#which is in line with tiamat i suppose | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thessaliah · 2 years

Text

Meh

Arcade was really, really bad and underwhelming. I know I expected too much from an Arcade game, but Nasu being involved raised some expectations. Let me address some worst points underneath the cut:

Chaldea Mystery Goes Unresolved: Nothing is explained properly. They hint before to the final battle that this Chaldea isn’t the real one (echoing to Merlin in Camelot as warning to Bedivere only to trust the real Chaldea), using Chaldea under double quotations and brackets, yet (unless Mash’s Bond CE fills the gaps), nothing is actually explained. It creates more questions than answers including: why is Mash alive in 2017 without Cath Palug, why is Mash or Da Vinci even there without Roman (the condition Da Vinci stays, and why Mash survives at all), why is Chaldea even there at all without Roman or the Animuspheres (you know who made it?), why is a crap mage as Guda even chosen as Master without a sabotage to take down the previous candidates and more if there’s no “part 1 happened but their memories got erased.” And memories getting erased was even hinted by Merlin in the end (that they will forget this journey?) which is a drop line without a single explanation. There’s no explanation why says “Grand Order Recovered” instead of “Completed.” More superfluous mystery built up which has no payback at all. The OP song seems more confirmed to be for Mobile Mash’s arc, so I don’t know why was it used in Arcade at all. Terrible. Why was Chaldea here too? It feels like the Master and Mash did nothing and amounted to nothing in characterisation, it was all Arthur and Merlin and neither required their presence. They did nothing in the last battle. There was not even a debate with the Beast where the Beast obtains an “answer,” just some hilarious “discussion” about why they are fighting someone with obviously evil intentions with less depth than Beryl which is supposed to “troubled” them morally?

The lore is all over the place: Both Grand and Beast lore got completely trashed by the unnecessary introduction of G and S of Beast VI and pretending Merlin included them in a prophecy she told Arthur, which was what we read in Arthur’s quest years ago and nowhere Arthur nor Merlin mentions G and S. It reeks to Nasu retconning his lore again to shoehorn more scantly clad women as “final bosses” (playable, of course) instead of going with what was probably originally planned where R was described with a lingering “scent of roses” (so could have been Sodom/Draco) and L was “miasma (so would go to Proto Beast and Manaka), forgetting they called Proto/Fragment Beast “Sodom’s Beast” and Beast of the sea. The poor, inconsistent writing to try to create a plot for Arcade is just ridiculous. Of course we still have Beast VI/G to deal with and means well, a sequel hook for Arcade. If it continues and might not. What will happen if it doesn’t? They’ll retcon Beast G as dying? She (because obviously will be another cringe scantily clad woman) will be killed on her way back to her home planet? Point “It was Angra Mainyu in Heaven’s Feel” so is defeated yay!” IDK. Grands are also inconsistent, why is Hassan a Grand again (why was he even here? He did nothing other than sass Sodom and add more mystery boxes or “ooh they knew each other!”)? Thus rendering his sacrifice to beat Tiamat void. Not only Arcade has bad writing, but its bad writing affects some of the mobile best chapters with its reek. And Noah could have been cool. I love how he says he can’t help anymore in Babylon and he appears again without 0 back-draws and consequences for what Draco did to him with “Yo, I brought Arthur with me!” also undermining the loss of Noah a chapter ago. This makes him way less cool, but also makes the Beast whose only on-screen feat was to eliminate that Grand, look really incompetent. Oh well.

(Next in FGO: Rasputin pours water on U-Olga and she starts to spawn multiple Beast parts which bounce around different spinoff, where “Chaldea” needs to fight Beast VII/A, Beast VII/B, Beast VII/C, Beast VII/D and more!).

Worst Beast to date: Look, I really, really wanted to like her, but she’s a hot mess in a post U-Olga and Koyan setting where they are hot messes too. But at least they were hot messes from the beginning (U-Olga and her story isn’t yet over) or degraded over the time which gave me zero expectations (Koyan). The Harlot, though, I had big hopes for. Draco is a little better than Sodom, but not for much, and gets points subtracted by her awful design. Nero’s fursona fails to be a competent antagonist in all aspects: she’s pure tell, without any showing. There’s no backstory, no characterisation beyond “I’m Evil and Hungry lulz!” There’s no connection to the protagonists to make her get a meaningful role to influence and be influenced. She does absolutely nothing other than gloating and flashing her tits at us (nice chest but that would just make her a good hentai character not a final boss). Her only kinda impressive feat was Noah being taken out the board, only to have this made irrelevant a chapter after. Her actions despite trying to sabotage Noah ended up doing nothing since he does everything he’s supposed to do anyway? Noah doesn’t even require any miracle to return, Chaldea or the Master do nothing, he was just looking for Arthur so he arrived late.

Now to elaborate most points. Old rule: show, don’t tell. You can tell me Sodom is some Universe Buster but if she does nothing to prove it other than tell me things she allegedly did off screen, she doesn’t build any sense of danger or despair. She’s all talk and no walk, and worst is when she clarifies she didn’t destroy the worlds, humanity did, so any past actions were just her eating despair and desire after humans wrecked some timeline. On the second point: Just like is important to showcase what your boss can do, it’s important to show us why, give us motivations, backstory, and something to relate to the protagonists. Time Temple battle is so memorable because of Goetia’s connection to the people who fight against him. Olympus climax is so memorable because of Kirschtaria’s connection. Even with Olympus all over the place writing, everyone agrees the climax of the Crypter arc is really a powerful moment. They would be memorable climaxes to remember, while Arcade climax is completely unmemorable and partly is because Sodom has no connection or resonates with anyone around. They tried to shoehorned this with Merlin and still didn’t click. An antagonist to be memorable also requires them to be some compelling character first. Sodom works as a midboss or throwaway villain, but not as an arc final boss which is supposed to wrap the take away from this story. Not in the way they wrote her. Fluffing her with supposed off-screen deeds and powers does not make your antagonist (be a villain or a rival): that’s why Kotomine is better than Angra Mainyu or Gilgamesh as final boss for FSN. Even Kiara with is as wicked as Sodom had this in Seraphix conclusion, by paralleling her to Melt. Now it’s unfair because Arcade has little lines, but it just felt absolutely shallow. The ending in general looked like a dummies’ version of Time Temple/Babylonia combined without their heart. Which also leads us to the other point of why she fails as antagonist: there was never a sense of danger, stakes or anything during the entire fight. We don’t see anyone even getting injured or in despair or in trouble, they are, well, calm? Remember Babylonia? Remember Time Temple? Even Ooku and Seraphix had this. Merlin even hilariously lampshades this:

What was even the point lmao. There was nothing memorable about the final battle and the fault lies on Sodom being a good for nothing antagonist in execution. The way the boss is written and is presented carries the resolution. All would have been solved if Merlin didn’t send Arthur away to gatekeep him from one shooting this Beast early on for no reason but horrible plot she wanted to be amused. All that Biblical background possibility and nothing is really brought up to spice things. There’s not even clarification if she’s Nero or just a Pseudo Servant Nero like Kama is Sakura Pseudo. Her Welfare’s Final Art has the Draco constellation in the background which gives her a completely unrelated mythological source to the Bible and Nero. And her region is “Europe” so again, vaguely displaces her from her Abrahamic connection of the slide. The source being FGO seals her as an Original Character instead of a historical or legend one, but one without background to justify her existence and makes her compelling.

Nasu demonstrates once more his ideas are hit or miss. This could have been great, he had all the ingredients but really mess when he tried to cook them.

#fate grand order #fgo arcade #critical #impressions

24 notes · View notes

grailfinders · 3 years

Text

Fate and Phantasms #160

Today on Fate and Phantasms we’re making... wait a minute! Isn’t King Arthur supposed to be a girl?

Anyways, this faker is a Watcher Paladin and Monster Slayer Ranger to hunt down beasts wherever they may hide, as well as a Zealot Barbarian for his own Mana Burst skill and even bigger smites.

Check out his (god, it feels wrong using that pronoun) build breakdown below the cut, or his character sheet over here!

Next up: He might not be allowed at pride, but I’m not waiting a month to do another build.

Race and Background

Arthur may be from a different reality, but he’s still a Human, and since we need those ability scores more than any feats, this gives him a +1 to all abilities. You’re a Pendragon, so you’re a lil bit basic by FGO standards.

He’s also a Knight, getting proficiency in History and Persuasion.

Ability Scores

Unfortunately your mana burst can’t do all the work, so make your Strength as high as possible to swing your sword sword. After that is Charisma; you have a whole skill named after it, and I mean have you heard his White Day voice lines? Dude’s sexy. If you want to set off on an interplanar hunting trip, Wisdom is also a must. Your Dexterity also has to be pretty good, mostly for multiclassing, but also because sometimes you fight in a tuxedo. Sadly, this means your Constitution isn’t as high as we’d like, and you’ll have to dump Intelligence. I honestly don’t know how smart Arthur’s supposed to be, but we’re juggling a lot of balls here. The only things we could dump are intelligence and constitution, and he definitely doesn’t have a negative con modifier. If you’re really worked up about this one, just remember all his historical knowledge comes from another dimension, so it probably isn’t that useful in this one.

Class Levels

1. Paladin 1: Starting off as a paladin gives you proficiency with Wisdom and Charisma saves, as well as proficiency with Religion and Athletics. You are still a Pendragon, and I’m pretty sure a holy grail fits into your backstory somewhere.

You also get a Divine Sense to help you hunt down extraplanar beasts, and you can use your Lay on Hands as an action to heal a creature you touch as an action, healing up to five times your paladin level per long rest.

2. Paladin 2: Second level paladins get their Fighting Style, and Great Weapon Fighting makes your attacks more consistent by re-rolling damage dice that land on 1s and 2s. This adds up, especially when you start factoring Divine Smites. Yes you too can use up spell slots to deal extra radiant damage to your Excalibur’s attacks!

Speaking of, you can use Spells, preparing and casting them with your Charisma. We’ll go into more detail about which ones to pick when we grab a subclass next level.

3. Paladin 3: Upon taking your sacred oath, you become a Watcher, this plane’s bulwark against extraplanar threats. (I mean, CotTT hangs out in his own demiplane, Tiamat spends most her time in Imaginary Number Space, and Kiara’s from the moon... most of the beasts we’ve seen so far count.)

Once per short rest, you can Channel Divinity in one of two ways. You can use your Watcher’s Will to give your allies advantage on Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma saves. You can also Abjure the Extraplanar, turning extraplanar creatures who fail their wisdom save, running away for a minute or until it takes damage.

You also get your freebie spells, Alarm and Detect Magic. The former will prevent your camp from getting ambushed, while the latter will be very useful to track down that beast you’re tailing.

Once you find them, use Compelled Duel to keep them in sword range, or Protection from Evil and Good to even the odds if they go on the offensive. Also, smites. Smites are good.

4. Paladin 4: Use your first Ability Score Improvement to round up your Constitution and Charisma for stronger saves and more health.

5. Paladin 5: Fifth level paladins get an Extra Attack each attack action, making Excalibur’s victory a bit more promised.

You also get 2nd level spells, like the freebies Moonbeam and See Invisibility. Beasts do come with the tendency to transform for the climactic battle... I wonder if forcing them back into their less intimidating forms will actually weaken them?

Beyond the free spells, you can use more Smites, as well as Magic Weapon to make Excalibur a truly legendary weapon, adding +1 to its attack and damage rolls.

6. Barbarian 1: Changing planes to barbarian gives you your Mana Burst in the form of Rage, giving you several benefits: you get advantage on strength saves and checks, as well as bonus damage on melee attacks, and you resist physical damage. The downsides are; you can’t cast or concentrate on spells, the rage only lasts 1 minute, as long as you take or deal damage each round Also, you can’t use heavy armor. Hope you like a breastplate, because that’s the most you can hold onto here.

You also unlock your tuxedo, thanks to your Unarmored Defense, giving you a minimum AC based on your dexterity and constitution. I never said it would be good, but it’s better than nothing.

7. Ranger 1: Switching over quickly now, first level rangers get a free skill proficiency! Grab Survival to track your quarries, then use Canny to double survival’s proficiency bonus so you can track them beyond planar boundaries.

You also gain a Favored Enemy, a kind of foe that you have advantage on checks to track or recall lore about. Most beasts probably qualify as Aberrations in D&D, so go with that one.

8. Ranger 2: Second level rangers get another Fighting Style. Fighting in a tuxedo is pretty unrealistic, so let’s double down on the armor with Protection, giving you +1 to your AC in any kind of protection.

You also get another set of Spells that use your Wisdom. Thankfully Hunter’s Mark and Zephyr Strike don’t really care about your modifier. The former adds extra damage to every attack and makes tracking even easier than it already is. The latter only adds damage to a single attack, but it makes you able to ignore attacks of opportunity and move faster the one turn you deal extra damage. DW might not have given you a wind-based spiritron dress, but you can still make them work for you.

9. Ranger 3: Third level rangers get Primeval Awareness, spending a spell slot to sense various kinds of extraplanar and otherworldly creatures around you to make tracking down beast four a little easier.

Once you find it, you can use your skills as a Monster Slayer to take it down. Your Monster Slayer Magic gives you Protection from Evil and Good as a freebie, and you also gain two actual features! Hunter’s Sense is an action to determine a creature’s weaknesses and strengths. You can use this a number of times per long rest equal to your wisdom modifier.

You can also turn one creature at a time into your Slayer’s Prey, spending a bonus action to deal an extra bit of damage once per turn with your weapon attacks. It sticks to that creature until you finish a short rest.

Finally for your normal spell this level grab Searing Smite. It’s a smite, it sears.

10. Ranger 4: Fourth level rangers get another ASI, so bring your Strength up for stronger sword swings. Wielding the breath of a planet doesn’t mean anything if you can’t hit people with it.

11. Paladin 6: Your Aura of Protection gives you and allies within 10 feet of you a bonus to all your saving throws equal to your charisma modifier. Honestly this is super useful, you might want to think about doing this earlier. Or don’t, I’m not a cop.

12. Barbarian 2: Second level barbarians can make Reckless Attacks, giving you advantage on attacks for a turn in exchange for your enemies having advantage on attacks against you for the round. The smart thing to do is to smite them out of existence before they get the chance.

You also get Danger Sense, giving you advantage on dexterity saves if you can see them coming. You probably wouldn’t last long against Beast 1 if you weren’t able to survive a fireball.

13. Barbarian 3: Third level barbarians get their path, and as a Zealot you can put the fear of god into anything you fight. Your Divine Fury deals 1d6+1 extra radiant damage with each attack while raging, and as a Warrior of the Gods, you can be revived with magic without needing material components.

You also get Primal Knowledge to figure out an Animal Handling proficiency. Riding skill, checked off the list.

14. Paladin 7: Seventh level Watchers exude the Aura of the Sentinel, adding your proficiency bonus to your initiative, as well as the initiative of any creature within 10′ of you. With most beasts, attacking slowly means you won’t be attacking at all.

15. Paladin 8: Use this ASI to bump up your charisma for stronger spells and better saves. I’m still not entirely sure how we’re building Kiara yet, but rest assured those saves will be necessary.

16. Ranger 5: Fifth level rangers get an extra attack, but that doesn’t stack with the one you already have, sorry.

It’s not all bad news, though! You also get Zone of Truth from your Slayer magic, and Enhance Ability as your usual spell. The former forces humanoids to tell the truth if they fail a charisma save, while the latter just makes whoever you cast it on better in one kind of ability check for the duration, giving them advantage for the duration.

17. Ranger 6: If a Beast isn’t an aberration, it’s probably a Monstrosity, so grab that as your second Favored Enemy. You also get another Deft Explorer perk, Roving, which gives you an extra 5′ of movement speed, as well as a climbing and swimming speed. Since you’re never getting a summer version, it’s important that you can keep up with your female counterpart as-is.

18. Paladin 9: Ninth level paladins get third level spells; Counterspell and Nondetection both work to put a damper into beasts’ plans, either shutting down their super form or making it harder for them to spy on you. You also get more smites, Dispel Magic to force them out of their super mode later, or Spirit Shroud for more damage. more damage is good.

19. Paladin 10: At tenth level, you and your allies can’t be frightened because you’ve got an Aura of Courage! It’s level nineteen so that’s not super useful, but it’s still one less thing to worry about.

20. Paladin 11: Your capstone level gives you an Improved Divine Smite, adding a bit of that radiant goodness to all your melee attacks, regardless of what spell slots you do or don’t spend on them.

Pros:

Arthur has a big sword, and he knows how to use it, dealing some heavy damage with each swing. While raging and preying, he deals 6d6+4d8+10 damage each round (assuming both attacks hit), all boosted by great weapon master, and that’s before any kind of smites get included.

