#{ you thought this was going to be about garis }

[mayflora-18]

Incorrect CoD Quotes #15

Sherlock: Unlike some people, I'm a very mature person. I apologize when I'm wrong. Gaz: But I've never heard you apologize??? Sherlock: Are you saying there's times when I'm wrong? ---- Price: Well, you know what they say, when life gives you lemons... Roach: Put them in a face mask. Soap: Use them in a battery. Gaz: Throw them at people. Ghost: Squirt the juice in life's eyes. Steal life's wallet and assume its identity. Now you are life and hold dominion over all. Your enemies cower at your feet. Price: ...make lemonade, guys. The answer was lemonade. ---- Soap: When I get murdered, can you make sure I become an unsolved case? Gaz: What? Soap: I want to be on Buzzfeed Unsolved. Gaz: Can we go back to the part where you said "when I get murdered"? ---- Graves: I invited you into the woods because I crave the most dangerous game. Soap and Ghost, nodding: Knife Monopoly. Graves: Graves: I was actually gonna hunt you down for sport but now I'm interested in whatever the fuck Knife Monopoly is. ---- Alejandro: I wish we could block people in real life. Rudy: Restraining order. Valeria: Murder. ---- Gaz: Truth or dare? Roach: Truth. Gaz: How many hours of sleep have you gotten in the past week? Roach: Dare. Gaz: Go to sleep. Roach: I no longer enjoy this game. ---- (CW: suggestive) Sherlock: The food is too cute, I can't eat it! Price: Gaz: Nikolai: Ghost: Soap: Roach: You're cute, but I'd still eat y- Laswell: ONE DINNER. Farah: *sighs* Here we go again... Laswell: ONE NORMAL DINNER, THAT'S ALL I ASK! ---- Sherlock: Time for plan G. Nikolai: Don't you mean plan B? Sherlock: No, we tried plan B a long time ago. I had to skip over plan C due to technical difficulties. Krueger: What about plan D? Sherlock: Plan D was that desperate attempt half an hour ago. Farah: What about plan E? Sherlock: I'm hoping not to use it. I die in plan E. Nikolai: I don't like plan E. ---- Ghost: Why are you standing on the sofa? Soap: I wanted to see what would happen if I taped a knife to a Roomba. Ghost: Okay... and? Soap: I went to put the tape away and when I turned back around it was gone. I haven't seen it since. (Five minutes later) Gaz: Why are you both standing on the couch? Ghost: RUN AWAY GAZ, RUN AWAY! IT'S OUT FOR BLOOD! ---- [Soap and Graves texting] Graves: where are you Soap: turn around Soap: no the other way Soap: wrong way again Graves: soap where exactly are you?? Soap: at home, but the thought of you turning aimlessly in circles amuses me ---- Price: Do you seriously think you're above the rules? Soap: The stupid ones, yeah. Ghost: If you want me to follow the rules you have to make sure they're not stupid. This isn't a difficult concept to grasp. ---- Farah: Never have I ever... been grounded by my parents. Gaz, exasperated: Every time. She makes orphan jokes every time and she always wins. Alex, horrified: I- ---- Roach: I like your dress. Sherlock: Thanks, it was 50% off. Roach: I'd like it 100% off. Sherlock: Sherlock: The store can't just give out free stuff. Roach: That's not what I- Sherlock: That's a terrible way to run a business, Gary. ---- Soap: *is carrying all the groceries* Ghost: *holds out hand to help* Soap: *aggressively moves all the groceries to one hand to hold Ghost's hand* ---- Sherlock: A mosquito tried to bite me and I slapped it and killed it. Sherlock: And I started thinking... Sherlock: Like it was just trying to get food. Sherlock: What if I went to the fridge and it just slammed the door shut and snapped my neck. Sherlock: How would I feel? Krueger: Are you okay? ---- Price: Are you sure you're alright? Ghost, crying: Yeah, i-it's these onions. Price: Ghost: Price: Those are potatoes. ----

[qm-vox]

Ancient Evil Survives - Liches In D&D

(Art of Vox-Tan by Domochevsky. Yeah I used my avatar for the lich article, my hubris is without limit and there is not weapon you can turn against me that I will not eroticize.)

Liches are one of the most iconic D&D antagonists. They are arguably more famous than copyrighted monsters like the Beholder (whose spread into fantasy in general has been greatly hindered by, uh, litigation), more representative of D&D's "brand" than fucking dragons, and more used as antagonists than any other "kind" of single-entity monster with the possible exception of vampires. Liches are also, appropriately, old, first appearing in known genocide enthusiast Gary Gygax's home games, except they're also even older than that, with true roots in the sword-and-sorcery stories that greatly influenced Dave Arneson and Gygax. The image of an ancient, moldering spellcaster, gone insane with the passage of time and possessed of power lost to memory, is appropriately eternal. Liches lurk in the dark places of every setting, steeped in their own malevolence, traps that spring shut upon the unwary, the unprepared, the weak, and the arrogant.

This article's title is sourced from, of all things, the build confirmation of the Lich from Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. It would not be possible without the research contributions of Afroakuma, my eternal partner in these endeavors, as well as Matt Daley, gralamin [sic], @criticaldiplomacyfail, DragoonWraith, Nekoincardine, and Vhaidara. It needs content warnings for child murder (yeah, we're starting there), insanity, loss of the self, possession, normal murder, desecration of dead bodies, touching on sexual assault (related to the possession), mind control, and violence, just, so much violence.

One final note on terminology. The word 'phylactery' is generally used to describe the vessel that guards a lich's soul, without which they cannot return to unholy life. I will be using 'reliquary' in its place. It is entirely possible that known incompetent Gary Gygax chose a word he thought sounded cool to describe this, but given that Gary fucking Gygax was also a known fanboy of both the Crusades and fucking genocide, I am not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on using a word strongly associated with Judaism for his evil spellcasters that literally kill babies. If you have some objections to this, then in my usual spirit of debate I invite you to go fuck yourself. This is not a point upon which I am entertaining debate, nor am I available to be persuaded upon this score.

Now, without further ado...

Beasts of the Sword Logic - Liches Through the Ages

Liches are nearly as old as D&D itself; they appeared both before and after BECMI, became entrenched during AD&D 2e, and have only become more used, more iconic, and more entrenched ever since, especially as early in 5e's life cycle known videogame voice actor Matt Mercer centered the first campaign of Critical Role on his depiction of the ascension of Vecna on Exandria. Their specific details have changed remarkably little through the editions of D&D, but their deployment and narrative role has changed quite a bit, and they have influenced works beyond D&D that have hit far larger audiences who then absorbed expectations about liches that were first set up by Arneson and Gygax. So let's play the oldies, shall we?

Pappy Badtimes - OD&D <--> 1e Liches - Liches showed up early in D&D. As best as Afroakuma can discover, the first lich was actually what would later be called a demilich, an enchanted skull left behind (more on this later) by the entity which would later be named Acerak, in the Tomb of Horrors. In that particular infamous adventure, the lich functions as a sort of trap, in which the PCs have their souls stolen before getting their asses beat into the ground should they be stupid enough to disturb the lich. This would become something of an ongoing theme; the second-ever lich, and the first one to be named, is a gentleman called Asberdies who lurks behind an illusory wall in the side area of a dungeon and attacks if he senses spellcasters. Man opens with time stop, this is just a trap that Kills You. Asberdies begins the tradition of liches as you understand them today, which were initially presented with the following description:

("LICHES: These skeletal monsters are of magical origin, each Lich formerly being a very powerful Magic-User or Magic-User/Cleric in life, and now alive only by means of great spells and will because of being in some way disturbed. A Lich ranges from 12th level upwards, typically being 18th level of Magic-Use. They are able to employ whatever spells are usable at their appropriate level, and in addition their touch causes paralyzation [sic], no saving throw. The mere sigh of a Lich will send creatures below 5th level fleeing in fear.")

This depiction of the lich is almost certainly from the story Sword of the Sorcerer, part of the Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman series by Gardener Francis Fox. D&D was strongly influenced by this genre and we know Gygax read it; further, this story is where we get the use of the Old English word 'lich' (itself derived from a nearly identical Proto-Germanic word), which was used to mean 'dead body' and can be found in archaic phrasing such as 'lichyard'. This depiction plays all the later hits - incredible magical power, a frightful presence, paralysis (albeit not by touch), and is distinct for sharing the basically-a-trap nature of the "inactive" lich. Our man here would really like to just chill out being mostly dead, and awakens to answer social obligations to other magicians, a thing he doesn't like doing but has enough honor and courtesy to do anyway.

However, there is notably something missing from this depiction of the lich and its successor in BECMI. I don't blame you if you haven't spotted what's gone, since I gave so little description to begin with - it's their fucking reliquaries. This iconic, some might say essential, component of the lich was not part of its first two iterations, three if we wanna count Acerak as a separate one (him being a demilich and all). The reasons for this are pretty simple and easy to point at; those incarnations of D&D were much closer to a skirmish game, hewing towards their roots in wargaming, and as a result a need for recurring enemies or recurring villains was pretty low. And if you wanted your lich to show up again, well, it's already a powerful Magic-User, dude can just cast teleport like a normal Magic-User, problem solved, right? This attitude was influenced by D&D's roots in wargaming communities, to be sure, but it was also heavily influenced by tournament play which used to be a thing. I've touched on it lightly in some other articles but legit folks used to go to like, tournaments with cash prizes and scoring systems, and as a general rule being the last man standing, slaying enemies, and getting treasure got you a good score. When you might end up being in the same module multiple times in one night as a result - this is also where the random tables come in, by the by, to add an element of difference to each run, an aspect which would go on to define a game called Rogue you might have heard of - you just really do not care why the lich is there. You care that he TPKs the party and you're not winning a thousand dollars.

The BECMI version of the lich was broadly similar. It continued the idea of the lich as an essentially passive force ("A lich is not normally found wandering, but instead remains in or near a very well-defended lair.") while explicitly enhancing certain aspects that were, previously, kinda logical extensions but not official. For instance, the BECMI lich explicitly carries around "4-5 magical items in case of trouble" which the DM is instructed to select, rather than roll for. These liches are noted to have 1-2 spells permanently cast on themselves ("most often detect invisible or fly) and to keep their lairs well-stocked with minions, but joining the party here temporarily and only coming back sorta in 5e is a summoning table, which enables the lich to call other powerful undead to defend itself - including vampires that may themselves be Magic-Users or Clerics! Here we have the lich not only as a sort of trap (although, yeah, they're still that) but as a genuine boss fight, the culmination of a dungeon or a dangerous entity from which to flee in an exciting action sequence.

In the edition generally thought of as 1e, we finally get the reliquary. This lich actually pre-dates the use of the word 'phylactery'; indeed, their reliquary has no formal name, and is instead referred to in Dragon Magazine as the object they will "jar" into via the spell magic jar, which will be a formal pre-requisite of lichdom from here through 2e until affairs change again in 3.0. Now, for those of you joining me from D&D 5e as your first edition of D&D, I need to introduce a concept here; a lich's reliquary did not sustain them on its own back in the day. Instead, for this version of the lich, they required access to their own corpse in order to return to life, and it had to be close to their reliquary. If they didn't have access to their corpse, another would do, but those corpses got saving throws to resist being taken over by the lich, and the lich could only return in a "wightish" form with greatly reduced abilities - potentially, even without spellcasting - essentially meaning they had to go on a corpse run like a damn MMO character. Now, this is where I need to interrupt myself to introduce another concept here.

You see, turning into a lich doesn't turn you into a lich.

Becoming a lich is a multi-stage process. In the first stage, one drinks the potion I've been alluding to above; this "prepares" you for lichdom. Later on in 2nd edition, this stage of lichdom - where you are prepared but not actually dead - will be named 'lichnee'. Now, to be clear, you are on a bit of a fucking clock at this point. Your body is not healthy or pleasant to be in and you sure did chug a shitload of arsenic and magical poison alongside, and I do not hesitate to repeat this, several quarts of human blood, you really just went for the forbidden lean. After, I cannot stress this enough, after you drink the potion, then you create your reliquary ("the object the lich will "jar" into [via magic jar]") using a slightly modified version of the magic item crafting rules. Notable here is that "no charm will make the lich candidate reveal where his jar is!" and that planar boundaries and imprisonment cannot stop the lich-to-be from returning to its reliquary upon its first death. So you're a lich once you die, right? Wrong.

The lich-to-be's life force returns to their reliquary upon their first death. At this point, the ideal situation is that the lich-to-be's original corpse is within 90 feet of their reliquary, and they can possess it and become a lich at last. If this is not possible, any corpse that has been dead no longer than exactly 30 days ("from a mouse to a kirin") will sort of do, causing the lich to rise with "no more than four hit dice" and, if the corpse could cast spells in life, the ability to cast up to 4th level spells. The trick here is, the corpse gets a saving throw, which, if it succeeds, prevents the lich from possessing that corpse forever; only their own corpse can be subjected to repeat attempts. No eligible corpses within 90 feet? Sucks to suck bone boy, welcome to imprisonment within your reliquary, please enjoy slowly pickling in your own madness, unable to communicate with the outside world, while your mutilated soul degrades and you end up in the afterlife anyway! What an excellent decision has been made here.

If, if, there is a corpse in range that fails its saving throw and the lich possesses it, they must track down their original body - in whatever state it's in - and then EAT THEIR OWN CORPSE, at which point they slowly change form into a corpse-like version of their original self over the course of about a week, and are, at last, a lich. Given all the risks and rigamarole involved, most people who aspire to lichdom quite smartly kill themselves (thereby possessing their own corpse and skipping the transformation) after their preparations are made rather than risk having to go on a fetch quest for their fucking bodily autonomy.

Mind you, every time they return to the reliquary they gotta do the fetch quest anyway. And it does get worse; these 1e liches cannot gain experience points. They cannot level up. They cannot change which spells they have memorized. Furthermore, reducing them to 0 or less hit points fully destroys the lich! Like! Instantly! They just fucking die! The most they use their reliquary for is the ability to return to it on their turn as their whole turn, at which point they're on the fetch quest again and they lose one (1) whole character level with all that entails.

Being a lich in 1e fuckin' sucked y'all.

That said, the news isn't all bad. The lich's reliquary was shockingly protected, being unable to be located by means less than an actual god, standing incarnate in the world, within 100 fucking miles of the reliquary, casting the spell locate object. Further, all pieces of the lich's corpse "emanate locate object with an unlimited range", though actually getting to them is still the lich's problem to solve. While "teleporting" to your reliquary (see: yeeting your soul into your fucking jar) costs you a level and leaves your original corpse on the floor where you gotta go find it and eat it again, no force can gainsay that teleportation - you'll always live to die another day, unless you've managed to fuck up enough that you were first level again to begin with. Which, while we're here, wild to contemplate that one might encounter and have to somehow deal with a degraded lich well below its former power level! That is not a thing that happens any more!

Which seems like a good time to segue into what fighting spellcasters in general, and not just liches, was like. 'Cause, y'all 5e folks? You have not the faintest comprehension of how good you have it. Much like the lich I am, permit me to discard my mask of human courtesy and become an old man yelling at the youngbloods; that whole 'concentration spell' thing you're used to? That's new. That's extremely new. 11 years old in the canon of D&D, that's nothing, that's a flash in the fucking pan. You roll up on a lich any time before the release of D&D 4e (or in Pathfinder 1e, which hews to 3.5) and that bony mother fucker is coated in buffs and defenses, unironically he just wakes up every day or detects the living and they do this with no edits other than the spell names. Take them by surprise? They cast time stop and then do that anyway. So they have a lot of defenses, right, okay, surely the pain train stops there IT DOES NOT; these liches (and, again, all spellcasters) don't have concentration slots for offense either. That lich casts wall of stone? That's an instant, permanent wall of stone forever, which you cannot dispel and must instead deal with for the entire fight. Lich casts banishment? Sucks to suck bitch, you're out of the fight and the lich is gonna do that again to someone else next turn. Control effects like Evard's black tentacles are set-and-forget, spells like flesh to stone are permanent save-or-die effects, and this is on top of any damage-dealing spells the lich might want to cast, you know, for fun, and their magical items, which they own and use. A lich by itself is a powerful solo encounter that could easily be the culminating boss fight of an entire campaign, and uh, it's not going to be alone for long. That summon table and the various summon spells have some thoughts about whether or not this fight comes with adds (the thoughts are "yes, yes it does"), and by Nerull those adds are gonna suck for you. The lich is already evil and its soul is already kept from the afterlife, what's a demon or fifty between friends at that point? And, not to leave this unsaid, if you can't completely destroy the lich before its turn comes up, it goes back to its reliquary and you get to do this again. Easier, every time, sure, but how lucky did you get the first time? How lucky are you feeling next time?

"Alright Vox," I hear you saying. "This is when you open a quote with dialogue from a strawman reader and reveal that there's another layer you haven't even talked about yet." And to this I reply: fool, I'm saving that for later in the article! This is when we talk about what these early depictions of liches contributed to lichdom, and uh, well, not to say the obvious thing but: lichdom. Lichdom is what they contributed. Every iconic piece of lichdom starts here, and while the bits change, their presence never truly does. These early liches very much favored a sort of inactivity, in which the lich is basically minding its own business and you personally stick your dick in this toaster, either on accident or, for many adventurers, on purpose. Not to leave this on the table at all, liches as villains were essentially absent at this stage. The first villainous lich was introduced already wholly destroyed, in fact, and was relevant only as backstory for powerful artifacts that he left behind before the final annihilation of his soul. You might have heard of him - he was this greasy little shit going by the name Vecna? I'll leave you to chew on that while we move on.

Once More, With No Feelings - AD&D 2e - AD&D 2e barely changed the lich at all from the 1e model, and why would it? There were, however, some refinements. The exact process of enchanting a reliquary changed, the recipe for the lichdom potion changed (including a titanically awful specific requirement which, for my sanity and yours, I will both not explain and presume to be an editorial mistake), nothing major there. Newly major, however, is that any corpse a lich possesses is the lich; the "wightish body" is gone, as is the lich losing power as it returns to its reliquary. Getting even worse, the lich now returns instead of being destroyed when reduced to zero hit points - you gotta track the box down, and you can't wear the lich down over many successive victories. On top of that, the passive defenses of the lich, the things it gets from being a lich at all, have a longer and more robust set of immunities, including immunity to many kinds of weapon attacks. Notable here, however, is that it costs 1 level to become a lich at all. Also notable is that the reliquary can take any form, so long as it is made of inorganic material and prepared properly via magic. This idea, that the reliquary can be literally anything, will be carried forward into all forms of the lich hereafter. That said, the reliquary also lost its incredible passive defenses, and now requires that the cautious lich actively take steps to protect it while also keeping it near a supply of recently dead corpses.

However, where AD&D 2e differs from its predecessors is a greater interest in liches from both the adventures and the novels, setting books, and other such materials. Nearly every famous lich in D&D gets their start here; Vecna becomes the lichgod and eventually God of Secrets, Larloch enters the canon of The Forgotten Realms at this time, Azalin makes a splash into Ravenloft as the immortal fascist dictator of his own Domain, alhoons (mind flayer liches) become a big deal, dracoliches enter the canon for the first time (more on them later). Many of these liches are still classically inactive, but a few regularly interact with the living in one way or another, and so here we have our first villainous liches, motherfuckers who want something and believe they can have it and enjoy it while being undead. They are, you see, wrong about this, and that's the joke that would be much funnier if it weren't for all these stacking corpses. They still weren't employed that way a lot in adventures, still being used as traps or incidental encounters, but the prior activity of these inactive liches is now a much more important element, and one players can potentially use to avoid a fight, acquire a dubious ally, or even attempt to outwit the ancient spellcaster. The Forgotten Realms was and will continue to be notable in the arena of lichdom because of the background element of Netheril. Now, you may have heard of Netheril while playing hit CRPG Baldur's Gate 3, but I wanna stress here that back when those jackoffs were flying the peaks of mountains around and doing doughnuts in the parking lots of the gods, your pappy and mine Jergal, LORD OF THE END OF EVERYTHING, was god of death, hatred, tyranny, murder, the hunt, fascism, cannibalism, the dead themselves, and even more. The Netherese rightly took one look at that guy and went 'I must never die' and just shat out an infinite supply of undead spellcasters whom you can plop into any adventure at any time for any reason. Add one to your game. Hell, add five! There's plenty to go around!

I Feed On My Own Fire; None May Harm Me - D&D 3.5 - My hat to Abbadon (Kill Six Billion Demons & Lancer) for the quote; it was too good for this not to steal.

Finally, a lich I can just give you a link to! First we need to talk a bit about some design technology from 3.5; you may notice "lich is an acquired template" in there. What's a template? How do you acquire one? The short version is that templates, at first, helped formalize a great deal of monsters or monster-adjacent things that a player could become, which could be used for diverse villains/antagonists, or both. Liches, certainly, but also half-fiends, celestial creatures (ex. a bear but from the Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia), werewolves, etc, etc, etc. To make a creature or character with a template, you make a normal version of that creature, then modify it in the ways laid down by the template. In the case of liches, this meant that the Dungeon Master made a spellcaster as if they were making a player character (this being 3.5, mirror matches were a common and accepted action; the idea was that players and enemies used nearly the same rules, though Terms And Conditions Fucking Apply to that statement), and once they were happy with that character they would apply the effects of the lich template, which would change things.

So, what changes, what benefits is lichdom giving this person? Ignore the reliquary entry at the end, we're getting there. On the lich page that I linked you can see that the lich has kept its deathly, paralyzing touch, though now it deals negative energy damage (necrotic damage is the closest idea for you 5e kids). It has its fear aura, it resists Turn Undead, and any weapon damage not dealt by a magical bludgeoning weapon is reduced by 15 points before any other resistances, such as from spells. Additionally they're immune to cold damage, immune to electrical damage, immune to hostile shapeshifting, and immune to mind-affecting attacks (so no charm, no suggestion, no hold person, no mind-affecting illusions, nothing, all attacks on the lich's mind fail automatically). Pretty sick, right? Oh, but dear reader, we're not fucking done. Take a gander at the laundry list of immunities provided by the undead type for me. You see all that shit? Good, so do I, and it's fucking terrifying. Rogues can't Sneak Attack a lich, critical hits do nothing to it, it can't be turned to stone, level drained, or have its mind or body weakened in any way. Nearly everything you normally use to make a caster stop operating is off the fucking table, forcing you to have an actual-ass wizard duel with this ancient evil - and just like 1e and 2e, he is very, very able to stack buffs, engage on his own terms, escape whenever he feels like it, summon as many adds as he pleases, use all his magical items and, oh right, killing the lich doesn't weaken or hinder it in nearly any way.

You can scroll down to the reliquary entry now.

When you kill a lich in 3.5, it simply reappears near its reliquary in 1d10 days. No corpses, no range limit, no needs of any kind. It loses any items that were on the body you killed, for obvious reasons, and while that's not nothing it's definitely not enough; the lich is gonna be back with its full complement of spells, any items it keeps in its lair, and some serious beef. Your only way out of this is to either convince the lich to cease its attack on you and/or your bloodline and/or your entire lineage of teaching and/or your nation and/or your species, or to pierce the defenses around its reliquary, find the thing, and destroy it. And then, if you're unlucky, you also have to fight the lich again - destroying the reliquary doesn't kill a lich currently in a body, just traps it in the current body and makes it vulnerable to destruction, and now you're on a clock to stop it from building a new reliquary and, oh yeah, it's definitely not being talked out of fighting you now. Good luck fuckers.

Also new to 3.5, and continued in Pathfinder (though swiftly abandoned by 4e and 5e) is the idea that any spellcaster, not merely wizards and clerics, could become a lich. To become a lich you need to be able to take the Craft Wondrous Item feat (available once you have a caster level of 3 or higher), "be able to cast spells", and have a personal caster level of 11 or higher. What's a caster level? It's a sort of derived score that represents how good you are at the fundamentals of magic, and which determines several things about how your spells interact with other spells, the power scaling of your spells, as well as certain options a character can or cannot take. So, who all qualifies under that? Well, the list includes, but is very much not limited to: bards, clerics, druids, paladins (via Practiced Spellcaster or Sword of the Arcane Order and then taking the Blackguard prestige class), rangers (via Practiced Spellcaster or Sword of the Arcane Order), wizards, sorcerers, members of the assassin prestige class (via Practiced Spellcaster), beguilers, warmages, healers, hexblades (via Practiced Spellcaster), duskblades, shugenja, wu jen, warmages, warlocks (via Precocious Apprentice or Magical Training), spellthieves (via Practiced Spellcaster), factotums (via Precocious Apprentice or Magical Training), shamans, artificers (via Precocious Apprentice or Magical Training), the NPC class adept, and that's not even getting into building a lich that dives deep into prestige classes that can make them even weirder than me speed rapping a bunch of character classes you've never fucking heard of.

And lest this go unsaid, while the full flower of lichly variety never bloomed, they were, indeed, extremely varied in their official publishing. Not just in adventures or as NPCs, though yes, liches in 3.5 got wild, but in terms of player support! You might, for instance, be going "a druid lich sounds like a contradiction", but the supplement Libris Mortis published options specifically for undead druids (and they were metal as hell). Bard liches were published as campaign villains, and that's not even touching the lich-like but not-lich antagonists such as the Worm-That-Walks. While the sovereignty, the full flower of the Sword Logic, of these liches is one of their greatest thematic and mechanical strengths, I very much do not want to undersell the sheer variety of them. If the DM has an idea for a lich, they can probably make that lich! The only real limit is that only "humanoids" can become liches, so no like, giant liches, no gnoll liches, no hag liches, none of that, and while in some senses that's a bit of an absurdity and a loss it is in keeping with the prior, iconic forms of lichdom. It's not as if D&D doesn't have a history of creating special liches that other people don't get - balenorns and dracoliches come to mind here - easily justifying a different tradition of lichdom for other peoples. Mind you, at that point you're doing homebrew, which means you're doing the designers' job for them, but, well, welcome to D&D. The designers haven't been doing their jobs since the 1970s. Expect more on these topics in a later section.

