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#i miss magic… any level of it
lavender-femme · 1 year
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someday i won’t have to cry myself to sleep. someday i’ll feel warm and loved and wanted and i’ll be wrapped up safely in my beloved’s arms and there won’t be anything worth worrying over. someday i’ll be loved. someday i’ll be seen.
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dont-offend-the-bees · 5 months
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God I fucking miss my days of Dirk Gently fandom
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paperlovesadness · 1 year
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Ugh, sometimes I look into Miles' comment sections and feel so bad for him.
I don't think I need the disclaimer if you know my blog - but just in case. Yes, I love TLSP. As a band - they're in my very top of favorites (next to a bunch of dead people bands). As people - I'm fascinated by them both apart and together.
But I can't bear seeing the amount of people who ignore Miles himself and his solo stuff to just shout "GIVE US TLSP3" / "DO THIS SONG WITH ALEX" at him. Lord, get a grip people. If you love the band so much - be nice and considerate to one of its actual frontmen.
He's talented in his own right. Very. We need more respect and appreciation for that.
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worstloki · 1 year
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random thorki headcanon time (if u want)
they were both envious of what they perceived the other having for so long that they struggle with grasping the perspective of the other. their immediate assumption is always to doubt the other brother recounting their feelings of an event properly, making communication the largest hurdle between them when trying to repair their relationship.
#they both understand each other as brothers on a fundamental level but assuming they know the other never goes well#they struggle with separating each other from themself in their head and the idea of having MISSED the changes frustrates them both#but on the envious thing it's like#Thor looked at Loki and saw that he had freedoms he never did and Frigga's ear/willingness to humour him#while Thor had standards enforced on him which he struggled to make personal and Odin's favour which was not a boon of comfort#Loki looked at Thor and saw him commanding freedoms he never had and their Father with the Kingdom's favour in trust#while Loki struggled to keep up with standards enforced on him and Frigga wasn't the sage counsel he could speak loosely to#i think Loki saw Thor performing peak Asgardian masculinity and wondered why he couldn't too and he lowkey gave up on competing#Loki didn't see Thor as competition he saw Thor as everything he *wasn't* so every time he failed a task he was envious#but it wasn't directly at Thor as much as it was on himself#he saw Thor being popular and sleeping around and just being Thor and that would never be something he could do#he recognized that because it wasn't what he personally desired to do and he wasn't happy with the idea of being entertainment for people#while Thor refused the idea that the path that was expected of him was not what he wanted - and if it wasn't it's what he *should* want#so he overcorrects and plays to be larger than life because that's his role and the duty he'll be given at the end of the day#Thor looked at Loki and thought it must be nice not to have that pressure of conforming#he looked at Loki being stronger in areas like study and magic and wished he could focus on things he liked too#he was jealous that Loki could look at a situation and make the decision to leave a fight when Thor couldn't do that#etc. etc.#this has been brodinsons but it would make any thor/loki secx much spicier for them both#to have a part of them that can't stop hating the other#because they vied for what the other had for so long
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madegeeky · 2 months
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Epic Free Game (til 4 Apr 2024, 10am ct)
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Take to the sky and reunite a fragmented world in this surprisingly wholesome metroidvania! Help Iko adventure across beautiful hand-painted islands, receive letters from a quirky cast of characters, and face powerful monstrous adversaries.
#free games roundup#next week is outer worlds again which i highly recommend#and also the thief remake which is garbage#you know one of the most interesting and best things about the thief games?#the lore and everything that comes with it#that sounds insane i know it's just a game about stealing stuff#but the lore in it was so interesting#and they just didn't even bother at all with the lore?#like this amazing and original and fascinating lore?#gods and factions and wild magic and metal technology and they ignore it?#like i just do not understand it at all#anyway if you're into stealth games i cannot recommend the thief games enough#the first one can be a bit rough around the edges#but then they were doing something that no one had done before#so they were basically having to just mcguyver stuff until it worked#honestly i recommend using cheats to help with the rougher tough spots#there's not any to use the traditional way (commands)#i think that i had to find like a separate program for it#mostly i use it for dealing with zombies#because yeah there are zombies in the thief game#and you deal with them really early on#you think they'd slowly introduce zombies into a game that's supposed to be stealing#but nope it's like here's the second level with zombies XD#oooo and i love the maps in thief#they're awesome#they're hand drawn and they're based on what info garret can find#so they're often missing chunks of data and you just have to explore#it's such a little thing that i feel adds so much to the feel of the game#anyway apologies for next week when you'll probably hear this rant again >.<#i was really excited for the thief remake too :(
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rubys-domain · 1 year
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uwu
#⇢₊˚⊹ 🩷∥ruby∥yo,ide yo !!#i cried a little about an hour ago#no specific reason. life is just too much and the negativity i suppress always catches up to me at some point#i'm by no means okay now#but pretty pictures give me just that tiny bit of serotonin#why do i suppress in the first place? well#because i don't know how to NOT suppress#i physically can't conceive of any other way to deal with shitty emotions#yeah i need therapy i know#if only i could afford it#... i miss playing genshin for the first time#everything felt so magical and exciting#as cheesy as that choice of words is#not that i don't enjoy it anymore#there was just something so special about playing it for the first time that's not there anymore after progressing through most of the game#back in the day it was just me chongyun bennett and noelle. and whichever of the starter characters i needed at any given time#and then i got xingqiu from hu tao's banner#and the team has been inseparable ever since#the fourth is honestly a flex slot#it used to be noelle. and then collei for a time. and then mika. and now i might go with sucrose for grouping once i get her leveled#although it will be kinda sad missing mika's speed buff that makes chong move almost as fast as a sword user combined with his own skill#which in theory translates to more dps#but nowadays i get kind of impatient with picking off small enemies one by one when farming ley lines and such#i just want the deed over and done with as fast as possible#and sucrose herding all of them together means i can hit them all at the same time. and therefore kill them all just as fast#the only problem is that i only have her c0 on main#and c0 sucrose is... it's painful#and i don't have sac frag either#so yeah... really wish she was in the starglitter shop#there's like three electro in the shop and zero anemo. like why
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kitten4sannie · 4 months
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ᴅᴜɴɢᴇᴏɴ ᴄʀᴀᴡʟᴇʀ
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ꜱᴇx ᴘᴏʟʟᴇɴ/ʙᴜᴋᴀᴋᴋᴇ ➠ ᴍɪɴꜱᴀɴʏᴜɴʜᴡᴀ
pairing: half orc! mingi x elf! reader (fem) x barbarian! san x goliath! yunho x tiefling! seonghwa
genre: fantasy au/dnd vibe, humor, gratuitous smut
summary: you go on a quest with a group of brutish, questionable individuals. anything for some gold and riches, right? 
w.c: 6.5k ish…..yeahhhh
the world’s longest list of warnings:  alcohol mention/usage, soft/hard! dom party members, brat in the streets baby in the sheets sub! reader, these mfs have a hard-on for social hierarchies esp mingi (he’s a big pervert too hehe), mxm (real homies jerk each other off), monster fucking (mimic box…listen i saw it in a porn one time and its been my dream to recreate it since okay sue meee take me to court!!), five?? some?? idk they made it work somehow, voyeurism/exhibitionism, praise/degradation, pet names, olfactophilia, aphrodisiacs, teasing, vast size differences, size kink, strength kink, manhandling, oral (receiving), overstim, tit play, bulge kink, handjob, blowjob, titjob, all the jobs actually, double penetration made possible with magic incantations <3, creampies, back shots, and facials for everyoneeee !! one for you!! and for youuu~~ also the word cock is mentioned at least 50 times in this one sorry bout that hshjs
a/n: hi ahhhh so this chaotic jumble of insanity is my baby 🥹 and it’s also my very first filth fest fic of the month !!! so yk what that means ;3 go on and strap in for me okay? it’s about to go down frfr <3 this is a sort of sequel to my half orc mingi fic but it can be read on its own! also i’ve never actually played dnd,, i’ve just heard about it from my brother so don’t expect an extremely accurate representation;;; i did do quite a bit of research tho <33 but yeah that being said…. rip reader’s elussy </3
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ᴅɪʀᴛʏ ᴡᴏʀᴋ ʙʏ ꜱᴛᴇᴇʟʏ ᴅᴀɴ
0:01 ❍─────── 3:01
Volume: ▁▂▃▄▅▆▇ 100%
ᴘʀᴇᴠ | ꜰꜰꜰ ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ | ɴᴇxᴛ
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“Ladies and gents, now this is a quest that’s not for the faint of heart,” your local guild master announced, leaning his heavy forearms on the crowded bar table below him, stroking his long, bushy beard absentmindedly, the wood furnishing of the bar creaking underneath his weight. 
The lively room grew a bit more quiet, some individuals quirking their heads in the seasoned barbarian’s direction, yours included. “With a hefty 1000 gold pieces as your reward, this quest requires you to find and locate the rare lujuria plant, then bring its seeds back to me. Unfortunately for you lot, they’re only found in the abandoned dungeons near Mist Falls. Any takers?” 
At the mention of the plant and location, most of the interested individuals turned back to their ale and friends, resuming their loud, enthusiastic conversations. You, however, couldn’t believe how idiotic the other patrons were. You could do quite a lot with 1000 gold pieces, and being a solo adventurer, you wouldn’t even have to share it with anyone. With dollar signs in your eyes and a spring in your step, you headed up to the busy bar, having to get on your tippy toes and wave your hand around past some of the larger patron’s broad shoulders until the guild master noticed your presence. 
“Now, don’t tell me a dainty little high elf is interested in the quest I just announced. You gonna scare them off with your shiny hair and sparkly crystals?” the older man gruffed, letting out a hefty laugh, before taking a couple gulps from the oversized mug he held within his large, calloused hands.
When you simply stood there with your hands crossed over your lace-covered chest, the guild master set his mug down, his bushy eyebrows raising upwards. “Oh, you’re serious.” He leaned down to your level, cupping his hand around one side of his face, allowing you to smell the ale on his breath. “Do you know why no one likes to go to Mist Falls, little Miss?”
You shook your head, causing the small jewels that dangled from your silky hair to sway a bit. You cupped a hand around your own face, murmuring, “Why does no one like it, Mister?”
“There’s some strange wildlife that frequent the land there. Otherworldly things…things that an elf like you wouldn’t want to get wrapped up in,” he explained carefully, looking over the lens of his glasses to squint at you. “Unless, you’re into that sort of thing, of course.” 
Not understanding what he meant by his vague statement, you shrugged it off, taking his underestimation of your abilities as a challenge you couldn’t bear backing down from. “I’ll take the quest, Mister, and I’ll bring you those seeds.” 
The guild master smiled down at you, chuckling a bit, like you weren’t in on the joke that he was so amused by. “Very well, little Miss.” He handed you the rolled-up scroll, his lips still curled into a suspicious smile. “Good luck with your quest.” 
Taking the scroll, you nodded your head at him, a smug smile painting your own face, as you turned on your heels to leave, reveling in the fact that your levels of commitment and intelligence were clearly in the upper echelons compared to the rest of the idiots that frequented the crowded guild.  
Before you could leave without any issues, a deeply familiar, incredibly cocky-sounding baritone voice interrupted your mental victory dance. “Would you look at that. Gonna handle a dungeon all on your own, eh, princess?” 
You quickly turned your head, your eyes landing on the tall, solid beast of a half-man, half-orc standing with one hand resting on his leather-bound hip, his golden eyes slowly studying your body with an almost nauseating amount of interest. “Mingi…” you sighed, the events of your last few meetings flashing through your brain, the tips of your ears turning a faint red. “Oh, you think I can’t handle a stupid quest on my own either, huh?” 
He shook his head, his shaggy silver hair falling in his eyes, forcing him to swipe it out of the way with his large ringed fingers. “Nope.” His simple response encouraged his equally large, equally intimidating party members, who were hanging out near him, to laugh and chatter amongst themselves. 
Now your hands were on your hips, getting hit by a wave of annoyance, your cheeks burning.  “Watch me.” 
Mingi took a step towards you, just to show you and anyone nearby just how much he towered over you, his lips quirking up into a shit-eating grin, still peering down at your body like he could already picture what you looked like without the form-fitting lace dress that was wrapped around your curvy body like a pretty present, one that he wanted to open as soon as possible.
“With a petite little body like yours?” He reached down to slip a finger into your hair, playing with one of the crystals that adorned it. “Yeah, so small and delicate, like a pretty little fairy, ain’t ya? Those monsters in that dungeon will swallow you whole.”
You might’ve hated Mingi to an extent, but he was good. Good at making you feel tiny and desirable, and so wet, you were afraid he’d be able to smell it from where he was standing. You closed your thighs together slightly, lowering your closed fists to your sides, leaning forward. “I-i’m not a fairy, you dumb orc! I'm an elf! And I don’t need your help!” Just as you turned around to leave, Mingi cleared his throat, making you turn your head back to glare at him. 
He placed his other hand on his hip, letting his weight shift to the opposite side, his head tilting the other way. “Sweetheart, listen, I know you’re very capable of getting what you want,” he mused, chuckling softly at the way your face scrunched up slightly in embarrassment. “But, I’m sure you could use some extra party members to back you up. Me and the boys want to help you. Won’t you let us?”
You gazed at Mingi a little while longer, before your eyes shifted to his friends, first drawn to the most elegant-looking tiefling you’ve ever seen. He had sleek skin that looked like expensive marble, his hair as white as the frost that would cover all the lands during the winter months, his heavy horns ridged and curled into an ‘s’ shape, and black as soot, his thin, pointed tail quietly slithering around in a snake-like motion behind the long black cloak that hung from his pointed shoulders. 
“That’s Seonghwa,” Mingi informed, with his arms folded across his wide tattooed chest. “Doesn’t talk much, unless it’s to cast a spell or call me stupid.” 
Seonghwa’s pretty lips formed a smirk, wrapping his arms comfortably around his slim, corseted waist, his sharp, milky eyes focused intensely on you, like he was peering through you and straight into your soul. 
“Oh, are we introducing ourselves?” someone said excitedly, your eyes following the voice upwards until they landed on the handsome face of the gentle-looking goliath standing besides the tiefling. At roughly seven feet tall, the broad man sported shiny, golden locks, pretty brown eyes, and a tribal tattoo that was plastered on his veiny neck, clad only in a thick pelt that sat comfortably around his solid waist, wearing matching furry cuffs on his thick forearms. “I’m Yunho! I like to get drunk and smash stuff. What do you like to do, elf girl?” The goliath stepped forward to shake your hand, his hand completely encompassing yours, your neck almost hurting from having to look up at him. 
