#i went on a quest to find the right paper

[loz-the-noob]

I am going to steal the squid sisters’ identities by learning to write/draw like them >:3

[fridgrave2-0]

I'm tired of pretending that I'm okay with ford being an absolute asshole towards fiddleford and basically abusing him.

first of all, yes, it's not ford's fault that he was manipulated (doubtful tbh) and abused by bill, but that doesn't give him the right to be a jerk who closes his eyes on his friend's deepest traumas. the traumas fiddleford got only because stanford completely ignored his warning and got fidds involved into bunch of shit. like his monster hunting which wasn't even the reason fiddleford went to gravity falls in the first place. he was there to help ford build the portal, not to be a part of ford's anomaly quest. and when fiddleford spoke out against it he was ignored because ford doesn't give a shit about anyone else but himself or his muse. fiddleford got traumatized physically and mentally so deeply that in the need to be able to sleep at night peacefully he completely destroyed his mind to the state that even bill was scared to be in there. and what stanford did? he (the one who couldn't care less about fidds warning him about gremoblin) critiqued fiddleford for using the memory gun and didn't even bother to apologize or say that he's sorry in the journal. god, what am I saying, he didn't even took fiddleford to the hospital after fiddleford feel from the sky through the roof of a fucking barn with a dozen of poisonous quills in his body AND A BROKEN ARM. ford described what happened to fidds in the journal, said he "took him home for a treatment" and the next two paragraphs on the other page is "good news the hyperdrive works" LIKE IS THAT THE ONLY THING YOU CARE ABOUT WHAT THE HELL??? "despite our fortune, I have become worried about my assistant... I myself have survived many monster attacks without trauma, but perhaps F is more sensitive that I realized". no shit sherlock, who would've imagine that seeing your worst nightmares and being poisoned can leave a mark on your mental state. sure it's just fiddleford, he's just overreacting because he's "sensitive"))) /src

ford was ignoring fiddleford's concerns all the fucking time that mcgucket was there with him, he took a superstitious and religious guy with anxiety into the forest with real ass monsters who's no one but ford is used to see. fiddleford was warning stanford about shifty and got kidnapped with his identity stolen by the shapeshifter because ford didn't listen. well, at least this time stanford had bothered to apologize for another traumatic event- ah no, next thing ford said is that when the portal is finished all the traumas fiddleford had been through were "worth it". ford just finds ways to make everything worse

we all know that fiddleford has an addictive personality and that the memory gun is the biggest example of that. what we don't talk enough about is that ford at some point decided that sleeping is for losers, but didn't stop at himself and made fiddleford drink 13 fucking cups of coffee, not allowing him to sleep, what in the future made fiddleford a caffeine addict. ford is not only an overworking idiot who gladly damages his own health, no! he wants fiddleford to be the same and quote "gets frustrated" when fiddleford cares not only about his own, but their both basic needs. fiddleford had to work on the portal, get in the trouble with monsters because of ford, but also babysit this manchild to prevent him collapsing from exhaustion (which is more impossible than building a giant portal into the multiverse)

and here we are, the portal testing. once again (and as always) fiddleford did warned ford about everything. fiddleford was working without breaks for days to make sure if the portal will work, and when he found the flaws, he wrote a whole fucking thesis paper, putting all ford's research into a solid work (not taking even smallest credit even tho he was the one to build the portal. when fiddleford had his own theory in the university, ford helped him to only proof that fidds wasn't going crazy by checking the calculations and ford bothered to take the credit for the whole theory, but fiddleford who was a part and a victim of this monumental theory of weirdness didn't took it because he unlike ford doesn't care only about fame). but what did stanford do? he assumed that fiddleford wanted to steal his fucking fame and backstab him. ford didn't even bother to look at something fiddleford was making for three days without resting to make sure that portal won't hurt anyone in the town and that ford won't end up with empty hand if the portal was indeed a lost cause. stanford coldly dismissed fiddleford like they weren't friends, said that he doesn't really waiting fiddleford for the test of the device that fiddleford did built, and even knowing that the portal was dangerous fiddleford chose to come for the test

and then fiddleford got in the portal and it was the biggest traumatic event for him. it was the breaking point for him from which he couldn't stop using the memory gun. it damaged him so much, that he turned from that bright 30-y.o. man into the familiar to us old man mcgucket in the span of two years. his life was ruined for another 30 years, a half of his life he was a mad lonely guy who lived in the junkyard. the man who could've become someone like steve jobs but much better if only he didn't go to help stanford. his family could've been full, tate could have his father. the incident with the portal was the moment of no return for fiddleford, and what did stanford do?

when fiddleford got sucked in the portal, he thought only about the success of his work, that for fidds it was "a remarkable opportunity to confirm or deny the theory" (which he already did with his pre-test research). he didn't think that it was dangerous on the other side, that the portal wouldn't just disintegrate fidds on atoms. and when stanford saw him speaking in a non-human way, shaking and twitching in shock like fiddleford did after the gremoblin incident, ford decided it was nothing. when fiddleford warned him about the apocalypse because he was in the portal and saw it with his own eyes, ford, as always, didn't listen. he didn't just not care about fidds' condition — he diminished everything fiddleford was feeling and everything he witnessed only because it didn't fit in ford's believes which were based just on bill's words (and for stanford it's not something new to belittle things related to fiddleford. he wasn't taking fidds' dream of creating a portable computer seriously, believing that his weirdness theory was much more important)

and after this, stanford insults fiddleford and his family in the journal. he says that he doesn't regret their partnership (it's not really a partnership if stanford didn't count fiddleford as an equal) and friendship breaking up. "to think I considered him a friend!" I doubt he ever did. stanford doesn't know shit about being a good friend (or even a decent person) to someone who sacrificed everything for him. who did put his life aside to be with ford, who cared enough to stay despite stanford again and again putting him in danger, constantly waving him away and feeling no remorse for that. fiddleford was breaking himself for this guy, he canonically was going through "I am nobody to ford if I don't build stuff for him" (and in the end this is exactly what happened). fiddleford didn't tell ford most of his fears and concerns because he didn't want to bother him. fidds was constantly scared and kept in inside because he wanted to be a "better partner". "if I have an anxiety, I will pop anxiety pills", "I'm gonna get through this". and then he didn't

fiddleford was abused by stanford. he was to stanford that ford was to bill, in some ways even worse. it's fucking wild that fiddleford did forgive ford after 30 years of a neverending madness nightmare with his mind being destroyed so much as like it was the earth in the times of the dinosaurs after being hit by the meteorite. fiddleford had lost literally everything, he wasn't even himself for a half of his life and still fidds found the strength to forgive someone who is responsible for it and who used him with regular emotional neglect. and you know what? fuck this. ford would never forgive bill and fiddleford had every right to stay mad at stanford. ford needed to be stuck in the portal to get his head out of the ass and by that time there were only crumbs of someone who fiddleford once was

fiddauthor and billford both are about abuse and toxic relationships. it's up to you what you like to ship, but we need to acknowledge the fact that fiddauthor isn't some fluffy healthy thing where both are happy. fiddleford was never happy and stanford didn't care about fiddleford and his feelings. they made each other worse and ford ruined fidds' life. THIS is the real fiddauthor

[vigilskeep]

Oooh could you elaborate on your feeling about Aveline? (Nobody really talks about her)

i think aveline is on paper really quite an interesting character because of her bizarre worldview, in which “rightfully stolen” property counts as a real claim, her guards are people she needs to protect rather than make protect others, and she truly believes herself to be the long-suffering lawful character when first thing after rolling up in kirkwall you can ask her to pull a knife on a merchant so you can get a job smuggling

however on a personal level i find her pretty grating, and her unshakeable belief that she is always in the right even more so. what doesn’t help is the lack of narrative consequences for her corruption (having failed to do her duty for the elves at the end of act 2 who were forced to turn to murder for justice and the qun for safety, because one of aveline’s guards went unpunished for raping their sister) or her inaction (openly making fun of emeric’s three-year investigation into quentin’s murders as soon as it caused her inconvenience, and asking hawke to get rid of the annoyance for her, while the murderer went on to kill hawke’s mother, for which aveline angrily refuses to take any responsibility). it’s almost impossible to make her leave the party at the end of the game, and the only way to really affect her state of mind is to not get her a husband, which in itself is a pretty sexist and dismissive thing for her story to be based around rather than the issues of morality and justice at hand, making her personal quests hard to engage with

sometimes i try to to take her around more, to learn more about her. but i find the entire experience pretty disheartening and usually give up quickly. frankly she’s very judgemental and i don’t like the way she talks to me or my friends

[critrolesideblog]

Essek sat on the floor in the center of the Nein-Sided Tower laboratory. Papers crammed with arcane equations were spread about him in a semicircle, and the slate wall before him contained diagrams and notes copied from the fragile pages of a mostly-destroyed Aeorian spellbook.

"Oh, boy." Caleb had appeared in the doorway, returned from his quest of retrieving possible spell components from his bedroom. He was grinning with the sort of delight most typically seen on the faces of children who'd just received a gift. "Are we shifting into floor mode?"

"It seemed appropriate." Essek grinned back at him as he set the satchel of components down on a nearby table and waved his hands back and forth through the air excitedly. It was a habit Essek found endearing in the extreme. His enjoyment in puzzling over Caleb's subtler body language not-withstanding, his hand-waving was like a brightly-painted sign that said HAPPY and EXCITED.

He turned his focus back to the challenge in front of him as Caleb began carefully tip-toeing his way around the papers. The spell in question sent its target into a maze in a demiplane. Essek supposed it could have practical uses under the correct circumstances, but really it excited them simply because it was, well, fun. The demiplane foundations had been a wonderfully engaging brain teaser to solve, but the randomization of the maze was proving to be a much more complex bit of arcana. And complex arcana simply made more sense on the floor.

He was certain the fragment on the upper right corner of page twelve of the spellbook held the key to the puzzle. He copied it neatly onto a fresh piece of paper and considered it. It took some time before he noticed Caleb was watching him in his periphery rather than examining the equations on the ground, a soft smile on his face.

"What?"

"This thing you do when you're thinking hard," Caleb replied after a moment, tapping his fingers on his chin in demonstration. Essek's own fingers stuttered to a halt. He had long ago trained his hands to find other, less-obtrusive outlets for their energy when not in the comfort of his own home, but this time he had not caught himself. Before he could apologize, however, Caleb continued. "It … It's cute." There was a hint of bashfulness to the way he turned his head back towards the papers on the ground that, combined with the lingering boyish excitement, made him look as young as he was.

"Cute?" Asked Essek, once his senses returned to him. "I do not think I have been called cute in a hundred years, if that."

"I find that hard to believe. We were calling you 'hot boi' within an hour of meeting you."

"Well, 'hot,' certainly. Handsome. Sexy, perhaps." This earned him a grin from Caleb, and he tapped his fingers against his chin as he thought it over. "Hmm, not cute, though, no. At least, not to my face."

"I will have to add being the first to do so to my list of accomplishments."

Both grinning, they turned their focus back to the puzzle at hand. They settled into a comfortable silence broken only by the tapping of fingers and the scratching of quill against paper, until a solution struck Essek like a lightning bolt.

"We need to apply Petjyre's Possibility Theorem!"

Caleb was already in motion reaching for the nearest piece of chalk. "Ja, ja, and we can apply Wysaric's rune to stabilize the containment field."

And off they went.

[silentmagi]

Rising Star

Main Page

Welcome back, I’m hoping that everyone’s still enjoying this story, and would love to talk with you if you have questions or comments about the stories. After a discussion with Luna, Star has decided that her next steps are:

3: Finding a third to go to the mountains with them.

I hope that you all enjoy it.

Getting to the Headmistress’s office, Star and Luna knock and await admittance before entering. What they found waiting was a bit of a surprise. The Headmistress had company.

The swordsman and his apprentice turned to the two and bowed in greeting. “Salutations and well met, I am the swordmaster Sol, and this is my niece and apprentice Nebula,” the older man offered with a warm smile as he tapped his chest. “We have completed our discussion, so we will let you have your meeting.”

Star noticed an expression and look shared between her aunt and Nebula, apparently used to the formal speech of Sol. “My name is Star, arcane archivist and scholar, and this is the bard Luna,” she introduced while meeting his bow with one of her own. “You honor us with your visit, Swordmaster.”

“Quite so, though the honor is mine,” Sol continued with a chuckle to his voice. “Until the next time we meet.”

With that, he and Nebula excused themselves and went about their day. Star and Luna took a seat, letting the Headmistress finish filing some paperwork before presenting their notes. “Last night, I believe I may have been visited in my slumber, and we were wanting to have your thoughts on this.”

It was not the first time that Star had gotten a raised eyebrow from her aunt, but it was a rare occurrence. Taking the notes, she began to go over it, reading through them casually before looking up. Not at Star or Luna, but out the window, towards the mountain peak that Star had suspected would be the one she was being called to.

“I do not like the idea of you going out, not with your father on the loose,” Headmistress Celeste commented as she processed the information that had been presented to her.

“I know, and I’m not going on my own, but I don’t think a large group is a good idea.”

“Good, however, you and Luna should take someone with more… martial training I believe,” Celeste mused as she set the papers down steepling her fingers before her in a meditative pose. “Taking a member of the guards could raise suspicion, though.”

