#but i WILL elaborate on my lore if anyone asks i just need an excuse lmfao

[witchykale]

i have so much complex lore for MID in my head that im straight up analyzing the parallelism in my OWN lore

[2baabbies]

🖤 Summer in Winter (faerie!felix x human!reader)

I’ve been working on drafts of this since last October so I think it’s just time to post it lol

Words: 4200

Summary: Felix visits often, but is usually gone when you wake up in the morning. Wouldn't it be nice if he stayed?

Fantasy + Fluff + Smut + Humour

afab + fem!reader

CWs: none really, maybe pining?, implied scary fae lore but not elaborated on

Smut Tags: use of pet names, confessions during sex, chatty sex, light teasing, fingering, praise, so kissy and cuddly waaa, some dry humping, cunnilingus, reader is desperate af/slight begging, Penetration™️ (p in v), unprotected sex (practice safe sex pleeeease), creampie

@bookswillfindyouaway @rixenluv

🔞 MINORS DNI 🔞

!!ATTENTION!!

Reposting this fic to other platforms, including as a translation, is expressly prohibited. Do not copy, alter, or claim this fic as your own. Absolutely no permission is given to anyone to post my works, even with credit, and this fic should only appear on Ao3 or Tumblr under my accounts. Reposting is not only plagiarism, but a direct violation of my wishes as the original writer and owner. Please respect writers and don’t steal!