“Hi, Yunho,” you replied, smiling softly, feeling a bit dizzy from your vast difference in sizes. Everything about him was just so big, you couldn't help but wonder what else was too. “I’m Y/N. I like to go on quests and collect gold.” 
“Don’t tell me we’re actually going to help a high elf,” the last party member interrupted in a low voice, sneering, showing off his large, rounded canines when you looked past Yunho to scoff at him. “And an annoying one, at that. I don’t care if she’s fuckable. This is still a waste of time.”
Yunho put a large, warm hand on your shoulder, covering it completely. “Don’t take San’s words seriously, sweet. He bullies people when he likes them.” 
The brooding barbarian folded his arms over the thick, furry pelt that covered his broad upper half, rolling his eyes, a few strands of his wild raven hair falling past his forehead. “Or maybe I just don’t like stuck-up little elven brats, ever think of that, Yunho?” His pronounced eyebrows joined together in a bout of sudden fury. “Huh? Can you even hear me up there, you oversized son of a bitch?”
A faint blush appeared on Yunho’s cheeks, smiling in San’s direction, before looking back down at you. “See? He loves me.” 
You returned his smile with a grimace. “He loves being a dickhead too, apparently.”
“Excuse me?!” San growled, about to walk up to the both of you to prove that he only loved moonshine, his trusty club, and himself. 
Mingi stepped in front of San, waving his hands around exasperatedly, wishing someone presented a dialogue skip option a long time ago, bored of the introductions. “Alright, alright, so are you coming with us, or not, princess? What’s the verdict?”
You rolled your eyes, opening the large entrance door of the guild, eventually letting out a long sigh, glancing back over your shoulder with a pout. You knew you had a slim chance of surviving without them, but you still had your pride. You let out a small hmph, annoyed when they still all just stood there waiting, encouraging you to stomp your silk shoe down on the ground, grumbling, “Ugh, are you coming, or what?”
Mingi and his friends chuckled amongst themselves and elbowed each other, amused by the amount of fiery zealousness your tiny body possessed, finishing their mugs of ale, eventually following you out of the guild and onto the dirt road. 
“Hurry up! I wanna explore this dungeon today, not during the next winter solstice!” you called out to them, already at the forest entrance, tossing your head back in an exaggeratedly annoyed fashion.
The half-orc waved his hand around nonchalantly, despite his large lower canines growing more and more visible the more he began to smile, pulling out a small pair of lace panties that had a familiar design etched into them. “Yeah, yeah, don’t get your little elf panties in a twist,” he chuckled, bringing them up to his face to take a sniff.
Your inquisitive expression melted down into one of horror, then scrunched again, this time pleading him with his eyes. “Mingi…don’t tell me you’ve kept those all this time.”
“Of course I have, princess. In fact, I jerk off with them every chance I can in your honor. I can cum real hard just from knowing I turned a high elf onto orc cock forever. I still remember like it was yesterday,” he sighed dreamily, wiping away a fake tear, like had just said the most romantic sentence even known to orckind.
“I still fuck elves, you twat! I don’t need you or your stupid orc cock!” you argued, turning away so that none of them could see how flushed you had gotten, heading into the forest by yourself.
“That’s a damn lie. You showed up to my hut like three times during the Great Hunt not too long ago,” Mingi explained, following after you, his friends following beside him. “Don’t you remember? I had to carry you home after you passed out from squirting too hard.”
“No!” you shouted from ahead of him, swearing you were going to melt into the floor.
“She’s got elven pride, that one,” Mingi sighed, admiring you from behind. “Anyway, I got her soaked panties to prove it. You want to see them, don’t ya, Hwa?” Mingi elbowed Seonghwa, who just shook his head in disappointment, while he continued smiling truimphantly to himself.
࿏࿏࿏
Your group took on a range of opponents, from skeleton armies to disingenuous slime cubes that you may or may not have fallen into, able to pass through quite a few levels of the dungeon, mostly due to Seonghwa’s spell casting abilities, San’s uncontrollable rage, Yunho’s knack of destroying anything he came in contact with, and Mingi’s axe-wielding skills. Did you want to admit that to yourself? Sure. Out loud? No, of fucking course not. 
You picked off bits of pink slime that still clung to your wet form, grumbling under your breath about how sticky you felt, not even noticing that some of the slime had already absorbed into your skin. 
“Need a little help there, princess?” Mingi mused, reaching down to your shoulder and wiping off some of the slime for you, his fingers tingling once he had done so. 
“I suppose so,” you murmured, standing still so that he could continue helping you, surprisingly not even that bothered when the other members of your newfound party all gathered around you and picked or pulled off the remnants of slime that remained on your body, face, and hair. 
As you entered the next room, all five of you noticed how the tinglyness remained, how it spread throughout your bodies like a gentle ripple effect, your bodies now collectively hot to the touch, though no one said anything to each other — at least, not yet, anyway. 
“A chest!” you gasped excitedly, putting your dagger back into its respective holder and running up to the large, gold-plated chest that sat at the edge of the room, just waiting for someone to open it up and collect its contents. 
“Don’t be stupid, elven brat. Not all chests are filled with treasure. Some of them could be decoys. You know that, right?” San rested the rounded bottom of his ginormous club down onto the dungeon floor, leaning on it, raising an eyebrow at you. “Or do you only familiarize yourself with crystals and orc cock?” 
“Shut up!” You held onto the barbarian’s insult, rather than hearing him out. “You’re just saying that because you want the treasure for yourself!” You got on your knees in front of the chest, muttering, “Selfish prick.” 
“What’d you say?!” San barked, his hand squeezing around the thick handle of his weapon. 
Mingi slung an arm around San’s tense shoulders, smiling as though he was quite pleased with himself. “She’s got a mouth on her, huh?” He met San’s grimace with a shoulder squeeze. “Don’t worry, Sannie. She’s gonna learn the hard way.” 
Yunho walked up beside Seonghwa, lowering himself down to sit on the cool stone ground with a thud, wiping a bit of perspiration that had formed on his forehead. “I’ve been feeling weird since we left the slime room, Hwa. Can you cast a healing spell?” 
“Yeah, me too, now that you mention it,” Mingi called out, rubbing his sweat-covered neck with his free hand, encouraging San to open his own black furry coat, revealing an expanse of sweaty, tan, tattooed skin underneath it. 
Seonghwa nodded his head in agreement, waving his hand around in front of him, manifesting a large glowing violet pentagram into existence, which eventually disappeared after the spell had be casted completely, a faint glow still visible around the edges of your bodies. 
“Mm, I don’t really feel any different…” Mingi mumbled, his hot-blooded body even more tingly than before, starting to feel like he could fuck someone into oblivion right at that moment, even more than usual. 
Once you had opened up the chest, ignoring the subsequent pounding inside your chest and cunt, you were met by a multitude of shiny, gold coins just waiting for you to take. “Holy shit, I’m rich!” 
“You better split that with us, before I split you in half with my cock, stupid elf!” San griped from where he stood, now a bit hunched over, his words slightly slurred, not even fully realizing what he was saying. 
“Wh-what?!” you squeaked, your ears bright red, turning your head to look at the barbarian in disbelief, not even noticing when the chest in front of you began to sprout limbs, a long, slimy tongue slipping out past the gold. 
“I said, I’ll split you open–” San fully dropped his club, which resulted in a resounding thud inside the small room. He pointed an accusatory finger in your direction, blinking at you through his hazy vision, using his other hand to grab at himself through his furry kilt. “–with my big, barbarian cock!” 
Yunho pointed at you as well, wanting you to notice the big monster that was about to have its way with you. “Um, Y/N, you should…” 
“Not now, Yunho, I have to tell this idiot barbarian to suck my clit!” you informed angrily, holding your middle finger up at San, which he returned enthusiastically. 
“Oh, yeah? Then, get your fucking ass over here and sit on my face, you elf slut,” San barked back, sticking his tongue out at you, still holding onto Mingi, appearing drunker by the second — though it wasn’t alcohol running rampant through his body. It was lust. The rest of them were feeling it too. 
“Slut? I’ll show you slut,” you grumbled, about to stand up and give San a piece of your mind, your fist, and possibly your body when the mimic suddenly snatched you up with its long limbs and pinned you to the floor. “Oh my god, what’s happening? What the fuck is that?!” 
San simply chuckled, leaning his back against the cold concrete wall of the small room, trying to cool his intensely heated body down. “That’s a mimic, dummy. I’m sure you can handle it though, since you’re so tough.” 
Mingi looked to his friends, biting at his lip, noticing that none of them even attempted to assist you, more concerned with finding out what the monster was about to do to you. Even Yunho, who was the only one with any semblance of a conscience out of the entire party, somehow couldn’t bring himself to get up, instead answering to the oversized tent that was forming underneath his pelt. 
The mimic pinned your wrists together above your head with one strong hand, using the other to lift one of your legs up into the air, breathing harshly as it studied your slick cunt through your tiny lace panties, eventually licking a long stripe up your body, from your pussy up to your chest, leaving your white garments completely soaked and see-through. 
Trying desperately to free your hands from the monster’s unwavering grip, unable to prevent more slick from leaking out of you with your legs being held open, you angled your head back to look at the upside-down versions of your party, crying out, “Are you fuckers just going to sit there and watch?!” 
“Yeah…we are, sweetheart,” Mingi sighed out, still leaning on San, a few drops of sweat cascading down his flushed face. He dragged his tongue across his teeth, breathing in the flowery scent of your arousal, inhaling so deeply his bull ring shifted slightly. “I’m sure you got it handled. Just tire it out with that wet fucking cunt of yours, will ya?” 
A strong wave of pleasure pulsed through your body at Mingi’s response, looking to each of the members, realizing that they were really just going to observe as you got pleasured by the monster, getting more aroused by the second. What was wrong with you? You would’ve contemplated it more, but any thoughts you had would completely fizzle out once the mimic’s tongue came in contact with your cunt, licking you up and down in a rapid, desperate fashion. Its tongue was so heavy and hot against your pulsing cunt, you couldn’t help but cum within a few minutes, your body going limp. “Fuuuck, oh my god…” 
“Came nice and hard, didn’t you?” Mingi continued to share his filthy words with you and his party, all five of you reacting positively to it. “I can fucking smell it, princess…” His smile twisted into a faux pout, his voice dripping with lust. “That tongue isn’t enough for you though, is it? Mm-mm, not nearly enough. You need cock stuffed inside your tight elven pussy, don’t you, darlin’?”
All you could do was let out a long pathetic whine, your flushed, fucked-our face giving Mingi and the boys the answer they needed. Now that you weren’t fighting back, the mimic lifted your lower half up into the air, positioning you so that its tongue could slither inside you, pistoning it in and out of your willing hole, your upper half hanging upside down, your tits bouncing with each of the mimic’s thrusts of its wet appendage, your writhing body on display for your party members’ viewing pleasure. “I’m…going to…kill you all…for watching…” you huffed out in between moans, drool slipping out past your parted lips. 
Mingi turned his head to share looks with his friends, all of them now dealing with the same almost painful predicament. “Are you all as hard as I am…?” When they nodded, he felt a little less guilty, reaching down to rub at his leaking cock through his kilt, able to feel how stiff it was even through the thick material. He gazed down at you, biting at his bottom lip, holding onto the thick leather of his body harness, trying not to blow his load too quickly. “It feels good, doesn’t it, princess? I can hear how just how sloppy that mess of a cunt is…Do you like the way it’s fucking you senseless with its tongue? Is it filling you up just right?” 
You couldn’t believe just how turned on you were in the moment, hardly about to breathe in between your bouts of pleasure, your body beginning to sieze up when the mimic shoved its tongue as deep as it could go, causing a prominent bulge to form inside your lower stomach. “S-so good, Min, gonna cum again…” 
“Cum for us, baby, that’s it…” Mingi sighed, leaning his shoulder against San’s, noticing how he began to play with his cock through his kilt, doing his friend a solid and reaching over to stroke the base of it for him. 
Groaning underneath his breath, San reached over to help Mingi out as well, the both of them hyperfixated on the way the mimic drank up your juices as though it needed it to live. Seonghwa and Yunho were in a similar position, but instead of answering to their aching cocks, they simply watched on, the visual stimulation clearly enough for them. 
The mimic lifted your limp body upwards so that you were on your knees, with its large, agile tongue fitted in between your trembling thighs, grabbing you by the waist so that it could drag you back and forth along its long, slimy appendage. “Just like that, oh my god, it’s so–fuck–” you gasped, barely able to look at the men that were huddled around you, the new position not allowing you to hide away from their hungry gazes, your body on full display for them. 
With his hand now fully hidden underneath San’s kilt, Mingi nodded his head at you in approval. “That’s my naughty little elf girl,” he praised you in a gravelly voice, groaning at the sensation of San tugging at his dripping cock from underneath his own pelt. “Let me see you cum one more time for us, princess. Can you do that?” 
“Yes, Mingiii, I’ll cum for you,” you whined obediently, reaching down your shiny, wet body to rub your clit around through your thin, soaked panties, unable to keep your mouth closed anymore from how hard you were breathing. 
“What a good listener you are, baby. Look at you playing with your tiny little clit without me having to ask. Such a good elf girl you are,” Mingi continued to praise you, knowing exactly what made you tick, his hand squeezing around San’s throbbing length. 
San let out a higher pitched moan, his body beginning to tremble against Mingi’s. “I can’t believe you–unnh–managed to tame her so easily…” 
“It wasn’t hard, Sannie…fuck– She may be a brat, but she’s a good girl at heart…” Mingi was beginning to fall apart as well, San’s calloused hand continually rubbing along his cock enhancing the pleasure of watching you willingly playing with yourself while you rode a monster’s tongue, his party’s presence filling him with even more warmth. “Cum for us, sweetheart, show us how pretty you are when you fall apart…” 
Mingi’s praise-filled request mixed with the sensation of your puffy clit grinding along the mimic’s slick tongue sent you barreling over the edge, cumming so hard, you saw stars, barely able to grasp at the dagger that still sat inside its holster.
Meanwhile, San and Mingi both began to groan and shudder against the cool dungeon wall, shooting their hot loads onto each other’s hands and the insides of their pelts. Seonghwa and Yunho both coated their own undergarments with white, biting into their bottom lips so hard they just about broke the skin.
They were all so deep in their wells of ecstasy that they hardly even noticed when you let out a war cry and stabbed the mimic with your long dagger, rendering it dead, causing it to fade away in a flurry of sparkly, white dust, leaving a few gold pieces for you to take. 
“I told you I could fucking take care of myself,” you grimaced, shoving your items into a small pouch you had hanging from your upper thigh.
