#Crusaders aren't the only ones you can meet here

[cakypa120]

Here is part 4 of our fun trip

Red Hood is now an honorary citizen of Fawcett. Only by passing the maenads do you become a true citizen of this city.

[satoshy12]

Danny learned from the Ghost Writer that other worlds exist, even his favorite world. The Justice League!

However, Ghost Writer has always been hesitant to use his portals to explore other realms. This is due to the immense power and danger lurking on the other side.

Danny's curiosity gets the better of him, and he can't resist using Ghost Writer's portals to go into the DC universe.

Danny was here to have fun, so he decides to dress up as various DC villains, but with his young age, it has an adorable twist: he appears as a tiny child version of them.

To his surprise, Danny realizes that these costumes give him access to the powers of the villains. He seemed to mimic them, like he did in a few of his fights against his enemies attacks.

Like Ghostly wails with Dan or Cloning with Vlad.

And just seeing this would be much more fun! He started his playful journey to meet iconic heroes and villains.

The first one Danny met was the Flash family while dressed as Reverse Flash. He stumbles upon a face-off between Flash, Kid Flash, and the real Reverse Flash. With his childlike innocence, Danny manages to confuse all three speedsters, much to Kid Flash's chagrin. Danny began to tease Kid Flash about a prank he played on him. "It was me, Wally; I shoved the coffee table ever so slightly so that you would stub your toe right before you were sent off to school." "It was me who made your mother and father see your adult magazine!" Thawne laughed as he heard what the boy did. Leaving after Eobard was defeated, leaving very confused Speedsters behind.

Next, Danny decides to become Ares, the God of War. This leads to a comical confrontation with Wonder Woman. Ares is perplexed by how this young boy possesses his godly powers, and Diana is equally confused by the mysterious demigod child.

The one he had most fun was the Ra's al Ghul cosplay, complete with a sword. Danny found himself entangled in a battle between the League of Assassins and Green Arrow with his sidekick Speedy. Ra's was puzzled by this unexpected child version of himself, and Green Arrow can't help but be amused and confused by the whole situation. After the battle, Danny poured the ectoplasm from his bottle on the ground and jumped into it. Which made it look like Green Arrow and Ra's that Danny just jumped into Lazarus water and was swallowed by it.

Sinestro and Hal Jordan were bewildered by the appearance of a child wearing a Yellow Lantern ring. The notion of such a young Yellow Lantern throws them off balance during their battle. Sinestro and Hal Jordan are utterly baffled as to why a child could even wield the power of fear.

Dressed up as the Ocean Master, Danny intervenes in a conflict between Aquaman and Aqualad against the vengeful Ocean Master. Initially mistaking him for Orm's son, Arthur planned to talk with the boy, only for him to leave after the fight.

When Danny dons the Lex Luthor Warsuit, he finds himself in a confrontation with Superman, catching the attention of Lex Luthor. Lex is intrigued by the young boy's capabilities and is somehow proud of him, even though they aren't fighting on the same side. If Lex sees potential in him and contemplates offering some guidance, the boy would go far. The Suit was like his own.

At Last, The Mr. Freeze Costume, Danny intervenes in a showdown between Batman, Robin, and Mr. Freeze in Gotham City. The Caped Crusader is intrigued by this young "villain" and contemplates whether the boy can be taught to use his abilities responsibly. As Danny was just talking about Dr. Victor Fries inventions and theories, Victor saw that the boy had good ideas and theories.

Danny had his fun, and he tried to return home, only for the portal not to work.

He used it many times and had to wait a short time. Well, what are a few days here?

[strwbrychffoncke]

"take me home,, 4.9k words synopsis: in which the crusaders take care of you while you're sick! contains: completely self-indulgent. fluffy sick comfort ,slight crack ,ooc chara(?) dunno ,reader is jotaro's sister (jotaro is referred to as older but wrote w the idea of them being twins (at least 18)/similar in age... minimal phys desc. so reader can also be seen as adopted LOL) ,heavy polnareff x reader coded ,clingy!sick reader LOL ,reader is short (lol) ,some japanese terms used (written in eng) ,french terms of endearment ,light cursing... i think thats everything lol.. :X note: i also realized a lil too late iggy isnt in here but i promise u he's in another draft for something else i started i could never forget him!!!!

-

'why me?'

you crack your eyes open to the sun peeking through the inn's room window. you immediately notice your throat feeling sore, sniffling nose uncomfortably stuffy, and fatigue enveloping your entire body.

why was it so hot?

you kick off the covers, finding your strength to roll over in an attempt to get out a bed, only pausing when you feel a looming headache clouding your senses.

you sit on the edge of the bed, holding your head in your hands for a few minutes in an attempt to seize the pain, even if only slightly. when nothing seems to change, you get up, stumbling a bit from sudden dizziness before deciding to get yourself ready for the day.

should i go wake jotaro to let him know i'm not feeling well?

the thought leaves you quickly, all too aware of the time crunch you all were on, and you weren't about to slow down the journey in favor of you getting better. who knows how long that might take?

so, despite the way you have to hold onto the bedframe to keep your balance as you change, the way your skin feels like its bursting into flames, wincing in pain every time you swallow and the way your head is throbbing in the worst way possible: you persevere.

does the inn sell medicine anywhere? maybe i can buy some before anyone sees me, and then meet up with them in the dining room later. i'm usually one of the last ones, so it shouldn't be too strange...

with this plan in mind, you check yourself one last time in the mirror before stumbling out of your room, shutting the door with a click.

-

"ah, bonjour, mademoiselle! what a coincidence we're up at the same time, huh?"

polnareff felt so lucky.

were the gods smiling down at him today? had he done something incredibly noteworthy? it didn't look like any of the others were around yet, either.

polnareff getting to spend the morning alone with you????

'score!'

on the other hand....

you freeze.

'of all times-!'

considering your soft spot for the sweet french man (despite never admitting it, convinced it was one-sided), you hardly wished for him to see you in your current state.

however, you weren't about to turn him away (anyway, its not like you two got much one-on-one time on this hectic journey), and so you decide to face him before mustering up a small smile and a wave.

with or without realizing it, polnareff is absolutely beaming at you, eyes practically filled with hearts and his cheeks flushing a light pink, just from a little greeting? you didn't even speak!

he thinks you look so beautiful, like always, and he's thanking the heavens above for being the first one to see you like this today.

he quickly regains his senses before closing the short distance, standing before you.

his smile is dazzling, and he looks as attractive as always today... you hope your appearance looks presentable enough in this state.

"i was just about to make my way to the dining room, i'm starving! care to accompany me, mon mignon?"

you feel your heart race, as it usually does when he casually calls you by names like that. you still aren't sure why he does, but the crusaders always shoot you a knowing look: when you ask, they don't say anything.

realistically, you could probably say no, sneak away to search for that medicine, and then make your way back to find polnareff in the dining room, munching away at whatever suit his cravings before joining him.

on the other hand, polnareff was strangely attentive to you (something that the other crusaders pointed out more times than not, and that polnareff never once denied but rather avoided the accusation), leaving the possibility of him insisting to accompany you wherever you wished to go, no matter how hungry he might be.

indeed, he'd follow you to the ends of the earth if that was your wish, but you didn't need to know that yet.

so, you're left with simply giving him a small nod, following him sluggishly to the elevator as you allow him to talk your ear off about anything that comes to mind as you try to think of another moment to slip away to attain some medicine.

-

since it was still early, the elevator was occupied by only you two. polnareff filled the silence as he continued recalling the last enemy stand fight, and how they were "no match" for his chariot.

polnareff was so animated in his storytelling. he hoped he might impress you with recalling how strong his stand was and, by extension, him.

though, he did think you seemed a little quieter than usual today, but chalked it up to you simply still being tired.

you nodded along as he spoke, smiling at his dramatics when the elevator shook slightly. it didn't help your dizzy state, easily losing your balance and falling right into the man in front of you.

without any struggle, he caught you with ease.

"woah! mon ange, are you alright? i didn't expect you to stumble into me like that!" polnareff was holding you so securely yet gently, one hand on your upper left arm just below your shoulders, the other gently against your waist, looking down at you to quickly scan your face.

he couldn't help but take in the details of your face at this proximity, noticing the dazed look in your droopy-looking eyes, your shallow breaths, your flushed face, and was your skin warmer than usual?

your eyes shift up to meet his, bashful at the proximity before giving a curt nod. "sorry.." you mutter, shifting your gaze away from his dazzling eyes, unable to handle the intense eye contact for much longer.

"chérie, are you-"

ding!

polnareff is interrupted by the elevator doors as they open for you both.

he quickly releases you, muttering a short apology in his native tongue before stepping out first, turning back to make sure you're following close behind.

still feeling the dizziness, you stumble out after him, subconsciously gripping onto his shirt to keep your balance.

'he's so warm...'

you miss the way the silver-haired man's face practically bursts into flames, red hue matching that of his earrings.

"y-y/n-"

"sorry.. i'm still a little dizzy.... don't leave me behind, you walk too fast.."

. . .

'how can someone be this cute?!?!??!'

aside from the fact that polnareff's heart feels like its about to burst, he can't help but notice the fact that 1) he wasn't walking any faster than he normally did, it was actually you that seemed to be walking slower, and 2) he couldn't tell from the brief responses you gave before, but now, he was sure your voice sounded different than usual.

(additionally, he thought, there was no way in hell he'd ever leave you behind anywhere, accident or not. was that really something you were worried about?)

somehow, he slips the hand that was gripping his top into his own, giving it a firm squeeze before offering a triumphant look back to you.

"i-in that case, don't you think this is better, mon ange? th-this way, there's no way you'll be separated from me on the way to the dining room, right?"

you hum, satisfied. his hand is so warm.

he turns towards the direction of the dining room, hiding his red face, hoping his hand doesn't start to sweat as he begins to guide you.

"w-well then, let's go get some food!"

-

no sooner than later, you both arrived to the dining room, finding a table for six to wait at until the rest of the crusaders came down to join you.

"hmmm, it looks like the others aren't down yet. ah, let me get that for you, mon cœur."

polnareff releases your hand in favor of pulling out your chair for you, pushing it in once you're comfortable before taking the seat to your left.

he orders waters for you both to start before you have his full attention.

even the short trip from the room a couple of stories up to the dining room felt tiring, and you took this moment to momentarily shut your eyes and rest in your seat.

polnareff notices your head hanging slightly, as if it's too heavy for you to hold up yourself.

"here, y-you can rest on me," he practically whispers.

he scoots his chair closer to yours, reaching out a hand behind your head, hesitating for a moment in case you decide to pull away before gently leaning you onto his shoulder.

"are you feeling alright today, mon mignon?"

his voice comes out much softer than his usual loud tone that you almost think you only imagined his concern.

you crack open your eyes to meet his, polnareff's face holding pure concern for you.

"mhm," you nod with a hum.

polnareff gives you a hard look, obviously unconvinced. you quickly grow shy under his stare, gaze shifting to your lap.

"you know, you're a pretty bad liar, m'amour~"

despite his words, he says this fondly, resting his chin in his hand, his gaze never leaving you.

you don't answer, fidgeting with your hands.

"let's see.."

he begins reaching the back of his hand out towards your forehead in an attempt to check your temperature when a voice interrupts the moment.

"goodmorning polnareff, y/n-san."

polnareff recoils his hand as kakyoin makes his way to join you two at the table.

damn.. he thought you two would have some more time together.

you look up, smiling at kakyoin, sparing a small wave before closing your eyes once again.

kakyoin takes the seat to your right, raising an eyebrow at your arrangement before shooting a smirk towards the now-blushing french man.

"oh? polnareff... didn't expect you to be so bold."

"a-ah! kakyoin," his gaze shoots around the room, quickly thinking up an excuse at kakyoin's knowing stare. "doesn't the mademoiselle seem out of it today?"

"polnareff!"

despite the bluntness of polnareff's words, upon closer inspection, kakyoin concludes that you do seem to be less energetic than usual, as you're visibly very fatigued.

"is y/n-chan not just tired? it is quite early for them, isn't it?"

polnareff is quick to refute, having taken a closer look at you himself.

"that's-"

"goodmorning you three, you're up early!"

joseph's voice rings out to you three, avdol and jotaro in tow behind him.

kakyoin gestures at you with his eyes before shifting them to the group and back, silently telling polnareff to do something before jotaro or joseph see.

polnareff is quick to gently move your head from his shoulder to the back of your chair, seemingly before anyone else sees.

avdol and jotaro greet you three before they take their seats while joseph comes up behind your chair, beaming down at you before beginning to pat your head.

you wince at the unexpected contact before realizing who it was, quickly sinking into the familiar feeling.

"goodmorning my beautiful granddaughter! did you sleep well? you're up early today, aren't you?"

without opening your eyes, you greet him back with a short "morning, jii-san," still feeling dazed.

"did you order anything yet? you can get anything you like, however much you like, you know?"

his favoritism is really showing.... was the shared thought between the crusaders at joseph's usual cooing.

"sit down already, old man," jotaro scolds, arms folded across his chest.

joseph huffs out a breath before he retracts his hand, making his way to the last seat between kakyoin and jotaro.

polnareff opens his mouth to speak only to be interrupted once more by a waitress coming by to take everyone's orders.

maybe it's best to bring it up later.. i'll just keep an eye on her for now polnareff thought to himself.

once she leaves, everyone engages in small talk, occasionally asking you something or trying to bring you into the conversation.

as much as you usually enjoy chatting with everyone, you're much too distracted. your skin is hot to the touch, yet the dining room is somehow so cold, you keep taking sips of your water in hopes of it soothing your throat, and your head is throbbing, entire body almost begging you to just get back into bed.

because of this, your answers come out short, or you seem to space out of the conversations.

this isn't something that the crusaders don't take notice to, but most chalk it up to you still being sleepy, and simply decide to leave you be.

-

'she doesn't seem to be looking any better...' polnareff frowns at your state, fighting an internal battle trying to decide if he should inquire about your health here and now, or if he was simply overthinking it.

as you're resting, you unconsciously shiver, something your brother jotaro doesn't fail to notice amongst the chatter and laughter at the table.

he mutters his signature "good grief" before standing up to toss his jacket over you before promptly returning to his seat.

you jump at the sudden weight, looking straight across the table at your brother right as he retakes his seat.

you mouth a quick "thank you, nii-chan" readjusting the oversized jacket comfortably, only now realizing how you were shivering.

jotaro only clicks his tongue in return.

despite this, he keeps his attention on you, having sensed something being off with you from the moment he saw you.

(not to mention polnareff's inability to keep his eyes off of you for ten seconds at a time. even if that was the usual case with him, something was different about it this time, like he was concerned about something. as your big brother, he decided to watch you for the time being).

polnareff watched the exchange, wishing he had a jacket that he could wrap around you. he would've loved to wrap his arms around you instead, but no way was he about to do that in front of everyone, much less in front of joseph and jotaro, lest he be restrained by hermit purple and pummeled half to death by star platinum.

. . .

yeah, absolutely not.

just as he shudders at the thought the meals arrive.

"ah, that looks good! bon appetit~"

you nod, picking up your utensils, hoping that having something in your system will improve your state in some way.

-

"y/n-chan, are you not feeling hungry today?"

avdol's inquiry catches the crusader's attention, everyone's eyes shifting to your half-full plate.

you take a peek at everyone else's plates, either empty or almost there, before shaking your head, reaching for your water cup to down the rest of it.

you couldn't bring yourself to eat much more than a couple of bites, only trying for more as to not worry everyone (though, you usually loved to eat to your heart's content, so even seeing you only eat so much has them concerned, something you didn't consider. who knew they were so attentive towards you?)

you pull jotaro's jacket tighter around you. all you want is to lie down in the thick comforter of the inn bed once more, go back to sleep, and hope that that's the remedy for your annoying sickness.

speaking of, even after eating, you don't feel any better. your headache is still ongoing, dizziness lingering so much so that the room is lightly spinning, your throat hurts no matter how much water you've had, and despite your brother's jacket, you still feel so damn cold!

unbeknownst to you, jotaro and polnareff give you a concerned look, noting how cold you seem to be despite being wrapped in such a large jacket. were you breaking out in a cold sweat?

joseph stares at your unfinished plate for a few lingering moments, humming in thought before speaking up.

"well, if everyone's finished, let's get going shall we?"

as everyone begins to get up from their seats, polnareff is quick to get your chair for you again, holding a hand out for you to take.

"allow me, mademoiselle~"

you crack a smile at his antics, standing up before the lingering dizziness takes over completely. the noise around you begins to merge until it fades to nothing at all, and the next thing you know, you're flush against something warm, your consciousness slowly slipping away.

"woah! y-y/n? Y/N! hey, she passed out!!!!"

even through his panic, polnareff acts quickly, catching your now limp body, cradling you securely against his chest.

at polnareff's cries, the rest of the crusaders quickly shift their attention to you two, everyone quickly growing alarmed at your sudden unconscious state.

"Y/N!"

"damn! you really were... you idiot..." mutters jotaro as he quickly makes his way over.

"OH MY GOD-! is she okay??? what happened?? was it something she ate? why didn't she say anything?!??"

no one can keep up with joseph's questions as he checks over you for himself, frustrated and panicked at the same time.

polnareff shifts you in his hold, bringing the back of his hand up to your forehead.

"damn, she's burning up! she really is sick..."

"what should we do, joestar-san? is there anyway i can help?" kakyoin is quick to offer his services in whatever way he can.

"jotaro, kakyoin, go find some place to get medicine for her. avdol, polnareff, take her back to one of the rooms, there's still time until we have to check out. i'll try to get ahold of one of the doctor's to ensure it's nothing serious."

"right. let's go, kakyoin," jotaro gestured to said man, walking off in the direction of the pharmacy.

"we'll be back soon!" kakyoin called, following right beside him.

"come on polnareff, we should get her into bed as soon as possible so she may rest."

"right!"

"take care of her... she's my precious granddaughter!"

even though joseph meant this in a serious way, it still somehow managed to come out in a sulking manner.

"we promise we will, joestar-san," avdol assured. "let's go, polnareff!"

"i swear i will," polnareff nodded, serious expression on his face before he made his way to the elevator with avdol.

polnareff kept hold of you close to his chest, heart pounding in anticipation for the elevator to arrive at the correct floor.

"did she tell you she wasn't feeling well, polnareff?" avdol broke the silence.

polnareff looked up, a guilty expression on his face. "she didn't.. but she did seem off today. i guessed she maybe wasn't feeling well at the table, but i didn't say anything..." he trailed off, regretful.

"perhaps she did not want us to worry, though, her actions were in vain, considering how everyone is scattered like rats now," avdol offered a smile to polnareff.

"so don't beat yourself up over it. i doubt she wanted to look weak, especially in front of you."

polnareff's face tinted pink, eyebrows raising in surprise. "hey, what do you mea-"

ding!

"come now, let's get her to the room, shall we?"

avdol steps out first, polnareff following close after, sparing a look at you in his arms.

'please be okay, y/n....'

-

"..doesn't seem to be serious.... weather change...."

"what a relief......"

"joestar-san, we found medicine!"

"hey, dont wake her-!"

"good grief..."

you stirred from your slumber, cracking your eyes open to see polnareff's worried expression focused on you.

he stood from where he was sat beside the bed, expression immediately brightening.

"hey, she's awake!"

you sit up slightly in your spot, taking a look around the room to see the rest of the crusaders seated around the bed you're resting in.

"ahhh, goodmorning again! it really was too early of a morning for you, hm?" joseph jokes, reaching a hand out to pat your head once more.

jotaro adjusted his hat, giving you a pointed look.

"geez, you're such a troublemaker, you know that? why didn't you just say something... dumbass."

"jotaro! be nice to your sister!"

"i'm sorry for worrying you all-" a short coughing fit interrupts your words, causing polnareff to gently pat your back to help you until it stops.

"i didn't want to hold us back, and i thought it wasn't that serious. i'm really sorry..."

the apology comes out as almost a whisper considering your sore throat, but it's enough to melt everyone's hearts as they're quick to forgive you.

"good grief..." jotaro mutters.

"don't listen to him, he was the most worried, you know?" joseph teases, continuing his patting.

"says you, old man. you're the one that was barking out demands at everyone, pestering the doctor just trying to do their job."

joseph retracts his hand in favor of pointing it at jotaro.

"why you-!"

you laugh at their bickering before kakyoin intervenes, attention completely on you.

"y/n-chan, it's such a relief you're alright. here, we have some medicine for you. it's supposed to work quite quick, and since you've already eaten something, i recommend you take it right away!"

you nod, thanking him sincerely.

you just begin to realize that you're no longer in jotaro's jacket (as he's wearing it once again), but that you're still incredibly warm before avdol quickly pipes up.

"are you warm enough? i had magician's red warm the blankets for you since you were shivering so much in your sleep."

you nod, thanking him too, before shifting your attention back to polnareff, who had retaken his seat: the one closest to you.

"you really worried me, you know? of course, it's a knight's job to protect the princess, but i didn't expect you to collapse into my arms like that! give a guy a warning next time, will you??"

despite his teasing, his eyes are darting around, and you can see what you think is a hint of a blush covering his cheeks- you're sure your own face is flushed by his words.

you're not sure if it's because of his heartfelt words, his bashful expression, or your sick-dazen state (maybe all of the above) but you reach out your arms to hug his left arm that's closest to you.

"Y-Y/N- wha- that's-"

"'m sorry, jean.... didn't mean to scare you so much..." you mutter, practically nuzzling into his arm, disregarding the others in the room.

his heart feels like its running a hundred miles a minute, and he doesn't think he'll ever get over how his name sounds spoken from your lips (even with your cracked voice).

as much as he loves you clinging to him like this, he can't help but fear for his life when jotaro and joseph are in the same room with him.

"h-he-hey! you must reaaaally be out of it. ka-kakyoin give her- hey, quit laughing! gi-give her the medicine, will you??!"

kakyoin stifles his laughter, quickly handing him a small plastic cup with the orange liquid at the correct measurement.

"here, i've already filled it up for you, y/n-chan. you just have to take it now."

your nose wrinkles at the smell alone, quickly tucking your head back into polnareff's arm and away from the medicine in kakyoin's outstretched hand.

"jeez, you're such a child," jotaro rolls his eyes at your reluctance. "i'll make you drink it if i have to."

joseph takes the cup with a proud "watch this, this always worked on my holly!" before holding it out to you.

"y/n~ if you drink this for jii-san, i'll buy you anything you like, okay?"

you turn back, give the medicine in his hand one single glance before shaking your head, hugging polnareff's arm closer to your chest.

joseph's triumphant smile quickly drops.

"WHAT??!?!"

"that sure worked like a charm," jotaro jokes.

"hey polnareff, why don't you try offering it to her?"

avdol suggests this with a playful smile on his face, almost as if he knew that it would work, but simply framed the tactic as a suggestion.

polnareff, still flustered, only nods, taking the medicine cup from a (pouting) joseph before lightly shaking his left arm to get your attention.

"come mon ange, i know this medicine doesn't ever taste good, but it's the only way to help you get better," he whispers.

you give a slow nod, and he's confident that he's got you.

"oui oui, that's it. i'll even..." he takes a side glance to the rest of the crusaders, eyes all locked on you two.

"i'll even help you. ready?"

you pick up your head, raising your lips to the small cup. polnareff tilts the liquid into your anticipating mouth, and you squeeze your eyes shut once the flavor hits your tongue.

in no time at all, the cup is empty, and you're reaching for a cup of water that was left at your bedside (something that polnareff left for you when you woke up, ready to ensure you'd be hydrated) which polnareff gets for you, trickling the water into your mouth slowly to ensure nothing would spill.

when you gestured you had enough, polnareff retracted the cup, swiping a thumb over your lips to dry them before placing the cup back on the bedside table.

". . ."

the crusaders almost felt like they had intruded on something that they shouldn't have.

the first one to say something was joseph, who was gawking at the entire exchange.

"OH-MY-GOD-!!!!!!!!"

polnareff jumped at joseph's cry.

"joestar-san-!"

"joestar-san, quiet down, she may still have a headache!" kakyoin gently scolds.

"calm down, old man," jotaro states plainly. "she took the medicine, right?"

avdol couldn't hold in his laughter, sending a wink towards polnareff, who quickly looked down at you, seemingly unbothered by your grandfather's antics.

you watch the chaos unfold, grateful to have everyone by your side like this.

"how long are we staying here?" you piped up, causing the commotion to momentarily seize.

joseph checked his watch before speaking up.

"hmm, we still have a couple of hours until we need to check out. take that time to rest up all that you can. by the time we leave, you'll have to take more medicine. if you're still too weak, one of us will have to carry you, alright?"

you nodded, "ok, jii-san."

"oooh that's it. now, you just be a good girl and rest up for the time being, ok?"

you nod again before looking back to polnareff.

"you're going to stay here, right?"

polnareff has always been weak to your charms, but something about you asking him to stay with that wide-eyed dazed look, your cute flushed face, your pursed pink lips-

it makes him almost completely fall at your mercy.

"of c-"

"hmm? will you, polnareff? are you sure you don't have anything more important to do? i'm completely capable of-"

"oh shut it, old man. she wants him to stay, he'll stay. i'll drag you out of here myself if i have to."

"JOTARO! you can't be serious!!! you're really okay with this???!"

"it doesn't matter to me," he trails off.

"but jotaro-!"

you're still looking up at polnareff expectantly, and he can't bare the thought of saying no to you.

"o-of course i'll stay. if that's what you want..." he replies bashfully.

he looks back to see both joseph and jotaro giving him a hard look.

did he say something wrong?!??!

"no funny business, yeah? she's sick-"

"what do you take me for?!??!"

"just make sure she's okay... let us know of any changes," jotaro says, giving polnareff a stern look. "that's my sister, ya know? wouldn't want anything unfortunate happening to the brat."

"of course, i'll let you know right away!" polnareff says a little louder than intended, hoping to earn both men's trust.

why do you have to have such scary relatives, mon coeur?!?!?

joseph lets out one last grunt before he steps out of the room, jotaro following after him.

"we'll be taking our leave to. i'll come back to check on her later, but if you need anything, i'll get it for you."

"kakyoin! you're the best, i appreciate it, really!"

kakyoin smiles before stepping out, back to his and jotaro's shared room.

avdol smiles knowingly at polnareff before speaking up.

"i almost thought i was watching a romance movie, with the way you fed her there."

"avdol!!!"

he chuckles, standing up and making his way out of the room.

"if she's cold again, let me know, and i'll bring out magician's red again. though, she seems... quite cozy for now, so i'm not too sure that will be necessary," he winks.

"avdol-!"

"see you lovebirds later," he waves before closing the door.

polnareff let's out a sigh, looking down at you, already having dozed off, still clutching onto his arm.

'what am i going to do with you, mon trésor?'

-

later, when it's finally time to check out, you're lightly shaken awake to get your next dose of medicine before polnareff offers you a ride on his back, gently settling you before you rest once more. because of this, you miss the way he's blushing hard, all too aware of your soft, warm body so close to his, and you miss the looks that your brother and joseph shoot at him, ensuring that he's holding you securely. the crusaders talk about their next stop while polnareff is lost in his thoughts.

he decides that, once you're feeling better, he ought to be honest with you and confess his feelings properly. for now, he'll continue to do everything that he can to help you feel better, and to keep you extra safe until then.

-

a/n: omg i actually wrote something lol.... wanted to write something w polnareff for awhile n i was sick recently so in that state i wrote this up LOL.... feel like i don't see a surplus off jjba x reader on here ,so i also wanted to write something myself hehe... hopefully it came out well? i was originally just gonna do short hc's but then this happened.... editing this drove me insane LOL. tbh im only on pt4 of jojos ,but still hoping to write more in the future :P my only concern is the french petnames.... i searched up a list for ideas but from my memory, i remember the mon/ma but the list i found only had "mon" for some pet names n both options for the other ,so that's why there's both. otherwise, i hope it came out well n if anyone reads it ,thanks lol~

[remembrancer-of-heresy]

Black Celebration (Jaghatai Khan, Mortarion)

Summary: Mortarion befriends Khan's lover and realizes that he has feelings for her… and that she must be saved.

Jaghatai Khan/fem!Reader, Mortarion/fem!Reader

Warnings: yandere, manipulation, angst

Word count: 1371

Song: Depeche Mode - Black Celebration

I decided to try something new. Jaghatai is a soft yandere, but the focus is not on him, but on Mortarion. Of course, he can also be called a yandere (he is a primarch, they are all a little wierd there), but his fears are still justified.

Jaghatai Khan, Primarch of the White Scars was a special person. Strange culture, strange manners and isolation from others. He, like Mortarion, was forced to serve the Emperor, but not because of an agreement, but because of the desire to protect his world. But they were not friendly. The only person with whom Warhawk was able to strike up a friendship was Magnus the Red. A witch, no less.

It is not surprising that when Jaghatai became attached to a small mortal woman, no one paid attention to it. And it was so difficult to understand what was on his mind. So why waste time on you when there are much more important things to do.

“Oh, I didn’t think anyone else would be here. You are Mortarion, aren't you? Jaghatai has told so little about you.”

Mortarion takes his eyes off the ivy and turns around. He’s not used to seeing you without your patron. On the other hand, it’s unlikely that anything could threaten you in the Terran greenhouse.

You smile brightly and talk non-stop about how you wanted to see the greenhouse. After all, so many wonders from all worlds are collected here. The Primarch of the Death Guard continues to sit on one knee with an impassive gaze, looking at your words. During all this time, he never changed his face or said a word. Simply put, he did not show his passion in the conversation.

“I see you liked this plant. Can you please tell me more about it? Everything is so interesting here.”

You press your hands to your chin and look pointedly at the primarch. Mortarion can do nothing but frown. Something was erroneous here. Something is wrong. In you. You were wrong. Strange. You acted differently.

“Aren't you afraid of me?”

You almost recoil at his words and raise an eyebrow. Not out of disgust. But surprises. Misunderstandings. The primarch watches carefully as your eyes scan the man from head to toe. Your lips curl up and your face takes on a funny look.

"No."

Perhaps now you should be scared. Mortarion is sure that if he didn’t hurt your feelings before, now... you should have run away as fast as you could. A primarch, but he cannot control his own body, what a shame. The eyes widened, the nostrils inhaled deeply. He looked like an enraged monster, ready to rush forward and tear his victim to pieces. Only it wasn't rage.

He had never heard pleasant words.

And didn’t know how to react. But you continue to stand, embarrassedly fiddling with your hands. Waiting for the Pale King to deign to tell you about all the different types of plants in the greenhouse. Mortarion opens his mouth several times, gulping air like a fish. Until he gathers his strength and begins to talk.

***

You started meeting more often. The greenhouse was your secret place. You hardly saw each other in different parts of the Imperial Palace. Or pretended not to notice each other. But you and the primarch didn’t even discuss why you kept your friendship a secret. It just happened that way.

But Mortarion looked forward to all these meetings. Couldn’t calm down his feelings or control his thoughts. He longed to meet again, to hear your laughter. And when these meetings came, he waited with bated breath for their completion. Hoped to the last that the wonderful dream would last as long as possible.