Despite your low dexterity score, you’re still pretty quick when you need to be. You’ve got a faster walking speed than most people, your dexterity save is solid thanks to your aura and danger sense, and you’ve got another aura boosting your initiative! Basically you have a high dexterity in everything except ability checks and AC, with almost no direct investment needed!

Mixing your primeval awareness with your divine senses means you are a fine-tuned tracker when it comes to locating creatures from another plane. Just make sure you don’t mix up your quarry with MHX, I doubt she’d be happy to see you.

Cons:

While medium armor does a solid enough job of protecting you, your HP is pretty low for a front line fighter, with barely over 120 HP. You’re here for a good time, not a long time.

As always, mixing spells and rage is pretty bad, forcing you to choose one or the other. That’s especially painful because it means you can’t use your neat gish spells to add effects if you want to deal more damage. Kind of like your smites, when I think about it.

Your paladin, barbarian, and ranger features all want use of your bonus action, meaning it will take a while for you to get up to full speed in a fight anyway. I’d definitely rage first, it’d help with the squishiness.

#fgo #fate grand order #D&D #DND 5e #Arthur Pendragon #paladin #barbarian #ranger

34 notes · View notes

maandarinee · 3 years

Note

what are all the podcasts you listen to?

anon I'm so glad you asked

Since it is a pretty long list including synopses (stolen from the podcast feed or website because I'm Bad at summaries and in some cases it's been a while since I listened) I'm going to put it under a cut.

I've separated the list into "Complete" (either finished or cancelled) and "Ongoing" podcasts. Some have additional comments by me. Current favorites are marked orange. My eternal beloved are Our Fair City and Wolf 359.

Complete

ars PARADOXICA: "When an experiment in a time much like our own goes horribly awry, Dr. Sally Grissom finds herself stranded in the past and entrenched in the activities of a clandestine branch of the US government. Grissom and her team quickly learn that there's no safety net when toying with the fundamental logic of the universe."

Blackwood: "Five years ago, Molly Weaver, Bryan Anderson, and Nathan Howell started a podcast focused on the local legend of a monster called The Blackwood Bugman. Quickly, the investigation grew out of their control, as they discovered that, not only are the legends seemingly true, many people in Blackwood have turned up dead or disappeared without a trace." --> [this feels like the Blair With Project, but as a podcast. Didn't get a second season due to no funding, but it works as a standalone]

Dreamboy: "Dane, a spun-out musician spending the winter in Cleveland, Ohio, has two main goals: keeping his job at the Pepper Heights Zoo and trying not to waste all his time on Grindr. What he doesn’t expect is to get swept into a story about dreams, about forevers, about flickering lights, about unexplained deaths, about relentless change, and about the parts of ourselves that we wish other people knew to look for. Oh, and also a murderous zebra." --> [very NSFW; does cool things with music! Didn't get a second season due to no funding, but it works as a standalone]

King Fall AM: "...centers on a lonely little mountain town's late-night AM talk radio show and its paranormal, peculiar happenings and inhabitants." --> [cancelled after 100 episodes, ends on a huge cliffhanger]

Our Fair City: "A campy, post-apocalyptic audio drama." --> [I know the description sounds like nothing but just trust me, I love it so much]

Steal the Stars: "...is a gripping noir science fiction thriller in 14 episodes: Forbidden love, a crashed UFO, an alien body, and an impossible heist unlike any ever attempted."

Stellar Firma: "...a weekly Science Fiction, Comedy podcast following the misadventures of Stellar Firma Ltd.'s highest born but lowest achieving planetary designer Trexel Geistman and his bewildered clone assistant David 7. Join them each episode as they attempt to take listener submissions and craft them into the galaxy's most luxurious, most expensive and most questionably designed bespoke planets. However, with Trexel's corporate shark of a line manager Hartro Piltz breathing down their necks and I.M.O.G.E.N., the station's omnipresent and omniinvasive stationwide A.I. monitoring those necks to within 3 decimal places, they'll be lucky to make it a week before being slurried and recycled into raw human resources." --> [semi-improvised, I thought I'd have a problem with the improv bit because that's not usually my thing, but no, I absolutely devoured this]

TANIS: "...is a serialized docudrama about a fascinating and surprising mystery: the myth of Tanis. Tanis is an exploration of the nature of truth, conspiracy, and information. Tanis is what happens when the lines of science and fiction start to blur." [+ spinoff The Last Movie] --> [I have no clue what the hell is going on here]

The Black Tapes: "...is a serialized docudrama about one journalist's searc for truth, her enigmatic subject's mysterious past, and the literal and figurative ghosts that haunt them both."

The Magnus Archives: "...is a weekly horror fiction anthology podcast examining what lurks in the archives of the Magnus Institute, an organisation dedicated to researching the esoteric and the weird. Join new head archivist Jonathan Sims as he attempts to bring a seemingly neglected collection of supernatural statements up to date, converting them to audio and supplementing them with follow-up work from his small but dedicated team. Individually, they are unsettling. Together they begin to form a picture that is truly horrifying because as they look into the depths of the archives, something starts to look back…"

Time:Bombs: "...a new audio drama podcast about the hilarious world of bomb disposal. Ride along with EOD technician Simon Teller on the busiest night of the year for him and his team - when business is, quite literally, booming."

Wolf 359: "Life's not easy for Doug Eiffel, the communications officer for the U.S.S. Hephaestus Research Station, currently on Day 448 of its orbit around red dwarf star Wolf 359. He's stuck on a scientific survey mission of indeterminate length, 7.8 light years from Earth. His only company on board the station are stern mission chief Minkowski, insane science officer Hilbert, and Hephaestus Station's sentient, often malfunctioning operating system Hera. He doesn't have much to do for his job other than monitoring static and intercepting the occasional decades-old radio broadcast from Earth, so he spends most of his time creating extensive audio logs about the ordinary, day-to-day happenings within the station. But the Hephaestus is an odd place, and life in extremely isolated, zero gravity conditions has a way of doing funny things to people's minds. Even the simplest of tasks can turn into a gargantuan struggle, and the most ordinary-seeming things have a way of turning into anything but that." --> [starts funny, turns very intense]

Ongoing

Alba Salix, Roya Physician (+ The Axe & Crown): "A witch, her apprentice, and her fairy herbalist treat the ills of a fairy-tale kingdom." + "Gubbin the troll tavernkeeper deals with his clueless new landlord, his shady niece, and some new competition."

Archive 81: "A found footage horror podcast about ritual, stories, and sound."

Arden: "A (fictional) true crime podcast about cold cases and the reporter and detective who try to solve them."

Brimstone Valley Mall: "The year is 1999. Lurking somewhere between Hot Topic and the food court, five misfit demons from Hell kill time inciting sin in a suburban shopping mall. When the lead singer of their band goes mysteriously missing, the demons only have two weeks to find him before they play the biggest gig of the millennium - or face the wrath of Satan herself."

CARAVAN: "First rule of Wound Canyon: No one who gets in, ever gets out. So when a brilliant, ghostly specter flies through the sky amid the rain and lightning, Samir stumbles off a steep cliff and into a hidden world, one in which demons, vampires, and all other manner of paranormal creatures take sanctuary." --> [also pretty NSFW and horny in general]

Death by Dying: "The Obituary Writer of Crestfall, Idaho finds himself deeply in over his head as he investigates a series of strange and mysterious deaths… when he is supposed to simply be writing obituaries. Along the way he encounters murderous farmers, man-eating cats, haunted bicycles, and a healthy dose of ominous shadows." --> [I had to stop listening to this in public because it kept making me undignified laugh and snort noises]

Desperado: "Blood magic, Voodoo magic, old gods, new gods: We've got it all! Follow the story of misfits from all over the world, as they try to survive and protect their heritage from modern-day crusaders."

EOS 10: "Doctors in space, a deposed alien prince, a super gay space pirate and a fiery nurse who'll help you win your bar fight."

Girl In Space: "Abandoned on a dying ship in the farthest reaches of known space, a young scientist fights for survival (and patience with the on-board A.I.). Who is she? No one knows. But a lot of dangerous entities really want to find out. Listen as the story unfolds for science, guns, trust, anti-matter, truth, beauty, inner turmoil, and delicious cheeses. It’s all here. In space."

Janus Descending: "...follows the arrival of two xenoarcheologists on a small world orbiting a binary star. But what starts off as an expedition to survey the planet and the remains of a lost alien civilization, turns into a monstrous game of cat and mouse, as the two scientists are left to face the creatures that killed the planet in the first place. Told from two alternating perspectives, Janus Descending is an experience of crossing timelines, as one character describes the nightmare from end to beginning, and the other, from beginning to the end." --> [absolutely harrowing horror]

Love and Luck: "...is a fictional radio play podcast, told via voicemails and set in present day Melbourne, Australia. A slice of life queer romance story with a touch of magic, it follows the relationship between two men, Jason and Kane, as their love grows both for each other and their community." --> [soft and gay, feels like a warm hug]

Potterless: "Join Mike Schubert, a grown man reading the Harry Potter series for the first time, as he sits down with HP fanatics to poke fun at plot holes, make painfully incorrect predictions, and bask in the sassiness of the characters." --> [the only non-fiction podcast on the list]

Primordial Deep: "When a long extinct sea creature washes up on the shores of Coney Island, marine biologist Dr. Marella Morgan is contacted by a secret organization to investigate the origins of the creature’s sudden and unnatural resurgence. Soon, she and a team of experts find themselves living on the research station The Tiamat, traveling along the abyssal plains as they search for answers far below the waves. But there are dangers in these ancient waters. Reawakened, prehistoric monsters are rising from the deep -- jaws wide and waiting, and in the darkness, something is stirring."

Red Valley: "No one at Overhead Industries wants to talk about defunct research station Red Valley, and account man Warren Godby is out of his depth. When he meets Gordon Porlock, a disgruntled archivist with a bag of tapes from the station’s last known occupant, they will begin a journey to the limits of experimental science, confront horror and trauma from the past, present and future, and try to remember the cheat codes from Sonic the Hedgehog 2."

Rusty Quill Gaming: "An actual play podcast following a mixed ability group of comedians, improvisers, gamers, and writers as they play through the extended, tabletop roleplaying campaign Erasing the Line, an original game world of the GM’s crafting." --> [took me a while to get into because I have trouble focusing on non-scripted things, but eventually I got really hooked on the plot and attached to the characters. This podcast is really fucked up at times if you think about it]

SAYER: "A narrative fiction podcast set on Earth’s man-made second moon, Typhon. The eponymous SAYER is a highly advanced, self-aware AI created to help acclimate new residents to their new lives, and their new employment with Ærolith Dynamics." --> [feels like Welcome to Night Vale but narrated by GLaDOS from Portal]

StarTripper!!: "Join Feston Pyxis on a road-trip through the cosmos, as he leaves behind his old life in search of the best and wildest experiences the galaxy has to offer!"

The Amelia Project: "...is a secret agency that fakes its clients' deaths, then lets them reappear with a brand new identity! A black comedy full of secrets, twists... and cocoa."

The Big Loop: "...a biweekly anthology series. Each episode is a self-contained narrative exploring the strange, the wonderful, the terrifying, and the heartbreaking. Stories of finite beings in an infinite universe." --> [I don't like anthologies, except this one]

The Bright Sessions: "Dr. Bright provides therapy for the strange and unusual; their sessions have been recorded for research purposes." --> [think X-Men, but with therapy instead of a school]

The Deca Tapes: "Recordings have surfaced of ten people that are locked into the same space together. We don’t know where they are, or if they'll get out. But the answers must be somewhere on these tapes."

The Silt Verses: "Carpenter and Faulkner, two worshippers of an outlawed god, travel up the length of their deity’s great black river, searching for holy revelations. As their pilgrimage lengthens and the river’s mysteries deepen, the two acolytes find themselves under threat from a police manhunt, but also come into conflict with the weirder gods that have flourished in these forgotten rural territories."

The White Vault: "Follow the collected records of a repair team sent to Outpost Fristed in the vast white wastes of Svalbard and unravel what lies waiting in the ice below."

Tides: "...is the story of Dr. Winifred Eurus, a xenobiologist trapped on an unfamiliar planet with hostile tidal forces. She must use her wits, sarcasm and intellectual curiosity to survive long enough to be rescued. But there might be more to life on this planet than she expected." --> [think The Martian, but on a water planet]

Unwell, a Midwestern Gothic Mystery: "Lillian Harper moves to the small town of Mt. Absalom, Ohio, to care for her estranged mother Dorothy after an injury. Living in the town's boarding house which has been run by her family for generations, she discovers conspiracies, ghosts, and a new family in the house's strange assortment of residents."

VAST Horizon: "Nolira is an agronomist tasked with establishing agriculture in a new solar system, but when she wakes up on a now- empty colony ship, the whole of her plan disappears. The ship has been set adrift, with numerous mission-critical problems requiring immediate attendance outside of her area of expertise. Nolira is aided by the ship’s malfunctioning AI, which acts as her confidant and companion during the fight for survival."

Victoriocity: "Even Greater London, 1887. In this vast metropolis, Inspector Archibald Fleet and journalist Clara Entwhistle investigate a murder, only to find themselves at the centre of a conspiracy of impossible proportions."

We Fix Space Junk: "...follows seasoned smuggler Kilner and reluctant fugitive Samantha as they travel the galaxy, dodging bullets and meeting strange and wonderful beings as they carry out odd jobs on the fringes of the law."

Welcome to Night Vale: "Twice-monthly community updates for the small desert town of Night Vale, where every conspiracy theory is true. Turn on your radio and hide."

Within the Wires: "Stories told through found audio from an alternate universe."

Wooden Overcoats: "Rudyard Funn and his equally miserable sister Antigone run their family's failing funeral parlour, where they get the body in the coffin in the ground on time. But one day they find everyone enjoying themselves at the funerals of a new competitor - the impossibly perfect Eric Chapman! With their dogsbody Georgie, and a mouse called Madeleine, the Funns are taking drastic steps to stay in the business…" --> [one of THE funniest podcasts I have ever listened to]

#ask #anon #please talk to me about podcasts at all times #podcasts #podcast recommendations

41 notes · View notes

villains4hire · 2 years

Text

Eva Rainsong.

Eva Rainsong, independent OC based on the popular TTRPG Dungeons and Dragons. Reworked Quickling race into to something I enjoy more. Disclaimers: 1. If it isn’t completely compliant to 5e as I do rework classes or other things, don’t be surprised I suppose. I homebrew a lot of stuff for my group that we all use in a high fantasy setting, along with using griffinsaddle bag items. It will be highly 5e-esque because I’ve recently converted to the handbook for the sake of teaching people I play with the game much easier. So expect more of a mix of quarter 3.5 and then mostly 5e, along with the flavor of powers inspired off how the guide encourages spells to be done such as magic missiles being chickens instead as a spell, but translated to fighter powers as well or fae related things. As she will have artifacts and of the like depending on her level, so expect the more powerful of her items listed to be the farther level she is. I will try to keep things mostly to canon or close to canon/official sources in that regards, but beware if things look odd, it’s mostly from a homebrew ruling that I’ve decided with my friends on how we do DnD 5e to keep it rewarding but also deadly still.

2. I will do this character in tiers which will be kinda meta but if you plan on doing anything to her against her to hurt her or oppose her, it’s kinda needed. Along with making her a more flexible character. They will be labeled lvl 5, lvl 10. lvl 15. lvl 20 or ‘epic lvl’ which goes beyond lvl 20. This would be if you want her to be able to fight major gods without getting trashed or at least have a chance, though minor gods, arch fiends, or even gods can be doable in a group/specific questline or plotline we make together or even solo vs Eva if you want that to be a thing as a lvl 20 character could be considered a demigod/god in terms of scaling of that point. Major Gods like Tiamat levels and so forth would need a group however. If you need more details on power scaling to your specific universe and what she’d be at in terms of each level scaling. Then feel free to DM me and ask me if you plan on doing some kind of adventure or fight with her.

3. Tag ‘eva being nasty’ as Eva being a demented evil fae, bc I will have cursed humor that I would never actually be into rping for smut or want to pursue. She mostly does this kind of stuff to say or make people go ‘wtf’, but it will include mostly censors and implications of ‘guro’ or ‘gorefucking her dick’ etc. Traditional Fae for how I do things are pretty fucked up, if anything, the things I say or have her do will be pretty tame compared to that, but a warning is still needed.

4. Eva Rainsong will have multiple timeline iterations mostly for the sake of her either permanently dying to your character, or interacting with them before or after meeting your character with their main timeline. Main timeline Eva I will not be killing as in DnD, the multiverse is canon along with countless iterations and taking inspiration that there are countless DnD worlds that have been made.