“We were thinking of a three-person team, since that’s the auspicious number for starting new quests,” Luna supplied with a knowing smirk as she caught up with the gears spinning up in Celeste’s mind. “Do you have any suggestions on who we might ask to come with us? We might be a day or two getting there and back.

“Now that you mention it, there might be some options that could work.” Lifting up the notes, Celeste tapped her finger along the side as she thought through the options. “Sol is here for a month to do some training exercises with the guard, however his apprentice Nebula is ready for her journeyman trials.”

“Alternatively, there is a druid that arrived earlier this morning named Wolf, who told me more about your little incident in the woods. We are preparing a team to investigate the dinosaur that you three met. She has been contained, and is well fed and looked after right now. So Wolf is sticking around until that is ready. Perhaps a week.”

“Finally, we would have the option to reach out to the local rangers and see if one would be able to escort you,” she concluded with a sigh. “What do you believe feels best to you?”

It seems that we have a few choices as to who to round out the team.

[nonasuch]

so I went to New York this weekend!

I tagged along with some friends who were going to the Five Points Toy Festival in Brooklyn, and convinced them to come see Sleep No More with me on Thursday night, since it’s allegedly closing at some point and I’ve always wanted to go.

And since they had to head back to DC a day before me, I decided to get another ticket for the Sunday matinee on my own.

Unfortunately my cards were a 6 and a 7, so I missed a few things right at the beginning, but I’m still really happy with my experience. My first show I spent a bunch of time following the Tailor, which I really enjoyed — he had a duet with the Taxidermist in his shop where they played tug-of-war with his measuring tape, and another with the speakeasy bartender. I saw Hecate eat her dinner and sing “Is That All There Is” in the 4th floor bar, and the Porter try to save Lady Macduff from the poisoned milk and then do an amazing dance in the bag check room. Plus a bunch more small lovely moments that I caught in passing as I explored.

My second show I had my bearings a little bit more. I got to chat with “Benji” (who I now know was actually Will Boyajian!) in the Manderly before my card was called, which was really fun!

Before this trip, I did do some advance reading, so I’d have a general sense of what to expect and wouldn’t be totally lost. This also gave me an idea for a little art project: I made a set of papier-mâché eggs (using a trashed copy of Macbeth for the paper) with thematically appropriate prizes inside, sealed with a wax seal and a red ribbon you could pull to open them. Basically fancier versions of the mystery eggs I have at the shop. I made eight, because that was all I could fit in my dress pockets. The prizes were:

a glass jar of vintage mother-of-pearl buttons

a glass vial with a dried flower inside, sealed with wax

another sealed vial with a fossil shark’s tooth

a tiny bell jar with mini (fake) butterflies on pins

a brooch made from a vintage medal ribbon and vintage keys

a tiny glass bird

a little bag of vintage game pieces

a wooden acorn with more tiny treasures inside it

I ended up giving “Benji” the shark tooth egg, which turned out to be perfect because he said he collects shark teeth! The others I saved until I got inside; I wanted to be careful about making sure I could give them out without interrupting anything.

I was super lucky to have some time entirely alone with the Tailor while he sewed up the Taxidermist’s coat, so I just set his egg (the buttons) on the corner of his desk and stepped back, and he tucked it into his jacket pocket when he was done.

I watched the Taxidermist make his bone sculpture assemblage and then smash it in frustration, so I hid an egg under one of the skulls after he left. I did get to see him find it when he came back. Same with Hecate, when I left an egg under her fan on her table at the wrecked bar.

The speakeasy bartender invited me to play a card game with him. I lost, but I gave him an egg as a thank-you.

I watched the Porter make a paper boat and blow it off the edge of the counter towards me. I caught it, and tried to give it back with his egg. He took the egg, but gave me back the boat. And I caught the witch in the green dress in a quiet moment in the lobby, and handed her an egg across the counter.

I realized I’d accidentally given the Taxidermist the wrong egg, but I managed to catch him at the last possible second, before he disappeared after the walkouts, gave him the right one, and told him I’d given him Malcolm’s egg by mistake. (Some of them were labeled, but the lighting is so low and my labels were tiny).

Aside from my self-imposed side quest, I got to see a bunch of scenes I’d missed last time. I caught the rave, I followed Agnes for a while, I saw a lovely waltz between Duncan and Mrs. Danvers in the ballroom. I kind of forgot the fifth floor existed, oops.

Afterwards, I was totally exhausted and must have looked it, because someone let me into the reserved section so I could sit until the crowd thinned out and I felt a little less wiped. I have some really cool souvenirs — my mask, and the paper boat, and I bought a poster too.

If they extend it into the fall, I’ll totally go again.

[iamvegorott]

Change of Life

So I decided to hop on the Vampire Jackie trend real quick This is an angsty one~

---------

Change of Life

Jackie felt…cold? Was he cold? He was shivering, body trembling against his will. Was he actually cold? Something about his everything was wrong. 

He was also so hungry. He was starving, but it didn’t matter how much food he ate it was never enough. Eating to the point of illness and still feeling so empty and weak. He was getting angry cause of the hunger, lashing out at those he cared for, and it hurt to see himself like that. 

Jackie needed answers, needed to figure himself out and get away before he went too far. 

He curled up into a tighter ball. The dark alley that hid his body only had the sounds of passing by cars. Jackie failed at trying to find answers almost immediately. The sun had been too bright, making it almost impossible to see, and he’d been cowering in the alley for hours, too scared to leave his spot. 

The others had to be looking for him by now, and that made his heart ache even more at the thought of them worrying about him. He was the hero. He took care of the others. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. 

How did he even get here? Ever since that weird guy attacked him, it’s been downhill from there. Jackie was just trying to get wood for some project Marvin was working on. He never questioned what that man was creating, he was just excited to be helpful and went looking for some sticks that matched the little list of requirements he had been given. A little side quest, he thought of it as. It gave him an excuse to go out and check out the little forest near their home. Admittedly, it was much later into the night than it should have been for him to be exploring since they had heard howls before, but Jackie was brave and strong. Even if something came after him, he’d be fine.

But something did come after him.

And it wasn’t a coyote.

It was a man. 

 A really weird man. A man who tried to grab his neck and instead bit down on Jackie’s arm when he broke free. The man didn’t seem to expect Jackie to fight back the way he did since he simply stood there as he ran back home.

Jackie rolled up the sleeve of his hoodie, looking at the two puncture wounds on his arm. He tried to figure out how the bite left the mark that it did. They were red and sore to the touch. Jackie knew he should have told the others about it and gotten them looked at, but that would have caused so much worry, and Jackie would never be allowed to go out alone again. However, he might be losing the privilege regardless, given his current choices. 

“Shit.” Jackie cursed when he pressed too hard on the mark, and it sent a jolt of pain through his arm, almost like a quick zap of electricity. “Man…I think I messed up.” He hugged his knees to his chest, telling himself he should get up and go, but he couldn’t. He needed something and had no idea what that need was for. “Oh, not now.” Jackie groaned when he heard voices coming down the alley. He really didn’t want to deal with people. A rarity for him, so that meant he really didn’t want people around him. 

“Leave me alone!” One of the voices stood out, filled with fear. “Help! Someone help!” Jackie quickly scrambled to his feet, unable to stop himself from running over. “Help!” He saw a young man being held by two others, a third digging through a backpack, tearing out books and papers from it. 

“Would you shut up!?” One of the men snapped, yanking on the smaller man’s arm and getting him to yelp in pain. 

“Hey! Stop!” Jackie felt a voice in the back of his head yelling at him that this was a bad idea. Standing alone took so much effort from his body. He was weak and hungry. Nothing was right, and a fight should be the last thing on his mind. 

“Buzz of kid, don’t try being a hero.” The man with the bag scoffed. 

“I’m not trying. I am a hero.” Jackie puffed his chest out, trying to appear tough despite the hollow feeling behind his eyes. 

“This is annoying.” The man stood up, pulling a pocket knife out. “You don’t want to get involved in this, alright? It’s none of your business. Just go home and let us do our work.” 

“Yeah, no.” Jackie took a step forward and watched as the man reacted.

The world felt slower.

The knife went toward him, and he simply swiped it aside, like knocking away a cobweb. He took another step and threw a punch, fist connecting with the man’s nose. He could hear and feel the cracking of it. 

“Holy shit!” One of the other men yelled. Jackie’s eyes widened as the man he punched held his face, blood gushing from his shattered nose, seeping between his fingers. He didn’t mean to hit him that hard. It was just supposed to be a quick jab. 

“I…” Jackie looked at his hand, blood on his fist. 

Red… dripping…blood.

Jackie thickly swallowed. The scent was so…oh it was so good. Tempting. Alluring. 

A new ache was beginning to form in his mouth, and he didn’t care. Jackie brought his hand to his mouth and dragged his tongue along it. That rich iron taste of blood felt like a blessing, just barely scratching at satisfying his need. 

“Dude! The hell!?” Jackie heard the shout. Heard the disgust in their voice, but he didn’t hear them. He didn’t hear anything anymore. Didn’t hear the screams, didn’t hear the cries of fear and comments on his body. All he could focus on was the blood. That sweet, delicious, precious blood that was going to waste as it fell to the ground. 

Jackie’s body started moving on its own, sights only on the man bleeding. Newfound instincts took over as he caught the man, tearing at the collar of his shirt to expose more of his neck. He could see the pulsing of the vein, knowing that more blood was hiding from him and that all he had to do was-

Jackie bit down, sinking fangs into the flesh, popping through and opening the thick vein, and allowing mouthful after mouthful of blood to be sucked out. Each swallow filled Jackie with a comforting warmth, holding him, embracing him, finally getting that need to calm down, to give him back his strength. 

The man could only cry, helplessly punching at Jackie, begging, pleading to be let go. But he was trapped, hits getting weaker and weaker, and Jackie drank and drank and drank. 

Until there was nothing left. 

Nothing more came out. 

He was dry. 

Jackie dropped the body and gasped for air he didn’t need anymore. 

He swallowed the lingering taste on his tongue, and as he calmed, reality sank in. 

“S-Sir?” Jackie squeaked out. “Sir…are you…sir?” He saw the emptiness in the man’s eyes…in the corpse’s eyes. “I…did I…” 

His hands were caked in blood. He could feel it rolling down his chin and neck, soaking the collar of his hoodie. Jackie took a step back, believing that something was squeezing his throat with how tight his chest was. 

“N-No…No, I-I didn’t…I…” Jackie fumbled and fell back, eyes never leaving the body. “Sir?” He tried despite knowing the truth. “Sir, please. Sir, get up.” 

If the man moved, then it didn’t happen, right?

He didn’t-

He didn’t kill him…

Right?

“Jackie! Jackie!” Chase’s voice called from further away, searching for his friend. “Jackie!” 

“I-I was…I was just hungry.” Jackie whispered to himself. “I…please…please.” He didn’t know who he was begging to. He just wanted someone, anyone, to listen. To help him. 

“Jackie!” Chase’s voice was louder, getting closer as he finally found him. “Jackie are-oh, fuck!” He shouted at seeing the body. 

“Ch-Chase?” Jackie looked up, a tear rolling down his cheek. “I didn’t...I didn’t mean to.” 

“Fucking hell, Jackie.” Chase breathed out, not knowing what else to say yet. “Fucking hell.” He repeated and crouched down. “Are you hurt?” He asked, noticing the blood on him. “You…dude.” Chase’s thoughts shifted when he saw the red in Jackie’s eyes and the fangs stabbing into his lower lip. 

“Help.” Jackie’s voice cracked, and he wrapped his arms around Chase, hugging him and trying to hide from what he’d done. From the life he took. “I couldn’t-I couldn’t stop.” His explanation was muffled, body shaking like before but from his own sobs this time. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t. I-I swear. I swear I didn’t.” 

“It’s okay, man, it’s okay.” Chase hugged Jackie back, glancing over at the body before quickly looking away. “We’ll get this figured out. We’ll call the others.” 

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Jackie continued his cries. “I’m sorry…I’m sorry.”

[chlix]

souvenirs

pairing: seungmin x reader

genre: fluff, light angst (???)

word count: 1.8k

warnings: vague references to depression (in a sense)

synopsis: It's getting harder to get through the day, lately. seungmin helps

a/n: the way this is borderline nonsense aksdjhlfajkd i've been exhausted from work lately and this is what i spit out,,,excuse the fact that my metaphors are all mixed together

You're sitting on the couch with your hand above your face, watching your rings glimmer in the afternoon light. Your head is reading on Seungmin's thigh as he reads a book he bought while he was in Paris, something about local birds and migratory patterns. He’s been trying to read more lately, says it’s important for self-improvement. You wonder what self-improvement could come from understanding the ecological niche of French swallows.

“It’s not about the information,” he says. “It’s about learning to parse meaning from text. It’s a brain exercise.”

You think your brain gets plenty exercise. You want to join him on his quest for media literacy, but your brain is too fried to process written language most days. Work takes everything out of you, and then you have to come home and worry about classes and the laundry and all the other things you’re responsible for each day, and it keeps you from being able to focus on any individual thing, in the end. Even now, you're meant to be relaxing, a rare afternoon off when neither you nor your boyfriend has anything important to do, but you can't relax. Your gut is tight, and your head feels stretched thin. In your mind's eye you can see your desk, your laptop, all the work and emails and papers piling up. It's hard to breathe if you think about it for too long.

