#they also absolutely eat people together but that’s just like a vex thing

[nuke-expo]

in my head . convex r the peak queerplatonic partners . no one brings out the unhinged behaviour in one of them quite like the other, yk ? it’s gay as fuck though they’re not just friends they’re not lovers they’re just. convex . gay evil people . they would hit eachother with rocks but they have matching earrings . scar would shoot cub as hotguy with no remorse but when cub asked to buy his basement he didn’t hesitate to agree . u get it . they get eachother .

[shesey]

Excerpts from A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous

Heart, hurt, love, desire: how foreign, how distant these words sound now. Evidently a sophisticated, discriminating love-life requires three square meals a day. My sole concern as I write these lines is my stomach. All thinking and feeling, all wishes and hopes begin with food. Apart from the bravery and resilience she demonstrated, her account reveals the close relationship between an enquiring mind and intellectual honesty. ... yet many still suffer from that powerful human desire for hope in the face of all logic. But seen up close, history is vexing - nothing but burdens and fears. Her reason for writing all this is quite simple. ‘It does me good, takes me mind off things’. Rape in war is a collective experience, she also observes, as opposed to in peacetime when it is individual. Each woman helps the other, by speaking about it, airing her woes. But, as she soon found out the male half of the German population wanted the subject to be buried. ‘These days I keep noticing how my feelings towards men are changing,’ she writes as Hitler’s regime collapses. ‘We feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. Deep down we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment. The Nazi world - ruled by men, glorifying the strong man - is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of ‘Man.’ That has transformed us, emboldened us. Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex.’ Women were forbidden to mention the subject of rape as if it somehow dishonoured their men who were supposed to have defended them. People ask why, tormenting themselves with pointless questions. But I just want to focus on today, the task at hand. Since I own nothing, I can lay claim to everything. Once again we see what a dubious blessing technology really is. Machines with no intrinsic value, worthless if you can’t plug them in somewhere. Bread, however, is absolute. Coal is absolute. And gold is gold whether you’re in Rome, Peru, or Breslau. But radios, gas stoves, central heating, hot plates, all these gifts of the modern age - they’re nothing but dead weight if the power goes out. As long as there’s no clock in sight my life is timeless. What flowers, what lovely flowers. The tears were running down her face. I felt terrible as well. Beauty hurts now. We’re so full of death. I’ve had so many narrow escapes; I feel I lead a charmed life. That’s probably the way most people feel. How else could they be in such high spirits, surrounded by so much death? What’s clear is that every threat to your life boosts your vitality. My own flame is stronger, I’m burning more fiercely than before the air raids. Each new day of life is a day of triumph. You’ve survived once again. You’re defiant. On one hand you stand taller, but at the same time your feet are planted more firmly on the ground. I want to give myself over to this communal sense of humanity; I want to be part of it, to experience it. There’s a split between my aloofness, the desire to keep my private life to myself, and the urge to be like everyone else, to belong to the nation, to abide and suffer history together. Technology has devalued the impact of our own speech and writing. We women find it senseless to begin with; that’s just the way we are - reasonable, practical, opportunistic. We prefer our men alive. Why are we so appalled at the thought of children being murdered? In three or four years the same children strike us as perfectly fit for shooting and maiming. Where do you draw the line? When their voices break? Because that’s what really gets me the most, thinking about these little boys: their voices, so high, so bright. Up to now being a soldier meant being a man. And being a man means being able to father a child. Wasting these boys before they reach maturity obviously runs against some fundamental law of nature, against our instinct, against every drive to preserve the species. Like certain fish or insects that eat their own offspring. People aren’t supposed to do that. The fact that this is exactly what we are doing is a sure sign of madness. Here, too, I have to relearn everything I’ve been taught about women in war. Once our role was to play the ministering angel. Scraping up lint for bandages. A cool hand on a man’s hot brow. At a healthy distance from the shooting. Now there’s no difference between a regular hospital and a field hospital. The front is everywhere. But there comes a time when you’re so mortally tired you stop being afraid. The fact that our German word for praying - beten - is so close to our word for begging - betteln -- obviously means something. After all, there was a time when beggars were as much a fixture at the church door as the handle. We’re happy whenever we can flee into the present to escape worrying about the future. And for these women the task at hand is sausage, and the thought of sausage alters their perspective on things that may be much more important by are nevertheless much further away. In the heat of battle, in the thick of the action, you don’t think - you don’t even feel afraid, because you’re so distracted and absorbed. What does it mean - rape? When I said the word for the first time aloud, Friday evening in the basement, it sent shivers down my spine. Now I can think it and write it with an untrembling hand, say it out loud to get used to hearing it said. It sounds like the absolute worst, the end of everything - but it’s not. I’ve never been so removed from myself, so alienated. All my feelings seem dead, except for the drive to live. They shall not destroy me. But I have the feeling that, deep inside, all these simple, undiscriminating men feel insecure in front of me, despite their blustering. They’re children of the people. The conversation did me good, and not so much because of the subject, which I’m not as well versed in as Andrei, but simply because one of them treated me as an equal, without once touching me, not even with his eyes. He didn’t see me as a mere piece of female flesh, like all the others up to now. I couldn’t help thinking about how good I’d had it, until now - the fact that love had always been a pleasure and never a pain. I had never been forced, nor had I ever had to force myself. Everything had been good the way it was. But what’s making me so miserable right now is not so much the excess itself, extreme though it is; it’s the fact that my body has been mistreated, taken against its will and pain is how it responds to the abuse. I’m reminded of a girlfriend from school, now married, who confessed to me at the beginning of the war that in a certain way she felt physically better without her husband. It can’t be otherwise, nor should it be; as long as I’m nothing more than a spoil of war I intend to stay dead and numb, without feeling. But these days I think children are right to be afraid of sexual things - there really are a lot of sharp knives. But I know that even the most seemingly gentle Russian can turn into a savage beast if you rub him the wrong way or offend his self-esteem. But why are these youngsters so eager in their pursuit of anything female?... They probably want to prove themselves in front of their older comrades, like 16 year old Vanya, the stairwell rapist, to show that they’re real men, too. So I am placing myself at his service of my own accord. Am I doing it because I like him, or out of a need for love? God forbid! For the moment I’ve had it up to here with men and their male desire. I can’t imagine ever longing for any of that again. The less he wants from me as a man, the more I like him as a person. What is that supposed to mean anyway - a bad person?

My schooling makes me desirable in his eyes. That’s a far cry from our German men, for whom being well read does little to enhance a woman’s appeal, at least in my experience. In fact, my instinct has always been to play down my intelligence for them, to make a pretence of ignorance - or at least to keep quiet until I know them better. A German man always wants to be smarter, always wants to be in a position to each his little woman. I’m not afraid. I’ll just sail blindly ahead, trusting my little ship to the currents of the times; up to now it’s always managed to carry me to green shores. It felt very strange, once again being around men you don’t have the slightest reason to fear, men you don’t have to constantly gauge or be on guard against or keep an eye on. I’m convinced that this particular woman will never forget her husband’s fit of courage, or perhaps you could say it was love. And you can hear the respect in the way the men tell the story, too. Girls, you better go and change the world. It needs it! We liked that. Because we didn’t think much of the world in 1930 either. In fact, we emphatically rejected it. Everything was so muddles, so full of barriers and obstacles. And this mass rape is something we are overcoming collectively as well. All the women help the other, by speaking about it, airing their pain and allowing others to air theirs and spit out what they’ve suffered. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that creatures more delicate than this cheeky Berlin girl won’t fall apart or suffer for the rest of their lives. If at least we had a little decent soap! I have this constant craving to give my skin a thorough scrub - I’m convinced it would make me feel a little cleaner in my soul as well. But no matter what the case, I think it’s up to each of us, even under these circumstances, to make our lives as meaningful as we can. No matter where we end up, we take ourselves. At times I think I could survive anything on earth, as long as it came from without and not from some devious trick of my own heart. Once I spent several days on a Soviet train, rocking across the countryside, and heard a Russian tell me. Our German comrades won’t storm a train station unless they’ve bought valid platform tickets first. Less sarcastically put, most Germans are horrified by unbridled lawlessness. Maybe that’s a mistake. If pictures like that were available, the men could fill their fantasies with all those idealized figures, and wouldn’t wind up throwing themselves on every woman in sight, no matter how old or ugly. I’ll have to give this some more thought. The major was embarrassed and looked away. In that second I liked him very much. We’ve surrendered. Nevertheless I do feel a new desire for life. Poor words, you do not suffice. The other one, delicate Brigitte, is nineteen and defends herself psychologically with an angry cynicism. These girls have been forever deprived of love’s first fruits. Whoever begins with the last phase, and in such a wicked way, can no longer quiver with excitement at the very first touch. What’s clear is that I was there, that I breathed what was in the air, and it affected all of us even if we didn’t want it to. Now that’s something that only men could cook up for other men. If they just thought about it for two minutes they’d realize that liquor greatly intensifies the sexual urge. I don’t know what in the world I should do. No one really needs me. All I can do is touch my small circle and be a good friend. What’s left is just to wait for the end. Still, the dark and amazing adventure of life beckons. I’ll stick around, out of curiosity, and because I enjoy breathing and stretching my healthy limbs. Once again I have to reflect on the consequence of being alone in the midst of adversity. In some way it’s easier, not having to endure the torment of someone else’s suffering. What must a mother feel seeing her girl devastated? Probably the same as anyone who truly loves another but either cannot help them or doesn’t dare to. The men who’ve been married for many years seem to hold up best. They don’t look back. Sooner or later their wive will call them to account though.  I’m still ecstatic at being able to sleep by myself between clean sheets. A bath at home, a nice dress, a quiet evening did some good. I have to think about things. Our spiritual need is great. Authority as a means of applying pressure. And here I was, using a little piece of paper to pretend I had authority. The trick produced prompt results, too. I’m convinced that otherwise I would have never got the radio back. Still, it left me feeling grubby. However it appears that most of life’s mechanisms rely on little tricks like that - marriages, companies, nation-states, armies. All I want to do is steer my little ship through the shoals as best I can. And maybe my heart will speak to me once more. One thing’s for sure: my life has certainly been full -- all too full! But the simply fact that I’m surrounded by other hungry people keeps me going. Even writing this down takes effort, but at least it’s some consolation in my loneliness, a kind of conversation, a chance to pour my heart out. Sometimes I wonder why I’m not suffering more because of the rift with Gerd, who used to mean everything to me. I only know I want to survive - against all sense and reason, just like an animal.

[skelegun]

Just finished rewatching George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead for the first time in like probably close to ten years. I remember really liking this film when it came out. I was a big George A Romero fanboy, and I was and still am a huge found footage fan, so combining the two was like a match made in heaven for a younger me.

When people talk about Romero’s final 3 zombie movies, I often see Diary of the Dead mentioned as the worst, and I always assumed it was just people not liking the found footage aspects of it. Upon rewatching it this time, I can absolutely see why people wouldn’t like it. Most of the dialogue is incredibly unnatural and feels like it was written by an edgelord, which is probably why I liked it as an edgy teenager. Also the sorta framing narrative that film is essentially meant to be some kind of in-universe documentary is really fucking stupid. Like they should have just gone with the typical “here is a bunch of raw footage that was found” setup that most found footage films go for. Hell it’s in the name of the genre. How shitty would the Blair Witch Project have been if it started out with an overdub of Heather being like “me and my two friends who DIED filmed this in the woods, and I edited this footage together and added spoooooky music to spook yah!”

That’s not to say it’s terrible, or that I wouldn’t (albeit somewhat hesitantly) recommend it to others. It’s an incredibly uneven film, but the parts of it that do work end up working really well. Somewhat minor thing to point out, but i really enjoyed how they emphasize that anyone who dies will come back as a zombie and the characters even discuss the implications of that. Which is like a thing in the other Romero films but it’s usually treated as a like background blurb. This is the only film in the series where you actually see someone die from a non-bite related injury and reanimate***, I just think that’s kinda neat.

I suppose It’s somewhat unfair to talk about this film in reference to Land of the Dead and Survival of the Dead without rewatching those films. Land of the Dead I remember being a rather vexing film that I could ramble on about but i feel it’d be better to rewatch it before doing so. Survival on the other hand?. You would have to pay me to sit through that shit. I’d rather eat broken glass.

***I suppose you could argue Johnny from the original Night Of The Living Dead counts, because we never see him get bit on camera. Also kinda unrelated but Dr.Frankenstein gets shot with a machine gun in Day of the Dead and doesn’t reanimate. Though how much of Day of the Dead is “real” and how much of it is a dream is up for debate.

[hopefulfuturenovelauthor]

Headcanons of what's like to date Pike, Grog, Scanlan, Vex, Keyleth, Percy, and Vax?

Vox Machina Relationship Headcannons...

I did not check for grammar mistakes, sorry. Also, please do not copy my work in any way, thank you. Enjoy!

A/n: I’ve typed couple so much now it seems really funny and sounds weird now 😂.

Vax:

Are they a couple? couple

-alright, so I kid you not, people have no clue you are a thing until you blatantly tell them. 

-Most people don’t even realize you are that close.

-Vex only knows about you two because Vax is her brother. Out of Vox Machina Grog is the only other one that knows you are a couple and Percy just thinks you both have feelings for each other. Scanlan can’t even tell and he knows everything when it comes to the mercenaries' romantic lives.

-You aren’t secretive in your relationship, you are both just far more reserved. Neither of you is huge into PDA and you are both very sneaky.

-it is not hard for the two of you to escape from your friends to be alone together or to flirt in front of others without them recognizing it.

-you both are always next to each other too. No matter if you were fighting, eating, or in a cart you were always at each other’s side.

-Vax absolutely adores you and you feel the same. You are both entirely supportive of one another. 

-when you are drunk you both show more affection towards each other. Then again you both show more affection towards everyone. When one of you have had something to drink, that one tends to always be touching the other, whether it’s hand holding, foot nudging, or just leaning on the other.

-your relationship with Vax is revealed to the group when Scanlan and Pike find you both making out in a closet in a pub.

-Pike’s reaction was far less inappropriate than Scanlans which was somewhere along the lines of “I don’t know when this started, but I would love to join.”

-after that Pike just goes pink, scolding Scanlan. You all return to the group.

-when Scanlan reveals what he saw the other two are in shock, while Grog just says, “You didn’t know?”

-“wait, you knew?” Pike questioned.

-“yeah, wasn’t it obvious. They flirt like all the time. Did none of you notice?”

Vex:

Chill couple

-super, super chill. You guys are like the cool couple that everyone thinks is awesome. 

-you are both great with nature and your perspective weapons. Vex sticks with her bow, while your weapon of choice is the chain-sickle. However, you tend to stick with knives more often than not because of the clumsy ness of your own group.

-(we’ll skip over the time your weapon wrapped around Scanlan pinning his arms to his side. His comments on that experience were not something Vex liked. Scanlan was scared shitless of your girlfriend for days)

-you both like to spend time talking and bonding while sharpening knives and creating arrowheads.

-Neither if you care for extreme pda. Most of the time you elbow and nudge each other or rest your arm on the other’s shoulders.

-you both enjoy making the other flustered in certain situations. You both never take it too far though. To get her flustered all you have to do is kiss her cheek lightly and lingering, somewhat ghostly and fairly intimately. To get you flustered she grabs your chin with her hand and carefully places her lips on yours for a few seconds.

-The entire group is very supportive of your relationship. Percy and Vax are very supportive. Sometimes Vax and Scanlan make fun of the two of you a little bit because of how close you are.

-you both also like never fight. Really, you don’t get in arguments that much and are typically always on the same page.

-as chill as you both are, Scanlan will make comments that set Vex off. You tend to hold her back and calm her down. Most of the time you just hold her hand and rub circles in her knuckles with your thumb.

-sometimes when you're feeling anxious or bored she’ll let you braid her hair.

-you guys like definitely cuddle up together before bed or when you are just chilling. Sometimes you sit between her legs. Other times you sit behind her off of the ground messing with her hair. Once more, you definitely do the arm over the shoulders. It’s great for whispering to the other.

-also and lastly, you guys have like an infinite amount of inside jokes.

Pike:

Best friends couple

-best friend goals right here. Like you are so romantically and platonically meant for each other. 

-people honestly can’t tell if your in a relationship or just friends until someone says it outright or you kiss or something.

-Pike is so sweet and you are too. Pike you and Grog are like the most kind group and Grog loves to get in on hug reunions when you guys haven’t seen each other in a while.

-Pike and you are both very supportive people and it’s really great for the both of you cause at times you both definitely need it.

-no doubt, having you by her side definitely helps with her faith.

-you do not keep anything from one another. Like at all. Whatever one of you knows the other knows too. There is no doubt that she knows everything about you.

-once more you are besties in love.  Totally started as friends but wanted more but didn’t want to ruin your friendship. When you both told each other this you definitely laughed it all off. Life partners and partner goals definitely met.

-I cannot explain it, but while Grog is like your guys biggest supporter the close second is definitely Scanlan.

