#orym: imogen you're like a daughter to me | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

12pt-times-new-roman · 17 days

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c3e91

We open on the two teams booking it back toward the Volition hideout.

As the extraction team enters the industrial and residential circle of the city, the populace of Kreviris is in a rising panic, and soldiers are beginning to flood toward the Prime Pillar. Mystics begin to emerge as well, like bees swarming out of a hive. They form a matrix around it and the pillar lights up as a gossamer wave emanates out from it — a wave of dispelling energy breaks the extraction team's invisibility and the detonation team's illusion. They are all visible in the streets of Kreviris.

Their telepathic bond is gone too — that means that the dispel wave is at least 5th level.

Fearne spots that Zathuda appears to have survived the explosion and is riding Gloamglut in surveying circles around the pillar. As their illusion breaks, the dragon lands on the rooftops above them and looks down.

Ashton build update: While transformed by the shard of earth, Ashton's weapons have siege, which lets them deal double damage to structures (like walls). This lets him break down walls like a Looney Toons character so that they can escape the dragon (with a whole-ass building as a casualty, because siege doubles the already-doubled damage of a crit).

Meanwhile, Imogen recasts invisibility and Everoa starts to guide them out.

They tuck into a passage, but Zathuda calls out: "Fearne! It would be my own who fights against me. You really are your mother's daughter. It's a mix of pride and hate I hold for you, Fearne Zathuda! A true chaos being of cold shadow and fiery flame." Gloamglut can't quite find them.

Fearne polymorphs FCG into a slither then turns into one with wildshape, and with Ashton able to glide through the rock with the shard, they are safely burrowed underground and start heading back to where they came from.

As the extraction team gets closer to the edge of the city, walls of stone rise from the ground and encircle them in a 40-foot cage — the wisdom save that Laudna failed was most likely a scry, and they glance up to see a wind-swept, bloodied Liliana descending. Imogen is the only one visible.

When Liliana speaks, it has multiple tones, like an offset harmony as she speaks. "Did you know?" [Did I know what?] (persuasion: 31) "Then why are you here?" It's almost hard to focus on her from the pressure her presence is exerting.

Imogen takes out the locket that Relvin gave her. [You're so powerful. A better whole, mama.] "I don't want Ludinus to see how powerful you are. He'll make you the vessel instead." [Run away. Run away with me.] "I can't. As long as I'm here, I can control what happens around him. If I'm not here, there are so many others, children—" [You're hurt. Please, come with me. Please.] (persuasion: 31) "The Mind is lookin'. I have to think. I'll find you. I'll find you. Go. Go."

She drops the walls and shoots up through the ceiling of the city like a bullet. They start running. In front of them, five reiloran mystics clad in golds, platinums, gems, intricate robes — their crests with bones, runes, and chains. They are so adorned with jewelry that it's difficult to discern their age through the masks. Their outline is impressive, but their legs dangle down like straggly roots without ground. They speak: "There you are. Who are you?"

They turn to Chetney. "We've connected to your essence before..." There was a moment when the red moon seemed to look in to Chetney's soul, and he began to lose control — and it's happening again now, that same feeling. "Sweet feral child, instrument of our desire... who else joins us?"

To Laudna, or Delilah beneath: "Two spirits reside in one vessel. We can give you all that you desire."

As they look at each of them in turn, the Bells Hells' wills turn to paper. They turn to Orym, but before they can speak, he says under his breath: "Nana Morri, I need you, right now. We need to get out of here. All of us. Now."

They turn from Orym to Imogen: "You... you've come home. We're happy to have you. The rest may stay — no. They resist. They must go. Welcome home." And their illusions disappear. They keep running, and make it into a tunnel that climbs toward the top of the city.

Team detonation can see Liliana's walls going up and race toward it — they reach team extraction in time to see the Weave-Mind leave, and the Bells Hells reunite.

Imogen casts sending on Rashina: "We have Everoa. The city is unsafe. How's the safehouse? If it's not safe, we'll take her with us elsewhere." The safehouse is, unfortunately, abandoned. Too hot for us to regather. Rest. Find the allies you promised. Take her with you. Anything of import, let us know.

