#bgbbau

[lamortwrites]

Ooo motion and alternate for the oc asks!

answering these character design questions

motion: How does your OC move? How does their clothing help or hinder their range of motion? Are they flexible, coordinated, clumsy?

answered here!

alternate: What would your OC’s alternate universe look be? If they’re a fantasy character, what’s their modern look? If they’re sci-fi, what’s their fantasy look? What AU would you want to see your OC in, and how would they dress themself?

I talked about modern au in the same post linked above, so I'll use this opportunity to talk about bloodborne au! surprising no one I'm sure I gave Cainhurst to the bhaalists, so Labrys grows up as royalty and therefore has a very different view of fashion -- namely, its use as a status symbol. in the pseudo victorian setting of bloodborne au status is very important, and Labrys knows how they are supposed to dress in order to convey that they are right at the very top (even as foreign royalty, they rank above...well, just about anyone else, until they get disinherited). think very ornate, incredibly detailed embroidery, eye wateringly expensive. I'll admit I'm not really a clothes person I don't know how to describe stuff very well but I based a lot of my ideas on the knight set -- very gothic formal clothing like that, set with bhaalist iconography both as part of the clothing itself (embroidery, buttons, etc) and as accessories (Labrys has a lot of jewellery, cufflinks, brooches, etc with bhaalist symbols on). I love a good black/red colour combo as much as the next gay goth but there is definitely room for violet in there, too, never fear!

[lamortwrites]

please i must hear about horny unethical scientific experimentation

if I was a betting man, I would've put money on you asking for this one, lmao. bloodborne au again :)

(cw for needles/injections, mild body horror)

"You're feverish," comes a voice that they recognise, but it sounds far off, distant, like they are hearing it from a room away. "Perhaps this was too much. If we flush your system through with saline--"

"No," they snap, voice breaking. They will not fail. They will not fail. They will not fail. "The third vial. Give it to me."

He releases them and steps away and they cannot bring themselves to turn their head far enough to follow him. "That is unwise. If you cannot handle two vials, the third--"

"I can handle it," they snarl, wrenching at the restraints as if they hadn't checked and double checked, the both of them, that they were strong enough to hold them down. "If you cannot handle seeing me in a little discomfort, then perhaps I need a better partner. Perhaps Ketheric--"

The needle burns as it stabs through their skin. He has not waited long enough for the metal to cool and they worry, for a split second, that the heat will have denatured the blood -- but the ice that spreads through their veins amplifies the song echoing in the back of their mind and their mouth falls open on a moan even as his hand finds their face, resting possessively over their skin, fingers catching briefly on a tusk before pushing between their lips.

Mor had lasted three vials. They had complained of the cold, had shivered more with each injection until their body had turned brittle and rigid, skin hard enough that the needle of the fourth syringe had snapped off when Labrys had tried to administer it. The skin of their temple had cracked open, dark brown splitting apart to reveal the bleached white of their skull beneath, but they had not bled. Their blood had still been frozen solid in their veins an hour later, after Labrys had blunted three scalpels trying to cut them open.

They are cold now, but at least they can feel their blood still liquid enough to pump sluggishly around their body. They cannot stop shivering: their sweat still has not dried, and the air down here is too cold to ever truly be comfortable, even if they did not have ice water running through their veins in place of blood. Enver's fingers in their mouth are so hot they almost burn -- they should bite down until the rich taste of his blood floods their mouth, until he cries out in pain. But when they set their teeth to his skin their jaw feels too weak and they cannot bite hard enough to break the skin.

He pulls his fingers free with too much ease, trails saliva across to their jaw and down their neck until his hand rests heavy and burning across their throat. They bear their teeth at him and growl, low and bestial, a warning ripped out from their throat as he leans down closer to them. Stupid. Stupid. Doesn't he know how badly they want to hurt him? Doesn't he know just how fragile he is, how the blood running through the veins so close to the surface of his skin calls to them, desperate to be released?

[lamortwrites]

wip whenever

tagged by @todderwodders, thank you!!

