#that would be WAY more than a 3 but-

[un-deserts-your-bluffs]

hiya!! this is my first year doing any sort of gift exchange, so @moonslamp i hope you like it!! happy @mcyt-halloween creepy level is a 3, and i chose to do LDShadowlady from season 1 of empires (i recently rewatched it and got inspired when i got your list of characters!) story's below the cut! mind the tags

Well.

This was certainly a turn of events. 

Late at night, Lizzie had heard a splashing outside her base. Now, seeing as her base was on the water, that was sort of to be expected. However, something felt off about it.

It didn’t sound like a fish, or a turtle, or.. even a dolphin.

No, it sounded like a person swimming towards her base- the unwieldy splashing and struggling was far too human to be anything else.

She stepped out of her bedroom, looking down from the edge of her palace and squinting at the shape she saw in the water below. Was that…

“Jimmy?” She called down- but as it got closer, it didn’t seem like Jimmy. The swimming was too ungainly, looking as if the person was struggling to push themself through the water- Jimmy normally swam gracefully (he was the Codfather, after all), so… who was this? Lizzie took a few steps down her staircase, glancing back at her axolotl guards- “You two stay here, okay? Come get me if I scream.” They didn’t respond, being axolotls. (She loved them anyway, even if they did just sit there and look pretty most of the time.)

Heading down the steps, she paused about halfway down, peering over the edge. She could see the person a bit clearer now, and- yeah, that was Jimmy. But… what was wrong with him?

He looked paler than usual, even from the distance she was seeing him from, and he seemed scared- stars, what was wrong? She hurried down the steps quicker, her nightgown swishing around her legs- maybe she should’ve put her armor on before this, but Jimmy’s practically her brother, he wouldn’t hurt her.

“Jimmy, what’s going on?” She called down to him as she reached the bottom of the stairs, looking out into the sea to see him. “..Jimmy?” She called again as he didn’t respond. He simply swum closer to her base, looking almost sickly- his skin was a sickly green and purple color, sallow and shining like wax. It was… wrong.

The splashing was unwieldy as he got closer- she should’ve known something was wrong as soon as she saw he wasn’t in a boat, it was far enough away that any normal human would be tired, but she hadn’t been thinking- and she took a few steps back on the stairs, nearly stumbling on the slick prismarine surface. “Jimmy, what’s wrong?” She called again, not expecting an answer- was this even Jimmy? He looked so… wrong- even for a man who normally looked like a giant cod. He didn’t answer, just pulling himself onto the stairs as well, and- well, there was nowhere for her to go but up. 

So she ran.

She nearly slipped a few times, which would be a really awful way to go, she thought to herself, falling down the stairs of the base that took me so long to build, but not-Jimmy seemed to be moving slowly, as if he wasn’t fully there. It was like those weird gross worms fWhip had told her about once, the ones that mind controlled people. 

Ew. She probably shouldn’t have gotten distracted, because she missed a step on the stairs, yelping in surprise and stumbling down several steps- nearly bumping into the not-Jimmy. When had it caught up to her? She’d thought it was further behind than that- It was reaching for her, a wet, slimy hand getting closer and closer and- 

She kicked it.

More out of reflex than anything, some long forgotten self defense class kicking in, but she kicked it, and it stumbled away, sliding down the same stairs that she had only a moment ago.

Panic now clouding her brain, she just stared for a minute as it picked itself up, further back but not by much, before her survival instinct finally kicked in, prompting a much faster ascent. 

(She held closer to the handrail this time too. She really didn’t want to find out what that hand would feel like.)

As she reached the top tower of her palace, she realized that… she hadn’t really thought about what she should do after arriving here.

She glanced around, looking for something, anything that could help, but- nothing. Stars, she was so dead.

She could hear the footsteps creeping up the stairs, her heart hammering against her ribcage as she tried to think of what to do- 

And there it was, staring at her from several steps away. It was worse as it got closer- its eyes sunken in, dull and bloodshot- stars, how had she ever thought this was Jimmy?? It lumbered towards her as she stood, frozen- what could she do?? There were no weapons nearby, her armory far on the other side of the tower, and despite her luck earlier, she didn’t know if she could take this thing in a one on one fight. She glanced around frantically, her hands raised in what she hoped would work as a shield should the thing decide to attack while she was trying to figure out what to do, and her gaze landed on her throne- 

And the axolotls beside it.

She locked eyes with Sir Strawberry, trying to psychically convey the thought I need help right now- and praying that he picked up on it.