The Bells Hells resolve to leave the city and return to the secret passage to Exandria. They approach the top of the tunnel, and as they realize Otohan is following them, they start collapsing the tunnel behind them and preparing for battle. (I think this is the point where Matt regrets, just a little bit, giving Ashton this stone-surfing ability.)

Bormodo update: Their speed is 25.

Otohan goes around the tunnel collapse and gets ahead of them. Orym takes point to listen for her — he doesn't hear anything, but sees an echo — "then, it suddenly has color, has form. Otohan is here."

To break!

Begin combat:

Orym goes first, and opens with a hex and then two critical hits on Otohan's backpack.

Otohan takes Chetney down and kills him in one round, but expends a lot of her juice to do so — action surge is down, and so are three of her psionic dice. Matt is absolutely playing her how he should be — with a lone fighter like her, she needs to get someone down in almost every round because the action economy is so desperately stacked against her.

Chetney's last words are, "for four hundred years, I looked up at the moon. Not a bad place to go."

She looks at Imogen. "We have more than enough Ruidisborn to complete our plan. The loss of one candidate will not be impactful."

Fearne activates the spark of Rau'shan, and becomes a creature made completely of fire. While it's active, difficult terrain does not impede her movement.

God, the fact that Matt allows FCG to trade his 7th-level spell slot for preparing revivify definitely says something about how this fight is going thus far — but FCG attempts a revivify on Chetney: "Chetney, you haven't become a legend yet." Resurrection spells work, or at the very least they work on the moon! Chetney's DC goes up to 11, he's back up with 1 hit point, and FCG has no more diamonds.

Imogen's telekinesis tears the backpack off of Otohan, and she pushes it toward Ashton so he can smash it. "Oh, you bitch!" That's anger there. As it's torn off, the shadows around her vanish — she can't use any of her echo knight abilities anymore, so they were all sourced from the backpack.

Orym update: He did get the fey-touched feat, and took misty step for his 2nd level spell. He teleports, does a bait and switch with Imogen, and starts going off on this bitch — advantage for flanking and two back-to-back crits.

Laudna hits a massive blight roll and burns one of her legendary resistances, on top of three eldritch blast hits.

Fearne update: When she hits with an attack or spell, she can choose to deal additional fire damage.

Orym has rolled so many natural 20s this fight, and I can't help but feel that it's excellent poetic justice.

Otohan uses her second action surge, confirming that she's at least a 17th level fighter, but is most likely 20th.

Chetney, on 1 hit point, uses his healing potion on a downed Imogen instead.

Laudna update: The ability is actually called hunger of the shadow shard, meaning it's actually sourced from the piece of the gnarlrock that Delilah absorbed and not Delilah intrinsically. Also, she can keep using it until it works, but once it works it can't be used again. Also also, the energy that emanates from Laudna's hand as she does that is unfamiliar to Otohan, and she looks afraid.

Ashton update: Ashton's gravity rage build does not require a saving throw — it stands to reason that their other rage builds don't either, only the extra abilities do. That makes a lot of sense, actually. Also, when Ashton has the shard activated, they can choose to deal an additional 1d6 fire damage on a hit; and at some point, their chaos burst damage went up to 1d8.

Otohan update: She actually did go super-Sayan, and has an exalted rage form that has an increased AC and, presumably, an increased damage output, bonus to hit, and saves. She also regains both action surges when it happens.

Ashton rage build update: As a reaction, Ashton can use erratic defense and roll 1d4. On one of the results, Ashton takes half damage from the attack and the attacker is pushed 30 feet away.

Oddly enough, she downs Imogen again and doesn't go for a kill shot — instead, she downs Chetney again and doesn't kill anyone, which is going to allow FCG to heal everyone back up.

Otohan having resistance to all damage in this form on top of 25 AC is....... that feels like a little bit too much to me. just barely. But we'll see. (edit from future Note: this is the point where the party begins to lose hope.)

On one of Otohan's blades, when it hits a creature that's concentrating on a spell, the concentration check DC is doubled, which drops Fearne's aura of life. FCG, on their last leg, triggers their stress response. See above.

