#so here it is lol this is my worldstate ramble

[themournwatcher]

Cas I am obsessed with the archdemon situation in your worldstate out here. The selfishness undoubtedly seen as some national-level people's heroism at a personal level without accounting for Mahanon or Loghain's warden status, the anger after death, the lack of room for closure for anyone involved including Loghain??? Steel chairing into the position of martyr under their noses. And yes Mahanon comes out of it alive but seething??? Chewing on it 👀

Talking about Thedas having a print news cycle earlier, too, can you imagine the spins and public takes on that whole situation? Delicious.

LAST OF THEIRIN BLOODLINE: SACRIFICED

Mahanon stared down at the water-logged scrap of parchment trapped underneath his boot. 'Sacrificed' was hardly a new claim. He'd seen several circulating about Alistair in the weeks following his death. Warden. Hero. Prince. You name it, the people were happy to affix it to the dead man like the crown he had so long denied. It made his blood boil.

Once the sun had set, the rain had followed suit. No longer a torrential downpour, it was only a misty drizzle that chilled the back of Mahanon's neck as he stalked through the city streets to the memorial for the fallen warden. It was dark and late enough now that no mourners or zealots were crowding the site with their tears and their flowers. That was good; it meant that Mahanon could say his piece alone.

He sat on the edge of the lead coffin and took a long sip of his drink. The cheap alcohol burned all the way down his throat, but it was nothing compared to the reaver's blood running through his veins. Since the death of the Archdemon, his blood had been burning him from the inside out. He couldn't have been so lucky to be like poor Andraste, able to quench that fire on the end of a blade.

"You're a bastard," Mahanon said quietly. His mumbling slowly turned into laughter. "A royal fucking bastard! You just couldn't stand it that I called you out for what you were. You selfish prick!" He threw the bottle down and smashed it. Shards skittered across the wet ground, reflecting his own face back up at him. "You just had to get back at me, didn't you? You couldn't live with the consequences of your actions, could you? Not even at the very last."

He wasn't sure how long he sat there and seethed, spitting curses on the dead man's name. Long enough that he'd given up sitting and drinking and taken to pacing around the coffin, as if he could shout at it loud enough and long enough that the man inside might rise back up to tell him off. He was there long enough that, soon, he felt a hand on his shoulder that pulled him to a stop.

"We should go," said Loghain, unsure if he should be grateful that he was spared. He knew that Mahanon's intention was to place him in the path of the Archdemon, and he had been willing to take that fate upon himself. Instead, Maric's remaining son had died for them both.

They were all a bit selfish.

UHHHH sorry lex you possessed me but ummm yeah this is the vibe. this is the vibe, right???

[queenofbaws]

🎀 [Bow] How many named characters are in this WIP? How many do get a POV?

aw man, see, the problem here...is that, while working on the (almost)s, i got a taste of the low-stakes oc creation euphoria that is putting 2-dimensional characters in the background of a story, so like wringing blood from a stone has....................QUITE A FEW NAMED CHARACTERS

i'll throw a handful of the ones we've already met (in one way or another ;P) under the cut for anyone who's just like. collecting fun facts about this fic 🤣 there may be some EXTREMELY MINOR spoilers about plot points that we haven't gotten to quite yet, but nothing earthshattering, i pwooomise

the only characters who get POVs are the family themselves, though - jed, constance, travis, chris, bobby, caleb, kaylee, and jack - the good people of north kill county will have to wait for some other project if they want a POV of their own, i'm afraid 😔 but lord knows they live in my head

random wip asks!

NORTH KILL'S FINEST (background characters)

the hacketteers

y'all already know these fools ;P

the neighborly sort

jim & pearl warren (80s), the ones who live on the other side of hackett woods

diane kelly (40s), the camp mom nurse and chris's good good good pal

silas vorez (teens/early 20s), :)

the day crew

carver graves (30s), the responsible one; nephew of the late sheriff hank

callie kildeere (30s), the one who probably shouldn't have a gun but does anyway

graham cutter (30s), the one who thinks he's funnier than he really is

abel gore (70s), the one whose sister absolutely saw bigfoot that one time

the dead

hank graves (~50s/60s), previous sheriff of north kill

amelia grant (30s), chris's wife; caleb & kaylee's mother; niece of sheriff hank

eliza vorez (70s/80s/???), silas's handler mother...and a problem

susanna hackett (???), one of jed's sisters

francis hackett (70s), jed's father

john fiddler (~50s), jack's grandfather; a monster hunter and occasional friend of jed's (but "occasional" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here)

hannah & beth washington (early 20s), the girls jack couldn't didn't save

charity (~30s/40s), constance's mother :)

"mama" (~50s/60s), constance's grandmother :)

amos grundy (~60s), constance's father; a good old fashioned preacher by trade :)

maybe a pattern has begun to develop, hmm? hehehe

while i can't promise every character on this list will be pivotal...they all very much have their roles to play, and if it doesn't seem like it just quite yet, well...

we've still got us a few more weeks of summer now, don't we? ;)c

[mxanigel]

what we have is each other

The lovely @socially-awkward-skeleton and @captastra tagged me to play with this relationship template!