Once the post-nut clarity set in, Mingi cleared his dry throat, scratching at his prickly chin. “I mean, you did defeat the mimic on your own, so credit is due when credit is due, princess. You just used your pussy to combat it…which is just as valid as using a real weapon, don’t get me wrong–”
“Shut it!” you simply yelled, your face so hot, it probably rivaled the surface of the sun, stomping past the recovering men and pushing the next door open once it unlocked itself, wasting no time to enter the last floor of the dungeon where the supposed lujuria plant was said to grow. 
“Let’s go help her out with that plant. And remember, whatever happens, happens. Just know I’m not fucking any of you.” Mingi patted San’s shoulder, looking over to the other members of his party with a playful smile.
San smacked Mingi’s back playfully, which Mingi returned. “Let’s put that elf brat in her place.”
Mingi nodded. “Yeah, on my cock where she belongs.”
Seonghwa scoffed from beside them. “Could you be anymore crass?”
Yunho patted Mingi’s and Seonghwa’s shoulders, practically dislocating them, smiling goofily, his cheeks and face flush from the energy he exerted.  “What happens in the dungeon, stays in the dungeon, boys.”
Seonghwa quietly nodded his head in agreement, until he murmured softly, “Indeed.” 
࿏࿏࿏
“Where are you, you stupid fucking plant?” you called out inside the vast, foliage-covered room, swiping at the overgrown leaves and plants that were in your way, almost tripping over a few vines that grew in and out of the broken-up cobblestone floor below your feet. 
The rest of your party followed your lead, Mingi and Yunho taking the initiative to cut down the thicker plants and foliage that stood in your way with their axes, almost completely out of breath when you finally came across a large pink plant growing in the middle of the room. 
“I’m assuming that’s it,” you said mostly to yourself, slowly walking up to the plant, impressed by its intricate petals and inviting flowery scent. “It’s not as scary as I thought it’d be. It’s almost…pretty…” 
Just as you reached out to touch it, Seonghwa opened his mouth to warn, “Wait, don’t–”
As soon as your slender fingers came in contact with one of the flower petals, the plant sent out a puff of dusty pink pollen directly into your face and the air around your party, before folding in on itself and growing comically large spikes to protect its core which contained the golden glowing seeds you needed to complete your quest. 
You began choking and coughing along with the others, reaching out blindly through the thick pollen, finding solace in Seonghwa’s arms, who began reciting a spell to lessen the effects of the plant’s attempt at self defense, but it was too late. Mind-altering desire had already set in. “Can’t breathe…can’t think…” you whispered, grabbing at Seonghwa’s chest, unbuckling his top and revealing his smooth, marble skin, henna-like tattoos decorating his jewelry-adorned collar bone. 
Seonghwa clutched your shoulders, breathing just as profusely as you were, murmuring, “Don’t think, then, silly elf,” before pressing his mouth onto yours with haste, his long, snake-like tongue slipping inside your mouth to explore it.
Strong, solid hands grabbed at your hips from behind, Mingi pulling them back so that he could grind his cock into your ass, his lips already ghosting along your neck. His deep, gravelly voice made you let out a weak moan into Seonghwa’s mouth when he sighed, “Gonna fill your cunt full of my cum, sweetheart. So fucking full.” 
“Then, I get to fill her slutty elf cunt with my tongue first,” San interrupted, already on his knees, positioning himself in between you and Seonghwa, not hesitating to tear your skirt and panties apart to access your rapidly dripping cunt. “So pink, so pretty…” He attached his drooling mouth onto your clit, sucking so roughly, your knees almost buckled underneath you, about to completely collapse when he plugged your hole up with his hot tongue. 
Seonghwa pulled away slightly, finally letting you breathe without having his tongue down your throat, instead completely shredding  the front of your dress with his talons, just in time for Mingi to groan and cup your tits, squeezing and moving them around, saliva leaking past his plump lips. “I always know exactly what your idiotic orc brain is thinking,” he sighed at Mingi, bringing his own hands up to tweak and pinch at your nipples, making you cry out. 
“Oh, yeah? Can you read my mind right now, Hwa? Can you tell that I’m about to stretch this elf’s little fuckhole wide open with my fat fuckin’ cock?” he said near your twitching, elongated ear, his hard length slipping in between your thighs to rub along the underside of your cunt, his dark eyes settled on Seonghwa’s before returning to your slick body, their hands moving in tandem to play with your tits, each getting a chance to squeeze your squishy flesh and tease your increasingly puffy nipples. 
Yunho, who was hard beyond measure and feeling a little left out, walked up to the side of you and reached down to show off his enormous cock, the slick , oversized tip an angry shade of red. He pouted down at you, letting out a small whimper. “Can you please help me out, sweet? I’m so hard, it hurts…” 
Unable to resist his puppy-dog eyes, you nodded, licking your lips, collecting his vast amounts of pre-cum at the rounded tip with your fingers, eventually using it to slick up the rest of his cock, doing your best to jerk him off with your small hands. “Does that feel good, Yunho?” 
“So good, doll,” he gasped, leaning his head back, not registering when he began to thrust his hips forward into your hands, using them like a fleshlight. 
You’re so big, Yunho, fuck– I can hardly wrap my hands around it…” you sighed out, opening your mouth to lick at the tip of his cock each time he thrusted into your hands. Your mind went blank, until you suddenly remembered that San was in between your squeezing thighs, devouring your cunt like it was his last meal, his tongue and lips wreaking havoc on your clit, his thick fingers shoved inside your pulsing hole.
“Like the way I’m eating this cunt of yours, eh, elf girl?” San mumbled in between slurps, gulping your juices down, a few dribbles of it cascading down his veined throat. “You don’t even need to answer, love. I can tell you do just from the way you’re fuckin’ squeezin’ my fingers.” San groaned deeply, watching the way you dripped for him as he continually went knuckles-deep inside you, biting his bottom lip, growling, “Cum for me. Cum all over my face, you brat. Fuckin’ do it.”
You unraveled almost instantaneously, getting your creaminess sucked off of your slit by the desperate barbarian, not even noticing that he had been jerking himself off so roughly, he had already made himself cum before you did. 
“Goddamn it, since when did high elf squirt taste so fuckin’ good?” San mumbled drunkenly to himself, licking at his swollen lips, prior to sucking your cum from his fingers noisily.
“You’ve had your fun, Sannie boy. It’s time for this little elf girl to experience the pleasure of getting broken in by real men. Hwa, you know what to do,” Mingi announced hastily, already bringing you down to the floor so that you were about to slowly take the half-orc’s cock in your cunt from behind, Seonghwa supporting your front, the tip of his tail already brushing back and forth over your swollen clit, rubbing his large, ridged cockhead on your puffy lips to slick them up with his pre-cum, his own plump lips moving at a quick pace, expertly reciting an incantation that would allow you to physically take two obscenely large cocks at once, all well as increasing your natural lubricant and allowing you access to heightened physical sensations.
“Fuck, look at you…What a good little elf girl you are, taking us both inside you like this,” Mingi sighed into your ear, reaching around your body to lazily rub your wetness into your sensitive clit. “Almost like you were made to take monster cock, huh? Not made for little elven peckers, it seems.” He pressed his hand into your lower abdomen, able to feel the pronounced outline of his friend’s abnormally large length. “Mm, that’s right. You loved being stuffed full of monster cock, don’t you, sweetheart?”
“Love it, Min, so much,” you choked out, your mind going positively blank, the only thing on your mind being the insanely pleasurable stretch you felt inside your core, knowing you were quite literally filled to the brim. “Feels so good, I can’t think.”
“Why think when you can just feel good, princess?” he chuckled, rubbing your tummy in an up and down motion, feeling the outline of Seonghwa’s thick, ridged length with his calloused fingers, shuddering from the sensation of their slippery cocks rubbing along one another inside your tight, slick walls . He nuzzled your neck and the side of your face with his prickly cheek, whispering onto your skin, “M’ so proud of you, sweetheart. I broke you in before and now here you are, taking big tielfing cock in your pussy while an orc’s stuffing you just as full. What a pretty sight you are. Wish I could take a picture.”
“Oh my god, Mingi, please, it’s so–” you could hardly verbalize, your eyes just about rolling into your skull, your body pulsing with so much pleasure, you could barely keep up with what was happening around you.
Mingi routinely filled your elongated ears with more filthy words, Seonghwa gazing deeply at you, your willing hole continuing to clench around their thrusting cocks, getting stretched so pleasurably, you almost passed out from that sensation alone.
All the while, San positioned himself in from of your tits, squeezing them together and driving his cock back and forth between them, grunting and groaning each time.
Yunho gently grabbed your chin, coaxing your mouth open as wide as it would go, whispering, “That’s it, my sweet, just a little wider…” He began to feed you his cock, stuffing your mouth full and instinctively fucking your throat, your jaw already beginning to ache from the obscene girth. “You’re so tiny…can barely take it…huh?” Moaning breathily, Yunho eventually settled for fucking the inside of your gummy cheek, afraid that he would suffocate you if he continued to throat fuck you.
It seemed that this quartet had been in this exact position before. That was clear to you now. You couldn't have been more wet and willing if you tried. Getting used by two filthy men while two more watched and desperately tried to get off using your body in any way they could filled you with a sense of purpose you didn’t realize you had always sought after. 
“You want our cum in your pretty elf cunt, princess?” Mingi huffed, in between harsh, deliberate thrusts, his hands cemented on the reappearing bulge in your stomach. “Huh? You want us to make a mess of you, aye? Want to be fucked so full of our seed, you’ll give us pretty elven offspring?” 
Once Yunho freed your saliva-streaked mouth from his suffocating length and resorted to jerking himself off, you were able to reply in a fucked-out, slurred voice, “Yeah–yeah–yeah– fill me up, wan’ it all. All your cum, in me, on me, I need it, pleaseee.” 
Your willing party members’ highs all crescendoed in succession, Mingi resorting to sloppy, rough thrusts inside your tight hole until he spilled most of his load into you, his cum splashing onto Seonghwa’s cock, dripping along their lengths to form a milky rim. “Oh, fuck, that’s it…but I’m not done yet, princess…I gotta–nngh–leave my mark on my favorite elf…” He slowly pulled out with lewd pop, coaxing a few more cum shots out of his cock with a large, closed fist, watching the large milky droplets slide along your smooth skin and torn sections of your dress onto the curve of your exposed ass, his eyes creasing with clear adoration. “That’s more like it…”
“W-was that necessary…?” you murmured, trying not to cum just from the sensation of getting stuffed full of cum, sensing that Seonghwa was next in line to come undone inside you.
“Oh, my gods, I…see heaven,” Seonghwa gasped sharply, the whites of his boundless eyes glowing brightly, his lips parting to allow a shaky moan to escape. Seonghwa gripped your hips so tightly, he was bound to leave handprints, relying on slow, deliberate strokes, using your contracting cunt to milk the cum from his cock, unable to resist leaving a few drops on your clit and mound when he pulled out.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, gonna cum all over these tits, you little elven slut, take itttt,” San gritted his teeth, his jaw tightening, only having to pump himself between your slick, pre-cum covered tits once more before he was able to leave thick spurts of white all over the bottom of your heated face and lips, leaving most of his load on your messy tits.
“O-oh, godddd…!” Yunho came last, and the most, closing his hands around his reddened tip, whining profusely, unable to keep himself from completely unloading all over your pretty face and hair, practically drenching you in his cum. 
Mingi reached down to cup your chin, tilting your head back so that he could get a good look at you, admiring the way their collective seed dripped off and out of you, swearing he could shed a tear from such a beautiful sight. “Look at you. My pretty princess.”
You gently nuzzled his large hand, smiling contentedly, tasting the salt of someone’s load on your lips when you licked at them. “Your pretty princess…” 
It took a while for all of you to come down and catch your breath, the effects of the pollen still practically running through your veins, but you managed to wobble your way over to the main plant and slowly pull your trusty dagger out of its holder, slashing the plant until its precious seeds dropped into your open palm. You looked down at the golden, glowing seeds, your fingers still splattered with milky liquid, reminding you of the trials you conquered to get to your ultimate goal. As you wiped your sticky face with your sleeve, you looked around at your panting, much more docile party members, wondering if it was all worth it. 
Mingi brushed some of his sweaty hair out of his eyes, noticing the way you were looking up at him, sending a cocky smile your way. “So, you’re 200 gold pieces richer, princess. How does it feel?” 
“Huh?” you questioned immediately, your fingers closing around the pouch that contained the precious lujuria seeds. “It was 1000 gold pieces. Did fucking me stupid render you stupid instead?” 
“I’m sorry, darlin’, but with each party member fee, it rounds out at 200 a person,” he corrected you, bringing you in to give you a gentle hug and a pat on the ass, chuckling delightedly to himself, his friends joining in on the amusement. “That’s still quite a bit. You can buy yourself a pretty new dress since yours is all torn and drenched in our cum, ya’ know?” He leaned his head in your direction, twiddling his large thumbs, his smile growing more lewd. "That means I can have the one you're wearing right now, yeah?"
You grimaced, your blood boiling over, already stomping your way out of the last dungeon floor, your voice still growing louder and louder the further you walked away, swearing to yourself, “This is the last time I do anything with you, Mingi! Never again. Never! EVER!” 
Mingi simply waved off at his friend’s questioning gazes, holding the seeds that you had taken from the plant inside his own hand, admiring their shimmering edges. “Don’t worry. She always comes back.” 
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phantomrose96 · 22 days
Text
Sham Sacrifice: Chapter 2
(Sham Sacrifice: Chapter 1)
Chapter 2, because @ciestess voiced an idea that absolutely consumed my entire mind and I could not rest until I made this
...
Danny’s eyes tracked the swing of gunfire raining bullets across the horizon. Tucker reloaded, crouched, dodged left and pivoted, another blast of bullet confetti launched through a gaggle of zombie heads. He tossed the magazine and reloaded. Click. Ching. Danny flinched when a zombie smashed a hammer clean through Tucker’s head.
 “God. Fucking…” Tucker pulled out of his hunch. He unclamped his fingers from his controller like bug legs unfurling. He extended the controller to Danny, bouncing it in his grip. “Your turn.”
“Huh?” Danny asked, as if he hadn’t been watching Tucker’s game the whole time.
“You. You’re up. I died.”
Danny accepted the controller, reloaded the screen, and jogged about a hundred feet forward before the first horde of zombies took him out football-style from the left. The death screen rolled.
“Oops,” Danny said.
“Not your best work.” And Tucker took the controller back. Tucker shot a few spare glances to Danny while the level restart loaded in. “Is it Vlad?”
“No. Well, yes,” Danny answered, flopping back into his normal position on the Foley attic armchair. Tucker’s mom had planned to toss it ages ago, before it became Danny’s chair. “But at least he left when my parents went all zombie mode into the basement.” Danny picked absently at the scabs of leather flaking from the armrest. “It was just weird.”