He told you about Barbarus. About the Crusade. Not the most pleasant stories, full of pain and suffering. But you listened to them carefully. You wanted to support him. And when you touched his hand one time during the story about his “adoptive father”... The Pale King was relieved. You didn't mock him. Wasn't afraid.

You were a true ray of light. Mortarion loved listening to your stories about your home planet, customs and traditions. What are your favorite holidays, how is your family doing. Your distant home among the stars seemed like a real paradise. While Mortarion's homeworld rotted alive.

“You know, I really appreciate that you listen so eagerly about my culture.” - you get embarrassed and fidget with your dress while sitting on the floor. - “Jaghatai is also interested. But he has a lot to do and besides, I have to integrate more into the culture of Chogoris. So there is little time for me.”

You say this so calmly. You accept your fate and position like a slave. Mortarion frowns. He doesn't like you being neglected. You were mortal. Small and fragile. You need to be taken care of, not terrorized.

“What is your relationship with my brother?”

You open your mouth and blink your eyes. Until you squeak in embarrassment and hide your face in your hands. Mortarion wants, desperately wants to smile at this sight. Show you at least a little bit of goodness. But he doesn't know how to smile. Besides, he simply cannot calm down until he understands that you are safe.

“Jaghatai... he annexed our world to the Imperium too quickly. We couldn't fight back anyway, peaceful planet. I... we met at one of the holidays, and then we began to meet more and more often. And so unexpectedly! It’s as if fate was favoring us.”

Mortarion hears your heart begin to beat with greater intensity. Or was it his?

“I-I know how it sounds, but I love him. And... and he loves me. Of course I had to leave my home, but nothing could be done. Jaghatai said that he will take care of my family, they will not need anything. Of course, he forbids me to go to a lot of places and my social circle is narrow... but this is all for my safety. Sometimes his care is a little suffocating... but he said that he has never fallen in love and does not know how to show his feelings... He writes me poems, laughs at my jokes. And he also gives me rides on his bike!”

Naivety. Pure and simple-minded naivety. Which his brother brazenly took advantage of and turned a wonderful girl into a slave. And she doesn’t even realize it, greedily accepting what he gives. This is not freedom. Mortarion should have saved you, you deserve better, you need...

Him?

No, Mortarion is not worthy of your care and affection. How can such a beautiful and pure girl desire such a disgusting man like him. He looked terrible, but compared to the Primarch of the White Scars, he must have caused momentary disgust.

Khan was handsome and dressed more flamboyantly than Fulgrim. He looked after you, behaved perfectly and so normally. Mortarion looked simply ridiculous compared to him. He may be a primarch, he may be called the Pale King. But he was pathetic in front of you.

And he doesn't say anything.

***

The next day he doesn't see you in the greenhouse. And in subsequent ones. In truth, it seems as if you have disappeared from the Imperial Palace. Your trace is gone, the scent has cooled and he can’t hear the beat of your heart. You are absent. You're far away.

Mortarion thinks he is going crazy and he doesn't know what to do. Have you decided to leave him? Have you decided to run away? He couldn’t blame you, but resentment and sadness gnawed at his soul. He really wanted to spend time with you again. Feel needed. Beloved.

His thoughts are abruptly interrupted by a tap on his shoulder. Khan.

“I am grateful to you for brightening the days of my nightingale.” -White Hawk doesn't look grateful. - “My moon is already tired. She shouldn't talk to other primarchs so often. Besides, we were delayed on Terra. If you have something to say, then say it. I’ll pass on the words to my beauty.”

Mortarion wants to scream. You have a name. Jaghatai has no right to treat you like this. You deserve better... The Pale King is terrible and disgusting. He's a monster in the flesh. But it seems that your soul makes it better. Mortarion wants to see you again among the flowers, cheerful and alive. Happy. Free.

“Tell her that we will meet again.”

Whatever happens.

[qm-vox]

Man Who Talk To God Have Difficult Life - Playing Clerics In D&D

(St. Nokta Kinslayer, whom you'll meet further down in the article. Art by the esteemed @druid-for-hire who quite frankly cannot be thanked enough!)

Guess who's back motherfuckers. When they ask how I died, tell them, still angry. After the paladin article I asked around about classes to cover "next" and got a lot of requests; rogue, warlock, sorcerer, so of course I have elected to be a good friend by losing my will to live for months on end and then doing none of those. Let's talk Clerics, shall we? I'll not lie to you, this is going to be an angrier article than the paladin one, in no small part because it's inevitably going to go into contentious ideas like alignment, fantasy religion, and others that the player base has been knife fighting about since mammoths still walked the Earth. There are going to be moments when I look y'all in the eyes and say with my metaphorical human mouth that the problem is you Doing It Wrong, and I can only ask that you hear me out. Not to assign you homework about my fuckin' cleric article or anything, but the one I previously did about The Many may be helpful here as well. There's going to be a bit of a focus on D&D 5e here, and I'll be frank about that: most people are playing 5e these days, and as I'll be arguing further down, Pathfinder's take on Clerics and more broadly on faith are a worthless poison that actively worsens the world.

This article's title is drawn from Small Gods by the esteemed Sir Professor Terry Pratchett. As always, credit goes to Afroakuma for teaching me a great deal of the examples I'm going to give, though citing specific sources are going to be difficult as many of the books in question have been out of print for decades and I am neither an academic nor a machine.

Now for the obligatory Content Warnings. We're looking at discussion of fantasy religion & comparisons to real-world religion, violence, discussions of atrocities such as torture, desecration of the dead, and destruction of culture, as well as traumatic deaths/backstories for the sample clerics at the end. As mentioned above, there is also going to be some alignment discourse. You have been warned; do as thou wilt.

Without further ado, let us begin with...

O Mighty Smiter - Clerics Through D&D's History

We begin the obligatory text wall.

Clerics have been here since the beginning. They were around back when "Elf" was a class, and while their history is complex it has, eternally, been colored by the bit where Cleric has an inherent identity problem. In many ways it is, as a class, too broad, so wide-open that getting something coherent out of it is an exercise in frustration or even futility. It'll be easier to talk about what Clerics aren't than what they are, and oh boy, will I. A brief note here: while Druid is going to come up in the context of 1e and 2e, and again a bit later when I start talking about priests (yeah, that's a separate conversation, we're gonna get there), this article is not otherwise dedicated to Druid. I'm gonna need a significant amount of whiskey for both me and my priestess before we god damn go there.

AD&D 1e and 2e: Deus Vult - Do the world a favor if you ever pass near Gary Gygax's grave: piss on it. Ol' Gary G rooted Cleric in his classic blend of obsession with medieval ideas and piss-poor research, invoking many myths about priests of the Crusades and applying them as a one-size-fits-all vision of war-clergy of Every God. He would personally run into problems with this in his own writing before he got out of the game, and rather quickly at that, as he tried to write faiths whose imagery and ideals did not fit the Crusader Priest ideal, but since he was, and I cannot stress this enough, a hack with all the morals and emotional intelligence of mustard gas, he never quite solved those problems for himself. I'll hop off my screed now, I just want this said up front, especially since it's the fundamental evil that chases Cleric to this day.

The O.G. Cleric was described as a melee combatant that took a close second-place to Fighter in that arena, with proficiency in heavy armor and a variety of useful weapons, though they were forbidden from using "edged weapons that spill blood" (there's those Crusader myths). Random fun fact, the very first incarnation of Cleric only had spells up to 7th level, but the level tables for their class went up to level 29 or so, and man, ain't that just wild. As your Cleric gained levels they also became more highly placed in the church of their god, eventually hitting High Priest and just kinda sitting there as they leveled up. Interesting note here: Clerics couldn't be Neutral (that is, not Lawful, Chaotic, Good, or Evil) back in the day, and instead anyone wanting to run a Neutral Cleric had to take a subclass you might have heard of by the name of Druid, which in turn eventually had to face other Druids in SINGLE COMBAT in order to level up past a certain point. Why? I don't know. Summon Gygax's ghost and ask him between rounds of spiritual torture. This original version of Cleric had Turn Undead, a feature that's been attached to almost all Clerics by some name or another in all of their incarnations, and boy, Turn Undead used to be fucking wild. Roll a dice, consult a table based on your result and your level, and end up Turning or Destroying a number of very specific kinds of undead. AD&D 2e would put "undead gods" on this list starting at 13th level or so, and let me tell you: this came up in published material more often than you might think. Last but not least, like most characters back in 1e and 2e, Clerics eventually got to run a building full of people. At first the Cleric attracted about 20-200 "fanatics" who would work for free and help them build a shrine (no word on how TF you feed and water these fanatics) but eventually was given the right to build a proper castle-temple and produce 1 silver per month per resident via "trade, taxes, tariffs". Ladies and gentlemen, D&D.

Aside from the aforementioned alterations to Turn Undead, AD&D 2e introduced a concept known as Spheres to Cleric casting. Now, stop me if you've heard this before: each god gave access to 1 or more Spheres, which were specific lists of spells that their Clerics had access to (fun fact, Paladin casting was "as Cleric of 9 levels lower", but only with access to specific Spheres). So if you worshiped, say, Lathander, you had access to Healing, Sun, Divination, and IIRC a couple of others, and that's it, that's the whole ticket. Now, you may remember Kits from the Paladin article, and Clerics did have some of that action, but more than that they had "specialty priests", a sort of even-more-hardcore version of this whole proto-Domain deal; a Specialty Priest had different class features in comparison to normal Cleric, and access to different or more Spheres, both of which were determined by their god. Each Specialty Priest was, in its way, its own separate subclass of Cleric and if you published a god back in the day you had to get one of these installed. Were they all good? No. Fuck no. God no. Are you kidding me? But they were often very distinctive.

This doesn't get talked about a lot, at least not until we hit Pathfinder, but Clerics have had codes of conduct like Paladins for as long as they've existed, sort of atomized across their various gods. The rules around these have always been vague, and rarely culturally enforced in the player communities, but they did and do exist. A cleric of Kelemvor raising a zombie has done a bit of a blasphemy; raising a ghoul or vampire probably entails divine retribution, a reduction in character level, or even the loss of their powers. Oh, and other gods are probably trying to court you since clearly you're looking for new management and a trained cleric is a resourced that's hard to pass up.

No version of Cleric has ever particularly had a strong identity, but this original version may have been the closest to having one...because it's bad. To the credit of 1e and 2e, the eventual installation of Nonweapon Proficiencies, later to become the Skills system, did let them be competent as actual like, priests? Cleric got access to the stuff needed to actually minister as a spiritual leader with some extra socked away to practice sacred arts related to their god (ex. bookbinding for a cleric of Denier) and maybe even some god damn hobbies too. But outside of the ever-more-niche & esoteric arena of specialty priests, themselves presented as particular fanatics, agents, or chosen ones, every cleric was a Crusader, and every god's clergy were war-priests. And that's weird, right? And so now we must move on to the demon that never dies.

D&D 3.5: The Word Of My God Is 'Begone' - Quick question, have you ever wanted to roleplay someone perceptive but otherwise deeply stupid and utterly incompetent to move unsupervised through human society, who is, nonetheless, OMNIPOTENT? Welcome to the 3.5 Cleric, one of THE casters of all time in the absolute Caster Supremacy Edition. I hope you came ready to hear casual mentions of mechanics that would make a Victorian occultist cry. If you go looking at the class page for Cleric you might notice there's both jack and shit there, and for my readers who got into D&D at 5e the following might be a bit of a shock: Cleric was one of the strongest classes in 3.5.

In terms of the actual mechanics related to Cleric in 3.5, Turn or Rebuke Undead and spontaneous casting were some of the big ones. Well, "big" ones; Turn Undead qua Turn Undead was actually kind of shit and would often just not actually like...turn...the undead, but the charges of Turn Undead a Cleric kept around could be used for many other options that permitted alternate spending, notably here to include Divine Metamagic. These alternate spends were better than using Turn Undead for its actual intended purpose more or less always, and Divine Metamagic (DMM) in particular was an unholy monstrosity that underlied a lot of Cleric's power later in 3.5's run, letting them customize their prepared spells on the fly without having to use up higher-level spell slots. Now, I really cannot stress this enough: Cleric was one of the most powerful classes in core alone, without adding any supplements. DMM and similar options made Cleric even stronger but they were very much gilding the lily, to be frank. "Hey Vox why are you saying this," you would not believe the number of ignorant pricks who made a literal moral crusade out of going to "core only" in 3.5 claiming it made for a better balanced game. The good version of 3.5 has never existed, destroy anyone who claims otherwise.

Where was I - spontaneous casting, yes. Now, Clerics were still prepared casters, they had X spell slots every day at very specific levels and had to pick specific spells to fill them. That is, if you want to cast create water more than once in a given day, you need to memorize create water more than once that day. However, Clerics could convert a spell of any level to either cure wounds or inflict wounds of the same level, depending on the alignment of the Cleric (Good Clerics Turn Undead and cure wounds, Evil Clerics Rebuke Undead and inflict wounds, and Neutral Clerics not otherwise restricted by their god get to pick one for their entire career). This gave 3.5 Cleric a lot of flexibility, very valuable flexibility in a game environment where casting a heal mid-combat was basically always the wrong move, but out-of-combat healing was still an invaluable resource. RIP to Evil Clerics though, inflict sucked ass.

Lastly, we have domains. Now, if you check through the domain list on the SRD you may notice that they are rather less defining than the 5e Domains, granting a single power apiece and a list of spells you get access to. Most gods in 3.5 granted access to 3+ Domains, and their Clerics got to pick 2; together, these are the "kind" of Cleric you are, the aspects of your god that you kinda embody which then shape your power. Clerics got special extra spell slots solely for Domain spells in addition to their usual progression, and could memorize these Domain spells in normal slots as well. 3.5's list of Domains was deep and wide to the point of self-parody, and the power that gave a player to customize their Cleric's aesthetic and mechanics could be immense. Sure, many Domains were much weaker than others (Magic Domain is bonkers and that asshole is in core) but ultimately every Domain is stapled to Cleric, and since Clerics don't learn spells, only memorize them, there's a floor as to how weak you can possibly be.

So, what are your restrictions on Cleric? Not many. Non-War Domain Clerics had a sort of mid list of weapon options, sure, but if you're not casting you're playing wrong already so who gives a shit. Heavy armor and full access to shields meant a lot of build flexibility as far as that goes, so no problems here. The biggest thing is that a Cleric needed to be, and remain, within one alignment "step" of their god, plus or minus any other specific restrictions. That is, a Cleric of Liira, who is Chaotic Good, must be Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, or Chaotic Neutral; becoming Lawful Good, True Neutral, Chaotic Evil, etc would result in losing all Cleric powers and being unable to take Cleric levels until they fixed their shit or found a new god. Strictly speaking, these Clerics could/would still Fall a la paladins if they sufficiently blasphemed against or angered their god, but in practice this sort of thing was just...not common.

This is the section where I would talk about other divine classes in 3.X but honestly they were all so god damn weird and specific that no comparison really could be made. Shugenja, for instance, just isn't cognate to Cleric. The closest thing is the Healer class, no points for guessing what their deal is, but the thing with Healer is they have more in common with paladin, so like. Cleric or bust baby, welcome to fucktown.

Which brings us back to what Cleric was like narratively, the answer to which is: confused. The thing is...Clerics have always, likely will always, want high Wisdom, which makes them perceptive, good at detecting lies, weirdly talented at handling animals, competent to navigate the wilderness, and also I just described a Disney Princess. The trouble is, nearly everything else is strictly secondary. Every caster wants and needs Constitution in 3.X so they can make those Concentration checks and also, you know, not die, so okay, you're perceptive and you can hold your liquor, but after that nothing else matters. On the one hand, this makes for a great deal of versatility in terms of your ability scores, but on the other hand Cleric had 2+Int skill points per level on the most dog shit skill list in the game so being a very smart Cleric rarely bought you anything. Higher Charisma could be cool, but hey, see that skill list? It's still shit, and if you aren't also buying Intelligence you quite literally can't afford to keep up the social skill tax. A true war-priest wants Dexterity so they can act before their enemies and command the battlefield but that's more or less all you buy out of Dexterity on Cleric so congratulations, you're an almighty quickdraw and also illiterate. "What about Strength," what about it.

I really cannot overstate the paralyzing nature of that skill list, because priests - which 3.5 wanted Clerics to be, which it thinks they are - need more of them than most people think. A proper spiritual leader needs to buy up Insight, Knowledge (Religion), Knowledge (Local), Knowledge (Nobility), and Persuasion at a minimum, and they sure do also want Intimidate and Perception. You get two of those. Two. Just two. If you buy up Intelligence after you eat your vegetables like a good player, you maybe get to buy four of those. And that's it, that's all you fucking get. Clerics are not competent to be priests, which is going to be true of them going forward from this edition on. Now, I'm painting with a relatively broad brush here, and there's definitely religions on Earth these days which did, or still do, separate out roles that might reasonably be called a priest & Cleric vs. those roles that are community leaders and interpreters of doctrine and law, but there's a shocking amount of "here's my vision of what priests are and do" that Cleric wants to be, and isn't, because of this whole fucking deal.

But while 3.5 was extremely blind to the bit where Clerics just were not what it thinks priests are any more, it was very much not blind to the terror and power of their spellcasting. A high-level cleric, in the narrative of any given setting, is a terrifying force - an army unto themselves, a one-woman political bloc whose existence is an implicit threat of violence on a civilizational scale. I didn't spill all that ink about the power and mechanics of Cleric up there for nothing; 3.5 was very interested in how those mechanics could manifest within the narrative, how they are inextricably bound to said narrative. Hell, in Expedition to Undermountain alone the backstory of the dungeon includes one non-relevant sect of Clerics who was, in-universe, trying to game the spell slot system, alongside another unrelated sect that the PCs trip over by accident and fight inside their half-constructed fortress of partially undead bone which they control via Rebuke Undead.

Lemme say that again just for emphasis: there's an adventure where an accidental encounter is a long siege through a half-animated evil fortress that can be controlled through pure divinity, which was invented because its builders, in-universe, were trying to optimize their power and create an advantage they could control but their enemies couldn't. And this is just my favorite example, it's hardly the only one. Even the fucking novels got in on this sort of thing. We all joke about how wizards have no rights, because they don't, but watch a Cleric hit level 7 or so and you'll realize quickly that they are becoming something to which mortal laws are more like polite suggestions. Nor is this necessarily solely the sign of greater favor and thus potentially restriction from their god; indeed, a Cleric has to bring things to the table themself, narratively speaking! Divine spellcasting is a real skillset that you get better at with practice and experience, and part of the reason higher level Clerics get so much attention from other gods - aside from the obvious "this person can solo an army and still go home in a mood to have sex with their wife" angle - is that a skilled Cleric is a rare resource worth stealing.

Overall, 3.5's vision of Cleric is perhaps the one that suffers most from Cleric's identity-draining lack of specificity. Its Clerics were powerful, but they were also largely all the same; they could change their spells every day, but that only really meant that your list of spells doesn't really matter beyond personal preference. Domains offered some customization, but they didn't go far enough, and indeed if they were to go far enough the all-consuming might of Cleric would only be even more flagrant. So let's return to the most honest edition of D&D, shall we?

D&D 4e: Healer Calls The Shots - There are a lot of reasons that D&D 4e was born dead, and a big one is that classes with healing abilities were labeled 'leaders'. This seems absurd these days, especially if you're into esports at all; the support player being the team leader has become accepted strategy in a variety of games, in no small part because one simply cannot win without them, and yet at the time the D&D fanbase - still in an awkward transitional period of nerd masculinity that I don't have the time or the PhD to write about - rebelled against this concept with fountaining violence. The "girlfriend classes", leaders? Absurd. Preposterous. Clearly Sir Dipshit the Fighter with no mental stats or applicable skills is the leader.

I'm not fucking bitter, you are.

So what was Cleric's deal, exactly? Cleric qua Cleric was a Leader, as mentioned before, that could primarily be built either as a scrappy melee type or a more hard-support implement caster. "What's an implement caster?" glad you asked; back in 4e you had to hold a casting implement to cast your spells, something like a rod, staff, wand, holy symbol, your mother's haunted skull, whatever, and these had specific mechanical effects that altered your abilities. Some classes, like Cleric, could also or instead use a weapon as their implement, but in practical terms the strict wealth-by-level guidelines meant you got one or the other and would build your stats accordingly. Keep this in your back pocket for later, it's going to come up again. Also for your back pocket for later: these implements were, well, implemented as part of 4e's item progression, and the expectation was that you would spend your available resources (in this case, gold/phantom gold, collectively Wealth By Level) on better implements that would make your abilities work more work-y. Limited wealth meant that while in theory you could have both a magic weapon and a magical implement, in practical terms you get one or the other 'cause there's other shit you gotta buy.

What Clerics did with these implements was sell healing and healing accessories. While 4e introduced the concept of Radiant damage (used there as especially good against fiends, undead, and other forces of evil) and Clerics did indeed have access to some of that as well as buff abilities, their main thing was being the ranged healer par excellence, able to heal or cause healing far in excess of their peers in the role such as Warlord. Here, then, we return to the throughline of the divine healer which stretches all the way back to fucking BECMI, and which modern audiences may recognize more readily as the JRPG archetype of the White Mage - itself rooted in BECMI again! This hobby is an ouroboros, I say, with love.

Joining Cleric here are a selection of other classes with divine powers who take on a similar conceptual space. I talked a bit about Invoker during the Paladin article so I'm not gonna go over them again (this shit is long enough as it is), so we're gonna talk about Warpriest and Runepriest.

Introduced in the Essentials line, Warpriest was - like most Essentials classes - a simplified take on Cleric meant to be more accessible to new players. It shifted just about everything towards Wisdom in terms of writing one's character. Warpriests were these tanky all-around characters who gave up some of Cleric's team support for better attacks, and notably did not select powers on level-up, but rather got a progression based on their Domain. Readers familiar with D&D 5e might see some similarities here.

Runepriest, on the other hand, was a weird freak of a Defender whose thing was projecting offensive or defensive Auras that they could amplify with their support abilities and swap out every time they attacked. Their primary stat was Strength, drawing on a similar idea to the later revised 5e Barbarian or, perhaps more familiar to y'all, Beast incantations in Elden Ring. Very much not simplified, Runepriest offered some initial build diversity but didn't get a lot of support as the gameline continued, ironically ending up as very limited despite seeming intentions of breadth.

Narratively, these classes were somewhere in the range of 'village preacher with a hidden badass streak' to 'war missionary' to 'literal thug for the literal god of literal fascism'. 4e here stands out for being the first edition to acknowledge that a Cleric is not really a priest as such, and is much more like...a chosen one, a conception that very much fit well into 4e's idea that adventurers are inherently freaks who do things no sane person would ever consider. If you're thinking, "gee that sounds odd, why wouldn't there be like Clerics just existing inside cities", I point you at works like Dungeon Meshi who advance this same idea. Fundamentally, the skills one uses to break into ancient tombs full of undead are not skills you develop while working as a spiritual leader or a bureaucrat or even as a military officer. Adventuring is not a career you get into because your life is going well.

Of course, as mentioned, D&D 4e was born dead, so now we need to talk about the demon that ate its corpse and was, for a time, the unquestioned king of the TTRPG space by dint of its treachery and malice.

Pathfinder: Deus Vult Part II: World Holy War - Keep Pathfinder in your back pocket next to casting implements, they're gonna star in the religion section later as I express a fundamental anger that borders on inhuman rage. You have no earthly idea just how much I'm cutting out of this section alone considering that like many, I was there for Pathfinder during the beta and thus got in on the ground floor of a great deal of incompetence, malice, cruelty, outright betrayal, unexamined double-think, and egotistical bullshit.

That said, let's actually talk about Cleric.

In terms of Cleric qua Cleric, you may be noticing that the table there looks a lot like 3.5's Cleric, and indeed in many ways they're pretty similar. The biggest immediate difference is the addition of Channel Energy, which lets a Cleric become a healing bomb (or harm undead bomb, or vice versa) a certain number of times per day linked to their Charisma modifier. This is in addition to spontaneous casting, so it's a strict addition; further, it being a 30-foot burst means a channeled heal might actually be worth your Standard Action at some point in your career. It won't be, but it might. Additionally, Pathfinder Clerics are proficient in the Favored Weapon of their god by default (more on this later), which - by contrast - was often much harder to access in 3.5.

Like D&D 3.5, Pathfinder has a dizzying array of Domains to go with a default setting packed full of gods (more on this in the religion section later), ranging from things as broad as 'all magic ever' to things as embarrassingly specific as 'ambushes as laid by kobolds specifically'. Seriously, look at this list, it's absurd. And while by sheer numbers and specificity it's roughly equivalent with 3.5, I'm not about to claim 3.5 has the high road here, Clerics in Pathfinder get more abilities from their Domains and thus your choice of Domain and/or Subdomain is far more important to your Cleric than it ever was in PF's parent game.

Indeed, option paralysis is going to be the name of the game here. Clerics in Pathfinder, in addition to Domain and Subdomain and their choice of god, also get to pick out variants on the Channeling ability that I talked about and, like all Pathfinder classes, have access to a dizzying array of Archetypes. These Archetypes in turn range in scope and concept from variations on how one has trained as a Cleric (such as Crusader, keep that name in mind for later) to like, race essentialism as class features such as Fiendish Vessel. Sit on that statement for a bit. Really internalize it.

Now, while the rules for Pathfinder give provisions for older versions of Clerics such as Clerics of ideals, Planar Clerics, etc, in practice Pathfinder is very much married to its one-and-only setting, Golarion, and to its particular vision of Clerics as the dedicated priests of a single god. This is a difficult vision to accomplish, as they still aren't competent to be priests, but it's also one that adds another layer of information a player has to juggle, as Golarion makes a much bigger and yet somehow much smaller deal about Clerics falling and losing their powers; each of its gods has a published code of conduct, Obediences you can perform for mechanical benefits, and sometimes even exclusive spells. I said I was gonna cut my beefs with Paizo out of this section but I really cannot resist just one: this is from the creators who made their first bones by arguing that mechanical bloat was the cardinal sin of 3.5 and advertised a return to the purity of Core. It would be funny if it weren't so fucking infuriating. If you can't hack it as a Cleric of your god, you lose your powers until you either start hacking it, or find a new god that agrees better with your current behavior, and those gods are very much in the market to hire.

In addition to Clerics as the hypothetical main priests (both as PCs and NPCs), Pathfinder introduces Inquisitors, Oracles, and Warpriests and we're gonna have to talk about all of them so I hope you weren't doing anything else with your day. Let's start with Inquisitors. Meant to be to Cleric what Ranger is to druid, Inquisitor is a wildly revealing take on how Paizo thinks about religion and ethics. To wit:

"Grim and determined, the inquisitor roots out enemies of the faith, using trickery and guile when righteousness and purity is not enough. Although inquisitors are dedicated to a deity, they are above many of the normal rules and conventions of the church. They answer to their deity and their own sense of justice alone, and are willing to take extreme measures to meet their goals. Role: Inquisitors tend to move from place to place, chasing down enemies and researching emerging threats. As a result, they often travel with others, if for no other reason than to mask their presence. Inquisitors work with members of their faith whenever possible, but even such allies are not above suspicion."

James Jacobs would like to tell you, with a straight face, that this is a normal and expected way to engage with religion, to think about religion, and that Inquisitors as presented here can be of any alignment and serve any god, all of whom will keep them around on purpose. In a related story, James Jacobs is a sniveling wretch. In another related story, the aesthetics and proficiencies of Inquisitor are very much like, the Hugh Jackman Van Helsing. I do not say this as an insult to either Inquisitor or to Mister Van Helsing, his aesthetics slap, but do keep that in mind for what I'm gonna say later.

Mechanically, Inquisitor drops a lot of control and damage, gleefully sacrificing most of the support a Cleric offers in favor of singling out particular targets and persecuting them to death. They also get a surprising amount of out-of-combat utility, adding their Wisdom modifier to Knowledge checks to identify "monsters" ("hey what's a monster" good FUCKING question), gaining bonuses to tracking like a Ranger, and adding a FAT bonus to Sense Motive (this becomes Insight in 5e) & Intimidate checks. Their combat style is a mix of hard control spells and self-buffs to damage so they can sandpaper their enemies to death; very functional, but also very much a particular vision of a holy warrior. And lest we leave this unsaid, Inquisitor spells were very much concerned with rooting out "heresy", heterodoxy, and punishing "sinners" within their own faiths, which is a wild-ass statement when you remember, again, that they can follow any god. You wanna tell me the god of revolutions runs secret police whose job it is to murder heretics? You wanna tell me that, James Jacobs? That's what you're telling me? Fucksake. Adding to this is that while Inquisitors can take Domains, they more commonly take bespoke Inquisitions that, well, make them better at being the secret police. You know how the god of the harvest runs the Grain Gestapo and they're the good guys somehow? Like that.

This, however, is where I drop the other shoe. Look at Inquisitor's skill list. Look at their skills per level. Are you seeing what I'm seeing? They're competent to serve as spiritual leaders, indeed, infinitely more competent to do so than either Cleric or Warpriest are or ever will be. The rest of their abilities make that idea just a little bit absurd, but if you don't mind every local village priest being an apprentice serial killer on their off hours Inquisitor is the only divine class that can do the job. The only one. There are no others. The next-closest candidates are fucking Bard and Rogue.

Which brings us to Warpriest, I think. I will not mince words here: Warpriest fucking sucks. Pitched as one of the many so-called "hybrid classes", Warpriest's parent classes are Fighter and Cleric, and it really got the worst end of both. Cleric is cracked enough that even with 6th level casting Warpriest evens out to doing fine, but my fucking god. Warpriests get some minor buffs to their weapons and armor, allowing them to customize those items and granting a phantom buff to the budget they can assign to them, as well as access to Blessings, their particular spin on Domains. These are good ways to extend their spellcasting but are, essentially, equivalent to a secondary pool of spells and buffs; likewise, their Fervor ability is a pool of healing/harming in theory, but in practice you burn Fervor to self-buff as a Swift action (Bonus Action for you 5e folks) or you're doing it wrong. The problem here is that Warpriest is just...worse Cleric. The phantom buffs to their weapons and armor, as well as their pool of bonus Combat feats, do not make up for the bit where they swing less accurately, less often, than an equal level Fighter, Paladin, Ranger, etc. You're casting or you're failing, and if you're already a hard caster, you're a Cleric - and Clerics, y'know, are already war-priests.

Oracle is the weird one out of this list. A spontaneous and Charisma-based divine caster, Oracle stands out for having a more limited list of spells that they get to use more often, and for having flexibility with their use of Metamagic feats the way a Sorcerer does. "What if I don't want to use Metamagic feats," I'm afraid you'll need to go fuck yourself, this is what you're doing. Oracle was an instant smash-hit with the player base of Pathfinder for its strong aesthetics and customization; where most Clerics are essentially the same with minor differences, every Oracle is, in some way, different. In particular, each Oracle has a Curse which makes them like, literally & textually disabled in some way but also grants them power, ranging from "you're just deaf, that's it that's the curse" to "you've been infested by an alien hive-mind from literal space, good luck fucker", and also pursues a Mystery that gives them themed abilities and further customizes their spell list. Unfortunately this is still a Paizo class; in terms of the actual mechanics, most Curses are essentially meaningless, with a rare few either being so bad that they're unpickable or so good that you kinda have to justify why you didn't take them (Deafened is the latter, incidentally) and most just being nothingburgers that matter not at all.