Drank The Kool-Aid By The Jug - D&D 4e - We return, once again, to the most honest edition of D&D. Like with most things, 4e had a divide between liches as monsters, and liches as player characters. On the monster end, lich was a template (this is gonna keep coming up) that could be applied to any monster of 11th level or higher with an Intelligence of 13 or higher that is able to cast a ritual calling upon Orcus, Demon Prince of the Undead. You might notice those requirements are very open, and indeed 4e took that shit and ran with it, introducing in its lore and adventures dracoliches, an aboleth lich, dryad liches, and new varieties of lich such as the void lich from the Far Realms. These liches had an aura of necrotic damage, regeneration that was shut down by radiant damage, the ability to add or substitute necrotic damage for other kinds of damage, and of course they return from their reliquary within 1d10 days. Due to 4e being 4e, the defenses of these reliquaries was far less insane than in older editions, and the liches themselves, while terrifying tactical encounters, are not the beasts of ruin and woe that they once were in comparison to other monsters or PCs. Hell, 4e let you fight Vecna and kill him, far more easily than any previous incarnation of Vecna except the 1e one that came pre-dead for you.

On the player end we have the Archlich Epic Destiny. I'ma post a screenshot of it here, and then summarize it. I don't know how to do image descriptions on this fucking hellsite and even if I did I'm not transcribing the whole fucking thing, my apologies in advance.

Archlich is an Epic Destiny, a path your character can take towards the end of their career. While it is technically only open to arcane casters, multiclassing in 4e means that it's very easy for a caster of any other kind to become an archlich. It plays a lot of the hits! You have a reliquary that sustains you (and even rescues your items when you die, a first and last for liches), you gain some undead resistances, you can deny death once a day, get your spells back, and radiate a deathly aura that you control so that it doesn't hurt your friends. Put like this it doesn't sound terribly impressive, but honestly for 4e, this is a rock solid choice both in narrative and mechanical terms; narratively, the idea behind Archlich is that you have been seeking a means to sustain yourself that is not controlled by Orcus, and you finally found it, permitting you to finish the great business of your life in safety and then retire as a sort of guardian of the world, becoming a recurring NPC for all future campaigns.

D&D 4e runs sideways with the sheer variety of 3.5's liches; the idea of liches having incredibly varied "class features" is all but gone, but in exchange lichdom is now anyone's game, provided you're stupid enough to look at Orcus and think, "would" or you're a player character smart enough to look at Orcus and think, "this guy is bitch made". The ease and simplicity of adding the lich template to a monster in 4e can't be beat, not before or since, but where this vision is weak, it's weak due to 4e's own weaknesses - a certain genericness to the setting, a de-emphasis on player characters and monsters as members of the living world, and a general weakness in the arena of non-combat roleplaying. So...I guess we need to talk about Pathfinder.

Majoring In Necromancy And World Domination - Pathfinder 1e - So the thing about liches qua liches in Pathfinder is that they're just the 3.5 liches. Mostly. Note there that "any living creature" that can create the reliquary can become a lich, which kicks down the last of 3.5's closed doors and opens lichdom up to anything that might be interested, which Pathfinder certainly ran with - among other things, named liches in Pathfinder include a cyclops and a hag. By this move, Pathfinder elegantly combines the strengths of the 3.5 lich with the strengths of the 4e lich and creates an arena of lichdom which players intuitively understood to already be the case but which was, in fact, not the case; I am handing Paizo a rare unqualified W on this one. But since the mechanics are nearly identical, we must then ask the question: what is the lore on liches in Pathfinder's only setting, Golarion?

Differing vastly from all prior liches, and all current liches after it, PF 1e and PF 2e both posit that lichdom does not have a one-size-fits-all formula. Instead, every spellcaster who seeks to become a lich must research and perform a ritual that will only work for them uniquely. This isn't a case of like, reality only has so many slots for lichdom so you can't repeat someone else's ritual; instead, it balances on the idea that because every soul is unique, you require unique tools and surgeries to mutilate your own soul enough to become a lich. You can get the help of someone who has already become a lich but the base problem is still irreducible; it's less learning how to become a lich and more getting your PhD in necromancy, essentially. Though every ritual is unique, all are quite fucking evil; the least collateral damage of the canonical lich rituals involved torturing 13 dryads to death and the body count & atrocities only go up from there. Strangely for Paizo, no dead children on the canonical list except by implication (the massacre of an entire city), which is oddly restrained for them and a rather distinct difference from liches at AD&D 2e and backwards.

This, then, is the great strength of Paizo's liches, which welds them to their role in Golarion. Not only is each lich unique, but the kind of people who become liches must be willing and able to pro-actively harm others, and therefore have some goal beyond lichdom which requires it. These liches are motivated actors in the world, each one a particular villain who needs to be fucking dealt with and whose schemes will unleash atrocity, corruption, and harm on a staggering scale. That this makes lichdom of ironically limited utility to them is engaged upon, and worth engaging with! They have become beasts of the Sword Logic and then discarded nearly every advantage gained thereby, putting themselves into conflict with "lesser" beings that motivates those beings to find their one weakness and attack them through it. The end result is extremely striking and potentially unique and involved campaign villains, though here Paizo fumbles the ball a bit; its liches are rarely deployed as long-term antagonists in its adventures, instead used as a problem within a specific section. Meet the lich, fight the lich, find the reliquary, done - they're sidequests, essentially. But the potential, especially for the big-ticket liches who get their names in the articles and sourcebooks? Oh, it's there. Yet again, rare Paizo W, as much as I physically loathe saying it.

Holes In The World - D&D 5e - 5e's liches retain the fiendish connection from 4e, though while it is "often" Orcus, it doesn't have to be. This means that these are all people who made a fantastically bad choice for themselves specifically who are on the hook to an evil power. I'm not gonna lie, I despise this aspect, the more because it conflicts internally with what 5e says liches are like - sitting in tombs like the liches of old, rarely emerging when reminded of memories of life, and otherwise not bothering people. Like, I dunno about you, but if I am a demon lord I'm not letting my pet 18th level wizard sit in a hole doing nothing. That man has work to do.

So, what are liches aside from slaves to demons? Well. For the first time, they're Wizards Specifically, that is a new thing 5e did that I also don't like. 5e would later attempt to solve for this problem by introducing creatures like the Deathlock as cognate to like, Death Knights, but I'll be real, I consider this an error and I am not pleased or enthused by Tumblr posts out here trying to make a lich equivalent for every base class. Their actual statistics and abilities fall in line with classic lichdom, albeit downgraded; they are now resistant to cold, lightning, and necrotic damage, they retain their classical immunities (with their damage resistance being upgraded to all non-magical weapons), they have a paralyzing touch, they're 18th level spellcasters off the Wizard list. New to the lich is being a Legendary creature, giving the lich a pool of actions it can use at the end of other people's turns, including a terrifying gaze (same idea as the fear aura, but it works on any one person at a time), an AoE necrotic blast, and just spamming even more fucking spells at you. Getting better, liches also have Lair Actions, making facing them within their dominions even harder, including the wild-ass ability to bond with a victim and force them to share half the damage the lich takes. Cruel! I love it! Rejuvenating from their reliquary is once again 1d10 days, no corpses required, and I honestly do not anticipate this changing in official lich stat blocks any time soon.

Ecologically, these liches are the least sovereign they have ever been. To sustain their undeath they must regularly capture people with the imprisonment spell, sending the victim into their reliquary where their soul is devoured over the course of 24 hours. As fates go, it's horrific, but it also means that the difference between a lich and a wight with a spellbook becomes even smaller; Peepaw is hungee, and if he doesn't get his snacc he dies. This further conflicts with the written role of liches as sitting in the bottom of dungeons, which, I wish I could be surprised, but I can't. 5e's early writing had a lot of...this, really, which I am extremely willing to lay at the feet of Jeremy Crawford (managing editor). The buck stopped at your desk, Jeremy, the fuck were you doing? Meditating on the dreams of twink supremacy you would bless 5.5 with? Like I'm not complaining about the twink supremacy I just wanna know why you had to do my grandpa this dirty. Small, but perhaps worthy of note, is that these liches build their reliquaries first, then take the vile lich potion that contains the soul of a sacrifice. The 'lichnee' concept is well and truly gone here; the forbidden lean just fucking kills you immediately, at which point you become a lich. Which. Mood. Send me some of that immortal sorcerer HRT, I'm tired of this fleshly bullshit.

So, what does D&D 5e bring to the table of lichdom? A boss fight. For all the terror and power of older depictions of liches, they are, ultimately, quite similar to fighting any given spellcaster - just tougher and you get to do it again and again until you smash his collector's edition Dune theater cup. If you wanted to sell them as unique and dramatic that was entirely on you, the DM, to paint a picture with your words and do the goofy voices. This is no longer solely on you; the addition of Legendary Actions and Lair Actions really cannot be over-stated in terms of how well they make the lich fight feel unique and dramatic, how they bring out long-standing but little used abilities (the paralyzing touch in particular hasn't been rolled as an attack on purpose in the entire history of lichdom until 5e), how they sell the idea of a lich's place of power and make a potentially final confrontation in the lair in which it keeps its reliquary a desperate all-or-nothing fight. That isn't to say that you should run liches solo with no backup, the action economy does not respect the laws of dramatics, but it makes the lich the absolute centerpiece of the fight, especially as it interrupts the flow of combat to bring forth fresh horrors upon would-be heroes and turns the tide with its powerful magics. This design technology is worth stealing for any depiction of lichdom you care to hold forth on, and I heartily endorse doing so.

Hell Is Full - Pathfinder 2e - There's not a lot new to cover here in terms of NPC liches; the ecology and mechanics of lichdom are basically unchanged since PF 1e. They're still unique beings, still motivated to scheme against and assault the living, still up to schemes to take over and/or destroy the world, all that jazz. There's just this one thing. This one little thing going on. Barely even worth talking about. Tiny thing.

Player characters can become liches in Pathfinder 2nd edition. I would like to personally invite James Jacobs to huff my nuts. Man threw a bitch fit about people wanting to play undead characters for all of PF 1e and all of Starfinder and he finally had a real adult tell him that he sucks and can fuck off. Oh glory FUCKING be!

For a player character to become a lich, they need to take the Lich Dedication Feat. This requires them to be able to cast 6th level or higher spells via spell slots, to craft a soul cage (quick aside, I did not suddenly pick a different word than 'reliquary' - the Paizo writing team abandoned 'phylactery' in favor of 'soul cage', a move I heartily approve of), and to complete their unique ritual of lichdom. In exchange they get a host of benefits for being undead and for being a lich, albeit slightly nerfed for game balance reasons. I understand the logic - player characters and enemies have different roles in a campaign, and therefore different design needs and concerns - but it does create a ludonarrative friction where like, you as a lich will always be a secret second lesser kind of lich that isn't quite as resilient as a 'real' lich. To be clear, this isn't a D&D 4e situation where there's a non-evil path to lichdom, this option is only open to absolute mother fuckers, but, y'know, those can be PCs sometimes? It's fine? I am here for it, and I am eating.

Notable here on the ecological end for both PC and NPC liches is that a lich deprived of its soul cage is not immediately destroyed, but does begin to degrade and will eventually become a demilich, losing much of its power. As long as the soul cage is intact, the lich revives within 1d10 days as has become normal, no need for further input. However, all undead in Pathfinder 2e, liches very much included, have an "undead hunger", a hollow place in their ontology which they need to fill with something. For wights it's souls, for ghouls it's flesh, and for liches it's...knowledge. Peepaw has a serious book addiction and if he doesn't get his fix he's attacking the kingdom so he can snort the entire bibliography of Fabio. More seriously, this is also the kind of thing that compels these liches to go on adventures, to conduct magical experiments, to engage in classic cartoon villain behavior (ex. "it will be interesting to learn your pain threshold"), and the like. I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, it means that the average lich has reasons to not be a sovereign thing, and therefore to participate in the living world. On the other hand, it means that the average lich has compelling reasons to not be a sovereign thing, damaging the thematic resonance of them as beasts of the Sword Logic that need nothing and no one, and yet are galled, needled, aggravated by their single weakness into realizing that they are not, in fact, perfect and removed from the real reality they foolishly thought to escape. More on this idea later.

Wearing Their Parents' Clothes - Warcraft - Surprise motherfuckers! I'm not going to stay here, or return here, but given the significant interchange between D&D and Warcraft, and the way World of Warcraft influences fantasy gaming - doubtless many 5e players started in WoW well before 5e even released in 2014 - it felt intellectually dishonest to leave them out of the conversation. My hat is off to my friend Drake for additional lore here, though my primary focus is on liches circa the events of Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos and Warcraft 3: the Frozen Throne.

So, what are Azerothian liches? They are the specific creation of the Lich King, and the majority of them began their lives as orcs. Well. I say "began their lives", but the thing is, the timeline between the invention of the lich and the present is less than 20 years. Orc liches are, statistically speaking, at their oldest Your Grandpa, and human liches are even younger! Hidden lore revealed by the Lich King taught them spells of frost and cold, and as undead spellcasters they favor magic that kills, decays, and blights, but at the end of the day these dudes like, just finished grad school and turned into fucking bones. World of Warcraft would later introduce reliquaries for its liches, which feature in raid fights against them, as well as expanding their skill set to fold in the abilities of the Necromancer generic unit from Warcraft 3, but man, I really cannot stress this to you enough. Your average lich on Azeroth has been a bone dude for 10 years or less, and 'or less' is winning that fight by a lot.

So, what does Blizzard do with the incredible, mind-boggling youth of liches and undead culture in general? Nothing. Fucking nothing. If you tilt your head and squint the wild-ass decisions of the Forsaken (themselves extremely traumatized by their murders and subsequent undeath) could be blamed on their youth but honestly I am not about to be out here giving Blizzard that much credit. There is a huge well of untapped potential here! Lichdom was the consequence of a literal invading army of literal, actual demons! It was taught and spread by a dude who worshiped a suit of armor in a frozen throne that ran the undead as a loose hivemind! Undead as an idea are barely older, first introduced by the invading orcs during their war against Lorderon and the Alliance, and people were still grappling with that when the Lich King decided to play his funny prank with the granaries. And aside from the temporal horror of being invaded by your own dead loved ones...we don't...get a lot about this. And that's a bit of a let-down to me. What do the survivors of Lordaeron think about these incredible changes to their understanding of the magical world? What is it the temples in Stormwind preach about the unexpected discovery that their holy magic is particularly effective against the undead? What does that mean to the Forsaken? What compels someone to attend Scholomance? I dunno. There's a lot of potential here, and it's potential you could maybe bring out in your own depictions if you have an interest in portraying liches not as an ancient evil, but as a new technology whose motion is only now beginning to blight the world.

For All The Marbles - D&D 5.5 - Mark your fuckin' calendars y'all, 5.5 hard swapped to 'spirit jar' over 'phylactery', calling itself all the way back to the original 'jar' terminology and finally doing a really basic 'don't be a dick' move. It also comes with a sample table of jars for your lich that honestly has some pretty metal ideas, with my personal favorites being 'the first magical item the lich ever created' and 'the skull of the lich's mentor'. Our liches here are arcane casters and specifically wizards (with a special rule that lets them attune to magical items as if they were wizards for prereq purposes), who utilize a variety of powerful spells that evidence 5.5's newly-focused concern on verisilimitude; your 5.5 lich comes locked and loaded with detect thoughts, prestidigitation, scrying, and, within her lair, unlimited uses of clairvoyance per day - all spells that influence the lich as a boss fight not at all, but which give them remarkable versatility as NPCs and sell them as forward-thinking, ancient spellcasters.

That said, the actual boss fight(s) are fucking terrifying. Rolling in at CR 21 as of the standard stat blocks, these liches have returned to their ancient D&D origins as unholy terrors whose mere presence is a sign that you have done fucked up. They remain resistant or immune to many forms of magical damage in addition to having counterspell and shield once per round, unlimited times per day. Additionally, liches in 5.5 have Truesight out to 120 feet, rendering them de facto immune to illusions and other forms of high-level stealth in addition to the aforementioned information-gathering spells that mean the lich has a very high chance to know what you do and what you're about before you ever breach her sanctum. Get into melee? The Deathly Teleport legendary action says no, but the lich can also stay in melee and use her new Multiattack option to paralyze 3 people in a single turn 'cause fuck you - oh, and then she teleports out at the end of your (paralyzed) turn. Also in the legendary action toolchest for the lich is off-turn fear, scattering the party unless they've specifically defended themselves, and finally Disrupt Life as the lich's second-strongest but most consistent blast, laying down 9d6 Necrotic within 20 feet of the lich once per round, every round. Don't let her wear you down - the lich has power word: kill prepped once a day and she's itching to use it, and for those situations where you're out of range there but she might want to gamble anyway finger of death is also locked and loaded.

Oh, and one last thing. One last little thing. Hardly bears mentioning at all. Permit me to quote Page 196 of the 2025 Monster Manual for you: "Inevitable Siphon. Whenever a Humanoid dies within 1 mile of the lair, its soul is immediately consumed by the lich. A Humanoids whose soul is consumed this way can be brought back to life only by a true resurrection or wish spell."

This fight is for all the marbles. Don't fuck it up.

So, what did 5.5 write for the narrative end of liches? They didn't, thanks for attending.

Okay, no, I can't do that to you, as funny as it would be. Unfortunately it's not entirely a joke; almost all of the lich's entry is spent describing their aesthetics and giving potential candidates for their lairs, but very little is spent on who becomes a lich, how, why, or why liches are solely arcane casters. The situation here is so fucking dire that no explanations or theories are even given for why the lich is devouring souls. This, broadly, is a weakness of the 5.5 Monster Manual in general, which provides a very light overview of uh, everything, alluding to older lore but attempting to keep itself lightweight and moving forward, but for an edition of D&D that is for the first time in literal decades most concerned with the player characters being real things in the game world, it's bizarre that the NPCs just kinda fucking aren't. Additionally, it inherits 5.0's weaknesses in this arena - PCs cannot become liches, and liches have lost the breadth of origin that they had even back in their original incarnations where they could also be Clerics. Any attempt to reinstall such things is going to be a lot of effort on the part of the DM and/or play group.

Now that we've journeyed deep into the crypts of Full and Complete Context, I can write the actual article! Will I make that joke every time? Don't you already know the answer to that?

The Lords Of Shrouds - Liches In The World

This section is going to deal in the various ways liches exist in the world of the game; who becomes a lich (and why), the psychological and ethical effects of lichdom, the advantages and obstacles of lichdom, and varieties of the lich that have been published through the ages, along with a brief refutation of undead that are kinda lich-like, but ultimately are not liches. Let's start this off right, shall we?

Taste The Kiss Of Death - Becoming A Lich

So you may have noticed some shade being thrown at liches up above. Some of them, like the early liches, seem almost nakedly not worth the cost; others, like the 4e and 5e liches, involve sticking your dick in a blender and praying that the demon who owns the blender keeps it on a low setting (they won't). So why become a lich? What is so appealing about this idea that presumably very intelligent, wise, charismatic, or all three, people keep making this choice? Walk with me.

My Constancy Assured - The first, most obvious, and most alluring aspect of lichdom is that it halts and in many senses negates one's failing body in a way that is nearly unique amongst the undead. Liches do not have an animus, the negative energy equivalent of a soul; instead, they use their own soul. They mutilate it, yes, they harm themselves, but they don't die in a metaphysical sense, and they are not overwritten the way vampires are or replaced the way wights are. To be a lich is to ensure continuation of the self, and to be destroyed as a lich is no worse than dying already would have been since, you know, you were evil in the first place and therefore at least a little fucked (terms and conditions apply). But permit me to step outside metaphysical concerns and call in a targeted airstrike on my own position and, based on my circle of friends and mutuals, also yours.

To be a lich is to have a body that stops failing you.

That degenerative spine condition that's afflicted you with chronic pain your entire life and made the simple act of walking down the street an unbearable trial? It's gone. That leg which healed badly after a childhood injury, it doesn't hurt any more, and it bears up your weight. Your Parkinsons is cured. Blind eyes see once more, your cataracts cleansed by the tincture of death. Chemical imbalances that lead to depression are lifted as you become a thing that no longer uses a brain to think, giving you a clarity of mind represented in the many editions that give liches bonuses to their mental ability scores upon transforming. Nerve disorders, gone, paraplegia cured with one sip of the forbidden tonic. Never again will you need crutches, or a wheelchair, or a cane, never again will you have to ask someone else to fetch something for you from within your own home, never again will you have to so much as don a pair of glasses. You have remade yourself within death's fires and emerged as something whole, freed of the shackles of flesh that was ill-made for you and lifted high, so high, above the agonies of life.

Compared to this, being free of physical needs seems almost petty, but it's not nothing. A lich does not need to eat, or drink, or sleep, or breathe. All of the frailties of a mortal form are removed from them, freeing them to pursue their interests and desires without pause, to chase their thoughts without interruption, to work and experiment and seek their leisure as they so wish. The base act of existence no longer costs you money, or labor, or time. You are sovereign in yourself, freed, at long last, from having to ask and to answer for your own life.

A World Of Toys - To be a lich, sovereign in yourself, is also to be at a remove from society, from the living world, to be above it and aside from it, able to observe from the outside. If you have something within it that you treasure, you may now devote your time to its upkeep and constancy as you so wish, far more safely than you ever could as a living thing. What does it mean to you that you might lose this body delving into a deadly dungeon so that you can fund your son's inheritance or donate to the orphanage that once sheltered you? It's just a body. It's probably not even yours. Sacred places can be kept up, through labor or, later, through servants. You can read every book that catches your fancy, and many more besides, experience any culture you so choose, learn whatever languages you wish, travel to other realities, walk along the sea floor and witness what no mortal thing can even imagine. For classic liches, being undead isn't even an obstacle to enjoying the succulent pleasures of life; through magic jar, the lich can possess the willing (or the unwilling, let's be real, you killed 1-4 people just to get here, what do you care) and remember the rush of life through their bodies. Vampires, the mewling things, are so romanticized for their ability to fuck, for the eroticism of feeding, but a lich can taste a new dish, walk in the sun, feel a raging river, bask in a storm, take a lover, even bleed and die, all at no danger to itself. And when life grows wearisome, their volunteer or victim gets control of their body back, assuming it's intact, and the lich returns to its work and its passions satiated.

And the lich does all of these things from a position of supreme safety. Even a scraping mage who spent their last clipped copper simply to become a lich is now in a position to create and defend their hidden lair. Even without access to powerful magics such as move earth, your body is stronger than ever, more resilient than the living ever could be, and you feel neither pain nor weariness. You can dig your tomb with your bare hands if you have to, or even just if you feel like it, and design it until it fits the precise image in your mind. This done, you can defend, conceal, and customize it however you wish! Perhaps it might start a bit bare-bones if you aren't skilled in magically creating objects or physically creating them, but you'd be surprised what tedious work people will pay money for that even the most incompetent wizard can get done. Sign on for a few years as a lumberjack, cloaked in illusions; take bounties on monsters or to cull overpopulations of animals. Make lace and crash the fucking market like Christopher Paolini is writing you, who cares, it'll even itself out. Once you have money, which will never vanish down your belly or into medicine bottles, you can pay for higher-quality work or, for the truly forward-thinking, people to train you how to do that work yourself. You, and you alone, dictate the terms on which you engage with the living world, and few are those who could even detect you. Fewer still, those who can gainsay you.

My Works, Completed - Much hay is made over liches having access to dark and forbidden knowledge. It's not wholly inaccurate; lichdom is, in fact, dark and forbidden knowledge, after all, and further the relative safety and surety of lichdom changes the game when it comes to, say, rolling a demon and pillaging his library while your minions beat the shit out of him. For those inclined towards taboo knowledge and secret power, lichdom positions one well to seek it, and for those with the foresight to not rob demons, it gives one a strong basis for more peaceful negotiations. However, this is far from the only opportunity to continue one's work.

To be a lich is to have time. Endless time, with which to pursue the things which speak to your soul. Many are the lich-priests who essentially exist to manage a theocracy, to preserve holy rites, or to teach ancient lore - indeed, the benevolent balenorns are often created to do precisely this! A lich can make for an excellent guardian of a sacred place or a vista of untouched beauty, a benefactor to a family, culture, or faith. The research a lich commits to can, and often does, advance the understanding of magic in the world, and nothing compels the lich to advance only cruel and evil magics (indeed, many liches end up as unsung innovators of magical creation simply to avoid having to leave their lairs). If a mortal lifetime is not enough to truly understand your gods, why not take two? Twenty? Two thousand? When an immortal who has wronged you would have outlived the mortal you were, how delicious will revenge be when they realize that your constancy lies assured? As a lich, you will never die with the works of your life unfinished. Even something so daunting as writing the complete history of the fallen empire from which you once hailed is simply a matter of patience and ink. Behold a reach that can never exceed your grasp.

We Cannot Be Not!People - Consequences Of Lichdom

Quote sourced from the Celt, from her discussions of Glitch: A Story Of The Not by Doctor Jenna Moran.

It's not all upsides. Afroakuma stated, during our discussions on the topic of lichdom and while he was sourcing the information for the earliest liches, that "all forms of immortality are self-mutilation of some stripe". So too is it with liches. Many are under the impression that they understand the cost; they can draw the diagrams of their souls and detail each cut that will let them fit into a reliquary. They have ideas for their defenses and secrets well before they ever brew the potion that will transform them. An inability to be openly themselves amongst their own people or nearly any other? Lichdom appeals most to the lost and the lonely, this seems hardly like a cost at all.

