so we had a fake wedding episode in the grand bloodstorm adventure, but get ready the new season's about to start and we're opening with some drama
astarion and mal are trying to track down a relic that's rumored to have the power of protecting a vampire from the sun. neat. they find out that its last known location is at some ancient noble house's castle, so they go there but they get caught sneaking around.
fully expecting to have to fight their way out of there, both of them are surprised when the lord of the house instead offers a warm welcome to his house, taking particular interest in mal, showering her with attention and gifts.
he also reveals that the relic has been lost to the surrounding woods after their house was attacked by outsiders, but both astarion and mal are quite suspicious of that version, so they stick around to find out more. while mal focuses on charming her way into the lord's heart so he'd tell her the truth, astarion goes out into the surrounding town to gather information.
turns out, the local legend tells that the relic is, in fact, still somewhere in the woods, as when the invading forces attacked, the lady of the house took all of their most important belongings, shoved them into a bag, strapped that to a horse that she then tried to flee the castle with, but was shot down by archers and fell to the enemy as the horse galloped deep into the woods. it's said that the horse was eaten by a giant demonic bear, but the treasure still remains somewhere. and that leads various parties to venture out into the forest to seek it.
astarion decides to join one such party, if not to find the treasure, then at the very least to get more information. he leaves maleane alone with the lord, who seems to be quite infatuated with her. mal reassures her lover that she can handle herself in case something happens. she's a sorcerer, after all.
the vampire spawn & the gang set a small camp out in the woods after traveling for most of the evening. they drink and tell stories over the fire and astarion starts sneakily peppering in questions to get the information he needs. one of the drunk men decides to go on a bit of a spooky retelling of the most horrific event he had witnessed. the great attack on their town by the most brutal monsters. it happened over three decades ago, when he was just a little boy.
they came in the night, with their intricate armors, their swords and their arrows and their daggers in the dark. some of the commoners fell to poison before any blades could lick their throats. those that didn't flee in time were either massacred or put in chains and dragged back to the underdark to be used and sold as slaves. both the lord and the lady of the house were brutally slaughtered in the ritual known as the blooding, leaving their only son an orphan.
oh, so the guy's entire family was killed by drow? and who is he currently hosting in his massive castle? hmm, yes, another drow.
but not to worry! he dressed mal in the finest of silks and set up the most elaborate dinner for just the two of them. an array of intricate pastries, wild salmon and spit-roasted steak, and, of course, a flagon of his favorite wine to wash it all down.
they talk over the dinner, maleane slowly trying to poke and prod for more information about the relic and what happened to it. the lord, eventually unravels the same story that astarion heard over the campfire, and as the puzzle pieces slowly slide into their places, mal suddenly feels lightheaded. her breathing starts to become erratic as she struggles to catch her breath. and when she rises from the table, in a frantic attempt to flee, her legs feel like they're full of lead. the same petrifying feelings spreads throughout the rest of her body, pulling her to the ground in an instant.
as she gasps for air to fill her failing lungs, the lord walks right to her, watching the paralyzed drow fight the effects of the poison, and tells her how much he hates her kind. how long he's been dreaming of this moment, to get his hands on one of the monsters that took everything from him. how they all are the same. how he's going to peel the skin off her flesh, bit by bit. he chuckles at her panic, at soft wheezing coming from her throat. he wasn't sure how much of the poison to pour in her glass. after all, drow are known to be resistant to most of them. perhaps he gave her a bit too much. but it doesn't matter. by the time it wears off she won't be able to escape.
he then drags her to his personal quarters, a little dark room with chains and cages, a large wooden table stacked with books and scrolls and sketches. everything you need to know about drow and more. he takes the beautiful soft gown off her body and shackles her wrists and ankles to a rack.
a beautiful monster, he calls her, dragging his fingers from her cheek, down to her breast. yet, soon his hand is replaced with a dagger. this is more than just revenge. it's something darker and deeper. the obsession with drow, all that hatred and rage latched on something else entirely. the want to have her, to own her, to break and hurt her again and again and again, for years and years. because that's how long he's been carrying all that venom inside. it's not going to be over soon, maleane realizes.
it's almost a relief when it's his hand touching her again instead of a blade. but she knows that the intent behind the gesture is just as sharp as the bite of a dagger. she can't utter an incantation. she can't move her body to channel her magic. it's been so long that she felt this helpless.
then she feels her mind start to slip, drifting away somewhere. the lord's unhinged ramblings turn into echoes from a distant room. the throbbing pain softens into an almost-numbness. for just a brief moment, maleane is not there.
it's the odd shift in the surroundings that drags her right back into the dark cell. a sudden, violent gurgling sound. when she looks up, all mal sees is red. the blood pouring out of the lord's mouth and throat. the shock still frozen in his eyes before his body collapses just as hers did before. and then, two red irises, framed by a set of worried brows, staring at her. astarion.
