#I'm sure someone has mapped out them all as D&D characters by now

[parachutingkitten]

Jay = High Intelligence, Low Wisdom

Kai = Low Intelligence, High Wisdom

Essay about this concept below the cut

Now these are all just my interpretations of the characters, I don't necessarily have hard evidence on hand to back all this up, but here we go:

I've been trying to put my finger on the Kai smart/dumb duality, and I think I can finally somewhat make out my thoughts. Kai is not smart. Book smarts don't come easily to him, he's not great at math, he's not great at overly complex stratagizing- but he's got a LOT of great knowledge in him.

Take the dragon healing in DR. He might not intuitively know how different medicines work or why, but he's got injured enough that he knows that type of information is important to know, and so he's forced it into his head. He couldn't tell you why the blue goop helpped the dragon, but he knew that it would, and that it would be important to remember that it would.

He's pretty good at navigating complex social situations, because he's good at reading people. Having had a history with extreme emotions, he knows how to take them into account, and knows how important it is to do so, even if it's not necessarily logical. I hate to say this, but he's very emotionally intelligent, which sounds kinda like an insult but is actually insanely valuable, because humans are inherently emotional creatures.

He's got a solid basis of common sense, and is constantly looking at the bigger picture. That's why he can come up with the best outline for a plan, because he can not think through the details. Now, if he tries to implement a plan of his without consulting others, he's probably going to miss some very important details, and screw himself over. But, he's most likely to have the best basic premise for an effective plan. This is why his intuition is usually correct. He's not logically thinking through the most likely scenario given all available factors, he's looking at every problem from the birds eye view, and is easily able to fill in the blanks, because he sees the whole picture. You can not tell me this kid knew Lloyd was the Green Ninja because he used logical deduction to eliminate all other possibilities, he had a gut feeling based on realizing the value of human life.

Now, sometimes you need details. And Kai is not good at those. He sucks at those. Big time. But he's self aware enough to know when those times are (most of the time, sometimes he wastes all his lives in a video game before talking to anyone else).

The thing all of these points have in common is that he's lived a very full life while making very many mistakes, and he's learned from all of them. He learns from his dumb mistakes, and is wise enough to know which lessons are worth holding on to.

Jay on the other hand... does not learn from his mistakes. He's got a real thick skull.

Inside that skull is a really smart guy who intuitively latches on to engineering and science concepts. He's got a whole heck of a lot of information that his brain is holding onto simply because it can. This man is all about the details. He gets hyperfixated on details to the point where it's a problem. He's the most likely to solve the intricate problem facing the team, forget that they need to stay hidden, and yell "I did it!". Good at details, bad at big picture. This is also why he usually gives up hope so easily compared to the rest of the team. He can not think long term, he can not see the bigger picture like Kai can, so road blocks in the current plan seem insurmountable.

Sure, he might have rigged an old sailing ship with rocket boosters, but he couldn't unscramble "darnagom" his logical problem solving skills are not what's carrying him.

My standby for the Jay dumb/smart duality is that he should have a significant amount of William Osman energy to him. He's very smart, and can work out how to solve intricate problems and make insane builds, but if making said things is a dangerous or dumb idea has never once crossed his mind, and if it has, he has actively chosen to ignore it. Jay's intelligence is much more creativity based than I think a lot of people like to think. Engineering is about slapping crazy ideas together which barely hold together at first- and that's Jay's brand of smarts.

If you compare this to Zane, that's the vital component that his intelligence is missing- the creativity. He is VERY good at assessing options, but not so great at coming up with new solutions himself. He's running on pure logic and tested successes. He's also missing that social intelligence that Kai has. I'd venture to say that Zane is, by far the most gullible member of the team. If there is not a solid logical reason to doubt something, he is absolutely going to take it at face value. Point being, all the ninja have different smarts, and stupidities, let's not try to conflate them too much.

[localsharkcryptid]

*stumbles onto your blog, tripping over various tree root and covered in leaves* Hi! I heard you have a Dragon Rider AU!!

Is everyone humans? Are some people dragons? It’s it angsty? Do you have a general plot? What kind of location is this based on? What kinds of dragons are there? Is dragon riding widely accepted? Can everyone do it or just a select few? How do people get their dragons?

Well hello there! :D

I've gotta say this is a LOT of questions but I do not mind at all!! Just this gonna be a long post, and speaking of which onto the answers!

---

Is everyone humans? Are some people dragons?

In this case everyone is human for this au!

Is it angsty?

Mildly?? I personally would consider it, bittersweet I suppose? The bit I'm working on currently is very focused on the shattered nature of DTeam's dynamic so I'll say good mild angst rating with a happy ending eventually (Angst may also be higher for the dnf enjoyers)

Do you have a general plot?

I have quite a few plot notes actually!! Currently I'm focused on what is a prequel to my original idea, which is shelved temporarily for reasons, so now this part of the story is focused on Dream and how he's dealing with his choices - and his attempts to run away from his role in everything.

The short version is basically: Dream is heir to his brother's (DreamXD) throne and well he wants absolutely nothing to do with it, this leads to a lot of rash decisions and unfortunately attempts to shove away his friends. A spiral very similar to canon dsmp just different motives. Inevitably though when he finally claims a dragon he at last has his ticket to freedom and makes a break for it to have his freedom. Shennagains then ensue, including obligatory Drunz cause I eternally love their character dynamic, Rivals Duo being rivals, XDnf in the distant background, and various other things I'm working out still!

What kind of location is this based on?

In general I am taking a lot of vibes from Westeros from A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, a very very classic medieval fantasy vibe along with the actual layout and environment of things being loosely based on the actual maps of the dsmp!

What kinds of dragons are there?

At the moment just wyvern style dragons, a lot of my inspiration for the dragons comes from House of the Dragon as well as the works of Sawyer Lee (Sawyerleearts on insta/da he has some AMAZING work)! Effectively all the same 'species' of fire breathing beast but they all have their own unique features and looks! Though I am considering maybe adding ice and lightening breathing dragons as a fun little reference to the Ice & Fire mod - not much would change design wise, just kinda mixing up the breath abilities if I do go with that.

Also have some of my current concepts (newest to oldest, since I'm still in the process of changing designs)

Is dragon riding widely accepted?

Dragons in this case are rare, and dragon riders are rarer - when dragon riders usually come about they become part of a kingdom's greater military force or some similar high standing rank. Dragons are tickets to power if you don't already have it pretty much, they are after all the fantasy equivalent of a multi use nuclear weapon! Though there are some outliers who have dragons but don't align with either kingdom in the realm, these being sell swords/mercenaries like Punz or just lords who wish to remain independent and not everyone uses them for war. In general I'd say it's a very respected position to have.

Can anyone do it or is it only a select few? How do people get their dragons?

The criteria for someone to bond with a dragon varies a bit, pretty much anyone can bond and develop a link with a hatchling - if the wyrmling imprints on them after hatching it's a free ticket pretty much! Though hatching dragon eggs is not easy, and the hatch rates of them are very low. The other option to get a dragon is claiming a wild one. Bonding with wild dragons though, is more difficult, no one is exactly sure how it's done but the rider usually has to have some recessive magic genes effectively (magic is a long dead art but remnants of it's influence remain, i.e potions & enchantments). When it comes to claiming a wild dragon what also matters is the dragon also choosing and accepting the rider, things can turn a bit- nasty if they decline the bond. Gaining a dragon is in general no easy feat, adding onto that sort of instant status boost dragon riders can gain if they succeed in getting one!

---

Thank you for the questions btw!!! It thoroughly made my day to see a full list of stuff to answer about this project ^^

[regrettablemeasure]

I always love hearing about other people's D&D games and I was wondering if you had like a method for how you plan out your sessions? In a slump rn myself so looking for some inspo lol

ok so i need to get better at this again (depression made me a way more 'seat of my pants' DM) BUT i basically lay out a "timeline" of main story points the party will eventually hit, and place "questlines" there. Essentially like a tree of quests and their progression in a videogame. This is NOT always detailed by any means but it helps me get a linear view of what's going on. If you run pre-made modules, this is the book stuff. My current game started out this way before I went "I like doing this myself" and went completely off the rails.

Then I go into the main details of the questline. Stuff like where it is, if there's going to be new lore introduced, the actual contents of the quest itself and it's requirements, etc. My players and myself are big on RP, so I also try to always make sure the quest will have interest for Story or Character reasons. If it doesn't directly push the plot in a major way, will it still give the party interesting interactions with each other and npcs? Are there going to be any new threads for some of the game's mysteries?

Then I also ask what in the questline is going to play to the party's habits and strengths. I admit this is WAY looser, and again kind of wraps around into "what would be cool RP for them" - but for example; knowing an encounter with nobles will give our noble-born artificer some additional lore, since he understands the city's politics.

After that, I do sometimes "script" certain lines of NPC dialogue or location and item descriptions. Stuff I'll be narrating that I want to make sure has a certain weight to it, or to flow well. You might not need to do this if you speak succinctly, but I find my brain stutters when trying to describe scenery on the spot, so it usually helps to write it. After that I make the session from there!

For me that usually includes picking out "splash screens" for the conversation backgrounds in our game, drawing new npc portraits if I have the time (it started because some of my players have aphantasia/some former players were new, so I drew PC and NPC portraits to make RP easier to visualize - then it just became the Only Way I Want To Do It Now LOL), and making maps. I use Epic Isometric for my maps, highly recommend. I get most of my splash screens from Art Station, but I have to say obviously that's unwise if you're streaming a game. Same goes for using pre-existing art as character/NPC art -- I know myself and other artists don't care if someone uses our stuff for their home game that no one's ever gonna see. I plan to release some of my portraits in packs one day free of use though.

Here's the RP Backdrop kind of splashscreen I use in R20 (but you can make one in FVTT too, I've done it) and an Epic Iso map I threw together (the party tokens were drawn over Epic Iso assets. If you join their discord people make community edits constantly. I'm currently working on a project to color all the released decor assets)

[sunnwalker]

For all the silent posts, are you thinking along the lines of the game/games or the movies?

Definitely basing it more on the games rather than the movies!! I do not like the movies and in fact I kind of hate them. The first one is ..fine i guess, but the second one is so bad I had to shut it off halfway through. That's just my opinion though.

Anyway, I wanna talk about the way I'm thinking about this. Sorry to be using this ask as a springboard, I'm just excited. Writing more under the cut ykno ykno

Where I'm at now, Angel is in a similar position to Heather, but really only superficially. She has no real reason (that she knows of) to be in Silent Hill/ this Silent Hill equivalent, nor was it her intention to even be there in the first place. She's just trying to escape a shitty "home" life and she had things to work through for herself, it's that.

I really want Timothy to be not as present (cause this isn't really for him primarily), but I'm not sure if I can handle that with what I wanna do with him. I want him to be more akin to Maria or mayyybe Eileen? I haven't decided on whether or not he's real, but either way, the original (pre-Jack) Timothy Lawrence in my little AU (I guess it's appropriate to call this that?) is a missing person rather than being legally dead. Again, I haven't thought about him as much as I have Angel, so he's not really as fleshed-out.

I am considering putting other characters in as like minor appearances, but I want to focus on the two main players first. I just want an excuse to put someone else in there too.

As for where in Silent Hill this happens, I'm kind of settled on it being in a pretty condensed area. I scribbled what I was thinking of doing onto a map earlier, subject to change of course.

That's a good chunk of what I'm thinking Right Now!

Can you tell these two games are some of my favorite things ever.

‼️ Edit: I'm taking inspiration from the Silent Hill 2 novelization as well, even though I may not have finished it yet at the time of writing. It's not significantly different necessarily, but credit where it's due and all that :D

[paarthursass]

1, 3, 4, 18 (altho this is kinda obvious 👀) & 23 for Aurel 💖💖💖

Ahhhh Thank you so much for enabling my desire to be Unhinged about my boy

Tell us about your Tav! Name, class and subclass, race, pronouns. Do you have a headcanon for where they're from? Their family? Are they a Dark Urge? Or did you choose an Origin Character? Was it an easy decision?

Aurelius von Munteanu (Aurel to his friends, Ari to a select few), Storm Sorcerer with 1 level in Bard, Drow, he/him. He's not an OC exclusive to BG3, I have played in him a forum RP, in a D&D setting, and in a couple other RPGS (mainly just DAO). For adapting him to BG3, I took most of the aspects from his D&D counterpart with only a few changes (he's a Lunar Sorcerer in the D&D game I play, and also only a half-drow in that game).

Aurel is also a dhampir.

Found as a baby by the vampire Dragomir von Munteanu, Aurel started off as a normal drow baby. But as detailed in Forgotten Realms lore, old, true vampires have a way of warping their surroundings just by virtue of existing in them. These effects normally just extend to the land they're living on, but also had unintended effects on the newborn baby that was now attached to Dragomir's hip. Teething Aurel was a NIGHTMARE when his fangs started to come in. Also a toddler that can climb on the walls? Horrifying. Dragomir knew no rest raising little Aurel.

Also until this very moment I didn't have a strong sense of where Aurel (and Dragomir) were from (the D&D game I'm playing them in is a homebrew setting, so I worked with the DM there to create where they were from). I knew it was vaguely north, somewhere in the mountains, and somewhere quite far away to account for why Aurel didn't just send a letter to his dad to come in and help with the Cult of the Absolute. Looking at a map of the Forgotten Realms, I tentatively want to place Dragomir's castle somewhere between the Lurkwood and the Spine of the World.

Of course this is all just personal headcanon for BG3, as there's no legitimate way to play a dhampir in that game (though there is a mod that adds dhampirs to the game which i am THRILLED about and will probably use in a future playthrough with Aurel). But I found it did inform a lot of his choices in the game and also how he reacted to certain companions right off the bat. He was quite wary of Wyll at first, for example, as he wasn't sure what kind of monster hunter he was. His fears were allayed very quickly of course, because Wyll is so gosh-darn nice and noble, but it was still interesting to play off of.

Has your Character been using their illithid powers?

Unfortunately. Yes. He has not gone the full route of becoming a partial-illithid and has resisted the astral tadpole, but he has used a few of the other powers in battle scenarios, and when manipulating members of the Cult of the Absolute. He tried to use it sparingly, but the first time he used it whole-heartedly and with viciousness was in the fight against the gnolls on the Risen Road. They almost ripped him and his friends to shreds, so he used the tadpole to force the leading gnoll to fight for them, and then to rip her own throat out.

Do you remember in which order you recruited your companions? Which companion introduction would have felt the most familiar / like home to your Tav / Character?