That's a fantastic template for two people. And I hope to use it for Vix and Shadowheart once I explore more of their journey. But. Uh. My current brainrot is my AoT OT3. So I'm stealing this opportunity to share the latest version of their chart (OT3 template here).

Explanatory rambles below the cut!

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Hange is a chaotic non-binary mess of a leader soldier, Levi is a clean freak who blunt and crass and so deliberate with emotions that he doesn't express them like others do, and OC Shion is a broken sunshine character seeking joy on her better days and clawing for meaning on her worse ones.

[greeting each other] Levi consistently uses demeaning terms toward Hange. "Idiot," "four-eyes," etc. When he uses their name, it's a big deal. I haven't figured out what he'll call Shion, but since she confessed so early in their relationship, he didn't have a chance to come up with something like what he calls Hange before Things Changed between them.

[First to confess] ahaha yeah Shion first tells Levi she loves him in chapter 9. We're on chapter 23 and neither Levi nor Hange have used those words. (but we're getting so damn close aaaaaaa)

[First to kiss] Levi kisses Shion after she confesses. He can't articulate why. She doesn't press him to. He knows she's important to him, something he shows in a thousand little ways. (Hange's a force of nature and takes all of this in stride in chapter 10 in very Hange-esque ways.)

[Dies for the others] OHOHO the WAYS this could happen depending on timeline and adherence to canon. Dare I explore a worldstate in which Shion dies to save Hange's life? WE SHALL SEE

[Prone to hide their feelings] This condition is in Levi Ackerman's blood okay. And an innocent chapter 8 conversation leads Hange to hide their feelings for both Shion and Levi to some extent. Their affection? Not at all hidden. Their romantic feelings? BURY THAT SHIT. Until they can't keep it buried any longer.

[First to apologize after a fight] Shion is not one who tolerates strain between herself and those she loves. Especially if she's the person responsible for it. But when that strain exists for reasons outside of her control… she won't apologize for the sake of apologizing. And she's learning not to apologize for who she is or how she feels.

["Excuse me, they asked for no pickles"] Shion will sit there and roll with things (and may encourage others to do the same depending on the situation) but there is no freaking way Levi or Hange would accept any of the three getting pickles when they didn't ask for pickles, lol.

[Spoils the others] How said spoiling occurs depends on the person, but they're each ready able and willing to spoil the other two.

[Wakes up first] Levi canonically doesn't sleep much. So I headcanon that Hange has experimented with sleeping draughts (experiments which always piss off Levi regardless of effectiveness because Hange takes it as a personal challenge to slip him one without him noticing). But for this relationship, he's the first one awake which has already manifested multiple times in the fic. The very limited scenarios in which he wouldn't wake first are super fun to play with~

["What's updog?"] I took this line less literally, seeing it as which of them are the most casual in speaking to the others, most likely to make puns, etc. And that's 100% Hange.

[First to propose] Once the OT3 shakes off its rocky romantic restart, this is unnecessary. Hell, even before the official confessions, they're already a unit.

[Wants children] I actively avoid giving my OCs children. I stopped writing for one in part because it seemed like children were a likely outcome. And then Shion comes along and turns that on its head. So. There's a kid in one possible future. With three parents who love her very much.

[Didn't know they were dating] The they-were-already-a-unit thing I mentioned earlier comes into play here. I have mixed feelings about the word "dating" here only because it tends to have romantic connotations, and both Shion and Hange's initial feelings are strongly platonic. But given how much I adore Levihan and that this is my first-ever OT3, plus after thinking long and hard about how Shion eventually feels about Hange and vice versa, I decided all of their feelings would be considered romantic.

[Initiates contact] Shion holds back SO HARD from being affectionate toward Levi, but he picks up on that (and appreciates it) and works to communicate when he's more open to that sort of thing. Not that he's good at it, but he tries. Meanwhile, Hange is alllll about touching and other affectionate gestures, which helps further lower the barrier for the other two.

[Approached first] Shion kind of sort of approached Levi first (remember, she was holding back) and Levi, once he's open to taking another step, doesn't hold back. But I'm thinking about this romantically, and Hange is highly reticent to show romantic advances toward either one knowing that Shion has feelings for Levi.

[Says the L word first] Shion 100%.