But there is no escape from being a real thing in the real reality. No escape but a true death, in any event. The following section deals in the consequences of lichdom and common reactions to them.

Entropy & Alienation - Okay. This is gonna be a big ask from me, the writer, to you, the reader. I am on my hands and knees begging you to journey with me to a mental world that the majority of you would otherwise dismiss out of hand, and I need you to consider it soberly. Okay? Please. For me.

Turning into an 80s metal album cover is not the plan going into lichdom, nor is it generally considered a feature or a positive by prospective or, indeed, current liches.

While exceptions exist (and have been published), lichdom is mainly a blueblood's kinda game, either through having old money or, y'know, lots of new money (say, from being an adventurer). Though a certain amount of misanthropy and disregard for other people, outright arrogance even, is significant amongst those who seek out lichdom, they're not like...wizards in a box who only care about wizard things? They have status, they have hobbies, they have social, political, or military obligations and the accolades earned thereby. Even in 5e, the most narratively confused of all liches, it is noted that most liches are dressed in "rich, though rotting, garments". These are people who see themselves as having great dignity, making a choice for their own well-being or research or ambitions, and quite a few go to great lengths to preserve that dignity. The lich may well arrange for a contingent gentle repose on their own corpse to preserve it during the transformation process, and magic makes it easy to mend, repair, sustain, and even replace their garments. A simple prestidigitation, which costs negligible or even no daily resources depending on edition, can keep your regal fashion intact as if brand-new for the entirety of your undeath.

So why do they rot?

Few liches understand what they're getting into when they assure their own constancy. Removed from mortal needs they are also removed from all the little things the living use to understand the passing of time. A lich who sits down to have a serious think about something will never need to use the bathroom, eat a meal, scratch an itch. Its bones won't get sore, and its eyes will never grow weary. The classic image of a lich simply sitting in a throne doing nothing until adventurers cross its eyeline (and sometimes not even then if they're willing to neither bother nor rob the lich) isn't like, undeath afflicting the lich with lassitude, that motherfucker is just real deep on some magical equations and has been since before your species lived on this continent. But you know what does run out and require one to bestir oneself to fix? Preservation spells. Enchantments to renew one's dead flesh. Perhaps the lich spends decades, even centuries, making an effort anyway, but at a certain point, why bother? You never leave your tomb, your only visitors are tresspassers, and illusions are so much more convenient if you need to go outside for some reason. Your rotting body doesn't hurt you, and at some point in the war between dignity & self-respect on one side vs. ambition & annoyance on the other, ambition and annoyance win. In that moment, the lich loses something it may well never get back, or even understand that it has lost. They let their flesh decay, they write in their tomes while mold and mushrooms blossom in blackened organs, they start burning up bits of muscle that fall onto the ground rather than restoring their body, and eventually they become the undead beasts others expect them to be. Why bother? Why care? It's only a body.

It's probably not even yours.

The Madness Of Ages - Liches are not, usually, insane. I want to stress this. If they are, generally they were dealing with some shit to begin with, and do not experience new forms of madness or trauma merely for being liches. However, there comes a time when the isolation and apathy of lichdom stands in well for a dangerous disconnect with reality, and much like their rotting garments it is the result of neglect. When was the last time the lich left its tomb? Learned a new language? Checked in on the state of the world? When this undead sorcerer begins speaking to you in the tongues of devils it is rarely because he is so steeped in evil that he refuses to use Common, it's because the last time he knew "Common" it was called Netherese and people were still building cities on flying mountain peaks. Its conception of manners and courtesy is equally ancient, and its understanding of geography may misunderstand the shape of the coasts, the locations of cities, and whether or not there's a mountain range there. The madness of ages only serves to further isolate the lich, as time spent correcting these problems is time not sitting in their chair having a nice high-quality train of thought, and as the living become a bother and pursuing the pleasures of life through possessed victims becomes boring the internal incentives to do so dry up. Liches are not mad, and yet in their ossified sanity they are more dangerous, more unpredictable, than madmen could ever be.

Banality & Futility - Young liches die a lot, either incidentally or permanently. These are the liches still putting in an effort, whose business with the world involves those who are still living. They may have grand ambitions to take over a nation, petty revenge they are prosecuting, or simply be bellied up on their own constancy and unable to understand that their sovereignty is a lie they told to themselves. This is the most common form of the "active" lich, a dude who isn't even one (1) full elf lifetime old who, after displaying the cold arrogance to sacrifice the lives of others in order to sustain his own, believes he is entitled to power or, worse, that his reign would be beneficial for the simpering, lesser people blessed by his boot upon their necks. Here's the thing.

What is it that even the most vile, depraved lich uses power for?

No, really, I'm asking. Are they going to...build a huge harem of concubines? That seems like a non-starter. Build a gigantic palace to their own glory that they could never, ever, use as their actual lair because it's too obvious a target? Take time away from their research and contemplations to govern - and if they did, to what end? You got to this position by not giving a shit about other people in the first place, to their detriment, and now you cannot so much as lounge in a couch being fed grapes by topless elves unless you kidnap someone else to use their body to do it with. The ambitions of these young liches are self-defeating, a form of denial-meets-temper-tantrum about their new state. It is telling that if they don't end up permanently destroyed (and given how high-profile these schemes tend to be, they end up destroyed a lot), these liches generally abandon their schemes, often without comment, certainly without any intention of coming back except, perhaps, to use systems left behind for their benefit. An ancient lich who once founded the empire your character was raised in isn't still the empress, she owns a damn gem mine so she can show up every 25 years and collect spell components.

It turns out that when you don't care about other people and separate yourself from nearly everything you have in common with them, power kinda sucks to have. Power for its own sake is already an exercise in futility, but for the lich it is also an exercise in denial of their condition. All of the rewards for being a despot are off the table. Even a lich who's emotionally or intellectually obsessed with unethical sadism is going to find that it's easier to just kidnap random people from across the planet, never learn their names, and then put them in the torture machines. And the thing is...most liches are not those liches. They're more or less ordinary assholes who don't think much of or about other people who now confront the eternal, grinding drill of the banality of their own evil. They are not bestirred to help others, or to harm them; they are not interested in making a mark on history except perhaps through their obsessive ambitions, and once those run out, what're you going to do. Conjure a new obsession out of nothing? For the average lich, the only thing keeping them undead is the faint, yet not absent, fear of true death. Few indeed are the liches who can come to peace with their own amortality, and even amongst those luminaries of undeath there is always time on the world's side. They'll give in, eventually. They can't fight it forever. And in the meantime they steep in their own pathetic evil, cut off from the wonder of the world not through malice but through simple apathy, no better than the venal bandits and muggers they imagine themselves so removed from.

There Is No Escape - Let us imagine, for a moment, that you are a lich in the model of D&D 3.5. You are a sovereign being, removed from all need and nearly all weakness. Your reliquary will generate new bodies for you no matter how often you are struck down, and it needs nothing to do so. Your soul is not degrading; you experience no hunger, nothing even remotely cognate to a survival need. You are a thing which feeds on its own fire, asking nothing and answering no one.

Quick question, Dread Master - where do your spell components come from?

Maybe you don't need many material components; there's feats for that (in 3.PF) and arcane foci (in 5e), but uh. Your undead minions require expensive onyx, and that doesn't mine itself. Diamond dust for stoneskin neither mines itself nor grinds itself. Living creatures, blessedly, do die on their own without any intervention on your part, they're very polite that way, but y'know, for some reason their corpses don't deliver themselves to your door? That magical item you're making, do you think the wood logs itself, the metal mines itself, smelts itself, forges itself? No? The ink for your scrolls, spellbooks, and tomes, does that make itself - hell, does it keep indefinitely on the shelf? For that matter, the parchment required for scrolls and spellbooks - parchment specifically - do the sheep raise themselves? Do they slaughter themselves? Treat their own hides for you? The quills you're writing with, do the birds simply fly into your lair, shed their own feathers, and then cut them into a useful form? If you want a pen instead, does that make itself? If you use undead minions to get this done, do they feed themselves or raise themselves from the grave? Okay, living minions - do they pay themselves? Are they immortal the way you are? Will they always listen to you? Well shit, okay, let's try extraplanar - are the dao of the Great Dismal Delve going to give you shit for free? How about devils from the Nine Hells of Baator, they doing charity work lately? Celestia isn't even returning your calls, that's a non-starter. Maybe you try to enslave a djinn, that surely doesn't have any history of ending badly but, oh yeah, she still needs things too, and worst of all these extraplanar forces still see you as a pissant mortal.

Say you try to stockpile resources early in your lichdom, put off this problem for as long as you can. You pile gold, gems, metals, high-quality items suitable for enchanting, tools, books, and furniture in your lair. Congratulations, you are now dragon-bait the same way dwarfholds are, and Dread Master, let me tell you, dragons are high on the list of things that give you pause (though admittedly, you are high on the list of things that give dragons pause). Okay, what if you set up an institution instead, you found a school of magic or a support system for ranchers or something. That needs upkeep, not just in the sense of money (which you can't make from nothing) but in the sense that you need to check in with them pretty regularly to make sure the institutions are still serving you as well as keeping up elaborate fictions of your identity so that you can draw from them without bringing attention to your undeath. Well shit, okay, maybe being a despot won't get you the usual rewards of despotism but at least you can openly have an entire kingdom feeding your lab and you can get people to mostly run it for you, right? No, wrong, do you have any idea how much even the most hands-off king gets fucking bothered every single day? That's even worse than being the silent partner of the entire sheep industry!

The sovereignty that you have purchased through blood, darkness, and pain was and is a lie. You are not freed from the living world, nor can you be. There is no escape. There never was any escape. You have done this to yourself, and in exchange you have gotten nothing. Nothing. At. All.

Dead Inside & Out - Active vs. Inactive Lichdom

Liches can, broadly, be thought of as being in one of two modes. An 'active' lich is in the modern vein; this is an undead villain proactively attacking the world in some way. It might be for world domination, for revenge, for godhood, some ancient racist crusade that's on levels of Van Helsing Hate Crimes that the modern adventurer can't even begin to understand, whatever; the lich wants something, and they're trying to get it. Conversely, the traditional 'inactive' lich is the guy sitting in a tomb, though balenorns, lich-kings, and the like also tend to fall into this role. Let's talk a bit more about them

Some Serious Chair Time - Inactive Liches - As noted above, the inactive lich was the first lich presented in D&D, and also tends to be the lich most in harmony with her lichdom. These are the folks sitting in their thrones having a nice long think about magical theory, the nature of the divine, or what have you, but they're also balenorns serving as what are essentially undead park rangers (when they say 'don't feed the bears' they mean it, though blessedly you're more likely to end up teleported away with a geas to not come back than you are, say, to have your soul stolen - they're balenorns, after all), lich-priests managing theocracies, elders of the sahaugin who embrace undeath to preserve the histories of their people, and the like. As you may be noticing, this means that inactive liches don't necessesarily need to have no contact with the living, and indeed even the guy in the tomb has that 'you need material to do stuff' problem I explained above. Rather, they are characterized by long periods of inactivity, a hands-off approach to interacting with the living world, and/or specific, special roles in their societies that mediate their semi-regular interactions with the living. These liches tend to be the calmer, more mature, and more self-aware of the two broad varieties; they have had time to make peace with their undeath, and though the madness of ages is upon them and they are, not to put too fine a point on it, evil, they rarely represent a rampaging malevolence.

So why use an inactive lich in your campaign? There are a number of reasons. The classic inactive lich is great as a sudden sidequest or one-off encounter, one which might be resolved through might, magic, mayhem, or diplomacy; the players are in a location for some other reason, and a lich is also there, either because it is her lair (or her lair is attached to it) or because it has something she needs. These liches make for excellent dubious allies if approached properly, who may have a use for or interest in adventurers - perhaps the party wizard could be tempted by an apprenticeship to the Dread Master, or a Cleric might be stunned to encounter an undead creature whose relationship to their own god seems so shockingly different to their own (this one is great for Clerics of more neutral-aligned gods like Mystra or Azuth). An inactive lich might own an item the party desperately needs, or if you like giving your players rope to hang themselves with, one they simply want very badly. An inactive lich needs no foreshadowing, no prior justification for being in the campaign, and if you decide you've made a mistake by including them their separation from the living world is a convenient ripcord to pull any time you like. Certainly having to make a new lair is annoying, but it's probably not the first time. It might not even be the hundredth.

Screams Of The Undying - Active Liches - Active liches are those who are a threat to the living or possibly the entire world. These are the dudes trying to make a planet of the dead, take over a kingdom, kill a god, whatever. And they're clowns. You may have noticed in my arguments above that being an active lich solves a couple of lich problems (the madness of ages, the inevitability of dealing with the living world, etc) by more or less giving up all of the advantages of lichdom in favor of being a particularly resilient spellcaster. This is their strength and their flaw, and the flaws far outweigh the strengths; by being tied to the living in this way, the lich attracts enemies by the score, and even their victories will only create more enemies. Unless this motherfucker actually ends all life he is going to have groups of 3-8 traumatized orphans with class levels after his reliquary forever, and even a world of undeath is no protection when you remember that the undead have forever to hold on to a grudge against the bitch that killed them. Despite these problems, which become rather obvious when one sits down to have a good think about them, the active lich is far and away the most common in modern depictions of lichdom, and yet even in the relative thoughtlessness of the people pushing it (IT'S PAIZO IT'S ALWAYS FUCKING PAIZO IT IS PAIZO EVERY GOD DAMN TIME) we see some themes emerge. These liches tend to be 'young', they became liches to become particularly resilient spellcasters, and they tend to not grasp the futility of their goals. Power doesn't do anything for a lich! They get no rewards from having it or exercising it! They are, at best, hollow things, the undead version of your Elon Musk or Robert Moses who seeks what they cannot have with tools that will never give it to them.

The advantages of an active lich in one's campaign are obvious. They are powerful, motivated villains who are difficult to destroy and have had decades, centuries even, to figure out their esoteric plans. Even in a more mundane kinda goal - taking over a kingdom, say - tools like magic jar, imprisonment, various illusions, and RAISING THE FUCKING DEAD make the lich himself a particularly esoteric threat who can easily generate mysteries, puzzles, and full-scale war. But they are also, ultimately, very intelligent and driven morons whose activity is a raging scream of denial about this thing they have done to themselves, which will reap them no rewards, which cannot make them happy or even content. For a player group inclined towards diplomacy, there's a powerful, Fallout style social game one can bring to bear against these liches, turning their own dissatisfaction, hypocrisy, and double-think against them.

Callous Cruelty - Liches And Alignment

One day I will do that alignment article and then it's over for these hoes.

So, I'ma repeat something here for my argument. With limited exceptions - there's the balenorns again - becoming a lich generally means you're evil in the first place. Putting a human sacrifice and a shitload of poison into a blender before giving it the big chug is not one of those things good people do, no, not even if your virginal human sacrifice is a fucking incel. You have devoured the life of another to sustain your own as an act of selfishness and disregard for the other person, and it only gets worse as you move forward in time when ideas like soul devouring get introduced. "Hey why are you getting ahead of the idea of finding an acceptable target to sacrifice for lichdom" buddy let me tell you, I am extremely sympathetic to the idea of destroying my enemies and taking their shit, but that is not what's going on here. It comes up in the discourse a lot more often than is fucking reasonable.

The thing is, for most liches the kind of evil that motivates them into lichdom evidences the problems that liches have well before they become liches. They are distinterested in other people or actively contemptuous of them; they see the needs of being a living thing in a society or a culture as, at best, an ongoing annoyance, and generally as an indignity beneath their station, talents, or intellect. Misanthropy is common albeit far from required; the belief that anyone would become a lich if they could and you're just ahead of the curve is certainly conducive to lichdom, but one doesn't need to hate other people to find the 1-4 murders necessary for you to become undying. All you really need is to either find them to be less important than yourself, or already be primed by prejudices and other biases to consider some of them acceptable targets, and lemme tell you, that's not hard to find.

Exceptions exist, of course. The clown motherfuckers who become active liches are predisposed towards malevolence and cruelty, or at least a bitter envy and entitlement that can stand in just fine for malevolence and cruelty, but for your traditional liches this is the original problem which will inform the evil to follow. Liches are rarely active threats to the world, and often do not bother being cruel as such. Rather, their indifference towards other, less sovereign beings manifests as a callousness that can do duty for cruelty just fine. A lich may not bother killing a failed experiment to create new life before recycling it into the flesh pits; why go to the effort and waste the spell slots when it's going to die anyway? A lich might use an item such as a mirror of life trapping as a passive defense in its lair, reasoning that it can interrogate prisoners at its leisure, and never think twice about the existential horror the victims are subjected to. Ironically, killing intruders with spells like finger of death or wail of the banshee is more morally neutral; motherfuckers did, in fact, break into the lich's house, start stealing his shit, and then - in all probability - threw hands. To fuck around may be human, but to find out is divine. But this, too, is rooted in callous apathy, a symptom of the lich's alienation and sovereignty.

So what if a lich wants to stop being evil, or a PC believes they can get a lich to stop being evil? There's a lot of ink spilled on this subject. In Pathfinder 1e, Paizo spends quite a bit of page space in their dedicated lich article about how lichdom 'warps the soul' and even those going into it with theoretically good intentions are turned irrevocably evil, which is a deeply weird thing to spend a lot of page space on when, again, the least evil lich ritual in PF 1e involved torturing thirteen people to death. I would like to reject this premise. Instead, consider: getting a lich to care about other people, the first step towards a lich becoming a good-aligned person, does not actually necessitate that they become a better person. Let us ignore for a moment all of the vast incentives the lich has to continue to not give a shit and take it as given that a compelling argument for going outside to touch grass has been made. A lich wields vast power, incredible concealment of its nature, and is a civilization-level threat to the average society by itself. If you get a lich to believe that an evil empire must be stopped, that man is not walking into a courthouse to persuade people of the injustice of the law. He's going to start murdering cops and he's only gonna stop when there are no more cops. Alternatively, he will seek connections to the world which do not disturb him overmuch, which we see in Larloch of The Forgotten Realms. Larloch is a famous and classical inactive lich, a being of evil whose callous cruelty can be most succinctly expressed in his spell Larloch's minor drain, and homeboy has a whole second lich in his employ whose job it is to take down Larloch's words on the history of Netheril. Larloch and this assistant record vast and intricate tomes on the life and culture of people history has forgotten, hymns no longer sung to gods that no longer live, art that burned in the flying cities, the peasants and smallfolk ground into dust by their wizard masters, and they do it because they sincerely believe they have a duty to history and the world to ensure that those people are remembered, and that the world know that they lived, and died, and that it mattered. Not to leave this unsaid, copies of these histories are then delivered to the libraries of the living, notably to include Candlekeep, so that they may be read and understood. This upwelling of compassion and the feeling of duty to truth has not made Larloch less of a piece of shit! It is very much compatible with him being a piece of shit! People are complicated and evil people don't get mystically simplified just because they're evil.

If you can solve that problem somehow, really talk the lich around into taking some ethics courses, maybe learning modern Common, really go The Good Place on his undying ass, there are still some obstacles. Though previous editions lacked mechanics for this, narratively a lich is supposed to still be degrading, requiring either pillaging the souls of others or increasingly elaborate magical protections and remedies to sustain their immortal fire. In 5e this is explicit; a lich must consume souls, an act of pitiless evil that cannot be justified. This isn't so much a problem with becoming a more ethical person in and of itself - as already discussed, being a lich doesn't automatically make you a worse person than you were to begin with (which, admittedly, is a pretty bad fucking person) - but rather represents the closest thing these liches have to a survival need. Your lich, in seeking to be a better person, faces the death he's been avoiding for aeons. Maybe he spins the wheels a bit for a few centuries, feasting on demons and the like - they're very convenient targets for soul-stealing - but if he stays on his ethics grindset that turns out to also be deeply unethical, and then the lich faces a few choices. Self-annihilation is the most obvious one, and a lich dedicated to ceasing their own evil may well pursue it. For those who wish to finish the business of their life, ceasing to be a lich via wish or divine intervention might possibly be options, but they're risky and they definitely put you back on the path towards a true death. For most, ascension into a greater form is the only true exit, either via divinity or by becoming an astral being, more on that when we talk about demiliches later. Both options take immense amounts of time and effort, and in the case of becoming a god the lich either has to attack and defeat a god somehow - no light task even for an immortal archmage - or seek sponsorship from a deity both willing to uplift them to the heavens and who is compatible with the lich's newfound ethics.

The exit doors are all kinda scary, aren't they?

The Obituaries - Lich Variants

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that I, just now, brought up the idea that liches degrade and wonder why it didn't come up in the history of liches section way up there. This is where I repeat something I've repeated in every article so far and will repeat in every article after until people get it through their heads: in any fight between mechanics and narrative, mechanics win by default because they are the tools with which you actually interact with the game world. Which means in turn that you as a DM or a setting designer (or both) have a choice to make here; mechanically, nearly every lich feeds on their own fire, sovereign and sustained. I believe I've made a pretty good argument for the thematic value of that so I won't repeat it. However, there's something to be said as well for the drain of ages, the way exposure to the Negative Energy of their own undeath harms the lich's soul and requires answer.

There have been, over the years, many potential solutions to this. Many liches simply kick the can down the road as long as they can, inventing new and more elaborate spells to protect, shore up, or even heal their souls if they can, though that last isn't an option for every lich. Most will eventually predate upon a souled being, though again the idea is to minimize time out of the chair; summoning a Planar being and then devouring them works just fucking fine, and you barely have to walk the five feet to your ritual circle to do it. For the truly arrogant and brillaint, you can stop cutting into your chair time to eat souls if you could find a way to link your soul to a source of Positive Energy, renewing it with no further effort on your part, which has many obvious advantages and the slight disadvantage where the tiniest error will annihilate you instantly. As a result, most liches who grind their faces against this problem for thousands of years eventually seek an astral ascension or godhood to solve their problem. Godhood isn't the best idea, but it does solve the problem they want to solve.

In addition to this basic question of the sustainability of lichdom, there have been many variants of liches across D&D and Pathfinder. Here's a few of the more notable ones, and a refutation of a being often thought of as lich-like.

Balenorns (D&D) - I keep bringing them up, here they are. Invented by elves, the balenorn is a lich variant greatly concerned with not being a hole in the world. They achieve undeath through a wholly different process that does not produce or require a reliquary, instead using clone and a specialized spell that creates and sustains their undead state so that they can transcend mortal limits and mortal needs. Rare even in the context of the rarity of liches, balenorns are typically employed as the teachers of ancient and complex lore that cannot be written down (for reasons that might be sacred, practical, or traditional), as the guardians of holy places, or as something akin to park rangers for elven roams. They typically train their own replacements. A balenorn is an unambiguous candidate as an ally for a good or neutral-aligned party of player characters, and an interesting ambition for an elven spellcaster, especially one greatly concerned with the traditions of their people.

Dracoliches (D&D) - Pop quiz, what settings are dracoliches native to? If you answered anything but The Forgotten Realms I have some bad news for you! Though the idea of the dracolich has spread to fantasy in general and has many variations (Seath the Scaleless in Dark Souls comes to mind), the origin was in the work of Ed Greenwood, where it is wild as fuck. There's a cult that thinks they worship dracoliches but essentially worship Fantasy Nostradamus and they're trying to take over the world because they believe the world will be ruled by "dead dragons" and they are not chill about that shit at all. In an extremely related story, becoming a dracolich is not something a dragon can do by themself, and therein lies the trap. You need multiple high-level spellcasters to make a dracolich, and that in itself is a bit of an obstacle; dragons draw their personal space bubbles with maps. Then these high-level spellcasters need to talk the dragon into letting them turn it into a dracolich, which involves, at a bare minimum, THE DRAGON DYING AND LETTING THESE ASSHOLES FONDLE THEIR SOUL. But hey, say the wyrm goes through with it, its constancy is assured! There's just this small problem where all those high level spellcasters and their minions own its reliquary, know where it is at all times, and want the dragon's help taking over the world. Fucking oops.

Dracoliches are excellent 'active' liches and high-level threats who cannot have a normal relationship to lichdom because there's a gun to their head. They cannot control the fanatics who ostensibly worship them, and even if you take the idea outside of The Forgotten Realms I highly suggest keeping that push-pull relationship between the dracolich and its assistants, as it both impels the creature to be a threat of some kind and provides an angle for cunning parties to play both sides against the middle. It's a ton of fun, trust me.

A brief note for PF1e specifically; Pathfinder's liches can be "any living creature", so explicitly in Golarion a dracolich is just a normal lich and none of the above applies. They also don't get different abilities the way a traditional dracolich does. I'm not necessarily saying this as a criticism, just a 'keep this in mind'.

Psychic Liches (Pathfinder) - Rooted in Pathfinder's 'occult magic', psychic liches are the ultimate end point of its active liches; spellcasters who sustain themselves by turning the legends of their atrocities into a reliquary. They are, universally, idiots. Like, liches on Golarion are already having a bad time, they kinda have to do some high-profile shit just to become liches, but when you need to sustain yourself by continuing to commit herostratic crime eventually even the other evil people are going to come after your ass because they don't want to tolerate a wildcard. I am torn here, because on the one hand I find the concept deeply stupid, but on the other hand it being deeply stupid has narrative value. Then again, it only really works with occult magic or something like it, so, call your shot.

Forsaken Lich (Pathfinder) - The other end of the spectrum from the psychic lich, the forsaken lich is a load-bearing pillar of Golarion's lich worldbuilding; these are victims of failed lich rituals or spellcasters who accidentally (or on purpose) tried to use someone else's materials to become a lich. Most of them explode pretty quickly, and the ones that don't are bound to a single location which sustains them. Honestly they don't necessarily need to come up even in a lich-focused campaign, but their existence helps gird Golarion's themes around the uniqueness of lichdom and the soul. Rare Paizo W.

