#watcher Clelia

[secretsfromwholecloth]

I see a picrew that'll let me make Clelia and Eiheune, I make them in it to celebrate. It's that simple.

[secretsfromwholecloth]

Ooh, picrew time. A post-apotheosis Eiheune (trying out a new hairstyle, apparently), and an attempt at Clelia. At this rate, I'll die of shock if there's ever one of these actually equipped to make an aumaua or moon godlike.

[secretsfromwholecloth]

Tagged by @risualto​ and @yanara126​, so I had probably better actually do this. All five babies in order, what the hell.

Clelia:

I. ANIMAL: The cosmic pets you get in Deadfire II. COLOUR: Light cyan, gently glowing III. MONTH: Préprima IV. SONGS: “Ara és temps de dormir” by Lídia Pujol (Catalan translation of “Hor ch’è tempo di dormire” by Tarquinio Merula, fl. 17th century) V. NUMBER: 6 VI. DAY OR NIGHT: Night VII. PLANTS: Things in the mint family VIII. SMELLS: Camphor IX. GEMSTONE: Blue topaz X. SEASON: Spring XI. PLACES: A well-to-do neighborhood of charming old houses in a port city XII. FOODS: Cold, milky desserts XIII. ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius XIV. ELEMENTS: Air XV. DRINKS: Fruit and flower cordials

Oriol:

I. ANIMAL: Some kind of bird of prey. Pretty. Graceful. Large. We’ll go with some kind of eagle. II. COLOUR: Warm browns and greens III. MONTH: Majestu IV. SONGS: “I Care Not For These Ladies” by Thomas Campion, fl. 17th century, as performed by Joel Frederiksen V. NUMBER: 5 VI. DAY OR NIGHT: The time around sunset when the day’s work is done and it’s time to kick back and have a chat and a meal with your friends VII. PLANTS: Palm trees VIII. SMELLS: Warm, rich perfume IX. GEMSTONE: Onyx X. SEASON: Summer XI. PLACES: A well-appointed tavern XII. FOODS: Meat curries XIII. ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus XIV. ELEMENTS: Water XV. DRINKS: Expensive spirits, drunk neat

Aegen:

I. ANIMAL: Tempted to say “bear”, of course. Let’s run with that. II. COLOUR: Earth tones III. MONTH: Fonauton IV. SONGS: "La cançó més curta” by Lídia Pujol V. NUMBER: 1 VI. DAY OR NIGHT: Day VII. PLANTS: Krummholz evergreens VIII. SMELLS: Sweat and medicinal herbs IX. GEMSTONE: Agate X. SEASON: Autumn XI. PLACES: Forests where kith are few and far between XII. FOODS: Dried meat, fruit fresh off the tree XIII. ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Gemini XIV. ELEMENTS: Earth XV. DRINKS: Tea made from herbs that people from other places have no names for 

Sikkerneq:

I. ANIMAL: Lynx II. COLOUR: Light beiges and off-whites III. MONTH: Préëstu IV. SONGS: "Ahiani: Elsewhere” by Piqsiq V. NUMBER: 8 VI. DAY OR NIGHT: Night VII. PLANTS: Jade plant VIII. SMELLS: A confusion of plants and trees in flower IX. GEMSTONE: Snowflake obsidian X. SEASON: Summer XI. PLACES: A busy but hushed library XII. FOODS: Roasted nuts XIII. ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Virgo XIV. ELEMENTS: Air XV. DRINKS: Murkbrew to fuel all that studying

Eiheune:

I. ANIMAL: An affectionate, mischievous cat II. COLOUR: Blood red III. MONTH: Tarprima IV. SONGS: "Ogan Erê” by Lenine V. NUMBER: 9 VI. DAY OR NIGHT: Sunrise, when you relax for a bit and gear up for the day VII. PLANTS: Pretty things with soft petals. Violets, perhaps. VIII. SMELLS: Barely-there floral scents IX. GEMSTONE: Lapis lazuli X. SEASON: Spring XI. PLACES: The main street of a small town XII. FOODS: Ricepan the way her tribe makes it XIII. ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Pisces XIV. ELEMENTS: Water XV. DRINKS: Anything flavored with spices, whether milk or tea or liquor

[secretsfromwholecloth]

I'm having entirely too much fun with this Watcher apotheosis idea. Thanks, @pillarsheadcanons!

The blue light is a comfort. A courtier's garment, a thread in a tapestry, and sometimes, rarely, a head of blue curls and a glowing crescent moon, and for all that you have the fate of thousands in your hands, the right decisions become clear and obvious.

Where did the stranger come from? You saw no one come in the door, but here he is, running a lascivious eye over your table and your guests. "Feast with me, my friend." He helps himself to a skewer of razortooth fish and a glass of saucco, then strides to the center of the room. Do you hear music? You're certain you hear music. Kith bodies don't move that way, they've never moved that way, but the stranger's dance is beautiful, and for all that the geometry of his curls and braids hurts to contemplate and you'll never be able to describe his face, you're certain he's the handsomest being you've ever seen. Your guests' voices sound cheerier and friendlier than before, and a loveliness shines from their faces that you never noticed before. Can no one else see him?

