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itstheelvenjedi · 10 months ago

Note

~couple questions~ for when you need an excuse to talk about your characters/ship 😽

8, 10, 16, 19, 22 and 25

Pick your fav pairings with your tav.

These are from the [~Couple Questions~: For When You need An Excuse to Talk About your Characters/Ship] list for anyone who either wants the list or wants to send some more!

Sorry this one took a while @csphire, I too got a little carried away and wrote probably way more than I was supposed to bwahahaha But I hope you enjoy! 😉 Obligatory disclaimer that there's some very horny/suggestive things in some of these answers, and also there WILL be spoilers for the plot of the game so like. Do not read if you're someone who hates spoilers and hasn't played through the whole game yet etc etc.

Also, I'm playing loosey-goosey with the lore in some respects because I'm here to have a good time, not a 100% canon compliant time. If you don't like that then just stay off my posts for the sake of both our sanities, I beg of you 🙏Rai is a polyamorous bisexual disaster and has a closed polycule with Karlach, Wyll and Dammon (tho I'm going on ~vibes~ and Wyll and Dammon aren't romantically/sexually involved bc I just didn't get that vibe from them while writing. It's a "ah yes, my girlfriends and their cool boyfriend : )" situation from both sides for the guys. They're purely platonic but they both love their girls a whole lot.) And before someone says it, no I don't care that it's not canon in-game. I don't need it to be canon in-game to do it anyway and I will die on this hill so don't try me /hj

commence the spoilers/horniness/etc under the cut! last chance to click away if you don't want to see that! XD (oh also trigger warning for mentions of child abuse/mistreatment, and...idk how best to word it other than discussions of being trained as a child soldier and references to past abuse and trauma. I've tried to blanket cover with trigger tags but ask if you'd like me to add any others I've missed!)

What do they find physically sexiest about each other? Going with Rai and Wyll for this one bc I think they have the best answers! ☺️

Rai: The ✨horns✨. Listen. I get why he's upset about them at first. I do. I totally get it. But come ooooonnnnn!! You CANNOT tell me those babies are anything except sexy as FUCK to tieflings. They're fucking beautiful horns, and I like to think Rai's a big factor in Wyll learning to "live with" his horns and maybe eventually like them. Just a little bit. She loves his horns and she'll use any excuse in the book to get her hands all over them. At first she was offering to help him with the horn care because he really had no clue & asked her & Karlach for help (tho Karlach wasn't touchable at the time so Rai had to step up for the physical "here like this" demonstration and that's prolly where it started lol) then it became a little intimacy habit between them, he doesn't need her help anymore but he's not going to say "no" if she asks/offers, ya know? :3 (honourable mention to the time drunk Wyll at the Grove party complained very loudly about having "bumps and stuff where they absolutely should not be" because Rai's only reaction to that was "OOH~ 👀💖" hahaha)

Wyll: This might sound like a weird one, but probably her tail? Rai's very tail-expressive, if she doesn't force it to keep still by wrapping it around her own leg (or someone else *wink wink*) then it's ALWAYS moving around or giving away her emotions in some way! It started out innocent enough in that his eyes were automatically drawn to it because it moves around so much. Even despite growing up in Baldur's Gate for some time and thus being around a fair few tieflings (from my limited understanding of the lore and stuff thus far, don't lynch me hardcore fans, I've never played tabletop 5E or the other baldur's gate games lmao) he'd never met a tiefling that moved their tail so much until he met Rai. But now he can't help but stare when he thinks she isn't looking (she totally knows and does things with it on purpose sometimes just to tease him because she knows Wyll is staring. Rai and Karlach have a running (playfully ofc) bet going about how long it's going to take Wyll to figure out that she knows he stares, he hasn't figured it out just yet 😉 lol) Honourable mention for her eyes bc he thinks they're very pretty uwu and not at all for smutty eye-contact reasons cough I mean what