The sun is so pretty on your gold rings. Seungmin bought them for you in Paris from a vendor’s stand on his way to the airport. They're not real gold; one of them is already tarnishing, and the gems inlaid in another are chipping, clearly fake and not at all real garnets. But he thought you’d much prefer to have the “authentic” experience of a tourist Paris, and wear something you would’ve gotten yourself had you gone.

"If I went to Paris, I would’ve asked you to send me your card details," you'd said after he gave them to you. "I wouldn't have settled for tacky fakes.”

“You don’t even wear jewelry,” Seungmin threw back at you. “You would’ve only put them on to post them to your Instagram story, and then you’d never wear them again.”

“I would wear them if they were from Paris.”

“And so from Paris they are.”

It’s become something of a running joke. Every time you post a picture of yourself, you make sure one of your hands is visible, and with it, the rings. Of course, for this to be possible, you end up wearing them almost every day. In the end, Seungmin is right that it doesn’t really matter that the rings are cheap fakes. They’re beautiful, and they complement your skin tone, and Seungmin had bought them for you, so you don’t really care they’re from a cheap street vendor. First and foremost, they’re from your boyfriend, a souvenir he’d carried thousands of miles back to you, like those birds he’s reading about crossing large bodies of water to find their families back home.

You take one off and hold it directly above your head, looking through the hole like a lens at the ceiling above you. You zero in on the sunlight dancing across the ceiling, getting caught in the brass rings on your curtains and bouncing around in delight.

"You're thinking so loud," Seungmin says.

"Well, stop eavesdropping," you reply.

"It's not eavesdropping if you're loud," Seungmin says. "What's wrong?"

What's always wrong, you want to ask, but you don't know if that's helpful or vindictive, so you don’t. Instead, you say,

"I've just got a lot on my mind."

"Penny for your thoughts?"

“They’re worth more than that,” you say, absent. You're still looking through your lens. You're waiting to see something appear on the other side. Like Coraline’s seeing stone, you think to yourself, ignoring everything outside the metallic ring. If I look through it I can see a new reality.

Seungmin reaches up and takes the ring out of your hand.

“Boyfriend discount,” he says, teasing. He turns the ring over in his fingers curiously.

“Is this the ring from Paris?”

You hum.

“It’s tarnishing.”

“It’s cheap. That’s what happens with cheap things. They break down.” You reach for it, but he holds it out of your reach.

“A shame. Now what will you have to remember Paris by?”

“I didn’t even go, moron,” you say. “I never do anything that fun.” You mean to be lighthearted, but your voice is bitter, hard.

“That’s not true. You do fun things all the time. You’re the interesting one, not me.”

You actually laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It’s true. If I wasn’t in an idol group, I would never go anywhere. I would have gotten a boring office job and been a salaryman, and I never would’ve even met you.”

Maybe that would be for the best, you think, but you know better than to say it. You've both grown tired of conversations about not deserving each other; there’s no denying you guys are in this for life. You love Seungmin so much it’s embarrassing, so much that you go to all his shows and sound checks, so much that you buy newspapers with his face on them and stick them on your coffee table even though you never read a single page. You love him enough that you stay up late and call him at odd times at night when he’s off in Europe headlining a music festival, so much so that you wear tarnished rings from a stupid Parisian street vendor just because he bought them and you love him and you want to look at your hands every single day and think about how much he loves you. So much so that you fantasize about the day he’ll give you a ring that won’t tarnish, because it’ll be real gold, and it’ll sit prim and shiny untouched on your currently unadorned ring finger. It’s not about deserving. If it was about deserving, you’d never have it. But you will have it, someday.

It's not someday yet, though.

"However you used to be, or could be, I'm the boring one now. I'm tired all the time. I have nothing to talk about most days except my work. And the work never ends. I'm not even a housewife. I'm something worse." It’s toeing the line of how much self-deprecation Seungmin will allow, and sure enough, he fights back.

"You said you wanted to keep your jobs. You said you liked them."

"I do like my jobs. And I like having money. Very low bar for me, liking things that I need to survive.”

"Is there a lot going on lately?" Seungmin holds the ring out between his thumb and middle finger, surrendering it back to you. You slide your finger back through the hole easily, reunited with your prices possession once more. Crossing portals, becoming whole, something else metaphorical that would fix you, that would make this conversation easier.

"Like I said, just a lot on my mind."

You don’t know why this is so hard.

Seungmin has always been willing to hear you out, knowing you're not one to complain when you don't need to. But something about this situation is getting to you, this prison of your own making, of trying to do everything in your own. You don't let Seungmin support you and then complain about working. You say you want fulfillment through education and then cry about midterms. You move miles away from your family to earn your independence and then wax depressive about how you're not seeing your baby sister grow up. It must be tiring for him, not just as someone who’s made similar sacrifices for his idol career, but just as a person on earth who has to listen to you all day. You don't like to be whiny. You understand your choices, and you don't regret them. You regret very little of your life, and very little of yourself, even on your worst days, but that doesn't mean it doesn't suck.

"Thinking loud again,” Seungmin says.

"Does that mean the thoughts are worth more?" you ask, but there's no mirth in your voice.

"You can tell me anything, you know," he says, and you do know. Of course, you know.

"Take your own advice," you say. "It's like pulling teeth with you.'

"You shouldn't pick up my bad habits," Seungmin says. "You have plenty of your own."

He isn't saying it to be mean, it's just true. There are so many parts of yourself you prefer to ignore, this being one of them. Seungmin is all about self-improvement. Hence the book on swallows, and the afternoon off. Hence the way he's not demanding you tell him what's wrong and is instead letting you decide. He's working on being less impatient, more empathic. You're working on honesty. To be honest it's like pulling teeth for both of you.

Talking with Seungmin like this is doing...something. It isn't really making it easier to breathe, and it's not helping you ignore the piles of work you have left, but it does make it easier to remember that you two are a team in this. In being people. In suffering and paying rent and being maybe not so good with money, if he’s willing to waste it on street trinkets that will just tarnish within the year and you’re willing to encourage him by wearing them.

You're drowning in work, you both are, always, but then, the work isn't here with you, is it? Here it's Sunday afternoon, and it's golden hour, and you're on the couch with your boyfriend. And you still don't really want to tell him what the problem is, because you're afraid he'll laugh, even though he clearly won't. He would never laugh at you. He doesn't find most of what you do funny for him to start making jokes now.

"Buy me fried chicken and I might give you a thought or two," you say. "I'm bringing back the barter system.”

“Traditionalist," he says.

"True innovation is found in retrospection," you say. "I’ll make it a BOGO. Combining old with new.”

"Enough metaphors," he says. “What place do you want to order from?"

You pretend to be offended. "You don’t know my chicken order?"

"Now you're just inventing things. Coffee order, sure, even dessert order. But chicken order?”

"If you don't love me, just say that."

“This is why your thoughts are only worth a penny, just so you know."

You grin, looking up at him. You're not looking at his face through the ring, but it feels like you're seeing another world anyway, a universe where there's Just the two of you, a universe sustained only by your love.

Who cares about migrating birds, as long as Seungmin keeps flying home to you.

[heliads]

Not sure if you write for Namor from MCU, but could you write Namor x Y/N Enemies to Lovers where Y/N is a Greek demigod who helps Namor after washing up injured and Namor pays them back by helping them deal with a monster? They’re enemies bc he still distrusts humans. Could Y/N also be a child of Hecate please?

had not seen wakanda forever but this request is so good that i specifically sought it out for you, anon. a+ job

masterlist

At this point, the man washing up on the shores of the sea isn’t even the strangest thing you’ve seen all day. Nor is he your chief concern. Normally, the boundary spells up around your city would keep out any intruders, unconscious men who might be soldiers be damned, but the boundary spells haven’t been working well as of late. That’s kind of why you’re here. 

You consider him for a while, his unmoving form, the weapons at his sides still softly clinking as the rolling surf pulls them together, then decide that this is so not your problem and leave. Men destroy themselves all the time. This one, although stranger than most, will either be able to sort himself out when he wakes or be far beyond the reach of your help.

This sort of sentiment would strike many as unkind, but to you, it is nothing uncommon. This is survival. It has never been pretty. It works as well as you let it, and one moment of mercy can spell your death in a second. Right now, you’re not just responsible for yourself, but your entire civilization as well. 

If you ask most scholars and historical enthusiasts, they’ll tell you that the lost city of Atlantis is a myth. Nothing real, just a bunch of old stories all tied together into one perplexing knot. The world loves disasters. The idea of a highly advanced Ancient Greek society sinking beneath the waves, all that knowledge and power gone forever, is highly corruptive. Some people spend their entire lives hunting down rabbit holes and paper trails to see if they could be the one to track it down, but in the end, no one actually wants to find Atlantis. The allure is in the impossibility.

You suppose that’s why they never managed it. Atlantis is somewhere out there, ripe for discovery, just as so many thrillseekers have envisioned. The only problem is that its inhabitants have absolutely no desire to be found, so no one has found it. You would know, you live there. In fact, you have lived there for a very long time. Not as long as the oldest; some of you have died by now, others have left, and many have been forgotten, but the stories of what it was like before you cut yourselves off from the world have been passed down for centuries, and you’ve heard and told most all of them.

The Atlantaens were in danger, that’s why you left the ancient world in the first place. Many scoff at the idea of the Ancient Greek pantheon today; so many gods and heroes and monsters, none of them kind, all of them doomed. We love to laugh at that which we do not understand, but the gods laugh at us for not believing, and then they damn us with curses and agents of destruction. The gods are real, all of them, and they do not take kindly to insults.

Over the course of time, while the Aegean Sea was settled and fought over, a certain kind of people tended to drift towards Atlantis. At first, the progression of its society was slow, but as rumors grew of its inhabitants, those who found they had more in common with the Atlantaens than their own people left their homes to find a true one. 

To put it plainly, Atlantis was home to the demigods, the ones chosen by the Fates for a higher purpose. Many Greeks went their whole lives without being called upon the gods. Others couldn’t have a good night’s sleep without being plagued by visions of future quests in their dreams. So much immortal attention attracted the ire of the Athenians, the Spartans, everyone. Out of fear for their lives and a desire for more, those of you touched by the Olympians went to Atlantis, and once there, you never wanted to leave.

For a while, this progression was fine. No one bothered you on Atlantis because they weren’t stupid enough to try and attack an island full of half-gods and heroes. During difficult times, though, when harvests weren’t bountiful and water supplies grew dry, it was easier for outsiders to blame the island of outcasts than their own city-states. Thieves started sneaking onto Atlantis, burning your crops before vanishing under the cover of night. Prized possessions went missing. Families were hurt.

Without a definable cause, infighting erupted between demigods. Old angers between godly parents renewed themselves among their children. Poseidon’s children swore destruction on Athena’s chosen scholars. Ares’ soldiers spit at the feet of any tinkerer of Hephaestus who crossed their path.

Eventually, it became clear to the island leaders that drastic changes had to be made before the island tore itself apart. The demigods never attacked each other before things started turning sour, so the enemy was obviously the outsiders. To solve the crisis, the strongest of the demigods turned to the gods for help, and for once, they answered. Atlantis was cast away from the rest of the city-states, veiled from mortal eyes and dragged further into the Mediterranean Sea. You still had all the resources you needed from your island, you just weren’t hurt by the mortals.

Thus life carried on for centuries. Your art and achievements continued to expand at a breakneck pace. You lived longer, accomplished more. The gods smiled upon you. Your island was huge, your society could flourish without being impeded by the limits of your land. It became clear that the bad times had ended.

Or, they had, and then the first monster showed up. Without constant invaders, the art of fighting had somewhat fallen out of fashion. Ares’ descendants would never allow it to die completely, but it had become almost archaic. The monster was eventually slain, but it sparked fear into the hearts of the Atlantaens, and made everyone realize that they weren’t invulnerable.

The people of Atlantis responded in two separate ways. Some flung themselves before their temples, praying to the gods to deliver them again. They waited in their homes for an inevitable second attack, shaking and scared. Others, like you, realized that the only ones who would save you would be yourselves. The gods respond to insult; they removed Atlantis from the mortals because their offerings were constantly raided. One monster on an island of many is not worth their concern. It is up to you to protect your people.

You have two ways of saving your island. One is through the sword. The other is with your spells. Your mother, Hecate, often visits her children in dreams to instruct them in the magical arts. You’ve learned many spells and incantations, and they’ve come in handy as more and more monsters appear. You can only hope that they will be enough to continue the defense of the island. It seems as if the attacks will never end.

And, chillingly, perhaps they never will. You and your fellow demigods, the ones that decided to fight back instead of waiting for a salvation that will never come, have made a plan to save yourselves. Part of that involves regular patrols and expeditions to the outermost reaches of the island to kill any monster that crosses your path. You have enchanted swords at the ready, plus half a dozen defensive spells burning under your fingertips. This is not the time at which you die. 