Horde Lich (Pathfinder) - This one is just funny and might be worth stealing for a non-PF system; horde liches are essentially normal liches, but they have built their undead bodies to be many bodies that they Voltron together, and which they can shed during combat to make additional minions. As boss fights go, a boss who is his own adds is deeply funny to me, and a potentially interesting tactical situation especially with a couple more elite minions (say, an evil Cleric) to back him up.

Demilich (D&D and Pathfinder) - So in Pathfinder and D&D 5e, a demilich is a degraded lich. In Pathfinder, they lose most of their spellcasting; in 5e, they're still a dangerous, high-level encounter that steals souls. Ultimately, though, they're the same concept, the idea of a lich's futile war with entropy finally being lost, and they're perfectly servicable in that role, though they are also, y'know, definitely in the vein of the original Acererak - this is a thing you find at the bottom of a dungeon and nowhere else.

This was not the case in prior editions. A demilich isn't even, metaphysically, the lich. The entity once known as the lich, seeking truer sovereignty (or, in extremely rare cases, an ethical end to their lichdom that isn't suicide) dedicates the work of ages to an Astral ascension, becoming a new kind of being further beyond mortal concerns - ironically, going through a process much like just dying in a regular-ass fashion from the other direction, as it turns them into a beast of Thought and Belief, much like a Petitioner or an Exemplar. However, this being still has strong connections to the mortal it once was, even though it has changed far beyond that person. These connections, especially its former reliquary, its last body, and its possessions, can be used to form sympathetic magical attacks against the ascended lich, and so they leave something behind that is a bit like a clone of themself, and a bit like a guard dog, and a bit like a door bell. This being is known as a demilich, and it is under the rather distinct impression (most of the time) that it's the original. They lurk in well-hidden lairs, either to receive an ever-dwindling list of acceptable visitors, to work on projects it believes are still important (and which the original has abandoned), or, you know, to kill anything that disturbs it on sight.

Official stats for these ascended liches do not exist. As plot hooks and opponents go, they're in the same sort of weight class as like, a demigod. But there remain narrative opportunities here, especially for those seeking truly ancient lore, or evidence of forgotten knowledge. Notable is that a lich who ascends to divinity may well prepare a demilich beforehand for similar reasons, and that entity is a self-protecting weakness; if you can cripple and capture it, you have something in your hands that might be used to attack a god, perhaps even usurp it. Awfully tempting, isn't it?

A brief note here; though the iconic form of the demilich is a yellowed skull with many soul gems inside of it, this has never strictly been a requirement. It's iconic for a reason, don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of the floating skull. However, those soul gems could be the joints in a skeletal hand, a disembodied spinal column, hell if you're running a comedy campaign make the poor thing a single leg with the soul gems as the toes on its foot. You really only need one relatively continuous body part that you can replace bones with gems on, you got options.

And now for the one I need to refute...

Siabrae (Pathfinder) - Click the link. Read the flavor. Read the abilities. Read the abilities again. Tell me if you spotted the problem. There's a lot I could say here about the blatant pillaging & blaspheming of Celtic faith (do you have any idea how hard you have to try to blaspheme there? It is genuinely fucking difficult), the internal contradiction of Paizo's own worldbuilding (how is a demonic corruption undead exactly?), the way the sustainability of these druids makes them a problem even more thorny and impossible than a normal lich, but I'm not going to do any of that. I am instead going to point out that these entities, being undead creatures sustained by and hellbent upon revenge, have more in common with ghosts and revenants than liches. Indeed, Pathfinder has a whole-ass ghost wizard running a necromantic nation! This is not a lich.

Lab Safety And Other Eternal Concerns - A Lich's Lair

There are certain universal concerns and incentives when designing a lair or other base of operations for a lich. Many of them are the same kind of concerns any high-level spellcaster may have! While the image of a lich simply moldering in her tomb is fairly accurate - given that a lich can devote literal centuries to really following a good train of thought down, chair time is most of their existence - they do have projects that they're working on. A lich attempting to make large-scale constructs or undead, such as, say, zombie giants, will need large open spaces. While a lich rarely has to worry about concerns like ventilation (which can make an underground lair extremely appealing as they do not need to compromise its structural integrity), an exploding alchemy lab may harm other projects; likewise, clouds of poison or toxic runoff might harm the lich's scrolls, tomes, holy texts, or delicately forged magical items, which means that like a living wizard, such labs go near the top floor. While smoke and soot from a forge will never affect the lich, it may damage its lair, and so such facilities may in fact need ventilation or even to be in a separate place from the main body of the lair itself.

There are, however, other concerns. Liches are holes in the world through which Negative Energy seeps; rarely do they find some pre-haunted forest to bury their tombs in, and instead they tend to be the generative cause of such hauntings, afflicting the living world with the abrasion of centuries. Young liches often do their best to mitigate this damage, as it's a fairly obvious sign of undead presence which in turn brings annoying people to their doorsteps, but at some point when you get up from a hundred and fifty years of high quality Chair Time it's just not worth the bother to clean up the mounting taint. This, then, becomes both the sole warning people get (posting actual warnings also brings annoying people) and the reason liches almost inevitably move to rural lairs far from the living. It's one thing when a stretch of an uninhabited forest is haunted. It's quite another if the city parks are.

That said, many liches will end up with more than one lair over the course of their unlife, for various reasons. Younger liches with more alive-seeming bodies, especially those who routinely interact with the living, may simply stay in their towers, mansions, or temples. There are many advantages to this, not least of them being that one has, presumably, already built the facilities. They're well-ventilated, hospitable to the living, not suspicious, and close to any business the newborn lich wants or needs to wrap up. These youthful liches may well be finishing the training of an apprentice or acolyte, preparing to create a new, more isolated lair, simply enjoying access to victims and/or kinky motherfuckers who want to get possessed (that particular entertainment can last awhile), wrapping up career obligations, under the mistaken impression that they can pretend to be alive long-term, or any combination of the above. Additionally, there is a certain adjustment period to lichdom. While the lich is now immune to, say, poison, a young lich may well still value safety features in her lab because she does not emotionally understand this; as Afroakuma put it, the situation is quite similar to getting a new upgrade in a Metroidvania that makes you immune to spikes, but forgetting this because it's so new. However, these relatively public abodes also come with a certain floor of scrutiny; with many eyes on the building, and potentially many wandering hands, keeping one's less savory experiments secret may be difficult, and as the lich begins to experience Chair Time or yearn for the same, the living become an annoyance. Those liches who remain in this position long-term are, inevitably, balenorns or those evil-aligned liches in a similar social position.

Most liches will be encountered in a kind of undead middle age. These are the liches who look like mummies or heavy metal album covers, and the ones who will be most commonly encountered, either by enterprising adventurers raiding their tombs or because they have emerged to enact something. They tend towards isolated, rural lairs for the reasons explained above, and almost all will eventually build something underground to better defend against scrying, teleportation, and other means by which annoying people might bother them. However, here we see a bit of a split. More arcane liches - bards, wizards, sorcerers, and the like - trend towards the classic tomb. Divine liches need sacred spaces to work with, and given the limited number of gods tolerant of lichdom many divine liches will be more active than their arcane counterparts. A lich sworn to, say, Bane, has some shit to do on a regular basis; a lich devoted to the likes of Mystra may be holding on to ancient traditions such as the now-forgotten rite of stocking dungeons with magical items before new monsters move into them (no, really, no, really). A druid lich may be protecting a sacred grove or holding back an otherworldly corruption such as a portal to the Abyss, and therefore ironically be among the least visible liches despite their Healthy Outdoor Living (it's not healthy and birds have eaten their flesh). While these liches have access to powerful teleportation magic and have had plenty of time to get used to being liches (lairs with no entrances may be favored as a result), there is still a certain appeal to...convenience. A lich who needs to operate a forge may well make her lair in the mountains so she can just go mine her own metal, for instance, while a lich devoted to a god likely needs to make his shrine at least theoretically accessible to other worshippers.

Notable for these middle-aged liches is that harm to the lich is less annoying than harm to the lich's possessions and projects. The lich repairs itself; bookshelves don't. Their magical traps and defenses often lean on necromancy, save-or-die effects, and items like the mirror of life trapping not solely out of malice (though, yes, callous cruelty is certainly a factor) but because a door that casts wail of the banshee on intruders doesn't fucking blow up their lab. If for some reason the lich has made a grievous mistake and needs these people to not be dead, imprisoned, or trapped in a mirror, their vast wealth and magical power often makes reversing the problem trivial; at worst, such as a person refusing a raise dead cast by the lich, they can mantle themselves in illusions and deliver the unfortunates back to a living person who can do that for the lich, and then get back in touch via magic to make whatever apologies, threats, or social calls might prove necessary. Nothing pisses a middle-aged lich off quite like her Chair Time being interrupted, so you can bet your ass she's going to handle her business quickly.

Elder liches are the rarest and also the hardest to categorize, because they are not really a function of time per se. Rather, an 'elder' lich is one that has gotten fed up with the limits of lichdom, and seeks an ascension to remove their final weaknesses, to escape the trap they have built around themselves. A lich seeking an astral ascension requires isolation so that they can devote absolute thought and time to the work. One thinking completely rationally may well build a new lair with no entrances or exits, such as a demiplane (through the spell of the same name) or by shapeshifting into an earth elemental before teleporting into solid rock to carve out a bubble in a mountain. However, a lich that has had enough time to work on ascension may well be under the impression that their current lair is just fine, and simply tighten the defenses while making it clear to any extant social contacts that they are going in for the best fucking Chair Time of their life and that they are not to be disturbed upon pain of death. This, then, is where we get demiliches in frontier tombs and forgotten ruins - the fruits of successful ascension, girded by the most formidible magics the lich could bring to bear in protecting any scrap of their old life that could be turned against them.

Seeking divinity is certainly the riskier and more high-profile option, making it seem more common than it is, but it is also the faster option. For many liches who decide to escape lichdom it might seem like the only option; their research has failed to uncover the possibility of astral ascension, they have powerful enemies hammering down the metaphorical gates, or they simply misunderstand divinity and are under the hilariously mistaken impression that being a god will make them ever-more sovereign and removed from the world. The advantages of seeking divinity is that gods are available to be usurped and have some very storied and famous histories of dying and being devoured that one can research, if not easily, at least more easily than figuring out how to transmute your soul from base principles. Slightly more complicated, but much safer, is attempting to ascend without usurping a god, which often involves gathering divine energy, scraping fragments of divinity from many lesser gods, and the like. However, even these 'safer' methods run into the politics of the divine, and not to put too fine a point on it, usurping a god means going head to head with a fucking god, who may well attempt to interrupt your attempt ON THEIR LIFE and whom you may need to defeat in single fucking combat. It's not easy, but the reward for success is divinity and all that implies. These lichgods are now beings of Belief; worse, their lichdom is now an inextricable part of their divinity, no more easily removed than Odin having only one eye. Many discover, too late, that while they are no longer dependant upon their reliquary, it now forms a weakness that they cannot destroy without harming their own godhead, chaining them to the items that have become part of their legend in a manner that tempts with opportunity and damns with vulnerability. Fucking oops. And since their lairs need to be somewhat accessible so that they can go on the adventures and quests needed for their fell purpose, congratulations to the newly divine lich - you need to get a church around fast, and get them to hide your shit for all your new life is worth. Good luck.

The Ungrateful Dead - Liches In Your Campaign

The following section covers liches in your D&D campaign from both a DM perspective and a player perspective. Talk to your fucking group and get on the same page if we're seeing liches on the player end, as this may well influence the players' plots relating to these liches! That said, let's start from the pure DM end.

...And Then The Body Moves - Liches For The DM

Consider the following when you're looking to introduce liches into your campaign and game world.

Sovereignty - You may be noticing up above that there are many versions of the ecology of lichdom, and they break down into two general camps. The first is that the lich is wholly not sovereign; she requires corpses to return from the dead, she needs to eat souls, whatever. The second is the 3.PF model; the lich needs nothing (except all the things she needs) and is wholly sustained by her own fire. Each approach has some advantages.

A lich that isn't sovereign is one that has a lot of angles of vulnerability. They become a sort of puzzle with many solutions; separate the lich from the ability to eat souls, burn her stash of bodies, destroy her reliquary, maybe even negotiate! Or run! These liches must be more actively cautious, and are ever-more inclined to be retiring and inactive as a result. These liches are great as random encounters, sidequests, and one-off antagonists, though they also have potential for recurring antagonists who are particularly subtle and concealed, moving in the world through minions.

The more sovereign lich is great as an active villain because they have less to lose and are less vulnerable. Narratively, this may be the strongest mode of the lich as the sole nearly-sovereign thing, with but a single grain of sand that gives lie to their perfection, is such a sharp contrast to player characters who are living things in a living world. The trouble is, this mode has not actually existed at the same time as characters that are living things in a living world. It exists in 3.PF, where characters are windup dolls who go on an adventure and then go into a closet when they're done. If you want this lich, you need something like the Bastion system in the 5.5 DMG, which strongly loops your character into the world and creates that contrast.

Either approach is good, but you're going to have to pillage mechanics and lore to fully commit either way.

Thematics - So uh, who is your lich? No, really - are they an arcane caster? A divine one? What sort of projects fascinate them and how might that theme their lair and defenses? Are they still holding a grudge about something, and do they bother to prosecute it? There's a lot you can do here, ranging from drawing on funerary traditions for their lair - for the morbid, realistic, or just culturally proud lich who has come to terms with their undeath - to emphasizing differences in how the lich casts spells (in a different language, with different somatic components...), even the language your lich attempts to speak to the living with might be relevant. Is that truly ancient being speaking in, say, Infernal because he's a piece of shit, or because he correctly deduces that Infernal has very little linguistic drift and someone educated in this group of intruders surely must speak it (other fun and potentially thematically resonant candidates for that include any of the elemental languages, Celestial, Abyssal, Dwarven, or Giant)?

I wanna say again that the classic lich look with the crown and the rotting robes and so on and so forth, it doesn't exist for no reason. The kind of mother fucker who sips the forbidden lean in the first place is pretty arrogant, y'know? But even if it's all a front, if that lich was never a king, never a ruler, never greatly respected by their society...if you intend to use your lich as a recurring antagonist, or a recurring ally even, it pays to pay attention to how they present themselves and the ways in which their lair, their attire, and their actions hint at who they are and how they think. A lich is not an alien malevolence from beyond mortal ken; quite the opposite. Give your players these hints and nuggets of information in good faith.

The Reliquary - Okay, so. Here's the thing. There is a sort of default dichotomy between liches and their reliquaries where either they hide their one weakness away as hard and deep as possible, gladly sacrificing convenience & access to their own possessions in exchange for a more certified revival, OR the reliquary is 15 feet away during the boss fight in plain view (thanks World of Warcraft). Lemme trouble this some. While it's quite true that the cautious lich may well go to a lot of effort to bury their reliquary deep, they do have like...needs? Needs and limits on their resources. Every moment spent gathering money to pay for a separate set of defenses and concealments, and then to maintain them, is a moment that does not involve Chair Time. In many cases an inactive lich "lives" near their reliquary because even for the undead convenience will beat out caution quite often - and with such dire defenses in place for their projects, what more could the lich do to make the reliquary truly safer, especially since putting it in a separate location means it loses an important line of defense in the form of the lich itself? An active lich has plans in motion which are going to be time-sensitive either from the lich's perspective or from an objective one, and they may well choose to rely on concealment over other forms of security; the bard lich published in Libris Mortis, for instance, uses a wooden spoon as her reliquary which is concealed in the castle kitchens where she works among many other such spoons. Is that the "rational" move? Sure! She's got shit to do! People to scheme against, a kingdom to take over, the living to manipulate, girl is on a fucking schedule - should her body be destroyed, she can't afford to tack even more time onto her 1d10 days of revival. She has willingly accepted a potentially greater risk of permanent destruction in the name of her goals, and if she survives that decision she may well have different priorities later in her unlife.

On the other end, a lich whose reliquary is there for the fight, there's a few ideas. The most obvious is that the party has found the reliquary of a more cautious lich and it has showed up to defend its one weakness; this can be great for a tense combat encounter in which stopping the lich from escaping is as important as attempting to kill it, especially if the players don't have control over the reliquary yet. However, I want to make a case for a lich that carries their reliquary around with them and what that might look like. It does seem, on its face, to be a fantastically bad decision, and indeed if you go this route the resilience of the lich is at least hypothetically very damaged. While spells like nondetection or magic aura can make the reliquary a less obvious target (potentially causing the lich to revive quite close to its slayers), it's a lot of risk regardless! So why? The easy answer might be that in your game world, it's required; the lich can only be sustained within a certain range of their reliquary, necessitating that they or their familiar carry it around. If they're going to have to carry it around anyway, they may well enchant it into a power source, a weapon, or other useful item; a ring turned into a reliquary is worked further to become a ring of spell storing, for instance, which also masks its nature as a reliquary and makes Ye Average Adventurer reluctant to destroy it. For more martial liches - your rangers, duskblades, bards, and the like - they may simply carry their reliquary around with some form of concealment or disguised form because they recognize that they cannot build the usual terrifying magical defenses that characterize another lich's lair; indeed, they may make an actual weapon into their reliquary and then enchant it further, relying on its power or curses layered into the blade to keep it safe.

Whatever route you take for your own lich(es), the thing to keep in mind is that you need a reason that your players can interact here. Certainly if you're better at the mechanics than your players are you can create an ironclad defense for your lich's reliquary that cannot be touched, but that's no fun, y'know? When deciding how the lich treats and defends her reliquary, look at her values, her goals, and most of all, the convenience and costs of her chosen solution. And while you're at it, go look at Crimeworld, published in Fate Worlds II: Worlds in Shadow and written by the writing lead from Leverage. It's from a different game system, sure, but the advice is invaluable in any context in which you want to think about the pressures and incentives of a character's security systems as well as for heist plots - and what is going after a lich's reliquary but a heist where the Score is the undead sorcerer's immortal life?

Lair vs. Bastion - The Bastion concept re-introduced in 5.5 (Dungeon Master's Guide, 2024) is the long-awaited official return of an idea that was last mechanized during AD&D 2e under TSR. It is, perhaps, worthy of its own article, but the brief summary is this: as the PCs level up, through their great deeds and accumulating wealth, they gain access to a building or buildings and land upon which they themselves may build further. The genius of the Bastion is to tie the player characters to the world, binding them strongly with the twin incentives of narrative power (favors from their lords, economic leverage, military might, information networks, and more) and mechanical benefits (item crafting, increased profit-making, access to poisons, generating Charms, and more), and in this way it is a much more elegant and refined variation on its predecessors. A Bastion binds the player characters to the game world before the Bastion itself is ever finished, and indeed it will only be finished at level 17 or so; for an adventurer's entire career, their Bastion - shared or solo - will be continually changing, continually being upgraded, continually altering in response to the events of the campaign, the desires of the character, and the interests of the player.

This is in sharp contrast to a lich's lair.

A lich's lair may have started much like a Bastion; indeed, a young lich's lair may well just be their Bastion, until or unless they relocate. But the pressures and incentives of lichdom will either force changes or relocation or both eventually. Some obvious things come to mind, chief among them being that unless the lich has made the extremely unusual choice to have living creatures in their lair (to get in-house access to spell components, say), it's not a place where people live. A lich's lair does not have bathrooms, kitchens, or food; with nothing alive in it, the lair might even lack dust. The altar to the lich's god may be quite "lacking" in offerings (temples in D&D don't like, heap gold that their gods eat - they're using the money they charge for their services to perform sacred works, lobby politically, and buy spell components, all things the lich likely isn't doing or may even travel to another temple in disguise to donate towards). Depending on the attitude of the lich, considerations like stairs and corridors might not be installed; while a lich has no need to display their magical prowess or install a teleportation circle (any visitor is already a failure of the lair), they may well consider temporary expenditure of their spell slots to be a good price to pay for the extra security turning their lair into disconnected rooms, being flight-accessible only, or even requiring incorporeality represents to be quite worth it. Indeed, even if the lich bothers installing stairs and corridors - perhaps to save those spell slots on the rare days they go outside - they may well keep their personal rooms behind permanent illusions and emerge into the "false" lair only to attack intruders or deal with projects that are less security-sensitive. "Hey Vox that sounds like Dark Souls," I have exciting news for you about where Miyazaki got it.

What this means for you the DM is that a lich's lair is a wonderful opportunity to contrast with your player characters and their dreams, ambitions, and changing lives. It's said that the best villains mirror the heroes in some ways, and honestly here's your chance. A PC wizard's arcane laboratory is full of plans and moving parts, pieces, components, forever being reshelved and moved around and in the glorious disarray of life; when she steps into the lich's ancient forge for magical items, which burns pure gold for a fire hot enough to fold magic to steel, is she unsettled by her own thoughts of magical convenience mirrored in this master of undeath? A cleric of Lathander entering the temple of a divine lich must grapple with the knowledge that this, too, is a holy place - a testament to the glory of the living world built by something profane. A bard runs her hand along the spines of books written in languages nothing living speaks and wonders: was this person like me, once? And the worst part is, yeah, the lich probably was. This ancient evil was just like you, once, and in some ways they still are.

You May Do It Once - So there's a concept that's crossed my dash a couple times here, and by God I wish I could find it and just link it; if y'all do, let me know and I'll edit the proper credit in here. The post in question proposes having liches cast spells from older editions, to represent their ancient sorceries and disconnection from the living world. This is absolutely hilarious and the worst possible idea and I love it. The downsides are obvious - there's a lot of work to be done in how the PCs interact with such magic (how does a dispel magic work in this context, especially with editions that use a separately tracked 'caster level'? How about counterspell? If you drag in, say, a darkness effect from an older edition, how would newer light effects interact with it? If you're using 2e style countermagic where specific spells can counter and dispel other ones, can the modern equivalents still do that, or newer spells like the older ones? Can the lich do that to the modern magic?), the game balance changes drastically, and not to put too fine a point on this one, spells older than 5e don't use Concentration, leading to buff stacking to an unholy and terrifying degree. You should absolutely not do this.

However, it is very funny and I encourage you to do it once. You get one shot per play group, and I might suggest in this context that it's done best in the specific form of an early encounter with the lich to demonstrate the problem, followed by a subplot about researching these ancient forms of magic and then the quest to confront the sorcerer and resolve that person somehow. Before you pull this ripcord, though, keep in mind that your players are gonna want to use this magic, and any excuses you have for why they can't are gonna scan like bullshit. Additionally, many settings - notably here to include Forgotten Realms - make changes to spellcasting diegetic, which is to say, these ancient sorcerers are swept up in actual alterations to the laws of magic themselves, and pulling this little trick may be in conflict with the lore of the setting. That isn't to say that you can't do it, but you either need to be prepared to say that this lich is an unusual exception or perhaps has an item that shields them from the changes (the latter is a great way to let your players have access to these spells) or to say that here at your table the lore will be different.

The esteemed Afroakuma on review of this section offered a pair of practical suggestions for giving players access to this older magic, should you choose to dance this dance. The first is that the remnants of these ancient sorceries require some manner of praxis that will die with the lich, the kind of thing so ingrained and obvious from the inside that the lich didn't bother writing it down. While this means the spells essentially die with the lich, magical items made by them - wands, staffs, scrolls, spell gems, and the like - still retain them, giving your PCs the ability to literally break the rules when it really matters to them without it becoming their number one option. The second suggestion is a more narrative problem; buried deep in the lore of the Planes is the Draeden Compact, an agreement between five unlikely signatories which, among other things, obligates them to cull the spread of magical knowledge from before the current iteration of the multiverse. The lich had some way to hide from the Compact, but your PCs may well only learn it exists when the Keepers (think the Men in Black) and/or the githzerai come after them and they realize they have a brand-new life problem that they could have a whole adventure about that lasts and lasts and lasts until the end of their careers.

The Skeleton War - Liches for PCs

Consider the following if you're looking to incorporate lichdom into your PC's backstory or character arc.

Peepaw's Off His Shit Again - Perhaps the easiest way to incorporate a lich into your player character's backstory and themes is to tie them to the ancient sorcerer directly. Back in the Paladin article I proposed the idea that a lich had sponsored a young paladin for mysterious reasons and I still stand by it, that shit fucks, but there are many more options. Perhaps your character's family is part of a business which unknowingly services a lich's research. A young bard finds an incomplete work whose creator mysteriously vanished, and it inspires her; later in her adventures, evidence of the work's author persisting emerges. A desperate peasant girl pacts with an ancient lich and becomes an Undead Patron Warlock, bound only partly willingly to a cult of Mellifleur, Lord of the Last Shroud. In his youth, a Cleric was brought back to life after a misadventure in the wilderness by a skeletal priest of his own god, and now seeks to understand what strange dogmas would drive one of the chosen many to seek immortality.

As a perpetual dungeon master myself, this sort of thing is pure gold to me, and working with your DM can get you a long-term character arc whose opposing figure can be dubious ally, villain, and mentor at turns. If your DM is less interested in that sort of thing, eat them while they yet live and get a better one. However, do keep in mind that the DM is gonna want to, y'know, add in their own plot twists, expand on the ideas you present, and generally have fun making the game world and story for you to confront and interact with. The ideal situation is a strong hook that can be fleshed out beyond your sight and brought back to you as something thrilling for you both.

Becoming A Lich - Don't.

Okay, that's not fair. The temptations of lichdom have a lot of dramatic potential going for them, and if you're playing in 4e or earlier the game bears it just fine with absolutely minimal problems on anyone's end. If this is a thing you want to explore in that context I don't even need to give more advice than you've already read to get this far in the article, so I won't.