5. I will be giving a much more descriptive bios than normal so bare with me. Expect her to have full Quickling racials, but I fully expect other characters of even ‘mechanically’ weaker races than a Quickling to keep up with her if they’re on the same scaling for the rp. Mechanical enemies and mechanics does not = lore strength.

Species Faceclaim below: most Quicklings, including mine look similar to the picture below, usually blue-skinned, long thick ears, long hair, yellow-eyes, slit pupils. Clawed hands, clawed feet. Then are around 4′0 to 5′1 at max.

My specific Quickling faceclaim:

Do I want them to die: They can very much lose or even die as they will return to the fae realm upon death, even if a creature is capable of soul-stealing and of the line due to how fae work similar to other extra-planar creatures. Then even dying in the fae realm to die permanently is fine, but that won’t be considered main timeline Eva. You could even have that person meet main timeline Eva if you want, but we’ll discuss how it plays out. As I won’t be killing main timeline Eva and any alternate timeline will just be called ‘au’. Will I have/get icons: I have around 260 or so. Tag: (maintag), flash of blue. (lvl tags) lvl 5, lvl 10, lvl 15, lvl 20, epic lvl. Age: Centuries to Eons based on her lvl. She is an adult in every verse/stage of development. Sex: AMAB Gender: She would be considered a trans woman in other cultures, but as a fae, she is merely considered a woman among her kind as she’s not human and fem identifying primarily, though is fine with she/him as well. As for other identifications, she is very much fine with (after asking me ooc) with terms that vary but not limited to: Male Wife, Girl Husband and so on. Her relation to gender is much less humanized along with viewpoints. Race: Quickling. Sexuality: A hole’s a hole. Personality traits: Greedy. Likes rain and water. Likes to chew on bones, people, flesh. Tends to weed out and goes for weaknesses out of her own glee. Extremely Brutal. A Glutton. Selfish. Wrathful. Sadistic, Masochistic. Pretty horny at times, but it depends who it is and only if the mun in question is fine with it/requests it. Can be kind of stalkerish at times when looking for entertainment to play pranks or to eat someone. She is a bitch, grumpy, prone to more outbursts. Eats people pretty indiscriminately, doesn’t matter who they are. If she doesn’t like them, she will probably kill them or eat their ankles and just stalk them over time to kill them. Quicklings are extremely spiteful and vengeful if spited enough. Likes to steal, likes to play tricks. Likes to mess with people using her Quickling invisibility and supernatural speed. Can be sweet if you manage to gain her affections or listen to you. Hyper. Hates a lot of people depending on the usually benign reason. Slightly tsundere. Has a bit of humor in a spiteful or playful way. Stabby. Bitey. Likes to be spoiled. If she likes you, she will force herself into your lap to sit. Destructive. Doesn’t think of the consequences a lot. Can be fun. Can go too far even with her loved ones sometimes. Reckless. Tends to self-sabotage her own relationships on accident at times with her alien perception if friends with non-fae. Can be surprisingly loyal to the point of self-destruction though this is rare with most individuals, as they need to really earn it with her. Can be pretty cursed at times if she just wants to fuck with you or make you uncomfortable/weirded out by her. Feral. Can be extremely manipulative, tricky or unpredictable if she doesn’t like you, she may even pretend to be your friend to later betray you potentially if you piss her off unknowingly enough. (I’ll handle her based on peoples’ comforts and such of course, but yeah) Mental traits: Has an alien mindset and viewpoint to certain topics and things. Physical traits: 4′3. Yellow eyes, black slits. Black hair with blue glowing ends that goes down to only her waist. Thick-bodied, has a fairly decent breast-size. Thick, long ears that twitch or even change direction in her mood, they tend to flick back when fighting. Has two rows of sharp, retractable teeth. Has maws of teeth in her throat that are retractable and she can chew with it independently of her mouth. Has a tongue that is quadruple her height that has retractable spikes, this is used when scooping out the organs of people she leads into a false-sense of security. It is akin to an ant eater but biting a hole in someone and using supernatural speed to quickly scoop out their organs or flesh. Retractable claws on her hands and feet. Tends to meep akin to a chinchilla making a noise when being affectionate toward people she genuinely likes. May spit or chirp akin to a chinchilla as well as a warning to not be touched with people she likes, as people she dislikes will immediately be missing a hand.

Powers: statline and skills, racial powers, items, then classes and feats. Keep in mind that this is scaled down significantly the lower lvl she is for her tagline. This is to give a good idea of what she’s capable of and to be able to scale her down.

Statline:

HP: 240ish at max level or in epic levels. (Average for Fighters is around 170 to 240ish, especially if toughness is taken)

Strength: 20, Belt of the Storm Giant (29 strength) when wearing it at higher lvls.

Dexterity: 16.

Constitution 20.

Intelligence 14.

Wisdom 10.

Charisma 8.

Skills:

Athletics. Acrobatics. Survival. Perception. (Fighter Class and Background)

Intimidation. (Barbarian multiclass)

Saving Throws:

Strength.

Constitution.

Intelligence (Resilience Feat)

Movement:

110 ft in six seconds or 220 if dashing. (That’s the standard combat time it takes each round.

Languages:

Common, Infernal, Aklo, Sylvan.

Racial Powers:

Standard Stats:

Despite being a Quickling, as while her intelligence is fairly good and dexterity is as well, her recklessness and unusually clumsy dexterity for Quickling standards leaves her a bit standoutish from the rest. Along with her supernatural strength and endurance that she’s honed instead to compensate. Though she is able to to somewhat overcome this further down her life at least for being clumsy to a more acceptable level after training with a few magical manuals.

Quickling Cunning, she is able to burst twice her speed in a dash to get closer, run away or can hide fairly easily.

Attacks are extremely hard to hit her as she zips and blips seemingly out of existence from her blinding speed. And then is able to go invisible if standing still. Think the DC’s ‘Flash’ almost.

Her fae ancestry allows her weapons to be magical to overcome resistance or immunities that targets may have.

She is immune to fire and able to move through fire and lava due to this.

As a fae, they trance as part of their sleep, such as elves who have a direct ancestry link to this. Resistance to being charmed and immune to sleep magic.

Dark vision of 60 ft. She can see in shades of grey and white in absolute darkness.

Fae-Born: on death, she returns to the plane of the Fae rather than being killed outright, akin to a devil or fiend, as the same rules canonically apply to the fae. She must be killed on the plane of the Fae to completely die. Her items as with demons, also go with her unless she drops them/their snatched out of her hands or removed from her somehow.

Innate Spellcasting:

at will, dancing lights, fire bolt, minor illusion.

Three times per day, burning hands as a spell.

One time a day for each, levitate, shatter as a spell.

Items: (Keep in mind the more insane things such as the ‘Belt of Storm Giant Strength’ or anything like that in terms of legendary rarity is kept to lvl 15 and above.

Main Equipment: For her armor, it is either none before lvl 10 or Mithril Full-Plate, because it is near weightless and more befitting of a Quickling as they tend to like things that don’t weigh much or wear nothing at all in terms of armor. A magic +3 shortsword with a radiant enchantment on it to deal with fiends and demons. A magic +3 shortword with a necrotic enchantment on it to deal with living beings and celestials. Then a magic +3 greatsword of dragonslaying as a situational weapon. A few magic daggers of returning for utility. (They return on throwing them). A few backup shortswords that are +1 and +2. A bag of holding. A backpack. Trapper’s tools. Butcher’s Kit. Mess Kit. Rations.

Minor Magic Equipment: A ring of enlargement, mostly to be able to wield two-handed weapons due to their short stature and build as while even strong, it is an unbalanced wielding when small-sized. And also to be able to carry, push, lift or grab to make use of her full strength or the strength of the giant’s belt with a better size. Though it does not effect the weight of her blows otherwise due to supernatural, trained strength. A ring of slowfall, as to avoid being killed through great heights or teleportation. Potions of flying if dealing with flying enemies, mostly for utility. A few potions of supreme healing, only three or four at the most. Then quite a few superior healing potions, around six to eight. Rope of Climbing.

Major Artifacts that require attunement: Belt of the Storm Giant’s Strength. A Mantle of Spell Resistance. (Both self-explanatory) Then a Blood Fury Tattoo. It has ten charges per day, it allows the user to inflict great necrotic harm on top of any of their attacks and healing from that specific necrotic damage, along with giving lightning-esque reflexes to deliver blows back as a reaction. Amulet of the Planes (This item is usually unattuned unless she dies, as her goal is to leave the fae realm as soon as possible). Magical List of Grudges: this magical list of grudges is seemingly near endless that reign from benign to the most twisted, sadistic, or even insane plots of revenge wants toward them. It seems to unfold near endlessly from the Eons of use... some even with plots to go into planes of existence for certain afterlifes.

Classes and Feats: this segment will be starting with barbarian since it is shorter, then fighter as that’s the most of where levels are going into.

Barbarian (2 levels put into after 1 into fighter, no subclass):

Fae’s Spiteful Rage: she gains immense resistance as her flesh hardens from her anger and spite. Slashing, bludgeoning and piercing physical attacks nearly bounce off her body when tapping into her rage.

Reckless Brutality: her attacks almost always hit in a flash of the flurry she does. They leave her hardened, supernatural body much more open to attack however, not that it bothers her much.

Supernatural Reflex: as part of being a Quickling, her supernatural reflex allows her to dodge out of the way of traps and spells much easier than most. However her senses in this regard can be interrupted when being blinded, deafened or incapacitated.

Fighter (17 levels put into after 2 levels of barbarian and 1 starting fighter level, subclass is my reworked Champion to be more Nemesis and Signature Fighting Style based):

Adrenaline Rush: her intensive training has allowed her to attack three times as quickly by tapping into her supernatural adrenaline for six seconds. This is only twice as quickly if below lvl 20. She needs a short break afterward in order to be able perform this legendary flurry of intense, deadly strikes.

Fae Endurance: tapping into her fae spirit, she may heal herself supernaturally slightly once per day.

Secondary Fighting Style: mariner, with intense training, Eva has adapted her honed athletics to be able to use supernatural speed with climbing and swimming, along with gaining an adaptive movement defense. She is only capable of using this with mithril armor or inferior forms of light armor, as it cannot be used with heavy, clunky armor.

Graceful Brutality: Eva’s strikes as a Quickling combined with her honed brutality and strength could be considered a new fighting style in itself, creating a deadly series of attacks using supernatural speed, deadly precision and accuracy, giving the ability to strike several times a second. She combines this brutal, precise fighting style with her ability to dual-wield masterfully to fully abuse its effects on any unfortunate victims of hers.

Fae Resilience: her innate resilience as a fae has been honed to a level not thought possible for someone so small when combined with her intensive constitution training. She can often shake off even the most devastating effects or attacks, but there is a limit of so many times per every eight hours that a body can physically handle.

Subclass Champion Variant:

Fueled by Spite: Eva’s critical deadliness is defined by her spite, utilizing the inner supernatural spirit and nature of her kind to a terrifying effect. Her attacks are much more pinpointed to weak-points she picks out when in combat or from stalking her opponents or repeatedly attempting to kill them... or those around them to get to them. This power seems bizarre in nature in functionality, as even foes trying to kill her don’t seem effected by this unless she herself develops a grudge toward them. Though it may at best be a temporary heat of the moment use of this Spite-Based power in combat as an imperfect grudge to gain access to these seeming supernatural fighting skills. It cannot compare to any poor soul that she develops a grudge toward for her own reasons... or twisted affections toward them.

Remarkable Grudge: Eva’s ability to perform skills against her enemies are remarkable in determination to see them miserable.

Signature Style: master of Dual-Wielding, being a master of ambidexterity and with intense training? Eva is able to near supernaturally strike several times more with her offhand compared to the average dual-wielder in a short amount of time, even when compared to her own kind.

Honed Spite: she’s somehow learned to wield this innate magical nature of Quicklings as a deadly weapon. Her strikes tend to be instinctively guided toward the weakpoints of other creatures to inflict as much pain or suffering as possible if she has a grudge toward them.

Reigning Contender: Eva is able to tap into her supernatural nature to have a mock form of troll-like regeneration so long as she’s not critically injured... then gains the ability to move toward her grudge-aligned target with a speed not thought possible of even a Quickling.

Trained Feats and Stats:

Trained Strength and Constitution: instead of dexterity, most of her training or magical manuals went into being intense strength and endurance training early on in her Fighter Career, or the use of magical manuals to become a supernatural fighter.

Trained Toughness: through near self-inflicted torture in the form of endurance training from taking repeated blows to every part of her body? She can endure an extreme amount of punishment comparable to even the bigger, magical races can endure as a fighter comparable to her caliber.

Dual Wielding Training: she may dual wield most weapons even if she prefers dual shortswords due to their grace and ease for critical strikes. She did this mostly to become better at dual wielding to develop her signature style, along with having an offensive defense. Then with being able to effectively draw her weapons in a blink of an eye when stowed away, mostly to seem unarmed at first if any aggressors get any wise ideas.

Combat Mobility Training: supernatural speed requires training to use in effective group combat, along with dodging or moving in a way before targets can effectively attack her or be aware she’s moved out of the way. This training has left her a little bit faster than normal, but only slightly.

Mind Training: to first grasp the spite within herself, Eva honed her mind into that of a steel cage to properly process, analyze and utilize her spite deep within her mind to control her subconscious hatred.

Motivations: she’s mostly a mercenary, but kinda just fucks around metaphorically or literally. Just doing this for fun as a kind of thing as a chaotic evil character, as she can be with ‘good-aligned’ party members but she’s more or less the party’s bastard rather than against the party as their bastard. She has no real tragedy in her life other than her many petty grievance list of people she’s listed over the centuries and plans to either make them pay in the living world or whatever afterlife they had either through moderately harmless pranks, or extreme as death, torture or w/e is fitting for the grievance to her own twisted perception as a more evil leaning fae. Something trying to not be ridiculous in terms of edginess but overall something fun or funny as a concept, though pretty evil as well. She tends to be much more respectful toward non-mortal races or on the mortal plane, though is still playful and annoying. Backstory: Born as of one of the fae and a Quickling, Eva’s nature left her chaotic, but not exactly evil to start with in terms of alignment energy. While living a mostly good life when experiencing growth as a fae in her home realm, she yearned for travel and exploration but more importantly... more victims to play her pranks on or to prey on. It is with her love of pranks sometimes turning into fighting with others and then brutalizing her victims did she fully shift her alignment energy toward ‘evil’. Now she mostly is a mercenary, an adopted ‘fae’ into an organized group that can be reasoned or convinced with a proper moral compass for a time, or even develop friendship or of the like. Though her nature always remains the same as some of the more chaotic evil leaning Quicklings are, just with the ability form attachments and deep loyalties... though isn’t above lovingly tormenting her close friends or loved ones.

#flash of blue #bios #ooc #lvl 5 #lvl 10 #lvl 15 #lvl 20 #epic level #villains #unredeemable villains

2 notes · View notes

ghostietoasty · 4 years

Text

Why Sherlock Holmes FGO is Sus: Theories and More

Before I begin, I’d like to give thanks to my wonderful friend for all the points, art, and info searching that have been made to produce this piece, I can’t appreciate you enough for the effort you put in. 🥺🙏💕

Alright now on to it!

INTRODUCTION: Humble Beginnings (Identification of the Abnormal)

If you’ve played the app Fate/Grand Order for a while you’d know about the Heroic Spirit we first encounter in a hole within Camelot’s dessert whilst going to the Atlas Institute. Smart, handsome looking, and sharp enough to discern our True Name, this man of mystery has been seen as an oddball by many long time players of the game. There are many aspects about him that raise doubt about his credibility, is he truly what he wants us to think he is? That servant is Sherlock Holmes (Ruler) and there are many theories about him having some secrets, about him either being a Foreigner class, Beast class, or something else entirely. We are attempting to catalogue all this information in one place for maximum clarity.

SECTION 1: Other Character’s Reaction (First Impression is the Best Impression) *WARNING LOSTBELT 1 AND 2 SPOILERS AHEAD*

From the first encounter in Camelot right until the end of Lostbelt 2, there are many instances of characters reacting to his presence in….interesting ways.

Bedivere, when first coming in contact with Holmes in Camelot says that "I suppose I've never really been good with people like him. He reminds me of Merlin."

It could refer to the mysterious manner in which both Holmes and Merlin conduct themselves, but better to keep in mind that Merlin is a Grand Caster, and that he manifests as a servant due to specific circumstances (he is not dead).