- He is like super close to you. Definitely very good friends and always pushes you and Pike together, even before you were a couple.

-you and Pike like to hold hands and lean your heads against each other.

-pda isn’t huge on your guys front other than that.

-you both definitely get super like crazy when drunk. Combo moves with her magic and singing songs while swaying together.

-definitely the kind of couple that makes and wears flower crowns for the other person.

-totally cute, totally loved by everyone.

Scanlan:

Power-couple

-So, surprisingly Scanlan is like super soft for you unlike what others would think.

-total gentleman except for when his mind is in other places.

-power couple, not because everyone loves you and wants to be you, but like you together is like more powerful than either of you could ever be alone.

-definitely smarter together. You are like one functional person which separated you two aren’t really.

-you both create elaborate schemes to steal and exploit people.

-half of the things he’s gifted you, you guys got while lying, manipulating and stealing. You are both very good at being charming and persuasive.

-you guys flirt a lot. Like all the time, it’s half of the shit that comes out of your mouth and practically all that comes out of his.

-you are always together. He is glued to your side.

-if you are away from each other you only have him on your mind and he is annoying the crap out of whoever he is with because he won’t stop talking about you.

- he thinks you are the most amazing person in the world.

-most definitely writes songs about you. As confident as he is, he does sometimes get insecure about his music, mainly how real his words are in his songs,and his abilities with you.

-Scanlan is not really a fighter. He doesn’t think he can protect you as well as the rest of the group could.

- it doesn’t take him long to realize that that isn’t that much of an issue. One too many drinks led to another and some asshole made a comment about Scanlan. Let’s just say that bar fight you had left him both incredibly impressed and very turned on.

-PDA, hell yeah, it’s Scanlan. You sometimes have to tell him to stop. Sometimes you will make him flustered in the worst situations. Never when you're in danger, just if you're in front of important people. 

-Scanlan definitely likes to be held. Total small spoon in my book. After all he needs some comfort and you love being that for him.

Percy:

Inseparable couple (but in a sweet way)

-childhood friends. Went through hell together at Whitestone and both somehow got out. 

- definitely spent childhood together with parents knowing you would end up together. They were planning your wedding before you were even ten.

-you both met up after your family had already escaped the town. Percy was devastated and spent days crying, you just held him and brought him food and water and tried to get him to sleep.

-you were devastated about his sister and his family when he told you what happened.

-you guys definitely just somehow ended up romantically involved naturally. After Whitestone you both became inseparable and super affectionate and protective of one another.

-let’s make this known, when he’s going to bed you go to bed with him, when he’s awake you're awake, when he’s stressed you are right beside him and vice Versa.

-you are always there for him, especially when it involves his family.

-you like to watch him make his guns. When he gets too worked up or won’t stop tinkering you take off his glasses. Most of the time afterwards you lead him to your bed. On the rare occasion you grabbed them to joke around he will tickle you for them back like you guys did when you were younger.

-he will make weapons for you and will teach you how too as well if you ask.

-if you ask he will show you hands on, standing behind you, arms in yours, guiding you through everything.

-you will name your weapons together.

-you love to play with his hair, and he loves to hug you. You both take comfort in one another.

-you both like to cuddle when you read, even if the other person isn’t reading, which is great for hugging and hair touching.

-he surprisingly is more PDA prone than others expect. Once more you are inseparable. Will kiss your temple and forehead very often, he loves it and you love it. You like to snuggle your head into his neck. He will spontaneously grab your hand and spin you into him bringing your bodies into direct contact and faces only inches apart. He is super smiley when he does this.

-you always make him smile. It melts your heart every time.

-there are some hard times where either of you has nightmares, which leads to lots of holding and consoling.

-Percy can have anger issues at times especially when it comes to revenge.

-this is the only thing you guys fight about. While you both want all of them dead you are worried of the effects this will have on Percy and how far he is willing to go and how much he is willing to give. You definitely fear that his judgement is compromised at times like these and think that he himself or others might get hurt along the way.

-he tries to stop when he finds you crying in the corner of your room worried sick about him.

-his anger gets the better of him, but when he is reminded of you he cools down like 50%. If he sees you in one of these stages he will be much more careful too.

-after one of these episodes he definitely does not let go of you. He will hold your hand no matter what. He may even hold your one hand with both of his if you guys are walking or something.

Keyleth:

Opposites attract couple

-You met in a tavern

-In fact, it was your good friend Vax that introduced you to the group of mercenaries.

-You had already known Vex since she was Vax’s sister, but the rest of the crew were strangers.

-You quickly took a liking to them. Passing your free time drinking and betting in card games was one of your favorite ways to relax. 

-That first night you out drank them all and remained the only one not drunk. It was the fiery red-head that fell to the effects of the alcohol first. She was also the one you took care of the most that night.

-You helped her to bed, tucked her in, and even found yourself tucking a piece of her hair behind her cute pointy ear. You weren’t drunk, just definitely buzzed.

-She quickly realized she liked you, which is why the two of you became a couple so fast. That and Vax trusted you so she knew you were a good person.

-You were a bit slower when it came to coming to terms with your feelings. You always helped her out, complimented her, and protected her. 

-When she told you about her feelings you just kissed her. It was a small rushed peck, but it explained all she needed to know. You quickly and awkwardly excused yourself.

-Over time you become more comfortable in a relationship. You like to be affectionate with her when you're alone but you find it difficult in public. Around your friends you guys will hold hands, lean into one another, and have your guys arms wrapped around either shoulders or waists.

-She likes to give you little charms and pretty rocks and gems she finds.

-You like to gift her with stolen objects you took from merchants that were rude. So far the most expensive thing you’ve stolen and gifted her was a silver necklace with a very pretty moonstone charm. It’s her favorite and she never takes it off.

- She likes to fidget with your hands when she gets anxious, especially about her family. She finds it interesting how you can so easily steal, so she likes to observe the little things. For example, she enjoys tracing the scars on your hands you have gained from your time thieving and fighting. 

-You really like her hair, so she can sometimes catch you just staring at her. Sometimes when you guys are in public you even just mess with it in your fingers because you love how silky and bright it is.

-The entire crew is really happy for you guys, they like how much confidence you give Keyleth, and they like how soft you get around her.

-Vax and Vex can tell that you both make eachother better and stronger people and that you both are growing more into yourselves.

Grog:

Party couple/ adorably affectionate couple but not in an uncomfortable way

-You were quick friends that shared the same easy going attitude. You liked ale and parties and brawls. Grog liked those too.

-You both simply bask in each other’s happiness. You both feel warm and comfortable in the other's presence. 

-Ale, yes please, you will both compete to see who can drink more, your drunken selves becoming instantly more charismatic making you both the life of the party.

-Only nice things to say about each other. You both never fight. Unless you are play fighting, for example food fights, sneak tackles, and other various activities.

-Piggy back rides, most definitely. Especially during drinking games and other competitions. You on Grog’s back and Scanlan on Vax’s, the four of you barreling down the street in a race to see who would be the last one standing.

-Grog would definitely like it if you made him jewelry, like necklaces or bracelets from treasure you had found or pretty stones in the forest. 

-Grog would do the same for you as well, making very nice bracelets that now cover your wrists.

-You constantly fall asleep on him when you are adventuring. You sometimes snore, but he finds it cute.

-He likes to pick you up and give you massive hugs.

-You are both huge fans of hand holding.

-If someone attacks one of you, the other will beat the shit out of that person or creature.

-Pike loves you two together and is one of your biggest supporters. It makes you and Grog both very happy that she likes you together as a couple so much.

- You both constantly get into shenanigans together and crack the best jokes. There is a ton of laughter involved in your relationship.

[citronsblog]

Requesting because Tumblr is a bitch and ate my last one tf.

Teruteru, Ryoma, and Mondo proposing and/or getting married to their male s/o.

If this request makes you uncomfortable please do tell me and I can send in something different!!!

×Vex ∆

Notes: YES YES YES A MONDO REQUEST. I NEED TO WRITE FOR HIM MORE 😍 (also your request don’t make me uncomfortable, Although I do prefer writing for gender neutral readers so everyone can read it I enjoy writing for guys so I can feed all of my male audience and it gives me a small challenge)

Warnings: none

Characters: Mondo Owada, Teruteru Hanamura, Ryoma Hoshi

Mondo Owada

Mondo is normally able to be calm around you, that’s one of the reasons he fell for you in the first place, but right now he was stressing.

He is deeply in love with you, his wonderful boyfriend. You guys have been together for awhile now, through the thick and thin Mondo is so grateful for you.

Back to the reason on why he is stressed. He was planing on proposing to you. He was nervous, he didn’t know how his favorite person in the world, you, would react to all of this and frankly that’s what made him scared.

Mondo got snapped out of his thoughts by the lovely sound of your voice,

“Hey Mondo? You have a second?”

“Yeah? What is it hot stuff?”

Swatting at his hand you let out a sigh and continue.

“You said we have a date tonight, I just wanted to know if I should dress up in my tux or if it’s just a casual date?”

Mondo got flustered in the thought of you in a tuxedo. He’s seen you in them before, but oh man he would be lying if he said you never looked so sexy in them.

“Mmmm- huh?! Oh Y-yeah that works.”

Chuckling at your boyfriend you give him a kiss on the forehead and walk off with a ‘thank you.’”

It was later on that evening that you two had been sat down at your table. It was a beautiful view. The restaurant was an average size, you were seated outside with a view of the town.

“Wow I- Mondo I didn’t expect this. Thank you.”

“Tch, it’s nothing really. I’m just glad you like it.”

You two spend that evening eating your delicious meals and by the time the two of you were done the moon was in the sky. There was a soft breeze and the smell of fresh air blew around you.

“Hey, S/o. One more thing before we go…”

You took your hand in his,

“Yes?”

Taking in a deep breath Mondo mustered in all of his courage and started.

“S/o, the love of my life. You have been with me through just about every bad day I’ve had. You’ve never left me no matter what and I’ve always admired and loved that about you. God, what am I doing just rambling on-? S/o, will you give me the honor of being your husband?”

Pulling out a box, Mondo opened it and revealed a black wedding ring lined with silver on the outside and eight small diamonds in the middle.

Mondo, still on one knee, started to get even more nervous as anxiety bubbled in his stomach.

“You Can say no s/o..-“

“Are you kidding me?! You are the one I want to spend my time with Mondo! I love you.”

Mondo slid the ring one your finger and lifted up your chin to give you a sweet and loving kiss.

“I love you too.”

Teruteru Hanamura

Teruteru Hanamura, the most bold, flirtatious, funny, good looking man you’ve ever met, and possibly right now the most anxious.

He seemed to be walking around while mumbling stuff to himself. He seemed anxious about too many things so you decided to step in.

“Hey, Teruteru. Are you doing ok? You look, well um, stressed.”

“Huh?! Ahh- nononono Im perfectly ok love bug don’t worry about me hun!”

Rolling your eyes at him you Pat the spot right next to you on the bed.

“C’mere.”

He couldn’t bring himself to say no, so he sat down next to you and tried to relax. You could still see how tense he was so you started to massage his back slowly.

“Hey.”

“Hi…”

“Teruteru if you need to talk I’m right here. I love you a lot and I hate to see you taking the burden if something alone.”

“Thank you, sweets. I’m so lucky to have a boyfriend like you.”

Smiling to him you nod and stand up.

“Waitwaitwait! Do you mind if we have dinner later? I’ll make it and there’s this one really beautiful spot to eat it at?”

Chuckling you nod at his slightly jumbled words and walk out the door sending him finger guns.

“I’ll be there.”

Teruteru spent the rest of the afternoon preparing your favorite meals, he even made desert for you!

He went ahead and left before you to set up the spot. He put down the softest blanket he owned. He set out each dish and before he even knew it, it was time for you to show up.

You two had an amazing time. Sharing stories, an occasional kiss on the lips, compliments here and there.

The sun was setting and Teruteru knew he had to say it sooner or later. He stood up and gently placed a kiss on your lips and grabbed your hands.

“S/o, do you mind if I speak from the heart?”

“Of course Teru, I always enjoy it when you do!”

He gave you such a gentle look and smiled.

“S/o, you were my very first boyfriend. You never said anything bad about me, in fact you laughed when I made jokes or small comments. That always made my heart race, you’ve always made my heart race. S/o this is a big question and I want you to give me an honest answer,”

Getting down on one knee he made eye contact with you. Smiling to you he continues with the heartfelt speach

“Will you marry me? You make me so happy and I thought maybe we could take everything a step further.”

“Teruteru- Of course! Are you kidding me?! I love you!”

“Sugar- I love you too. Come here.”

Let’s just say you two had a fun and eventful evening.

Ryoma Hoshi

Ryoma was acting strange today. He seemed to be checking his phone a lot, getting some calls, and even acting a bit jittery around you.

You knew something was up but you didn’t want to make him anxious about everything. Deciding to lightly ask him about the topic you head to your shared room.

“Hey, Ryoma?”

“Gh! Oh, hey. Surprised me. Hey do you mind if we go to this restaurant later on? I know it’s last minute and such but- never mind… is it ok if we can?”

Cupping his cheek you give him a grin and a peck on the cheek.

“Of course we can sweetie. I’ll go ahead and get ready?”

“Yeah… I will as well.”

Ryoma checked his phone one more time. His friends were all texting him, wishing him good luck! He was really lucky to find such a supportive group of people to hold in his life. He was especially lucky to have you. You gave him a purpose again, you helped him to keep pushing through the worst days so he can find the better ones. He absolutely loved you.

“Hey ryoma im done-“

You saw him in the mirror looking at himself with a unreadable expression.

“Hey, if your worried about how you look don’t be. Remember I chose you to be my boyfriend for a reason. I really love you ryoma.”

“I wasn’t worried but thank you I think I needed a pep talk before we leave. I’m glad to have such a strong boyfriend.”

You both arrived on a restaurant that was overlooking the town. You could see just about everything, it was wonderful.

Ryoma and you had a very fun evening basking in each other’s company and just talking about what ever comes to mind.

You saw ryoma fiddling with something so you curiously asked about it.

“Hey, what is that?”

The question clearly caught him off guard. He took in a breath and looked at you with a loving look.

“S/o you’ve given me a purpose. You have helped me through my worst and I’ve never felt…. Happier. I wish to be in your life for a long time so S/o, will you be my husband?”

You couldn’t help the grin that seemed to settle on your face. Standing up you lean in to gently kiss him.

“I would love too.”

You two were happy, Ryoma texted all of his friends about the good news.

“Hmm… S/o Hoshi… has a nice ring to it doesn’t it?”

“Heh, it does.”

Bonus! Here are the wedding rings the guys would give to you!

Mondo’s ring for you

Teruteru’s ring for you

Ryoma’s ring for you

[curly-bangtan]

Heatwave Drabble #2: needy

[Heatwave // Godless] [Drabble Masterlist]

Pairing: fwb!Taehyung x reader

Summary: Lines between you are dangerously blurred.

Genre: drabble, domestic fluff, angst, fwb au, roommates au

Word Count: 2.3k

Warnings: (graphic?) mentions of smut, needy!Tae acting like your boyfriend when he’s not your boyfriend, confusing feelings 😬

A/N: I love this couple, ok bye.

.

‘Y/N’ Taehyung whines. You turn to pin him with hooded unimpressed eyes. ‘I’m horny.’

The two of you have been sleeping together for a few months now, it’s a carefully crafted, consensual agreement between two adults, two close friends. You have sex whenever you want to, no strings attached, friendship unaffected, none of that exclusive bullshit or godforbidden feelings. Just sex.

Sometimes you go a week without fucking each other, other times it’s five times in one night. There really is no strict schedule, it’s a casual, open relationship.

No, not relationship.

Friend(s-who-have-sex)ship.

After that club night, you both decided that there is an undeniable sexual tension between you that hovers beyond your platonic dynamic, yet it is purely physical. Neither of you are seeking anything more, neither of you want to give up your promiscuity for each other.

Thus births… Whatever this is.

‘And what about it?’ Sunday afternoon, you’re lounging on your cream L-shaped couch like vegetables, watching your favourite episodes of The Office. Taehyung is reclined on you, his head cradled in your arms in place of a cushion, and he’s stroking your hand a little too sweetly. Cuddling while watching a show together isn’t uncommon between you, though he is almost always the one to instigate it.

At your apathetic response, he pouts, nuzzling into your bosom. This is exactly the baby behaviour he know that drives you wild; since when have you been about to resist such a docile sub?

This is the same guy who asks you to call him daddy.

‘Why are you being so cold?’ From the corner of your vision, you see the puppy eyes he’s giving you. You have to resist rolling your own. He can be so needy sometimes.

‘We fucked this morning.’ You state, watching the television intently, purposely not giving him the attention he’s trying to lure.

It was a great fuck, in fact; several toys were used and you both came twice. You can still feel the phantom of his cock shoving inside you while he used the vibrator on your clit. Shuddering, you try not to bring up that memory in your head again to prevent your own arousal from perking.