Genuinely, this is 100% the kind of situation that I would warn new or even half-seasoned GMs about — the kind of situation that you look at and say, "do not ever do this unless you are 100% certain that your group would be okay with it." And I hope, but I know many won't, that the fandom will respond to this in the way that they should, recognizing that this is a group of players who know each other so intimately that the GM can do this and have the table be not only alright but content with it.

As a hail-mary, Imogen casts sending on Liliana. "Otohan has us in the tunnels. It's about to be over. Help." The response: "I don't — I'll try to find you. I don't know how fast I can get there, I'll try to find you." Imogen takes off the circlet to help her find them.

"We might have misjudged this a tidy-bit—" Travis. Laura. what do you mean. She sought you out. There was no way to avoid this.

Matt rolling behind the screen and not having Otohan attack to kill is hopeful! But still, the sheer hopelessness here among the players is something you really should not do if you don't know your table. (At the same time, there's also a building hopelessness in Matt, which I think is what allows the following events to transpire.)

That there's no music behind this half of the fight, or at least very low-volume music, is also...... not helping, I don't think.

Man, this is a BG3-ass fight. Literally fighting until the last hit point, spending every scroll and potion you can, especially because getting someone up means they get a full round of actions.

End of combat

With 5 hit points left, FCG casts a 4th-level guiding bolt at their core. You know what this means, right? "Yes. The rage that I feel, the stress being so high, the fuel pumping through my core — it has reached a level it's never reached before, and it is so intense, that for the first time I realize that I am made of metal and wires, but I am alive. I am alive not because I was made, I'm alive because they made me alive, and it's the connections that I made with all of them. It's a feeling of joy, and I am happy to do this, because they saved my life. And I'll save theirs."

FCG pushes Otohan back so that only they are in the blast radius. They roll 20d8, for 79 damage. "FCG... how do you want to do this?"

"The last things I see are Bertrand, and Dorian, and Frida. I just feel connected to everybody. Some connections are made with wires, and some are made with blood, some are made with bone, some are made with wood, but they all matter. And they, even in this dark, dark cave, they make every day a smiley day. So I just sign off, and go."

The red in FCG's eyes turns to white, and there is a smile turned toward the rest of the Bells Hells. Otohan goes to awkwardly pull a blade, and before she gets a chance to dart away, a ball of crackling energy fills the space, rocks around her — she is incinerated, utterly. Then it stops, leaving a crater in the ground. "The sound of hundreds of small pieces of metal sprinkle across the room. The charred, lifeless body of Otohan Thull is left there."

"The thing about heroic sacrifice is it doesn't just give meaning to the person in the moment — it's an inspiration that we have to carry with us. As this moment of tragedy washes over you, in ways that maybe some of you already knew, or are realizing right now... the stakes are realer now than ever. And this loss cannot be in vain. As the silence and numbness begins to subside, you start to hear the distant sounds of shouting soldiers. People coming. You know you have to keep going."

Ashton goes to find FCG's coin — it's like a beacon guiding them to the exit. He takes it. There is still part of FCG's head and smile left — lenses cracked, jaw unhinged, but it's something. They also recover the teleportation staff.

Of Otohan, nothing is left but her backpack, which was away from the explosion, and her blades, thrown away in the blast.

"Numb and distracted, pushing ever-onward because that's what this is all about," the remainder of the Bells Hells emerges onto the wind-swept quiet of Ruidus. Liliana descends, and takes Imogen's hand. As the dust rolls by and the clouds clear, with the vision of Exandria above... the stakes are clear. Sam Riegel, you motherfucker.

#critical role #note watches c3 #critical role spoilers #critical role campaign 3 #critical role liveblog #critical role c3 #long post #very long post

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utilitycaster · 1 month

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do you really think the reason Imogen doesnt get as much meta as Caleb (who got every little detail discussed with thousands of notes!) is because people are afraid of a reaction, when its so obviously sexism?

The same reason she doesn't get the exact number of notes as Caleb? No. There's multiple reasons. I'm sure some is misogyny. Some is probably audience size for the respective campaigns, and some is simply accumulation over time - a post about Caleb from 2019 has had 5 years to gather notes.