Bears in this region aren't normally red, but here you are. It's been weeks since you saw the face of another kith, and it'll be weeks more before they find you, but the red bear has been here, sharing its kills with you, keeping territorial animals away, and once keeping you from pitching yourself over a cliff you didn't know about. It clearly understands what you say to it. You don't think you've gone mad, not yet, but you could swear it just answered you.

Every spring, halfway through Tarprima, students and professors parade from the south gate of the campus to the science building in the northeast corner. It's half serious and half a joke, parodies of prayers ringing out, libations of murkbrew given in offering, and essays and dissertations held out to catch the blessings of coherence and inspiration. You catch the eye of an oddly silent middle-aged dwarf, and all of a sudden the solution to a problem that's been plaguing your project for months could hardly be more obvious.

From a distance, she might be an aumaua giving you a motherly hug. But she has entirely too many eyes, and starlight embedded in her skin where an aumaua's streaks would be. She whispers nonsense in your ears, and the shimmering chorus of voices surrounding her speaks of comfort and support and hope, and the despair you nearly succumbed to seems so very far away.

[secretsfromwholecloth]

For a very early Watcher Wednesday, thanks to me hitting the wrong button, all five babies in that Rinmaru dollmaker. I’m not entirely happy with all of them, but I tried, and the site let me try, which is more than I can say for a lot of them. Still no moon to put on Clel’s head, though, so I went for face tattoos that created a vague crescent shape on her forehead. Which turned out barely visible. Whoops. (In creation order, as usual: Clelia, Oriol, Aegen, Sikkerneq, Eiheune.)

[secretsfromwholecloth]

Watcher speech/voice headcanons:

Clelia has spent a lot of time reading poetry, and reading prose written by people who read poetry, and translating them, and not really much time talking to people outside of her family and some of her father’s longtime students. She talks like a book, tending towards a rather stilted register and weirdly-timed poetic flights. Her voice is soft, too, from a life spent trying to be unobtrusive—giving that rousing speech at the Battle of Yenwood Field takes nearly as much out of her as the actual fighting—and while she enjoys singing well enough, she doesn’t have the chops that she might if she were more willing to make noise by practicing. Her time running Caed Nua helps somewhat (less than you’d think, since she can give orders telepathically through the Steward), but it’s not until late on in Deadfire that she shows real evidence of coming out of her shell. You know what really changed things? Tekēhu. Hard to keep him happy when you’re a quiet little mouse. (Even if she did only manage it temporarily. Dating him was important to her development, but I suspect they’d have made each other miserable in the long term.)

Oriol does his level best to sound as sweet and melodic and lovely as he can at all times. Certainly, there are people who find bluster and ugliness attractive, but those aren’t the ones he’s interested in seducing. His pitch and volume are all over the place; he’s bringing his entire range to bear every time he opens his mouth. Honestly, Oriol, isn’t that exhausting? And as I mentioned in his intro, if you lose sight of him, just listen for the singing. Probably about something dirty. Hope you’re up on your Vailian swears and sexual vocabulary.

Aegen has a pretty recognizable Living Lander accent, but spending so much time with only his bear to talk to has sent his speech patterns in some rather idiosyncratic directions. That’s when he talks at all, of course. It takes time and effort to access those functions, and he can’t do it for long except on his best days. Not that it ever really mattered back home.

Sikkerneq...I mean, she’s a college student when we meet her. We’re hearing a mix of lore college memespeak, calques from Naasitaqi, and words of Rauataian or Naasitaqi dropped in where she forgot the Aedyran for something because she couldn’t brain. As for her voice itself, she talks at the absolute bottom of her range, because it’s hard enough to be taken seriously in her situation without everyone hearing a chirpy little soprano voice.

Eiheune generally sounds cheerful and friendly—sometimes it’s genuine, sometimes it’s forced, sometimes it’s sarcasm. Informal register, comically exaggerated emotional reactions, the whole lot—outside of ritual space, anyway. During rituals, she becomes something different, something by turns poetic and thunderous and hungry and powerful, and her speech is louder, with pitch and volume contours carefully crafted. (Hentzin’s bed is a welcoming place for her close friends, and what catches their eye and makes them want to take her up on her offer is usually equal parts Adorable Cuddlebug Hentzin and Divinely Inspired Force of Nature Hentzin. I can only imagine the looks on some of their faces around the camp/Caed Nua/aboard her ships when she would shift into Priestess Hentzin to practice a speech. And then giggle and chirp, “Yep, still got it!” as often as not.)

[secretsfromwholecloth]

🖊 + Clelia?