Oh, stars-

She could hear the thing getting closer and closer, its awful, dead looking eyes boring holes into her as she grabbed the only thing in her inventory- a stick. (Why did she have a stick in there?? What was she even going to do with that-?? Nevertheless, she was grateful for its presence. At least she wasn’t facing this thing unarmed.) Her hands shook as she gripped the stick, holding it like a baseball bat- if this were a different situation, she would’ve laughed- what was she going to do, hit a home run with this thing??

“Come and get me, then.” She said, trying to keep the shake out of her voice and failing. And it did. As if it had understood her words- which she honestly wasn’t sure if it had or not- it lunged at her, its nails dirty and slimy as it tried to scratch at her face- but she whacked it with the stick, stumbling a few feet backwards- oh stars, she was gonna die. She was so dead.

The floor was slick- why had she never fixed the leaky roof??- and she nearly fell due to the force of her swing, barely catching herself. The creature seemed more affected, though, as it slid back several feet, nearly falling as well.

Okay. Okay! This was good! Maybe if she just- kept doing that she could survive until the morning (she hoped that was as long as this thing would last, but knowing her luck…) It lunged again, catching her off guard- she shouldn’t have been thinking in the middle of a fight, stupid, stupid, she should’ve been paying attention-

And she fell, going sprawling on the floor.

Her stick broke at the impact, and she struggled to get up due to the fact that she was now covered in water.

Oh, stars.

It approached, reaching out towards her. 

She squeezed her eyes closed- there was nothing she could do now She was… there wasn’t a way out of this that she could see. She hoped someone apologized to everyone for her, told them that she was sorry she hadn’t helped with Xornoth more, than she still felt bad about the Cod War, that she was-

She heard a squeak, a splash sound, and opened her eyes- to see Lady Marceline and Sir Strawberry attacking.

They’d seen their Queen fall and lunged for the creature, pushing it backwards with the unexpected force-

And sending it careening off the edge of the tower.

Lizzie looked over the edge, not seeing it resurface.

Her hands were shaking, her heart pounding- her axolotls jumped on her (much gentler than they had the intruder, of course), trying to make sure she was okay. 

“..you guys.. You saved me.” She said softly, petting their little heads and trying to get her breathing to return to normal. They squeaked, butting their heads against her affectionately.

“...thank you. You- you did it. We made it.” She shook her head in shock and disbelief.

“We made it.”

[rainbow-femme]

I think it would be really funny if you could get Wyll out of his pact by having Withers reclass him

Mizora over here pissed off because she didn’t anticipate Wyll being friends with the god of paperwork who would get him out of his devil contract for 100 gold, meanwhile he’s punching trees in half because he’s a monk now and giggling the whole time

[donttellunclesam]

new holiday pfp!!

[the-mpreg-guy]

the hill that i will die on is that cas would have never said he loved dean if he had to deal with the consequences of it afterwards, meanwhile dean (who was SUPPOSED to tell cas he loved him in the original crypt scene script) would have eventually worked up to saying it without external pressure

[theoldkyokodied]

If you follow my main you had to know this was coming… anyway. Enjoy these bloodweave doodles :)

[idolomantises]

I… don’t really see myself continuing with the Amazing Digital Circus anymore.

[puppyeared]

act 4 :(

@chipper-smol and i came to a realization

[moghedien]

Minthara says “in Her name” when you first meet her and she’s following the Absolute but when you recruit her and she expresses that she no longer follows any god, but she still has an intact paladin oath, and she says “in your name” occasionally because she’s no longer Lolth’s paladin or the Absolute’s paladin, she’s your paladin

[vanmarkus]

SAL DELUCA + the face of a man who's about to report his boss

[vaguely-concerned]

huh. you know something I just consciously put together for the first time about caterina and lucanis' relationship is that through the game we get to hear them talk about each other a lot, but we get very few chances to hear them speak with each other at any length at all. contrast it with other companions whose storylines have elements of 'believed lost/long time no see relative returns!' like bellara and davrin, where we get to see both of them have several pretty in-depth conversations with cyrian and eldrin. hell I think even rook talks with varric longer in the regret prison scene than we ever get to see lucanis and caterina interact directly.

