#im in desperate need of support

[tiredtriedfailures]

im genuinely so lost. every once in a while someone tells me im the most distinguished person they know, claim anyone who talks to me for a minute would know im wise, im cartoonishly iconic or charismatic all the while ive spent the last 5 months feeling so alienated and lonely and invisible its unreal. like. i know what they mean by the compliments, theyre referring to how they know me, what they have known me to be. i recognize the adjectives as describing myself. and i wont oppose them. but like... thats really not how it Feels living as me tbh. i feel VERY abnormal, inadequate and outcasted. the duality is jarring. i am both meme to the extreme

[snekdood]

anyways ppl with vaginas are amazing and not inherently less than anyone with a penis and if you disagree you can jump off a bridge <3

[skitskatdacat63]

Dollman's backstory ☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️

I think I said this the other week, but Kojima really will make the wackiest concepts that make you hysterically laugh when introduced, only to have you hysterically cry over the same concept later on in the game

[pansunset]

not sure what part of “i’m disabled and broke and don’t have any extra money to share” people don’t understand but i’m still getting donation dms.

maybe i should start talking about killing myself in random strangers dms, that strat seems to be working for the guy who messaged me today!

[redeemed-wren]

Honestly I think Wax and Steris are my favourite Cosmere couple

[ehlnofay]

Pax should have said no.

Damn it all, they should have said no. Should have said go to hell and fucked off back – stop contacting me, sort out your own shit – but they didn’t, fuck knows why, and now they’re stuck here.

(They know why. They know exactly why; absolutely anything would be better than fucking off back to Cyrodiil. What’s for them there?)

But there’s nothing worth staying for here either, and now she’s crammed in between strangers on a long table, everyone dressed in fabrics she’s never seen with dyes so saturated they seem almost gory, eating stuff that isn’t food and talking loud enough to make her want to hurl a glass into the wall. It’s bizarre. The woman next to her, ruddy-faced and bald, wears a headpiece that shines like the sun the Isles doesn’t have; the other side is taken up by a stranger in a bone-white porcelain mask who has not moved but to swill the wine around in their glass. There’s scarcely room for Pax’s chair. It all feels like such a baffling pantomime of aristocracy (she's known the real thing well enough – feasts and toasts and luxurious gifts she had no use for, and if she doesn’t stop thinking about it she actually will throw a glass), bright colours and rich settings and a god taking offerings at the head of the table.

At least, Pax thinks, no-one tries to talk to him; they’re too busy fawning over their lord. Which is probably to be expected; but it all feels so strange, so unsettling, the way they all lean in towards it like flowers turning to face the sun, like seaweed dragged at by the inescapable pull of the tides. They grow towards it through the cracks in the air, matter moving toward the inevitable centre, as if they can imagine nothing more than this.

(Even more unsettling is the way it responds in kind, listening attentively to anyone who speaks to it, leaning in as though to kiss them, as though to swallow them whole. All hell, why did Pax agree to this? Why did they come?)

(They should have told it to fuck off. Should have said no way, I don’t want to help you, don’t want to get involved in anything you’d need my help for. I don’t owe you anything. I don’t need anything from you. I don’t want anything to do with you. I’m done.)

(Pax is done. Pax is sick to death of all this shit; doesn’t want to deal with this, the vaguely described problems of a god that picks people apart like it’s unravelling a thick yarn shawl. Doesn’t want to deal with anything like this. He’s had his fill of gods.)

(Why is he still fucking here? Why did he agree to this? This is no better than eating in that weird fucking inn in town. This is no better than –)

(That’s a lie. It’s a bit better than Cyrodiil. Just as much a shithole, but it pulls the rug out from under him often enough that he doesn’t have time to think too much.)

“Not hungry?” says a prowling voice, coiling catlike into the plaits in their hair, and Pax jumps enough to jostle the masked bastard sitting ramrod straight next to him.

He looks up.