The trouble is 5e and 5.5. These editions hard-code liches as enemies and give them access to Legendary abilities that are just not ready for PC use, to say nothing of trying to handle questions like their Immunities and Resistances. So the simple answer is: don't. Maybe you plan a story of temptation that will ultimately be refused, leaving the idea of becoming a lich on the table that will ultimately be declined, but like, what if you're playing an evil PC who doesn't give a shit about the moral cost of the forbidden lean? Perhaps new liches are not currently possible; the knowledge has been lost, fiends have moved away from this technology, the laws of magic have changed, the gods themselves are beating the ass of anyone who tries (if your character then proceeds to take on a god in single combat over their immortality and win...well, congratulations on becoming a god, that's a new set of problems and also handily blocks lichdom). This is by far the easier route as it avoids a great deal of mechanical problems and personal labor on the part of you and your DM and your group.

If everyone involved wants to do that work...well, I endorse the 3.5 model of lichdom in which you need to be at least level 12 to become a lich and that anyone who can cast spells could become a lich. The initial transformation should hand out the paralyzing touch, the lich's immunities and resistances, and the benefits of being undead; you already have the spells. As your character levels up, work with your group to figure out how the other abilities trickle in, and definitely save the Legendary abilities for later - level 15 at a minimum, maybe even level 17, trickling in over time as you develop off-turn actions. Keep in mind, though, that at that point you're kinda the main fuckin' character of every combat. Whose turn is it? It's your turn, every turn, and you're swinging the battlefield mightily. At that point your character arc is about your relationship to this heady rush of power and whether or not you understand and accept the dark bargain you have made for your sovereignty.

And that's our article folks! Usually this is where I toss in some homebrew or example characters and I might do so in a reblog later but the inspiration is not upon me at this time (new job got my ass in shambles). That said, if you found this helpful, entertaining, enlightening, or if you're simply burdened with wealth you can no longer abide, I did start a ko-fi recently and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Look forward to the next article on something at some future time.

[slyzia]

Unlikely Adventure

Wow first contribution to the Pokémon community hello!

This art was pretty self-indulgent. I imagine this happening because of like Professor Oak being like: “So Ash, there’s this like. Pokémon I want you to take a look at, and Gary’s coming with you. Cause… okay now go outside and get along” And then they just go on this trip absolutely hating each other and Gary once again just talking a lot of smack but they have to get along. Spoilers: they don’t at first, I’m sure they will have to work together and understand each other just more.

I just love them both sm!

ANYWAYS THANK YOU TO MY PATIENT LOVELIES ILL SEE YOU WHEN I SEE YA!

[kristalijah]

HE'S CHECKING OUT GARY!!!! I REPEAT, HE'S CHECKING OUT GARY!!!!

[creaturefeaster]

Why is Zack yelling at April:(

I just learned what the term "crashing out" means. it's because of that.

[natelia-aldelliz]

More ghost! Roach - Accidental Necromancer Soap AU : little moments

141 in the middle of a briefing, when suddenly Soap gasps, interrupting Price. Everyone turns to look at him and he looks back like a deer in headlights, apologises with a stammered excuse, something like he saw a spider or something, and the meeting continues with dubious looks.

"You're so bad at that," Roach giggles from where he's floating around above the table. "It wasn't even that big of a news, they were flirting for months! I have way worse, you know one of the Corporals under your command, the redhead one? She's been secretely married for years to the medic lady that stitched you up last week! Stop gaping at me, where's your pokerface oh my god-"

And then Soap uses all that information to win bets against Gaz.

Or also, Roach telling jokes while there's people around Soap. "Don't laugh," he taunts him. "Don't even smile or they'll know you're crazier than they think."

And then he tells the worst joke ever and Soap can't help the snort that escapes him and again, everyone turns to look at him.

"I can't believe you're laughing in a room full of explosives tied to people," Roach gasps, knowing full well that's exactly the result he wanted.

Soap rolls his eyes at him quickly and focuses back on defusing. He'll get him back when they're alone and he doesn't look weird talking to the air.

"He knows you find him hot, he's neither blind nor stupid," Roach says, peeking above Ghost's shoulder. "If you want him to blush you need to call him 'pretty'. Worked every time..."

And he's right. When Soap tells Ghost he's a bonnie lad, explains what it means, it's very obvious how flustered he becomes, and the visible part of the bridge of his nose gets very red.

"Be ready to be grabbed at every opportunity, his love language is physical touch but he'd rather die than admit it."

Roach has a bit of a poltergeist moment when he finds out he can touch things again. Cups go flying into walls, chairs move around, shoes disappear. Roach is very overwhelmed and gets non verbal, which is a bit hard because Soap only knows the basics of BSL and has to ask Ghost to translate by copying live what Roach is saying. (Ghost, who has seen the ghost of his dead lover save his life just a day before objects started flying, recognising in the back of his mind the quirks of Roach's way of signing being reproduced by Soap, but not willing to believe yet)

It lasts a few days and the whole base is convinced they're haunted by a ghost. They're not wrong, Soap wants to say. And not only one, but the others are far more apathetic, barely there.

Then Roach calms down, all at once, when he realises that maybe... maybe he can touch people too. He's very nervous. It's been years since he touched someone, years of his hand going through Ghost's arm as he tried to make him see him. Years of not feeling the warmth of a living being.

That scares him. What if he can touch Soap, but he doesn't feel anything? What if it feels the same as the glasses he's been trying to juggle for days?

So he waits until Soap is asleep and he holds out his finger, slowly, hands trembling, and presses it softly to Soap's forehead. He's... He's warm, he realises with a gasp. He's warm!

Soap wakes up to sobbing and soft fingers on his cheeks and in his hair. He gets reassured very quickly that it's happy sobbing and Roach kisses him.

Ghost, after learning about the ghosts existence, starts having really bad nightmares every night. Has to be reassured that no, he's not actually a ghost. He hasn't actually died in that grave, he's here, he's warm and he's alive and loved.

[no-place-to-be-happy]

Between Gary, Angel and Rocky, who's more likely to start panicking once Avocato/Husk/Mordecai says that "The baby is coming!"? Lol

Gary 🗿I don't know, I feel like Avocato tried to prepare him so he wouldn't panic, mentioning that things usually go well without much difficulty and stuff like that.

But NO, Gary will immediately go crazy. For a few minutes of course, Avocato threatened to knock him out if he didn't calm down :3 (empty threat but he was stressing him out)

[birdmenmanga]

hmm mixed results on the sleep thing... I did still dream of a "murder" but it didn't feel scary, it felt more like a setup for an escape room. there were maybe a dozen of us and we were all younger... middle school maybe? of old friends and acquaintances, and we were on some kind of field trip. it was the birthday for one of the kids and so a handful of people were trying really hard to surprise them with something nice so they kept trying to lie about where they had been during the free time we could hang out at the mall because they had actually been buying presents for the birthday kid. I wasn't really friends with the birthday kid so I mostly hung out with my own friends, and even while I was dreaming it became very obvious that this was starting to become some kind of conan situation where one of the kids goes missing and while I had an alibi and a ton of other kids did not. I woke up before the missing kid thing happened but I knew it was coming. you know how these things go

[dooxliss]

🚶🏽‍♀️ I'm here for my mario music association boss 🧍🏾‍♀️lolol

welcome! :]

peach beach (mario kart: double dash/mkw)

(still assigning mutuals mario songs :])

[sunni-stuff]

Part 1 This is part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

With the train ride now over, the sergeants ran, scouring the market for two familiar faces. Their footsteps in sync, crunching delicate mounds of white snow. Soap broke through the crowd first, then Gaz and Gary were right with him.

“Where the hell are they?” Gaz pants out, his breaths misting in the cold air.

“You said the marketplace,” Soap huffs.

“Yeah, I said the marketplace, but it's not like I know exactly where they went!” Gaz snaps back.

While the two sergeants bicker, Roach quietly breaks away, scanning the area until he spots the familiar figures they’d been hunting for. Price and Ghost stand outside a cigar shop, deep in conversation. The satisfied grin on Price's face tells Roach everything—he got what he was after.

“They’re over there!” Roach exclaims, snapping his partners out of their lovers' quarrel.

Gaz and Soap go silent, their eyes following Roach’s line of sight until they, too, spot their Lieutenant and Captain.

In a heartbeat, the three of them are sprinting toward their unsuspecting targets. Soap grins like a madman, practically buzzing with mischief, while Gaz shakes his head, both amused and slightly wary of what might unfold. Roach, meanwhile, is simply thrilled to be along for the ride.

They skid to a stop right in front of the two men, chests heaving as they catch their breath in the biting winter air.

“The hell is wrong with you lot?” Price’s voice cuts through, laced with a mix of annoyance and bemusement as he shifts his attention from Ghost to the winded sergeants.

Ghost, arms crossed, eyes them with quiet scrutiny. His winter coat does little to conceal his bulky frame, a silent reminder of his imposing presence as he stands beside Price.

Price and Ghost waited for an explanation, knowing well everytime those three got together, they were definitely up to no good.

Like how they put semi-permanent green dye in Ghost's shampoo for Halloween.

“We… we saw. A kid with your face,” Gaz manages, still catching his breath, pointing straight at Ghost.

Ghost raises a brow, baffled. A kid with his face? What the hell did that mean? Did they think he looked like a baby?

Soap huffs in mock disappointment, shooting a playful glare at Gaz. “Oi, I wanted to say it!”

Predictably, the two dive into another back-and-forth. Gaz isn’t one to shout, but Soap has a talent for riling anyone up.

Price lets their little show go on for only a moment before his stern voice cuts in, slicing through their bickering. “One of you properly explain, or you'll be walking back to base.”

Roach steps up, eager to clarify. “There’s a kid, probably about two, and she looks exactly like the Lt. Scowl, glare, and all!”

Price and Ghost pause, their expressions twisting as they both try—and fail—to imagine a little girl with Simon’s permanent scowl.

Price shudders, shaking the thought from his head. “That is not a face a kid should have.”

“That’s exactly what I said,” Gaz chimes in, nodding emphatically.

Ghost throws him an offended look, his usually hardened eyes showing a glimmer of hurt. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing!” they all exclaim in unison, even Price, who quickly averts his gaze as Ghost’s glare narrows on him.

Ghost huffs, then crosses his arms. “Did you take a picture?”

Soap snorts, leaning against the wall with a smirk. “Aye, right, 'cause that wouldnae be creepy at all.”

Ghost stares daggers Into Soap, rolling his eyes and pushing himself off the wall. “Okay, then where is she?”

The three stooges lead the charge once again, this time with their Captain and Lieutenant in tow. They weave through the crowd toward the train park, where Soap eagerly scans for the woman and kid he’d spotted earlier. But the line they were in is empty, the pair nowhere to be found.

“Shite. I think they’re gone,” Soap mutters, his Scottish accent thickening in his frustration, the words rolling out with a clipped bite. 

“So the imaginary woman and kid don’t actually exist,” Ghost deadpans, unimpressed.

“They exist!” Gaz insists, voice edging on exasperation.

“Sure,” Ghost replies, his tone flat and thoroughly unconvinced.

Roach snickers, then glances over at Price—only to see him staring slack-jawed through the window of a nearby café, his cigar dangling from his mouth, forgotten.

“Cap?” Roach says, touching the older man’s shoulder.

Price doesn’t look away, nodding toward the café. “Found them.”

Everyone turns toward the café, eyes landing on you and Adira. The little girl is happily weaving between your legs, her tiny hands gripping your coat as she entertains herself, all while you order hot chocolates to fend off the winter chill. A soft smile touches your lips as you watch her play, blissfully unaware of the audience gathering just outside.

The barista, with a warm smile, hands over two cups, one with a little extra marshmallows for Adira, her voice bright as she wishes you both a merry Christmas. You take the cups with a grateful nod, handing one to Adira. She immediately takes her drink, sipping eagerly, her small feet bouncing on her heels from the sugar rush.

“Yummy?” You ask, glancing down at her with a soft smile, a wave of motherly pride swelling in your chest as you watch her delight in the simple joy of her drink.

Adira nods eagerly, her eyes lighting up as she pulls away from her straw with a satisfied sigh. “Yummy.”

With a soft chuckle, you both leave the warmth of the shop, stepping out into the crisp air. Hand in hand, you walk back toward the park, the world around you feeling peaceful despite the cold. As you reach the crosswalk, you stop, waiting for the light to turn. Adira looks up at you, her little face filled with contentment as she swings your joined hands back and forth, her sugary energy still buzzing.

Across the way, the team stood frozen, unable to look away from the scene unfolding before them. Everyone but Ghost was struck by how much Adira looked like him—her features unmistakably mirroring his, save for the color of her hair and skin. The resemblance was uncanny, and for a brief moment, it felt like the world had stopped around them.

“She looks nothing like me,” Ghost stated plainly, his voice cutting through the stillness as though it were fact. His expression was unmoving, a wall of stubbornness in his eyes. He was ready to die on that hill.

Then, as fate would have it, a woman walking her dog passed by, and Adira’s cherub-like face hardened into a cold, calculating stare. It was subtle, but unmistakable. 

“Nevermind,” Ghost muttered, his earlier conviction faltering as he watched her shift before his eyes.

“So��� you’ve been having fun these past years?” Roach asked, his gaze flicking between Adira and Ghost, curiosity getting the better of him.

“Not that I know of,” Ghost grunted, his eyes still locked on you and Adira, a mix of unease and something else flickering across his face. He couldn’t pull himself away.

“Let’s get closer,” Price commanded, already making his move. Soap and Roach exchanged a shrug, falling in line without hesitation.

“Excuse me?” Gaz sputtered, though his body had already begun moving before his brain could catch up, unable to defy the Captain’s order.

Ghost fell silent, teeth gritted. This wasn’t a situation he was used to, especially not one where he was forced to go in blind. He stood stiffly at the crosswalk, trying to hide his glances, his focus split between the team and you.

Soap ended up the closest, standing just next to Adira. The little girl paused, her big, doe-like eyes lifting from her drink to catch sight of him. The recognition was instant. Her lips pursed into a small line, and her gaze grew heavy with annoyance. 

“Ugee…” she whispered, scooting closer to you.

Soap froze, his mind stuttering for a moment. Did she just—? Did she call me ugly?

Gaz, standing behind him, couldn’t contain himself. A muffled laugh broke through as Soap turned to look at the others, wide-eyed and speechless, completely taken aback.

“Do ye lot think I'm ugly?” Soap asked, his voice thick with disbelief, clearly thrown off by the little girl's words.

“Not the time, Mctavish,” Price said, a tiny laugh tugging at the corner of his lips despite the situation.

The streetlight flickered green, signaling it was time to move. You adjusted yourself, ready to cross the street. Each member of the team started mentally preparing, unsure of how—or even if—they should approach you. Ghost, however, was the first to make a move, determined to intercept you. But Soap, ever the opportunist, beat him to it.

Ghost wasn’t exactly subtle, and having him try anything would probably send you running in the opposite direction.

“Excuse me, aren’t you the lady from the train?” Soap called out, his voice light, though his intentions were clear.

You paused at his interruption, recognition flickering in your eyes. You remembered the man who bumped into you earlier. “Yes? Is something the matter?”

“Do you happen to know where I could find Leslies?” Soap asked, a hint of uncertainty creeping into his voice, though he tried to mask it.

“The pub?” you asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes,” Soap confirmed, his face lighting up with a mix of relief and surprise at your easy response.

You look around for a moment, trying to remember and see the street names of your current location. “Uh…it should be about a couple blocks south from here. They have a big sign, you can't miss it.”

Thank God for Soap, because that one question was all he needed to keep you trapped in a conversation, his charm working its magic as you giggled and chatted away easily, the awkwardness of the situation melting away.

Meanwhile, Ghost’s attention shifted to Adira. He looked down at her, and she, almost instinctively, looked up at him. Their eyes locked in a silent staring contest, each of them studying the other. The intensity in their gaze was undeniable, both sets of eyes reflecting the same quiet, unwavering strength. It was like looking in a mirror—a mirror that mirrored back his own hardened stare and no-nonsense attitude.

Adira was, quite literally, his mini me. The resemblance was impossible to ignore.

“How old are you?” Ghost asked bluntly, his voice low as he kneeled down to Adira’s height, his gaze intense but trying to soften.

Adira paused for a moment, glancing up at you for help, but you were still caught up in conversation with Soap. She turned her focus back to Ghost, her small fingers fidgeting with the hem of her coat as she murmured shyly, “Two…”

She was two. Two. Ghost’s mind raced, trying to piece together the details, but nothing clicked. Nearly three years ago… what had he done three years ago? He kept everything categorized, stored in his mind like a well-organized file system, but this was something that didn’t fit.

Then, Soap’s voice broke through his thoughts. 

“You don’t seem like the type of lass to frequent Leslies.”

You giggled, a soft blush creeping up your cheeks at Soap’s question. He wasn’t wrong… at least, not entirely. “I’ve only been to Leslie’s once, and, well… it’s how I ended up with my little blessing.” You glanced down at Adira, the warmth of your smile radiating as you spoke.

Everything shattered in that moment. Ghost’s stomach twisted painfully, his heart skipping a beat as the realization slammed into him like a freight train. Leslie's. Almost three years ago, during that stupid holiday.

His mind began to piece it together, the hazy memories from that night slowly coming into focus. He remembered the bar, the laughter, the way you had caught his attention. You were easy on the eyes, easy to make laugh, and most importantly—unlike everyone else. You didn’t ask questions, didn’t pry, you just let him lead, let him slip into the night with no strings attached.

But now, as he looked at Adira, everything fell into place. The way she stared at him, those familiar eyes, the resemblance he couldn’t ignore. His breath hitched, and the weight of the truth crushed him—she was his daughter.

A knot formed in his throat as he tried to process the fact. Adira. His daughter. The little girl standing before him was his flesh and blood, the result of a moment he'd long since buried in the depths of his mind.

---

Taglist: @auradaniela98-blog-blog @cumsluut @unstqblecvrses @moraxnomora @serafina-nyx @sage-burrow @skylarmitchell @xx-wal1flower-xx @n-y-x04 @gluttonybiscuits @imahugenerdlol @wehrgabriel @blackhawkfanatic @tazuduck @soxocs @jingyuansspouse @cutiecusp @sleepyoriana @forgottensomewhere @puppylikethedog @spongelistener @caged-birdies-blog @bubblegirll26 @misscaller06 @fuckbananas03 @watu2ka @yukisdelusional @redroserabbit

[ladadiida]

𝐩𝐮𝐭 𝐦𝐲 𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐨𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 | 𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐣𝐢 𝐱 𝐟𝐞𝐦!𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫

𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲 as much as you wanted to stay by his side, you couldn't bear the thought of watching him fall in love with other women while you're stuck at the kitchen washing dishes and measuring ingredients. so you dreamt of leaving, of traveling to different islands to share your lovely songs and tunes; but the more your desire to leave grows, the more sanji finds himself drowning in your warmth.

or,

you and sanji over the years, wherein five times you tried to leave him and the one time you finally did, despite his refusal to let you go.

𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐬 musician reader, 5 + 1 things, pining, unrequited love, not actually unrequited love, heavy (kind of) angst, fluff, hurt/comfort, angst with a happy ending

𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞 HERE IT IS! the response to the sneak peek was crazy, and so i rushed to get this done. i only watched the live action so beware of minor mistakes if you ever saw one. english is also not my first language and you are welcome to correct me anytime for any grammatical errors. title is a lyric from the last time by taylor swift ft. gary lightbody. this fic is also posted in ao3 with its full summary and WITH A BONUS CHAPTER. enjoy reading!

𝐰𝐜 11.3k

"There you are."

Your soapy, wet hands almost dropped the ceramic plate you were currently washing in the dirty kitchen sink as soon as you heard a familiar smooth and honeyed voice. Abruptly turning off the sink so that the sound of his approaching footsteps were clear to your ears, you wiped the sweat off your forehead with the back of your hand before turning your body towards him.

He was carrying a stack of plates, a fresh batch to add to the pile you had to wash, with an obnoxious yet handsome smile plastered on his lips. You took a deep breath to calm the growing irritation at the bottom of your stomach, reminding yourself that this was your job and you only had a couple of hours to endure until you're free to lock yourself up in your bedroom. You were particularly looking forward to writing today, and the thought of finishing the lyrics to your new song tonight slightly eased your mood. Accepting your fate, you pointed to the remaining space beside the sink.

"Place it there." You told him, albeit begrudgingly as you turn on the sink again and pour more soap on the battered sponge.

You took a mental note to ask Zeff later about buying new sponges, and if you were lucky to catch him in a good mood, you'll put in a request to get the sink fixed and cleaned. Your eyes scanned over the grime and rust around the area. If you were going to spend the rest of your life washing dishes, then you might as well get a proper kitchen sink to do so.

An amused laugh fell out of the golden haired man you grew up with, surprised at your compliance to do the job you hated. The sound nearly sent your poor heart into a dizzying whirlwind of little nuisances called emotions. "What a hardworking woman."

"I could say the same to you. It seems like you have a new record today." You said while you splashed dirtied bowls with soap water, smiling at him teasingly, "Thought you would've been kicked out of the line by now."

"The old man just can't help but to accept the fact that I am a greater cook than him." He smirked, wiping a knife with a dish cloth. Trying not to roll your eyes, you shook your head at his usual display of arrogance, yet you can't help but to grin as you began to hear scratching sounds against the floors.

"Then you better get those chopped carrots ready." You replied, and when you got to finish your sentence, the doors to the kitchen swung open, revealing the head chef.

Zeff's cold and steely eyes immediately landed on the blond. He walked towards him with a fast pace despite only having one leg, his braided mustache bouncing in each step.

"Aye, aye, aye. Why haven't you started on the carrots yet, little eggplant? Can you get any slower?" He scolded, loud enough for the whole staff to hear, but none of them even flinched. You returned back to your plates and glasses, smiling softly. This was part of your routine everyday: to listen in their silly arguments.

However, before the younger chef can reply, you butted in, "Sanji fetched some of the plates for me. Since there's a lunch rush, I couldn't leave the kitchen."

Zeff let out a low hum. You couldn't even see Sanji's face, but you knew him well enough to know that he was smiling triumphantly, knowing that he won this time. After a few minutes of contemplating, the head chef clicked his tongue. "Don't defend him, little lass. But I'll let it slip this time. What are you waiting for, then? Start cutting them!"

"Yes, chef." Sanji answered in a jovial manner, placing the carrots on a chopping board.

Twisting the faucet lever so that the water flow from the sink is gentle and quiet, you then paid attention to their little banters every now and then. You brought up a wine glass and positioned it by your side to try to get a glimpse of the two most important men in your life. Through their reflection on the glass, you can see Zeff hunching over Sanji's knifework, nodding every time the vegetables were correctly sliced.

On the other hand, Sanji was unbothered by the head chef's observations and continued to cut the ingredients calmly. Some of the strands in his hair fell down on one side of his face, covering an eye, and most people would think that it was an unusual way of styling hair; yet it was one thing out of many that you loved the most about him.

You accepted it years ago.

You accepted the fact that you somehow fell in love with Sanji Vinsmoke along your weird journey of working in a sea restaurant full of former pirates and making music while at it. How the pesky feelings grew and wrapped themselves around your aching heart, you didn't know. Maybe it was when he learned to cook your favorite food and gave it to you afterwards, or the way his crystal blue eyes reminded you of snowflakes every winter.

Or maybe it was when he pulled your hair out of jealousy the moment he learned that Zeff would be taking in another child in his care, but brushed it and even braided it after the latter cleared the misunderstanding. Maybe it was when he supported you in your dreams and told you they weren't silly, maybe it was when he fought off drunk men that were trying to hit on you. Or maybe it was the way his voice would drop an octave lower whenever he asks you for a favor. The list could go on and on and you still wouldn't know the reason why. It doesn't matter anyway. You tripped, you fell, and now you're pining.

Drying off the last of the plates, you washed your own hands after and patted them dry on your skirt. You were the last one to leave the kitchen, the other staff already back in their quarters after a long, exhausting day of cooking. You fixed the signature blue bandana tied in your hair then went on your way towards the upper deck.

You weren't blessed with a talent in cooking, so you offered to do chores instead. Washing the dishes, cleaning the restaurant, and doing the laundry were few of the things you do in the Baratie. You can't say that you enjoy it, but you were beyond grateful that Zeff gave you a chance despite his opposition to let a woman work inside his restaurant.

As you were about to go to the newly laundered clothes you hung on a thin wire earlier that morning, you heard two voices speaking. You also smelled cigarette smoke wafting through the air, and you only knew one person who could be smoking at this hour. Your breath hitched in anticipation.

"You bringing a woman to your bed again, Sanji?" The other person asked playfully, but there was a hint of disbelief in his voice. You carefully took a peek so you won't accidentally reveal yourself and be accused of eavesdropping. Two people came into view with their backs facing you.

"Now, what are you talking about, Patty? I am a gentleman. I only had a nice chat with the lovely lady and escorted her back to her ship." Sanji interjected, a cigarette hanging on his lips.

Patty huffed. "I didn't know that chatting included kiss marks on jawlines."

This caused Sanji to laugh and say, "Not my fault she was charmed by my food."

"The boss man ain't gonna like it when he finds out about this."

"He's not gonna find out." Sanji assured him, wiping off the said kiss mark on his jaw. You stared at him as he did so, and you pitied the woman who planted that kiss, knowing she was just one of the many beautiful ladies Sanji had flirted with before. However, a tinge of pain in your chest said otherwise, taunting you that it was not pity you're feeling, but foul jealousy.

"Why don't you look for more decent women, eh? How about 'little lass' for a change?" Patty suddenly suggested.