“I don’t mean this as an insult, but it’s definitely not the first time your dad’s gotten some math wrong,” Tucker said. “He blows up like three things a week doesn’t he?”
“He does. But he doesn’t care when he gets that math wrong. This one was like I broke something important.” Danny’s expression soured, and he picked a leather flake clean off the chair. “Vlad did, I mean.”
“Does any of the math actually work?” Sam offered from Tucker’s desk. She leaned an elbow around the back of his chair, head tilted to Danny. A pencil dangled from her loose fingers, nib-half worn to the History of an Invention report she was actually working on. Tucker had half-assed his earlier in the day about the palm pilot. Danny had not done his. “Like, it’s all crackpot theory, right? Do ghosts even follow math?”
“I think they follow some math. It’s not magic that makes the ecto-bazookas work, or the Fenton-phones work, or—well the thermos DIDN’T work—until I made it work.”
The unspoken thing Danny had been not-quite-saying hung in the air. He said it this time.
“So I’m wondering if I did it. Like the Fenton thermos. And now maybe they’re gonna do the math all over and realize the missing piece of the equation is one half-ghost son.”
“Well the order is backwards, for starters,” Sam said. “Thermos worked because you pumped ghost-energy into it. How would you have done that to the portal? You were human when you walked in.”
“Sam’s right. What do you think you brought to the table exactly? Button-slapping abilities?” Tucker loaded up the next level. “It was their portal, and their math, and it worked. There’s a million-billion kinds of math and they probably just forgot one thing.”
Tucker took a headshot and died. Mechanically, he handed the controller back to Danny.
“Yeah, probably.”
“Ask Vlad. He’s got a portal.”
“Like Vlad’s gonna tell me.”
“Just promise to be his diligent little son minion or whatever. He’s easy. Wait, let me do the next level. You know I like the cyberpunk levels.”
“It’s not your turn,” Danny said, reeling the controller just out of Tucker’s wiggling grasp.
“I’ll let you do two in a row for your next turn.”
Danny knocked Tucker away, distracted just long enough for a zombie cyberbeam to launch from the horizon and take him out through the head.
The screen washed sepia. Danny stared at it. You died.
Danny hadn’t really meant to stay the night at Tucker’s place. They’d just gotten really far in Man vs. Zombie, and Sam had gone home, and Danny was just resting his eyes between his turns with the controller.
So when he woke to the bright strip of sunlight beaming into his eyes through the attic skylight, his first thought was Fuck.
He was awake, here, morning, school. Fuck he had not actually done his History of Invention report, despite the stupid amount of grief it had already caused him this weekend. He pulled his face out of the armrest, now pineapple-patterned from the decaying leather, and pawed for his phone fallen on the floor. If it was still early enough, he could maybe still afford to desperately half-ass something before sixth period science.
He flipped his phone open. A text from Jazz. “Don’t come home. Make up an excuse.”
“…Fuck,” Danny whispered, through the sensation of his heart launching itself into his throat.
He scrambled upright, whole body shaking at the mercy of adrenaline shock so soon after being pulled from dead sleep. His mouth was dry, teeth unbrushed, wearing his old clothes from yesterday, report not done, Don’t come home, Don’t come home, Don’t come home.
They knew. He’d fucked it up. Somehow they knew. The math. Something. And it had to be with guns blazing, because Jazz would not send that text if they’d taken the “We accept you” angle.
Were they coming for him? On their way here? Tracking by his phone? Did they like Mrs. Foley enough to not SWAT-slam her against the wall when she opened the door for them so they could come capture the ghost pretending to be their son?
Fuck.
Danny was upright. Danny was standing. Danny was shaking. Danny wasn’t actually sure what the next thing was he was supposed to do.
Tucker’s ball of blankets rustled from the couch. “Mmph?” he asked, articulately.
“I have to. Go deal with my parents, I think,” Danny said, because any plan felt a little better than no plan. “I think they know.”  
Danny was a ghost. Danny was gone. Tucker sat upright, alone, blinking himself awake. He was staring at the You Died sepia screen still displayed on monitor, now burnt into the plasma of the tv.
Danny paused with his human hand slick on the Fenton front door. The gears in his mind turned as his plan quickly unraveled into no-plan. He had no plan, right? What was his plan? Handle this Man vs Zombie style—open the front door ready to dodge wide, because both zombies and parents liked to camp behind closed doors with bazookas at the ready?
“—absolutely absurd, and entirely unscientific, with no probability of being true. It goes against everything we know about neurology.”
Oh, Jazz. Was Jazz enough of a bazooka-deterrent? Probably not. Knowing his parents.
Danny turned the knob. His heart hammered. If bazookas, dodge left.
The first thing he noticed was in fact the no-bazookas. It was what he was most looking for. And so it was Jazz’s expression he did not notice until second—whites of her eyes wide, snapped to Danny, with a look that would be accusatory if worry hadn’t won that battle. Her cheeks were pale. Her hair was unbrushed.
He noticed his parents third. Compulsively, he rocked back onto his right foot, still outside the doorway, still outside the threshold of the Fenton family household.
Seeing his parents tired was of absolutely no shock-value to Danny. It was at least a twice-per-month tradition to see them haul themselves up from the basement sweaty and glaze-eyed at 7am, babbling excitement about some new ecto-spectral-hoozy-whatsits whose concept had shimmed into their minds at 8pm and now existed, fully operational, 11 nonstop hours later.
So it wasn’t the exhaustion on their face. It wasn’t the stagnant smell of sweat or the paleness of their faces or the stains on their clothes.
It was the way they looked at him. Like their whole world had fallen apart with his foot passing over the doorstep.
“Danny,” Jazz said, choked, a break in the silence. “Things are…! A little weird here. So maybe, if you wanna just get to school, I’ll finish clearing up—there’s a misunderstanding Mom and Dad have with their math. I am state finalist in Math League and have been studying college-level calculus in preparation for school applications so I’ve offered to help them fix their math, or prove to them—”
“Danny,” Maddie said, an echo of Jazz, but it felt worse. Danny scanned her hands for anything pointed enough to be a weapon. They were empty. “Danny can I just ask you something honestly, just quickly? Jazz is right. I’m just trying to clear up an issue with our math. And I won’t be mad. Whatever the answer is, I won’t be mad. I just want an honest answer.”
She stepped closer. Danny fought the urge to match her with a step backwards. Her eyes roved over him in a starved way, looking for something.
“Were you there when the portal turned on?” she asked.
“No, I wasn’t,” Danny answered. He wasn’t sure what to do with his face to make it look convincing. “It just. It needed some time to boot up, or something, right? That’s what you two said.”
“That was our guess ,but we don’t really know. The security tapes are wiped. We tried to make them EMF-resilient but a very, very strong blast of EMF could still corrupt them.”
“Yeah. I mean the portal’s gonna do that, right? When it turned on? Ripping open the Ghost Zone that’s—gotta be huge EMF.” Danny’s focus bounced between his mother’s eyes. “Just a guess. I really don’t know. I was in bed, already, whenever the portal started working.”
Left eye. Right eye. Why was she looking at him like that? Like she was sad. Was this part a trick? Make Danny let his guard down, go hey Mom need a hug? and that’s when the bazooka-whipping starts? It made his ribs feel scratchy. Stop looking at me like that.
“Have you felt anything weird at all, since the portal started working? Any gaps in your memory? Any parts of you that don’t feel right? Is there any part of you that feels like it’s changed in a way you can’t explain?”
She reached a hand out. Danny instinctively recoiled.
“Uh, yeah. They taught us about this in health class. They call it ‘puberty’ there.”
“Danny,” Jack said, and his voice was scratchy from disuse, from a long and uncharacteristic amount of time spent not speaking. “Did you die in the machine?”
A beat. A moment. Like when the zombie sends a hammer through your head.
“I’M alive!” Danny declared with a crack in his voice, with hands slammed to his chest. “Look at me. What are you talking about?”
“It’s the only math that works,” Jack continued, his words like chalk, his voice too dead. He looked too much at Danny. “If one of you two walked into the portal, and died in it. And I don’t think it was Jazz.”
This was bad. This was weird. Danny had ghost powers, sure. ‘They can’t kill me I’m already dead,’ was a funny joke sometimes. But it was funny as a joke. He was a ghost sham, really. A faker, a LARPer, whatever Tucker had called it. He was a human who was just kind of a freak now. More of a freak than he already was. He looked dead, for someone who was super-duper still alive.
He’d buried that worry, already. They weren’t allowed to bring it back.
“Look… at me!” Danny continued, mouth dry. He threw his arms wide. “Look how super alive I am! I’m awake! Using energy! Eating food and sleeping with my human body. I’ve got flesh and blood and bones and stuff! I’m not a ghost-expert but ghosts don’t have that.”
This was weird. This made Danny feel like something was scratching to get free from inside his rib cage. It twisted his entrails. Sure Tucker and Sam had thought he was dead, for those first horrible few minutes, but then he changed back to a human and the nightmare ended there. Jazz never called him dead. The ghosts called him freak and halfa and whelp, but never ‘one of them.’ That was his whole thing: being different from the ghosts who became ghosts by something so normal as dying.
He was not dead.
“If you died in the portal, your ghost wouldn’t have been ripped out of your body. It would have been allowed to stay, and then you’d be…” Jack hesitated. “I don’t know what you’d be, but you wouldn’t be alive.”
“Dad,” Jazz said, and she stood herself bodily between Danny and Jack. “What an absolutely messed up out-of-line thing to say to your son! You don’t know that! Dad you’re tired, and just because you weren’t able to solve your math problem in one night doesn’t mean you get to treat Danny like this! I said I’d help you with your math! Now apologize to Danny.”
Jazz looked over her shoulder to Danny, her expression falling at the sight of Danny’s face.
Danny backed up over the door threshold. He shook his head. “I’m not comfortable with this. This is weird. I’m gonna go to school now.”
“Danny, I promise they’re just—”
Danny turned on heel. No backpack, no change of clothes. He took to the street without a single school supply and moved, and moved.
It was supposed to be guns-blazing. Molecule by molecule. Headshot you died. He’d prepared for that this whole time, in the shower, in his dreams, in his daydreams in class. He’d duck and dodge and explain himself over and over until they understood him.
Danny wasn’t sure he was capable of explaining himself anymore.
Danny knocked the heavy iron knocker. He was in ghost form, as a threat. He wondered if he still smelled like yesterday’s sweat now that he wasn’t wearing yesterday’s clothes. Now he was wearing the clothes he died in.
No one answered the door. Danny phased himself in.
“Vlad!” he called, and his words echoed along the slope of the two elaborate winding staircases that twirled and met at the top like caduceus. Gold-plated banisters. A security camera buried somewhere in the ceiling, no doubt.
Danny phased into the library. His eyes roved the three stories of bookshelves wrapping the perimeter like a sheath. Gaudy. Audacious. Like Vlad would ever read that much. Danny racked his brain because some something in here was the secret to opening Vlad’s laboratory. Jazz had told him. Some gold something to be touched, and pressed down, or pushed up? Or it opened to a button. Or a keypad, maybe.
Danny spat a curse. He was being stupid. He was frazzled. He wasn’t thinking straight.
He dove into the floor below. Intangibility was the only key he needed.
The sheetrock was cold, even when he wasn’t touching it. The darkness was so piercing it made static jump in his vision, some weird trick of the brain Jazz had explained where, in the absence of all light, the brain hallucinates its own. It came with a sensation of pressure against his eyeballs, and a complete disorientation of direction, and he simply just kept going down.
Danny emerged into a wash of cold air. Cold like metal was cold. The low lights of dials and clicking machines were bright to his eyes previously dunked into the pitchest nothing. He drank it in, eyes grateful for light no matter how little, inner ear grateful for orientation that had left his head swimming and his stomach tight.
His feet tapped down to the stone ground, and the air that breezed past him was chilled.
“Vlad!” Danny called again.
Nothing.
He moved by the floor lighting, which ran in trim along the perimeter of the laboratory rooms. It lit things from beneath, made machines gaunt and specimens into sharp geometries of darkness and flesh. It made the Fenton lab feel warm in a way Danny had never considered it warm.
His feet clacked. His breath puffed.
“Vlad!”
He followed light, followed a wash of green miasma percolating from some far room and catching on the particulate of water and dust that disturbed with the air currents. Danny disturbed it too, walking through, wearing its shade of green which his shadow robbed from the wall behind him.
“Vlad. I swear to god Vlad.”
He crossed the threshold of the portal room, where the dusting of green ambience became a medallion wash of golden-green coating, painting every surface of the room. The Fenton lab was one single expansive room, portal anchored into the far wall and facing all the dead and empty air in front of it. This was different. A much smaller room, walled on all sides save for the simple doorway, and each surface reflected the color back deeper and heavier. It was like a fishtank in the wall of an aquarium lit radiant aqua-blue by all the lights within, but green instead, pure ecto-green.
Danny approached the open portal. He stared into its placid swirls, mesmerized, and scared of it, in a way he hadn’t previously felt about the portal in the Fenton basement.
“Ah, seems the cat is a good mouser after all, it dragged you in my boy.” The words came sing-song. They came spine-shivering for Danny, who felt them like hot breath on his shoulder and reeled back, pivoted, fire crackling to life in his palms.
Vlad stood at the doorway, a solid 20 steps from Danny.
“Vlad.”
“So I’ve been hearing.”
“I need you to explain the portal.”
“Ah, I see you’ve spoken to your parents.” Vlad stepped in, washed in the ecto-green which muddied his ruby red eyes. He held his hands behind his back, cape trailing, a smirk on his fanged face. “Last I heard they weren’t taking the news very well.”
“What news. What did you tell them?”
“Me? Nothing. In fact, very kindly for your sake I even tried to drive them away from the answer but… We know how stubborn your parents can be.”
“What answer?”
“That you’re dead, Daniel.”
Shock washed like ice down Danny’s spine. It sent prickles like spider legs across his skin.
“Well, I suppose there’s still chance for some doubt. It could be Jazz. She could take the fall for you, if there’s any benefit to that at all.”
“I’m a halfa. We are halfas,” Danny said.
“A silly made up word by a silly child,” Vlad mused, and the light smile left his lips. “We are dead.”
“I’m not dead,” and Danny’s words were small, and they were childish.
“You are. I am. Embrace it. It’s nicer this way.” Vlad took a few steps closer, lionously tall in his saunter, feet clacking the ground. “It’s very freeing. After you’ve died already what is there left to fear?”
“I’m alive.”