‘That’s never stopped you before.’ Huffing, he snakes an arm around your waist and plays with the hem of your shirt. Of course, he’s not even paying attention to the show anymore. It irritates you when he requests to watch The Office with you then does not even look at the bloody screen for the most of it.

‘You should get a girlfriend, then, if you’re so horny all the time.’ Your tone isn’t bitter, but you guess it’s a little blunt.

Because you’re not his girlfriend. You’re nobody’s girlfriend. Ever.

Taehyung sits up abruptly at what you said, the warmth of his body instantly peeling off your front. His repulsion to the G-word is even physical as he scoots away from you. ‘I don’t want a girlfriend. Dating is so much effort, first you have to take them out to nice places and get to know them, then you have to see whether you’re actually compatible, and then you meet the friends and family who may or may not like you. That’s so annoying!’ He whines, unconsciously palming his crotch that appears to be slightly stiff.

True. Relationships are so demanding and complicated. Why would you wish to always have someone constantly asking your whereabouts? Why would you willingly be tied down to a single person? Why would you give them so much of yourself when they could one day just take this power and crush it in their hands? Relationships are a societal construct, forcing monogamy down your throats and telling you that if you aren’t in a committed relationship, you’re lonely.

You’re a single woman held down by no man, you can fuck whoever you want, and you like it that way.

But thinking of which, you realise you haven’t been fucking a lot of other people lately besides Taehyung. Or even anyone. The last guy must’ve been… That accountant from the bar with a foot fetish… Which was over two weeks ago.

A shudder courses up your back, the claws of that frightening thought digging up your spine.

‘Why don’t you booty call that waitress you were boning for a while?’ It’s a trick question, to see whether you’re also the only hole he’s been putting it in recently. Because if you are, then you two are falling dangerously close to monogamy, the greatest bane of your existence that you avoid like the plague.

‘Nah, ditched her weeks ago. She was too vanilla in bed, didn’t do me like you.’

Of course no one does him like you, and no one does you like him. That’s why you’re friends with benefits - because you know what each other likes the most. So why even bother trying to look elsewhere for sex when you can find it in the room next door?

But this is getting weird. Maybe you should call up that accountant again, hopefully he isn’t too offended that you ghosted him.

‘Why are you asking about her anyway? Are you jealous?’ That word strikes at you like an insult. Taehyung is wagging his brows annoyingly, toes jabbing at your ribs the way your brother used to do, so you flick his forehead harder than you normally would. Wincing, he clutches the sore spot like you threw a rock at him or something. Dramatic.

‘Of course not. I’m never jealous.’ You scoff. Y/N? Jealous? Come on, he’s making you laugh. ‘I was just curious, don’t flatter yourself.’

But it seems your response is a little too much what he wanted to get out of you as he continues to wind you up. ‘Aww, Y/N.’ He pulls you in by the waist and nestles his face in your hair. ‘You know you’re my favourite girl, right? Since day one, you’ve been there for me and I’ll never forget that. No one night stand or blonde waitress can ever replace you, okay?’ When he leans in to kiss your ear, you squirm away, groaning in disgust.

‘Taehyung!!!’ You yell out. ‘Being all wet and sappy will not get you laid right now. Stop it.’

‘Hey, I wasn’t even thinking about that anymore, but if you’re implying that there’s a possibility that I'll get laid right now…’ That irritatingly smug smirk is plastered on his face, and though it absolutely vexes you, it doesn’t fail to make you smile too.

It’s not that you don’t want to have sex with him because since when have you been the one to say no to Taehyung’s thick meatstick? It’s just that…

‘Well, I’m not really feeling it, I’m sorry. I’m getting a really bad period cramp, I’m due tomorrow.’

There’s a subtle warmth creeping beneath Taehyung’s cheeks at your openness to talk about your womanly cycle despite years of you doing so. He’s used to it by now, but even he’ll admit, he’s not the most mature of men his age. The image of blood flowing out of one of his favourite body parts on you is… not nice.

‘Oh.’ Now the unenthusiastic mood makes sense. ‘I’ll get you some ibuprofen from the pharmacy?’

Sidling next to you back to his previous position between your lap with his head reposed on your sternum, Taehyung feathers his fingertips on your arm the way he knows you love. Although it only lasts a couple of days, he knows you always get quite down during period, not eating much and curled up in your bed to nurse your uterus pains. As your roommate, he sees it as his duty lift your mood the best he can. He must remember to get you some ice cream later.

‘It’s ok, don’t worry. Medicine is for the weak, you know I never take painkillers.’ You grumble moodily but brush his hair back from his forehead, his head tilting up in wave of your motion so he can look at you.

‘You’re a mad woman, painkillers don’t make you weak.’ This stubborn steadfast trait of your personality drives him mad sometimes. Why can’t you just take the bloody painkillers so you won’t have to endure the cramps?

‘I’m not a pussy. No, thank you.’ You glare down at him with a challenging glint to your eyes. Taehyung gets the sudden urge to wrestle you and shove those stupid pills down your throat.

He won’t be able to convince you, that’s one thing for sure after living with you for two years.

Change of tactics then. ‘Do you want me to rub your tummy?’ The dance of his fingers on your skin does not cease, he feels you stiffen under his touch when it reaches your bicep.

‘Are you going to turn it into some sexy massage roleplay?’

‘Not a bad idea, actually…’ The suggestion shoots an excited flare to his groin, but then you knee him in the side. ‘Kidding! We’ll do that next time. Just let me ease those cramps.’

When you don’t protest, Taehyung turns to his side in your embrace and reaches his big palm under your shirt. Your skin, smooth as silk, allows his hand to glide as if on ice across the span of your torso. A sound almost like purring sounds from your throat, and he cannot resist looking up to see the efflorescence of content on your face.

As he kneads on your pained navel with the ball of his wrist, you shut your eyes and rest the plush of your cheek atop his head. Maybe it’s the giver in him but when you hum, ‘That feels so good,’ he can’t help preening in pride.

‘What can I say, I’m good with my hands.’ Your arm around his neck tightens into a headlock until he splutters an apology that he doesn’t really mean.

Taehyung tries not to let his mind wander to dirtier places when you groan at the comfort of his massage. It’s weird how you have this effect on him now, how a simple noise from your lips can coax his arousal just like that. He has always found you attractive before all of this, yet would never dare think of you in that way. And now? You two could be gaming at midnight together, but then a brush of your thigh the wrong way would be enough to set each other off, and you will be fucking for two hours straight. He has never felt this magnitude of sexual attraction to anyone in his life before, and the fact that you’re his roommate and closest friend just adds to the convenience.

‘Okay, but why do I feel your boner on my leg?’ There’s a hint of amusement in your voice. Maybe even delight, but he could be reaching.

‘Just ignore it, it’ll go away.’ Knowing you’re not in the mood for sex also puts him off, though the message takes a moment to get relayed to his dick. Taehyung continues to rub your cramping stomach as if his erection isn’t aching to be touched right now. He will deal with it later in the shower.

‘You’re being really sweet… Today one of your needy affectionate days, huh?’ When your lips brush against his forehead, a tingle he purposely ignores shoots to his cock.

‘What do you mean? I’m always like this.’ Taehyung glances up to catch you piercing him with appreciation in your stare.

And he’s suddenly overcome with an urge to kiss you. Except that would be weird because you don’t kiss each other unless it’s during sex.

Friends don’t kiss when the benefits aren’t being reaped.

It’s the hopeless romantic deep in his heart that’s goading him. As much as he likes to sleep around, fuck random bitches, it’s in his blood to have such boyfriend tendencies. He really can’t control it even when he doesn’t mean it.

So maybe he is being particularly needy and affectionate today…

He probably shouldn’t when it could send you the wrong message. It’s a dangerous game you play, this. And although he should trust you and shouldn’t doubt your aversion from developing any sort of feelings, the risk still remains dangling above your heads.

Who’s it going to fall on first?

No, it won’t fall.

Because you’re just friends who fuck. Where’s the complication in that?

At the end of the day, he cherishes your friendship above all else. After the betrayal of who he thought were his brothers, you were his fresh start, his new home. The way he’s latched onto you, that kind of bond… No sex is worth losing that.

You’re twirling his hair in your little finger, tugging the tufts as well as his attention ever so slightly. You have a particular fixation on his hair, Taehyung realises. You even went to the barber with him the other day to make sure they don’t fuck up his hair; you were so reluctant to even let him cut it, saying you liked it that long and messy.

Your personal handgrip when he’s eating you out.

Circles his palm is rubbing into your core falter when you begin to brush your lips over his forehead. The slow pecks you plant on his bangs voids his brain of thought.

‘Stop kissing my hair if you want my boner to go away.’ It’s a challenge not to grind his still painfully stiff cock into your thigh, that guy down there really has a mind of its own.

‘Seriously..? Me kissing the top of your head is making you hard?’ Disbelief ridden in your tone, Taehyung’s skin now feels barren when you remove your lips.

‘Hey, I don’t control these things! Plus I was horny to begin with…’ He flushes.

You should stop banging so often, really.

‘Wait also, have you been using my shampoo? Your hair smells like berries.’ You sniff at his scalp like a curious hound.

Taehyung looks up at you sheepishly.

.

09/09/2019

© Copyright 2019

.

@shookpreme @taetaeobsessed @tangledsparkles @nonexistentfucks @evilkookie @nbiased95��@shimtatae @taehyungmakesmeoof @itscalledgayhoney @tahaing @deliciouslydisturbed365 @expensive-bangtan-girl @jwlmnbt @herakimkim @dnyad @kaepjjang365 @expensive-bangtan-girl @gingerpeachtae @taexxxiiaa @spring2787 @monixreal @askingtheimportantthingshere @icyi-sky

[greenhatsinthesky]

lockdown film no. 33 - Gladiator (2000) dir. Ridley Scott

13/05/2020

- I saw this film the first time when I was maybe 13? My dad decided that it was time for me to watch this Oscar winning epic, but we had to watch it in two parts because it was so long, and pretty damn violent for squeamish, baby me. Me and Dad managed this all in one, seven years later

- the opening is… really something isn’t it

- (just found out it was filmed in Surrey. Gutted)

- I got shivers right through to my scalp when he made that first speech to his soldiers that ends with “Brothers — what we do in life echoes in eternity.” Genius (there’s a chance it was because my room is the temperature of the arctic but nonetheless it was very moving)

- I had a foley workshop this morning and my tutor was talking about how foley should be subtle, but often the sounds need to be exaggerated so we’re absolutely sure that what we’re hearing is what we’re meant to be hearing. Likely because I came in with that mindset, they went absolutely ham thick on the foley for the opening battle scene

- “Enough of politics. Let us pretend that you are a loving daughter, and I am a loving father” — the fact that this line was said quite gently by Richard Harris’ Caesar Marcus Aurelius makes it so heartbreaking because there is absolutely no pretence that their family’s relationship is outrageously dysfunctional, and that’s not even getting onto the incest

- Joaquin phoenix is great in this. When he’s told he isn’t going to be emperor he’s like a stroppy kid who just wants to make his dad proud of him and now he’s a psychopath. That scene’s fantastic anyway, I love how the statue of caesar is right on commodus’ shoulder the whole way through, and really oppressive after commodus has killed Marcus Aurelius

- also fun fact about that scene — apparently phoenix was so stressed out about shooting it that he fainted right after they cut

- the little *fwoop* when he flipped the sword over was a bit much and then saying “the frost. Sometimes it makes the blade stick” before slicing the other guy felt a bit too bondy for this but you know what ? I respect the swagger

- there was an absolutely ineffable sense of dread and pure terror when the roman army was approaching maximus’ home and his son was running and waving thinking it was him. I hated that bit

- “those giraffes you sold me. They won’t mate. They just walk around eating, and not mating. You sold me… queer giraffes.” Whoever wrote this deserves every Oscar this film won, and I want it framed in my kitchen

- I enjoy the fact that they could have so easily done a training montage gladiator style when Maximus had been bought by proximo. Instead they took time to get a bit more into his character and for us to meet juba and the other gladiators. We didn’t need to see him training as a gladiator, that’s not what we’re here for. This film isn’t about fighting — sure, it’s got some great scenes in the colosseum which are entertaining to watch, and there’s stacks of gratuitous violence, but I feel in this case it’s warranted because you can’t get away from the brutality of the games in this context. The film itself is more about Maximus as a general, a gladiator, a husband, father and person and how he relates to the ever conflicting idea of “Rome” and the permanent violence it seems to require to keep that idea going under the reign of commodus. Maximus was required to kill in the army, but there it felt like it was for a purpose: to protect the idea of Rome and the emperor and the people that he cares—here he is required to kill just because he is required to kill. That would obviously change the dynamic but it says a lot about his character that he doesn’t seem to have any qualms about killing a person he doesn’t know for the entertainment of more people he doesn’t know and will likely never meet

- when Maximus walks through the cage it exactly mirrors the opening scene and him walking by all his soldiers as they salute him as their leader and I really liked that

- “i did not say I knew him, I said he touched me on the shoulder once” — why does this film have so many relatable lines 

- one of my favourite things about this film is essentially nothing to do with the film itself, and it’s how my dad will yell stuff from it at opportune moments. When I was learning to drive and going round corners, he would say “hold the line” like Maximus does in the amphitheatre. once, when we were climbing up a hill and it got a bit steeper near the top and I got a bit more tired and started to slow, he clapped me on the shoulder, pointed up the hill and yelled “STRENGTH AND HONOUR! HOLD THE LINE! STAY WITH ME!” just to encourage me up this hill and I love him so much for it

- absolutely cannot stand the bit in the chariot fight where the archer woman gets fully sliced in half. Couldn’t deal with it in 2013 and can’t deal with it now

- fun fact this film got the thumbs up thumbs down thing the wrong way round. In the scene where maximus’ identity was revealed to commodus, he moves his hand from a neutral position to his thumb pointing upwards, which means that he is sparing maximus. Often the emperor would use this code to signal to the winning gladiator if they should kill the loser. However, apparently thumb down didn’t mean “finish them”, it actually meant “throw down your weapon”, and the thumb pointing upward was meant to symbolise the sword thrusting up into the loser’s body. However this might also might be incorrect, I have not by any means done extensive research

- “it vexes me. I am terribly vexed.” Another classic dad quote

- just ruminating on ancient rome. Legitimately cannot imagine a worse occupation than being a gladiator. I’m sure if I thought about it a bit more I’d think of worse jobs, but right now, this is the one

- they used… real tigers for the scene with Tigris ??? Not happy about that. First of all, how ?

- I love the constant talk of the dream that was Rome, and the constant talk in tandem of the mob and how fickle they are. There is the dream that is Rome and there is the reality of the fickle mob. They obviously can’t coexist but those everyone we meet wants something better, in some way

- I don’t know if phoenix made a conscious decision about his speech but it really fit with what I said before about him being a petulant child because his speech didn't sound completely developed and reminded me of a child’s speech in how he pronounces certain letters. It adds so much to the character because he is a completely abhorrent person who wants to sleep with his sister and have a pure blood heir, have complete control over the roman empire and kill anyone who comes between his dream of what that empire could be under him. But then at the same time he sounds like a kid who’s not getting his own way

- I do not want a snake in my bed

- ‘“Strength and honour,” Maximus said to Juba. The two men smiled and rested their foreheads together.’ I did beam at this bit

- apparently proximo was meant to live in the original version of the film, but Oliver reed died during production, before all his scenes were filmed, so his character had to be killed. The last shot of him is from the back, so we don’t see his face, and a shot from earlier where he says “shadows and dust” is cut in right before he dies. The film was dedicated to reed’s memory

- OH another thing I Loved about commodus was how he had a white horse, and white armour in the final battle with maximus, while maximus has black armour, which is the standard. Because commodus has such an idea of who he is, and in his mind, he is Rome’s saviour, even though he knows full well he doesn’t have any of the qualities of a good emperor. White is typically the colour used to signify that a character is good, and pure, etc. so I really enjoyed the inversion of that to show commodus’ character and the character he wants Rome to see

- this isn’t a film about violence, it’s about a philosophy

- one last thing is that when I rewatch films to write up these things, I often skip parts because I get the gist of what’s going on and I don’t need to watch the whole thing. With this, even though it was 2 hours 35, I watched the whole thing, and I think that says a lot about how good a film it is

[geckolady]

Skulduggery Pleasant: Raising Cain - Chapter 7

Chapter 7 - Perchance for cain

They laughed on the way to the Sanctuary, and hugs with Bear and Weasel were mandatory – for Stephanie only – and they were finally able to find out what had happened.

“Serpine’s men had amour and weapons,” Bear told Stephanie. “And they were in a small room and made sure to split us up.”

“We work better together,” Wolf said.

“Always have. And with others in the room we didn’t have a chance to fight to our strengths. They knew that would happen, but we rushed into it and didn’t realise until too late,” Bear said. “We were very lucky to have you, Stephanie.”

Crow nodded. “Though we do need to help you think up a name still. Calling you by your given name is getting more dangerous every day.”

“She’s Cub,” Wolf proclaimed. “Right, Cub?”

“Yeah!” She said, putting her hands in the air. They high-fived.

