#also excuse to talk about my ocs on here lol i'm forcing u all to perceive them now

[acealistair]

the more time passes the more i'm losing my mind over this can someone please tell me what they think is going on

full context under the cut

His name is Fix, and he's a drow/pallid elven (those two are the same thing in this world) tiefling. This is unusual; most tieflings are from human ancestry. My character Finch is a high elven tiefling and thought she was the only elven tiefling ever until she met Fix. However, she doesn't know enough about the outside world to have raised a stink over it, she pretty much thought, "Huh, guess I was wrong and there are more elven tieflings out there" and moved on.

It's not immediately evident that he is a pallid elf bc his tiefling features gave him pitch black skin as opposed to pale white/gray.

The implication is that he ran away from pallid elf society (a culture the surface world knows little to nothing about) and was potentially someone important from there. I was thinking he's royalty but that doesn't explain wtf just happened.

Finch figured things out from her own experiences as an elven tiefling and decided to not pry bc she could empathize with what he was going through (rare occurrence for her lol!). He also seemed really reluctant to talk about it, something Finch also related to. (She opened up to him about her secret as a show of "I really truly think of you as a friend and trust you" with the tacit expectation that perhaps he'd open up to her as well but then THIS happened ahahaha but that's not what this post is about 🤪)

Fix is (WAS) a student at the university studying artificing. He was working on a thesis that was essentially him trying to create the first ever car using elemental magic. The party has known him for like 8 months in-game; he and Finch bonded over their shared interest in tinkering and he's been teaching her some artificer stuff (enough for her to have half-proficiency in tinker's tools and the Artificer Initiate feat).

He is potentially the chillest NPC we have ever met, seemed nigh-unflappable except for when he got flustered around Finch bc he liked her, and then when Finch told him about her secret (at which he just acted awkward and said he had to go, which was exactly what he did other times when presented with an opportunity to ask Finch out lmao so while she was a little hurt she was very much under the impression she'd. y'know. see him again).

He 100% did NOT know Finch was the princess, as he didn't leave until she told him and was very surprised. I thought I was dropping hints left and right; for instance when the party was away from the city for a few weeks, Finch was worried her family might try something fucky there in an attempt to find her (like perhaps interrogating her friends), so she sent Fix a message ominously saying that if he caught wind of the Empire doing anything, gtfo of the city. He was like "damn that does sound ominous but okay got it 👍" no questions asked. (The irony of this does not escape me lmao)

He fully dropped EVERYTHING to leave. Packed up his shit, cleared out his workspace at the college, etc. Didn't tell anyone, of course. Implied he didn't necessarily un-enroll from the college as his professor didn't know he was gone-gone. But he did leave a note at his place saying vaguely that he was sorry he couldn't tell Finch what was going on and that it "isn't her fault" (???).

Apparently he only left the note bc two of our party members followed him after he left the bar since they knew Finch told him the secret and confronted him. They obvs didn't get out of him exactly what was going on but he made it clear he was leaving (hadn't decided where he was going though), they tried to convince him otherwise, and when he didn't relent they made him promise not to tell anyone Finch's secret (under Zone of Truth) and also at least consider leaving a note for her. He did mention during this that he "left [pallid elf society] to get away from his family."

One of the other players DOES know what's going on with Fix (one of their other characters in a side-campaign within the same world is a pallid elf that knows who he is) and said they don't know if he will ever come back bc the city is "now a hot bed for him." (LIKE WHAT???)

In a little wrap-up scene from the DM we as players (not characters) got to "see" Fix riding away on a boat, and a little bell chimed (implied to be when Finch found his note). He looked at it, said "A princess? Seriously?" and shook his head. (My takeaway from this is he specifically said "a" rather than "the" so it's not necessarily that she is "the high elven princess" but rather is just royalty in general that's an issue, maybe?)

As mentioned in the tags earlier, apparently this was always going to be the outcome of Fix learning this secret, the only variable being, in the DM's words, "how smoothly he made his exit." (This was very much not smooth, for reference lol; he rolled a nat 1 on perception while leaving the bar which is why the party members were able to follow him and confront him at all.) So, like, wild to me that he would've still left if he and Finch had been in a relationship. Dodged a bullet there, clearly 😂

My question is, what could possibly be going on that learning this information made him flee the city? She's been a princess the whole damn time, so any danger he might've been in because of that was the same as it always has been, unless his knowledge somehow increases it (which, like, sure it does in the sense of "if Finch's family decides to interrogate people she knows" but I feel like that's not significant enough to warrant this; he seemed fine to stick through things when she was acting weird and shady and pretty much explicitly told him that he should watch out for the high elves even before he knew).

It has been confirmed that there's someone in the city that is giving Finch's family information on her whereabouts, but it couldn't be Fix because he literally didn't know she was the princess until she told him just now. Or he did an incredible job of faking the surprise, but that doesn't explain why he just LEFT. Him also being royalty likewise doesn't explain that either. Brooke has been half-joking that he's a "sleeper agent" which like. I don't want to think is true but honestly I can't rule it out. 😂 But he did swear under Zone of Truth that he wouldn't tell Finch's secret to anyone.

little D&D update: yesterday Finch told her potential love interest the truth about her being the high elven princess and he fucking SKIPPED TOWN