It was like someone had hit your stomach with one of the metal pans in the kitchen with the way it lurched in surprise and nervousness. Your heartbeat started to quicken the longer you waited for his response, making your grip on your skirt tighter. In moments like these, you allowed yourself to hope, to wish that he saw something in you and that he finds you beautiful and lovely enough to be the person standing by his side.

But his answer made all that hope crumble down into nothing but dust.

"I don't see her that way." Sanji said after a long stretch of silence, taking a long drag from the cigarette then releasing the smoke in a single breath.

Ah.

You blinked repeatedly, trying to keep the tears from forming. It's always been like this, so why can't you get used to it? Taking a deep breath, you gulped away the knot forming in your throat and decided to leave. You can grab the clothes later.

"You're too kind for him." Someone behind you spoke, making you jump and tense up. Turning around, you saw Zeff looking at you with an unreadable emotion in his eyes and his hands on his hips, almost like he knew your secret. Of course he does. He always sees everything.

You stumbled on your words. "Sir?"

"That boy is always up to something." He began, switching his attention to Sanji. "One minute he's stubbornly immature in the kitchen, and the next he'll be a thirsty man staring at women like they're liquid booze."

Clearing your throat, you forced a smile.

"Well, he can be a lot sometimes." You agreed, remembering the days when the two of you would fight over irrelevant matters. Then you chuckled and continued, "But he's kind. He's gentle, and lovely, like a freshly made poem you keep repeating in your head. But then he's also confusing, hot-headed, and reckless. He's like the sea, isn't he? Calm yet wrapped with mystery, dangerous yet beautiful..."

You trailed off, an unbearable heat rising up your cheeks and neck once you slowly began to realize that you just ranted out your feelings to the head chef. You glanced at him with wide eyes, preparing to see a disgusted look on his face; however, Zeff didn't appear to be repulsed by your little speech. In fact, the corners of his lips were slightly quirked up.

"But I cannot swim. If I were to drown, he wouldn't save me." You quickly added, hoping to shut down the topic.

He sighed. "You will meet someone who deserves you as much as you deserve them, little lass." He simply said. He then laid his hand out, and on his palm was a little box poorly tied with a ribbon. "Here, for you."

Altnough you were a bit confused at the random gift, you accepted it and cradled the box to your chest. "I'll be okay, Zeff." You insisted, grinning cheekily. "When I become famous, I'll sing my songs here in Baratie, and people would flood the restaurant to hear my singing. And to eat your food too, of course."

The head chef nodded, relief flooding his expression. "I look forward to that." He said while awkwardly returning your smile.

That night, when you were sure that everyone in the Baratie was asleep, you opened the loose floorboard on the floors of your bedroom and grabbed the wooden box you kept hidden for a long time now. You opened the lid and began counting the Berry you saved for the past few months.

Tomorrow was the perfect day to leave.

You just can't stay here. Yes, you had a roof over your head, delicious food to eat everyday, and clean clothes to wear but you were so miserable. This wasn't the life you wanted. You wish to go out there, sing your heart out, and fall in love with someone who actually loves you back.

A knock on your door made you freeze. You held your breath as the person on the other side continued to knock a few more times. "You awake?"

Pain surged through your veins, your chest twisting in agony. Sanji.

"You didn't come down for dinner. I guess you're too tired, hmm?" He said, his muffled voice gentle, and the sound almost prompted you to stand up and open the door for him. But you dug your fingernails in your palms and resisted, because you can't just let this opportunity pass by.

You heard a brief clinking sound before Sanji spoke again, "Sweet dreams, ange."

Once his footsteps faded away, you cautiously moved towards your door and opened it as quietly as you can. There, on the floor, was a small plate with a slice of your favorite desert: angel's food cake, topped with fresh cream and strawberries.

You bent down and saw a note beside the plate. And when you got to read the contents of the note, you burst into tears and sobs that wracked down your entire body.

Happy Birthday

— S.

You ate the cake with tears silently falling down your cheeks, and that was the first time you failed to leave Sanji Vinsmoke.

⸻ • ⸻

Today was the day, and you won't allow anyone to ruin it for you.

You had saved enough Berries to travel around the world and sustain yourself for the upcoming months. Your notebook containing the lyrics of the songs you wrote laid open on top of your bed as you spent all night revising them while planning out an itinerary. Then you'll find a place to settle in, a stable job that required doing what you loved the most, and overall just be peaceful and free from pirates and chefs and pirate chefs. It was perfect.

Folded clothes surrounded you everywhere, ready to be packed in your bags. Once you finished stuffing them all in, you grabbed your treasured instrument, the one thing you couldn't live without: your guitar, which has been with you since you were a little child. It was given by your mother and you've been attached to it ever since.

It has scratches all over its wooden surface, and the strings needed some fixing occassionally, but you wouldn't trade it for the greatest treasures in the world. You ran your fingers over it, suddenly feeling like it was lacking something. Seeing the paint chipping off at the corners, you figured that it needed a little color.  You'll need lacquer, and paint if you managed to find some.

You set the guitar aside and left your bedroom to head downstairs to the kitchen. As you were about to push the doors open, a loud, angry shout made you stop in your tracks.

"I won't ever become a pathetic waiter for you!" Sanji's thunderous yells can be heard from outside. Your shoulders tensed up. It was a good thing that brunch was over and all the customers had left.

Zeff's own furious voice followed, "Leave then, for all I care! You can do anything you want, but don't you ever serve one of your shit dishes in my kitchen!"

A frown settled on your face. Their fights were a normal occurrence to you, but this one sounded more grave than usual. Crossing your arms, you stepped in closer to the entrance and hesitated whether you should go in or not. Before you could make a decision, Zeff beat you to it by pushing the doors open, rage emanating from his figure as he ignored and walked past you.

Without hesitation this time, you entered the kitchen, greeted by the sight of Sanji bowing over the counter, breathing heavily, his face covered with his hair. He didn't move an inch even as you approached him, the clacking of the heels in your boots echoing throughout the room.

Both of you were silent as you rummaged through cabinets, trying to find lacquer to cover your guitar with, while he tried his best to calm himself down after his outburst. Many cupboards later, you finally found a small can of used up lacquer, but as you started to reach for it, your hand completely stopped mid-air.

You looked over your shoulder, and found Sanji already recovered from the argument seeing that he was on the move again, preparing a cut of beef tenderloin and other ingredients he needed for tonight's dinner.

Slowly, you closed the cupboard and went closer to him. He still refused to look at you. And so you watched him place a bag of flour on the countertop, slices of cold butter, and a variety of spice bottles to season the meat with.

Sanji began to wrap twine around the beef tenderloin. You sighed, and before you could stop yourself, you grabbed a bowl and decided to help him. Your guitar can wait.

It was rare for you to cook inside the kitchen, having so little knowledge about food and how they were prepared, but you knew this recipe well. You poured two cups of flour through the sifter, followed by placing heaps of the cold butter in the mixture.

The moment you started to mix the dough for the puff pastry, Sanji quickly pointed out in a monotone voice, "You're adding too much butter."

You raised your head and glanced at him, his attention now on the meat he was searing on a skillet. You smiled, glad that he was speaking again.

"You're beginning to sound like the old man himself." You joked lightly.

His jaw clenched. "Don't compare me to that shitty geezer."

In a softer voice, you asked, "What happened?"

"The usual." He replied curtly. "Didn't approve of my dishes."

You perked up upon hearing about a dish he made himself. Sanji was talented when it comes to creating his own recipes, and sometimes, you would be the person he chooses to test them out. Every time he lets you taste them, your chest would feel warm and you wouldn't be able to sleep for days because you'll keep replaying it in your head. "What did you make this time?"

"It doesn't matter. He'll never agree to any of them."

"Maybe I can—"

"Drop it. Don't poke your nose in things you're not involved." Sanji cut you off, his hardened gaze meeting your concerned stare. You only blinked at him, straightening up.

"I see." You muttered, eyes landing on the bag of flour. You looked at him, then at the flour, then back at him. A smile began to form on your lips as a devious plan formulated itself in your brain. Sticking your hand inside the bag of flour, you took a fistful of the pillowy powder and threw it straight into his face.

Sanji jumped back, flinching and closing his eyes when some of the flour's particles managed to enter them. His jaw dropped open in surprise, hands quickly removing themselves from the skillet's handle to dust off the flour that rested on his now white hair. You tried to stifle a laugh as you watched him struggle getting the flour out.

Once he managed to clean himself, he stared straight at you and said in the calmest way possible, even if you knew deep inside that he was fuming, "What was that for?"

A high-pitched snort left your mouth. You covered it to prevent yourself from laughing.

You cleared your throat and smiled at him innocently. "Am I involved now?"

His piercing blue eyes then started to sparkle with mirth, amusement replacing the vexation previously swimming in them. He also looked to be trying to push down a smile, and that made your heart skip a beat. "You're insufferable."

He reached for the bag of flour. You squeaked and took off running, trying to escape from his attack, but he still managed to throw a small amount on you. Giggling, you ran the opposite direction to confuse him, and yet he caught up with you, throwing another round of flour. This time, it hit your cheeks, making you laugh loudly. He laughed along, pointing a finger at you because you probably looked crazy at the moment.

You tried to take the bag of flour away from him, but he just took it an as opportunity to catch your arm and grip it firmly. He pulled you into his chest, caging you completely.

With your cheeks warm and your breaths short, you tilted your head up and looked at him, noticing the way that you were both covered in flour; and not only that, you also noticed the short distance between your bodies and how your noses were almost touching. His pupils were dilated, black dominating the alluring blue shade that kept haunting your dreams. You drank in the attention he was giving you, the breathing coming out from his soft lips, and the comfortable silence that wrapped around the both of you like a safe little bubble.

"Caught you." Sanji muttered, voice deeper and huskier, making you let out a quiet sigh. His arms snaked around your waist as he leaned in closer. A million questions started to run inside your head, begging to know what this situation was and how you got into it. "Nowhere to run now, darling."

A slamming of doors shattered the secret moment you shared, and you immediately pulled away from each other. You pushed down your disappointment and hid it in the secret crevice in your heart as the two of you faced your intruder.

Zeff observed your flour-laden figures, his thick eyebrows scrunched together in irritation. He then demanded, voice seething and dripping with anger, "What in the hell are you two little brats doing?"

Sanji blurted out in defense, "Zeff, we—she was the one who started it!"

"And you went along with it!" You accused incredulously, grinning from ear-to-ear. Sanji grinned back, shaking his head and biting his lower lip.

"Oh, shut up before I stitch your mouths! Just by looking at you two, I already know that you snot-nosed shits are both at fault!" Zeff shouted, clicking his tongue at the sight of the half emptied flour. "Wasted them good flour for your childish fights. You're even worse than fatwits. Get out and clean the toilets!"

"Not the shitty toilets!" Sanji groaned, and you couldn't blame him for it. The bathroom area smelled revolting and the floors were always wet for some reason.

"I don't wanna hear complaints from you when you've dirtied my kitchen! Off you go!" Zeff dismissed, and you can't help but to laugh again when you saw Sanji pout like a little kid.

The head chef watched the two of you leave the kitchen together while giggling and exchanging fond looks. Patty, who also saw the whole situation unfold, suddenly appeared beside him, snickering, "I can already hear the wedding bells ringing."

Zeff took a deep, tired breath.

"Oh, they're ringing alright."

You cleaned and scrubbed the toilets the entire afternoon with the man you're in love with, flushing your plans down the drain and forgetting all about them, and that was the second time you failed to leave Sanji Vinsmoke.

⸻ • ⸻

You didn't know how you ended up in a ship full of pirates.

Well, maybe you knew. A little. But it wasn't supposed to be like this.

Your knuckles were beginning to turn white with how tight you were clenching them. A mix of emotions swirled around in your chest, namely confusion, impatience, and hesitation, pondering about whether you should be irritated at yourself or at Sanji.

The opportunity was there, handed to you like a steak on a golden platter, or a miracle that suddenly fell from the sky. The day you met Luffy and his strange pirate crew was the day you immediately realized that he was the key to your exit from the Baratie. He was friendly; a good pirate, according to his own words, so you figured he would allow you to tag along for a while until you find an island to get off to. You just had to ask for his permission and wait for his reply.

Luffy agreed. And you were ecstatic. You were finally going to leave Sanji Vinsmoke and your pathetic, unrequited feelings behind.

Or so you thought.

You watched in horror as he followed you when you boarded the Going Merry, also carrying a bag of his own. He said something along the lines of Luffy needing a cook for the journey to the Grand Line but you couldn't care less. You got here first. Why was he here?

So here you were, sitting in a corner, lonelier than ever and regretting your life decisions. You watched Luffy and his friends celebrate after defeating the pirate Arlong and saving Coco Village from his inhuman hold over its people, but Sanji and the beautiful orange haired Nami were nowhere in sight.

The thought of them being gone together at the same time left a bitter aftertaste on your tongue.

Nami. The first time you laid eyes on her, ethereal was the word that came up to your mind. With soft deep saffron locks that framed her small face and a wide blue eyed gaze, she would have the cruelest of men begging for mercy and affection at her feet.

Unfortunately, Sanji was one of those men.

Fuck, you cursed mentally, rubbing your face with your hands to try and forget about the times he flirted with her and the moments he wouldn't stop talking about her or kept asking about her favorite food or dessert or if she's into blonds. Your already battered heart doesn't need the usual reminder that he'll never see you that way, that you weren't going to experience his sweet words and his loving gazes.

You took a sharp breath. It's okay, you tell yourself over and over again until they were buried in your heart. They'll make a great pair, Sanji the cook and Nami the thief. A strong man with an equally strong woman. Yes. That makes sense.

You'll leave soon anyway, and you'll no longer have to worry about seeing them or how they were going to end up together.

And yet you can't help but to think about the things that could've been if you were the one he was in love with instead.

You were crossing your arms and hugging yourself as the crisp afternoon air was getting chilly when a hand gripping a shot glass filled with amber liquid appeared in front of you. Looking up, you saw Luffy smiling widely at you, waving the glass encouragingly.

"Come on, just one drink! Usopp poured this for you!" The captain exclaimed heartily, obviously trying to uplift your spirits and to make you feel welcomed in his crew, even though you did nothing but to guard the Going Merry while they were fighting for their lives.

You shook your head and smiled politely. "No, I don't drink. Sorry."

Luffy's smile faltered, but he recovered quickly. He nodded, setting the glass down on top of a barrel. "Well, okay." He said, then turned to Usopp, who was currently downing a whole bottle of whiskey. "Hey, where's Nami?"

"Oh, she's with the cook," Usopp replied cheekily, wiping his mouth after drinking. There was a teasing tone in his voice as he continued, "Someone's getting a boyfriend tonight!"

With that said, you reached for the shot glass that Luffy was offering you earlier, grabbed it swiftly, and poured the whole thing down your throat. The whiskey tasted unfamiliar, and it burned and made you dizzy at first taste, but it doesn't matter; as long as it can make you forget just for a little while, you were willing to drink more of the horrible beverage.

Zoro, the green haired swordsman and the captain's first mate, stared at you as if you had lost your mind, but a tinge of concern was visibly written on his face. "Woah, slow down." He warned sternly.

"I thought you didn't drink." Was all Luffy said, blinking in confusion. You chuckled tiredly.

"Now I do."

Drink after drink, glass after glass. You lost count on how many times Usopp poured whiskey for you, or how many times Zoro shook his head in disbelief. Luffy was the same old happy-go-lucky captain throughout the disaster that was starting to brew inside you, turning your brain into mush. You can barely lift your head or your fingers as you asked for another shot in an incoherent voice. Luckily, Usopp was still able to understand you, tipping the whiskey bottle yet again towards your glass.

You started to raise the glass to your lips, eager to just get severely drunk and be over with it already. However, you suddenly felt strong fingers wrap around your wrist to stop you from drinking; and when you caught sight of a familiar silver ring with Baratie's jolly roger inlaid upon it, you didn't need to look up to know who it was.

Sanji's voice was unnervingly calm as he questioned the crew, but the slight shake in his words lets you know otherwise. "Which one of you allowed her to drink?"

"No one. She took the glass and made the decision herself." Zoro drawled, challenging the chef, "The last time I checked, waiter, you were supposed to be the one responsible for her."

Sanji ignored him and turned his attention to you. He stole the shot glass away from you, then kneeled and held your hands comfortingly, smiling. "Come on, ange. It's time for you to rest now." He said quietly, yet loud enough for only you to hear.

You stubbornly shook your head repeatedly and whined loudly. "No! Don't touch me!" You cried, prying your hands away from his, "I don't like you...!"

Zoro huffed in amusement at your declaration. Sanji glared at him for a short second before looking at you again. This time, he stood and gently placed his arms under your shoulders to raise you up. Once you were standing on your feet, he swept you up and carried you bridal style with ease. Another whine escaped your lips.

"Put me down! I want another drink, please, just one more!" You pleaded while throwing weak punches on his chest. Sanji only smiled and began to lead you towards the sleeping quarters. You continued to thrash in his arms as he walked slowly and in small steps so he wouldn't drop you.

Sanji carefully set you down on your hammock. "No drinks for you until you actually learn how to take them." He told you, tucking a stray piece of your hair behind your ear. His thumb caressed the soft skin of your cheek and rubbed it in circles, noting how fast you were heating up due to the alcohol. You pouted.

"Pretty please, Sanji...please..."

He chuckled, staring at you intensely. "Maybe some other time, ange."

You went quiet, staring back at him with half-lidded eyes. Then, you crossed your arms like a child and asked, "Why do you keep calling me that?"

Sanji raised a brow. "Call you what? Ange?"

You nodded. "I don't like it."

He began to smile, the dimples on his cheeks appearing. You briefly wondered if he'd allow you to poke and feel them. "Why?"

"I don't know what it means. Is it an insult?" You wondered aloud, your eyes widening in curiosity.

A hearty and warm laugh came out from Sanji, his eyes forming half-moons as he cackled at your words like they were the biggest joke he heard in his entire life, "Oh, my dear girl, how could I possibly insult you?" He managed to speak between laughs, "It means angel. You're an angel, to me at least. My angel."

Oh.

Your lips parted in surprise. Blinking, you simply said, "You're not Sanji."

He's not Sanji. He wouldn't call you angel; you're not even sure if he found you beautiful or attractive. You wear the same old tattered dresses that Zeff bought for you a long time ago, and you didn't even bother to style your hair or put on face powder like all the other beautiful ladies do. You look nowhere near to an angel.

But Sanji only grinned. "I assure you, I am very much Sanji. The little brat who pulled your hair when we were barely eleven years old."

Your breath hitched at the thought of him remembering one of your fond memories in your childhood. "You remembered."

"Of course I remembered." He whispered, cupping your cheek one last time before he got ready to leave. He turned on his heel and was about to walk away when you spoke.

"Are you going to see her again?" You asked, and he quickly noticed how broken your voice sounded. Sanji faced you in concern and was taken aback with how deep you were frowning. He figured that you were just drunk and women tend to be different when they were intoxicated. You were no exception to that, it seemed.

"Hm?" He hummed, prompting you to elaborate further.

Tears began to form in the corners of your eyes. You shakily mumbled, "Nami...you're going to Nami, aren't you?"

Sanji froze, an icy cold rush filling up his body. A knot formed in his throat, and it continued to tighten the longer he stared at your face. You looked so hurt—like he just destroyed your beloved guitar into pieces. Your lower lips were trembling, your eyes glistening with unshed tears. For a moment, he couldn't find the courage to answer you, feeling like he could die at any second now if he answers your question.

But the answer was simple.

"Yes." He breathed out, a sharp pain stabbing through his heart.

And it only became worse when a teardrop finally rolled down your cheek. "Why?" You rasped, and Sanji didn't know that a single word can hurt this much.

He tried to give you a reassuring smile but awfully failed to do so. He started to explain, "We were just discussing something—"

"Why not me?"

Those three words coming out of your mouth felt like a final blow to his heart. He can feel himself bleed, drained of life and soul because of you and your words alone, and he let you. He let you kill him, he let you make him swim in his own guilt and he doesn't why, why, why.

More tears fell out of your angelic eyes, staining your cheeks with wet trails, and he tried to hold himself back from wiping them off. You choked out, "Why not me, Sanji? I have been asking myself that question for the past decade, and it eats my brain every night like some kind of plague, but I let it anyway. Because why? Why can't you just recognize me and appreciate me and see me? Why can't you go to me if you want to talk about your dreams, or what dish you're planning to create? Why do you have to seek solace in other women when you have me standing by your side everyday, me who is willing to listen to you and whatever you have to say?"

Angry, red rimmed eyes glared at him. Your hair strands stuck to your skin and framed your face as sweat began to form on your forehead. Teardrops clung to your wet eyelashes and your face was drenched like you just took a swim in the ocean. You were burning with fury and rage and want, struggling to breathe properly after your little rant, and Sanji thought you couldn't be more beautiful. You were so beautiful.

"Oh but I couldn't blame you for that. She's just so beautiful, so perfect, and so strong. She could give you anything you wanted and she could be anything that I never was." You hiccuped, smiling forcibly, "But in the end...I will still love you. I will always love you. I think."

You scooted closer to him, leaning in until your faces only had a few inches apart between them. You didn't notice how his lips were slightly parted in shock, nor his eyes that were starting to glisten with his own tears. "No matter where I flee to, or where I lay my heart on, or which skies I look at—it's always you, Sanji. It's always been you."

"I had been so selfless all these years, Sanji. So please, can you pretend to like me too, just for today, before I leave?" You whispered meekly, cupping his cheeks with both of your hands. Numb and completely speechless, Sanji simply gave you a single nod as a response.

You gingerly pressed your lips against his, and he immediately tasted the saltiness of your tears. But your lips were soft, as he expected from an angel like you. And so he couldn't help himself; he closed his eyes and delicately kissed you back, repeating your name in his mind like a sacred prayer and wishing to the stars above to not let the moment end.

However, you broke the kiss by losing consciousness and falling down on your hammock, knocked out and peacefully snoring.

Sanji spaced out, not moving from his position. No. It's not that he didn't want to move—he couldn't move. He couldn't feel anything except for the drumming of his heart, knocking on his chest desperately. His lips were still tingling and his ears and neck were warming up.

He gulped, loosening the collar of his shirt to cool himself down. He needed a cigarette. And a drink.

Scrambling to get up even with his trembling legs, Sanji managed to stand properly. He avoided your sleeping figure and decided to get out of the room as soon as possible. However, when he took a step forward, his foot touched a notebook lying on the floor.

Sanji bent down and took the notebook. He flipped it open, and after reading only the first page, he finally came into a conclusion.

Heartbroken, drunk, and unaware, you dozed off the rest of the afternoon. When nightfall settled on the azure horizon and dusk fell on the rough surface of the sea, you missed the chance to walk away from the crew yet again; and that was the third time you failed to leave Sanji Vinsmoke.

⸻ • ⸻

The next morning, you woke up feeling much better with only the memory of you drinking and crying yourself to sleep and nothing else. Everything was normal, and the crew began to make plans for their next adventure during breakfast.

Everything was normal, except for Sanji, who was quiet throughout the whole discussion. And of course, just like always, you were the only one who noticed his strange behavior. You tried to catch his eyes, but he looked at everywhere except you.

When he finally met your gaze, you gave him a soft smile, hoping he would smile back and everything was fine and you were just overthinking it.

He doesn't.

⸻ • ⸻

"Are you really going to leave?"

Taking your gaze away from the heart shaped cloud you spotted on the clear blue sky, you faced the person who asked the question you were dreading for some time now. Luffy was staring curiously at you, awaiting your answer. You can't help but to smile softly at the captain, whose kindness you have yet to repay.

"I believe we already talked about this, captain." You said, recalling your short conversation last night. He kept asking you if you were really sure about your decision while his eyes darted to a certain blond haired chef every time he shoots you the question. It was strange, and you felt even more suspicious when Sanji pretended not to hear your answer and even refused to glance your way.

Luffy put his hands on his hips. "You know, you're welcome to stay and be a part of my crew."

You crossed your arms, smile growing wide. "And what, pray tell, is my role? Sing battle songs and chant your names while you swing your gummy arms at pirates?" You joked playfully.

The young captain stroked his chin in deep thought, almost like he was considering your suggestion. "That's not a bad idea."

You bursted out laughing, shaking your head in disbelief, "I'll leave first thing in the morning. I told Nami to dock at a nearby island."

"What about Sanji?" He suddenly questioned, leaving you flabbergasted for a split second. You weren't prepared to hear Sanji's name after days of not talking to him properly.

Him not speaking with you wasn't a strange occurence at all; back when you were still in the Baratie, there would be days when Sanji wouldn't bother to acknowledge your presence and would completely ignore you. This would happen whenever he was extremely busy with his cooking or he had a disagreement with Zeff.

And it seemed like this was one of those days, seeing that he had been ignoring you for about a week now. Yes, you have been keeping count. Although he doesn't appear to be angry with you, the short-lived exchanges and the abrupt cut-offs before you could say anything deeply concerned you more than it should have.

You tried to rack your brains for reasons on why he was acting like this. Maybe Nami had rejected him for the hundredth time, or Zoro kept throwing insults in his direction—or maybe his cigarette packet had ran out. Maybe his kitchen knives weren't sharp anymore and he was struggling in the kitchen.

Should you ask him? Should you go to him and demand him to tell you what's wrong?

You pressed your lips together. It sounded like the worst idea you've thought of so far. You convinced yourself that Sanji was fine and he'd be back to normal in no time; there would no need to talk to him.

"What about him?" You faltered, chuckling to ease the tension in your body.

"You care for each other." Luffy explained bluntly and matter-of-factly, "What does he think about you leaving?"

A shaky sigh made its way out of your lips. How will you tell the captain that his cook has been avoiding you like you were some kind of rotten fish these days?