In Camelot, Mash assumes that Holmes must be Caster class and that the original novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle must have been biographies penned by Dr. Watson under a pen name. Holmes corrects her, saying that: "My true identity, my essence, is slightly different from what you may think. And sad, but that is not the purpose of our gathering here today."

This dilemma is also present in the Sherlock Holmes Trial Quest (which mostly tackles the debate of whether he's a fictional character or someone who actually existed). Holmes has a line where he says:

"Ah, yes. I mentioned I was a Caster. Forgive me, I lied."

This is however immediately followed up by:

"A jest. My apologies. I couldn't help myself."

This sort of backpedalling raises a doubt as to whether he was really Caster class before, so the nature of his former class is still a mystery. He later mentions that his Ruler class is the World telling him that not all illusions and dreams need to be laid bare.

When meeting with Salieri in Lostbelt 1, Holmes introduces himself as such:"I'm Sherlock Holmes, Chaldea's administrative advisor. I became a servant through unusual means, just like you."

Salieri was only summonable as a servant because of his reputation caused by the fact that he killed Mozart. He is under the effect of Innocent Monster. It can also be said that Salieri is a lostbelt servant and is significantly more sane than he would have been in a normal summoning, that was the unusual summoning that Holmes was refering to. Does this mean Holmes is not from Proper Human History?

Sigurd (who's under the control of Surtur), while attacking us in Lostbelt 2 says this: "So, a human and two Heroic Spirits. No, wait. Neither of you are pure Heroic Spirits, are you? You've both got something else mixed in. Hehe, hybrids then. Interesting"

This is in reference to Holmes and Mash, who are alongside the master at this moment. Mash is a demiservant (human+servant) hence the "Hybrid" comment makes sense, but Holmes? What is the "something else" mixed in with Holmes?

Later in LB2, Holmes requests the assistance of Scáthach-Skadi in beating Surtur. Skadi says that normally she would never pay mind to what a mere Heroic Spirit had to say but: "...but in your particular case…I sense wisdom in those beautiful eyes. You remind me of Baldr, god of light." Quite a bit later, she also has this to say:"Perhaps those piercing eyes of yours in fact surpass Odin's? Mystic Eyes, perchance? ….No, that's not it. They merely reflect your wisdom born of human history's cumulative accomplishments."

She says that's not it, but the fact that it was the first thing she thought of shouldn't be ignored.

Baldr is the god of light. Holmes' attacks consist of beams of light, and his cane lights up when he's using it in battle.

In Norse legends, Odin is said to have sacrificed one eye to the spring of Mimir in order to get ancient wisdom, the ability to perceive everything in the world.

SECTION 1.5: More Reactions (From JP Only)

Since it is JP only and there is no official translation for NA yet, this information cannot be 100% confirmed in any way. (Most of this is from Reddit translation done by fans). But as these are also important, it's best to put this information separate section.

Moriarty's interlude involves him finding a micro-singularity in London. At some point the transmission between Chaldea and the master gets cut and Moriarty reveals he created this scenario, made the singularity and everything to get one on one time with the master. He tells us not to trust Holmes. When the time comes, we as master should choose Moriarty over Holmes.

It has to be kept in mind that Moriarty is not a good guy, he is a character created entirely to oppose Holmes so it is natural that he doesn't trust him. For all we know, it is just emotional manipulation.

Moriarty's very nature is tied to being the antithesis of Holmes. Holmes might theoretically go against us for the sake of humanity while also trying to keep us safe (the master is in a way, a Watson replacement to him after all) while Moriarty would gladly let humanity burn for the sake of us but also for the sake of being completely opposite to Holmes and keeping his identity as such.

However he does raise valid points, how was Holmes able to rayshift? This part was never explained, and he also mentions that his hypothesis has a fatal contradiction in the fact that Holmes risked his life to save ours. What can be inferred from this is that Holmes is a good man and is on our side, but there is something very weird about him that should not be ignored.

In Lostselt 5 it is mentioned at one point that Zeus called Holmes dangerous, he mustn't look at Zeus or the other gods and that his eyes are enemies of the world.

It has to be mentioned that this is some heavy emphasis on Holmes' eyes (Skadi mentioned Holmes' eyes twice, and she was a god as well). Is it because of the nature of Holmes that he is the one that reveals all truth? Is that in some way detrimental to gods, magic and the world in general?

Recently, from Holmes' skill upgrade interlude there was a section about Holmes saying that he is always an ally of justice and that while he may be on our side, he is still capable of evil but it doesn't change the fact that he is our ally. Even then it seems he has some secrets that can't be understood by himself.

By now with the presence of Dr. Jekyll and Helena and their recounts on what happened, it is confirmed that Holmes was actually "alive"(?)

Some of the adventures penned by Dr. Watson were actually censored versions of the original happenings, which were magical in nature.

Holmes was traumatised(?) by Helena's death back when they were both alive. He swears he would never let that happen again. (remember what happened in lostbelt 2…)

It seems that Holmes himself is not fully sure of what is secret about him. Since he utterly dislikes talking about something without being 100% sure about it (this tendency of his has gotten us in trouble before) plus his general secretive nature, it can be said that this is why he wouldn't talk about that.

SECTION 2: Weird Things That Holmes Does (And Other Questions)

Heroic Spirits are anything but normal, but there are few servants who break the norm even further, and Holmes is one of them.

Holmes is able to Rayshift (presumably) from London, to Camelot, and then to Shinjuku. There are very few servants who are able to manifest themselves.

Musashi also appears here and there, but it's not a deliberate choice on her part. She is not able to predetermine her next destination.

Arthur travels from a parallel world to this world, but this is due to "chasing after a certain powerful antagonist, evil omen" - so he tells.

Beast class has the skill of Independent Manifestation which would allow the servant to manifest anywhere they'd want. Merlin, Tamamo Vitch and Shiki possess it. However, it has to be noted that Holmes' rayshifts have a significant toll on his saint graph, as he is unable to fight or defend himself by the time we meet him in Camelot. While normal Independent Manifestation shouldn't lead to the depletion of the user's saint graph. Holmes' class is unknown at the time of his rayshifting.

At the time of summoning, Heroic Spirits usually reveal their class and True Name (there also are exceptions to the rule). At the time of his summoning, Holmes doesn't reveal his Class: "Are introductions necessary? I am a detective. If you were expecting a hero, my apologies...But if you wanted a detective or an investigator, you drew the right card."

In the case of EOR Servants whose names haven't been found, they reveal their class.

Who summoned Holmes? The only thing we know regarding his presence was that it was first clearly there when he tampered with information in London.

Holmes' illustrator is Yamanaka Kotetsu, who was also the illustrator of the beasts Tiamat and Goetia

The artists who design and illustrate the characters tend to do it in groups of servants who are related to each other in some way (Pako with Arjuna and Karna Chacha and Nobunaga; Miwa Shiro with Brynhildr and Sigurd). It is strange that Kotetsu designed only Holmes, Tiamat and Goetia.

(NEW ADDITION) It should also be noted that as an illustrator Kotetsu has had previous works in a Lovecraftian Guidebook and is also the artist to the Alien God Preistess, somewhat showing how their work leans more to the outerworldly.

SECTION 3: The Design

It is a very commonly noticed fact that Holmes' coat in his third ascension has a very similar shape to that of the Foreigner card artwork.

The pattern work on the coattails of the foreigner art and the inside (blue) part of Holmes' coattails have a very similar, if not exactly same pattern running down the entire length of it. The sphere summoned in Holmes' Noble Phantasm also has the same pattern on its sides and front.

There is a "fog" around Holmes in his third ascension, which is reminescent of the smoke in the card art. (Also can be the London smog).

The glowing section of the abdomen of the being reminds one of the metallic corset that Holmes wears.

There are 4 notches of smoke on either side of the being (total 8), under their cape. If we stretch our interpretation, then it could mean Holmes' arms and the metal arms that he has is also equal to 8.

In that tangent, the shape of the coat is also similar to that of Saver class Buddha, the fantasy trees from Lostbelt 3 and 4, and the Shadows made by the 6th imaginary element.

The Endless Knot / Shrivatsa symbol on his shoulders is one of the many references of his connection to Tibet (faking his death after the Final Problem). It is an important symbol in both Jainism and Buddhism.

Some of its interpretations include:

The eternal continuum of mind.

The union of wisdom and method.

Since the knot has no beginning or end it also symbolizes the wisdom of the Buddha

the endless cycle of suffering or birth, death and rebirth within Tibetan Buddhism.

The cane that Holmes wields has a pattern on its handle in the shape of a Prayer Wheel.

However, we are not able to find the meaning behind the script on the cane. Both of us attempted to translate it but failed. If anyone can translate the meaning it would be greatly appreciated.

The holographic books in the base of the unidentified sphere have a pattern on their front that greatly resembles a lotus.

In Holmes' third ascension, there are a number of magical circuits on his coat.

The circuits are almost only on his left side, with very few circuits on his right side. It's not like it was woven into it, were that the case the circuits would have been all over his coat in a more even distribution. It's almost like an impact radius.

The circuits are very similar to the ones visible on the title screen of the lostbelts, as well as the patterns seen on the fantasy trees.

CONCLUSION SECTION: Something's Up (It's Big Brain Time)

It's clear that something is very strange about Holmes, from his interactions to his design, it's clear that there is too much effort into throwing these hints that it's not just a red herring.

Is he a Foreigner? Beast? Counter Guardian? Some other unknown extra class? It cannot be said at the moment. Holmes' role as a revealer itself is dangerous to mystery and magic, so it can be anything.

It is also not necessarily true that just because Holmes has all these abnormalities, that he will betray us, or is on the side of evil. When has there been a clear cut side of good or evil anyway? It can be argued that we are the villains in some way, as we bring about the end of these timelines to safeguard our own proper human history.

Holmes has always been on the side of humanity and will continue to be, the question is what the reveal will be, why and how. That, only time and future chapters can answer, all we can do is speculate.

#fate #fate grand order #fgo #Sherlock Holmes #lostbelt spoilers #foreigner theories #fuccyoutumblrfuccyoutumblrfuccy #hope yall enjoyed!! feel free to give yalls thoughts!!#and again thank you soso much fremd🥺🥺🥺🙏🙏

278 notes · View notes

mcnstros · 3 years

Note

"I don't know much, so. . ." She took their hands and turned them until she could clearly see the tattoos inked into their skin. "Can you tell me what they mean? If they have any meaning. They just look like they do, so I assumed." Cautiously, Anita let the tips of her fingers inch towards the edge of one tattoo. She didn't touch just to be considerate, but she was clearly fascinated with the idea of learning from them.

unprompted. / accepting!

" hey, you do not have to be cautious around them. they will not harm you or anything. " sorun smiles, somewhat amused by the way she approaches their tattoos. " they do have their own meanings, but not a particularly special meaning to me. " it was kind of funny, actually. they've lost track of how many humans asked about their tattoos (or threw disgusted or horrified looks sorun's way because they already knew about their symbolism) and eventually asked something along the lines of 'you got it just because you liked it? not because it meant something to you?' nope. just really liked it. the reactions to that were always a little amusing, like it wasn't their body so they couldn't do what they please with it. besides, with sorun's shapeshifting abilities, it would be easy enough to change them or get rid of them.

sorun rolls up their sleeves so she can get a better look at the tattoos on their inner wrists. " this one, " they hold out their left wrist, " is an inverted pentagram with baphomet in it. there is a great deal of history behind both baphomet and the pentagram alone, so if you do ever want to know more, you can always come to me and ask, okay? we can talk or i can direct you to books to read from! "

and with that, they offer their other wrist. " this is the sigil of lucifer and is used in satanism and luciferianism. it was, and can still be, used during rituals and to communicate with lucifer. the different parts of the sigil even have different meanings. " they trace along the different shapes to tell anita about them; the sigil itself bears a resemblance to a chalice, which is a symbol of creation, the x over it is a symbol of power, the v at the bottom represents duality — light and dark, man and woman, so on — those dualities coming together to create balance.

" all the meanings a symbol can have are fascinating, no? oh! and there is this one. " sorun lifts up their shirt to reveal the tattoo over their ribs on the left side of their body. " this is a sulfur symbol, sometimes also known as a leviathan cross or satan's cross. did you know there is a leviathan mentioned in the bible? of course, it is based on earlier existing myths of great sea serpents, like tiamat and jörmungandr! ah, but i am getting sidetracked. " a soft laugh leaves sorun's lips before they continue. " this tattoo is the alchemical symbol for sulfur and it is associated with the fire and brimstone of hell. "

" and then there is the inverted cross at the back of my neck, but we all already know what that means. " sorun lifts the other side of their shirt, showing off part of their snake tattoo. " i suppose this one may have a bit more meaning to me simply because of my love for snakes. i also wanted it because it looks pretty cool, yes? this is not all of it; the rest of it comes down and coils around my leg, but i am sure you saw it during the summer when i was wearing shorts to stay cool. "

sorun lowers their shirt and leans back on the couch. " i suppose... all of them do mean something to me. my connection to hell. to home. " it'll always be home to them, but here (with anita now) feels like home. " do you have any tattoos, anita? i can see you having a bear tattoo! "

#SDHFGKASHDGF THIS GOT SO LONG AAAAA #sorun likes rambling abt the meanings behind their tattoos #they're always happy to talk about them c:#could you imagine them getting tattoos together 🥺#OH OR MAYBE MATCHING TATTOOS!!!#ic.#you take me in and everything in me begins to feel like i belong. ( anita ♡ sorun )#xamassed

2 notes · View notes

random2908 · 4 years

Text

Ok, it's time for my crack Locked Tomb interpretation that I've promised... the two people I've been reading these books with. I will say first, the theory isn't itself a crack theory--in its general form I actually stand by it as a serious prediction. But some of the textual evidence I'm going to use is way out there, so don’t take this too seriously--I certainly don’t. Spoilers for Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth behind the cut. Sorry it’s long.

Ok, first, the theory, simply put: I think Alecto/AL is a Resurrection Beast. Personally, I found this "insight" fairly uncontroversial the moment the thought occurred to me, but one of my two friends who've been reading these books with me disagrees on the basic evidence; the other friend has embraced it wholeheartedly, though. So, ymmv, I guess.

The basic evidence starts with: well, what the hell else could she be? She's not human. The older Lyctors call her a monster. There is a missing Resurrection Beast: nine were born, five were killed, three are loose, and the narrative actually calls attention to this numeric discrepancy while glossing others (e.g. the number of Lyctors, which does eventually get explained). John presumably can't just kill Resurrection Beasts himself, or he would have (maybe?? who the hell even knows what his abilities or grand plan are at this point). There aren't really other monsters that have been presented other than revenants (of which Resurrection Beasts are the biggest) and heralds (which are spiritually part of Resurrection Beasts), and the third book of a trilogy isn't really the time to introduce them. (This, by the way, is also my argument that it wasn't aliens who destroyed the solar system in the first place--even though everyone else seems to have come to that interpretation (where by “everyone” I mean my two friends who have read this book). Being Doylist, it's kind of a cheap, lazy argument on my part, but whatever, I still stand by that as a prediction: no aliens.) And Alecto must be something much more powerful than a human because John is so much more powerful than a Lyctor. Finally, the stoma opens for John, and it only opens for Resurrection Beasts--it opens for him because he holds part of Alecto's soul and she is a Resurrection Beast.

The potential counter-evidence is the older Lyctors are confident they know her origins (but that doesn't necessarily make her not a Resurrection Beast), and the [other] Resurrection Beasts are drawn to her as much as to John according to Mercy (although in that case why haven't they attacked the Tomb? and also, again, that doesn't preclude her being a Resurrection Beast--we don't know their relationships with each other, and anyway, their attraction to her might have something to do with the Lyctorification process).

Ok, all that's fair enough. Let's delve into the crack interpretations now. I'm going to start with an irrelevant introduction, though, to explain my frame of mind when I came up with this. In the Appendices of Gideon the Ninth, Muir mentions that Isaac is named as foreshadowing for Gideon's sacrificial death, as in the Christian interpretation of the Bible, the Biblical Isaac foreshadows Jesus. My copy of the e-book did not have the Appendices, but my best friend's did, and she shared screens with me. It's slightly embarrassing that my best friend and I, reading this together, did not even guess from this, not even as a joke, that Gideon's father might be God. I mean, it's not... generally embarrassing--no one reading this should be embarrassed for themselves--it's only embarrassing if you know the two of us, know how good my best friend is at this sort of thing (she guessed the entire murder mystery in GtN a little more than halfway through, including that Dulcinea was dead and had been replaced by a Lyctor in disguise who had philosophical problems with God and was rebelling), and know what sorts of in-jokes and ridiculous speculation we tend to bandy around with each other--know just how often we, respectively and together, joke that some character or other is Jesus. And here it was right on the page, we read it out loud to each other and discussed it, and we didn't even see it. We were both completely taken in by the Gideon Episode One red[-haired] herring (as was, to be fair, Gideon himself). This speculation that I'm about to present came right on the heels of the two of us debriefing over this, because I was primed to read way the hell in too much into Biblical references.