But also. Are you fucking stupid. You literally showed up because of my tags to be kind of a dick in my inbox. I and multiple people who committed the grave sin of *checks notes* interacting with me were sent hate messages for hours on a Saturday night because I hinted in the tags that I kind of liked Fearne and Ashton as a ship while not being terribly into Imogen and Laudna, and some absolutely deranged loser decided this was an appropriate response. I was called out by someone who had made a blog specifically to block me when I responded to a reblog from someone else on a post I had made stating that Gelvaan was almost certainly not homophobic in canon and that treating Imogen's psychic powers as a metaphor for queerness has a lot of really unfortunate implications. And this hasn't even touched on that one person whose entire raison d'etre appears to be harassing every single person who doesn't think Imogen, Laudna, and their relationship is perfect; and who specifically made multiple alts to harass me. Like, the "It's Obviously Misogyny" people are genuinely putting more effort into being a dick to me than in writing meta about Imogen. You might be one of them.

I talk to many of my mutuals, some of whom really like Imogen, and yes, people do decide "you know, this could be interpreted by someone as too critical, and I don't feel like dealing with the heat" and keep that meta to the DMs or don't share it at all.

You know that post that Matt liked on Twitter that people have been, let's not mince words, jacking themselves off about ever since? If you actually try to say something with substance and evidence about how Imogen has Liliana's fear (the fear that meant that when Imogen begged her mother to leave the Vanguard, Liliana turned her own daughter down, claiming to need to stay with other children) or Delilah's love (which made her cruel, ruthless, and ultimately all-but doomed her) or Ludinus's desire for power (led him to commit endless atrocities) but resists these things in her desire to be a good person - and frankly, I think painting her with the same brush as Delilah or Ludinus isn't even true but I would love to dig into her similarities to Liliana - some asshole who smugly reblogs that post every time someone says "not to be controversial I think Imogen sometimes says things that could maybe be hurtful to other people I think" will throw a full temper tantrum and might send them an incoherent anon calling them a little hypocrite.

It's also fascinating because a lot of the tantrum-havers who will defend Imogen of even the most anodyne "perhaps this is not the most positive trait" and who will cite harassment Marisha received 7 years ago as a reason to not breathe a word of criticism about Laudna - and many of these people joined the fandom about 2 years ago if not sooner - will do this at the very people who have been supporting Keyleth since Campaign 1 was still airing. I mean, seniority doesn't mean anything but if you're lecturing people about something you weren't there for and they were? Clown behavior. Oh and a lot of those people doing the lecturing? Don't really like Keyleth very much, because she does things like "be angry" and "support Orym" and "have a measured viewpoint that doesn't match theirs" and "pretty clearly, along with Allura, who they also barely ever talk about, is directing Bells Hells along a specific path of that pesky moon plot because contrary to a weirdly widespread belief this is the moon plot campaign and not the baking cookies in a cottage campaign."

I mean, half these people forget about Fearne much of the time. The only NPCs I see many of them even talk about are the Vanguard generals and occasionally Abbadina when she's convenient for an argument. Not a damn word for Orlana or Birdie or Dancer or Weva or Rashinna, and they mostly treated Deanna, Prism, and Deni$e as nothing more than implements to shove Imogen and Laudna together but man do they have mountains to say about Bor'Dor. Hell, go to the blog of someone who whines about the way people treat Imogen and look through their meta, if they have it, and the vast majority of the time it's about Ashton and Orym and Ludinus and then they spend the rest of the time complaining about how The Big Mean Fandom is So Mean to Girls but they sure don't have much to say either because turns out if you can't say anything even remotely critical of a female character, it's really hard to write anything, and that's assuming they actually care about writing about female characters instead of just being an asshole, which as stated above is, in my mind, in doubt.

If you have ever spent a single second harassing actual living women online because you didn't like their thoughts on a pretend woman you are, at least in this specific scenario, easily the shittier person. Personally I am confident in my feminist bona fides through, you know, real world activism and how I interact with and support women and feminist causes socially, professionally, financially, and politically in my actual life, but yeah even I sometimes say "you know, I have thoughts about this thing regarding Imogen...but I've had a rough week and I don't feel like having one of the fandom tar pits on my ass" so I'll send my thoughts to a few friends and then idk, write about something else. And I'm pretty thick-skinned (this is the other problem with this strategy; you filter out the more measured and kind and sensitive people first and you're left only with people like me). A lot of people have flat-out given up writing about Imogen (or Laudna, much of the time) because they don't feel like dealing with backlash over some really mild statements. And because you send kind of dickish anons I suspect that it's more likely that you might be part of the problem than part of the solution. So no, it's not the only reason, but it's absolutely a significant one. Congratulations. You played yourself.