What was their last big fight? What did they learn from it? You get a two-for-one with this one bc the two fights are interconnected (pov: one half of your polycule gets into a pretty major lovers' tiff and the other half gets dragged into it as collateral damage anyway. Sorry boys lol )

Both these fights are also the focal plot beats for a Hurt/Comfort oneshot, but alas, I can't get away with being too vague with this or the reasons why it was a fight kinda don't match up with the "what they learned from it" in the 2nd part of the question, so just act surprised a while from now when I post the fic, ok? XD(I've got all the dialogues and whatnot plotted out now, just gotta convert it to written prose 🫶 ) This one ran away with me and got REALLY long, sorry (or you're welcome, I guess? lol)

Rai and Karlach: disclaimer: I know in-game it all kinda happens in the same convo but for some ~creative liberty~ (because I love me some good ol' Hurt/Comfort angst) I chopped the convo in half with the first bit happening before the fight (bc something Karlach says in the heat of the moment kicks it all off) and the latter half of Karlach realizing she does still want to live and is upset that she's still dying happening a couple days later, after the spat is resolved.

Karlach technically starts it after she hits out when they've killed Gortash but I wanna be clear when I say both of them are at fault for it. This is not only their biggest fight but also a powder-keg type of situation where things built up over time till they both exploded at eachother for different reasons, see below :

Karlach's very stubborn about not wanting to go back to Avernus at first - even into Act 3. Wyll and Rai ofc offer to go with her, but initially that doesn't help Karlach feel better. The worst thing she could possibly think of is putting two of the people she loves more than anything through the nightmare that is the Blood War. So when Rai keeps bringing it up and keeps pushing her about it, she snaps. Listen, I love Karlach a LOT and I think she means well, genuinely, and would never hurt her partner's feelings on purpose/maliciously. But she's a Yeller when she gets mad - and with Rai that is a BAD kind of mad to be. We see this in-game especially if you have her with you when you run into Gortash, and her heartbreaking meltdown after you kill him.

Logically, Rai knows the autonomy of getting to make that decision - to choose her freedom even if it means that it comes with death as an unwanted consequence - is important to Karlach, and if she was thinking logically at the time she would of course want to respect that. In theory. In practise however, it turned out "just sit there and watch me die" was not a line Rai was willing to draw. She gets pushy about Dammon's suggestion that they should take Karlach back to Avernus to stabilize her Engine, even when Karlach insists she's made her mind up and doesn't want to talk about it anymore. Rai keeps bringing it up over and over again, and insisting that she and Wyll would both go with her if it'd make it less scary for her, and just refuses to take "no" for an answer etc etc

By the time they kill Gortash and Karlach has her little meltdown she's just had enough of Rai throwing the suggestion into what feels like damn-near every conversation they've had since Dammon broke the news to them in Last Light. So she loses her temper and starts shouting before Rai can say it again.

And the thing about Rai is…she's emotionally reactionary. Whatever energy you give her, she'll bounce right back to you, she can't help it and hasn't quite figured out how to stop doing it at that point in time (though she does get better at it in the future!). If you keep your voice calm and level, she might growl and snap her teeth or smack her tail on something a little bit but eventually she'll match your energy and chill out to just talk about things. But if you yell and scream and shout and call her names? She's gonna yell, scream, and call you names back.