You have enjoyed many patrols over the past few years, but today, your veins are thrumming with adrenaline even more than at the start. You know something is out there. A couple of farmers turned up with bloody livestock, scared of something poaching their animals. Scales and talons have been found. If you’re right— and let’s be honest, you really don’t want to be— you’ve got a Hydra on your hands. 

That’s bad news. The monsters were small at the start; a lesser scourge here and there, a malevolent spirit, and then they got bigger. A harpy. A medium sized giant. If you’re getting hydras— well, maybe you’ll have to make some good offerings to the gods in addition to your regular training. Some divine protection couldn’t hurt at a time like this. 

That’s why you can’t afford to worry about a man passed out on your shores, not yet. Yes, he is a problem, a definitive sign that the godly interference that should be protecting Atlantis has started to slacken, but you can deal with him after you kill the hydra that’s after both of you. Always the monster you know, right? Or the monster you know is lurking in the undergrowth, ready to slaughter you and your entire island. 

You had planned on coming back for the guy, sure, but maybe his unconscious body doesn’t believe that, because you’ve hardly taken ten steps past his fallen form when he suddenly jerks to life. It’s like reanimating a corpse, how he moves; from nothing to everything all at once. His eyes go wide, and he gasps desperately for air, one hand reaching to his throat. Strangely enough, he doesn’t choke out water, but blood, a few scarlet mouthfuls before he lies on his back once more, twitching into stillness. 

You peer back over at him. Not dead yet, his chest still rises and falls with desperate breaths. It would be smart to carry on your path and only check in with this man when you’re sure a monster won’t lunge at you out of the surrounding trees the second you turn your back, but he’s spotted you already. One hand reaches out towards you, trembling, from where he lies in the surf.

He starts to open his mouth, and you silently prepare yourself for some sort of desperate plea, a call for aid. Instead, you’re surprised when all the man says is, “Were you really going to leave me to die here?”

You blink at him. “I thought you were already dead.”

He has the audacity to frown at you. “I would have died if I needed help and you didn’t provide it.”

You can’t believe he’s washed up on your island– you know, the unfindable one– and has the nerve to question your hospitality. “Same difference.”

“Not to me,” he harrumphes, and starts to sit up. So he really isn’t dead. If he isn’t dying, though, that means it actually is your duty to help him. You’re more of a soldier than a nurse, so he’d better not have any broken limbs. Seeing as you really have no choice, you bite back a bitter groan and help him at last. He eyes you distrustfully, but lets you drag him farther from the tide. You had intended to prop him up against a tree or something, but he protests when he gets too far from the water, so you settle for a smooth boulder close enough to the surf that the waves still crash over his feet.

Strangely enough, the water seems to be helping him heal. You can see the ghosts of scars criss crossing his chest, but they don’t appear to be old wounds. Instead, they might be recent. 

You squint at him. “Do you have enhanced healing?”

“And strength,” he adds. “I wouldn’t recommend trying to kill me. You would die before you got the chance.”

If this is how strangers act when you try to help them, you’re not surprised that the ancient Atlantaens asked the gods to cordon off their island. “I could tell you the same thing. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

He regards you for a second. “Why should I do what you tell me? I don’t bow to strangers.”

“Neither do I,” you force out through gritted teeth, “and right now, you’re on my land, so I suggest you learn to scrape at least a little bit.”

He narrows his eyes. The salty sea air blows his dark hair against his face, revealing more of the ornate jewelry around his neck. It looks ancient, perhaps even as old as your society. Although you’d like nothing more than for him to hurry off of Atlantis, you can’t help your curiosity and open your mouth to ask about it.

You’re cut off before you get the chance. The man doubles over all of a sudden, hands flying to his throat once more. Now that you’ve moved him farther away from the ocean, you have a better look at his wounds, and although they’re healing quickly, they look severe. Severe enough to kill him even with advanced health.

Swearing, you raise your hands and begin chanting. Healing spells have become increasingly useful as of late; Hecate’s children learn at least one before they're even knee height, and you’ve had plenty of chances to practice these sorts of incantations thanks to the sudden surge of monster attacks.

Tendrils of magic fly from your hands and wrap around the man. The spells target the injuries across his chest, his heart, his throat, and strangely enough, a few fly down to one of his ankles, repairing a set of wings above his feet. You chant until your throat goes hoarse, until he stops choking, until his breathing settles. Only then do you lower your hands, and wait there in terrible transience, waiting for him to say something.

At last, slowly, incredulously, he does. “What did you do?”

“I saved your life,” you say.

He nods. “I know. With magic?”

You incline your head. He ponders this for a moment longer, then extends a hand towards you. “My name is Namor.”

You stare at his outstretched palm, then take it. “I’m Y/N. Welcome to Atlantis.”

He doesn’t believe you at first. It appears that the rumors of Atlantis’ disappearance are more widespread than you thought if they’ve managed to reach an underwater Mesoamerican city across the world. Namor believes you soon enough, though, especially when he’s gathered his strength enough for you to lead him up a rocky cliff so he can see the majesty of your island sprawling out before him. 

The sight stuns even you, with your years of remembering it, so you’re pleased to see that Namor looks appropriately stupefied. Atlantis is a marvel; crisscrossing colonnades, magnificent gardens, marble roofs shining in the sun, temples to so many gods and goddesses that even you can’t remember them all. Children run laughing in the streets, and their parents chastise them or smile at the fun they’re having. A flock of university students chatter on their way to class. Soldiers practice in an open training yard, and the clash of bronze echoes such that you can hear it even here, on the very outskirts of the island.

“This is your home?” He asks.

You smile. “It is.”

“Why were you all the way out here, then?” Namor queries, “If not looking for dying men to ignore?”

You roll your eyes. “I saved you eventually, didn’t I?”

He laughs. “Only when I asked you to. Some would call that heartless.”

You arch a brow. “Would you?”

He takes a step closer to you. “No,” he says at last, “I don’t think I would.”

You breathe out evenly and then, to hide the sudden pressure between your ribs, change the subject. “How did you come here, Namor? Our island is under enchantment to hide us from the rest of the world. You never should have been able to come here, especially not since it’s so far from where you were.”

Namor sighs. “I don’t know. I was returning home with my people after a truce with the Wakandans. We were attacked on the way by something, some sort of monster. I don’t know what it was. We managed to kill it, but while I was leading it away from our home, it struck me through the chest. I must have lost consciousness after I struck the killing blow, and then I woke up here.”

This makes worry tie up your stomach in tight knots. “A monster?”

You look back towards your shining city. Everyone seems to be happy and carefree right now, but if your monsters are cropping up in other parts of the world– if you cannot protect yourselves, not even if you had to run from Atlantis– there is no telling how long any of you could survive, especially not if the monsters keep getting bigger.

Namor lays a gentle hand on your shoulder. “Is everything alright, Y/N?”

“No,” you say firmly, “It’s not. Our peace has been shattered as of late. More and more monsters show up on our borders. I was out here to find another one that’s been spotted recently, a hydra. Even if I kill this one, though, it’ll be replaced by two more the next day. They never stop coming.”

The look in Namor’s eyes is soft, understanding. He knows what it’s like to feel as if you cannot keep your own people safe. “I will seek out this hydra with you. I have to go back to Talokan soon, but you have my word to return whenever you need help.”

You regard him questioningly. “Why would you make such a promise? We only just met.”

He lifts a shoulder. “You saved my life, I owe you a debt. Besides, we only have so many places free of humans left in the world. We should protect each other when we can.”

You smile, then decide to tease him a little more. “You know I’m half human, right?”

He feigns disgust. “I will only help half of your city, then.”

You laugh. “And kill half the hydra? That’s ridiculous.”

“No more than someone only being half immortal,” he points out. “How does that even work?”

You grin. “I try not to think about it.”

He matches your pleased expression. “Then I won’t, either.”

And so your daily patrol is joined by a feathered serpent god. The two of you stalk silently through the forests on the outskirts of Atlantis, marking signs of heavy travel. Intent on your prey, you manage to locate it with a combination of your spells and his experience. Killing the hydra is difficult, obviously; Tartarus does not make its monsters without wanting them to be impervious to most attacks, but when the dust settles, both of you are still alive and without too much damage. The same cannot be said for the dead monster, so a win’s a win.

The two of you stand there for a moment longer, weapons in hand, and then Namor slowly, remorsefully lifts his gaze from the dead hydra to look at you. “It’s time for me to go,” he says softly, “Talokan will be expecting me. They will wonder why I have not returned. I cannot afford for them to attack Wakanda again out of some nonexistent threat to their leader.”

“I understand,” you reply. You don’t like it, though. Not nearly as much as you would have liked it when you first found him on your shores.

“I should go,” he repeats, but his weapons are gone from his hands and he’s striding towards you, closing the distance in a breath, kissing you.

“You should go,” you tell him, but his hands are on your hips and you don’t want him to let go, not now, and certainly not to a city across the sea.

“I should–” Namor begins, but you interrupt him to kiss him again. His fingers curl against your sides, and you know for certain that he wants to leave just about as you want him to.

He does force himself away eventually. Both of you understand that there is and will always be something greater than the two of you at stake. Neither of you are just a person, just a god; the fate of your homes is far more pressing than any personal want. Still, when you walk back with him to the ocean and watch him disappear beneath the glimmering blue of the waves, you know that you’ll regret every lost moment.

Still, there is hope that you might see him again. He told you how to find Talokan, and Namor is familiar with Atlantis now. You could find each other again, frame it as a need for your countries to have diplomatic relations. You could be happy again. It might take time, but it could happen. You, for one, will be counting down the days until then.

marvel tag list: @mayfieldss, @rogueanschel, @mycosmicparadise, @ellobruv, @callsign-scully, @with-inked-solace, @sher-lokid7, @eclliipsed, @23victoria, @watchreadfangirlrepeat, @gods-fools-heroes, @w1shes43, @deafsuperhero, @fadedver, @alex-1967s-blog, @crazyhearttragedy

all tags list: @wordsarelife

[endlessmidnightcreates]

Finally was able to finish the character sheet of my girl, Opal Skai for my most recent DND campaign. It's going super well so far!

Can you see all the lil notes I made, I had a lot of fun doing those :3

Here's the low down on her below the cut

She is a Fire Genasi Druid who is all smarts and like 2% fight despite her ferocious appearance (some would say). She is sometimes seen smoldering or glowing. But she is a Huge Nerd and Babygirl and a bit odd.

Opal is a Bookshop Keeper in Baldur’s Gate. Even though the town is regarded as a nest of vipers, she values knowledge and community and takes pride in the family library/store that she runs with her mother. People around it respect her and the store and it’s seen as neutral ground and is both used for gang negotiations and occasional toddler reading circles, sometimes in the same day. 

She Spends 50% her time in the store, 30% in nature and doing #HotDruidShit (like hot girl shit but with druids) and then the other 20% vibing. She’s quiet, but not shy and actually quite talkative when the moment is right (someone asks her a question about a book–or she’s drunk). She will talk and say hi and bye to people on the street. When it comes to fighting, she prefers not to but that won’t stop her from slapping a bitch (with her hand or staff). But like she reeeeally prefers not to (int. modifier Is -1). Mainly cus she’s Genasi and she is mostly untrained so she would rather not kill someone. But she’s capable.

More Deets

Occupation: 

She owns a small bookshop specialty store. Well, technically it belongs to her mother, but it will go to her once she retires or dies (god forbid).

Denizens of Baldur’s gate can get a wide range of books and scrolls as well as several common herbs and spell components. Everything from eye of newt to various animal bones. She partly keeps it stocked with her own foraging as well as having a supplier and an elderly mother (human npc) who watches over the shop and manages logistics. She manages the front of shop. Having read all the books and catalogued everything in the store, she has begun to work on her every-expanding growing “To buy” list that consists of various rare books and magical items. 

She has started to take on minor mercenary/adventurer jobs to build up capital. There are expensive texts and components in Elturel that she wants to get her hands on. These jobs have ranged from delivering 20 rabbit pelts to serving court papers in creative ways (read: transforms into a cat and tricks them into letting her in). Though, for some of the more rare artifacts, she figures, the easiest way is to tag along with one of the many Adventuring parties in BG to gather information on its whereabouts. 

Class: Druid

Why is she a druid. Druidism runs in the family. Opal’s mother and a few aunts and uncles are and were druids. Her grandmother was as well. It was only natural that Momma Opal taught the ways to her flaming baby. But Opal was resistant to the lifestyle as a young one. The spells, the philosophy, heck, being around leaves as someone whose average body temperature could easily reach 300°C made it difficult for her to find the value of the practice. She figured that blacksmithing would be more useful. Being a Druid helps her live more in harmony with the energies and elements that swirl around in her blood. She’s a valued member of the Druid Community in Baldur’s Gate because she’s just a cool gal, but also because she has helped many a druid get lava flowers (a flower that grows inside volcanoes)[i also literally just made that up] 

Combat 

Opal has only ever unwillingly killed once. She was on one of her many quests. She was an ox, lugging a massive stag carcass behind her. Bandits attacked her and she fought them off, maiming a few and kiling one instantly. The others escaped. She went straight home, fleeing the scene. That was the first time she had ever been attacked. She was rarely provoked or approached in human form because of her stature. But as an ox, people didn’t recognize or fear her. She missed a big payday that day. She doesn’t know if they survived or not. She tries not think about it often. 