Likes, reblogs, asks and comments are very welcome and appreciated <3

~~~

Perhaps it should feel abnormal to welcome the fae into your home, knowing the warning tales you grew up with as a child, but it does not. Especially when it is Felix. He was the first to find you when you moved into this new town- the first you trusted- and he only makes his presence more apparent once the cold winter hits. His visits become more intimate than they were in the warmer seasons, when he would linger at the edge of the treeline and watch you garden until you left a gift for him near the brush. Now when he visits he comes right to the door, asks to be let in, then sits and chats with you late into the night. Sometimes he is there when you wake up, puttering around the kitchen or reading in the living room. Sometimes he is not, and your gut sinks just a bit.

There is no name for your relationship, but you feel the tension building all the same. Felix, always a gentleman, sleeps on the living room couch when he stays over. But the unsaid ‘what if’ lingers in your mind at the end of each night, when you curl up alone in your own bed after long conversations by the fireplace. You try to stay awake and listen for his footsteps on his way out, but you never do hear them. 

One night, hours after you have retreated to your room for bed, you use the excuse of needing a drink of water to see if he has left yet. You are slightly surprised to see him still on the couch, his eyes shut and his breathing slow as if he is in a deep sleep.

Your heartbeat quickens as you look him over, you note how the moonlight catches the softness of his lips and the highlights in his golden hair. His pointed ears and nimble fingers twitch when the floorboards creak as you creep into the room. His freckles and delicate cheeks still charm you even if they are barely visible in the dim light. His eyes open slowly as he turns his head to look at you; lazily, eyelids half-lidded to give the impression that he was truly sleeping, but his sudden awareness breaks the façade.

“Can’t sleep, darling?”

His voice is gentle and a little deeper than normal, which rumbles you in a pleasant way.

“I’m thirsty.”

“Ah, let me.”

He rises from his spot and gracefully steps out of the room. You remain where you stand, waiting as you hear the glasses clink and the tap run. He returns and regards you calmly as you blink the sleep away.

“Are you alright?” He asks.

He guides a glass of water into your hand and tidies your hair where it was mussed by your pillow.

“I’m fine.”

You sip your water as he hums quietly.

“You just look like you have something to say.”

“When do you go back to the forest?”

He cups your cheek with a soft smile.

“When I know you’re asleep, and safe.”

“You don’t have to wait for me to fall asleep, you know. You can leave whenever you want.”

“But wouldn’t you be disappointed?”

Your cheeks flare as you feel caught.

“Does that matter?”

“It wouldn’t to some.”

Your heart skips.

“But it does to you?”

“Of course.”

“You really don’t have to stay, Felix.”

“I know, but I have to know you’re alright. I’ll just keep thinking about you if I leave now.”

His response may as well be a confession with the way Felix says it, and you do not know how to react. You blink a few times, suddenly sure you must be dreaming or hallucinating this. His warm hand on your cheek, caressing you gently, reminds you that this is real. 

“You will?”

It is all you can manage and your voice quivers out at the end of the question. You shiver and let him take the glass from your hand. Perhaps you are both nervous that you will drop it with how shaky his words have made you.

“You should get back in bed, sweetheart.”

You nod and let him lead you back to your bedroom. He sets the glass down as you crawl into your bed. You gaze up at him in the dark, feeling him pull your blanket up and tuck you in.

“Felix?”

“Yes?”

“Will you lay with me?”

He pauses as he contemplates your request.

“I’m cold,” You add, desperate to convince him.

“It is cold, isn’t it?”

You say nothing as Felix lifts the blanket and slides in beside you, but feel a bit of pride that he accepted your invitation. You try not to dive into his arms as they come around you, try to restrain yourself from melting immediately when you breathe in his fresh summer scent. He lays his head on the pillow next to you and, very loosely, embraces you. The position is a little awkward, but you are too embarrassed to move any closer.

“You avoided my question earlier,” You murmur into the pillow, half-hoping he ignores you.

“Hm, what was the question, darling?”

“Do you really think about me when you leave?”

You shut your eyes, your face feels on fire.

“Oh, always.”

“Always?”

Felix sighs softly and whispers, “I can’t think about anything else sometimes. It’s… difficult.”

“Why?”

“Because… I can’t help but fret over you. I wonder if you’re eating, and if you’re sleeping. I wonder who you are seeing. I wait helplessly when you go far away. I worry something wicked will find you, you sweet thing. And to be worrying like that all the time, it can make a faerie weak.”

You open your eyes and meet Felix’s gaze, longing and tired as he watches you.

“Oh.”

“Yes. Always on my mind. Isn’t it shameful?”

“Why would you be ashamed?”

“Doesn’t it make you feel ashamed?”

You swallow.

“Not because… I think those feelings are wrong. Well, actually, that’s a lie,” You laugh breathlessly, “My whole life I’ve been told how dangerous your kind is, and not to let myself get trapped in fae magic. And love is a sort of trap, right? It’s vulnerability, it’s deals and promises, and in theory I should be wary. But I’m already so far gone, so what am I holding back from? But I don’t necessarily think these feelings are bad or want them to stop. God, I never want this to stop. I’m so happy with you. I just don’t know. I don’t know what to say, and I know I’ll say something that will make me more anxious because…”

You trail off as you notice Felix watching you with wide eyes.

“Because of this. Because I’ll run my mouth and regret it afterwards,” You finish.

“Oh,” Felix answers carefully, “You think wanting me would be wrong. Because you’re a human.”

“No, I-I don’t. I don’t care if it’s right or wrong, I just… I get embarrassed because I don’t know how to make it make sense to both of us. I can’t speak in front of you.”

“You’re speaking right now.”

You laugh at his teasing lilt.

“Yeah, and making a fool of myself.”

“Well, then you understand my predicament.”

“I don’t.”

“The feeling you’re describing now, this fear you have, I feel it every day when I leave you.”

“You do?”

“Yes. And it is so, so relentless.”

He continues to stare, patiently awaiting your reply. You shudder at the intensity in his eyes and they soften, before he pulls you closer.

“Are you still cold, my darling?”

You tense as he pulls you in. Your head comes to his chest and he slips his thigh between your legs. Your bodies curl together and his arms hold you a little tighter, with more certainty than before. You shakily squeeze him back, but the closeness is not what makes you shiver.

My darling. 

The alteration to your pet name is intentional.

“Felix?”

“Yes?”

“Do you…”

He chuckles and your lips shut tightly.

“Yes?”

“Do you feel the same way?”

“I do.”

“Can you kiss me?”

He pulls back to look down where your head rests on his chest, and you look up.

“I could kiss you. That is certainly within my abilities.”

“You’re- ugh.”

You both laugh as he presses his forehead to yours. You begin to realize how warm he is, how every spot where your body touches his is soothed. His magic seeps into your body, making your chest tighten and stomach flip. The heat is almost too much, almost burning, but you refuse to move away. Everything intensifies when the laughter dies down and he finally kisses you.

His mouth moves slowly against yours, giving you time to register the contact and adjust to it. Your thighs tense as you press closer, and you feel his thigh move just a bit higher to put some pressure between your legs. You gasp and he breaks away, enough so you can both pant into the space between you. You duck your head as your cheeks heat up again and he gives you an experimental nudge. You barely muffle a moan in his shoulder.

“Sweetheart, how does that feel?”

You try not to rut yourself on his thigh but he pushes against you again, and you instinctively roll your hips to chase the pleasure.

“A-Ahn, nice,” You cry softly.

“Nice?”

You bite your lip and look up pitifully as he leans back to take you in.

“Mh-hmnn…”

“Oh, you are precious.”

You whimper at his tone, somehow sounding both enamored with you yet taunting your reactions.

“I haven’t…”

“Hm?”

“H-haven’t b-been touched in a while…”

“Oh, sweetheart,” He coos, “Would you like me to help with that?”

You nod and shakily exhale. He smiles and pulls his leg from between yours to replace it with his hand. You make a wrecked sound as his palm presses through your pants to cup your pussy. You whine and throw your head back as he rolls his wrist and spreads your legs wider.

“Fe-elix…”

He makes a pleased sound and, very chastely, kisses the dip of your throat. This draws a longing moan from you.

“Lovely little thing. I haven’t had a moment’s peace since I met you, you know? Not a day that I’m not thinking about you. You’re so much trouble.”

“M’sorry,” You moan.

“Mhm, are you? Does it not excite you a bit, to have me in the palm of your hand?”

You laugh at the irony as he draws his hand away.

“I-I didn’t know…”

“Oh, I know,” He breathes as he brushes his hand over your abdomen, “My sweet girl.”

You moan in agreement as he slips his hand down your pants and beneath your panties. His middle finger brushes over your clit then he curls the first digit between your folds. You jolt at the intrusion and tuck your face in his neck as he lovingly pets your hair. Soft sounds escape your lips as his finger carefully swirls inside you.

“M’sensvmmm…”

“Hm, darling?”

You buck your hips and whimper as he finally thrusts his finger to the hilt.

“M’sensitive…”

“I know, sweetheart. You like it though, right? Feels good?”

“Mh-hmn…”

You are adjusting to his touch now, and begin rocking your hips as he adds another finger. He presses a kiss to your temple and cups the back of your head as he begins thrusting his fingers faster. You tense under his touch, becoming more wound up as he settles into a rhythm. You make a desperate sound when he spreads his fingers open and grazes his thumb over your clit.

“Felix,” You sigh, “Oh, Fe-elix…”

He chuckles and noses at your scalp as you press closer.

“You sound lovely, my darling. So good for me.”

Something snaps when he speaks and your climax hits you suddenly. Your body shudders from the intensity as he coaxes you through it with quick pecks and careful attention on your clit. You take in a gasping breath before his lips crash into yours, swallowing up your sounds of pleasure. His touch slows, but does not stop, as your legs tremble and you become boneless in his arms. He breaks the kiss and smiles as you whimper and twitch against him.

“Nhnnn…”

“Good?”

You nod sleepily as he finally slides his hand out of your pants. He gives his fingers an experimental lick and smirks as you throw your head back with a groan.

“You’re too much…”

“Hm, get some sleep, my love.”

Your head snaps back and he pecks your forehead as you stare blankly at him.

“Hey, w-wha-”

“Hm?”

“Um, we’re going to bed after doing that, are you kidding me?”

He chuckles.

“You’re not tired?”

“You’re not… horny?”

Felix laughs and blushes as you pout at him. He swipes his thumb over your hip as he speaks.

“I have patience, darling. I waited this long for a moment to lay next to you, I’m sure I can wait a bit longer.”

You huff as you move to straddle his hips. He lets you shove him to the bed and stares up expectantly as you settle on top of him.

“What if you don’t have to wait?”

His eyebrow cocks up and his eyes rake over your body.

“Impatient, are we?”

You give your hips a tentative roll and bite your lip to muffle the whimpering gasp that threatens to spill out. Your clit is still throbbing, but your desire outweighs your sensitivity. You grind down again and smirk as you draw a groan from him. His hands fly to your hips and hold you in place as he bucks up to meet your thrusts. You giggle as you lean down to kiss him, which he returns eagerly. You lean away with a smirk.

You squeal when he flips you over and dives in to kiss you again, nibbling at your lips and peppering your face with sweet pecks. Delight bubbles in your chest as your abdomen swirls with desire. His hips are pressing against yours so you can feel his cock strain through his pants and the contact makes your head spin. He nuzzles his nose against yours and smirks at your moans.

“Do you want me, sweetheart?”

He pulls back slightly to look at you. You blink dazedly, still feeling drunk on your last orgasm and the heat of him on top of you. You spread your legs wider to let him press closer, which he does. You nod as you throw your arms over his shoulders.

“Of course, Felix. Do you want me?”

“I do,” He murmurs, “Every touch. Every kiss. Every moment. I want to take care of your every desire.”

“My desire is that you fuck me.”

He laughs.

“I will… do that, yes. I’m more than happy to…”

You laugh at how his usual eloquence has dissolved into sultry rambling, and draw him in for another kiss. You part your lips and he laps into your mouth, his hips jumping at the moans you let out. He slides your pants and panties down, allowing you to shimmy them off. You start to pull your shirt off and pause when he begins kissing down your neck, to your stomach, and lower below the blanket until he stops between your legs. You fling your shirt away and make a wrecked noise as his tongue slips between your folds.

“Mhm, Felix…”

You melt as he laps at your sex and hum his name shamelessly. He groans in response, vibrating your clit and drawing another wrecked sound from you. You whisper his name and try to stifle the crescendo of needy sounds he pulls from you to no avail. Suddenly, he stops and pops up from under the blanket. Your disappointed moan trails off into a fit of giggles as you take in his disheveled appearance. His hair has been fluffed up by the blanket that now hangs loosely off his shoulders. He blinks back at you, trying to decipher your reaction.

“Are you alright?”

“Come here.”

You pull him in for a kiss and taste yourself on his tongue when it slips into your mouth. He sighs when you reach down to unbutton his pants and wrench them down so his cock springs free. He breaks the kiss to mouth messy bites over your jawline and throat. You giggle and tilt your head back to ease his access, while one of your hands slips under his shirt and traces his abdomen lazily.

“Felix, come on,” You whine when he lingers on sucking a hickey into your shoulder, “Come on, please.”

“Remember when I called you impatient, my darling?”

You huff and smile wryly as he rises to pull his shirt off and fully remove his bottoms. He kneels between your legs, his cock standing hard against his stomach. You tsk softly and pull him into your embrace, lovingly cupping his cheeks as he sinks on top of you. He beams and brushes his nose against yours shyly.

“I haven’t been fair to you, have I?”

“I’m in no rush,” He breathes, his eyes fluttering as his cock presses against your soft skin, “Y-You’re always fair to me.”

“Are you okay?”

“Mh-hmn,” He pecks another kiss on your cheek.

“You’re sure?”

“I just love you so much.”

You freeze at the confession, staring through the dim light as Felix peppers kisses down your neck. You grasp his cheeks and pull him up to face you, he stares back with a surprised expression.

“Do you mean that?”

“Of course,” His brows furrow, “Of course I do.”

“You promise?”

He breaks free from your grasp to peck a needy kiss to your lips, then murmurs, “I couldn’t lie if I wanted to.”

“Lix,” You whine, “Please, I really need you. Fuck me.”

He laughs softly as he resumes kissing over your face and hooks his arms under your thighs, then slowly eases into you. You gasp as he fills you and your eyes shut in bliss when his cock presses deeper. A whimper escapes your lips as he slowly pulls out and lazily pushes in again. You open your eyes to see him studying your reactions, his lips parted in shuddery groans with each calculated thrust.

“Felix... Felix, oh my God…”

He kisses you, messily, open-mouthed and desperate as he draws another moan from you. You let him lick into your mouth and nibble your bottom lip as your mind goes hazy.

“That good, darling?”

“Ye-es…”

He chuckles and leans back to let you breathe, still thrusting intentionally.

“My lovely girl. You look so good like this, my darling. I love it, I love you. Wanted this since the moment I met you.”

“Mh-hm?”

You let your head fall back as his pace quickens. Somehow your hands have managed to find his arms where they support your thighs and you grip his biceps tightly. He makes a pleased sound and presses closer, pushing your legs up to thrust deeper inside you. You whimper as the tension builds and you hear your own wetness dripping around his cock.

“Oh, love, my love,” He sighs against your chest as he rests his forehead in the crook of your neck.

You make a giddy sound when you feel his hips stutter.

“So good, Felix. I love you.”

He nods and nuzzles closer.

“J-Just about… there. Oh, darling, please.”

You giggle when his movements pause again.

“That’s- ah- perfect, Lix. You gonna come? Come on. I want you to, want you to come i-inside.”

He nods and continues with as many shaky thrusts as he can manage. He pushes in and pants into your neck as he finishes. You whimper at the sensation and squirm for some stimulation as he presses you into the bed. He drops one of your legs and reaches his hand between you to play with your clit. You whimper and look at him as he chases after your lulling high. His cock is still nestled between your folds when you reach your orgasm, and he groans when you clench around him. He gazes into your eyes lovingly as he rubs you through each wave of pleasure, until you begin to whimper from the overstimulation.

“Felix…”

His hand slowly draws back and he gives you a deep kiss as he pulls out.

“Mhm, sorry. You were so lovely, darling. I didn’t want to stop.”

Your legs quake as you let them fall, while Felix kisses your forehead.

“Oh, Felix.”

He laughs and presses his forehead to yours with a cheeky grin.

“My, you really are sensitive. What a shame you haven’t been touched, you needed it.”

“Hah, you- mhm…”

He lets you recover from your orgasm with long, doting kisses to your lips and cheeks. You sink into the bed with a blissed out smile as his hands coast over your stomach and thighs.

“Still good, darling?”

“With you? Always.”

He chuckles.

“Always? That’s what I like to hear.”

“Don’t get too cocky.”

“Why not? Telling me you’re not satisfied? Please, feel free to speak your mind.”

“You didn’t last very long,” You tease.

“Neither did you.”

Felix winks and pecks your forehead before settling down next to you. You roll into his arms as he pulls your thigh over his hip and fixes the blanket over you both. You rest your hand on his chest where his heart is still pattering and feel your own swell with affection.

“Next time,” You decide.

“Hm?”

“Next time we’ll take it slower.”

“So, there will be a next time?”

You giggle.

“Of course,” You gaze up at him dreamily, “You’re not done with me already, are you?”

It is supposed to be a joke, but you cannot help but worry.

“Darling,” He whispers, but it sounds like the air has been punched out of him as he gazes back at you, “I will never be done with you.”

You shiver as his hand rests over yours and he kisses the bridge of your nose.

“Oh.”

“I promise, I meant it. Since the moment I met you, I knew we belonged together. And I was right.”

Your eyes tear up a bit and you nod quickly.

“I guess I just… I didn’t know if love meant the same thing to you that it does for me…”

His eyes soften and he pauses to search for the proper response.

“Maybe not, but I know with all of my being that I love you more than I can bear. Even harder when you love me back.”

“Felix.”

“Because it hurts me so much to be away from you, and I want nothing more than to spend everyday with you like I am right now, I think it’s safe to say I want to be yours.”

You nod and sniffle.

“I want to be yours, too.”

“Always?”

“Always. I promise.”

He smiles.

“You know the fae aren’t ones to go back on our promises.”

“I know. I’m not either.”

His thumb glides over the back of your hand in soothing strokes as you finally drift to sleep.

When you wake the next morning you are alone, and for a moment your heart aches. You sit up slowly in the early light and sigh as you listen to the howling of winter winds and firewood crackling in the living room. Your brow furrows slightly and you move to get out of bed, then you pause when you realize you are dressed in your pajamas. You are feeling the soft linen and questioning when you were dressed last night, when your bedroom door opens.

Felix eyes you with shock when he sees you are awake and hurriedly comes to your side.

“Oh, darling. Did I wake you?”

You watch him intently as he sits beside you and pulls the blanket up to your chest.

“It’s still quite cold, love. Go on, you can go back to sleep. The fire is just building up now.”

“Felix.”

“Hm?”

He is rubbing your arm gently, spreading warmth over you like a second outside of the blanket will leave you frozen.

“You stayed.”

He pauses then looks at you with some relief.

“Oh… I did.”

“You… didn’t have to.”

You let him crawl in beside you and tuck the blanket around you both. He rests his head on your chest as you run your fingers through his hair.

“I think we’ve been over this, yeah? You don’t like it when I leave.”

“I know, but you usually go when I fall asleep.”

“Yes,” He leans up to look at you, “That doesn’t mean I have to leave when you fall asleep, does it?”

“No.”

“Then I’m going to stay.”

He smiles and rests his head on your chest again, snuggling in with a content hum. Your fingers play with the hairs at the base of his neck as you stare at the ceiling.

“Felix?”

“Hm?”

“How long will you stay?”

He hums.

“As long as I can. But don’t worry, my love, I’ll come back.”

You smile and let your eyes fall shut as you fall asleep in his embrace.

“Always?”

“Always.”

“I love you, Felix.”

“I love you, my darling. So very much.”

[ravel-puzzlewell]

Hi! Do you mind elaborating on what you meant by "tiefling politics" on that wotr vs bg3 post? Just curious, ignore if you want

its about the fact that bg3 has a lot of tiefling characters, somehow more than wotr, and huge theme of like hells and connections to demons\devils and somehow manages to say absolutely nothing interesting about it.

in wotr we have examination of tieflings fitting into human society, ostracization and (literal) demonization of them, where even if some of them would want to help in war against hell, they are scared (frex, group of tieflings thieves you save which you can ask to help u and they are like are u kidding me, crusaders will torch us). woljif in particular is a deconstruction of selfish chaotic neutral tielfling rogue archetype, his story both exploring how both he was pushed into being a criminal bc he had no other options, but also interplay with how he then himself tends to dismiss his own agency in being able to decide for himself and choose better, forever excusing himself with "well this is a crappy hand dealt to me", his survivalist attitude of everyone for themselves vs desire for community, how when given a smidge of stability and access to decision making in council, he tries to awkwardly, but eagerly advocate for societal improvement for all tieflings, and this is one of his most sincere moments - and gets laughed at immediately, etc etc. and speaking of community, v interesting intersection between "good" and "bad" marginalized groups of mongrels vs tieflings, with Lann being self-righteous about both his moral superiority and how mongrels "have it worse", while ignoring that mongrels - and he himself specifically - are mistreated literally bc they are mistaken for tieflings.