And that's exactly what happens. It's a huge miscommunication/misunderstanding between both of them. Karlach makes assumptions about Rai's past despite the fact that unlike Wyll and Dammon, she'd never really asked Rai about her childhood in Elturel or anything like that (again, I'll stress that I don't think this was done with deliberate malice, but I feel like being a little bit selfish is a realistic character flaw for Karlach to have. She's been through a lot and she gets tunnel-visioned on solving her own problems and when you pair that with Rai's brand of "too busy trying to fix everybody else to fix myself" trauma response and it's just an unfortunate combination. Rai never brought her own trauma up, and Karlach never thought to ask) So as a result, she thinks Rai "got lucky" not being in Elturel when it fell and that as a result, Rai is naïve and doesn't know "how bad" Avernus really was. Meanwhile, while she's certainly not as well-acquainted with it as Karlach and Dammon, Rai's not as ignorant as Karlach thinks. Her Mother Superior was a necromancy wizard, and one of Zariel's goons. The temple where Rai was "taken in" and raised was really just a front for training up either spellcasters or sword-fighters (depending on an individual's aptitude and uhh, the way they figured out where to funnel them was to use them as magical target practise until they either threw a spell back at their "tutors" or the staff agreed that it had been long enough and "they're too slow/useless at magic so idk just give them a sword I guess", basically - most of Rai's scars come from the early years where she was used as every other "student"'s magical punching bag, the rest are from Avarice's rituals, except for the one on the end of her tail which she got when Elturel came back and Rai didn't know the tieflings had been exiled so went back to try and look for Dammon, Rolan, Cal and Lia and ended up being attacked and driven off instead) to be ultimately sent to Avernus for Zariel to toss into the Blood War. She's been the unwilling participant in far too many necromancy rituals and while I haven't quite hammered out the full details of this yet, they were definitely not nice and she's definitely ended up looking some brand of devil or other in the eye before, during said rituals. I'm very much going for the angle of if Rai hadn't been assumed dead and left where she'd run off into the woods and she HAD been in Elturel when it went down? She'd have been just as fucked as Karlach was with Gortash. Straight to the Blood War with her, she would've been Infernal Engine prototype 2.0 and she and Karlach would've met fighting in the Blood War. Karlach doesn't know any of this, and thus makes a flippant off-hand comment that rubs the salt right into the open wound that is Rai's survivor's guilt without fully realising she's done it. Instead of staying to talk it out, Rai gets even angrier and storms off despite poor Wyll's best attempts to try and get between them and calm them down.

Dammon and Karlach: After Rai storms off, she finds herself going straight to Forge of the Nine. It's not a surprise really. She's known Dammon the longest and because Rai already felt bad that Wyll was in-between her and Karlach during their fight (they were having a screaming match in the middle of camp, it wasn't exactly quiet, or pretty D: ) she didn't want to make it worse for him by forcing him to pick a side, so Rai made the choice for Wyll and went to Dammon. Rai's so upset at first that Dammon's terrified Karlach's engine has exploded and Rai's here to tell him she's dead. When he finally calms her down enough for Rai to tell him what actually happened, he…doesn't feel that much better. He's too worried about Rai to go marching back to camp and confront Karlach himself, especially when she asks him "can I stay here tonight? I don't want to go back just yet". But he does stew (I like to think Dammon isn't one to get angry often. And even when he does he's not loud and shouty about it. It's more a broody, quiet, "give you the silent treatment" type of thing)

Karlach's the one, after she's calmed down, who ends up checking Dammon's place when the rest of the party split up the next morning to go looking for Rai after they realize she's still gone. Rai sleeps through Karlach's knocking (she had a hard night, did a lot of yelling/screaming and crying, ya girl passed tf out once Dammon wrangled her into a bath & then bed to sleep it off ;-; ) but Dammon doesn't. He tries to be patient with Karlach but when she starts posturing and growling and snapping at him, Dammon loses his temper right back. Again, he's not a Scream And Shout kind of angry but he is a "Do not raise your fucking voice at me!" kind of angry. It's a side of him that Karlach hasn't seen before and it stuns her so much that it shuts her right up, but Dammon keeps going. He ends up reading Karlach a bit of a riot act about how much, exactly, she'd hurt Rai's feelings because Rai was probably never going to admit it to Karlach herself and it gives Karlach some serious cause for self-reflection. Dammon and Karlach's fight only gets broken up when their back-and-forth finally gets through Rai's Sleepiness and she wakes up and stumbles down the stairs to find them mid-argument. Karlach feels so guilty when she locks eyes with Rai over Dammon's shoulder that she apologises on the spot, which leads to Rai apologising too and they work it out with a little bit of mutual encouragement from Dammon <3

As for what they learned from it: Rai defo gets the longest list but I'll do all 3 of them again bc why the hell not lol