I can't remember who I tagged yesterday and I don't wanna double tap anyone so I am tagging anyone who would like to be tagged!

Her face is altogether too familiar, even lined with wrinkles and scars that are new to them. There had been portraits of her all throughout the castle when they were young: Tamoko, First Knight of Castle Kazgaroth, in her harrowing black armour, with her ever watchful gaze, her stern expression. She had looked faintly disapproving in every single painting, save for one.

They had been ten years old, playing hide and seek with Orin. Labrys had thought themselves clever, sneaking into Sarevok's chambers when he had been busy with the dull meetings that they were never allowed to attend. Not the rooms he shared with Cythandria; these were his private rooms, away from his consort, away from his children, away from his subjects.

It was here where Labrys had seen a different side of her, one that, looking at the age hardened woman before them now, they still aren't sure had been real. She had been dressed in some sort of loose robe with a wide belt, with her arm threaded through Sarevok's and her expression, as her painted face had looked up at him, had been soft. Open. Happy.

When Sarevok had found them there half an hour later he had been furious, had roared and screamed and thrown them from the room hard enough that their arm had sported bruises in the shape of his handprint for a week and they had been so spooked by his behaviour that they had never dared venture inside again.

But the woman before them looks nothing like that painting.

She is wearing the same armour as most of her portraits in Castle Kazgaroth. Not exactly the same -- she had left that behind her, along with the rakuyo that is now theirs, when she had left Sarevok -- but it is the same deep matte black metal that seems to swallow up the light, twisted into horned, snarling faces on her chest and her pauldrons and her arms, the expressions so detailed as to seem ornamental.

"Do you remember me?" she asks finally, when she tires of waiting for them to continue the conversation themselves.

[lamortwrites]

wip whenever

tagged by @mightymizora, thank you!! tagging anyone who sees this and would like to join in.

surprising absolutely no one, I am still stuck in bloodborne au hell, so here is another lil snippet from there!

"Yes," Enver says finally, voice rough. "That was my theory."

"And what--" Their voice is shaking. They pause to collect themselves, take a deep breath, and try again. "What is your conclusion?"

He smiles and rises to his feet, collects the syringe that is still clutched too tight in their left hand.

"My results are inconclusive, as of yet. I think I should repeat the experiment to eliminate any potential biases. What do you think?"

He cannot be serious. Labrys stares at him, half seething, half dumbstruck, as he disposes of the used syringe and retrieves the next. His expression is serious but there is the hint of a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, a playful glint in his dark eyes half hidden by the dancing light from the flame beside them on the bench. But they feel...fine, at least, compared to the new baseline Isobel's blood has drawn within them. Four vials taken fine, with the fifth being prepared, and they feel as close to normal as they can think to expect.

"I think," they grit out, "that we have more important tests to run."

"Oh?" he asks, sounding amused. "I thought the point of this was to catalogue all we could about the blood. It hardly seems in the spirit of things to ignore one aspect in favour of another. How do you feel?"

They glare at him as he finishes preparing the fifth syringe. They have a right to be angry, they think. Don't they?

"Fine," they say finally, when it becomes clear he is awaiting their response. "Give me the fifth."

"Say please."

[lamortwrites]

lmao you know i want to ask about horny unethical scientific experimentation BUT i also want to hear about tamoko... the never ending struggle

both of these are from bloodborne au! I flipped a coin for this and it assigned you Tamoko :)

(cw for briefly referenced/implied necrophilia)

"Then what--?" Labrys shakes their head, tries to keep their cool. "You have omitted too many details. Explain."

"Just one detail, actually. That is all that is important to you. Do you know why the line of succession follows the female line in your family?"

They shake their head, anger finally sparking its way through the confusion that has wrapped around their mind. "What does it matter? I know Orin should have been the heir. I know Sarevok only inherited because his sister died when they were young. What does any of that have to do with me? With-- with my mother?"

"Sarevok never had a sister. That was a lie he fabricated to explain the changes in himself. The day his sister died was the day he became Sarevok. Do you understand?"