Iirc the order of events for Aurel was Shadowheart - Astarion - Gale - Lae'zel - Wyll - Karlach. Upon first introductions, Gale was definitely the one Aurel felt the most comfortable and familiar with. He'd visited a few universities in cities like Neverwinter, and so was used to conversing with scholarly-types like Gale. They definitely became the fastest friends out of the others, until Karlach came into the picture. Aurel almost instantly bonded with her as well.

How did your Character deal with Wyll, Karlach and Mizora?

Aurel was hesitant at first to help Wyll hunt down someone (as a dhampir, and a drow, he's all too familiar with what it is to be hunted simply for what you are), but he could tell there was more to the situation with him and Karlach than what Wyll was letting on. The urgency concerned him, and if what Wyll said about Karlach was true, well, better to stop her rampaging quickly.

But of course Aurel VERY quickly realized that Karlach was not what Wyll said, nor was she what Wyll thought.

Aurel's opinion and regard of Wyll grew so much when Wyll instantly backpedaled upon realizing that Karlach was one of Zariel's victims. And the subsequent confrontation with Mizora was one of the few times Aurel had no desire for diplomacy; he threatened to kill her almost instantly, to defend both Wyll and Karlach.

What are your Character's thoughts on the dream visitor?

Oh boy. Well. Oh boy.

So, for context; I did not design the Dream Visitor off of anyone from BG3!Aurel's backstory.

I based him off Aurel's original love interest from the forum RP where I first played him. Because I thought it would be funny. (And, after discovering who the Dream Visitor truly is, I like to imagine some hand-wavey inter-dimensional stuff happened and when the Emperor first looked into Aurel's head, he saw that form was someone who had been important to him in another life)

Boy Howdy. Was that a Mistake. Aurel was an absolute GONER. Especially because the Dream Visitor was so active in the early game, before Aurel had formed any strong romantic attachments to anyone. He saw how he seemed to be fighting a battle all on his own and how lonely he seemed and his heart absolutely broke for him. This beautiful man with big brown eyes was fluttering his eyelashes at him asking him to use the tadpole for power and he just went "yes babe whatever you say 🧡"

Of course, when the light of day came back and Aurel talked things over with everyone else, the logical part of his brain told him not to trust the Dream Visitor. This was probably a trick of the tadpole's. It was a Bad Idea. But Aurel's resolve would crumble all over again when the Dream Visitor would return.

Funnily enough, Astarion ended up being the one to deter Aurel the most from the Dream Visitor - at least for a little while. Astarion's reaction to Aurel using his first tadpole power got him to stop and go "Astarion is WAY too into this that is NOT a good sign" and actually managed to knock some sense into him. Aurel was a bit more leery of the Dream Visitor after that, though there was still a certain pull he wasn't ever quite able to resist.

[thelavendernarwhal]

Hey look! It's the ghost short story I talked about years ago :D

I finished this abt a year ago, but I'm using these characters for art fight, so it felt like a good time to post this. Hope you enjoy! (link to read on wattpad instead bc this is pretty long: https://www.wattpad.com/1459637880-deep-indigo)

----

Something told Mara they should’ve hurt. A strange whisper in the back of their mind said that they should have been in terrible pain, but nothing felt out of place. A tingly feeling settled into their limbs, but it was more like getting injured in a dream; their brain telling them something was wrong when in reality, nothing had happened. 

The outside world filtered in slowly as they opened their eyes and propped themselves against a wall. The first strokes of morning poured through the frosted windows, almost tricking them into thinking that they were at home and just fell asleep in a weird spot. It wouldn’t have been the first time. 

But, their sleep-idled brain couldn’t explain away the rows of desks in front of them.

They shot up, scanning the room and ignoring the fuzziness in their leg. Sunrise reflected off of the cold tiles, coloring the space with warm highlights and cool shadows. Despite coming here every day, Mara had never seen it like this: empty and sterile. To be fair, they’ve never woken up at dawn in their homeroom before, but there’s a first for everything, right?

Walking over to their desk, another strange thing stood out at them: a yellow rose. Huh? There weren’t any holidays coming up and even if there were, who would give them flowers? Mara’s stomach turned. The blossom was light in their hand and cast a shadow over its stem with no note attached. Avoiding any rogue thorns, they let the flower fall back to the table and rubbed their light-green eyes. So this is someone’s bright idea of a prank?

“-anything for us to work on today?” Mara froze as a tired voice cut into the room. 

Of course. Within a random classroom, there’d be nowhere to hide. “Not really. I didn’t think we’d have school.” Turning the handle and pushing the door open, a pair of students walked in with a stack of papers in hand. Out of all days for the student council to use this particular room for their meeting. 

They looked down at their desk and tried to appear like they were looking for something in it. Maybe if Mara could act like they had a reason for being here at the crack of dawn, their peers wouldn’t interrogate them.

“Oh, hey…” They waved, their hand barely poking out of their brown and white sweater.

“Sure, it’s not the first time a student’s passed in the middle of the school year, but this has to be the first time it’s happened on school grounds.” The taller of the two set down her stuff at a front desk without giving Mara a second glance. Or a first glance for that matter.

The other sighed and took out a laptop. “Yeah, the entire back parking lot is closed off. You’d think the teachers wouldn’t want us at school right now with a whole investigation going on.”

There was only so much time Mara could waste looking through an empty desk with no materials on them. Seriously, who’d leave a rose and then take all of their stuff? Maybe the girls saw something. “Hey, have you seen anyone around here…”

“Wait, weren’t they in this class?” Steps trailed over to them. “Mara Lamb, right?” 

“That’s my name.”

“I think so. Someone even left flowers for them.”

The gnawing in their gut intensified. “Umm…I’m right here? Why are you talking about me in third person-” Ice shot through Mara’s veins as one of the girls stepped closer to their vigil. No, not closer. Through them.They jumped back. The student council members started to examine their spot, but they were too freaked out to care. Mara could write off the pair not noticing them, they were never very social around their classmates anyways; even the silent treatment could be explained away, but that? That doesn’t happen. People don’t just clip through the map whenever.

Mara’s breathing switched to shallow gulps of air while their heart pounded against their chest. No, this can’t be real. The weird place, weird people…it could all be a dream, couldn’t it? They ran a relieved hand through their near-black hair. Looking at it like that would explain why two random people at school would be talking about them. Most people didn’t know Mara’s name, let alone enough about them to have a conversation.

A long sigh escaped them. Maybe they could just hang out for a little bit? They’ve always wanted to lucid dream, so this could be a golden opportunity…Wait, what?

Whipping their head towards the hallway, a flash of curls and blue disappeared around the wall.  Since this was a dream (right?), it wasn’t too strange to have people pop up out of nowhere, but something else drew Mara’s attention in. Now that they had something to compare to, the people in the room seemed…muted. Colors that should have been neon appeared dull and the girls themselves seemed miles away: like watching someone through a window or listening to a conversation from the other side of a wall, but not that boy.

With one last look into the classroom, Mara ran past the girls and into the hallway. The first students of the day chatted by their lockers, but that couldn’t hold a candle to the sight before them. The boy was still in the hall, apart from the others seeing as he was floating above the lockers.

“Hey! Who are you?” The boy’s face lit up, but instead of answering, he zipped away. Really?

Lockers blurred by as Mara gave chase. What was his deal? He looked like he wanted to strike up a conversation but wouldn’t stop or even slow down. The twists and turns of the building flew past them against their light paces, almost like their feet were barely touching the ground.

“Wait!” They should have been out of breath by now, but their lungs stayed strong. “Where are you going?”

It was as if the world curved in and flattened within a heartbeat in front of the school’s library. The cheesy lion mascot grinned down at them. It would have been the most unsettling thing in the space if it weren’t for the equally smile-y, flying boy perch beside it.

Before they could regain their bearings, Mara jumped back as the boy flew towards their face. Up close and on their level, he was shorter than they thought but just as vibrant: bright gray eyes with pieces of a dirty-blond wave falling into them, a T-shirt from a sports team that the taller of the two had no hope of recognizing, and a slight dimple in his cheek. The most surprising thing was how normal he looked. If he wasn’t actively hovering in front of them, Mara would have thought he was just an average boy with some personal space issues.

“You can see me?” He asked in a voice that was way too loud for how close he was, shaking them out of their thoughts. “Wait, that means you’re a ghost too! That’s awesome!”

A ghost? “Ummm…what? I’m alive.”

“You must have just popped up.” Finally, he backed up only to start zipping around them, ignoring their statement completely. “This is so cool! I’ve never seen another ghost before. Mara, right?”

“How do you know my name?” They asked defensively.

He laughed. How is being a ghost stalker funny? “You come here all the time and I live here, so it’s only fair that I’d recognize you.”

“Wait, you live here? In the library?” The ghost nodded. “Why? And how am I talking to you?”

Apparently deciding that he spent too much time on the ground, the boy floated back up to the library’s signage, forcing Mara to look up at him. Well, floating didn’t quite describe it. It was more like he could swim through the air with nothing holding him down. “I like it here. New books every week, people to listen to…What more would you want?”

What a loaded question that was. But before they could answer, the library ghost was right back in front of them, this time with a little more space between them. “It feels a little weird for me to know your name and not the other way around, so, hi. My name is Theo.” He held out his hand.

They looked down at it and swallowed deeply. “Will you answer my question?” Mara raised their voice, making the boy pause.

“What’s there to answer?” His genuine curiosity stopped their temper from rising.

“I’m not dead. Or at least…I don’t know how I died if I even did.”

“You were in a car accident. In the back parking lot.” A few words spoken so matter-a-fact it pushed Mara back.

What? The memories flashed before their eyes like a movie on fast-foward: walking out of the building after dance practice, wind whipping around them, a car sliding on the ice- They froze, one hand snapping to the back of their wrist. They took a deep breath. No pulse. 

“No, this isn’t right.”

That can’t be it. They never went to another country or organized their closet like they said they would. They didn’t even make it through high school let alone get to college where supposedly everything would get way better. Dad… he must have been freaking out. A wave of cold dread washed through Mara. They’d never see their family again.

Looking over at Theo, concern filled his eyes as he took a step back. “Ummm…I’m sorry. It might be cold comfort, but I can explain some of this stuff to you. It’s got to be confusing.”

They looked at the hand still extended to them. Once upon a time, Mara would have thought that a ghost’s hand would look blurred and a little sickly, but it was no different than their own. Well, they weren’t a good point of reference anymore. Mara rubbed the glossiness from their eyes and returned the gesture. 

As much as they didn’t like getting bombarded by a supernatural stranger, they had to admit that it was nice to see someone that they didn’t phase through. 

“I guess...nice to meet you.”

He cleared his throat. “Come on in! You probably have a lot of questions.” 

Never two seconds of rest with this kid. Theo raced inside, waiting no time flying to a set of windows that framed the tallest shelves in the room. 

Mara looked around, noting a handful of students clustered around the center tables. “Could we talk down here?” 

They jumped when they noticed Theo was already back on the floor. “Why?”

“It…I’d just rather be here.”

“Okay. ” Despite the fact that he could simply walk, Theo refused to touch the ground as they moved to an open table tucked in the back of the room. He pulled out two seats before sitting on the backrest of his chair instead of on the seat itself. Mara hesitated until they realized how pointless it was. They’re apparently dead and talking to a ghost, what else was there to lose? 

Theo picked up the conversation right where he left off. “I thought you’d want to explore some of the nooks and crannies you can get into now, though.

In return, Mara looked down at the floor next to them. “Maybe later.”

“So, what are you curious about?”

‘Everything’ didn’t seem like a helpful answer. 

“How does this whole ‘ghost’ thing work? I feel like I’m breathing, you aren’t cold and lifeless, it felt like I had a pulse earlier until I suddenly didn’t.”

“I guess it depends on how you look at yourself.” He paused, presumably gathering his thoughts. “It’s sorta like you see yourself as someone with a pulse and warmth and breath, so your ‘ghost-body’ mimics that.”

“Why?”

Theo shrugged. “I don’t know. You’re the only other ghost I’ve met, so I’m my only point of reference.”

“Then… what can you do?”

His whole posture perked up like he was just waiting for someone to ask. “A whole bunch of stuff! Flying, for starters.” Reaching maximum staying-still capacity, Theo zipped up and over to a bookshelf, picking up a well-loved novel. “I can still touch stuff as long as no one’s looking and- Oh.” He looked down at the book in his hand. “Marcy would love this one.”

Before Mara could process it, Theo was on the other side of the room, placing the book covertly on the chair next to a short girl with choppy, brown hair. She glanced at it with surprise, rather than confusion, as she picked it up and read the synopsis.

With that, something clicked; an itching memory of someone, something, leaving great reads for people to find without ever being seen.“Wait..” They got up and ran over to the boy. “You’re the library ghost!”

“Yes? I do live here.” 

“No, that’s not- Well, obviously you’re the library ghost if you live here, but you’re the thing that keeps bringing people book recommendations out of nowhere.”

That made Theo break into a wide smile. “Of course! I’ve pretty much read all the books here, so I’ll pass the really good ones to people who’d like them.”

“Huh. I just thought the librarian was shy.” Although…“But how do you know what books people will like?” Mara asked, creeping toward the bookshelves to anchor themself. 

“You don’t live somewhere this long without learning a thing or two about the people.” He started to drift upward as he seemed to be remembering something. At this rate, Mara didn’t know if he was aware of it or not. “The same people come here day after day, so I notice stuff about them.“

From above, the library must have been a sight to see. A labyrinth of shelving snaked its way through the wings, creating isolated pockets of study space, natural light streaming in from a line of windows perched high on the far wall, even the gentle warmth from the earthy wood and carpet colors, forming what Mara could only assume was Theo’s perfect space. 

Although, on the ground, Mara’s stomach turned with a seed of discomfort that had been rooting its way into them since they saw a flash of blue that morning. Every time they came in here to work or simply read something, this random ghost had been watching them? How much did he know? Did he see them sneaking in during their lunchtime through a back door so they wouldn’t have to eat in the cafeteria? Did he find them laying low at a corner table when their dad couldn’t pick them up for at least another half hour? Mara tried to swallow back a crazed laugh. He probably had enough dirt on them to plant a goddamn whole garden.

Without thinking, they made a break for the exit.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

…Without a plan of where they were going. 

Mara slumped against the locker-covered wall. Their super-charged running led them to the music wing of the building on the clear opposite side from the library, but that wouldn’t stop Theo from wondering where they went and trying to find them. Plus, it’s not like Mara could leave the school for more distance. They learned that the hard way.

They shivered

It’ll be fine. This isn’t the worst spot. The music rooms were always a nice place to be; good teachers, pretty sounds, even some of the nicer students were down here. Plus… 

Mara looked up from their sulking to race down to the auditorium, smiling when a familiar warm-up track greeted their ears. Just in time.

