak in colours and in nature scenes, people have certain feels and we communicate those by means of colours and scenes. I have synaesthesia when it comes to feelings and colours and by extent people have colours. Renn has always been ridiculously good at figuring out my feelings when I couldn't put them into words and described them as colours. I think it might partially be the fact we are both neurodivergent.

I am going off in many tangents, the tl;dr of this story is that while I have always been rather scared of making plans for the future or dreaming of a fantasy that is perhaps not within reach this is more and more seeming like a clear and achievable picture and I am just simply not used to that. Like I am not to so many things that maybe should feel normal. Although I think my entire generation is quite cautious when it comes to a future mainly because of all the ways the world has been going.

I think I'd like escaping to a small cottage on top of a cliffside, a small town not too far away and a lighthouse shining in the distance with a dog and two cats. Writing books, teaching kids and perhaps accidentally taking a few with problems under my wing. It seems like it is something I was always meant to do. So maybe.

One thing is abundantly getting clearer; I don't think I want to stay in the Netherlands. It's too busy here, too full, too crowded with the impending doom of rising sea levels on top of it. My dad told me not to be too pessimistic but I have trouble seeing my future in this rushed country with nearly 18 million people. It just doesn't suit me.

I hope my health issues just won't get in the way of being able to emigrate.

I'd likely end up in a Celtic country regardless, always had a weird affinity for them.

The scene I would be or would be living in would be described somewhere along these lines:

okay so, imagine a slightly unruly sea, it's windy but not cold, a morning fresh around dawn, too dark to actually be considered light but the stars have gone away. It's a somewhat secluded beach, small patch of meadow with deers on one side that changes slowly into dense woods and rocky and grey cliffs on the other side, the rocks the kind people climb on. The sand is leaning towards a white-ish colour and there's a very small pier where you can sit and stick your feet in the water. It's quite the way from the small town however the lighthouse is close by and the outline visible within the dark grey air. On top of the cliffs stands a small dark wooden cottage, cluttered with creative stuff and books everywhere, a half handwritten letter with some dried flowers on the desk. Paintings drying beside the kitchen sink. Besides the desk stands a shelf that displays a variety of mismatched trinkets; all send to me by best friend. There's an old wooden chair outside on the porch, a golden retriever dog and two cats lazing about. Dawn but one after a night fuelled with insomnia, a sleepy and calm morning.

#Felix' blog (a collection tag)#personal #thoughts #future

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mediocre-writerr · 1 year

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a mediocre 2k party!!

2031 FRIENDS!! Y’ALL ARE AMAZING! If you want to participate in this little party, i have a variety of prompts based off lyrics from my favorite songs for you to choose from. you could choose one of the prompts and create a scenario out of it or just have me quote it in the blurb, up to you! also lmk if you want angst, fluff, or nsfw. when you request through my inbox please note that it is for the mediocre 2k party and what character you would like it to be written for. for those of you don’t know these are the characters i am currently writing for: criminal minds: jennifer jareau, emily prentiss, euphoria: cassie howard, lexi howard, maddy perez, mcu: kate bishop, natasha romanoff, wanda maximoff, you: love quinn, guinevere beck

prompt lists:

“but all the we are is all that we’ll ever be, cause he’s the one waiting at home” - (smoke slow, joshua bassett)

“i’ll be fine for tonight with you by my side, but don’t you know you’re my lifeline) - (lifeline, joshua bassett)

“something keeps me holding on to nothing” - (haunted, taylor swift)

“when i told you ‘i’m fine’, you were lied to” - (mess it up, gracie abrams)

“i’ll be your summer sun forever” - (forever winter, taylor swift)

“nothing to say, when everything gets in the way” - (as it was, harry styles)

“i know heaven’s a thing, i go there when you touch me” - (false god, taylor swift)

“you’re a crisis of my faith” - (would’ve, could’ve, should’ve, taylor swift)

“but you had no problem leaving, now i’m the one to feel it” - (friend, gracie abrams)

“i still love you, i promise” - (i miss you, i’m sorry, gracie abrams)

“please don’t ever become a stranger, whose laugh i could recognize anywhere” - (new year’s day, taylor swift)

“i once believed love would be burning red, but it’s golden” - (daylight, taylor swift)

“and i need you sometimes, we’ll be alright” - (feels like, gracie abrams)

“i miss the shape of your lips” - (to be so lonely, harry styles)

“from strangers to lovers to enemies” - (in the kitchen, renne rapp)

“so i’ll leave before you go, cause there’s no tears when its my fault” - (let the grass grow, ruel)

“she could be perfect, but the problem is, she’ll never be you) - (somebody’s nobody, alexander 23)

“call me on your way home, don’t matter the time” - (on your way home, patrick droney)

“sacred new beginnings that became my religion” - (cornelia street, taylor swift)