"No," they try, but it's not entirely true. "You said-- you said he was my blood, but not my father."

"I did."

"Then who is my father?"

"Not who," she corrects, and they feel ill. They cannot get the thought of Melodia out of their mind: that bloated, beached whale of a creature, corpse white and not quite rotting, the song of her blood so loud it had set their teeth aching.

"I don't understand," they try again, but this time it's a plea -- one which she ignores.

"Try harder," she says unkindly. "You have old blood of your own here. Don't tell me you haven't thought to experiment."

They turn away from her. Cross to the window, the ornate stained glass that looms over them. But it is Aylin's eyes that look down at them, and the weight of their old friend's gaze does nothing to help them quell the rising nausea within themselves.

Enver has suggested it, of course. After all, if the blood can heal, what is to say it cannot also create life? Ketheric has never explained how Isobel came to be, whether the womb of a corpse can still bear new life or whether she was conceived outside of it. But Ketheric could not have carried her, even if she was artificially conceived, not in the way that Enver's failed experiments -- that their mother -- that Sarevok could.

[lamortwrites]

Isobel talk??

@spellmage also asked for this! bloodborne... :)

(cw for needles/blood draw)

"You can't keep doing this," she says. "Have you people learned nothing? My blood is not the miracle you all seem to think it is. My father says you seek to found a religion? You have to know that that is madness, that anything founded upon a belief in whatever flows through my veins has no foundation to begin with. It would be far better to give up this nonsense before you all get in too deep."

"We don't know why"--her name seizes in their throat, and they clear it, roughly, redirect--"why it did not work. But we do know the properties of your blood -- some of them, at least -- and they are sufficient to fool the populace into willing submission."

"This is madness. You--"

"Your arm, Isobel. Now."

They think, for a moment, she might try to fight them at last. But when they hold their hand out she sighs, lets her shoulders slump as she rolls up her sleeve. She winces when they tie the tourniquet just a little too tight and when they press a finger down too hard at the crook of her elbow it is not because they need help locating her veins.

They do not bother sterilising the needle before they push it through her skin. They do not need to -- her blood will take care of any contaminants before they can become a problem, either in her own body or in the body of whoever ends up on the receiving end of this vial. But they wish, darkly, that they could push too hot metal through her skin to force a reaction: she is too used to needles to flinch when they stab too hard into the delicate skin at the inside of her elbow.

They know it is not her fault that Aylin is-- whatever she is now. But it is difficult to remind themselves of that when they're in her presence, when she looks at them with her big, mournful eyes, eyes that try to plead with them, fool them into believing she is nothing but a pawn.

"I had thought," she tries, "that perhaps we could find some common ground. After everything. After--"

"Do not say her name."

The words are rough, scraping their throat raw as they force their way out of their mouth. They cannot quite bring themselves to meet her gaze and so they glare at the bridge of her nose, instead, in the hopes that she will not notice that they are avoiding her eyes -- the same eyes that had bloomed all over Aylin's body as she had grown and warped and twisted before their eyes.

[lamortwrites]

Gotta ask about 0 noodles

answering questions about my wip list

entirely unsurprised that you've sniffed out some bloodborne, haha! bloodborne au was supposed to be a sort of duology -- with 1 sort of mirroring pre game canon bloodborne lore and 2 roughly mirroring the events of the game -- but 1 starts with Labrys and Gortash very close, so close that it almost feels weird to write...I always had in my notes that they'd met and done their whole enemies to whatever the hell they are thing at uni (they're post grads at the start of 1), so this is just a doc on my phone that I jot down whatever partial scenes come to mind in! I don't know if I'll Actually Write It as a prequel (can I even call it a prequel if I haven't finished the actual fic it would be a prequel of?) but I'm having fun noodling about in that timespan (hence the name noodles...that's pretty common in my naming conventions lol)

[lamortwrites]

reithwin beach WIP!

more from bloodborne au!

