#his dad and grandfather r SPITTING images of each other

[petrichorium]

Making this it’s own post bc I rlly have thought abt it so much Kuroo’s dad has a beard and he tries to emulate it in college but when it comes in patchy and bad he shaves it off but does the classic “can’t grow a beard but here’s this stupid mustache” for like two years until he starts actually working and realizes how dumb it makes him look so he shaves it too

[princelucivaryaslana]

I need to rant about my D&D character because a lot of heavy shit was revealed to me by the DM last night because even tho we are only 2 sessions in, pure luck and die rolls have accelerated the plot very quickly and i’m dying, it’s very long and i don’t expect anyone to read it, i just love my character and his brother and i’m DYING

So my character is a pink tiefling named Valafar Nemonis, but he goes by Mercy, right. He’s the firstborn of a fallen aasimar named Lillith “Lila” Nemonis and her tiefling husband Barnabas “Carrion” Nemonis, who also happens to be the head of the largest criminal organization in literally the whole continent and is also a VERY powerful politician. Valafar was his dad’s best assassin for YEARS, was deliberately groomed to be such, and he was a force to behold. 

There’s a lot of backstory backstory ‘cause this game’s taking place in the same universe that our old campaign took place in, but essentially there are these big amorphous gems that represent and contain the power of each plane of existence, and at one point due to Old Plot Reasons they shattered and now exist as thousands of small shards, which people have found and used for many purposes. 

Valafar’s dad, specifically, is in the business of finding as many of these shards as he can because of the power they contain. In order to make Valafar the heartless killer he desired him to be so as to achieve this end, he deliberately groomed Valafar to think himself superior to all but his father and drove a MASSIVE wedge between Valafar and his little brother Iari (who is the spitting image of his grandfather, Barnabas’s abusive dad; it’s tragic), to the point where Iari was moved to the servants’ quarters to separate them physically and was often used as a literal punching bag by both Valafar and Barnabas in Barnabas’s attempts to separate them emotionally, to reasonable success. (This is especially tragic because Valafar and Iari loved each other to the point where a 10-year-old Valafar got his mother’s help in creating a small heart-shaped dangley earring for his 4-year-old brother while their father was absent on business, simply because Iari had come home from an outing with their mother and excitedly told him about “a rose-colored tiefling woman who looked just like you! She was so pretty and had the most beautiful earrings!” He still has the earring. I’m dying inside.) 

The problem was, near the end of this training, Barnabas wanted to make sure his son was truly ruthless, and he did so by giving Valafar a puppy to raise, with a name and everything, and then ordered him to kill it a few months later. This trauma, plus the fact that Valafar couldn’t crush the pity he held in his heart for his brother no matter how much his father beat them both over it, led him to make the decision that rewrote his entire everything.

Valafar was sent to complete a botched mission that a few of his father’s underlings had failed to accomplish some weeks before, wherein they not only managed to kill the wife of the man they were after and not the man himself, but also failed to acquisition the piece of the Faewild shard they were sent to take from him. The man was, of course, on his guard this time, and he was able to arm himself with the sword that held the piece of the shard Valafar was after and fight back. 

Unfortunately, as providence would have it, three things happened at once: the man’s very young son entered the room upon hearing a racket; Valafar saw the little boy, about whom he had been previously unaware, and immediately realized he didn’t want to kill the man and orphan the child; and the man took Valafar’s hesitation as an opening and chopped Valafar’s shoulder with the sword. The green shard in the sword reacted to the magic that resided thick in Valafar’s blood, and the resulting explosion of green light killed the man, knocked the child unconscious, and bleached Valafar’s once solid-black eyes a fair mint bluegreen and rewired his brain a considerable amount (aka turned him from a lvl 10 assassin rogue into a lvl 1 druid and lowered his Intelligence to 10 in favor of boosting his Charisma).

Panicked, confused, and filled with a resolve he had previously found lacking, Valafar took the unconscious boy to a family in town to raise, stressing very heavily that he needed to leave and that he was relying on them to protect the boy. Then he took to the woods and lived alone for a few years, becoming acquainted with his new abilities, taking on the name Mercy, and desperately formulating a plan to save his brother from their father before it was too late. 

Meanwhile, Iari had made massive progress towards becoming a top-class assassin in his attempts to garner his father’s approval and become like his brother his whole life, but with Mercy on the run, his father’s approval still didn’t come; in fact, all he was given were assignments paid for by a new-money noble family across the continent and the overarching assignment to “Bring my son back to me, dead or alive. Do not fail me as you have your whole life.” His despair at his father’s hatred of him paired with his brother’s final abandonment of him unlocked the magic in HIS blood and expedited his growth as a top-tier killer. Now known as The Lavender Death, Iari is the most feared assassin in the entire world, and he is coming after Mercy.

Mercy was given the warning by a messenger from his father’s organization under Iari’s orders and is currently on the run to avoid “running into that little shit until I’m old and ready to die,” now teamed up with a goliath barbarian, a warforged wizard, and a baby silver dragon who recently lost its caretaker (the guy was playing a dragon trainer ranger and quit two sessions in lmao). 

Now, the reason that the plot has been accelerated very quickly is because, in an attempt to get out of the city and muddle any trail his brother might use to find him, Mercy asked the warforged’s creator to opened a portal to a random location for him and the goliath, who is also a target of The Lavender Death because he’s the escaped slave and murderer of a few of the members of the new-money noble family Mercy’s dad has contracts with (he’s also the son of a giant slave and a human woman from said noble family, it’s complicated and sad), and where should we be teleported by the luck of the dice

than to Mercy’s home country, three miles away from his home city, near enough that Iari could sense him via their mutual connection to the positive energy plane and begin his game of cat and mouse about three or four LEVELS early

So now we have a level 10 Iari after our little level 4 party of three (and a half) and i’m very scared and very tired and very Emotional and one of three things is gonna happen:

1) Iari is going to kill Mercy and then himself (he goes by the name Parricide, which the DM told me means “to kill someone dear to you” and i’m fuckin dying he still wears the earring Mercy made him 16 years ago the DM’s so cruel) 2) Mercy is going to have to kill Iari and deal with the trauma of watching his baby brother die in his arms because he failed to save him 3) By some power of luck and providence, Mercy will manage to stave off the deaths of his party and Iari long enough to make peace with Iari and become his ally and brother again

If Iari and/or Mercy die, their mother is going to finally get fed up with their father and leave him and take his eye out with Inflict Wounds (oh yeah me mommy is a DEATH CLERIC btw) when he inevitably tries to stop her

If Mercy lives, regardless of Iari’s fate, Mercy’s gonna build up his power and then D E S T R O Y his father 

I’M AN EMOTIONAL MESS

TL;DR: My character’s brother is a better assassin than my character was before my character’s levels were replaced with druid levels and now there’s a lot of complicated and heartbreaking plot underway and i’m very emotional about it because I am also irl a shitty favored older sibling who engaged in the mistreatment of my younger sibling and it’s amazing how much life imitates art