No. 16: Bad Luck
Part 16 of Deck the Hells
Fandom: Critical Role
Rating: T
Warnings: violence, kidnapping, verbal abuse
Summary: Fresh Cut Grass is very nearly abducted. Good thing they remembered everything they've learned from their friends…including when to ask for help.
(Read on AO3)
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“Well, well. This must be my lucky day.”
Fresh Cut Grass stopped, not wanting to run the orc woman over. “Oh! Uh…smiley day to ya?”
She smiled, gold-capped tusks gleaming in the sunlight. “And who might you be, little one?”
“Why, I’m Fresh Cut Grass. And who are you?” they risked a glance around for any of their friends, but they were all alone at the moment. The others had scattered to different corners of the market.
“Are you just the most interesting thing I’ve ever seen?” the woman asked, crouching down to get a better look at them. “You can call me Bela.”
“Nice to meet you, Bela,” Fresh Cut Grass stuck out a hand, but the orc woman took it to examine instead of shaking it. “Well, I’d better go.”
“Not so soon,” Bela crooned. She tapped the casing on their right arm and flexed the joint. “You’re a marvel, aren’t you? Who was your maker?”
Imogen had taught them about this. Fresh Cut Grass gently pulled their arm out of the woman’s grasp. “I don’t think I’m comfortable with this line of questioning, Ma’am.”
She laughed. “Not comfortable? Don’t be silly. It’s just a simple question.” She reached out again, hands on either side of their face, tilting it this way and that to study. “I really must know more about this design. Who is your master?”
Ashton had taught them about this, too. “I don’t have one,” they declared proudly. “I’m my own being.”
“Really, now?” Bela’s smile deepened. “We both know that can’t be.”
“I’m gonna ask you to remove your hands from my person,” Fresh Cut Grass said, still keeping their voice polite. It wasn’t worth causing a scene here.
“Your person?” the woman laughed again. “You’re not a person, little one. You’re a machine. An object.”
Well, now they really weren’t comfortable with this conversation. Chetney had taught them something about this, but they weren’t ready to choose violence. “Well, you’re welcome to your opinion on that subject. If you’ll excuse me, I really must be off.”
“You just said you didn’t have a master, so where could you be rushing off to?”
“My friends are waiting for me.”
Bela smiled. She was smiling an awful lot, and it didn’t necessarily seem nice. She was showing a lot of teeth when she smiled. “How could something like you have friends?”
Ah, right. Laudna had taught them about this. “Well, to start, I’m a someone not a something.”
“Oh, of course you are.” With a nod, Bela slid a hand behind their shoulders and gently directed them out of the flow of traffic. Fresh Cut Grass went along with the momentum, if only to maintain the conversation.
“And friends are, you know, friends. You make ‘em yourself.”
“You poor thing,” Bela simpered. There was a sparkle to her words that shot right down into their central processer. “You should understand that they’re not your friends. Not really.”
They were pretty sure Dorian had taught them about this. Fresh Cut Grass concentrated, trying to follow the thread of Bela’s words. It was hard, but they managed to shake off the charm that was winding its way deeper into their being.
“That wasn’t very nice,” they said, blinking up at the orc woman. “I really have to go now.”
They tried to wheel away, but she put an arm in front of them, pushing them even further back into a nearby doorway. “You’re not going anywhere,” she whispered. Her voice was smooth and slick, nearly sapping the strength out of their body. “I’m sure you’re worth a lot of money to someone.”
Maybe it was time to try what Fearne had taught them. The flap on their chest popped open, and a gout of Sacred Flame scorched up Bela’s arm. She gave a shout of alarm and jumped back, then her face twisted in anger as she yanked a heavy cudgel off her belt.
“Fine. We do this the hard way,” she growled, shoving Fresh Cut Grass back into the room behind them. The cudgel came down, and though they tried to block the blow with one arm it was still strong enough to knock them over. Bela kicked them over, wrenched an arm behind their back. “You’re worth less as pieces, but a platinum’s a platinum,” she snarled in their ear.
All right. Orym had taught them about this.
Fresh Cut Grass took a deep breath—or at least what passed for breath with their kind. “Help!” they screamed as loud as they could, sending out an accompanying blast of psychic fear. “Somebody help! I’m being kidnapped!”
“Shut the fuck up!” Bela backhanded them, but that seemed to hurt her hand more than their face.
“Ashton!” Fresh Cut Grass yelled. They managed to wiggle away from Bela, but she tackled them before they could get to the door. “Orym! Anybody! Help me!”
A hard blow to the back of the head stunned them for a moment, and Bela yanked them further back into the room. “If you don’t shut your mouth, I’ll dismantle you now.”
If they’d had a heart, it would be pounding. As it was, that little coil of stress inside was winding tighter and tighter and tighter. They were afraid it would snap, and they’d become a monster again, and who knew what kind of damage they’d wreak with no one to stop them. They didn’t want to kill Bela, but they had to stop her before they cracked.