Rai definitely learns to not let her emotions make her careless/less aware of her partners' feelings. As an orphan who was treated more like a tool/weapon by the main parental figure in her life (part of the reason, like Astarion and Karlach, that Astarion and Rai are besties. Cazador treated Astarion like a possession, Avarice raised Rai as a weapon and they're kindred spirits of sorts as a result despite Astarion complaining about Rai being "too nice" XD) for most of her formative years, Rai's emotional maturity very much comes from her stumbling face-first into the lessons/epiphanies herself lol

So she learns to be a bit less "keep my shit to myself but expect everyone to let me deal with their shit" and take up a bit more space/be a bit more communicative about her own trauma. "I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you" and "Avernus fucking sucks and they're all haunted by it in some way or another" are the two overarching themes for Rai and her polycule 💖

She also learns to be a bit less impulsive. She ran off because she didn't want to force Wyll to "pick a side", but ended up doing exactly that to BOTH the boys, because she ran off first without thinking it through logically.

Karlach has a little "oh, shit" moment when Dammon sets her straight and she realizes that she never actually asked Rai anything about her time in Elturel or what it was like for her/why she danced around the subject. She just…made assumptions and didn't fact check or think that maybe her assumptions could've been wrong.

For my "version" of the story the snowball effect from this fight culminates in Karlach ultimately deciding that she doesn't want to die. She wants to LIVE. So when they get to the dock at the very end and Rai and Wyll tell her "we won't make the decision for you, but whatever you choose, we're with you". And she chooses Avernus in the end, because even though she's fucking terrified, the fact that after everything they've all been through with something from Avernus dogging their every effort to get away from it, both Rai and Wyll are still willing to go back too. For her. And if they can do it for her, then she can do it for them, and maybe buy Dammon enough time to figure out how to fix her heart for good. (I'm not crying you're crying /lh)

And she also learns that while she has a right to make her own decisions, she cannot presume to make those same decisions for anyone else in the polycule just because she thinks she's protecting them by doing it. She can make those decisions for herself, but she has to let them make theirs sometimes too, even if they're not the decision Karlach wanted them to make.

(honourable/slightly joke-y mention: "Don't piss off Dammon. He's scarier than any Raging barbarian when he's angry" lol)

Bonus Dammon, bc I love him and he's kinda a package deal with Rai /jk. Who gets to wrestle a little bit with guilt (it was his suggestion that snowballed into making his girls fight, after all ;-; ), the guilt from this fight is the straw that broke the camel's back in a biiiiiig pile of guilt he's been carrying around since Rai "disappeared" and he just believed Avarice when she said she was dead and never thought to try looking for her etc. He has to learn to make peace with it, before it starts eating him alive, sort of deal. ;3; Also feel like he gets a bit more comfortable with making his voice heard despite his general introverted nature. If he hadn't been a bit firmer with Karlach she might not have stayed quiet long enough to listen and the spat might've been a lot more drawn out than it ended up being so he gets a gold star for that hahaha

How do they react when the other is upset? How do they try to help?

Sorta-kinda talked about this one in question 10 with Rai and Dammon and Rai and Wyll so I'll do Rai and Karlach for this one! :3

I'd say it depends? Unlike Dammon who just gets angry but not necessarily violent, Rai and Karlach both have a tendency to get aggresisve/violent when the other one is hurt/upset. If its a specific person whose made them upset (and you know. it's not someone they already know/just a misunderstanding between friends) they will start threatening and even actually hurt the person responsible if they can get their hands on them. Be careful with upsetting the other one because you will have a homicidal tiefling on your ass and when she catches you she will rip you in half. Trust me on that one. If Wyll and/or Dammon can't talk her down.