Slowing their pace to a walk, Mara came to a welcome sight. Their dance team was just getting ready to start, stretching on the stage as their warm-up playlist filled the air. With a competition next week, the school would let them take time out of class to practice at the perfect time for Mara to catch it.

They breathed out a relieved sigh. On some days, they’d spent more time in this room than at their house, doing anything from practicing the same routine for an hour straight to lounging on the plush, auditorium seats as they waited for everyone else to show up, sprawling their legs across multiple chairs like a cat in the sun. The stage lights were close enough in their mind.

They ran down the stairs all the way to the front of the house. It was a practice like any other; stretching, a hum of chatter bouncing around the stage, leading to their coach pulling together any announcements for the day. Mara slowed down once more to casually stroll on stage and take their normal spot in the back of the group.

“Did you hear what happened yesterday?”

They tensed up.

The girl in front of them nodded. After over two years with this team, Mara still didn’t know most of their names.

Cutting off the conversation, their coach clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention. “As you all know, we have a lot of work to do and not a lot of time to do it.” Mara could see her look towards the ground and shake her head softly. “Sadly, one of our dancers is no longer with us, but Mara Lamb was a dedicated member of this team who knew that the show must go on. Sarah, you’ll be taking over their part in the routine-”

Mara blinked. A prickly numbness settled in their cheeks.

The coach kept talking, but Mara couldn’t process any of it, their head filling with static; a bucket slowly filling with sand. They…they replaced them. No fanfare, nothing about their ability, just… Dedicated. ‘Well, they tried really hard at this.’

A cool chill snaked up Mara’s arms as their throat tightened up, refusing to let them breathe. You don’t need to breathe. You can’t. 

Not really. 

Not anymore.

They stumbled backward, falling until they could feel the warm, black stage under their hands. The dancers, their team, moved into position, filling in Mara’s spot like they were never there to begin with.

Once again, they found themself sprinting to the exit.

Of course, this would happen. Mara knew, they already knew, they weren’t anything special to the team. Maybe they got a solo in their set, but who were they kidding? The coach probably felt bad for them and gave them the part out of pity, seeing as it was so easy to give it to someone else. After all, the show must go on even if one of the dancers is-

Mara shook their head, bracing themself on the wall just outside the room before sitting down, pulling their legs into a tight ball.

“Hey, what are you doing down here- Oh.”

Their attention shot up, fried as it was, to find Theo standing awkwardly beside a bend in the hall. Standing, not floating. “Umm..are you okay?” Mara huffed into their arms but didn’t say anything. “Guess that’s a no.”

He walked around the area like he was trying to scope out the situation. Mara tensed up when he poked his head into the auditorium. “Are those your friends?”

“...Not really.”

Theo nodded. “Acquaintances?”

“Something like that.”

He grinned, the passive-aggressiveness apparently lost on him. “Man, I didn’t know you did dance. That has to be super cool.”

Mara sighed. “Why are you on the ground?” The words came out more accusatory than they expected.

“Because the flying seemed to make you uncomfortable.” Mara’s eyes flicked up at him, filling with surprise. “Hey, I may not be the best with people, but I’m not completely oblivious. Just…a little slow about it.”

That was able to coax out a tentative smile. “Thanks.”

“So, what are you doing down here?”

The expression was quickly steeled away. “Nothing.” Because that doesn’t sound ominous at all. “Checking on the group in there.” Mara amended, sighing the words into the sleeves of their sweater. Even if it wasn’t fully true, it felt right. “We have a competition soon, but I guess it’s not my problem anymore.”

“Could you show me?”

“Huh?”

Theo paced around with a new spring in his step. “Could I see what you were working on? It might be fun.”

“You could look into the practice. They’ll be working on the exact same thing.” 

“But I don’t really know those guys. They don’t stop by the library that much.” Theo’s excitement doubled at the small chuckle Mara let out. 

It’s not the same as a full audience, but… “It would be nice to show someone.” They admitted. Especially after how much time I put into practicing it.

Theo’s face lit up as Mara stood up, wiping their eyes and walking out to the middle of the hall. Lucky for them, they could hear the starting cords of the dance team’s backing track ring out from the auditorium speakers. They got into their starting pose, back straight, arms resting at their sides, and feet poised with one in front of the other.

“You’re… Don’t make fun of me if I mess up, okay?”

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

They took a deep breath as the music built up into a steady rhythm. The choreography was contemporary, matching the team’s usual style; emotional, dramatic as their coach would say. Big movements with a bigger personality expected from the dancer. That was something Mara always struggled with; being larger than life, not just dancing, but soaring, gliding, expressing. 

But, now, there was nothing to stop them. No need to save anything for the judges, no one left to judge in the first place. The only thing left was to feel the power in the music and all the emotions that they never felt able to show to anyone. It’s funny. They’d never performed like this before.  

Loud applause broke Mara out of their revelry. “That was amazing!” Theo ran up to them. “You were like-” He tried to imitate a pump turn, instead stumbling and needing to catch himself mid-air. “Nice job.”

“Thanks.”

“That must have taken forever to learn.” Theo commented, a stunned smile still lighting up his face.

Mara shrugged in return. “As far as this choreo, not really. It’s mostly the basics that take a while.”

“Could you show me?”

Now, it was Mara’s turn to be surprised. “Okay, umm…You push off the ground and use your arms to keep yourself balanced, moving them with your leg to keep the momentum going.” They demonstrated, only doing two turns.

“Yeah, most of that went right over my head.”

At least he’s honest. “Okay, repeat after me.” Mara stood with one hand in front of them and one to the side, giving Theo a second to mirror them. “The front leg and hand should move together in an opening motion.”

They showed the movement. On Theo, he was a bit choppy with not the best posture, but he got the idea. “Is that right?”

“Yeah. Then you connect that to the spin to keep it going.”

Theo nodded. “I think I get it.” He tried the turn again, this time not fully falling when he lost his balance halfway through.

It took all of Mara’s willpower not to laugh at him, double standards and all. “You’ll have time to work on it.”

“What if…” Slowly, like he was worried about startling them, Theo floated a few feet off the ground. When he gave the turn another shot, he glided through the motions, completely weightless. “That’s not too bad!”

“How can you get traction for that in the air?” They asked, mostly to themself.

He drifted up like a balloon in the wind. “I have no idea. You should try it.”

“I don’t know how.” Not to mention how Mara’s stomach flipped at the idea of not being on solid ground.

“I can show you. You just have to trust that you won’t fall.” When Mara hesitated, Theo came back to the ground and led them over to the wall, placing one hand on it. “Try bracing yourself and just lifting your feet off the ground.”

Mara glanced down at the floor, feeling the presence of gravity more than ever as their brain screamed at them about how people don’t work like that. Well, there’s someone a solid five feet off the ground in front of me, so shut it. 

They took a deep breath, lifting one foot up slowly. “I can do this.” They whispered. Before Mara could question it, they pulled the other foot up, marveling as they stayed suspended in the air.

“Yes! That’s great!” Theo shot himself up so fast that Mara worried he hit the ceiling. “Try kicking off.” Huh? Tentatively, they kicked off the wall, still only a foot off the ground. 

“Like that?”

“Close. You can use the air too.” He pushed himself closer to the floor, getting the momentum, seemingly, from nowhere. They sighed. When would any of this make sense? 

Although…they had something they wanted to try.

They raised their arms and pointed their foot out, pushing off the air into the pump turn they demonstrated earlier. Suddenly, Theo’s fascination with flying made a bit more sense. 

The weightlessness carried every action farther than Mara could ever get pinned to the Earth. From the corner of their eye, they could see Theo going in his own flippy-flying routine close to the roof, but that wasn’t anything new by this point. 

Floating, flying…Any dancer would probably think it was the coolest thing even if the idea of it made Mara a little nauseous. Their coach would probably have a field day. 

Mara paused at the thought before deciding to ease themself back to the wall and floor, sitting cross-legged. “Man. Imagine what the rest of the team would say.”

Theo stopped his freestyle to stand next to them, his hand fidgeting with the hem of his shirt as he stared at the bland, school tile. “...That was the next thing I was going to warn you about.” They looked up at him questioningly. “As ghosts, we can’t interact with the living.”

“I thought you interacted with students all the time?”

“Not really.” He switched to staring at the ceiling. “I can move stuff, sure, but if I tried to talk to someone, no one would hear. Or if I wrote on something, no one would see it. Or, heck, I’ve flown into shelves hard enough to knock them down, but I’d phase through instead.”

A twinge of sadness echoed in his voice, making Mara wonder how many times he’s tried these things. “So, the universe at large won’t let us affect people.”

“Basically.”

Mara rubbed their eyes with the palm of their hand. “How did we get stuck here anyways?” They asked, more to complain than anything else.

Theo slouched down next to them, now leaving a solid foot of space between them. “I think it’s based on attachments.” 

“I don’t think I’m attached enough to this school to be here for all of eternity.”

“Maybe you won’t be here forever. There are tons of stories about people “moving on” after a final attachment in life is severed and school ghosts are pretty common in fiction too. It could be that, as a student who died here, you have more inherent connections to this place. If or when those connections fade, who knows if you’ll stay here.”

“That’s…” Terrifying, ominous, incomprehensible. “Nice.” They took a deep breath. “How long have you been here?”

Theo went quiet for a moment. His foot started tapping against the floor.

“Two hundred years.”

Mara’s eyes widened. “Two hundred years? Is this school even that old?”

“I think so. I would’ve been one of the first classes.”

“Wait,” No wonder he paused at their question. “you don’t know for sure?”

He shrugged. “Not really. It doesn’t matter though.”

A strange conviction built up in Mara’s voice. “That sounds like it does matter.”

“Not really. None of the people I would’ve known are still here, the building is probably completely different… It’s not like I can go back to any of it, so why get hung up about remembering it?”

How could he say that? “Just because you can’t go back doesn’t mean it’s not important. I can’t move back to the house I lived in when I was six, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely irrelevant.”

Theo shrugged again albeit more unsure than last time. “It’s fine, really. It’s not like I have anything to remind me of it anyways.”

“Wait…” 

For a second time that day, Mara dashed away.

“Why do you keep doing that? Sheesh, not everyone has magic ghost-warp powers.” Theo crouched down, gasping like he ran a marathon. Although, if Mara had to guess, he was just being dramatic. “Why are we back here?”

Warp powers? Before that train of thought could keep going, Mara pushed it away. That’s a later problem. Instead, they focused on the room in front of them; Theo’s quaint library. “Because I need to find something.”

Immediately back in top form, Theo perked up. “I can help with that! I know where everything is in there.”

“That’s kind of the problem.” They muttered, hopefully too quiet for him to hear. Mara walked inside without giving him a real answer, heading for the furthest back stacks of the nonfiction section. The shadowed shelves were surprisingly familiar to someone that barely read informational books. After all, this was always the most isolated and quiet area for Mara to hide out, causing them to spend a lot of time with the rarely touched pages. A glance at Theo’s awestruck face told them that he must have had the exact opposite experience. 

That expression quickly soured when he caught a look at the shelf Mara was focusing on; the school’s yearbook archive. One copy of every yearbook from each year the school had been open that Mara paged through on the occasion when they had too much time on their hands.

Surprisingly, Theo was quiet as Mara reached for one of the earliest volumes. Opening it, it had a small dedication on the first page for some members of the school board at the time. They put the book back and pulled out the next book to its right.

This song and dance continued for the next few moments, each new book seeming to double Theo’s nerves. Still, he didn’t stop them. He wasn’t stupid as far as Mara could tell; he must have known what they were trying to do. 

Hopefully, he’ll thank me later. Maybe.

Shortly, Mara’s silent search led them to the third oldest book in the set, dated 1827. A sharp breath alerted them to the fact that Theo was looking right over their shoulder. Hesitantly, they opened the first page…

Only to find a boy’s photograph staring up at them. Mara’s eyes squinted to take in the details through its grainy film. He was short with light hair that curled away from the edges of a newsboy cap, sitting on some stone steps as he looked straight out at the camera with uncertainty in his expression. The jacket-suspender combo reminded Mara of when their English class watched an adaptation of Jane Eyre. Underneath, a short description read, Dedicated in memory of Theodore Andley.

A series of shallow breaths called Mara away from their staring. Theo had stepped back, his eyes flickering between the picture and being squeezed shut. 

“Hey… Are you okay?” They closed the book and stashed it back on the shelf. Maybe this was a bad idea after all.

Theo kept going backward, phasing into the neighboring books instead of running into them, the spines discoloring and warping his appearance. “I’m fine.” The forced cheeriness made Mara’s stomach turn. 

They reach out for his hand, maybe for comfort or maybe to get him out of the shelf before the sight gave them a headache. “Are you sure-”

----------------------------------------------------

If Theo was only given 15 minutes to live, he’d spend it in arithmetic since 15 minutes there felt like an eternity. 

He resisted letting out a long sigh as the teacher finally dismissed the class for lunch, instead brushing off the chalk dust that accumulated on his pants after an hour stuck on one math problem. Why’d he need to learn math anyways? It’s not like a long engineering career was in his future.

On any other day, the classroom would be empty by now. No one really liked eating inside if they could help it, but today, that had to be weighed against the winter storm that hit them a few days ago. Freeze or fresh air. Personally, ‘freeze’ didn’t sound too bad.

Theo picked up his lunch pail from under his desk along with a worn copy of Frankenstein that he snuck from his parent’s collection and headed out to the front door, hoping that no one would notice him. The class’ chatter covertly covered the sound of the door opening, but a few students did bristle at a gust of cold air that worked its way into the room. Still, they didn’t stop him.

Theo let out a deep breath, marveling as it crystalized in the air in front of him. The chill pricked at his exposed cheeks and nose, but it was worth it. Finally, some time to breathe with the cramped, loud building far behind him.

Not that he hated his class. Theo shook his head, despite knowing that there was no one  to see it or hear what he was thinking. ‘Hate’ was such a strong word for his feelings. Overwhelmed, maybe a little annoyed, a ‘drowning sensation of noise that blocked out any scrap of focus Theo had’ was more apt. 

But that wasn’t a problem anymore, not when he was out in the fresh air where the only sound for miles was the rough sway of the trees, scratches of wildlife, and the satisfying crunch of snow under Theo’s shoes. The path he took was well-worn from other afternoons of trekking down to his favorite reading spot: a small outcrop onto the neighboring river.

On warmer days, Theo would sit right on the grass, but the frozen ground made that a bit impractical. Instead, he took the gingham cloth covering his lunch and folded it into a small square just big enough to sit on. Not a perfect solution, but it was enough to stop his mom from yelling at him for soaking his pants through. 

