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quentafeanorians · 4 months

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On Nelyafinwë's scars & remnants of injuries

It is my belief that elves do scar - but not in every situation. In most cases, minor and even major injuries can heal without leaving a mark due to the strength of elven bodies, and skill of their healers. However, deprived of proper care, injuries may still heal scarring. Another situation in which scars and marks remain is when the wounds are inflicted with malice, and/or the use of dark powers.

Nelyafinwë's bears no scars from his childhood falls or mishaps, and no scars from battle wounds, as those had been treated with the help of skilled healers. But the injuries he received during his capture, time in the dungeons of Angband, and upon Thangorodrim - those lefts a permanent mark on Nelyafinwë's body.

Some of these scars are nothing more but lines or bumps on his skin, and do not cause Nelyafinwë any trouble. Others impede him in certain ways, or make him more sensitive in the area or more prone to injury. And some still, those infused with the most malice and ill intent, the dark lords' will, cause him great suffering at certain times.

Maedhros rarely dresses in ways that would allow for his scars, save those on his head and face, to be visible. He prefers to keep his body covered, to spare himself the annoyance of dealing with the reactions of others to his body. It is quite enough that he has to contend with the way others perceive his face. Though he is not one to show it outwardly once sufficiently healed, he is not unaffected by his disfiguration.

Below is the list of the most major of his scars and remnants of injuries. Do assume however that little of his body is left without at least some line or mark.

Head

left eye: whitened due to corneal opacity caused by ocular trauma. He retains light sensitivity and some sight in it but it is greatly limited.

scar running from the middle of his head, on the left side, down the left side of his forehead, spreading across his eyebrow, eyelid and below his left eye, and also over his cheekbone and cheek under his eye. Long, jagged, wide across his cheekbone and under his eye, the kind associated with burns On his head he lacks hair along the scar tissue.

scar running from his left cheekbone down to his mouth. It cuts into his upper lip.

left side of the upper lip: a part of it is missing, making his lips appear as if in a grimace permanently.

hair: there are streaks of grey in his copper hair, growing mainly from around the areas of scars and healed fractures in his skull. His hair is still mostly copper, but the streaks of grey are clearly visible.

left ear: smaller than originally (and than his right). Its tip had been cut off. Initially the scar was jagged, betraying the process had been slow, but later he had it altered by healers, cut to a cleaner line and appearance.

left side of the jaw: three parallel lines of scars of the appearance they had been left by claws, running from the bottom of his jaw upwards, ending in the middle of his cheek.

nose: had been broken an healed and thus appears misaligned, with a characteristic bump in the middle of it, and shorter, jagged scars across it.

right cheekbone: appears uneven and with a bump as it had healed in a misaligned position

back of his head: several dents and bumps, unevenness of his skull, and blunt trauma scars. Usually hidden under his hair, though he lacks hair where there is scar tissue.

Upper body

left clavicle: unevenly healed, bumpy.

right nipple: Missing. A circular, uneven scar in its place.

upper back and chest: many lines of scars from whipping, curling around his front and back, in uneven patterns but distinct in their appearance as they're raised and pinker than his pale skin.

left side of lower back: brand scar in the shape of a flaming eye that has been burnt into his skin. Despite passing of time, it always appears red.

right side of the stomach: the word 'kinslayer' cut into his skin, below the navel, in detailed and elaborate lines of the Tengwar. Despite passing of time, always appears red.

right arm: missing his hand at the wrist. The stump has healed well but not completely scar free. The top of it is mostly smooth, some jagged scars running below his wrist.

Lower body

front of the left thigh: over 380 short, vertical lines, in somewhat uneven rows, across his entire thigh and reaching as far down as his knee. The lines vary insignificantly in length and width.

inside of right thigh: a large chunk of flesh missing from this area.

shins: both appear bumpy with uneven healing of the bone.

feet: a circular scar on the bridges and soles, straight through. Missing little toe on the left foot. Missing toenails on the right foot.

#maedhros headcanon #headcanon #musing: maedhros #tw injuries #tw scars #tw torture #tw abuse #this list may be altered in the future #it may also vary slightly depending on verse

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mantisgodsdomain · 11 months

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3,4,15 for any member of team snakemouth!

...how about all three?