At the empty placemat across from him sits a figure veiled in gossamer, glittering in the glow of the lit-up lichen on the distant throne; the fabric of its endless shawls pulls apart at the ends, peeling away from itself, shedding patches like iridescent insect wings every time it shifts. If Pax squints, they can see through it to the grand marbled wall behind.

She glances back at the chair at the head of the table, where something lounges, eyes dripping gold, intricately carved cane laid across its knees; its too-many fingers are laced with the hand of a man whose gown blooms floral. Flatly, she says, “What the fuck?”

“Aren’t you hungry?” Sheogorath asks, pouting; she can hear it laughing down the other end of the table. “It’s a proper feast. We pulled out all the stops.”

Pax shifts their eyes away to peer down at their plate. “You have served me worms,” she says. She flicks the dish with a fingernail. “In jelly. With flowers.”

“Larva, actually,” Sheogorath replies. It’s still at the other end of the table. It doesn’t seem eager to explain this. When it smiles, the gossamer falls away; its whole face splits in half.

It’s all so fucking stupid. Pax takes a deep breath – in through the nose, ignore all the odd spiced smells, and out – and does not yell at it, or try to hit it, because she’s gotten herself into a situation where that’s not really an option, because she’s a fucking idiot. Why didn’t she just say no?

(She knows why.)

The Mad God’s teeth flash bright as the ornate silver cutlery. Its chair scrapes back from the table. “It melts in your mouth,” it tells her, eyes glittering, “but I won’t make you try it. Walk with me?”

The figure still sits at the head of the table, snatching something from someone’s plate, always, always laughing. Its limbs sprawl like tentacles, like the silken threads of a tapestry, to encompass the whole room. The dinner guests stare as though bewitched, bedevilled, beguiled. Not one of them is looking at Pax. If he were to drop dead with his face in the food his corpse would not be discovered until sunrise.

Pax sniffs and shoves his chair back from the table. He lets Sheogorath (the second Sheogorath – but it must be, what else could it be?) lead him through a narrow door into some winding hallway, the walls lined and rimed with ornate coloured-glass windows. (It’s so much quieter. Still as garishly bright, but Pax is getting the sense that that is inescapable, here; the clothes they wear, as crumpled and covered in travelling-grime as ever and startlingly out of place against the odd jagged finery of the dinner party, seem unimaginably dull in comparison. Everything seems unimaginably dull in comparison.) Outside the windows, they can catch glimpses of the city – its winding, lamp-lit streets, the jumbled mess of its architecture, the sky arcing above it like a child’s attempt at watercolours. Pax wants to smash it, tear it down.

There’s no sun here, but still it’s night. The sky has shifted to purple and black.

“Isn’t it nice?” says their companion; when they look back, it’s nothing more than a shifting impression in the stained-glass window, a series of hairline cracks. It still manages, somehow, to smile at them.

It’s not. The sky is a shadow and the flamboyance of the palace is scraping at their spine. “Sure,” Pax says flatly. When she flexes her fingers, the bruising staining the base knuckle of her thumb aches.

Sheogorath looks at her – an ancient man leaning on a stick, a flickering painting, a bloody corpse, a little girl in velvet-red skirts, a breath. In its mercurial shifting she catches the flowery blossom of the man at the table’s collar, an unpleasant glimpse of her own braided hair, the smell of sulphur. It tips its head. She can’t focus on it anywhere but for the eyes.

“You don’t like my dinner parties,” it announces, as though it’s a revelation, a tragedy; its body crumbles like sea cliffs slowly eroded by the ways. It’s annoying – bloody obnoxious, and incomprehensible, and kind of weird that it noticed, that it would even care. (She’s never liked dinner parties. Nobody ever commented on it before.)

I’ve had well enough of them, Pax could say, or no, I don’t like you, but it’s the fucking Mad God, Daedric Prince of – Pax doesn’t even know what, he’s never known much about this shit, only that it’s well worth avoiding. Prince of the mad and the missing and the foolish, of breaking and breaking and putting yourself back together backwards. She should have said no, but she didn’t, and who knows what would happen if she went back on that now?