Crow made a movement that was likely an eyeroll. “But you still need a real name. Code names are good for missions, we’ve needed them for a while I suppose, but that doesn’t change the fact you need a Taken name.”

“Hey,” Weasel said to Stephanie, “you still haven’t told us why you gave us those names.”

“Aren’t you meant to know these things?” Stephanie asked him.

He rolled his eyes. “I can’t know everything. That would be boring. Tell me, why do I get the bad name?”

She tilted her head at him. “You don’t have a bad name.”

“Oh God,” Snake said. “She’s already acting like Skul.”

Stephanie flipped her hair back and began pointing and explaining – she pointed to Skulduggery, “Crow, you always brought weird things, like crows get stuff for their nests.” She pointed to Ghastly, “Panda made me a panda bear when I was little and it was the first thing he gave me and my favourite toy, so it became his name.” To Anton, “Bear, you got me things that made me think you were trying to be all tough and not super cute but also wanted to spoil me like a marshmallow. I almost called you marshmallow actually but I liked the animal theme so you became Bear.” Dexter, “Wolf, I’m not really sure how it happened, but it seemed to fit the you I made up from all the things you got me. It was always something new, unexpected and I loved it. I could always count on you to get me something when something bad happened too, so I sort of learned you were loyal and trustworthy, so I thought of a dog, but that sounded too tame compared to the other cool names so you’re a wolf.” Saracen, “Weasel, you always got me things I could eat or where I’d find more things to eat when I got there and weasels were good at finding food and getting from place to place unseen. At least to my head when I was a kid that’s how I thought of it, so you got to be Weasel. I like that name.” Erskine, “And Snake, I always thought you’d be telling me to do the stupid things and getting me in trouble on purpose, and then you’d hide and laugh at me, so you got to be Snake. You were always my favourite when I was very little because I’d spend so much time alone and whatever stupid thing imaginary Snakie said to me were usually pretty fun. So, I like it. I like them all though.”

They nodded and grinned. She thought they seemed pretty happy with that. “I like that,” Wolf said. “I’m the coolest.”

Stephanie started to laugh as all hell broke loose and they started bickering over who got to be the coolest.

“Guys!” She shouted at them, finally getting their attention. “You still need to tell me what happened! You got split up but you didn’t tell me anything.”

“Oh, yes,” Crow said, then coughed as if trying to distract himself from his own immature behaviour. “We were split up and attacked with extreme force. We knew Serpine was not to be underestimated but I think when we didn’t see Serpine we didn’t think his lackies would be any good. Obviously, we were wrong. Though we are lucky enough that there aren’t as many Hollow Men now.”

“Hollow Men?”

“Those paper like things from earlier. They have the single purpose of fighting to the death. Generally they can’t do anything but in numbers they are catastrophic. Eliminating a handful now is the absolute difference between life and death later.”

She nodded.

“The fight didn’t last long. They had a very big man that got a bag over my head and shackled me to a bedpost before I could do much, which bound my magic and stopped me from helping,” Skulduggery explained for her. She had assumed that was what the cuffs did but it was good to know. “I believe the rest of the fight was over as people were knocked out. And now I would like to know what happened to you.”

Stephanie was looked at by them all and Wolf let her have the stage. She hesitated. “Well, it was pretty fast honestly. I just remember attacking this guy and the Hollow Men almost made me sick – I hate them by the way – and Wolf had all that purple mist you told me about on him. He kept screaming at that first guy who was going to hurt him more, so I stabbed him in the chest. Serpine said I killed him.”

They were quiet. “I’m sorry,” Wolf finally said.

She waved him away. “I’d rather he stopped hurting you. But then again, I’d rather never have to see Serpine again, his magic definitely hurts too much.”

“What the–”

“Excuse me I’m still speaking Mr Pleasant!” She called before he had the chance. His jaw snapped shut. “So I passed out in the office after some guy turned up and I don’t remember what he said, just that he was there. I woke in the cell and that guy came in pretty soon after to take me to Serpine and he tried to make me convert to his mission and be his daughter or some shit and I told him to shove it but in less words because I didn’t want to die and I was taken back to the cells with only one smack which I thought was pretty good going considering everything. I tricked the guy into switching around cuffs and then I beat his ass and came and found all you. So you all got save by a little girl. Ha.”

They snorted at themselves and the tension went from the van. “We are so teaching you to fight.” Weasel said.

“I did fight!”

“Better,” Crow said. “If this becomes a habit, if you want to keep up with the people we have to fight, you need to be better. We get the worst, most likely to be killed missions. You will have to sit out of a few until you are up to the standards we expect. I’m sure we can find a few small cases until you’re ready for the big dogs though.”

She rolled her eyes. “Sure.”

They told her about Meritorious and the other Elders on the way but told her they were not going to be introducing them at that moment as they didn’t want to have to argue to keep her as their apprentice. Still, she and Dexter would have to go to someone called Doctor Kenspeckle in the Hibernian Cinema, a place he had converted secretly into a small hospital. They had already registered with him as soon as Gordon had died since they knew she was going to be sent into their care.

They waited for the Cleavers to get out the van and they all left, and Wolf disappeared to get them a car – Weasel whispered to her secretively that he was going to flirt one out of the Administrator which had made her blush violently because flirting was weird, but also grin because it was weird in another way – and the others disappeared to sit around for the Elders and Stephanie had to wait for Wolf next to Panda who snored lightly from the pavement. It didn’t take too long before Wolf pulled up next to her and they pulled and pushed Panda awkwardly into the car and then got in the front.

Since they were hoping he would awaken soon and didn’t care how, they put on the radio as loud as it went, making the car vibrated with the music, and they sang along too loud for them to sound good, which Stephanie was grateful for. They drove for half an hour and screamed the whole way, even in traffic, getting a lot of looks, and when they pulled up in front of the cinema and continued to sing until the end of the song, Panda still hadn’t woken up.

Her ears rang, but she was happy to help push Panda from the borrowed car and Wolf pulled him onto his shoulders. She locked the car for him and opened the building doors. He told her where to stand and made her walk through the magic door into the medical practice, making her grin and laugh and run up to the top.

“Who is making that racket?!” A voice shouted from somewhere. Two young men walked into the large waiting hall with smiles. They waved at her.

“Hello,” she said to them. “My friends need help.”

“Who are they?” One of them asked.

“Ghastly Bespoke and Dexter Vex.”

They laughed. “Oh, we know them, are they coming up now?”

Wolf came up sideways with Panda still on his shoulders. “Yeah,” she said. “Where do you want them?”

“This way,” he said. “I’m Civet by the way.”

She grabbed Wolf’s top and pulled him along. “Come,” she commanded. “I don’t have a name yet.”

“It’s a big decision. I’m Stentor,” the other told her and they opened a door to a ward in which Wolf placed Panda with surprising gentleness onto a bed.

She put her hands on her hips. “You need to lie down too.”

He grinned wickedly. “Oh yeah? Why should I?”

“Because you were in a traumatic incident and must be checked for death.”

“For death?” He said, laughing.

“Yes, and if you don’t I’ll tell on you.” He stepped towards her menacingly, but she didn’t move. “And it’ll be awful. You’ll be lectured and told off and still have to get checked but it’ll be worse. What are you doing?”

He didn’t respond, just pulled her to him and started tickling mercilessly. She shrieked with laughter and immediately fell to the floor, hugging her sides and trying to breathe through the intensity of the fun. An old man with grey hair and stern words for Wolf came in at some point but it just made Wolf pretend to roar and pounce on her and he ended up on his knees tickling her until she was screaming that she was about to pee herself and she was pretty sure she did just a little bit before he stopped and they panted, giggling still in her case, and the old man came and stood a foot from them.

“Are you two quite finished?” He said sternly.

“No.” They said at once.

He sighed tiredly. “Get on a bed. Both of you.”

He turned to his assistants and started telling them thing so Wolf and Stephanie looked at each other. They both stood silently and got into the same bed, Stephanie sitting on Wolf’s knees in the most uncomfortable for him way she could.

Kenspeckle turned back to them to tell them something and saw them. “For God’s sake. Your own beds!”

“Oh!” Stephanie said acting surprised. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?” She got in her own bed and tried not to grin at the looks she was getting from the doctor, Civet and Stentor.

“Insolent girl. Tell me what happened to you.”

She told him about the brief torture and her time stuck in the cell but after a check over and some food she was told she’d be fine. Wolf was checked last and the other Dead Men came into the ward just as Panda groaned and started to wake up.

They were also sent into their own beds for check-ups though Bear and Weasel got out of that, meaning they could sit on either side of Stephanie and relay the meeting, in which they tried to convince the Elders that Serpine had killed people recently, including Gordon, and had taken them hostage, including a minor female that had been left at the mercy of not just Serpine, who tortured her, but also other known criminals. It had been played up a little to try and convince them but even then, it hadn’t been enough to get a guaranteed stance from the Sanctuary.

“We usually fight alone,” Bear told her reassuringly in his deep, quiet voice. He was the most comforting to have around, so calm and reassuring. Panda came next though she imagined she’d go to him for council and he’d help her, whereas Bear would let her talk and probably then kill or seriously maim whoever tried to hurt her, so they never tried again. It was very nice to have such strong support. She could have used that last year through school.

It was after saying all that they tried to help her with her name. The key word being ‘tried’.

“We need to play to your strengths.”

“Your personality.”

“You like funny things. Something warm and fun would be good.”

“Or something ironic,” Crow pointed out. “You like dark humour too much for something warm.”

“No,” Weasel argued for her. “She could have a warm name.”

“Yeah,” Snake smirked. “Like Flame.”

“That’s terrible,” Panda groaned. He had a bad headache after hitting his head hard and being given a sedative.

Stephanie nodded. “It was pretty terrible.”

“You need something bold. Strong,” Wolf said. “Like Wolf.”

She stared at him. “Wolf is my least liked name.” He raised an eyebrow and she grinned instantly. “I do want a bold name though. Something easy to remember. Not a mouthful. Not boring either.”

“Perhaps something exotic,” Wolf said. “Maybe we should get some books.”

They tried to think up some books or other things they could use to help her but were soon being kicked out of the place by Kenspeckle, getting Stentor and Civet in trouble as they had joined the efforts to think of names. Stephanie was last out and held back for a moment by the doctor.

“Are you alright my dear?” He asked.

She smiled at him. “I haven’t been happier in a long time.”

He sighed. “I would hate to see you get hurt on one of their hair-brained schemes.”

“I like hair-brained schemes. I like crime, in fact. I want to do crime tonight!”

He rolled his eyes. “God, just like Pleasant. You two both have a perchance for cain.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Trouble. It means you’re trouble and I’m going to have to fix you too much. Now go on I suppose but remember to rest or else you’ll be very sore tomorrow.”

She grinned and gave the grumpy man a hug before running down the stairs straight onto the back of Bear who hiked her higher and let her stay there. He really was a marshmallow.

[silvermoongirl10swfics]

501st Legion OCs

Doc (CT-4153) - Medic. Doc has military regulation black hair and is clean shaven. Before the war, he was one of the medics responsible for training medics on Kamino. He trained Painkiller and Needle of the 212th. During training Doc became very protective of Needle, partly due to Needle fainting every time an IV or injection had to be administered. Seeing how close Needle and Painkiller became during training, Doc actually made sure they were assigned to the same battalion and he also used his sneaky skills in getting them both assigned to the 212th under Patch (his best friend from his own medic training). Doc appears mild mannered and calm. But if you mess with or hurt one of his ‘chosen’ baby brothers e.g. Needle, you had better run for your life. He is the living defintion/example of ‘never annoy the medic’. Once the war started, Doc could have remained on Kamino training the new medics, but he volunteered for active service and was assigned to the 501st. While he didn’t train Kix, Kix still finds it weird being the Lead Medic, so in charge of one of the medic trainers he knew on Kamino when he was training. Doc was named for all the historical dramas I watch and how every medic gets nicknamed Doc.

Jek ARC Squad of the 501st - the ARC squad I have added Echo and Fives to. This is the squad in the Vopak series Echo is a corporal of. There will be a reunion fic of Jek squad on Vopak. (I’m not sure if ARC squads exist in canon, but in the Vopak AU series they do now.)

Hefty (CT-5620) - ARC Sergeant of Jek squad. Bald with a scruff beard. Hefty has a tough guy persona, but if you are in his squad, you know he is really a softie. Has the bad habit of not sleeping or eating enough when he is stressed about an upcoming campaign or just generally worrying about his Jek boys. Once Echo and Fives were made ARCs, he snapped them up into his squad knowing they would be a good fit. Relatively quickly, he had Echo promoted to Corporal of the squad. He and Echo worked really well together and Hefty became protective of his little brother. After the Citadel mission when Echo was presumed dead, Hefty grieved the loss of his little brother, but carried on knowing he needed to help support a grieving Fives, just as Echo would have wanted. As the clones and Jedi left Coruscant Rex told Hefty that Echo was alive and was travelling on the Negotiator with Fives. In the privacy of his room, Hefty held onto a holo picture of the squad taken three days before the Citadel mission and cried because he was so happy that Echo was alive.

Quote (CT-1721) - ARC Corporal of Jek squad (was promoted after Echo’s presumed death). Quote is bald and clean shaven. He has two quote mark tattoos on his head above his right ear. His armour is painted in blue quote marks of varying sizes, he likes you to know who exactly he is if he is wearing his helmet. The front of his helmet has a single quote mark painted on it, covering top to bottom. The same is painted on the back of his helmet. He got his name in training because he quoted people and things he read, his batchmates gave him his name lovingly. After Echo’s ‘death’ and after Fives refused Hefty’s offer of a promotion to Corporal, Quote was promoted to Corporal and while he accepted his new rank, he hated it. He felt like he was replacing Echo, but he had looked up to Echo for the nine months he served with Echo (Quote became an ARC Trooper three months after the Domino twins). He also knew Echo would want someone who knew Hefty well to serve as his second-in-command of the squad and who would continue to look after the squad. Quote cried the first time he hugged Echo on Vopak.

Dace (CT-4135) - ARC Trooper. Dace has buzz cut black hair. He was the second member of Jek squad, Hefty choosing him personally. Dace didn’t mind Echo being promoted to Corporal, he actually laughed at Echo when he apologised for being promoted before Dace. Dace doesn’t care for promotions, apart from being given ARC Trooper status, he is happy at the bottom of the pecking order. He silently taught Echo how best to be Hefty’s right-hand-man and helped Echo and Fives adjust to being ARC Troopers. He was very proud of the Domino twins and also helped them with some of their chaotic schemes, privileges of not being a higher rank. When he heard about what happened on the Citadel mission, he hugged Fives and then went to the gym on the Resolute, where he punched four punching bags so hard they came loose from the chains holding them up. He was non-verbal for a week and then went back to his gruff self, if he was spotted keeping a closer eye on Fives, then nobody mentioned it. On his arrival to Vopak he kept a close eye on Echo, obviously reluctant to have the injured brother out of his sight. Dace laughed when Echo and Fives’ speeder ended up on the lake, happy to see the twins back to normal. The first time he saw Echo back in his ARC armour (that day on the lake) he cried.

Error (CT-5181) - ARC Trooper. Error has military regulation red hair and a red scruff beard. He was not named because of his hair colour, it was actually because every time he learnt something shocking, his facial expression would freeze, with wide eyes, representing/being a living embodiment of the error.code message you get on a computer. Error was made an ARC two months before the Domino twins and was transferred to the 501st, Jek squad from the 126th Battalion. He was so happy to have brothers the ‘same age as him’, as he had taken to calling Dace and Hefty the ‘goldie oldies’, which Hefty complained about, only because their armour was blue, not 212th gold.

Xerus (CT-2418) - ARC Trooper. Xerus has short blonde hair and is clean shaven. His batchmates are Patch and Fixer from the 212th. He loves that the 501st and 212th often work together as that means he gets to see his batchmates. While training on Kamino, he had initially wanted to be a pilot, but when he watched Commander Colt and some of the other ARCs train, he decided he wanted to be an ARC more than a pilot. After being assigned to the 501st and six months into the war, he happened to confess his aim to Rex while drunk. The next day, the Captain began training him and once Xerus distinguished himself in battle, he was given the official word that he was going to become an ARC Trooper. He liked Echo and Fives immediately and called them the ‘best of the 501st’. After the Citadel mission, he hid for the entire night on the Resolute when he cried himself to sleep. The next day, like Dace, he kept a close eye on Fives. Spent most of the journey from Coruscant to Vopak crying when he found out Echo was alive and travelling on the Negotiator. He and Tactless chose to live together on Vopak and live next to Fara and Quote.

Tactless (CT-2013) - ARC Trooper. Tactless has longish black hair he puts in a nerf tail. He became an ARC four months after the Domino twins. Originally from the 184th Attack Battalion, the same as Copy’s batchmates. He did not like Avid, Gloomy and Vex (Murk was the best of the four of them) and so Tactless may have rubbed in his ARC Trooper promotion and transfer to the 501st to the three Tango squad members. (He absolutely rubbed it in!) Tactless did not know Avid, Gloomy and Vex were the Cadets Echo and Fives spoke to about bullying Copy, once Tactless found out on Vopak. He would take the time, every day, to walk past Tango squad and would grin as he pointed to his ARC armour. As you may have guessed, Tactless is named Tactless because he does not possess a lot of tact. But I love my petty boy.

