#pvp with em (affectionate)

[daisychainsandbowties]

it's become commonplace for them, beatrice sitting astride ava's lap, arms draped over ava's shoulders, a book clutched loosely in her hands as she reads aloud. it's poetry, usually, slim volumes by oliver and vuong and siken and gibson and smith, the words slipping from her mouth with the pitter patter of summer rain, warm and all-encompassing.

ava always busies herself with her hands sliding beneath beatrice's shirt and her mouth on beatrice's neck, each touch shaped into oblation by the fervour of her devotion. there's restraint there, in the surety of hands that remain above the white-capped crests of beatrice's hip bones, below the blooming swell of her ribcage. it's an unspoken understanding, a silent promise. at our own pace. always, always at our own pace, now that we are free.

beatrice initiates the shift, having, in one of those moments she'd felt brave enough to venture into the queer bookshop across the city, stumbled across a particularly apposite poem. she recites it into ava's ear, chest clenched with that all-too-familiar melange of laughter and tears, emotion now too frequently spiralling beyond her ability to control it. whatever happens with us your body will haunt mine and your touch on me, firm, protective, searching me out and your strong tongue and slender fingers reaching where I had been waiting years for you.

and ava acts the words out, fumbles beatrice's belt open, slides her hand between her legs. her other hand climbs the uneven ladder of beatrice's ribs, presses delicately against the scar tissue that marks where beatrice's breath had been gifted back into her body, and ava captures beatrice's exhalation in the hollow of her mouth as she slides a finger into her cunt

Language, to Beatrice, has always felt like a poorly-healed bone; a series of fracture points waiting for the right pressure to come apart again. She feels like an imposter inside it, trying to untangle her hands, her mouth, her hips from their signifiers - words like daughter, like duty. Words in restless orbit trying to stick to her skin.

She can’t think of what she’s thinking of when Ava’s finger glides through her wetness. Maybe she’s wondering at words, maybe she’s speechless in the face of these soft, mouth-made things and their ability to consume her. Why does it frighten her so much, to think of that motion? Fingers gathering the slick evidence of her desire, using it, and she’s already imagining what will happen to it after, where it might go.

She wants to flinch from the thought, but she can’t, because Ava’s hand is shifting down between her legs and god, she’s in every direction.

Ava’s fingers drumming on the tabletop, damp from her mouth, licking strawberry jam off her fingertips in the morning. Tangled in Bea’s, or drawing them over into her lap just to play, folding and unfolding each joint, tracing traceries of scars and asking after each one, like she wants to know where they live so she can visit.

She takes Bea’s startled exhalation into her mouth as she starts to fuck her, one finger sliding into her cunt, and it is astonishingly easy.

It’s as if Ava’s finger belongs there, moving slow, steady, ghosting around her entrance and then inside. There are moments that make language inadequate,Beatrice thinks but all the same she reaches, dangerously, for the half-remembered image of a page from the book in her hands. One line in a poem that goes ‘Spilled orange juice all over the table this morning. Sudden sunlight I couldn’t wipe away. My hands were daylight all through the night.’

There’s a palm pressed into her ribs, around scar tissue, and where’s the word for that gone? Pneumothorax, and the flutter of Ava’s hands after unearthing her chest, how they shook flecks of blood back down onto her. It didn’t happen like that, but Beatrice dreams of it anyway – of what I almost did to you.

She pulls away from Ava’s mouth as Ava pushes into her, further, and the poem was right; it’s as though she’s been waiting her whole life for this, hips rolling down onto Ava’s hand of their own accord.

Beatrice didn’t think her body could, would move without her permission, but it does.

There’s a gap between them - space given form by the bracket of their bodies - and Ava’s looking down inside it, watching the movement of her own hand as she fucks into Bea. The uncoordinated twitch of her hips in response. 

‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ Beatrice breathes, feels Ava pause, buried to the knuckle inside her. She looks up, away from her hand in Bea’s pants, the belt hanging open like a door. She pushes up – slow, easy – shifting only slightly in Bea’s cunt but enough to make her cry out a little. Not a shout but a short, plaintive noise.