They say that if you’re not embarrassed by who you were three years ago, it’s because you’re still the same person you were three years ago*. It says something positive about my personal growth, then, that I look back over my notes from her playthrough, in the fall of 2018, and have moments where I cringe clear off this plane of existence into the Cringe Dimension. That said, she was Eiheune v0.9, in that I plowed large amounts of my own experiences into a pretty young female Watcher with blue as a major element in her coloring, and intellectually, at least, I can respect where I was as a person when I came up with those ideas. And it wasn’t all bad; I like to think her concept works well with what we learn from Pallegina about godlikes in the Vailiosphere. So:

Whether her father did her any favors by keeping her shut away in the rooms behind his studio until she finally ran away to another country is an open question, considering the available alternatives for someone trying to keep a godlike child safe in Old Vailia. But it certainly worked out somewhat regrettably, and one of the ideas I had for her companion quest was that a family member or ex-lover shows up and tries to get her to go home, and she isn’t having it.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the OT4 exactly reflects my relationship situation from ages 19 to 22 (AFAB person with a distant at best relationship with womanhood who has three regular male partners, two closer to her age who identify as “boyfriends” and one preexisting older one who doesn’t and is also a huge stoner). This was a complete accident. I just wanted to pair her up with all my favorites in ways that made sense for the characters involved, and...well. Tekēhu was her actual in-game love interest, the game tells us nothing about Rekke except that he’s attracted to Tekēhu (probably the biggest departure from the real-life situation the OT4 is “based” on, those two weren’t into each other at all), which left me room to do as I liked with him, and if the game tells me Edér has no romantic feelings for the Watcher? Well, first and foremost, the game can’t tell me shit about fuck, I headcanon what I want, but also, I’ve heard those words before. From someone I was sleeping with on the regular (confused the shit out of me at the time, it did, because buddy, why do you feel the need to tell me this, when did I ever ask that of you in the first place).

Her coming from a culture where she’d be considered legally non-binary and probably grow up considering herself half in and half out of the “female” box? Kind of like I did, though without that kind of help from society or the legal system? That was an accident, too. I gave her one Ixamitec and one Vailian parent because those were the closest equivalents to Latinx and Mediterranean ethnicities in the game, and hey, trying to reflect my own ancestry is as good a way to decide that for my character as any other, right? And I waffled over which of those two origins to reflect in the game until I saw that Old Vailia would give better equipment and stat bonuses for a cipher, and that was that.

For all the attention I’ve given to her present life, even going so far as to name her parents, I haven’t pinned down much about her Inquisitor incarnation. I made her Iovara’s sister, which does some of the work for me, but beyond that? *shrug emoji*

For a while I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have made her main language pair for translations Aedyran/Vailian, but no, I imagine there’d be a robust enough market for translated versions of philosophical texts and particularly cerebral poetry from Ixamitl in the universities and salons of Old Vailia. Though she probably adds Aedyran to her repertoire after the events of PoE1, and maybe another language or two after Deadfire.

* There are arguments to be made either way about this, of course, but I’m trying to make a point here.

[secretsfromwholecloth]

I got tagged in a thing, apparently? Thanks, @shimmer-like-agirl! Now, which baby do I start off with? Because copying this over six times and doing it for all of them isn’t something I would inflict on you lovely people. Hm, I’m getting a bit of a Clelia feeling from the list as a whole, so let’s start with her (here she is, if you don’t remember her).

Bold for always. Italics for sometimes.

𝐌𝐄𝐃𝐈𝐄𝐕𝐀𝐋.

tired eyes. coffee stains on the table. listening to the bustle of the city. unmade beds. ponytails. sunlight seeping through the curtains. chapped lips. walking barefoot across the floorboards. dusty dictionaries. black and white reruns. huge sweaters. the ticking of the clock. hearing birds in the morning. fireplaces. falling asleep during class.

𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐀𝐈𝐒𝐒𝐀𝐍𝐂𝐄.

freckles. the sun rising. watching the sea. taking shots of the city. historical museums. bright eyes. looking up at the clouds. walls covered in artworks. drawing in the middle of lessons. tracing your fingers on the sand. painting for hours. staying in uncrowded coffee-shops. worn paperbacks. messy braids. going to bed with your knee socks on.

𝐁𝐀𝐑𝐎𝐐𝐔𝐄.

dark hair. a little sophisticated. always observing the world around you. intricate designs. high ceilings. extravagant musical pieces. dim lights. colorless photographs. fancy furniture. pale skin. hearing soft footfalls coming from outside the room. mischievous looks. bitten nails. candlelight dinners. dark shades of lipstick.

𝐂𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐒𝐈𝐂𝐀𝐋.

chandeliers. the clinking of a teacup mug. laced clothing. modern architecture. light hair. watching the view from the terrace. hidden birthmarks. drinking tea in the morning. wandering about in an empty building. botanical gardens. old films. ancient marble sculptures. expensive perfume. breakfasts in bed. reading stories about mythology.

𝐑𝐎𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐂.

compassion. short writings on scraps of paper. blushed cheeks. a bouquet of roses. reading collections of poetry late at night. loose hair. carpeted floors. attending operas. faint music playing in the background. staying under the covers until midday. the night sky. streetlights. picking flowers. dancing around in silk dresses. scented candles.

[secretsfromwholecloth]

Assorted musical selections for assorted babies (nothing nearly so organized as a playlist).