Fara (CT-6118) - ARC Trooper. Fara has military cut brown hair and has a scruff beard. Fara is the baby of Jek squad and is the most protected of the squad. Fara became a member of Jek squad two months before the Citadel mission, Echo took Fara under his wing and Fara hero-worshipped Echo. When Rex told Jek squad about Echo’s fate on the Citadel, Fara found a corner of the hanger and cried for a few minutes. After composing himself, he went to the ARC’s barracks and found Fives curled up crying on Echo’s bunk. Without saying anything Fara went and cuddled Fives for the entire night. Even though, thanks to Echo’s influence, Fara didn’t need to be watched over anymore, he let Fives be protective of him without a word. Four months before the end of the war, Fara was badly injured in a battle, Fives got him to Kix and then proceeded to have a meltdown in the middle of the Medbay. Once Fara was conscious he comforted Fives and pulled the older ARC onto his medical bed and they cuddled for the night. Once he heard Echo was alive, Fara spent the journey to Vopak smiling and helped Rex gather up pieces of ARC armour for Echo. Once he saw Echo, Fara hugged him tightly and was relucant to let Echo go. Once living quarters were chosen in the Vopak Temple, Fara and Quote made sure they lived next door to the Domino twins (Hefty and Dace lived on the other side of the twins). (Fara’s name was inspired by the lotr character Faramir.)

[casualcatastrophesincorporated]

Either sneak or survival, your pick! :D

ask prompt courtesy of @fallout-lou-begas  

[ I hope I answered these OK : ) ]

Survival!

34. How well does your character take care of themselves in the wilderness? Do they feel most at home in the wilderness, small settlements, or densely inhabited areas? Are there any particular reasons why that is? 

The Kid is handy with a pistol and can survive just fine on there own in the great outdoors as long as they have there pip boy with them. If not for the pip boys map T.K. probably wouldn't be able to get from one town to the next without getting just hopelessly lost. 

The Kid does prefer cities and settlements over natural areas. He just loves people so darn much! To T.K. every persons a story, and T.K. Wants to hear every last one! Its also a lot easier for him to feed his curiosity in an urban setting, your just as likely to find T.K chatting away with someone at the farms, gun stores, medical centers, and military stations surrounding Vegas than you are to find him at his actual home in the lucky 38.

35. What kind of diet does your character keep? Is it more indiscriminate, or picky or particular? Are they good cooks, whether in a kitchen or by a fire? Do they think of food as simple sustenance, or do they appreciate indulgent dishes and finer flavors? Do they have a favorite food? 

The Kid has one golden rule when it comes to food : if your going to cook, make sure you cook a lot! T.K. has an appetite that would put a death claw to shame and is willing to eat pretty much anything (much to Arcade’s distress).  T.K. is also a surprisingly good chef, and if given a kitchen to work with and ample ingredients will set to cook absolutely gigantic meals. 

T.K. also prefers to eat with others if possible and loves to set up community meals, be it the dinners cooked together with his companions in the lucky 38 or helping give out food at the old Mormon fort.  

Due to his big appetite, The Kid has a hard time understanding why people would enjoy “fancy” foods that come in small serving sizes. The Gourmand for example completely vexes him, he understands that the food is of a superior quality and is cooked by experienced chefs, but the sight of a single slice of steak with just a drip of sauce being priced at well past what could get you a solid set of ribs and a few pounds of chuck roast is enough to send him into a hunger induced tizzy.

36. What keeps your character going? What is the one thing that they have that could motivate them to keep persisting if they lost literally everything else?

The Kid is egregiously optimistic,really and truly believing that there is always a path forwards towards a brighter future. That’s not to say he ignores that things can be bad, he is fully aware that the Mojave desert is a rough place to live, but to give up? to stop putting in the effort to continue forward? To him that might as well be death before death. So even if he was to lose everything, to be absolutely alone with nothing and nobody, to tumble down to the bottom of the  mountain, he would simply dust himself off, take a deep breath, and start climbing.

That’s also why Kid’s biggest fear is death, to be robbed of the ability to continue, to be removed from the story, scares him to the bone. He’s died once already, and he refuses to do it again.

[c-is-for-circinate]

---okay wait, no, nevermind, this is what I want to say about Vex and Percy, I found it after all.  I love them because they’re a love story about choosing what you want to build after the world falls down around you, and finding somebody else who will look to the future and build next to you, even though you’re both working with shattered landscapes and cracked tools.  I love them because the way both of their worlds broke is so fucking different, but they understand each other enough to recognize it, and neither one of them can keep from moving instinctively, unstoppably forward anyway.

Once upon a time, they both had lives with plans, and then those lives fell apart.  And both of those lives, those sets of plans included love in their own way, but neither of them looked anything like the love Percy and Vex found with each other.  They didn’t expect that at all.

I have a lot of feelings about teenaged Percival de Rolo, who is probably going to be a clockmaker.  He has so many siblings in his vast noble family that he can do that, he can be semi-useless and artful.  He expects to get married someday, a respectable arranged match to someone he’ll presumably like well enough, and live a quiet, clever life.  I picture him as fond enough of his family, assuming that he’ll be fond enough of his hypothetical maybe-someday wife and his hypothetical maybe-someday children, happy enough in that partnership, with the time and space to be passionate about his cleverness and his books and his inventions.  There’s such a specific kind of fulfilment in that life I think Percy once envisioned for himself, with people who are reliably there, loved but taken a little bit for granted, all of the focus and elation and ‘this is the point of me’ devotion towards intellectual pursuits.  I think he would have been happy with that life, and that he would have been kind of a vaguely-inoffensive asshole because he never really paid enough attention to other people to bother really hurting them, or to learn that he could really hurt them and stop.

Of course we know how all of that fell apart.  What I’m fascinated by is Percy himself, though, Percy who survived to join Vox Machina, because the Percy we know from canon never actually stopped falling apart.  We know he hasn’t rebuilt himself a new life, he doesn’t have a future, he’s got a revenge quest and then he has a dragon distraction, sure, yes, we see that, but it’s not just the facts of what Percy does, it’s the feelings and the headspace he’s in the whole time.  Taliesin’s said a few times, and I am so interested in the implications, that Percy spends 95% of the campaign mostly staying coherent through the middle of a constant, years-long nervous breakdown.  He is constantly slipping back and forth along the edges of dissociating, present enough to react to things but not exactly here, not really processing the full weight of everything that happens, not quite.  He can’t tell his Orthax-visions apart from nightmares cooked up by his own brain, and he talks more than once about how much the past few years with VM feel more like a dream than reality.  His judgment is a mess, diving headfirst into deals with anyone who’ll have him, making whatever bad decision seems like a good idea at the time.

So Percy’s life was smashed to smithereens and the Percy we know has absolutely not recovered, has not even really begun to recover--but one of the really epic things about Percy is the way he just keeps moving forward anyway.  Dazed, dissociated, acting on instinct, whatever Percy may be, it is baked into his very nature to keep on going.  When Percy is surprised or threatened, he always seems to be shocked into action, not stillness.  We see it when he goes full Determinator in Whitestone during the Briarwoods arc, and again chasing Ripley to Glintshore.  We see it directly after the Chroma Conclave attack, looking for a plan, for a next step, when he tugs Vex to evacuate the keep; we see it in the ruins of Draconia when he’s the only one to notice Tiberius, and he is so careful about asking questions that won’t derail the thing they have in motion, so careful not to alert any of the others who might grind everything to a halt, because grief or no grief this has to keep going anyway.  Even when he’s awash with useless emotions and there’s nowhere to go to, Percy broods at work, down by a forge or setting pen to paper, making and planning and doing.  It’s so telling that even at his absolute worst, in that pit of nothing when Orthax first whispered in his ear, Percy’s reaction was to make something.

.

Which brings us to Vex, who isn’t quite a maker like Percy, but is still a builder in her own way.  Vex who had her own life that fell apart, and I don’t really mean Byroden, and I certainly don’t mean Syngorn.

Vex’s life, Vex’s plans, weren’t handed to her.  The life Vex expected to live was the one she was still living when we first met her: the traveling adventurer’s life she’d built with Vax.  (And maybe that’s our first demonstration of exactly how much Vex is maker and a builder, that after her life fell to pieces the first time--after Byroden, after Syngorn--she’d already managed to put together a new one once.)  She has her brother and she has her bear, and by the time we meet her she has Vox Machina, and it’s not much for convention but it’s a life.  All of her expectations are locked into that life and that future.  VM at level 9, with a keep under construction and the respect of Tal’dorei, was obviously already pretty different than the twins at level 1 living in the woods, but it’s also so easy to see how it’s just a continuation of the same thing.  Vex and her twin live in each others’ pockets, and she shoots things and makes sure that there is always enough to eat and always money for a rainy day, and there’s stability in unconditional love and self-sufficiency right there.  Laura’s mentioned on Talks that, if the Conclave hadn’t attacked and Vax had left the group, Vex would have tried as hard as possible to convince him to stay, and then would’ve gone with him for sure.  Of course she would have. Vox Machina was the life Vex was trying to build, but Vax and Trinket were the life she already had, cornerstone and truth.

You can see how hard Vex works to create and maintain and secure that life with every coin she squirrels away so zealously against a rainy day.  There is no doubt in my mind that, pre-Vox Machina, Vex and her bow and her hoarded pennies was the one who made sure there was always something to eat over the campfire every night.  There is no doubt in my mind that when they found Byroden in ashes, Vex was the one who got her brother moving, who kept them moving, who kept them pointed forwards no matter what.  And you can see how much Vex put into the bigger, richer, theoretically more-stable life Vox Machina was starting to build together when it all came crashing down.

Percy’s life fell apart pre-stream, and we all know exactly how.  The super fascinating thing about Vex’s arc is that we get to see her life fall apart, right there in the middle of the story, maybe more than anybody else.  The Chroma Conclave was hard on everyone for all sorts of reasons, but in terms of what Vex tried to build for herself and tried to keep, it’s easy to see how fast and how utterly she loses very nearly everything.  Greyskull Keep is first, of course, with the heartbreak of watching Vex hesitating there at the edge of the tree with tears in her eyes, because this was their home.  It’s such a big thing for her, more than for anyone else--and of course it is, because Vex more than anyone in the group saw Greyskull as her future.  Keyleth always had the Ashari to go back to, and Pike had Sarenrae, Grog lives in the motion and Scanlan avoids plans, Percy could barely conceive of a future existing and Vax was lost and floundering for any next step he could find, but Vex had this castle and Vex called this castle home.  

Of course it doesn’t end with the castle, though, because this love story is the story of how everything breaks, and the next thing of Vex’s to break was Vax.  Before the dragons came, Vax was already falling apart and falling away from her in two different directions, half of him tugged away by depression and uncertainty, the other half pulled after Keyleth.  The seeds of distance were sprouting there even before Vex died in the Queen’s champion’s tomb.  And maybe that feels even more symbolic now than I ever realized it did before--Vex died and came back, but the deal her brother made, that vow he swore, wiped away any chance Vex still had for ever getting back that wandering rogue-and-ranger life that once was hers.

The Chroma Conclave arc takes nearly half of Campaign 1, and Vex spends it watching bits of her old life crumble while she’s much, much too busy to process or mourn.  There are dragons in the world, and there’s no time to worry about what the world will look like once they’re dead.  She doesn’t have plans.  Vax has raven wings and a goddess and a girlfriend, and Emon is on fire, is turning to lava beneath Thordak’s feet, and Keyleth is a wreck and Grog dies for five minutes and god only knows what’s going on in Scanlan’s head ever--and Vex, like Percy, just keeps going.  She reads the Raven Queen book cover to cover seventeen times.  She takes things, and she hoards things, and she scrounges for loot, and she gets called greedy for it but the thing is that for Vex, acquiring things is very much a fundamental kind of building for the future, maybe even more than making and tinkering is for Percy.  Stocking up now will save them later, it’s baked into the firmament of Vex’s soul, take whatever you can because you will NEED IT someday.  She steals a broom because she wants it, yes, and then it saves all of their lives.  She sets the group after Fenthras because she wants it.  She bargains and she haggles, even when there’s no reason at all to believe that tomorrow will come, even when Vex has no idea what tomorrow could be, because whatever doubts she may have on the surface, her instincts can’t give up that last breath of faith: I will need this money later, because there will be a later.  Just like Percy, scribbling plans in his journals late in the night for inventions he has no time or supplies to make.  Neither of them have any fucking clue what the future could possibly be, but they can’t stop working towards it anyway.

.

This is the environment where they fall into each other, Vex and Percy, in the middle of the mess of the Chroma Conclave, in this violent limbo world where any day could be the last and next month might as well not exist.  This is where they plant the seeds and start to grow the future they don’t even believe in yet.

The attraction and the flirting start before the dragons even come, of course.  Percy builds things for Vex to have and keep and use or squirrel away, and it’s such a perfect expression of both of their attitudes towards the world.  Vex keeps his coin with hers, and makes sure to shepherd it just as carefully, makes sure that Percy will have enough in whatever future comes.  And there are hints of what they’ll be.  There’s a reason that ‘Darling, take the mask off’ is SO MUCH, and it’s because ever-moving determinator Percy is stuck.  He’s driving himself right into a corner, working himself off a cliff.  He’s just killed someone horribly and he’s on the edge of blue-screening right now, of stopping, or maybe of smashing everything until there’s nowhere left to go.   And Vex, who’s got a good life for herself right now but has already lost one and knows what it’s like, says, come on.  Let’s back you away from this wall you’ve thrown yourself up against.  Take the mask off.  Let’s keep moving forward. 

And they’re something, there, in the way Vex not only keeps going but tries to keep Percy going right through it all.  So much of Vex’s constant planning and motion is wrapped around and embedded with keeping other people going too.  We know she took care of Vax when it was just the two of them, because they took care of each other, and you cannot tell me Vex wasn’t the long-term planner of the pair.  She gathers Trinket up out of horror and sadness and makes sure he has a future.  She collects strays, angel slave-boys, the fruitless quest for the Gray Render baby.  She pulls Percy out of a jail cell and keeps him in the first place.  And there’s a selfless generosity to it, of course, or it’s easy to see one anyway, Vex who mothers, Vex who checks in on everybody else after her own death, but that’s not the whole story.  The other half of it is Vex-who’s-never-been-alone.  Vex who hoards people as tightly and as carefully as she hoards coin.  She can keep going through nearly anything, so long as her people are there with her, so she is going to make sure that everyone she loves stays okay because she needs them to be.

The thing about Percy is that--because he’s a builder, a maker, a fixer, a determinator in his own right--he can return that favor.  He can make sure that Vex keeps going, not by stopping and sitting in her feelings with her until she’s ready to move (which is very much the Vax and Keyleth energy), but by tugging her along in the direction she was already going.  In Syngorn he gives her Whitestone, and oh, it’s a way to shut her father up, but more than anything it’s a someday.  There in the city that helped destroy Vex’s first good life, while the dragon that burned the rest of it to ashes sits over the ruins of her last, Percy makes a promise that someday Vex can have a home and a future again.  It’s far away and shrouded in mist.   Percy can’t even really picture his own someday right now.  They might both die before they get there.  But there’s a someday ahead, and it’s enough to get Vex moving again, proud and hopeful and ready to go and collect that bow that’ll help get her there.

And Vex turns right back around again on Glintshore and in its aftermath, demanding that Percy have that future too, because she doesn’t want this one without him.  If he’s going to promise her a someday to move towards again, then he damn well has to get there too.  It’s because she wants him to be alive and happy, and it’s because Vex just wants him, needs him in her life, this human she collected and is so determined to keep.

So the promise of someday, in Whitestone is glittering on the horizon for them when they kiss in the woods after the Vorugal fight, and it’s just barely around the corner past the next couple of hells when Percy comes to her room before Thordak, but I think it also still feels like a far-away mirage, and I think that matters.  They are both still lost in a world full of carnage and dragons and constant threat.  Percy is stabbing Raishan in a council meeting because why the fuck not, this seems like a good idea at this time.  Vex is still so unsure, trying to teach herself to forgive, trying to see a path forward to that someday-horizon, trying to deal with the fact that even if they kill all the dragons and even if they all survive she’s lost her brother to Keyleth and fate.  The world is a wreck and they are a wreck in it, and the only thing they can do is not stop.  The only thing they can be sure of is right here, right now.

So that’s where they fall into bed.  On the eve of the Thordak fight, knowing they both could die tomorrow, knowing they most likely will.  They’re about to go take on the monster that destroyed the only two homes Vex ever loved, a decade and a half apart, and there is no kind of promise that either of them will see the other side of the war, and that’s where they grab each other and hold on.  They’re here in this impossible place together.  They’ll take it as it comes, they’ll take whatever comes, and for this one night they have each other in it.