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Instead of continuing the theme of granting glimpses into the unsettling realities faced by hypothetical sapient spaceships, I’m gonna post about perspectives and expectations versus reality! Aka the headcanons I have about the legends and mythology surrounding Lor based on what little was known about her by people in the past, and then how the expectations those created set up those in-the-know-but-not-quite about Halcandran history for some good ol’ whiplash. And since this isn’t discussing The Horrors I’m also putting it in main tags. As a treat. This is totally not part of my agenda to spread boat mom propaganda to more people.
Most of the legends around Lor stem from the simple fact that they’re the ideas people get about her based on observations without context and a lack of concrete information. For example, it was years after she was buried beneath the Haldera Volcano that it became common knowledge that there were multiple Starcutters that all have the same appearance; her name was just learned first, and with all the warping and appearing wherever in the sky going on people just assumed it was one ship named Lor doing everything. Everything included sailing majestically through the sky with what seemed like twinkling starlight in her wake, regularly cutting holes in spacetime like it was nothing, and overall being mysterious and seemingly ethereal. As one of several exploratory research vessel, she also had ties to the discovery of new planets and territories and such for the Halcandran empire to take advantage of, places that supposedly held the potential to become paradises if properly developed.
This combination of things, and the fact that such beliefs were not corrected for a very long time, led to Lor essentially becoming mythologized into an arcane, divine vessel with a heart and soul of its own that either served as the ferry to Paradise or could lead people there. And as many myths tend to do, things spun out from there, with some also deciding she must be able to don dark and royal colors and rain down divine punishment on the wicked, others saying she is the physical form taken by an angel or spirit of sorts, and a handful believing she is not merely the way to Paradise but actually holds it within. Many believed some combination of these ideas, even if they didn’t actually witness any of the things that inspired them. While at first in a sense they were drawing all the wrong conclusions, in a twist of fate spending a lot of time(as in almost 30,000 years) underground above the heart of Halcandra’s natural magic and below what may have been the most concentrated collection of soul magic ever… Well, it did have some impacts on her magic after a while that perhaps give some of those concepts more merit than they once had.
Of course that doesn’t change the fact that she is not actually some heavenly being of Paradise with godly powers beyond mortal comprehension. She’s a magical spaceship that was stuck in a rock for the vast majority of her existence and nearly forgotten about, who got taken for some teen’s takeover plan fated to go very wrong, crashed and broke, got fixed, crashed again twice being attacked by dragons under different circumstances, and woke up right as shit was hitting the fan. After all that confusion and the joy of saving herself and a bunch of strangers from the void like 3 minutes after awaking from what was possibly the record longest boat coma, she had to come to terms with everyone she ever knew being long dead and gone, the only place she really knew being entirely different and unsafe to return to, and the fact that she didn’t have anyone to go through this with. That was until some fuckin teenage catboy Minecraft spawned in the living room on the brink of death, apparently knew her for whatever reason, and was probably her best bet of finding out what the hap had fuckened while she was away. The medical part of that got figured out but afterwards the two took a while to get everything straight.
See, Magolor thought she just wasn’t talking to him the whole time on purpose; he had no idea her AI wasn’t activated so the person aspect of her literally wasn’t present. Lor in turn had absolutely no context for what she’d been involved in and was super confused how this Small Child(aka short teenager) knew anything about her because last time she was awake was thousands of years ago. The reveal that he’d pretty much taken her unconscious body for a joyride was… Interesting, for the both of them, as was the period of sorting out other miscellaneous but important things. For example, how to interact with someone who is also a something that you hyperfixated on for a long time without seeming weird, or how to gently explain to someone that at least a third of what they thought they knew about you wasn’t true. There were also more introspective things that needed to be thought out, like their respective flavors of coming to terms with everything you ever knew having been taken away and changed. In the same vein, Magolor had to find out how to cope with no longer having his family to live with, while Lor was left figuring out what she was going to do with no purpose to serve or duties to perform for someone else.