When Raphael starts bothering Rai during the course of the game plot, Karlach has absolutely threatened to rip his face off if he dares lay a finger on Rai. This may or may not become foreshadowing, haven't written/planned anything that far ahead just yet so we'll see when/if I get there hahaha. If its just a general "someTHING happened and I am upset" the default is definitely cuddles. They're both absolute cuddle fiends, esp after Karlach's touchable again. If they're not busy adventuring or helping with camp chores they are huddled on a bedroll snuggling, but this is doubly true when one of them is upset because cuddle piles fix everything. "No you may not bother her until she decides she's done, unless you want IN the cuddle pile too then go ahead". You get the idea lolol

What values do they not share? How do they reconcile those differences?

Going with Rai and Dammon for this one bc they're the first ones that came to mind when I looked at this question!

Rai's definitely a warrior/soldier at heart. Fighting comes naturally to her, whether Dammon likes it or not (and assuming that she'd had a "normal" childhood and not been scooped up by Avarice, this would still be true. Just instead she would've probably ended up a Hellrider instead of an Acolyte). It doesn't mean that he's not going to worry, or freak out, when she charges into something dangerous. Especially because Dammon is the opposite. As I said earlier, I think he can fight, he just chooses not to because he doesn't like it.

From Rai's end, it works perfectly fine. She's never expecting Dammon to come with her into battle, she knows he hates it. But Dammon does worry. He's terrified that one day she'll leave for a battle and never come back. And he won't be there, it'll be Wyll and Karlach by themselves coming back to give him the bad news. Dammon doesn't think his heart can take it. He's definitely had panic attacks before because of worrying about Rai charging off into a fight, but he's had to make peace with the fact that it's in her blood and he can't stop her. A frequent exchange between them before Rai runs right into something dangerous is usually Dammon telling her "I don't need you to be a hero, I just need you to be alive and safe" ( D: ). But he has to learn to trust her when she responds with "I promise you, I am coming back. I'm coming home to you when it's over". The more times she does come back, the more he starts to believe it even if the worry doesn't ever completely go away </3.

Rai always makes sure to "check in" with him before and after a fight as a result. Because even if it seems silly to her, she knows Dammon needs to hear her say it. (Also I think once they end up in the closed polycule with Karlach and Wyll, and knowing that they're there to watch eachothers' backs helps Dammon's anxiety be a bit less bad!)

What's different about their backgrounds? Do those differences affect the relationship?

And again bc they were the first pair I thought of after looking at the question, Rai/Wyll ✨

Rai's an orphan, with the Acolyte background because she was raised in a temple in Elturel and the closest thing to a "parent" she ever had was her Mother Superior, Avarice (who is also a Bhaalspawn a.k.a canon-divergent Durge). Even then, Avarice was not at all nurturing past the absolute bare minimum and by that I mean "don't kill the child soldier before she's been put to use in the Blood War" kind of deal. She has no memory of her biological parents whatsoever and doesn't really even know what having parents feels like.

Wyll on the other hand at least has his dad. But as a result of her childhood, Rai doesn't really…understand, the father-son dynamic that Wyll and Ulder have because she never had anything even close to that in her formative years. She's never deliberately confrontational with Ulder but it definitely takes her a LONG time to warm up to him after Wyll tells her about how he ended up pacted with Mizora as a result of what went on between him and his dad. She doesn't want to make things difficult for Wyll (on purpose) or tell him he can't have a relationship with his father. But she definitely doesn't GET it for a good long while and I think that would definitely bleed over into her relationship with Wyll until she can work through it.

(also something to be said for the Nobility/essentially a street urchin class-gap possibly? But no immediate anecdotes come to mind as of typing this. Just that I think that def creates some differences of experience for them that I'll prolly expand upon/explore more as I write more for them! :D)

Who said "I love you" first?