A little way ahead of them the shore is clear of wrecked ships. The sand there is stained the same dark, unnatural colour as the sea, and the wind changes direction as they approach to allow them to smell that same sickly sweet scent as they had the day before when they had crossed the Chionthar, like overripe fruit with just the edge of rot to it. It feels oily when they crouch to drag their hand through the sand, warmer than the cold seawater that has collected in pools amongst the wreckage. When they touch the tip of their tongue to the grains of sand left clinging to their fingertips it tastes rancid, cloying, like spoiled meat and rusted iron.

There are wrecks out in the ocean, too, they realise as they rise to their feet. Half sunken, masts breaking the surface of the water like jagged teeth reaching up to devour the horizon. How many ships does a small town like Reithwin have? Surely there cannot be any left, not when there are so many splintered and broken along the shore. They are not an expert on ships but the wrecks don't look that old, and they are all in approximately the same condition -- whatever happened to them, it happened all at once.

The sunlight is silver where it filters through the fog, glinting off the surface of the ocean. The water seems too calm for the harshness of the wind, still and near silent in the gloom. If the beacon in the lighthouse was lit they might be able to see further out, past the wall of broken ships that closes off the bay, but as it is the thick fog makes it seem much later than it truly is and they cannot make out anything further from where they stand on the shore.

"Anything?"

Enver stands thirty feet to their right, parallel with them where they stand close to where the waves reach out their hands, gentle, coal black and greasy and eager. They fight not to step back out of the next wave as it crashes against their ankles, seaweed catching and wrapping around their boot as if the water is trying to drag them down to join the bodies of the townsfolk who perished in whatever battle played out on these shores, bloated and rotting beneath a surface that they cannot see beneath.

But there are no ghosts left here. Labrys shakes their head, points up at the abandoned lighthouse on the cliff above them.

"We might have better luck up there," they say. "With any luck, the lighthouse keeper kept a journal. They would have seen the whole thing from up there."

[lamortwrites]

wip wednesday

tagged by @mightymizora, thank you!!

tagging @nullshocked @todderwodders @say-lene @sybaritick if you are so inclined!

It is as if her words have rung a gong in their own mind. Labrys grits their teeth against the brief shock of pain, breathes slow and steady until it evens out again. There is something upstairs, they realise: they can hear it, too, calling out, softer than that creature -- Melodia -- had called to them downstairs, but their blood stirs in their veins at the sound of it, pressed into their mind like fingers laced tight through their own.

Enver accepts this statement without question and crosses back towards the stairs. They follow close behind but are too distracted by the siren song that grows louder with each step up to notice the ambush waiting at the top of the next flight of stairs, and by the time they have drawn their blade to retaliate there is already the sharp edge of a sword pressed too close against Enver's throat.

The blade is an odd sort of colour, rusty like dried blood and shot through with veins of darker crimson that pulse, slowly, as if the metal is as flesh, attached to a beating heart instead of an iron hilt. Where Melodia had shouted and the presence still somewhere above them in the lighthouse had sung, this carries with it the absence of sound, as if it is pulling all noise within its vicinity inside of itself, leaving only the too fast beating of Labrys' heart resting heavy in their throat.

"Drop your blade," says the man holding the sword. He is older, elven, with long dark hair shot through with silver at his temples. He must be the lighthouse keeper, but his voice rings with such effortless authority that they almost obey him automatically. Despite the fact that his blade is swallowing up all errant sound in their vicinity his words cut through loud and clear.

"You first," they say, the blade in their right hand still halted in midair, just inches from his unprotected torso. Enver winces as the edge cuts into his skin but does not say anything, wisely staying still. Dame Aylin has a hand on the hilt of her greatsword but in such a narrow passageway it will be difficult for her to unsheathe it. Labrys is the only real chance any of them have against him, but although they are fast they cannot be sure that they will move quick enough to close the gap between their blade and his flesh before he can push his own sword through Enver's throat. It would be worth a shot, if they were the one with the blade to their throat. They still have a chance, they could still throw themselves forwards and hope to throw him off balance, hit at his wrist hard enough that he loses his grip, drive the point of their blade forwards and count on being faster than him.

A thin stream of blood trickles down the side of Enver's neck.

They drop their blade.