“You’re a dead body with its soul still stuffed inside it like a Christmas goose. A lot of things in your body don’t work anymore, but ghosts don’t work right anyway and it is, for all its defiance of nature, a perfectly symbiotic relationship.” Vlad’s smile brushed his lips again, warm. “It’s nice to share this with you. Isn’t it nice to share things with people?”
Danny’s heart was beating too fast in his chest, and it was a human heart, a human beat. “I’m not dead,” he declared.
“Your wounds heal quickly because the ghost piloting you only needs to remember form. It stacks cells back into place and calls it good. You’ll endure fatal injuries as you no doubt have many times in your fights, but they’re trivial because physical trauma is not what kills a ghost. It’s what creates one. You’ll necrotize in places but it’s okay, because you’ll carry on, and it will bother you only if you let it bother you, if you’re too sentimental about the puppet you’re still inside.” Vlad closed in closer, neck craning to appraise Danny. “Ghosts love a facsimile of life so you will keep your heart pumping, your lungs breathing. You’ll eat and you’ll sleep but you’ll find you won’t perish if you don’t. It just won’t be a good time if you want to keep occupying your flesh form. Take better care of it. You won’t get another.”
“You’re psychotic. And you’re wrong.”
“I have all the math to prove it.” Vlad leered from over Danny’s shoulder. He circled the boy, knocking Danny’s balance, who still on a hair trigger stood ready to fight. The light from the ghost portal painted Vlad’s face like the phases of the moon as he moved. “Did your parents explain that part to you properly?”
“No, because they didn’t get the math right.”
“Oh they’ve gotten it right. This time. It only took them two decades longer than it took me.” The portal rolled like static, and its fizzling pattern crashed like an ocean wave across Vlad’s cape. “No amount of man-made power is sufficient to drag the entire fabric of the Ghost Zone up against our own, tear a hole through it, and anchor it to a stable frame. It requires something with a pull on the Ghost Zone, a strong pull, and that thing is a human life at the moment of an extraordinarily violent death.”
Danny backed a step away from the portal, from Vlad, but the walls boxed him in. He swam in its green light.
“You stepped in and you turned the portal on, that’s what you thought, right, Daniel? Pressed a careless button on the inside and now here we are. Silly parents for not finding that button first.” Vlad’s face hardened. “No. Jack and Maddie knew about the button. Maddie explained it to me over the phone. What engineer designing and building their own portal would forget the location of the on button? They’d pressed it from the outside. It didn’t work. And so you pressing the button was not the important part. It was you dying to the electrocution that clicked everything right into place. And while your ghost should have been torn from your lifeless corpse and pulled to the Ghost Zone you instead pulled the Ghost Zone here. Your ghost got to stay put. You opened the portal. You became the undead freak you are. And now we’re here.”
Danny’s eyes bounced between Vlad’s. His cheeks felt hot, like he was enduring an accusation of wrongdoing. And he had none of the knowledge to refute what was being said.
“You’re messing with me. You’re wrong,” Danny shot back. He thrust an arm out, drenched in the fog of the portal. “If the portal needs a person to die in it then explain your portal! Are you so casual about it? You killed someone? You’re admitting to murder and you think I won’t do anything about it?”
Anger flashed like a storm across Vlad’s face. His aura swelled, pressing down with a pressure on Danny as Vlad halted and cast his shadow clear across Danny, coating the back wall. “The killing of other people with the wanton carelessness of half-baked machines is the domain of Jack and Jack alone. I’ve brought no such harm onto anyone else.”
“Then how do you have this portal?”
“This portal? This portal that I’ve had for 20 years? Which I opened when I solved the piece of Jack’s broken math that he was never able to solve until this morning?” Vlad stalked closer, hunched, imposing. Danny stepped back. “My boy Daniel you’ve had it so easy. You had it so simple. A truly clean break. So clean so lucky. A single lethal dose of electricity and it was already over. I’m jealous. You never even suffered.”
Vlad stepped closer, striking distance, arm extended. Danny flinched, but Vlad only swept his cape around, clenched in his fist, and pivoted to approach the portal.
“Put out of your misery before it even started.” Vlad slammed his fist against the portal rim, and the explosive metallic clang bounced through the rooms. His laugh belted out. “I should have been so lucky.”
19. Vlad Masters was 19. A sophomore in college. A man actively in the midst of sabotaging his social life to chase a woman who was already deeply in love with Vlad’s best friend who he hated more every day. He wasn’t sure what he ever enjoyed about Jack’s bumbling ineptitude, or his loudness, his brashness, his poor social skills, his bad breath, his mullet. Maybe Vlad had gravitated to Jack because deep down he loved how superior it made him feel to surround himself with the likes of Jack Fenton… And now, he hated how enraged it made him to watch Maddie’s eyes skip past his to focus on Jack Fucking Fenton again and again and again and again.
But surely there was hope still. Surely it was a matter of time before the rose-tinted glasses fell away and Maddie saw bumbling and inept and every such word in the basket when she looked at Jack. There’d come the day she tested the waters with Vlad to complain about one of Jack’s little quirks, and they’d find solace together in all the things Vlad was that Jack wasn’t, and all the things Vlad had that Jack didn’t. And he’d be gone, back to bumble elsewhere, and it would be just them.
The day didn’t come. It wouldn’t come. And maybe Vlad needed to change himself for Maddie. If he listened to her and Jack’s ghost ramblings, if he could put Jack in his place and solve the things Maddie couldn’t, it would show her. She’d understand.
Because that was the thing about Jack. His math was never right. Enduring Calculus 1 with Jack was all it took to prove this to Vlad. How many times he’d caught a single error on a single line for Jack, like a dropped stitch that would unravel the whole sweater. Every problem, without exception. Jack only passed on his homework grade with Vlad’s help. On his tests, he failed.
So Vlad was staring at Jack’s equation, full of bogus math, which Vlad knew was wrong because Jack had penned it, and Vlad had not yet fixed it himself.
“I’m telling you Jack, it won’t work.”
“Bogus V-man it totally will!”
It wouldn’t. But Vlad wouldn’t fix it for him. Not yet. Vlad would let Jack embarrass himself first, fully in front of Maddie, watching on, judging. Vlad would solve it for her. After. Once Jack had made a fool of himself for the hundredth time since college began.
He leaned in to study the portal frame. The gears were turning in his head already. He didn’t hear the whir of the power source catch.
19. Vlad Masters was 19. A tube ran down his nose and into his lungs, supplying oxygen for lungs which were failed by a diaphragm sloughing itself away. He was poisoned from the outside-in. Irradiated by ecto-energy none of the nurses or doctors could fully understand. It damaged his DNA. First obvious in the skin of his face where the blisters of his ecto-acne drained and sloughed. “Acne” was the wrong word. An unkind word. They were boils where the blast had cooked his skin, microwaved his cells. The skin on his body blackened over time. Organs decayed. Vlad Master read a lot about radiation sickness. He knew everything he had to expect.
Jack and Maddie had stopped visiting. They were dating now. It was on their last visit they’d told him, and Vlad hadn’t taken it well, and he’d perhaps burned a few bridges with the words he chose. It was deserved. Considering what Jack did to him.
He’d found the error in Jack’s math, by the way. Errors, but all the rest paled in impact compared to the lambda. The ecto-energy. The necessary ecto-potential to pull the Ghost Zone here. How stupid. How idiotic. For Vlad to die to a machine so botched in its construction.
When Vlad was released from the hospital, it was not because they’d cured him. It had been because there is a certain cruelty in making a 19-year-old live the last of his days bedded down in a white-walled room with just his books, his equations, and no one coming to visit anymore.
He was released with bedrest instructions. Vlad did not heed them. In his beater car, every cell of his body aching, he drove. At the materials lab, he disconnected his oxygen tank and moved through the lab space with the tube dangling loose from his nostril. No one was Vlad Masters’ friend. No one cared to stare long at his ugly boil-ridden face. No one stopped him as he hauled sheet metal, and supports, and bolts and wiring and resistors and power tools, checked out with a valid student ID, from the lab. The lab inventory room would not be seeing these back.
It was a prep bunker, buried beneath a vast lot of empty Wisconsin land, that Vlad hauled his materials. He and Jack had discovered it as freshmen. Poked through its bowels with flashlights and quipped and laughed over how eerie it was. Deep beneath the sheetrock, boxy rooms carved out of walls of stone. Shelf upon shelf of dusty canned foods, and shotguns sealed in cases fastened to the walls. The locks had rusted with water damage.
His arms ached until they throbbed, dragging beams of metal across the stone floor, scratching chalk-mark stains into the ground. His skin sloughed, inflamed, burning to the touch. Vlad didn’t bother to rest, because these injuries would never heal anyway. He hauled, and welded, and wired up his circuitry and resistors with a care and caution Jack would never have bothered to practice. He checked it against his math by flashlight. He took naps on the cold stone floor and woke with deep purple bruises on every part of his body that had pressed against the ground.
His appetite left him. His lungs filled with mucus. The boils on his face had spread down to his chest, his shoulders. The touch of his shirt chafed them, so he worked without one, a figure of skeletal rib ridges jutting from tight skin that bloomed with the projection of his shadow against stone walls.
He knew why Jack’s math was wrong.
A silly mistake. A stupid mistake. Anyone with half a mind for the paranormal should have realized the Ghost Zone was not so easily at your beck and call. Not without chumming the water with something it would rise to feast on.
And in that violent death, what would happen to the ghost? It would stay, wouldn’t it? If it successfully anchored the Ghost Zone to the portal it stood inside, then by definition the ghost would stay?
And was that death? Yes, in a way. But it was a death one would get to keep living. As opposed to the death Vlad was headed for, whose coldness and finality scared Vlad more than anything he could put to words.
He’d fixed the oxygen tank back to himself. He couldn’t work without it, hauling it about on a little dolly with him, back and forth, while he fetched and affixed the last of the plating he needed to craft the frame of his silent soulless portal.
He’d stolen a generator from the sports storage shed. It was meant to be enough to power the portable stadium lights they hauled onto the fields for late games, an absolute obelisk meant to cast light across an entire football field.
Surely, it contained enough power to kill one simple human.
Vlad fixed the last bolt in place. Jumper cables clamped generator to portal wiring. It was a pure skeleton. A paltry thing, like the bones of something already picked clean. Built in haste, sloppy, by a 19-year-old whose fingers were too inflamed to clutch a wrench any longer.
He could have asked Jack for help. Maddie. But he wouldn’t let them have this. They had to solve the portal on their own. They didn’t get to know his hard work. They did not get to save him.
Vlad would save himself.
A ghost anchored to a body. What was that? What monster was that?
Vlad moved. He coughed mucus from his lungs. It made it hard to breathe. So he moved slowly, and crouched, bony jutting angles, painted blotchy purple, all bruises and skin, sloughing away.
He crouched, because the portal he’d constructed was not large enough to hold him standing up. He bowed inside it, a small thing, a pathetic man of little life. He wheezed. He hurt. His eyes burned.
And he held in his hands the remote to flip the generator switch, and connect the circuit, and bring to life the math Vlad had so kindly corrected out from under Jack’s grip.
Vlad did not. Because throwing the switch would kill him.
Deep in his animal brain, his dying brain, he knew this intimately. It filled him with a drowning fear like paralysis. He did not want to die.
He would die if he did nothing.
It would be this one throwing of the switch which could save him. Which would burst the portal to life right through his heart. Electrocute it out of its rhythm, slaughter him like a pig on spot and… maybe… hopefully… drag the Ghost Zone here. And whatever he was, dead, would stay.
And whatever he was, dead, would be better than this.
Vlad held the remote in his clammy hands.
And from within the humming skeleton of his portal, his fingers caressed the on button.
The portal sung its happy contentment, mused in its healthy green aura, staining all the slabs of rock wall. Danny swiveled his head, recognizing now the bunker this had been before it had been a laboratory.
“I’ve harmed no one, Daniel,” Vlad concluded, his voice too measured for the horrors it had spilled forth. Too calm against the blossoming terror its words had wrought across Danny’s face. “I opened the portal to save myself. You’re lucky, Daniel. It was because of my fast thinking that your father is not a murderer. I took that honor from him.” Vlad’s head tilted to the side, suddenly sympathetic. “Although, you’ve maybe made the title whole for him.”
Vlad reached out, Danny shot away.
“Dad didn’t kill me,” he choked. “I did this to myself.”
“How lucky Jack is, to always dodge responsibility for his actions.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Of course you don’t. If you believed me, you’d have to accept you’re not wriggling out of this. There’s no denial you can bring home to your parents. If you believe me, then this is reality.” Vlad smiled, a playful glint to his fangs. “I suppose I should have more sympathy. I quite like being this way. It is so much nicer than wasting away to death, like I was. But you. You were healthy before this. This killed you, and it didn’t save you from anything.” Vlad cocked his head. “Such tragic fates, both of us, due to the carelessness of Jack Fenton.”
Danny shook his head. His heart beat—his human heart beat—all too fast in his throat. It made him sick. It made him feel like the walls were closing in around him. This was Vlad’s doing. Vlad’s trap. Vlad’s prison he’d been forced to join.
"That's not true. I'm not like you."
“Of course not,” Vlad said, sweetly. “How sweet denial is. Deny it if you like. Call me a liar. But if you ever want to come to terms with what your father did to you, consider coming to me. I understand you in a way no one else will.”
Danny gave no response. He gave no acknowledgement of Vlad’s words. He took to the air, phased himself up through the sheetrock that had been packed atop the doomsday prepper bunker. Up through the mansion, which had been built atop the portal beneath it, and not the other way around. Into the open sky, he breathed fresh air not stagnant and damp beneath the ground, bathed in light pure white from the sun and not tainted green like the bowels underneath him.
And he flew back toward the portal that made him, leaving Vlad with the portal from which he’d made himself.
...
(inspiration post from @ciestess)
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pyrrhiccomedy · 20 days
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A DM’s Fair Play Guide To Plot Twists
I love running a game with a lot of surprises. The challenge to pulling this off well is that, unless you’re playing a one on one game, your players outnumber you: and between them, they have a good chance of figuring out what’s going to happen, no matter how sneaky and clever you are.
The first way of dealing with this - which I’ll just call the bullshit way - is to not give your players the information they need to solve the mystery. Don’t let them find out about the secret society until it’s too late. Don’t give them any reason to suspect that their NPC ally is planning to kill them. Don’t let them find the murder weapon, don’t let them locate the witnesses, don’t give them the chance to skip to the end of their investigation.
This sucks, and if you run your games like this, you’re going to piss off your players. Because it isn’t fair.
In mystery literature, a “fair play mystery” is one where the reader is given all of the information they need in order to figure out the solution before the Big Reveal. It’s what makes the reveal good: that GASP, the “oh shit, the knife! the knife from the party! that was hers! I forgot!”