btw if anyone wants me to talk more about mongrels vs tieflings thing, hit me up, i think there was a interesting stuff, even if not properly dramatized

meanwhile in bg3 being tiefling largely means nothing? like the refugees would sometimes like drop a line out loud about how tieflings should stick together bc humans won't help them, but like that's it. the refugees could literally be humans running from war or blue cat ppl from avatar running from capitalism and nothing in the plot or characters would need to be changed. tieflings is just cosmetics for them, like idk its cool to have colorful NPCs with fire eyes and sexy horns. And even companions wise, you know I love Karlach and tried to romance her, but being tiefling is just looks for her, its not meaningful. It doesn't matter for her backstory, she could have been a strong human from poor background who was sold out to idk, underdark. like it sucked bc she was forced to do violence and everyne was an asshole and she couldn't see sun, but otherwise it being Blood War specifically doesn't come into play. and like. Blood War has famously huge effects on ppl with hell heritage! I'm not saying she should have been Valen Shadowbreath with entire plotline about struggling with blood war calling, but like. idk, something?

my point is that tieflings and hell has a lot of lore and like, FLAVOUR in this setting, which were not explored at all. these are just ppl with horns and generic Bad Place.

and then like. devil essentialism. bg3 has central motive of how evil races are not ontologically evil, but like, devils are. sdfghjk. apparentely mind flayers can fight actual mind control if they are V Special, but all devils/demons are evil with no exceptions. karlach was in hell for 10 years and never met a single sympathetic devil. the closest one he had mocks IS Evil when we meet her in game. and I actually liked Raphael (transition could've saved her), but there is nothing particularily interesting about him, he's also straighforwardly evil. this severely limits how interesting interactions with hell are. in wotr there is a wide range from reformed succubus to most evil sadists, with every shade in between, which allows for complex stories, like that that fucked up love between that betrayer dwarf and demoness who seduced him. she's legit evil, but she also has actual twisted affection for him, and he knows she uses him, but he was pushed too far by humans and chooses her anyway. this background story is honestly has more depth than wyll's and mizora relationship, where shes just evil and he's straighforwardly martyr. when mizora offered to have fun wink wink, i immediately knew she's gonna Evil It. and she did. and she didn't even get anything out of it! it was just staining your soul to be evil:3 like ok, but boring tbh.

and like yeah war with hell is central plot of wotr, obviously it has a lot more to say and explore about it, but like. bg3 didn't HAVE to have to include so many tieflings and have us follow their stories through all acts. it didn't have to include hell in "no race essentialism" game if it didn't want to talk about it. it chose to, and when game has big chuncks of content about smth connected by a theme, i expect it to say smth about it? anything interesting? eh.

btw, this is not to say i think wotr's writing is perfect, far from it, i can talk for ages of my problems with that game's writing, but this initial phrase was from shitposts specifically comparng things in wotr to bg3, so

[ro-botany]

I want to know who, if anyone, you ship Freddie with. I wanna hear all ur Frederick Fired Emblem opinions tbh--

HELLO I HAVE SO MANY OPINIONS ON THIS MAN

Probably too many opinions to fit in one ask!! To be honest!! I don't even really know why I imprinted on Fred so hard. It was the meme quote and the horse backflipping at first but at some point it became genuine fhdsjkfhds

Given that Fred strikes me as one of the older members of the cast his ship options were a bit limited for me lmao. But I ended up going with Fred/Cherche in my playthrough, and I stand by that! They don't have the most exciting support chain, I suppose, but there's so much mutual respect there. They meet each other on even footing in so many respects, and their S support feels like a very natural extension of the supports before it. Idk it's just cozy. They'll terrorize new recruits together forevermore.

Though I could easily leave him single, too. He strikes me as acespec, and while he can be a sap in S supports I also think he could be perfectly content never having a romantic partner. Maybe's that's me projecting but eh.

Some other opinions that I may elaborate on sometime include

I may not consider the spotpass chapters canon but I WILL NEVER RECOVER FROM HIS IN-BATTLE CONVERSATION WITH EMMERYN. I AM INCONSOLABLE...

I know we all joke about his out of left field arson streak but LISTEN. LISTEN TO ME. THAT CAN BE SO COMPELLING IF YOU TAKE IT SERIOUSLY FOR A SECOND. He may not necessarily have full blown pyromania, but if you humour that he might... Pyromania is an impulse control disorder. And often for someone with pyromania the starting of fires is a way to release tension or anxiety. Do you see how interesting this could be combined with how neurotically worried he is about the safety of his people, and how rigidly he controls himself, and how he keeps himself busy literally every single waking moment?

Between the potential pyromania (often caused by childhood abuse and neglect??? hello??) and the wolf attack trauma and the fact that he's now the razor-witted right hand of the goddamn prince, I'm super interested in this man's backstory. And the fact that 90% of the content we have about him is variations on being comedically overprotective of the royal siblings pains me sometimes. I love how ridiculous he is too, and I know flanderization is the curse all fire emblem side characters bear, but you can't just put these interesting breadcrumbs in front of me and expect me NOT to want to eat the loaf of bread they came from! I'm over here having to re-engineer this bread recipe my damn self! Give me the forbidden Fred lore intsys!

Frederick and Robin enemies to besties arc is criminally underutilized in fanfic and I need this problem resolved yesterday.

The fact that Frederick and Validar share their english voice actor is criminally underutilized in fanfic. We can use this as an excuse to make them sound similar in-universe! We can do angst with this, people!

The fact that his main hobbies are knitting and mushroom picking is adorable, actually. He's like if a grandma was capable of felling entire armies with a greataxe.

This is getting so long so I'm gonna stop there but listen. I will always answer questions about Frederick Fire Emblem. He is my boy and I love him.

[arya-skywalker]

Paper faces on parade (Arcane fanfic)

Summary: Piltover celebrates The Harrowing with elaborate masquerade balls, recreating a ceremonial truce between dark and light for the sake of the eclipse. The most grand ball is of course the Kirammans’. This year, Caitlyn insists that Jayce and Viktor attend.

Grudgingly, Viktor agrees to put up with the nonsense, just this once. He’ll wear the stupidly expensive costume and go through the motions until they leave him alone. Unfortunately for him, Jayce and Caitlyn are a stubborn team, determined to make the ball enjoyable.

Notes: While doing research on league-lore holidays, I stumbled upon the Harrowing event wiki page and was possessed to write this, which ended up nearly twice the length I expected. Enjoy these gay idiots.

Timeline wise, somewhere roughly mid-timeskip.

AO3 link

Caitlyn Kiramman swooped into the lab without preamble— they really should get better about locking it. Viktor did his best to politely ignore her, as usually she was there for Jayce.

“So… do you guys have plans for Harrowing?” Caitlyn asked. Unfortunately her question appeared directed at both of them.

“Not really,” Jayce said.

“Working,” Viktor said without looking up, scribbling rune combinations into his notebook. One of them had to work. If he just—

“You know it’s bad luck to work during the eclipse, right?” Jayce nudged him lightly.

Viktor scoffed and nudged him right back. “Piltie excuse to take the day off. Nothing but unfounded superstition.”

“Congratulations, you’re both invited to my family’s masquerade ball!” Caitlyn announced, shoving black and white envelopes into their hands. “You better come, since you don’t have anything better to do. And everyone else is boring.”

Jayce laughed. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

Viktor placed the invitation on his desk without opening it. “I am flattered, Miss Kiramman, but I must decline.” It was merely a formality to invite him; he knew he was not welcome in such places even if he wanted to go.

“I’ll provide costumes, no charge,” Caitlyn offered.

“You do not have my size.” He barely fit into most standard sizes, his back brace making things difficult.

“You can borrow our tailor if they don’t fit,” Caitlyn said with a shrug, “or, you know, just tell me your size.”

Viktor groaned dramatically and looked up at Jayce. “Please tell her to drop it.”

“I dunno… it might be fun,” Jayce said sheepishly. “It’s just for a few hours. You don’t need to stay for the whole thing if you don’t want to.”

Viktor glanced between them— at Jayce’s puppy dog eyes and Caitlyn’s smirk— quickly realizing he was outvoted. “Hmph. Fine. You’d best have good food, that is the only thing that could possibly make these events worthwhile.”

He stubbornly fought back a smile as the other two high-fived and whooped in triumph. Menaces, the both of them. “Now, shoo! If I am going to lose a day of work, we will need to make up for it.”

“See you at the party!” Caitlyn waved and left as quickly as she had arrived.

“Alright, alright! Where were we?” Jayce put a hand on his shoulder and leaned over to look at his notes. His hand was extremely warm and distracting, but still their work continued as if it had never been interrupted.

~*~

The Kirammans worked fast. By the time Viktor returned to his apartment, there was a package on his doorstep. He stifled a groan at the sight; it would have been much easier if he were here when it was delivered. How long had it been sitting there? Anyone could have stolen the clearly-expensive parcel. Then again, perhaps the Kiramman crest was enough to deter thieves.

He reached over to unlock the door and poked at the offending package with his cane until it was safely inside, slamming the door shut behind him with more force than necessary. Stupid parties. Stupid costumes. Stupid expensive customs.

After glaring at the package for a few minutes, he reluctantly heaved it onto a table and opened it. Inside was, of course, the costume Caitlyn had chosen for him, along with a business card to her tailor.

The ebony mask was large enough to cover from the tip of his nose upwards, with a crown of raven feathers fanning out from the top and some silver embellishments. Black silk shirt and pants, with a waistcoat covered in delicate silver embroidery vaguely resembling feathers. The collar of the shirt was lined with raven feathers as well.

It looked ridiculous and far more expensive than any sane person would pay for clothing. The Kirammans had more than enough money to spare. Refusing it would be beyond rude, and besides he had given his word.

~*~

Harrowing came far too soon for Viktor’s liking. He took a full shower and went through the trouble of gelling his hair back so it wouldn’t get in the way of the mask. The suit fit well enough, although he made a few minor adjustments himself so it wouldn’t catch on his brace. There was no reason to waste time troubling a tailor for it. If anyone commented on the slightly-messier stitching, he could claim it was part of the costume’s charm.

A carriage came from the Kiramman estate to bring him to the ball in style. A bit showy for his tastes, but it would save a good amount of walking so he allowed it.

Once they arrived, Viktor stared at the Kiramman estate and the sea of people flowing inside. There was still time. He could tell the driver he suddenly felt ill and back out. It wouldn’t necessarily be a lie either— his stomach twisted in knots, and he was glad he hadn’t eaten before leaving.

The driver opened the carriage door before he could open his mouth with the excuse.

Never mind. Time to put on a show. Viktor took a breath, grabbed his cane, and stepped out, pointedly ignoring the driver’s offered hand. He didn’t need their help.

The stairs were an annoyance, but between his cane and the railing he managed just fine. He handed the invitation to a servant at the door and followed another servant to a waiting room.

The room was draped in thick black curtains, lit by dim candlelight, filled with people in dark but lavish costumes. Viktor resisted the urge to turn around again, instead making his way to a sofa against the wall to catch his breath. He barely had time to sit before he was found.

“You made it!” Caitlyn exclaimed, winding her way through the crowd to his side. Her black mask had cat-like ears and whiskers; her blue hair was partially-hidden under ornate black lace. Her dress was fancier than usual, flowing to her ankles with black fur at the cuffs and waistband.

“Mm. I thought the point was to be anonymous, no?” Viktor replied with a quirk of his lips.

Caitlyn shrugged and perched on the armrest. “I never said who you were. I could be excited about any guest.”

Viktor leaned back with a sigh. The sofa was surprisingly quite comfortable. “Is our mutual friend on the other side?” he asked after a moment.

“Maybe, maybe not.” The twinkle in her eyes was answer enough. She swung her feet and hummed. “You know what the best part of being on this side is?”

“Enlighten me.”

Caitlyn grinned under her mask. “We’re encouraged to cause mischief, without repercussions. In the spirit of the season, of course.”

Viktor squinted at her. “Mischief. What sort of mischief are you implying?”

“Well, mostly harmless pranks. But still, it’s fun!”

“Mmhmm… So if I were to… be careless with my cane, causing someone to trip, they could not lash out in response?”

“Exactly!”

Viktor nodded thoughtfully, fiddling with his cane. It would be satisfying to see an aristocratic prick fall on their face, but in the end he was still a crippled trencher. There was no way to tell if the same protections would extend to him as to the daughter of a Great House. Most likely not— if anyone recognized him, anyway. He filed away the thought for later.

A bell chimed. People hastened to the door. “What is happening?” Viktor asked, craning his neck to see around the crowd.

Caitlyn grinned. “It’s time to meet the other side and find our matches!”

“Ah.” Viktor tightened his grip on his cane. Already time. “I will wait. Wouldn’t want to hold anyone back.”

Caitlyn’s smile faded, then she shrugged. “I’ll wait with you.”

“No, no. You go on ahead, Miss Kiramman.” He gestured to the crowd.

“I’m hiding from my cousin anyway. Waiting isn’t such a bad idea,” she added.

“You are… what?” Viktor stared at her, befuddled.

Caitlyn shrugged. “My cousin. My mother invited some distant relatives. I was planning on avoiding them. Or scaring their fancy pants off. Whichever works.”

“Ah.” That meant Jayce was available after all. As long as no sponsors claimed him first. Viktor watched the throng of people flow out of the room, then took a breath and heaved himself to a standing position.

“You ready?”

Viktor nodded. “As I’ll ever be,” he said with a half smile.

The ballroom was chaos, the crowd doubled as dark found their light, mingling in a jumbled mess. He had no idea why anyone thought that would be fun. Somehow no one was trampled. At least the larger room meant it didn’t feel quite as cramped.

“Good luck,” Caitlyn said, vanishing into the crowd before he could respond.

In theory, Jayce would be easy to find. Few aristocrats had such a muscular frame. But costumes made it more difficult, the tumultuous parade of masks unsettling. Viktor shuffled around the room, watching for his familiar shape and for once hoping his own frame would be easy to spot. Mostly he did his best to avoid being knocked over.

Across the ballroom was a man of Jayce’s muscular shape, wearing what appeared to be an exact inverse of Viktor’s costume— white feathers with gold as opposed to black feathers and silver. Of course Jayce wore it much better, far more fit for the sparkling light of chandeliers where Viktor would much rather hide from view.

Their gazes met and instantly the larger man started pushing through the crowd— seemingly apologizing the whole way. There was no doubt now. Viktor took a few steps closer where there was space to do so.

“Viktor!” Jayce smiled brightly at him under the mask. “You look amazing! I’m so glad you made it!”

“Who is this Viktor? I haven’t seen him,” he said with as innocent an expression as he could manage.

Jayce blinked, opening and closing his mouth like a confused fish. Then, finally, he caught on. “Haha, very funny.”

It was far easy to mess with him. “The masquerade, anyone could be hiding under these masks.” Viktor smirked and patted Jayce’s arm. “You look… as charming as ever.“

Jayce beamed at the praise. “Thanks! Cait did a good job on the costumes, don’t you think?”

“If you are meant to be an overly-muscular chicken—“

“Hey!” Jayce squawked indignantly. “It’s not a chicken!”

Viktor tapped his chin. “White fluffy feathers, could be any white bird, no?”

“That’s not— I mean— I think it’s— it’s—“ Jayce sputtered.

Viktor took pity on him. “Yes, of course, it must be a dove,” he said, settling on one of the more flattering options. “A noble, peaceful, dove.”

“Oh.” Jayce nodded slowly. “I can see that.” He looked Viktor up and down. “I think you’re… um… a crow? No, wait! A raven. You’ve got the shiny feathers. And you’re smart.”

“I suppose so.” Viktor shrugged, not overly concerned with whatever it was supposed to be. This whole charade was still a waste of time.

“Oh, right! Gifts!” Jayce held out a wrapped package that was much larger than Viktor’s. “Um… how about we find somewhere to sit?”

Usually Viktor would argue against it on principle, but the ballroom was extremely stuffy and he wasn’t looking forward to fumbling one-handed to open a gift. So he bit back the instinctual I’m fine and simply nodded. “Lead the way.”

People parted much easier before Jayce’s towering frame. Within minutes they managed to find a padded bench near some potted plants.

“Lights usually go first, so, um, here!” Jayce nearly dropped the package in Viktor’s lap.

“Eager, hm?” Viktor teased, then opened the gift, careful not to tear the wrapping. Instantly he felt something luxuriously soft. A pristine white fur shawl. A white so bright he feared merely touching it would leave a stain.

“You always seem cold, so I thought this might help? And, well, we’re limited with the kinds of things we can give for these events. No choice in color, and it’s gotta be something wearable, and technically we’re not supposed to know who we’re gifting to…” Jayce was rambling in the way he did when he was nervous and wanted to fill the silence.

Ah, he had been quiet too long. Viktor cleared his throat to stop the flow of words and offered a smile that wasn’t entirely forced. “Thank you, Jayce. It is lovely.” He lightly stroked the plush fur, then swung it around his shoulders and clasped the front before he could lose his nerve. “It is also quite warm.”

Jayce sighed in relief and smiled back. “Great! That’s good to hear. Glad you like it.”

His turn now. Viktor reached into one of his larger pockets and took out a small black box, handing it to Jayce, who had less respect for wrapping paper and eagerly tore into it. Viktor couldn’t help fidgeting as he waited for his partner’s response. The gift was perhaps a bit of a leap— he had seen how Jayce would often touch his Hexite bracelet in times of stress, and so Viktor had chosen a similar leather bracelet as a gift. Was it too much? Or too little? Why did piltie customs need to be so fucking complicated?

Jayce took out the black leather bracelet, staring at it and rubbing the glass bead almost reverently. The bead was meant to resemble the eclipse, with silvery sun-rays embossed around it.

“Jayce?” Viktor prodded, impatient with the wait. “Where did you go, hm? Same restrictions apply, of course.”

“You got this for me?” Jayce turned to him.

“No, I got it for a mysterious admirer that I couldn’t find in time,” Viktor replied dryly. “Of course I got it for you. If you don’t like it, I can return it after the ball.”

Jayce nearly crushed him in a hug. “I’m never taking it off.”

“What an honor, but Jayce, too tight, loosen your grip, please,” Viktor mumbled into his shirt. The warmth was overwhelming.

Jayce let go just as quickly. “Sorry, sorry!”

Viktor took a breath and shook his head. “I am not angry at you. You were simply excited.”

Jayce rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. “You, uh, wanted food, right? I think I saw some tables on my way in. Want me to grab something for you?”

Viktor scoffed. “And trust you to choose the dishes for me? You would be trapped in indecision for the remainder of the ball. I am going with you.” He used his cane to stand.

“Ouch. You know me too well.” Jayce stood and led him to a decorated table.

At first glance, it didn’t even look like food. More like delicate flowers and small jewelry boxes, all in black and white. No wonder he hadn’t noticed it before. Viktor scrunched up his nose. “Is this some sort of joke?”

Jayce picked up one of the “boxes” and took a large bite out of it, then showed him the cross-section. It was cake-like pastry filled with jam. “White is vanilla, black is chocolate.”

“That is ridiculous. Food should look like food,” Viktor said with a huff, but started serving himself a plateful anyway. Free food was free food, even if it was overly artistic. “Why create art only to destroy it? Frivolous waste.”

Jayce shrugged, filling his own plate. “Because it looks nice, I guess?”

“Yes, because everything in Piltover must look perfectly pristine with no exceptions.” Viktor rolled his eyes. “Are there drinks?”

Jayce led him to another table, where the drinks were slightly more visible. Red wine, a mystery black cocktail, champagne, and a warm creamy drink. “Oh! You’ll like this. It’s kinda like a spiked sweetmilk.”

Viktor arched an eyebrow, before realizing it would be hidden under the mask. “Is that so? I doubt it,” he said, but accepted a cup and took a sip. It was not sweetmilk, but it wasn’t terrible either. “This is an insult to sweetmilk.”

“You don’t need to finish it, I can take it—“ Jayce reached for the drink.

Viktor glared at him and moved out of reach. “No, it’s mine now. I did not say I didn’t like it.”

Jayce laughed and backed off. “Alright, alright.”

“But if you think this is sweetmilk, I will need to make you the good stuff myself.”

“I look forward to it.”

They made their way to a bench to consume the treats, mostly in silence to focus on the food and drink. It was tolerable, although Viktor would have preferred a full meal of genuine food. Still, it could be worse.

Some time later, the bells chimed again. Viktor scowled. “What is it now?”

“The big ceremonial dance,” Jayce said. “I can show you the steps.”

Viktor stiffened. “I am not doing that.”

“It’s not that bad—“ Jayce stopped, his gaze falling on the cane. “Um. Right. Sorry.”

“You go on ahead, if you wish. I will not hold it against you.”