#answered #Anonymous #cr tag #cr spoilers

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vexing-imogen · 1 year

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seal my heart (and break my pride)

"She told me she was proud of me."

Imogen's voice is a quiet thing on any given day, and tonight it's almost lost to the winds of the Hellcatch. Were Orym not so very close to her (always the protector Lita had gently teased, watching him interact with the Hells, just like Dad), were he not able to read lips, he suspects her words would have been lost to the night.

He simply hums in response. A question, but one she doesn't need to answer if she isn't up to it.

"My mother," she clarifies, and he can just see the shine of fresh tears on her cheeks in the dusk. "It was the last thing she said to me before she-" She swallows hard. "Before she died."

It's the first time she's actually said the words out loud. They'd all watched Liliana sacrifice herself in the eleventh hour, teleporting directly into the path of the blade that Otohan was about to sink into Imogen's back. She'd died in her daughter's arms with no chance of resurrection. (Not that they would have wasted their resources on trying; not for her. Not unless Imogen had explicitly requested it. All of them, with the exception of Letters, had agreed that the gesture was too little too late.)

Imogen has been a shell of herself since. It's different than it was with Laudna. She'd had hope to cling to then, a goal to fulfill. She has none of that now. He also suspects that it's difficult to mourn someone you barely knew, who turned out to be so very different from what you imagined.

"Yeah?" he prompts gently.

She laughs, a hollow, broken thing that echoes in the desert. "And I felt absolutely nothin'," she confesses. "Here's my mother tellin' me everything I'd ever wanted to hear; that she loved me, that she was proud of me, how I was the very best part of her life. And none of it meant a goddamn thing."

She stares at the marker that Chetney had made. "I just wish..." She finally turns to him. "I wish she were still alive so I wouldn't feel so guilty for bein' mad at her."

Orym lays his hand on her wrist. "You're allowed to be angry, Imogen," he tells her. "One good deed doesn't make up for decades of bad decisions. Not the least of which was abandoning you."

"I don't hate her," she says after a minute. "And a part of me wonders how much of her was still left in there y'know?" She sighs. "But all the stuff she did, all the stuff she was tryin' to do..."

"You can't just forgive and forget?" he guesses.

"Yeah." Imogen pulls the marker out of the ground, traces over her mother's name. "Maybe it's best if..."

She doesn't finish her thought. The smell of ozone is all the warning Orym gets before a bolt of lightning strikes the wood in Imogen's hands, shattering it into pieces. He gets his shield up just in time to avoid a face full of splinters.

Imogen isn't quite as lucky. Her face and chest are a mess of bloody scrapes. Orym winces as she pulls one particularly large splinter out of her cheek. He digs a healing potion out of his pack and hands it to her.

"Feel better?" he asks.

Her lower lip quivers, fresh tears making even more of a bloody mess of her face. "No."

Eventually, she tucks the largest piece of wood away in her bag; the piece with part of Liliana's name still legible on the charred surface. She drinks the potion, uses her magic to clean herself up, and then turns to him.

"Don't tell Chetney?"

He takes her hand, can feel the static electricity still buzzing through her fingertips. "I wouldn't dream of it."

#critical role #bell's hells #imogen temult #orym of the air ashari #critfic

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inconmess · 1 year

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I am soooo here for Orym finally figuring out Ashton may well be a misplaced Ashari on one kind or another and patterning on hard like mother bird with a new chick. If only because their sheer size difference makes the image of the sort-of-adoption so freaking HILARIOUS.

I mean, it's Orym. What else can you expect? He IS the dad of the group since the Crown Keepers, even if it were unwilling. And let's get it real, he sees Imogen as his daughter, Fearne as a sister/daughter. Ashton as a son/younger brother wouldn't be much of a stretch in the longer run, related to Ashari or not.