Pulling off a twist in a fair play game is an incredible feeling. Your players will think you’re a genius (or an absolute dick bastard, which is just as good) and they’ll respect it more when they land in hot water that they plausibly could have avoided. So how do you run a fair play game without your players figuring out the twists ahead of time, given that you’re definitely not smarter than all of your players put together?
By fucking with their expectations.
Here are some things that I keep in mind, to keep my players guessing. And it’s important, with all of this, that if your players see through something, let them have it. They should figure out a lot of things on their own! But if you’re regularly seeding your stories with all of this stuff, eventually your players will miss something. Those are somethings you can build on. The same way that a low level enemy who gets away once can keep coming back again and again until they become an important antagonist, a misapprehension your party proves to have a blindspot for can grow and develop until they get smacked with a breathtaking twist. 
What’s a twist if not the sudden overturning of an assumption you never thought to question?
1: Make your powerful friendly NPCs know a lot...but not as much as the players think they do.
Player characters often end up with powerful allies. It would be very convenient for the party if those allies always had accurate information. Make sure they don’t always enjoy that convenience.
It’s a balancing act: you want your powerful NPCs to be powerful. You want this alliance to be meaningful and beneficial to your players. But give your NPC an Achilles heel of some kind, when it comes to the information at their disposal. The Noble General commands powerful forces and knows the lay of the enemy’s land well...but that doesn’t mean he knows what every squadron and scouting party is up to. The Political Mastermind may know the ins and outs of the court, and have keen insight into the motivations of others: but he has an enemy who pisses him off so much that he loses all objectivity around her. The Powerful Wizard can call upon great magic to aid the party: but his divinations aren’t as accurate as he thinks they are, and he’s prone to finding, in his signs and omens, what he wants to see, more than what’s actually there.
Most of the time, their information should be good! That will make it more likely that your players will trust them the one time when it isn’t.
2. Let (apparently) less powerful NPCs sometimes know more than the players think they do. 
Most NPCs aren’t the Noble General or the Powerful Wizard. Most NPCs are Daves, designed to get the players from place to place. Most of those Daves know about as much as you’d expect them to. But some Daves have plans of their own.
You don’t always have to signpost with big blinking lights which of your NPCs are ‘important,’ and which ones are ‘unimportant.’ Sneak in a crafty Dave from time to time. That assistant they talk to, every time they go to see the prince? That bitch knows everything, and she’s almost ready to make her move. 
3: There is no such thing as a completely reliable witness. 
If the players only get information from one person, that information should be flawed in at least one, potentially small, but important way. Smart players will seek a second opinion, or at least allow for the possibility that their information may be incomplete. But even smart players get out over their skis sometimes.
4: Let your NPCs be aware of the power of a first impression. 
If an NPC gives a strong first impression of being a particular kind of person, it’s because they’re comfortable giving that impression. That might be because it’s who they are. But maybe not.
One of the first characters the PCs met in a VtM campaign I ran was Gawaine. Gawaine was a good old pine-scented man’s man, with salt and pepper stubble and a blue Ford truck. He listened to AC/DC, and talked about the war. He was affable and honest and willing to lend a hand. You already know Gawaine. Everybody knows a Gawaine. Gawaines are trustworthy, salt of the earth types. You don’t necessarily think to question a Gawaine.
That’s exactly why Gawaine was such a useful persona for Krystiyan, the Tzimisce Voivode, a cruel and alien sculptor of flesh who “never left his haven.” There were plenty of clues that they were the same person, but that campaign was in its endgame before the players put them all together.
5: Sometimes, dangerous and villainous NPCs should be helpful and cooperative. 
Not even necessarily because they’re manipulating the players, or even deceiving them about their true natures, but because their interests and the players’ interests genuinely align...for the moment. 
One of the easiest levers in your players’ brains to exploit is the expectation that people who help you are your friends. Even if your players know, consciously, that they shouldn’t trust this person, most of the time they kind of can’t help it, if the NPC is genuinely helpful to them and at least a little charismatic. 
6: Sometimes, good and valuable NPCs should be unhelpful and uncooperative. 
No matter how mature your players are, there’s a natural tendency to react to uncooperative NPCs with a reflexive, “Hey, fuck you! We’re the protagonists! This guy is an asshole!” so from time to time have a helpful, honest, good-aligned NPC have a wholly justified but as-yet-unknown-to-the-party reason to flatly refuse to deal with them.
7: Every NPC should have a secret. 
Not necessarily a bad secret. Were it to be revealed, it might even make the party like them more! But for their own reasons, the NPC does not want their secret to come out, and they will lie to the party to protect it. Players go crazy when they realize they’re being lied to, and often jump to some wild assumptions about your NPC’s motivations. I’ve had an NPC lie about the opening hours of a shop, and had the PCs assume that they were black market dealers for the villain when the dude just wanted to be able to close early so he could go smoke weed in the park.
8. As a DM, it’s polite to remind your players of the common knowledge their characters would possess...even when it doesn’t reflect the truth.
We all know it’s tedious when the DM calls for a roll when you’re just asking for common knowledge. I shouldn’t have to make a roll to know the dumb space word for plastic in a Star Wars game. I shouldn’t have to make a roll to know who the Holy Roman Emperor is in a game about medieval vampires. The DM should supply common knowledge for free, whenever it comes up.
That doesn’t mean common knowledge is true.
This is different from just lying to your players, because you don’t put the weight of DM word-of-God behind it. It’s not “You would know this guy is a Ventrue, based on XYZ.” It’s “it would be a common assumption that this guy is a Ventrue, based on XYZ.” He might not be a Ventrue. It might in fact be extremely important that he is not a Ventrue. But if it is commonly assumed that he’s a Ventrue, that is - word for word - something you can share with your players. If they don’t look any deeper than common knowledge, that’s on them.
9. Obviously untrustworthy NPCs provide great air coverage for less obviously untrustworthy NPCs.
The obviously untrustworthy NPC might or might not be planning to betray the party. But if you introduce two untrustworthy NPCs in the same storyline, and one of them seems normal and cool and has a genuine plot-related reason to be there, and the other one is Jaffar, Jaffar’s gonna get clocked, but Susan over there will probably slip under the radar, and might even get tapped to help out with the whole Jaffar situation. They might get Susan’s number, by the end of the session. Susan might become an ‘ally.’ Susan might even get romanced by a party member. Play your cards right, and Jaffar might just end up a footnote in the introduction of Susan, Scourge of Worlds and most hated NPC in the entire campaign.
10. Your villains should always have a secret plan B.
Your villain isn’t stupid, right? And your villain probably isn’t so arrogant that it is inconceivable to them that their plan might fail. They’ve been planning this ritual for ten thousand years, after all. It’s always possible that some plucky band of heroes could show up at the last minute and murder your high priest, or steal your amulet, or seduce your second in command. So what does your villain have in his back pocket to make the players go, “Oh, shit - he planned for this!”
This may mean that there is a whole separate plot happening, running alongside the main story. This is great, because when weird things happen, the players have to figure out whether this is part of Plot A or Plot B, and working out who did what and why gets a lot more interesting. If they end up foiling Plot A, great - your villain was also secretly behind Plot B the whole time, and will transfer all of his resources over to that. 
Sometimes your players will figure out that Plots A and B were both the same plot the whole time, with the same villain at the head, and they’ll feel like the smartest people on the planet, and it will be their favorite moment of the entire game. That’s great! You gave them that!
Sometimes, they won’t. And when the villain of Plot A, apparently defeated, starts laughing and reveals that he was also the mastermind behind Plot B, which is now too late to be stopped, that will probably be your favorite moment of the entire game.
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atamascolily · 7 months
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There is a tendency I see in PMMM analyses and discussions to treat the witches simply as monsters that can be overcome with sufficient force regardless of other circumstances--and thus Homura's failure to ever win against Walpurgisnacht on her own terms is something that could be easily fixed with more firepower and different tactics. And while there's nothing wrong with this interpretation, it's not one that particularly interests me, either.
What I like about PMMM and what makes it so engaging for me, is that it can be read on multiple levels--both as a literal journey and as a symbolic one. In-universe, witches are the shadow selves of magical girls; is it really so surprising that they also serve as narrative foils to those who face them, thus making victory or defeat as much of a character issue as a tactical one?
It is not a coincidence that Mami Tomoe, a girl who was forced to grow up too fast and who could have wished to save her dying parents but didn't, meets her end at the hand of a particularly childish and immature witch, a lumpen, misshapen doll that transforms into a clown--a girl who never grew up, who could have wished to save her dying parent but didn't. Mami, an experienced veteran who wiped the floor with the Rose Witch and her familiars earlier, is completely caught off-guard and is eaten alive by a witch who embodies all of the issues she herself struggles with and has yet to overcome within herself.
Yes, Mami was careless and overconfident, which led to her doom--but she had also fulfilled her role of introducing Madoka to the world of magical girls. On a narrative level, her death was necessary--not only to free Madoka from her impulsive promise to become a magical girl too early in the story, before she'd learned all the facts and could make a fully informed decision, but also to teach Madoka one final, horrific lesson about what life as a magical girl is really like.
This is not to say that AUs where Mami survives are wrong or missing the point--I've written them myself and I love them! (It helps that Mami's survival is usually the result of someone else's interference, not something she accomplishes on her own.) Nor do I mean to suggest that Mami's death is a moral failing on her part--merely that I think that Charlotte represents Mami's own particular brand of kryptonite at that particular point in her life, one she might have been able to survive if she had been able to move beyond the psychological issues hobbling her.
Meanwhile, Homura is able to easily defeat Charlotte, because metaphorically she's moved beyond the childish worldview that Mami is still stuck in. From that same symbolic perspective, it's this relative level of maturity, as much as her time stop and pipe bombs, that allows her to win.
Likewise, it is not an accident that the next witch Madoka encounters is one that specializes in extracting the memories of its victims, trapping Madoka in a spinning carousel as she is tormented by her own grief and guilty conscience over Mami's death. She is freed by Sayaka, who has moved beyond such angst by her decision to take on Mami's role as an idealized magical girl protector. Later on, Sayaka's descent into dualistic thinking is symbolized by her fight against a witch whose world is literally black and white--whom Sayaka defeats, but only at the cost of pushing herself dangerously to her limits.
As with Mami, Sayaka's death is directly tied to her own psychological issues--in this case, by her incredibly strict rules about how magical girls should behave and her refusal to cut herself any slack whatsoever. Her metaphorical self-denial results in literal self-denial, and her death as a magical girl and rebirth as a witch.
Then we come to Walpurgisnacht, a witch made of cogs and gears--the one witch Homura cannot beat, no matter what she does. Homura is stuck in her loops, unable to imagine a future beyond them, increasingly isolated from any meaningful connections or relationships--Walpurgisnacht may be the "fool that spins in a circle", but so is Homura. The inside mirrors the outside; when we watch Homura fight against Walpurgisnacht, we are also watching Homura's struggle with herself. Unlike Mami and Sayaka, Homura's magic allows her to fight this battle over and over again--again and again she is forced to retreat and start over, unsatisfied with the results and determined to do better next time. She doesn't die, but she doesn't win, either--instead, she's locked into perpetual stalemate with no end.
Madoka, however, is able to see beyond the vicious cycle represented by Walpurgisnacht and thus easily and repeatedly defeats an enemy that Homura cannot, regardless of her relative power levels in any given timeline. It's probably too simplistic to say that hope triumphs over despair--and yet, that's exactly what happens, every single time. Homura has numbed herself through repeated exposure to where she no longer feels hope or despair, thus existing in perpetual stasis with her purpose the only thing driving her. Paradoxically, the one thing she needs to do to win is the one thing she cannot do--and the thing that Madoka can do all too easily.
(This is not to say that Madoka doesn't have her own issues--she does!--just that her issues are different from Homura's, meaning she's not tripped up by this particular obstacle in the same way that Homura is. And it's not that Homura's struggles were pointless--they were what allowed Madoka to get to point where she had both the power and the knowledge that she could save everyone, including Homura.)
Homura's final battle with Walpurgisnacht shows Homura going to insane lengths, including a wall of C-4 explosives inside a refinery, a flaming oil tanker, and a submarine with Type 88 Surface-to-Ship missiles--none of which has any lasting effect on Walpurgisnacht whatsoever. That episode goes to great lengths to show that Homura's approach to fighting Walpurgisnacht fundamentally isn't working; I don't think adding more nukes would help.
The one time Homura gets the closest to her happy ending is the one timeline where she and Madoka fight and fall together--the one timeline where they are shown as equals, and the one where they debate becoming witches together and destroying the whole world before Madoka thinks better of it. This is also not a coincidence. If there is ever to be a truly happy end to this franchise--or an end at all--Homura and Madoka must be equal and willing partners, not one protecting/sacrificing themself for the other again and again. It is also likely that they will remake the universe in the process, through the combined power of their mutual wish.
[It also wouldn't surprise me if that line foreshadowed future plot elements--after all, Madoka technically became a witch in the final episode of the TV series (she got better, thanks to the nature of her wish), and so did Homura in Rebellion--but we shall see if the series ever follows up on this.]
This is why I'm so excited that Walpurgis no Kaiten seems to be laying the groundwork for Homura creating her own enemies and her greatest enemy being herself--once again, making the metaphorical literal. I'm excited about the prospect of Homura getting a do-over with Walpurgisnacht, which would represent a chance for her to confront her narrative foil one more time, and show us how her character has changed. Though it may play out on a larger stage, the real battle will be inside Homura's mind and heart--and, I would argue, always has been. The only way the outcome will change--the only way we can move beyond what's been and into something new--is if/when she changes.
I want to be clear that there's absolutely nothing wrong with the strictly literal interpretation of witches, and I think people should write what they want to write; if that's the story you want to tell, then go for it! For me, however, I find it far more compelling--not to mention richer and truer--if the actions and words on-screen correspond to the characters' emotional and psychological journeys, and there's no question that this preference how I interpret media in general, and PMMM in particular. And it's not that I think Homura couldn't defeat Walpurgisnacht in an AU scenario--merely that any story where she achieves this victory without changing in any way or addressing her own psychological issues in some fashion removes exactly the elements that drew me to this series in the first place.
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goldengirliez · 18 days
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STEALING MIKEY'S KEYS SO HE'S LATE FOR A MEETING>>>>>
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09:32 pm
I believe that intimacy is the new kind of pure love. Getting to know someone on a deeper level is something that goes beyond simple attachment, it goes beyond the simple but necessary need of validation.
Being intimate means getting on the same frequency level as a person and communicating effectively with each word, each action, and each stare.