(for this ask game)

3. Obscure headcanon

For Kabbu, though we may have noted this before, we think that the North is quite firmly considered a patch of Deadland - and its inhabitants, as a result, tend to be very, very strange from the perspective of the rest of the world. For Kabbu, specifically, this means a variety of things, both biologically and culturally - though Northern beetles are a lot more common in Bugaria, deadlands in general come with a very high rate of mutation and a very high rate of death, and that means a high rate of superstition both in things that actively impact survival and in things that do not - as well as the simple fact that a constantly-changing set of genetics means that what a northern beetle is like is often very, very open to change.

Kabbu is an example of a burrower - a subspecies of sorts primarily identified by claws designed, very specifically, for digging. His claws grow into a sort of broad shovel shape and tend to be much sturdier than an equivalent beetle's - getting underground in moments in soft ground isn't really an exaggeration! Though he can dig through harder ground, it takes time and effort, and he can't go at it with the sheer speed of softer soil - technically, he could burrow through solid rock given enough time, but it would be both hard and extremely painful. It's a trait that's heavily prized in the North for its ability to create shelter and safety - beetles dominate the North's underground, and there's nothing that can really pose a threat to them. Tunnels are safety, and it really surprises and disorients him when things underground attack him, because back home that just kind of doesn't happen unless it's Another Beetle specifically targeting you.

In terms of more social things, he has a lot of trouble getting used to the concept of mimics. This is mostly due to the fact that mimics as a whole don't really... exist in the north, at least not in the means of gaining benefit from mimicking anything else. If you can talk to them as any other awakened bug, they're usually exactly what they say they are, and species mimicking normal geological features and plants haven't found any success, unless you're willing to get extremely generous with describing the snow-bank camouflage of a Northern Silk Moth's topcoat.

Though sand wasps or "white bees" still exist, the thing they're mimicking no longer exists in the same area. Any Hive that once was in the North is long dead, overly-large groups of bugs tend to die out quickly thanks to the handful of large predators that may decide the benefits outweigh the consequences when enough tasty beetles gather in the same place, and when the enemy you're dealing with is both too heavily armoured to be really deterred by most weaponry and capable and intelligent enough to stalk your group through the snow until the cost outweighs the benefit of eating you... well, the sort of small groups generally sent to start a new colony of social bugs really don't stand a chance.

It is, occasionally, very hard to get used to the fact that southern silk moths only grow a few heads taller than him. He's used to them presenting a lot more of a threat.

For Leif... we think he's completely, 100% blind. His eyes are frozen over due to quirk of his biology - the thing about his integration that makes him a failure, specifically. With any of the Snakemouth cordyceps, they do not naturally transfer the immunity to their own magic that any other variety of mage would have, and so need to alter their hosts in order to get the appropriate biology across. With Leif, that protection is not sufficient to protect the host, much less to preserve valuable organs - eyes, especially, are fragile, after all. The cold he naturally generates exceeds the host adaptations he provides, resulting in, even beyond the blindness, unusually brittle chitin, extremely stiff and easy-to-damage tissue, organic food processing efficiency appropriate for a bug currently freezing to death...

Well, you get the idea. Functionally, if alive, a host body would be in a state of perpetual hypothermia, prone to breaking down over time and needing persistent repair that his strain of cordyceps cannot provide, as any repair he could offer that's not within his host's natural healing capabilities requires manually breaking down and reconstructing any parts, which... is inconvenient at best. As he is, he gets around most of these issues by simply replacing his host body's soft tissue with cordyceps, but that has its own issues, mainly in making him look and move incredibly uncanny. Injuries take a very long time to repair, relatively, though the less tissue damage is done the easier it is to fix - being cleanly sliced in two, for example, might be easier to handle than any sort of crushing damage. As far as his eyes go... eyes of any sort are delicate, and the slightest damage can permanently blind someone. Any of Snakemouth Den's cordyceps tend to go blind anyways as the fungus burrows into ocular nerves - if anything, this is better for hiding, since the frost over his eyeballs conceals any mycelium in the eyes themselves. In theory, it can be repaired... in practice, it would be far too much of a pain for work that will be undone the moment he overtaxes his ice magic again.

...also, he doesn't really care. Sight is not the most important sense a moth has and his scent and ability to sense pheromones is fine, along with a general sensitivity to things like vibrations in the air. More than fine, even, since he's now kind of hybridized with both Ant and Bee and the number of pheromones he's sensitive enough to sense has shot through the roof. This on top of the "magic sense" he has means he has absolutely no trouble getting around, though reading books requires more or less sticking an antenna or fungal tendril over them and parsing out where the ink is by scent and texture. He full-on didn't notice he was blind until after the cordyceps reveal.