Now, notable here before I talk about Mysteries is that Oracle, like Cleric, is living that 3/4th base attack bonus life and can natively wear up to medium armor. Unlike Cleric they are not natively proficient with their god's Favored Weapon but otherwise they're fronting as a gish (spellblade for you youngbloods, a character that mixes magic and melee). The thing is, while that 3/4 attack bonus is great for spells that make attack rolls - here Oracle is handily beating contenders like Wizard or Sorcerer in terms of accuracy - they are, you know, ninth-level casters. The correct move for your turn is "I cast a spell". There are not exceptions to this. In an extremely related story, most Mysteries are full of not-spell things to do with the actions you would normally use to cast spells, and while some of them - such as the endless parade of ways to boost your Armor Class - replace certain spells, essentially saving you a slot, many of them are just kinda...weak blasts or control abilities that don't meaningfully compete with, again, "I cast a spell". And like, the flip side of your choice of Mystery often not mattering is that you're free to pick something that seems thematic to you, but riddle me this: if you never use the abilities you pick up, does it matter that you have them?

There's some obvious winners in Mysteries, as there always is. Lore and Time are cracked as hell, and you can get away with something like Metal that has mostly passive abilities, but here we need to talk a bit about the theme and flavor of Oracle. Paizo sold the class on the idea of mysterious connections to the divine, a sort of divine mirror to their Witch class whose associations with the otherworldly are potentially unknown to them and move them without their consent. They then immediately abandoned this faster than my father abandoned me; every published Oracle is the Oracle of one god in particular, Mysteries are associated with gods the way Domains are, and this means that in all ways Oracle is a Cleric who can get laid. I am, perhaps, disproportionately angry about this, both on a professional level (lying to your readers is a bit of a dick move) and on a personal one (I wanted the Oracle they sold and did not receive it). And that's...a bit of a let-down, right? Paladins are already god-locked in Pathfinder too, so at this point Oracle, while having strong imagery, is not meaningfully different from its peers in a way that you can really latch onto. I dunno. It's a waste, y'know?

Overall, Paizo's vision of its divine classes is not able to be separated from its vision of religion as a zero-sum holy war in which everyone is desperate for converts, no one trusts anyone else, and rooting out one's own flock for heretics and heterodoxy is considered normal and morally acceptable behavior. Paizo deadass thinks the Spanish Inquisition are the good guys, if not literally, then in spirit, and that is, not to put too fine a point on it, disgusting. Mechanical innovations are present here, but to be frank the signal-to-noise ratio is awful, and it's very much not worth the effort to pillage their work for the few good ideas that have managed to survive.

Which brings us, at long last, to:

D&D 5e: The Power of God And Anime On My Side - I apologize for nothing and I will do this again.

So, right here up front, before I talk about anything else, anything else at all, Fifth Edition Clerics are, for the first time, both not priests and not trying to be priests. To quote Pages 56-57 of the 2014 Player's Handbook: "Not every acolyte or officiant at a temple or shrine is a cleric. Some priests are called to a simple life of temple service, carrying out their gods' will through prayer and sacrifice, not by magic and strength of arms. In some cities, preisthood amounts to a political office, viewed as a stepping stone to higher positions of authority and involving no communion with a god at all. True clerics are rare in most hierarchies.

When a cleric takes up an adventuring life, it is usually because his or her god demands it. Pursuing the goals of the gods often involves braving dangers beyond the walls of civilization, smiting evil or seeking holy relics in ancient tombs. Many clerics are also expected to protect their deities' worshippers, which can mean fighting rampaging orcs, negotiating peace between warring nations, or sealing a portal that would allow a demon prince to enter the world.

Most adventuring clerics maintain some connection to established temples and orders of their faiths. A temple might ask for a cleric's aid, or a high priest might be in a position to demand it."

Merciful fucking Illmater, we made it y'all. Not that the player base, by and large, has noticed; many people continue to play clerics as priests, to think of all clerics as priests and spiritual leaders, and to expect them to be such. And they are not priests. As I've argued already they've never been priests, but 5e does have a firm vision of Clerics - they're shonen protagonists. The chosen many, as it were, and that vision is clearer and more thematic than Cleric has been since mammoths still walked the Earth. Y'all are doing this wrong. Please stop.

Anyway, mechanics! The more things change, the more they stay the same; Cleric still has a dog shit skill list, they're still a mid-armored all-rounder with anti-undead features, they're still pretty good at resisting mind control. The Optimal Cleric(tm) is rocking high Wis and Dex so they can act first and get off their powerful control spells, which in turn implies light armor in an unusual first for D&D, but I'll be real with you: Cleric has one of the best spell lists in the game, as long as your Wisdom is high you can do whatever you want and never be punished for it. Notable here in comparison to previous editions are the flexibility of the Cleric's spell slots in 5e - you can cast any spell you have prepared out of your slots rather than locking 1 spell to 1 slot - and Ritual Casting, a feature most people associate with Wizards but which is very, very much available to Cleric and gives them similar out-of-combat utility. Turn Undead and Destroy Undead return, both more functional than they've been in decades, and are now linked to rests of any kind and also used to charge Domain features. "What about Divine Intervention -" what the fuck about it.

Which brings us to Domains. And the thing about Domains is there's still a lot of them in the context of 5e; the Player's Handbook alone published seven of them, and just about every player-oriented book after that had 1-2 more, sometimes as many as three. Cleric is feasting, and while most of the food is decidedly mid it still doesn't matter because it is, again, stapled to Cleric. Like I could wax poetic, at some considerable length, about why Domains like War, Trickery, or Grave are bad options, but y'know, the thing is, they're still fucking Clerics, they'd be doing fine with no Domain at all. I'm not gonna go into a massive breakdown of the pros and cons of any given Domain, but in general you'll have the most harmonious time with Domains that don't expect you to be spending your actions doing things that aren't casting spells. War, for instance, is gonna be a let-down because it really wants you to be making weapon attacks and you do not have the tools to make that remotely worth it; conversely, Grave also sucks, but it mostly fills in actions that your spells can't or won't, so you'll have a much smoother time playing Grave. For those wondering, the hands-down winners of the Domain list are Knowledge, Life, Light, and Tempest, though an extremely dishonorable shout-out goes to Order as a control & utility pick that is completely unaware of its own existence as a cosmic fucking horror story. See the sample Clerics below for that shit.

Now, remember when I told you to keep implements in your back pocket? 5e also has them, but they're introduced a bit...unevenly. Magical items do exist that do what magic implements used to do, namely, boost your spell DCs and spell attack modifiers - the caster equivalent of a magical weapon - but not many were ever published, and the ones that were are mainly for arcane casters. Fans of Critical Role may be recognizing items like the Spire of Conflux or the Hand Cone of Clarity as taking this role (and indeed quite a bit of Mercer's world and mechanics draws influence from D&D 4e), while players of Baldur's Gate 3 are pointing at the screen and naming some of their favorite caster-focused shields, gloves, and helmets right now. Any of these are a pretty neat way to engage on this idea as long as you keep things under control (you don't wanna exceed a total of like, +3/+3 here), but you as the DM, or you and your DM if you're a player, can and will be making this shit up yourself for your Cleric.

So, what's 5e's vision of Clerics, narratively? Well...see, the thing is, the text I quoted above is mainly it. D&D 5e is remarkably lore-light on the player-facing end, instead investing a lot of its lore writing in wild reworks of various cultures such as drow or gnolls, which I will not comment on because I do need to end this article at some point and I'm still in the fucking context section. There's a soft sympathy towards the position that 5e's Clerics, as they level, are holier Clerics, rather than more skilled Clerics (again, see above), but even that is a very tepidly held position, one which in novel writing and related media is far from consistent or primary. That said, I couldn't walk out of this section with a straight face if I didn't talk about the WILD fucking Domain assignments 5e makes for its gods, which in some cases is an artifact of many more specific Domains no longer existing, but in other cases appears to be the product of some of the most ignorant Protestant bullshit you can possibly imagine when thinking of the gods in question. Again, see the existence and flavor of the Order Domain as an example here, but like, in what fucking universe is Helm associated with the Light Domain? Since when was Wee Jas a Grave Domain kinda goddess? Not to hype this up twice in two paragraphs, but you will notice when we get there that I have chosen to ignore this whole affair for many of the upcoming sample Clerics and when I do there'll be some discussion about it. I do these things to myself and I really wish I didn't but this is who I am as a person now.

Going to the Land Of Context is like going to the Underworld, it takes you three days no matter how fast you travel. But at long last we have arrived, and we can conduct the actual fucking article. May Oghma pity me, for I myself will not.

Gotta Go, The People In The Important Pajamas Are Mad - Clerics At Your Table

Before I say anything else, that headline is not my original line but I cannot for the LIFE of me remember what early aughts webcomic it's from. I am likely misquoting it but if anyone on this hellsite recognizes it and can point me back to it for a proper credit I will be quite grateful & also get the citation in.

The following section is meant to help you in fleshing out a Cleric concept to play or even to use as an NPC. While some of this advice is edition-agnostic and indeed when we get to the religion section we're gonna return to some Takes Through The Editions and I will be very sad and also angry, a great deal of it will be slanted towards 5e because, let's face it, that's what people are playing. Make of this what you will. Also covered here will be same-paging (again), Clerics & alignment, and common pitfalls of playing Clerics (and suggestions of how to avoid them). So, without further ado:

Same Paging - In Which I Blow The Meta Joke About This Being In Any Class Article I Do Early Like A Damn Fool

Same-paging is the practice of talking to your group in a way that helps set mutual expectations, and it’s something every RPG group should strive to do regardless of the system they’re playing in. You’ve probably done this to an extent before, as part of being pitched a game (”We’re going to do a dungeon crawl through the deadly halls of Undermountain”), during character creation, and the like. If this opener to the section sounds familiar, it's because I copy-pasted it from my last class article and there's nothing you can do to stop me. In the specific case of Cleric, the elephant in the room you need to explicitly talk about and not just assume shit about is the sort of relationship you're looking to develop between your character and their god(s) and, y'know, any themes or ideas about spirituality that you explicitly would like to see included or, conversely, very much need to not see included. We're gonna get into it more in the religion section later but man it truly does fucking blow chunks if you're looking to have, say, a serious exploration of your character's faith and its relationship to society, but the rest of your group is on some Reddit Atheist shit, right? Hell, it's not even pleasant if you unexpectedly end up doing the inverse. In addition to this, if you're looking to explore ethical or doctrinal dilemmas (i.e. if you're really into the idea of playing a Cleric of Eldath as a dedicated pacifist, or dig into the conflicts that might arise between the Orders of Denier who preserve knowledge vs. some kinda magical infohazard), this is the time to say it and chew it over with your group. And again, as long as everyone's having fun and not hurting someone else any way you play it is fine - a kick-in-the-door style campaign is a perfectly fun campaign to have. The point is to set expectations up front, not to like, ensure that the group is playing in the one ordained way to play. Which is bold words considering how many times in this article up to this point I've deadass accused people of playing wrong, but I do mean it. I contain multitudes.

One Day, A Tortoise Will Learn To Fly - Making Your Cleric

The Pratchett quotes will continue until morale improves.

Once you and your group have communicated your expectations to each other, it’s finally time to start sketching out your concept! There are many ways to do this, though the two primary schools are mechanics-first and narrative-first. That is to say, opening up with something like "Using the Knowledge Domain to pick up proficiencies on the fly sounds fun to me," works out great, as does opening up with something like, "My Cleric learned her ex-wife was literally a goddess about three weeks ago and is having a wild one about it." However, this article is about to be long enough already without me trying to write a mechanical guide to 5e Cleric, let alone any other Cleric, so we're gonna focus on the narrative approach. If you need a mechanical guide, I promise you that the player base of whatever edition you're into has made several and that the author of each one has some kind of passionate beef with the authors of all of the others. Consider the following questions for your Cleric:

Why Did You Become A Cleric? To be a Cleric is to be of the chosen many; inherently, you're gonna be a bit weird. That weirdness may be because of the conflict between your perceived social station vs. who you are as a person (to wit, people might expect a Cleric of Oghma in the Forgotten Realms to be a stuffy scholar and be surprised when he shows up to strongman competitions or turns out to be one of the Sword Coast's most prolific authors of erotica), but in all honesty odds are much higher that you're a freak. Incredible divine power doesn't erase the bit where adventuring is not a career one takes up because one's life is going well. That said, just because you're a chosen one doesn't mean you didn't also get to choose. Did your Cleric pursue Clerichood for some reason, and if so, why seek that power? If they didn't seek it out on purpose, how do they feel about this change in their relationship to divinity and the burgeoning power within them? This is where you can get both characterization and plot hooks; a Cleric forged when she swore herself to the Red Knight in a desperate attempt to defend her farm from bandits is a very different beast from one who sought power and station from Bahamut so they could enact reforms in their society. Look for connections to the game world and reasons to care about it.

How Did You Learn? There's some obvious things to answer here - your Cleric learned how to wear up to Medium armor, the proper use of shields, and basic combat techniques - but the more interesting question to dig into is your spells. D&D has actually had many different schools of thought here, some of them co-existing or competing with each other. D&D 5e, as mentioned above, breaks on the idea that a higher-level Cleric is a holier Cleric, and that their casting is an almost intuitive process of seeking intercession or requesting miracles in advance in case they need them. Many people play their Clerics this way, but here I will once again climb atop my mountain of old-ass lore and offer an alternative: divine spellcasting as a skill you actually have to learn and practice. In this school of thought, a higher level Cleric is a more practiced and powerful Cleric, and is intrinsically attractive to "rival" deities not simply because they are a great champion of their own but because they are a potent resource. For those in the audience wondering how this makes any fucking sense, I will point out, gently, that this idea is actually still prevalent in Japanese media and its White Mage archetypes, as well as in popular videogames like Elden Ring. These Clerics learn spells from somewhere, and the "somewhere" has a broad variety of answers; they unlock the secrets of their rites through cryptotheology, they experience divine revelation, their god teaches them personally, they're mentored by more experienced Clerics. Indeed, Ms. Jester Lavorre of Critical Role fame engages on her divine casting in this mode, often expressing that the Traveler has been telling her about new spells or teaching them to her personally, and while this is set up as something suspicious about the Traveler in her story it's actually a quite storied idea of Being A Cleric with deep roots in many D&D settings. Regardless of your choice here, though, consider this next question:

How Do You Relate To Your Power? This is another arena with a lot of unquestioned ideas that do not necessarily like, relate to how Clerics have been historically or even what they could be if we took only 5e as gospel. In most cases, people take a very Protestant slant to their Cleric; their spells and powers are divine gifts which can and should be revoked at the whim of their god, who is in turn a being of higher morality who intrinsically knows better. And like, I'ma get into this in the religion section here in a bit, but this is a wild idea when you actually look at the gods in question, let alone when you remember that to be a Cleric is to build a relationship with one's deity. Pious service as thought of by Christians is a way to relate to your deity, sure, and there's even some hanging around that are into it (Torm, f'rinstance), but like, Waukeen would find such a relationship distasteful, would say to such a cleric, "Girl, you're selling yourself short." So put some real thought into this, and you may come to surprising answers for your Cleric. Do they see their divine power as bringing forth the holiness intrinsic to the world? As an outflowing of their own passions and obsessions? Could your Cleric read as a grim cynic to others because they view their spells as not fundamentally different from arcane magic, and caution sternly that power is power regardless of source? Are they gifts from the world of wonder and horror, which anyone could use if they knew the right way of seeing? Your Cleric's abilities are not like a second layer on top of their personality, they're part and parcel of who they are as a person; give it consideration.

What Are Your Values? Hear me out; this seems like an obvious question, something every character should ask, but here I'm going to introduce an argument that I'll elaborate on later - gods in D&D are, essentially, worldviews. And while the worldview embodied by your Cleric's god(s) is obviously the one most important to them - they did become a wholeass Cleric about it - D&D has some specific-ass gods. A Cleric of like, Azuth (god of spells, patron of wizards) is not getting a party line about a whole lot of basic ethics and kinda has to figure that shit out for himself. So ask yourself not just who your Cleric believes in, but what, and how this might relate to their faith or grow from who they are as a person. A Cleric who is the fourth child of a noble house (kicked out to a life of adventure because they ain't inheriting shit) may well have opinions about noblesse oblige, politics, and power that have absolutely nothing to do with their chosen god; likewise, D&D has a rich tradition of Clerics of fairly evil gods such as Auril, Loviatar, or Umberlee who are out here selling the wonders those dark powers have on offer because they genuinely believe in helping people or, you know, have Standards, the thing professionals are supposed to have. A frontier Cleric may well have opinions, for better or worse (traditionally worse, D&D has a long history of being friendly to empire) about the colonial project they're a part of, or a Cleric up from the Underdark might be spending her free time in academic knife fights defending the beauty and splendor of her home's ecology. Your Cleric is a real person in a real reality, not an extension of her god; that's the kind of thing that gives a person some fucking opinions, no?

What's Your Relationship To Your God(s) Like? And in a related story, this point! Unless something really odd is going on, your Cleric is not a divine being free from mortal needs or the burdens of history; it therefore follows that she is not about to be a perfect incarnation of her god(s) ideals. That's, y'know, the neat bonus you get for having an afterlife. Let's leave alone for a moment that there is a pretty strong possibility that your Cleric is so uneducated and/or fucking stupid that they don't know the textual dogma of their own faith (though please, do not forget this, it's one of the funniest things about Cleric); the ideals of that faith, and of their god in particular, are something they are probably growing into. This really should not be a controversial take, not after Critical Role blew the fuck up with the likes of Caduceus Clay and his spiritual journey in the name of the Wildmother, but you might be surprised. It is, genuinely, okay if your Cleric is kinda bad at following their god(s) in some ways! Maybe even many ways! A dwarf Cleric who's out adventuring instead of at home using their magic to help their clan is already failing at least one major ideal of the dwarven pantheon, for instance. Clerics and even priests of Sune Firehair (goddess of art and beauty, a chaotic and capricious foe of evil whose mantle is the splendor of the living world) have a partly-deserved reputation as shallow hedonists who reify existing beauty standards; the entire faith of Lathander has a serial inquisition problem that they haven't stopped having an ongoing civil war about since the fucking Dawn Cataclysm. So how does your Cleric see the divine ideals to which they are meant to aspire? Is their deity their teacher and guide? A stern master to be obeyed? A distant and dazzling figure almost disconnected from matters of dogma in the Cleric's mind? Their literal actual lover? There can be many answers here, and while I don't want to downplay the delicious angst of a well-done "I'm a bad worshipper of my god and I'm guilty about it" arc...well, the signal-to-noise ratio there is real bad, let's say. More on this in a later section.

Hobbies? Pick some. I really should not have to be saying this and honestly it's a dependent consideration with the whole 'what are your values' thing but if I see one more Cleric whose entire life and job is religious service with no interests outside of it I'm going to drop the moon on Europe and whatever happens will happen. Fucksake, this isn't even a 'many D&D players are culturally Christian' thing, this is just lazy writing and historical illiteracy. Did you think all those monasteries and temples in like, Redwall and such making beer or growing crops was just the authors having a fuckin' laugh? Come on.

Playing With The Big Boys Now - Cleric Aesthetics

You may be remembering this section as where the Paladin article talked a bit about refluffing. This is...sort of like that. As one of D&D's full casters, Cleric is deep in its particular idiosyncrasies, and using the Cleric kit to make a non-Cleric thing, while possible, is still going to have a...a particular shape, let's call it. If, for instance, your setting doesn't have any separation of arcane and divine magic & "clerics" are just a different school of magical study, you're probably fine. If you're trying to do a fully technological setting where "spells" are high-tech gadgets, you're gonna run into a bigger set of problems much faster. All of that said, though, there's still quite a bit to talk about in terms of bringing out unique flavor for your Cleric, some of which are habits that the 5e player base has already rushed ahead to hold up as good practice and others which are rarely thought explicitly about. I do hope you came ready to learn about obscure TTRPG audience drama that has never wholly died out. Let's start with the easy one first, shall we?

Spell Aesthetics - I'll not lie to you, I should probably be angrier about this topic but the convoluted history of the player base's relationship to "what do your spells look like?" is too fascinating for me to really build up the fury it deserves. There has been, indeed, in some senses still is a shockingly vitriolic argument within D&D circles about whether or not all spells of the same name look the same, and while I am vastly simplifying the two perspectives generally break down into "they need to look the same so that they are identifiable for balance reasons" vs. "having your own personal brand is sick as hell". The latter has traditionally won by default in terms of the overall body of D&D's work, especially in the spaces defined by the novel-writing, though the influence of CRPGs like Neverwinter Nights who break on the side of spells looking the same for everyone (for obvious reasons) shouldn't be downplayed. D&D 3.5 had a Feat for this that makes your spells a little harder for people to recognize via the Spellcraft skill but mostly just gives you absolute reign to customize the look of your casting; Pathfinder, by contrast, doesn't want you customizing jack shit (and indeed late in its run also edited Silent Spell and Still Spell so that your casting of spells is still detectable to the naked eye, cowards that they are). That said, and to the surprise of absolutely fucking nobody, I break very strongly on the side of "having your own personal brand is sick as hell", as do many of the major works of modern 5e, here to very much include Critical Role but also many other actual plays such as Dice Shame or Planet Arcana.

So, what goes into deciding what your spells are like? First things first, the mechanics; an aesthetic that doesn't do what the spell does, or have the components the spell uses, is right out. It's one thing if your group handwaves certain ideas for ease of play or because they don't interest y'all (see here the common practice of replacing expensive material components with just subtracting the gold from your sheet when you cast), but like, your guiding bolt fires Something that requires an attack roll, it deals Radiant damage, and it causes some kind of light that clings to an opponent. Verbal components, mechanically, must be spoken in a clear voice. Somatic components...exist. To be perfectly honest no one has had a clear idea of what Somatic components are ever aside from a vague idea that they require your hands (this is mechanically explicit in 4e & 5e) and even then there's exceptions, dishonorable shout-out to the scene in War of the Spider Queen where a wizard casts with his fucking feet. Notable here is that casters in 3.5 through 5e can replace non-expensive material components with a focus/implement/character feat, such as a staff, orb, wand, crystal, or in the case of Clerics, their holy symbol; these implements are touched, invoked, involved in the somatic components, or otherwise pretty obvious. The next bit of this is gonna be all about selecting your own aesthetics but I do want to reiterate first something I have said before and will continue saying over and over and over and over and over and over and over again: in any conflict between the narrative and the mechanics, the mechanics win by default. This is because they are the tools with which you actually engage with the game world. When your Cleric of Umberlee casts flame strike, there is some manner of dealing Fire damage involved. Maybe it's boiling sea water, maybe you hit a motherfucker with an underwater volcano, maybe you just go "the classic burning column of fire is fine", but you can't bitch slap people with that spell and then say it's actually the cold ocean depths. Alright? Alright.

So when you're looking at "what do my spells look like" there's three places I like to interrogate. The first and most obvious is, what's the deal with my god? This can be a pretty broad thing to look at; gods are worldviews, and those can be interpreted very differently. Not to return to a super famous example here or anything, but when your friend and mine Caduceus Clay (Critical Role) has spiritual guardians that look like swarms of beetles and manifests his damage spells as aspects of decay, another Cleric of the Wildmother may well lean into vines and trees, or their guiding bolt might appear as hurling a whole-ass rhino at your face that then explodes into light. Here, then, we roll into the second question: what domain is your Cleric? This is the aspect of your god or your faith that you're the closest to, which is dearest to your heart, and will therefore manifest in the act of spellcasting - which in turn is derived from your relationship with the divine. A War Domain Cleric of say, Eilistraee, may well emphasize the martial prowess of that goddess in their spells, manifesting spiritual armor, blades of moonlight, mighty shields, numinous warriors, while a Twilight Domain Cleric of the same goddess is gonna be all in on the moon and stars, the sky at night, crescents, and the like.

Lastly there's the physical action of spellcasting to consider, and here I would like to hasten to point something out. While it is common practice to simply use one's holy symbol as a divine focus, it is not required. Many faiths on Earth have holy symbols or something cognate to them, but there are also many that do not, and for those looking to explore a faith in a D&D god which doesn't practice that sorta thing Clerics are, like all casters, perfectly empowered to use a Component Pouch and cast spells in a more formal, ritualistic fashion than the typical image of calling out to one's god and seemingly producing a miracle without actually casting a spell (but more on this in a bit). Is your Cleric a student of divine magic, going through carefully-practiced forms? Are they intuiting their way through spellcasting, a razor's width away from being something like a Sorcerer? An almost saintly figure, whose spells appear for all the world as miracles (and if they are how do you square that with the dumb plans the average adventuring party engages with)? Do they speak their spells in a booming voice, announcing the presence of the divine? Are the rites they chant almost business-like, a concession to the needs of the casting but perhaps not seen as properly holy or reverent? What language are you casting in? Give it some thought.

Turn Undead & Other Features - Surprise bitches, there's old-ass lore about this too. While all Clerics can Turn Undead no matter how little sense it makes (look my in my lich eyes: what the fuck does Azuth care about undead?) and this is for Doylist reasons of legacy design, how they've gone about doing so and why have multiple interpretations. Way back in AD&D 2e this was something you were encouraged to think about and design for your cleric (see: The Complete Cleric's Handbook & The Complete Paladin's Handbook), both in terms of the physical action and what the power looks like. The classic wave-of-radiating-force look, displayed in Baldur's Gate 3 and used extensively in Critical Role, is indeed an old one with a lot of pedigree, associated with Clerics of sun deities such as Pelor or Lathander, but also with militant deities like the Red Knight, Bahamut, or even Wee Jas (it might seem weird that the goddess of necromancy is out here sponsoring Turn Undead but for the Ruby Lady specifically it's less 'begone, unnatural horrors' and more 'behold, my eviction notice'). Going with this has traditionally been some kind of plainly-spoken invocation or prayer; 'disperse and dispel', 'back to dust', 'return to sleep', that sorta thing.

However, this is far from the only possible look or interpretation. Indeed, popular these days is simply lifting one's holy symbol and calling upon one's god, which I have some objections to - it's not appropriate for every god, and it's also just kinda unoriginal - but is perfectly serviceable. Turn Undead as a sort of spell, with obscure incantations or formal rites for gods like Azuth (here making one's Turn Undead similar to dispel magic rather than any intrinsic divine abhorrence) could fit your Cleric, as could Turn Undead as a power move where you assert your god's greater authority over the undying (excellent for many non-nature Evil-aligned gods, and hilarious for gods like Loviatar). Likewise, Turning or destroying the undead can and should be flavored by your god and Domain; a Cleric of Chauntea that Turns Undead may well terrify them with the reminder of the grave, the bounty of the earth that will grow from their stolen bones, while a Cleric of Mystra simply unbinds the magic that holds them together (and, again, the eternally hilarious Clerics of Loviatar manifest the power of their goddess to beat the shit out of the undead). One move might even be to say your Cleric of a god who doesn't give a shit about the undead is actually drawing on another god from their pantheon who does; the aforementioned Cleric of Azuth is actually invoking his vassal, Velsharoon, who has authority over necromancy.

When it comes to one's Domain powers, you kinda live and die by your brand here. Every Tempest Cleric in 5e is gonna have the exact same fucking power list, so if you're not making your Tempest Cleric of Umberlee different from a Tempest Cleric of Gruumsh what the fuck are you even doing. While the way your god interprets these themes is obviously important - your character chose to follow them for a reason, after all - perhaps more important is the way your Cleric relates to them. A Chaotic Neutral Cleric of Umberlee who has a love of the terrible beauty of the sea conjures storms of sublime awe, like something out of a Gothic novel, while a more traditional Chaotic Evil one may well lean on storms as instruments of vengeance and punishment, sharing in her goddess's petty malice. When your War Domain Cleric takes that attack as a bonus action, is he seizing a moment, or drawing on berserk rage? What kind of Light or Life do you have? The opportunities are here y'all, seize 'em.

Radiant and Necrotic Damage - These are relatively young as far as D&D goes, and while they have bones in with earlier kinds of damage they're actually a bit thematically confused. Just to give you an idea here, Radiant damage is dealt by guiding bolt, the Light Domain power, ACTUAL FUCKING LASER RIFLES, and also flame strike. It has replaced instances of "this damage derives from pure divine power and cannot be resisted", Positive Energy damage, and also just fire damage for some fuckass reason. So when your Cleric is dealing Radiant damage, something all Clerics do, what is it? Nearly any of the above is a potential option, though I'll admit that I'm a sucker for the Positive Energy damage where you give living beings super-cancer that devours them in moments and/or unbind and dispel undead. Complicating this is that in the 5e paradigm, Radiant and Necrotic damage are both associated heavily with divine classes, and have nearly equal claim to holy power.

Which brings us to Necrotic damage, which is dealt by inflict wounds, as well as spells like blight, and also associated with Evil Clerics via spiritual guardians and similar spells. This one is derived from Negative Energy damage historically - that is, pure entropic power, not just death but "stop", "cease", "still", "silence" - but this is not always the case, and it very definitely has been used in 5e to represent things like blood drain, soul drain, pure unholy power, and also flaying someone alive. Similar considerations to Radiant damage apply, but they apply especially when you're out here casting Necrotic blasts when you, say, worship a nature or life god. What exactly are you doing? Why is it you're doing it that way? How is this, too, a miracle?

I May Have Started Worshiping Umberlee Because The Priestesses Are Hot - Clerics & Alignment

So here's the thing. As I mentioned above in the 69 page long context section, Clerics have had Falling mechanics for awhile, even if they have been consistently downplayed or ignored in comparison to Paladin. There's also been a very long time in which Clerics were required to be close to their god(s) in alignment, and there's something to be said there; how can one build up a deep and intimate relationship with a divinity that you have nothing in common with? But there are many groups that don't want to fuck with alignment (I'm gonna do that alignment article one of these days and on that day I will die), settings where alignment and worship are less connected (see: Eberron), and of course in 5e these ideas are no longer formally connected in that fashion, with alignment requirements being removed. Hell, books like Xanathar's Guide to Everything and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything introduce some wild-ass ideas on the random fucking tables like "your Cleric has an ongoing relationship with an imp she doesn't fuckin' like". That seems pretty functional, so, why am I talking about it? Glad you asked: I'm an ancient-ass lich and a bit of an alignment apologist, and also this is my article and I'll infodump about alignment bullshit if I want to.

Now to make a proper run at this I'd really need to actually do that alignment article, so I'm gonna ask you instead to journey with me to an imaginary land where everyone is engaging on alignment in good faith and understands two foundational principles that the modern zeitgeist has kinda left behind; the first being that alignments are broad categories that describe beliefs which have things in common, and the second being that any given one of the nine alignments has room for many, many variations on those beliefs. Not to put like too fine a point on it but just as one f'rinstance there are no less than three different Outer Planes you can point to and say "this is Lawful Good" and each and every one of those three separate dimensions of Lawful Goodness contains its own internal array of differing beliefs and expressions of what it means to be Lawful Good. And in that sense, your Cleric's god is going to be a worldview that is included in their alignment, but is not necessarily, often, or even ever a generative force for that alignment. Evenhanded Tyr is not a fount of Lawful Goodness from which mortal beings drink to become more holy; he has a worldview, beliefs, and dogmas which one can describe as being Lawful Good, and he/his church seeks to teach them. Likewise Umberlee, the famous Bitch Queen, is not Chaotic Evil in the sense of 'overthrow all governments' but in the sense that the sea recognizes no master, is sovereign in itself, and will not be denied; that she is friendlier to Chaotic worshipers comes down to a sort of mutual comfort and expectation. A Chaotic person might not like that her goddess is a divinely infamous bitch, but she like, gets it, y'know?