Aaand for this one, I'mma do all the Tav(Rai) ships again, because I think they're all equally cute and I can't just do one sorry! :D So here we goooo, in no particular order ~

Rai and Dammon: Both, pretty much. As discussed in question 10, Rai and Dammon have known eachother pretty much their entire lives. Their "I love you" was a "both of them blurted it out at exactly the same time" deal. When Zevlor recognised Rai and thus let them into the grove, and she started milling around and reconnecting with old friends/acquaintances/found family from Elturel, it takes her a little while to come across Dammon because his makeshift forge is tucked so far into the back of where the tieflings are staying. And while he's close with the other tieflings, Dammon does prefer to keep to himself so when there's a commotion at the gate he doesn't think it's his place to go sticking his nose in. It's probably something to do with a fight, and ever since Avernus he doesn't want much to do with fighting anymore (I'm also a "Dammon is an introvert" truther. And while I think he can wield a sword I feel like he very much chooses not to. Avernus fucking sucked my dudes, and I don't think he enjoys being on or around a battlefield AT ALL after getting back, though he will craft/fix weapons, armour, shields etc for his friends and family and if it called for it (like helping protect the tiefling kiddos during the grove raid, or defending Moonrise with the Tadpole squad and the Harpers) he will pick up a sword and fight if he HAS to. But he'd very much rather not if he has the choice between fighting or not.)

Eventually, she wanders to the back where his forge is and suddenly Rai is hit with a wave of recognition when she catches sight of Dammon and realizes it's him. She ends up getting his attention by calling out to her and at that point he almost burns himself dropping the weapon he'd been putting through the coals because as far as Dammon thought, Rai had died during the fuss with Elturel and he couldn't believe she was here - cue them both almost strangling eachother with hugs, a lot of tears and a very rushed out "I love you" because with the way Rai was carting around looking for a way to get un-tadpoled, they had no idea if there would be a "next time" that they saw eachother alive again and "I need you to know". ;3;

Rai and Wyll: Wyll went first here, but only just. Rai and Wyll's "I love you" was very much both of them were waiting for the other one to say it first because they were worried it was Too Soon(tm) otherwise. Wyll was the one that cracked first and Rai said it back ahem I may also have a fic for this hence why this one is so short, I don't want to spoiler y'all before I'm done w/ the oneshot and that was that.

Rai and Karlach: Rai went first, she'd known she loved Karlach for a while (I'd even make a cheesy "love at first sight" argument for these two tbh lol). Post-Engine upgrade 2, Karlach had a good cry when she realized it had worked, and as she cuddled and comforted her a little "I love you" slipped out into Karlach's hair. Karlach wasn't too far behind, it pretty much went down how it does in-game after they finally get to go to bed on that same night because I just think her getting so excited and yelling "ILOVEYOUTOO!" back at Rai is so goddamn cute that I have to keep it in there ;3; ❤️

#bg3 sort of #couple questions ask meme #mildly n/sfw #suggestive #long post #elven's bg3 headcanons #bg3 oc: tief!saarai #tiefling tav #saarai/wyll #saarai/karlach #saarai/dammon #saarai/karlach/wyll #saarai/karlach/dammon #thank you for picking very fun questions i had a blast writing these #''everyone deserves their own polycule'' truthers unite :P #i am very normal about rai and her polycule (i am physically incapable of being normal about how much i love them. Ever /hj)#also pretty sure i read somewhere that tief tails *aren't* prehensile anymore?? but they are to me so the lore can fight me lmao #also also both wyll and dammon *are* also bi because in her other verse rai's polycule is all-bi so #it makes sense to make dammon bi as well (and wyll is ofc also bi anyway in-game)#so it's not that they're het here they just *happen* to not have a vibe with eachother is all lmao #we had that convo with drunk wyll at the grove party and i couldn't stop fucking laughing #wyll. baby boy. sweetie pie. firstly she loves you *anyway* you silly (affectionate) man.#but besides that; you're complaining about bumpy/spiny dick as if that's not something that's like. if it's *not* canon for tieflings #it *should* be [nodding emphatically]#so you just got 10x as attractive between that and the horns #(actually now that i think about it...#that's prolly about the point in time that wyll realises rai has been doing the fuck-me tail *at him too* and not just at karlach #bc that was her *immediate; instantaneous* response to his complaint about the bumpy dick lmfao)#i love him so much #tw: child abuse mention

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