.

And then they survive.

So much of the episodes directly after the end of the Conclave--the next week or two in Vox Machina’s life, where they save Scanlan and try to bury some ashes and rip themselves apart, and then fight a kraken and die trying, and then go to Hell, and then come back--is just this string of, okay, nobody here knows how to stop.  The dragons are dead, but the fugue state of violence and getting-the-next-thing-done, nose to the grindstone and figure this next step out and don’t worry about long-term plans because we might not survive to see them anyway, that’s still here.  Percy’s been living there for years (and certainly didn’t have time, post-Briarwoods arc, to start thinking about pulling himself out of it).  Vex’s specific life plans got trashed by the dragons more than anyone else’s.  But really, the whole group is living there in one way or another.  It’s just that Scanlan shattered under it and ran, and Grog’s never really suffered from it or lived differently anyway, and Pike keeps taking breaks to fix temples and tend to refugees and work towards rebuilding right through it all.  Keyleth and Vax both found a sort of peace in fatalism and destiny, in knowing that they have set paths there in front of them and all they have to do is choose to follow them.

Percy and Vex, very fundamentally, don’t have those set paths.  Nothing for them is a given.  There’s Whitestone, yes, but there is a reason Percy isn’t Lord of Whitestone, king in his castle, leading his city through the dragons and beyond.  When Percy’s life broke it shattered, and even when Whitestone was freed, he didn’t claim it as his.  He only came back after the dragon attack because Emon was gone and it was the only safe place they knew.  Whitestone is in Percy’s bones, part of how he defines himself and his life, but living there, running it, tying himself to the city--it isn’t a given.  Percy could die fighting dragons or die to a kraken or spend eternity trapped in the Nine Hells, and Whitestone would be fine.  He could leave and never come back, and Whitestone would be fine.

So coming back to Whitestone--sending Vex on the Gray Hunt--fucking in the castle treasury and setting up plans for whatever’s next--it’s a choice.  Nothing about the people Percy and Vex become during peacetime is about destiny.  They had lives and plans and destinies, the rich asshole clockmaker, the ranger on the road.  Those are gone.  Everything they keep from those old lives is a little broken, a little twisted from what they once expected it to be.  Everything they do now is what they decide to build.

And this is the glory of Percy and Vex, the love that’s so big it makes my heart ache: the thing they decide to keep in this new world is each other.  In the fugue of war with no future, they found each other and built things together, spent an entire evening tinkering on Vex’s stolen broom in Percy’s workshop, flirted and fucked and kept each other going even when nobody knew where.  Neither of them had real, passionate romantic love written into their plans, back when they had plans.  Neither of them needed it, not for the lives they wanted.  But those lives are dead and gone, and they found this thing together in the weird wilderness between there and here, and they’re keeping it.  They get to do that.  They get to build their new lives in whatever shape they want, and that means they get to set each other as cornerstones and build everything else around them.

It’s so fundamental to this relationship and this new future that all the building blocks they’re working with, on both sides, are a little bit broken.  Whitestone itself is still a struggling, recovering city sitting on a decimated continent.  Percy is still so caught up in his own anger, still waiting for another shoe to drop, still not quite ready to believe any of this is real.  Vex is pouring through libraries researching Orcus, researching Vecna, waiting for old debts to be called in.  They are neither of them fixed.  They are neither of them safe.

But we get to see, in one-year timeskip, how tentatively and tenaciously they keep working together towards something anyway.  Vex builds a house and a Gray Hunt corps and a tentative detente with her father, starting to pick up those old pieces, starting to try.  Percy builds civic works projects and an international early warning system, still ready for the next disaster, starting to entertain the idea that it doesn’t have to destroy everything.  They get new glasses and open a bakery and invest in armor and ammo and art.  They host a ball.

They get married, in secret, and tell almost nobody they know.  It’s such an asshole thing to do!  They are both still assholes, both still broken enough to be wary of the consequences of inviting their own loved ones to a simple wedding.  They do it because the point isn’t the moment, it’s the marriage, all the future days to come in this new life they’ve agreed they are going to create together.  They want it to be theirs, just theirs, this relationship they never expected to have and now intend to base the rest of their lives on.  It’s kind of a messy, slightly dickish way to go about things, and that’s perfect, because Vex and Percy are kind of messy, slightly dickish people, and they own that together.  They own a lot of things together now.

.

The epilogue of Campaign 1 walks the line between open-ended and closed story in a way I find so deeply satisfying, and so much of that is because of Percy and Vex.

So many stories end at a point where--the day is saved, or it appears to be, and the horizon is wide open for the heroes and the sunset, and everything is triumphant and victorious and anything could happen next.  It’s perfectly satisfying and ripe for sequels, and nothing is quite guaranteed but everybody is happy for now and that’s a good place to tie things up anyway.  It’s the ending of Return of the Jedi, or the first Pacific Rim--something has to happen next, somebody has to figure out what that is, but that’s not the heroes’ problem and that’s not the worry for today.

Sometimes, stories end with everything so tightly wrapped up that there’s no room to breathe.  It’s the ending that says, what you’ve just read or watched or gone through is the entire story.  It is everything that matters.  It is full, and it is complete, and nothing that ever happens in the rest of these characters’ lives will ever be as important as what they’ve just done.  Lord of the Rings does this a bit, and it actually works; Harry Potter does it badly, and I’d submit that The Adventure Zone: Balance does too.  It’s the implication behind every Disney or fairytale happily ever after, although those at least tend to skip the epilogue describing exactly what that happily-ever-after means.

Vex and Percy do neither of these things at the end of their story, or they do both of them, and that’s so great.  They do get the epilogue, with the closed ending and the happily-ever-after.  The Lord and Lady de Rolo settle down, have at least five children, and live in peace for decades until Percy eventually dies of old age and Vex far-more-eventually follows.  Their friends outlive them by decades or centuries.  It’s tidy and nice and final...except.  Whitestone could outlive even Keyleth, and Percy--and by extension now Vex, too--lives as long as Whitestone lives.

Somehow Percy and Vex manage to have an epilogue with every one of the trappings of a perfect picture-book ending, without feeling static.  They’re going to have the house and the kids and the castle and the tiny little kingdom, and it’s going to be full every single day, because inherent in the very makeup of these two people is the inability to ever stop growing.  With the dragons dead, with Vecna gone, they can keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing this entire time.  They can move forward.  They can build.  And they can build something massive that outlasts both of them, lay foundations and groundwork for centuries and generations to come.

Fighting with Vox Machina will always have been the biggest, hardest, most glorious and dangerous, most epic thing that Vex and Percy have ever done, and it’s absolutely over.  The book is done, tied off with a bow.  But they’re not stuck and they’re not empty without it.  They’re going to make clock towers and festivals and change the whole culture of Whitestone.  They’re going to have half a dozen children and raise them towards their future.  The Whitestone of fifty, sixty, seventy years from the end of the campaign when Percy eventually dies will be fundamentally different from the Whitestone they came home to when their adventures ended, and it will be the pair of them who made it so, together.  Which means that even without him Vex will still have him, in civil infrastructure and all the things that let people keep living their lives, in this thing they created as a team, this thing she’ll continue to shepherd and grow without him for the rest of her own life.

And maybe that’s the key to Vex and Percy, to why their ending feels so satisfying, so inevitable and perfect and good.  So many stories end before their characters can change and split away from each other.  So many epilogues decree that their characters will never change, ever, so they can never grow apart.  But Percy and Vex are built of growth and motion, and when they found a match for themselves in each other they decided to point that forward momentum in the same direction and change together for the rest of their lives.  It’s what a real relationship looks like, a real happily-ever-after.  They will pick each other up and help each other on along the way, because we’ve seen it happen.  They’ll hold on to each other, and they’ll build.

[shadows-bitty-fun]

One full trip around the sun

Evanora has taken a full trip around the sun once more, AKA it’s her birthday. Usually, this doesn’t really mean anything, but with the new family members? It’s about to be a very different story...

This has been made because today, 10th of November, is my real birthday!

Will add credits for all the bitttybones types at the bottom of the story!

Warnings; None! (Just fluff in this one!) _____________________________________________________________

I would never have seen this coming. They’d been doing well to hide it all.

Yesterday had been hectic for me. I had clients all day but for some strange reason, I couldn’t find any of the lamias anywhere or Acacia. All the other bitties, too small to take proper care of the twins, was there but couldn’t tell us what the others were doing. Even the bond with Blaise didn’t tell much, only that he was happy and excited. Not really something that was uncommon.

So, I had to take the two little squirmy noodles along with me to the meetings with the clients. Something that went well because all the ones I was meeting up with yesterday were people who liked monsters so they absolutely LOVED the twins. I almost got late to a few meeting with clients because of it.

So, I was very tired when I got back home, got the little ones to sleep (for having a father who’d love to do nothing, they really had a lot of energy), and basically just fell onto the bed and slept.

I woke up like I usually did; curled up to a ribcage with a tail wrapped around most of my body to keep me in place for cuddles. I chuckle a bit before managing to get one arm free to gently poke just over his nose-hole, getting him to make a face before Blaise looks to me with a smile. 

“ ‘morning sunshine. ya feeling refreshed?”

I rolled my eyes at that. “You’ve been doing that thing overnight? Sharing extra magic to make sure I wasn’t tired today?” I asks.

It was something he learned he could do with how close we were these days, something he explained to me was only possible because I was a mage, having nothing to do with his kind of bitties. And seeing that he was blushing a bit even if he wasn’t looking away told me enough.

“Well yes, I do feel refreshed, thanks for asking sweetheart.” I really can’t stay mad at him as I kiss him on the cheek.

“good. ya hungry? can smell that ‘liphas been going ‘round the kitchen.”

He was right, he had. The beautiful scent of bacon, scrambled eggs and… Pancakes perhaps? Yeah that scent was pancakes all right, was getting to the bedroom at this point.

“Well if that’s the case, better not keep him waiting.”

I slowly got myself untangled from the tail that was wrapped around me. He might have asked if I was hungry as a hint to getting up, but he would never make it easy. He loved staying in bed and cuddling as long as we could these days with the twins around. Speaking of the twins… They weren’t in the cradle where I’d left them yesterday. Huh.

“Drake must have gone in here to take them.” I mumble, getting a pair of pants on under my nightgown and putting my slippers on, seeing that it was getting cold around. Getting heating installed in the floor might be a good idea, for the lamias’ sake…

Walking into the living room, I’m surprised instantly. All the bitties were there, sitting around the table that had been set up with the things that I’d gotten the scent of before along with what I guessed was tea water and hot cocoa and juice, the last clearly freshly pressed. To say that I was in awe was a understatement.

“What’s all this now?” I asks, looking to Blaise for a moment before looking back to everyone once more. Even the twins were here, all quiet for once!

“Well Evanora, have you forgotten what day it is today?” Eliphas asks me, making me blink.

“Uh… As far as I know it’s nothing really special today… Is it?”

“We’d say ‘frent there Eva, ‘s a pretty special day ‘f ya ask all ‘f us.” Rowan says, everyone else nodding.

“Have you really forgotten your own birthday?”

I look at Drake for a long time, then around at everyone else.

“Uh well… I didn’t really think about it? I haven’t done anything special in years…”

There was silence a bit after I said that… And then I found out why I love all my guys so much.

Rowan was in charge of calling all my clients for the day to tell them I was taking the day off to celebrate my birthday, telling me later that they all told him that was a good thing and that I really should take the day off once in a while! Eliphas made sure I had anything I needed at all meals, even going out of his way to make my favorite to make me happy and even found out that they’d all been using the day before to get me gifts and baking!

Blaise had been out finding some beautiful, natural gems and managed to actually create a necklace with them for me! There was a white, yellow, green, red and blue stone set after each other with the necklace itself being woven leather strands! I absolutely loved it and put it on right away!

Rowan, Acacia and Drake had gotten some lovely flowers and a fruit basket for me, a sweet thought that I really appreciated!

Eliphas, Archie, Baris and Sage had gotten together and gotten me a few new hoodies; one with cat ears, one with floppy dog ears and one with fox ears, all of them with matching tails! I squealed a bit at them, clearly making the bitties proud of their choice.

Desmond had actually gotten me a gift on his own; a music player that I could take with me and listen to no matter if I had pockets or not, he’d even gone as far as to decorate it with some of the things he knew I liked. I really hadn’t seen him blush as much as he had when I thanked him over and over again - the gesture meant a lot to me.

Darko and Aaden had gotten me some candles! They were engraved with a few different things that each meant something and I loved them!

Ravana and Samael had together made a beautiful image of all of us, of course with the two of them in front! (Zagan had helped them with writing the names of everyone on it so he was part of the gift, something his brothers argued against but seeing that I loved it even more for that they let it slide.)

There even was a gift from the twins, though I had a sneaky suspicion that Blaise was the one who’d gotten this, a new dress that I absolutely loved. And putting it on it was clear that it looked perfect on me as well!

And at dinner, I was surprised when Dawn, Soul and Sergent came over, along with some of Dawn’s own bitties! It was a good surprise though, seeing that Eliphas had clearly expected it and gotten enough on his hunt for everyone to eat along. They also brought gifts of course! Some supplies for the house, some new fabrics for my projects and a few herb packages that I’d been looking for!

Once the day was over and I was laying in bed once more, Blaise happily holding me to his chest while the sound of his breathing, our souls and the twins calmly breathing as they slept, I just… Couldn’t stop smiling.

“This has been such a wonderful day…”

“ ‘s good ta hear love.”

“I never realized what I was missing out on.”

“ya welcome…”

“Not that silly… I was thinking of how I’d been missing out on having a family around me to celebrate things like this… I hope to have many of those days with you… All of you….”

We didn’t sleep for a while after that, just holding each other… And Blaise wasn’t crying of happiness at all if you ask him... but I saw a few little tears I’m sure.

____________________________________________________________

- Blaise (Chain), Eliphas (King), Desmond (Honey Bo) is from @vex-bittys - Rowan (Twister) is from @selkiesbittybonanza - Darko (Lich), Aaden (Ghoulrus), Zagan (Vampyrus), Ravana (Red Lucirazz), Samael (Purple Lucirazz) is from @mythical-adoptions - Archie (Redimese), Baris (Honey Fold) is from @meadowlarkkitties - Acacia (Echo Flower Bitty) is from @randysbitties - Drake (Starlust) is from @bitti-tarts - Sage (Loaf) is from @wonderland-isles

[shyeehaw]

Children of this Land: Ashes to Bone

Supernatural AU - Chapter I

I would like to thank @shethenightwolf , @famderlinde , @kaziklubaby  and @crabby-abby for bearing with me and helping me with my first long fic, hope yall like it <3

This is the story of your birth, my son. It’s an adventurous one, filled with love, but also great sadness and loss. It speaks to us as well, children of this land. We know no home, and neither do you. The same land that created us now is doing the hunt.

The wooden wheels were rolling, and that hellish sound kept screeching on their ears, a sound so cruel that reminds them why they are moving in the first place. A feud as old as time, ignited by the most primordial motive: food. Then, finally, a dead man lying on the road.

When on the run, there’s no time to feed, as fugitives don’t get any rest. Time unfolded as a yarn, and Hosea’s eyes were kept glued to the small portrait in his hands. They had infuriated too many people, both gangs and law. Still, the strong scent of the corpse got them jumping out of the wagon, facing its empty eyes. Dutch approached the dead man, assaying the state of his own skin over the new one. Fresher, better. A grip around his wrist and a screech of the harpy’s throat; That’s how they knew it was an illusion, a trick. There weren’t enough roads to put distance between the Driscoll's and the Van Der Linde gang. And now, as the evening shadows and he sits on his ragged tent, Dutch watches his sons as they heal, with growing hunger.

The flames licked Abigail’s legs, and still, she wouldn’t wish to be anywhere but there. It was a flesh-eating blaze consuming her feet, her core. Yet, the only hurtful sting was their piercing gaze. Her agonized figure was a reason to cheer, to chant, around her, hearts full of hate gleamed like burning coal. Their indifference allowed her to once more, feel the depths of cruelty. What they couldn't wrap their minds around was judged, and tonight, Abigail was the defendant.

She wouldn’t scream, wouldn’t give them that satisfaction, raising her chin up, Abigail breathed the smoke two or three times, the crescent moon as her single witness.

“We are gathered here tonight to send this whore back to her Master’s arms”, said the Cleric, holding a cross against her direction, “Begone, foul creature! Leave us, good people, free of your bewitched venomous words.”

The crowd cheered, oblivious to the ferocity of the fire, as she was reminded, once again, of how she was used, tricked. It was a savage world, and still, Abigail was no more inhuman than those who smiled upon her burning body.

“See! She won’t even deny it! Promiscuous! Sorcerer!”, those were the words used by simple-minded men to describe women who owned themselves, who dared to be free, only to have their freedom sworded by their hypocrisy. Speaking softly to the flames, she asked them to be done, to consume her. Ash and bones. Rolling her head back, and her eyes even further, Abigail chanted a last time, the old forgotten words folding her tongue in a familiar way, praying to whichever God birthed her to claim her soul. She embraced her fiery fate.