For Vi, while this might be one we've mentioned before, we headcanon that she's got a bit of minor mutation throwing her antenna... maybe 2% more towards a non-social relative, which gears her just slightly more towards being able to detect "foreign" scents - predators, prey, and any pollen or nectar in the area. Unfortunately, this slight shift in what scents she's made to pick up comes with a reduced sensitivity to pheromones and pheromone communication within the hive, along with loss of the general innate understanding that an average bee would have of how she's meant to "fit in" to a structure that utterly cripples her communication and social life in the hive.

It's minor enough of a mutation that she's never been flagged - she's a mutation of a social bee, not a normal variant of a solitary - but she smells weird, and she doesn't pick up on pheromones quite enough, and the variation in signals she puts off means that she both fails the communication to get across what she might need and fumbles the communication conveyed back to her about what she should do. Subtle things build up over time, and within the Hive, the negatives far outweigh the benefits - the Hive is only built with bees that fit to a standard in mind, and even minor deviations can get you dragged far, far behind.

This is getting very long so, uhh. Here's a cut. Everything else is below it. We enjoy getting very long-winded. There's a lot in here.

15. Worst thing they’ve ever done

Well, this one will depend on if it's "in general" or "by their standards". Putting any sort of objective moral judgement on just about anything is ridiculously difficult, especially with how values vary by culture or individual.

There is no such thing as objective worst, and we absolutely don't guarantee these would line up with your idea of worse, and so we'll offer two options here - what we believe they would think of first if posed with the question, and an alternative answer that would likely crop up.

For Kabbu, his own response would be easy - abandoning his teammates to The Beast. It haunts him to this day - really, what sort of beetle abandons their swarm to a fate like that? If he was a little faster, a little braver, a little less of a coward - but no. He abandoned those he was meant to care most for, and they died because of it.

For the other...

There are some things that are necessary, to survive somewhere as harsh as the Deadlands. Not everyone can be saved. Not everything can be helped. Not everyone can be taken in. Tradition and law is the heart and soul of the North - rules that everyone must comply to, if not for the sake of themselves, than for the sake of those they may interact with. To break a law, for any reason, is to be shunned by the community, most likely to your eventual death.

She broke a law. It could have been for understandable reasons, or not - it doesn't matter. She put the community at risk, and for that, she couldn't stay. She was put out in the cold, despite her pleading to the contrary. She was allowed to beg and plead and bang on the door, and yet, it meant nothing. The beast she would have lead to them caught up, eventually. He would still believe it was justified.

For Leif, his first response would be... exactly what you expect of him, really. The body he took without a care. The life he stole. He might vary on whether it's the action of stealing it or the lies he's told with that body, but the answer would be the same.

For the one he wouldn't think of... He could have spoken up. He didn't. He met their eye, slated for execution on crimes that he could parlay them on if he implicated himself, and he said nothing.

The look on their face still haunts him sometimes. It hurts more now that he's two, rather than one. It's what was needed to protect his family.

For Vi... a fault in a machine. The instructions were boring, and confusing, and hard to read. She tried to do whatever she thought might work, instead of following the manual. There was an injury. Then another one. It was her fault, really, for rigging it wrong, but she was tired and angry and she argued instead of just sucking it up and fixing it when confronted on it, and it went unfixed for days more. A minor fault can very well lead to deaths, and though this one didn't, it came close - one more inch, a slightly looser bolt, and it would have cracked a bug's shell clean open. It's a miracle it turned out as well as it did. It's a miracle that no one connected it to her enough, even when it was fixed. Someone else was punished, and she was old enough to know not to step forward - she's not stupid, after all.

The guilt still haunts her. The "what-if". The possibility of it. If someone died of her own stupid negligence, if she made someone else take the fall - she would let them, really, her sense of self-preservation isn't that bad, but she's not sure she could live with it after.

With the one she wouldn't think of personally... considering the background she's got, the journey to the Ant Kingdom, and the fact that it's already stated she took jobs before canon? We think there's a fairly good chance that Vi's off jobs got... shady. It's not like she has much in the way of morals when it comes to money, and "will do just about anything for enough cash" is a decent market. If you're willing to forsake your morals, you can get more money than your heart desires - at the cost of just a bit of risk, at that!