(and when we do see them interact, it's mostly one-sided -- it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, caterina who is doing most of the talking and giving all the orders, as he ruefully observes is her wont after murder of crows. including jumpscaring him with 'you're first talon now btw' and the shocked pikachu face in five acts he goes through in response lmao. perhaps it's more accurate to say that she talks at him and he reacts, than that they talk to each other much.)

it has such an interesting effect too, because in deliberately denying us direct insight or experience and only having this mosaic of description from each of them to go on, as well as forcing us to pay attention to the negative space of what is carefully not said, it's evocative along the same principle that you never actually show the monster in a horror film. if you've read the wigmaker job you have a clearer image of the more uh. worrying elements at play here going in, but there is something fascinatingly insidious and naturalistic in the way it's 'hushed up' in the game itself. she has his complete loyalty both as a member of her house and, more importantly, that of an abused child to a parent figure. he readily admits several times that she's a difficult person to live with, an even more difficult person to be loved by ("even for me. and I was her favourite")... but never once does he actively blame her nor truly conceptualize that he has every right to do so (that he can be angry with her and still love her, because whether he should or not he unavoidably does), or that she might have acted differently than she did, that she made a choice every time to hurt him. even affectionately he speaks of her as a force of nature, an act of god -- something that can't be reasoned or pleaded with or resisted, something you can only hope to navigate with as little pain as possible and pray to survive. let yourself get carried away by the riptide, resisting it will only make it worse. you don't compromise with a hurricane, you just try to find the best shelter you can and cross your fingers while you wait for it to pass and be calm again.

love is that hurricane. you do whatever she asks. you earn her continued affection day by day by never letting her down. you only want the things she tells you it's okay to want and cut everything else away preemptively. ("A wyvern tooth dagger?? I loved wyverns as a boy --Caterina would never let me have one of these, though." and as we have all wept and gnashed our teeth over, it never even OCCURS to him that he's a like thirty-five year old adult man who can buy himself any dagger he wants at any time. she said he couldn't have one. so he'll never have one. that's just how it works. and maybe if Illario could just accept that and find his peace with it like I have, this whole thing wouldn't be so difficult. oh lucanis.)

such is the price -- and the cost -- of being loved by her, it's a loan on which the interest will never stop piling up. you have to keep paying it down in perfection every day if you want to keep it. who got the worse deal there: the grandson who has abandoned everything else in life to live up to that and mostly succeeded, until the day he's so burned out and broken it threatens to no longer be an option, or the grandson who can never seem to scrape together enough worth in her eyes no matter how he begs, borrows or steals it, how he hustles and plays dirty?

one of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to be loved by a selfish god. another one of the worst things that can ever happen to anyone is to not be loved by a selfish god. (hope that helps, boys!) even in betraying everything else, Illario can't bring himself to hurt his grandmother, because that would defeat the whole point. who would he defiantly be proving himself worthy to, without her. in love, devotion, submission, hatred, frustration, bitterness, everything is defined in relation to her, you can spot the gravitational force of it through how the dellamorte family move through time and space. she -- her love and regard and attention -- is still the sun both of their worlds orbit around, even as adults. the game might never tell you outright 'she used to beat and starve them growing up. for their own good you see, so they'd be strong (and broken down enough for her to build them up again however she wanted but I'm sure that's incidental)', but if you know even a little bit about how these dynamics can work the writing is on the wall everywhere you look and all the more unsettling for it.

follow lucanis' freeze-logic and fraught interpersonal catch 22 irreconcilable mixed emotions problems back far enough, looong before the ossuary entered the picture, and you start to see caterina's ghost around every fucking corner. she is so proud of him. (well, she would be. she made him. she forged exactly the knife she needed and it rests willingly, devotedly, in her hands, it would return to her every time because it doesn't know love as anything but to be a knife. his tama never taught him how to be anything else. his biggest fear with her is that she won't even want him back, the way he is now.) to the best ability of her soul, whatever parts of it survived a lifetime of crow politics and 'five children, eight grandchildren, only Illario and me left now', I think she really does loves him. he certainly loves her, with all the sincerity and artless desperation of a child, of the little boy he was once. and what she's done to him (and to illario, for all his shitty gremlin scar-ass antics lol) is awful. the harm is real, and the love is real, and trying to find a way for these two truths to exist in the same space is driving all three of them their own individualized forms of insane. you know. the way only family can and so often does lol.

through implications and short glimpses and having to put the pieces together yourself, you can have the feeling that there is very genuine mutual love and attachment in this relationship... and that beneath that there is something so profoundly wrong. and the sneaking '...oh shit it gets worse the longer I think about it' horror of that is more effective for me at least than the stark in-your-face presentation of the facts of the matter could have been. the love is here. the love is here. it only ever makes it worse.