Fighting and killing are not things she often does. She’s the type of gal to grab a spider and let it outside rather than smush it. But– She CAN do it. She CAN fight (in humanoid form) and she CAN and WILL hurt someone if they hurt or try to hurt her. She will turn into what the situation needs and act accordingly - need to make a quick getaway? HONSE. Need to serve court papers? KITTY. Need to slap a bitch? HUMANOID

She will not attack unless provoked physically. Her moral code is fuck around and find out but reeeally hopes that they don’t have to find out, cus she doesn't know herself tbh.

Childhood:

Opal doesn't know much about her Genie father’s side, though he comes to visit often enough from the elemental plane. She also has a way to contact him whenever she wants.

She has 12 aunts and uncles who are scattered throughout the country, quite a few of them are druids and frequent their local bogs while the others reside in normal villages and have average families and lives. Opal has ALOT of cousins.

She has an aunt and uncle who live in other parts of Baldur's gate. they sometimes take shifts at the shop. All of them contribute to building the shop’s library and maintaining goods. Her aunt is an adventurer while her uncle is a cook at a tavern.

Religion:

She believes in the spirit of nature. Thus she tries to respect it whenever she has the opportunity. Aside from that, she tries to be respectful of everyone else’s gods, except the evil ones (like bal) or the ones that expect an unhealthy blind devotion. She’s not a devout worshiper. Prays on occasion to the universe but other than that, she focuses on her own actions.

[yandere-toons]

Yandere Death the Kid (Platonic Scenario - "Death and Dignity")

Warnings: Use of Firearms, Death, Violence, Toxic Mindsets.

Word Count: 4881.

Hour after hour, from the time the sun climbed up the stars to the time it sank below the horizon, with every fanciful stroke of a tired pen, Kid poured onto paper the thoughts that would not leave him.

These thoughts gnawed at his mind like termites at rotten wood, consuming it bit by bit until what once was stable now teetered on the precipice of collapse. This flight of passion was a waking nightmare that haunted his every movement.

His right hand, which clutched the pen as though glued to it, exploded into a fit of shakes after forcing itself to remain stiff for a final sentence. The words that lay before him disgusted him more than the most fetid odour, and with an anguished cry, Kid tore the page free of the notebook.

“It's not good enough!” His yell was dripping with frustration, frustration with himself, the look of the letter and its intended recipient. The noise carried on the silent air of the mansion and shattered the peace of many a slumber.

It rounded corners and slipped underneath closed doors, ushering two pairs of haggard footsteps from a plush bed. Kid was deaf to this series of thumps, for what filled his ears was a combination of mumbles and rustles.

A few strips of paper had been severed from the rest and stuck to the spine while Kid pounded the majority into a ball and hurled it into the metal wastebasket beside the desk. As the wastebasket rattled, Kid slammed his elbows into the flat top of the desk, hunched over in his seat, and cradled his face in his palms.

“Kid?” Liz called, surprise and concern intertwined. “You okay?” She hesitated to ask, fearful of what had dragged such pain from him in the dead of night.

Bare feet brushed stone as Liz took another step towards him, and this one brought her to the foot of the desk. She looked down at the back of Kid's head and leaned forward to get a better view of him.

Kid did not meet her gaze. Perhaps, he had deemed himself unworthy of it, or perhaps, he had not the strength. “If I don't get it right, they'll think I'm garbage.” The misery in his voice told the story of someone who had given up on proving anyone wrong.

Liz saw how many pages were missing from the notebook and how packed the wastebasket was becoming, and she understood how steep the cliff was from which Kid dangled. “No, they won't. Just go with whatever you have left.”

On any of the nights that came before, he went to sleep at the same rigid bedtime. On this night, Liz observed, he quested for something that eluded him.

His eyes were glazed with manic confusion and open wide despite the dark circles surrounding them. His fingers danced across the desk as if it was hot to the touch, finding solace in digging each nail into the wooden surface.

Kid finally blinked after a full minute of staring at the next blank page in the notebook. In a shaky breath that teased the arrival of tears, he whispered, “I can't stop, Liz.”

It was not a declaration of determination or some great desire, but rather, it was a desperate recitation of the fact that he was, at that moment, as he had been at countless others, a slave to his obsessive thoughts.

They looped in his mind without end, threatening devastation if they were ignored and withholding his ability to relax until he wrote a particular string of words exactly as he had imagined them in his head.

Dozens of failed attempts sat in a stack inside the wastebasket.

Patty squatted in front of it with a curious laugh, collected a few balls of paper off the top, and began crafting an origami giraffe. She hummed a merry tune as she smoothed the trash and then folded it into a work of art, which earned a slight smile from her big sister.

Kid, however, was dead to everything but the blank page and the pen in his hand. He moved to quell the thoughts that suffocated him, and Liz grabbed his hand and guided it away from the page.

She frowned at the coldness of his skin and narrowed her eyes at his shallow breaths. “Have you had anything to eat today?”

He looked at her as though it was his first time hearing the word “eat” and was puzzled by its lack of apparent relevancy to his task. As the fact that a world existed outside of writing the letter washed over Kid in a slow wave, he turned his head back to the notebook and mumbled, “No. There was no time for that.”

Patty jumped up and spread herself across the desk, lying on her stomach and kicking the air. She stretched her arms towards Kid and shoved an origami giraffe in his face. “Give them this! Everybody loves giraffes!”

If she had taken a pack of crayons to it, one could have mistaken it for a real baby giraffe.

Kid eyed the origami giraffe and instinctively judged whether slicing it in half would produce equal pieces. A vertical slice would, he deduced, and he accepted it with both hands.

* * *

Kid's house was a castle pulled from a gothic storybook, its walls adorned with tentacled skulls and red spikes, and its grass home to a garden of guillotines. Being in it was like stepping into a different universe, one where each room mirrored itself on opposite sides.

Every red-carpeted staircase footed the traffic of dozens of guests, and all the linen-draped tables threw their candlelit shadows upon the stone floor. The floor had been scrubbed and buffed until no scratch was in sight, as you noticed your reflection on the monochromatic rock.

Peering through one of the arched windows of the aptly named Gallows Mansion yielded the moon-tipped glint of a cast-iron fence, its spear-like bars pointing at the purple sky and spreading from a locked gate.

The music of the student body enjoying a break rang loud over the jazzy piano emitting from a gramophone. Its needle traced the grooves in an old disc, tucked into the corner of the walls bordering the right side of the central staircase.

Doing so much as lifting a piece of food from the lines of prearranged plates seemed a disservice, as if you were sullying a priceless creation meant to be looked at, not touched. The air smelt of salads, turkey legs and mashed potatoes with peas, leaving a zesty bunch of crumbs on everyone's tongue but your own.

Kid bopped himself on the forehead with the heel of his hand: “Idiot!” He hissed the word through clenched teeth and pushed his eyes to the floor, his breathing rattled and his once-steady hands curling into fists.

“Of course, they don't like it!” The bite of self-disgust in his voice was potent, but when Kid snuck a glance your way to catch you scanning the other partygoers with boredom, his heart punched his ribcage. “They're not having a good time,” he muttered, “I need to fix this.”

After patting imaginary dust from the clothes he had ironed twice before the party started, Kid took a deep breath through his nose and straightened his posture to the point of stiffness. A stony composure washed over his face and unwound the wrinkles clinging to it.

Kid departed from his group of friends, who were humouring the blue-haired Black☆Star as he stood atop a table and dramatised the events of his latest victory, and only one of them noticed.

The squeak of dress shoes pivoting on the stone floor alerted you to the sight of Kid sliding into the space beside you. He had aligned himself with you, facing the same direction as you and standing at the same distance from the nearest table as you were.

He wore black suspenders over a dark tie and a cedar brown dress shirt, like a classy gent out for a stroll, giving him a muted appearance that would have been easy to overlook in the crowd if not for his half-striped hair.

“I couldn't help but notice that the catering is not to your liking.” Kid recited the line that he had been refining in his head and repeating under his breath on the way over. “Rest assured, the menu will have greatly improved by the next party.”

As he turned to you, his arms came round from behind his back. “In the meantime, please accept this as a token of my apology.”

Kid presented an origami giraffe with the spirit of a chef peeling off the lid of a silver platter. He had closed his eyes, but when his anxieties about somehow grabbing the wrong item sprouted, he reopened them to study the gift in his hands.

“Patty wanted me to give it to you.” He stumbled on the name, as if he had intended to say a different one, but faltered just as the sound came out.

You tucked the giraffe underneath your arm, nodded at him, and offered a smile that Kid had yet to see you bear for any other person. “Tell her it's the finest gift I've ever received.”

Something bloomed on your face, an untroubled excitement that quieted the worries swirling round his mind about whether the dimensions of the paper giraffe were still symmetrical. “I heard about your last assignment!”

It was at that moment that Kid lost himself, his mask of calm slipping to betray unabashed interest. The hunt for maleficent souls had not occurred to him once that night. These villains were as much fair game as a wild hog, yet here he was, fretting about matters that he now wondered if his father would deem trivial.

Your eyes flitted to your pocket, which your free hand dipped inside with a purpose. “It sounds like dangerous work, so I made you this.”

A ringlike shadow flew over Kid, and then a necklace found its place on him. It was symmetrical, just as he would like it to be. It was also homemade, a truth that dawned on him like the first ray of sunshine after a storm.

“It's a good luck charm!” was how you described it, but he was too far gone into a spiral of hopeful theories to register this.

Kid cradled the necklace in the palm of his hand, and he saw the effort you had poured into making it. In that instant, it was a promise, a wish fulfilled, a dream realised.

When he gazed at you again, time had frozen for him. The surrounding chatter about upcoming exams and who had collected how many souls from voices of varying pitches and tones shifted to a similar, insignificant buzz, as did everything else but the rapid beats of his pulse.

His arms began to outstretch towards your face with the awe of someone daring to reach out to something godly. Kid took the sides of your head in his hands, applying a firm yet careful pressure that suggested both the need to admire and the fear of causing ruin.

In a half-breathless whisper, he said, “Of all the souls I've seen, yours possesses symmetry unparalleled.”

It was the type of compliment one might expect to hear while dancing under glittering chandeliers on the marble floor of a ballroom, intimate yet formal. From the mouth of a god who personally folded the tips of every roll of toilet paper in his mansion into triangles and abandoned missions to centre the painting in his living room, it was the type of compliment that had you walking with your head held high.

A wine glass full of apple cider hit the floor and shattered against the stone.

Kid recoiled as if he had been slugged in the gut, a twitch invading his eye while his face warped into a look of pure horror. The shattering of the glass was a high-pitched explosion that clawed his brain, which overflowed with images of the apple cider tainting his spotless floor.

When Kid thrust his head towards the source of the disaster, his gaze met that of Liz, who was standing in front of a nearby table with Patty.

He stormed to her table and arched his back, careful not to step in the orangish puddle of drink and broken glass. “Liz! How could you? Do you have any idea how long it takes to make this floor sparkle?” The words gushed out of his mouth like a waterfall, not stopping to breathe or allow for another's response.

As his agitated rant about needing to scrub the room again rolled over her ears, Liz raised her arm and rubbed the back of her head with a forced chuckle. “Whoops! Guess I'm a little clumsy tonight.”

Patty skipped after her big sister, only to pause and set her mouth agape when she took a peek at you. “Huh?” She tilted her head and leaned towards you with her hands sticking outwards.

“Hey!” shouted Patty, drawing the short word into a lengthy stretch of surprise that pulled joy at her lips. “You're who Kid's always talking about!”

Kid caught his breath mid-sentence, and he veered towards her as panic etched itself across his face. “Patty!” His sheepish outcry reverberated through the atrium and gathered the attention of various partygoers, who disregarded their previous conversations and proceeded to rubberneck.

She turned to him and cocked her head with an innocent hum. “What is it, Kid?”

He dashed behind her and began pushing her back to the table where Black☆Star was devouring his third dish. Patty did not resist, merely staring over her shoulder at him.

As soon as you were out of his sight, the repetitive thoughts returned to swarm his mind like flies flocking to the smell of carrion.

* * *

From the moment that it was flung over his head to the moment that he walked the streets of Death City on this overcast twilight, Kid had not removed the necklace for any reason for even a second.

He kept it near his heart, circling his spearpoint collar and framing his skull brooch of pure metal as if his heart would cease to beat without it.

Liz had glimpsed him cleaning it and polishing it when he thought he was alone, and on three separate occasions, she had questioned him about his preoccupation. “I don't know what you're talking about,” Kid always replied, eyes half-closed with disinterest and tone one of steely resolve. “I'm simply caring for a friend's gift.”

He was chasing a fantasy, and it seemed that everyone except him knew that. Every few minutes, he reached for the necklace and touched it, holding it for a bit to confirm that it had not disappeared since the last time he checked.

Shimmers of a napping sun poked through the cloud bank and dappled the cobblestone road ahead. The rhythm of his footsteps, a deliberate pattern of Kid counting the number of brown and grey stones, was broken by a scream.

It was the scream of glass as it shattered into a downpour of shards jumping on the street, and it dotted the cobblestones where Kid would have rested his feet if not for the hulking man blocking his path.