So when it comes to your Cleric and alignment, there's an easy ask: what is it about their faith that attracted them to it, and in what ways are they aligned with that faith & in what ways are they lacking, opposed, or still have things to learn? The gods of D&D are stranger and wilder things than people give them credit for, to be sure, but the thing is that being a perfect embodiment of your god(s)'s worldview is one of those neat bonuses you get for being a dead person, not something people generally pull off while yet living. And, not to leave this bit on the table, not all or even most of those conflicts are necessarily what one might call a dealbreaker. It can be something as simple and doesn't-need-to-be-solved as like, a follower of Azuth spending time running for political office (a Lawful/Lawful disconnect; Azuth doesn't really give much of a shit about mortal law), something profoundly wrong but understandable (a follower of Oghma who passionately hates certain kinds of literature or poetry; Oghma is the god of all language and written art), or even really major which can form the core of an arc where either the character or god has to give (Shadowheart in Baldur's Gate 3 goes through this, but for the one person on Earth who hasn't played yet a different example might be a worshiper of Bahamut who ended up joining the colonial invasion of Chult, directly angering his god because he has failed to understand some fundamental fucking lessons here).

All of this is a lot of words to re-argue a previous point; your Cleric is not a sovereign being, capable of acting without reference to the real reality or by pure ideal alone. They have baggage, they have community, they have or had a family, they have beliefs shaped by being a real thing in a real reality. Look at the ways these aligned beliefs both touch and conflict with their church, their god, or both, and you will find a bounty of characterization and plot hooks. Keep in mind as well that the gods of D&D are fallible beings; they are students of their own ideals as much as they are teachers of such, and there are, indeed, perfectly usable hooks to be found there as well. Your Cleric is not a saint or a savior, usually; they are a student and teacher of divinity who seeks to understand it, and going on that journey together with one's god is something that has been lost in the current paradigm of the D&D audience being friendly to fucking Reddit atheism.

Call It A Girlfriend Class One More Time Motherfucker - Common Cleric Pitfalls

I'm not bitter, you're bitter.

D&D is a snake devouring itself, and like many such ongoing communities and fandoms it therefore has a lot of cultural baggage which is, how do you say, completely disconnected from objective fucking reality. This section covers some common pitfalls people walk into when making and playing Clerics. If some of these end up sounding like personal callouts...dunno what to tell you. Examine your shit.

Healbot.exe - Yeah we're starting off with the big one. Look me in my eyes. Look me directly in my fucking lich eyes. Clerics are not healers. No one in D&D is a primary healer. There have been exactly two effective primary healers in all of D&D history; the first is the Vitalist, a Psionic class published by Dreamscarred Press as part of a third-party supplement for Pathfinder 1e, and the second is Life Domain Cleric in 5e. That's it. End of list in all of history. "But what about -" no. I promise you, whatever you're thinking of is not a primary healer in the fashion you think it is. This is an ancient misconception, rooting all the way back to when only divine-type classes could heal (Cleric, Druid, Paladin, Ranger), but even back in that day healing was valued more highly than its actual effectiveness; the archetype of a videogame healer, someone like Mercy in Overwatch who can turn the tide by keeping vital people alive long enough to make big plays, that has never been part of D&D - at least not before players have access to the spell heal, which radically flips the math by itself. Much like the question of alignment, I do not have the page space or the fucking game theory degree to give this topic the attention it truly deserves, but the very short version is that PC hit points are very low, damage is quite high, and healing doesn't solve either of those problems. When you burn your action, Bahamut fucking forbid your one spell per round, on a heal what you have done is a few things: failed to advance the combat towards a conclusion, failed to meaningfully mitigate damage, burned a spell slot that could have done one of those first two, and quite possibly put yourself out of tactical position. There are cases where a heal is the right call - the spell heal as mentioned already, or in 5e getting someone to stop making Death Saves - but in general if your options are healing or doing literally anything else, pick literally anything else. Am I coming at this very strongly? Yes, but the thing is that the perception of Clerics as being "healbots", expected to memorize primarily healing spells and cast the same, has been an equally ancient and infamous perceived drawback to playing Clerics; indeed, there was a time when tables would offer incentives to someone for playing the Cleric because "someone has to be the healer" and nobody wanted to be. Does that sound like a fun experience to you? Is that the future you want to keep having? No? Good, STOP FUCKING HEALING.

Now, I said I don't have the game theory degree to unpack this, and I don't, but that was aggro as hell so I do owe a bit of an explanation. Healing being bad in D&D comes down to a few incentives, some of which I just mentioned above, but there's another big one - the only hit point that matters is your last one. Your PC, and indeed NPCs/monsters, are just as effective at 1 hit point as they are at 100 as they are at one thousand as they are at one million. Meanwhile, especially in 5e towards which this article has a significant bias, average NPC/monster damage is more than double that of an on-level heal until, again, heal; therefore, a cure wounds or healing word for someone who isn't unconscious has, at best, bought them half a turn of being alive, and given that the real swing is much larger than actual average damage the odds that you get that half a turn - pathetic in and of itself - are not in your favor. Your party does not need to be healthy, only alive; this, then, is why you only start healing once they stop being alive. Area-of-effect heals like mass cure wounds change this math a bit especially in response to area-of-effect damage which is typically lower than single-target damage, but here I will finally hold to my repeated statements that I lack the education to unpack this; if a mathematician wants to compare a devil's fireball to mass cure wounds in the notes here, please, be my guest, genuinely.

Zealotry - Welcome to the Cleric version of "stop making your paladin a cop", which readers may remember from the Paladin article. Here I need to cut a fine line; the average D&D player likely has a pretty strong idea of a particular kind of person when I say "zealot", and that kind of person is the scum of the Earth. And, indeed, while masterful roleplaying and acting might make running a fanatical missionary interesting for your play group, this is a common failure mode and I do not fucking encourage it unless you're really sure that you are, in fact, the god-king of Big Dick Mountain. However, this mode of like, the Baptist preacher is a very narrow and specific kind of zealotry and passionate belief, and I am here to make the argument that a good Cleric is, indeed, a zealot on some level, at least in part because odds are good that you, person reading this article, are yourself a zealot on some topic or other! The esteemed Kendrick Lamar, for instance, is a zealot of hip-hop. I am a zealot of old D&D lore. Ed Greenwood, praise fucking be, is a zealot of anthropological worldbuilding. To be a Cleric, one of the chosen many, is to have a deep and passionate connection to the ideals of your god; it is to care about those ideals, and to learn them further, to be a student and teacher of them, to be a disciple and practitioner of them, and that indeed is a kind of zealotry that has nothing to do with trying to convert people or oppress them (usually). Kill the part of you/your Cleric that cringes; if you're running a Cleric of like, Sune Firehair, right, pour in your passionate opinions about art and beauty and love. Go on rants about proper trade and taxes when you're running a Cleric of Waukeen. Get fuckin' homoerotic about the ocean with your Cleric of Umberlee. When your Cleric is moved to share their wisdom with others, look for ways in which these lessons are relevant to their lives, and commit to the fuckin' bit. These are the things which are, definitionally, most important to your Cleric, closest to their heart. By all means, act like it, yeah?

Slapfights And Other Bad Ideas - Way back in 1e, D&D described Cleric as a secondary weapon-user, competent to fight in melee but lesser than Warrior-group classes. This is a lie. This has always been a lie. 5e furthers this lie with the Divine Strike class feature, but the thing is that while you are not technically doing nothing by making a weapon attack you really are not doing much and should be looking into doing literally anything else; if you're not casting, you're doing it wrong. There are going to be levels in which Divine Strike edges out a Cantrip, but ultimately you are not a weapon user and should not be acting like one. Going further here, the sanctioned action for Cleric is to bump your Wisdom as fast and hard as you can, because it controls all the Cleric things you do. Here I again return to my statement that in any fight between mechanics and narrative, the mechanics win by default because they are how you engage with the game world. Once you eat your vegetables, then you can go off doing wild shit like taking strange Feats. If you need to see this in action, look no further than the oft-cited Ms. Jester Lavorre of Critical Role fame (Campaign 2, The Mighty Nein).

St. Dipshit the Illiterate - Man I hope you're ready for a third version of this joke when the inevitable Druid article happens. Like with the Paladin article, this isn't so much a pitfall as it is a for-your-consideration; Intelligence has long been a real easy dump for Clerics, and that's gonna shape how they move through the world. While D&D 5.5 (the 2024 releases) went some distance here by giving Clerics the ability to add Wisdom to their information-style checks, for every other Cleric you have someone who is very attuned and attentive to the living world (high Perception, Insight, and Survival), but very bad at formal learning, academic study, and the like. Does your Cleric compensate for this by seeking aid when they need that kind of intellectual rigor? Taking more time (that is, making more rolls) so they can correct for their own shortcomings? Do they embrace the intuitive knowledge they can gain via their Wisdom-based skills rather than attempting to record or examine? Of course, I should not leave this on the table either; as of 5e, Charisma is also an extremely easy an attractive dump stat, and since CLERICS ARE NOT PRIESTS exploring a low-Charisma Cleric who can only really show her troth through works rather than words could be quite interesting, should you be inclined.

The People In The Important Pajamas - "Cleric" NPCs

Again, if anyone can track that webcomic down my life is yours.

You may remember this section from the paladin article and be wondering what the scare quotes are about. Following through with my argument that Clerics aren't priests, some of the potential NPC roles I'm about to outline aren't Clerics, strictly speaking, but would have been Clerics back in 2e (when they could be priests) or 3.PF (when everyone was in fucking denial). Our first entry is going to cover a concept that you could pillage for worldbuilding purposes, and then the rest are potential Cleric roles. Ready set GO!

Adepts (Revenge Of The Old Lore) - Introduced by this name back in D&D 3.0 and rarely used by Dungeon Masters or, if we're being honest, the game writers, Adepts were an NPC-only class back when PCs and NPCs were built using similar rules. Sorta like a Cleric, and sorta like a Druid, and sorta like a Wizard, but absolutely dog shit at all three of them, an Adept is the spellcaster who is worse than other spellcasters at everything; that is, they're meant to suck shit, but can be competent to, say, buy a remove curse from, to manufacture magical potions, to help enchant divine-type magical items, and the like. Notably, being an Adept means you're not part of the chosen many - this was the class associated with people who put in the work to learn divine magic the hard way, or who for one reason or another could not commune with their god in a manner that might be more associated with a Cleric. As little use as it saw, this is a concept that could use some bringing forward - many, many D&D settings, here to include Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, and Eberron, blithely assume that these services are on offer, and indeed that in a big enough city you might even be able to buy raise dead or stronger magic. You know who sells that but isn't qualified to be the kind of freak an adventurer is? Adepts!

Retiree - Of course, sometimes Clerics do survive being adventurers, often "intact" for a given value of that (having regeneration in-house saves you a fortune on prosthetic limbs). This kind of Cleric-as-NPC are going to be famous figures, perhaps thrust into positions of spiritual or communal responsibility they might not be equal to; after all, Clerics aren't priests. Make an NPC a lot like a Cleric, turn them middle-aged or old, call it a day. Someone like this may have taught a PC Cleric, especially if they caught said PC early on and intervened to try and ensure this youngblood doesn't die screaming between learning the difference between "my god is with me" and "I'm invulnerable."

Rival - As a PC Cleric gets more powerful and starts, you know, slaying fucking dragons and shit, the strength of their legend may well give their word weight on dogma, doctrine, and ethics. Someone more happy with the status quo of their faith, or someone with a differing vision, these can be great Cleric NPCs, rife with potential for social conflict and always able to be tapped for an epic caster-on-caster showdown. Your goal here is to make someone who could be a player character, they just aren't; bring in passionate ideals, think through their reasons for supporting the vision of faith they do, and, oh yeah, don't forget the weird pile of magic items endemic to all adventurers.

Cackling Villain - Did you know Clerics have been either the best or second-best necromancers in D&D for nearly every edition? They're third-place in 5e, behind Necromancer Wizards and Oathbreaker Paladins, a first-time event for them, but quite literally every Cleric of 5th level or higher can wake up in the morning, decide to raise an army of the dead, and then do that. They can just do that! Even outside of strict necromancy Clerics have that combination of zeal, competence, perceptiveness, and, let us not forget, terrifying magic that can make them excellent setpiece villains or even non-villainous antagonists. Your party thinks a wizard is behind this bullshit? They're gonna wish it was a wizard.

Religion In D&D Part 1 - Context Part II: Revenge Of The Context

Do I need to break this up into two headlines? Strictly, no. However, this thing is already a fucking doorstopper, I might as well give a place where people can pause.

So remember, eighty years ago, way back at the top of the article, when I said this was going to be an angrier article than the last one? Despite writing that warning myself I have, during the course of this, been shocked at how salty and aggressive I've gotten about things thus far, and this is coming from someone who knows he has anger issues in the first place. I genuinely did not realize the depths of passionate opinions I have on offer about Cleric. However, that warning was for these next two sections, as I'm very, acutely aware of my beef here, my deep well of bitterness, and my years of confused rage that have become a kind of formless hate for the way the discussion on fantasy religion across the genre, but especially in D&D, has been discussed. Y'all got a lifelong atheist out here about to tell you that you're being harsh and reductive about religion as like, a concept, and to make matters worse the behavior of the D&D audience in general has been such that I am now in a position where I need to do apologetics for known genocide enthusiast Gary fucking Gygax. Do you have the slightest idea how little that pleases me?

So let's start this off right. A lot of folks operate on incomplete, incorrect, or just plain nonexistent ideas of what faith has, historically, looked like in various D&D settings, so I'ma play the hits here and then we're gonna get into the next section where I make some suggestions. Alright? Alright.

Greyhawk: Weirdly Coherent - Commonly and incorrectly hailed as the first D&D setting (rest in peace Blackmoor & Dave Arneson), Greyhawk (known in-universe as Oerth) was written primarily by Gary Gygax, though shaped heavily by his home games and the players thereof. Now, I'm not gonna veer into a hit piece on Gygax (and even if I wanted to better ones already exist), but notable in the context of his writing on fantasy religion is that Gary Gygax was a fanboy for the Crusades, but also a massive (and half-educated, poorly researched) fanboy for ancient Celtic legend. Some of the oddities for this strange mix have already been mentioned, such as how the original Cleric is based on Crusader priests and the modern Cleric is still feeling that influence, but this - alongside growing up very culturally Christian in, you know, the United States of America - was also very much influential on how Gygax would come to write his fantasy faiths and also run up on his own limits with the same.

Faith in Greyhawk is polytheism as brought to you by someone who almost sort of understands the idea of polytheism. Genuinely, Gygax made a good run at this and kinda tripped over his own shoelaces at the end...well, his own shoelaces and his unrelenting race essentialism, thanks for the racial pantheons buddy. Greyhawk is home to many faiths, which worship and/or fear and/or oppose multiple gods (for example, Erythnul is associated with the so-called New Faith of the Flaeness but is more of a demonic figure of evil than a god you are, socially, expected to 'worship'). For your average person, the buck stops here. While an individual god may have greater prominence in a given region for political, social, or mythological reasons (for example, the relative prominence of Boccob the Uncaring in the Free City of Greyhawk in no small part due to the influence of the legendary Cleric known as Riggby) and therefore have a grand temple or dedicated cults in their name, this isn't the norm everywhere. When the Church of St. Cuthbert of the Cudgel installs a building in your frontier village they're here on a mission, it's weird, and you should be worried. On a normal day, your average lay member performs acts of worship as part of their day-to-day life, calling upon the god(s) who are relevant to their endeavors to give thanks, to ask for blessings, to honor them, or to plead mercy. Clerics, in turn, while socially conflated with the more specific cults are often pantheistic Clerics, drawing upon many gods as representatives of the overall faith. Dogmas are typically a little light on details when it comes to the afterlife, in part because the idea of an unearthly reward for one's faith is often seen as a little distasteful, and in part because going to the afterlife of a particular god is actually pretty rare on Greyhawk. Your average person is drawn to the Outer Plane that most aligns with their worldview, and goes on their spiritual journey in the hereafter without reference to a particular god.

Which is where we get to the weird shoelace tripping, because you only get an afterlife related to your faith if you've developed an intimate and intense relationship with one god in particular. When this relationship has become a defining, perhaps the defining part of your life (whether or not you're a divine caster), then you go to that god's afterlife when you die. The typical case here is someone with a deep passion for work that falls under the purview of a god, such as a master thief ending up with Olidammara, or a mountain man passing into the dominion of Elhonna. Clerics, though rarer, are prime candidates for this sort of afterlife, but also like...the fuck were you on, Gygax? Admittedly not all faiths in the real world particularly concern themselves with the hereafter or claim to have answers about what it might be like or what it entails, and in that sense Gygax's Planar afterlives as soft mysteries and a sort of default state aren't entirely out there - it's the strange dash of monotheism at the end that gets me. And, not to leave this unsaid, Gygax is not a particularly good fantasy anthropologist, so sometimes he just. Wrote shit. That he perhaps should not have written if he wanted to retain the chunk of his dignity that he lost by publishing it. I'd say to do a shot every time he writes something weird about women as gods or women in faith but you'd get through one book and be dead already.

Forgotten Realms: The Original Sin - Ed Greenwood you are this hobby's cool grandpa and also mine and I'm so sorry that I need to put you on fucking blast here. I can only hope that you've heard all this already; it's been being bitched about for twenty years, after all.

Statistically the first D&D setting that you personally have encountered, the Forgotten Realms (the continent of Faerun on the planet Toril, in-universe) was originally written by Ed Greenwood and has been contributed to by a list of other authors entirely too long for me to cite without dying of starvation at this keyboard. Most commonly known for its gonzo locations, intricate worldbuilding, and being absolutely riddled with famous high-level NPCs engaged in high-level bullshit with one another and the world at large (a status encouraged by the staggering array of novels and videogames set in it), the Forgotten Realms is also infamous in the audience for requiring that people worship a god that is their closest and most favored god and to be true to that god or face punishment in the afterlife. Those who are False to their faith face an eternity of civil service in the City of the Dead, while the Faithless end up mortared into the Wall of the Faithless to suffer until eventually becoming one with the Fugue Plane. It's very easy to point the finger at Ed Greenwood's Catholic faith when it comes to these worldbuilding elements, and while I'm certain that has something to do with the state of affairs I need you to take a walk with me.

The Forgotten Realms is a land of miracles and wonders. It is lousy with gods; indeed, if you ever go look up a full list (do NOT fucking use the FR Wiki) you may well spit your drink at the screen. Faerun is home to gods native to the world, interlopers from other Primes, gods from human cultures that ended up here when their faithful were kidnapped across the Planes (here to include gods from Ireland, Egypt, and Finland, raise your hand if this sentence is how you learned that there are gods native to Finland), alien horrors from beyond the stars, Planar luminaries, ascended mortals, and more. These gods gather into pantheons, though to be frank that relationship is often quite uh, feudal, or familial. Trying to claim the gods of someone else's pantheon don't exist or are lesser than your own god on Faerun is a real fast ticket to getting your ass beat by said gods while your own gently asks what you've learned from this experience. Among other things, though, this means that "converting" within your own faith basically isn't conversion; if you grew up in a family of Chauntea worshipers and you get real into Mielikki this event, socially, is fucking nothing, it's a non-event. It might be a different story if you turned around and started worshiping Mystra, but even then that question is very much mediated by one's culture and geography; converting even far outside one's current or native faith is a non-event in, say, Waterdeep, but it might be a little more surprising in Neverwinter.

Here's the thing: the Forgotten Realms does not experience a separation of "religious life" from "normal life". This is gonna be a hard idea for my American readers in particular to grasp, but while Jane Average Realmswoman has a single patron deity and she is trying to emulate that god's example as much as possible, it is perfectly normal for her to pray to other gods, ask for their favor, and interact with their worshipers, and this is in no small part because they are inescapably bound with Jane's everyday life. The local cults of Azuth and/or Mystra bankroll the parchment makers who print the novels Jane reads (because parchment is required for scrolls, and both churches are also in heavy on magical industries), the fishermen who catch the food she buys offer fearful worship to Umberlee who is both their provider and their destroyer, the faithful of Sylvanus, Chauntea, or Eldath maintain the city parks and fight tooth and nail to keep them wild. When she feels lost in her life and needs guidance, the temples of Selune are open at all hours of the day and night and are the closest thing the Realm has seen to A. therapists and B. benevolent therapists. The weird BDSM club she goes to every now and again opens every party with a hymn to Loviatar. The Temple of Illmater doesn't run a fucking bake sale once a month vaguely for poor people in general, they go forth amongst the downtrodden and help them every god damn day, offering food and potable water, healing, healing again, healing a third time it's a bit of a theme, a listening ear, and campaigning for their interests in the political arena. Jane herself is a worshiper of, oh, let's say Deneir, she runs a bookstore and dedicates herself to the Goddess of Libraries; she goes to the temple of Deneir for copies of their holy texts to give away to those who ask, to verify rare tomes or donate them for the public good, and for those rites which are held in the temple, but when she went and got married a few years back she and her wife were joined in the temple of Sune Firehair, goddess of love. These gods and the organizations they run have been part of Jane's community since that community was founded, and each advances something in the living world that they see as holy and worth having; they are entwined, active, earnest. You've gotta be chill about people worshiping another god or being part of another faith entirely or your social life is going to just fucking explode.

This, then, is the full and glorious flower of Ed Greenwood's zealous dedication to anthropological worldbuilding, and unfortunately it has been sorta softly hidden and scraped under by years of corporate writing. Back in AD&D 2e, the books Faiths & Avatars and Powers & Pantheons went in deep on this subject, digging on all levels into how these religions practice and their role in everyday life, but from 3.0 onward this theme has seen less importance alongside a plethora of other writers who did not understand the vision, not that I'm looking at any RA SALVATORE YOU FUCKING HACK in particular. The end result is that the average player for 20+ years has been introduced to the part of faith in the Forgotten Realms that is deeply weird monolatry, and has reacted to that vision, but been denied the full view of a strange but very functional polytheism whose bones are still in the setting. That vision of strange monolatry is also one that other settings have been copying for a dog's age, here to include our next subject, Pathfinder. Strap in, I am going to say a lot of things and none of them are kind.

Golarion: World Holy War - Originally written by James Jacobs and contributed to by a plethora of freelancers and internal staff members at Paizo, Golarion is a shallow theme park of a setting characterized by incuriosity, disinterest in the human condition, incompetent homages to other, better settings, and thoughtless, distinctly American sympathy for empire. Like with many things James Jacobs claims to love but refuses to understand, Golarion's model of divinity is very much based on what people think the Forgotten Realms model is, and even in the context of that already-corrupt shadow, Golarion's is much worse. Much of the worldbuilding around divinity and cosmology is utilitarian; for instance, Mr. Jacobs is on record stating that gods on Golarion empower Clerics and other champions because direct miraculous intervention would set off a chain of mutually assured destruction that would leave no mortal life behind. Other bits are clearly more personal; as a key for-instance here, gods on Golarion are generative forces for alignment. That is, a god defines what it is to be, say, Lawful Good or Chaotic Neutral, and to defy a god is to have your alignment changed (see: Wrath of the Righteous). It is for this reason that the churches of Golarion concern themselves to an extreme extent with orthodoxy ("right thought", contrast orthopraxy, "right action"). Sharp-eyed readers may be recalling that I talked about paladins in Golarion being expected to root out heresy; this situation is also why every god on Golarion supposedly maintains Inquisitors, as seen prior in this article. Further, these literal thought police deploy spells like castigate which punish and humiliate victims, primarily those of one's own faith, into confessing their "sins", which, while we're right here, how did the literal god damn Catholic remember that not every faith has sins or engages with the idea of sin and James Jacobs fucking couldn't pull that shit off?

Churches on Golarion do not have broad faiths that include multiple gods. Any given god may have divine friends, allies, or slaves, but ultimately the churches they run all have missionary work & attempted conversion in common. There was a good chunk of time in which Sarenrae, goddess of redemption, was running a fucking slave empire into swordpoint conversions, and only as of Pathfinder 2e has that been being fixed at all, in no small part because, again, James Jacobs does not understand the things he claims to love and dug his heels in when readers told him to his fucking face that this was a bad look. Likewise, these churches are separated from "normal" life quite a bit, being a place where one walks to in order to get one's worship on before returning to the rest of one's life, a particularly Protestant model of worship reproduced so thoughtlessly that I'm shocked Mr. Jacobs didn't achieve a state of no-mind and escape Samsara. Sometimes they sponsor religious organizations such as knightly orders or wizard colleges but these are exceptions, not the rule, and even then "oh hey the Hellknights are coming to town" isn't exactly a day to day kind of fuckin' event, is it? Mechanics like Obediences attempt to walk this back, but the thing about requiring you to spend resources to get mechanical benefits from worshiping your god is that you've turned around and made this a strange thing. Praying and honoring, say, Shelyn every day is no longer something you just do, it's something weird freaks do and they get divine power from doing it. There is no escaping the blade of the ludonarrative; mechanics win all conflicts because they influence the actual game world.

Now, while I sincerely hope my complete contempt for James Jacobs has come across here, I do have an obligation to be evenhanded. Pathfinder 2e has walked some of this back, but the root problems remain. The second edition of Golarion has, for example, removed Alignment entirely, which certainly solves one problem, but it also replaced castigate with crisis of faith, a Cleric spell designed to kill other Clerics by making them doubt their gods. Likewise, Pathfinder 2e has been mum on certain cosmological revelations from late in Pathfinder 1e, one of which being the idea that only one god will survive the end of the universe and they get to be the supreme god of the next one, which is given as the motivation for them being so far up on the nuts of getting converts. This idea is, to me, completely repulsive, but it's also just such a revealing take on what Paizo thinks gods are and what they think of faith. And unfortunately, the broad zeitgeist of the current D&D audience is very sympathetic to that idea, which brings us to:

Religion In D&D Part 2 - I Cannot Believe I Of All Fucking People Have To Tell You To Stop Being Such A Cynic

Man the little icon on the scroll bar is gettin' real fuckin' small at this point. This will be the last major set of arguments for the article; following this section will be one sample Cleric for every Domain published in 5.0 (5.5, released in 2024, is a bit young for me to bother just yet), so just stay with me here y'all. It's been a long, angry, bitter journey, and yet there is this final hill to die on.

So, what's this broad zeitgeist I was just talking about? To be frank, it's a combination of thoughtless American Protestantism and some r/atheism bullshit. As the audience for D&D has gotten more left-leaning and queer, in no small part due to the wild successes of shows like Critical Role and Dimension 20 (and WotC's weak, half-done, and yet unambiguously open support for including queer players, players of color, and others traditionally gated out of D&D), there has been a...conflation, shall we call it, of the fictional religions in various D&D settings with, not to put too fine a point on it, real-world Evangelicals and others who perpetuate harm in the name of faith. And, y'know, I get it. I'm a whole-ass bi dude from the edge of the Bible Belt, I used to get fuckin' jumped every other day or so, I lived in Kansas for six mother fucking years, I get it. But uh, remember when I said I'm a bit of a zealot for the old lore? Remember my consistent theme in articles of not liking it when things with great potential are left on the table because there is an Approved Way to view them? Yeah. So. Let's talk. We're gonna lay out some arguments and some suggestions.

Everything Old Is New Again - "But Vox," the strawman who teleported into this sentence is saying, "you yourself have said that the stuff you're into is old! Surely there needs to be an accounting for the changes in play culture, let alone real-world culture?" And like yeah, sure, but here's the thing: edgy-ass immature atheism (I say, as an edgy atheist) is also old as hell in D&D. Like, old-old. Late-game AD&D 1e old. Older-than-me old. Now, D&D's first serious and nuanced internal conversation about the nature of divinity and its role in mortal lives was part of Planescape, whose bones remain in all modern settings to this day (even Exandria, primarily written by Matthew "I Am In Every Videogame, Yes, Even That One" Mercer), but like a lot of settings it was very...inconsistently brought forward during 3.X, leading to the loss of a lot of its strangeness, its philosophy, and even its earnest willingness to simply be cringe but free. Though this was by no means confined to Planescape, as many writers of D&D novels were extremely willing to question the utility, motives, or even divinity of the gods - here to include Paul Kidd (author of the novelizations for White Plume Mountain, Descent Into The Depths Of The Earth, and Queen of the Demonweb Pits), who I usually claim as my gold standard for D&D novelizations but whose attitude here is, quite frankly, embarrassing in its confident thoughtlessness and cynicism. The ideas that gods are super-predators, that they are a class of abusers, that they are false idols, that they cannot claim divinity because they are limited/can be killed, these ideas are, statistically, likely to be older than you are. Better writers than you have been fumbling this since before you learned how to read.

Jesus Christ Is An Outlier And Should Not Be Counted - So here's the thing. The idea that a god needs to be a transcendent being, with attributes that render them sovereign from the living world, removed from time and supreme in all senses? That's just Christianity. If you go talk to like, a rabbi, an imam, if you can have a frank conversation with a Hellenic pagan or a Zoroastrian or a follower of Voudoun, they'll offer quite different perspectives, often a number of different ones from within their own faiths. There are more conceptions of what it is to be divine, to be a god and to worship gods, than there are cultures that have believed in gods, and to be frank the best advice I have for you here is to go outside and touch grass. Then, take some of the grass with you and have some fascinating & frank conversations with anyone who is not Christian. Even Gary Gygax, fanboy of the literal fucking Crusades, tried to handle his shit here and got more than nowhere in terms of success. When you insist that the gods of D&D need to be like the god of Christianity, you are both limiting yourself creatively and engaging on a great deal of art in bad faith, bringing with you your own baggage which you are failing to question. These conversations are gonna be difficult! You're going to feel ignorant; you may try the patience of the people you're seeking to learn from. But to learn is an unalloyed good, and here I am speaking of far more than the hypothetical benefit it's going to bring to your Cleric in your happy elfgame time.

The Lord Is God Of Both Good And Evil - Surprise bitches it's a second alignment section. First tings first, I want to repeat again that gods in D&D are not generative forces of virtue; rather, they are worldviews. This changes if you're playing Pathfinder, but if you are playing Pathfinder, stop immediately. And this argument can seem like I'm splitting hairs, but it changes the game quite a bit; a lot of players and readers wonder why, say, Liira isn't out here trying to solve all of the world's problems, but that is not Liira's fucking job, y'know? Her job is to be the goddess of joy, the pure light and laughter of seeing the world of wonder, to be god of delights and surprises, and it's not exactly fair to ask her to be something else. If your character is a Liiran and you have some concerns about, I dunno, the homelessness problem in Waterdeep, that's on you to work towards.