Intimacy isn't something you only find under the sheets until sweat, tears and arousal dampen the mattress. Its true nature lies in between the actions of your everyday life, moments that don't need any kind of particular reason to happen and yet feel special because you are there, you are connected.
You have realised such a thing only briefly as the air is getting in and out of your lungs hectically, your breath coming short and irregular and the adrenaline rushing through your veins full speed with each pump of your vital muscle.
Your legs almost shake and your feet ache slightly, your eyes darting to the person in front of you with an excited and rebellious glimmer, the glint of life.
You've been running away from Mikey for the last ten minutes because you had taken the keys to his motorbike.
He has been spending every evening with Toman recently, not passing by your home to even say goodnight because the meetings always finish late at night.
You know that he always tries his best to make it up to you for the lost time with his ways of bringing your favourite sweets to school, taking you home and around the city with his bike whenever you need to, sending you a sweet message randomly throughout the day to check up on you, never missing the opportunity to hug you, kiss you or keeping you close when you pass by, and yet… You can't help but miss him more than anything.
You tried to talk to him about it but he prefers for you to not get too involved in his gang business: he fears your safety, not wanting hundreds of testosterone-filled guys to get close to his beloved.
You fear nothing when he's by your side but he still turns you down when you ask to come along with him: he has lost too many people he cared about for his good and he has no intention of putting you in danger even the slightest.
This had to change.
That's why you're preventing him from heading to the meeting of Toman until he makes up his mind.
“Y/N! I'm gonna be late, please, give me those darn keys back, goddamnit!!”
His voice spurts out desperately, short puffs of air coming out of his mouth as he tries to catch his breath: you're fast for fuck’s sake!
He is a bit pissed at you for acting this stubborn, sure, but he can't help the wide smile that plasters on his face the more he hears you laugh every time he can't catch you, every time you hide behind his motorbike and fool him by running in the opposite direction, almost tripping on your own feet.
That smile of yours, that light in your eyes is worth every spare minute of his life and the meeting can wait if that means he has the chance to see you this full of energetic playfulness.
You're both in the flowers of your youth and sometimes you forget that due to how harsh life experiences can be. Moments like these make up for the lost time.
As you raise your hand high and shake his keys, making them jingle as you do so, you can't help but feel overpowered by pride: having your super athletic boyfriend, the invincible Mikey whining out to you so he can get what he wants isn't an everyday occurrence (I mean– unless he's begging for sweets or your attention, of course). Maybe you could break him and he would finally let you come along in one of his meetings.
“Begging ain't gonna do shit, you gotta work for it, Mikey!”
Sprinting to the other side of the garden of his house, you can feel him sigh exasperatedly and follow you along as he mutters “If I catch you–" in between a breathy laugh.
The wind feels magical against your skin, the cool breeze of the night after a heated summer day gives you goosebumps and yet you feel hot all over; your blood pressure rising with each stride of your run is what keeps you going, laughing nonstop as you stare up the full moon over your head briefly, savouring such a moment that will surely become a core memory of yours.
As you hide behind his motorbike once again, Mikey stops a few feet away from you, the vehicle is the only thing separating your bodies.
“You’re a menace, y/n!”
You shrug at his words, rotating his keys on the tip of your index finger with a proud expression.
“I guess that dating a delinquent made the trick– eek!”
You can't even finish your sentence as Mikey takes a run-up and easily jumps over his CB250T and lands not so graciously on top of you, making you fall on the grass with a thud. The impact doesn't hurt that much though, not when Mikey put a hand behind your head right on time so you couldn't injure the slightest.
He couldn't resist the urge to bring you down and wipe off your face that shit-eating grin and see that cute pout your peachy lips make every time he catches you by surprise. He's a weak man, bear with him.
Pinning you down on the floor he takes away his keys from your hand and smiles toothly: his rosy cheeks and messy hair shine under the moonlight, his obsidian gems staring into your soul easily make you melt and your initial annoyance turns into an amused laugh. He's your angel, no matter what.
“Sorry, what were you saying about dating a delinquent?”
Rolling your eyes at his statement, your smile slowly fades when he gets off you and brushes some grass away from your shirt with his hand, before kissing the top of your head with the soft petals of his lips.
He was going to leave again and that thought screeches inside your brain. It doesn't sit well with you the fact that he's keeping you detached from a big aspect of his life… There's a strong gut feeling that tells you you shouldn't let it slide, you should insist on being part of this area of his life because, if you don't, something extremely bad will happen in the future.
And Mikey sees right through you, he always does, because he loves you and he is connected to your being in every way for respect and admiration.
He feels the intimate bond you two share, he can almost touch that connection, he can feel the burn of the red string that connects the two of you.
He can feel his bones ache under the weight of letting you drown away from him so sad and helpless and whenever he sees your angelic face darken out of worry and fear for him, for the both of you.
He knew why you took the keys away from him that day and he couldn't help finding it amusing and cute... but believe me when I say he's not blind and recognises the desperate attempt to have yourself near him for longer.
Mikey stands up from the ground and offers you his hand to stand up, his calloused hand brushes against your tender palm and holds in a strong and warm hold that doesn't flatter even when you're finally standing.
Staring down at your feet, your voice comes out in a whisper, a loving but pained one.
“Please, be careful Mik–”
“Hop on.”
Your head snaps up, your eyes searching for his out of confusion and then hope.
The two of you are intimate, you understand each other's worries and can feel them within your organs, you can feel each emotion run through your being and resonate like a magnetic wave from you to him and vice versa.
You two are flames that burn for love, with love: your glint should never flatter, you deserve to feel it alive and vibrating.
Mikey smiles at you as he puts his helmet on top of your head and secures it attentively.
“I'll keep you safe, pinkey promise”.
That's your man to you.
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I have had this idea bouncing inside my head for a while now! I've been inspired by this post of the sweet @xsleepinggoodx.
I hope you've enjoyed reading it as much as I loved writing it.
English isn't my first language so I apologise for any mistakes!
Sending y'all hugs. ⊹ ࣪ ˖ ꒰ঌ ♡ ໒꒱ ⊹ ࣪ ˖
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©GOLDENGIRLIEZ do not repost or modify on any platform.
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violettelueur · 2 years
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— 𝐅𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐍𝐃𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐏 𝐋𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐋 𝐅𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐃 ∞
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SUMMARY. congratulations, you have reached friendship level four with a certain man. what to know what he says about you to the traveller?
CHARACTERS. alhaitham, kamisato ayato, tartaglia (childe), diluc ragnvider, kaeya alberich
PRONOUNS. she/her
TW. mentions of breakdown (in alhaitham's part)
AUTHOR NOTE. been a while huh? but i can't help but feel like my writing magic has completely gone but maybe i need a change of topic to bring it back, but i will give you this free coffee before i will probably announce something about the blog soon...
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༉‧₊˚. ALHAITHAM
ABOUT LOVER - BEFORE FALLING IN LOVE
Now, what would you like to know about the manager of Puspa Café? Y/N was once a talented student and researcher at the Akademiya before she walked off. She was notorious for burning all her research before the Grand Sage had the chance to obtain them but even after that, all the students within the Akademiya have nothing but praises about her, always coming into the cafe for a chance to have a tutor session with the famous ex-researcher…some might even say her wisdom rivals against most beings but she would tell you to not disrespect.
ABOUT LOVER - FELL IN LOVE
Don’t you think you are asking too much about her? Yes, Y/N is someone I hold dear but other than that, I rather not say anything more than that…it’s a private matter between me and her.
[Tighnari - About Alhaitham’s Lover
He’s like a hawk around her like we get it, Y/N is your lover. However, I understand why he is protective of her, after her infamous breakdown back at the Akademiya, she has never been the same. Never smiled or laugh cheerfully like she did back when she was a student, but ever since her relations with Alhaitham, she seems to slowly get back to her old self…don’t tell anyone I told you this but every time he sees her, he suddenly shines like a Nilotpala Lotus.]
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༉‧₊˚. KAMISATO AYATO
ABOUT LOVER - BEFORE FALLING IN LOVE
Lady Y/N is no stanger to the Kamisato Clan, matter of fact, she also friends with Ayaka but due to her being one of the adopted daughters of the Kujou Clan, she is extremely busy…yet, she doesn’t seem close to her parental figures at all. As much as Kujou Sara has gratitude to old man Kujou, Y/N seems to despise him more than ever…maybe me and her have more in common than I originally thought.
ABOUT LOVER - FELL IN LOVE
Me and Lady Y/N have been engaged for a while, hehe. It was kept a secret between the both of us before Y/N found the right time to break away from the Kujou Clan without any issues. The old man couldn’t believe what he was hearing once I came in and took her back to the Kamisato estate, what a sight it was. I am more than delighted to have her by my side for a lifetime.
[Kamisato Ayaka - About Kamisato Ayato’s Lover
I’ve known my brother had an eye for Y/N for quite some time, it’s actually quite funny to see him subtly stumble on his words when he doesn’t know it. When I heard of their engagement, I was so delighted to hear that she was going to be my sister, now I have another person to make sure my brother takes care of himself.]
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༉‧₊˚. TARTAGLIA
ABOUT LOVER - BEFORE FALLING IN LOVE
What would you like to know about Y/N, comrade? I could give you pages upon pages about her and it still wouldn’t be enough. Y/N is a childhood friend of mine that I hold dear, she’s very close with my siblings as they see her as an older sister. Ah…I still remember the days when she would smack my head whenever I did something she said was ‘stupid’...kind of miss that feeling.
ABOUT LOVER - FELL IN LOVE
It was actually Sonia who made me realise that I was in love with Y/N. Actually, I think I already knew deep down but was worried due to my involvement with the Fatui, but she’s a kind-heared soul that accepts me in every way! Why is my forehead red? Oh, comrade, make sure not to get on her bad side…she’s quite strong.
[Zhongli - About Tartaglia’s Lover
Sometimes I wonder how that rascal was able to capture the heart of Miss Y/N, but I admire his enthusiasm when she comes up in conversation. Knowing him, he would show off Y/N in any chance he got and I’m surprised he didn’t drag her to Liyue to do so.]
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༉‧₊˚. DILUC RAGNVIDER
ABOUT LOVER - BEFORE FALLING IN LOVE
Y/N? She sometimes volunteers at the tavern when she has the free time but she mostly works with Lisa as a librarian. She’s quite reliable if she ever wants to join the Knights of Favonius but she said she rather not get into much physical work…but I feel like she knows too much about things - actually, let me apologise, I shouldn’t have said that about her.
ABOUT LOVER - FELL IN LOVE
Y/N? She’s doing perfectly fine…What’s new? Me and her have gotten closer over the past time and decided to commit to a romantic relationship, it’s nervewracking but at the same time, it’s nice not having to walk alone after a long time…It’s quite peaceful.
[Kaeya Alberich - About Dilic Ragnvider’s Lover
Sometimes I wonder how Y/N has fun with Diluc. Like, what are the dates like? How do the conversations flow between them? How does she even giggle within his presence when he is as dead as a frying pan? But…It’s nice to see how much Diluc is opening up again.]
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༉‧₊˚. KAEYA ALBERICH
ABOUT LOVER - BEFORE FALLING IN LOVE
Oh? Don’t tell me you have eyes for Y/N too. Hahaha, well sorry, she caught my eye first…maybe next time after my…..fiftieth rejection?!
ABOUT LOVER - FELL IN LOVE
Hahaha, of course I won at the end. I managed to steal her heart and now she has become my lover. Being with her is like taking a sip of the most expensive sparkling wine. Divine.
[Diluc Ragnvider - About Kaeya Alberich’s Lover
From what I heard he had been bothering her for some time and often comes to rant to me about them. But after she accepted that one date, her opinion has somewhat changed. You see, she still gets annoyed but it’s more of a worried annoyance. I just hope he doesn’t stress her out too much.]
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© violettelueur 2022 - all rights are reserved to violettelueur. Do not repost, copy, change/modify, plagiarise, translate or screenshot my work : this will also include other social media/writing platforms like AO3, Wattpad, TikTok and many more.
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burr-ell · 1 month
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Something I just noticed and really enjoy about Campaign 1 is how often their story involves becoming incredibly powerful and accomplishing so much and yet still not being able to do what's truly important to them. It's not only the gutpunch of the final episode, it's a thematic underpinning throughout the campaign.
Way back in their prestream adventures, the party was strong enough to defeat the Dread Emperor and save all the kidnapped children from Tal'Dorei—except one, a child Keyleth killed by accident, an act which haunts her through at least much of the early campaign. The party defeats the Briarwoods and reclaims Whitestone, but Ripley still escapes and 19 still misses, and the Chroma Conclave raze half the continent. Percy has great intellect and access to a powerful magical amplifier and forced out a demon through sheer force of will, but his carelessness still killed Vex and he only rolls a 6 to try to save her. The party has slain a dragon and is armed with four Vestiges of Divergence, but they couldn't save Tiberius and can't even give him the proper burial they want to. They brutally slaughter Ripley, but not before she gets the revenge she wants; she kills Percy, sending him to Orthax, and spreads guns throughout Exandria. The Conclave is slain, the whole party made it out alive, but Scanlan is forever scarred by the experience and leaves, tearing the party down as he goes. Even Vilya, prior to the campaign's beginning, was at the very end of her Aramente, likely a level 16-17 druid like Keyleth was, and still failed the trial of the Water Plane and was gone for almost 40 years.
And of course, Vox Machina became some of the most powerful people in the world, slayers of a god, legends to be immortalized for centuries...and none of their power could save their brother.
Percy points out to Bell's Hells, thirty years later, that fate isn't always kind and not everyone gets a second chance, and to me that's underscored by what we don't see. Elaina is still dead. Juniper is still dead. Percy's parents and five siblings are all still dead.
I mean, if any or all of their bodies are intact, it wouldn't even require True Resurrection to bring them back—not that Keyleth or Percy are averse to a little heresy, but hey, conserve your resources. If there are bodies, all they'd need is 7th-level Resurrection; none of those people have been dead for over a century, and if they need to find the bodies, well, Vex has Locate Object and Pike gets a Divine Intervention freebie once a week, right? Even if they did need True Resurrection, it's a heftier cost but probably not something too difficult to pay over time for one of the wealthiest families in the world.
But none of them have ever done that, nor do we get an indication that they've pursued it. Vox Machina is, probably more than any other CR party, defined by grief—how individual PCs respond to their own profound losses; how they succeed and fail to shoulder each others' burdens; and at the end of their story, how they deal with one of the most painful losses imaginable, and how they move forward and find peace in spite of it. Campaign 1 is just as much about how to deal with what you couldn't do as it is about what you now can do.