Clelia:

Lídia Pujol - Ara és temps de dormir (Ignore the lyrics, this is here strictly for the auditory aesthetic—the trajectory from near-silent to tentative to terrified to thundering is exactly hers over the course of both games.)

Oriol:

Ensemble für Frühe Musik Augsburg - Farai un vers, pos mi sonelh (I mentioned in his introduction that Oriol does a lot of singing, particularly the Eoran equivalent of troubadour songs, and that much of his repertoire leans towards the bawdy if not outright obscene. Here’s one of the models I had in mind. Incomplete without the lyrics, if you didn’t read them last time.)

Joel Frederiksen - I Care Not For These Ladies (No, seriously, I wasn’t kidding. Oriol’s flirtation with Xoti definitely involved him pointedly singing the chorus of this song at her at least once. “Her when we court and kiss/She cries, ‘Forsooth, let go!’/But when we come where comfort is/She never will say no.”)

Joel Frederiksen - Qui veut chasser (Thank you to W. D. Snodgrass for the translation: ”Who wants to cure a headache, let him/Drink up good wine and scuppernong/Sausage and ham at table set him/And keep his pantry freshly hung.” Definitely heard aboard the Defiant and/or the Red Sun at least once. Frederiksen isn’t my official voice claim for Oriol—I described him as a merely serviceable baritone, where Frederiksen is a bass and really something quite special—but in practice, he’s very close to the voice I hear in my head, as well as providing a big chunk of repertoire.)

Aegen:

Lídia Pujol - La cançó més curta (There are layers to this one. There’s the birdsong being reminiscent of spending time out in nature, yes, but the insistent repetition and the image of the “oiseau qui chante dans ma tête” make a fine metaphor for spiraling or recurrent intrusive thoughts, and I listened to this one a lot during a time in my life when it felt like my mental illness needed its own theme song. This was it.)

Eiheune:

Lídia Pujol - El Cristo de los piojos (IRL, this is a real thing, composed by St. Teresa of Ávila. In-universe, Hentzin absolutely composed something like this as a pitch-perfect parody of some other church’s liturgy—let the Eothasians concern themselves with redemption and the Magranites with force of arms, while Hentzin’s Waelites pray for what really matters: freedom from lice.)

Steinar Raknes - Walkin' (This one is here to encapsulate the spirit of her friendship with Edér; Raknes even sounds a bit like a Norwegian-accented version of him, if you ask me. “Don’t resign, you dear friend of mine/I’ll buy another round, get your feet to the ground/Let’s go walkin’/And talkin’/Down by the riverside/You’ll feel the sunshine/And everything will be just fine.” Which of them is expressing this sentiment to the other? Yes. I only regret that I couldn’t find a full version of him singing this as a duet with Sámi singer Sara Marielle Gaup Beaska, mashed up with “Biegga ložžestii“, because that was lovely. There’s this one, but they cut to another song after one verse, which makes me sad.)

Linniva (bet you didn’t expect to see her here):

Mari Boine - Mun Da', Han Lean Oaivámuš (The title translates as “I am the one in control here”, and the lyrics, well, “Please won’t you help me to keep them all collected/Please won’t you help me to keep them in their places/Please won’t you help me to keep them where they belong/Just when I had set up limits, limits!/Built high solid walls/Now it all starts to crumble/They spread in all directions/Now it all starts to crumble/They drift with the winds” Could’ve been Linniva’s theme song in the early mid-game.)

Savina Yannatou - Sareri Hovin Mernem (A lament for a lost beloved, for when Blackwall does the thing. Though she’s not without him for nearly as long as all that.)

[secretsfromwholecloth]

Eh, fuck it, why not. So. First off, Clelia.

What the in-game model can’t show you: Her crescent and markings glow, like they did in the first game. She has the features you might expect of someone born to an ocean folk mother and savanna folk father—full lips, cheekbones out to there, nose that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be flat or sharp and settled on triangular. And her ears are not pointy, godsdammit, what is it with fantasy fiction and pointy ears.

OC INFO MEME |

B A S I C S:

Full name: Clelia mes Rèi—would’ve been Clelia Palli had she not been born godlike, but here we are.

Gender: Woman as and when it suits the people around her, otherwise...demiwoman? Agender? Depends on what mood she’s in when asked.

Sexuality: People who are kind to her. Mostly men.

Pronouns: She/her. She was never taught to use anything else.

Background: Artist from Old Vailia (I waffled between that and Ixamitl, she has one parent from each)

Race: Moon godlike, human-born

Class: Cipher (no subclass)

O T H E R:

Family: Parents (Asanina Maleno, Old Vailian shopkeeper’s daughter, and Tehual Palli, Ixamitec painter), some auncles and cousins on Asanina’s side, presumably a whole extended family in Ixamitl on Tehual’s side but she couldn’t tell you who any of them are.

Job(s): Translator, primarily of poetry and fiction. Main language pair Vailian/Ixamitl, for obvious reasons, but she’s made forays into Aedyran as well, because it’s fucking everywhere.