Jayce shook his head. “It’s a partnered dance. Showing the truce between dark and light. Having an uneven number would throw the whole thing off.”

“Ah. My apologies, then.” Viktor gripped his cane.

Jayce recovered first, leaping to his feet. “We can do something better! C’mon, let’s go before the dance starts.” He offered a hand, smile bright.

Viktor looked at him skeptically, then shrugged, reluctantly accepting the hand as he stood. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be worse than being a public embarrassment to dance. Jayce led him through the halls, eventually stopping at a door and revealing a garden courtyard.

Many of the flowers were dead or dying, but there were a few patches of color remaining— mainly the fiery foliage. Some statues were scattered around, and a small pool reflected the sky above. The moon left barely a sliver of sunlight, casting the garden in mysterious shadows.

“No one will bother us out here, and the weather’s still nice,” Jayce explained. “We can even watch the eclipse without bumping into a dozen other people.”

Viktor took a breath of the fresh air, some tension leaving his shoulders. “It is nice here, thank you.”

Jayce smiled his brightest smile. “Wonderful!”

“I’ve never actually watched an eclipse before.” The words tumbled out of his mouth unbidden. Must be the drinks.

Jayce turned to look at him. “Really?”

Viktor shrugged. “Most Undercity children would climb onto rooftops to see. But… well…” He gestured to his leg.

“Oh.”

“Once I came topside, I was more focused on my studies and not getting arrested. It never really crossed my mind to take time to watch the eclipse.”

Jayce put a hand on his shoulder, warm and grounding. “What do you think of it now?”

Viktor partially-leaned into the touch, turning his attention to the eclipse. He hummed in thought before settling on, “It is a routine astronomical event. I think the company makes all the difference.”

“And do I make good company?” There was a hesitation in Jayce’s voice, a nervousness.

Viktor placed a hand on top of Jayce’s. “I can think of no one I would rather experience it with.”

Jayce’s answering smile was brighter than the remaining sun-rays. “Same here! With you, I mean.”

Something clicked. Viktor’s brow furrowed and he let his hand fall. “Jayce… I have a question,” he said slowly, fiddling with his cane, “Forgive me, there are still some Piltover customs I do not understand. If it is too forward, you do not need to answer.”

“Um, okay? Go ahead.” Jayce looked at him, seeming confused.

“These… Harrowing matches, dark to light. Are they usually romantic in nature?”

Jayce coughed, his face turning an interesting shade of red. “No, no! Well, I mean, they don’t need to be. I exchange gifts with Cait most of the time, and she’s more like my little sister than anything.”

“Ah. She claimed to have a cousin to torment today.”

“Did she?” Jayce laughed. “Good luck to them.”

They fell silent for a few minutes before Jayce spoke again, “Do you… want it to be? Romantic? Between us?”

Viktor’s cheeks burned. “I… would not be opposed to the possibility, if that is something you are interested in.”

“Viktor?”

“Hm?”

“Can I kiss you?”

Viktor nodded slowly, not trusting his words. He turned to Jayce, leaning closer. Jayce bridged the distance between them and their lips met.

It wasn’t the cleanest kiss, and their masks clacked against each other, but it was their first try. As with all things, it would take practice to perfect. And Viktor was more than happy to practice.

[devildomdisaster]

Comfort spell gone wrong (the dateables)

Anonymous asked: for the lore Olympus ask but with the dateables. (Deleted this ask by accident but here it is)

Comfort spell gone wrong

Not only had the brothers been completely horrible the past few weeks but even your friends in purgatory hall and Diavolo himself had been too busy for you.

You understood that Simeon was busy helping Luke work through some things. But still, being brushed aside after the brothers had been so cruel towards you hadn’t helped your crumbling self-worth.

Solomon had heaved a big sigh and told you “They're demons Mc. It’s what they do. You’re going to have to grow a thicker skin. Besides, I don’t have time to help you with something so trivial.” Before handing you a page from a spellbook “if you really can’t deal with it yourself use this for comfort.”

You’d undeniably ruined Barbatos’s hard work when you’d tripped and tipped over the cake he’d been working on all morning. The demon had shooed you from his domain with barely concealed rage and asked you not to come back until “you can prevent yourself from causing me more work.”

Diavolo, despite always telling you you could come to him with your troubles, had snapped that Solomon seemed to be doing just fine. “So maybe you need to try harder, Mc. Rather than blaming your problems on other people.”

The spell Solomon had given you seemed simple enough. Although it was in an unfamiliar mix of Latin and Infernal. Couldn’t hurt to try though. At least not anymore than you were already hurting. You’d cast the spell, stumbling through a few words and thinking it hadn’t worked when nothing happened. Figures you couldn’t do it, you were still new to magic and just as useless at it as everyone had so kindly reminded you the last few days. It still sapped your energy though, stupid spell. You closed your eyes thinking that maybe it was better that the spell didn’t work. You’d never live down the embarrassment if anyone found out you tried to use a comfort spell.

Lucifer calls the others asking if anyone has seen you, after several days of radio silence from you. Solomon, Luke, and Simeon rush to the house of Lamentation once they hear you haven’t been seen for days. They find Lucifer and the brothers crowded around you, worriedly discussing the spell which has covered you and your room in vines. Babratos and Diavolo are already there, both looking guilty. Solomon feels his stomach drop when he recognizes the page from the spellbook.

“Lucifer, I recognize that spell, I gave it to them when-” Solomon begins

“Yes, it figures you would have your hands in this Solomon.” Lucifer glares.

It’s Simeon who steps forward to undo the spell, giving Luke’s shoulder a comforting squeeze on his way by. “Lucifer if you would,” he says gesturing to your form “this will take both our magics to undo, I believe.”

Solomon:

Shit, shit! Solomon recognizes that spell! He gave it to you.

It wasn’t supposed to do this, it was just a simple comfort spell!

But he can’t help feeling responsible for what's happened.

He feels like he should have known, should have realized something was going on when he gave you that spell.

You’d just wanted to talk, but he was so caught up in trying to find a way to make pacts with the brothers that he totally brushed you off.

He handed you a page out of a spellbook instead. And told you to deal with things yourself.

Solomon is crushed. He has always told you that if you ever need to talk to another human, he’d be there. But he wasn’t. He told you to deal with it alone.

When Simeon and Lucifer break the spell he is by your side in an instant.

Hands fluttering over your body, brushing withering plants off you. Feeling utterly useless.

The spell had gotten so convoluted and twisted in ways he’d never seen before, he hadn’t even been able to break it.

You blink your eyes open, Solomon’s distraught face coming into focus.

“Mc, I shouldn’t have given you that spell. I’m so sorry. I-I said I’d always help you if you needed me but all I did was hurt you instead.”

He wants to distance himself from you. But he knows that won’t make you feel any better. It won’t make him feel better either.

Instead, he’ll be far more careful with the magic he gives you. He’ll start teaching you more magic, so you can practice spells safely.

But he’ll also do his best to make sure you never need a comfort spell again.

He wants to be your comfort.

Solomon will plan elaborate outings and magic filled dates. He gets all these grand ideas and half of them turn into disasters but somehow he’ll make sure the two of you still have fun.

It’s easy for Solomon to forget that he needs to communicate better. But he’s trying. Instead of snapping at you again he’ll be sure to set aside time for himself. Besides, being in the Devildom is more fun with an apprentice anyways, plus teaching you magic gives him plenty of time to make sure you are happy too.

Simeon:

Simeon is shocked when he sees you.

A shiver runs down his spine when he feels the spell sucking the energy from your body.

His eyes don’t miss the botched comfort spell on the ground and he wonders why you didn’t come to him.

And then he realizes. You did. But he brushed you off to help Luke and even when you were hurting you didn’t want to burden him.

He feels like he’s failed you by making you feel like you couldn’t come to him.

When you open your eyes Simeon is the first thing you see.

He gently brushes the plants from your face and hair.

“Oh my sweet little lamb, you are never a burden to me. I am so sorry I made you feel you couldn’t come to me.”

Simeon brings you to Purgatory hall while your room is cleaned.

He gently untangles bits of plant matter from your hair, humming what must be some Celestial lullaby to you.

“Mc,” he begins once he’s removed the remaining plants from your hair and skin, and you’ve allowed yourself to relax into him. “Forgive me, Mc. I should have seen how much you were hurting.”

He is being so gentle with you. But his voice takes a stern edge as he tells you “Next time you feel like this, promise me you will come to me. If you tell me what’s going on I will always have time for you.”

Simeon makes sure to check in on you now, to make time for you. He’ll invite you to Purgatory hall for dinners and/or sleepovers. Oftentimes Luke joins you. But sometimes he’ll sneak you in so the sleepover is your little secret.

Diavolo:

Oh, Mc! He hasn’t seen a spell like this in centuries.

He knows it’s a mistake, but the power it must have taken to cast this spell is impressive.

He’s curious to know what kind of power you’ll have after you’ve been trained properly.

That not to say he isn’t concerned, it's just he knows the spell can be undone, and he finds it easier to deal with the situation if he doesn’t think about how close he came to losing you.

He’ll request that the brothers keep a closer eye on you, not that they weren’t going to anyway.

Diavolo will scoop you from the tangled vines, brushing the remaining vines from your skin as he carries you from your room.

He sits down on his throne, with you still held in his arms. For a moment you're afraid of his thunderous expression.

And then his eyes soften. “Mc,” he whispers. Emotion making his throat tighten, choking off his voice. “Why?”

“Why don’t you find a human who can do better than me Diavolo? You said so yourself, I’m a disappointment.”

“Mc, I didn’t mean! I didn’t want you to-! I didn’t”

He knows what he said. But he never meant for you to take it to heart like this. He was just stressed and he took it out on you.

“I’m sorry, Mc. I shouldn’t have taken my anger out on you. You haven’t disappointed me. I’m sorry I made you feel like you can’t rely on me. Please understand that I would do anything in my power for you.”

A frightening promise from the prince of the Devildom.

Diavolo is careful to control himself in the future. To prevent himself from letting his stress and anger get the better of him.

Careful to remind you how important you are to him, and not just because you are an exchange student, but because he cares for you.

Barbatos:

Anger. Fear. Barbatos tumbles between the two emotions.

It seems that by placing you in this timeline to protect you from Belphagor’s anger he has put you in a new kind of danger. One he didn’t see coming.

This makes him question his decision not to look into the future more than necessary.

Humans are so fragile. And this is just more proof of that fact.

Barbatos is by your side the moment you wake up.

He is lifting you to your feet and guiding you from your room.

Barbatos is a perfect gentleman as he helps you clean up. Helping you scrub the plants from your skin, wrapping you in the softest blankets.

But he remains silent the whole time.

Once you are safely tucked into bed Barbatos speaks. “Mc, I know I have made you feel useless. I should not have taken my anger out on you. I should have known better.”

For a moment you think he’s going to leave, that that’s all he is going to say.

But then he asks if he can stay with you. If the answer is yes, he’ll curl around you in your bed. Holding you to him as if you are likely to disappear.

It has been a long time since Barbatos has had something or someone he has been afraid to lose. “I’m sorry Mc. Please know you can come to me, even if I may be upset. I’d rather you make me face my shortcomings then lose you.”

Barbatos starts having you over for tea more often. He’ll take you on errands with him, if he thinks you’d find them at all interesting.

Mostly he just wants more excuses to spend time with you.

This made him realize how important you are to him and he’ll make sure you know it.

Luke:

Scared little sibling vibes.

Luke is so scared to see you like this!

You are so still and pale that he thinks you might be dead.

When you open your eyes he is so relieved.

Please don’t scare him like this again!

He’s got tears in his eyes, and he half yells half cries at you “Mc! You- you can’t just do something like this. What if- if you had died? I know these demons-” he shoots a watery glare at the demons “can make you feel sad but you’re my friend.”

He’ll ask you to stay at Purgatory hall for a while. He 100% thinks this is all the brother’s fault.

In fact he wants you to move into Purgatory hall permanently and he is so insistent that Diavolo might just let you if that's what you want.

He’ll make sure you know that he sees you as a big sibling, a friend that he could never replace “so please don’t think nobody cares Mc. I know we’re not really related but you’re like a sibling to me.”

[createandconstruct]

can i ask about amarant coral? the monk in red himself~

Can you ask about Amarant Coral? *cracks fingers* Oh I insist that you do. Welcome to my Amarant Appreciation Post:

favorite thing about them: First off best thing about Amarant? His theme. The percussion and the guitar. It’s great and it captures him so well. People out here like “take Amarant out of the game he adds nothing.” EXCUSE ME? You remove the Amarant you remove the Amarant Theme my friend and that is something I do NOT vibe with. 

least favorite thing about them: I wanna know more about him. Now Amarant doesn’t need a backstory or history in the game. In a sense, he already has one that connects him to Zidane and explains his motives and actions and eventual arc. But my issue is, Square never gave him anything else. If you look at Ultimania there’s additional lore about other characters, like Steiner for instance. You learn Steiner was a war orphan who was saved by the Pluto Knights - explaining his devotion to them. Amarant though? Square was like “uh... yeah he was born....? And then he uh got famous...? Idk then he met Zidane. You figure it out.” Square. I hate you. 18 years from his birth until he became “well known”. WHAT WAS HE DOING. WHY’D HE BECOME A SECURITY GUARD. WHAT WAS ON HIS RESUME. TELL MEEEE. Like, okay, what the actual in-game canon gives us on Amarant is sort of enough. He’s a purposely written mysterious “cool-guy” character so we’re given scraps to make him unknown but come on. In the published after-game canon, like Ultimania, we could have been given a bit more. He says he doesn’t remember anything about his origins or parents, but why. Was he another victim of Gaia’s wars? Probably. Was he born on a battlefield? Fighting for his life, living without comrades, taking scraps whenever he could? Was he betrayed when he was young? Is he a supposed to be a version of Zidane had he not been adopted into Tantalus by Baku??? These are questions I deserve answers to, Square.

favorite line: “’I can't just walk away. It goes against my nature...’ You're a real simpleton. Forget it, guys. There's no stopping this fool." I love this. Amarant figures Zidane out pretty quickly after Ipsen’s Castle. Zidane is hardheaded and also an actor. He acts cool and pretends his reasons for doing things are loose but when he’s decided something it’s always for a reason. You don’t need a reason to help people, but Zidane has his reasons for helping Kuja and while Amarant doesn’t give two shits what they are he knows Zidane won’t be stopped because, despite everything, Zidane saved a loser like him. Also this line “Tell me! Why didn't you kill me!?" Because I quote it all the time and it makes myself laugh. Amarant is such a drama queen and Zidane knows it. Zidane’s like “dude... what is your damage, it’s 5 pm on Tuesday in Madain Sari. I ain’t getting blood on my gloves cause you’re having a temper tantrum.” And then Amarant runs away to have an existential crisis. He’s 26 but compared to Zidane, he’s the real teenager with angst.  

brOTP: I could talk about Zidane or Freya with Amarant but instead I’m gonna say the underrated dynamic of Amarant and Eiko (and also Vivi).  Amarant with the kids is truly the greatest gift given by his presence in the game. Amarant has never known true suffering until he became a designated legal guardian of a group of minors. It also kills me how he’s the one to volunteer to carry Eiko and Vivi up the Iifa tree. He looks at Zidane and is like “you have seriously been the ‘adult’ of this group???”

OTP: Gotta say the Freya and Amarant dynamic. I really enjoyed their unlikely friendship in the game but then the content. The fan content. The Freya x Amarant fans out there, you win. Ya got me. You captured me and I am now imprisoned by their banter and begruntled allies to lovers story. Even if they’re not romantic I love them together and really wish the game gave us more of them. But even Lani and Amarant together are valid, though I prefer them as butting head bros. Not much content for my girl Lani out there either, she deserves more.

nOTP: Nothing I can think of. I tend to like platonic pairings for Amarant. The dude needs friends because he can barely define the word friendship.

random headcanon: Before Zidane returns at the end of the game Amarant wanders around a bit, unsure of what to do. He doesn’t feel any place with the others in Alexandria, Burmecia, or Lindblum. I imagine he goes off on his own for a bit like before but this time he’s not after Zidane or a fight. Instead he’s got no particular destination. Yet he somehow always finds himself running into people just like him - or the old him - friendless lonely people who are looking for a fight. He doesn’t go out his way to find these folks he simply runs into them and decides he might as well knock some sense into them. He does however make it his business to go after any murmur of people hatching any ideas of going after the far off little village on the Lost Continent. The home of the genomes and black mages. They were so helpless, so weak that anyone who’d want to mess with them is pathetic in Amarant’s book. Until Zidane returns, no one has the chance to even look at the Black Mage Village the wrong way because in the shadows Amarant lurks, making damn well sure of that.

unpopular opinion: I kinda love that he’s just there for most of the game? While I agree he gets the short end of the stick in the same way as Freya, not receiving additional individual character spotlight (which could have very well been supplied through discoverable lore in the world/npcs or through sidequests) I never considered his “standing off to the side” as a detriment to his character. 

Many would probably agree that Amarant always felt like a bit of a parody of the loner character, or at least the stereotype of the loner character. Amarant is so easily paralleled with Squall and Cloud’s surface-level attitudes because his dialogue always felt like something to poke fun at. As the player we’re supposed to align with Zidane’s way of thinking and how he views Amarant. When Amarant loses to Zidane and pretty much grits his teeth and goes “KILL ME,” along with Zidane we’re supposed to kinda raise our brow at him and go “...really, dude?”

 Amarant’s a character introduced as an antagonist who has more in common with the power hungry villains of the game. Like many of the characters in FFIX, Amarant is in search of purpose in life, which he has never found, because he was always looking in the wrong places - in places of violence and power. Very toxic-masculinity of him. Amarant is “cool” on an aesthetic level but in reality he’s the polar opposite of cool in terms of what FFIX states about the need for others to be intertwined in your experiences so that you can live a full life. 

I sort of love that he’s like a grumpy pitball following a 16 year old and his friends around. Then he sits in the corner when they all meet up and discuss current events acting like he doesn’t care (not to mention he casually walks as everyone is running as fast as they can to escape Terra - made me laugh cry on my first playthrough) He is “just there” but that’s because he has no where else to be, no where else to go, he’s a man without a home. And until Zidane offers his hand, at the point where Amarant is most willing to take it at Ipsen’s Castle, he’s not truly a party member. He IS an outsider for almost the entire game but at Ipsen Castle he joins the party, becomes a comrade, and decides he’ll allow himself to change paths and start a life where he has friends and lives, as well as fights for them. Which is why after that moment, Amarant finally has a victory pose.

song i associate with them: I was scratching my head for so long trying to think of a song or track that had Amarant vibes until it hit me. Outskirt Stand by Tsukasa Tawada (from Pokemon Colosseum). Amarant is so chill, he’s not a bombastic guy, so he needs a theme that drops me in the rocky open desert of the Lost Continent like I’m just lumbering around looking for a monkey-tailed menace. Some other Amarant tunes:  Pyrite Town, The Under, Snagem Hideout tracks from Pokemon Colosseum. This post is just an elaborate call to action for everyone to listen to the Pokemon Colosseum soundtrack. Tsukasa Tawada is so great and he has a YouTube. Check him out.

favorite picture of them:

Yoshitaka Amano’s Salamander Coral. I love him. He had too much power. 

Also everything drawn by @crispy-ghee. Everything. I will think of this Comic forever until I die. Tattoo it on my flesh. The banter, the dynamics, the post-game content, the Zidane prince-consort outfit, the new Amarant outfit, the stuck-in-the-same-place relationship him and Freya have. Perfect. Go read it and consume Crisipy’s stuff. And also check them and their current art out, they just consistently get better and better. Here’s a first panel preview of my fav comic. Read it.

 @hannahlady​‘s Amarant art and their Freya/Amarant art is just ugh. *Chef’s Kiss* Here is another preview because you should go look at it.

Here’s a piece that deserves so much more love by @snackage. I LOVE how they drew Amarant. Here’s a little preview. It’s SO GOOD

Anyway TL;DR: Amarant is love and life and you’ll have to pull him from my little gremlin hands.

[johnconstantinesdick]

Okay *cracks knuckles, accidentally dislocates fingers* @agentscamander-romanoff and @steel-phoenix took the bait and enabled me by asking me to elaborate on my Children of the Watch origins theory. Which means I am about to go ABSOLUTELY feral.

Apologies to anyone for having incorrect Star Wars lore, I’ve barely consumed canon content and I don’t intend to start now. Also sorry if anyone has already said this! I’ve never seen this particular theory/interpretation and it’s made me go a bit insane.

