theabysscomeshome

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[id: Wulfenite smiling and giving the V for victory sign at the viewer. end id]

wulfenite arknights is a youtuber

she makes videos about rocks

she did not intend to become a youtuber when she started making videos about rocks

she was just feeling lonely while exploring the wilderness to look for rocks and started vlogging to feel like she was talking with someone

she does not explore the wilderness to look for rocks because she is a geologist or has any formal education as one, she just really loves rocks and talking about rocks and collecting rocks

one of her friends told her the videos are awesome and she should upload them

her friend had to upload the videos for her at first because she didn't know how to use the internet

she became unexpectedly popular because of how passionately she talks about rocks

one of her friends is the pasha

she does not have any kind of high class background that would let her come in contact with let alone befriend the pasha

she befriended the pasha by passionately talking about rocks

she started making more educational videos about rocks with higher production values instead of just rock exploration vlogs after she became infected on an exploration and lost most of her real-life avenues for talking about rocks

her experience as geologist-explorer and sheer enthusiasm for talking about rocks lead to several breakthroughs at the professional geologist meetings at rhodes island

one of the first things she did after joining rhodes island was organise a meticulously planned and overwhelmingly successful rock exhibition

the rock exhibition involved her friend the pasha bringing over the humongous chunk of wulfenite from the pasha's personal collection that she got her codename from

she looks like a poser geologist-explorer because even though she has all the necessary tools on her at all times they barely show signs of use

she barely uses the tools because she does all the climbing and rock crushing and so on with her massive fucking tail

she keeps the tools on her as emotional support

she does not call herself a geologist or an explorer she calls herself a rock collector

she just wants to talk about rocks

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[id: Image of Eblana standing at a forked path. On the left is a bright, sunny castle titled "Siscon". On the right is a dark, stormy castle titled "obsessed with the doctor". end id]

do the right thing, hypergryph

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When Elegies Are Ashes

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[Arknights X Delicious in Dungeon]

Collaboration Event New Collaboration Event is coming soon. More details will be released soon, please stay tuned!

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Now that I think about it, it's honestly bs that Marcille is the only one who has a costume, when there's a PERFECT costume for Laios. He could go incognito as a perro, and it would fit for lore and gameplay at the same time.

They did this before when Ash from the R6 collab got a skin where she disguises herself as a feline. No reason Laios can't do this too, especially considering he's the only one out of the dunmesh crew that would stick out for being a normal-ass human. They've done this before for the same reason.

Although he's not the 6 star, he is still the protagonist of dunmesh, so it makes sense that he would have a skin, so why does he not?

He would take any excuse to be a dog boy.

His second skill, monster scare tactics, follows what he did in scaring the basilisk, but he did something similar. Namely, when they fought the shapeshifter and he intimidated it by getting on his hands and knees and barking like a dog. They have the reference on hand.

That's not even a spoiler for the collab because Marcille uses familiars, something that occurs after the dog scene.

Perros also cannonically bark like a dog. He has NO reason not to use that talent.

We were ROBBED!

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talking to @theabysscomeshome this morning about complicated Jean/Kaeya(/Diluc before he left) FWB scenarios and Lisa coming onto the scene, and I am just really enjoying:

Lisa: I do know what they say about assuming, cutie, but I did have *grounds* to assume you're in a relationship. You live together-

Jean: Oh, no, I still live in the Gunnhildr mansion. Kaeya has just been letting me stay at his house because it's closer to the Ordo, which is important now that I'm Acting Grand Master.

Lisa: -sleep in the same bed, given that you brought me into the other bedroom in that townhouse and it's very clearly an office-

Kaeya: We needed an office space.

Jean: And Kaeya has nightmares. They're better when he sleeps with another person.

Lisa: -bring each other food and coffee, touch each other very liberally when you don't think anyone's watching-

Kaeya: We're childhood friends. That's normal.

Lisa: -shower together after exercises-

Jean: It's more efficient that way.

Lisa: -and, very demonstrably, have sex.

Kaeya: We're very good childhood friends. Besides, it helps to give her an incentive to be in bed before midnight.

Jean: And that also helps with his nightmares.

Lisa: ...That baffling statement aside, I'm not arguing with your description of your relationship, cuties. I'm only saying that it was rude to barge into the library and ask why I haven't returned Jean's Windblume when I was still trying to square it with some perfectly reasonable assumptions.

Jean: Kaeya, you didn't.

Kaeya: The pining was getting unbearable. I do disagree on the assumptions, though. She's been so obvious.

Lisa: ...You understand this is why Eula thought the year she says you spent flirting with her was hazing, right?

Jean: Oh no.

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Before I end up making that post I want to talk about briefly with the release of IS5 again, the concept of each IS havin a fundamental theme of unreality to them. I really like this, because it feels like in a pretty unsubtle way a solid way to ground the structure of a roguelike setting into what is normally a pretty grounded storyline.