Before opening his book, Theo pulled out a bundle of left-over pancakes from that morning’s breakfast, made cold by the wintery air. Perhaps he could have warmed them by the fire if he were in the schoolhouse, but… He shook his head again.

Anything to escape the cacophony of noisy chewing even if his food could be used to nurse a bruise. Theo swore some of his classmates were related to cows with how they ate.

Another round of sharp winds blew past him causing a shiver to run through his back. Well…maybe staying in there wouldn’t be too bad. Maybe his desk-neighbor would strike up a conversation or the class monitor would want to talk to him about what was stopping him from understanding algebra. Okay, probably not that last one. But what else would they do? Theo’s classmates would probably throw a fit if they had to hear about his books again.

He couldn’t help himself, really. Each new novel had the potential to take him to a whole new world far away from Middle of Nowhere, Midwest. The words of analysis and poetry built up in every loose space in Theo’s head until they had nowhere to go but out, so of course his peers would hear about it. 

But, it didn’t pay to waste his reading time lamenting. To complete his set up, Theo pulled out the book from a protective pocket in his jacket and laid it open on his lap. 

Chapter 12

"I lay on my straw, but I could not sleep. I thought of the occurrences of the day. What chiefly struck me was the gentle manners of these people, and I longed to join them, but dared not. I remembered too well the treatment I had suffered the night before from the barbarous villagers, and resolved, whatever course of conduct I might hereafter think it right to pursue, that for the present I would remain quietly in my hovel, watching and endeavouring to discover the motives which influenced their actions.”

Theo couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be left alone like that; staying out by the wide river because he wasn’t allowed inside rather than by choice. Either way, his peers wouldn’t do that. Sure, they probably weren’t the fondest of him, but Theo couldn’t think of anyone who truly disliked him. Disliking him seemed like it’d take too much effort, frankly. 

Yet… no one’s ever asked where Theo went during break nor had anyone tried to come with. They’re simply busy. It’s too cold outside for them. Who’d want to spend time with me out in this weather?

Theo frowned. His reading time wasn’t supposed to be like this, all sad and morose. He started to pack up his things despite just setting them out. Book back in pocket, remains of his food back in the pail, gingham square in-

As he sat up, the wind snatched the fabric out from under him. “Hey!” He called. Theo reached his hand out, hoping to snag it before it drifted into the river. As he stretched, his foot caught on a branch hidden by the snow.

It was as if the world flipped itself; ground falling away from him being replaced with sky. The water hit Theo like a brick, piercing and icy, sending all of his nerves into shock. His clothing quickly soaked through as he flailed his arms in an attempt to stay above the surface.

The heavy fabric cocooned around him, dragging him further down. Even worse, Theo could feel water sinking into his book; ink smudging on the page, paper warping beyond recognition, the little world inside drowning. Still, he kicked and bobbed in the water. Ice filled his lungs as he went under again causing his cheery curls to lay plastered to his forehead. 

“Help! Please!” His voice was hoarse, the water stopping him from getting enough air. Unless someone was right on the bank, they wouldn’t hear him. Even if they could, the flow had already pulled him far from the shore. 

No… This can’t be happening…I-

It wasn’t until a patch of ice spanning the whole river hit him on the head did Theo stop struggling against the current. 

—-----------------------------------------------------

Mara vaguely thought that ghosts didn’t get headaches for some reason, but dang, were they wrong. A splitting pain throbbed dead center on their forehead, pulsing like a second heartbeat and forcing them to squeeze their eyes shut. A groan next to them revealed that Theo must have been feeling something similar.

A few minutes passed as they tried to dull the ache, enough time for Mara to take inventory. The library carpet rubbed against their hand; somehow they ended up on the ground, but they were sitting up rather than laying down, so they probably didn’t fall. They slowly opened their eyes. The light poked at their headache, but it was still tamer than earlier, letting them look around. Not much has changed; The only notable difference was that the room’s main lights were off, leaving the space casted in natural light from windows far overhead. 

“What…what happened?” Their voice was quiet, calling to an ancient instinct to not be too loud in a library. 

“...I don’t know.”

Mara looked down the row of shelves only to see Theo running away on foot.

“Hey!” They skittered onto their feet, following behind. For someone who spent most of his time away from the ground, Theo could run pretty fast when he wanted to.

His path veered from one side of the library to the other into the fiction section. It didn’t take long for Mara to catch up. As they slowed down, it was clear that Theo wasn’t going anywhere, instead opting to stare down a section of books. They didn’t say anything as Theo pulled out a novel from the shelf. Its worn cover read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Theo’s expression was unreadable as he studied the first few pages. “Y’know, I never finished reading this book.” 

“Any reason why?” They leaned against the mirroring shelves to give him some space.

“As I’ve heard some students say, I thought it had bad vibes.” That got a small smile from both parties. “I haven’t thought about any of that stuff in years.”

Mara tensed up. They wouldn’t blame him if he was mad. “I’m sorry.”

Theo shook his head. “Don’t be. I…I haven’t thought about my parents in such a long time. That river… You can see it through the windows on the other wall. I think my mom donated a copy of this book to the school a few years after I died.” He turned the inside cover towards them, showing the ancient publication date.

“Are you okay?” Man, they wished they didn’t sound so timid. 

“I will be.” He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, almost like he was powering back on. Revving up, maybe. “It’s just a lot to process.” 

Mara wrapped their arms around their middle. “I can give you some space if you want.”

“No need. I’m gonna need to talk about this real soon.” Theo admitted with a more relaxed tone that made Mara let out a relieved breath. “Plus, with your whole warp thing, I don’t think I’d be able to find you later.”

“I still don’t know how that works.”

An abrupt sound came from Theo that reminded Mara of a pin being pulled off a record. He paused before picking up his words. “Do you want to find out?”

Mara looked up in surprise to find a new spark in Theo’s eyes. “Sure? Although, why do you ask?”

“Because who knows what else we could find out!” His feet tucked up underneath him leaving him floating close to the ground. “Maybe there’s a whole bunch of things two ghosts can do that one can’t. I mean, ghost memory-sharing? That’s a huge mystery to figure out!” 

A shocked smile pulled at their expression. “Wait… Maybe I could show you my cat.”

“That’d be great!” Theo held out a hand, energetic and excited. “Do we have a plan?”

Mara didn’t waste time meeting him. Maybe this was different from what they were used to and they definitely weren’t done with the consequences of what happened to them, but…they weren’t alone anymore. “Let’s do it.” 

[retphienix]

This little quest, like many, is more or less just filler while we wait on various background events to happen.

We help a bard, he doesn't know anything about our dream cave, now we know the artificer or whomever has finished analyzing the mcguffin we left back there, so we have a direction to go (or will) so this was basically just "Go do a side quest (90% of the game's content) to recruit a bard :)" and that's fine.

Speaking of: Bard!

The Bard in FFT is, well, pretty shit. BUT, I have nostalgic admiration to that iteration of the class. It's a favorite :)

It's one of the most difficult classes to unlock in that game (not saying much but still relevant!) requiring you to level magic themed classes (Summoner and Mediator) with a male whom in Tactics are statistically inclined towards physical jobs (quick way to gauge that being that at level 1 most males have 4 strength and 3 magic attack, and females have the inverse).

So already, it's "hard" to get and has a uniquely counter-intuitive acquisition method (train the traditionally fighter characters to be mages) which makes it neat, but also it has an entirely unique playstyle where Bards in FFT are channeling classes who target the entire map.

They can begin singing anywhere on the map and every time they finish an entire verse the song effect will play out, targeting everyone.

I just find that really cool because it's so unique in the game, only a few classes target (or can target) "everyone", one of the others being Dancers, the female counterpart whom fulfill all the same requirements but inversed (magic leaning character levels physical classes instead).

Anyways, Bards in FFT are underwhelming without abusing the 900 different ways you can break a character to FORCE them to be good. By default Bards are a support class that buffs or heals ally units (everywhere on the map) but for VERY small amounts and VERY slowly (often taking many turns to channel their song and complete a verse all to heal for like 10 hp).

I love em! I love em when they are bad, I love when you break the game and make them good, great and interesting class!

I'm stoked to see how they actually work here.

At a glance, it turns out Bard didn't exist in FFTA?

MOST of the classes in FFTA2 are just copy pasted from FFTA-

(For better- interesting archer classes,

and worse- so many underwhelming classes in my opinion lol)

-but as it turns out, Bard didn't exist in TA, and is a unique job in TA2 that apparently only this guy has, that's kinda neat, making Bard into a signature class :D

Reading the wiki it seems like they really did lean in on the same ideas as other bards in the series, namely "support magic" and the like. I'm actually interested in using this guy though, if only to see just how it works. Because it SOUNDS (heh) like his songs affect everyone within 4 tiles of him, basically being a magic bomb wherever he's standing.

That's, actually kinda cool, if that's accurate.

I hope that's the case and it's not just "You can target someone within 4 tiles" but I guess we'll see. That will kill my interest entirely.

Regardless, glancing at his skills, yep, that's a bard. I like that.

Geez, I kinda hope he's underwhelming though because I REALLY like my team right now.

Double mage, double melee, double range feels great with this lineup.

Both Paladin and Defender work fantastically for tanking through everything head on.

Redmage/summoner and my eclectic Nu Mou who keeps changing jobs have successfully covered the healing and "pelt them with spells" end of things.

And MY LORD is my hume hunter putting in work consistently- and my Clockwork spamming gun moogle might not be damaging things but the status buffs and debuffs are sensational (note, I'm cheating and save scum every time lmao- definitely a class I would HATE without cheating but I'm shameless and it's fun :P)

I'd really like to slip a bard in if it turns out he IS a magic bomb and doesn't target 1 unit at a time, but I'm genuinely not sure who I'd move out.

Maybe the red mage... but, while her tools are kinda just "magic lite" like elementalist who is just a simplified (and less prone to proccing status in my experience) geomancer from FFT, or red mage who is just black and white mage with extra steps, or summoner- who in this game certainly FEELS like black mage with extra steps since the damage is so mediocre- these are still useful tools to bring to the squad.

It's just a shame that she has so many options for magic but because they are all options conceived of in FFTA originally, they are all basically just "Cast a spell on 1 guy for a little damage" or "Cast the same spell a black mage does". Bleh.

I'm starting to think Viera just have shit options all around in terms of appeasing my tastes and that them, along with how I tried to master all the skills and found so much overlap in classes, tainted my entire FFTA run.

It's either "Magic lite" or "Normal attacks that sometimes proc status" or "Cast death (but with a bow)", all 3 aren't interesting enough.

*sigh* doesn't help that a lot of FFTA design, including here, is "Make it interesting by adding a debuff chance!" and that's it. Between Fencer, Elementalist, Assassin, Juggler, Ninja, Base Archer in a sense, Sniper, JEEZ- a lot of classes in FFTA mistake "add a status proc" to "Make this class interesting without making it play any differently".

There are winners though, like re-imagining tank classes to have more options to actually tank, or giving Hunters an identity by making their skills more effective against monsters, or, indeed, being a bit silly with some ideas like Morphers or Clockwork.

I just wish so many abilities weren't just "Hit for a little damage and sometimes proc a debuff" or "Hit HARD but inaccurately / Hit SOFT but accurately" but in the grand scheme of things that's not every option or even most- when so many weird options like morph exist etc.

[cowboymantis]

Started this pretty much immediately when I saw the post! :D

So here is my journey so far! Decided to stop for today (well, it's already tomorrow technically...) since it's 4 am, but I had a lot of fun already :3

I wrote this separately in a notes app, while I was playing, so I'll be just pasting it here:

First of aaaall, I'll give a short comment on the extra PDF:

Advanced Documents for the Board Overseeing Archaeological Research Department

As someone who is familiar with Blade, I tried to put myself into the shoes into someone who has never heard of it, so I think even with this bias it looks very understandable for newcomers to Blade!

Okay, now to the main thing!

I loved the description of the Undead as furries, realistically people would totally first think they are furries (goes with any Tokumon really) 😭

Before I started, I was getting ready and making it look all aesthetic, fully knowing I won't use my epic Oneus card deck from the Trickster album bc it's not a full suit, also fully knowing I won't need all the other dice but they just cool for the photo :3

(Future note: My notebook here has a lot of random information in it, like world times, different currencies of the world, a world map, etc, which is really cool! But now I noticed oh wow it actually lowkey influenced me in my character creation, love the subliminal messages from my own equipment)

Creating a character

Since I am writing those notes, in real time while I am playing the game, I just want to say, the "Thoughts on anti-homeless architecture?" questions in the character creation was a jumpscare. 😭😭 Well we'll see how relevant this will become in the future, I guess... But you're on thin ice 👁👁

Anyway, for the character I tried to make it a bit quick, since I wanted to get to the game fairly quickly to test it out. But the questions about creating the character gave me a lot of inspiration so I sat a bit longer on the making! I guess it's just like the character creation in video games, you end up spending way too much time on it. 😭

He's got some characteristics from me, but at the end everything else, like abilities and origin are mostly OC, in general just more focus on existing in a Kamen Rider world!

So yeah, my rough character sketch:

Put it in more of a cute almost chibi style so I don't spend too long on the drawing kdjdjd

Btw... The name is a BIIIT of a refference to Ravn from Oneus, bc I had to think of them with the card deck staring at me, and I love Ravn, so yay!

His last name's meaning is something along the lines of "peaceful warrior", which I think fit perfectly for the character :)

Also, I tried for the first time to draw an OC Kamen Rider design, I'm not sure yet if I will even go that route, but I just thought it would be cool to have :3 Loosely inspired by the Cobra Undead, since I love snakes and it's my Chinese zodiac funnily enough, and going for the obvious (Mantis Undead) felt kind of weird given Hajime exists lmaoo 😭 He stole not only that humans identity, no, MINE TOO!!! I AM MANTIS!!!

Anyway, let's get to that character lore:

Raven Humphrey

[he/him, aroace which is completely unrelated but I just want to specify it so there is one more aroace character on this planet 🙏]

Age: 34

Origin: Alaska

BOARD:

- just newly joined BOARD as a Kamen Rider in training

- saw weird people in suits fighting monsters, was immediately intrigued, so he followed them, ended up being the one attacked by an Undead, actually tried to fight back, until he got rescued by the suited people and got ridiculed for doing such a dangerous thing. Wouldn't stop pestering them until they told him what they were and now he somehow ended up training to be a Kamen Rider

- is very fascinated by the Undead, thinks they're actually kinda cute! Thinks fighting them looks fun, but is kind of sad about the only option to interact with them to be hostile, so he likes to imagine different possibilities how to interact otherwise

Even has a small notebook where he has a lot of sketches of the Undead he encounters

- is, like any decent person, very much against anti-homeless architecture and gets kind of sad whenever he sees it

Before BOARD/backstory/overall character:

- grew up in Alaska, was always rather quiet, but easy to make friends with once you get to know him. He's rather introverted though, so he never really went on too many activities during his childhood

- doesn't have the best relationship with most of his family (probably bc they want grandchildren or something), but is still in contact with his older sister from time to time

- nowadays generally prefers peace and quiet over everything else, but has been doing Judo from an early age, later on started fencing, then archery. So while he is regularly more of a pacifist, he can get heated in a fun battle and his old battle spirit gets ignited!

