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angrennufuin · 5 months ago

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Niosiki “Nee” Cranta The Halls of Screaming Stone Titanomachy Campaign (written in early 2020)

The Acorn Path academy prides itself on the gruelling nature of its entrance exam, but what you chiefly remember is the time just after its completion: the hour you spent waiting for news of acceptance or rejection. Prior to today, prior to right now, that hour was the longest one in your life. Now, as then, the seconds drag past. Your stomach feels as if it is stuffed with boiling lead; a horrible itching restlessness crawls along your skin. You can feel every molecule of blood and sweat and cave dirt on your body and all of them are… Wriggling.

Now, as then, you pace in long circuits. Only this time, you’re pacing an underground passage instead of the deep-carpeted university hallway. That’s fine. The clatter of your hobnailed boots on the stone is more satisfying, anyway.

“Nee,” says someone, from somewhere; you don’t know where, because you’re extremely not interested in looking anybody in the eye right now.

“I’m fine,” you say, brusque, with a lot of dignity, and sit down on the ground. Sketch the outline of Prestidgitation in the air with your fingers; it’s a cantrip you’ve done a million times, and it’s actually almost relaxing. The invisible force that whisks everything unclean off of your skin and clothes. The almost-heat, almost-cold, almost-pressure of the sensation, all of those and also none of them. It steadies you, so you cast it again. Uselessly.

You didn’t take a single hit in this fight, so you don’t have any need to patch yourself up. You used maybe two spells, and flipping through your spellbook to prepare more takes precisely forty-seven seconds. Leaves three thousand, five hundred fifty-three before the rest of the party is ready to move on, and you feel every single one of those seconds like a weight on your ankles.

Pacing bothers the people around you, apparently. People who got to the fight sooner, and, therefore, did get injured, and, therefore, need more rest. So you won’t pace. You cast Prestidigitation again. Still feel unclean, afterward.

This hour is stretching far, far longer than the other one, the Acorn Path one. You think about possible time-dilation or -compression spells (that’s, what, Dunamancy?) to occupy your brain, which otherwise will start churning about the fight itself. You refuse to think about that. Your brain is your most powerful weapon and you are not going to-- oh dammit, you’ve thought about it.

This hour is stretching, yes, far longer than seems possible or believable, but it’s nothing. Nothing, compared to the agonizing seconds of waiting to see if Tanith’s desperate spell would take.

You’re thinking about it now, so any protection not thinking about it could have afforded is gone. That makes it okay to look across the cave, to let your eyes pass over Oz (sitting with one leg pulled up, leaning back against the wall, face pale and drawn, hands unsteady) and Lylah (squatting next to him, talking low and seriously). Nothing immediately happens, which makes it okay to take a deep breath. From this angle, the new scar on Oz’s face is glaring. Obvious, with its corpse-white hue, with the way it drags one eyelid down, with that eye’s iris gone pale green and milky. It’s not a clean scar, somehow. It makes your fingers itch to shape healing spells, even though you don’t know any. You have tried exactly one healing spell, back in university, which sucked and was boring. But still.

If you look at it logically, laying out all the facts, what happened shouldn’t be shocking. It really shouldn’t. Yesterday, you took a horrible gelatinous cave-thing to the face and upper body, and passed out twice within the span of an hour. Leif routinely gets skewered by assorted weaponry, and also hasn’t had an audible heartbeat in weeks. Lylah and Oz and, yes, Tanith and Symon and Arrie, too, have gotten knocked out plenty of times. Sometimes more messily than this. No one in this party is invulnerable, you know that. Obviously.

But it’s never been this bad before. Never anything that wasn’t fixable by dumping a healing potion down someone’s throat and hoping for the best; never anything that put you out of sorts like this. Leif and Lylah and, awfully, Oz -- you’ve been traveling with them going on five months now. You’re used to them being around. You kind of like them being around. And when you saw Tanith’s face as she leaned over Oz’s body -- when you thought, for an eternal, nasty moment, that he was gone for good--

Your thoughts stop right there. They refuse to congeal. It feels like someone is moving heavy furniture on your chest.