Of course they thankfully kinda solved each others’ “fuck what now” problems because the egg came to understand the hype behind found family while the boat decided to spend her new life looking after her new son. The two must’ve had that kind of connection to one another for a reason, right? Magolor really needed someone else with an ounce of responsibility to help him stay on the right path, and also make sure he doesn’t have an accident related to adhd and homemade bombs. Lor needed someone she could look after to have that sense of purpose for her existence again, and to a degree she also wanted someone to be there who could help her adjust to an era entirely foreign to her. Some might say she’s become a guardian angel for him, but she personally prefers the title of adoptive mom. Both because it’s more accurate to their relationship and because she wants him to experience consequences and learn from them rather than simply shielding him from everything the world tosses his way. Oh and because they are prone to mutual fucking around and finding out, impulsive decisions, and getting on Meta Knight’s nerves.
Speaking of which, he was probably even more surprised by Lor than Magolor, if only because he had mostly read things depicting her as mysterious, unbelievably powerful, and willing to do what needed to be done to bring reckoning to evildoers. In other words his expectations were decidedly not for her to turn out to be this curious and somewhat lighthearted computer lady who will happily harbor a traitor and spend time becoming well-versed in modern internet culture. Already not the most respectable combination of traits, in his eyes, and that was before their clashing views of authority became obvious. They got on better terms after Lor found out what exactly went down that led to the circumstances of her waking up, but saying they see totally eye to eye now would be wrong for more reasons than just their height difference and the fact that ships don’t have eyes. Also he’s mad that he doesn’t have the fastest and most advanced airship in Dreamland anymore but he just doesn’t say it. He doesn’t say a lot of things he feels towards her and Magolor, really. It’s for the better.
Anyways the moral of the story is that how history is written doesn’t always reflect the truth! For example someone capable of rending spacetime with ease is not necessarily a godlike entity. They might even like giving people head pats. Or making their voice sound like Moonbase Alpha or Hatsune Miku. Or gaming
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urehghdhgdhghg. whf is generally... listen. she gets it. she understands why people end up working for corps - she was one of them. it put metaphorical food on the metaphorical table. it paid for medical bills, piling up. it let her keep the people relying on her afloat. she won't apologize for making the decisions she made and doing what she had to do.
cut bc Longe. post abt takemura mostly.
but she never liked the corp itself, and only pretended she did when she had to. she worked in cybernetics programming, not intelligence, not public relations - she was tucked away in a basement lab, testing software integrations. no one looked at her for too long, let alone cared about how strongly she believed in arasaka's great vision. and behind all that, behind the chip she let them put in her to dull the edges of her emotions, there's just a massive, massive onslaught of rage.
listening to takemura talk up the Order and Overwatch of arasaka like it's a benevolent patriarch makes her want to climb off the side of the unfinished building they're doing a stakeout on and just hit the concrete, it'd be faster and less painless than her head exploding.
takemura, look at yourself. look at her. both of us are from respective slums created by corporate bullshit. she's been in debt since before she knew how to count, inherited and generated out of thin air as everyone she cared about fell victim to the poisoned air, the poisoned water, the poisoned earth - all effects of corpos running amok, unfettered. it's not like he doesn't know - it's just that he's convinced himself otherwise. seen what he wanted to see. and she was like that, too, before leaving arasaka for good. she knew, conceptually, that there were worse things under her feet. that some of her work was being used for horrible things. but there was only the desperate tunnel of needing to make it through to the next paycheck. and she stayed until the very last possible fucking second because - because it was only on the brink of having them take the last ten years of her life away from her that she realized she couldn't rationalize that away, and she had to stop doing it for everything else, too.
so sure, talk to hanako. do whatever you've got to do based on whatever loyalties you've got to honor. but don't fucking pretend, don't fucking lie to yourself that you were ever anything other than lucky. you worked hard, but a corp is a massive beast. you just got lucky. every day you got lucky except for that one day.
just like her. every day she got lucky. except for that one day.
meanwhile johnny's just sitting over there listening to all of this and it's the most she's ever spoken about anything prior to the corp, really, and it's usually walled off in her mind behind the arasaka no-feelings implant, so he's... interested, but also so fucking. sad. he guesses. he's sad because she's sad. except she's just empty, and the only thing left (because there is No One left; they've all gone and the years she spent trying to keep them alive feel completely and utterly wasted now because who is she to fight entropy. who is she to fight the corps. who is she to fight the decay of the planet) is just a well of anger so deep he's surprised he's never tripped over it before. not that he pries, exactly, but it's so obvious now that he's seen it. she's got so much of it and so little of anything else left, and he hates to see a mirror in her in this way.
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