The key line is something my best friend caught, not me. She wasn't even done with the book yet, but the line was bothering her (I'd completely glossed and then forgotten it--never let it be said that my bad grades in English Lit were undeserved). Page 327 (and I'm so glad to have an ebook so I can do word searches), Teacher is talking to Harrow in the dream bubble...........

To their silence, [Teacher] added: “I believe we are now being punished for what they did. Even the devil bent for God to put a leash around her neck … and the disciples were scared! I cannot blame them! I was terrified! But when the work was done—when I was finished, and so were they, and the new Lyctors found out the price—they bade him kill the saltwater creature before she could do them harm … Oh, but it is a tragedy, to be put in a box and laid to wait for the rest of time.

"Saltwater creature" stuck with my best friend. She had no idea what it meant, other than that nearly every mention of saltwater (or salt water, two words, the text is inconsistent) in Harrow the Ninth is alluding to Alecto in some capacity (we confirmed this by searching--again, I love ebooks for this kind of thing). But I was like... wait, I might know! This is my favorite Bible lore!

Muir is working from the King James Bible (based on the quotation at the end of Gideon the Ninth) which is impenetrable and also is a translation of the Latin Vulgate, which is mostly a translation of the Septuagint, which doesn’t even have an extant Hebrew version, so ugh all around. But for this purpose it’s close enough, so I guess that's what I'll use for my English version. Here is how the KJV starts:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Ok, that word there, "the deep." What it says in the Masoretic text (the Hebrew Bible used by both Jews and Protestants) is "tehom," which is not quite a hapax legomenon, but neither is it a word that shows up very often, and importantly it only shows up in very few contexts that reference each other. It is certainly not the usual Hebrew word for sea, and importantly, in the Hebrew there is no "the"; it actually says "darkness was on the face of Tehom" like it's a proper name [capitalization mine for illustration, since Hebrew doesn’t capitalize]. Notice also how on the second day basically the only thing God accomplishes is cutting this thing, this "Deep" made of water, in half, sending one half up into the sky. This is a quick retelling of the defeat of Tiamat (linguistically cognate with Tehom) in the Enuma Elish. Tiamat, the Goddess of the Saltwater Deeps, Mother of Monsters and Dragons, is justifiably angry with the other gods and sets out to kill them; Marduk, the aspiring new head of the Pantheon, cuts her in half. Half of her he leaves on Earth to create the oceans (or just the Earth itself? been a while since I read it), and half of her he throws up into the air and it becomes the sky.

There is a lot of old Jewish writing, some of it predating Christianity, that just starts to touch on this, without daring to delve too deep (...as it were) and pull on the pan-Middle Eastern polytheistic roots of Judaism. (They had enough problems with people still worshiping Asherah, who in southern Canaanite tradition was the sea-and-mother goddess who was the wife of Yahweh the storm god, and who gets mentioned in the Bible a whole lot, without also bringing Tiamat into it.) The Gnostics really latched on, though. They said that this "deep" obviously in the text there predates God's creation, and used that as the foundation of quite a lot of their theological argument: that God (who they call the Demiurge) didn't create the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing) but rather that there was a being even more powerful that came before. And they named this more powerful, older being Bythos (among other things), which means "depth" in Greek. They changed the gender, but they brought Tehom the saltwater goddess back as the most primordial and powerful of all beings.

Bringing this back to Harrow the Ninth... Insofar as it's Biblical allegory (which isn't much--less than Narnia and even Narnia doesn't strictly adhere to Biblical narrative), I think we should take the Resurrection committed by John to be the Biblical Creation not the Biblical Resurrection. First of all, John becomes God by performing the Resurrection, which is a much better parallel to Genesis than to Isaiah or Revelations or whatever. Second of all, after the Biblical Resurrection, everyone who gets to be resurrected is supposed to live in eternal peace in Eden. In contrast, in Genesis, after the creation, people start out in Eden but are quickly expelled and then bad things happen. This matches the story much better, where the expulsion from Eden is due to Lyctorhood--the Resurrection Beasts come for the Lyctors and they have to leave Eden; in this respect, I guess John is really the snake as much as he's God, lol. (Worth noting that in some parts of Christian tradition--although I can't remember about Catholicism specifically--the snake is supposed to be Satan. This also ties back to Gnosticism where the Demiurge is malevolent; John, insofar as he did not actually create the universe on his own, is a much better match for a demiurge than a true god.)

So, anyway, taking John's act of Resurrecting all those people as the initial Creation rather than the Resurrection (the fact that Augustine doesn't remember his pre-Resurrection self, is effectively a new person, also points to this being effectively an initial Creation), the Resurrection Beasts actually come before Creation. They come from the dying of the planets. They predate John becoming God. Furthermore, Alecto is a “saltwater creature,” and she keeps her body after she's Lyctorified, meaning she's split in some way between John and her old body; she is Tehom. Back to the Gnostic idea, Tehom is a more-powerful being who predates God, and the only creatures predating God in Harrow are the Resurrection Beasts who must be comparable to him in power to create such fear: Alecto, then, must be a Resurection Beast.

The problem with this theory is it's a little Jewish and it's very Gnostic but it isn't Catholic. In the Gideon and Harrow, Muir draws references in her language from practically everywhere. But as far as I can tell she only draws allusions and allegory from two mythologies: Greco-Roman and Roman Catholic. And although Jews and Gnostics are drawing on a lot of the same source text, the understanding is different, and the expansive side stories are different. Although, then again, who am I to say that Muir isn't also drawing on Gnosticism and this isn't our big clue; I've half convinced myself as I wrote this, with the whole John-as-Demiurge thing. It's a fun theory, anyway, and so I thought I'd share it.

(I'm aware that I've completely ignored any connection to Greek mythology, despite her name being Alecto.)

#locked tomb trilogy #locked tomb spoilers #harrow the ninth #harrow the ninth spoilers #harrow spoilers #hopefully that covers the important tags people might be blocking #I learned while writing this that I don't know how to spell 'resurrection'#I tend to put too many letters in #it seems like whenever I make theories about books it's always some weird religious thing #this write-up is SO much more Gnostic than what told my best friend over the phone a few weeks ago #(now that I've done more reading on it)#I knew there was bound to be at least one homestuck reference in these books but I did NOT expect it to be dream bubbles

15 notes · View notes

jukemaid · 4 years

Text

to heal

“should this end up being too strange or uncomfortable, i would not be offended were you to decide to leave it be. i will close the room and we need not discuss it further.”

tiamat only hums a little in thought as her footsteps become less and less echoing, hers and g'raha’s pace unhurried yet anxious. she had never been into these storerooms before, and was far too interested in what he had deemed worthy of collecting after the calamity that tore their world asunder, much to g'raha’s embarrassment (which only added fuel to her desire to know).

“i’m morbidly curious about what you kept of mine,” tiamat answers with mild humor, “or, i suppose her, since i have everything of mine at home on the source, still.”

(“i am not your warrior of light,” she had said to him in a moment of anger, when g'raha had once again attempted to forfeit his claim to be involved in her life, in favor of the slumbering young man still within the crystal tower. “and for every instance where you attempt to pull the same rhetoric on me, i will remind you of this. unless you intend to force this divide of your own making to be mutual, this train of thought is over.”)

g'raha’s ears tip back, which is his only open sign of his discomfort by her words. this would be a dragon he has no intention of poking.

“it may be jarring,” he begins instead, treading onto a new topic, “to see the state of one’s own belongings in disrepair from centuries of disuse. i merely advise caution in this case, out of… concern, for your emotional well being.” his voice softens and tiamat bites back an annoyed sigh, because he is right in every way. she’s pushing it with this venture and they both know it, but by the gods from his warning alone does she even moreso need to know what of hers he’s kept all these years.

g'raha guides her through a modest room lined with boxes, dusty shelves, and equally dusty piles of tomes and scrolls, and it’s incredibly underwhelming to what she had envisioned. she decides to not say as much, remembering his advice, and assuming the most painful mementos were simply stored out of immediate sight.

tiamat only realizes she’s let her mind wander when g'raha suddenly offers to her a fairly inconspicuous, wooden box. she takes it mindlessly, blinking dumbly to restore her attention to the current time and place, and reaches for the latch. she does pause for a moment once it clicks open with a gross, metallic noise, looking briefly over to g'raha for… something she does not know. he only regards her gently, though she sees the little smirk of his lips and a weight she didn’t notice on her shoulders suddenly drops all at once. filled with new resolve, she only winces a little at the again-gross creak of the hinge fighting against her.

the box is full of jewelry, and upon first glance tiamat barks out a laugh. it’s a complete mess of failed products and incomplete work, the metal poorly handled and smoothed and taken to rust over so long of lacking care.

“oh, these are awful,” she says through a laugh, picking out an uneven, silver chain and looking it over. “must have come from when i was a barely mediocre goldsmith and spent most of the time practicing. i wasted so much metal! it was humiliating having to show any of my work to my peers…” tiamat digs through the box and allows herself to drift in kind, innocent memories of desert heat and nearly screaming in frustration at her grinding wheel.

even g'raha manages a small, but rueful laugh.

“i must confess my reluctance to show you these, made all the more justified by your reaction just now. i simply couldn’t help it, knowing these were made by your hands… i would preserve all that i could find.” his voice dips into melancholy, his smile turning sad and strained.

“she and i both appreciate the gesture,” tiamat answers easily, “even if it means you see all of the terrible things that i am still embarrassed about having made at all. knowing how precious this is to you means a great deal, for what it’s worth.”

g'raha’s expression opens in surprise, momentarily vulnerable, but the warrior doesn’t capitalize on it while she’s so invested with discovering all the goods the sole box contains within.

she snags a ring with her index claw, feeling victorious in such a silly way about it, and drags it up to view in proper. the second she sees the familiar band, every part of her inside and outside seizes and crashes to total stillness. she does not hear g'raha saying her name repeatedly, with ever increasing worry, over the static in her ears and pounding of her heart. she can’t–

she can’t–

you can.

tiamat inhales sharply and deeply, her eyes squeezing shut and then slowly reopening. she feels a loose grip on her elbow and focuses on that, the skin-to-skin contact just enough to ground her mentally. she forces herself to breathe out steadily. the ring burns cold in her palm.

“are you alright?” g'raha asks, stepping a little into her sight. tiamat exhales, ignoring how she trembles, and manages a stiff and uncertain nod. he doesn’t appear convinced, if the furrowing of his brows and pursed lips are any indication, but he nevertheless accepts her muted answer without further question, and relaxes back at her side. she can already hear what he would have said next, just as in any other case of her weakness: say the word and we will leave. we can go back and you will never need to see or speak of any of this ever again.

but is that what you want, tiamat?

esteem’s presence nudges from within her consciousness, ever vigilant and prepared to take on her burdens.

i will lock this heart of ours in ice so you may be numbed to such pain, so you will never need to confront it, but only if that is what you truly want.

in this sliver between time, tiamat holds esteem’s sentiments to her own, unconditional safety and security that she would have normally taken to in a heartbeat and positively basked in. she was so good at running away from her problems, her emotions, and would have rather shut them all out than risk succumbing to them. to think about what could have been and what should have been if only she were stronger, faster, better.

g'raha waits for her to be ready with unending patience. he honed such a skill over decades of hardship and battles he cast himself into for the sake of a future he did not intend to ever live to see with his own eyes. like her, he wears his trauma as a cloak, a shield, and hides within its shade when it is too much to embrace the reality of himself, of this world he resides in despite all else.

… is this what she wants? the crossroads lie ahead. she may continue in this loop for as long as she wishes and no one will stop her or blame her for it. she may stride into unbroken ground and they will be with her for every step. no matter which path she chooses for herself, they will be with her, always, because she is not alone and never has been. because above all else, they love her.

and she loves them. she loved him, loves him with every bit of her self damaged and not, and was prepared to dive into unfamiliar and exhilaratingly new territory because of how deeply she felt for him. he was the reason for boundless joy in one of the darkest times of her life, and reignited a tender hope she so desperately needed kindled in the wake of heartbreak and betrayal. he fought for her, died for her, and even though she will carry the despair of his passing until her final breath, she will never forget the kindness of his smile and will never choose to forget these memories of him she holds so dearly, even if it means knowing the pain as well. the warmth of his hands on hers, and the sound of his laugh when they shared truly awful jokes during a blizzard that held them hostage within the walls dragonhead, to her secret delight.

the tears streaking down her cheeks are happy ones, tiamat thinks, and she looks once again down at her handcrafted ring, smiling at it and all it represents. her chest aches, the wound forever in the process of healing, and it is filled with warmth even still.

g'raha, understandably, is confused by her sudden turn of behavior, but tiamat very much notices the hesitant gleam of happiness and pride in his crimson gaze. he wants her so badly to be at peace when he cannot mend her hurts, and will support her in every effort, and she knows without a doubt in her mind that haurchefant would have been so grateful to him for that and more.

“this is… this was my answer– to a question i was asked by someone who loved me very much.” tiamat offers out the ring when g'raha’s eyes widen in shock.

she had never told anyone about her engagement, not ever, for all these years. not once had she ever mentioned their intention to marry, not even to any of his family or hers. not a single soul ever knew, and tiamat was content to let that knowledge pass with him, no matter her guilt informing her otherwise.

“you were,” g'raha mouths more than speaks. he cannot finish the sentence, she assumes, due to the realization of the tragedy slamming into him all at once. there would be a great deal of history he would need to re-evaluate at a later time, out of her audience and where he would be able to grieve for her properly.

tiamat smiles at him, and she knows it’s genuine this time. it is not forced or fake and she even feels esteem’s approval from the deep darkness, as for the first time in both their lives, they need not step into her body to shoulder her suffering.

she would never be able to recover if she kept on with that.

she places the ring back in its container and shuts the box with a sense of finality that severs an old chain from her. she breathes a little easier, stands a little taller. she thinks about haurchefant and feels pain and love both, but above all the memories of her late fiance fill her with strength.

“as i said, she and i appreciate this,” tiamat says roughly, “and i would very much like you to keep these in particular, even including all the bad ones i wish hadn’t been found. … i think he would be grateful for it as well.”

g'raha doesn’t respond with spoken word, only pulls her into a tight embrace the moment she sets the box back into its spot. tiamat clings to him and weeps in full force, mourns the loss with all her being, until it utterly exhausts her. in the following silence, all she can focus on is the steady rhythm of her beloved’s heart and the feeling of his arms around her.

#ffxiv #shb spoilers #juke writes

9 notes · View notes

spaceokase · 5 years

Text

so my girl wrote a letter to her mom and it’s recently ended up biting her in the ass b/c a crime lord got hold of it lmao

And since it’s been put it out there, I thought I’d share it here! I’m always pretty wary about sharing my writing as it’s not something I’m super experienced with, but I was encouraged to do so this time. And in general.

“Dearest Maman,

I hope you are doing well! It has been a while since I’ve written, I know. But, not without reason! A lot has happened and it has been hard putting it into words. But, I will try my best.

Before you worry, I am doing well. I’m healthy, I’m happy, I have been sleeping and eating properly, I’ve made numerous friends and I’m surrounded by people who care about me.

Most importantly, I found the friend I was looking for! Though truth be told she is my love, my partner, my heart, more than a friend. I am sorry I didn’t say so sooner, as at the time I wasn’t entirely sure where our relationship stood. I knew how I felt, but with what Lemaire had done, I wasn’t sure how Therila felt at the time. I know now, though, and she loves me, too.

That is her name, by the way. Therila Varghast. She’s lovely. Sharp and witty, passionate and wise… she keeps me grounded, but never weighs me down. She lifts my spirits, lifts my soul, makes my heart soar and even as I write these words down I feel like they could never do her justice. Even through everything, she’s been nothing but supportive and wonderful.

I just know that you’ll love her. I hope that you will get to meet her soon. I want you to. She’s even the reason I’m writing this to you. Not the reason I’m writing! Nothing could stop me from writing you for long, as you know. But she is the reason, or part of the reason, this letter is going to get... particularly lengthy. She has encouraged me to be honest with you.

You see, Maman, I have not told you everything about what I’ve been doing while I’m here. At first, I just wanted to avoid making you worry, but then it became… well. I need to tell you now. So much has happened while I’ve been here.