His mask was akin to the head of a devil, with bicorn ears and a drill-like nose. It glared down at Kid from under the rows and rows of fluorescent lights spewing out of adjacent buildings.

He had donned the red spandex and yellow cape of a superhero from the comic books of yore, but the sack he lugged over his shoulder was brimming with gold bars.

The surprise that had opened Kid's eyes and mouth wide died away with a surge of opportunistic confidence. “You evaded me once, Lupin. I can assure you it will not happen again.” He extended one arm to Patty and the other to Liz, prompting them to exchange brief nods.

The sisters vanished into beams of pinkish-white light, and there in his hands materialised a pair of silver Beretta M9s. Kid held them upside down and crossed his outstretched arms into an X-shape, with his pinkies hooked on the triggers.

“You think I'll just stand here and take it?” was all Lupin bothered to say before his free hand scooped a wooden handle out of his boot.

No sooner than Kid saw the glint of a dagger did he yank the pistols towards his face and form a protective barrier of steel and tailored sleeves.

The blade was so swift and the cut so clean that he was scarcely aware of where it had struck. His ignorance persevered until the glimmer of something caught his eye as it was split in twain and ripped from its home about his neck, and the answer drove a graver pain into him than the sharpest spear.

The necklace, a sliver of yourself that you had so graciously bestowed on Kid, lay battered at his feet.

The shock lasted only for as long as it took him to stumble backwards and regain his footing. He had enjoyed the gift so much that it became indestructible in his mind, and to see it reduced to what a passer-by would call garbage was the most dastardly of transgressions.

It was then that the pang of sorrow, which paralysed him like a snake's venom, bled into a frenzy that shook his heart and twisted his innards into knots. A lonely kind of fear crept up his spine, the kind that saw isolation in crowds and focused on every detail of imperfection.

The slice had been at an angle, dooming one piece to be longer than the other. That cretin, Kid thought, had not the decency to damage it symmetrically. By robbing the necklace of its symmetry, he spat on your hard work and perverted his connection to you.

Thuds of boots on stone approached him in a flurry, and Kid spun his head towards the noise to see Lupin rearing his dagger in preparation for another swing. Kid drew his twin pistols before Lupin could do him any more harm and, at point-blank range, planted two shots in his chest.

“You wretched pig!” Kid bellowed vitriol with the ferocity of a vindictive god, and during that momentary surrender to his darker impulses, that was what he had become.

He pulled the triggers again and again as quickly as they reset. The flashes of light were brilliant and tinged with pink, an oblique hail of his very soul.

To Lupin, who it blew to the ground, and the dagger knocked free of his grasp, it was inescapable like the claws of fate reaching down to take a swipe at him.

The barrage of shots had mangled the body beyond recognition, yet Kid fired at it still. He unloaded his virtually infinite magazine until the bones turned to powder and the cobblestone was chock-full of holes.

His hold on the pistols' grips was ironclad enough to crush a windpipe, a fact that unnerved Liz into shouting through the din, “Kid! You can stop now!”

The shadow of Kid stretched far as he loomed over the dead Lupin. His teeth, clenched until aching, glistened with spit while sweat traced the sides of his head. The incessant twitch in the corners of his lips complemented the wrathful look in his eye, the look of vengeance outpouring.

When the flood of bangs ended, the air, so thick with tension, begged for an encore. Kid swung his arms downward in a manner both snappy and rigid. Trails of smoke wafted from the barrels of the pistols, hissing and crackling.

The chipper, excitable voice of Patty rang out in the coming silence. “Woah! He's got spooky eyes!” Like a child to whom death was a game, she laughed.

As Kid turned back to the necklace and softened his scowl, the rage that had consumed him faded into hollow depths. In its place, a sense of shame swept over him like wind over dunes.

Kid dropped his weapons at once and fell to his knees. The sound of the pistols clattering to either side of his feet, as well as the immediate protests from Liz, went unheard.

For a while, all he could do was stare at the ruined necklace as if at the burial of a dear friend. Terror squeezed his stomach and seized all warmth from him, the anguish about what you might think of his failure to protect your gift, about a mistake that you may believe was intentional or evocative of his shortcomings.

When Kid retrieved the necklace, it was a heap of pieces that would never be whole again. His lips began to quiver, and he became misty-eyed.

He kept pushing the broken ends together, whimpering like a kicked dog when nothing stopped him from pulling them apart as effortlessly as he breathed.

Tears dripped from his eyes and plopped on the skin of his hands in streaks that rolled down the base of his thumbs. Some dangled there on the edges of his fingers, while others plummeted to the cobblestone and stained it with dark spots.

A shudder had begun to invade his body as if a cold wind was blowing through the room that only touched him. His hands closed around the remains of the necklace until his fists could be no tighter, and then Kid slumped in defeat.

“They entrusted me with this.” His voice rose from a desolate whisper to a high-pitched lament that threatened to crack under the tears straining his throat. “And I failed them.”

Even with the towering shape of the DWMA on the horizon, you had never seemed farther away from him than you did now.

Liz looked on, arms akimbo and eyes crinkled in suspense, and debated whether to console him or chastise him.

Patty raised one finger to her chin and observed his woe with a wide-eyed, curious gaze. She had parted her lips slightly, and a howl of laughter was bubbling on them.

“I don't deserve to live anymore,” cried Kid. He pressed his fists against his temples as if his brain was throbbing and wept into the dimly lit expanse of the deserted street.

Liz sighed through her nose and turned to Patty, who bent forward from cackling and slapping her knee. “Come on, Patty.”

The instant she said this, the two sisters knelt at Kid's side. Patty slammed her palm into his back time after time as if she were performing some crude version of the Heimlich maneuver on him. “You gave them a giraffe, so there's no way they can hate you now!”

Liz set her wary eye upon the scattered remains of Lupin, upon that display of a life ended in seconds with barely any trail to prove that it had existed. “Kid, we should tell your dad.”

His head snapped up, and the outflow of tears paused. “Yes,” he mumbled, “yes, you're right.” Kid stuffed each piece of the necklace into his pocket and then rushed away from the skeleton, lifting both hands to his collar and straightening it.

He banished all distress from his countenance and shut his eyes. When they opened, the back of his hands lay sideways against his lapels. He twisted his wrists and curled his fingers before extending his arms frontwards, tucking his middle and ring fingers into his palms while splaying his thumbs, index fingers and pinkies.

Orbs of violet light expanded at his fingertips and enveloped his hands in a sizzling, sparking glow that shot forth onto the cobblestone. It exploded in a ball of purple fire like a comet's tail and, with searing heat whipping the hem of Kid's uniform, branded the face of Death into the ground.

The brilliance of the flames shone across every speck of wall and window in the street. Disembodied souls of the dead emerged from Kid as strips of darkness silhouetted against this light, their ghostly shapes bobbing and pulling away from him with expressions of permanent terror.

The trio of holes that acted as Death's eyes and nose touched the reddish sky in blazing cylinders of light, and an angular figure cloaked in black appeared in the upward wind that followed.

Death, God to many and Dad to few, looked back at Kid through the same white mask that had rendered him unreadable in the days of early childhood. Even with eyes that judged the souls of all living beings, Kid could only guess his father's emotions until he talked.

“Hiya, Kiddo! Learn anything new?” He spoke with the goofy voice and exaggerated mannerisms of a cartoon character from the black-and-white era of television.

As he maintained heavy eye contact with his father, Kid resembled a statue carved out of stone so that it may never shed a tear. He stood erect, his dry tone betraying a hint of disdain. “You can scratch one name off your list.”

From her spot just beyond a car's length behind him, Liz stood beside her sister and squinted at Kid. Patty was still finding amusement in how funny Lupin's skull looked with no jaw bone and only half a cranium, while Liz struggled to parse the venom that laced Kid's words.

Death leaned towards Kid to the point where his mask was all that was visible, turning his head so that one eyehole was nearer to Kid than the other. “Oh? And which one would that be?”

Kid was conscious of his red-rimmed eyes, but he forced his lips into a straight line and smothered the urge to contort his face and resume crying. Instead, a hateful coldness flowed into his pronunciation of the name that he spat from his tongue as if it were a piece of rotten food. “Lupin.”

“Ah, can't say I'm sad to see him go!” chuckled Death, shrugging and retreating to his former position. “He must've gotten lazy after last time!” He bounced as he said this and stuck out his arms with palms upturned.

On his hands were oversize gloves, the bulky and puffy variety that devoted sports fans jiggled in support of their favourite teams. No part of Death's natural form was exposed, all of it concealed under cloth and mask.

Kid allowed his eyes to narrow and his brows to furrow. He delayed blinking, fearing that the movement would encourage another tear to fall. “Yes, I'd rather not be reminded of my past failures.”

Death settled down enough to take a closer look at his son and indulged in what he considered to be harmless curiosity, but his next question struck Kid like a lightning bolt. “Say, Kiddo. Where's that necklace you've been wearing?”

* * *

Long after the corridors of the DWMA had darkened with nightfall, life stayed under the flickers of sconces to prepare the school for tomorrow.

The door to the infirmary creaked open, and a stream of moonlight gloated over the pair of black shoes that trudged across the tile floor.

It startled you from where you had been changing the sheets on a bloodstained bed. “Kid? What are you still doing here?”

Kid emptied his pocketful of broken pieces onto the end of the bed. He turned his gaze sideways and clenched his jaw, refusing to look you in the eye. “A Grim Reaper worth respecting wouldn't make such a grievous error.”

You nearly failed to recognise what the pieces once were, but when the realisation loosened your grip on the sheets until they clumped near the pillow, you slunk towards him.

Kid collapsed into a sitting position, with his knees folded on opposite sides of him and his toes pointing at the walls. “You have every right to wish ill on me.”

He bowed his head so that his hair obscured his eyes, which had lost much of their natural glow in favour of a tearful sheen. He condensed the emotion that had been running rampant in his voice moments earlier into a whisper. “But my life would be worthless if you cut me from yours.”

You crouched to his eye level and brought your hands onto his shoulders with a tentative slowness. “We're friends, aren't we?” Hesitation littered the “aren't we” part of the statement as if you were deep in foreign territory and searching for validation. “One broken necklace won't change that.”

The crescent moon jiggled with a resonant laugh, and as Kid sat there wondering what sort of angel you must have been to forgive him, his shoulders rose with a newfound lightness.

You almost took your hands back when he gripped one in each of his own, holding them up at equal heights like a knight pledging himself to his new liege. “I will never let you down again.” His stare became unwavering on the word “never” as though it were the most certain thing in the universe.

Kid sprung from the ground at such an impressive speed that he dragged you with him and went airborne for a split second. His next footstep was brisk, no more than a lurch, and brought him far closer to you than was necessary to make his words heard.

“This I swear on my life.”

[m1d-45]

hidden blessings

summary: thoma takes you to the teahouse, but you two are interrupted. you don’t know whether it’s fortunate or not, but it will affect your trajectory within inazuma.

a/n: this one goes out to @shizunxie and @alexteea, who asked for a part two to small miracles. i now fear talking in the tags [/hj].

word count: ~2.1k

-> warnings: spoilers for inazuma archon quest, spoilers for ayato story quest, probably out of character ayato…. green tea?

-> lowercase intended!

taglist: @samarill

<< first part || < masterlist > || third part >>

komore teahouse is warm.

the moment the door opens, it’s the first thing you notice. the air smells of honey and spices, heated by some invisible fire. your hand is still in thoma’s, leading you behind him as he moves into the teahouse.

taroumaru sits up a little straighter on the counter as you two approach, but doesn’t seem on guard. strange, considering you’re not a member of the kamisatos, but since you have thoma with you…

“hey there taroumaru! is anybody here?”

the dog barks once. you don’t know what that means, but thoma seems satisfied, pulling you to one of the tea rooms.

“komore teahouse is owned and operated by the yashiro commission, so only those approved by the con can enter. whoever your hiding from-“ how did he know? “-can’t get in here, alright?”

he waves at a cushion and starts to fiddle with a tea set, lighting a small flame on the end of one of his fingers for the heating element. it’s strange to see such nonchalant usage of his vision… but wouldn’t that be normal here?

people with dendro visions selling herbs grown to order, hydro users automatically refilling their drinks, anemo wielders catching a dropped pen or paper before it hits the ground…

not for the first time, you wonder how you ended up in such a world.

“there! that should be ready soon. i’ve made you green tea, hope you don’t mind.”

you shake your head. even plain water would be fine to relieve the burn of salt on your tongue, and the fact that he went so far to make you tea when he barely knew you..

you lick your lips, “thank you.”

he waves it off with a laugh, sitting down himself. “oh, don’t worry about it. and please, save your breath, id hate for you to irritate your throat on my behalf.”

you swallow. salt stings. you’re quickly getting tired of the taste.

“that being said, i do have some questions, if you don’t mind. for starters, you are hiding from the shogunate, right?”

you pause, watching the fire flicker. yes, he’s with the yashiro commission, but he personally had to hide with yoimiya from the vision hunt decree, didn’t he?

you nod.