"I..." You stammered, gathering the courage to lie to Luffy even if you thought it would be the gravest sin you could commit, "He...agrees. Yeah. No need to worry."

Luffy grinned, but it didn't look normal at all. You winced in embarrassment. He knew that you were lying and was totally unconvinced.

Luckily, he didn't voice it out. He only nodded and said, "Great! Oh, I have an idea! Why don't you sing for us before we part ways? Think of it as a farewell party for the crew."

Hearing the pure and genuine excitement dripping from his voice, you couldn't turn him down. It was a good idea too, and now that you thought about it, you haven't performed for them yet. "Sure." You agreed, shrugging.

He raised his fist up in the air and cheered. You smiled, watching as he shouted for his crewmates' names to come down and listen to you sing. You prepared yourself for an impromptu performance, making sure that your guitar was properly tuned and your voice was clear enough to give you the best version of your singing. Sitting on top of a barrel, you faced your audience of four, all their eager eyes watching your every move.

As you struck the first chord to your song, you tried hard not to think that Sanji wasn't there to watch you sing the song you secretly dedicate to him.

In the kitchen, Sanji busied himself by plating the food that he'll serve to his fellow crew mates for dinner. He grabbed a large plate and placed the chicken drumsticks that his captain favored, but Luffy wasn't the one in his mind when he cooked those. Looking at the food, he wondered if you would love them too.

He shook his thoughts off and took the plate with him outside. Approaching the crew, his steps slowed down when he heard a familiar singing voice and a melodic tune of a guitar.

Sanji almost dropped the plate.

It was you. Of course it was you, you were the only one he knew who had a voice like that. It was you, and you were singing with a lovely smile painted on your sweet lips, the very same lips that touched his a few days ago, resulting in him not getting a wink of sleep every night. The beam of the sunset right behind you colored your hair in the different shades of the sky as the dulcet-filled notes you made echoed throughout the vast sea. For a moment, he was worried that you were going to attract ferocious sea beasts with your angelic voice and steal you away from him.

He could hear his blood pound in his ears the longer he observed you from afar. You looked happy. Happier than you were when you stayed with him and Zeff. His chest tightened, knowing that you leaving and go on adventures on your own was probably the best decision you could make, even if that means leaving him too.

You were finishing up your song by the time you saw Sanji standing behind Usopp, silently listening. He met your gaze, and for the first time ever, you couldn't read his mind. His expression was blank as you stared at each other, and as you opened your mouth to say something, he cut you off.

"Dinner's ready." Sanji announced shortly, setting down the plate in front of Luffy and then walked away without saying another word.

That was your final straw. You immediately put down your guitar and followed him into the kitchen. You didn't care about how you felt Nami's watchful eyes on you as you went after him, nor how Luffy was scarfing down the dinner and was definitely going to finish it all before you could take a bite; you just chased the blond with determination oozing out of you.

You roughly pushed the door open and found Sanji washing the pans he used for cooking. He glanced at you briefly then quickly looked away after. This irritated you even more as you demanded, "Is there something bothering you?"

"You should eat before the food gets cold." He said with an empty voice.

"Sanji!"

He stiffened. You rarely raised your voice at anyone. Sighing in defeat, he dried off his hands and fully faced you.

Your eyes were sharper than his knives, cutting straight into his soul. "I've known you for a long time now, do you think I don't notice whenever you have a problem?" You glowered, taking a step closer to him, "You have a problem. What is it?"

It happened fast. His hand landed on the small of your back and pulled you to his chest, and the other was placed on top of your cheek, and in a single motion, Sanji captured your lips with his. You gasped in the kiss, your heart dropping to the soles of your feet when he tilted his face to deepen it. Your fingers tightly grasped the sleeves of his shirt for support as he passionately moved his lips against yours. A pleasant heat ran down your spine, your whole body tingling and warming up. You were simply drowning. There was no other way to describe it, and it was only caused by his fervent kisses.

Sanji pulled away, resting your forehead on top of yours, and you took it as an opportunity to breathe in air that you lost. "You are the problem." He murmured lowly, eyes darting down to your swollen lips. Confused and lightheaded, you didn't get the chance to retort.

"Ever since that night, ange, you occupy my thoughts. You gave me a taste of your lips and you didn't even remember the next day. Do you know how that feels, hm?" He said, pecking your lips once again. You made a noise in the back of your throat, turning your head sideways so he couldn't kiss you anymore, but he took your chin and hungrily connected both of your lips.

He spoke between kisses, "You torture me. Ever since I read those songs you wrote about me in that little notebook of yours, you torture me with your presence."

That was when you snapped out of your daze. With all the force you could muster, you placed your hands on his chest and pushed him away. Sanji stepped back, surprised at your reaction.

Without giving him a chance to ask you anything, you ran off and left the kitchen, slamming the door loudly so you wouldn't hear him calling your name and be tempted to go back in his arms again.

You arrived in the sleeping quarters, locking the door behind you. You were sure that the others would understand you needing your alone time. Once you made sure you were on your own, your body collapsed altogether, your back sliding down against the door as you panted heavily.

He knows, was all you could think about. He knows about the songs. He knows about your feelings.

Well, you finally got your answer to your previous question, but a more complicated one replaced it. With trembling hands, your fingers raised themselves to your lips, touching its surface. You hated the way that you still felt his warmth on top of them.

A lone tear slid down the side of your nose. He was cruel. Sanji was cruel.

You didn't come out of that room for days, refusing to talk to anyone as you gathered your scrambled throughts and pulled yourself back together, and that was the fourth time you failed to leave Sanji Vinsmoke.

⸻ • ⸻

A stack of books, most of them being a collection of maps compiled in one, rested beside you while you flipped through the pages of the one you chose among them.

Nami has been lending you her books ever since you shut yourself out from the crew. You ignored all of them and only let Nami in, hoping that she'll be able to understand you; and she did. She was a good listener. Although you weren't particularly close with each other, you trusted her and told her everything: your dreams, your problems, your feelings, and Sanji. In return, she confided in you too.

"Here. So you can finally decide on where you will go to," You recall her saying while she handed you her collection of world map books, "and to distract yourself, of course."

"You're too kind, Nami." You said in admiration. Maybe this is why Sanji was enamored with her. She was a beauty inside and out.

Nami shrugged, yet she was smiling. "Just helping a fellow woman out."

The books did take your mind off the stubborn blond haired man that was still resting inside your heart, even if it was only for a fleeting moment. You tried to search for islands that will be suitable for you to start your career, narrowing some of them down into choices, but your eyes wil always lead back to where the Baratie was stationed.

You leaned back against your chair, letting your head hit the wall with a soft thud as you released a sigh of frustration. Not only will you need to prepare yourself for a journey all alone, but you also have to talk to Sanji sooner or later, whether you like it or not. The kiss distracted you more than the books Nami gave you. You think of it in the morning and dream of it at night, and it only got worse every time you remembered that he kissed you like he loved you.

Relaxing in your seat, you closed the book and listened to the silence.

The Going Merry docked for a quick trip to a market to gather fresh ingredients for food. Sanji will be gone for the meantime and you were free to roam around the ship without his heated stare boring holes in your skin.

But the peace was ruined by rushed footsteps and Usopp breaking into the room, almost destroying the door with his brute force. You frowned, standing up on alert when you saw how nervous he looked.

"Sanji's injured!" He exclaimed, which got your brow raising, knowing that he had a long history of lying to people. However, he forcibly pulled Sanji inside, and you were greeted by the sight of a bruised man, whose lips were bleeding and cheeks were starting to yellow.

You immediately sprang into action. You took the first aid kit you packed in your bag and grabbed his arm, making him sit down on your chair.

"How did you get into a fight in just a span of ten minutes?" You asked in irritation, wetting a cloth with saltwater to wipe off the blood on his lips.

Sanji grunted, tensing up when you took a hold of his face and dabbed on his lip using the cloth. "Some petty vendor was selling overpriced onions, and they weren't even the best of quality."

You stopped for a minute, glaring at him. "So you decided to punch them instead of talking it over?"

He only huffed in reply. Pursing your lips in annoyance, you continued to treat his wounds in silence, noticing him flinching and wincing in pain whenever you compress the bruised area with ice. "Who's being petty now?" You scolded impatiently, "Stay still."

The only sound that filled the room was you hastily rummaging your kit trying to find an ointment and an awkward silence that made you want to jump into the sea and never swim back to the surface. You unscrewed the lid of the jar of ointment and scooped some with your finger, looking at Sanji as you did so. He looked back at you quietly, and you tried hard not to think about the fact that you have to touch his lips in order for you to apply it.

It seemed like he realized that too, glancing down at the dollop of ointment on top of your finger, then back to you. You just gave him a small, uneasy smile, showing him that you weren't uncomfortable even though you were, and shyly took a step forward.

As gently as you could, you spread the ointment on the wounded area on his lips, reminding yourself to not be distracted on how soft they looked.

"A busted lip because of overpriced ingredients...it almost feels like you're doing this on purpose so I wouldn't get the chance to leave you." You half-heartedly joked to lighten up the atmosphere. However, you were greeted by nothing, not even a smart comeback or a funny joke from the blond. You hesitantly observed his reaction, and saw that he was grim and serious, guilt swimming in his beryl blue eyes.

The realization began to sink in.

Oh.

You should've known from the start. Sanji was a great fighter; he wouldn't be injured in the first place. "Sanji..."

Sanji took your wrist and held on it tightly. Your breath hitched, only then realizing how much you missed his touch, his warm, gentle, and loving touch.

"Let me go." You weakly said, even though deep down, you didn't want him to.

"Tell me you're not in love with me." He said, sounding utterly desperate that it almost made you fall down to your knees, "Tell me, and I'll let you go."

When you didn't answer, he stood up and cupped your cheeks with both of his hands. He pleaded, "Look at me. Look into my eyes and tell me you don't love me."

"Please don't do this." You whispered in pain as you tearfully shook your head.

"Stay. Please, stay." Sanji begged, pressing his forehead against yours, "What can I do to make you stay? Tell me. I'll do anything. Do I need to kneel? To beg for your forgiveness? Tell me what you want. I'll do anything in my power to make you the happiest woman in all of East Blue. Just please, don't leave."

"I can't." You answered, closing your eyes, a few tears streaming down your cheeks. You hate the way he was making this so hard for you.

He only continued, "Hate me, curse me, shout at me, if you must. Anything but you leaving me. Or do you want to make me yours? Then I am letting you. Whatever you want, mon ange—my heart, my soul, my attention, they're all yours. I'm all yours."

"No..."

"The crew will be incomplete without you." Sanji insisted in anguish.

"I have dreams, Sanji. Just like you and the rest of the crew." You explained softly, placing your own hands on top of his in attempt to comfort him and relieve him from his confusion.

However, he was persistent, "You can achieve your dreams without leaving. You can stay, and I will support you in everything you do. You're better off staying with me—with us."

You said firmly, "I will not spend the rest of my life doing what I don't want."

"Even with me by your side?"

A few second pass before you finally reply, "I'd be miserable."

Pain flashed on his face, making you want to take back your own words, yet you remained strong and unyielding. Sanji took a deep breath and stepped away from you, saying, "I'd rather have you miserable here than go out there and encounter ruthless pirates."

The statement quickly irritated you, frowning at him deeply. "You think I'll have problems with pirates when I've been serving them for years?"

"Oh, darling, you wouldn't be able to say that once you've encountered worse ones, with bounties higher than you could ever imagine." He snapped, voice raising with each word.

"I can manage on my own!" You bit back frustratingly, your tears evaporating into anger.

Sanji scowled at you, impatiently running his fingers through his hair. "You can't fight!" He shouted, voice breaking in the process, and with it, your heart too. It shattered like glass and the shards landed and pierced through your lungs, rendering you breathless. Your eyes widened, mouth dropping open in shock.

Seeing your expression, he immediately snapped back to reality, regret writing itself on his face. You shook your head in disbelief and let out a humorless laugh, "Are you telling me that I'm weak?"

"I didn't say that." Sanji quickly said in a hushed manner.

"But you're implying it!" You choked, still can't believe that he doesn't trust you. He doesn't trust you enough to accomplish your dreams on your own, and that he was not confident that you'll succeed without him by your side.

You wanted to ask him about the passionate kiss you two shared, about his loving gestures that confused the hell out of you, about his fresh bruises that he received on purpose so that he can get you to stay, and why he did all of that. You needed confirmation. But the question that left you was, "What am I to you?"

Sanji stayed quiet, and your heart broke again once more. Deciding that this was the last time he breaks it, you walked away and left him alone to tend to his own injuries.

He lit up a cigarette as he listened to your fading footsteps. A single teardrop fell down from his eye the moment he placed the cigarette between his lips, and all he could think about was that you hurt more than the bruises on his cheeks.

You packed your bags and spoke with Nami, telling her that you were ready, and that was the fifth time you tried to leave Sanji Vinsmoke—and tomorrow, you'll finally succeed.

⸻ • ⸻

The sun had just risen, and the early morning breeze smelled of the ocean, the calming sound of waves filling your ears. It was one of those days when the sky was clear and the sunlight wasn't harsh but pleasantly warm on your skin, making it the perfect day to start working on a new song and strum on your guitar for the melody.

But today was different. You were standing on the first step of the ship's staircase that leads to a docking station and a wooden walkway towards an unfamiliar island that was soon to be your new home. Your fingers clenched on the strap of your bag, finding this moment to be surreal. You have tried many times to leave, and here it was, right on the palms of your hands.

"So. This is it, huh?" Your trance broke as Nami commented beside you. She was the only one to bid you farewell and watch you leave, since the others were still asleep. You thought of Sanji and how he looked like when he was sleeping, staring at his handsome features so you can memorize them and implant it in your mind. He was your first love; you didn't want to forget him.

You smiled. "Thank you, Nami." You said earnestly, "I would've liked to spend more time with you. It's tiring to speak to men sometimes, don't you think?"

She laughed. "Yeah." Then, she caged you in her arms and hugged you tightly, surprising you for a second before you laughed too and returned the hug. "Stay safe out there."

"I will."

"So you planned to leave? Without saying goodbye?" A new voice interrupted, breaking the hug you and Nami both shared. You swiveled to look behind you, and there stood Sanji, appearing to have just woken up, with the strands of his blond hair sticking up in different directions. You observed his dejected expression, the downward tilt of the corners of his lips, and the glistening of his tired eyes. You stared at his crumpled suit and his crooked necktie. Despite how messy he looked, he will always be perfect to you.

You walked forward and looked at him fondly, with your eyes full of so much love reserved for him and him only. "Thought it would hurt less." You said, raising your hands to touch his hair and brush it down, "And I was right. How can I leave now when you're standing in front of me?"

He sighed shakily as he felt your soft fingers threading through his hair. "Then don't." He whispered. You only smiled at him. He didn't smile back, but that didn't stop you from taking both of his hands and caressing his knuckles using your thumb.

"Every night, I'll look at the moon and think of you. I'll tell my stories, sing my songs, and whisper my secrets to it. Just like what you and me would do when we were little." You told him softly and endearingly, "Would you be so kind as to look at the moon too and think of me?"

Sanji's eyebrows were scrunched together in agony, muttering, "I can't make you stay, can I?"

When you didn't answer, he just nodded his head, understanding what you wanted to stay. He forced a smile and tightly squeezed your hands. "I'm sorry."

"I'm yours." You answered, placing a soft kiss on the back of his hands. After letting your lips linger on his skin for a while, you slowly let go, and with one last glance at his face, you stepped back and made your way downstairs to the docking area, leaving before you could change your mind.

Sanji watched you go. While you walked away from the Going Merry, from the crew, and from him, not once did you look back. He just watched as you went farther away and became smaller in the distance, until you blended in with the crowd and you were just another person in a sea of people. And then you were gone.

It was the sixth time you tried to leave Sanji Vinsmoke, and this time, you finally did.

⸻ • ⸻

The red velvet curtains began to draw in front of you, gently falling back down on the stage as you said your final good-byes to your audience for tonight, a bouquet of roses cradled in your arms while you blew delicate kisses towards them. You can still hear their loud cheering and clapping even as you retreated to your personal room backstage.

A middle-aged woman greeted you inside when you stepped in the room and closed the door behind you, whistling. "There she is, our talented rising star!"

You only laughed at the silly nickname, setting the bouquet of roses that one of the people gave you in tonight's show on top of your vanity table. "You exaggerate, Madam. I have only performed two shows in your beautiful theater."

The madam, who was the owner of the theater you were currently working in, shook her head in disagreement. "And those two shows are sold out!" She informed you proudly, placing her hands on your shoulders, "Let me know if you want to add more, you are welcome to perform here anytime."

"I'll think about it." You replied, smiling. The madam patted your shoulder twice before she left you alone, humming happily to herself. You huffed in amusement, fully aware that she doesn't appreciate your talents at all, but only cared for the money.

Regardless of that, you were happy. It has been a couple of years since you left the Strawhat Pirates and pursued your dreams all on your own, and you've been traveling to different islands across the seas to perform. You never had a permanent home; being a musician meant going to many places from time to time to share and spread out your music.

Yet you can't help but miss life on the sea.

You missed washing dishes on the Baratie and the late night conversations you had with Zeff. You missed Luffy and his weird antics, Usopp and his jokes, Zoro and his blunt comments, and Nami and her kindness.

You missed Sanji and everything that he was.

You stared at your reflection in the vanity mirror on your desk. Your hair was pinned neatly, you had make-up on and you were dressed fancily for your performance. Years ago, you wouldn't look like this. It was hard to believe how much you've grown and changed, but these days, you felt like you wanted your old self back. Slowly, you took the itchy pins off your hair, and cleaned your face with warm water and a cloth. You replaced your dress in a more comfortable one and went outside.

Looking up at the night sky, you saw a bright full moon with no stars in sight. It was just the moon and its beauty, illuminating the pitch black sky with its glow. You silently watched it, a smile growing on your lips as you felt a tug on your heart.

"I wonder what you're up to, Sanji." You thought aloud, cheeks heating up at the memory of your first love and his golden hair and his contagious smiles. Then, to your surprise, a voice spoke unexpectedly.

"Well, I am fortuitous to have met such a beautiful angel."

You froze. No one referred to you as angel except for one.

Sanji.

As you turned around, he was already walking towards you. And there you both were, bathing under the moonlight, with him grinning at you mischievously and you looking at him lovingly.  You didn't know how he found you, but what mattered was that he searched for you and now he was here, and he was still making your heart beat fast in your chest just like all those years ago.

How the pesky feelings stayed and wrapped themselves around your aching heart, you didn't know. But maybe it was because he was standing in front of you, and the way his next words made you run into his open arms and kiss him until you were both breathless,

"There you are, ange."

taglist part 1 @angel-luv3r @appalost @chexmixtrys @nimtano @sparklyphantom @natalieisfreeziing @reallysparklychaos @maydaylovex @johnnysactualgf @mochamei @kisumisumi @ttokyocat @mypurplewinee @rosaliinnn @nonniecannie @court-jester-stuff @detectivelucy07 @megumiif @untitledandrandom @erin-the-king @fangeekkk @nikolaevna-art @candesstuff @chaoticevilbakugo

[mollyrealized]

How Michael Met Neil

original direct link [MP3]

(Neil, if you see this, please feel free to grab the transcript and store on your site; I had no easy way of contacting you.)

DAVID TENNANT: Tell me about @neil-gaiman then, because he's in that category [previously: “such a profound effect on my life”] as well.

MICHAEL SHEEN: So this is what has brought us together.

DAVID: Yes.

MICHAEL: To the new love story for the 21st century.

DAVID: Exactly.

MICHAEL: So when I went to drama school, there was a guy called Gary Turner in my year. And within the first few weeks, we were doing something, having a drink or whatever. And he said to me, “Do you read comic books?”

And I said, “No.”  I mean, this is … what … '88?  '88, '89.  So it was … now I know that it was a period of time that was a big change, transformation going through comic books.  Rather than it being thought of as just superheroes and Batman and Superman, there was this whole new era of a generation of writers like Grant Morrison.

DAVID: The kids who'd grown up reading comic books were now making comic books

MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah, and starting to address different kinds of subjects through the comic book medium. So it wasn't about just superheroes, it was all kinds of stuff going on – really fascinating stuff. And I was totally unaware of this.

And so this guy Gary said to me, "Do you read them?" And I said, "No."  And he went, "Right, okay, here's The Watchman [sic] by Alan Moore. Here's Swamp Thing. Here's Hellblazer. And here's Sandman.”

And Sandman was Neil Gaiman's big series that put his name on the map. And I read all those, and, just – I was blown away by all of them, but particularly the Sandman stories, because he was drawing on mythology, which was something I was really interested in, and fairy tales, folklore, and philosophy, and Shakespeare, and all kinds of stuff were being mixed up in this story.  And I absolutely loved it.

So I became a big fan of Neil's, and started reading everything by him. And then fairly shortly after that, within six months to a year, Good Omens the book came out, which Neil wrote with Terry Pratchett. And so I got the book – because I was obviously a big fan of Neil's by this point – read it, loved it, then started reading Terry Pratchett’s stuff as well, because I didn't know his stuff before then – and then spent years and years and years just being a huge fan of both of them.

And then eventually when – I'd done films like the Underworld films and doing Twilight films. And I think it was one of the Twilight films, there was a lot of very snooty interviews that happened where people who considered themselves well above talking about things like Twilight were having to interview me … and, weirdly, coming at it from the attitude of 'clearly this is below you as well' … weirdly thinking I'm gonna go, 'Yeah, fucking Twilight.”

And I just used to go, "You know what? Some of the greatest writing of the last 50-100 years has happened in science fiction or fantasy."  Philip K Dick is one of my favorite writers of all time. In fact, the production of Hamlet I did was mainly influenced by Philip K Dick.  Ursula K. Le Guin and Asimov, and all these amazing people. And I talked about Neil as well. And so I went off on a bit of a rant in this interview.

Anyway, the interview came out about six months later, maybe.  Knock on the door, open the door, delivery of a big box. That’s interesting. Open the box, there's a card at the top of the box. I open the card.

It says, From one fan to another, Neil Gaiman.  And inside the box are first editions of Neil's stuff, and all kinds of interesting things by Neil. And he just sent this stuff.

DAVID: You'd never met him?

MICHAEL: Never met him. He'd read the interview, or someone had let him know about this interview where I'd sung his praises and stood up for him and the people who work within that sort of genre as being like …

And he just got in touch. We met up for the first time when he came to – I was in Los Angeles at the time, and he came to LA.  And he said, "I'll take you for a meal."

I said, “All right.”

He said, "Do you want to go somewhere posh, or somewhere interesting?”

I said, "Let's go somewhere interesting."

He said, "Right, I'm going to take you to this restaurant called The Hump." And it's at Santa Monica Airport. And it's a sushi restaurant.

I was like, “Right, okay.” So I had a Mini at the time. And we get in my Mini and we drive off to Santa Monica Airport. And this restaurant was right on the tarmac, like, you could sit in the restaurant (there's nobody else there when we got there, we got there quite early) and you're watching the planes landing on Santa Monica Airport. It's extraordinary. 

And the chef comes out and Neil says, "Just bring us whatever you want. Chef's choice."

So, I'd never really eaten sushi before. So we sit there; we had this incredible meal where they keep bringing these dishes out and they say, “This is [blah, blah, blah]. Just use a little bit of soy sauce or whatever.”  You know, “This is eel.  This is [blah].”

And then there was this one dish where they brought out and they didn't say what it was. It was like “mystery dish”, we had it ... delicious. Anyway, a few more people started coming into the restaurant as time went on.

And we're sort of getting near the end, and I said, "Neil, I can't eat anymore. I'm gonna have to stop now. This is great, but I can't eat–"

"Right, okay. We'll ask for the bill in a minute."

And then the door opens and some very official people come in. And it was the Feds. And the Feds came in, and we knew they were because they had jackets on that said they were part of the Federal Bureau of Whatever. And about six of them come in. Two of them go … one goes behind the counter, two go into the kitchen, one goes to the back. They've all got like guns on and stuff.

And me and Neil are like, "What on Earth is going on?"

And then eventually one guy goes, "Ladies and gentlemen, if you haven't ordered already, please leave. If you're still eating your meal, please finish up, pay your bill, leave."*

[* - delivered in a perfect American ‘serious law agent’ accent/impression]

And we were like, "Oh my God, are we poisoned? Is there some terrible thing that's happened?"  

We'd finished, so we pay our bill.  And then all the kitchen staff are brought out. And the head chef is there. The guy who's been bringing us this food. And he's in tears. And he says to Neil, "I'm so sorry." He apologizes to Neil.  And we leave. We have no idea what happened.

DAVID: But you're assuming it's the mystery dish.

MICHAEL: Well, we're assuming that we can't be going to – we can't be –  it can't be poisonous. You know what I mean? It can't be that there's terrible, terrible things.

So the next day was the Oscars, which is why Neil was in town. Because Coraline had been nominated for an Oscar. Best documentary that year was won by The Cove, which was by a team of people who had come across dolphins being killed, I think.

Turns out, what was happening at this restaurant was that they were having illegal endangered species flown in to the airport, and then being brought around the back of the restaurant into the kitchen.

We had eaten whale – endangered species whale. That was the mystery dish that they didn't say what it was.

And the team behind The Cove were behind this sting, and they took them down that night whilst we were there.

DAVID: That’s extraordinary.

MICHAEL: And we didn't find this out for months.  So for months, me and Neil were like, "Have you worked anything out yet? Have you heard anything?"

"No, I haven't heard anything."

And then we heard that it was something to do with The Cove, and then we eventually found out that that restaurant, they were all arrested. The restaurant was shut down. And it was because of that. And we'd eaten whale that night.

DAVID: And that was your first meeting with Neil Gaiman.