Red, carmine -  the vivid colors flashed through their collective mind. John was the first, howling at his packmate to stop, something wrong in those woods.

“What are you fools stopping for?”, Bill stomped his hoof, “Dutch is waiting on us!”

With a growling sound, Arthur followed John, his bent legs opening way between the dense forest.

“Ahh shit!”, Bill turned around, chasing the two immense shadows by the night. A smoke scent filling their lungs.

It was a sorry scene, indeed. Those creatures, those humans, once again burning what they couldn’t understand. Out of sight, out of mind.  How long until is us burning, John? the thought invaded his mind as if was his own. Adrenaline rushed through his veins, spreading quickly, bristling his fur. John jumped at the nearest peasant, munching on his torso, breaking bones.

“You goddamn idiot!”, Bill was furious, his horns now glazed on dripping blood, making his way through the crowd. And how they screamed, running in circles only to meet Arthur’s massive open jaw. Marston, you idiot! Dutch will geld us, those intrusive thoughts were buried under his primal goal, an instinct hard to refuse.

Fire shook his claw-hand as an agreement, John Marston slashed the ropes, freeing the witch’s body from the stake. She was alive, breathing. Barely.

Retreating to the camp, John was the one carrying the sorceress’s burnt body, his nose flaring to the smell. We should hurry, those Driscoll demons are still after us, he looked at his brother -  blood on his fur from the confront, humans and their damned guns, their own way to feel powerful. The night was as silent as death, just the sound of crickets guiding the weird party home.

“Absolutely not!”, Dutch said taking a single look at the wounded girl, “As far as we know humans are burning their own under the accusation of witchcraft. No!”. He left the tent in a hurry, only to stumble upon Hosea, who seemed very much concerned.

“What’s going on here, Dutch?”, He peeked through the open tent flaps, where Ms. Grimshaw avidly worked, the girl seemed like a rag doll compared to how big and feathery Ms. Grimshaw was.

“Is she a witch?”, Hosea asked.

“We reckon”, said Arthur, his beastly shape now a bit more under control.

“Dutch, we can’t just send her away! Are you so caught up with Colm and his demon hierarchy that you missed the news?”, Hosea looked at Ms. Grimshaw, as asking for her to back up his stories, “Night folk are gone!”

“They had it coming for them, going around attacking people.”

“And how do we feed again? We need to eat, and soon! Or we ain’t healing.”, Hosea crouched beside the girl, placing his hand with a cautious gesture on her forehead, “Saint Denis is just about the same, vampires being hunted down. Towns are being watched day and night, Dutch!”

“That’s exactly why I say to take no more folk, we have bad as it is!”

The gang was already used to seeing the pair arguing like this, Strauss was barely lifting his milky white eyes from his newspaper, watching their discussion with a detached interest.

“Alright Hosea! we’ll have her if she pulls her weight! And if she’s not some human mistook for one of us.”, he said putting a saddle on The Count, “Now, we need to tend to the urgent matters, these wounds! Strawberry?”

The face of his partner turned blank by the absurd proposition.

“Jenny, Mac, Davey… I miss them too, you know? They were fine people. But we can’t go looking for revenge, Dutch, Colm’s army is growing as we speak, I thought we was going to lie low”, Hosea said, placing his hand on Dutch’s shoulder, “I would rather we go to Valentine.”

His dark eyebrows furrowed, that livestock town was like going back to his origins, feeding on farmers and travelers. Still vexed, he nodded just to humor his partner, like he did so many times.

An eternal life granted them a non-verbal communication, much like John’s and Arthur. More than that, they merged into one. Hosea became more ambitious and lively, Dutch learned to consider risks, put others needs along his own. What one did the other was there to complement, like a synchronized dance, opposites, but working together. And how far they came, finding friends along the way, watching them turn into family.

As Ms. Grimshaw and Strauss helped them packing things to get to town, John stood still beside the girl, wondering what was her name, and if it was possible from the top of her slumber, to have cast a spell on him. People would soon start wondering why he wasn’t back to his original form, since there was no longer danger around. But the fear that was haunting him had nothing to do with something that could be fought using his teeth.

“Mister? What is you called?”, a crooked lady asked Dutch.

She was the only one still wandering through those muddy streets, stopping right on her tracks when she saw the man’s face. A frightful sight, they must have been. In a group of four, they walked in pairs, the wolves behind, as shadows enlarging the danger on the careless steps of the first two, who walked sure that nothing there could kill them. Except for each other.

“Aiden O'Malley is the name, my lady”, he said with a flourish, old ways never really died. Hosea glared, doubtful, at his partner.

“I’ve seen you before… but no, not with that name, I would recall.”, said the crone, her white tuft of hair escaping from the scarf. She looked so old her memory was doing a favor by still working.

“You must have mistaken me for someone else ‘mam, excuse me.”, a collective sigh and the group left, entering the dim-lighted alley on the right.

With a single gloved hand, Dutch raised the glass window, leaving enough space for him and Hosea to slither in the warm home. Gesturing for the boys to stay behind, they began their millenary ritual, plucking breaths as fruits from a tree. Glowing yellow eyes and fluid movements would never be seen by those who quietly slept. And if they were… their skin would become his.

But Hosea never liked that, the ugly crawling feeling he got when harvesting an innocent skin, no. He and then, Dutch pledged to only take the skin of those who had not done it right.

Still insatiable, drinking the slumbered breath, they heard footsteps. It was not unusual to find a restless human walking around their houses, but sharing a concerned look, the pair hid, mixing their silhouettes with the shadows.

“Who's there? Face me, ya cowards!”, the high-pitched voice floated across the room - disembodied.

With caution, Dutch draw his gun, human or not, a bullet would always slow it down. And the trigger was almost pulled when an almost toothless smile greeted him. And then headbutted him to the floor.

Gliding across the room, Hosea placed his barrel against the thing’s head.

“Easy boy! We are the same as you.”, he spoke slowly, trying to hold the creature still.

“Oh no, that’s my way of saying hello! Hello there!”, he pushed Hosea. And in a blink of an eye, the trickster vanished, leaving both men looking around, in a neurotic state. “Now ya see me!”, he resurged sitting on a chair, “Now ya don’t!”

“Alright! We are leaving!”, Hosea declared, having his sentence finished by Dutch, “We didn’t know this house was guarded…”

“Guarded? eh, not really. Folk here give me only musty bread and milk, that’s nothing if they want to count on me mighty protection.”, the red-head swung his legs from the bed, getting up on a jump, “ Give me beer, whiskey, would’ya? Back in Ireland, I was a fucking king! Know what? Eat them, I don’t care”, he spoke too fast, leaving Hosea’s ears buzzing.

“Ireland? So what are you? Leprechaun…?”, he asked, making his way to the door.

“Pff, ya american creatures! I’m irish so I can only be those fools? Nah, I’m a Clurichaun! Related to those famous bastards, yeah, but way better.”, he said, stuffing his chest as he followed them around.

“Alright, nice to meet you, mister. Goodbye now.”, Dutch said, meeting the inquisitive eyes of John and Arthur.

“I’m Sean!”, he said shaking their furry hands, unbothered, “Say, can I join ya fine fellers? It’s awful boring in that old house.”

Dutch was about to protest, but it took just Hosea dismissive gesture for him to not be bothered, for what he saw of Sean, he had the attention span of a puppy, and would be soon off their hair.

“Great, so as I was saying…”

With their ears filled by the heavy accent, in the length of one street, the gang learned all fae hierarchy, their taste for music and booze. When Arthur could swear his arms were going through the transition just to grab the boy’s neck, they stopped.

“Alright boys, keep your eyes open. Dutch and I are coming in.”

It’s hard to draw a clear distinction between good and bad, with that thought in mind, Hosea signaled to his sons to get working on the jail’s door. Arthur slashed the fragile doorknob, his paws kicking it open, their jaws clenching to the sound. The wolves and Clurichaun kept their guard outside the door, as the couple entered, greeted by moldy walls that held a quiet interior, where all prisoners snored just as much as the deputy on charge. All but one.

“Ay! What’s going on”, a whisper was heard, “Mary-Beth! Wake up!”

Dutch quickly found the source of it. The murmuring pair was sitting at the cold tile floor, ash crosses draw on their foreheads. His eyes lingered a bit on the man’s tied burnt hands. Sharing a look, Hosea and Dutch understood what that meant.

“If I were you, I would look away.”, Dutch said, much to Hosea’s displease.

“No need, sir. We both seen things that would shock you.”

“That I doubt very much.”

Squeezing through the bars, Dutch crouched on the asleep prisoner's chest, his long fingernail slicing the flesh, separating muscle from skin. He did that with precision, with a bored look of who committed this atrocity thousands of times, like he needed it to survive.

“Sir, you seem kind enough. Would you help us getting out of here?”, the soft voice of the girl pleaded to Hosea, “They… burned my tent, and I might be next.”

Ignoring the conversation, Dutch kept slicing.

“I…Of course, my dear”, he glanced at his partner whose frown was getting worse by the moment, “John, Arthur get over here and open this cell would you?”

Struggling but a moment with the lock, the two were free, rubbing the crosses off their heads.

“And then what Hosea? Are we keeping two more mouths to feed? We don’t even know if they are like us!”, Dutch was no longer keeping his voice low, which made Sean fidget with anticipation of that deputy’s sleep being interrupted.

“They clearly are! Look at their markings!”, his voice was firm, “We can’t leave them behi-”

The words were concealed under a freezing scream, one so excruciating and cold that sent shivers down their spines. Dutch’s sloppy movements as he argued caused the man to keep screaming, his skin being ripped off. It was like watching a stagecoach crash, in slow motion but yet unable to stop it.

An iron net, and guns. Hosea’s liquid fear, filling his eyes like never before, unable to move. Among the warning bell sound of the town, he searched for the portrait that he could swear it was on his pocket. He had but a moment to undo that, and failing to find it there was nothing left but to say goodbye.

But not Dutch, his nails went through the throat of the closest policeman, as his sons fought against the others. The girl, Mary-Beth, was unlocking a chest, weirdly enough grabbing a guitar and untying the hands of the man with her.

“There’s no point, my dear…”, Hosea talked above the confusion, “Take them and go, please. Do this, for me.”

With a second chime from the bell, Valentine was filled with it’s citizens. An angry mob following them, There wasn’t enough time for goodbyes. Fugitives don’t get to say “I love you” back. Their furious steps cracked the glass of the picture, Dutch’s smile immortalized beside a beautiful lady.

“I told you I knew you, mister.”, the crone said, accompanied by his old friend. His red mustache and unmistakable black hat. On top of that, the fiery sword embroidery stitched on his cassock.

“Hello, Dutch.”

[nilim]

Consider also: The Luggage running after Rincewind, with Frumpkin napping atop it. The Librarian gently, carefully petting a sleeping Frumpkin, barely visible, curled up in his huge furry arms. Caduceus chatting with the witches over tea. Nursing orphaned lambs with Tiffany Aching. Molly shamelessly flirting with Death, because if anyone would, it'd be him. Jester sticking a little pamphlet about the Traveler to tortoise!Om's shell, then feeding him little bites of fruit.

Jfc, these are all so ridiculously excellent. Your mind is a gift.

–

I AM AFRAID THIS IS THE END OF THE ROAD. THE LAST CHAPTER. THE CONCLUSION… THE FAT LADY HAS SUNG, IF YOU WILL. 

WHAT I MEAN IS, IT IS TIME TO MOVE ON.

“Aye, apparently so. But… that doesn’t mean we can’t have a little bit of fun first, just you and me?” Molly grinned, winking at the tall, cloaked stranger in front of him. The bright blue points of light underneath the cloak wavered ever so slightly as Death simply stared back.

OH.

 —

The Librarian not only tolerating but loving Frumpkin is the best mental image, thank you. Also, Caleb uses him as a distraction to sneak in and get access to books. Additionally, the rest of the wizards would fucking hate Caleb because he’s way too ambitious and would make them look bad.

Also, thanks, I had only thought about the M9, but Vox Machina in Discworld is an absolute delight as well. 

If he had the mindset to find a job, Grog would honestly be one of the best coppers Vimes could have. Oh man, I love the idea of Vimes trusting Grog and giving him more and more responsibilities because he knows how to play to Grog’s strengths. And I mean, the dude is a fucking giant, but he’d absolutely learn so much from Vimes as well regarding proper policing. Yes. 

Keyleth is a toughie, but if she follows the same route as Grog she’d fit in perfectly with other bad-ass (shape-shifting) policewomen, like Cheery, Angua and Sally. I think she’d have a lot of trouble following orders though, she never liked authority much. Maybe she’d just work together with Lady Sybil to take care of sick swamp dragons, changing into a fire elemental to deal with the explosive nature of the job.

Scanlan would probably end up somehow getting involved with one of Moist von Lipwig’s little ventures. Those two would immediately recognize the conman genius in each other… but also would have an instant unspoken rivalry. Shaking hands like; 

“Mr. Von Lipwig. Still doing Lord Vetinari’s bidding, I see.” 

“Mr. Shorthalt. It’s always a delight. Not many people would dare to pull of those shades of purple and wearing a beret, it very much suits you.”

“Interesting choice of words, Mr. golden-suit.” 

Followed by intense eye-contact and cheery grins.

Also, Ankh-Morpork is the city of temples… Pike would probably love the way they deal with faith over there. I’m sure she’d be able to easily build a following. But she’d definitely occasionally offer a prayer to Anoia as well, the Goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers.

(There being a billion temples in Ankh-Morpork is also the reason why Jester would go absolutely fucking bananas there. So many opportunities for Traveler shenanigans, damn.)

Vax… would’ve probably been sent to the Assassins Guild by the twins’ father, where he got really high scores - until he ends up dropping out to run away with his sister to live their own lives, getting away from the influence of their father and probably eventually the city as a whole. He’s honestly too kind-hearted to be able to let the city to corrupt him like that. He doesn’t really have the same defense mechanisms that Pike and Carrot have.

(Btw, Nott and Vax would both end in so much trouble with the Thieves Guild at some point though, oof.)

Vex and Percy would have trouble fitting in in Ankh-Morpork, I think. But I can totally imagine them living in a mansion somewhere in Überwald. Vex roaming through the wilds before dinner. Percy doing all kinds of crazy experiments, he’d probably have a laboratory set-up in the basement where he definitely works together with Igor.

“The werewolves are howling again, dear.” 

“Don’t worry, I’ll have a little talk with them after dinner.” 

“Don’t forget to use Diplomacy, dear.”

“Oh, I won’t.”

Vex and him would visit Ankh-Morpork on diplomatic missions, meet with the lord and ladies of the city. His Grace, The Duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes would honestly probably despise Percy. But he’d be completely delighted by Vex, trading quips over hors d'oeuvres - Vex laughing at him over his failure to eat those properly. 

[lordshaxxion]

All for Vigil!!

all under a cut c:

Where were you rezzed?

“In a snow drift somewhere in a forest. Still don’t know exactly where, but I think it was somewhere deep in the EDZ. Warden won’t tell me, I think he knows exactly where but he refuses to tell. Either way, being born in a snow drift meant that I’m practically immune to the cold.”

How long ago was it?

“Oh, nearly two-thousand years ago now I think.”

Did you have anything in your pockets?

“Not that I can recall-”

“You had a photograph of a family in your pocket.”

“Ah, yes, now I remember. It was an old and worn photo of what I’m assuming was my family in my first life.”

What was your first week alive like?

“Hell. I spent much of it just trying to find a way out of the forest I was in. At least I was fortunate and didn’t succumb to the cold at any point, but starvation and exhaustion was a problem until I found the first village in days and for miles around.”

How did you react to your new role as a Guardian?

“The title of Guardian doesn’t mean anything to me, perhaps even less now than it did a century ago when it came about. I’m just here to do my duty and nothing less.”

Do you have any regrets?

“Too many to regale you with. I don’t think even a Guardian would live long enough to hear them all.”

How did you get your name?

“I believe my Ghost named me.”

“Nope, you named yourself in a way. Your determination to fight through the cold to civilisation, the way you protected every village you had to go to. I think at some point the people described your actions as nothing but vigilance, and you took it from that point.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You wouldn’t, this was within the first year of your life.”

Does your Ghost have a name?

“He’s called Warden.”

What is your Ghost like?

“He’s steadfast and very brave, keeps me focused often and always lets me know when I have meetings and such. I don’t know where I’d be without him.”

“Dead, probably.”

“He’s a smartass, too.”

How do you feel about the Last City and the Vanguard?

“The Last City is my home and I will protect it with everything I have at my disposal. The Vanguard... they’re something. It’s never been perfected, and fortunately never claimed to be, but even less after Cayde passed. They do their best, though. Always have.”

What’s your favourite place to go?

“Just for a stroll through the City, on the few days off I take. Or into the mountains or forests around the City.”

Do you participate in strikes or the Crucible?