“thought so… well, the good news is that i can help you, but you have to tell me why they’re looking for you, alright?”

there it is. the fact that he went so long without asking why you were hiding is a testament to his character, but even he couldn’t trust fully when he’s so close to the kamisatos.

though, he did bring you into the teahouse…

“you stay here, and i’ll go get a notepad from the back room. if the tea’s done by then, feel free to pour yourself a cup!”

he stands up from his spot and exits the tearoom, hesitating for a moment in the doorway before undoing the string keeping the cover tied above the doorway. the mat rolls down smoothly, swaying, and you’re suddenly alone in the room.

though being ‘alone’ probably doesn’t apply in a tearoom belonging to the kamisato clan. you don’t remember seeing the girl at the front, nor have you heard the other two NPCs inside, but that must only mean there’s more security elsewhere.

and that the clan must have moved the prior personnel.

…like to hunt for the imposter running around teyvat.

no matter how kind they looked, they were still involved with the shogunate. there’s no way they haven’t heard of the situation, and have likely dispatched some of their best to find you.

and you’ve walked right into one of their bases.

suddenly the warmth in the room feels oppressive, the soft smell of green tea overwhelming. you shouldn’t have caved. you shouldn’t have agreed to come with thoma, shouldn’t have let his kindness pull at your bruised, beaten heart, you shouldn’t you shouldn’t you shouldn’t-

“-ot necessary, my lord, i-“

“-best for you. please, allow-“

words outside your room pull you from your thoughts, muffled by your heartbeat in your ears. it’s familiar but you don’t know why, footsteps and voices passing through the thin walls. three men are speaking, and are quickly approaching your room.

you tense, but settle for grabbing a spoon to try and soothe yourself. they won’t come in here, you tell yourself. you have to trust thoma.

the footsteps stop.

“is this the room?”

it’s not your room. it’s not. you’re safe in the teahouse. you have to be. thoma is on your side.

fingers fit between the mat and the floor, carefully curling the edge to roll it back up.

no.

three sets of shoes appear. two are dark, one dressier with a golden design on it, and the third are taller, heeled, with a buckle. the mat rolls higher, almost ridiculously slow, revealing details you struggle to place.

white pants. brown striped shorts. a black belt, a jacket lined with purple on the inside, yellow tassels and black gloves and you hate that you don’t know who it is.

the mat reaches the ceiling, hands you now recognize as thoma’s tying it back up.

to his side are two men. one is dressed simply, like the many NPCs around the city, and the other…

kamisato ayato.

his clothes are far simpler than his model, but he’s unmistakable. calculating lavender eyes, framed by deceptively soft eyeliner and baby blue bangs. the vision dangling off his hip, the set of his shoulders….

it’s only by sheer will that your terror doesn’t show on your face.

the unidentified man hums, crossing his arms, and thoma looked between the two of them with obvious unease. they must be the voices you heard.

“hello.”

ayato is the one who breaks the silence, and you almost wish he hadn’t. his presence is far more intimidating in person, very much so what you should have expected from somebody of his status. you clutch your spoon tighter.

“i don’t recognize them, my lord,” the unnamed man says, and something in ayato’s eyes shift. you can’t decide if it’s better or worse.

“so you’re the one that’s caught thoma’s eye.” ayato walks into the room, taking a seat across the table from you. “why?”

you shouldn’t be surprised he knew that. you still are, as information couldn’t possibly be passed all the way to him in time for him to arrive.

thoma walks in, taking off the pot you didn’t notice was boiling, attempting to break the tension by pouring out two cups of tea.

the pot hesitates over the third cup. “hisashi, would you like some tea?”

hisashi. why is that name familiar?

the man—hisashi—shakes his head, but does walk in to lean against the doorframe. “no.”

the teapot is set back down on the table, but ayato raises a hand as thoma steps away.

“please, stay. i have as many questions for you as i do for…?”

his eyes turn to you and you can feel the bitter taste of salt burn away any thought you have of responding. the tea looks too hot to drink, and you’re not sure if green tea would taste the same here anyway.

“ah, i never got you your notepad!”

thoma tries to leave for a second time, and ayato stops him again with a questioning look.

what had you gotten yourself into?

“they’re sick, and their voice doesn’t sound too good. i was getting them a pen and paper to ask my own questions before..”

a small smile crossed the commissioner’s face. “excellent job, thoma. you may leave; and please, take your time.”

thoma quickly bows before leaving with hurried steps.

ayato’s gaze returns to you, and he picks up his cup, swirling it twice before taking a small sip. his eyes sweep your figure, pausing momentarily on the hand with the spoon. you let it go, pulling your hand back into your lap, and he hums. after another drink, he sets down his cup.

“you should really try some,” he says, nodding at your untouched tea. “thoma always makes excellent tea.”

you don’t doubt it, but you’re not keen on drinking something still steaming. it may be wise to drink it, something something green tea has medicinal properties and the warmth will ease your throat…. you still don’t touch it.

his eyes flash, and you feel like you passed some sort of test.

“are the shogunate after you?”

you nod.

“do you know why?”

you hesitate. you technically do, as it’s likely the same reason you were chased out of liyue and everywhere prior, but you still don’t know why they’re accusing you of such things. you didn’t do anything initially, you’d barely gotten out your name before…

“interesting.” you look back from where your eyes have wandered, seeing his smile has grown. apparently your silence was answer enough. “you’re not from inazuma.”

it’s not a question, but you shake your head no anyways.

“and yet you know me.”

why wouldn’t you? he’s the head of the yashiro commission, a prominent figure in inazuman politics. even outside of inazuma, surely there’s people that know the yashiro commissioner, right? you know he stays out of the public eye most chances, and that ayaka handles that side of things, but still. it can’t be that rare.

ayato takes another drink of his tea. you wonder when thoma will come back. ayato told him to ‘take his time,’ but finding a pen and paper shouldn’t…

…oh.

kamisato ayato. what else did you expect?

“do you have any plans to stay in inazuma?”

you didnt have plans at all, really. you fully expected to die in the ocean, whether by the fall or the waves or the rocks below. perhaps even osial, if you were unlucky. all you wanted was food and maybe some clothes; you didn’t think you’d get this far.

you shrug.

“given your state, i doubt you can leave,” he points out. “do you even have any mora?”

the jab works better than you thought it would, the memory of the kind hilichurls sharing the mora from the chests they guarded for you to get things from marketplaces sparking defensiveness. of course you have mora, because you had friends.

“even if you did-“ oh, he is far too good at his job “-i don’t believe it’s enough for you to make yourself presentable enough to get a job.” he’s speaking to his teacup, watching the tea swirl. “so i offer you a deal.”

of course. of course he wants a deal.

“you tell me why the shogunate is after you, and i will protect you from them.”

what.

there’s no way he could do that. he couldn’t just go against the tenryou commission like that. there’s no way. there has to be a catch.

“i can see you’re confused.” if you weren’t certain it would hurt, you’d have said something sharp in reply. “thoma is an excellent judge of character. though he is sometimes far too kind for his own good, he still knows a criminal when he sees one. i am inclined to agree with his judgement, and this wouldn’t be the first time the tenryou commission has unwittingly accused an innocent.”

…huh?

the sudden tone shift sends your brain in a loop, repeating his words over in your mind. he was offering you an out? why was he willing to go so far from his duties for somebody he didn’t know?

ayato finishes his tea, setting down the empty cup on a platter. he seems to be waiting for your response, surprisingly, and the only problem is that you don’t know what to say.

you’re faced with the same dilemma again: trust, and get involved with people that could get you in severe trouble were you to be caught, or decline, and risk getting caught quicker by giving up that safety.

footsteps project thoma’s rearrival. he hesitated in the doorway, likely sensing the tension, but comes in anyway, placing down first a plain notepad, then a similarly simple pen on top.

“would you like anything else, my lord?”

“sit, please.”

thoma pauses again, and it’s comforting to know that not everybody here knows everything.

that point is driven further home when he chooses to sit next to you rather than ayato.

the commissioner himself seems shocked, his eyes widening slightly as he sits up straighter. beside you, thoma’s hands twist in his lap, and you wonder if even he knows why he chose what he did.

ayato clears his throat, catching your attention once more.

“do you accept?”

[tellusd20]

Artwork by @hirodraga A campaign I started in June 2021 has finally concluded and this band of tomb robbers and grubby mercenaries archaeologists and brave adventurers have gone their separate ways at the end of their expedition. Starting from top left and then zig-zagging down to bottom right, here are their brief bios and character arc conclusions: Qiliq: orc ranger and party leader. Minor noble from the empire of Alamgir who got roped into a matter of family honor. His uncle, the patriarch of their family, had been disgraced and accused of cowardice. His uncle had subsequently undertaken an honor quest into a magical wasteland (the remnants of a collapsed civilization) with the promise of retrieving the crown of a long-dead tyrant as a trophy for the emperor. He disappeared instead, leaving Qiliq to both solve the mystery of his disappearance and to complete the quest. The party accomplished both objectives, recovering both his uncle's corpse and the crown. The tyrant's crown turned out to be a powerful, sentient magic item that began speaking to them in their dreams, preying on insecurities and tempting them into bargains. Almost all of them desired it for themselves, but in the end, Qiliq ended up possessing it. Instead of returning to Alamgir and presenting his emperor with a new prize, Qiliq turned to a conquistador path, using his newfound wealth from the expedition to hire more mercenaries and carve out his own bloody "kingdom" on the periphery of civilization.

Minerva: elven druid, common born retainer of a reactionary noble house in the elven empire of Melate. A spy inserted into the group to ensure that any elven artifacts recovered on the expedition were returned to their homeland. Over the course of the campaign, she made a bargain with the fey to betray her sponsors in favor of the empress for her own gain.

Minerva possessed the tyrant's crown when it was first obtained, but ended up trading it to Qiliq in exchange for a political marriage and a leadership position among the forces he intended to raise. She went on to conduct numerous atrocities in their conquest of a new 'kingdom'. Her player was aware that the lifespan difference between Qiliq and Minerva meant that the crown would pass back into her possession again within a few short decades, and she was fine with being patient.

Zerrus: tiefling warlock masquerading as a human sorcerer. A con artist, grifter, and criminal from Alamgir's lower classes, he misrepresented himself to acquire a spot on Qiliq's expedition and the opportunity to gain wealth, power, and most importantly, a way out of the country. During the course of the campaign, he somehow managed to keep his secrets. Zerrus liquidated his share of the expedition's treasure, purchased a townhome in the city of Aphursa (a bustling, Istanbul-style metropolis), and went on to invent the world's first multi-level marketing scheme.

Auden: human fighter, archaeologist from the kingdom of Talland. Marooned in the wasteland by the deaths of his prior party, Auden gratefully took the chance to join a new group after meeting them at a frontier outpost. Upon the conclusion of their adventure, Auden returned to his homeland and university, where he published numerous research papers on his findings. He became a highly sought subject matter expert on the wasteland; published tales of his adventures raised him to something of a minor celebrity and enabled him to found a profitable consulting service for other expeditions.

Aupo: orc, orthodox cleric from Alamgir's anti-magic Tathir religion. He signed up mostly to remove heretical and blasphemous artifacts from existence. His enthusiasm for the task often generated tension with the rest of the party, particularly when his hammer fell upon expensive relics. The crown never revealed its true nature to Aupo, and the rest of the party concealed the truth from him, knowing he would attempt to destroy it. He signed up with Qiliq's mercenary force, becoming a fanatical missionary in new lands.

Herwyg: human druid, archaeologist from the kingdom of Talland. Upon return to his homeland, he liquidated many of the mundane treasures but kept all the interesting pieces for his own collection. His research papers and artifact loans to museum exhibitions won him tenure and academic awards, as well as recognition from the royal government for his service to the kingdom's cultural prestige.

[dramadramallama]

Love Supremacy - brain rot part 3 (hopefully that's it, last part, i'm done PHEW)

As stated here, the story within a story structure makes for a cool viewing experience. Different readings for different levels.

Layer 1 - Myung-ha abandons himself Layer 2 - Limbo: an intermediary, temporary, blurry state Layer 3 - The Game, roleplaying yourself (Layer 4 - Us, watching the show haha)

It grants both the audience, and the characters a chance to get a new perspective. 

As Myung-ha sinks into himself, he has to rise back up.

The game framing is interesting, as it makes Myung-ha an active participant in his own fate. He is more likely to act in the safety of a game, with defined, clear goals, and “easy” missions to complete on the side of the main quest. It compartmentalizes the universe in neat little game notifications, and relieves some of the pressure of the hardest part of life. Finding happiness? Pfff, EASY, right?

Myung-ha is given the opportunity to do what all of us have probably wished at one point: re-start, from the latest save point, where it all went wrong. As argued in part one, the characters aren’t just words on paper, or pixels in a game. They have agency, just like Myung-ha.

1. Mirrors/Symmetry

2. Fate, Free Will, and Happiness

▶️3. Game/Reality

Very soon, it appears the lines between the so-called game and so-called reality are getting extremely blurry. 

First, the stakes are incredibly high for a simple game. The penalty is death. 

Myung-ha doesn’t seem fazed by the threat of death, he’s not scared of it. It could be because it's "just a game," but I personally think it's because he's technically already "dead." He ignores the penalty and focuses on his mission(s) at face value. Subconsciously, he works towards changing his own fate, and he gets there!