Ava leans up, gentle, to kiss her, and Beatrice realises she’s still holding onto the book only in the moment that she lets it falls back onto the pillow. Her hands find Ava’s jaw, and she doesn’t know what she’s doing, at all, but she rolls her hips forward and she finds this mouth she’s been seeking and waiting for and wanting, so badly she almost died from it.

Thumb up under her shirt – Ava’s thumb – rubbing that crescent of scar tissue. Fervent, and this is a language, too. It’s Ava’s hand reaching up further, until her elbow hooks at the hem of Bea’s shirt, pulling it up and away from the flexing of her stomach muscles. She’s fucking herself on Ava’s finger now, feeling Ava huff – not in frustration but out of need – as she finds the back of Bea’s neck. Her fingers now splashed over her shoulder to hide the comet tails of freckles.

‘Bea,’ she sighs, breaking the kiss just long enough to speak. Breathless sound, tipping high at every jolt of Bea’s hips, her slick spread onto the heel of Ava’s palm where she’s grinding down against it. She smiles, and this is what they have in common – honesty.

‘I don’t know what I’m doing either.’

Recitation. This has been her lifeline, her life, the feeling of her faith in the braidedness of syllable into sound into meaning into motion. She used to pray under her breath, by rote, before, when cleaning knives in the leaky light of the armoury. How blood gets in everything, how it goes everywhere, and the prayers slipping out of her into silence. But now she’s home, and there’s no evil in the world. Just light, taking different shapes.

Soon it all slips into fragments, words hurrying through her on the way to somewhere. Ava, whispering to her as she slides a second finger into her cunt, her free hand pushing Bea’s shirt up more and more, until she’s helping her to duck out of it, casting it onto the bed behind her. Not the floor, because she knows who the shirt belongs to.

Ava kissing her on her collarbone, fingers slipping out to their tips and plunging back into her, taking up a steady rhythm. Her mouth in the softness under Bea’s jaw as their movement finds tandem, and all the world can be simplified like an equation. Into Ava’s mouth, kisses scattered along her jaw until they find the corner of her mouth. Ava’s fingers, fucking into her.

Now, in the glow of the bedside lamp, she holds Ava by the absence of the scars she said once lay across her back. In Switzerland, she remembers Ava sitting on their tiny couch, doing the sudoku in the local newspaper. So much slipped out of her then, unguarded, almost unbidden.

‘They were probably totally fucked up – the scars, I mean.’

I never got to see them, but there were places where people paused, holding me at an angle to reach my back with a washcloth. There was this… catch in their words, like a question.’ 

‘You’re not a question, to me.’ Beatrice said this sleepily, trying to pretend that she found it natural, the way Ava pulled her stockinged feet up onto her lap when she collapsed onto the couch next to her.

She never elaborated on it then, wondered if Ava knew that underneath her response there was another, too honest for daylight, too scalding for her tongue.

So she takes Ava’s nipple into her mouth, humming the discarded edges of sentences into that softness, feeling it change with the pressure of her tongue before breaking away. Ava, smoothing the tears from her eyes as her other hand tries to match the frantic pace of Bea’s hips, as she clenches around her, as another cry – louder, and as honest as anything she’s ever said -  falls from her mouth.

Her voice unravelling. Language, her anchor, falling into needy whimpers as she lowers her head, surrendering to the heat pressed against her, wrapped around her, inside her. Thinking of a poem she read while standing in a bookstore, surrounded by motes of dust, by sunlight. Ava’s voice wafting through the shelves and the words rummaging around behind her lungs for a place to live.

‘if love is a hole wide enough to be God’s mouth, let me plunge into that holy dark and forget the colour of light.

love, stay in me until our bodies forget what divides us, until your hands are my hands and your blood is my blood and your name is my name.’

[how-and-why-do-i-know-this]

Opinions on Elden Ring PvP and Invasions specifically?

What's your opinion on dogs?

PvP isn't my cup of tea but invasions are an interesting concept. I like 'em.

As for dogs (affectionate), I love dogs. Especially Miriel. Best dog ever. That being said...

I hate dogs (derogatory).

[gossamer-scraps]

Hm, I don't think I ever wrote up the "build" I affectionately call "Sonic," did I? Okay, it's not really a build, so much as it's a, "hey, did you know that if you merge your soulbeast with a bird and equip a sword and a greatsword, you can basically continuously press movement skills, and occasionally stop to press one of the best power damage bursts in the game, and then go back to continuously pressing movement skills?"