It's slinking closer. All that stay static enough to make out are eyes and teeth.

“Pax, yes?” it says, soft-voiced – a hand lands on his arm, small and dry and shivering, the skin as thing as a mouldering leaf. “You have no obligations here. If you want to be on your own, be on your own. We’ve plenty of space for it.”

Pax’s eyes narrow. He does not jerk away from it.

In the light of the coloured sky, the coloured windows, its face is phantasmagorical. “If you don’t want to be here,” it continues – still so skin-pricklingly gentle – “then your hand will not be forced. I’ll speed your way home if you wish.”

They can’t help but twitch at that. It’s setting their teeth on edge. (It’s lying – has to be. After its ages of coaxing them in, meting out information, not telling them where they were until they were on its doorstep, it would not give them the chance to leave.) Rough, still covered in road-grime, Pax asks, “Why should I believe you?”

(None of them have ever given them the chance to leave.)

Sheogorath, a figure of hollow skin and bone, inclines its head. “I wouldn’t lie to you, Pax,” it says. Its eyes are wide and bulging, whites on full display like a frightened horse; it grins again. “Others might. But we’re not a monolith. We’re not even especially similar.”

Pax bites down on the flat edge of their tongue. “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

The light coming in through the windows flickers. The Mad God turns to meet it.

“I’m the youngest,” it says, its voice glittering like mist on the air. “Did you know that? I don’t remember the world without you in it.” Its form spasms, volatile, wings and limbs and eyes like a snail’s on stalks sprouting and choking and subsiding back into its mass. “I’m closer to you than any. I understand, almost.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Pax repeats. She’s gritting her teeth, tonguing at her gums where two are missing. Are two devil-gods not enough to deal with for a lifetime? Is there really going to be more of this now, too?

Rolling through the air like smoke, the voice says, “It will.”

Pax presses purple-green knuckles to her mouth. Her teeth dig into the soft meat of her lip.

Sheogorath turns to face her, hair moving as though blown by the wind, as though tugged by the tides. It sighs. “You don’t believe me,” it says. Its tongue pokes through its teeth. “That’s perfectly fine. Clever, even. But if you want to leave, all you need to do is tell me so.” It pauses, then; the train of its strange, gnarled crown shifts over its shoulders when it moves its head. “Or just leave. The door is still open.”

“You’d be fine with me just leaving,” Pax rasps around his knuckle, “after weeks of not leaving me alone?”

(Of begging him to come, poorly-hidden agitation giving way to blatant franticness, half-swallowing the fear that choked its face in every mirror it spoke to him through. Of begging him still, after he got here, after he met it – begging in a roundabout manner, casual as anything, its every motion reeking of fear. Its abject terror when he turned to leave. You’ve come this far. Why not hear an old man out? Pax told it that it wasn’t an old man, that he didn’t give a shit either way, and it slid through a child, a monster, a sulphur-burned body coughing blood, his own shuddering form in armour he hasn’t seen in months, and it said please.)

(Regained its composure, its gentleman’s face, immediately afterward. But it – the Mad God, unknowable, inconsolable – said please. Pax still doesn’t know what to do with that.)

The Mad God, now, shrugs. Taps at the hairline cracks in the stained glass windows. “I’d prefer you didn’t,” it says, one pair of hands braiding something intricate into its beard. The hand on the glass slips down. “I told you. I do need a champion.”

“And I told you,” Pax bites, something aching and ugly surging in their gut, “not to call me that again.”

A smile, bloody-mouthed and beaming. “But we will abide,” says Sheogorath, and digs its fingers into the cracks of the stone. One brick slides loose, mortar dug up under its nails. It offers it up.

Pax licks their teeth and takes it.