- actually got heavily in trouble in high school for knocking out someone cold in a battle THEY started and didn't expect him to fight back. From then on spiraled into a bit of a street fight phase, got thrown out of his Judo team due to that

- normally is rather logical and tries to see things through, but also always tries to see the best in things and the best in people, since he went through a rough depressive episode during his teenage years (probably the major factor of his more aggresive behaviour during that time) and since then managed to come out more positive and controls his anger well now

- worked a bunch of different jobs you can do from anywhere (like writing books, doing journalism or photo/video editing, which back then definetly wasn't something just anyone could do!), so he could travel the world a lot, in the countries he stayed he would also sometimes work in random establishments, primarily works with heavy lifting since he's quite strong and also doesn't need to talk too much in those (helpful when you're introverted and not an expert at a language)

- in general is just interested in many things and loves to learn about new stuff

- really liked it in Japan, always loved different movies and shows from there, especially when they had fighting, and decided to study the language more in-depth and live there for a while (since all of this Kamen Rider stuff is happening, seems like he'll be staying there for a bit longer!)

Special skills:

- martial arts, different weapon fighting skills and also quite strong

- skilled in first aid (very useful and needed when you're travelling alone all across the world)

- very cold resistant due to growing up in Alaska

- I guess it is kind of a special skill, stays cool most of the time (no Alaska joke inteded) and its very hard to rile him up nowadays

- speaks a bit of multiple languages

- different computer skills

Relationship to the other characters:

Kenzaki:

- thinks very positively of him, while they haven't talked too much, he thinks Kenzaki is a good person, maybe even a bit too good given how naive he seems, but appreciates that there are people like this

Shiori

- probably interacted with her the most so far, since he's very interested in the Undead and their story. Overall the easiest to talk to for him, maybe because she almost feels like a little sister

Kotaro

- thinks he's a bit silly, but alright other than that (but the obsession with milk is, no offense, kind of disgusting)

Hajime

- thinks he's an alright guy, but they never really talk. Probably all of their conversations would just consist of silence since none of them would want to be the first one to talk

Tachibana:

- isn't so sure how to feel about him, since he seems a bit unstable, but trusts him anyway, since he and Kenzaki were the ones saving Raven back then from the Undead, so in a way he feels like he owes them trust

Mutsuki

- thinks he means well overall, but sees him as a bit annoying, but that's just how teenagers are. He'll hopefully grow out of it

Everyone else not named: neutral

Position in house:

Second floor, his room is filled with different bits and bops from all the places Raven has visited and immediately looked very lived in!

Now, finally getting into the gameplay!!!

Already like the system with different tasks and how cards are being used to determine what you're going to be up to for the day!

Also damn!! Started off with some great RNG, get to do 3 tasks!

For those, I pulled K, Q and Joker!

(Live Mantis reaction:

Okay let's see what task K is- OH MY GOD)

Anyway, Day 1 from the perspective of my character now, imagine him reminiscing or writing about the day in a journal:

"This day was certainly off to a rather weird start! I finally finished packing all of my belongings in the temporary farmhouse home, and it seemed like a quiet moment for once, so I went out for a walk to get my mind off things. So much happened all at once, it's only natural you need a bit of a time out, right?

Well, seems like the universe had other plans... For some reason, this weird guy claiming to work for the IRS just kept on bothering me. Not sure how he knew me, IF he even knew me (I didn't ask about my name at all) or if he even was IRS.

It was rather annoying, but thankfully, I just started to talk English, which he didn't seem to understand, and act like a confused tourist. Which probably just confused him more in turn, since he just completely stopped trying to annoy me at all.

Guess that's one way to get rid of the IRS (don't try this at home kids!)

Being sure that weird man went away, I continued my journey around the city. And I went down this really idyllic forest path, when I set my sights on an absolute abomination. Such a beautiful bench, ruined by an ugly metal bar in the middle. Surely, this was just to prevent homeless people from sleeping on it. Not even that, it also looked absolutely hideous.

Now, I normally try to stay calm, but I just couldn't, it infuriated me so much, I just HAD to get rid of those. I'm sure I'd be doing a favour to everyone.

Thankfully, it wasn't to hard for me to get them off the benches, but when I was just finished with a second one, an officer spotted me! And I was so stupid and held the other one still in my hand, thinking I could recycle it into a cool makeshift weapon or something else. But it just ended up exposing me further and the cop watched me put both of them back again... Ah, well I guess all I got was a warning.

Eventually, I decided to just give up and go back home anyway, away from scammers and police."

Adding to the Joker Task: Omg this reminds me so much of one of my favourite dramas, SPEC: Birth, where one of the protagonist always throws a bunch of paper in the air (it has a point there but the mental image I got from this task just reminded me of it!)

Also, just trying to make sure, but I'm fairly certain this isn't canon/included in the story, since it is a "safe", aka a joker task?

DAY 2

Exciting, my first Undead Encounter!

Also, I keep accidentally writing Unded 💀 My brain is rotting from the internet I swear

Omg, I got a King of Clubs 😭 Tarantula Undead... Guess that's probably the most fitting first encounter for my character (well, Shima to be more specific bc he's also rather chill)

But that also means no fighting!

"Yesterday I pretty much just fell into my bed, exhausted from everything and then those weird encounters on my walk. I'm not gonna lie, I was feeling a bit down this morning and just wandered around the house a bit.

Eventually I started to get into a little chat with Shima, who also was around at the time. I never really actually got to talk with him, so I didn't know he was so chill! If anything, it just further proves my theories that Undead don't necessarily have to be fought. It makes me wonder if there are any other Undead like him..."

DAY 3

I didn't roll an Encounter, so I thought it would be a fitting idea to make my character look for an Undead, after a conversation with Shima he might be encouraged to try and look for Undead to potentially befriend.

And...Oh boy we'll see if this will go horribly wrong or if he gets lucky for once!

And yes, I actually got an Encounter and pulled 7 of Hearts. SO CLOSE to 8 Hearts! Why do I care about 8 Hearts? Bc now I have Welcome To Hell stuck in my head, aka the boss theme of 8 Hearts in No More Heroes Travis Strikes Again... the boss also likes to say RIDER KICK when attacking you, so I guess it's all connected somehow-

Anyway, I got distracted again!!!

"Today, I was feeling rather optimistic! Talking with Shima gave me some new hope again, and especially ensures me that it's not impossible to get along with different Undead. Obviously, since my training isn't complete, it's not recommended I go and look for Undead myself, so Mutsuki was sent by Tachibana to follow me, since he somehow knew my intentions for leaving. Ah well. I mean, the kid isn't bad (I think), but edgy teens like him are the exact reason I don't ever want to be a parent. No offense, but I just couldn't handle this all day.

One day though, I guess that's fine. Or rather, part of one day.

We were walking through a park, when suddenly, I felt like something held me back! And there I noticed, something was tangled around my ankle, I could just about stop myself from tripping.

Didn't take me long to realize it was an Undead, because it revealed itself, probably trying to squish me, thankfully Mutsuki quickly reacted and punched it away.

This encounter definetly didn't start off friendly, but I tried my best talking to it! I'm... honestly not sure if it understood me or just chose to ignore me, but I felt like talking to a wall. I guess it was annoying even Mutsuki, since he told me to just leave it to him, eventually defeating the Undead and sealing it.

Honestly, I was a bit frustrated. I told him we could've tried harder, he answered it just won't listen. Eventually, he just threw the card at me and told me I can always try and talk to it this in there, not that it would know.

Now I'm home again, staring at this card while writing... I'm... not sure how this made me feel. I guess, some Undead just have to be fought because they have a more violent nature.

It definetly sucks, but I'm also not saying no to an exiting fight..."

Having the Plant Undead as an encounter while Raven was trying to look for one to befriend was definitely kind of funny. I was trying to think, but I just don't think that's an Undead you can befriend. Not saying it's impossible! Just maybe for my character :'D Also it's a good character development moment where he learns early on how different the Undead can be!

DAY 4

Another day with tasks, 3 again and... JOKER AGAIN??? Like damn I know the Joker Undead is one of my favourite designs ever but damn...

Anyway, I got Joker, 3, 6!

"I guess I woke up rather early today, I just was very exhausted after yesterday, once again! But I decided to do something nice for everyone and prepare breakfast today!

There was this dish that wouldn't leave my mind ever since I tried it in a breakfast menu in Germany! To be honest, I had to look up what it was called in my journals: Kaiserschmarrn.

But I absolutely wanted to try and recreate it, so more people can experience it.

It's basically like a scrambled egg for pancakes, if that makes sense.

And, well, I guess it smelled very good because everyone was commenting on that, but once we tasted it... Yeah, I think I definetly mistook the salt for sugar...

I mean, because of the cinnamon sweetening it too, it wasn't aaawful, but it also wasn't good either. Funnily enough, I think Tachibana really liked it, which, I don't know if he acted like he did, out of sympathy, or he actually just has a weird taste.

Either way, I think in theory this recipe would've been nice, if I actually added sugar. Ah well, we'll see next time!"

Fun fact: I tried making Kaiserschmarrn the other day for the first time and I was amazed at how easy it was and everyone absolutely LOVED it, I inhaled everything off my plate in record time it was so good. So it went the exact opposite from what my character here experienced lmaooo this poor guy man 😭

I got the baseball practice next, and I just want to add: this is actually such a creative way to implement that training into this game!

"Later that day, Tachibana asked if I wanted to do baseball practice with him and Mutsuki.

...I knew exactly what that meant and no, I am not good at it. I don't even know why, with my skillset, hell, archery especially! I technically should be good at it, but it seems almost impossible to me.

But with everything, practice creates the master.

So I did join them, and I would say I was very average at it. And with average I mean about how good a regular person with no fighting experience would be at it.

I mean, I did guess some of them.

But I always impulsively punched them away, and I might've accidentally hit Mutsuki on the head with one!

Now, I am not one to start a fight or hold a grudge but all I'll say this is payback for him being so stubborn with the Plant Undead. Yes, I am still thinking about that. Yes, I do think mayyybe it was possible to befriend it.

Either way, I think all things considered, and the unfortunate happenings aside, today was quite fun."

It's funny, the ONE character my character was a bit negative towards (Mutsuki) is now one he keeps on having to interact with, like a kid having to babysit his smaller brother 😭😭😭

NEXT TIME ON OWO, THERE WILL BE AMONG US... (Yes I rolled that task)

But for now, it's sleepy time.

As a last visualization, page 1 from today and my setup dkdjdj

Hopefully me going through my experience like this kind of shows the thought process of someone who did not make the game and just goes after the instructions, however here are some things I haven't explicitly listed during my playthrough, and just thought about later on:

I started to kind of question this when my first real fight started:

Does your character have Kamen Rider abilies in the fights?

Or just the characters that help you?

When an Undead gets sealed, does your character get the card? (aka can you freely decide?)

If your character has Kamen Rider abilities, do you just make up a new Category Ace Undead card for them (however that would work logically)?

Obviously, a lot of things are open for interpretation, since it's all about telling your own story with vague instructions, and at the end of the day you can literally do what you want, but I was just very unsure about those points personally, and if they were intended in a certain way, or if you're completely free to go Kamen Rider fighting route (wether it is from beginning on or during your journey)!

Version 1 of the Kamen Rider Blade Solo Journal RPG project is now up!

I'll be posting the link in a reblog of this post in a second. This is my first time making one of these, so any constructive criticism is very, very much recommended. I hope you enjoy trying it out! And if there's any issues with the gameplay, please let me know immediately. Thank you!

[utilitycaster]

I'm curious on how you would rank the CR cast in terms of how well they understand the mechanics of dnd. Because I agree with something you said a while ago, which is that Sam somehow has this rep as being "the mechanics guy", but I feel like that just isn't true honestly. Not that he's terrible, but I think he does tend to like having one "go-to" move like bigbys hand or sneak attack, and seems to be struggling a little now that he has more choice. And perhaps controversially, I think Marisha has come such a long way in terms of mechanics. Like, sure, Keyleth had some bad moments, but Marisha mostly killed it as Beau and she's killing it now as Laudna, yet she gets very little respect for it I feel.

(answering this along with this from earlier today):

So in terms of strongest, Matt. I think DM-ing is the fastest throw-you-into-the-deep-end way to get good at mechanics, and so an experienced DM generally is excellent at mechanics. We can see it from him as a player, as Dariax or in one shots.

In terms of the rest of the cast, it gets a little murky in that I think everyone but Sam and Ashley is very, very strong (and I have my eye on Ashley because she's catching up fast), and the people I perceive as strongest are in part a matter of my personal taste in how to play/their playstyle beyond just mechanics. As a result I explain a lot of things and this is going to get long so I've put it below a cut just to save your dashes.

Unsurprisingly for followers of this blog, I think Travis is among the top players. I remember sitting with my father watching the boys basketball team at my middle school play a match and he pointed at the team's star player, who I should point out had not hit his growth spurt yet and also iirc never broke like, 5'8" as an adult, and said "that kid has incredible court sense" and anyway Travis has court sense. He asks all those questions because he's thinking about the battle map like, well, an athlete. And as someone who in some small part plays casters because my spatial reasoning is adequate at best, this is really impressive to me. Like, there's a reason he's taken the mobile feat twice, and why he's confident in melee, and this is on top of the fact that he managed to build out a utility hexadin with so many short range teleports, swapping out spells thoughtfully and picking highly useful invocations that also tell the character's story, like, part of why I've been so outright derisive towards the people who have insulted his skills is because this guy recognized Vespin Chloras within seconds. This guy is reading the manuals.

Liam is also among the top players. Hilariously, he exclusively has played Core Four in D&D with two exceptions (Vax's multiclasses and the For Legal Reasons This Is Neither HP nor the Breakfast Club one-shot) so he knows what he likes but he is, to be fair, very good at what he likes, and what he likes is utility casting and fighters and that's the most valid. He is perhaps the strongest at the table at integrating mechanics and story, though Travis and Laura are very close, and like Travis he can handle a highly modular build skillfully and thoughtfully as we've seen with both Caleb and Orym.