“guess i’d die to keep your eyes on me” - (reckless driving, lizzy mcalpine)

“did you ever have someone kiss you in a crowded room” - (question, taylor swift)

“hash brown, egg yolk, i will always love you” - (keep driving, harry styles)

“i didn’t choose this town, i dream of getting out, there’s just one who could make me stay” - (you’re on your own kid, taylor swift)

“there’s many different way that you can kill the one you love, the slowest way is never loving them enough” - (high infidelity, taylor swift)

“london is lonely without you” - (london is lonely, holly humberstone)

“all our best years are behind, what a brutal way to die” - (where do we go now?, gracie abrams)

“i’m not worried about where you are, or who you go home to, i’m just thinking about you” (little freak, harry styles)

“and i wake with your memory over me” (maroon, taylor swift)

“i’m sure that i would like her, if i were slightly nicer” - (rockland, gracie abrams)

“and i’ll dream each night of some version of you that i might not have, but did not lose” - (stick season, noah kahan

#a mediocre 2k party #mediocre writer

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st-vier · 1 year

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tagged by @fadetouched. thank you renne! i’m way too lazy to tag further but mutuals do this if you like <3

3 ships: right now my id is 90% weird brothers from the weird brothers show like i’m back in 2006. other than that, i’m not very focused on ships in my current fandoms.

1st ever ship: for my sins, subaru/seishiro from x/tokyo babylon

last song: sane by fear of men

currently reading: fiction: ‘dark matter’ by michelle paver, ‘the little stranger’ by sarah waters, & ‘embassytown’ by china mieville. nonfiction: ‘phallic panic: film, horror and the primal uncanny’ by barbara creed (originally i started it for my dissertation but never finished), also i JUST found out that she has a new book out — return of the monstrous feminine: feminist new wave cinema — with a WHOLE SECTION about female cannibalism. i’m so excited to read it holy shit.

last movie: zimna wojna (2018). it was so good! sometimes polish cinema deserves rights.

currently consuming: tea with honey & lemon

currently watching: seasons 5-6 of community, & microdosing on the nth rewatch of sharp objects (i read a detailed analysis of the show’s costume design and it made me feral again). oh and i’m trying to get into netflix witcher but alcohol might be necessary for that to happen.

currently craving: the ever elusive motivation to write, but both the spirit and flesh are weak.

#as always barbara creed thank you for my life

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yuki-boshi · 2 years

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Kuro no Kiseki II Crimson Sin - Chapter 3 Part 1 English Summary

Table of Contents:

Prologue

Intermission 1

Chapter 1 Side A

Chapter 1 Side B

Chapter 2 Side A

Chapter 2 Side B

Intermission 2

Chapter 3 Part 1

Chapter 3 Part 2

Chapter 3 Part 3

Finale

Nadia leaves a note to the group that she’s leaving. They try to rationalize Swin’s behavior while questioning the validity of Ace’s survival, who Nadia claims was dead, but that there was a small gap between that could’ve allowed him to live and stay in hiding.

At Bermotti’s Café, they see Marielle and Bermotti talking and the two inform the group that rumors of the Red Grendel attacking places has stopped entirely, and that Nadia didn’t drop by. Risette thinks there’s some kind of media censorship going on because the attacks of Grendel-Zolga haven’t been reported.

---

Sidequest 1: Kill a monster that showed up in Dirke Memorial Park again.

Maxim Lugan is actually at the entrance. Talking to him to will reveal he has a big upcoming race tomorrow. He’s reminiscing the times he was at the park with Paulette regarding the time capsule and he wants to devote everything to the race for Paulette and Yume.

Shinyon from Agnes’s school is filming an indie film with a friend and they say that they heard that Swin and Nadia went back to Remifiria and hope that they’ll see each other one day.

Sidequest 2: A migrant worker has gone missing, and Conrad, the guy who got the guy hired wants you to figure out why everyone he brings on board for this job keep quitting. They’ve found out that Northumbrian workers keep quitting. They accept the case and ask Bradley, in Riverside, who owns a car tuneup shop, if he has heard any stories about mistreated migrant workers in Old Town and are directed to the bath house. Anya of the bath house tells them that she doesn’t really. She finds it odd to call these people immigrants despite being white and that’s why it’s hard to discern whether or not there’s issues going on or not related in the immigration side of things. Van nods and understands that the northern migrants are immigrants like anyone else but they lack the active support and are not the target of sympathy like the other minorities. Mr. Huck overhears them and tells them that a lot of white workers have been swayed away by a NPO (nonprofit organization) promising of higher standards of work for their cause.

Agnes explains the difference between an NGO and a NPO, where the former engages on activities on an international level and NPO looks out for the locals.