IS1, Ceobe's Fungimist (please Hypergryph let it return), is a hallucination caused be Ceobe eating weird forest mushrooms. Nothing that happens in IS1 is real, explicitly. However, IS1 is fundamentally drawing from something, and in Ceobe's case, it seems to be drawing from her memories of traveling abroad Terra looking for the origins of her axe (and food, of course). What are things Ceobe's remembers happening to her, what are hallucinations filing in the gaps, and what are Ceobe catching glimpses of fundamental truths of the world (the Black Procession and the Feranmut skeleton that is Maybe? Lifebone for instance) is left extremely vague. Characters such as the Frozen Monstrosity do seem to genuinely exist, but there was no Frozen Monstrosity in Lungmen. Was Ceobe using something she herself experienced in place of Frostnova, or is Ceobe hallucinating the entire thing regardless? Who knows. Ceobe probably doesn't have the answers for you.

IS2 has explicit themes of madness and deception, and although I do not find him a particularly compelling character or plot device, a playwright who can literally warp reality with his plays. Much of the stage design recycles echoes the stage design from IS1, almost as if the Troupe is welcoming you, the player, onto their stage. You aren't here to discern the truth behind the Troupe, you're here to save one man, and while you are able to peel back the curtains somewhat, you never really do learn what the Troupe is. There are puppets who come to life and whose music damages your souls, there are actors driven so fully into their roles that they end up traveling to Sami to carry out their destined end, there's a Troupe Leader whose defining imagery is puppets and strings, and yet, you're no closer to finding out how this all happened than you are trying to explain why the Knights' Duel node exists.

IS3 asks the question "What if time is like evolution?" and presents its unreality in the form of a sprawling, massive bundle of alternative timelines to your own. It feels almost impossible to line up most of the events and memory mappings and endings on top of each other, and even the endings seemingly branch off into several versions of themselves. While, for example, the Irene encounter maps onto her own memory mapping story, we never see the timeline involving Lumen's memory mapping in the game at all. There is no Seaborn version of Gladiia in-game for you to fight. This is made seemingly all the more uncanny by the fact that there is actually a canon timeline going on, and the implication through the Bosky event that you are only seeing these alternative timelines because curiosity got the better of you. You came into contact with technology alien and yet familiar, and as a result, your good little timeline where you just save a girl who tries to commit identity death turns into you having to watch from the third person a version of the world where you and Mizuki are potentially the only intelligent life left on Terra for all eternity.

(No seriously, this ending is fucked up, what the fuck.)

IS4, on the other hand, gives us a reality that is unraveling, so fragile and malleable that you can cause things to manifest out of sheer force of will, something there are explicit warnings about not doing. It's a land where the living become the shambling, almost mechanical dead, and the mechanical being living creatures. It's a world where the abyss looks back at you, and finds you to be worth destroying. Gravity isn't right, time isn't right, language isn't right, snow falls black and the dead rise once again to beckon you home. There's nightmares in the shadows, and they're eating away at everything.

Sorry shit I got dark there. IS5 is Nymph's happy little storytime where she explores future and alternative versions of Kazdel through the imagination of her and her compatriots. What if Theresis and Theresa worked together and Nasti completed her designs (and maybe committed a genocide????) and Kazdel was a flying utopia city? What if the Teekaz all walked in a different direction and became the Sankta, or all became the Anasa? You know, sometimes you lose your sense of reality and become dependent on the visions you see from the Revenants, sometimes you need a little bunny to pull you out, and sometimes those Revenants might have actually caused a new reality to exist but haha, don't worry about that.

What if, hahaha, just saying what if, there was a version of Amiya in a world where the Sarkaz barely exist, where she was given the crown by a dying Theresa with no guidance on how to use it ethically? Haha I mean, what if Kal'tsit wasn't around? What if, just theoretically, there was a version of Amiya for whom the most formative person in her life was the decaying mind of a man stuck as an AI program who kept his people alive for 10,000 years? What if, hehehehe you know, what if, there were special endings you got for each of the stories you told where you went onto fight her, showing up closing up those stories, those worlds, to eternally protect them until she can find the answer to all troubles? What if the Sarkaz prophecy from Chapter 7 kept coming up, over and over again, the prophecy of an Amiya who would melt millions of lives into memories over and over again? What if this was an Amiya so immediately dangerous that the Sankta version of Buldrokkas'tee doesn't hesitate in trying to kill her?

I mean that would be a really scary story if it was true. Really it's Nymph's special storytime with the revenants. Don't worry about it.

Anyways I love pretty much each of these takes (IS2 is definitely the weakest though) and it shows a lot of thought from the storywriters about how they wanted to integrate a roguelike mode into their game.