Liam and Travis were also the two players I said who I think could at least take a reasonable stab at the Empathy Domain, in that they are both the pragmatists of the group. I think Ashley may be one as well, hence why she's one to watch, but: they are able to quickly make peace with tough decisions or a bad turn and see it through, which, with the finicky nature of the Transfer Suffering feature and the highly RP dependent Sympathetic Bond, is crucial. When will one of them play a cleric for more than like, a two-shot. Please.

I think Taliesin is extremely good at mechanics broadly and has a lot of DM-ing experience and so he's counted in the "very, very good" section with Laura and Marisha here mostly because I happen to also be more of a brutal pragmatist and so that gets extra points, and Taliesin is one of the more optimistic playstyle cast members. He also tends towards min-maxing (obviously for Percy; Caduceus is min-maxed for healing and perception) and I respect that but I prefer the broader utility that Liam and Travis tend to pursue - although Ashton is, mechanically, super fun and has a more diverse array of skills/abilities than many barbarians (though a lot of credit goes to Matt here for the subclass) and I'm excited to see more.

I do have to disagree with the idea that Marisha "got much better". I mean, she has improved at D&D as has the rest of the cast but she was one of the strongest players from the start and the narrative that she's vastly improved since C1 instead of being consistently excellent is outright incorrect. I think people do not appreciate that she was usually the only prepared caster on screen, she was the only person with crowd control while also trying to be the healer and the tank simultaneoulsly, or that druids in 5e are significantly different than in Pathfinder. Like, literally, the only example of a bad Keyleth moment that comes to mind was the Wind Walk in the purple worm fight, and not to keep dunking on Sam but if Sam got a rep for being the mechanics genius for two great moves 3+ years ago it seems, uh, mad fucked up that Marisha still has a reputation for not being great as Keyleth for one bad spell 6 years ago. (In fact, to stop dunking on Sam: most criticisms of Sam and Marisha from C1 should probably stop. If suddenly you're down a sorcerer and usually down a cleric? You get a GENEROUS leeway.) I also was more impressed by Beau than by Laudna in terms of story incorporation - like, eyes of the runekeeper is great but why does she have that, and also I personally believe no warlock should ever have higher wisdom than intelligence unless they multiclassed. A sorcerer/warlock should not be in the business of having a positive wisdom score. Which isn't a knock on Laudna in general - some of this is personal taste and some will be resolved as we learn more - but I need to say that your Marisha mechanics opinions seem really off to me.

I think Laura is quite good and I think everyone who insults Jester's healing is an idiot who listened to Laura complaining and forgot to keep in mind that Jester actually did a great job healing while complaining, up until Caduceus "the healing guy" Clay showed up at which point she pivoted. This is called "responding to what else is going on" and I highly recommend it because mechanics in a vacuum are mere thought exercises. I think Laura is mechanically good but she also I think knows what she wants to do, which is to hit big and hit hard - I think she's aware that certain aspects of mechanics (support casting, tanking) aren't her interests, so she's not quite as strong all-around, but she's very good at what she's interested in. She's also showing a lot of utility as Imogen. Sorcerer is a really good fit for her and she's killing it.

[nochiquinn]

exandria unlimited: kymal: part 2: I planned for this

not adele dazeem

h a t s

"I feel like critical role's so serious" "WHAT"

sends that clip to all the "critical role was never this crass" tlovm critics

they got her

erica seems so much more comfortable tonight

pick-me casino

"I got fiddle-fingers!"

POODLE PIP

oh, oxboxtra does that one sometimes

see, bell's hells, THEY get it

I'm love him

mor: brumestone dorian: [rapid blinking]

spaceship

"and hide his dumb ass"

BOOP ACTION

matt teaching aimee and erica how to hit dice

rip aabria's voice

the chroma conclave getting turned into a tacky theme spa is the BEST

"no ringworm for dorian"

"he's not little, he's 6''6'!"

the way opal's face dropped at "thordak"

orym would probably also have had...some reaction

dariax

"it's kinda disrespectful but. y'know."

"I've always wanted to see the top of your head!" "👀" "NO"

"you can't get pregnant in a hot tub - you COULD get chlamydia!"

(edit from the future: I can't believe I spelled that right the first time)

jinoir :(

I need them to adopt and protect this child

"dorian's a taurus for sure" can we not call me out personally in this moment

ouchie check

for the record laying on pokey things is my absolute nightmare

"please draw it. and tag me."

dream check DREAM CHECK

comment cards

I love opal so goddamn much

everybody trying so fucking hard not to laugh over aimee

stop dating the episode

("no one who hasn't watched shortonegaming will get that" well maybe they should watch shortonegaming then)

(watch shortonegaming)

matt telling erica "it's fine, it's gonna be fine"

awakened vestige!!!

this is the dai character editor mirror

opal and the power of friendship

where is dariax. where is the back-to-back

"what should I do next" stop being a fucking dipshit

diligent, intelligent

they got the mother gothel treatment didn't they

GO AWAY AND THEN COME BACK SOON

"thank you for letting me do that, it was so disrespectful"

"she's wearing this, because we did the art"

cognitive psience

"sometimes cuddle buddies"

ted 2 again

"that is a man who let a pet rock die"

....birds of a feather

"will this be a pun list? YES."

PIERODIN

"I'm just gonna make eye contact with you, Matt"

LIFE NEEDS WINE TO LIVE

how long until the svg goes up for the vinyl cutters and their wine glass wraps

"she grew up in this buffet"

fantasy ostrich

big farm-a

"the exact same" gay

"we've moved a few couches together" GAY

"you gave me the power!"

innuendo as spellcasting flavor

apparently we are two hours into a five hour stream, help me

the early break is going to be my downfall

orym where are you

oh BOY

"you heard an eldritch language" that's how I hear all math

I don't like how much this guy smirks

dariax is a GOOD BOY

"I made her yeet a dice :D"

for a hot second I thought she threw it AT him

someone loan her a new d20

awww

what in the gravira

his mean little brainhole

don't love that!

"should have given him lair actions"

"look at the flowchart!!"

exCUSE

thrall? girl got a thrall?

poska-senpai noticed me

"doors are mysterious"

"the biggest boss I can offer: a mean door"

"do you think we care about money more than you?"

"as long as the money is out of this vault, I did my job"

I love one (1) himbo dwarf

"do you have some - it's just me, stop screaming - do you have some paper"

cyrus did one (1) useful thing

it's free gratis

this means in their future sessions - and there better goddamn be future sessions - they will have not one but two bags of holding

unless something really stupid happens

hello??

raven? matron of ravens?

(I'm sorry, I know why they had to change it, but "matron of ravens" will never be as smooth to say as "raven queen")

Dariax Is A Good Boy

even if this is a stupid idea (I have no idea) it is Hurting His Friend and now it has to Die

matt control your face

GO AWAY PIKACHU

aimee stop metagaming

"just smashing stuff?" "....yeah" "hell yeah"

anjali: wait I have the thing

there's an hourish left and I am in suffering

MAP

gaola mvp

dick around

"we're all impossibly stupid!"

"have you ever kicked a building to death?"

is fantasy c4 the only explosive you've heard of

"I'm really good at breaking things!"

"I had...a thought" "no!"

lmao the dice roller

"it's not that good a plan"

"I love you and I like you, and if this is not airtight I will FUCK you up"

!!!

QUEEN SHIT

god I want an exu animated miniseries

KING SHIT

did I compare the nameless ones to the dollars from durarara last time we did this

!!!

god I am TENSE

please don't everybody go splat

"roll good" "I'M TRYING"

I love her SO MUCH

"everyone turn into a simple machine!"

but they didn't HAVE machines in the middle ages

(this is more salt at tlovm critics, ignore me)

YIP YIP

the world's craziest poodle

wall effect!

smoke? clouds? probably clouds

here at the end I would like to state that every time they mentioned morrighan's songbird I pictured Songbird from bioshock

HEY

HEY WAIT A MINUTE

HER name? as is Mor is using someone else's name?

AS IN AN OLD WOMAN IN THE FEYWILD NAMED MORRIG(H)AN?

that was a sequel hook aabria you can't fool me

"we got 50k and a floating balcony!"

"did you forget their relationship started with peeing off a wall?!"

[shakes tin cup] spare a stinger?

no stinger :(

[solesurvivorpaigeargot]

HOLY HELLO Sketchy friends, followers, and fans! It's that time again, time for...

SHIPPY SATURDAY!

The heck is happening here? Here's an FAQ~ Wanna support the event? Here's my Ko-fi!

That's right, it's FINALLY the last Saturday of the month... and I've decided it's high time our Quotable prompt evolved into a Dialog prompt! This is gonna work a lot like previous Quote prompts, but with an extra twist, so please make sure you read the guidelines for a valid request before sending in!

ONWARDS!

To make a VALID Shippy Saturday request, please send me the following in an ASK to my ASKBOX:

The COUPLE you'd like me to sketch up ---- OC? Heck yes! Canon? Hell yeah! All characters welcome, so long as they're from Fallout ---- OC x OC? Cool! Canon x Canon? SWEET! OC x Canon? DAMN RIGHT.

The NUMBER of the dialog snippet you'd like me to art them saying ---- Got more than one favorite? You may list up to THREE in your ask, in order of preference, to help the artist avoid repeats <3 ---- Still can't pick? Send in 'Dealer's Choice!' and the artist will pick one for you.... oooor possibly make up some fresh dialog on the spot ;3

What KIND OF RELATIONSHIP your couple has with each other ---- Romantic? Platonic? Professional? Familial? Rivals? Neighbors? Despite it's name, Shippy Saturday is about all kinds of human connections, not just the romantic ones! ---- Is your couple part of a larger OT3 or poly group? Tell me who else is part of the relationship; they probably won't get arted, but they might add their two cents to the scene from off-frame XD

IF YOU'RE SENDING IN AN OC!! ---- Send your request ask FIRST, without reference information ---- THEN send your OC's reference information to me via my Tumblr IM ---- Don't have any reference pictures, but you can type of a written description? Great! I love working from written descriptions! :D [ No, really, I do. Give them to me :D ]

After that, you can leave all the rest to me! :D [ I.e Please do not request poses or specific actions ]

Hokay? HOKAY! With all of that out of the way, let's get onto the dialog snippets! These are taken from various things I enjoy, as well as some of my own work. These quotes have been modified to gender neutral pronouns, to remove most proper nouns, and for brevity.

[ Some of these quotes have multiple speakers! That will be shown like this! "Speaker A" -- "Speaker B" ]

"Yeah, well, I'm a victim of circumstance" -- "... I thought you called it your pecker."

"Here, you look cold."

"You are so lucky I love you." -- "Damn right."

"You know the routine." -- "Yeah! WE do all the work, YOU get all the credit!"

"I want you with me, but... I'm scared." -- "Trust me. Trust me to take care of myself." -- "I trust you, it's the rest of the world I'm terrified of!"

"No breakfast?" -- "I did it yesterday-- bologna and beans, it's your turn." -- "No... It was eggs. I did eggs... over easy." -- "The hell you did! Bologna and beans, it's your turn!"

"I like the kind of person who can handle themselves... think on their feet."

"So you were ahead of me." -- "I don't know about ahead, but I've been behind you ever since you fried those mannequins."

"Don't make me say it out loud..." -- "... I can say it first, if that'll help."

"Nooooooope... five more minutes." -- "We were together all night." -- "Didn't count... I was sleepin'."

"Well, this is very serious" -- "IT IS!" -- "You, you destroyed a door." -- "Colonel, we're talking about a test on an armored vehicle, that will carry people into combat." -- "Right, but this door is property of--" -- "The shell barely penetrated the door." -- "okay, but now it's all bent out of shape. How are you gonna get it back on its hinges?" -- "I'LL BUY THE ARMY A NEW GODDAMN DOOR!"

"Sorry, I thought... I thought you were trying to buy something I'm not selling."

"I'm busy." -- "Too busy to look up?"

"You can't kill people just because you don't agree with them." -- "You see, that was the ONE point me and the doctors could never agree upon."

"Would you ever consider having a drink with an enlisted solider?" -- "Depends... does the enlisted soldier think I need one?" -- "What are they gonna do? Kick you out?"

"Thanks" -- "No problem, anytime."

"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up-- one day it's gonna happen to you. Someday someone is gonna ask you, who is it? And a face is gonna jump to the front of your mind, and it's gonna completely sandbag you... I can't wait to watch!"

[to a peacefully sleeping person ] -- "Good moring, Mx. ___, this is your wake-up call. Please move your ass."

"I say we run for it" -- "Running isn't a plan, runnin's what you do when a plan fails!"

"... Normal Illinois, is that on the map?" -- "Yes, Sergeant, it is." -- "... is it normal in Normal?" -- "... Uneventful, I think, is the word."

"Now-- how many brahmin does it take to make a stampede? Is it like... three or more? Is there a minimum speed?" -- "Wish a stampede up your ass."

"I don't mind being a secret of yours."

[Right after THE BIG FUCKING KISS] ".... let's not make it a year before the next one, okay?"

"If we were serious about money, we'd quit being hired hands--" -- "Handymen! We are han-dee-men." -- "Oh whatever! We'd quit this and go find some real money."

"Please... don't go where I can't follow."

"Alone is fine! I can do alone, it's worrying after them that's got me all wound up!" -- "Have you considered that's because alone is NOT FINE and you don't wanna do it anymore?" -- "---!!"

"This is not the first time you've been here." -- "We've been down this road before, that is correct." -- "Several times, in fact." -- "I hadn't been keeping count."

"And you must be ___, I've heard all about you." -- "I deny everything."

"First time I saw you? I thought to myself, that's the kind of person BRICK WALLS jump outta the way of." -- "Figured you'd be safer behind me rather than in front of me?" -- "Damn right."

"Just keep looking at that beautiful sky; that's the sky that'll be over our roof when we're done." -- "What if we don't finish the roof? Then we can look at the sky all the time."

"Yeah, well... maybe a friend is what I need right now."

"Next thing you know the Feds will be at our door; Sorry, time to move out, Eminent Domain." -- "Down honey, down."

"Even a heat-seeking missile can miss a target." -- "... you taped so many hot-plates to the test target you could fry an egg at 20 feet, and it STILL missed by a mile."

"My dear, my darling, love of my life...." -- "What do you want?"

"What I mean to say is... you make here a better place to be. For me. Easier. Does that make sense?"

"Calm down, you make it sound like a war." -- "What do you people have against being prepared?!"

"This is not just a report, it's a deadly weapon." -- "Sir, an M-16 is a deadly weapon. A report is just a pile of paper, unless you plan to inflict a lot of extremely vicious paper cuts."