Warnings: discussion of child abuse, cults, and the aftermath of genocide. I don’t go super in depth on any of it but it’s there. Also, I typed this in the notes app of my phone and autocorrect hasn’t quite submitted to some of these names.

SO. I’m going to break this up into sections. 1. Exploring canon 2. Extrapolations/Connecting the red string 3. What does this MEAN??? 4. Complaining about Bo-Katan.

First off, though, here’s my thesis: Children of the Watch is a “splinter group” made up of the children that Death Watch stole, indoctrinated, and abused. They’re also not a cult (Death Watch is though lmao).

1. Exploring Canon:

Okay, so. Canonically, Death Watch has abducted, tortured, and brainwashed children. Arla Fett is an example of that, having been abducted at the age of 14 after her parents were killed and she was subsequently brainwashed into becoming an assassin for Death Watch. She didn’t even hesitate when she found out her brother was alive! That’s how strong the conditioning was! She was so fucked up from it that she spent YEARS in a mental facility, and she outright begged a Jedi to wipe her memories in exchange for a favor. DEATH WATCH DID THAT. And you CANNOT tell me she was the only one they’ve done this to. PLENTY of fic writers have extrapolated off of this and mentioned it, but it’s important to me that everyone know this shit is absolutely rooted in canon.

Another Death Watch Child Abuse Fun Fact: Dred Priest and Isabet Reau, two of the trainers of the clones, canonically had Death Watch leanings and tried to instill Death Watch beliefs in the clones by FORCING THEM TO FIGHT EACH OTHER IN SECRET BATTLE CIRCLES THAT ENDED UP KILLING SOME OF THE CLONES. THEY WERE CHILDREN AT THE TIME, IF IT WASN’T CLEAR. WHAT THE FUCK. If THAT’S not an example of Death Watch abusing the kids under their care then I don’t know what is. It’s suuper not a stretch for me to think that this wasn’t an unheard of thing in more official Death Watch circles.

Also canonically, Bo-Katan has referred to Din’s covert as “Children of the Watch”, and Din, despite obviously being an important and respected member of his community, doesn’t recognize the name, which implies to me that it’s not a name the covert chose for themselves. Rather, a moniker that was given to them after they splintered off of Death Watch. Since this isn’t an opinion and it’s more just… information, I’ll trust Bo-Katan on this one.

We also know for sure that Din’s covert IS connected to Death Watch in some way, seeing as the flashback sequence very clearly shows Mandalorians in blue and gray beskar’gam, the colors of Death Watch. HOWEVER… the Armorer, who seems to hold a high position of authority in the covert, wears gold and copper beskar’gam. Din wears unpainted (v2) or mismatched colored (v1) beskar’gam (I do grant that his paint color counts less towards this because he’s pretty much one of the only people interacting with the outside world and so colors associated with Death Watch are probably a no go no matter what). Paz Vizsla’s armor is a very dark blue with yellow and cyan details and, oh my fucking god I didn’t even know this but he has a fucking MYTHOSAUR SYMBOL ON ONE OF HIS PAULDRONS. THE FUCK???? THAT’S LITERALLY THE SYMBOL OF THE TRUE MANDALORIANS IM. Ok. Okay. I needed a minute. Like I KNOW that the mythosaur skull is Mandalorian symbol in general but I think it just hits different when a Vizsla is wearing it, you know? Especially because the placement is the same as Jaster Mereel’s???? Literal founder of the True Mandalorian movement????? Excuse me???????

Let’s uh. Let’s get back to armor. I can address that… later. So. Anyway. Armor is super important, and it’s uhhh very telling that the covert doesn’t emulate the Death Watch colorscheme strictly. Like, yeah, there’s gray and light blue in there, if you go through some wiki pages, but they’re not the only colors they use, and the Armorer doesn’t even have either of those colors! And she’s the biggest authority we’ve seen! Very fucking interesting!! Bo-Katan still has her armor painted in Death Watch colors! And yet she’s derisive of Din’s covert! Verrry interesting!

We also know that Din’s covert emphasizes children VERY much, more than Death Watch ever would have, imo. It’s expected for the adult members to provide for the foundlings (and it’s VERY interesting that the kids are seemingly all referred to as foundlings iirc. More on that later.), and even though Paz disagrees with Din working with the empire, he and the other members of the covert immediately and with no hesitation come to Din’s aid for this child that Din hasn’t even claimed as his own—it’s amazing! And I will note that Bo-Katan and her warriors do the same upon their initial meeting with Din—Koska dives into danger with no hesitation as soon as Din says the child is still in danger. We see that this solidarity does come at a price for Bo-Katan, though, while the Armorer sees protecting a foundling as a duty that is completely worth all the trouble it brought.

Fascinating also that Boba was 100% on board to help out Din to save Grogu past what Din or anyone else would have expected of him, while Bo-Katan had to be bribed into coming by the promise of Moff Gideon and the darksaber. And she thinks she’s somehow more Mandalorian than him.

And NOW, going way back in time to the beginnings of the True Mandalorian movement, we know that Jaster Mereel originally authored his Supercommando Codex by looking back through history to the Canons of Honor and the Resol’nare, and he took those ideals and ideas and he modernized them to create a set of moral guidelines to follow. And people loved that shit! Death Watch had to infiltrate the True Mandalorians and then trick the Jedi into slaughtering them just to get rid of them, because Jaster’s charisma and his sexy sexy morals were too strong. (God. I fucking LOVE Jaster Mereel if you couldn’t tell.) Anyway, there’s precedent for Mandalorians looking back to their history to bring forth old ideas, repurposed to a modern context. We also know that, canonically, Din’s covert follow the “old ways” of not sharing names and of never taking their helmets off in front of others.

Moving on.

2. Extrapolations/Connecting the red string:

So if we extrapolate from the fact that Death Watch are, uh, super fucking abusive towards the kids that they stole/their own kids, then we’re left with… this group of kids, who have been mistreated and indoctrinated for a LONG TIME, and possibly don’t have that great an understanding of non-toxic Mandalorian culture. And if they’ve been abducted or rescued, whatever, they might not fit back in with the places they were taken from, or they may not have a place to go back to, or they may not even remember where they’re from originally. It’s some prime angst material! Good stuff.

And if we pull the implication from the names that “Children of the Watch” is a splinter group off of Death Watch, it really does make you think… huh, you know what? These two things may be one in the same. Maybe.

And, like, we know that Jaster Mereel and Din’s covert both looked to Mandalorian history to find pillars for their community’s morals. Jaster did so in the middle of a lot of political turmoil, as a way to say “Hey, we can still be Mandalorians in the ways that matter, but being Mandalorian doesn’t mean being a morally bankrupt conqueror. We can have honor and still wear armor and fight and uphold the Resol’nare.”

And I think Din’s covert did so when they were struggling with unlearning the toxic ideals that had been shoved onto them by Death Watch. I think they had to figure out their own way of being Mandalorian or else they would have crumpled under the pressure. And so they looked back to the old ways and picked out the more extreme interpretation of Cin Vhetin (clean slate) which says that, once you swear the Resol’nare and become a Mandalorian, your past doesn’t matter, it’s what you do now that does. You don’t take off your helmet, and you don’t let others know your name, because those things don’t matter to who you are and what you do. (There’s also the issue of the helmet and name rule being an important defense tactic to protect the covert, seeing as how Mandalorians post-Empire are the survivors of genocide. There’s already a fantastic post on it here)

Related, another Mandalorian saying is “Gar taldin ni jaonyc; gar sa buir, ori'wadaas'la.”, meaning “Nobody cares who your parent was, only the parent you’ll be,” which IMO fits in very nicely with how I’m interpreting Din’s covert. It’s all about your actions and future mattering more than your past. I think that when the covert was splitting off and being built, this would be a huge component of them healing. Because the way they were treated and indoctrinated by Death Watch doesn’t have to affect their future actions. They don’t have to perpetuate the cycle of abuse, they can build a covert and a community around caring for foundlings.

Now, onto the foundlings! I find it very interesting that, whenever the covert’s younglings are mentioned, it’s always as foundlings. I think this implies that there’s a focus on saving and raising children more than there is on sharing blood with them, and I think that the covert would be more inclined towards communal raising than typical family units, if only to keep everyone in check and to protect the children from ever being treated as they were. I also find it VERY interesting that there’s a lot of emphasis put on returning children to their own kind. I don’t think Death Watch would have employed that practice, and I think that’s another example of the covert wanting to make their community a better place for children. I think it’s likely a lot of them didn’t get that choice, and they had to leave their cultures and people behind. And so they want to give that choice to their children.

I think it’s also amazing that, like. They keep finding and raising children instead of deciding they’re too damaged or whatever to have kids. Because it doesn’t matter if they have baggage or trauma when a child needs them. That’s FANTASTIC. I’m losing my MIND. It really doesn’t matter who their parents were to them, just the kind of parents they will be. It’s all about breaking that cycle and deciding to be better and I LOVE THAT.

3. What does this MEAN???:

Well. What this means is that Din’s covert has a very clear set of motivations and structure when it comes to how their covert is run. It’s not a cult; in fact it is specifically a group created by cult survivors who are determined to not do to others what was done to them. The rules may seem weird and strict at first glance, but they have a clear purpose and rationale, and no one is trying to amass power. They’re just… trying to do better, and be better.

(This also means that I’m 99% sure that, with the assistance of time travel, at least half of the covert would be SUPER INTO Jaster Mereel. I like to imagine that Paz had, like, a poster of him on his little sewer bedroom wall. I fully believe he painted that mythosaur skull on his pauldron in honor of a good man who was killed by Paz’s own relatives for standing by his morals and daring to try to reform and rally Mandalorians. I also think it would be funny if, like, Din doesn’t know shit about ANYTHING to do with modern history, but Boba mentions that his grandfather is Jaster Mereel and Din is like “OH I KNOW THAT GUY! Yeah he’s cool, he’s the historical crush of like, my entire covert.” And Boba is like. What.)

It also means that it can be up in the air about whether Din was found by Death Watch before his covert splintered off, or if his covert was still just wearing Death Watch colors when he was found. Fun thing to play around with, but right now I don’t want a solid timeline.

Hmm just thought I should add: while the Armorer does seem to have a position of authority, I don’t think the covert can be structured politically with clans and houses like other Mandalorian groups. Like, clan just means family in this context, and is less a part of hierarchy, and I don’t think they would even recognize houses within the covert? Like they MIGHT decide to call themselves part of House Djarin now that Din is Mand’alor, but before that they weren’t like. House Vizsla with Paz as the leader just because they used to be Death Watch. I don’t vibe with that. This isn’t really super relevant, I just wanted to add it.

4. Complaining about Bo-Katan:

Anyway Bo-Katan is absolutely full of shit and it’s doubly disgusting that she’s standing there in Death Watch armor, seemingly still allied to this fucking cult of imperialism and conquest, and she accuses Din of being in a regressive cult, and she implies that the way he engages with the Resol’nare is wrong and like. Repressed or something. God I hate Bo-Katan. But I love to hate her. She’s horrible but I want her to be included in the list of Din’s friends but not the list of people he’d trust his kid with. I have contradictory Bo-Katan feelings, whatever. The most important thing is that all of her opinions are horrible, like, all the time. And we shouldn’t trust her when she says Din’s part of a cult. Literally why does anyone take that at face value. If we’re taking her word as the authority on Mandalorian issues then I guess Boba and Jango aren’t Mandalorian!!! Seriously.

TLDR; Din’s covert (aka “Children of the Watch”) is made up of survivors of childhood abuse, torture, and brainwashing at the hands of Death Watch, and they’re dedicated to making sure their children don’t go through the same thing. They’re not a cult, but Death Watch sure was! Jaster Mereel is the love of my very aromantic life and Bo-Katan’s opinions can’t be trusted. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

[cursewoodrecap]

Session 23: Medical Ethics

Y’all ever been to college?

Our new friend Vigdor has just pulled a pale, twitching human leg out of a poster tube, sheepishly admitting to Valeria that it’s his own.

Valeria blinks at it. “Well, it doesn’t appear to be bleeding demons, so that’s good?”

Shoshana sticks her head in the door, and has to pause to take in the sight. “Uh, bruh? Bruh? I have questions. Is that yours? I mean, like, yes, you HAVE it, but was it attached to-“

“That’s a bit tricky? It was amputated twice.”

“Twice?!”

“Once from me, and then, well, um. Once from an amalgam of sewn together body parts?”

(Gral and Shoshana pile into the room, because Oh, Lore?)

“When I was in the swamp, we were fighting a bunch of zombies led by this particularly nasty undead guy. We called it the Wailing Wight. At first it was just the usual undead hordes, but then a local leatherworker was found, torn apart and harpooned every which way, half his limbs torn off and stolen. After that, we started getting attacked by stitched together abominations cobbled together from human and animal pieces. I was there just trying to help the villagers, being a doctor and all. But that’s when I lost my actual limbs.”

“They got stolen, like the leatherworker’s?”

“I had to chop them off. Which, for the record, is not a fun time? The Wight’s harpoon has a kind of poison that rots everything it touches. So I had to amputate or, like, die. So I cut them off and his zombies, uh, stole them. And I managed to get one back? Kind of a long story. I don’t know how I recognized it, but – I guess I know my own leg like the back of my hand? Now I’m taking it back to Sturmhearst. There’s a weird fluid inside it; I want to study what’s going on with that so we can take care of the nastyboy in the swamp.”

“Well, I am generally against nastyboys,” says Shoshana, poking his foot in the ticklish bit. It squirms at her.

We’re headed to Sturmhearst anyway, so traveling together seems reasonable. We think about taking Fun Key Shortcuts, but that could backfire spectacularly, so we’ll play it safe and go the normal, boring way.

In the morning, we head downstairs. The inn is trashed. The stalwart barkeep Rene is not there; instead there’s a young elf sweeping out what debris he can. As we grab breakfast and the young fellow thanks us over and over for saving his friend’s life, Vigdor awkwardly wanders around casting Mending on chairs and tables that got a little too close to the tentacles and chainsaws. Shoshana doesn’t really do non-destructive magic, but she slips the barkeep some gold for repairs.

Vigdor’s too lopsided for a horse, so he’s gonna hop on in our cart. He’s very taken with the Eyegis, poking at it with fascination. “You can see the blood vessels in the eyes, despite no source for a blood supply! Do they have tear ducts? Have you ever seen the shield produce tears? Can you make it cry?”

Valeria gets very uncomfortable with this line of questioning and turns the eyes back into painted ones, put off by a Weird Stranger gettin’ all up in her business. Gral distracts him by asking about his fancy metal limbs.

Vigdor goes full technobabble on how the runes and machinery work. “Well, there’s three different kind of magical actuators on each joint, and they act as conduits for the dilithium crystals-” He knows the details secondhand from Bjork and none of us speak robotics, so if he ever needs serious repairs he’ll have to bring them back to Sturmhearst for the engineers to take a look at.

Valeria knows a bit about Jotunn runesmithing, but she’s never heard of it working to this degree of precision; before, she’d only heard of stuff like boats that row themselves, or a peg leg that has a little extra articulation. These are fully actuated limbs!

Val checks if the limbs are the same metal as our space wrench, but nope, they look like completely normal everyday metals. She’s not gonna inspect further, because she has RESPECT, unlike SOME people.

(“Hey, I didn’t try to pry the eyes open or anything!” Vigdor protests.)

She does notice one thing, though: Valeria recognizes runes from most magic systems even though she doesn’t know them well enough to use; her sister studied magic for a long time, so she knows what they look like. There’s one elaborate rune that appears on both Vigdor’s forearm and leg that is of no origin she’s ever seen.  

“How long’d it take Bjork to build this thing?” Shoshana asks, squinting at Vigdor’s kneecap.

“Well, I was unconscious for a good bit of it so…between a week and 2 months? He was already working on it when I, uh, had to amputate.”

“…did you KNOW you were gonna wake up with those things on?”

“Oh! Yeah, yeah. It took a while ‘cause the original blueprints they found were for somebody, like…really short for a human or really tall for a halfling? Something in between. Bjork had to resize the whole model to fit a human.”

“He, uh, FOUND blueprints?

“I can’t imagine he’d have made blueprints for a person who didn’t exist? It was all proportioned very strangely. I don’t know too much about it, you’d have to ask Professor Bjork.”

(One of the players asks if the strange rune, perhaps, says ISTC in a language the characters don’t know. It DOES, and we’re all very pleased with ourselves for previous-campaign references.)

The long road stretches on before us, and we have plenty of time to talk as we spend a week or two heading north toward the coast. We fill Vigdor in on the four flavors of Curse and the concept of the Prisoners, and that we suspect there’s major Key nonsense going on up at the university. (Heh heh, “major key.”)

Vigdor and Shoshana bond over being locals. Why are foreigners so weird about trolls?

Vigdor really, really wants to look at Twombly’s glasses. We explain to him that the Key could take his desire for knowledge and turn him into a cackling, dimension-hopping madman with a few extra eyeballs. He still wants to play with the glasses. Valeria protectively hides the Key map, just in case, flashing her Hunt fangs at anyone who asks about it.

After like a week of pestering everybody, Vigdor gets to look at the glasses. Disappointingly, when not looking at the Key map, the colorful lenses just make everything look slightly more those colors. Maybe Gral’s lutestrings look weird, but that could be the placebo effect. He tries flipping around the many lenses in different combinations, and finds that all of them make him look absolutely ridiculous.

Eventually after many days of travel, we can smell the ocean and the distinctive stench of a large number of humans living in one place. Vigdor takes in the familiar sight of his college hometown. Shoshana is dumbfounded that this many people can live on top of each other, while Valeria thinks it’s a quaint little town.

Up to the west, Sturm Castle squats on a cliff above the city, like a big hippo of knowledge. It looks like it was once a reasonable castle shape, but it’s had new wings and towers built onto it haphazardly until it’s a weird sprawling network of jammed-together architecture. By the edge of the cliff, in one of the more sensibly-built sections, a majestic lighthouse beams out over the bay. In the city below, the largest building appears to be a grand temple, with its roof carved in the shape of an open book. The perimeter of the city is outlined by strange wooden and metal towers, two or three stories tall with conical brass roofs.

Eh. It’s only got one castle, so it can’t be that good of a city compared to Aurentium.

Our cart is briefly stopped for a quick examination at the gate by a friendly city guardsman. He’s flanked by two of the same enormous owl-masked guards we saw accompanying Quercus and Ulmus. “Hi, welcome to Sturmhearst, folks! What brings you here?”

We all awkwardly try not to look at Vigdor’s leg bag.

“I’m, uh, here to visit Dr. Emily Thorpe?” he tries.

“Oh, visiting the university. Don’t need yer life story. Where you stayin’? I can recommend some inns. Oh, and check out the Scholar’s Temple while yer here!” He hands us a brochure from the Sturmhearst Tourism Board and steps back. “ALL RIGHT BIG GUYS, LET EM THROUGH!”

The owl guards don’t move.

“Oh, uh, I mean –“ He fishes in his pocket and pulls out a whistle. “Lemme see if I can remember how the doc told me to do this.” He blows a few sharp notes on the whistle, and the owl guards promptly step off the road to let us through.

Huh.

Vigdor makes an investigation check on those guards, who definitely weren’t around back when he was in school. They’re pretty bulky for humans – no, honestly, they’d be bulky even for goliaths. He’d heard a story from Professor Bjork that the school was hiring goliath mercs and dressing them in owl masks, but the professor had sounded like he hadn’t believed it much. Supposedly they’re silent because they don’t speak the language, but Vigdor’s pretty sure Bjork speaks Jotunn, so that excuse doesn’t quite hold up.

Once we’re out of the guards’ earshot, Gral pulls a huddle. “Vigdor, the Key’s a more recent influence, so let us know about anything new or significantly more abundant – that’s where we’ll need to search.”

Vigdor hmms. “The big brass towers weren’t here before. And the owl guys didn’t used to be a thing.”

Gral cuts another glance back to the owl guards, considering. “…How much of a faux pas is it to remove a Sturmhearst person’s mask?”

“I mean, if you’re dealing with the plague, it’s kind of a dick move? And dangerous? But most people – it’s like, the same rudeness of grabbing someone’s hat or jacket. For some people it’s badge of honor or superiority, y’know, how amazing they were to get through the gauntlet of Sturmhearst. But mostly it’s a practical tool of the job. We’re not, like, afraid to show our faces.”

Gral nods. “So you wouldn’t have to duel them, then.”

“W-what?”

“Oh, with bards it’s like ‘you are not deserving of your title’ and you have to duel about it. You know, like, how dare you slander my name, I’ll have to fight you for my honor?”

“Oh, uh, no, nothing like that. The mask is proof of office, that’s all.”

Before we get investigating, though, it’s late and we should rest. Vigdor wasn’t a palling-around-town type, but he rolls a nat 20 and knows the best inn in the city – not one of those touristy places on the square; the best-kept-secret on a side street that only the locals and regulars know about.