The brick shivers, momentarily – crumbles, in their hand, like sand slithering through their fingers, and left in their palm is a hardy slip of bone. Spiked and sprawling, carved with intricate patterns; it arranges itself around an oval of empty space, the perfect size for four sharp-knuckled fingers.

“You can always leave,” the Mad God tells them, and for a moment it does look so very young and strangely, staggeringly hopeful. “But give it a chance. I think you could love the Isles, if you choose to.”

[sparring-spirals]

hello. are there perhaps folks who follow me and/or folks who have been following re-slayers take and would like to share their thoughts/recommendations around it? fascinated to know what people are liking about it, elements they're enjoying, character archetypes, storytelling style, narrative structure/genre so far, etc.

[bluedesertbruja]

wanted to add to this, a more detailed opinion\explanation (??) about betty’s gaslighting arc. bc we see armando demand why she didn't tell him that that she knew about the plan and the letter. 

we know she wishes it wasn’t real, that she hopes it a very sick joke. we see her test the waters; her watching him read it, throwing it away. she keeps a copy of it and watches his moves fm then on. her decision to fuck with him isn’t premeditated, it comes at the result of knowing him. she’s seen first hand how he treats marcela (and how marcela treats him).

the night of the picasso exhibit, when they’re in the car and marcela calls him and he goes off on her, saying he’s not with anyone and betty’s face as he’s yelling at marcela--

she’s genuinely like, ‘hey, wtf is wrong with him?’. bc its so extreme. she’s seen them fight, but this is like, first hand where she only sees his side of it. and after the phone call she goes on to say,  ‘i feel bad, on top of all the lies, and you mistreating her (marcela). no, i dont feel great about it’. 

fast forward to nicolas, later on asks betty ‘when are you gonna tell him you know? or are you just going to keep doing this?’ but again, betty knows armando--knows the worst of him despite loving him. if she had confronted him about it the day she knew, he would have denied it like he denies cheating on marcela to marcela’s face. 

look, it was gaslight or be gaslit. 

a lot of fics that play with ‘if he knew when she knew, this would have happened’ don’t understand that armando is not emotionally there yet. he’s yet to grasp the depth of his feelings or understand the affect his actions have on her. if betty had confronted him that day or even the next, armando would have done everything in his power to lie, make her believe it IS a sick joke. anything to not lose her. he never would have admitted to his part in the plan. and betty knows this bc she’s seen him do this to marcela time and time again. 

so she plays armando’s (and mario’s) own game. her choices are limited. she sticks to this and the only way that she will stop is if (1) he stops following the instructions of the letter or (2) he realizes that she knows and confronts HER about it. she wants HIM to to admit to HER what he’s done. 

but he doesn’t. and when he finally knows why she’s acted this way, its too late. part of his arc is learning to admit to others and himself when he’s wrong. his ego, his stubbornness, his selfishness---it deters him from the things he realizes too late that he wants most (beatriz’s love and trust back). 

gaslighting arc is so important for both of them bc it’s them at their worst, its betty’s knowledge of him, it’s his knowledge of her bc he knows something’s wrong. he knows this isn’t her. but he doesn’t want to look too closely at her actions and the why of it. it’s so much easier to believe that he could be losing her to someone else than to admit that she now knows the ugliest part of him. 

[alchemiclee]

I hate how much i'm afraid to open an art shop because my last 2 failures cost me so much money 😭😭😭😭 especially in this time of great, scary uncertainty! and i know i can't bother other people about this, so i'm in this alone. *sad yippee noise*

[ranger-jahen]

can you talk a little bit more about jahen’s ailments?

also (from oc “have they ever” game) what motherfucker groped him and how many rocks will it take for me to break their legs

oooh! :D tysm for the questions!

I think the very best way to learn about Jahen's ailments in a broad sense is to read my fic "Fever" over on ao3 about them. :3 (listed in my fic index as well.)