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some general is5 observations & tips having done every ending currently available and some souls level 10 runs

a lot of maps, particularly bosses but also regular ones, happen in two phases and make it difficult to use one set of units for both phases. because of this you essentially want to have an A team and a B team who can swap for each other as needed. there's usually only one chokepoint to defend, but you do want two sets of units who can defend this chokepoint.

my personal checklist of things I need is this:

a way to quickly get rid of spines of epoch, both to free up tiles and to get plans early on for more options

someone who can bait (seeds of withering, bind casters, stun snipers, those guys who call in drones, mobile artillery, corruption tanks, ch14 lasers, lich wizards with their necrosis field cast, sankta jumpscares)

helidrop damage

aoe damage

someone who can just hold a guy for a while and ideally can also take the manfred cannon

a healer who can heal without needing skills for it and a healer who can heal without needing to attack enemies about it

low priority but less of a luxury the further you go: dedicated anti-air damage

not strictly necessary but convenient: some source of spare bodies to feed to vore sarkaz

bonus: block 4 for duck lord maps, low-altitude hovering counters in case a bunch of flying treasure chests try to be funny, elemental damage to melt reborn creations

phantom with his IS module covers half of these points by himself so he's like playing easy mode. I took him for fun on my first several runs and then stopped bringing him for a bit so i could learn how to actually solve these maps.

there are a lot of holes and collectibles and inspirers to combo with shift gaming (50% increased physical and arts damage taken for 10 seconds after being shifted lmao) but I'm just not very shifterbrained so I haven't done much of that

for spines of epoch elemental and true damage are the easiest but any arts damage is generally fine. aciddrop is my favourite for this job though, a lot of sarkaz enemies have innate res so physical damage is better early on and thanks to her high minimum damage she can reliably take out the spines even at e1 and stays relevant on later floors after enemy def starts scaling. aoe damage (be it splash or chain) is good because lots of maps have big groups of enemies but also because it lets you somewhat circumvent the taunt on spines by still hitting enemies around it.

all three bosses counter fast-redeploy strats in some way (locking up units / +3 dp cost / increased redeployment time on manual retreats) but there's so many maps where taking out priority targets fast makes things easier that fast-redeploys are still really strong picks. in general someone you can drop on a guy to immediately deal a bunch of damage (executors, dreadnoughts, musha, surtr, etc) works extremely well against every midboss and is a great asset in face-off nodes.

you generally don't need a lot of dedicated block in is5 but you do want at least one sturdy defender (ideally two on the principle of having A and B teams) and someone who can handle cannon jumpscares, as well as a bunch of extra melee bodies that can be less durable (your vanguards, your bait, your summons, etc). passage blockade is much easier if you can just hold one of the knights for a bit while you wear down the other, and having a bunch of spare bodies makes past the aquapit free as hell and the norport civilians in epochal gaps much easier to manage. I like to bring poncirus because she's very bulky for a vanguard.

between necrosis and corruption you don't want to solely rely on skill-based healing or attack-based healing, you either need one of each or just a healer that heals. a wandering medic isn't a requirement the way it was in is2 and arguably is3 but it gives you more leeway in deploying around spines of epoch. swire the elegant wit's s1 is notably unaffected by necrosis because it's technically always active, and she's very good at holding a guy.

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rhodes island mandated shopping trip

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i love how ines puts so much effort into pretending to be a sarkaz filing down her horns and everything and basically not a single actual sarkaz falls for it. not just ancient powerful bloodline sarkaz who can magically sense she's not One Of Them but also random nobody sarkaz who've never seen a battlefield and rarely seen another sarkaz can tell basically at a glance that this is actually just some weirdo sheep filing down her horns. but the funniest part is that none of them really question it either they just go well, whatever, there's nutjobs everywhere

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👀👀👀👀

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"allied unit" includes summons and it also triggers when phantom's clone is automatically removed when he retreats lmao

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Arknights Official Comic: Cecelia and the Sauin Pilgrimage

May the fireworks of home light your way back.

Official Comic Cecelia And The Sauin Pilgrimage is now available on our official website！

Read Now: https://www.arknights.global/comic_section?comicId=9&fromId=1

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W's nobility and restraint, despite everything else about her, in regards to not killing Doctor the moment she can during every opportunity that arises for her to do so, really comes into perspective when you consider that W was terrified of Doctor.

Even when she was young, she had a habit of staring at Catastrophes from not terribly safe distances, to the point others told her to cut it out so they could get on with the evacuation. This same person had her hairs stand on end when the scary hooded thing that had no qualms sending several Sarkaz to their deaths and somehow always found a way to ultimately make these losses acceptable with even bigger victories was in the same room as her. Avoided them like the plague. Doctor inspired actual fear and dread in her as per Darknights Memoir.

Cut back to the present, when Doctor is now a funny hooded freak that holds classes for the younger personnel at Rhodes Island and is known to get goofy and be well respected by a wide variety of different Operators ranging Gavial to SilverAsh passing through Hellagur, you can't blame W for feeling a way about it and not ever relenting on her hostility towards Doctor, without even taking into account the fact that, you know, Doctor is highly (and correctly) suspected of doing That to Theresa.

Because that fear and hatred forged her, motivated her to become the absolute fuckhouse she is nowadays, always motivated to one day exact justice on her greatest of fears, it really speaks of W's moral fiber that the amnesia meaning she's dealing with a different person practically speaking is the one thing that prevents her from eviscerating Doctor, because it wouldn't be fair and they are, in a way, not the one she wanted to kill.

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C:<

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oh my god.. just little guys

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Got me there.