Broadly, though, there is a problem in the fanbase that was laid out excellently in The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, written by the esteemed Ursula K. Le Guin; people find it very easy to assume that if something is described as good, as benevolent, as truly kind and compassionate and full of wonder, there has to be some kind of catch. There is a hidden evil, there is a dark cost, there is an ulterior motive. And like, look, the gods of D&D are fallible beings, they make mistakes, but the thing is that when D&D tells you a god is Good, it like...means it. Does the writing always bear this up? No. The writing is often friendly to things that are in fact bad. But even figures like Bahamut or Tyr, infamous for their associations with fantasy cops, they're trying to be the gods of like, Sam Vimes, not the gods of police brutality. Likewise gods are not the primary drivers of the battle between good and evil - they are prosecuting their worldviews, and those worldviews relate to a Prime Material Plane that is of both wonder and horror, that is full of the creations of many gods and even many mortals. It is the law of the living world that wasps lay their eggs in living things, but so too is it the law that the land is bountiful, that a shocking number of alien beings would love you to pet them, that the sunrise after a storm is uncommonly beautiful and glorious.

As far as evil gods go, let me link my article there again so I can expand on it. Broadly, evil gods in D&D can be thought of as part of two camps; Greenwoodian evil, and Dickensonian evil (shout-out to my close friend and priestess - don't question it - the Celt for this framework). Greenwoodian evils are parts of nature, unrelentingly bound to the living world, who are gods over things that are terrible but necessary. Talona (goddess of plagues), Umberlee (goddess of the sea), Auril (goddess of winter), Loviatar (goddess of suffering), these are Greenwoodian evils, and if you're noticing that most of these are women, well, Ed Greenwood seems constitutionally incapable of writing a woman who is not, at worst, both glorious and terrible, and this is a compliment. Now, Greenwood has gods that don't fit this conception - look no further than Bane, god of tyranny - but the great joke at the expense of these gods is that they are not, contrary to their own belief, sovereign from the living world, they are not above it, removed from it. They are, instead, bent, defeated, broken, and beaten down until they service the natural order, and each time they attempt to shatter the cage the world of wonder has woven around them they lose some part of themselves in the process.

Now, Dickensonian evil is named for the works of Seth Dickenson, which concerns itself with the Sword Logic, the logic of empire. The argument it makes is that reliance on others makes you vulnerable, and only through becoming a sovereign being can you be safe and complete; the ideal being, in the conception of Dickensonian evil, interacts with others not at all, or, if it must, interacts with them only to consume them for resources. Bane is a Dickensonian evil, as are Bhaal, Myrkul, Gruumsh, Hextor, and the like, and the thing about the Sword Logic is that it is persuasive, powerful, and wrong. However, while it is ultimately self-defeating, the harm done to real people in the meantime is an incalculable tragedy, and thus it needs to be opposed at all times. As edgy bastards say constantly: you can't let God do all the work. This style of evil appeals to people who are, themselves, cruel, ruthless, and inclined towards consumption, but it also appeals to people who are hurt, who have been betrayed, whom the world has let down, and in that sense there is quite a lot to explore here. The ordinary person does not give in to the logic of empire without cause.

For gods of both good and of evil, the question at the root of it all is this: why do people willingly worship them? What worldview is on offer, and why are you sympathetic to that worldview? What would it mean to change, adopt, or oppose that worldview? If you take nothing else from this section, take that and ponder it.

Death Is For The Dead - Going with the above, holy fucking hell y'all the cosmology is not as important as you think it is. There is a vast emphasis placed by the player base upon the afterlife, one which sometimes bleed into the writing (in Starfinder, published by Paizo, "choosing your own afterlife" is seen as the ultimate expression of religious freedom) but you know what most people know about the afterlife? Nothing useful! Jane Average Realmswoman knows that she will in some way be with her goddess when she's dead and that it'll probably be pretty cool and that's about it, and as far as these things go Jane is correct. People tend to react with shock and horror when they learn for the first time that the usual spiritual journey someone goes on in the afterlife will end with them becoming one with the Plane and/or god they're associated with, and to an extent I have some sympathy for this. Lifelong atheist, remember, the idea of "losing myself" to become part of something greater sounds terrifying...but is that what's fucking happening? If one is to experience an afterlife, that is, a form of life, one must be able to change. There is no escape from eventually changing so much that you would be unrecognizable as the living person you once were, and for those who want to try we have undeath on offer (except we don't, undead also experience those sorts of changes and as a result there is truly no escape from being a real thing in the real reality). And in this cynicism for the afterlife people miss the forest for the trees. When you end up, say, in the divine realm of Oghma and are filing books in his infinite library, Oghma isn't using your soul for slave labor here. You're a newly dead person who needs time to acclimate to not having the needs of the living, and moreover you're a newly dead person whose greatest, most ardent passion was language, poetry, prose, nonfiction, the glory of writing in all its flower, and now you have unlimited access to such, an endless opportunity to truly understand and grow closer to this thing that was so important to you. I'm not saying not to involve cosmological themes or to not take adventures to divine realms, don't mistake me, but...maybe try to open your mind to the idea that this thing which is supposed to be good and natural is, in fact, good and natural.

Gods & You - This is more or less re-stating some arguments from above, but put some thought into the churches and faiths your character has a relationship with. Are they part of a broader faith? Is such a faith big where they live, and what does that mean for them? What sorts of interactions and opinions, right or wrong, do they have with the local religions and why? It doesn't have to be anything huge, but the faithful are, again, inescapable. People's lives in these settings are religious, and that faith infuses their day-to-day; so too does it infuse your character's. And while I'm right here, having beef with those faiths and/or the gods behind them? Legit. Not just legit, but on the table to be consummated; there is a long and strong tradition in D&D of killing gods with your own two hands, and while gods can be hard to keep dead (look at Bane), killing them always means something. Maybe you can take their place and try your hand at being a better god than they were. Maybe you're just trying to stop their evil schemes. Maybe they slept with your mom and you take some exception to this. Whatever it is, these sorts of conflicts both have bones in with real-world religion and a storied history in D&D itself, and they shouldn't be considered outside the scope of your ambition if you really wanna go for it.

Y'all, it's been a journey. If you've made it this far thank you for reading, and as always I remain open to feedback and criticism. Please don't let the incredible length of this piece or my unrelenting, undying fucking rage intimidate you; I wouldn't be making articles like this if I wasn't trying to have a legitimate dialogue with my audience, y'know? Now, I have one last bit for you. In an effort to be helpful, to fucking flex with my writing, and as a little treat, the following section will present some example Clerics. All but one (Matthias Winters) are from the Forgotten Realms. If you make the egregious mistake of looking up the Forgotten Realms wiki, it will tell you that Matthias's god is an aspect of Velsharoon; this is incorrect, and the first person to try to tell me otherwise will be turned into a bowl of spaghetti and served up at a high school dance. This is the one thing I will be entertaining no arguments about. That said, please feel free to take these characters as inspiration, mine them for ideas, or even just to play them yourself if you're inclined to indulge my staggering arrogance in such a fashion.

One last note; you will notice that I have often disregarded the Domains associated with various gods in the books. This is in no small part because WotC did those assignments with incredible, mind-blowing fucking incompetence, and also because a great deal of their former Domains or Spheres no longer have adequate representation. I have chosen to ignore them on purpose and with malice aforethought.

Now, without further ado, may I present:

The Chosen Many - Sample Clerics

Our sample Clerics will be formatted as follows:

[NAME]

Species Domain Cleric [Background]

General pitch of their concept & plot hooks

Personality Traits: [HERE] / Ideals: [HERE] / Bonds: [HERE] / Flaws: [HERE]

Matthias Winters

Human Death Cleric [Guild Artisan]

Mattie was only an apprentice when the monsters came to his village, ravening things set loose by an unwise summoner. People he knew died, until the Shrouded Lady came and destroyed the beasts with a dark and divine grace he had never before encountered. This Lady did not ask for money, and she did not ask for favors, but of the proud and simple people of the village she did ask two things: to let others know that they had a friend in the lich-god Mellifleur, Friend of Heroes, and for Matthias's services as her apprentice. Both were granted, with many tearful goodbyes and promises to write, which have been, it must be said, kept. It's a strange life, working as a Cleric to the Lord of the Last Shroud. Matthias isn't terribly educated, no, but he's no fool: he knows his god is evil, far more vile and underhanded than Matthias himself would ever want to be. And yet, "Friend of Heroes" seems to be no empty title. Matthias is sent on odd errands all across the land, all of them ominous and to some nebulous good. Go here, says the Shrouded Lady, and warn the town that a drow raid is coming; go there, and deliver these potions to the Moonstone Four, who will have need of them. Matthias has guarded caravans, healed the sick, slain the wicked, and placed far more magical items into chests within crumbling ruins than he ever thought plausible. During less pressing times, his work as a smith still sees use, crafting items of unusual make and odd, threatening beauty for more powerful spellcasters to enchant. One day, the Shrouded Lady has promised, his training will be advanced enough to create his own.

Mellifleur is evil. Matthias knows this. But does it matter so much, if Matthias is still helping? Does the promise of lichdom for himself really matter, if he can do more right by the world with all that time? He thinks about this, between hammer strokes, and he has no answer yet.

Personality Traits: "I tend to work when I need to think." & "I ask people what they think of death." & "I eat big and hearty; quality is a distant consideration." / Ideals: "If you've helped others, the method shouldn't matter [Neutral]." & "Professionals have standards [Lawful]." / Bonds: "I might uh, be in love with the Shrouded Lady." & "I seek a lost artifact of Mellifleur that can divine the plots of other evil gods." / Flaws: "When I don't know what to do, I take the first order I'm given that sounds right." & "There is no kill like overkill."

Elrissa Morrowmoon

Drow War Cleric [Soldier]

Born on the surface as the first generation of her family to be so born, Elrissa was raised in a community devoted to Eilistraee, actively involved in shepherding escapees from Lolth's dominions. She grew up idolizing the warrior-priests of her goddess, their grace and confidence, their surety, but never felt that for herself; big for a drow, hell, big even in comparison to a human, she despaired at ever achieving her dreams of becoming one of Eilistraee's paladins, even as she trained every day with gritted teeth and tearful eyes. When her community was found and raided in an attempt to capture the escapees as sacrifices to Lolth, Elrissa lost her father, and the very next night she stormed into the sacred grove and screamed her demand for vengeance up to her goddess.

She was answered.

In a sick way, Elrissa feels sometimes it might have been better if she wasn't. Now she's a holy warrior, now she knows she has the favor of her goddess and none can deny it, but she's still the plodding, clonking, clanging thing she was before, hunting the faithful of Lolth in her plate armor like an army of pots and pans. She lacks subtlety; she lacks grace. But while Elrissa is still in some ways the little girl who was never good enough in her own eyes, watch her change when the innocent are threatened, or when the priests of the Spider Queen are within striking distance. She does not leave survivors. She will not heed surrenders. She is coming, in a tide of moonlight and hateful sorrow, until no brick stands atop another.

Personality Traits: "I am very earnest and forthright." & "I get easily distracted by nature." & "I maintain my own equipment; no one else gets to." / Ideals: "People get better when they're offered love and support [Good]." & "For drow to have a future, Lolth must die [Neutral]." / Bonds: "I will find the ones who killed my father and repay them in kind." & "Sacred groves, even those of other gods, are worthy of my protection." / Flaws: "My hatred of Lolth can blind me to practical realities." & "Alcohol isn't a problem, it's a solution."

Gemma Rivergard

Half-Elf Forge Cleric [Noble]

Gemma acquired her vocation the way she gets most things: she bought it. As the fourth child of the noble Rivergards, who make their money in trade, her life was always a bit of a loose end. On a dare, she walked into a temple of Waukeen, laid out a spread of gems and gold and art pieces from the family vault, and announced her intention to purchase the exalted station of Cleric. She was as surprised as everyone else when the Goddess of Coins agreed.

Gemma is still a bit of a loose end. Waukeen blessed her with the power to make the goods her family merely trades, and much more besides, but lacking a specific holy mission she's taken to traveling, and it's broadened her horizons. One walk down a poorly maintained road might lead to a quest to cull the monsters threatening it, or politics with a greedy lord who has forgotten the value of commerce. She's set predatory contracts to rights, fought to the death against slaver rings, and purchased a truly concerning amount of amateur art from various goblins. And yet while she's happy with her growth as a person, Gemma still feels like she's lacking a purpose. Surely she can't purchase that.

…Surely not?

Personality Traits: "Is this some kind of peasant joke I'm too rich to understand?" & "You not understanding if I'm joking kinda is the joke." & "That really updated my journal." / Ideals: "To broaden one's horizons is to improve oneself [Good]." & "Every man has his price. That's not always a bad thing [Neutral]." / Bonds: "I haven't left my family! I'm still looking out for them." & "I still keep up with the goblin artists I've bought paintings from. I'm kinda their patron." / Flaws: "You bet I can't? Hold my beer." & "I forget sometimes that my experiences aren't universal."

Neela Wagonborn

Halfling Trickery Cleric [Haunted One]

So, here's the thing. This isn't Neela. Neela is not here at the moment, and you can't leave a message. Neela, you see, was captured by a Thayan looking to build a better Mirror of Opposition, and the wizard's experiment spit out Aleen, the Lawful Evil reflection of the original Neela, who had spent her life to date as a Cleric of Liira, Goddess of Joy. The mirror's enchantment, normally used to compel the summoned copy to kill the original, did not do this to Aleen, who was swiftly captured herself, brutally experimented upon, and then turned loose with the promise that her "creator" would be watching.

She's been hiding for all her life is worth, posing as Neela and playing a nerve-shredding game of balancing distance from Neela's loved ones with staying close enough to not arouse suspicion. Who knows if she'd survive getting killed in this Faerun, which is so unlike the one she knows? Praise be to the gods both above and below, though, Aleen here has an excuse: she's been receiving revelations from Liira, which are guiding her on a quest whose objective is unclear to her, but which has enabled her to become more powerful as a Cleric. If she's tricked the Lady of Illusions…well, that speaks well of her odds, right?

Liira has not been tricked. This journey of self-discovery into the world of beauty and wonder is about to be the funniest prank the Lady of Mists has pulled in fucking centuries.

Personality Traits: "The road calls! Immediately!" & "I remember those who wrong me." & "I have a weakness for musicians." / Ideals: "A deal is a deal [Lawful]." & "Everyone else is looking out for themselves first. Why should I be better? [Evil]." / Bonds: "That Thayan needs to die. Screaming." & "No one can find out who I am. No one." / Flaws: "I'm a good liar, but not as good as I think I am." & "My cruel streak can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."

Fila Firetouched

High Elf Tempest Cleric [Entertainer]

Descended from a long line of Waterdhavian elves, Fila broke with family tradition by converting to the worship of Sune Firehair, goddess of beauty and patron of the arts. During their more youthful years they lived down to the stereotypes of the many lay members, producing a frankly embarrassing catalogue of love poetry, ex-lovers, and amateur paintings, but after the loss of their sibling to a sea storm their art took a rather more gloomy and Gothic direction. Storms and landscapes featured heavily, and with their newfound focus Fila was praised as an artist to watch, with a keen eye for the sublime. Their parents and community did their best to support Fila, but they were determined to process their grief in their own way, seeking to capture the "true heart of the storm", which they feared, hated, and also loved.

It was atop a hill in the Dessarin Valley, during a savage spring storm, that Fila was struck by lightning while trying to paint. They died in an instant of eternal agony, but it was not to be their end. Rather than claim Fila's soul, Sune Firehair offered them the chance to return, to continue their art and seek out others whose beauty was hidden by the cruelties of the world. Fila accepted, and returned to a body branded by the storm and crackling with divine power.

The plate armor is still taking some getting used to, as are the odd glances and awkward greetings from the church, but the storm, oh, the storm…

It feels like an old friend now, beautiful and terrible. It's all too happy to help with Fila's work.

Personality Traits: "Hold a moment, I need to sketch this for later." & "There is a party person in me that comes out sometimes." & "The amateur poetry will continue until morale improves." / Ideals: "The world is good, the world is beautiful, the world is worth fighting for [Good]." & "If you don't challenge norms and expectations, people will never examine them [Chaotic]." / Bonds: "I don't always get on with my family, but I'd still do anything for them." & "I haven't forgotten any of my ex-lovers; they can ask a lot more of me than I care to admit." / Flaws: "My resurrection was a miracle, but sometimes when people say my scars are a curse it still feels like they're right." & "I may be a little too excited about my newfound powers of violence."

Nattie Kells

Human Order Cleric [Hermit]

Nattie's family likes to say she was born morose; a depressed and somber child, she never quite got on with the people of her river town, and made few friends, not even during her wild years of late adolescence when she carved her way through every interested lass available only to seemingly lose her passion. Oh, yes, people tried to help, but the things they found meaning in just didn't quite resonate with Nattie, and she dabbled with this church and that career and suchlike before, inevitably, dropping them in favor of her only seemingly eternal passion: reading. Eventually she scraped some money together to go traveling, looking for anything that could speak to her, and she found a long-abandoned shrine to Jergal, the Last Scribe, assistant to Kelemvor and Lord of the End of Everything. It wasn't meaning, not exactly, but the idea that all would be ash one day, that meaning was not required, it had a comfort to it.

She was 23 when Jergal came to her in her dreams and requested her services, which would necessitate a return to lands where other people dwelled. Nattie awoke to find a pile of equipment near her, along with a holy symbol, and she set off, learning the ways of divine magic in her dreams as she made the long and pointless trek back to "civilization". Now, as the Quill of the Last Scribe, Nattie enacts what she thinks of as fate. A charm spell here, a nudge there, and things happen; a man meets his future husband by taking a road he would have walked past, a goblin scout is devoured by an owlbear he would have avoided, a horse spooks and kills its rider. Nattie has hurt people. She has saved people. She tells herself it doesn't matter, but beneath the layers of lassitude and nameless sorrow there is an uncertainty. What is she becoming?

This, too, is Jergal's design. Nattie is determined to live in misery, but the Last Scribe can wait for her to realize better. He can always wait.

Personality Traits: "Ugh. People." & "Primary sources motherfuckers! Write some! Keep them safe!" & "Nobody talk about the kind of person I am around furry animals. I mean it." / Ideals: "It means something, that you were here, and that you were alive [Good]." & "People return to dust eventually. It doesn't matter if they return to dust faster [Evil]." / Bonds: "My lonely home in the shrine is sacred to me." & "The bookstore I used to go to as a child was nearly going out of business, but as long as I keep spending adventuring money there it will never die." / Flaws: "I don't really have any bad feelings about people dying. People die all the time. They're very good at it." & "I wish I felt more blessed by the attention of my god, but he's such an aggravating little bitch. Why's he gotta be so annoying?"

Dagill Tapper

Shield Dwarf Knowledge Cleric [Background]

The son of miners, Dagill quickly proved to have a keen interest in learning, if little talent for academia. For much of his youth he found employment running books for the clan's mines, until - on the advice of the local priests of Moradin - he was sent to Neverwinter to be educated in magic, as the gift was in him and his home had little resources to explore it. Wizardry did not work out for Dagill, despite his passion for the Art, but that passion saw him into the worship of Azuth, God of Spells, and eventually he was chosen as a Cleric.

Dagill's interests lie in the recording and advancement of magical knowledge, and his new faith keeps him busy. Between expeditions to recover lost knowledge and study traditions of spellcraft, he assists in scribing scrolls and seeks out potential mages in under-served populations. Though his clan doesn't approve of his conversion, he's still a dwarf's dwarf, with a deep love for the gods of his people, who returns home often and pays his dues in gold, labor, and knowledge for the good of his people. They'll come around eventually. They must.

Undiscussed with most is Dagill's dearest ambition: to find one of the lost scrolls penned by the very gods, and cast it with his own hands. What else could bring him closer to his new god?

Personality Traits: "Have you heard the good word about how great wizards are today?" & "Despite it all, I'm still a dwarf's dwarf in a lot of ways." & "I make a big deal out of Azuth. All the time! People should appreciate him more!" / Ideals: "The advancement of the Art is meant to help people [Good]." & "We have obligations to truth, and to history [Lawful]." / Bonds: "I still send money to my clan, and I should visit again soon. I might have an arranged marriage coming up." & "The wizard who tried to teach me is a good woman; I need to repay her kindness." / Flaws: "I have a bit of an inferiority complex about wizards." & "I am easily distracted by puzzles and riddles."

St. Nokta Kinslayer

Goblin Life Cleric [Outlander]

Honesty can change a life, you know. Nokta's warband came up against a pack of tall-folk adventurers, as goblin warbands sometimes do. She was a soldier, then, seemingly destined to be smeared beneath a mercenary boot, but when she was captured the adventurers said: talk, and we will let you live. She talked, of course she talked, Maglubiyet teaches survival at all costs, but her fellows found out, and intended to kill her along with the adventurers during an ambush.

The tall-folk fought like demons to save Nokta, because they had said she would live, and they meant it. Despite their best efforts she died, to an arrow in the throat, only to wake with the battle still raging, brought back to life by diamond and spell and the tall-folk shaman in his metal armor. Three times did Nokta die, and three times was she brought back, only to watch the tall-folk shaman take a blade to the heart. Gripped by something she couldn't name, Nokta raced over, and took his diamonds, and tried to speak his spell, fervently calling out for his strange tall-folk god to spare him.

Nokta was answered in the name of Illmater, the Lord on the Rack, god of mercy and of self-sacrifice, and has served him since. For dying and returning, her new church calls her Saint, but her people call her Kinslayer, and the Traitor Shaman, and more besides. There will be no peace, and though Nokta knows her suffering reduces that of the world, this cannot continue. If the Fire-Eyed God wants her head, there can only be one recourse: break his priests until the cost of war sickens Maglubiyet , and he accepts peace. Saint Nokta is unafraid, and she is unmerciful.

Personality Traits: "What, tall-folk - uh, I mean, yes, my child?" & "I don't hate vegetables, I love meat." & "The Tall God says His blessings are for all. For some reason." / Ideals: "Peace for peace, wrath for wrath [Neutral]." & "I don't understand the compassion I was shown, but I do treasure it [Good]." / Bonds: "The adventurers who fought for me have my service for the asking." & "I'll drop everything to fight the servants of the Fire-Eyed God." / Flaws: "I don't know what this 'love' is, and 'trust' is also still pretty difficult for me." & "My fears drive me to violence far more often than the Tall God likes."

Jelka Threebones

Orc Grave Cleric [Acolyte]

Jelka came to live amongst the Sky Pony tribe of the Uthgardt as a young adult, one of several political hostages exchanged between her own tribe and the Sky Pony as part of a peace agreement; with both in the shadow of the Kingdom of Many-Arrows, wise leaders on both sides sought to cool traditional conflicts between them in favor of looking to the greater threat to their mutual north, and Jelka was selected for her cool head, proud bearing, and great foresight for such a young orc. The story might have ended there, if the Cult of the Dragon hadn't moved into the area looking to pillage the spirit mounds and burial grounds of both tribes' warriors to secure a supply of corpses for their necromancies. Outraged at this desecration and disrespect, Jelka called upon Gruumsh and Tempus in the name of both her peoples for the power to revenge herself upon the defilers, and her prayers were answered.

Today, Jelka continues her campaign of revenge in the name of Gruumsh, hunting down those who raise the dead, defile graves, and bend the minds of warriors. Her list of enemies is long and only growing longer, and she is keenly aware that she is not yet mighty enough to face down the likes of dracoliches or, say, the entire sovereign nation of Thay. But she will be. She must be. Wrongs have been done, and she wades into battle chanting the litany of them in an endless roll of accusation and reprisal, screaming hateful hymns alongside her chosen allies. Her new mission has made for strange bedfellows, but for all her outward fury Jelka remains the curious and level-headed young orc she was when she was selected all those years ago. Perhaps there are other enemies she might make peace with, to gain the satisfaction of her almighty vengeance.

Personality Traits: "Raise a cup with me! We should celebrate!" & "I'm very curious about new cultures, sometimes to the point of being annoying." & "I love a good story." / Ideals: "The world will hit you hard. If you don't take revenge, all you'll get is hit again [Evil]." & "If you don't have the guts, you don't deserve the glory [Chaotic]." / Bonds: "My word of alliance, once given, is absolute." & "I have siblings in my first tribe who should be adults soon. If they need my help, they have it." / Flaws: "I never forget a sleight." & "I pick fights I can't win sometimes."

Kellard Frosthalt

Rock Gnome Nature Cleric [Folk Hero]

Kell should have been a druid. He knows it, his clan knows it, druids know it, there's even odds that mushrooms in Menzobarrenzen know it, but he's always had a deep phobia of shape-shifting, so for a long while he was content to study nature…academically. Sure, his papers were trite, but the man published and that's not nothing. When he was hired to catalog finds for an expedition into Netherese ruins, the team found an ancient shrine to the goddess now known as Chauntea, and beset by undead guardians. Unwilling to let the sacred place be defiled, Kell took up arms for the first time, and found himself blessed with power.

Now Kell spends his time in lost places, seeking revelation and tending to the needs of rural communities. His new position is intimidating. More than many other followers of the Lady of Waving Grain, he understands that his goddess is an ancient and persistent foe of evil. Only…can something better truly be grown from her foes? Is Kell ready?

Personality Traits: "I love nature! Let me tell you about this parasitic wasp!" & "I know it doesn't fit my station, but I just, I need to be dressed sharp, okay?" & "I tell jokes with a completely straight face." / Ideals: "There are no pointless things; all things of the world have a treasured place in it [Good]." & "Generosity is the highest virtue [Good]." / Bonds: "Fuck Netheril, fuck the Netherese, burn their ruins and salt the ashes." & "After that first fight in the ruins, a peasant family took me in. I owe them my life." / Flaws: "I have a deep and abiding phobia of having my body changed against my will." & "I never, ever, ever, shut the fuck up."

Dolly Bookchild

Half-Drow Peace Cleric [Investigator]

Most half elves lose their human parent first, but as the child of two adventurers Dolly wasn't exactly surprised when her drow mother bit the big one doing battle with a demon accidentally released from an ancient binding. Seeking to understand her loss, Dolly started spending time in the sacred libraries of Deneir, and eventually converted after falling in love with learning. Academia isn't exactly her strong suit, but Dolly has a lot of practical knowledge that isn't often written down in an accessible fashion. Her new church was proud to fund the publishing of Dolly's Practical Survival Guide.

Still, a new love of learning isn't closure, and Dolly yearned to be an adventurer like her parents. After her second book went off to the printers, she stayed up in vigil to ask Deneir for a cleric's power, vowing to use it to find and advance knowledge, and to protect the ignorant. Her wish was granted, and now she bears the peace of the library wherever she goes. Every day is a lovely day for learning.

Hopefully one of these lovely days Dolly will figure out that the demon isn't done with just her mother.

Personality Traits: "It's a beautiful day to learn something new, isn't it?" & "Ah, the great outdoors!" & "I skip when I'm happy. No really. No, really." / Ideals: "Knowledge belongs to everyone [Lawful]." & "Extend grace to the ignorant; they truly do not know better [Good]." / Bonds: "Dad's getting on in years. I need to make sure he isn't worrying about me when he passes." & "I still return to my temple pretty often; it feels more like home than home does." / Flaws: "Sometimes I forget that my fun adventures can have deadly consequences." & "I'm from the big city where my heritage isn't a big deal, so it's surprising every fucking time that it's a big deal elsewhere."

Jonas Cobbler

Aasimar Light Cleric [Urchin]

So here's the thing. Jonas had a bit of an odd childhood. Raised by a then-single mother who is a devout follower of Lathander, Jonas was maybe six, seven years old when he mentioned in his prayers that he's a boy and asked for some help being a boy because he knew Mommy worked very hard and didn't have a lot of money. His first direct experience with divinity was his god's gentle voice in his mind saying: yes, my child, your new dawn is upon you. He had some explaining to do the next morning, and his mother was happy for him and seemingly cross with Lathander, for some reason?

It wasn't until Jonas was about seventeen that he got answers to that particular mystery; he came home to find his mother, her partner, and a golden-haired stranger waiting up for him. His mother introduced the stranger as Jonas's father...

...Lathander.

Maybe running away from home in a bit of a panic was the wrong move, but uh. Jonas has at least one parent looking out for him now, right? It'll be fine. It'll be fine. It's all gonna be fine.

Personality Traits: "I am extremely food-motivated." & "Let me teach you my secret handshake!" & "Uh, I've got, a spell for this, uh - fuck - uh, in the name of the new dawn uh -" / Ideals: "You don't need a reason to help people [Good]." & "The best time to be a better person was yesterday. The second-best time is now [Good]." / Bonds: "My old friends mostly went off to real careers, but we still stay in touch." & "There's a hidden place in the old neighborhood that I take care of." / Flaws: "I cannot walk into church any more without thinking, holy shit this guy slept with my mom." & "I am embarassingly weak to a pretty face."

Freddie Wright

Human Twilight Cleric [Criminal]

Hailing from a family of Selunite wererats in Yartar, Freddie used to have a fairly exciting life spying on Zhentarim operations, right up until she blundered into a cell of Sharrans in the sewers. They pushed her into a portal to see what would happen, but not before somehow stripping her of her lycantheropy to ensure she would suffer and die. Freddie arrived in Undermountain with nothing but her faith, and in her time of need the Moonmaiden answered. Against all odds, Freddie survived, scrounging up equipment, learning the traps, and eventually staggering out of the Well into the Yawning Portal Inn. She still has nightmares, but Freddie is grateful every day that she's alive to have them.

Now the former wererat stalks the Sharrans up and down the Sword Coast, seeking the return of what was taken. She hates her heavy armor and despises being caged in one body, but despite her snappish ways she takes her duty as a guide very seriously. That's part of the problem, actually. The dead of the Underhalls haunt Freddie and beg her intercession so that they might move on, and with every ghost laid to rest her prey gets further away. But what's a girl to do, ignore them? No. Freddie has faith. This righteous path must, will, make her whole again.

Personality Traits: "Time is money, hurry it up." & "Sometimes I overcomplicate things because I'm biased against direct solutions." & "Hey that reminds me of something that happened in my family -" / Ideals: "If you give people what they need to grow, they become their best selves [Good]." & "No one else can walk your path for you [Chaotic]." / Bonds: "Yartar is still my favorite city, and I stop by to do good by it when I can." & "The dead of the Underhalls that follow me have none other to speak for them." / Flaws: "Do you have any idea how much this stupid monkey body pisses me off?" & "I've got a vengeful streak that is not uh, approved Selunite behavior."

[sky-kiss]

hello <3 I’ve been lurking around the raphael tag little niche and I see that a fairly popular concept is tav/durge duchess (love the concept love the energy, very big fan of it in your fic as well) and I was wondering, since raphael struggles with sort of minimising how much his mortal side is perceived in favour of appearing as much as possible as a devil with a capital D (see his celebratory paintings being all about his devil form), whether that by itself would be a peculiar choice to take a mortal as a consort. or if you think he sort of did the math and went well tav/durge is a very effective asset he can keep close and its sort of worth it take the loss of sort exposing himself to other archdevils being judgemental over it (especially since the hells seem very much like a only devils can sit at the grown up table lmao)

/Stares at you. Sighs. Sips scotch/

So, I see. You're finally here to kill me, anon.