I plan to sprinkle in bits and bobs about the ongoing illness over time in the course of writing my planned longfics, but I may write a second piece eventually directly addressing the reveal, or I might end up writing an emergency scenario about it into my plotline buildup for Astarion regaining the ability to walk in the sun. I'm still chewing on some of the structural ideas. :]

few extra details about it that cannot be learned from the "Fever" fic:

- there is a reason that Jahen experienced the fevers far more often during his childhood as opposed to his adult life outside of Baldur's Gate. the same reason is the culprit for as to why he experienced two fevers in less than six months while the tadpole party was having their adventure.

- Jahen doesn't have a single flareup while he and Wyll and Karlach are in the hells. lore reasons for this too but also he gets a break lol. the trio discusses this at some point.

- unfortunately Jahen doesn't get any benefits from these fevers or anything xD no extra powers or cool unlocked potential or anything like that. legit just an illness. the reveal will give him more insight into his heritage, though.

so the groping x'D <3 you're so sweet I will make sure you have an abundance of rocks

"groped by someone they know" and "groped by a stranger" are two different instances, and if it helps at all, the latter was probably just a Weird Incident at a bar lmao, like I can imagine Jahen just pulled a face and sternly peeled them off. he can usually take care of that sort of thing himself without being too upset. might not even remember it too sharply.

the "groped by someone they know" is a part of the past-romantic-and-sexual history I have for Jahen and it's from his first relationship when he was still very young in his late teen years. :'] essentially, his girlfriend at the time was a messy person, and while she never intentionally hurt him just for the sake of watching him suffer or anything, she was also kind of addicted to his attention and enjoyed yanking his chain in ways that stroked her ego but hurt him deeply. almost using physical affection/sex as a method of emotional control, if that makes sense? touching/groping/pulling at clothes until he thought he was going to get something he wanted from her, but at the last minute shutting him down and then sort of overly-sweetly comforting his tears. I think the actual number of times they had sex was very few, but he was really trapped in the beck-and-call thing for a while.

[dreamcatcher-roulette]

I still haven't recovered from Sydney actually oh my god. I went a little um. Crazy. On the snapshots. And I started trying to figure out which pose to do with who and if I should do something special with yooh because she's my ult bias but ultimately I was like well but I love them all. Hearts for everyone. So the first six were in Melbourne and genuinely every single one of them was magical and I don't regret a single bit of that money because I'm first of all so happy I got to thank all of them in person but also I'm going to treasure those pics forever but then Sydney was like. The Big one. You know. AND SHE PRANKED ME.

[I removed the image because I got Scared people who know me could see the image and realise it's me even with the blur lol. She's giving me bunny ears]

So now I have six hearts and yooh doing this which is better than I could have ever imagined 😭 the spike in my heartrate halfway back to the SVIP hitouch line when I opened my photos and realised....

[memorys-skyscraper]

taking donations of any and all good employment-related vibes rn

[grimowled]

;ooc

[brittie-frog]

I'm living purely of the joy of that date but also on the verge of crying over q!Tina wanting to be perfect and her insecurities. I so desperately want Tina to do lore where she finally confronts/remembers some of her past. She needs to at least talk to probably IronMouse about their demon-hood again and why Tina hates it so much.

BBH said that demons can reset themselves to remove illness (such as his radiation poisoning) but it would scramble their memory library. So either Tina reset herself knowing this would happen due to something else or she was just way more willing for the memory wipe to work on her. Which begs the question of whether she still has her memories and they're just scrambled or are they completely gone??

Much like BBH's stream when he returned from purgatory of wondering about in that dream scape place I need one of Tina in her mind palace unlocking her library and pulling a random book of a memory but panicking and not wanting to know more and trying to run or if she's more comfortable about remembering to be better for Bagi she starts to organise it and remember her life.

[spouseoftherisingsun]

Elderly woman told me I was lovely and look like I'm in a commercial the way I walk down the aisle in the grocery store in my thigh highs and kilt

[mach1ne-g1rl]

hello tumblr erm 2 art trades with. the besties