When I said that I came here to find Therila after Lemaire did what he had, that was the truth. I did also hire a mercenary, as I said. I do not believe I told you before, but her name is Surina, and at this point I view her as a friend. She’s a force of nature and everything that phrase entails, and she’s wondrous and sweet even if she doesn’t admit it. She stuck with me until Therila was safe, when anyone else in her shoes would have left long before. I was, as it turned out, a terrible employer.

Even before we set sail, I wouldn’t let Surina just do her job on her own. When she boarded the slaver ship, I went with her, pretending to be a buyer. When we got to Nyx, I chased up leads with her. When we ran into trouble, I fought alongside her. Or I attempted to, anyway. Strangely enough I was not a particularly good fighter, magic or no. Still, it felt wrong to just stand idly by and let her get hurt on my behalf. It felt wrong to just do nothing when Therila’s life was on the line.

Looking back on it now, I think I did more harm than good at first, but ultimately I’m glad I took a more hands-on approach. My magic has improved tenfold, for one! I’ll have to show you the next time I see you, but I’ve been able to do things I’d never thought I’d be able to. And not a single exploding bird! But more importantly, with the friends I’ve met and made here, I’ve been able to help people and I’ve slowly been finding out a lot about myself.

There’s been a lot going on in Nyx since I’ve arrived here. There were disappearances, for starters. Caravans were getting attacked, and people vanished. There was a plague, there’s been slavers. It’s been kind of a mess. I’m still not entirely sure what caused the disappearances, but I suspect it’s to do with the people who’d started the plague. It was something that was made by a group of wererat cultists who are really disgusting and like to spread disease and death wherever they go, and… I realize this probably sounds ridiculous, but I promise it’s true. And my friends and I ended up getting involved, and we, for now, stopped them from spreading the plague they’d made. We also stopped a group of slavers from selling off a bunch of innocent townspeople, saved a town from a hag... We’ve even saved and made friends with a local noble, Lord Victor Garland, whose estate I’m currently writing from. We also went through the Feywild at one point. Yes, that one. It’s okay, we made it out perfectly fine!

I’m hoping you’re starting to realize why I did not write to you about this earlier. Writing this out makes me feel like a crazy person, even when actually I lived through all of it. I cannot imagine how it feels to read this all the way in La Rochelle.

I suppose what you really you want to know, though, is why I’ve been putting myself in these situations.

Before you worry too much, Maman, I want to emphasize here that my friends have kept me safe, and I trust them to keep doing so. I’m not alone and I don’t see myself being alone anytime soon. There’s been a lot to process, but they have been and will continue to be here for me.

I’m sure you’re wanting to know who they are, and I’ll do my best to not turn this into more of a novel than it already is. Currently, with our group, there are five of us who work together, myself included. There’s Encore and Rask, who have been with me since the last time I sent you a letter, and now there’s Helena and Koda. Helena’s a cleric of Sarenrae, who I worked with briefly before the plague business really took off. So I’ve known her as long as Encore and Rask, really, though our time together has been more on and off. She’s sweet. She reminds me a bit of Anton, but more religious. Koda is new, and I don’t know him as well, but he’s a bard, very skilled with a sword, and most importantly an absolute sweetheart. A little nosy, but a sweetheart.

Rask and Encore have been here the longest, and although we don’t always agree on things, they’ve always been here for me. They, along with Surina and a mercenary named Myra, were the ones who ultimately saved Therila from the person who’d held her captive for months. I’ll be forever grateful to them for that.

Rask is from a remote tribe in the Wilds of Haldis, and was a warrior when he was there. He left to redeem his honor, for reasons I haven’t asked about, but I personally don’t feel like he has anything to redeem himself for. Although he can be fierce in battle, and sometimes I think he has trouble seeing the bigger picture, he has been nothing but sweet to me. Encore is currently working for the local Merchant’s Guild, and like Koda, he’s a bard as well. A talented singer, for sure, and a good dancer. (We even won a dancing competition together!) He’s also rather clever, and sweet as well, but should you meet him, don’t tell him I said that.

I know you’d probably like to know more, but I think it’d be best to meet them in person someday. I’d like you to meet them. They’re an odd bunch, but I’m part of that odd bunch and they’re all worth protecting, loving, and fighting for. There is not a doubt in my mind about that.

They have helped me a lot, and I’ve tried to do the same for them. I’ve also tried to assist the people we find who would not have help otherwise. I guess that is what I have been doing, in general? Finding people who need help, and helping them, making things better for them. It’d started with helping an information broker, Torvald Silverbelt, with finding his missing daughter, then it turned into investigating the plague in Nyx, stopping the people responsible for creating and spreading it… At the time, and even now it simply feels like it was the right thing to do. I never thought I’d be able to make a difference, before, but now that I’ve seen that it’s possible… I feel like this was what I was meant to do. It feels right, and it feels meaningful. It feels like, for the first time, I have purpose. I don’t know how else to describe it.

Which leads me to write what is perhaps the hardest part of this letter. When I mentioned that I have been learning things about myself since coming here, I was referring to several small things, like the fact that I enjoy getting people out of trouble and making things better for them, but also, there is something much larger. It’s not… unrelated. It ties in with making things better for people, I believe.

It started when, not long after meeting Encore, Rask and Helena, we stayed at an inn outside the city. When we were there, I apparently awoke in the night in a trance. I don’t remember much of what happened aside from waking up, floating in the air as a mark manifested itself on my arm, and collapsing to the ground.

That’s what the mark looks like. Or it sort of looks like that. You can better tell they’re dragons on the mark itself, and they’re made up of my scales, but differently colored. It’s not a burn or a brand, but a part of me, and as you can see, it’s a mark of Tiamat.

Before you freak out, I’m fine. I’m okay, and I’m still myself. I was understandably upset and scared when it appeared, and at first I was hoping to get rid of it somehow. As I’ve learned more about it and about Tiamat herself, though, I no longer want that, and I am no longer afraid.

You know how the less you know about something, the scarier it seems? It’s kind of like that. I had prioritized saving Therila at the time, but as soon as I could, I bought a book about Tiamat and the people who worship her. I thought whatever I found about her would be bad. Initially, I only thought to use the book to find a way to get rid of the mark. What I ended up finding, though, eventually made me not want to get rid of it all. The mark itself at this time also started helping me. It would warn me of incoming dangers, it helped translate text I couldn’t read normally, it amplified my magic. It saved my life, and my friends’ lives, on multiple occasions. Then, I realized it wasn’t really the mark at all that was helping me. It was Tiamat herself.

I know this sounds crazy. This entire letter sounds insane, and this part sounds the craziest, but I promise you that it’s true. You know that I have never been the religious sort, Maman. I’ve left the occasional offering to Sehanine and given the occasional prayer, but you know that I’ve always felt that people are what influence the world in the way that matters, not the gods.

But she appeared to me, and she spoke to me! It was through my dreams, at first, and initially I was not sure it was her trying to reach me. The first dreams were very cryptic, but were usually a warning of some sort, or a hint of what I should do. I am still unsure what some of the dreams meant, but others were very clear. She warned me of several things I ended up running into and without her advice, I am not sure how well I would have fared. She also insisted, both indirectly and bluntly, that I should seek her out if I were to get answers.

Because of course I had questions! What was the mark? Why was it on me? Why was she helping me? What did she want from me?

When I mentioned her insistence, what the mark had done ,and the dreams I’d had to my friends, they were rightfully skeptical and scared for me. They warned me not to channel the magic from the mark, and they assured me they would find a way to stop it. I didn’t agree that it was something that needed to be stopped. I felt there was more to this than me being some unwitting puppet of a supposedly evil god, but looking back I should have explained myself better.

I also should have told them before I eventually tried a ritual to contact Tiamat, but I did not. It was stupid, and reckless. I regret not telling them, but I don’t regret doing it.

When I contacted Tiamat, she had answers to the questions I wanted to ask. She was more forthcoming than I expected, yet more vague than I wanted.

I am, as it turns out, the next Hierarch. Yes, that Hierarch. The one in Tiamyra that people try not to speak of.

The mark on my arm is my physical connection to Tiamat, a part of her that is now a part of me. It is both a symbol to show others who I am and a means of channeling her divine energy. No more, no less, though why it’s on me specifically is rather interesting.

Tiamat claims my parents offered me to her before I was born. I don’t know why. I wasn’t given a reason, but was told it wasn’t something they did lightly. I want to believe her… or more, I do believe her, but I find it hard to wrap my head around. I cannot imagine what could possibly drive them to offer up their child to a god. Like most things regarding my parents, I am just left with more questions than answers. I suppose it ultimately doesn’t matter.

What does matter is what I intend to do with this. Tiamat says that she wants me to invoke change in the world. She says that her people hide away as the world fears and reviles them, and they do themselves no favors with their isolation. She says the upper echelons of society have grown complacent and indolent, and that the common people suffer for it. She says I am what they need, and that I can change things and lead her people to a better future.

I would have to see Tiamyra in person to know for sure what it is like, but I have seen enough through my travels elsewhere to accept the possibility that these things are true. I have seen enough suffering, I have seen nobles abuse their power and their people, I have seen the people who commit acts of cruelty and I have seen the people that ignore it. I don't see why it would be different elsewhere.

But perhaps, you want to know why it is that I felt even remotely inclined to believe the goddess of deception.

It all culminated in one of her temples that I eventually visited. I wish I could show you what I saw there. Even with all the beauty in this world, in the places I’ve seen, nothing could compare to what I witnessed in that temple. I had seen glimpses of it in my dreams, but even as breathtaking as it was then, nothing could compare to seeing it in person. It was grand and old, maybe even ancient, hidden away underground and long forgotten, yet not only still standing, but in absolutely incredible condition once I entered the main doors. Impeccably. carved and crafted, with pillars at such a scale that from the ground they seemed endless. Flowing water, all around, waterfalls carving into the natural cavern surrounding me. Purple flames lit, unwavering, lighting everything around me in their pale arcane glow. On the walls of the long halls inside were carvings of all sorts, intricately and lovingly detailed, each telling a story. I saw dragons, and monsters, I saw beloved kings, horrible tyrants, I saw people like you and people like me, and everywhere I saw change. I saw common people overcome tyranny, I saw new rulers rise and old ones fall, I saw people take fate into their own hands and I saw the goddess, ever-changing herself, one moment the fearsome five-headed beast we are taught to fear, but as a protector, the next a more subtle form, almost indistinguishable from a large dragonborn, being a guide, an inspiration for her followers to take matters into their own hands.

As incredible as it was, though, seeing her, the actual her, was infinitely moreso. When she appeared to me, it was not as the five-headed dragon, but as the elegant dragonborn... half-dragon? She was tall and imposing, yet refined, seemingly flawless. Every movement she made felt both calculated and natural, as it seemed effortless yet perfectly precise. And her eyes… her eyes were like looking into infinity, made of magic and stars and time itself. Her presence was invigorating, refreshing like a breath of fresh air, or a cool breeze on a hot summer day. I was in awe.

In the moment I saw her, I knew she was infinitely more than what I’d been told, and I knew then that her mark was not a curse, but a blessing, a connection that felt utterly priceless. I was excited, I was elated, relieved, loved… I had found... faith, I suppose. It felt right, in a way I can’t even begin to describe. It felt so incredibly right.

Tiamat gave me the option to walk away, but I stayed. Our connection strengthened that day, and I made a promise to inspire, to change things, to make a difference in the world and to be her Hierarch and all that entails.

I don’t regret it.

Admittedly, now that I have had more time to process it, I realize that I have a lot to do and am not entirely sure where to start, but I don’t regret it. I believe I can use the opportunity I have been given to make the world a better place. I believe I can use my connection with Tiamat to help people, and I believe it is also what she wants me to do. She is not the horrible monster I and many others have grown up believing she is. Her spheres include deception, yet I have found deceiving terrible people to be useful on my journeys. She encompasses magic, and is ultimately where my magic comes from, and exploding birds aside, I have never felt ill towards my magic. Most importantly, though, she represents change, and people taking their fate into their own hands, and I think that is what I believe in most.

I believe the world needs change, and I believe it needs it especially right now. There is so much beauty, such beautiful people, and so much potential… and there are other people who wish to hoard it for themselves or crush it entirely. There are the nobles who get fat, who squander everything they’ve been given while the common people starve. There are people like the chevaliers, who have the power to do good, yet they abuse that power to hurt others simply because they can. There are those who watch while this happens and do nothing because they feel it isn’t their problem.There are slavers, criminals and cults running rampant, those who hurt and kill and abuse because they believe in something darker, or they enjoy it. Then, there are those who see all of this, all of the darker, unjust, horrid aspects of the world we live in, and feel utterly hopeless.

I want to, and intend to give these people hope, but I intend to do more than just offer them weak platitudes. I want to actively make the world a better place. I want to protect the innocent, bring justice down upon the wicked. I do not want to simply tackle these problems one at a time and hope for the best, I want to make sure they do not happen again. I want to end suffering before it begins. I want people to have the opportunity to grow and change, regardless of their status. I want a world where people do not have to worry about simply surviving and getting by. I want them to prosper and thrive and be the most they can be. I want to do more than simply distract people from their suffering.

Although… I must admit, I am not yet entirely sure exactly how I am going to change the world. It is a rather lofty goal. I am sure it seems both daft and extreme. If it is any assurance, I know that in reality, I can only change so much. I have not lost my mind entirely, Maman. I promise.

That said, I do not know how much I can do until I actually do it, and my ideals, utopian as they are, are important. They are dear to me and someday I hope they are dear to others as well. I want to give people a brighter future to look forward to.

Try not to worry about me too much. As I said before, I am not alone. I have friends, and support, and currently a very fancy roof over my head. Also, despite all of my grand and lofty claims and ideals, I am taking things one step at a time, and starting small, by helping people as they need it. No grand attempts at changing society just yet. Just a bit of adventuring which I am now infinitely more adept at than I ever was.

Again, I am sorry I was not honest with you before. I got so wrapped up in not wanting you to worry, that I failed to remember that you only worry because you care. Also, that you tend to be able to sniff out when I’m hiding something and really, I should always be honest with you regardless. I promise to be honest with you from here on, though I will warn you now, Maman, that I… well, no. You already know I have a habit of getting into trouble. I will try to get into less of it if I can help it, though. For you.

Giving you grief aside, I hope someday soon I can see you again. It has been far too long. I know I won’t be able to immediately, as I have responsibilities here in Nyx, and I think my friends need me, but I promise you I will find a way to visit as soon as I can. I miss you, and I love you. My heart yearns for the day I can hear your voice once more, for the day I can hold you in my arms and see your face again. You are always, always in my thoughts.

Love you, love you, love you,

Zephrine”

#writing #long post #dnd #dragonborn #tiamat #sorcerer #paladin #dungeons and dragons #zephrine #okase writing #i wrote this months ago and so much has already changed #also you ever just write your mom and accidentally slide ur political manifesto in there #cause zephrine sure do

20 notes · View notes

g-kthehedgehogfan · 5 years

Text

@makshroomarts Sonictober Day 23: 90s

I’ve grown obsessed with my dragon OC and I think she’d look like this in SatAM. She looks great if you take all the pencil lines out.

Basically she’s an Eastern Dragon which is why she’s supposed to look smaller than Dulcy and her hair doesn’t have that yellow stripe because she hadn’t come into contact with power yet. (Or she dyed it, but I’ll figure it out sooner or later.)

Anyways, here’s Tiamat everybody.

#sonic the hedgehog #sonic #sonic original character #sonic oc #sonic fan character #sonic fc #inktober #sonictober #sonictober 2019 #sonic inktober #traditonal #pens #oc: tiamat #tiamat the dragon

5 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 5 years

Text

Ghostbusters: Afterlife - Who is Ivo Shandor?

https://ift.tt/2LLMLBF

A brief shot from the new Ghostbusters trailer ties into a threat that's been looming over the team since the first movie.

facebook

twitter

tumblr

When it comes to Ghostbusters lore, if you were to ask about their biggest villains, the list would begin with the likes of Stay Puft/Gozer, Slimer, and Vigo the Carpathian. Then maybe some of the more memorable monsters from the cartoon or someone might bring up that incel guy from the reboot. But then there’s Ivo Shandor, a footnote of the franchise who has gradually transformed from a deep cut to being the puppet master of everything ecto.

The trailer for Ghostbusters: Afterlife hit recently and while it’s established as a sequel to the original two movies, they’re fairly light on the actual references so far. There’s a ghost trap, there’s old footage of the original team in the '80s, we see Egon’s old jumpsuit, what appears to be a Gozer dog, and so on. In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, characters are shown walking towards a sign saying, “SHANDOR MINING COMPANY.”

Yes, Shandor. As in Ivo Shandor. So who the hell is Ivo Shandor?