“Crucible, but only on rare occasions and sometimes Crimson Days with my husband and partner. It’s quite amusing to hear Guardians freaking out at the Speaker and his bodyguard causing havoc in the Crucible.”

How do you celebrate the holidays?

“With my partners, Hakim and Null. Occasionally Guardian, when they come home to the Tower.”

Hakim, Null and Guardian belong to @autobotrose

Who is your favourite NPC and who is your least favourite?

“Well considering I’m married to him, the Speaker is my favourite. Osiris can go suck my-”

“AHEM.”

Where do you sleep/call home?

“My apartment in the Tower, of course.”

Do you have any pets or companions?

“Not particularly.”

Does anyone live with you?

“My partners. Vencel did, until a few years ago. Now Guardian comes and goes as they please.”

How do you unwind or comfort yourself?

“I prefer to sit myself in my armchair in the evenings and work on one of the many crochet projects I have going. Alternatively I’ll read, or just spend it cuddling Hakim and Null.”

What would truly break you?

“Losing all I love. Not being able to protect Hakim, like I’m supposed to do given it’s been my job for the past eight centuries - perhaps even longer.”

Most embarrassing moment?

“....”

“He won’t say it, so I will. The time he, Null and Hakim thought they were all hard-nails and tried to brave a haunted house together. Oh, and let’s not forget the time Vigil ran screaming through the Haunted Forest with Guardian and Null.”

“Hey that was a great time-”

“Vigil, you called the Nightmare a cunt.”

“Yes, yes I did do that.”

“You yeeted Guardian across the Forest.”

“That too.”

“And as good as picked Null and Guardian up and charged to the finish with them, only to fall through the floor.”

“Also that.”

Any cherished memories?

“The day I met Hakim, the day I met Null. When Vencel was born-”

“- he cried so hard that day-”

“-and when I asked Hakim and Null to marry me.”

What was your highest and/or lowest point?

“Our wedding day, of course. Lowest point was the Red War as a whole. I wasn’t myself during it, or even afterwards. It really got to me that I failed to protect the Speaker, that Ghaul had managed to kidnap him. Null can tell you just how much of a wreck I was around the Farm for the longest time.”

Views on the enemy races?

“They’re all a pain in the ass. The Fallen are the ones I perhaps feel most sorry for.”

Which enemy race is your most/least favourite?

“I can deal with the Fallen and I’ve ripped apart more than my fair share of Cabal, but Vex and Taken? Now the concepts of what they are, that’s beyond my intelligence.”

What’s your role in a fireteam? (Tank, support, buff/healer, comic relief? Or are you the dead weight?)

“Tank.”

“Seriously, the amount of walls he’s come crashing through is tremendous. Plus, my Guardian can take an inhuman amount of hits from enemy forces. I’m pretty sure he’s not human, outside of the whole Lightbearer thing.”

Do you have any mentors/mentees?

“No and no. While I train my Guard well, I do not consider them my mentees.”

What is your favourite weapon type/favourite weapon?

“Thunderlord.”

“Pfft, more like fists.”

“Thanks, Warden.”

Do you play Gambit?

“Absolutely not.”

How do you feel about the Drifter?

“I don’t trust him and if I were able to without causing my husband some distress, I would have yeeted his ass off the damn Tower by now. I don’t care for the sob-story he’s selling susceptible Guardians, he needs to be gone now.”

If you could be any class/subclass (not just your own), what would you be and why?

“... I’ve always envied how Hakim is able to float like he does...”

What are your thoughts on the Nine?

“I don’t know enough about them to make a fully accurate judgement, but I know that I don’t trust them.”

Any secret crushes or relationships we need to know about?

“I hardly make my relationship with Hakim and Null a secret.”

“Well you used to have a massive crush on Saint-”

“Shut up, Warden.”

Does your Ghost approve, or haven’t you told them?

“He approves, and gets along very well with Vega and Redwood. Even if all three of them like to swap embarrassing stories at times.”

You’re about to go off-planet on assignment, and will only be able to eat protein rations and food gel for a month. What’s your last meal?

“Anything Null or Hakim has made.”

If you could take over any NPC’s job, who would it be and why?

“I don’t know that there really is a job I’d like to take over, I’m content with being head of the Speaker’s Guard and his bodyguard.”

What is the most beautiful sight you’ve seen?

“Watching Hakim roll over in bed and scrunch his face up at the sunlight peeking through the blinds. When Ven was still a baby and would make little ‘ababah’ noises at everything and everyone. When Null showed us their Void form for the first time.”

Do you have a favourite colour?

“.... Neutral whites and greys. Blue is good.”

Show us your favourite outfit!

“I don’t have a fashion taste, let alone a favourite outfit. Hakim... practically picks everything out for me, my fashion taste is that nonexistent.”

What’s your favourite shader?

“I’m not sure yet. Like I said, no fashion taste and this extends to not knowing what colours go well together.”

If you could make a wish to an Ahamkara for anything - no strings attached - what would you wish for?

“To save those infants I failed to during the Dark Age. So many little motes of Light lost to mere illness...”

[loquaciousquark]

Talks Machina Highlights - Critical Role C2E18 (May 15, 2018)

@eponymous-rose​ is out tonight, so here I am instead, tiny-footed in her enormous...shoes? This metaphor’s escaped me.

Preshow is the crew filling a whiteboard with chat-directed drawings. It includes Mollymauk covered in pyramids, Jester’s lollipop, and Caleb on fire. You know, as it happens. Liam smiles very convincingly next to it.

Anyway, tonight’s guests are Liam and Sam, who arrives late and brings his Emmy. This fool.

Tonight’s announcements: new website! Critrole.com. It’ll have updates, news, events, and Sam suggests a daily vlog from BWF. The hardcover version of VM Origins will have its launch date announced this Thursday morning on said website. Liam pulls out a copy of the thing and it looks great. Also, everyone except Liam will be participating in the Stream of Many Eyes livestream in LA June 1-3, which will include multiple live D&D games. More information and tickets here. 

Crit Role Stats! Nott currently has the most kills of the MN with 16. Her HDYWTDT on the hill giant puts her at 5, tied with Molly for the most.

Caleb has cast the most spells of the group with 146. The next closest is Jester with 100. Liam: “It’s that ritual casting, yo.” However, Jester’s cast a larger variety of spells (22 to Caleb’s 20). This doesn’t include the Wand of Smiles (Caleb: 1, Jester: 4).

Sam is still stuck in character creation in Pillars of Eternity. Liam calls BS since he asked how to walk, but Sam reminds him you walk before going into the CC. He’s spent an hour and a half making a Cipher. BWF made Pike, but picked the wrong voice. Liam suggests picking Grog’s voice in his remake. Liam played the opening nine times and eventually had to reinstall the whole thing to unlock the VM portraits. Sam has a traumatic realization that he has the same problem & will have to reinstall as well.

Caleb is strongly regretting entering the Victory Pit due to the exposure it’s gotten them. He didn’t think there would be any bigwigs this far out, but he was “shocked” to find he was mistaken.

Nott isn’t happy with the notoriety either, but she’s conflicted; “she enjoys the supportive glances of her comrades, her teammates, but every once in a while is reminded other people are watching too.” Both agree the afterparty went badly.

Re: the Trent namedrop, Liam: “I can’t believe he’s here, this far out... I didn’t take in a lot of what happened for the next twenty minutes.”

During a discussion of distractions during an episode, Sam talks about how he and Laura were drawing a shared picture last episode whose arms and legs became dicks over the course of the episode.

Nott was surprised to find she was of value to the team during the hill giant fight. She’s still getting used to her abilities, but being so small and taking down something that big was a confidence boost. “She’s super jittery and nervous about everything and she drinks to compensate. I think this is going well for her, helping the team.”

Frumpkin happened post-asylum, so there was no danger of Trent recognizing him. Liam: “He was tapped for school at 15, meets Ikathon at 16 & goes with Astrid & Aeowulf, goes home for the first event with his parents about a year later, burns the house at age 17, and then was in the asylum until age 28. He ran and was totally alone when he got out; the first step was a cat, the second step was a goblin, and the next step was a group.” Sam: “Your guy was institutionalized for over a decade? I should reconsider who I travel with...”

Nott doesn’t necessarily believe Yasha is a spy, but she doesn’t know why she keeps disappearing or what she’s doing. She doesn’t even know what Yasha is, just that she’s super powerful and scary.

GIF of the week: @trisail. It’s the Trent reveal moment with overlays of Caleb shorting out. Heh.

Lengthy discussion about the “leave the table” moment. Liam found the scene super satisfying as it played out and doesn’t regret it. However, it’s a game for his friends first and foremost, and the primary purpose must be to entertain his friends and make them laugh and gasp, and this way robbed them of their reactions. He doesn’t think there would have been an issue with them being at the table--they’re all respectful audience members, and they’ve all been present before at other reveals. Plus, his story is very complicated, so “what am I gonna do? Spill it out all over again for Fjord, for Jester? It just didn’t seem feasible.” Caleb’s story has been in Liam’s head for a long time, so he was glad to get it out. Liam got the most responses on Twitter ever after his first tweet that he’d told his friends to go back and watch.

None of the other cast members aside from Ashley & BWF have watched the Caleb scene yet. Ashley found it pretty crazy and “a lot.”

Liam reminisces about seeing Vex’s heartbreak at Percy’s death and Grog’s privy conversation with the sword, even though he wasn’t part of those scenes, and wishes he hadn’t excluded his friends from his reveal. “I didn’t get a cat o’nine tails out of Taliesin’s closet and flagellate myself, but...a small course correction.”

Caleb’s reveal clarified some things about how Nott views Caleb; neither Sam nor Nott are dumb, and they both knew that he was suffering from something terrible. This just confirmed that & fleshes out the details. Nott’s views of Caleb’s victimhood, and her wishes that he no longer have to suffer, have not changed. 

 Liam points out that the intimacy of the show has changed over time, allowing them to pursue deeper conversations between characters instead of just the wacky hijinks they started with. As an example, he points out the difference between the first Liam/Keyleth scene where people hid behind hats vs. later Percy/Vex scenes where everyone was respectful and quiet. Sam enjoys that they can now have fun-fun (getting out of tricky situations and fighting together) alongside adult-fun (deep conversations and new relationships). BWF points out they’ve spent more time with these characters already than a full 5-season primetime show.

Sam became addicted to playing D&D precisely because of the level of depth you could reach with these characters, which you can’t achieve anywhere else.

In the thirty minutes before the Caleb conversation, Liam was wildly conflicted about what he was going to do (reveal everything, reveal only parts, lie). At the same time, “it’s killing [Caleb] to keep it all bottled up,” and even though Caleb’s really smart, he’s not a mastermind, and it may have still been too soon. However, Liam was also ready to stir the pot--he’s getting antsy that so many backstories haven’t been revealed, even though they’re theoretically a sixth of the way through the show. He also points out that Caleb has achieved his goal of finally getting into the library, so there’s nothing keeping him from leaving at any time. “That’s Caleb talking, not Liam.”

Laura & Travis interrupt to Facetime in & pretend they meant to call BWF’s mom for Mother’s Day. It’s pretty darn funny, and they confirm they totally watch this show from home when they’re not on it. Nerds.

Sam also takes a moment to loudly, angrily remonstrate Laura & Travis for taking pho home to eat. “You do not take pho home to eat. You eat it at the restaurant. It does not travel.” Discussing Sam’s food snobbery, Liam reminisces about how proud he was of some homemade blueberry pancakes he made after his kids were born. He shared a picture of them with Sam, who then sent back a picture of pancakes Sam’s wife made that “looked like something out of a magazine, there were raspberries, and everyone was like OHHHH, OHHHH, and I was alone and tired in my kitchen.” Sam: “I’m the worst person.”

Sam had guessed that Caleb’s backstory had something to do with fire, but had thought maybe he’d accidentally hurt/killed someone. “It’s pretty bad to accidentally hurt someone with fire. It’s super bad to intentionally kill someone with fire who is related to you.”

Caleb has no idea what happened to the other two children. The last thing he remembers before hospitalization was the house. Liam still thinks of Caleb as young since he’s essentially lost eleven years.

Sam asked Liam why he wanted to play someone so dark after Vax instead of someone more lighthearted. Liam’s just attracted to these kinds of stories; “this is what I want to do with my spare time.” He’s fine with other people being jovial instead of him.

Fanart of the Week: This gorgeous thing by Wesley Griffith. Apparently, Travis said this is his favorite representation of Fjord so far.

Nott doesn’t think she can do powerful magic; she’s just excited to be able to do small things. Liam’s dying to know Nott’s backstory: “She’s like a little bag of knives who’s hyperintelligent and drunk.”

Sam pauses to plug a new organization, Nerds Vote, a nonpartisan encouragement to register to vote.

In re: Beau’s reaction to Caleb’s reveal, Liam discusses his other options. He thinks Fjord is very intelligent but an unknown who might be evil. Jester he thinks would be the most likely to be repulsed or run away. Yasha’s her own kind of stranger who always leaves. Molly’s a 24/7 party animal that’s wildly different from Caleb. He feels Beau was the best choice; Beau had something he wanted anyway (and had shared a secret with him) so he didn’t have second thoughts acceding to her request.

Even though Nott has forgiven him, Caleb’s not looking to be forgiven or have anyone pat him on the back. He doesn’t believe “it’s going to be okay or it’s not his fault.” He knows he’s absolutely to blame and there’s a massive degree of self-loathing, so Liam feels Beau was the absolute perfect person to tell since she was going to be dry, pragmatic, and real. “No fluff, all...elbow-corners.” He didn’t want someone to coddle him and she was the perfect person for that.

He recognizes that they’re both Empire kids and share that history. Caleb also has been paying attention to everyone, and he feels Beau is clearly not happy with the Empire regardless of what she says, which aligns with Caleb’s feelings as well. Liam thinks it was a great choice to break it to her first, & he feels it wouldn’t have been fair to exclude Nott if he were to finally spit it out.

Nott’s not concealing anything from anyone about her backstory; it’s just that no one’s asked. Caleb never asked about anyone’s backstory because he didn’t want return questions.

Sam likes Liam’s story choices and calls them brave.

The original idea for Caleb stretches back so far that Liam thought of the name Astrid even before Matt introduced Pike’s cousin, Astrid. When they started discussing character creation for the new campaign, Matt okayed repeating the name. The German accent came much later in character creation (i.e. after the development of backstory). To Liam, Caleb’s backstory reads more like KGB or Pet Murderer over Hitler Youth, since as far as he knows it was only the three children involved, not an army.

Of the choices available to the group, Sam most wants to go back to the Gentleman. Liam wonders if Pumat has skeletons in his closet. (How many closets does Pumat have, I wonder?)

Sam segues into his difficulty remembering the difference between the Soltryce Academy and the Cerberus Assembly since they both have “C-A” sounding names. Liam: “Look, folks, he can either be really funny, or he can know the details.” Sam: “And that’s... where Ikathon is? And then there are the Halls of Erudition? There are too many things!” I have never identified more with him than this moment right here.

I have a brief, violent heart attack when an accidental keypress navigates me away from this page and I think I’ve lost it all. False alarm, please reduce heart rate to under 100bpm.

After Dark: Emmy and a lovely mace for Pike Edition

Liam elucidates the difference between a mace and a morningstar. Sam just about knocks his Emmy off the shelf getting the aforementioned mace for demonstration.

Sam’s asked which 90s Disney Afternoon show his character would like best. Sam: Darkwing Duck, Talespin, Gummy Bears, Fraggle Rock. Liam: Duck Tales.

Does Nott regret saying she’s Caleb’s mother after knowing what he did to his last mom? Sam: “Oh, wow. I didn’t even think about that.” Liam: “How could you not? I’ve been thinking about it for weeks!” Sam: “Well, it’s not like he’s a Terminator-style hunter of only mothers...” Finally--no, it hasn’t crossed Nott’s mind, but Sam will inform her soon.

The ultimate food sin for Sam--transporting pho is pretty high on his list, but he decides on ten-dollar wine. (Two-buck chuck, you know what you’re getting, swillwater flavored like wine; ten-dollar wine is actual wine that is terrible.) He recommends splurging for the fourteen-dollar wine. Sam loves cheap Chinese but Panda Express doesn’t count as Chinese. “No good Chinese restaurant ever advertises, ever.” Salted vs. unsalted butter is also a big thing. This is all because of Sam’s wife, he says; Liam points out that a year after they first met, when Sam moved to LA, Liam went over to Sam & Sam’s wife’s terrible apartment where they made very fancy salmon wrapped in that clear waxy rice paper stuff I can’t remember the expensive name for.

Caleb had very little left offensively in the hill giant fight. All he had was Sleep and Shield and a weak cantrip, so all he could do was gamble and guess on the timing. When he first cast it, Sam told Laura it was a big mistake. 

A viewer question tries to goad Liam & Sam into a tickle fight. Liam threatens BWF with the mace instead. 

Sam agrees to grow a small beard for Liam’s birthday, a little “chin music.”

And that’s all for the night! Is it Thursday yet?