Here's roughly what I run for the spirit woods event, which is where I actually use this (gear is your typical power gear, nothing fancy):

I guess to really lean into this you should take quick draw (if you'll be in combat), and there is some nice synergy on griffon stance, as well as lightning whip if you have an about-face keybind:

The build explanation is pretty simple:

The eagle f2 skill gives 10 seconds of swiftness on a 12 second cooldown to all allies in a massive area (you could use lucent oil and concentration sigils or whatever if you wanted to cap this out without help, but your heal will get you to permanent swiftness for yourself). It has no cast time, so you can cast it mid-rush; just spam the button as soon as it's up.

You have huge leaps from greatsword 3 and sword 2. I just weapon swap immediately after pressing either and wait for the other one. (With quick draw, I guess you would use each one three times before swapping, probably? Improvise.)

You have a huge rush from the eagle f1 skill, which you can use in between the other ones. This might be the best-feeling skill on the class, honestly.

If you have an about-face keybind (common in PvP I hear), you can press it, immediately use a "backwards" leap, then release it. This makes lightning reflexes a huge forward leap too, and also works on sword 3 if you manage to run out of other mobility skills.

When you actually do want to fight something, sic em gives you a brief +25% damage buff, greatsword 2 gives you an additional +25% damage buff on your next single attack, the merged f3 skill is perhaps the hardest hitting single attack in the game, axe 4 is both great damage and gives you another 10% damage buff, and axe 5 hits 12 times, doing great damage and providing good synergy with one wolf pack, which you should press as early as possible. Sure, your damage falls off pretty hard once you use all of those skills... but, you know, gotta go fast.

You might want to take dolyak stance and/or healing spring if you expect to get crippled/immobilized a lot; those preclude Going Fast.

I have no idea how this compares in movement speed to a really optimized thief, or whatever, but honestly I think it feels a lot more satisfying to play, and isn't that the whole point? Also, mounts exist, but y'know, ssh. Anyway, it's great fun to do the beginning of spirit woods on, if nothing else. Try to beat your mesmer to every capture point and jump up and down on it - it's really easy.

[blacknerdproblems]

All right, all right, all right.

After almost 64 hours of game time according to Charlie (a bot my clan uses in our discord), I finally saw my first Ascendant Primeval, affectionately referred to as a Meatball, in the second round of my four game post-patch on Kell’s Grave. Out of special and power ammo and lacking abilities, all I could do was pepper it with my pulse rifle, frantically watching the life bars race down to zero. My heart fluttered repeatedly as we slowly spray and pray. Finally, the meatball pops out of existence and The Seething Heart pop into my inventory. The Drifter congratulated my team on the win, and we went back to the Tower to meet with him and start the questline to get the Malfeasance, an exotic hand cannon and pinnacle Gambit weapon, one of the last triumphs necessary to become Dredgen.

Sixty four hours and counting, my Gambit journey is barely beginning. And Traveller be damned, I love the game mode enough that I’m going to keep going at it.

Let’s see what we got.

Gambit is a new game made introduce in Destiny 2 Forsaken. A hybrid game mode comprised of PvE and a light touch of PvP, the premise of the game is simple.

Fight. Collect. Bank. Invade.

You and your team of 3 other guardians spawn into the Derelict where you can get a glimpse of the opposing team before the match begins proper. The Drifter will let you know what enemy type you’re facing beforehand if you want to switch up your load outs before transmatting you to the ground of one of 4 maps. Enemies will start to spawn in one of three locations on the map, and your job is to kill ‘em and collect their motes they leave behind. Motes are then banked in the central area. When you deposit 5-9 motes, you send a small blocker to the other team, 10-14 sends a medium, and 15 (the max you can hold) sends a large. It’s a race to 75 to summon a Primeval, a big bad boss, which you beat it to win the round. However, after depositing a total of 25 and 50 motes, you get a chance to invade. One guardian is put into a dangerous 1v4, but kills destroy any held motes and heals the Primeval if it’s active. In a best of three, the matches quickly become slog fests and brutal wars of attrition.