The original Ghostbusters movie namedropped Shandor once and only once as part of an exposition dump. When the crew were in their jail cell, Egon started to explain just why Gozer and its kind were targeting that one specific building and why it was so haunted.

“It's not the girl, Peter, it's the building. Something terrible is about to enter our world, and this building is obviously the door. The architect's name was Ivo Shandor. I found it in Tobin's Spirit Guide. He was also a doctor. Performed a lot of unnecessary surgery. And then in 1920, he started a secret society.”

Understanding the situation, Peter added, “Let me guess: Gozer woshippers?”

So all the marshmallow golems and demon dogs and so on were all traced back to one nutjob with a forgettable name. Now, with the minimal amount of stuff we know about Afterlife, part of the backstory appears to be that at some point after Ghostbusters 2, Egon Spenkler moved to Oklahoma for the sake of keeping an eye on something Shandor cooked up with his mining company. He definitely didn’t stop it (at least completely) and it’s up to his family to finish the job.

Ivo Shandor started the ghost uprising in the '80s and his legacy is to bring it back in 2020.

Coincidentally, this lines up with Shandor’s position in the franchise. This man with a throwaway piece of dialogue to his name is constantly being farmed out into being something much bigger for the sake of follow-ups.

To be fair, he was originally going to be a bigger deal in the first movie. In an earlier version of the script, Shandor was supposed to appear as Gozer’s initial form during the climax, juxtaposing this apocalyptic, godly threat with a mundane guy in a suit. They even wanted Paul Reubens to play him, which is...wow, that’s excessively '80s.

He’s a better vampire than a ghost, anyway.

In 2009, a big Ghostbusters video game was released on various platforms – and remastered a decade later – with emphasis on being the “official” version of Ghostbusters 3. It featured all the actors reprising their roles (excluding Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis) and a script that was partially worked on by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. It took place in 1991 with the player being a silent rookie getting roped into a “greatest hits” storyline that involved the likes of taking on Slimer and Stay Puft all over again.

read more: The Scariest Episodes of The Real Ghostbusters

While the game set up the return of Gozer, the true mastermind was Ivo Shandor, who was hiding in plain sight by possessing the mayor. What better way to undermine the Ghostbusters from doing their job than screwing with them from the top of the bureaucratic ladder? With Gozer defeated a second time over, Shandor decided to overstep his boundaries by turning the plot into a scheme to turn himself into a god. Initially, that meant sacrificing Peter’s new love interest Dr. Ilyssa Selwyn, who – wouldn’t you know it – was Shandor’s descendant.

In the end, he achieved power and was able to choose his own form as the destructor. The Ghostbusters took him out by going back to the “cross the streams” well and moved on.

The IDW Ghostbusters series, while bringing in concepts from the animated continuity (ie. Kylie from the underrated Extreme Ghostbusters being the team’s researcher), only treated the two movies and the video game as canon. That meant that Shandor wasn’t really on the table as a nemesis, but there were references to him here and there.

The initial storyline revolved around a being named Idunas, who was hellbent on bringing back Gozer and forcing Ray to imagine him as something more threatening than a giant marshmallow man. While he had an otherworldly look to him, one of the original concepts was to have Idunas take Shandor’s form as a reference to the unused idea from the movie.

One of the comic runs ended with a big storyline involving Gozer’s war with his sister Tiamat. Gozer would show up in Ray’s subconscious to taunt him in various forms. One of those forms was presumably Shandor, looking very much like a slightly-off-model Pee Wee Herman. Nice that they finally got to scratch that itch.

Otherwise, outside of being namedropped, Shandor appeared in a short story called “The Origins of Slimer” by Erik Burnham and Rachael Stott, where the Ghostbusters went over their various theories on what Slimer is or who he was. While they suggested that he could have been a chef or a vagrant, Ray seemed pretty sure that Slimer was some kind of failed glutton-based entity conjured by Shandor and his cult.

While Shandor didn’t get too much lip service in the comics, Erik Burnham eventually decided to make Tobin’s Spirit Guide from Egon’s exposition into an actual book. Albeit, a book updated with specific ghosts from Ghostbusters itself. It was there that we got to see the very entry that Egon read many years ago, going into more detail about his horrible experiments, path to Gozer worship, and the suggestion that he died from trying to give himself goat legs.

I mean, if you're going to be demonic, might as well go all the way.

Gavin Jasper writes for Den of Geek and is neither too hot to handle nor too cold to hold. Read more of his articles here and follow him on Twitter @Gavin4L

Read and download the Den of Geek Lost In Space Special Edition Magazine right here!

facebook

twitter

tumblr

Feature

Books

Gavin Jasper

Dec 11, 2019

Ghostbusters

from Books https://ift.tt/2YOeaIN

#aion-rsa #Books

2 notes · View notes

helenarlett-rex · 5 years

Text

The Story of The Lady Liandra, or, When your D&D party is too stupid to live...

Years ago I started my great campaign. I felt it was a stroke of brilliance. It was a campaign in which I was the DM but no one knew I was the DM. I wrote every session and handed it off to a proxy DM to run while I posed as a player filling in the part of the party’s rogue. But what the other players never realized was that my character was actually a succubus. The Lady Liandra. I spent my time fighting along side the party as we dealt with a false wizard running a underground drug ring and later an evil Rakshasa. And never once did I do anything evil. I truly was their friend and ally. But I was always watching them. Always paying close attention to their actions. I was waiting. Waiting for them to commit the three sins of thought, word,and deed. Which for this game, meant saying something, thinking something, and doing something against their alignments. And eventually enough of them had committed the three sins that that poor little succubus just couldn’t sit back and watch anymore. They were gift wrapping their souls and handing them to her. What was she supposed to do? She was a lawful character. Lawful evil, but still lawful. And according to the laws a succubus had every right to their souls once they committed the three sins. And that was when I relieved myself and took over as the true DM, while my proxy DM stepped down and joined the party as his favorite NPC.

This led to a grand adventure where the party traveled to hell and broke into a law office to retrieve the contracts for their souls. But there was a slight problem with this. I had a way for them to get their souls back the proper way, but they didn’t take it. Instead, my party of mostly lawful good heroes, who lost their souls by doing things that were far from lawful good, broke into a law office, slaughtered an army of filing clerks, and stole the contracts for their souls which Liandra had acquired through entirely legitimate means.

The poor succubus didn’t know what to do. These were her friends. She had fought and bled alongside them. They had saved towns and villages together. She had even developed a drug addiction in the line of duty helping them take down a horrible drug lord who was addicting the masses to a new substance refined from demon spit. She had done that for them. She didn’t make them commit the three sins. They had all done that on their own. If they were going to throw their souls away then they should at least be collected by someone who cared about them and would take care of them in their eternal damnation. She had to sacrifice her ability to continue adventuring with them just to make sure that when they did die, their eternal torment would be the least horrible she could make it. And this was how they repaid her? Killing her staff, burning her law firm to the ground, and stealing from her? But they were supposed to be the good guys... Why would they do this to their friend?

So with a heavy heart, Liandra cut all ties with her former companions and let them go on their way. She didn’t even press charges and try to retrieve her stolen property. If they were just going to reject her help then she wouldn’t interfere. And if they lost their souls to someone who didn’t have their best interest in mind, there was nothing she could do about it. She had been rejected.

In her grief, Liandra returned home to be with her brother, the half breed, Maldekore The Demon Child. But upon returning home she found that her brother had started a war with the kingdom of Ulria. A war that was close to bringing about the kingdom’s destruction. Still the legal minded sort, Liandra brokered a peace treaty between the warring kingdoms in which she would marry the prince of Ulria and unite their two families instead of watching them destroy each other. But then along came her former companions once again...

They were at once against the wedding and set out to find a magic ring that would protect the prince from her influence. That was a little disappointing. Liandra had rather hoped to have her new husband wrapped around her little finger, but whatever... Even if they managed to retrieve the ring from the wraith of Sinner’s Island and give it to the prince, she would still be in line to become the next queen, even if her power wasn’t absolute. And she would still have saved both kingdoms from the ravages of war. That was something.

But then a third party decided to interfere. A band of dwarves who were unhappy with Ulria’s decision kidnapped Liandra and attempted to convince both sides that the other had been behind it. The war was going to be back on and Liandra was powerless to stop it.

But her former companions! They would surely uncover the truth. They knew a war like this would destroy both sides. Surely they would rescue her! Sure, they’d had their differences in the past, but this was bigger than any of that. They had to know that rescuing her was the only way, right?

Well... no... Instead her former companions... the “heroes”, took the advice of a certain drug lord she had once helped them remove from power, and traveled to the Realm of Madness to recruit a Jabberwock in a last ditch effort to storm her brother’s castle. And Liandra? She was left in a dwarven prison to rot. Alone and forgotten.

Years later the dwarves befell a great calamity at the hands of their master, a Corrupted Monger who her former “friends” had never bothered to remove from power, and Liandra was able to escape. But what she found when she did shocked her. Not only had her former companions put an end to the war by bringing a Jabberwock over from the Realm of Madness and using it to kill her brother, but they had apparently promised the beast her brother’s kingdom in exchange for his service, only to double cross him and banish him back to the Realm of Madness the moment the job was done.

And other tails were being told as well... Tales of Icewind Dale being completely overrun with vampires, which her former companions had tricked into migrating there so they wouldn’t have to deal with them in Ulria. Tales of them aiding a cult in summoning the dread planet, Allabar, the Opener of the Way, from the Far Realm. And even tales of them altering the very fabric of time, resulting in the eldritch abomination, Lenore, becoming the goddess of what was now the most popular religion in the land. Were these really the deeds of the people she had once called her friends? How had the party she once fought along side, who had prided themselves on their precieved goodness, changed so much? She was a succubus. A fiend. Lawful evil... And even she had never done anything that bad...

And where were they now? Happily settled down and retired from adventures. Enjoying the spoils of the exclusive shipping rights for the entire Kingdom of Ulria, which they had apparently swindled the King out of in exchange for their services in killing her brother. Liandra was disgusted. She wanted nothing more to do with them. But apparently fate would not allow it...

It seemed that with her brother’s death, she had come into an inheritance. An adamantine mine located on Dis, the second circle of The Nine Hells. It had once supplied adamantine to the material plane through a pass within a mountain cavern that connected Dis to the material plane. She could use the profits from such a thing to get back on her feet after her law firm was destroyed and her brother’s kingdom concurred in the name of Ulria. But with the kingdom now under Ulria’s banner that meant all shipments would have to go through the shipping company now owned by her former companions.

Not wanting to deal with them again, Liandra reached out to a younger group who had apprenticed under her former companions and now worked for the company. Asking them to handle the shipments of adamantine to the material plane. She even warned them that there were recent reports of trouble in the mountain pass they would have to use and they may have to clear out whatever had decided to nest in there during the time the mine was out of service.

This new group of adventurers seemed promising and she had hoped that maybe she could establish a new sort of friendship with them to replace the one she had regrettably lost with the old group. But trust was going to be hard to build, because they had apprenticed under her former companions, and as such has been told of her. Though obviously tales colored through her former companions’ warped perspectives. This was only made worse when the trouble in the mountain pass turned out to be far greater than she had anticipated.

It turned out the mountain pass was now being used as a staging ground for a heretical cabal of demons and devils working together towards the goal of freeing Tiamat from her prison in the hopes of unleashing her upon the Nine Hells. When the new group of adventurers stumbled into their lair they were quickly taken prisoner and transported back to Dis to serve as slaves for the cabal.

Liandra quickly began working on a plan to rescue them and help them put a stop to this cabal. After all, Dis was her home now. She had even had to sign a contract promising not to leave Dis just to convince their shipping company to take her on as a client. She certainly didn’t want a very angry Tiamat laying waste to it. But her plan was all for naught. The party was only there for three days and before Liandra could even put her plan to rescue them into motion they had already escaped, blamed her for their capture, and unleashed a plague of Brown Mold upon Dis which rapidly spread and engulfed the entire second circle of hell.

They knew Liandra was lawful. They knew that the contract she had signed would bind her to Dis without means of escape. And they covered the entire plane in deadly Brown Mold. It was an assassination attempt. She hadn’t even been a part of what happened to them and they blamed her without any proof and wiped out an entire plane of existence just to kill her. This group was even worse than the ones who had trained them...

Thankfully Liandra was able to escape. An emergency evacuation was put into effect for the entire plane of Dis, and because many of the higher ups who made the rules in Dis were likewise bound to the realm, they voted to lift all binding contracts restricting anyone from leaving under emergency evacuation protocol. Even Tiamat was set free in light of the situation. So it was no problem at all for someone as insignificant as Liandra to breach her contract and flee.

After that she spent a great deal of time as a refugee in one of the great undead cities in the Shadowfell with many of the other evacuees from Dis. She didn’t dare step foot back in the material plane again. Both her former companions and their pupils were deranged psychopaths who committed great atrocities while proclaiming how “good” they were, and they all held a serious vendetta against her. They didn’t even know she had been trying to save them and they weren’t about to listen now.

But after a year in the Shadowfell news reached Liandra of new trouble in Ulria. A band of kobolds had somehow managed to assassinate the king, and at the same time a visiting king from an orcish kingdom across the sea who was visiting on a diplomatic mission. Both sides were now blaming the other and war was once again coming to Ulria. And to make matters worse, that last group of adventurers she had dealt with had somehow managed to destroy Ulria’s economy, amassed all the land’s wealth on their own micro-nation, and was now declaring neutrality in the coming conflict. Ulria would not survive this war on their own.

But Liandra was still a noblewoman with some degree of power. Even if her lands had been taken or destroyed, the orcs didn’t know that. And the new King of Ulria had been her feancè once, so many years ago. Perhaps a political marriage would be enough to give the orcs second thought and hold off the war until things could be sorted out. After all... who wanted to go to war with a kingdom that had just united with the forces of hell? Maybe... Just maybe... their bluff would save Ulria.

And so Liandra and the new king were finally married. He still had that magic ring that protected him from the influence of a succubus, but Liandra didn’t care about that anymore. That was in the past. Now her only concern was in saving the kingdom she had once fought to protect all those many years ago. And she had her work cut out for her. Her new husband was not a very good king. He’d never had much of a mind for politics. She’d known that even back when she tired to marry him the first time. But with Liandra taking over the courtly duties and allowing her husband to serve as king in name only, things were finally starting to improve. They were able to hold off the orc invasion. The lives of Ulria’s people were beginning to improve. Things were finally looking up. Liandra was actually happy. She even converted to her husband’s faith as a worshiper of Odin. She was the first fiend to ever turn her back on hell and convert to the service of a good god.

And then it all fell apart.

A member of the party she had once tried to employ broke into the castle in a drunken stupor, and through a feat of unbelievable luck, managed to make his way to her husband’s bed chambers where he slit the King’s throat in his sleep and stole one of the magic rings from the King’s collection.

Liandra was now the widowed Queen of Ulria, but she had lost the husband she had actually come to love. And now she feared that her former companion’s apprentices would be coming for her next.

But there was another problem. Her husband had been a worshiper of Odin. And Odin had a rule. No king who followed him would be denied death on the battlefield without retribution. But her husband had had his throat slit in his sleep. The rule had been broken. And before Liandra could do anything about it, the castle was suddenly full of valkyrie sent to enact Odin’s retribution. They would have blood. They would have the blood of the one who killed the king and everyone associated with him.

Hoping to hold off the needless slaughter of innocent people who had nothing to do with her husband’s murder, Liandra convinced the valkyrie to stay in the castle as her bodyguards. Telling them that if they stayed with her, the guilty party would come to them when they came back to kill her. She knew she wouldn’t be able to save the foolish party at this point, but at the very least maybe she could limit the deaths the valkyrie would deal out to only them, and spare the lives of their families.

And just as Liandra had expected, the party did come back for her. Now that the King was dead, they had come to kill her and place one of her husband’s illegitimate daughters on the throne as a puppet Queen, loyal to them.

For a fleeting moment, Liandra hoped that upon seeing the valkyrie protecting her, the party would second guess their actions. Maybe they would realize they had gone astray and were no longer doing works of good. But the moment quickly passed when upon seeing the valkyrie the party declared that “Odin must have turned evil if he is protecting a demon!”

In their self delusions they still insisted that she was an evil demon and they were the virtuous heroes. But Liandra wasn’t a demon. She was a succubus. A fiend, neither devil nor demon, and not beholden to the rules of either. She could be whatever she wanted, and that included being good. And those were Liandra’s final thoughts as she and her valkyrie bodyguards were viciously slaughtered in her own bedchamber. She never even fought back.