We have a lovely night around the docks of Sturmhearst. Shoshana spends like fifteen minutes just staring out to sea, because they MAKE boats that big???? This much water even EXISTS????? There’s a dragonborn ship from Aurentium, a goliath ship from Jotunhein, a couple of Galwan freighters, and even a ship crewed by colorful macaw aarakocra. (History check: while the Aquilians mostly died out, some of the ground-based aarakocra cultures survived. Valeria’s met macaw traders before in Aurentium; they tell lots of stories and do GREAT impressions.)

Valeria, meanwhile, holies some ocean water. They say Galwan clerics swear by holy seawater; salt repels demons, right? It’s gross harbor water but, whatever, it’s holy now. She also beats a sea captain at Man-go, presumably dock style. The inn’s equipped for foreign travelers, so it’s got a whole bar of draconic and goblin spices!

Gral, meanwhile, discovers the inn is near a bath house and enjoys finding out what a sauna is.

Morning comes, and Sturmhearst U awaits. Vigdor knows the main campus has the colleges of Engineering, Science, and Medicine, while the satellite campus across the bay houses the college of Ethics, which includes humanities like economics and history.

Valeria rolls for Order of the Rose knowledge. The Order actually has an arrangement with Sturmhearst when they’re working in Valdia – whenever the Order is sent on disaster relief, some Sturmhearst ethicists are sent to help coordinate. Valeria’s never worked with them personally, but the impression she’s gotten from her fellow knights is Not Great. From what she’s heard, they’re supposed to do triage and help direct the knights, but it seems like they spend the whole time sitting around debating absolutely horrible things. “Hey, if we brewed up some necromancy, could we use the skeletons of plague victims to transport supplies without spreading the infection?” Apparently they just sit around in corners debating whether that kind of shit is kosher or not, without ever actually DOING anything.

Also ethicists wear white instead of black like most Sturmhearst scholars, which is just pretentious. We then poke fun at an Order of the Rose knight calling anyone else pretentious.

Vigdor studied at the College of Medicine; he’s a doctor. But that’s not where he’s taking the leg.

“Why not Medicine? I mean, it’s a human body part, innit?” Shoshana asks.

“It’s…I have some concerns…regarding the, um. So, along with this leg, my arm was stolen, right? Not long after the arm was stolen, the sewn-together amalgams got a lot, uh, cleaner.”

We stare at him.

“…as if whatever stitched them together had my medical training.”

…oh.

“I’m a little hesitant taking that info to the College of Medicine,” he admits.

“Why?”

“There’s a lot of ‘for the greater good’ stuff with the College of Medicine sometimes. The College of Ethics keeps them in check. Anyway, there’s actually this thaumochemist I want to take a look at it.”

(We’d know the discipline as alchemy, but she hates that. She’ll go on a whole tirade about it. Somebody yells “Full Metal Thaumochemist” and we accidentally take a commercial break. We’ll never get tired of that joke.)

More of those owl guards are at the door, supervised by a businesslike white-coated member of the College of Ethics. His mask is a bit more abstract than the ones we’re used to; not modeled after a bird face like the regular scholars’. He lets Vigdor in with no problem, though he’s a bit suspicious of the rest of us. We’re with a doctor, though, so he’ll let it slide. “Welcome to Sturmhearst, may your visit be enlightening.” He does the same whistle we heard before and the guards step aside. Gral’s a string guy, he can figure out the notes easily enough but he doesn’t whistle.

“Nothing goes on here without Ethics knowing about it, huh,” Gral observes.

More owl guards are stomping around, some carrying heavy objects. Vigdor knows where he’s going, but asks an owl guard for directions, as an experiment. The owl guard doesn’t even notice him. He steps in front of the guard, who just steps around him very politely.

The castle is a nightmare to navigate, like Hoeska, but we have an expert tour guide. “The old keep, the part that used to be a castle – that’s where all the 101 classes are and the whole working hospital. All the additions are laid out super weird, and then there’s the tunnels underneath. The Chem students had WILD parties down there, they brewed up all SORTS of stuff. The lighthouse is a real lighthouse, but it’s also where admin is, and the dean’s and headmaster’s offices. Oh! DO NOT cross the librarians. Each college has its own library? Like, theoretically they share the whole collection, but which college keeps which books is kind of a blood sport…”

Shoshana and Gral hang back, feeling out of place. “Bards don’t really have a college, exactly?” Gral explains. “It’s more of a pilgrimage. I met the elders of each village and they imparted wisdom upon me?”

Shosh feels like an uneducated hick even by that standard.

We take a hairpin turn in one of the Science buildings and run into Professor Quercus! Or at least someone with a bird mask and a similar voice, chatting with some other masked scholar. “Ah! Yes! We made a lot of excellent discoveries before we started to run into problems – you see, there hadn’t been an event in some time, but if we could get in there to the source, we could really – well, my goodness! These are the people I was telling you about, who gave me such wonderful notes!” Quercus turns to us, sounding rather delighted. “I certainly didn’t expect to see you here. Welcome to the world of knowledge! What brings you here? I thought you were having adventures and derring-do!”

“Well, it turns out our adventures led here!” Gral tells him.

Quercus nods enthusiastically. “I’d show you around, but I rather need to speak to the bursar! If you need anything, I’m sure you can find my offices without too much problem. And please, if you’ve encountered any interesting monsters, I’d love to hear details! Especially if you have samples!” Despite his keen excitement, Professor Quercus rolls a four and fails to notice our Shusva accessories.

“If you ever need a cup of tea and a biscuit, you’re welcome to stop by my office! I’d be more than happy to speak with you! And if you could do me a favor – well, I wouldn’t mind having you with me when I speak to the bursar! See, our expedition to Holzog has hit a bit of a snag. The events with that mist stopped happening, you see. Luckily, we managed to identify which house you were going to, and we were all set to investigate, but then the Baroness put a squadron of those damnable Condotierri to prevent us getting in – “

Gral shrugs, deliberately casual. “I don’t know why you’d go back; there’s not much to see besides what’s already in the notes.”

(Vigdor immediately rolls insight to see if Gral is lying. Unfortunately for him, bards are excellent liars.)

“Anyway. The bursar’s giving me an earful about continuing to fund the expedition. I’m considering withdrawing from Holzog and asking him to redirect the funds into a different project! For example, lots of interesting monsters have been seen around Barroch lately!”

Yes, definitely, we want him to go somewhere that’s not a Tempting Key Portal. Valeria and Gral tag-team Persuasion checks to sell him on interesting cases of monsters we’ve heard of around Barroch. If we’re fuzzy on the details – well, all the more reason to have someone get out there and take a closer look!

Quercus is rather taken by the idea. “If you would, Mr. Duu –“

“Um, actually, Duu is the tribe, my family’s name is-“

“-yes, if you could write me some letters, I might find it useful making the acquaintance of the locals while setting up camp. Sturmhearst hasn’t established an official relationship to your people yet’”

Gral agrees to write up a formal letter explaining the mission of Sturmhearst and the expedition to make introductions a bit smoother; the word of a bard will go a long way in gaining the cooperation of the orcs of Barroch. He’ll do a personal letter of introduction for Quercus, and a general letter to Shieldeater’s administration to explain who the heck these weird bird people are.

“Wonderful! Bring it by my office!” He gives us directions that make NO sense to anyone but Vigdor. We’re pretty sure several of those compass directions aren’t real words?

“Oh, and if you see an angry tall woman stomping around, tell her I’m not here! She’s mad at me for some reason I can’t discern. Good day!”

He scuttles off, presumably to hide.

We definitely want the gossip on that – Ulmus was mad at him about funding, and she definitely dissed his field of study. Is this what academia is like?

Vigdor confirms that the professors have all kind of weird beefs, interdepartmental politics, and personal feuds. “One of my professors gave me a B- in amputation – shows what he knows – purely because I was taking some classes outside the College of Medicine and he got all offended. It’s a lot of politics and bullshit, they’re all more concerned about their careers and publishing than actually important stuff.”

We find a door with a brass plaque: Dr Emily Thorpe, Thaumochemist. There’s a paper list tacked to her door with a list of courses: “Intro to Potion Brewing,” “Principles of Alchemy Thaumochemistry”

Vigdor knocks. “Yes, who’s there? Come in!” a voice calls.

“It’s Vigdor! Vigdor Gavril!”

“Ah, Vigdor!” A halfling woman in the requisite bird mask waves from behind a counter where she’s handling a set of proper Movie Science bubbling beakers and flasks. “Yes, you sent me that letter! You had something ‘interesting’ for me!”

“Yes, and you will see why I couldn’t be more detailed!”

She notices his metal arm as he starts pulling open his heavy waterproofed case. “Oh! I heard that Professor Bjork was giving you his prototype! How’s it working?”

“They’re loud and heavy and uncomfortable sometimes, but I have limbs! Can’t complain! But then I, uh, found one of my limbs again.”

He goes over to an open table and pulls out his entire-ass leg with a flourish, plus vials of hair and blood and strange unidentified liquids. Her eyes widen.

“Ah, this is yours!” She watches his toes wiggle. “Well, you don’t see that every day.”

“Yeah, I found it stitched to some kind of unholy undead abomination.”

“And that explains the Knight of the Rose. Hello, Kyr.”

“Kyr Valeria Argent, at your service!”

“Dr. Emily Thorpe, at your service as well, I guess? Pardon the mess in my lab, it’s not much but it’s home. Hand me that vial?” She pulls out a syringe and takes a sample of not blood, but oily black liquid, from the leg. “It will take some time, but I can write up a thaumaturgical profile without much difficulty. Do you mind if I keep it?”

“You can hang on to it. But I would appreciate discretion.”

“Yes, this will stay between me, your friends, and – oh, this is Hugo, he’s my teaching assistant. He’s been helping since the school was mobilized.” She turns to Vigdor’s clearly uneducated hick friends (not you, Valeria, you’re very fancy) and explains:

“In times of crisis, the University turns from education to innovation. Were this a disease, we’d be researching cures! If demonic, we’d be researching weapons or dimensional banishment. We haven’t really received direct orders this time, so everybody is doing their own thing, which I can’t say I mind. Mostly I’ve been helping other researchers with the practical application of their theorems.”

She scribbles out a hasty list. “Hugo, if you can go to the library and put these books on order? The Vigmar and the Auspelius especially would be useful, but don’t let the librarians kill anyone over them. And the Principles of Advanced Anatomy – tell them I won’t ask. But I do need it.” The grad student nods and hustles out of the room.

(Shoshana insights, out of paranoia. Hugo’s a good egg, though he might refer to thaumochemistry as alchemy.)

“Now, Dr. Gavril, do you want this leg back? How intact-“

“Want it back? Like, in the abstract, or on my body?”

She pulls out a vial of bubbling acid. “I’d like to put some of this on it and I’d like to see what happens.”

He blanches slightly. “Uh. Um. I have some proprietary-“

“Aw, no acid then,” she grumbles, stowing the acid with an audible sigh.

“Only do something you would do to living person’s leg. That they would survive!”

“How would I know? I’m a chemist, this is only, like, my second dead person!” She pauses. “…well, fifth.”

Shoshana starts looking around at all the alchemy equipment curiously. Everything here is clearly labeled with numbers, and letters that feel like numbers, and complex formulae, which hedgewitch potionery doesn’t really account for.

There’s a knock at the door. “Ah, that must be Hugo. Come in!”

Valeria instinctively body-blocks the leg from view.

It is not Hugo. In walk 3 white-clad ethicists. The gentleman at the front is in fancier robes – we suspect he’s the kind of fellow who has tenure – and he wears a powdered judge’s wig atop his mask. We immediately don’t like it. His two companions peer around the lab – one has a jeweler’s loupe built into the lens of his mask, and the other is carrying a big chime with runes carved into it, clearly a magic item of some sort.

“Dr Thorpe,” the leader intones.

“Sorbus,” she replies disdainfully.

“I see you have guests, is now a bad time?”

“Is it ever a good time?” Emily makes a point of tending to her samples and beakers busily.

“I suppose not. We have come to ask a few follow-up questions. Have you been visited at all by Professor Matthias Macker? Has he followed up on the project you were working on together?”

“I told you, no! I had no potions strong or precise enough for what he needed, and he’s never spoken to me since. That was months ago!”

“And no one has seen him since then. You understand why we need to know what you discussed.”

“Yeah, not since you quarantined the whole surgical wing!”

“That is not what I’m asking about. Has Macker’s assistant Greta Ruble visited you?”

“No. She’s a good kid, though, don’t hassle her.”

“We are simply making sure she is not a danger.”

Emily sputters angrily. “A danger to who?!”

“I cannot tell you that.” He turns to Valeria. “Kyr, it is always a pleasure to see a member of the Order here. I suppose if you’re here we can be assured nothing… unethical is happening,” he says, unpleasantly oily. “I am Professor Rigmor Sorbus of the College of Ethics; I lecture on legal and judicial ethics. These are my assistants, Charles and Pippin.”

Valeria bows with the precise degree of politeness required. “Kyr Valeria Argent, at your service.”

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance. In these times of mobilization, it falls to us as ethicists to supervise our colleagues’ noble efforts. Please, I implore you: if you see anything untoward or suspiciously unusual, I request you report it to the nearest representative of the College of Ethics.”

Emily butts in. “What happened to Eric Pelbort, his other assistant?”

“Mr. Pelbort has transferred to the College of Ethics and is assisting us with some research. We will let you know if that changes.” He tells her dismissively. “Kyr Argent, the College of Ethics has always been proud of our long association with the Order, and I would like to extend our deepest condolences for the tragedy of the Crusade. Should you have need of any assistance whatsoever, do not hesitate to ask. Our offices are on the satellite campus across the bay. If you were to visit, I’m sure many would love to speak to a paladin of the Order of the Rose.”

“We have business here, but I might be able to make time to stop by,” she equivocates.

“Very well. I will let you all get back to whatever it is you’re doing with that leg,” Sorbus says, turning neatly on his heel and taking his leave, his toadies hurrying in his wake.

(Yes, you guessed it: That was Professor Rowan, with his Tort Wig and his assistants Pip Loupe and Chime Charles.)

“Those guys give me the creeps,” Emily grumbles. “They used to be fine, but lately they’ve been doing this whole inquisitor act.”

Vigdor’s always known these guys as douchey blowhards. But now they’re douchey blowhards with AUTHORITY.

There’s always been a divide between Ethics and the other three colleges roughly the size of the harbor! The sciences don’t believe in debate, they believe in experimentation! Anyone who can spend an entire week talking without action is wasting time and breath. The College of Medicine thinks even less of them – they just get in the way of progress!

(IRL we all respect medical ethics, but Sturmhearst WAS founded on a fine tradition of graverobbing and leeches.)

Vigdor is primarily a surgeon, or he was, when he had two fully functional hands. (Two players at once: “HE GOT DR STRANGED!”) He had quite a few classes with Macker, the chair of the surgery department. Most people didn’t like the guy, except his surgical grad students who would defend him to the death. A bit of a hardass about proper procedure, but that’s probably not a bad quality for a surgeon. He was a local institution, so it’s pretty alarming he’s somehow gone rogue.

“His whole lab was quarantined?”

“The whole teaching wing, actually,” Emily tells us.

“Are there people in there? Some kind of sickness?”

“Not that I’ve heard. Ethics just put guards outside the labs and blocked everyone from going in. They’ve done it to a couple places around the school recently. The excuse is that someone was doing ‘unsafe experimentation’ that’s ‘poisoned the area’ or something?”

Wack. “How long have these quarantines lasted?”

“They don’t really end? A couple stopped after a few months, but some have been there for a year! Nobody goes in or out. Sometimes the white coats go in, but it’s pretty rare and they don’t stay long.”

“Is that what all the guards are for? Where’d they all come from?” Vigdor asks.

“Medicine used to be the ones, uh, hiring them.” (A quick insight roll notes that she hesitates on the phrase “hiring.”) “Lots of them still answer to whoever they were originally assigned to. But recently Dean Chidor from the College of Ethics took over that whole program, so a lot of the newer ones answer primarily to the ethicists. I mean, they all dress the same, so it’s kinda hard to tell? I haven’t asked a lot of questions, I’ve been trying to keep my head down since the whole thing with Macker.”

“What actually happened with him?”

“He’d been acting weird for a while,” she confides as she starts sticking pins in the leg and wiring them to a voltage generator. “He’d been working on something, some kind of extreme surgery – I think he was looking into a method of surgically removing Curse corruption. He was hitting roadblocks, though; he called in me and Alma Ulmus, who’s a College of Medicine bigwig.”

“Yeah, we met her in Bad Herzfeld!”

“I heard she’s here again, stalking around the halls complaining about funding. She knows more about his project than I do. Anyway, Macker sent me requirements for a healing potion he was gonna administer as part of some surgical procedure. I couldn’t get anything as powerful or precise as he needed. I’m a thaumochemist; I don’t know medicine that well. So it was beyond me to do that amount of gross tissue damage repair as controllably as they wanted it. I mean, I made some pretty nice innovations as far as the theory of potioncrafting, I’m hoping to get published as soon as it goes to peer review.

“But I couldn’t do what he needed, and eventually I got shut out of the project. Then one day he vanished. Alma set off for Bad Herzfeld and Macker stopped coming out of his lab. His assistants were still going in and out, but not long after that, the ethicists quarantined the place.”

“Has anyone else been quarantined?” Valeria asks.

“People from all three colleges got hit. I dunno about other ethicists, I haven’t heard about them quarantining anything of their own. But everyone else has. A group of engineering students were building a defense system to be deployed out to the Scar, and all of them got quarantined. Here in my department, Dr. Vilman – remember him? Stupid goatee, did a lot of stuff with crystals? – got shut down. Sometimes they quarantine the whole lab; sometimes they just shut down a project and everyone working on it gets a ‘guest lecture position’ over in Ethics. Sorbus said they got one of Macker’s assistants, Eric Pelbort. He had another one, Greta Ruble, but I guess she’s given them the slip.”

Emily’s got experiments to do on that leg, so we’ll let her get to it. As we head out, Gral asks one last question. “What’s up with those guards, by the way? Why do they only respond to those whistles?

“Uhhhh,” she says, as we fail our persuasion check. “They, er, don’t speak very good Valdian. Mostly foreigners, goliaths, the like. The whistles get their attention.”

Gral sighs and doesn’t push it. Vigdor’s already making plans to pickpocket a whistle. Valeria, since she has a direct invite to talk to the ethicists, considers the unheard-of paladin approach of Just Asking Them Directly.

First, though, Vigdor wants to check out the quarantine of Macker’s lab; he knew that professor well, and we’re all curious what’s been going down.

We walk on over to the surgical wing to case the joint. There’s a single owl guard blocking the hallway, presiding over a small barricade. A pleasant sandwich board sign states “Area quarantined by College of Ethics, apologies for the inconvenience.”

We try to walk in and the enormous guard holds out a hand to stop us. Shoshana tries to wiggle around him, like a cat trying to get at your dinner, but he impassively blocks her every move.

Gral tries a smoother approach. He begins with small talk; the guard doesn’t even twitch. He starts asking prying questions about the surgical ward. No response. Fine, then: he switches to Orcish, a sinister undertone weaving through his voice as he uses Words of Terror.

An insight roll reveals completely unchanged body language.

“Either they’re immune to fear or not a humanoid,” Gral reports back. “Not a single emotion. Definitely not goliath mercenaries.”

“Tryin’ to talk your way into the surgical wing?” says another chatty passerby. “Good luck. They got all the medical cadavers locked up in there and they won’t let us in.”

(Cadavers? Oh shit, we bet that’s the guard factory, theorize the players.)

“Oh, are you a med student?”

“Yeah. I work with Professor Herberts, or I used to, anyway. We needed a couple cadavers to do this comparison study about spleens; we got some weird ones from out in the wood, we compare spleens to see if place with thing don’t worry about it; need control spleen. And then these BIG DUMB IDIOTS wouldn’t let us in, and Herbert got transferred to the College of Ethics all of a sudden. He’s been gone a couple months.”

“How long do professors usually transfer for?” asks Gral.

“I mean, they usually pop over to give a lecture or two and come back by the end of the day.”

(Vigdor happens to remember that the College of Ethics also runs an asylum. They live in a big spooky castle and do dissections with guts and stuff, it can do a number on your head! Some of the ethicists have branched into the field of psychology. No reason to mention this when people are having extended stays on the ethics campus, of course…)

The student shrugs. “I gotta get to lecture. If you manage to get in there, any chance you can bring me back a couple spleens?”

We wave goodbye noncommittally, though Vigdor insists he can pop a spleen out of a corpse like a yolk from an egg. He’s a good surgeon!

Anyway, Vigdor went to school here, and the dice are on his side; he knows a side path through an old abandoned classroom into the surgical suite. He pops the lock on the door easily; all the undergrads used to go this way when slipping into lecture late, to get past the TA keeping track of tardies.