Debuffs (negative effects) need to be corrected

His efforts are slightly slowed by “debuffs.” These incidents happen due to Yeo-woon’s general dislike for everyone (including himself). They slow the process down enough to teach Myung-ha how to build friendships and relationships. The trick here is that Myung-ha is supposed to learn by proxy, through Yeo-woon’s self-love journey, how to love and be loved, and speak his true feelings.

“Bad” things seem to happen because Yeo-woon isn't quite ready for that unstoppable wave of affection Myung-ha unleashes. At first, the debuffs are incredibly mild and inoffensive (Fondness/Affection level around -10 or -5 = a LEAF falling on his face, a defective streetlight, and spicy tteokbokki lmao) and are easily transformed into something positive, bringing them closer.

But Yeo-woon’s affection is directly related to how honest Myung-ha is with himself and others. For example, he is disappointed to realize the urgency of Myung-ha’s text was fake (="Myung-ha doesn't trust me like I trust him"), and he doesn’t reassure Yeo-woon about the fact that he smells like someone else (lol cat energy). By refusing to open himself up to be cared for, it backfires with direct consequences. 

Myung-ha is allergic to listening to his own advice. All "do as I say, not as I do." When he told Yeo-woon "when someone cares for you, just accept it, why do you have to [question it?]" I almost screamed. We're all mental health experts when it comes to someone other than ourselves lol.

As for most things in life, the answer is balance. His side quests involve, for example, making other friends, who can be reliable and provide help in return. Kyung-hoon helps with a part time job and Sang-won offers to drive him to Yeon-woo.

Also interesting to note, his knee jerk reaction to anyone trying to enter his sphere is to close himself off, keep some distance. The above is in response to someone using casual honorifics (hyung/oppa).

Kyung-hoon, as if expressing Myung-ha's interiority, explains he's ok with long distance dating. Why? Simple: he likes his boyfriend, and wants to enjoy every moment until it ends. This is in direct opposition to what Myung-ha chooses: he places the certainty of pain/suffering above the mere possibility of happiness.

(...relatable tbh)

Myung-ha's inner desires clash with his depressive state constantly, and it gets worse after Yeo-woon’s affection levels dramatically drop from a positive number, back to zero, and then negative again, due to Myung-ha struggling to accept, and balance his own feelings. Too much love for everyone but himself, too scared to need anyone who might end up leaving him. The debuffs get more serious (Grandma gets hospitalized), and he starts fainting. Myung-ha is falling back into old traps, and like vicious circle, by trying to fix the errors incorrectly, in turn, makes the system shut down.

Thankfully, he does come to understand things remain worthy, even though he cannot have them forever.

The mysterious texts from an unknown number

Myung-ha faints several times, like things aren't quite going right. The nonsensical texts keep pouring in.

These read, to me, like close friends/family grieving, like they're in a columbarium (?). Besides the one from his sunbae at the end, they're all unsigned. There's one text saying they have "followed someone wearing the same clothes as [Myung-ha], knowing it couldn't be [him]", and one about a broken vase. Are they all from his sunbae, relaying the things said to him once? Or after his death? At his funeral? As a prayer? Thinking of him?

While the game server experiences extreme instability, memories, “real-life” happenings parasite the safety of the game.

Very personal elements keep permeating the game play; lines go beyond blurry, and disappear entirely.

Elements outside of the game keep popping up. Soon, the edges of the gameplay aren’t so clear-cut anymore, as Myung-ha gets more precise with defining happiness. His own handwriting shows up in the game notifications.

The answers are his own: he filled in the blanks himself. But he constantly tries to apply them to someone else.

It becomes impossible to dissociate the game from Myung-ha’s existence. I’m sure I haven’t caught them all, but there are many instances where Myung-ha's reality bleeds into the game.

Bubbly, water sounds are heard at key moments, and before long, his "memories" with his sunbae also get a underwater backdrop. To say nothing of the water/wave imagery around Myung-ha.

His world is leaking through the seams, the wave is rolling him over, and he’s sinking deeper. Which way will he come up? Water symbolism is always, MUAH, chef's kiss.

He is given ultimate freedom - a symbolic pen, to overwrite the program, and solve the system errors

Myung-ha for better or for worse, whether he likes it or not, is in control, quite literally, of the game, and by extension, of his life. When he starts to understand he's the origin of the errors, he panics, chooses to end it early, and saves Yeo-woon's fate over his.

That same pen has been used to write all the answers to the questions that appear in the game. He chooses Yeo-woon over himself. The game fails, the universe wavers. Beautiful contradiction: he fights to stay. Just like the way he regretted it after walking into the water. His true intentions come bubbling back up to the surface, and he runs to Yeo-woon, away from death and towards life. He doesn't want to disappear.

Time's up

In the previous post, I went more in depth about how he only gives, never takes. He doesn’t reach out to be pulled out of the water, thinking himself to be alone, and his system slowly starts shutting down. 

The scenes end abruptly, we jump from seemingly disconnected locations, faster, while Myung-ha frantically tries to outrun his own errors. I’ve seen some criticism of the pace and editing getting a little hectic in the later episodes, but I think it was purposefully reflecting Myung-ha’s state. 

Yeo-woon, with his newfound agency, defies his own story ending. By changing the game’s core mission to “make Myung-ha happy” he counters Myung-ha's one-sided choice and the balance can be restored.

CONCLUSION // PLEASE LET THIS END

"Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it and welcome every moment." (Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others)

It is unclear whether Myung-ha gets a redo in a new reality, or if he gets to enjoy his own personal heaven after death. The game might be a physical representation of Myung-ha’s mind. It’s as real as any other intangible concept, like love, or happiness. There's definitely something to be said about the aspect ratio changing depending on where he is, but...

But to me, it doesn’t really matter. It's not where he ends up, it's how he got there.

I love that we open with Myung-ha abandoning his life at sea, and close on him returning to the water for a new start.

And I love that Myung-ha loves his own story: on his date with Yeo-woon, he gets emotional over the movie because the Monster Croc is "an alien" (COUGH Myung-ha) who joins the Zombie Gorilla (COUGH Yeon-woo) in his world to "save it"...

[myprongsfootera]

Prongsfoot Microfic: Quest

@prongsfoot-microfic - 2/13 - 579 words

-

It was bloody freezing and James had Sirius out on a bloody quest in the middle of the night. Sirius had agreed of course, because it was James and Sirius trusted that he would make it fun, but it was cold for March and they were outside and Sirius really wasn’t dressed for it. 

“Califactori,” James said, tapping Sirius’ shoulder. Sirius felt a welcome warmth spread all down his body as his cloak heated him.

“Thanks, you’ll have to teach me that one later,” Sirius said, his teeth no longer chattering through his speech. 

“Will do, but c’mon,” James said, “you figured out the first three clues, you only have one more!”

“Why couldn’t you let me bring Moony, he would have figured this out ages ago and we could be inside by now,” Sirius muttered, even as he started to think through the clues again. 

“This one’s just for you,” James said, a smug smile on his face.

“The things I do for you,” Sirius said, shaking his head a little. James just laughed. 

“Past the river and through the woods…” Sirius said, repeating the last clue he’d found. He’d come outside after that, determined to go to the forest before he’d realized that there wasn’t a river nearby, not until pretty far into the forest, and then wouldn’t James have phrased it “through the woods and past the river?” That would have made more sense. So maybe that wasn’t it at all.

“Oh!” Sirius said excitedly, “You didn’t mean the actual forest, you meant the fourth floor painting, didn’t you!”

James grinned that thousand watt grin of his. 

“It wasn’t my fault we went outside then, see? That was all you!”

Sirius raced past him, laughing too hard to mind that he’d been cold. He ran through the castle, the cloak that was supposed to protect them forgotten in James’ arms as he rushed to the painting in question. Thankfully, Filch and Mrs. Norris were nowhere to be seen.

“Oh!” Sirius said, stopping short when he got to the painting. 

At the base of it was one of their favorite trap doors. It didn’t lead anywhere, it wasn’t a tunnel or passageway, it was simply a hidden compartment where they could store anything that they didn’t want anyone finding. 

Sirius felt for the opening and then wrenched it open. Inside was an old piece of parchment, wrinkled at the edges and torn in one corner. Even before Sirius picked it up he knew what it meant and he turned to James, wide-eyed. James just nodded and gestured for him to open it. 

There was only one line on the paper.

“Let’s go on that date.”

Sirius smiled at him warmly. They’d talked about it before, but had never gotten the timing right. First James had been dating Lily, then Sirius had dated Mary. But now they’d both been single for a while. Sirius had wondered, but he hadn’t wanted to press the issue in case James wasn’t interested anymore. But he was. 

Sirius launched himself at James and pulled him into a kiss so eager it nearly knocked James clear off his feet. But he seemed just as happy as Sirius was, so he accepted that and more.

They would finally get to go on that date they’d been talking about for ages. 

Suddenly the quest being just the two of them felt really special. Magical even. Sirius put his thanks for that into the kiss too.

[dilxcc]

:: mrs magic. diluc ragnvindr

contains. fem!reader, small angst, fluff, love confessions, mutual pining, idiots in love, grammatical error . . .

summary. his head is filled with you. he just had to figure out what kind of sorcery that you had casted on him . . .

requested. none

note. this basically sucks 😭

he pants lightly, holding his claymore in both hands as he finished his training. the sun had already said goodbye to the city of mondstadt. yet, he didn’t seem to have noticed.

“she cannot keep on jeopardizing my quests,” those were the words that kept on ringing in his ears. he didn’t want anyone to help him. he doesn’t require one’s help. kaeya, who was there to deliver an apology letter from venti (a drunkard that seems to always drop by angel’s share), clapped his hands in amusement.

he could see clearly even with one eye how affacted his brother is by you. you. his only thoughts. it would have been natural if diluc’s only thoughts were of surpassing you. but kaeya had heard from adelinde that his brother was always thinking of you.

not just thinking of you, but would also have dreams about you. and not just any dreams, ones like where he would be with you in the same room, just reading a book or simply relishing in each other’s company.

diluc wondered what kind of spell that you had put him under. it’s got to be some sort of sorcery to make him feel this infatuated by you. he ought to ask adelinde about this soon.

with a tired sigh, he put down his claymore and gave kaeya an annoyed look. “what business do you have here?” he asked flatly. “what? i can’t come here and visit my brother now?”

with an unamused expression, diluc quickly drag his claymore and went inside the winery. “hey, that drunkard have something for you,” kaeya said, his eye casting a longing feeling. “i... will take my leave now,”

he simply hummed, only turning back when he was sure his brother had left. he took the letter and went back inside.

.

“why has she always been on my mind?” diluc groaned into his hands. “i do not need distractions,” he mumbled. “what seemed to be the problem here, master diluc?” adelinde asked, her head tilted to the side slightly. she had never seen the master diluc to be so distressed these days.

“it is nothing for you to concern yourself for,” he said, quickly dismissing her. “is this about that lady who often carried you here injured?” adelinde asked. “n-no. what makes you think of that?” he stuttered.

adelinde smiled at that. “you see, she came by this evening. told me that she wanted to see you for the last time,” at that, his ears perked up. “last time? what does that mean? is she leaving?”

“i suppose. she left you a letter,”

he basically snatched the paper from adelinde and read it immediately.

dear mr. grumpy,

i have come bearing this letter to tell you that, i will soon leave mondstadt for liyue. perhaps i shouldn’t have needed to write this letter. but i felt that i would... indeed miss you after a long time. so this letter is to lessen that longing feeling.

it is quite odd for me to write this letter to you. especially when you probably hates me. and for some unknown reason, i fell for you mister. how did you even do that simply by standing around and pushing away my help? i will be missing you dearly in all honesty.

i hope that you will be happy staying here in mondstadt. i will be continuing my traveling elsewhere after i finished venturing liyue.

your truly,

y/n.

he quickly scrambled to his feet and dashed out of the winery. he had to find you. he just had to catch you before you leave.

.

you looked at your house with sadness. you so much wished to stay. but you also wanted to do this. you finally had enough mora to go travel all around teyvat. maybe do some commissions along the way for mora.

“y/n...!”

you quickly whipped your head around, trying to find that source of voice. it felt like his heart had stopped for a bit. you looked... alluring. he doesn’t know if that is the right word. everything about you is just magical. had you always been this beautiful?

his thoughts scattered in his brain as he walk towards you. his heart beating hundreds of miles per hour. “you... you’re leaving,” he stated. as if it wasn’t obvious enough. a bitter smile appeared on your face. “yeah... my journey in mondstadt has come to an end,”

“but you don’t have to leave...?” his voice came out more pathetic than he had hoped for. why has he become so... fragile in front of you? “i’m afraid it is important for me,” you said. you hoped that he would leave you now. if he stays any longer, you might actually stay and confess your love for him.

diluc stood in front of you, slightly out of breath from rushing all the way from the winery back into the city of mondstadt. “i need to know... what sort of sorcery have you put me under... to make me so... attracted to you, to make you so alluring that it’s hard for me to not think of you,” he admitted.

you couldn’t believe his words for a second. but the way he was looking at you, staring at you with heart eyes. “i wondered the same,” you chuckled, your eyes filling with tears. slowly, he pushed your hair away and tuck it behind your ear. his hand rested there for a bit, and he leaned closer, his forehead meeting yours.

“would you... keep in contact with me?”