"Stupid son of a bitch, knocked himself out cold..." -- "Cold my ass, he's dead."

"Y'know, in baseball, a guy who hits .400 is consider pretty damn great." -- "In baseball the losing team isn't killed by their opponents."

"Hey... I love you. Did I tell you that today?"

This post is going online at 8 PM, June 24th, 2021, US Pacific time. The askbox will open for requests until 6 PM, June 25th, 2021, US Pacific Time. Get yours in now!

Arting will begin at 9 AM tomorrow morning, see you then! :D

-Loor

[meichenxi]

Hi!! I'm a college student about to graduate and my dream is to teach English in China and I was wondering if you could somehow help me and give me some advice. I have been studying Chinese during my years at university (and I love your blog!), along with my physics degree. I don't know if any of this is relevant but my level of Mandarin is not very high (HSK3), I study in the UK and I'm planning to get a TEFL 120 hour certification in June. Is this a solid plan? Love your blog, Isa

Hiii! Sorry it took me so long to get to this, I have my final exams at the moment and am on semi-hiatus. First, what an amazing dream!! You'll have a wonderful time :D

SO in general having a degree not in English language and a TEFL certificate is most definitely enough to secure you a job, but at the moment it is a rather 'special period', as every job advert says, and so finding a job is a little trickier because of visa problems.

Basically, there are no work or study visas available at the moment for people from the UK. The only people who can get into China are those who the Chinese Embassy deems 'foreign experts' and therefore 'crucial to China's progress', and your company or school will have to provide something called a PU letter. This grants you the ability to actually apply for the work visa, though itself doesn't grant it. At the moment there aren't that many companies available who can offer that.

Because of this, I'd recommend going through a recruitment company. I do not necessarily mean a graduate scheme (the ones advertised as such are not very well paid and you don't have much control over where you go), but a recruitment company. You can find these on any general site if you google 'ESL jobs China'.

In terms of actual jobs - generally speaking there are three categories, private language schools, state schools, and international schools. International schools are by far the best in terms of packages, but they rarely take graduates without 3 years of teaching experience. The good news is that if you do find somebody who is looking for recent grads (if you go to a particularly prestigious university like Oxbridge, for instance), you might be able to teach Physics or Science rather than English language. International schools will also be the easiest to deal with in terms of communication and visa applications, but the competition is quite stiff, and most people who apply will be teachers in their home countries already.

State schools are another good option if you want 'normal' teaching hours, good holidays, and older children. The position I have next year is in a good state school that has two programs, the Canadian curriculum and the GaoKao (the Chinese university entrance exam). The main disadvantage is that you may be the only foreigner in the school, and communication might be difficult. I don't just mean with Chinese but in general: you will be not told things, you will be excluded, you will turn up to your class and find someone else teaching it and be told just to go back to your office. If you can be flexible and have an open mind, state schools are great, but they may be quite exhausting especially if this is your first time in China. You will also have to teach to exams, and the curriculum might be tight. For me personally though, I would much rather teach in a state school than the next option -

Which is private language schools. These are very good - sometimes. This is the main problem: the quality of the schools, the teaching, and the ethos all vary from school to school. You may be teaching very young children, and you may be teaching exclusively in the evening. The schools may be very supportive of creativity in the classroom, or you may be literally forced to teach the flashcards they give you. The plus about these schools is that they often have competitive relocation packages, are not too bothered about how experienced (or not) you are, and that there will be a community of other English speaking colleagues (natives and not) to help you integrate.

The reason I add this is that it's so, so important. It's very laudable and easy to wish for immersion and want to make Chinese friends - and you should!! - but living in another country without easy access to internet you are used to can be exhausting at times and even the staunchest believer in immersion is going to be stressed and tired and teary far from home. Having colleagues who want to improve their English can also be a good basis for a (somewhat awkward at first) friendship.

Some general tips: brush up on your English grammar. Seriously. Because the amount of teachers who have no idea and bluff their way through it is shocking and disrespects those who try very hard to make it a proper profession. Also having students ask you when you use the present perfect continuous and the present perfect simple and not knowing the answer is a very special kind of pain!! I'd recommend bringing a reputable grammar book with you, and using it when making your lesson plans.

Re Chinese: if you already have a little, your Chinese will improve so much when you're there!! Don't stress about it because China is a wonderful environment for learning - it's literally perfect, few people speak English and EVERYBODY wants to speak to you as many people are direct and very curious - but at the same time, the more you can learn, the easier it will be. Don't neglect your characters!! Learning useful menu characters and signs will be hugely helpful too. You won't need Chinese in your job really, but you definitely will in your daily life, so well done for learning and keep at it!!

The other thing I would say is: sort out your music and your social media and your banking before going to China. This includes a good VPN. You can't download apps on the google App Store, and to make the transition to the Chinese internet easier, I'd recommend getting a Weibo account, any music app, Baidu translate and maps and so on, and accustoming yourself to that before going.

Re where you are going and the package: you should have your flight paid, help with your visa, and transparency about quarantine procedures. You should also have accommodation or an accommodation allowance of between 2000-5000 (2000 is more than fine). Public or international schools may pay for your food during school-time as well. Re cities: prioritise what is important to you. If you want to save, bear in mind that China is extraordinarily cheap and that even in places like Shanghai, you can still save a lot if you live somewhat sensibly. To give you some context: I lived in Tianjin, a second-tier city, and I got 'pocket money' of 2000 every month (with accommodation and food paid), and I managed to save enough to do martial arts for a month at an academy after 5 months. And I was living well - going out about twice a week, taking taxis, eating out almost every evening (cheap food). So don't prioritise one position over another solely because of money, and also bear in mind kindergarten teachers may only be getting about 2000-3000 a month - so regardless of whether you earn 10,000 or 15,000, it's a) SIGNIFICANTLY enough to live very well and save very well too, and b) considerably more than many of your coworkers will be earning.

Also, different cities have different costs of living: 10,000 somewhere like Hangzhou will go considerably further than 16,000 in Shanghai. Another thing to bear in mind is the air quality, and the environment, and the access to green spaces. DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THIS. If this is important to you, go somewhere smaller or in the south with access to nature - I nearly went crazy living in such a big city with such poor air quality. The positions I had to choose between were one in Shanghai, better paid and at a better school, and a position in Zhuhai in a campus in the mountains, in a third-tier city by the sea. I know now how important green is to me, how much I prefer a more relaxed pace of life, and so I chose the latter.

Lastly, don't be intimidating and don't be afraid to ask questions about your job. Make sure that everything they say is in the contract, in both the English version and the Chinese version. This is important because only the Chinese version is legal, so if you have a friend, get them to check that the same stuff is in each bit of the contract. Communication might be difficult, but don't be afraid to be direct and press for answers, don't just accept what you're told. You might be messed around with a bit, so it's important to 'shop around' for positions - don't feel bad if you do so, and don't be afraid to turn things down that don't suit. Finally, don't feel terrified if you can't find information about a school online - a lot of stuff isn't on Google, and will also be better accessed via WeChat or mini programs. Not finding information about your school or city does not mean it doesn't exist!!

So be prepared for a wild ride - and enjoy! If you have any more questions about any of this, please feel free to ask at any time!

meichenxi out :P

[perfection-is-an-opinion]

D&D Session 1

-After a short rest we walk over to the big warehouse-

-IS, TB, and TJ climb the ladder-

TJ: "Does anyone have any rope?"

-3 people immediately say "No TB"

-They enter the building and find two bandits-

DM: "Are you going go kill them or incapacitate?"

Me breaking character: "No survivors, no witnesses."

IS: *gives me a strange look to which I just nod*

TB: "We're gonna incapacitate."

Me still not in character: *huffs*

-a little later-

DM: "Are you going to incapacitate them?"

Me breaking character once again: No suriv-

IS: "Stop it."

Me: *huffs and frowns immediately making IS laugh loudly*

-The DM eventually gets back to us outside-

DM: CL what are you gonna do?

CL: "I wanna break through the window using fire breathing because I am a god."

FO: "Can I roll to punch the Lizard?"

VS: "DM, is the front door unlocked?"

DM: "Yup sure is."

*we burst into laughter again*

*CL breaks through the window cause he's extra hitting two bandits. Killing one and barely hitting the other*

*FO throws a dagger at him and misses (not surprised)*

-IS kills someone using FO's dagger that missed-

VS: "I cast shatter."

Me breaking character: "Shatter all their bones."

IS breaking character: *opens his mouth to speak*

Me: "I have many issues." He left it at that.

-at some point in this building the DM says something about a fog being lifted and we could see clearly-

Me and TJ breaking character together: "I can see clearly now the rain is gone~"

IS breaking character: "That was creepy."

-After the battle they enter a room that has a dagger and a map-

DM: *describes the dagger* "It's a silver bla-"

FO: "Dibs."

DM: *continues describing it and the map on the table*

Me thinking to myself: "This has got to be cursed but I called dibs and it's mine an-"

DM: "The dagger is cursed."

Me: *nodding* "Yeah, I knew it but I don't care cause it's mine now."

VS: -decapitates an enemy to prove we beat them-

FO: "Can I keep an eyeball?

DM: *sighs heavily because there is no reason for me to have an eyeball* "K?"

FO: "Yessss."

-we leave and go back into town-

DM: Where are you guys gonna go?

TJ: "I'm going to the bar to get wasted."

VS: "I'm going to check out the jobs board"

FO: "I'm gonna stick with TJ to make sure he doesn't do anything stupid. I'm gonna babysit."

TJ at the same time: "I'm being babysat."

-after everyone gets back to the tavern we go to our rooms-

DM: FO, you are give a pair of [***********] boots. *he explains what they do and everyone is jealous cause they're op"

Me breaking character again: "I hope they match my outfit..."

[ambered-glazed-sheep]

Please do go on about Doomslayer and his morals. I'm legit fascinated by him since starting the let's play I'm watching and I'd love to hear your take on him (I know literally nothing about the Doom franchise other than lots of blood and violence against demons and also badass music)

You know, a year ago when my friends asked me 'hey do you wanna play minecraft' and i said 'yeah sure' i would have never thought i would one day have a minecraft sideblog where i get questions about the personality of the main character of a shooter fps game (of all things!) that is known for its incredible violence.

But here you go:

(prepare yourself this has gotten way longer than i thought oh god, and also it has nothing to do with hermits whatsoever. warnings for language and descriptions of violence? and i assume the readmore won’t be working the way i want it to)

Ok so, Doom!

First of all, i know nothing about the old games, and i’ve only seen a minimal amount of Doom Eternal Letsplays. Most of this is based on Doom (2016). 

Ok so we all start out thinking Doomguy! It’s the guy you play in Doom. The hand that hold the gun YOU are shooting demons with. And sure, you can go trough the whole game with that mindset, but that’s boring and we are overthinking fictional characters in this house.

ID software actually managed to give Doomguy/Doomslayer a TON of personality despite him never saying a word, barely any cutscenes to show what he does when you don’t control him (at least in Doom 2016), and not a lot of other characters to interact with despite enemy monsters.

The game just leaves you little hints and snippets and that’s what makes Doomslayer so exciting to think about. Just the right levels between ‘cryptid half-god who never shows emotion and is a player-insert’ and ‘this dude’s got an AGENDA. he has PLACES TO BE’. You are him as you play, but sometimes he makes decisions on his own. But personally, i could never find myself to disagree.

First, you got the intro sequence. 

You got a unknown voice telling you: 

“They are rage. Brutal, without mercy. But you. You will be worse. Rip and Tear, until it is done.”

First of all, YO. WOW. HOLY SHIT.

The scene immediately shifts to Doomslayer waking up. He’s naked, he’s chained down somewhere, theresa SHIT TON of scars littering his arms and hands. First thing HE does, on his own behalf, is ripping off the chains by flexing a little (literal iron chains!!!), smashing a zombies head against the sarcophagus he lays in and completely obliterating said head into a bit of blood (mind you, three seconds after he woke up from a thousands of years long coma!! but we only learn that later), and then promptly gets up, picks up a pistol, and now it’s your, the players turn. This takes like 8 seconds in total. This man means BUSINESS. That’s the first thing we learn.

Second thing that strikes me is the interactions with Samuel Hayden. 

Doomslayer is patient when a computer voice tells him the status of the base. He is patient as he looks at the screens to see what is going on. (a demonic invasion, thats what). But then dear Dr. Samuel Hayden calls. 

Dr. Hayden says “Hi, i’m the boss here, i’m sure we can work together in a way that benefits us both uwu”. Doomslayer immediately grabs the PC screen and pushes it aside. His gesture says, i’m done with this. im sick of this dude. this guy is full of shit. And he’s right! And that after barely hearing two sentences from Hayden!

So the second thing we learn is that he has no time for people trying to exploit him. He hears Hayden, he has a gut feeling that this dude is a little fishy, maybe he just plain doesnt like higher ups and heads of facilities. But we learn that he IS. NOT. going to listen to this man, and his body language makes that very clear without being actually violent against the person (he doesnt destroy the Screen either! just pushes it aside very annoyed. He isn’t mindlessly destroying property here.)

This continues. 

Hayden goes ‘hey maybe don’t destroy that energy source!’ in the few seconds you dont control him, Doomslayer listens. He hesitates. He considers. Then he destroys the thing anyways. Hayden keeps telling him to stop, but Doomslayer doesnt listen. He’s got his own mind!

This was mostly about Haydens Company, the UAC, harvesting hell energy, and hurting people in the process. 

There’s a scene where Doomslayer rides an elevator. Hayden, over the comms, tells him that everyone that has died in the demon attack was a nacessary sacrifice that will bring a new future or some shit like that. the camera pans down to show some poor sods corpse at those very words. Doomslayer cracks his knuckles. he is NOT HAPPY about that, so we know he doesnt like it when human lifes are sacrificed. He destroys the communicator, so he doesnt have to listen to Haydens voice telling him lies and trying to sway him anymore. 

(then he takes out his shotgun, the doors open, metal starts playing and the doom logo is shown, but that’s more about making the player feel epic than showing doomslayers personality,,)

Now i would like to talk about VEGA, the AI that controls the mars facility. 

VEGA occasionally talks to us/the Slayer. He is very straightforward, tells us what to do and why to do it, and is generally very polite. In the story, Doomslayer listens to Vega. 

Now why does he listen to VEGA but not Hayden? 

I think it’s because Hayden tries to get him to do things that just benefit him, and Hayden is very manipulative in his words (or tries to be lol), while Vega just says (if you destroy this thing, that door will open. I think Doomslayer appreciates it when people are honest to him.