Fears/Phobias: Being looked at and put on display for dissection by anyone who she hasn’t already deemed safe. Being sexually assaulted (again? haven’t pinned down that part of her history exactly, but probably yes). Falling. Being abandoned by people she was relying on.

Guilty pleasures: Diving into a book or a discussion of something inconsequential and ignoring the outside world for a while. Even if it’s pressing. Especially if it’s pressing.

Hobbies: Singing, fiber arts (crochet, knitting, maybe some other things I haven’t pinned down yet), reading, writing the occasional bit of poetry of indifferent quality.

M O R A L S:

Morality alignment: Wants to help. Hasn’t had a great time of it with rules and norms so far in her life but doesn’t go out of her way to stomp on them. Is that what neutral good is? *shrug*

Sins: Timidity that leads to a lack of commitment to what she’s doing and that surfaces as outright cowardice at inopportune moments. She gets better about that over time.

Virtues: Patience and kindliness.

T H I S - O R - T H A T:

introvert / extrovert (a very shy extrovert due to prior experiences, functions more like an introvert most of the time)

organized / disorganized

close-minded / open-minded

calm / anxious / restless

disagreeable / agreeable / in between

cautious / reckless / in between

patient / impatient

outspoken / reserved

leader / follower / flexible (she’s much more of a leader by the end of Deadfire than she was when she first came to the Dyrwood)

empathetic / unempathetic

optimistic / pessimistic / realistic

traditional / modern / in between

hard-working / lazy (”lazy” isn’t quite it, but her fear of ruining everything becomes paralyzing sometimes)

R E L A T I O N S H I P S:

OT4: Edér/Clelia/Tekēhu/Rekke: specifically, the latter three as a triad and Edér as her close friend she sleeps with on the regular and has pretty strong feelings for but the relationship isn’t what anyone would expect of a romance, so there’s no reason for them to call it one.

OTP: Well, Clelia/Edér is endgame so far, but it kind of depends on where Rekke ends up after the events of Deadfire—if he’s still in the picture, and his new Ukaizo conversation makes it seem like he is, make that a Rekke/Clelia/Edér OT3.

Acceptable ships: Any other component pairing/triad of the OT4, Clelia/Adaryc, Clelia/Kana.

BroTP: Edér if we’re on a headcanon level where they’re not together, Kana, Pallegina (sort of, it’s a weird and sad friendship but an important one to both of them while it lasts), Aloth once they figure each other out a bit.

NOTP: Durance of course, Zahua, Grieving Mother, Devil of Caroc, Hiravias, Aloth (nothing against him, but they’d be bad for each other). Vatnir (for reasons of attitude as well as appearance, they’d be horrible for each other).

[secretsfromwholecloth]

Deadfire, addendum.

I took a couple of days to reload one of Clelia’s late-game saves and put her through The Forgotten Sanctum (and let her hug her boyfriend/metamour Rekke, godsdammit).

Misremembering where Advanced Wistful Stargazing could be found meant I lost a day’s progress when I gave up, used a cheat code to get the book, then found it, hours later, somewhere completely different than where I’d been looking, so I had to reload a save from before I’d entered the cheat code to make sure I’d get the achievements. Oops.

And that was after I’d reloaded once already to systematically murder the librarians in the Central Stacks after having spared them on the first go-round, just in case one of them had the book. Really now.

I actually got the quest to fetch the godseed this time (I think I neglected to have Oriol talk to Tayn at the proper moment). Which meant getting the locket as a reward for handing him the godseed, because of course I did. Good luck with your gardening, Tayn! (...you goober, maybe studying it should’ve come first? It’s not actually a seed, you know, burying it and leaving it be is unlikely to accomplish much.)

Tayn may be prone to Brilliant Ideas of the highest order, but he’s so damn likable about it that it’s hard not to side with him. On most things, anyway. I haven’t had anyone actually wake up the body yet; I’d be too scared, not knowing what ends up happening.

In true Clelia fashion, she left the body sleeping instead of killing it. Llengrath, don’t be so grumpy. If Tayn can be understanding about her going against his instructions, so can you. Looking over the stringtables, that may actually have the nicest ending of all the things you can do to it—it behaves itself, and the wizards flocking to the Black Isles to study it turn the area into a center of arcane learning.

I...may be somewhat attached to Mr. Worst Archmage over there. Clelia “What’s Monogamy, Can I Eat It?” mes Rèi would absolutely have been willing to call his bluff and give him a kiss before sailing north, while Oriol would’ve been stopped by his relationship with Xoti, not any kind of shyness or dislike.

Whoa, what happened here? Sailing to the Black Isles rather than straight for Ukaizo gave Pallegina time to leave the party, and now she got a good ending instead of throwing herself off the side of a ship. See, Pallegina? That was all you had to do. Just go and live your life.