He'll be all "You're Ashari. You need to know this! Have you tried this? Have you tried that? Are you related to the Earth Ashari? You probably are given the fact that you are Earth Genasi. How did that come by though?"

Orym the mother hen has me so hyped. Especially since one possible speculation I have is that the two have the same father so it'll be like... the man's dead? Good, he escaped my clutches for experimenting on you. He's still alive? I am going to fucking hunt him down for all the pain he's caused.

And when they meet up with the other group later on, they are gonna be so confused as to why Orym is extra protective over Ashton and all the inside jokes they have...

#cr speculation #orym of the air ashari #ashton greymoore #I mean #He is a mother hen on a normal day #now it'll just become 10 times worse #critical role #ask answered #messy thots

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12pt-times-new-roman · 2 years

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c3e31

"What am I if not a lifelong master of things that evolve into something greater?" motherfucker, what does that MEAN???

"Ah, there. I see what they're doing. Not much time, but I must watch their faces as they fail... they were fools when they thought they could do this alone, when they thought someone else wouldn't want to steal their thunder. But me? I just wanted to be the first there, and the one to make the choice for them." The they here is the Unseelie Court and their allies. Ira essentially took the Unseelie's machine and made it better. but "I wanted to be the first there"? there to what? Ira was looking for something else on the moon, so maybe the city wasn't the target -- maybe he was looking for holes in the lattice, those portholes that Matt once described in the Divine Gate. I don't think they built the city, I think they're trying to get to it.

The "they" is specifically the Unseelie, Otohan Thuul, and LUDINUS FUCKING DA'LETH. This motherfucker. He's still head of the Cerberus Assembly, and Orym is aware of him.

Ira finished the machine, took the crown, and ran. The Unseelie Court originally hired him to make the machine, then he got bored of them and got tired of their bureaucracy; they disagreed on how to build the machine, so when the crown was stolen, Ira took it as a sign to pursue it on his own.

The lattice around Ruidus looks almost exactly the same as the Divine Gate, so it stands to reason that it was constructed at the same time.

Hondir theorizes that Ruidus is a battery that's powering the divine gate. I doubt that this is all of what's actually happening, just on the basis that I don't think Matt would have an NPC drop that, but it sure is something that could be happening on top of/underneath everything else.

"It's a magic item, it shouldn't break!" oh no. oh no. that cannot be good. that feels like an item that Matt was counting on them having and now they don't have it anymore. hm.

I bet that this crown is a vestige made by the blessing of Sehanine's. It essentially gives the user the abilities of a moon cleric, and it focuses on illusion/enchantment magic.

Okay yeah so Morri definitely did take time in exchange for watching Fearne, but it wasn't Fearne's time. It was Birdie and Ollie's. She took time with their daughter away from them. Also, Fearne spent that long with Morri from her perspective, but I don't think she really aged at all -- since she doesn't look any older than expected (6 years), I don't think this time actually aged her.

The lens deal with Morri didn't have anything to do with the Calloways -- Ira traded something for it.

"If you wanna insinuate something, come out and say it straight, please!" thank god someone fucking said it. the bells hells are so good at talking around things, they say so many things that require people to read between the lines that they themselves can't see anything except what's between the lines. they're missing the forest for the trees.

When they cast detect thoughts on Ollie, FCG and Imogen find that there are blurred and smeared sections of gray in Ollie's memory. Pushing into one of them, they find things that indicate that Ira used the Moontide Crown to alter the Calloways' memories to remove the things that made them want to leave and stop working with him. So the Calloway parents were not, in fact, working willingly with Ira, but were being magically influenced to stay.

Ruidus' apex does indeed coincide with the apogee solstice.

"What are you gonna do, Imogen Temult? Bend to that? Or carve your own way?"

Keyleth had theories about the leylines and Orym heard about them scattered across "hundreds, hundreds of conversations." That's why he thinks the Gray Assassins targeted her.

This little halfling is hiding something -- you don't get to be privy to hundreds of private conversations had between the Voice of the Tempest and the leaders of massive political entities the likes of Whitestone if you're just a "simple guard."

Looking at the mask causes a "numb tingle" in the back of Ashton's mind.