And in the end, Doomslayer on his own decides to save a backup of VEGA. VEGA didn’t ask him to, Doomslayer did that on his own. It’s not relevant to his mission, he doesnt need VEGA to go to hell to close portals and whatnot. But he does save him. Why? I think it’s because he cares. Because he’s come to like VEGA. Because Vega didn’t try to manipulate him and screw him over. 

Next up is the Slayers Testament. 

These are a bunch of writings/recordings that you find scattered in the hell levels. (i highly recommend listening to them/reading them, they are metal as fuck and give me such an immense feeling of power bc they are talking about me, the doomslayer)

These testaments were written by demons. They were genuinely afraid of the slayer. 

Quote:

Unbreakable, incorruptible, unyielding, the Doom Slayer sought to end the dominion of the dark realm.

As said, i don’t think these are purely talking about his physical strength. They are talking about his... well, mentality. His Codex. They see him as an unstoppable force. He is incorruptible. Let that sink in. Man walks trough hordes of demons and at no point ever thinks ‘yeah maybe this is a bit much’ or ‘they just keep coming this is pointless’. No. He’s unyielding. (Can you tell how much i love the words in these testaments? It’s just got such a nice ring to it.)

In battle, the Doomslayer is BRUTAL. He tears apart demons, rips their eyes out, all that. He stomps on heads like they’re water balloons and isn’t fazed at all. Nothing stops this man. (except players like me who fall off the map 5 consecutive times, but lets just imagine the doomslayer is actually like he would be if someone played the game perfectly. player skill shouldn’t be considered in my headcanons jahdjhgd) One could even argue he has fun at this, because there are some animations like ripping off a zombies arm and beating the Zombie with it, or feeding a demon it’s own heart.

I feel like that says a lot about his personality as well!

He doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t doubt himself. He doesn’t question his cause! He fights to get rid of the demons, not just the ones in his way, but every. demon. He will go out of his way to kill more demons. You could either take this as him having fun, or him following his own moral codex to get rid of every demon, or him being a not-quite-human war machine, or wanting to protect humanity from them. 

I would say it’s a healthy mix of all that :D

In older games, there was this whole backstory snippet of him returning to earth, finding that the demons had invaded his planet but also killed his pet rabbit (Daisy), and he then goes onto a 2-game long revenge trip.Take that as you will.

The last thing i would like to mention is this post.

Please watch the video. Doomguy walks trough the rows of random human guards. This is the walk of a man who doesn’t owe them SHIT. Yes, he wants to save humanity. Yes, he cares. But he also knows who he is. He knows what he did, and what he will do. He doesn’t have to justify himself in front of these shady scientists and jerky guards.THEY owe HIM, in fact. This video emits the sheer CONFIDENCE of someone who has walked trough hell multiple times and knows none of these people could even touch him. Yes, he would never kill them. He would not harm humans. But he doesn’t care about making them uncomfortable with his presence, either. He doesnt ask for permission.

(i think by now i am using the exact same words they did in that post. really, its worth the read. i think there’s a lot of repeated things between this post and that post by now but i encourage you to watch that video. its worth it.)

Also, the impact he has on the people in this room! they trip. they walk backwards. they go quiet, stutter. they are intimidated. They know he’s technically here to help and save them, but now, standing in front of them.... just wow. it really puts things into perspective. it tells the player that all the demons that he’s killed, all that the doomslayer has done... its noted. it has an impact. 

I’m not really sure where i’m going with this anymore, but watching those NPCs react to the slayers presence just adds so much more to his character. it tells us how people see him, and boy.... do they see him. 

i think it also ties a lot into how the player is made feel, controlling doomguy. all these head stomping and limp tearing animations, the guns, people being scared, watching doomslayer destroy important equipment from first pirson or pushing open doors or whatever... it just gives me such an immense feeling of power! i can’t even describe it. (...it also has nothing to do anymore with the original question but holy shit did i love playing doom for the sheer atmosphere of it. despite me being horrible at playing.)

(at the end of this i’m realizing that all of this never addressed if doomslayer is happy and content murdering demons, or if he just wants his peace and quiet but can’t help himself every time he sees a demon. i would propose to leave that up to headcanons. mine is a mix of both but in a way that makes it not angsty. like he loves to have his calm moments, but is just as happy to rip some demon’s spine out. probably gets a little itchy and impatient if he hasn’t fought in a while.)

also if you’re interested in game design and way more professional people talking about why doom 2016 is great i reccomend this documentary

...anyways it’s past 1am and this has gotten way out of hand but

tl;dr: the doomslayer is metal as fuck, he has a lot of agenda he is following, and i love him so much

[mittensmorgul]

So. The lamp. As in, a sexy lamp. Like that one test. And wouldn't that just be a bibro early seasons' manly macho man ideal of heterostraight Dean (so, like, Chuck's), getting "intimate" with a disposable female eyecandy. But then he just, waves it goodbye. Good riddance, lamp. I have stuff to do, places to tapdance on. This was obviously supposed to be a crack ask but it sorta kinda almost holds water?? I'm???

Lol... but seriously... I had this exact thought... but like... haven’t said it out loud because, first off, was that lamp sexy? It wasn’t this lamp:

but it WAS dancing... Dean made it sexy by his interaction with it, I guess we could say.

Supernatural has a long-standing cracky history of Lamp Abuse, and a lot of folks immediately picked it up in that respect. I mean, I have a tag for this going back to May 2015:

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/tagged/this%20is%20a%20lamp%20abuse%20awareness%20blog/chrono

So I didn’t mention the Sexy Lamp Test, because heck... SPN also has a long history of Female Character Issues, and making the comparison to actual abused lamps, even in a joking way, just struck me as... an uncomfortable subject... An Actual Lamp got treated with respect before some of the female characters SPN has treated horrifically. And I don’t think that’s the message this scene was attempting to convey.

For reference purposes, as I’m typing this, I’ve got 4.16 on in the background, and Alistair is singing Dancing Cheek to Cheek, and I’m feeling really grateful they didn’t pick THAT song for Dean’s dream sequence... okay moving on from that >.>

For people who don’t know what we’re talking about, please read the Fanlore page on what is meant by the Sexy Lamp Test:

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Sexy_Lamp_Test

It’s similar to the Bechdel-Wallace test (that at least two named female character have a conversation that isn’t about a man), but again, both of these “tests” are also specifically regarding the representation of women in media. When fandom also began ascribing meaning to Dean’s dance with the lamp, suggesting the lamp he actaully wanted to dance with was Cas... I began to rethink this. Or at least to rethink how I could discuss this.

Andrew Dabb really likes using one scene to say or suggest multiple things. The more references or parallels he can pack into a single thing, the happier he is. I mean, he brought us Jack, after all, who has served as a narrative mirror focal point for no less than six other characters. It’s... his favorite thing, I think. :’D

So, bearing that in mind, and understanding that I am NOT suggesting that any of those other interpretations are wrong, because I completely agree with them, too, and argue that all of these interpretations can be applied to the same scene at the same time here without conflicting, and that this is legitimately a valid interpretation of Dean’s Lamp Dance as well, please have a loose definition of the Sexy Lamp Test:

If you can take out a female character and replace her with a sexy lamp without changing anything else about the story, then you’ve failed.

I don’t know if there’s a Queer Content Sexy Lamp Test, but considering this phenomenon of sequestering queer content to easy to edit out quarantine zones, the fact that major media outlets are literally doing the sexy lamp to LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, etc, and literally leaving them on the cutting room floor entirely... well... that is something I find even more disturbing than the Sexy Lamp.  But that’s a conversation for another post, and for someone with a more direct knowledge of this phenomenon in media in general. I’m just here to talk about one dude tap dancing with a lamp in an anesthesia-induced dream sequence, not the whole of the media industry...

The dance sequence was lampshaded (lol... I love discussing this because I get to be punny without actually even making a pun... this is literally what they did) Dean’s dance with his lamp partner as romantic, by tying it directly to his observation of and comments on Bess and Garth’s explicitly romantically coded dance at the end of the episode.

Is this a commentary on Dean’s past relationships? He sure has had a lot of encounters with women who could’ve just as easily been replaced by sexy lamps. Characters we don’t even have names for, sometimes, or whose only lines were directly about flirtation or innuendo, or even as the unwitting objects of Dean’s innuendo. And while the show may have been making a commentary about that, I don’t think that was the main intent of him dancing with a lamp, directly connected with a sense of longing for a real dance partner (irrespective of gender... a lamp is inanimate, and even in this context serves as a stand-in for a person. Technically, in this test, the person is a female character, but lamps-- at least in English-- don’t have an inherent gender).

It’s also been a while since Dean’s “danced with a lamp” in that respect. He’s “kissed that dance goodbye” a while ago. And had even been struggling with it going back as far as s9, you know? He wants a relationship, but something truly meaningful, and not just occasional dances with random lamps.

They tied this to Garth and Bess, who found something truly special together. They found a way to live their best lives, and they’re both happy together. They’re... metaphorically on top of the world, like Dean dancing on the map table at the end of his scene. All Dean needs is a real dance partner who’s willing to learn the steps with him. Much as he might know who he’d like that to be, Dean himself still doesn’t know if that partner is willing to dance with him...

(I’m talking about Cas... obviously... the guy who was literally introduced to the narrative in a non-human form of screeching sound and light that shattered glass and had Dean diving for cover and hiding his face, whose original form is a “wavelength of celestial intent.” Who’s since rejected that Celestial Intent and truly come to identify with Humanity when confronted by the Divine. Who’s now had an entire decade-plus-long character arc of un-lamp-ifying himself in the story, in every possible interpretation of that phrase, metaphorical and literal.)

Dean’s moved beyond wanting to just dance with passing lamps. But he still isn’t sure the dance partner he’s longing for even wants to learn how to dance, you know? But this episode accomplished one thing in that regard. Dean actively knows what he wants. We now have to wait and see if he works up the nerve to ask for it...

[myrmidryad]

hi, would you feel comfortable talking a bit about you writing process? I know you have many (pretty meaty) fics, but I'm familiar w/your Shadow Work story and was just So Impressed by how neatly plotted every second was. everything felt totally necessary and the character beats were deeply emotional but still impacted the plot. Just hoping to get a peek into your process/or any advice on plotting/writing a comprehensive story like that because! It really blew me away and I would love to learn!

inasmuch as I have a process, sure! and thank you! :D

I put it under a cut because it got more behind the scenesy than I expected, whoops. I’m just the normal level of narcissistic when it comes to my own writing, right?

edit: I tried to put it under a cut, and that....did not work. cheers, tumblr, this is one of several reasons why I never post anything. 🙄

Shadow Work is kind of an interesting one because I started it with the idea of it being quite short, and while usually my process is ‘sit down, write the whole thing in chronological order, done’, Shadow Work is one of the only fics where it went in a completely different direction which ended up not working, so I pulled back to an earlier point and did it differently. originally, the timeline was shorter, Alex called his mom at one point, the Air Force purchase of Foster Ranch for a base was a Project Shepherd thing where Max, Isobel, and Noah were being kept. Michael and Alex found the Project Shepherd bunker and caught Jesse and Jesse was the one who revealed the Rosa coverup. Alex tricked him into believing he bought the xenophobia and let Jesse take them both to the base before Michael used his powers to break free. there was a firefight and I think Jesse was killed in the crossfire. no Maria at all, far more military personnel, and it didn’t work because there hadn’t been enough time for the relationship between Michael and Alex to develop and there hadn’t been enough time for the world to feel as fleshed out as it ended up being in the final fic.

so process wise, the way it developed was with me needing it all to make more sense. not even emotionally, just in terms of real-world impact. it didn’t make sense for a Project Shepherd base to be on the Foster Ranch land, because that had been an official Air Force acquisition, and Project Shepherd is a secret. it didn’t make sense for Alex to be so easy with confronting Jesse. it definitely didn’t make sense for Jesse to trust Alex was on his side after only one manipulative conversation when he’d spent the majority of Alex’s life thinking he was inferior because of his sexuality. so everything needed to be reworked to make actual sense. no plot holes, no out of character decisions by anyone. Noah had to die very quickly, because Michael had to be free to find Alex and rescue Max and Isobel. if Alex was going to be so confident in Michael, he needed more time to develop that bond.

in practical terms, for any fic that has a Plot, I use Evernote to keep track of everything.

for me that just meant keeping track of exactly what was happening and when. I also made a thing to help me decide how the hell haunts worked, so when Alex referenced the classification system I could keep it consistent.

but yeah, keeping track of things, and editing as I go is kind of the key. originally there wasn’t a Friday at all (as in, the events of that day didn’t exist), but I wanted Alex and Michael to have more time just stewing together, so I made up some shit for them to do. all things that developed the relationship they were building, and developed the world too. they could’ve spent the whole day indoors on their laptops, but it made more sense for the story for them to go out and show off what the world looks like through their different perceptions.

with a fic this long, I noticed multiple mistakes in continuity as I went, and had to keep going back to fix things. I added in the part where Michael and Alex went to get spare clothes for Max, Isobel, and Noah, because I’d just gotten to their rescue and decampment to Kyle’s and realised, oh fuck, they have nothing but the pyjamas they were abducted in to wear, and they’ve been wearing those for about two weeks now so they must be disgusting. a tragedy occurred when Michael took Alex to the pod cave and I wrote a beautiful description of the way the pods looked to him...only to realise as I finished it that I’d written the pods being snatched as well, so there was nothing for Alex to look at. 😂

to get the emotional beats...I’m not sure, it just sort of happens. it might help that I picture each scene as if I was watching it, like it was happening on the show itself. so I imagine exactly how the actors would deliver the lines, what their body language would be like, where they are in relation to everything around them, etc. I think it helps me keep track of the physicality of the scenes. for anything with a real location, like Roswell, I use Google Maps a lot. even if the town as they portray it on the show isn’t what it looks like irl, it’s very handy for describing things like residences and deciding how long a drive from one location to another would take. I definitely went on real estate listings for actual Roswell to see what the houses were like in the neighbourhoods I’d semi-arbitrarily decided the Manes and DeLuca houses were in. interiors, exteriors, street layouts, everything. the lane out the back of the Manes back yard was based off what I was seeing on Google Maps.

oh actually for emotional beats, having a solid handle on what the characters are like and what all their issues are is key, and for that I highly recommend reading meta about the world and those characters. the RNM fandom has some absolutely killer meta, particularly character meta, and it’s really helped me nail down what motivates the characters, reasons for why they act the way they do, and giving extra resources and insight into what life is functionally like for a real disabled vet, or someone whose mother is suffering with undiagnosed early-onset dementia, etc etc.

I hope this was helpful, or at least interesting!