Random thought: The Saint’s War has some similarities to 9/11; 15-20 years before present time, someone launched a religiously motivated attack on another country. Afterwards, the attacker’s coreligionists there were targeted for violent reprisals. Now, I doubt the parallel is meant to stand up to much scrutiny, and it may not be intentional at all; that would make Waidwen into Fantasy Osama bin Laden/Fantasy Mohammed Atta, whereas the Waidwen we got is a handsome, gallant animal lover, in a world where “animal lover” is shorthand for “good person” (no cat-petting Blofelds here), with a spectacularly sympathetic backstory (poor woobie, let us hug him). Which, if the parallel is intentional, becomes a very bold statement for an American studio to be making. I’d love to hear perspectives on this from those more directly affected.

[secretsfromwholecloth]

I said there'd be fewer Deadfire opinions this time? Clearly, that was a lie.

Finding the dead Dawnstars in the Neketaka hinterland and giving them a proper cremation made Edér happy enough to get him to +2 approval and trigger that conversation, including the "do you have feelings for me" chat. I have to say, this was much better timing for that than right after Hasongo, like last time, at which point he's had quite a time of it, and is it really appropriate to be asking if he'll have you right after his hopes of being a family with Elafa and Bearn were dashed? Awkward.

Also, if he's still holding out hope that he can settle down with Elafa and raise her kid together, of course he'd say no, even to a Watcher who's actually his type (unlike Clelia, though my next one may be).

I chose one slightly different response in that chat, and him saying the Watcher having a crush on him "means a lot"...I couldn't even tell you why, but that hit me where I live. Up there with some of his most heartwarming lines in the game, if you ask me.

Er, did you kill your parents, Xoti? *eyebrow*

Maia, I'll let you know when it's murdering time. And if we can solve this nāga business peacefully, it is not currently murdering time.

If souls are Awakened by being reminded of their previous lives, as we've seen in a couple of places, what kind of life did Iselmyr have that she would be Awakened by her new incarnation being savagely beaten as a young child? Now I'm sad.

Sure, I've only played through Tekēhu's romance, but I have no reason to think the others are structured any differently: you begin the romance arc, court for a while, eventually sleep together, and that's the endpoint. I...guess that's how it works for normal people? I'm not really feeling seen here, though. My usual pattern is that I make friends with someone, fall into bed with them, and then over time the friendship mutates into whatever it needs to be and maybe we start calling it a Relationship™. Maybe. I should add that to my "your Watcher as a companion" post, that companion!Clelia's romance has you sneaking off to your tent/berth in the first conversation, and the big finale is deciding to stay together and start calling yourselves lovers in public.

[secretsfromwholecloth]

A bit more Deadfire.

You know, I wonder what the original crew of the Defiant thought when they realized they'd be taking orders from a clearly disturbed man who kept asking a broken statue for advice and loudly insisting that the dead woman—a dead moon godlike, of all the things to have aboard a ship!—he was hovering over was their real captain. Sure, the statue turned out to be pretty sensible, the madman saner than anyone realized and just distraught that his god had gone all stompy and his friend was lying inert on a bunk, and the dead woman a good captain once she resurrected herself, but I'm sure Eld Engrim, Beodul, Irrena, and Chitupec could all tell you some stories.

Chitupec in particular. Dead lady comes back to life just in time to fight off boarders and save his life during a storm. If he wasn't superstitious before, he sure is now. He'll be retelling that one until the day he dies, I suspect.

REKKE. :D :D :D My joy at getting him has nearly as much to do with the added flexibility in party composition afforded me by an additional tank who even Xoti and Aloth can't find fault with as with him being an absolute darling whom I love very much. Now let's science the shit out of his dialogue, shall we?

Tekēhu, I'm glad your romance triggered, I was starting to worry, but can we do this a) outside the actual throne room and b) away from Pallegina, who's visibly uncomfortable with your story of casual sex with an avian godlike? I love you to bits, but you need to learn how to act in front of people.

Should I be asking you about your junk? I keep getting the option to ask about your junk. Is there something I need to know?

I'm definitely glad that you're finding it in you to step up and be the reformer and modernizer the Huana need. You can do it, fish-boy! Now come here and let Clelia finally give you a hug, now that you're together, hm?

Oh, Bearn, you realize that if Eothas needed your soul, he'd have taken it by now, right? And it's a matter of sheer numbers, no judgment on your piety if he hasn't? And that the forces at work here are beyond human comprehension, so trying to exert human-scale control over them will only harm you and yours and not affect them at all?

Oh, Edér. Hug? No? Relax, Clelia isn't pining for you or anything, she just wanted to make it clear that she was open to there being more to your friendship if you were interested. You don't need to worry about encouraging her or anything. Please let her hug you, you need so many hugs. Especially since that business with Bearn. (You're lucky you didn't make that comment about orlans being a kind of animal you like within earshot of Serafen, though. Edér, no.)

Maia certainly gets a lot of stick for being a Huana descendant in a Rauataian uniform. I understand why she'd keep a tight lid on her reactions. All the same, it'd be nice if I could get a handle on how she relates to her heritage and current situation like I eventually did with Kana. She clearly thinks the RDC is doing the islands a favor, but that's about as much as I can make out, and she's no different from any other believer in the imperial project in that.