[unpersoniverse]

Skén:nen sá:sewh

as promised, here's Precious boy™ getting kissed by Precious wife™ because he deserves all the love in the world :cc

translation: Get home safe

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

with Luo Qingyang and Lou Binghe having the same last name I got start thinking of an au: like what if lbh was her little brother

tho what's funnier lbh in the mdzs universe or that means tlj is lou qingyangs dad in that au

I wanted to give this a genuine answer but I kept getting distracted by Lou Binghe...so...yeah.

[mystiffox]

i haven't stopped thinking about him so i did screencap edits. please enjoy all these feral!fords (but you can see it as vampire ford too, whichever fits your palate :))

i just think he's neat

[owlheartt]

Something I really like about timebomb is that Ekko actually knows what he's getting into.

I'm not really seeing it get talked about but in season 1 they mention that Ekko and the firelights help people addicted to shimmer get off it and lead more fulfilling lives within the community. I should probably rewatch the scene for the exact wording (might be misremembering tbh) but that comment implies A LOT.

First: Ekko's mission is helping people where he can, he would probably try and help Jinx even if he wasn't in love with her

Second: He has experience dealing with severe mental illness as that often goes hand in hand with drug abuse, namely depression/suicidal ideation like what Jinx was exhibiting

Third: He's probably mapped out best course of action FOR dealing with this and has already figured out his own limits/boundaries. Meaning he knew what he was getting into trying to talk Jinx out of suicide, and was thus more equipped to deal with the aftermath

Fourth: He's probably helped ex members of Silco's gang. The firelights seem to have a theme of healing and repairing and recovering, so they've probably also learned to forgive. If they're mission is to rebuild the lanes into a safe space, they can't exclude people they don't like, they have to make room for them. I think they fought Silco out of necessity, and I doubt Jinx would be the first person they help who's killed one of them.

These all might be a bit of a stretch but I think it really fits. Beyond that, it shows that Ekko can ACTUALLY help Jinx. As much as unconditional love can do, Ekko has the tools for Jinx's recovery and a path ready for her. He also probably knows that her "healthy" will look different from AU Powder's "healthy." On top of that, I expect he knows how to respect her even in the middle of psychotic breaks and won't agitate her already frail mental state

[x-i-l-verify]

Being honest, I think using Miss Delight and Ollie in this chapter instead of the Critters was a mistake. Dogday would have been a great candidate for the role Ollie filled. It would explain why he already knows us when we find him in the dungeon, why he calls us "Poppy's Angel," why he already seems to know what she's planning. It would also just be thematically appropriate, because of course he knows Playcare like the back of his hand, of course he would be the one to bring back the power, the light, in order to chase away Catnap's darkness. It would make the fact that we couldn't save him at the end of the Playhouse section that much more of a gut-punch, because he would have already saved us multiple times at that point and he would have felt like a friend.

As for the other Smiling Critters, a couple of them could already be dead, sure, but others could have been lurking in various buildings and locations within the Playcare. Bobby Bearhug and Picky Piggy could have been who we run into in Home Sweet Home, with Bobby languishing in the bedrooms that held the children she once loved so dearly, while Picky, who has gone insane from hunger, haunts the kitchens, desperately prowling for fresh meat. We could convince Bobby to help us, while evading Picky, lending a sense of true danger and urgency to the level that was lacking in the original, since we are never in any actual danger inside Home Sweet Home in that version outside of running into the red smoke without our gas mask.

Craftycorn and Bubba Bubbaphant could be who we run into in the school, or Bubba could possibly be found in the caverns or in one of the power rooms, giving us a key piece of equipment that we would need to progress or helping us with solving puzzles. Craftycorn could take the place of Miss Delight, with the same mechanics and everything, but instead of being insane with hunger like Miss Delight, she could be desperately seeking out new art supplies, since she has long since run out. Fresh blood makes great paint.

The antagonists in the Playhouse could still be the mini Critters, or it could possibly be Kickin' Chicken or Hoppy Hopscotch, who are trying to get your grabpack and take it for their own in order to escape. Whichever character isn't trying to steal your grabpack would be helping you play keep-away with it. Alternatively, Kickin Chicken and Bubba could already be dead (since their voice lines end in screaming in their cutouts), and Hoppy could be trying to help us get the power back on after Dogday's death (since her symbol is a lightning bolt). When Catnap finally makes his appearance, she could sacrifice herself to distract him, giving us key time to get away and set up our defenses with the batteries.

[skrrtscree]

burn my dread 💀💙

[redraw of sorts of official art, the og under the cut]