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daisys-reality · 13 days
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── ☔ꜞ˖ ꒰ 𝙿𝙰𝙲: 𝚈𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚜𝚑𝚒𝚏𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚓𝚘𝚞𝚛𝚗𝚎𝚢 ꒱
Hello my fellow shifters, here is your ☔ reading which you've voted for!
Do you want to know why all of this is exactly happening? Do you want guidance and answers because you want to know where you’re standing in your shifting journey and how to move forward? What are you heading towards exactly? I’ll try to find answers to such questions for you in this reading. Choose a picture and enjoy your reading!
Also check out my  masterlist if you want! Fyi I don't own any of these beautiful pics, they're all from pinterest. 🤍
──
𝙿𝙸𝙻𝙴 𝙾𝙽𝙴
Why were you meant to find shifting? What is your (higher) reason for finding shifting? (for personal shifting reasons, please check out my other pac reading)
To develop your creative force, to be more daring and to follow your passion and ideas, to make you follow your dreams, to trigger growth, to give you a spark for new beginnings, to recover the joy of life/the magic of life
To give you strength in trying times (mental/health struggles, feeling rejected by this world, feeling lonely and not understood, …), to help you endure those almost impossible trials in your (cr) life, to help you stay resilient, to strengthen your resolve and faith
To evoke a nostalgia for sweeter times, to find your innocence again, to connect with specific people/souls, some people want to connect with you, to strengthen your connection with spirituality/the world of spirits, to go on adventures and partly to re-experience childhood especially if you felt like you missed out a lot in your younger years, to experience love/soul connection in other realities
This message only applies to people with specific spiritual beliefs: if you feel like you have a specific purpose in this life, it might actually be a major purpose for which you need to be strong, that’s why you experienced so many hard lesson in your life until now, shifting is there to make your experience in this reality a little bit easier/enjoyable, to give you strength to keep going because there is something great waiting for you, for some it feels like an exceptionally strong soul connection (!!), for some of you it feels a bit like a so called “twinflame” connection that is finally tuning into the same frequencies in this human life/reality - if you believe in this type of connections
Major theme in your journey: Learning something specific?
To learn to connect with yourself and your emotions on a deeper level, expressing yourself wholly and authentically with youthful purity, to learn to love yourself and other as well as learning to enjoy your experience here and in other places/realities, to make use of your sensitivity and to develop your own spiritual beliefs, to just have fun and to let things happen to you, no one and no thing(reality) is bigger, better or more important than you - there is no hierarchy, there is no specific worth you need to have - you are able and “allowed” to experience anything you desire whether it is true love, freedom, adventure, joy, comfort or just silly romance. No one is deciding above your head on what you may or may not do in this universe. It's important that you understand this. (Connecting, loving and expressing/communicating seem to be very significant here in general)
The difference between you right now and the you in the ‘future’ that finally succeeds (shifting)
Disclaimer: ‘Future’ is a loose word and time is not really real anyways. So, everything that is not the ‘present’ or the ‘past’, represents the future. ‘future you’ can be you in a second, you after reading this or you in a week etc.
‘Future you’ embodies the queen of swords energy. ‘Future you’ is strong and knows it. You will know that you're protected, you will be fearless and fierce, unbiased and independent. You will stay calm and open minded while still being firm (not accepting less than your ‘goal’, firm boundaries + direct communication), not giving in because ‘future you’ knows that it’s only fair that you succeed - you’re meant to succeed, you’re meant to shift. You’ll see your situation with open eyes, mind and heart, remaining positive and not losing hope. Your insights will make your beliefs stronger, therefore your faith will become also strong and unwavering. You. Will. Shift. Periodtt.
Advice for you right now:
Keep looking and acknowledging the signs around you, focus on recovery (your health, your energy etc.), forgive and fully release your past. be in the present moment and be free. 
Timing: “Create space (in your mind, life etc.) for it to happen sooner”, “Release any attachment to timing”, “Time is still unknown” (the energy is mutable)
Thanks for reading!🤍☔
𝙿𝙸𝙻𝙴 𝚃𝚆𝙾
Why were you meant to find shifting? What is your (higher) reason for finding shifting? (for personal shifting reasons, please check out my other pac reading)
To learn/practice long term commitment, to become more determined in life, to learn how to complete a “project”, to be decisive
To awaken the power of self, to build balance, to find your inner beauty and learning to appreciate it, to build your self-esteem, to give you the ability to see a future for yourself
To  understand the spiritual nature of life, to develop your intuitive abilities, and your grace in dealing with others
To increase your knowledge and wisdom, to learn to listen to your subconsciousness, to get encouraged to form your own conclusions, to recognize your vast yet subtle powers, to become a mystery in the eyes of others
Major theme in your journey: Learning something specific?
Learning more about spirituality and other spiritual beliefs and practices, finding your joy in those things, learning about & developing your new spiritual gifts or abilities, getting closer to spirit world
Learning how to make use of your emotions/feelings and your compassion, learning how to be more receptive to creative opportunities and loving connections, and to be more deeply compassionate for other living beings
Creating the start of a new life and a new version of yourself
Learning and practicing self reflection, making important decisions for yourself and about yourself (ex. who do you want to be, etc.)
The difference between you right now and the you in the ‘future’ that finally succeeds (shifting)
Disclaimer: ‘Future’ is a loose word and time is not really real anyways. So, everything that is not the ‘present’ or the ‘past’, represents the future. ‘future you’ can be you in a second, you after reading this or you in a week etc.
‘Future you’ knows that your life will drastically change and there is no going back, the change is necessary. ‘Future you’ went through a metamorphosis and is embodying the ‘king of swords' energy combined with the energy of volcano deity Pele. Your power will be enhanced by your wisdom. ‘Future you’ is wild and free, capable of anything, patient and persevering. ‘Future you’ knows exactly what to do to succeed. ‘Future you's’ approach to shifting will be very structured and disciplined, while your mind force (will power + confidence) will be wild and uncontrollable like an explosion or the eruption of a volcano. ‘Future you’ cannot be held back, shifting is inevitable at that point.
Advice for you right now:
Reconsider your current mindset one more time, spend time reflecting and ask for help from others, perhaps communicate your current ideas/plans with someone close to you to gain another perspective, communicate clearly (specifically with yourself), focusing on romance might have a positive influence!
Timing: “When you’re truly ready for it”, “Don’t lose hope”, “Create space (in your mind) for it to happen sooner” >prepare the metamorphosis<, “Gain more knowledge/wisdom”, “Meditating brings answers” 
Thanks for reading!🤍☔
𝙿𝙸𝙻𝙴 𝚃𝙷𝚁𝙴𝙴
Why were you meant to find shifting? What is your (higher) reason for finding shifting? (for personal shifting reasons, please check out my other pac reading)
To have the opportunity to fulfill all your many dreams and aspirations. You might have so many that you wouldn’t be able pursue them in “just one normal life”
To stop procrastination and to choose and go after the things you desire in life
To learn to differentiate between “illusion and reality” especially in regards to what you really want to experience and what you think you want to experience… some opportunities can often lead to a major disaster (if you’re someone who romanticizes dangerous realities… shifting there might not be the best idea, buddy)
to leave seemingly good things behind in the pursuit of higher ideals, to go deeper into introspection and starting to seek the truth and to come to realizations about yourself and about life/universe etc.
Major theme in your journey: Learning something specific?
(This is very specific and only relates to those who have special s/o:) Going through a rocky connection with someone who is probably from another reality and going through all these feelings/moods/longing in this “long distance connection”... I feel like this is about one specific person and you developed feelings for them..? Even though you’re pretty much opposites, you complement each other well and I think you feel this too… Learning how to love healthily is a theme in your journey…even ideal relationships still face difficulties, right? 
Learning how to create a stable lifestyle/mindset and to actively be thankful towards yourself but also for the things you have gained and experienced and to cherish them and the people who support you
Your shifting journey is the built up to your happily-ever-after (your reunion with someone specific and the start of many happy moments) 
The difference between you right now and the you in the ‘future’ that finally succeeds (shifting)
Disclaimer: ‘Future’ is a loose word and time is not really real anyways. So, everything that is not the ‘present’ or the ‘past’, represents the future. ‘future you’ can be you in a second, you after reading this or you in a week etc.
‘Future you’ is grounded, down-to-earth and very practical and organized. They are always on the move, improving, perhaps even teaching others, sharing their experiences and realizations. They are starting to be very secure in their beliefs and they are eager to travel the universe. Also, they feel abundant in energy, they are very self reflected and therefore overall balanced and stable in their home/cr life. ‘Future you’ acts very motherly towards themself - pushing themself when it needs to be and taking care of themself when they need a rest. ‘Future you’ does not lose their temper when things go ‘awry’, they always keep moving steadily towards their plans/goals
‘Future you’ overcomes the procrastination and follows their passion with much force. They are not scared of what is to come because they are so secure within that they feel comfortable enough to be daring in the pursuit of their goals.
Advice for you right now:
You might have to change your focus right now or rethink your current plans - there is another path that leads to more big happy changes. Always remain positive, don’t stop or procrastinate -  take action!
Timing: “Refocus and stop waiting for it”, “Trust that it will happen when the time is right”, “Summer time” (- perhaps in 2 months from now? August could be lowkey an important/happy month for you and your journey…)
Thanks for reading!🤍☔
──
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indierpgnewsletter · 3 months
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There's Other Kinds Of GM Advice: Theatricality versus Transparency
(This first appeared on the Indie RPG Newsletter)
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I find that broadly there are at least two kinds of GM advice – and they have a very different philosophy underpinning them.
The first kind of advice aims at all costs to maintain verisimilitude. It’s a solution that you can implement without breaking the players’ immersion in their characters. This can just be stuff like Matt Colville explaining that if your players are taking too long discussing plans, guess what, orcs attack! We’ve all probably played a game where people were going in circles and not able to decide what to do. If it looks like we’re not able to decide, we’re probably going to be relieved if the GM makes something happen to break the deadlock and prompt us back into the action.
(Historically, this kind of thing was taken to egregious lengths like Gary Gygax saying if players start acting uppity, have a rock fall on their head. It’s mostly gone now but reddit tells me that Cyberpunk Red which came out relatively recently still says something similar.)
The second flavor of advice involves breaking character and talking to your players directly. I know “talk to your players” is a mantra repeated so often that autocorrect suggests it as soon as you type the letter t. At its worst, this advice is vague and unhelpful. We’ve all considered talking frankly to people in our lives, we just find it awkward and hard and annoying. But, but, but – at its best, just describing the problem as you see it and escalating it from a character discussion to a player discussion will make it go away instantly. Like magic. (If you’re not sure what that means: In a previous issue, I discussed Jason Tocci’s excellent advice on escalating conversation in this way.)
And since the theatrical flavour of advice has the weight of history on its side and transparent advice keeps getting boiled down to mantra form, I thought I’d write down some examples of situations and some alternative ways to handle them:
Situation 1: The players are marines discussing whether to dive into the alien lair and recover their stolen engine (their main goal) or go and see if another missing team of marines is okay. There is only 45 minutes left and this is a one shot.
Theatrical: The other marines suddenly come on the radio and say, “hey we’re okay, please complete the mission.”
Transparent: “Hey, folks. There’s 45 minutes left. If we don’t do the alien lair now, we won’t be able to do it at all. Is that fine?”
Situation 2: The players are low-level fantasy nobodies who have a famous wizard friend. They’re about to tangle with some medium-level bad guy and decide to call in their wizard friend.
Theatrical: When the players try to contact her via a telepathic phone call / spell, she sounds breathless and says she’s busy doing something way more important like fighting a dragon.
Transparent: “Hey, folks. If we get the wizard in, she’ll absolutely make this fight a cakewalk. We won’t even need to roll initiative really. Is that what you want? Or would we rather have a fun fight?”
Situation 3: The players were having fun exploring when they meet a cool NPC (an android! an elf! an android elf!) who has this interesting backstory with an urgent, earth-shattering hook. They go along with the android elf because it seems more important but immediately look like they’re having less fun.
Theatrical: Narrate how the android elf meets a group of other android elves and have the elf say, “Hey, now that I have these folks helping me, you can leave it you want!”
Transparent: “Hey, folks. Talking to you as players here, do we want to stick with this whole android elf plot here? It does mean that we won’t do any open-ended exploration. Which would you prefer?” If they want to ditch the elf plot, you could just retcon it entirely or do the theatrical solution.
All of these situations have happened at my table. They’re all relatively low stakes and I think whichever way you handle it, it’ll probably be fine. But that said, some situations absolutely work better when done transparently so if you’ve never tried the transparent way, give it a shot. If immersion matters a lot to you, try it at the end of the session.
/End
PS. The theatrical options often still require the players to willingly suspend their disbelief and go with it. If a player didn’t play along, they might just say “I thought their radios weren’t working, otherwise we could’ve just contacted them before. Why can they suddenly contact us now?” or “Oh, the wizard is fighting a dragon right now. We can totally wait. There’s no reason we need to fight the bad guy right now.” And sometimes I can’t shut off that part of my brain either so I won’t judge. But if there’s a way to sidestep that situation even coming up, I’m going to take it every time.
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petr1kov · 9 months
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i'm really so interested in seeing how simon will reckon with his identity as the ice king. his rejection of the fionna and cake stories clearly stems from his rejection of his past as the ice king, something he wants no association with any longer, and yet, at the same time, he also misses actually being ice king on some level, while also hating that he misses that.
it has always been tricky to determine exactly how much of ice king is simon, where exactly the curse starts and simon ends. many of ice king's characteristics come from the crown, his madness and appearence and magic (as made clear by evergreen), but even through all of this, the wearers remain the wearers, to an extent; ice king still is simon, deep down, and that's what truly terrifies him and thrills him.
i think that being ice king was like having all of his basest needs and desires broadcast to the world, filtered by the complete lack of moral compass and impulse control that came with the curse: ice king was a being of pure emotion, who made his needs known at all times. he wanted to find the love of his life (his princess, or, deep down, just betty), he wanted to be surrounded by his children (his gunthers, but really, just marcy), he wanted to have finn and jake's friendship, he wanted to be loved and accepted by all the residents of ooo, and he went after all of that loudly, shamelessly, recklessly.
being ice king was simultaneously restricting and freeing. he spent a millenia taking a backseat on his own mind, watching this twisted version of himself express everything for him, make every decision for him, by him. so now that he's back to being 'himself', how can he even know what that really is? how to act for himself again? how can he get used to it, when he spent so long completely overwhelmed by the crown, playing second fiddle to his own mind, ruled by a mixture of madness and his instincts? just existing, doing whatever he pleases regardless of the consequences?
it's no wonder that simon is mortified by it, and it's no wonder that he misses it, too.
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