MICHAEL: That was my first meeting. And also in the drive home that night from that restaurant, he said, and we were in my Mini, he said, "Have you found the secret compartment?"

I said, "What are you talking about?" It's such a Neil Gaiman thing to say.

DAVID: Isn't it?

MICHAEL: The secret compartment? Yeah. Each Mini has got a secret compartment. I said, "I had no idea." It's secret. And he pressed a little button and a thing opened up. And it was a secret compartment in my own car that Neil Gaiman showed me.

DAVID: Was there anything inside it?

MICHAEL: Yeah, there was a little man. And he jumped out and went, "Hello!" No, there was nothing in there. There was afterwards because I started putting...

DAVID: Sure. That's a very Neil Gaiman story. All of that is such a Neil Gaiman story.

MICHAEL: That's how it began. Yeah.

DAVID: And then he came to offer you the part in Good Omens.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, we became friends and we would whenever he was in town, we would meet up and yeah, and then eventually he started, he said, "You know, I'm working on an adaptation of Good Omens." And I can remember at one point Terry Gilliam was going to maybe make a film of it. And I remember being there with Neil and Terry when they were talking about it. And...

DAVID: Were you involved at that point?

MICHAEL: No, no, I wasn't involved. I just happened to have met up with Neil that day.

DAVID: Right.

MICHAEL: And then Terry Gilliam came along and they were chatting, that was the day they were talking about that or whatever.

And then eventually he sent me one of the scripts for an early draft of like the first episode of Good Omens. And he said – and we started talking about me being involved in it, doing it – he said, “Would you be interested?” I was like, "Yeah, of course."  I went, "Oh my God." And he said, "Well, I'll send you the scripts when they come," and I would read them, and we'd talk about them a little bit. And so I was involved.

But it was always at that point with the idea, because he'd always said about playing Crowley in it. And so, as time went on, as I was reading the scripts, I was thinking, "I don't think I can play Crowley. I don't think I'm going to be able to do it." And I started to get a bit nervous because I thought, “I don't want to tell Neil that I don't think I can do this.”  But I just felt like I don't think I can play Crowley.

DAVID: Of course you can [play Crowley?].

MICHAEL: Well, I just on a sort of, on a gut level, sometimes you have it on a gut level.

DAVID: Sure, sure.

MICHAEL: I can do this.

DAVID: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Or I can't do this. And I just thought, “You know what, this is not the part for me. The other part is better for me, I think. I think I can do that, I don't think I could do that.”

But I was scared to tell Neil because I thought, "Well, he wants me to play Crowley" – and then it turned out he had been feeling the same way as well.  And he hadn't wanted to mention it to me, but he was like, "I think Michael should really play Aziraphale."

And neither of us would bring it up.  And then eventually we did. And it was one of those things where you go, "Oh, thank God you said that. I feel exactly the same way." And then I think within a fairly short space of time, he said, “I think we've got … David Tennant … for Crowley.” And we both got very excited about that.

And then all these extraordinary people started to join in. And then, and then off we went.

DAVID: That's the other thing about Neil, he collects people, doesn't he? So he'll just go, “Oh, yeah, I've phoned up Frances McDormand, she's up for it.” Yeah. You're, what?

MICHAEL: “I emailed Jon Hamm.”

DAVID: Yeah.

MICHAEL: And yeah, and you realize how beloved he is and how beloved his work is. And I think we would both recognise that Good Omens is one of the most beloved of all of Neil's stuff.

DAVID: Yes.

MICHAEL: And had never been turned into anything.

DAVID: Yeah.

MICHAEL: And so the kind of responsibility of that, I mean, for me, for someone who has been a fan of him and a fan of the book for so long, I can empathize with all the fans out there who are like, “Oh, they better not fuck this up.”

DAVID: Yes.

MICHAEL: “And this had better be good.” And I have that part of me. But then, of course, the other part of me is like, “But I'm the one who might be fucking it up.”

DAVID: Yeah.

MICHAEL: So I feel that responsibility as well.

DAVID: But we have Neil on site.

MICHAEL: Yes. Well, Neil being the showrunner …

DAVID: Yeah. I think it takes the curse off.

MICHAEL: … I think it made a massive difference, didn't it? Yeah. You feel like you're in safe hands.

DAVID: Well, we think. Not that the world has seen it yet.

MICHAEL (grimly): No, I know.

DAVID: But it was a -- it's been a -- it's been a joy to work with you on it. I can't wait for the world to see it.

MICHAEL: Oh my God.  Oh, well, I mean, it's the only, I've done a few things where there are two people, it's a bit of a double act, like Frost-Nixon and The Queen, I suppose, in some ways. But, and I've done it, Amadeus or whatever.

This is the only thing I've done where I really don't think of it as “my character” or “my performance as that character”.  I think of it totally as us.

DAVID: Yeah.

MICHAEL: The two of us.

DAVID: Yes.

MICHAEL: Like they, what I do is defined by what you do.

DAVID: Yeah.

MICHAEL: And that was such a joy to have that experience. And it made it so much easier in a way as well, I found, because you don't feel like you're on your own in it. Like it's totally us together doing this and the two characters totally complement each other. And the experience of doing it was just a real joy.

DAVID: Yeah.  Well, I hope the world is as excited to see it as we are to talk about it, frankly.

MICHAEL: You know, there's, having talked about T.S. Eliot earlier, there's another bit from The Wasteland where there's a line which goes, These fragments I have shored against my ruin.

And this is how I think about life now. There is so much in life, no matter what your circumstances, no matter what, where you've got, what you've done, how much money you got, all that. Life's hard.  I mean, you can, it can take you down at any point.

You have to find this stuff. You have to like find things that will, these fragments that you hold to yourself, they become like a liferaft, and especially as time goes on, I think, as I've got older, I've realized it is a thin line between surviving this life and going under.

And the things that keep you afloat are these fragments, these things that are meaningful to you and what's meaningful to you will be not-meaningful to someone else, you know. But whatever it is that matters to you, it doesn't matter what it was you were into when you were a teenager, a kid, it doesn't matter what it is. Go and find them, and find some way to hold them close to you. 

Make it, go and get it. Because those are the things that keep you afloat. They really are. Like doing that with him or whatever it is, these are the fragments that have shored against my ruin. Absolutely.

DAVID: That's lovely. Michael, thank you so much.

MICHAEL: Thank you.

DAVID: For talking today and for being here.

MICHAEL: Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you.

[postmortemnivis]

nobody knew simon’s name, his cold glances penetrating souls whenever someone on the force even dared to call him by his first name. he preferred it this way. he wasn’t the kind to blend personal life and work, he didn’t want to look at himself in the mirror without his mask and still see a murderer. his hands were clean, protected by the gloves ghost slipped on each time he reached base. it was soon that the other soldiers almost forgot his name, agreeing that their lieutenant was indeed a ghost.

that was until your worried voice called for him.

you didn’t know of the ghost identity, it had never even crossed your mind that your simon, your sweet and caring boyfriend’s personality would switch into a cold blooded killer as soon as he set foot at base or in the field. of course he never mentioned it with you, he sporadically talked about his job and his missions. you knew he was a strict lieutenant, but you had been kept away from more by the person with the skull mask and balaclava.

“simon?” you asked for the third time the receptionist. she apologetically looked up at you and shrugged. “oh cmon, simon riley. i know for a fact that he’s here. please, i need to see him.”

“i’m very sorry miss but…” the woman shook her head again, “let me call the captain.”

you sighed and sat down by the waiting area until a man walked in and talked to the woman.

“who’re you looking for?”

you stood up. “simon. simon riley.”

“ghost?”

you shook your head, almost clueless. “no, simon riley.”

“yeah, that’s him…” he said, “he’s training the recruits now. shall i deliver a message?”

“no, i need to see him personally. i wouldn’t have come all the way here if it wasn’t important, captain.”

you'd seen price a few times, simon's loyalty to the man was almost like a dog's one, always following orders and rarely complaining. he often talked about him when he was at home, all he shared with you about his threatening job was the friends he made along the way: johnny, kyle, price, gary, nikolai. he'd often go out for a pint—or two—with johnny and kyle, who also occasionally would come to your shared apartment for dinner with their temporary girlfriends.

"follow me." price sighed. you eagerly followed him, as close as his shadow, and the courtyard came into sight. dozens and dozens of soldiers in scarlet training uniforms were running laps of the immense open space under the pale sun, and that's when you spotted a tall and muscular man in black tactical gear. hell, he was hard to miss.

"another lap, smith!" his mancunian accent was stronger than his will to neutralise it. "if my gran was alive she'd be faster than ya."

you'd recognised the voice, of course, even if it was much harsher than usual, but you couldn't recognise him.

you realised, that was ghost. his cold eyes were studying each of the recruit's tired and red faces, his arms behind his back as he barked for five more laps for the ones who didn't look sweaty enough. even his voice was different, but what shocked you was the black balaclava with the white skull drawn on top.

you'd seen the mask once or twice over the years, shoved on the bottom of his duffle bag or drying on a windowsill, but you've never given it much thought, why would you?

"si?" you asked, standing directly behind him as price stood a few feet from you.

his head snapped in your direction at a worryingly fast speed, his eyes immediately becoming soft, then confused.

"what're you doin' here?" his voice spoke, much sweeter.

you kept staring at him, not recognising the man you loved.

he immediately grabbed the crown of the balaclava and yanked it off without a second though. holding the black piece of clothing in his hand, both of them came to cup your elbows, drawing you closer to him.

"love?" he called you.

still at loss of words, you reached to the balaclava and twirled it between your fingers.

"love, talk to me." his voice sounded worried.

"ghost?"

he shook his head. "simon, love."

"we'll talk about that at home." you raised your eyebrows, attempting a smile.

he looked at you impatiently, his fingers brushing up and down your forearms.

you fished in your bag a small plastic bag and gave it to him.

this wasn't like one of the times when he'd forget his lunch at home so you'd drop by and give it to johnny so he'd give it to an always so busy simon ghost; he could see it in your eyes that this was something more.

he unwrapped the plastic bag that you had rolled up on itself. his eyes looked brighter than ever when he took with shaky fingers the finally positive pregnancy test.

[moonysbookshelves]

The Cadence of Part-Time Poets

The Cadence of Part-Time Poets by @motswolo

Have been working on this 10 volume set for the past few months now, and they are finally complete. My Magnum Opus. I have peaked and probably depleted all of my brain power.

Thank you to @motswolo for writing such a beautiful story. My brain chemistry has been favourably altered. Will forever flinch when I hear Queen, The Beatles or Bob Dylan. Love to you from western Canada (west coast best coast lets gooooo).

I also posted a TikTok of these since posts here are limited and I love the insides as much as the covers, so if you wanna see between the pages, here’s that.

Also thank you @avisbindery for letting me scream and cry in your DMs while I read the fic. May you get some uninterrupted sleep now LOLLL.

Going to write a whole essay below about the ideas and details because uhhh I wanna yap bit!

So for starters, I wanted to make these binds look like magazines because of the epilogue where (spoiler) Tonya sees Remus in a copy of New Musical Express. But of course this fic is long, so I was like, what if I do multiple volumes? This very quickly spiralled into me painstakingly (finding publication-accurate fonts almost sent me to an early grave) recreating 10 different music-focused magazines from the 70s and 80s from scratch (thank you to Photoshop, Affinity, Procreate and Canva). Each volume features a unique cover, along with stylized typesets to match that display the songs for each chapter but in different designs. And then I went a little crazy and made a 45 sleeve and a cassette too, to really set the scene when I took the photos lol

While the covers display the dates pertaining to the contents of that particular volume (Sept 1975 for volume one, for example) I was thinking about what the magazines would say if they were really published when Marauders are traipsing about being spectacular and famous in the future. I sprinkled in details from the fic itself and fanon-ed it a bit, but that was the general inspiration :-) Tried to keep the photos used either faceless/obscured, or to use the fancasts on Mots’ Cadence master post. I also tried to use period-accurate photos but didn’t always succeed, so settled for photos of 4 member bands where I had to :”) But the general intent with the facelessness was that they could be implied to be Marauders. If you squint? lol. Just pretend. Pls.

Volume One: Based upon The Record Song Book. This magazine went on to inspire the typesets, since it publishes lyrics and such. The cover images are of Spacey Jane and David Thewlis.

Volume Two: Based on ZigZag, specifically the issue from July 1978 featuring Siouxie and the Banshees just because I thought it looked sick as fuck. I re-drew the abstract shapes and such in procreate. The cover images are The Clash and a young Gary Oldman. Lord he was foiiine.

Volume Three: Based on Trouser Press, November 1980. The cover images are a young Metallica, and my personal fav fan cast for James, Reiky De Valk. The film negatives are from a Bruce Springsteen tour, 1976.

Volume Four: Based on Gay Times (November 1984), a queer magazine from the UK because this volume contains Wolfstars first kiss hehe. Also hence Somebody To Love plastered all over the covers. The Front cover is Inhaler. The “4A” on this one is of course the boys’ dorm number, but I made the A the lambda symbol as this was a pride symbol in the 70s after Stonewall.

Volume Five: Based on Melody Maker. Front image is Alex Turner. All of the text on this one is pulled directly from the fic. The scene where they all drop acid and James jumps off the roof Almost Famous style had me hootin’ and hollerin’… until Tomny showed up hahaha :”)

Volume Six: Based on IT (International Times, Aug 1971). Front image for this one is Joy Division, and the back features Jane Asher for Lily

Volume Seven: Based on Record Mirror, June 1976. Front image is John Taylor of Duran Duran. Yum.

Volume Eight: Based on Rolling Stone. More vibes than anything for this one, but the quote still makes me laugh.  Front image is of Matt Hitt. Can you tell I photoshopped a cell phone out of this one? IDK. This photo just screamed ‘Remus’ to me so I had to use it. The back image is an old cigarette ad, but the photo is taken in Shepherd’s Bush.

Volume Nine: Based on Fusion magazine. Front image for this one is once again Inhaler. Oops. Back cover is our gals. Images are Jodie Foster as Cherry, Brenda Sykes as Mary, and Goldie Hawn as Lottie.

Volume Ten: Based on New Musical Express. You know why :”) These are all victims of fanon, but this one especially. I wanted it to be NME instead of the re-invented logos I’d been doing for all the rest, as I wanted it to look like the magazine the Sister gives to Tonya. I referred to an issue of NME from October 1979 for this and layered in fic references where it made sense to. The cover image for this one is (I think) Cigarettes After Sex. This issue also contains all of the B-Side chapters, and the Marauders song lyrics too just for fun :)

Slasher Chick: This is just my take on what Sybill’s zine could’ve looked like. Prob way off but I just wanted to have fun with this one since I had no cover to reference lol. The zine contains her little write-up and the interview, lifted straight from the fic :")

ok yap sesh over byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee lmfaooooo

[dcxdpdabbles]

ok but office supplier is even funnier if jason hasn't been declared legally alive again and danny starts dating him thus allowing him to both be and not be part of the wayne family

"I have a date," Danny says one random morning as he refills the office snack bar. Danny, in his own words, is one of the highest-paid employees. He has chosen to create a snack center for all Wayne employees. He has one on every three floors, filling it with fruits, chips, chocolate, pudding, and drinks.

And a cabinet with free samples of stationery supplies he thought more people should know about. Next to the supplies, he wrote the name of the product, where to buy, and even recommendations of

Everyone felt really touched by this and started bringing snacks and drinks to help him. Half the time, Danny only refilled the stationary since everyone was happy to have a community snack bar.

"A what!?" Jack from accounting gasped. Danny didn't pay him any mind; he was too busy picking between the flower and moon mini-planners.

Both were pocket-sized, but one had a workout addition, while the other had a section to track books for readers. He felt like there were more readers than gym goers, but he didn't want either to miss out if he picked one over the other.

"A date," he responded after placing both options inside the basket. He'll have to wait to introduce the amazing erasable pens he found, but he could make it up next month.

"With who?" Demanded Sara. She worked in PR and had been attempting to have him attend at least three parties with the Waynes in the past month alone.

"Peter. I met him a week ago at a street fair. One of the personal pen makers I follow would have a booth, and I was dying to see them." Danny pulls a box from his pocket, showcasing the fancy navy blue pen. "This is the George Washington Battle of Princeton edition. It has the painting of the battle wrapped around it, with careful silver-golden details on the cap to resemble the colonial era and a golden-edged nib; this is one fine fountain pen. It cost me five thousand and nine hundred dollars."

"Danny, please focus- five thousand? You spent five thousand on a pen!?"

Danny puffs out his chest, smiling broadly. "It was worth every penny!"

"That's-never mind. Are you sure Peter is a good person?" Jack pressed, "Because I know a great man. Mr. Drake-Wayne! Wouldn't you rather go on a date with him?"

"But Peter bought me easrsers that were shaped like fried chicken. They came in bucket. See." He ramages through his bag until he pulsl out a palm-szed bucket with chicken shaped earses inside. "Isn't it cool?"

"I'll admit that's pretty cool," Sara conceded but shared a quick glance with her coworkers. Danny wonders why they all look so worried. This wasn't that expensive. Peter only used ten dollars for it. "Do you like Peter?"

"I don't know. It's just a first date." He shrugs. "I don't usually have those. Not many people are willing to listen to me ramble about stationary."

"You know who would love to listen to you?" Jack throws an arm around Danny's shoulder. "Mr. Drake-Wayne!"

"Mr. Grasyon-Wayne!"

"Mis Wayne!"

"Mr. Wayne!" Everyone turns to stare at Gary, who flushes, "Bruce Wayne, not Damian!"

That caused some head nods and a few scattered comments about how the age gap was still alarmingly large, but if both were consenting adults, who were they to oppose it? Danny stared back as everyone debated whether Danny and Mr.Wayne should date.

He glances down at his heart-shaped notepads and figures they are right. It's not like he has any feelings about this date. He just agreed to get the passers.

Taking out his phone, he sends Peter a message to cancel their date. He should go out with someone because he likes them, not because they may allow him to discuss his interests.

Jason despairs somewhere on the other side of town as he reads the text for his second persona- a living citizen Peter Todd- from the guy who he saw at the street market going gaga over pens. The guy was so cute, too.

[catherinnn]

Hey can you do a fanfic where cheerleader reader tries to subtly ask Eddie out multiple times but he is clueless and never gets the hint. This goes on for a while until the hellfire club talks about how Eddie is missing out on Y/N, Eddie overhears and realises all the times reader has asked him out and how much of an idiot he's been. Reader confides in Chrissy feeling humiliated that she thought Eddie would like her, and decides to give up on Eddie. Then with the help of Chrissy and some Hellfire members, Eddie plans a romantic gesture for reader then finally asks her out.

Tenth Time's the Charm

a/n: Thank you for requesting love! Also, two fics in two days, I told you I was finally free. Don't doubt to write me more requests ♡

warnings: kind of insecure eddie, some swear words, and a bit suggestive at the end.

words: 2.3k. masterlist

You were coming out of cheer practice with your friends, running to finally have lunch. You catch a glimpse of Eddie at his table, bickering with his friends. You can't help but stare at his messy curls and his adorable brown eyes from afar.

"Go talk to him" Chrissy tells you when she notices your staring.

"What do you mean?" you play dumb.

"You have such a crush on him, I know you" she says.

"He hates cheerleaders too probably" i shake your head.

"Oh, that's just an act. He would die on the spot if you asked him out!" she chuckles.

"You think?" you doubt.

"Go! I'm telling you!" she says.

"Alright, fuck it" you walk up to his table. "Hi, Eddie"

"H- hey" he looks at you confused.

"Um, I was wondering... are you free this Friday?"

"Uh... why?" he frowns.

"Well, i was thinking maybe we can hang out?" you say nervously.

"Oh... you need me to sell at some party? Sorry, princess, I don't sell anymore" he figures that is what you need.

"W- what? I don't-"

"You see that guy over there? He's Kevin, you can ask him" He turns around going back to his food, ignoring you.

You look at his back confused.

"Oh there you are! Lets go have lunch!" Jess, another of your cheer friends grabs your arm and walks with you, starting to talk to you about her problem with her boyfriend.

"So? Did you ask him out?" Chrissy asks you once you sit down at your table.

"Yeah, but I don't think he understood" you say.

"What do you mean?" she asks.

"He thought I wanted to buy weed!" you explain. "He told me to talk to that guy Kevin, and I just stood there! That was so embarrassing!"

"That’s not embarrassing! Just try again" she tries.

The next time you try it's when you find him at the parking lot. He was still bickering with one of his younger friends.

"Eddie?" you call him again.

"Yeah?" he frowns as he sees you again.

"Listen, I didn't want to buy anything from you earlier. I meant... Uh, you know there's a new movie, 'Ferri Bueller's Day Off'? They say it's really good" you say smiling.

"Man, hurry! We're gonna be late for rehearsal!" Another of his friends says from the window of the car. Gary you think his name was, something with a G.

"Coming! Uh, sure. Thanks princess, I'll be sure to swing by the theater if I'm free" he says in a hurry and runs into his van to leave.

You are left standing there once again, feeling foolish. Did he really think you were just suggesting a movie for him to watch? He cannot be that oblivious. Maybe you weren't being clear enough?

They say third time's the charm, so once again, you stand before Eddie at his locker.

"Hi, Eddie" you say trying to ignore the anxiety.

"Hey, I saw that movie you recommended, really fun actually" he says.

"Oh I'm glad! Umm, you know, there's a new ice skating place that opened up here in town. Maybe you would like to come with me?" you make sure to pronounce every single of those words in the question excellently so there is no more confusion.

"Ice skating?" he thinks and you nod. "Uh, I'm not very good at that, i broke my arm once doing it"

"Oh, well, It's okay. We can-"

"But you know who loves ice skating? Chrissy, you should ask her, she'd love to go with you" he says.

"What?" you ask.

"Yeah, she gets competitive though, so don't try to beat her!" he chuckles.

"Huh" you simply say.

"Anyway, see you in class" he smiles and walks away.

You sigh, staring at his back once again. You have to take the hint: he's not confused, he clearly doesn't want to go out with you. You decide to leave him alone. It's nice of him to not reject you directly, at least.

Eddie was about to get in the drama room that next Friday, when he thinks he might have forgotten his dices. He stands at the door, looking through his bag.

"Did you hear what he did on Monday?" Eddie can hear Gareth's voice behind the door. "She asked him out to go ice skating and he told her to go with Chrissy instead, since he's bad at it"

"That’s it? And then he left?" Dustin asks surprised. "I can't believe him, he has a fucking cheerleader asking him out three times already! And he rejected her every single time!"

"He's an idiot with a big ego" Gareth says.

Eddie was standing there confused, but not for long since he can hear an angry voice calling him out.

"Munson!" Chrissy walks up to him, almost red-looking.

"W- what?"

"What is the matter with you?!" she asks.

"Chrissy, I can explain-"

"You better have a good explanation! My friend is an incredible girl and you'd be lucky to go out with her! Are you stupid?!"

"Listen! Listen! I didn't know she was asking me out!" he explains.

"What?" she looks at him as if he is in fact stupid.

"Ugh, I mean, you saw her! How would I ever think a girl like her was asking me out?! I thought she was just being friendly, which was odd enough on it's own! I know I'm an idiot-"

"You are... very much so, an insecure one" she nods.

"Does she hate me now?" he asks.

"No, she doesn't"

"Is there any way I can make this better? I would kill to go out with her!"

"Fine, I'll help you" she says.

You can hear the honk outside your house, meaning Chrissy was waiting at her car. She came to pick you up to then go have a nice dinner together, maybe even go by the ice skating place after all as well.

"Ready?" she asks.

"Yeah, let's go" you confirm.

While she drives, you notice she took another route to get to the place. You look around confused.

"I have to make a quick stop first to pick something up" she explains.

"Oh, sure"

After ten minutes she stops at Forest Hill Trailer Park, a.k.a. Eddie's place.

"Come with me" she says before getting out of the car.

"Chrissy what are we doing here?" you ask getting nervous all of the sudden.

"Just trust me" she says and knocks on a trailer door before opening the door herself.

When you get in, you can see a living room illuminated with various candles, popcorn and wine already set at a table in front of the couch, acopanated by some movie options waiting to be chosen.

"Chrissy, I think we're interrupting something" you say, looking around. When you turn to Chrissy, you don't see her anymore, but instead you see Eddie walking out of his room, with flowers.

"Hey" he smiles at you.

"H- hi" you say surprised.

"Sweetheart, I'm so sorry, first of all. I'm such an idiot" he starts, to then give you the flowers.

"These are beautiful" you smile at him.

"Listen, I would kill to go out with you, I swear. But I'm an oblivious idiot who thought you were just being friendly and sweet to me, recomending movies and inviting me to ice skate!" he chuckles.

"You cannot even begin to imagine what an asshole I felt when I realized you were trying to go out with me... but I mean, in my defense, in what world does the prettiest girl in this town wants to date the nerdy metalhead?" he continues.

"In this one, silly!" you chuckle too.

"What a beautiful world we live in" he jokes. "Princess, would you please go out with me?"

"I don't know, maybe Mike is abailable! you should check with him!" you tease him.

"Fair enough" he laughs.

"Yes, i will... you idiot" you walk closer to him with a grin.

"Thank God!" he grins too, wrapping his arms around your waist when you're close enough. "I picked out a few movies, Ferri Bueller's too! Maybe we can finally watch it together after all"

When you see that beautiful smile of his, so close to him as well, you just go for it, and finally kiss him.

You grab his face with your free hand, standing on your tippy toes and locking your lips with his plushy ones. He instantly wraps his arms tigher, bringing you even closer, smirking into the kiss.

"Maybe we won't pay much attention to the movie" you tease.

"It's alright, I already watched it" he says quickly before kissing you again.