[secretsfromwholecloth]

Deadfire, take two.

Story mode is a delight. Fights like the giant cave grub in Neketaka's Old City that took multiple lengthy, careful attempts in Relaxed are now the work of a minute or so. *satisfied sigh*

I was staring right at the option to unlock Edér's pet slot and...didn't click on it? For some reason? Apparently I'm a terrible person who hates cute?

Maia, you can stay your ass on the ship this time until I'm done with everything else I need to do in Tikawara. (One of the quests there was rendered undoable last time when a needed NPC was killed in the fighting after her contact/ex was attacked.) I'm seriously considering not doing your quest, because ew, RDC.

Remembering to sell off excess gear right away instead of waiting for the late game meant that Operation Go Get Rekke As Soon As Possible could proceed even faster this time. :D *pats him*

I hadn't seen the banter where Serafen compares Edér's thoughts to a birdbath ("clear, shallow, and unoccupied short of animals") before. Undignified noises were made.

I've made sure to keep Xoti away from Pallegina, so this time she's got a problem with...Serafen? Oh boy. (And maybe next time I'll remember to stash her before taking Tekēhu to the Wild Mare—his responses in the conversation with Gyntel really piss her off, so if she isn't there to hear them, maybe I can delay the inevitable between those two.)

You know, I was kind of tempted to romance Xoti instead of Tekēhu this time, since I've already seen Tekēhu's romance and realized he and Clelia aren't optimally suited, but no, that's how her story goes, it's Tekēhu she takes to her bed. And besides, if I'm relitigating my twenties here, "sleeping with a BDSM enthusiast and making it work for a time despite not having that in me at all" is extremely on-brand.

[secretsfromwholecloth]

That's right, more Deadfire.

A couple of days back, I thought to myself, "With the party at level 15/16 and not much else left to do besides some exploring, it may be time for Beast of Winter." It was not, in fact, time for Beast of Winter. I couldn't get that awful dragon past Hurt, and Ydwin was knocked out in seconds every single time I tried (not bringing her with me when I go back, reactivity be damned). We'll see if it goes any better with a level 18/19 party.

The Harbingers and Vatnir are hilarious, though. And I look forward to getting my heart ripped out and stomped on by the rest of the DLC.

Crookspur has been emptied of slavers as best I could. WHOO, MURDER. :D By the time I made it to the Wahaki captives' cell to let them out so they could help me kill things, there was barely anyone left for them to kill. Oops?

Kana! *hug motions in the air, blown kisses* But, uh, buddy, what happened to Rauatai while we weren't looking? They went from isolationist to colonial empire disturbingly quickly. Maybe talk to the emperor about these "colonize all the things" tendencies? No?

Oh, Modwyr. It's OK, I still love you, even if Yngfrith doesn't so much. We can kill things and gossip together! (And ogle Edér, apparently? Sure, why not, but any hint that he's uncomfortable with it and it stops, OK?)

Rekke, there's no need to be coy. You want Tekēhu so badly, go ask him if he'll have you. I give it very good odds that the answer will be yes. You didn't think he and Clelia were monogamous, did you?

Speaking of whom, that date night at the Wild Mare. Goodness. Though he clearly wants a dominant, and while Clelia is making an honest go of it for the time being, she doesn't really have that in her for the long term. Kind of a shame, when they value, care for, and enjoy each other so much, but what can you do? These things happen.

I'm trying to think of which of the love interests Clelia would have been suited for, at this rate, and I'm honestly not sure. Xoti, maybe? I'll have to play through the others, or at least read the stringtables, to be sure.

Given what the models for Huana were, "Ngati" should probably be pronounced /ŋati/. Is it? No. Tekēhu's VA, at least, is genuinely trying and says /ŋ̍gati/, which I can absolutely deal with. I hear a fair bit of /ɪŋgati/, which is the best you'll get out of most English speakers, so OK, I won't complain too loudly. But then there are the ones who say /nɪgati/, and that makes me want to scream and throw things. (You too, Onekaza? That feels like a betrayal.)

Ashen Maw wasn't so bad, especially with the ability to talk the dragon into flying away. And I'm just going to sit here and whimper a little at Edér waiting for Clelia to say her piece, screaming himself hoarse at Eothas, and being brushed off and told to take care of her until next time. OK, yes, she does need the big man's help to not die, but all the same, he's already put so much time and effort into taking care of her that I kind of feel like Eothas has it backwards.

Aww, Edér is the bad cop to Clelia's good cop. Yes, he had his own reasons for loudly giving Eothas a piece of his mind, but they also make such a good team!

Headcanon: Things were a little strained between Clelia and Edér for a while after that conversation, but not being able to comfort her friend left her an absolute mess, and she had the entire rest of the party taking turns sitting with him and reporting back to her on how he was doing.

I want to experience aligning with the other factions in future playthroughs, but the Huana are the only ones whose questline's later stages don't leave me feeling like I need a shower, either because of the quests themselves (VTC, Príncipi) or the characters I'm dealing with (Atsura makes my skin crawl).