Alright. Let's get into it. If we're being entirely honest, I do not believe that Raphael would offer Tav/Durge a place as his consort. I genuinely don't. Especially not directly after they've given him the Crown. I've done it a few times recently, mostly because it's the only place to conveniently put it. And it works for short-form posts.

But if we are talking about genuine Raphael, it's my opinion that he would not offer. He may be fond of you, but his version of fondness would translate more to like...how fond you are of a good dog, or a subcontractor who put in great work. You aren't equals. "Friends," but not equals. Raphael's interest in Tav/Durge stems from what they can provide him. Once he has the Crown, he sees himself as having succeeded. You might meet for drinks like he's promised, but he has no reason to continue the relationship.

However, there is something to be said for an adventurer's soul. And Tav/Durge would be a massive catch further down the line. By the endgame, the TadFools are a bunch of freaks if we're power scaling. They're only level 12, but the games mechanics and the psycho gear they acquire allows them to punch well above their weight class. With their stat blocks, their party of four could probably fight Zariel. And on that note, because of game mechanics, Raphael could probably take Zariel (based on her 5E statblock) in a cage match, even without the Crown. He'd at least make it close. That's how powerful the crew is by the end. So, they would be a crazy powerful asset to acquire.

To the point of offering them the role of consort: no. I don't think he'd do it. Not right after the Crown, at least. And it's something I wish I'd made clearer in my long fic. I'd clarify it in a rewrite. Raphael never actually offers Joi/Durge the role of consort. Haarlep moves for her to be in that role. Haarlep informs Mephistopheles that she's his new consort. Meph is the first one to actually state it and does this in front of Dispater to discredit his son. Raphael then plays along with it in order to build his influence with the succubi/incubi. It's self-preservation, power, and arrogance that motivates the decision, not affection.

So uh...yeah. Sorry. I don't....I don't think he'd take Tav/Durge as his consort. Maybe after he's had his assbeat for a while? And they crusade and prove themselves to be incredibly useful?

But we lie to ourselves for fiction. Sorry for the longpost.

[everything-bagel-blog]

ABSOLUTE BATMAN #1

i absolutely adore issue #1 of absolute batman srsly

as someone has just been getting into DC this year, but still aware enough of the basic principles of batman's origin and character, this feels like a really exciting, yet approachable story.

I'd seen online some complaints that it's the 'same old batman' and that it's just another 'rehashed story with nothing interesting or worthwhile.'

I've even seen complaints regarding the inclusion of (spoilers) classic rogues like catwoman, killer croc, the penguin, riddler, twoface being introduced or mentioned so early in the story or simply being mentioned at all.

First of all - it's a five-issue series - there's only so much time to introduce everyone - and I think the first issue does a wonderful job at setting up the characters and world right of the bat.

Besides, I like the rogues. I like the DC characters - I'm reading a batman comic after all. This isn't to say that characters haven't been butchered in certain runs, or that DC always tells good stories.

What I'm meaning is - just think about what makes comics so different from every other media format? Aside from the gorgeous use of text, color, form and image - trust me, I am GOING to be making numerous posts about the silly bat costume and the GORGEOUS ART.

I'm still very new to comics, so I might be off here obviously, but;

when I think of batman, I think of the character

and what makes the character of batman?

Well, absolute batman is obviously asking this question - they've taken away the money, mansion, and butler - on top of that - his mum is alive! (He is a mama's boy 100%).

BATMAN IS GOTHAM

Like; Alfred Pennyworth (HOT DAMN THO) is narrating most of issue 1, and I love it - but when he arrives, he's asking 'where is your heart Gotham?', and then batman later appears.

Batman, who has studied and worked every blue-collar job ever - who knows the city in and out - who repairs the stairs he breaks in the night at his day job. Who Alfred acknowledges is building something here - who is childhood friends with his rogues - he's protecting Gotham.

Even Killer Croc goes 'This is our HOME, man ... someone's got to do something!'

This is overlayed a photo of them all as childhood friends, and child Bruce is even smiling - it's so precious.

We're being presented with a Gotham that's in very dire straits - and this is a Batman that feels so much more a part of the city.

Batman LOVES his city, and he LOVES the people in it.

To me, Batman is a protector.

Alfred calls him a crusader, citing his mother as his one weakness - seeing Bruce come home to a regular old house with his mum sitting on the steps - that got me.

Batman has this single-minded devotion - that's the strength of his love. I never realized how weak that devotion to his ideals seemed when he had all the money and resources in the world.

You take that away? You get a Batman who has planned his entire life to learning everything he can, on his own merits - that's some superhero shit.

Anyway, I'm so excited to see where this series goes - can't wait to meet more of the rogues! At the end of day, nothing stings quite like childhood friends who aren't as close as they used to be. Plus, his costume is cool as hell and so so so silly.

[west-tokyo-incidents]

It's quiet here.

How many times will he come back to stare at the Black Lake? Rathma isn't here any more. His body lay where it has for however long it's been since Inarius came back and spread the prophecy as gospel.

No amount of speed or lack of distraction would have let him meet Rathma personally.

The wanderer huffed under his breath and leaned on his hand. He's perched above, just inside Kasama, looking down at the barely-submerged platform where Vhenard died twice over.

"The first necromancer... Wow, I bet this is a big deal for you, huh?"

"Hm? ...I suppose so."

Neyrelle's question to him, when they'd first come across evidence of where they were.

"Well, isn't it? Aren't necromancers priests of Rathma?"

He remembers his thoughts from back then. Should he pretend to be in awe? Excited? Something other than skin-crawling anxiety about meeting the nephalem his people worshipped?

"I guess I'm just... Nervous."

The wanderer considers going back down there. Hell, he even walks through the City of the Ancients to the entrance of the Cradle... Only to stop and stare at the mural on the floor in front of it.

He must've not seen it before. Rathma's face, scrolls falling from his hands, a skeletal mage at his side.

Nope.

The wanderer turns back around and goes back to his spot overlooking the lake. Back to the little food he'd packed himself. Even if he went, he couldn't cross the lake. And even if he could, Rathma would still be dead and his spirit gone from this place.

And even if he wasn't...

Best not think about that. He stuck a piece of bread in his mouth.

"Well, Neyrelle told me I'd probably find you here."

Only to nearly choke on it in shock.

"Donan...!"

The wanderer, coughing, turned to look at the man.

The man is grinning at him, "Hey, now, don't die on me, you're the only necromancer we've got!" The man walks over as the wanderer manages to get a drink and clear his throat, "Mind if I join you?"

"No, of course not. Why were you looking for me?"

With a heave, Donan sits beside him, "You'd been gone for a while got concerned. I guess you couldn't resist coming back here while we're in the area, hm? Neyrelle told me all about how you two met."

A soft grunt of acknowledgement.

"...I can't imagine it." Donan sighs, his voice becoming soft, "I guess, in a way, it's like if Inarius had just. Suddenly died one day. No glory, no songs... I can't imagine how the church would react."

"Hah, yeah, except it's as if that arse died locked away in the Alabaster Monastery and the world forgot about him. Hidden away with a key you can never get again. And why would you even want it?" A dry laugh, "Just to see a dead body?" The wanderer stares down at his food. He can feel the heat of anger beginning to boil in his stomach.

Donan goes quiet, "I'm sorry... For what it's worth, he isn't forgotten--"

"His prophecy isn't forgotten, you mean." He spits, "There are no crusaders for him. No knights to guard his tomb. His temple is sunken beneath the rancid sea and his tomb is rotting. I've heard so many people talk about him ...But no one but me and Lilith seem to grieve."

"...I thought you said you weren't religious. Yet you sound as devout as Prava. Don't go falling into Lilith's arms just because she--"

"It's nothing like Prava. And I'm not falling into that bitch's arms." He snarls suddenly. Wolven teeth snap behind his own. He can feel Hatred in his words, and Donan does, too. "She grieves him... But what she does... It's too much like... Like where I came from. Except Rathma never actually demanded the things my people did to me." His hair bristles on the back of his neck. Donan clenches his hands into fists in his lap.

"...Wanderer... What happened to you?" Donan reaches and gently places his hand on the necromancer's shoulder. He flinches, but doesn't pull away. He glares at Donan, but the man meets his eyes evenly back.

Donan seems to be considering his next move. Almost like a young boy eagerly expecting to find a small hind on his hunt and running into a great hart who has no intention of being shot.

But this hart trusts that will not be shot, and he will not run, either. The wanderer rolled his shoulder, shrugging off the hand.

"We were terrible people. Isolated from the world on an island south of Hawezar. I thought I loved what We were. We took trips to the mainland to get corpses for Our craft. They weren't dead when We got there." His hands ball into fists in his lap.

"...you were an instrument in the Death Song..." Donan's voice is barely a whisper.

The wanderer tilted his head, "Is that what your name is for who We were?"

Donan scowls softly, "Well, it's what we heard from travellers who came from the south. What do you mean, were?"

"How long ago was the last time you heard a story about Us? I imagine We'll become nothing but a fairy tale to children before too long."

Donan frowns, "So... They're gone?"

"Yes. We're gone. For the most part."

Silence. The wanderer just stares at Donan, waiting for the next word.

"...What did you do?" A look of concern and caution crosses the man's face.

"I think you've already guessed the answer. Why do you think I travelled so far north? Why do you think Mephisto haunts me?"

"Answer the question, wanderer."

"I killed them." Tension hangs like a heavy stone in the air, "Say what you want about it. Yell, storm out, threaten me." The wanderer looks back at the lake.

A slow sigh, "No, I don't think I will." Donan's hand reaches to take one of his hands, and the necromancer realizes he's bleeding from his own nails, "I know you, wanderer. Whatever they did to you to push you to such a point. You still consider yourself one of them, even after killing them."

His shoulders fall. He pulls his eyes away from Donan carefully wiping the wound off with a cloth. And he decides to speak again, "I'd been a bad omen since birth. White hair. Pale eyes. And they treated me like it, only barely a part of the Whole, no matter how hard I worked, how many I killed. They only gave me a name when I was bathed in the blood of someone I loved." There is more to it. But he can barely conjure the words to speak it, "My mentor cursed me and stripped me of my name with her dying breaths. Probably the best thing she ever did for me."

Quiet, again. He glances to Donan and sees the man deep in thought as he wraps his palm. It stretches out for a while. The wanderer simmering slowly in his own head as the water below gently splashes onto the shore and stones.

"So why do you feel so strongly about Rathma? Why are you still a necromancer?"

"My craft is Mine, not Ours." He snaps, yanking his hand back and his lips peeling back from a snarl, "Made for One, not the Whole. I am a necromancer because that is who I am. My people may have shown me the path, but that's the only part they play."

A hum. He suspects Donan is confused, by what he doesn't know. It's clear to him, but Donan doesn't press on whatever it is.

"And what about Rathma?" He motions to the lake. The Necropolis beyond, "Your people told you everything was his command, didn't they?"

"Yes. And for a while, I hated him as much as I hated the Whole." The wanderer leaned against rubble nearby, looking down at his hand and finishing the wrapping himself. "And then I sought to learn more of my craft, beginning to struggle on my own. I read his teachings in the wider world, and I began to question what I had been taught."

The binding tight, he let his hands fall back down.

"First to learn he was a flesh and blood being? And not a serpent at all, but that he looks as human as you or I. And then to read his teachings and find that the Balance I had been taught was twisted." He shakes his head. He reaches into his pouch and pulls out a beaten up book; his journal. It's scarred and stained with who knows what all.

"I don't see him as a god, I don't worship him. He was a person. A teacher."

His fingers flip open the pages and his eyes flick between each one. And then he stops. The page he'd written after returning from the city of dead. There, delicately sketched, is Rathma's face.

"Almost every word I was told about him as a child was wrong. Coming here, suddenly being thrust with the realization that I could possibly even meet him. Only to find him dead. Killed by Inarius with his own weapon." A shaky breath.

"In a way, I guess I am devoted to him. But as one is devoted to a loved one, not an angel nor a demon."

Donan has been quiet for a while now. The wanderer snaps his journal shut.

"I hope you're satisfied now."

Donan still doesn't answer. After a second, the wanderer looks over his shoulder, almost wondering if the man had snuck out at some point. But no, he's still there.

"You've been through a lot, haven't you, wanderer?" Donan hums softly, "I can see why you aren't eager to let Neyrelle try and think of a new name for you."

"I am happy being a simple wanderer."

"Perhaps I'll have a word with her in private, ask her to stop."

"You don't have to--"

"No, I think it's only right." He stands up, then pauses. He wants to say something... But it escapes him, "We have to make for Hawezar soon, though. I don't want to rush your meal, but we're ready to leave when you are."

The wanderer stares at the Black Lake, but nods and begins to pack up, "I was nearly done anyway. Go on ahead, I'll meet you there."

[magicalbuffalotransformerman]

BLOOD-BOILED JUDGEMENT

[tl;dr: heaven-feared fallen angel fights robot that killed everything else. no spoilers]

{Railcannon. Sharpshooter. Projectile boost, projectile boost. A couple of parries here and there, and there's another P rank in the books. V1 siphons a little more blood to top off its health bar, and flies down the elevator shaft of 9-2, after freshly beating Gabriel down for the last time.}

{It's been quite the adventure for V1, what with all of the bloodlusting through the layers of Hell and meeting some funky characters along the way. It fought V2 - its apparent superior, from what it read on the internet - and annihilated it. Then Sisyphus Prime, a durable fighter who's Prime Soul started forming BEFORE he died, and won.}

{There is no enemy that can face V1 now and survive.}

{It lands in... 9-4? Isn't there supposed to be a third lev-... doesn't Treachery only have two levels? Where the fuck is V1??}

{It exits the elevator shaft, out to a significantly frozen landscape... wait, this isn't Judecca. What the fuck?}

{A circular arena-styled hellscape at the very bottom of Hell, practically underneath Judecca...? V1 is quite confused. Something that, judging by its notifications, shouldn't be available. It attempts to get back into the elevator shaft, but finds that the doors aren't there.}

{It's stuck here.}

{FUCK.}

{A flash of red appears at the center of the arena. V1 turns to face the center, identifying its final 'challenge'.}

{An angel, around Sisyphus' height, glowing red. They wield a crowbar, staring down V1 like a thing possessed.}

/-/-/ 9-5 // TREACHERY SECRET ENDING \-\-\

\-\-\ FORTUNATE SON /-/-/

{Hah. Funny name for an ice level. V1 waits for whatever monologue the Fallen Angel has prepared.}

{...}

{...}

{...}

{V1 looks to its Knuckleblaster wrist, as if it forgot to bring a watch.}

{A beat passes. V1 looks to the angel, shrugging its arms, wanting to know where the monologue is.}

{Then, some realization hits. Oh, this one's Asbeel, right? The mute one? That makes sense.}

Asbeel: I see now that intimidation doesn't work against your kind.

{Oh, there it is.}

Asbeel: Freak. Your reign of terror across Hell ends here. I shall wreak havoc across your feeble frame and hear your pitiful screams. Your crusade shall end in a whimper, struggling against the floor of Hell. I-

{V1's heard this whole spiel before. It flicks some coins up in the air, pulling off a Railcoin during Asbeel's monologue.}

{Unexpectedly, Asbeel parries the Railcannon shot right back at V1, hitting it for 50 damage.}

Asbeel: How rude.

{V1's left in a brief stupor, never having been counterparried before - especially not with their own Railcoin. Sheesh. Its gyroscopes barely have any time to react before coming up with a battle plan, with Asbeel bringing their crowbar down behind V1's upper shoulder blade plating and ripping the plates off.}

{How uncharacteristically weak. Asbeel wastes no time in pinning the disgusting wretch to the floor chest-up with their crowbar, getting down on their knees to pummel the vampire personally. Senator Style. Two punches in, and...}

{YOU ARE DEAD} { | | | | | 💀 | | | | | } {PRESS [R] TO RETRY}

{...}

{V1 appears again at the bottom of the elevator shaft.}

{...}

{This is going to take a bit.}

{V1 takes a moment to 'breathe' and recuperate before heading back into the arena.}

{Off to its right, Asbeel sits there, kneeling over V1's first corpse. They were to punch the wreck a seventeenth time, before noticing V1's new frame.}

Asbeel: ...oh, you're one of those. Hideous.

{V1's shoulders jittered and gyrated, as if mockingly bellylaughing at the archangel. Then, a shot of white noise.}

V1: SO YOU INTEND TO WIN V1: HOW DO YOU MEAN TO DO SO AGAINST ME V1: I'VE ALREADY KILLED EVERYTHING ELSE

Asbeel: So both of us have secret voices...? Why do you hide yours?

V1: OH, YOU KNOW V1: PLOT-IRRELEVANT VOICE BOX V1: YOU

Asbeel: God had forced me into silence. Now that He's dead, I can talk as much as I want. Oh, I'd like to tell you that Gabriel's still alive.

V1: WELL OF COURSE HE IS V1: IF YOU CAN'T SEE A CORPSE:

Asbeel: ...then they're still alive. I suppose that's a fair assumption. ...Have you ever heard of Undertale?

V1: PLEASE DON'T TELL ME YOU'RE GOING TO REFERENCE SANS

{Asbeel chuckles from underneath their helmet.}

Asbeel: Well, you're already in Hell. Might as well throw some gasoline on you.

{Their fight begun proper, Asbeel flashes back onto their feet, attempting to beat V1 down with its first corpse. V1 parries its own corpse (funny), following up with a shotgun blast.}

{The shotgun pellets simply bounce off of Asbeel's shoulderplate. A crowbar flies into V1's head, the robot barely able to dodge out of the way through dashing to the right.}

{V1 attempts to Whiplash themselves to Asbeel, trying to see if it can't do some close-up damage into their back... but Asbeel wraps their hand around the Whiplash's spearhead. They use the Whiplash to beat V1 into the ground a good couple of times, before pinning V1 to the ground and ripping the Whiplash off of its frame.}

{V1 responds with a point-blank Railcoin into Asbeel's face, knocking them backward, onto their back. They quickly get back onto their feet, looking towards V1's last known position and not seeing it.}

Asbeel: ...clever. What other tricks have you up your sleeves?

{No response. Asbeel assumes it's hiding among the ages-old wreckage of the arena. They begin searching.}

{V1 attempts, over and over, to bash the Whiplash back into its socket. It's not working. The shoulder is minced to bits. This isn't stopping V1, desperate to have its funny grapple arm back.}

{Eventually, it gives up, siphoning whatever blood it can from the Whiplash and preparing to Mal-Nuke Asbeel.}

{The fallen angel strays into range. A Core flies next to their face, followed up by a flash of orange and an explosion, right in the face. This causes Asbeel to stumble over their feet, throwing their crowbar in the general direction of V1.}

{Of course, it misses by a foot.}

{Asbeel flies behind V1, grabbing their crowbar once again and attempting to pin it to a chunk of ice. V1, again, dodges this attack, following up with a Sharpshooter/Slab-Piercer/Railcoin combo. Asbeel collapses to their knees, confusing V1 yet again.}

V1: WHAT'S WITH THE LETHARGY BUDDY

Asbeel: Apologies. It's been a while since I've fought anything one-on-one.

{Belting out a cough, Asbeel adjusts their helmet.}

Asbeel: As for you. Did you get an upgrade in regards to your Railcannon?

V1: EXPLAIN

Asbeel: You seem to be using it quite more than what should be possible. Grab a few extra batteries along the way?

V1: I GUESS SO V1: YOU SURE LOVE MONOLOGUING HUH

{Asbeel gets back onto their feet again. They look over their crowbar.}

Asbeel: How many times are you going to come back?

V1: AS MANY AS IT TAKES TO KILL YOU

Asbeel: As you wish.

{Asbeel cracks their knuckles, chucking their crowbar at V1 before disappearing as soon as V1 looks away.}

{V1 slidejumps around the arena, searching for Asbeel.}

{...}

{...No archangels.}

{No exit shafts either.}

{What's this about, then?}

{V1 stops in place, cycling their weapons impatiently.}

{Three beats pass. A crowbar finds itself in the crevasses of V1's chestplating, ripping said plating out from behind. V1 turns around, getting punched in the face for its efforts.}

{YOU ARE DEAD} { | | | | | 💀 | | | | | } {PRESS [R] TO RETRY}

{...}

{...V1 lands at the bottom of the elevator again.}

{That's some bullshit.}

{V1 flips its Sharpshooter between idle hands, stomping into the arena once more.}

{It is immediately met by its second corpse, parrying it out of the air and ricocheting a charged shot into the angel ahead. It intends to combo that up with some coins.}

{So, in order, V1's opening salvo is as follows: Sharpshooter -> Marksman coins (3) as the Sharpshooter's shot ricochets off of the ground, to act as a sort of sidegrade to a Railcoin -> Railcannon a 4th Marksman coin for pretty good damage.}

{Asbeel responds to the Railcoin by tossing some stolen coins of their own into the air, and ultra-rico-parrying the Railcoin into V1's wings, destroying them.}

{Well. Its armament is gone. Great.}

{V1 steals its Slab Piercer from its corresponding feather before it deactivates, jumps onto Asbeel, and whales on them with all three arms and the Slab Piercer.}

{Asbeel, having a crowbar swing interrupted by getting spidermonkeyed by a security camera, attempts to swing at V1 as it clamors around their bulky frame.}

{After V1 is able to get a total of 31 punches and 6 charged shots into Asbeel's helmet, Asbeel finally responds by digging their free hand into the pesky robot's back and gripping hard, ripping it off of them with force.}

{When V1 got their Whiplash back, Asbeel can not recall. Doesn't matter. They'll simply rip it off again.}

{They bury the bent end of their crowbar into V1's chest before it's able to get back onto its feet, hopping over to a nearby wall and bashing the wall with the newly-created V1-on-a-stick.}

{It takes only three impacts, before-}

{YOU ARE DEAD} { | | | | | 💀 | | | | | } {PRESS [R] TO RETRY}

{...}

{...}

{...The delay is longer this time. Asbeel relieves their crowbar of the corpse, taking a seat on a nearby ice chunk.}

{Five minutes pass.}

{V1 returns from the elevator doors.}

{Asbeel looks towards the vampire.}

V1: SORRY V1: HAD TO RESEARCH SOME NEW TECHNIQUES

{And off it goes, to hide behind a chunk of ice. Asbeel wonders what it might be planning.}

{V1 seems to have grabbed a pre-nerf version of the Sharpshooter. Where? Who fucking knows. It Slam Storage jumps into the ceiling, throwing some coins up before jumping off of the ceiling and back onto the floor, following up with firing the pre-nerf Sharpshooter at one of the coins.}

{This does some fucking nutty damage to Asbeel.}

{V1 comes out of hiding, to find Asbeel kneeling on the ground.}

V1: WHAT DO YOU THINK

{Asbeel hacks up some blood.}

Asbeel: ...a... couple of things... [Suppressed cough]. For example:

{Asbeel's crowbar pops in out of nowhere, making itself known in V1's lower torso. Once V1's attention is focused onto the crowbar, Asbeel throws a haymaker into V1's face.}

{YOU ARE DEAD} { | | | | | 💀 | | | | | } {PRESS [R] TO RETRY}

{...This takes... quite the long time. A time I'd rather not write down each instance for. Here's a couple of them, however.}

-

{Retry 12: Asbeel pulls off a wrestling move on V1, piledriving it.}

{Retry 56: Asbeel uppercuts V1's Knuckleblaster, making it kill itself with its own arm.}

{Retry 132: Asbeel utilizes some of their previous knowledge against V1, breaking its back(servos) like they'd done to Gabriel.}

{Retry 324: Asbeel manages to pull off some Looney Tunes shit against V1, crushing it with an ice chunk.}

{Retry 1006: Asbeel tears V1 apart with the crowbar, letting it suffer against the cold hard ground.}

{Retry 1942: Asbeel manages to summon Tricky the Clown himself. He clowns around as a result, torturing V1 until growing tired of it and wrecking it with his Improbability Drive.}

...

...

{Retry 9000.}

{V1 grows +ENRAGED.}

{The elevator doors fly out of the wall, making their new homes in the wall adjacent. Asbeel is peppered by ice particles.}

{V1, unable to utilize illegal tactic after illegal tactic against Asbeel, doesn't have the slightest clue in Hell in how to defeat Asbeel. It's tried shooting into the cracks of their armor. It's tried to catch Asbeel offguard. It's tried cheating, for God's sake. Its motherboard is fried.}

{Asbeel looks up from their book.}

Asbeel: You look like V2. Having fun?

{The first time Asbeel's spoken in 1000 retries, followed by...}

{Asbeel looks to their crowbar. Many chinks line it, similar to Asbeel's armor, now ripe for destruction.}

{Asbeel looks to the machine. Steam flies off of its plating, its arms shaking as they bob up and down, its rage put into something tangible. The Nokia's pissed. Hah.}

{Asbeel assumes their armor won't last this time. They get off of the ice chunk, cracking their knuckles one last time.}

Asbeel: Your heresy will not be tolerated.

V1: YOU WILL NOT STOP MY CRUSADE A SECOND LONGER

{V1 launches coins into the air, Deadcoining one off of the wall behind it with the Whiplash, and Sharpcoining the other three into Asbeel with the Feedbacker. It prepares to Mal-Nuke Asbeel with its free arm and the Knuckleblaster.}

{Asbeel parries the Sharpcoin back into V1, knocked back 5 feet by the Mal-Nuke. They toss their crowbar into V1's torso, missing by half a foot.}

{A Whiplash head digs its way into Asbeel's shoulder, followed by a Slab Piercer + Marksman combo into their face, as well as a stomp for good measure.}

{As Asbeel attempts to reach for V1, it rips the Whiplash's head out of their shoulder, shoving magnets into their sternum and firing saws and nails galore into the archangel.}

{Asbeel responds by teleporting behind it, attempting to uppercut it with their crowbar, and failing.}

{V1 freezes a rocket in place, hitting it with a Malicious Railcannon, and following up with The Funny S.R.S. + Shotgun + Sharpshooter Combo.}

{Asbeel stumbles over onto their ass. V1 leaps onto Asbeel, triple-wielding the Revolver variants with their right arms and digging into the fallen angel's helmet with the free arm.}

{As Asbeel attempts to swing again, V1 FINALLY destroys a significant chunk of armor: the chestpiece, through a point-blank Overpump explosion. This reveals the carapace underneath, naturally, adorned with glowing religious tattoos and long-dried blood, recently mixed in with the fresh stuff.}

{V1 finishes Asbeel off with a Railcoin, directly through the heart.}

{Asbeel crumbles to their knees. V1's +ENRAGED state wears off.}

{Built to be unstoppable, the most feared archangel in Heaven - before Gabe - clenches at the fresh hyper-heated hole in their chest. Their own milleniae-long +ENRAGE brought to an end, Asbeel's previously red-hot armor is brought to a cold, dark and dull lapis.}

{...They take a breath, and softly speak their last.}

Asbeel: you... fight quite well. despite the damage, you immediately develop new strategies to destroy me... and it only took you nine thousand attempts.

{They take another breath.}

Asbeel: congratulations, V1. you truly are the toughest opponent i've had in years. may your legacy be remembered and feared by all, as gabriel's has.

V1: WHAT ABOUT YOU

Asbeel: why do i matter? it's your story, is it not?

V1: V1: I SUPPOSE SO V1: ONE QUESTION HOWEVER V1: WHERE DO YOU GO WHEN YOU DIE V1: WE'RE ALREADY IN HELL

Asbeel: ...no one's ever told me. i'll have to figure that out for myself. Asbeel: i'd also like to point out that you're the only being to ever hear my voice. tell me, before i die... what do you think?

V1: WELL V1: YOU SOUND LIKE A BASS GUITAR WAS GIVEN LIFE V1: IF THAT MAKES SENSE

Asbeel: huh... interesting.

{...The corpse collapses to the ground. Their wings have disappeared.}

{V1 takes a knee, checking Asbeel's pulse.}

{...}

{...Finally.}

{V1 stands up, heading to the exit elevator... only to find that there is no hole. They were right: this is the bottom of Hell. Only way out is up.}

{Thank fuck for the actual platform.}

{V1 stands onto the elevator platform, presses the button, and finally leaves the bottom of Judecca.}

-

{TIME: 42,536:59:14 | F}

{KILLS: 1 | S}

{STYLE: 1,546,354 | S}

{OVERALL RANK: D}

{SECRETS: [No.]}

{CHALLENGE: [Parry Asbeel's crowbar.] | YES}

[act2drama]

*cracks knuckles* Right...

So for a very rudimentary starting timeline we have:

Over The Henge -> Fraud of the Blings -> Wishing For Wishy-Washy -> The Quest For Escape-A-Lot -> Rumpole of the Motte & Bailey -> Look Out / Look Out 2: They Sphinx It's All Over -> I Found It In The Bushes

That's all the pre-20th century ones.

Bread -> The Codfather -> Good Guys Finish Last -> Fire In The Hole -> Careless Whisper -> Who Bun It -> Nightmare on Bone Street -> Shop Till You Drop -> What's The Pointe

And that's all the pre-2000s ones. And we know Ipswitch It Up takes place in 2004(ish). The rest of the films are all kind of a jumble since a lot of them canonically take place in the same year as each other (e.g. Dress For Danger, Wild Feast, Hot Swap Buns and the Ashopalypse trilogy all explicitly take place in 2021) while a lot of others don't have a specific date given within the movie but are clearly supposed to be "sort of present day" (e.g. Angstronauts, Pier Today Gone Tomorrow, Singing In The Aisles, Now Museum..., Suicide Squid, etc).

Some random potential connecting things:

Delta von Tussel canonically appears in both Flat Pack Attack and Cat in the Habit (where he's apparently for some reason been elevated to the status of 'God');

I'm convinced that Macob Smarley/Christmas Bonanza Boy (All I Want For Christmas Is You) and Vinnie the Ventriloquist (Dice With Death) are in fact the same person - since Vinnie dies in DWD, that must logically come after AIWFCIY;

Similarly, you can't tell me that Prince Richard (Rumpole of the Motte & Bailey) is not a direct descendant of King Tim (The Quest For Escape-A-Lot);

I'm semi-convinced that Vivian (Primary Cape Crusader) and Samantha (Ipswitch It Up) are the same person given the prevalence of time travel in the plots of both films and the fact that both characters (each played by Josh) are the ones responsible for working out how to achieve it even if they aren't the ones who use it - I'm not entirely sure how this works except thinking that maybe Vivian is a reincarnation of Samantha or they're both alter-egos of Jimbo Jumbo (Fraud of the Blings) who exists outside the space/time continuum in his rainbow state (which is a sentence I genuinely never thought I'd write);

I can't remember if they ever worked out the timeline snag in Good Guys Finish Last but I'd like to think it's happening simultaneously to The Codfather literally for no other reason than I think it's morbidly funny to have two cruise ships simultaneously meet with disaster;

The Prophecy Guy (Hot Swap Buns) is a direct descendant of Horatio (Over The Henge), hence his familiarity with body-swap weirdness;

With regards to the whole "talking animals"/"animals with human levels of intelligence" thing (because there's a lot of intelligent talking animals in MMNI), it turns out that every species of animal has always had some who can talk and have human levels of intelligence; they were (mostly) just smart enough to keep it hidden except among humans they could be sure wouldn't expose or kill them, especially after the Great Turkey War, the only major exception to this being various species of bear, especially pandas. Or else they segregate from humans entirely and form entire animal-only community like the village of Oos in Who Bun It.