She doesn't think about it, really. It wasn't something she needed to think about. They were threatening her, they were a risk to her team, they were the price she had to pay to eat, the specifics of what happened don't matter much at this point. Put in the position again, would she choose their life, or hers? It doesn't matter. They're dead, anyways. She should know. She was the one to take the payment for it.

4. Favorite line?

We're copy-pasting these straight from the game! These Direct Quotes are all sourced from @aquilamage's Bug Fables Transcript project, which we highly recommend checking out! It's an excellent resource for double-checking dialogue without having to replay the game first, and a repository for just about all the dialogue in the game (provided it wasn't taken out by previous patches, of course).

We will be honest: there's a lot of dialogue in this game. This might not be our absolute favorites, as a result of a general poor memory as well as Too Much Game. Also, we have blatant favoritism towards Vi in all ways. Most of these are favorite interactions, rather than anything else, so...

For Leif:

Kabbu: Leif. If you need to take a break, let us know. Vi will carry you. Vi: That is not happening. Leif: Oh, the fatigue, it kicks in... Vi: I said it's not happening!

...and for Vi, we're fond of this dialogue, specifically because the first time we encountered it we misread "exploring" as "exploding".

Leif: Science looks like a lot of hard work. Vi: It's like uh...the thinking version of exploring!

But of course, our favorite Vi Dialogue as well as our personal favorite dialogue in the game in general would be the Bee Guard overworld spy.

Leif: Vi, you're the only Bee explorer, right? Vi: Huh? Uh, yeah! That I know of... Leif: We've been thinking it's a bit weird, to see so many Bee guards, but only one explorer... Vi: Look, they're not guards because they want to or anything, okay? Vi: They were born to be guards, so they guard. That's it. Kabbu: That's a bit somber... Vi: ...That's just how the Hive is sometimes.

"I'm allergic to bouncers" is a close second, of course. In terms of story implications, we pull on her Jaune interactions and especially the point just after getting kicked out of the studio for the first time during Jaune's request, but that's... it's less we "like" it, per se, and more that the implications are fun to toy with. In terms of the actual dialogue, it just... makes us feel sad. Sad, [], and maybe a bit angry on her behalf. We've been there more than we care to admit, after all.

We... wouldn't wish something similar on anyone. And no matter how good the good gets with Jaune, it still can't really outweigh the fact that the bad starts ticking boxes about emotional abuse in a way that makes relationships like Mothiva & Zasp that more people are willing to try and call out pale in comparison. We probably need to finish that essay some time...

Anyways, we like it when Kabbu gets mad enough to yell at people.

Kabbu: This is ridiculous! You realize you could be dooming us all!? Kabbu: What if the Termite King loses trust in the Queen!? Kabbu: What if you lose to the Wasp King without our help!? Kabbu: Have you gone completely, utterly insane!? Have you lost all intelligence! Mothiva: Yikes. You're overthinking this WAY too much. Mothiva: The Ant Kingdom's way better in our hands than with you LOSERS. Kabbu: We have SAVED YOUR LIFE BEFORE, you WITCH!

#asks #ask games #we speak #bug fables #headcanons #writing #kabbu hc section turned into north rambling but uhh. dw about it. you get to hear our cool northern worldbuilding now #hi. sorry this took so long. this is more than a thousand words of writing.#the Vi Worst Thing varies heavily by verse as does All The Other Ones #what's the worst thing they've ever done? depends on the fic!#for vi specifically the nature of the jobs she's done is often plot relevant and thus changeable by convenience #if we get into aus then there are some more drastic changes ofc but we're doing Canon TSM Only here so that's just a side note #the most notable difference in answers...#selkie vi would have a very #unfortunately selkie vi is also missing and assumed dead due to that so it would be hard for her to answer #we love kabbu but he is very much a product of his environment #the intense traditionalism is a Beetle Thing technically and kabbu's specific brand is even more specific than that #a bit of a Kabbu Thing we guess? highly area specific and notable in that its extreme even for northern beetles #you become an amalgamation of the little bits of the people around you over time #and the bits kabbu picked up. well. highlighted that law is The Way To Go for keeping people alive and safe #even if not quite happy #anyways we hope this is good. it took a longass time! we wrote So Fucking Much here. its a bit excessive.

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