The guard is in earshot but facing the other direction, and he’s not even blinking, much less scanning around. Gral casts Silence on us and our very clanky party slips by easily.

Shosh sticks her head into the TA’s office. Nothing really stands out, but she swipes some interesting-looking notes from the desk drawers to look at later.

Meanwhile, Gral and Vigdor go into Macker’s office. The desk is an absolute mess, which is very unlike the guy Vigdor used to know. There are wheeled chalkboards crammed into the office, covered in scribbles and anatomical diagrams. Paging through the notes and glancing over the chalkboard, Vigdor makes a decent medicine check and can at least figure out what problem Macker was working on.

Based on what Dr. Emily told us, Macker’s trying to develop a surgical procedure. The issue is that whatever he’s doing would cause so much physical trauma that it’d kill the patient, and he’s looking for some way to prevent that. There are lists of healing options: formulas, spells, potions, nonmagical stabilization methods to keep the patient alive while various tissues are extracted from the body.

Gral’s unimpressed. Healing methods? That’s pretty tame for forbidden knowledge.

To Vigdor’s experienced eyes, this stuff looks mega-advanced and highly experimental, but Gral’s right – it’s not anything you’d scramble to censor.

Weirdly enough, the place doesn’t look ransacked, only disheveled and a little dusty. Macker’s notes haven’t been moved since he was here. Maybe this isn’t what the ethicists were after?

We head to cadaver storage while Valeria keeps watch. Cadaver storage is creepy as hell, but only because it’s, y’know, a room full of cadavers. A lot of the bodies, kept stable with Gentle Repose, appear to be Cursed, but that’s hardly weird. What’s so crazy they’d keep it hidden from everyone?

Vigdor opens the door to the dissection labs, Gral’s Silence deadening any ominous warning he might have had from the room beyond. Yes, the table here’s been recently used, and the bizarre symbols scrawled on the chalkboards have spilled onto the surrounding floor and walls, but Vigdor’s eyes are drawn to where the chalkboard peels away like skin to reveal a strange, multicolored, impossible space. The floor begins to take the shape of a stone hand that projects out into the shimmering void, joining a daisy-chain of enormous hands that form a walkway out to a marble platform floating in space.

Gral takes his Silence spell with him and runs to get Valeria.

Eyes starry, watching entire worlds and impossible shapes spinning through iridescent mists, Vigdor takes his first heady hit of Key taint.

As we cut session, Valeria considers that the ethicists may actually have a point.

[98prilla]

Changing Tides

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...

“What is taking so long?” Roman muttered, tail flicking the water impatiently.

           “Look.” Logan replied, pointing up the hill. Two small figures were making their way down the slope. One was the easily recognizable form of Patton. The other was slouched, hands deep in pockets, following after Patton a little hesitantly as they reached the pebbly beach.

           “Hey guys! So, Virgil, officially meet Logan and Roman!” Patton exclaimed, pointing to the two mermen in turn. Virgil’s eyes flicked up, quickly taking in the two of them before looking back down at the ground.

           “Heya.” He gave a little salute, leaning against the rocky outcrop that ran around the beach.

           “Well, I’m just gonna slide this on and get in the water. Don’t mind me.” Patton said, slipping easily into his seal skin. Virgil watched wide eyed as he instantly morphed into the form of a seal. It gave a little bark, then hopped the few feet to the water and glided away, splashing playfully as he went.

           “woah. That was wild.” Virgil commented, eyes still fixed on where the seal vanished into the water.  

           “So, everything healed fine? Nothing sore or aching? Nothing wrong?” Logan asked, looking over Virgil carefully for any sign of injury.

           “Yup.” He popped the p, rubbing the back of his head. “thanks, by the way. For rescuing me, I guess. For… for helping. I can’t imagine it’s safe for you, being around boats and stuff.”

           “Yes, well, some of us can’t resist showing off. You’re just lucky he happened to be nearby.” Logan replied, pointedly looking at Roman, who rolled his eyes.

           “So overdramatic, Logan. That’s supposed to be my department. I’ve been around longer than you, and I haven’t been found out yet!” The mer argued, though it was clear they’d had this fight before and never resolved anything.

           “I’m going to go catch up with Patton. If you’ll excuse me,” without waiting for an answer, Logan flicked his tail and was gone.

         “Sorry about him. Not much of a social person, he’d rather be cooped up in his cave all day studying. Sometimes it’s like grabbing a jelly fish by the stingers, trying to get him out into some open ocean.” Roman commented, looking the kid up and down, frowning slightly.

           “Your hair wasn’t purple before, was it? It looks good, don’t get me wrong, but-“

           “Yeah. Yeah it’s purple now, for some reason. I don’t know why or how so…” The kid trailed off, kicking a pebble.

            “Easy there bud, didn’t know it was a touchy subject.” Roman replied, hands up in surrender. Virgil sighed.

           “sorry. It’s just… just been a lot.”

           “I’d imagine. Mermen, selkies, magic, most humans couldn’t handle it.” Virgil shrugged.

           “Is it so hard to imagine? I mean, there’s tons of the ocean we haven’t explored yet. Of course there’s going to be stuff we don’t know about. Like, I don’t know, giant squids were just legend until the 1920s. And you guys are clearly smart, so you can hide from divers or whoever.” Virgil replied animatedly, gesturing with one hand to help make his points.

           “Obviously. It’s just most humans think they’re the smartest things around, and if they haven’t conquered something or discovered something by now, it doesn’t exist. A load of arrogant pricks, most of the time.” He muttered, flushing as he realized what he’d said. “Not that you are, I mean, you seem fine, for a human, not that you being a human makes it not fine, I mean-“ He cut himself off before anything else could escape from his mouth, noting with some satisfaction that at least the human was grinning now, clearly having found his stumble amusing.

           “I’m the last one who’ll argue against humans being pricks, I can promise you that much.” He replied, smile fading a bit as something flashed across his eyes, a memory of something. He sat down, leaning back against the crag, looking up into Roman’s face for the first time since they’d started talking. “its not like they’ve ever done anything for me.” His voice was bitter, and he bit his lip as he idly grabbed a stone, running his thumb over its uneven edges to keep himself grounded.

 “I’m sorry.”

 “Why? Not like any of it is your fault. Should blame my mom, I suppose, for leaving and not taking me, too. But what's the point? He was a scumbag before she left, too. If she got out, good for her. Probably knew I’d just weigh her down.” Roman winced at the dullness seeping into Virgil's voice, the pain he tried to hide in his clouded eyes. Then Virgil stood, hurling the rock as far as he could, letting out a long breath, before wiping his eyes, turning back to Roman.

 “So. What do you do? I mean, Logan heals, Patton turns into a seal, sooooo what’s your thing?” He elaborated, at Roman's confused stare. Roman blushed, tail flicking the water uncertainly.

 “Don't freak out. I’m a siren.” Virgil stared at him for a long moment, before he stifled a snicker.

 “Aren't sirens supposed to be all ‘oh look, I’m so beautiful, come swim with me, sexy sailor', not… giant whale tail?” Roman gasped in indignation, flopping onto his back on the beach, hand flung dramatically over his face.

 “So ignorant! I have been slain by your words, young human! My pride is forever destroyed!” Virgil covered his mouth with his hand as he laughed at the merman's dramatics, standing so he was leaning over Roman's face.

 “… whoops?” It was Roman's turn to laugh at the bright smile across the human's face, his smirk infectious as he began to giggle again, flopping to sit down in the sand next to Roman. He shifted so he was on his stomach, hands under his chin, tail idly splashing the water.

 “Siren songs are what lure sailors close. And it’s not always sex" Roman wrinkled his nose, getting another snort from Virgil, “it’s whatever the human wants most. And our song only affects humans when we sing specifically to lure them in. Usually it’s harmless. Still, I don’t sing when there’s anyone around. Don’t want to risk it, mostly." Virgil bit his lip, thinking it over.

 “You… you weren’t singing this morning, were you?” Roman shook his head immediately.

 “No. Especially not near the island, now that you’re here. Why?” He shrugged.

 “I… had a weird dream, I guess. It was like… like the ocean, was singing to me. Trying to lead me somewhere, show me something. It sounds crazy now, I guess. But I thought your singing coulda caused it?” Roman squinted in thought, tapping his chin.

 “wasn’t me. And no other sirens are nearby, either. Could have been just a dream, I suppose.” Virgil's shoulders hunched a bit higher as he sighed, looking out at the waves.

 “that's when this changed.” He commented, indicating his eyes and hair. Roman’s eyes narrowed further.

 “well it definitely meant something, then. Logan might have an idea. He’s spent pretty much his whole life studying different beings, like us.”

 “Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. How many are there? Different beings I mean. Are we talking other mer people, or like, sea serpents? Kraken? IS THE LOCH NESS MONSTER REAL!?” Virgil asked excitedly, jumping to his feet, eyes wide.

 “Please. Nessie is a hoax perpetrated by a bored human who took pictures of a log.” Logan scoffed, head appearing above the water, settling on a rock in the surf. “sea serpents on the other hand, are real, and, contrary to human lore, quite timid and friendly.” Roman groaned, Virgil practically bouncing up down.

 “ohmygod cryptids are REAL!” He exclaimed giddily, fist pumping the air.

 “Um, did we not count? Cause, literal merman, in front of your face. But sure, get excited about some sea snakes, or whatever.” Roman pouted, making Virgil laugh.

 “yeah, yeah, you’re a pretty fish man, now shut up, Logan was about to tell me everything.” Roman squawked in offense, Logan looking a bit flushed at the sudden intense attention directed his way by the young, very enthusiastic, human. Still, he wasn’t one to pass up giving a lecture, and soon Virgil was wide eyed and completely enthralled by Logan, raising his hand when he had a question, Logan answering each one patiently, his own enthusiasm growing as Virgil soaked up every word.

 “well. Glad to see the both of them loosening up.” Roman jumped at the voice beside him, splashing Logan and Virgil with a face full of water, Patton devolving into giggles at their water logged expressions of annoyance and shock.

 “Sorry, kiddos!” Virgil groaned, pushing his wet hair back out of his eyes, though his lips still hinted at a smile.

 “It’s fine, Patton. You would think given his size, he would be less of a scaredey cat.” Roman huffed, sitting up and crossing his arms.

 “You’d think given your size you wouldn’t be so rude, and yet you hold enough attitude for the both of us!” Logan raised an eyebrow.

 “Alright, alright, enough arguing, guys.” Patton cut in.

 “He started it.” Roman grumbled, making Virgil smirk.

 “I don’t care who started it, I’m finishing it.”

 “Fiiine. I suppose I should be off, anyways. Need to spend a lot of time looking for food, comes with the size.” Roman explained to Virgil.

 “And I have sea creatures to check on. No supernatural beings, just normal ones.” Logan added, sensing the question on the tip of Virgil’s tongue.

 “Well, stop by again soon, guys! I should get your new books in any day now, so you have to come back now.” Patton teased, smiling as Logan waved, Roman flashing a grin, before slipping back beneath the waves, as if they’d never even been there.

 “Wait, how do you get books out here? Or food? Or… anything?” Virgil asked, following Patton back up the hill.

 “Oh, I have an arrangement with a captain of a boat from the mainland. He brings supplies and anything else I request, if he can get it, once a week. I pay him for the items and his time. He’s a fae, so he doesn’t care much about the odd goings on around here, and he knows better than to touch my coat.” That made Virgil shake his head, because why not add fae to the list of stuff that’s real?

 “should… I be worried about him?” Virgil asked, trying to keep his voice from rising an octave at his nervousness, pulling at his sweater sleeves.

 “Oh, no, you’ll be fine. If you’re nervous, just stick close to me, kiddo. I won’t let anything happen. I think he’s a bit lonely, honestly. Not many people around who he can really talk to, and fae don’t exactly trust each other.” Patton waved away his concern, and he bit his lip, thinking, unconsciously hunching in on himself as they reached the door, and he curled his legs under him on the chair near the fireplace.

 Why was it so… easy? It had never been easy, nothing in his life was easy, yet trusting Patton, believing Patton when he said nothing would happen, was so easy it was terrifying.

 Nothing good, happened to him. Nothing right, or happy, or positive ever happened to him. So why was Patton here, why was Roman, why was Logan? What had he done, to deserve to be found by them? He’d given up. He didn’t deserve a second chance, not when he’d chosen to give up, like the coward he was.

 “Virgil?” He flinched back, realizing he’d bit his lip so hard it was bleeding, trying to ignore the sting of tears pricking his eyes. He pressed his lips together into a hard line, trying to hold back the ache that suddenly tore at his chest and made him want to scream. Because he wasn’t worth that soft concern. He shouldn’t be here right now. It should be some other kid, who’d had it way worse than being hit, tossed around every now and again, not him, pathetic, little, useless, him.  

 “i don’t deserve this.” He whispered, looking down. “I don’t deserve to be here, to be… happy, here.” He felt Patton slowly come around the front of the chair, kneeling so they were eye to eye.

 “Why do you think that, kiddo?” Virgil swallowed hard, shaking his head.

 “I’m bad. I… ruin everything. I never do anything right. I’m a coward. So many people have it so much worse, and handle it all so much better, I-"

 “hey. You’re not bad, alright? I know it’s hard to believe, but you didn’t deserve any of the pain or hurt your father put you through. And you’ve been plenty brave, taking all this weirdness in stride. You were plenty brave when Roman rescued you, from falling over board.” Virgil winced and pulled back further into the chair, a desperate laugh bubbling up from his throat.

 “Brave? That wasn’t brave! He didn't rescue me, he stopped me! I’m not some cast away, Patton, I didn’t fall over board! I jumped! I jumped, okay?!” Patton drew back just slightly at that, eyes wide, and he wanted to stop before the selkie saw how pathetic he really was, but he couldn’t force the words back, now that they were coiling his throat. “I couldn’t take it anymore, I couldn’t get out any other way, I’d tried and it was hopeless and nobody would have even noticed, so what would it matter? What’s the point, if no one even cares to notice!? So why not?! Drowning's supposed to be peaceful anyway, once the body stops fighting it. Just drifting away. Sounded better… better than living with him for a single more day.” He gasped in a heaving breath, eyes wide as he looked through Patton, deflating almost as quick as his anger had risen. “I’m not good. How can someone who would do that ever be good? I tried to kill myself, Patton. I wanted… I wanted to die. How pathetic is that? How… how useless, right? I can’t do anything right, can’t even die without fucking it up. All I had to do was drown, and I couldn’t even manage that.” He said hoarsely, swiping at his eyes.

 “Oh, kiddo.” Patton murmured, trying to reach out, but Virgil shrank back, an almost feral hiss escaping him, as he lunged, shoving past Patton and throwing open the door.

 His world was spinning, tilting, and he needed out, needed air, needed to be alone, because he couldn’t let anyone see him fall apart, or he’d be hurt again, hit or kicked or grabbed and slammed against the wall for being a weak, no good waste of space, who was lucky he could haul a rope or he wouldn’t even bother to feed him, every once in a while. It didn’t bother him that they were scraps from the table, that he was treated like some unruly stray dog, that needed to have its lessons beat into its too thick skull, its what he deserved, after all, if he’d been better it wouldn’t have to happen, if he’d been better he’d have managed to run away properly, if he’d been better his mother would have taken him with her, if he’d been better he would have done everyone a favor and never existed at all.

  He wanted to scream, to rage, to rip at his hair, to claw his own skin to shreds, he wanted to bite his tongue until he choked on the copper, he wanted to stop, to stop feeling, stop caring, stop hurting, and he barely realized he'd stopped breathing before his vision went black and he crashed to the ground.

[r6s-imagines]

Heeey saw ur requests are Open, can you do a jackal imagine where he meets his number 1 fan( supposing r6 has a fanbase?in the games lore) and they explain to them how much comfort he ( without knowing ) has given them during dark moments and how they look up to him and tell him he is really strong,and when he goes back to base he feels really touched and low key cries?,sorry if its too much!

this is so sweet omfg yes pls

also, i switched up the end that you requested a little bit, same situation but different setting!

•••

jackal x reader >> biggest fan

•••

MASTERLIST

warnings: cursing, soft moments

•••

summary: a public appearance leads to a tearful confrontation.

•••

“i think a night out would be good for you, ramírez,” mira begged in spanish, leaning against the doorframe. “when’s the last time you spent a day away from your screen?”

“is that important?” he responded. “we’ve both got work. better have it done now than never.”

“we planned a food drive, few miles from here. you’re serving.”

“do i have to?” jackal didn’t mean that, his mind was overtaken with his occupation. perhaps his concerns were useless, and maybe a minute in the real world would refresh his system. for a moment, his mind flashed to his brother, and the conditions they grew up in. his heart ached at the thought of anyone else going through the same, and he suddenly arose, tying his long undercut into a bun and donning his policia jacket. mira nodded and departed, sending a reminder to the comms about the event.

the last time this much press was on ryad was that dismal day, and each flash and reporter that passed by while he sat in the car made him shudder. there’s a reason i’m always inside, he thought, exhaling, but his mind clawed at the thought, desperate to remove it from his conscience. nothing could ever stop these feelings, those of not being good enough, of never being there for anyone. he turned towards his teammate, lion.

“flament,” he began, folding his hands. “how do you do it?”

“how do you mean?” he replied, single eyebrow raised in surprise.

“through all the problems you’ve come through, how do you persist?”

“well...” he flexed his jaw, giving his full attention to ryad as he turned. “you won’t be able to help everyone, and i’ve come to terms with that. if i know someone can be saved, i do my best to make sure they don’t have the same life i did.”

you won’t be able to help everyone.

his throat tightened.

a large white building topped with a bell came into view, and the operators applied an anti-paparazzi scarf to save them from the press. flashes, screams, barks and praises came to jackal’s ears as he entered the church, prepared to receive instructions. him, lion, mira, buck and amaru stood in a circle in an attempt to block out the citizens’ shouts from outside. one by one, they shrugged off the scarves and received orders.

“you know your positions, we don’t need to chitchat, now, let’s get to work!” mira announced, nodding once. everyone parted, heading to the front doors which were already prepared by church staff. ryad found a station which was stacked with tinfoil-wrapped provisions.

morning turned to a warm afternoon as the line dwindled, the reporters quieted and the food was chilling. ryad’s theories were right: even a couple hours of fresh air seemed to detox his body, fill him with a new spirit that longed to be productive.

ryad turned to his right, watching buck stir the soup idly.

“thirty more minutes,” he mumbled. just as he announced the time, someone strolled up, puppy eyes immediately grabbing jackal’s attention.

“excuse me?” the person quietly said, removing their hood to show a young girl, around 19. “are you still serving?”

“absolutely,” ryad said, smiling. “is there anything specific you’d like? we’ve got a lot left.”

“um...” her eyes scanned across the tables, each operator fixing their gaze onto her. “what kind of meats do you have?”

mira’s eyes widened, turning towards her friend, and shrugged. ryad waved her off, looking back at the girl.

“hotdog?” he held up an aluminum wrapped hotdog, holding it out.

“without the bun, please,” she insisted, waving a hand.

“aren’t you a strange one?” lion added, leaning into the conversation.

“hm? it’s not for me,” she smiled lightly at lion, unwrapping the food and holding the hotdog in her hand. wordlessly, she tossed it up. to everyone’s surprise, a dog leaped into the air, catching it flawlessly and proceeding to finish it on the floor. “and... i’ll take some soup for me.”

“that’s incredible!” jackal called, leaning over the table to stick his hand towards the dog. “what’s his name?”

“he’s named after you...” she pushed a piece of hair from her face. “jackal.” ryad felt as if his heart swelled watching her blush in shame.

“why jackal?” he dared to ask.

“he’s a beagle. he tracks.”

she looked at her worn shoes.

“i’m a really big fan, sir,” she wiped her nose, stuffing her hands in her pockets. “i’ve seen all the good you do. i don’t have much, not a home or family. i wanna be like you someday.

“thank you, but it’s really the team that saves the day,” ryad insisted, grinning.

“no, i’ve heard about you on the news. rainbow six extracted hostage! rainbow six disarmed bomb! rainbow six secured a biohazard! if you weren’t there, your team would rush in blindly. you’re a legend, sir!”

ryad was taken aback by the honesty. not once did he consider himself a legend, let alone a truly valuable asset. he almost laughed at how many times he’s been banned from participating. it was his eyenox, not his talent, he told himself...

...but watching her speak about him so highly with her dog and puppy-eyed stare made him rethink. am i a good person?

he saw his brothers eyes, open to the ceiling. he heard the sirens and the reporters describe the murders. the last person to reassure him of his worth is long gone, buried under a mystery he’s spent his entire life uncovering.

“who are you?” ryad inquired, leaning on the table.

“y/n,” she bent down to pet jackal.

“y/n,” he repeated, grabbing her attention. “don’t let anyone tell you you’re worth less than you are. no matter the situation, things always get better.”

“th...thank you, sir,” she held her food close, taking off into a sprint with jackal behind her. ryad waved his hand in a gentle manner, left in a state of awe.

“what a niña extraña,” mira noticed, shouldering ryad. “i’m glad you came out today.”