The vampire family in Popes on the Ropes are descendants of Es Merelda and Sean in I Found It In The Bushes (the vampire curse was broken in IFIITB but the family line still suffered from hereditary iron deficiency - no I have no idea if that's biologically possible but...we're dealing with vampires here...);

The Croydonosaurus is an evolutionary descendant of the Stone Henge dinosaurs in Over The Henge

Someone should try to make a timeline of all the mischief movie night in’s. Like the Pixar theory but more unintentional.

[nightwings-circus]

One knock away

Detective!Dick Grayson x reader

A/N: This was a request from a lovely mutual of mine!!! @stxrrryskygrayson !! They write fic themselves so go give them some love :) hope y’all enjoy, it’s my first time writing smut in a while so hopefully it doesn’t disappoint

(18+. minors DNI you will be blocked)

warnings: 18+, smut, handcuffs, dom!Dick, praise, implied pain k!nk, pet names (baby, darling, doll, sir a couple of times), thigh riding, all the good horny shit.

synapsis: you're the newest vigilante in town, though some people aren't huge fans of you at the moment. when a knock disturbs you and a cop enters your house for questioning connected to the new masked crusader; you meet detective Dick Grayson, formally anyways.

you sat on your couch in a lustful daze, zoning out as a shitty romance movie played on the tv in front of you. you couldn't stop thinking back to last night, it had been a routine hit and run for you, all that was needed was to grab a few things to shut down the operation and get out, but then he had shown up. the detective; a tall young man with dark hair and a gorgeous face. it had knocked you off your stride a bit and ended with the goons getting a couple nasty hits on you. But not before his gorgeous face implanted itself in your daydreams. which was exactly what you were doing, fingers teasing your clit as you thought of how handsome he would look between your thighs, when you were interrupted.

a few harsh knocks on your front door broke you out of your trance. who the fuck was coming your house at this hour? you slowly got up, opening the door just a crack and peering out, your gaze met by two gorgeous blue eyes dazzling under your porch light.

“Hello, I’m detective Dick Grayson. would it be alright if I came in and asked you a few questions miss?” Your heart skipped a beat at the sound of his voice. It was deep, but not too deep, full of charm and so insanely sexy.

“Sure hun, and please, call me Y/N” you tried to sound calm and confident, and maybe slightly flirty as you lead him into your living room, the exact spot you had been so deep in pleasure moments before.

“Any particular reason why you’re here officer?” The two of you sat down on the big couch and you looked him over. It was the same detective from your run last night, the ever so handsome man who had caught your eye and made you hesitate just those few extra seconds, the one to occupy your mind and fill it with all those dirty things he might do to you.

“Well, there’s reason to believe you might have some involvement with a certain masked vigilante that’s new in Gotham. Have you ever heard or seen someone named Solar Flare?” His voice was all professional as he eyed you up and down. Trying to get a profile. To see if I match the description, you thought and you became all too aware of the short spandex shorts you had thrown on this morning out of comfort.

“Only on the news sir,” your voice was smooth as silk as you answered, and you could’ve swore his jaw clenched and a hint of something dark flashed in his eye as he heard that particular name. “I don’t make it a habit of runnin around with masked people.”

“Well aren’t you just a little angel,” he smirked a bit, biting his bottom lip softly and putting his hands behind his head as he leaned back.

“Look the department doesn’t know I’m here. Between you and me I have reason to believe that you, darling, are Solar Flare. So I wanna know exactly what you were doing stealing that shit otherwise I might have to report it,” his voice was darker now, giving you butterflies and making a heat appear in your core. “And if you tell me I can keep you out of a whole lotta trouble.”

“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you clenched your legs together slightly, hoping he wouldn’t take it as a sign of weakness. He was just so hot, with his sleeves rolled up and the top button of his white button down undone he looked like something out of a movie, his arms toned and defined with muscle. It was almost too much to handle, making you so incredibly wet you couldn’t bear it.

“So we’re playing it that way sweetheart? Cause I could’ve sworn I recognize the girl I busted last night, especially since that cut on your cheek matches the one she ran out with. Sorry princess, I never forget a beautiful girl like that,” he smirked. He had you and you knew it. He inched closer to you on the couch and pulled some handcuffs out of his pocket, the metal almost glittering in the slightly dim living room.“I just wanna know what a gorgeous little thing like you is doing going up against such big bad guys hunny,” his eyes were dark with lust now, and his voice made you so aroused it caused a soft moan to escape your lips, causing you to blush.

“Not so tough now are we?,” he had a devilish look in his eyes that made your heart beat even faster. “I seen you fight last night, tried to get to you to take you in before those goons did, like a professional. and yet all I could think of was how pretty you’d look on your knees instead, and how gorgeous you’d look moaning my name. You’re too perfect doll. Had me so fucked up I couldn’t think straight, and you got away. But I did some digging and here you are,” he bit his lip again, the sight of it drove you fucking wild.

You couldn’t help yourself anymore, you pushed your body against him and kissed him fiercely, every inch of you aching to be touched by the handsome man sitting in front of you. You craved him and his touch like a drug, one that simultaneously fueled and extinguished the fire burning in the pit of your stomach.

You slowly moved to sit on his leg, grinding against his muscular thigh through his jeans and letting out soft moans into his mouth as he pushed his tongue past your lips, kissing you rough before biting your lip and pulling away.

“Such a needy girl for me doll, look so pretty riding my leg, you want me that bad?” He quickly pulled your shirt and bra off before grabbing your wrists and pulling them behind your back to put the handcuffs on you, making your heart flutter with excitement as the cold metal touched your bare wrist.

“Yes detective,” your voice came out like a purr, full of lust and need and you felt his cock twitch and harden, wanting to burst through his tight jeans. He grabbed you and flipped around so were on your knees, face into a pillow and ass up in the air.

“God you have such a perfect ass doll, bet it would be even prettier with my handprints on it,” he growled and ripped your shorts off, revealing the blue and black lace panties underneath. You heard him moan hungrily at the sight of them before a kiss was planted on your ass, then on your dripping heat through your underwear.

“My favourite colours gorgeous, how could you have known,” his voice was thick and heavy with a primal lust as he moved your panties aside, teasing your slit with his long and elegant fingers.

“Please,” you whimpered as the heat inside you built up. He slowly eased two fingers into you, making you moan into the pillows you were pressed against. A sharp slap landed on your ass, making your walls tighten around his fingers.

“Fuck, Sir please.” You begged. He slipped his fingers out and you heard him unzip his jeans before feeling his long, thick cock rub softly against your ass.

“My girl wants it now does she? Gonna be a good girl and take it all?” He growled and started to tease your dripping pussy with his cock before sharply thrusting the whole thing inside. He kept it in all the way for a few seconds, letting you get adjusted to how big he was before he started to thrust into you. He fucked you hungrily and animalistic as he landed sharp spanks on your ass and pulled your hair back softly, making you whimper and moan.

“Yes sir you feel so good,” you moaned as he pounded into you, his cock hitting every sweet spot possible. It made you shake with pure pleasure, clenching your fists that were perfectly behind your back. You felt the cold metal of the handcuffs slide along your wrists as he fucked into you, hard and fast but not painful. He hit a certain spot inside of you that made you tighten around him even more, earning a deep growl and moan from Detective Grayson, and you swore you could almost feel every vein in his massive manhood as he pumped inside of you, both of you breathing heavy and moaning loudly.

“Such a perfect little cunt for me doll, so fucking tight.” He growled and hit your ass again, sending a wave of pleasure through you and making the knot in your stomach ravel even more.

“Fuck I’m so close,” you moaned, and suddenly he was pulling out and you were being spun around to face him.

“Ride me doll,” his voice was thick and oh so sexy.

“I wanna see that perfect face as you cum on my cock over and over again,” the smirk on his face was hot enough to almost make you cum on the spot, and his breathing was slightly ragged. He sat down and you quickly straddled him, positioning your legs on either side of him as he undid the handcuffs and re-clasped them in front of you.

“That’s it baby,” he moaned as you lowered yourself onto his cock, the feeling of him filling you up overwhelming as you bounced on him. You almost couldn’t handle it, each time he went deeper and deeper, hitting your sensitive spot every time. He started to rub your clit and took matters into his own hands by quickly starting to thrust up into you.

“Fuck Dick I’m cumming!” You moaned and kissed him hungrily, shaking as the knot unraveled in your stomach and a wave of pure pleasure flooded over all of your senses, vision blanking slightly as he continued to fuck into you.

“That’s it Doll fuck, you just want me to fuck you like this forever don’t you,” he moaned as you tightened around him. “I’m gonna cum inside you baby fuck,” he growled and thrust harder, your body still shaking from the pure bliss you had experienced. He sucked and licked your tits as he fucked into you, slowly sucking each of them and squeezing them in his hands.

You felt him thrust hard and fast, and ropes of his hot sticky cum painted your insides as you both moaned each other’s names, his teeth leaving small marks up your chest, collarbone, and neck as he moaned your name into your skin.

“Fuck y/n your pussy is so fucking good,” he moaned as his cock twitched, finally releasing the last of his cum deep inside you. He stopped thrusting and you relaxed on the top of him, both of you shaking slightly and panting, almost gasping for air, he brushed your hair softly out of your face as you laid it onto his chest, eyes heavy from how exhausted from pleasure and fucked out you were.

“Well isn’t this a gorgeous fucking sight,” Dick’s voice was smooth and confident, but you could hear it waver slightly from how hard he had came. “One that I could get used to.” He planted a kiss on your forehead and you smiled.

“On one condition,” you giggled, sitting up and looking at him as innocently as possible.

“And what would that be beautiful?”

“Okay well first, you uncuff me,” you smiled and raised your hands up

“and two, you let me explain what exactly you came here to figure out, because I have a feeling you didn’t come here on cop business, no offence” he smirked as you said that last part.

“Well love I believe that’s technically two conditions but, I would be happy to oblige.” He undid the handcuffs and kissed the tops of your hands before kissing your wrists.

“Now let’s hear all about it shall we? And maybe later we can have a repeat performance.”

[overwatch-does-stuff]

The more of these you answer the more I'll send. First time meeting this supersoldier, how does it go with S76, Reinhardt, and our favorite horrid gremlin men from Australia?

Okay at this rate we gotta give this poor homie a name! I'm starting to really get attached to this OC. Their title can obviously stay "The Supersoldier" (all in one word) because I've now tagged the other asks you've submitted with that, but we should really pick out a name! I'll let you decide how that happens. Now onto the reacts!

Soldier 76:

Jack was one of the ones in the field team that helped retrieve the Supersoldier in the middle of a skirmish with Talon.

His first impression of them was their sheer size- Moira had built off the old SEP program and done her own "improvements" along the way. Jack is strong, they are stronger. Jack is fast, they are faster. The way they move is just uncanny.

(Back in his youth, he had been worried about being a freak of nature after going through the program. Now, all these years later, he knows better. After seeing the Supersoldier, he really knows better.)

But, more than anything, he understands what they're going through. Seeing them move through the Talon firefight, he understands the doctrine they've been trained in their whole life. The weapon isn't just the gun they hold, it's their own body.

So when the team finally break free of the Talon troops with the Supersoldier in tow, and they make it back to the jet, Jack takes the seat next to them without hesitation.

There's a strange sort of kindred shared without the two ever saying a word to each other. Jack isn't scared of them, despite the incredible violence he just saw they were capable of. Because he's capable of it, too (to a lesser degree).

And ever since, he's been gentle to them, at least as gentle as he can be, being their superior officer and while dealing with his own issues about showing kindness and vulnerability.

He doesn't know if he wants to be their role model. He doesn't know if he can. He keeps interactions with them brief.

Reinhardt

Rein was not a part of the team that picked the Supersoldier up from Talon.

But shortly after, he sought them out and introduced himself. A proper introduction, outlining who he used to be and who he was now. He's used to being treated as a war hero, so it throws him for a loop when the Supersoldier asks "what's a Crusader and why should I care?"

He gets about halfway through explaining when they tell him to shut up and leave.

He does so dutifully and he doesn't say a word about it to anyone else, even though he's confused and a little hurt.

(The Supersoldier, who was already stressed out having to learn all these new names and faces, and having just been thrown into a completely new life where they only just acknowledged that feeling human attachment was okay, wasn't really in the right headspace to recieve Reinhardt's warm welcome.)

But then, one day, after the grace period has ended, the Supersoldier walks into the packed mess hall and almost panics. They don't know who to sit next to. They don't know any of these people. Morrison, Ana, and Zenyatta aren't here, and Baptiste's table is packed with all sorts of loud and colorful individuals they don't want to acquaint with. The loud peppy girl and the gorilla offer them a seat but they don't want to take it. She's too loud. The blue accelerator she wears flashes too much. They can't deal with that right now.

So instead, they make a beeline to the relatively empty table that Rein, Torb, and Brigitte are sitting at. The Supersoldier has already sat down next to Rein before they realize their feet have brought them here.

The first word out of their mouth to him is "sorry".

Reinhardt smiles. He's already forgiven them. He's just so happy they finally came around.

And that's the start of their friendship(?)

Junkrat

The first place the Supersoldier meets Junkrat is on the test range. It's Junkrat's favorite spot in base, which is because (go figure) it's the only place where bombs are allowed.

The Supersoldier wasn't even aware of his existence until about halfway through their practice session, Junkrat popped out of a corner and blew up the remaining target with a cackle of glee.

The explosion causes them to panic.

So now they're hyperventilating in a (different) corner. He joins them in the corner and tries to calm them down through various methods.

"Various methods" being patting their shoulder and offering them boba. They shrink away from both.

After a few good minutes, he finally remembers the breathing techniques Roadhog taught him ("Roadie says these breathing techniques will calm me down and keep me from doing stupid things! They don't work for that but they sure do help scared people!")

He stays with them until they stop panicking because even though he'd never admit he was responsible for it (compulsive liar!), he still feels pretty bad about it.

The next thing he does is stop slouching to compare their heights. He's impressed they're taller than him. They don't know how to respond to this.

The fun times are cut short when Junkrat hears someone else step out onto the practice range. He vanishes into whatever gremlin cave he carved out for himself and the Supersoldier is left completely baffled.

They're convinced that A. he's a cryptid and B. they hallucinated the whole encounter due to the panic attack.

They finally describe the encounter to Zenyatta one day and he helps them put two and two together.

[maxwell-grant]

One last one for the moment; top five superheroes who definitely AREN'T Pulp Heroes, but could be with a little tweaking?

Oof, that's a hard one. It's a hard one because, again, there ultimately isn't that much separation between the two to the point there's enough of a hard line in there to work with, but I guess the cat's out of the bag now that I've staked claims on there being differences between them.

Okay so, not counting superheroes who are deliberately modeled after actual pulp heroes, so no Tom Strong or Night Raven here. I'm sticking mainly with comic book superheroes (barring one oddball exception) since the medium separation is important), who I think could become pulp heroes with some tweaking.

5: Captain America

Sort of cheating because I already covered it here, but I definitely have to include Captain America in here, especially in the stories they actively go for a "pulp" vibe as well as the earliest ones.

Fun fact about Marvel: As Timely, they actually began life as pulp publishers. Not just pulp publishers, but specializing in some of the sleaziest, ghastliest magazines of the era, and you can bet this carried over to their superheroes. Where as DC's superheroes took inspiration from the big pulp heroes such as The Shadow and Doc Savage, Timely's superheroes seemed instead much more inspired by Weird Tales stories and Poverty Row horror films, and even in the 60s, Marvel never really abandoned their horror roots, the trick was just using them as a baseline to create superheroes. In DC, the world's first contact with superheroes begins with the world looking in wonder at a friendly strongman. In Marvel, it began with the world looking in panicked horror at a flaming monster rampaging through the streets desperately trying to not burn everything it touches. It should come to little surprise then that the majority of characters I'm including in this list are Marvel characters.

People think Captain America's first comics largely consisted of him fighting Nazis left and right, but they were actually much more often based around him encountering monsters and creatures of horror, like the above panel where it looks like Cap's staring down the beginning of Berserk's Eclipse (RIP Miura).

The early Captain America comics pretty much consisted of Kirby dipping his toe into the monster comics he'd make in the 50s which would later bleed into the 60s Marvel entourage. They even tried repackaging Captain America into a horror anthology in the 50s titled "Captain America's Weird Tales", just imagine how different the character would be today if that somehow stuck.

Imagine a world where Steve Rogers never became leader of The Avengers, never got to become the shining beacon of heroism of an entire universe, and instead, when he was unfrosted, he woke up to find a world running rampant with crawling nightmares and Nazi tyranny, and he has no idea what's become of his former sidekick. That definitely sounds like the start of a promising pulp adventure.

4: Namor

Another Timely creation. In Namor's case, he didn't so much encounter horrors from beyond imagination, as much as HE was the terrifying thing beyond us ready to rampage upon mankind, whose first on-screen act consists of the calculated slaughter of a ship full of innocents. The first true villain protagonist of comic books. Not just an anti-hero, a villain intent on wiping out the human race.

And not just a cardboard supervillain, but the beautiful prince of a race of ugly fish monsters, a momma's boy who's doing what he thinks is right by warring with surface dwellers. While Namor's become largely defined by his gargantuan arrogance, here, he's almost childlike, despite being much more brutal and villainous here, spurred on by the whims of his mother, who even acknowledges that Namor had no real reason to kill the divers but did so anyway, and now encourages him to genocide. His mom even tells him "Go now, to the land of white people!", and the very last panel of the story even states he's on a "crusade against white men".

The massacre of explorers at the hands of something beyond their understanding. A monster born of an interracial coupling. A race of fish monsters with bulging eyes, antagonistic towards humanity but are shown to have positive traits just the same. A dash of racism. There is no mistaking The Sub-Mariner's pulp horror influence.

A non-white superhuman warrior born from a Lovecraftian horror story, who gradually moves away from his villainous crusade into becoming more of an anti-hero, never truly putting aside his hatred for humanity, remaining a temperamental, unpredictable outcast, with a strong, palpable undercurrent of anger in his stories. I could very easily buy Namor as having crawled out of a Weird Tales story and I can't think of other superheroes whose origins are as steeped deeply in pulp horror.

3: Doctor Fate

Technically we already have a pulp hero version of Doctor Fate in Doc Fate, and I'll get to him separately, but even besides him, the earliest Doctor Fate stories in particular feel very much like he's a character steeped in the worlds of pulp and pulp horror who decided to put on a superhero costume and show up in comic.

He's got a similar set-up to The Shadow, from the pulp Shadow in the sense that he's a mysterious, eerie crimefighter who dwells as a presence more often than an active character and who kills criminals without remorse, always watching and waiting for the right time to strike as a a wrathful old-testament force of vengeance, and from the radio Shadow due to him using superpowers to fight crime while being accompanied by a smart, fierce love interest.

Originally, Fate was not a sorcerer, but instead a scientist who discovered a way to manipulate atomic structure, of his and other things, thus making it appear that he can do magic (although we never see his face, and he's implied to be thousands of years old, before they settled on the Nabu origin). And going back to Lovecraft, a lot of it appears in the earliest Fate stories. Fate was given powers not by a sorcerer, but an alien worshipped as a god. He barely encounters traditional monsters, but instead contends with hidden races, zombie slaves, abandoned alien monoliths, and half man and half fish creatures. Fate may have actually been the very first pastiche of Lovecraft in pop culture.

And of course we can't forget the gloriousness of Doc Fate pulling an Indiana Jones on us.

2: Wolverine

I don't even think you'd have to tweak Wolverine at all. You'd just have to get him out of the costume and Avengers/X-Men associations (although the X-Men have a substantial background in pulp sci-fi stories like Slan and Odd John, so they aren't really at odds here), maybe tone down his powers a bit and, that's it. Logan's already the kind of character who has such a varied sandbox history, whose powers can lead to so many different scenarios, that it's not a stretch at all to picture Wolverine in the usual pulp hero scenarios.

You can have half-naked Wolverine running around in the jungle with animals Tarzan-style, take him to Savage Land if you wanna throw dinosaurs in there. He's already Marvel's foremost "wandering samurai/cowboy" character which was one of the stock and trade types of the pulps. Western? Done. Samurai? Done. Wuxia? Just put him in China and add a couple extra fantasy elements. Wanna make a sword and sorcery story with him? He already comes with a bunch of knives and savagery and ability to survive grisly injuries. Horror? The MCU is crawling with them, or alternatively, tell a story from the perspective of someone who's being hunted down by Wolverine. Wanna tell a detective/noir/post-apocalypse story? Logan's right there.

Wanna have him crossover with pulp heroes? He's lived through the 1800s and 1900s and traveled all over the world, you could feasibly have him meet up with just about any of them. Logan may actually be the purest example of your question, because he's very much not a Pulp Hero, and yet, he definitely feels like a character who could have been one, at just about any point in the history of pulp magazines. He's perfect for it.

1: Wario

WAAA-okay, look, bear with me for a second here, I'm not just picking Wario because I love oddball choices and he's one of my favorite characters, I got some logic to this.

Okay so, the first question here: is Mario a superhero? While I'm usually adverse to calling characters prominent outside of comic books superheroes (hence why I'm definitely not interested in debating whether Harry Potter or Goku or Link or Frodo are superheroes), I do think it's a pretty shut case that, yes, Mario is a superhero. Superheroes don't just come in the form of skintight crimefighters, right from the start comic books have had varied types of superheroes appearing in comics and comic strips. For example, the "funny animal" superheroes are a type older than superhero comics, and they were arguably not only the most successful type of superhero of the 40s-50s era, but arguably defined trends dominating nonfunny animal superheroes, traits that predated or influenced Captain Marvel as well as Otto Binder's reshaping of Superman that defined much of superhero convention as we know it. It's part of why the question of "Is Sonic a superhero" has a very clear Yes as an answer.

So upon establishing that, yes, funny cartoon characters can be and are superheroes too, is Mario one? Well, I'd say yes. He's got an iconic uniform, he's got superpowers, he goes on fantastical adventures, he is both a nebulously general do-gooder as well as having a clear mission as protector of the Mushroom Kingdom. His adventures span multiple storytelling formats, he's got catchphrases, he even dresses up in Superman's colors and has a Super prefix iconically associated with him. Not a superhero the way we usually think of, but a superhero nonetheless.

And Wario? Well, putting aside Wario-Man who's more of a running gag than anything, Wario does just about everything Mario does. He's got all the traits that define Mario as a superhero short of a Super prefix and the selfless mission (which isn't exactly a rule). He goes around and gets into crazy adventures, he picks up items, beats bad guys, conquers the odds, and gets some kind of prize for it. He's got Mario's physical traits, and Mario's costume, and just about the same name short of a single letter. The caveat being, of course, that he's Wario, and so everything Mario is or does has to be exaggerated to gross extreme.

Mario is paunchy and strong, Wario's round and built like a powerlifter. Mario's got a friendly face and a fluffy mustache, Wario's got a massive horrible grin and jagged razors for a stache. Mario is a bit of an overeater, Wario can and will eat anything in front of him. Mario gets around with acrobatics and magic power-ups, Wario brute forces his way through everything and just rolls with whatever injuries he picks up along the way.

Mario gets fire powers by consuming magic flowers. Wario sets himself on fire and barrels around destroying everything in his path. Mario harnesses the elements or abilities of beings around him to clear obstacles and solve puzzles, Wario gets turned into a zombie, a vampire or a drunk to get the same things done. Mario befriends and rides dinosaurs who raised him from infancy, Wario piledrives dinosaurs and then uses their bodies to beat up more dinosaurs. Mario pals around with fellow heroes, princesses and friendly fantasy creatures, Wario pals around with aliens, witches, mad scientists, cab drivers, and lanky weirdos. Mario always ends his adventures joyfully leaping to the next one, Wario usually ends up either cackling in a pile of treasure or completely broke.

Mario races through plains to rescue princesses, Wario invades pyramids to hunt for treasure. Mario jumps through planets with baby stars guiding his path, Wario crashes into the Amazon jungle and fistfights the devil. You can see where I'm going with this.

If you were to take one of Nintendo's heroes to make them into pulp heroes, Wario, specifically the Wario Land Wario, may be the only one who really could do it, because in essence, he's the videogame equivalent of Professor Challenger. He's Bluto moonlighting as Indiana Jones, the weird brute adventurer for weird brute adventures where everything's off limits and you can trust our intrepid hero, who really shouldn't be a hero on all accounts, to deliver us a good time, give or take a couple deaths, scams, shams and oh-damns to complete said mad treasure hunts.

[punkscowardschampions]