They sit down near the train station and run into Towa, who formally introduces herself to the party cast who haven’t met her. They ask her if she knows any NPOs in the republic, and inform her of the details. She explains that the NGO she’s in actually supervises and coordinates with local NPOs and that they’ve been monitoring this case as well. They head together to the Center Marche and find that a man is advertising himself as being part of a committee that wants to improve the working environment of foreigners. They follow him into an alley talking to a man in a black suit, calling it a harvest, and the group use FIO (the robot) to listen in better and realize it’s a case of human trafficking.

Furthermore, they follow the man again and write down his registration plate number on his car as he gets away. Towa gets call from her informant about a suspicious bus with white migrants down on Route 8, and the group rush over. They save the civllians and arrest the mafia. Towa takes out the ringleader who is part of the Douul family and Van contacts the CID. The group brings the migrants back to town and they let Conrad know.

Afterward, Towa leaves and is seen talking on the phone to Crow that they need to be wary because everything seems to be connected. Towa suggests that they might need to get the help of Angelica and George from Cold Steel to help her, as this might be the incident that Rean was worried about as well.

---

At Central Street, Renne can be found eating cake with Sasha (from the sports sidequest). Sasha explains that they can’t find a supplier for materials for club, but Renne has managed to pull through and send in an order.

At the Bracer guild, Lashkar has made a recovery, making Gray happy.

At the Tyrell District, you can find Daswani talking to two officers. Daswani will mention that Nate has been depressed lately.

Diretor Gotch and Lam can be found dining in at a Chinese restaurant eating crab. They’re having a meeting about collaborating and directing the final scene for their movie.

In the Saiden district, you can find Eddy who moved his stall to the basketball court, and he wants to show that he’s independent and capable to Baselia, who looks up to him.

Nate can be found near the basketball court at the little food stall, drinking since noon, heartbroken that his girlfriend finally dumped him.

You can find Sherid, Zita, Naje, and Towa in the big hotel here. It’s just small talk about them praising Towa for being such a natural speaker and conveying information so well that the meeting ended earlier than expected. Towa is surprised to see the group again and thanks them for their cooperation in relation to the 4spg.

Talking to Towa again will have her lament that Swin and Nadia are both gone because they overcame so many things to finally have the life they have now and she hopes things will be okay for them this time too. Towa would like to hear from Van sometime about how he was acquainted with them sometime and he says sure.

At Triton Mall, you can find Bart and his mom from the sidequest where it’s revealed they were able to finally purchase a T-Phone.

Director Powell can be found at the Quincy Parlour and says hi to Elaine and Van.

You can also find Shaina and Saara from the first game dancing on stage. Shahina tries to flaunt her body afterward to the group telling them how much she’s grown and Aaron says she’s just imagining it while Risette applauds her self-confidence. Shahina also claims that Saara got more “sexier” too causing her to get blushingly annoyed and Judith gives her her approval and hopes she doesn’t get deceived by a bad man.

Lastly at Center Marche, they find Jack and Hal who have came all the way up to the capital where they reveal that Fan Lu and Gien Lu are also in the capital for Heiyue business.

The group then get a call from Bermotti to head to the Darklight District and the group traverse through the danger zone and Agnes finds the Genesis glowing and a giant insect monster destroyed.

They find Ashen who is upset with the group, calling herself an idiot for ever trusting them. The group wonders if Nadia did something but Ashen doesn’t answer them. Aaron and Van are killed by a poison shuriken.

Time rewinds and the group decide to meet up with Gien and Fan Lu figure out what Ashen’s been going through. A flashback story is told about Cao finding Ashen as a child when she was lost. They ask why would she be targeting the group, but Gien and Fan don’t have an answer and have to tend to other Heiyue matters. Outside, they find Shizuna. Van wonders if she has an odd job against them like last time, but she says nope. She asks for the groups help because Kurogane and other Ikaruga members are doing some kind of unknown mission, hiding it from her.

Shizuna joins them and they confront Ashen, who claims that they killed Cao. Shizuna activates her Spirit Unification and takes out all of Ashen’s Heiyue members in two swings. They realize the secret assailant that killed Van and Aaron in the previous timeline is none other than Kurogane.

Ashen is engulfed in a red distorted aura much like Grendel-Zolga. The technical term for this is called "Erosion" or "Encroachment", and everyone is warped to Lonlai’s waterfall, or so it seems, in actuality it’s making use of the Marchen Castle. They beat Kurogane and Ashen, and Shizuna is able to cut the distortion out of them.

Ashen still claims that Cao was killed but Cao and Gouran appear before them. Cao tells the group that the other families have approved of the Lee house being reinstated and that Gouran will be the head.