PS to Atsura: You and your attempts to blame the Huana for the slave trade can eat my entire ass.

[secretsfromwholecloth]

It's Deadfire time again!

I'm now caught up and then some—I finished Beast of Winter and did most of Seeker Slayer Survivor yesterday. Yes, in half the time it took me to get to this point in Relaxed mode; the easier combat makes that much of a difference. I'm retroactively proud of myself for beating the first game on Easy instead of Story.

Concelhaut went down even easier this time, of course, but I'm a little sad that it wasn't Edér who killed him. Sure, Serafen can share in the glory, but Concelhaut doesn't hate him the way he hates Edér. Eh, well, we've got our little skull back, and that's the important part.

When the decision was made to have Tekēhu say, "What a glorious hole!" in Ashen Maw, how loudly do you think the writer responsible was cackling? Because I know I was when I heard it.

No, Tekēhu, Caed Nua did not have a sex dungeon. Though perhaps if you'd been there, Clelia could've been prevailed on to repurpose one of the cells for you.

When I went to visit King Wingauro, I wanted to pass Rekke off as an ambassador, because I've seen that dialogue and it amuses me, but I guess I didn't take the right options to do that. Instead, I offered him Tekēhu as what was at least gently implied to be a potential bedmate (poor Tekēhu certainly saw it that way—headcanoning that Clelia made it up to him once they got out of there).

Reassuring him that he had to be the offering because none of the others were as pretty was hilarious, though. And was I wrong? Vatnir certainly isn't. And while there's something to be said for Edér and Rekke, there's no guarantee they'd have any appeal for an ancient Huana king, whereas Tekēhu is at least awe-inspiring on religious grounds even if the king turns out not to be interested in a boyfriend.

Ydwin had some good lines here and there, but she's really quite smug, isn't she?

I got screencaps of the trilingual text on the floor and Rekke's translation of the Seki part. Considering that we have an alphabet chart for Huana somewhere as well as the one for Seki, we should be able to do some good sciencing here.

Last time, I had Edér talk Waidwen into coming with us to face Eothas. This time, I told him, "That's fear of your father talking," to see what that argument looked like. Holy shit, mean. Not wrong, but mean. I actually reloaded so I could have Edér do the honors again, because being hurtful to woobies like Waidwen is not a business I am in. (I still want an option to hug him.)

I really expected Xoti to have more to say in The Bridge Ablaze. She piped up a couple of times, to identify Waidwen and later to reassure him that we'd be reuniting him with Eothas soon (er, Xotes, considering how reluctant he was to come along at all, do you really think that's the thing to say to him?), but Edér was definitely the talkative one out of the two of them.

Shut up, Neriscyrlas. You too, Rymrgand.

So I didn't actually fuck up the beginning of Seeker Slayer Survivor last time. That arena fight was, in fact, the next step in the quest. It's just that aside from the first one where you meet Konstanten's old friends, all the fights in SSS are challenging in Story mode and fucking impossible on any higher difficulty. Neriscyrlas and the Beast of Winter combined were a piece of piss by comparison to any one of the arena fights.

Edér is precious, but you knew that. His version of trying to warn you away from a creepy blood sacrifice thing is to complain about why it always has to be blood sacrifices, why not beer sacrifices or something like he would want if he were a spirit, "I don't trust any blood sacrifice spirit that doesn't appreciate good Dyrwoodan hops." I'm not kidding, that's the line, with some description that makes it clear that under the humor, he's deadly serious and trying to look out for you. Didn't I say he was precious?

Konstanten and Fassina are pretty cute. Was that a smile, Fassina? You'll ruin your reputation if you keep doing that.

If you'd asked me before this DLC dropped if I thought Konstanten had spent years as an arena fighter, I would probably have said no. Or maybe, at best. Welp.

The Seeker's Path fights were kind of fun, in that figuring out the secret to beating each one gave me some pride and happiness in between the constant stream of "oh shit oh shit oh shit". That said, if I'd known about the Faces' mortal identities going in, I might've gone for Survivor instead.

These Engwithans, I swear to fuck.

Is Erūke the first overtly non-binary character in this series? I know there were arguments to be made for Pallegina, but there are equally strong arguments to be made against her, whereas Erūke uses they/them pronouns and has a voice and character model that don't particularly evoke either binary gender, so the intention is pretty clear.

I'm not here to sacrifice Konstanten or my cheery ghost friend, so I guess we're settling this with a fight...wait, Aexica, why are you attacking me? Didn't you want me to do this?

The rest of the game (and the previous game) has done such a good job of cultivating this sense of "we stick together, we get through this" that the scripted interactions that systematically separate you from your party members had me legitimately scared. I don't think I've ever felt more relieved about anything in this series than getting Rekke back after some spiders grabbed him in the forest, or being able to deal with the boar peacefully rather than have to fight it solo and badly injured while waiting for the rest of the party. (And Edér, shut it about wanting to sit back and watch Clelia take most of the hits for once in her life—she's been an off-tank for the majority of this game, she is contributing!)