“sí,” his eyes were trained onto the horizon. his eyes stung, suddenly feeling moist. “she reminds me of myself.”

“how’s that?” she asked.

“ready to take on the world,” he elaborated. “not afraid of a challenge.”

a single tear slipped down his cheek, weaving through his aged creases and stubble.

[alcheminary]

do you ship royed? if not, do you mind it?

oh boy!! someone hasn’t read my about!!

not only do I not ship it, I have a personal vendetta against it

…………………………

…. Alright, okay. As funny as it is to leave it at that, because of the climate of uhhhhhh. people are callin’ em antis, right?? yeah, I don’t really subscribe to that either (it’s just simply way too broad of a term to really mean anything for one), so if I don’t completely detail my shit, I’m gonna get lumped in with like. death-threat anons. and I’d like to be judged for my actual views, not the ones I’m perceived as having

sooooo my full stance is this:

I don’t like RoyEd as an interpretation of canon, and I certainly don’t like it in canon timelines “aged up”. I think the risk that kind of content invites, although often unintentional, to be used by actual predators to groom victims? is far too great for any kind of artistic merit to outweigh it. I have friends who’ve had it happen to them, and I myself came very close to having it happen to me. The fact of the matter is that most RoyEd content skeeves me the fuck out. (And I don’t blame people for wanting it so far out of their zone they block RoyEd content and creators on sight. I think it’s totally rational.)

BUT. And this is very important: I said most.

As someone who prides themselves on rational thought and being able to admit when I’m wrong, it’s important to me that I acknowledge the possibility of a RoyEd story that thoroughly thwarts any attempts to be used or interpreted in such a way, enough that its merits DO outweigh that risk. I think it’s like, a 0.00002% chance, but I’ll acknowledge it’s there. Largely because I’ll give other stories that play the AU card a pass in re: fucking with the ages of characters, so I can’t be internally consistent if I don’t.

Which is why, and this is going to probably lose myself some bigtime points with my friends the antis, if I see a RoyEd story that has an interesting concept and it doesn’t immediately make me want to throw my phone out the window? I’ll give it a try, because there is a part of me that is desperate to be “fair” and to be proven wrong.

I don’t often finish those stories. Hell, more often than not, I stumble into them unintentionally because I’m just atrociously bad at looking at tags. But I’ll see if they’re worth their salt and if they manage to convince me that RoyEd can be good, actually. Because, I don’t know, maybe someday someone with something worthwhile to say in the context of RoyEd will blow my mind? Like, I’m not going to fault someone for trying something out, you know? To try answering the same question I’m over here asking: Is there a universe where RoyEd could work? Not that a majority of people producing RoyEd content fall into this category for me. I can think of like, ONE person.

(Not like, AU universe. I’m using philosophy jargon here, which is asking this question: “Is there a universe where my premises are true, but my conclusion is false?”, which I can explain another time if anyone’s interested.)

…. So far none of them have. I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed, by large. There is so much recontextualizing that would need to be done, and it just doesn’t happen. I don’t know if that’s because the fandom’s been around so long that RoyEds are a splinter faction with their own lore and prerequisite texts that the fic I’m looking for has already been written and they’re all just reinterpreting reinterpretation upon reinterpretation on that concept so I don’t even have the context to pick up what they’re putting down, or if they really just think that’s what chemistry in a relationship looks like and… ohhhhh buuuoooy do a lot of them not get that far away from the core gross of RoyEd.

Anyway. I still land solidly within the bounds of “anti”. What I’m describing is anomalous to what RoyEd largely is right now. So, in conclusion (or tl;dr:)

- I hate RoyEd for both personal and moral reasons- You’ll never see me reblog or promote it- I don’t hate it so much that I can’t acknowledge the slim chance that there could be something worthwhile in that mire- However, I haven’t found that exception yet, and I don’t think it’s worth excusing RoyEd at large for- This is a personal stance I’ve taken that I would never expect anyone else to take to be a good and moral person, and sympathize with people who lean so hard into “RoyEd hate” that they don’t want to see or hear about it or interact with people who would- Don’t get me wrong though. I’m still an “anti”. Chances are if you ship RoyEd and you followed this blog 1) I’ve noticed, 2) I don’t like you, and 3) the only reason I’m keeping you around is because I have a sliver of hope that you’re a good person ready to think critically about the implications and influence of the media (even fan-created) you consume or create, because you know what? I’ve got something like 9 volumes of Dengeki Daisy in a box somewhere. I’ve been there.

If you or anyone else has further inquiries or wants more elaboration on how I arrived at this point then you can hmu. lord knows I’m a little bit tired and punchy and off my medicine and so I might have skipped over something integral to my stance. but I would prefer it wasn’t on anon, and uhhh, that if you’re going to try and argue with me? you’re over 18.

now if you’ll excuse me I super gotta pass out

[romanfive]

400 years without Cervantes or "What giants?"

by Roman Vučajnk

(First published on Versopolis in 2016, but the server crashed and things got lost)  This year, we commemorate the fourth centennial of the death of two giants: William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Multi-centennial reminders sometimes serve as an excuse to dust monuments and re-discover something everyone has already heard of, but few can really lay out without the help of the Wikipedia. I’m looking at you, last year’s Magna Charta. A smooth vellum surface carries a written decision that shaped a significant part of human society, no doubt about that, but by now so distant that we do not recognize our own image in it, nor any reason why we should, so we remain content to cherish it for its age and genealogy.

However, we may rest at ease knowing that the legacy of the bard, who was clever enough not "to take arms against a sea of troubles" the way poor Christopher Marlow did, and the Señor, who took a bullet to his chest at Lepanto before he found something mightier than the sword, remains alive in our common cultural tissue. Born in the age of discovery of the New World, they both tackled basic and fundamental drives of the human psyche; explored oceans of motives and causes; braved currents of Fate and persisted through jungles of self-reflection. By their effort, talent, and a nod from gods, they found a literary Fountain of Youth and gained immortality by genuinely being able to hold a conversation with each passing generation (with the eternal gratitude of all publishers of the world’s collections of quotes). Not only as a immobile relic of the literary Golden Age, which we have to climb up to, but as a modern partner in full understanding of our age and a willing assistant to our quest for the Truth.

 How about a date?

Shakespeare and Cervantes, laureates of two hostile households both alike in dignity, share the same date of death, 23 April 1616. As befits the highly pitched drama of the Elizabethan stage, it should come to no surprise that in truth they died whole eleven days apart. Not a comedy of errors, but a calculated plan to re-calibrate the calendar, proposed by an Italian fellow from fair Verona** (honestly, you can’t make this stuff up). Catholic Spain complied with the Pope’s instructions to switch to the Gregorian calendar in 1582, while England clung onto the Julian calendar until 1752. Thus, Shakespeare’s Julian 23 of April would translate to the Gregorian third of May, if anyone insisted on ruining the magic.

Add the feast of St George, the patron saint of England and chivalric soldiers, to the same day and Destiny can enjoy a well-deserved picnic.

Shakespeare and Cervantes have never seen each other in person, but we may still appreciate a cinematographic entertainment of the idea in Miguel and William (2007). If their meeting actually had taken place, it would have reflected the hostile attitude between the Spaniards and the English at the time, however, nothing two brilliant minds could not handle. What a pair they would make! Sadly, it was not meant to happen in our version of the universe.

Not all is lost, though, as one of the giants fathered a couple who bridged the inequality of their respective statuses and changed our perspective of windmills forever.

----

 **  He was called a Veronese by Jean-Étienne Montucla in Histoire des Mathématiques (1758-98), but we must serve the truth by admitting that was an error on Montucla’s part. Aloysius Lilius, who included astronomy among his fields of interests, was a Calabrian.

Complementing differences

The two nomadic natives of La Mancha are definitely not the first known literary couple, who pursued the Truth in their discourse, but in contrast to Platos’ Phaedo and Echecrates almost two millennia earlier, they presented us with a prototype of a costumed hero and his sidekick. Now, that is something we can connect with in full, especially, if it involves special powers.

We may speculate, if Don Quixote’s magic helmet, which for the rest of the world was a mere barber’s basin, has drawn similar reaction from his contemporary audience as a certain underpants-over-trousers style manages from us (even though Don Quixote elaborated on his decision, while I still have no clue in regard to the Gotham’s-finest choice of costume in his animated series). However, we are sure that, in time, his conduct, ambition, and persistence in pursuing a crystal-clear notion of the Truth and his role of a knight-errant rose from a ridicule to an inspiration.

Many thanks to the skeptical voice of another crystal-clear notion of reality, provided by Sancho Panza, a servant-turned-squire (a basic understanding of the feudal social structure might provide necessary grounds for this particular jest. To which we reply: “Thank you, Jeeves.”), which allows for the most important issues from Don Quixote’s LARP quests to stand out in the reader’s own environment.

The dialogue between the two notions challenges the readers to investigate their own aspect of reality, before they can fully appreciate the story. Perhaps this is a part of the secret of this particular literary success: the reader does not need to understand the frame of the narrative. The reader just needs to connect to the action.

 We Call Upon The Author 

While each of us is free to perceive Don Quixote as either a downright loony or a heroic fighter for justice and liberty for all, it might be interesting to peek at the author. A Castilian, soldier in one of the major battles of his time, captured by the Ottomans, a purchasing agent (which eventually led him to stay as a guest at the expense of the Crown in Seville for a while. Not what we would think, regardless of the aversion felt towards the profession. The banker, which kept the collected money, went bankrupt. Which, in a way, gratifies the aversion towards that profession), and, lastly, a successful author with an immense influence on the Spanish language. He even applied for an accountant’s position in one of the prosperous ports on the Spanish Main in the south Caribbean, but that change of scenery has never taken place.

His nickname El principe de los ingenios (The Prince of Wits) hits the spot for the author who skillfully mocked those who deserved it. I cannot say, whether his wit stems from a desire to lessen the impact his physical defect may have had on his self-image (he was wounded in battle and lost the ability to use his left arm). Yet he was as sharp and unyielding as Cyrano, a famous Gascon version of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, even if grown out of chivalric tales and more inclined to fight the system.

The main target of his mockery was not so much the lore of knightly tales, a remnant of medieval literature, but those who took excess pleasure in it. Especially, when they used the invented tales to propagate their view on how things should be run for everybody.

A conglomerate of myths and romances commanded an influence that reached far to the other side of the Atlantic ocean, as it was a companion to the conquistadors, motivated them and even inspired them, also in their topographical exercises (California was originally a name of an island in the sequel to Amadis de Gaul, a literary target in Cervantes’ masterpiece). A notion of honour, bravery, virtue and duty presented by those romances may have worked for conquistadors, whose minds fantasized about immense riches, while their bodies struggled for survival, but in the Old World, it was confined between hard covers of amusing entertainment.

They provided the Prince of Wits with the necessary cover for his satire. In the days of duels of honour, inquisitive religious tribunals of the true doctrine, and a strong-willed monarch, satire had to find its way to the audiences in a considerate way.

One time, Sancho Panza wonders about the glorified battle cry Santiago y cierra España!++ and comments whether Spain was perhaps opened, that it wants to be closed up. That battle cry preceded every military encounter of Spaniards from the times of the Reconquista and it called upon St. James, the patron saint of Spain and Matamoros, the Killer of Moors. Some of my Iberian friends snigger at the remark, much too contemporary for modern Spain to enjoy as a mere play of words. Some may even draw parallels to the EU.

Cervantes also made it to the infamous list of prohibited publications, run by the Holy Inquisition. The readership may gasp in the expectation of Cervantes being hauled by sneering Dominican monks to a damp cell, laden with devices of torture. Why, we do remember how he openly mocked the method of the Holy Office of dealing with heretics. In Don Quixote, when the Barber and the Priest want to burn several books of the Innkeeper that they found guilty of heresy by trial, he asks: “I hope, Sir, they are neither Hereticks nor Flegmaticks (herejes o flemáticos).” To which the Barber corrects him: “Schismaticks (cismáticos), you mean.”

No, the sentence purged from the same book reads: Works of charity done in a lukewarm and half-hearted way are without merit and of no avail. Apparently, a sensitive theological ear considered it a tad too Erasmian in favouring the inner human condition to the outer action.

Cervantes also poked the influence of invented stories over chronicles, expulsion of the Morisco population from Spain, governing administrations, and even mental abilities of the ruling classes. With a dash of ridiculing the Church authority over the common sense of an individual person (that particular dart is still not entirely settled by literary critics, though).

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++ St. James and close, Spain! Interpretations of the unclear second part of the invocation vary from “Close your ranks before your enemies, Spain!” to “Let us close our ranks in the midst of our enemies, Spain!”, but we may be certain that it asks Spain to do harm to her enemies and let St. James play, too.

“There are many who are errant,” said Sancho. ”Many,” responded Don Quixote, “but few who deserve to be called knights.” 

On his deathbed, Don Quixote came to his senses and detached himself from knight-errantry. The moral of the story steps over boundaries of time, and could wear a ruff just as comfortably as a pair of jeans. It addresses us to stand out as individuals and pursue what we believe to be the Good in aversion from the corrupted, however, not by retiring to a constructed ideal, incompatible with the surroundings. Not to make that ideal an instrument of lamentation over some good-old-days that never have been, nor a cause for lamination of cherry-picked historical interpretations to parade as the Truth.

Let us rather make it a reminder of the human ability to better oneself.

Especially in times, when giants are not so easily recognizable. 

[naesoonghonors]

Inferno, Another Witch Burned

INFERNO (1980)

Inferno was another interesting movie. A spiritual sequel featuring another one of the three named mothers set up by Suspiria. This film departing to explore Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, who lives in New York. This time following a male lead, but kickstarted by his soon to pass sister. The before mentioned sister is Rose, and we begin the movie with her investigating The Three Mothers. She discusses the contents with a man, I assume to be a scholar or librarian. She asks if this fanciful depiction of witches could be real and a true account. With the social grace summon able only by an older gentleman condescending to a young woman he explains that women are the worst readers. They are the type to be susceptible to believe in witches and they want to believe in this frivolous stuff. He says this with the utmost confidence, as real witches exist and plot to rule the world in the background. Even thought he himself mentions the murder of the first Mother he still feels the need to be doubtful and belittling. Even as a scholar in a similar line of expertise and study as him she is treated as a being of inferior intellect and reprimanded for daring to ask if it’s true. Even in the recent past of 1980, women had only begun entering the workforce in large numbers in the 1960s. It’s difficult to harbor respect from people who you cannot be coworkers or comrades in arms alongside. Not that that is really an excuse for how this man acts to an interested student. Even though he acts it is below him they go on to discuss the contents of the book Rose brought to examine.

These three witches live separately around the world ruling it from the shadows. Hiding themselves from public eye both with witchcraft and henchmen. Oddly for these women who want to remain secret there is an ancient book titled The Three Mothers. This essentially spills all of their secrets and even tells how to kill them. And for the life of me I cannot figure out why they allow this book to continue to exist. It was written by an alchemist Varelli whom they black mailed into making their separate homes. Hopping off of how ridiculous it is that such a book still exists with the witch’s wealth of power it does say some very particular things about them. Just as in the Suspiria there is notable mention of the witches being unable to bring life only manipulate and destroy it. With a catholic undertone and philosophy displayed by the director this seems to be a larger statement than the movie lets on. In more traditional catholic followings is it not a choice of the woman if and when she will have children. Unless there is a vow of chastity or other such arrangements women are expected to marry and have as many children as the lord will. Despite frequent claims of god given free will there is an ironic undercurrent of people, particularly women being left to the whims of God. So I wonder if this point is that God denies them this ability or if they reject his will. Maybe the mothers free of this will of god act more like Lilith. Another woman who rejected Gods will, namely she rejected being subservient to Adam. So Lilith literally just flew away and decided to hang out by the dead sea. For some reason this HUMAN woman who just didn’t want to be subservient to Adam was decided by the angels to be willing and able to torture babies and make them sick. So in order to be left alone she said she wouldn’t do that if the angles watch over babies. I guess what I am trying to get at is my Catholic upbringing has taught me that no matter when age you live in women should be subservient and follow men’s lead, but are also weak and cannot do simple tasks, but are also powerful enough to perform witch craft but also if they don’t want to have kids that means they are evil. Common stereotypes of women even in the near past simply do not make sense. Abuse of power is not a new concept, so I guess the crime of The Mothers is being women. Because even the seemingly immortal alchemist Varelli isn’t framed as that bad of a guy. He was manipulated by eevvilll women and forced to make their elaborate homes. He is presented as blameless in their rise to power, and instead dies due to his own hubris and panic. A mark of these three mothers is to ruin the land around them. But who would have been influencing and working with that land? Varelli! The architect! He built the house and then the lands all suspiciously started to rot and have a bad odor. Its just interesting the difference of how male magic (read alchemy) is portrayed as opposed to the women. In fact despite all the lore known about The Mothers to all characters the alchemist still has to specify that he is not their master. Like this weak old man could even hope to possess the fury of 3 absolutely insane power-hungry witches. That simply would not have been an assumption by anyone had had the alchemist been another woman, nor if the witches had been warlocks.

Related, the way to tell you are in the presence of a witch’s house is the three keys. First, the strange odor as mentioned. Another clue guides her down to the cellar and gives the name of the witch sister. The final key is ‘under the soles of their feet’. But Rose never gets the chance to find the final key as she is stalked and murdered. But not before she gets a letter off to her brother Mark, in Rome already having caught an Italian witch’s attention. This lady witch is so alluring that Mark ditches the letter from his sister but thankfully someone in the room has a brain and his female friend Sara picks up the letter and reads it. Sara understand the danger detailed in the letter and goes to a library to look at another copy of The Three Mothers. Sara runs off with the book and is brutally murdered once she arrives home with a neighbor boy. Because of course inviting a random man in your house is better than being alone as a woman. Once more Mother Tenebrarum, if you don’t like the book existing… perhaps destroy it. It seems easier than murdering all the people who come looking for it. Also notice in the movie this book is in the biography section. Which one of the Mothers wrote it?? Why? It keeps getting you guys murdered. But admittedly these movies focus more on feeling and tone than plot, and the next relevant scene occurs at the end.

After the building being set aflame by an irrelevant subplot and an interesting run in with Varelli, Mark meets with the hospice nurse he’s seen caring for the now dead Varelli. She begins laughing evily and reveals SHE is Mater Tenebrarum. For getting to close to the secret Mater transforms into Death itself! So Mark does the most logical thing he can. He runs out of the extremely on fire building. The Mater is then killed by falling debris, either due to her spiritual connection to her coven land or her lack of wanting to run away from the fire. As funny as I try to frame it the witches really are done a disservice in both character and power. There is a lack of substance that really disappoints. Even so getting this look into the mindset of the Italians in the 1970’s. Though it could attributed to the genre women seem to really be looked down upon particularly by the intellectual community. Maybe we do need some powerful witches so show men what can be accomplished by women. But perhaps with a little less murder.