[The oblivious one] I'm using "oblivious" a bit loosely here; Levi takes a while to sort through what to name his feelings, and Hange hangs out in denial for quite some time.

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No-pressure tagging people to play with either template and/or just skimread my OC+blorbo rambles~ @poetikat @mxkelsifer @milesmentis @arendaes @outpost51 @dr-paine @saraptor @perhapsrampancy @spindleweedss @marythegizka

[thelearnedsoldiertoo]

My Rook is gonna be the younger sister of my friend's Lavellan, who missed most of Inquisition mostly on account of uhhhhhhhhhhh

...let's just go with 'she had something on her forehead'

They didn't reunite until Before The Dawn, which Angharad, her sister, didn't do until after Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts, and she just kind of haunted Skyhold and helped Dagna and Harritt until Promise of Destruction revealed she could even be cured at all--and Hara and Cassandra weren't close, so that came after What Pride Had Wrought. By the time Siwan was her own person again, the War was virtually over.

Now granted all of this is really unique origin that's being borne by the fact my friend and I have been writing this all out together and we have these two guys' stories from when they were children, pre-Origins at this point, but I'm super looking forward to playing her lol. All she needs is a mod to put a brand on her forehead; she slides neatly into Rook's role as it stands, and is kind of a natural fit for Shadow Dragon lol. Her surname and claimed origin in the game can even be a cover, since Lavellan is kind of a famous name by then lol

Her sister romanced Solas, which is kind of how she wound up so far north--she was finally active again in Trespasser and is here to help her sister deal with Solas's Solasing.

I'm legit so excited this was probably a little incoherent cause I just woke up from a nap but Siwan is like already my #2 Dragon Age Blorbo after only my HoF, who's our canon HoF in this shared worldstate, but I can ramble about Ciara another time ehehehehe

Ok I’ve been reading some of the tags on this poll from meg-does-art and it has made me wonder

[inquisimer]

Hey! I just read one of your DWC entries about Sari Mahariel and her timelines. I liked it! Can I ask for any facts/nuggets about the story(ies?) in this 'verse? 😍😍😍

hi!! yes!! i would LOVE to tell you about my beloved Sari<3

below the cut, because i have a tendency to ramble

for a more eloquently written explanation ((and a picture)), you can check out Sari’s page here or the post here for mobile users

the dalish origin was my first da:o playthrough and I loved it, but I had this story idea recently and decided that Sari was the right oc for it and reworked her canon (in my head lol) to suit it

hers is one of two long fics I’m actively working on, but it isn’t posted (yet). hopefully it will be soon, once i’ve got enough raw content and really felt out the world state and vibes

the core of Sari’s story is that she really hecked up in the Fifth Blight (read: I had no clue how the origins interface worked lmao). She was naive and standoffish and that meant she offended a lot of people and lost a lot of opportunities. She romanced Alistair, but he died killing the archdemon and she basically said ‘fuck you’ to the Wardens and the world and left to wallow in her grief. 

Hawke in Sari’s worldstate is Léan (page here or mobile here), who is a mage, and unabashedly vocal about mage rights, in a romance with Anders. The Inquisitor is Irosyl Lavellan, Dalish First and rift mage who romanced Solas to the bitter, bitter end. She doesn’t really have a page because she mainly exists in relation to Sari’s story, but there is a picture here, no mobile version, sorry!

basically, Sari’s story starts when she’s found a cure for her Calling and returned to Ferelden; Leliana and the Inquisitor call her to be part of their ‘stop Fen’harel’ effort and she goes. The fallback plan, when they obviously can’t stop Solas, is to send Irosyl back to the Breach as a re-do. Unfortunately, the ritual goes wrong wrong wrong and Sari ends up back in Ostagar. RIP her. 

Various tidbits about Sari and her first timeline: 

she was absolutely crushing on Tamlen and buddies with Merrill

Sari stops considering herself Dalish after Nature of the Beast

When she first comes to Skyhold, the only interaction she’s had for years is with Avernus

she went after a cure for the Calling less for herself and more for others’ benefit, but she also wants to sever all ties to the Wardens

she is a rogue who started out with a bow, but now prefers dual wielding bc it’s less tied to her Dalish heritage

in the events of da2, clan Sabrae is annihilated; after the events of dai, Merrill becomes an agent of Fen’harel 

her full name, Nada’sariel, is taken from the words nadas (inevitable) and sar (yours, possessive), and means ‘your inevitable one’

so that’s Sari’s verse as it stands now! like i said, i’m actively working on this one and it is undergoing some heavy development as i write out the first draft

thank you so much for the ask!!! i’m glad you liked Sari and the drabbles for DWC, i imagine she will feature in those often for me

i appreciate you<3