No one had taught them about this. The stress was winding tighter and tighter as Bela fought them. She was so much stronger, and every time they tried to call for help she just hit them. They tried to calm down, but that just seemed to leave an opening for her to hurt them again.
There was nothing they could do.
They closed their eyes in despair…when vines erupted from the ground to wrap around Bela and haul her away.
“FCG?” Fearne catapulted into the room, Mister shrieking on her shoulder. “Oh dear. Are you okay?”
They accepted her hand to be pulled onto their wheel, but she lifted them all the way into her arms to rest against her hip. “I think I’m okay,” they replied in a small voice.
“Well, you don’t look it,” Fearne replied. She was glaring down at Bela, who was still struggling with the vines. “What exactly were you doing to my friend?”
“Friend,” Bela spat. “You don’t make friends with things like that.”
Fearne glared at her, bouncing Fresh Cut Grass against her hip. “Well, that’s just your opinion. And it’s wrong.”
“Listen here, you—”
The faun raised her free hand, flinging a scorching ball of flame into Bela’s chest, knocking her back against the wall. “Do not talk to me or my friend ever again,” she replied.
“You poor thing,” she added, carrying Fresh Cut Grass out into the sunshine. It was much nicer when she said it, they decided. Comforting. Spoken like someone who wanted to take care of them, not just pity them. “Let’s go find Ashton, and we can watch them beat that woman up.”
They might have tried to dissuade her—Bela had probably suffered enough, and Ashton could be ruthless—but it felt nice to know they were surrounded by people who cared so much. “Thanks for saving me back there, Fearne.”
“Oh, anytime,” she replied, hugging them closer. “That’s what friends do.”
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crows use tools and like to slide down snowy hills. today we saw a goose with a hurt foot who was kept safe by his flock - before taking off, they waited for him to catch up. there are colors only butterflies see. reindeer are matriarchical. cows have best friends and 4 stomachs and like jazz music. i watched a video recently of an octopus making himself a door out of a coconut shell.
i am a little soft, okay. but sometimes i can't talk either. the world is like fractal light to me, and passes through my skin in tendrils. i feel certain small things like a catapult; i skirt around the big things and somehow arrive in crisis without ever realizing i'm in pain.
in 5th grade we read The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-time, which is about a young autistic boy. it is how they introduced us to empathy about neurotypes, which was well-timed: around 10 years old was when i started having my life fully ruined by symptoms. people started noticing.
i wonder if birds can tell if another bird is odd. like the phrase odd duck. i have to believe that all odd ducks are still very much loved by the other normal ducks. i have to believe that, or i will cry.
i remember my 5th grade teacher holding the curious incident up, dazzled by the language written by someone who is neurotypical. my teacher said: "sometimes i want to cut open their mind to know exactly how autistics are thinking. it's just so different! they must see the world so strangely!" later, at 22, in my education classes, we were taught to say a person with autism or a person on the spectrum or neurodivergent. i actually personally kind of like person-first language - it implies the other person is trying to protect me from myself. i know they had to teach themselves that pattern of speech, is all, and it shows they're at least trying. and i was a person first, even if i wasn't good at it.
plants learn information. they must encode data somehow, but where would they store it? when you cut open a sapling, you cannot find the how they think - if they "think" at all. they learn, but do not think. i want to paint that process - i think it would be mostly purple and blue.
the book was not about me, it was about a young boy. his life was patterned into a different set of categories. he did not cry about the tag on his shirt. i remember reading it and saying to myself: i am wrong, and broken, but it isn't in this way. something else is wrong with me instead. later, in that same person-first education class, my teacher would bring up the curious incident and mention that it is now widely panned as being inaccurate and stereotypical. she frowned and said we might not know how a person with autism thinks, but it is unlikely to be expressed in that way. this book was written with the best intentions by a special-ed teacher, but there's some debate as to if somebody who was on the spectrum would be even able to write something like this.
we might not understand it, but crows and ravens have developed their own language. this is also true of whales, dolphins, and many other species. i do not know how a crow thinks, but we do know they can problem solve. (is "thinking" equal to "problem solving"? or is "thinking" data processing? data management?) i do not know how my dog thinks, either, but we "talk" all the same - i know what he is asking for, even if he only asks once.
i am not a dolphin or reindeer or a dog in the nighttime, but i am an odd duck. in the ugly duckling, she grows up and comes home and is beautiful and finds her soulmate. all that ugliness she experienced lives in downy feathers inside of her, staining everything a muted grey. she is beautiful eventually, though, so she is loved. they do not want to cut her open to see how she thinks.
a while ago i got into an argument with a classmate about that weird sia music video about autism. my classmate said she thought it was good to raise awareness. i told her they should have just hired someone else to do it. she said it's not fair to an autistic person to expect them to be able to handle that kind of a thing.
today i saw a goose, and he was limping. i want to be loved like a flock loves a wounded creature: the phrase taken under a wing. which is to say i have always known i am not normal. desperate, mewling - i want to be loved beyond words.
loved beyond thinking.
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