Pushing harder on that line of thought doesn’t even do any good. It just kicks your stupid heartrate into overdrive and shallows out your breathing, and that horrible, crushing weight on your chest gets worse. Your thoughts wheel away from Oz lying still, Lylah screaming, Leif’s intent stare, but the only replacement is Rill’s wrinkled face. Her lips, turned down at the corner. Her saying How did you get to be such a disappointment, Nee. Your skin itches again; if you got up. If you paced, back and forth, fast, vicious, maybe you’d feel better. But Oz is tired and Lylah might be crying; you cannot disturb them. Instead, you twirl your new wand in your fingers. Put it away. Cast Prestidigitation again, even though you can’t have possibly gotten dirty.

A sudden memory, that time at Acorn Path again: you’d folded a spare paper from your exam booklet into a shitty little fan to pass the time. You’re way better at paper-folding now; when you dig out a spare parchment from your pack, your hands are practised and sure on the creases.

Rabbit-ear fold. Outside-reverse. Pleat. Making the edges perfectly even, the folds crisp and straight, quiets your mind and soothes the weird itchy-jumpiness. It speeds time back up, too; it’s almost time to pack up when you look down and realize the finished shape of the thing you’ve made.

Your chest almost gets crushed again, but you take a deep breath through it. Stand up. Stalk across the cave, angry, now, all of a sudden.

You drop the tiny paper wolf in Oz’s lap just as he finishes talking to Lylah. Skitter your eyes away from his befuddled look. “Don’t do that again,” you say over your shoulder, already turning to go. You add, as an afterthought, “Asshole.”

Some of the pressure in your chest eases, just a little bit.

#twitter imports #op #found this in my docs and figured i should repost!#not sure about the prose now but EH. almost 5 years old #niosiki cranta #oz #titanomachy campaign #prose

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angrennufuin · 11 months ago

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Movement and posture headcanons: Nee

Based on this meme:

Again, a twitter import.

⋀: stands with feet apart and legs braced, taking up as much space as possible. Center of gravity low(er than just her short-stuff default), shoulders squared. Posture fucking immaculate.

♚: when sitting, she crouches over whatever she's doing like the feral child she is. Shoulders hunched, arms protectively shielding her food/book from prying eyes

☞: talks FAST. Shitty gutter accent that she's painstakingly converted to shitty academia accent. Trips over her words sometimes, esp. when THOUGHTS TOO FAST WORDS TOO SLOW. High & relatively sweet voice, tending toward shrillness. Soprano probably.

➔: walks like a particularly pissy New Yorker. Very fast. Uses elbows liberally. Charges to her destination like a bullet from a gun.

♞: sprints on sheer adrenaline until her reedy nerd legs give out and she eats shit. No form, flailing limbs.

♐: rarely physically fights, so this is about magic! She uses magic as a release of stress and tends to go big or go home - fire spells, lightning spells, big flashy things that annihilate a lot of enemies at once. The relief she feels is partly from the magic but also partly from clearing obstacles in one hit! It gives her a sense of accomplishment and tidiness.

How this shakes out in fighting style: Nee plants her feet, squares her shoulders, and throws herself at the problem. Her gestures are sharp & efficient without many flourishes (unless she's trying to upstage Leif), and her hair Ghibli-puffs with arcane energy (& rage). A lot of her verbal components are screams or swears, esp for the attack spells!

... Also she casts in Gnomish unless she really wants the target to know what she's saying abt them.

♫: Nee does not allow herself a lot of frivolous fun, but she loved folk dances when she was a wee orphan & deliberately carved out time in her busy wizard college schedule to learn all the new dances and use them. She's got a lot of verve and energy in her motions!

☾: prefers to sleep with her back against a wall or against an ally. She doesn't have much trouble snatching naps whenever, but does tend to sleep lightly and toss around a fair bit unless she's sharing a bed. Chronic blanket thief when she IS sharing a bed. Snores squeakily.

☻: unused to physical affection and awkward at implementing it, so she just tucks her face in someone's shoulder/stomach (depends on height), squeezes as hard as she can, maybe thumps them on the back, and then disentangles herself asap. Like a very affectionate mugging.

◆: often kisses on an impulse and misjudges the required velocity; might accidentally headbutt her partner. Rather unfortunately bitey. Technically very skilled (she read a book about it!) but terribly embarrassed about the whole sitch. Inclined to flee afterwards.

#niosiki cranta #movement and posture #op #titanomachy campaign #twitter imports

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