FCG casts sending on Dancer. "Dancer, Fresh Cut Grass reporting in. Awaiting designation and assignment. What is your current status?" "How did you find me? What do you want from me?" Southern accent, so most likely Marquesian. Gravelly, textured, shaking -- scared.

Fearne takes two of the purple stones, puts one in Laudna's dollhouse, and the other one in Imogen's bag. Chaos entity.

2nd half!

"Art's never really done, you just abandon it for a while." I feel called out

Delilah's back, and she wants those goddamn rocks!

Another sending to Dancer: "Dancer? It's me, Fresh Cut Grass again. I might need you soon, and I'm worried about you. Where are you? Can you tell me?" "Please. Leave me alone. I barely got away. I don't wanna ever see you again. You know what you did." FCG takes four points.

Detect Thoughts on FCG -- "there is this burgeoning wave of tumultuous emotion and intensity, a level of stress and anger and a bottled cacophony of so many different voices and thoughts that they've taken on through years -- it's at a brimming point, a breaking point. Do you push further? [Yes.] With that, the loud noise becomes a heavy crackling static, and you have to pull back so it doesn't pierce your mind too."

"Some of your voices, other people, cries of pain, whispers, hundreds of moments of time of different voices all at once." waitwaitwait, was FCG awake for the entire time they were inactive? from when they were deactivated in the fall of Aeor to their recovery to their repair to whatever the fuck this is, has their mind been collecting all of that sound and it's only just now coming back all at once? that must be fucking maddening.

MURDER BOT, MURDER BOT

Chetney hits FCG lightly with a mallet and FCG immediately lunges for him with the buzz saw, and in this state they have advantage on their attack rolls. Their eyes turn deep red.

FCG is full on fighting Chetney. Like, spells and everything. Why don't you shut up? Why don't you shut your fucking mouth?

bitch what the fuck is happening?? you were never alive, your parents left because they didn't like you and they were fucking right -- who is in there?

Orym notices that the buzz saw is definitely a different coloration, and that the unique streak of grass on the chest could be grass -- also kinda looks like a streak of fingers.

FCG comes to consciousness in a familiar room in an unfamiliar perspective -- they see all of their friends upside down. Hanging from the ceiling. A bit woozy. It's weird to wake up like this.

They reset to 0 stress points. Cross-referencing with Ashton's memory, it's "definitely possible" that FCG was the one who killed their former party.

I... don't know what hunger of the shadow is. It's not a warlock or sorcerer class ability, not an ability of a Hollow One, not a spell -- I can't even find any spell that deals 4d8 damage and has an attack roll instead of a save. Also, Marisha says "I use" instead of "I cast," and Matt says "your ability" -- so I wonder whether this is something that Laudna got when Delilah absorbed the gnarlrock, because of the description of the warmth in her chest when she cast it.

A one-eyed monster is what killed their friends. That's what they remember. And when Ashton found them, one of their eyes was broken.

When Imogen looks into FCG's thoughts, there are none. It's like time looped on itself and rewrote over that time -- it's not obfuscated or blurred or modified, it's literally not there. She finds those voices and when they're all strung out, it's fine and chronological, but when FCG was in this state it's like it was all happening at one time to an overwhelming degree.

"Every one of us is a fucking powder keg. We are in this together. We're here, we decided to be around each other, we decided to be this fucking explosive, so why don't we try to fix each other and stop pretending that any one of us is the fucking problem?" every day Ashton says something that makes them even more interesting, and every day Talisein continues to come up with these banger lines

sooooo Orym's gonna take the Inspiring Leader feat at level 8, right? 'cause goddamn. they're all talking about how each and every one of them is a powder keg waiting to explode because of their abilities and their nature, about how Orym is the only one who isn't -- but he just was. that was a brilliant decision from Liam, to have Orym raise his voice and yell like that right after they said Orym would be the only not to explode. he's the moral center of this group, but what happens when he snaps? what happens when he falters under that weight? what happens when that gilded fulcrum rots?

this was the lore-heavy episode we needed, for sure.

#critical role #critical role spoilers #note watches c3 #critical role campaign 3 #critical role c3 #critical role liveblog

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