Over the course of my campaign Liandra’s alignment shifted from Lawful Evil to Chaotic Good. My players, who played out two different parties over the course of the campaign, shifted from Lawful Good to Neutral Evil both times. Although they are still in denial about this and will argue right to my face, that I, the DM, am wrong. But I think the sad tale of the Lady Liandra speaks for itself.

And now I have to find a way to TPK a high level party who has just stupidly declared war on Odin and unleashed the wrath of the entire Norse pantheon. Because at this point they are just too stupid to live.

#d&d #d&d story

6 notes · View notes

violetsystems · 3 years

Text

#personal

There’s a point where you are pushing a boulder uphill where you actually think you’re pushing it over the top. You look up. You look down. There’s this exact even point between joy and dread where you don’t know which way it will go. Seeing as how it’s an exact middle point you expect it to pass. Like this whole process goes on for a year and you emerge mentally “over it.” You expect something to change outside of your skill at rolling the boulder. You say to yourself that you can keep doing this all day like some juiced up eighties American action hero. And then you look up and down again to observe your process. It’s still limbo. You might even become strong enough to maintain this mirage of an ascent while doing other things. Watching a movie or a television show. Play a game on your phone. But the boulder is always there. The positioning is different these days. It feels like I keep pushing the boulder and the hill keeps stretching. Like there’s a bulldozer dumping other people’s shit onto the incline. Which makes it seem I’m climbing up a relentless garbage pile of other people’s baggage, perceptions, and detritus. This is essentially true particularly in the city I live in. Which mind you living in a city is much closer to the edge than where I came from. I lived in the suburbs for half my life. It felt like the bottom. An Irish and Italian Catholic suburb plagued by hard drugs and abuse. I eventually found a job in the city through my friends at the time. And later I eventually found a place to live. And I have lived in this city long enough to know there isn’t really something wrong with me. The incline is easy enough but sinking in other people’s shit seems to be the norm. Around here whether it’s Chicago or America, people like to disarm you by making your priorities seem selfish. We’re all in this together after all. In times of crisis, we pull together and help our own. Which is a reminder that for about a year I’ve been isolated taking care of my own. I spent about as much time per day trying to engage people on LinkedIn without any real success. It is place where I feel I’m successful at showing the professional side of me. Sort of like Tumblr is a place I feel like I’m successful showing the human and empathic side of me. Which one feels like the boulder? After all the years I’ve spent writing to the void here, I’ve seen a connection. Expecting too much is what shatters hopes and dreams. But I have spent a really long time expecting the very least and being given less. In a twisted turn of fate, I have a lot more financially than I may have in my previous life. To have to label it previous is a sure sign I stopped pushing that boulder a long time ago. I was forced to. Left with a realization that the world is bigger than this and yet I can’t seem to escape it. I played a game of magic yesterday online. Sometimes lately the player names are a little too telling. I had just built a Tiamat deck so I tested it out in Standard Ranked. The username popped up as “Escapeurf8yt.” I quit Hearthstone for less. The last two games I played in that Blizzard game were so sus that the player names were meant to trigger me. That last match was against a player named “Imcomingforyou.” Nerds aren’t the most delicate when they have their chance to wield power. I won the Tiamat game without even having to play Tiamat. But it left me with a similar feeling. Why do I try to be part of things that don’t have any real modicum of respect for other people’s feelings and identity?

That example could be chalked up as being a little too sensitive I guess. Every time I walk around the neighborhood lately it’s like I have to tiptoe around people’s feelings. I’ve gotten mad at my situation more times than I can count the last year. Anybody would. I lost all my ground. I lost everything and yet gained something in the process. People whispered behind my back and watched. Looking for clues to pin the blame on my downfall on me. And yet for all the new things I tried and did to survive, I’m still pushing the same generic boulder to most people. I’m not even good enough to be recognized as a writer by the broad public. I’m some sneaky individual that everyone feels it’s their duty to check up on at the expense of my civil rights and general mood. The gaslighting is at the very center. That nobody wants to address the elephant in the room. They can’t really. And maybe it’s for the best. Because the way I see everything from the inside out is troubling. Nothing has returned to normal. People’s privilege has been laid bare and somehow everyone is looking for the scapegoat to deflect the blame. I’m sick of it. Everybody being so nosy and confrontational with nothing to offer expect a bad attitude and a jokey stare. This is why I no longer go out for anything other than groceries. Why I decide to have things delivered instead of having to participate in a clown show parade of well intended bullshit. Why everybody speaks for me when no one has spoken a kind word to me at all. Everybody expects me to reach out and fix the trust they broke with me. And it gets sadder and sadder that people don’t understand that I’m pretty much a boarded up house at this point. Living in a little shack enclosed by people’s expectations and barriers. Time just keeps passing. People do keep reading. But here is where I feel people have the most context at how horrible I feel after all of this. Some of it is for the best. The community people ask for in the real world without deserving it is non existent or coerced. I know this because I’ve been welcome down here in the bowels of the internet. You don’t expect the community here to cross the line. Even when it does, it is a more delicate and slow process how you let people into your life. In the real world, it’s abrasive, clumsy and inconsiderate. And I dance around it all just the same. But there’s a point when it just becomes macabre. People out there might say they know me. But I’m the one out here alone constantly. I have a full year to prove it. More than that to be honest. I just gave up on trying to figure out everything that happened before that. I’ve lost my own history in that regard. I will never reboot my dj career. I will never be accepted as a writer. I will never be good enough to be called an artist. I remember this intense discussion I had with an ex during a break up. We were living together at the time. We had been together for about a decade at that point. We lived in the eastern side of this neighborhood at the time. It was designated by the developer as an artist’s neighborhood. My girlfriend at the time was a photographer. I was mostly her assistant. I paid most of the rent. We were at a crossroads. She cheated on me in front of my face in front of our house. Even after telling her to go, she wouldn’t leave. She told me to my face that I didn’t belong there because I wasn’t an artist. I also gave up my car in that breakup. I’m realizing just recently the reason I never renewed my driver’s license was because I knew I would never afford a car again after I lost that one. Which is a great thing to remember when State officials yell at you asking why you haven’t renewed it.

The world says it gives a fuck. It doesn’t show it. It doesn’t act. If it did we would never be in this situation. I know this because I was born to survive. I have pushed many boulders up many hills. So much so that I’m grey and over the hill. And apparently completely fucking meaningless to most people. Only good enough to speak through T-shirts and guerilla marketing. There’s a level beyond that I know. There are people that actually care but the situation is impossible at best. I’m supposed to see this and accept this out of love, care and attention. And for a few people I barely know, I do. The person I care about the most probably knows this too. But I don’t know anything. It’s blind faith. Which is saying a lot for spending two paragraphs saying I have faith in nothing around me. I don’t, That’s the curse. Seeing it how it really is. Knowing you’ve spent half your life pushing up a boulder for other people that wasn’t worth the slough. I gained some muscle mass. Some context to my backstory. But my life is dead in the fucking water aside from having actual net income. Kanye and Trump are cash poor. This is just a fact. I’m not. And yet nothing has changed. There’s no end in sight to where I need to be a year later. Just the same disrespectful shit. How I’m supposed to sacrifice my humanity for some rich people’s game with my emotions. The world uses you, eats you up and spits you out. If you are lucky to survive this you’d be me. Has anyone out there really thought about how I feel after all of this? How dark it must be to know the real truth and keep pushing that boulder just the same? How tiring and exhausting it feels to be able to write it so delicately but still be so fucking misunderstood just the same? Is my life just to be joked about backstage as some quirky subplot to steal ideas from? You cannot be me after all of this. I will remind you on my very last breath. And every day that passes is a reminder that you’ve tried. People have tried to say they know me. People have tried to say they speak for me. Understand my pain. And yet I’m never good enough to acknowledge. I’m invisible and supposedly this is my thing. In that case it is. From this day forward. Let’s not beat around the fucking bush. I got here on my own. I bled, I cried, I screamed and I retreated into the inevitable. How does anyone expect me to feel if I’m supposed to accept what I accept and know what I know. I don’t really know. I feel awful. I feel broken. And I feel like everyone who cares about me knows this by now. And the stakes are higher than my personal feelings about it all. But my words are meant for people who read them to understand me better for the love of it. Not to get a jump on me. Not to subvert me. Not to teach me a lesson or use me as a stereotype. Not to be a punching bag or scapegoat for communities who would rather burn me at the stake than hear what I have to say. In that you will forever fail. I love the culture that swirls down here. I love how hardcore it is without pinging the radar for the vultures and the marketing teams. And yet we have this power that still goes ignored. Gets laughed at. Joked about. Talked over because people are vapid, bored and only succeed by watching other’s fail. I dropped that boulder a long time ago. It apparently has not smashed the opposition yet. It is a long way down as it’s been a long way up. Tough at the top for sure. But there’s only room enough up here for two. And that seat is taken. <3 Tim

0 notes

viciousalicious-blog · 7 years

Photo

“God, it’s dark in here.” Scarlette said. It was indeed dark, and more ominous was that wherever she was… it was quite open. She heard her own echo as if she were standing in a vast cavern of some sort. But the echoes were too close together… perhaps a very long hallway. She couldn’t tell. To prevent any accident she gripped onto her friend Eric’s shoulder and made sure she could hear the breathing of her friend Azura behind her.

“Oooh. Spooky scary…” Azura said flatly. “You think after all you’ve seen so far, Letty, that you’d be okay with a bit of darkness. Besides, it’s not like you’re alone.”

“No… but I would really like to see where I’m going. I feel like I’m going to step off a cliff, or trigger a trap… I don’t know!” Scarlette panicked.

“Don’t worry, Scarlette.” Eric said calmly. “This isn’t Temple of Doom. The floor isn’t covered with spiders… in fact there shouldn’t be anything alive here at all.”

“A-Alive?” Scarlette stuttered. “You mean… there could be—“

“No!” Eric sighed. “There’s no zombies, undead, vampires, or any other such undead being here. As far as we know, anyway. This place isn’t frequently visited. Most people don’t even think it exists anymore.”

“Anymore?” Scarlette asked. “Where are we?! And how can you see where we’re walking?”

“Nuri, if you would.” Eric said, speaking to Nuri who had been silent this whole time. “Before Scarlette has a panic attack.” A few moments later, a light shone behind Scarlette. It glowed brighter and brighter prompting her to turn around and face Nuri. At first it was just a flame resting in a shadowy hand. Then it began to float in the air becoming bigger as it illuminated the entirety of the place they were in. The ball of fire revealed the long hall they walked down, framed by thick circular stone pillars. The ceilings were high, and the vastness of the space seemed endless. It quickly became easy to see. Scarlette took a moment to look at her friends. Eric walked in front of the group with his head covered and his hands in his hoodie pocket. Azura walked alongside Scarlette, a tan Caribbean girl with defined black wavy hair and attire straight out of Hot Topic. And lastly was Nuri, someone Scarlette trusted to be nothing but 4’10” fashionable bartender from the Middle East, who only recently revealed herself to be a djinn of royal descent.

“Well…” Scarlette said in awe as she looked around. “This is cool. Straight out of Nat Geo.”

“If only National Geographic could venture into places in different realms of existence. They’d have a field day with Atlantis and Shangri-La.” Azura added.

“So before I sound like a broken record… where are we?” Scarlette asked.

Nuri’s fiery eyes couldn’t contain the nostalgia floating through her mind. “It is a place I have not seen in a long time.”

“You’ve been here before?” Azura asked.

“Lucky…” Eric commented.

“I remember when this place was full of people…” Nuri said, still lost in her memories. “It was magnificent. Incomparable. And then---“

“The fire nation attacked.” Scarlette interrupted. “Sorry… I couldn’t resist.”

“Well… you’re not entirely wrong.” said Nuri. “Julius Caesar, set fire to his own ships, which then burned the docks, and then this place.”

“Caesar…” Scarlette paused. “So that means this place is…”

Nuri nodded. “The Library of Alexandria.”

“Eric, how did we get here from your closet?” Scarlette asked.

“Nevermind that. We have a book to find.” Eric noted. “This place was preserved long after its supposed destruction… much more was added to its archives. Maybe we can find out more about your powers.”

“Or where my mother is.” Scarlette added.

“Well we aren’t going to find anything talking here.” Azura huffed. “Nuri, if you could light up the place.” Nuri nodded, waving a hand in front of her. Soon every candle and torch was lit, and the true endless expanse of the library was unveiled. “Alright well… better start looking.”

The group split up, searching up and down the aisles for works of all kinds. Some were ancient, others in a more modern text that couldn’t have been more than a decade old. Scarlette was unable to read many of the ancient works, leaving that to Nuri and Eric. She pulled a book from the shelf, the markings on the binding were glowing a pulsating dim blue. Scarlette tilted her head and placed it on the table. The book was locked, with no key in sight. She tried to pry it open with her hands, and quickly became obsessed with trying to open it. With one last pull, she cut her finger on the rusty lock, pulling back her hand with a pained squeak. Her cut healed almost instantly as it always had, but blood still trickled down for but a moment. Her blood looked like it evaporated as it was absorbed into the leather book cover like a sponge. She heard a lock pin snap and the book was free.

“Everything about this is probably a bad idea.” Scarlette said to herself. She opened the book very slowly, trying to peek inside. Suddenly the book shot open. Scarlette let out a scream that echoed throughout the halls. Everyone rushed over to see what the trouble was, but instead found Scarlette sitting in front of a book, and inside its hollowed pages was a very tiny dragon. It seemed innocent enough, unbothered by the humans that swarmed around.

“I can’t leave you alone for two minutes.” Eric said. “What on earth did you do?”

“I don’t know!” Scarlette cried. “I was trying to open this book, and I cut myself, then the book opened and now there’s a tiny dragon. Why is there a tiny dragon?!”

“It’s kind of cute.” Azura said, placing her hands on her hips. “But it’s not going to help with our problem. We need to get ahead of the game. We need to figure out your powers, and find out where your mother is.” Nuri narrowed her eyes at the dragon before scattering away with everyone else. “Come on Nuri.” Azura said. “Scarlette, please just… sit tight.”

“Can do!” Scarlette said. She stared at the dragon who only looked back with big eyes that only melted Scarlette’s heart. “You are cute, aren’t you? Do you think you can help me?” The dragon nodded. “Oh, you understand me? Huh… Well… I’m looking for a book.” The dragon gave her a blank expression. “Right… I’m in a library. Um… I need a book on blood magic. Do you know any?” The dragon squeaked and flew up with its tiny wings, leading Scarlette away through the many aisles. Eventually they came across one particular book the dragon pointed to. She pulled it out and rested it on the table. After flipping through the pages, she realized that she couldn’t read much of it. “Hrm… this isn’t something I know how to read.” Scarlette pouted. The dragon walked up and nipped Scarlette’s finger causing her to bleed a single drop of blood. Once it fell on the pages, the texts became clear… well clearer. The dragon used its claws to flip the pages for Scarlette and then pointed to a particular text. “What’s this? Will it help?” The dragon nodded. Scarlette shrugged. “Okay. You’re the book wyrm. Get it… book wy—“ The dragon was not amused. “Okay… let’s see what this says.” Slowly she read over the lines that were still not translated entirely. “Canvar taya kin. Onun lan etion ozgur mar.” Scarlette raised a brow. “Creepy.” She looked at the dragon who began to convulse, and looked to have a small seizure. In sporatic bursts, the dragon began to grow, one bone at a time. “Uhhhh…. Guys?” Scarlette called. There was no answer. “Guys?!” The dragon soon grew too large for the table, and then too large for the aisle. “GUYS!” The others rushed over and gathered around Scarlette, only to slow in their run as they saw the fully grown dragon who’s head nearly reached the ceiling. Eric frowned. “WHY?!”

The dragon began to chuckle and speak in an unknown language. Nuri then replied, seemingly in the same language. The two had a small conversation before Nuri nodded.

“Didn’t know you spoke dragon.” Azura said. “So what’s the deal?”

“We’ve freed one of the daughters of Tiamat.” Nuri said. “She’s feeling a bit angry after being cursed and locked in a prison.”

Scarlette tugged on Nuri’s shirt. “Just turn into the giant ifrit fire monster chick you did before and fight it.”

“And burn the library for real this time?” Nuri asked. “There is good news though. Out of gratitude, she’s going to give us a head start before she tries to kill us.”

“How kind.” Eric said.

“We should probably run now.” Scarlette said.

“Agreed.” Azura said, darting away, the rest of the group following suit. The dragon roared and chased the group in her endless rage. “Back to Eric’s closet, yeah?”

“I can’t take you anywhere!” Eric shouted.

Scarlette rolled her eyes. “Oh shut up and keep running!”

#comingsoon #writing prompt #writing exercise #writing everyday #novel

2 notes · View notes