China & America

China: [After School] China: Where are you? China: You left your clothes on the bathroom floor and he's threatening to ✂ them up and she's just sitting there nodding America: ✂💳 after buying new 👌 China: Hilarious China: but you'd have to pry his wallet out his tight arse first and he's waving the ✂ about like right now America: 😐 America: terrorist negotiations are a no no China: Oh, believe me, if he knew you were on the 📞 he'd be straight on to shout at you himself America: if he wants me to walk around naked that's his damage America: she's guaranteed not sitting there 😶 when I do China: They're your best jeans China: you already don't have enough decent gear, you're seriously going to risk it? America: they'll be my best denim cut offs America: I don't come running for him China: Because it's not freezing 11 months and a half out of the year, Ricky China: I don't either but like fuck would I let him trash any of my stuff America: move us 🏝🧉 Gaz 👏 China: You want to fake as delusional as her? China: Fine, I'll be the only one living in reality, trying to talk some sense back into the woman and stopping him from ruining literally everything we've got America: back into? America: you've got jokes China: Please China: She was never this bad before China: or at least for this long, it'd be three weeks max of the lovesick bit and then she'd always come back and be mam again America: from your 🏰 that's the view China: There's nothing about this house that's castle like but he's definitely taken the only appeals it had away China: you miss having the parties and the hangs too America: they're still happening America: Gaz doesn't run the 🌏 America: can't roll out of 🛏 onto a dance floor but it's not 😢 China: But it was better when we could throw them China: and there was no rules around here, period China: You're just giving him reason to stay, the man's a raving lunatic, instead of saying no tah it's like his new cause to fix this family and save us both China: Must've been a fucking general in a past life America: there still aren't, his don't count America: & you're not giving him a reason to fucking go so 🤫 China: You say that but any time we have to be here China: and we do, at least some of the time, we can't do what we always did before and he's calling the shots China: I'm trying to figure out what the hell that would look like, what are you doing? America: watch me America: I'll throw a party right now China: Really China: Good luck with that China: Jesus, he'll lock you up, you know he will, if he doesn't do worse beforehand America: What's Daddy Garry gonna do? Hit me? America: They'd lock him up America: & his head'll 🤯 before mine does China: You don't remember some of the boyfriends she's had China: it's not funny, for fuck's sake China: I want my life back America: the trauma hasn't run deep enough to give me memory loss & you're not old enough to play that card America: it can be anything I want, it's my life America: I remember when we had live laugh love on the kitchen wall China: You know what? China: Let him rip up all your sketty clothes China: you're being selfish, why should I help you America: now the 👖 don't know whose side you're on America: they were THE BEST when you wanted me to come back China: I'm on the side of this family China: but you only care about yourself, apparently America: you're on your own side America: you care about having your life back, not what mine looks like China: I'm the one here arguing with him for your stuff right now China: and I just want things back how they were, for all of us China: him gone and her like an actual person with thoughts and emotions about anything that ain't what he wants America: you said yourself he won't leave if I act any kind of way America: he's crusading America: & I don't look old enough to get high enough to do a mam impression America: what do you fucking expect me to do, Chi? China: Help me work this out! China: Together China: you're still here, you don't get to wash your hands of it and ignore it like Zsa does because it doesn't really matter to her China: as long as he isn't hitting any of us and maybe even then, who the fuck knows with her America: don't ! at me America: if it were that simple, togetherness could get fucked China: It ain't, that's the whole problem and what no one else seems to grasp right now China: we act up, he's got more cause to stay and get progressively worse until we can't do anything and go anywhere China: we do what he wants and stay in line, he'll probably get such a boner he'll try to marry her and adopt us America: the audacity of me taking a 🚿 in my own home China: I know China: why is he not telling her to do more washing? America: be a controlling fuckwit but make it useful America: you could be wayyyyyyyy more productive with this, sir China: I'm not saying that's right either but it's all about how WE have no respect China: she's stopped doing anything that isn't doing her 💅💄👗 for him and we're meant to do it all, apparently America: Mam has respect for his 💪🍆🍑 China: 🤮 China: It goes without saying, but he's literally fuck ugly America: but I DEMAND it's said America: he needs to know on the regs China: He's got this one wrinkle on his forehead that's so deep I reckon it could hold a ✎ China: I hate him America: if you put your 💄 in there next time he's 😪💻 , I'll let you use a DIFFERENT ONE on me China: Alright China: I'll use one of hers America: would she end it if he had 0 hair? America: or eyebrows China: His hairline is dead and she acts like she don't notice China: It's like a spell, or something America: I know someone who'd come over for a face tattoo America: or 🍆🍑 if that's all she cares about China: You do not China: and he doesn't have enough of either to cover, shh America: I do TOO China: Who? America: Si is bored enough without your parties he bought a tattoo gun online China: Oh God China: do not do it he'll be so bad, never mind the hepatitis America: & he's dyslexic China: 😂 China: I can't wait to see what bullshit he decides to misspell on himself then America: [sends her some pics because imagine] China: He's so lame China: I can't believe Gary has wrecked my chance with Jake America: his da is a fuckwit too you'd think he'd be more understanding China: like I wanna tell him anything about this China: it's shaming enough we can't throw the parties no more and everyone knows why America: he's part of the everyone, he already knows China: doesn't mean I want to go and cry about it China: I've got some pride, thank you America: he should have some America: never throws a party at his own house China: That was one of the only things we had going for us America: weakkk America: you have things going for you, ask mam when she recovers from this illness China: Okay, the main thing China: but he's going to start going out with Lucie now instead, I know it America: Lucie's been out with half his friends before him America: not a ringing endorsement, like China: Yeah, she's a right slag, and she'll do it anywhere so she don't even need the free house America: get nan out of hers, she'd do it for the sake of your love life China: We have bigger problems China: sort that one and the rest will fall back into place, yeah America: biggest problem that we don't know how to sort it America: I'll get him to hurt me 🚨���� we're almost there China: That's not a solution China: and they won't do fuck all about it until it's serious China: too serious to control America: is if it works America: we know he wants to throw me out the window with the 👖 America: & maybe all the boys will think I'm into some hardcore bdsm shit China: Shut up you don't know anything about that America: 👌 Jake's vanilla that's a shame China: You're 12 and that's not the kind of reputation you want or are gonna have China: that's for girls like Lucie who have fuck all else to offer so they have to go hard with that degrading shit America: told you there was more on offer from us than a free house 😛 America: but stop walking into all my traps that easy China: You're such a dick 🙄😏 China: I didn't mean that was all but fucking hell, it was clearly a big draw China: so many people are airing me right now America: you know who doesn't care about parties? America: the people you air China: Who??? America: [a list which obvs includes Bobby and Libi on it and probably Beck as well] China: So you're just going to list every random loser in school for what? America: 😐 America: & you're gonna kid yourself that there's not at least 3 boys on there hotter than Jake America: get out of your fucking ⬛ China: it's not JUST about hot though, is it China: it's all the rest America: what else has Jake got? China: He's cool America: he's not cool enough to throw a party for you America: you're bored China: I am bored right now America: What's the point of Gaz if he doesn't take her anywhere anymore? America: why's she not bored? China: Yeah get this China: they're talking about redecorating America: what.the.fuck. China: I know China: it's looked like this our entire lives because she can't afford it China: now he thinks he can come in and whitewash everything America: remember when that one before offered to put up a roll of wallpaper and she looked at him like he said he wanted to beat you to death with it America: she'd let Gary kill us China: say goodbye to live laugh love China: it'll be RESPECT RESPECT RESPECT America: he needs to fuck off or I am China: Where to China: no one's got a sofa comfy enough or the desire to do any more than offer a night America: I know plenty of people I can get to desire me China: 🖕 China: not falling for it again so soon America: no 🕷🕸 America: they're not people I want, I didn't say that China: That's not a solution, again China: this is our house China: and our mam China: we need to sort it America: I know China: I can't think around them though China: I need to get out America: meet me [wherever the hell she is rn] China: Okay China: as I have nowhere else to be rn America: bring me a jacket China: assuming you've got one left after his tantrum China: that WILL be resumed, when you're relocated 🙄 America: if he's that desperate to text me China: He's that desperate to shout 'til he looks like a 🍅 America: 😋🤤 China: If you liked it or him at all, you'd be here America: I'm waiting here for you America: with ☕ China: I'm on my way America: I'll text Jake to be here & 🏃👌 China: You will not America: you wanna see him & you're not gonna hit send China: Because I have dignity, I don't know why that's a foreign concept to you China: and I don't even want to see him America: you do, you're losing it that he doesn't wanna see you China: Don't be dramatic on my behalf China: and getting my little sister to beg for me, that's hardly going to win anyone over America: I was gonna pretend to be you China: Ha! China: I'd love to see that, not America: party trick America: if we ever have one again China: If anyone wants to come by the time we've worked this out, it'll be a miracle America: it is getting 🥱 China: Seriously China: not getting aired for no reason America: you should listen to me about nan America: have one there China: The only person who would have a party at their nans house is Libi Foley America: it is mint there China: 🙄 America: it is China: Why? She got a trampoline? 👌 America: getting low if you're getting jealous America: [but whatever pics or vids we have from being there however many times we have like] China: I don't know what you reckon is cool in [whatever year they're in] these days America: her 🏠 America: some of her friends America: but I think I scared her off China: Well forget her China: She thinks she's something special but she's so not America: you're not describing her China: Sure China: If she's making you feel shitty she's hardly the 😇 everyone thinks she is America: how did you twist it to be her fault from what I said? America: 🤯 China: You aren't scary, she can't hang America: she didn't have you green lighting her on what cool is America: that's why I can China: She's super immature America: that shit must fly cos she's super well liked too China: With other people on your list, maybe America: you know she's got friends on friends, we don't have to downplay it America: it's not gonna make us feel a new way about any of the 💩 going on China: Literally why are we talking about her China: I've got so much more on my mind America: You brought her up to veto nan's house as a party place America: cos you don't want her to hate you too China: It isn't a party place, she's an old lady China: that would be so lame China: she doesn't have a boyfriend, where are we sending her? America: bingo America: use Zsa's flat then, she has a boyfriend, he's all she ever talks about China: Her tiny one bed China: I could have a few main people, potentially America: Princess and the pea isn't a sexy story America: if you're gonna kick it like that with Jake he will fuck Lucie in the PE block China: That's his prerogative if he wants to catch herpes America: everything doesn't have to be perfect America: you 🔊 like Gary China: If Asia is going to stop talking to me, it needs to at least be worth it America: you could trash the place and she'd think she did it 🔎 for her fake gucci belt China: 🙄 China: at least we don't have to worry about her man lasting America: ✂️💖 China: I don't know why they do it America: what are you doing with Jake? China: I'm not China: not like them America: I don't believe you China: Well first off, he's actually decent looking and cool China: and that's the difference China: Gary isn't, and whatshisname isn't either China: and I'm not throwing myself at him America: he isn't cool to me America: if it was so different you'd care about that China: How is he not? America: 🤡 China: What the hell does that mean? America: he thinks he's funny and he's not China: You don't have to think he is China: you're not interested and he's not interested in you China: that's a bit different to Gary fucking up our lives and taking over our mam America: he doesn't need to talk about me ever then China: I'm sure he won't...? America: 😐 China: He's not talking about either of us right now America: 🎊🎉 China: Happy for you America: I'd be happy for you if you used the Gary situation to get a boyfriend who's less of a dick China: Like who? China: [list boys from that list] China: LOL America: 🖕 America: [because we know the boy she likes is on that list honey] China: Who do you fancy then? America: dream on, shady bitch America: I'm not revealing my secrets now China: 😂 China: Omg go on China: I'll work it out America: if Gaz keeps treating me like a little girl without the choking, spitting in my mouth or giving me euros to spend, it's not gonna matter America: he'll think I'm immature China: You're such a dick China: but he's older then China: narrows it down America: as old as you, not as old as daddy Gary China: Well I can work out who it isn't then America: you've got other shit to prioritise China: You should get a boyfriend your own age America: I'm not getting one China: When you do, then America: when I do I won't be doing a poll of our year America: he's fun that's why I like him America: the 2 years aren't what's making me 🤤 China: What's fun mean America: he can hang China: I know who it is America: happy for you China: He's okay, I guess China: if you like that sort of thing America: what the hell does that mean? China: He's a bit China: but if you like him America: a bit? China: Annoying China: but you don't have to see him around school America: I thought you had a real concern! China: I'm not mam, we've still got one China: I just don't think he's cute but he's not like, the worst China: I don't know why he hangs around with who he does though, maybe he's weird America: Jake is who you think is cute & cool so 🤫 China: He's the hottest boy in my year China: who isn't like, the preppy sporty type America: & he acts like it America: talking down to everyone China: You're dramatic America: 😐 America: he is, behaving like 👑 China: You're acting like I'm married to him, for starters China: we were never even officially going out America: cos he wants to fuck around & find out who else is 🤤 China: He can do what he likes America: with Lucie & you won't care at.all. China: 🖕 America: me getting 🍆 could bring mam out of her coma China: If she finds out before Gary China: that might actually be a decent way to look into it China: 'cos clearly, 👑 has failed to save us all America: 👌 I'll do what I can China: all you have to do is heavily hint you are, in the 0.2 milliseconds he leaves her alone America: I'll stand on the 🚽 while she's 🛁 China: Take a piss test China: that should trigger the fear response America: they're expensive America: be going in Gaz's wallet again China: nah, you can get them for a euro in dealz China: market for the skanky slags like Lucie, duh America: I'll go after school tomorrow, he won't be leaving her alone tonight after ✂👖 China: Ew China: I'm definitely finding somewhere else to be America: seconded China: This is ridiculous China: Nan's going to get fed up of us crashing at hers America: that day came a month in China: but like, fed up to the point he'll talk her out of letting us because we should 'be at home' or whatever the fuck China: 🕠 running out America: What a flirty little game of 🐈 & 🐁 America: game on, Gaz China: 🙄 China: We've got no choice so, yeah America: Where are you gonna go? China: 🤷 China: I don't know America: come with me China: Where are you going? America: When you've got nowhere else, 3rd degree questioning's pointless China: Why is it hard to answer a question? America: I don't have an answer yet China: Right China: well, whatever then America: whatever yes or whatever no? China: So you need a dedicated answer, do you? China: You invited me, shouldn't make any difference if I do or don't come, as you've got no idea where you're going America: & you think my pretend babydaddy is annoying China: He very literally is China: if you wanna talk about thinking you're funny, Jesus America: he has a basis for it America: he's got jokes that aren't about what every girl at school looks like China: He's got adhd China: I think America: When he said he was on 💊s not what I thought he meant China: He must have it bad he's so twitchy still China: and he never shuts up China: which is probably why he's friends with the deaf kid America: I take it back, you and Jake are well suited 🤡 China: What? That's not a joke China: it just makes literal sense China: he's so loud America: You're being a dick China: Oh I am not China: it's not like I'm saying it to his face America: you know I like his face & you're saying it to me China: Well you know I like Jake and you're being a dick about him so in that case, we'd be even America: he can help having a shitty personality, that's not the same as an adhd diagnosis China: okay then China: an excuse to have prescribed speed America: what's your excuse for not calling the deaf kid by his name? China: Why does it matter? China: You knew who I meant America: it matters that you're back in your 🏰 China: 🙄 Shut up China: again, not talking to him, just you America: no shit, you don't talk to anyone outside of your ⬛ America: just me China: We're sisters so China: we have to talk, so sorry America: I know how to do a smoky eye & take a drink, that's your main criteria for what a cool girl is China: You wish America: it's not something I'm prioritising pre or post Gary America: you're stuck with me anyway China: And you're stuck with me China: at the minute, that's basically all we've got China: Zsa is literally not taking it in, no surprise there China: and nan is drinking the kool-aid on him now so America: I'll bring mam back with my 🤰 it'll be fine China: **fake 🤰 America: I assumed that was clear cos of having no real 🍆 inside of me before tomorrow America: Gary probably doesn't want to kiss & make up like that, I'm only 12 China: What do you mean tomorrow? America: assuming I do the test in front of her then China: Don't require you to actually do the deed, idiot China: s'all fake, we don't need you to go have a fake abortion, Jesus America: I'm just saying we don't need to waste time typing out a distinction like **fake when it's obvious China: Don't be a twat, I was just saying China: you're so bloody pedantic today, my God America: Don't be putting some kind of tempting fate 🤰 hex on me before I've even done anything with any boys China: Don't be a little slag and nothing will happen China: not going to be me or fate doing anything about it, you're in control America: right now Gary is America: 🚫🍆 China: It's about more than that America: I know China: You don't get it America: What don't I get? China: I've lost loads of friends China: maybe all of them America: you'll get them back the parties are America: when* China: yeah America: I'm fixing it China: **WE are America: did you save my 👖? China: Yea China: I put a load of washing on China: so now you're gonna owe me a thank you China: didn't know what else to do, he likes pitting us against each other I reckon America: I bought you ☕ ungrateful bitch China: UM, I meant you're going to owe me a grovelling thank you arselick because Gary says so China: I'm behaving and you're not, right now, cheeky cow China: anyway, I'm nearly there so don't fucking bin it America: I'll put washing on when my newborn is sleeping China: Fucking hell 😂 China: It's tragic, isn't it China: I can't think of anything more tragic China: poor mam China: poor nan America: how old do you have to be before they let you get sterilised? China: Oh, so old China: tell 'em you want to live off the state forever and have 14 of 'em and maybe they'll change their fucking mind America: Gary would do it for me if he was any fucking use China: If you ever really get pregnant, the botched abortion would do it America: I'll pitch the idea to my 1st boyfriend China: Good luck America: we're in the right place 🍀 China: Are we? China: Doesn't feel like it America: for a backstreet foetus killing scheme anyway China: Whatever brightside, I guess America: you sound as tired as I feel America: how early did he wake you? I think it was still fully dark out China: I swear, only solid he's done me China: loads of time to do a full hair and make-up routine America: What classes do you even have with Jake? Like 2 China: Oh, so now just 'cos I don't want to look like a bag of shit that's all about him too? China: Are you sure YOU aren't like them? China: Ugh America: you don't look like 💩 America: it's about him if you suddenly think you do China: I don't think that I just China: I'm not winning anyone back 'round if I do America: it's about the lack of parental supervision not your lack of split ends America: on every level you know that China: It is not China: that's a big part of it, but it is not all of it America: if it's not all of it where are they all? China: There's plenty of boys who care about pretty China: even if Jake isn't one of them China: if I have a desirable boyfriend, that's fucking something America: Jake does care about pretty, that's his main priority America: & why he's a dick to me China: You should've said China: you fancy him America: I'd fuck Gary before him, you delusional cow China: Ha, okay China: you're the one who's so hung up on how he treats you China: I'm so sorry he doesn't fancy you back but I'm actually not because you know I like him America: cos I want you to give a shit that your not boyfriend is like bullying me China: Wow, bullying now, really? America: you're asking for me to throw this ☕ at you China: I won't even come if you're going to be this China: melodramatic China: what do you mean bullying you? America: I mean every party you've thrown he's said something unnecessary to me China: Can you be more specific or America: can you not take my fucking word for it? China: Well not really China: like, if he's just made some passing comments it's not really bullying, is it America: 😐 America: 👌 make excuses for him & keep telling me you're doing things different China: For God's sake China: since when are you so sensitive? America: I've kept my mouth shut until literally now China: As you said, literally, he's joking America: I'm tired & I've typed the name Jake more times than I've ever wanted to China: You can't just accuse people of shit they haven't done China: if it was that simple, we'd say Gary was touching us and ta-da, problem solved America: I'll go down that route if the 🤰 fails China: It's not a fucking joke China: fuck this America: it is if you think I'm living like this for the next 6 years minimum China: You think 4 makes it any more palatable? America: telling a lie to get rid of him is the least of what I'm prepared to do China: I can't think straight right now China: save your ☕ I'm gonna go somewhere else America: Chi China: It's fine America: you're basically here China: I'm going China: I've got plans now America: you do not China: I do now America: with who? China: None of your business America: with who China: Who do you think China: happy now? America: what.the.fuck. China: Leave it alone America: Have you been talking to him all along? China: No, actually China: though I'm sure you won't believe me America: can't believe a word any of you say America: I hope he gives you herpes China: Nice America: You're not, why should I? China: You started this China: and for your information, I've never slept with him, or anyone else America: I did NOT China: then you got in my head America: not on purpose China: I've got my own life America: that wasn't in question China: I don't need your pity America: I don't feel sorry for you China: Good America: I'm fine too, thanks for asking China: You've got friends, who don't just use you for parties China: as you've been so keen to rub in America: & you're calling me over sensitive China: Joke all you lie China: k* America: you think Jake's are better China: Yeah, I do America: 👌🍆😗 China: Jealous much America: LOL China: Enjoy pining after Tweak America: 🖕 China: Enjoy your evening, that's my plan America: talk yourself into it harder America: maybe you will China: 👌🍆😗 America: 🤮🤮🤮 China: I'm not faking a pregnancy America: Lucie's not fake swallowing China: Ugly girls have more to prove America: you 🔊 like Jake America: he'll be excited as hell China: yeah he will America: 🎊🎉 he can stop trying to suck his own dick 🥳 China: you're just a kid China: let me know where you end up, Zsa's or nan's China: and I'll take the other 👌 America: you can take either cos I'm doing neither China: You know what, fine China: I shouldn't be the one doing this America: What this do you mean? Whoring yourself out to Jake or pretending you care what I'm going to do China: Looking after you China: are any of them in your messages? doubt it China: he's got no right and he goes too far but at least he'll be giving a shit where you are America: I don't need tabs kept on me, I'm going to MJ's not to 🍆 or 💊💉 China: 👍 America: I had a feeling Gaz wouldn't be stepping up to make 🍝 China: I can thank him for the diet too America: he'll be thrilled to hear about the 🍆😗 part of it China: I'm not planning to regale him with it China: 'cos not tempting an assault tah America: Mam & Zsa will have more useful tips China: I don't need them China: thank God America: just Jake telling you what he likes 💖 China: Piss off America: 🏰👑💖 China: Yeah, really feel it America: he'll make you feel really good about yourself China: What would you know about it, Ricky? America: it's what you want him for, I know that China: Why wouldn't I want that? China: Just because you've not had it ever America: Why can't you get it from someone else? China: Because I like Jake China: end of America: 😐 China: and every girl but you does too America: [lists all the girls that don't aka the lesbians, other girls he has shaded and girls like libi who are shamelessly in love with someone else/have boyfriends they care about even a little bit] China: 🙄🙄 China: You've got too much time on your hands China: not going to list every girl that does China: you know who I meant and that it's true America: I just spent a decade I won't get back waiting for you China: I wasn't about to come to MJ's and beg for food with you so America: I didn't invite you there, it's where I'm going now since you're on a Jake's jizz diet China: Don't be gross America: It's you who likes him 🤢 China: It's you who keeps talking about his dick China: like, stop America: I'm desensitising you America: so you can bear to look at & touch it China: I don't need that America: then this is me 🤫 China: 👍 China: Thanks China: Guess I'll see you in school tomorrow, or just before, pretending we've been 🛏 or purposely showing we're just coming in China: who knows what will be more effective in the AM America: you do one, I'll try the other China: Yeah China: know which one you'd prefer China: I'm not playing nice so you don't have to, like I always have America: you weren't playing when it was just you & mammy America: neither was I China: She was fun China: before America: I know China: What's not to like America: as her favourite, you would say that China: 🙄 America: & it doesn't matter who she was America: she's a zombie now China: we'll get her back America: What's the cure for swallowing Gary's bodily fluids? China: She's had worse China: equally as bad America: built up immunity China: There's no immunity to shitty men America: as you've proven China: pot kettle America: I don't like Jake, you're deluded China: I wasn't talking about him, moron America: 🖕 China: No, he seems like SUCH a cool, chill guy America: you'd be a shady bitch whatever you think he's like cos you're mad I don't wanna hop on Jake's 🍆 China: Yeah, SO mad China: you're twisted China: and delusional if you think it'd be any kind of competition America: you admitted you want me to be jealous & that his appeal is everyone likes him so yeah America: your priorities are twisted China: When did I? America: read any of this chat back China: 👍 Good one China: I really don't care what you think China: your taste is clearly trash America: I'd follow your ☕ into the bin but it'll make me late for 🍝 China: 😱 China: Can't have that China: I'm waiting for my bus, talk later America: 👋

[somuchanxietysolittletime]

So much passion and I hope you direct it towards minding your own GODDAMN BUSINESS instead of tracking down every. single. person. who disagrees with you in order to continue this ignorant crusade. I didn't even respond to your shitty post directly. You TRACKED MY RESPONSE DOWN in order to initiate an argument. You are such a miserable little weasel that you are scrubbing through the notes to find people who don't have your same worldview, just so you can feel morally superior to them.

Pathetic.

Now, I wrote up paragraphs about how saying chastity is a virtue undermined your fucking point (There are no other "virtues" where their absence is good in any context) - but honestly I deleted it because I want to stick to this point of you. learning. to. mind. your. fucking. business.

That's really what it comes down to here. You and other Catholics (And for the sake of clarity when I say "Catholics" in this post, I don't mean ALL Catholics. I mean Catholics like YOU) have a THING about not minding your goddamn business. You are so filled with self-righteous shittery that you think your nose belongs up someone else's ass. Constantly.

You are INCAPABLE of not peeking through the curtains. You're the biggest fucking morality voyeurs I've ever had the displeasure of meeting. There's this entitlement where you feel you should know everyone else's sins and their personal relationship to themselves, their body, and their God.

Sit the fuck down, because you fucking DON'T.

Oh, and if that wasn't obnoxious enough, you have this obsession with thinking you're right. all. the. time. about. everything. always. and. forever. That your religious views are not only unarguably correct but, to borrow the words of a giant asshole, "the objective and divine truth" of the universe.

And this comes together in a shitstorm of entitlement and obnoxious snobbery. You are completely incapable of making healthy and mature conclusions about the world like, 'This lifestyle works for ME, but other people might feel differently.' Instead it's always, 'This lifestyle MUST BE LIVED BY EVERYONE OR ELSE THEY ARE BAD PEOPLE.'

This is why people say Catholics shame sex. Because you invented these conditions for how sex should be performed, declared them to be the absolute truth of the universe, and no one is allowed to disagree or you're a heretic.

You don't keep this to yourself, either. You aren't content with being private little shitstains who secretly judge others, you need to invade other people's privacy and inject your views into their lives - whether they want you to or not. You fund legislation to police other people's bodies. Create camps to abuse people who don't love the same way as you. Excommunicate and shun those who disagree with your extremism.

Just to be clear: What I do or don't do with my body is between me and my God and my God says to judge not, asshole.

ignoring the bigotry, bloodstained history, etc etc, everything i’ve read written by catholics about catholicism makes it sound absolutely miserable

[punkscowardschampions]

Nancy & Rio

Nancy: Hey Nancy: how's all the prep going? Rio: Oh my God Rio: it feels good to talk to someone over the age of 12, put it that way Rio: its getting there but I might not 🤪🥴😵 Nancy: same cos Buster's acting like a 5 year old rn Nancy: I wish I was there helping Rio: Travelling brings out the worst in 'em Rio: if I have to see an airport with mine this year, too soon 😬❌ Rio: we could use your 👀 Rio: I'm sure there will still be shit to do when you all get here Nancy: Did your dad convince your mum about a honeymoon though? Nancy: Asking cos I wanna steal you away for a while Nancy: When I get there I'm gonna have so many 📷 to set up and take but I'll definitely make time for any finishing touches there are Rio: 😘😘😘 Rio: s'more convincing nan and granddad that your parents and the rest will help out controlling the masses whilst they're off 🎔☽ Rio: a reason we can NEVER find a babysitter 🙄 Nancy: Oh come on! If my mum gets involved they'll be perfect 😇s Rio: 😂 Rio: I'd be happy to test the theory Rio: going to be so good to see you again! Nancy: Me too if it'd get her off my back 🙄 Nancy: I've missed you so much! Rio: Uh-oh, what's the latest crusade with her? Rio: Girl, same! So much catching up Nancy: Who can keep track? This week it's something about how I spend too much time in my room Nancy: Like doesn't she realise I don't sleep in a cell? I have everything I need Rio: Right? Rio: At least we're past grounding, was such a laughable punishment when its not the 50s or something, please Nancy: malted milkshakes and jukeboxes yes, the rest of the 50s, no Rio: But you'd look so fetching in a circle skirt 😉 Rio: what are you wearing though Rio: I've been so busy making sure the kids are actually clothed that I'm not remotely ready, ugh Nancy: Also less likely to be hatecrimed when it's just gals being pals 😉 Nancy: [a pic of her outfit cos we don't have one yet gang] Nancy: oh my god if you're not joking dad better start speeding! You really need my help ASAP Rio: Don't rub it in, or I'll be at the back of the bus heckling you Rio: me and all MY #sistas Rio: 😍 you look so good, I'll ignore your white feminism if you tell him to step on it Nancy: 😳 x 10000 like Nancy: But I'll demand it Rio: 🧡 Rio: Its a mood, catch me stealthing down the aisle at the back, please, steal the show, kids Nancy: 💚 Nancy: Honestly I feel nervous & I don't have to do the walk/nobody's gonna be looking at me Rio: Awh, don't be Rio: Honestly, everything is so extra, no one will know where to look Rio: you know them Nancy: I was safe to assume that Junie isn't answering me cos he's 😳 x 10000000 then, yeah? Rio: No doubt Rio: I can't even find him to tell him to reply Rio: if I spot him Nancy: It's fine I'll see him soon anyway Rio: God bless him Nancy: I need out of this car now & away from all of them Rio: I can feel the tension from here, babe Nancy: If he spends another sec on speaker talking to his friends about last night's party I will have to throw his phone out of the window Rio: Eww Rio: your brother is 1000% gonna be THAT businessman on the train that wants everyone to hear his convo Nancy: I know Rio: then pops a few blood vessels when someone tells him otherwise Rio: you poor thing, forreal Nancy: He got into a fight at the party over some girl 🙄 But of course the other lad was the only one hurt Nancy: How am I related to this idiot? Rio: How have your parents not turned the car around or at least threatened to Nancy: He doesn't wanna come which means he is, no matter what Nancy: Even if he was 🤕 Rio: Also do you live in Chelsea or a bad American teen drama Rio: the dramatics 😂 Nancy: Right? But it's me getting lectured by my mother regularly Nancy: your favouritism is showing again Rio: We all like you better, don't worry babe Nancy: thanks Nancy: if your parents wanna adopt me, now is good Rio: What's one more is pratically the family motto so why not Rio: you'll have to miss all the WILD parties and the even wilder bants Rio: reckon you'll survive? Nancy: just about Rio: Be honest Rio: if I go to town right now, what are the odds of the kids staying semi-presentable? Nancy: It'd be single figures Nancy: like 5% maybe Rio: Yeah Rio: but even less chance of me getting something wearable if I ask my boy to bring something with him, right? Nancy: Unless he's very fashion forward Nancy: You could tell him to go to ours and raid my wardrobe? Rio: Such a humblebrag, Nancy McKenna 😏 Nancy: If you don't want my advice or designer labels, don't ask, like Rio: 😂 Rio: how is it possible I have nothing suitable in my whole ass wardrobe Nancy: This family has had a surprisingly few weddings in our lifetime Nancy: & there's no chance of you re-purposing what you wore to my parents' big day all those years ago so Nancy: I'll make a detour and pick something up for you Nancy: if you trust me Rio: The amount of sin is truly unholy Rio: my grandma be 😠 at all these heathens Rio: and that feels like forever ago Rio: dread to think what I was rocking but at least I was cute Nancy: So 😢 I couldn't bring a date to meet your grandma she sounds lovely Nancy: [finds a pic of the baze wedding like] Nancy: you were the cutest! Look! Rio: Love the sinner, hate the sin, sweetie 😘 Rio: Oh lord Nancy: Says you but what happened to ME? Nancy: I'm like a different person rn and it's not a glow up Rio: Shh, you look beautiful, are you kidding Nancy: I look like my parents are into medieval torture & put me on a rack Nancy: not cute Rio: Oh 'cos being tall is so unappealing Rio: all those leggy supermodels, YUCK Nancy: 😂 Rio: Anyone saying different is obviously jealous Nancy: How very teen drama Nancy: the girl who hates me really loves me 💋 Rio: better start loudly talking about that Rio: your 'rents will be so proud Nancy: They aren't likely to hear me over Buster's dramatic playlist 🎶 Rio: Now you're just making shit up 😂 Nancy: [records him as proof hey boy hey looking like a moody fuckboy snack over there no doubt] Rio: He really did just look at the window like a music video, huh Rio: also praying you make it here unmurdered now, girl 🙏🤞 Nancy: He wouldn't dare start a fight with us in our finery 👗👠 mum & dad would kill him Nancy: or I could with the 👠 Rio: Gotta stay favourite, yeah Nancy: definitely Rio: catch me being no ones 'cos I'm not coming Rio: see you tomorrow, like 👋 Nancy: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo Nancy: you have to Nancy: don't leave me with my evil twin Rio: 😩 but Rio: so over this before its begun Nancy: please Ri Nancy: I'll make it fun somehow Rio: There's no escape anyhow Rio: so many people here already just 👀 @ me Rio: I'm not putting on a fucking poofy dress I'm sorry Nancy: you don't have to Nancy: bridesmaid but keep it fashion Rio: I tried on some actual bridesmaid dresses but I felt so stupid Rio: why is it all floor-length and fucking Rio: the excess material Rio: I don't wanna drown in tulle, I'm not 5 Nancy: gross Nancy: I promise to never get married first of all Nancy: second of all I'm gonna make sure you look 🔥 today so Rio: 🧡🧡🧡 Rio: I've got to start on the drinks now though, sorry Nancy: show me what's in your wardrobe & I'll try & remember what's in mine Rio: I love you but you remember what I said about floor-length? Nancy: okay okay just yours then Nancy: come on, I can do this Rio: [does] Rio: but honestly, fuck it Nancy: there's so much I could make work Nancy: & no reason for us both to hate our outfits Rio: I won't hate it, I'll just be hated Rio: mainly by my grandma 💁 Nancy: as soon as Buster arrives his attitude will pull focus Nancy: plenty to keep your grandma busy in this car Rio: He'd never be that nice to me Rio: even unintentionally Nancy: I will then Nancy: thinking of a scene to cause as we speak Rio: 😏 Rio: such a shame there'll be no hot girls there you aren't related to 💔 Nancy: if only hitchhikers were still a thing Rio: So predatory for a 13 year old Rio: flip that script honey Nancy: it's the lesbian way Nancy: ask every girl at my school Rio: Ugh, turning their backs in the changing room is it? Rio: like half of 'em have got anything to hide, people are ridiculous Nancy: Yeah Rio: Its more than that then Nancy: It's not a story for today Rio: Later Rio: when you've caught up Nancy: when I've taken my make up off maybe Nancy: it took a really long time Rio: it looks 🔥 Nancy: it's not too much, right? You'd tell me Rio: Of course Rio: but it so isn't, its great Nancy: thanks Nancy: a benefit of doing it in February, our faces won't melt off & I'm not sunburnt Rio: They've thought of you at least Rio: love that Nancy: I'll try & remember to thank them too, like Rio: Thank whichever God made you gay too Rio: boys are such dicks Nancy: I got stuck with a brother so I'd still suffer Nancy: probably won't 🙏 Rio: Well you can ignore him Rio: sure you both prefer it that way Nancy: You can ignore any boys you want Nancy: or don't want Rio: Nah Rio: not when I'm this hard to ignore yeah Nancy: all the more reason Nancy: when you look like you look you can take your pick Rio: I already have, that's what I'm saying Nancy: & they're still dicks? Rio: He is Nancy: So dump him Nancy: there must be some boys in existence who aren't Rio: Eh Rio: None as cute Nancy: Gross Rio: Shut up 🙄 Nancy: if you wanna talk about boys you've come to the wrong place Rio: excuse me Rio: you've literally talked about your hitchhiker fantasy so you can deal with it Nancy: I don't have a fantasy I was trying to think of a diversion to horrify your grandma Rio: Sure Nancy: It's a shame Buster would never swap outfits with me Nancy: a move like that really would pull focus from what you're wearing Rio: I hate to break it to you but not really Rio: already got so many chicks in suits Rio: you know this is MY parents wedding, not yours Nancy: but how many boys in dresses do you have? Rio: I'll check Rio: my parents have weird friends, babe Rio: and have you met my siblings like Rio: your the normie branch of the fam, no amount of lesbian angst is changing that for you, I'm so sorry Nancy: at least they have friends, mine have co-dependence Nancy: and yeah, I'm trying to get adopted in, remember? Rio: 😍 romantic Rio: we'll swap Rio: I need the break Nancy: you and Buster would kill each other in seconds Nancy: but if you can survive long enough to end him I support it Rio: Duh Nancy: I've heard 'you should see the other guy' enough to be sure it's bullshit Nancy: you can take him Rio: I know Rio: trust me Nancy: he hasn't lost a 🥊 for ages it's way past due Rio: Weddings always end in a scrap Rio: may as well take it for the team honestly Nancy: fights & drunken displays happen whenever this family gets together Nancy: again, take your pick Rio: I'm not drunk but tah for the faith, babe Nancy: it's early still Rio: 😒 Nancy: they are all driving me to drink & I don't even Rio: Slainte Nancy: exactly Rio: Fuck it, I'm going town Nancy: do you have time? Rio: Sure Nancy: Then yeah go Rio: ✌ see you when you get here Nancy: I'll find you as soon as we show up Rio: Do Rio: I'll be the bombshell Nancy: I'll be the awkward ginger Nancy: 💚💋 Rio: 🧡💋