Ashen congratulates Gouran and looks forward to working together in the future. Aaron however punches Cao for manipulating and hurting Ashen’s feelings knowing full well that she cared about him. Cao apologizes to Ashen when she tries to tend to the wound on his face saying that the pain isn’t nearly as bad as what he did to her. Everyone seems to reconcile.

Unbeknownst to Ashen, she held one of the Genesis and gives it back to the party.

The group head back to the office and in a flashback, Ashen apologizes for her behavior and the group deduce that the Genesis is distorting and eroding the user’s perception. Shizuna formally joins the party now.

The group has two choices, look into Bergard’s help or look into the anti terrorist group.

I flipped a coin and chose Bergard.

Going downstairs, the Z1 race is happening and Maxim sent three tickets for Paulette, Victor, and Yume, so the shop will close in a little bit. Nice foreshadowing if you talked to Maxim beforehand. Back upstairs, the group contacts Mirabel who confirms that the Marchet Garden was hijacked yesterday because of Ashen and they don’t know how it happened. Van thinks the Garden Master, Ace, is responsible for hacking the Marchet Garden.

When going to Triton Mall and dropping by the Liberl shop, Shizuna will comment that she’s interested in the region and Elaine will talk about the guild having the grandchild of the Founder of the Eight Leaves, aka Anelace.

You can find Moira and Bart at the Verne store again. This time it’s because Moira doesn’t know how to use the T-Phone.

The group find Kilika and Kaela who say that they confirmed that since the Nemeth Island incident that things have calmed down. She explains that the human dolls we saw in Agnes’s High School are imitations, kind of like a simulated body.

The group can find Anya (from the Bathhouse), Rebecca (the orbal vendor), and Kisara (the graffiti artist) all hanging out together. Kisara, turning over a new leaf, has found solace in drawing in a sketchbook now.

----

Sidequests are to kill mobs.

Real sidequest is related to Mishy, where there appears to be an internal conflict with his redesign from a person who works with the Mishy show. Van teases Elaine for being a hardcore Mishy fan. The client tells the group that someone is trying to sabotage the Mishy show at Triton Mall. She asks for the group’s help and not the police or Bracer because it might hurt Mishy’s reputation if it’s found out it was over the design.

They find out it’s the balloon seller and the gang grabs all the balloons laced with paint. Elaine scolds the balloon guy for being a terrible Mishy fan and Mishy appears to talk to the group.

---

The group will get an email by Bergard and meet up at the underground ruins. Van enters the ruin and find Celis, who claims Bergard is dead and it’s all Van’s fault. Van realizes it’s the same thing that happened to Ashen. Celis claims that Van’s existence just spreads like a disease and that she will be doing an act of mercy getting rid of him. Celis kills Van.

Time resets, and Van decides to take a taxi with Giardono to get into the subway some other way. Ashrad and the Iscarions ambush Van, but he is saved by Rion. Rion explains that he split with Celis to gather information in the suburbs, but when he came back, she kept telling him Bergard was dead and it was all Van’s fault.

The two escape from the ruins and find Gotch and Nina. They go in a car to the capital, but they are ambushed by Celis. Van jumps out of the car as a diversion and is killed again.

Time resets again, and Rion and Van leave a decoy projected through spare Xiphas in Gotch’s car, as they run through the Edith ruins by foot. Rion asks what happened eight years ago with Van and Barkhorn because all he knows is that Van hurt Barkthorn which garnered ire from himself and Celis. He explains that because he was the vessel for the lord of demons, his power went out of control and hurt him. But he thanks Sensei because without his help, he wouldn’t have stayed as human.

Rion understands Barkthorn’s rationale now, and also tells Van that he isn’t all that bad considering he remembers Van sacrificing himself in the previous timeline. Celis and Ashrad catch up to Van but are blindsided by the rest of the Spriggans coming to Van’s aid. This is because Nina and Gotch wrote a 4spg request alerting them of the situation.

The group manage to escape and Rion reveals the reason he came to the capital was because he was also addressed the same letter that was given to Van. They hide out at the Auber District Cathedral. Celis and Ashrad appear again, and Van tries to reason with her by giving the letter that Rion was sent for them.

She gets a headache, but it isn’t enough to persuade her, and everyone is sucked in to the Marchet Garden recreation of the Oracion death game from Kuro 1. After finally fighting, it turns out that Celis allowed herself to be eroded and uses the chance to injure Ace by severing the connection they had as she was being corrupted, a risky move. After being freed, Celis and Rion activate their stigmas together to pull everyone out of the Marchet Garden.

Celis apologizes to Van and everyone goes their separate ways after Van is given another Genesis. The group contact Kincaid who gives them information and everyone agrees to meet up at 6am to mobilize. However at 6am, a surprise ambush has Van gravely injured and then the office is blown up by C4s.

#kuro no kiseki ii #kuro no kiseki #kuro no kiseki 2 #kiseki series #translation #trails series

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