After our morning wound wash plus five oral medications plus a bicillin shot. :(
But she's very cooperative (until I have to squeeze to make sure all the puss is gone) and we take a few minutes to just sit with eachother.
Usually she's trying to dig herself up under my thigh to hide after everything, so when she stretched herself out to just chill as soon as she got her shot I grabbed my phone.
a little thought to ruin your day: After Piper broke up with Jason, he had to deal with his heartache all by himself, isolated in a mortal boarding school with nobody to comfort him. No family. No friends.
thinking about transfem sanji and "apparently-bisexual-now" zoro.
Sanji comes back to sabaody post ts with long hair and fem presenting, yet kicks zoros ass even harder than before and he's immediately smitten.
Zoro who's never been attracted to a woman before, but now all he can think of is sanjis long hair and pretty eyes and "yeah, okay, I guess this is it now."
May I ask for some details about your Tav? What do you mean by hasnt really lived as a tiefling before? Like literally has never seen another tiefling? Seems like being abducted by the mindflayers introduced major life changes to your Tav
I'm sorry this took so long to answer, but I ended up doing a whole bunch of art to answer this!
Ember has a really extensive backstory that's kind of long, but the short version of it is: she was caught in the crossfire of a deal her parents made with a devil. They couldn't have a child of their own because her mother was too severely ill, so they made the deal in the hopes of returning her health and along with it the ability to bear children. Unfortunately devil deals being what they are, they ended up with Ember who the devil stole from her birth parents.
Her mom was a high elf and her dad a half-elf, and her mom's side of the family were quite vocally anti-Tiefling. Because of her mother's health problems, however, they couldn't just sever contact with her parents because they relied on their money to cover the cost of healers, expensive potion ingredients and the like. They couldn't be trusted not to be a threat to Ember though, so the decision was made to disguise her as their biological daughter throughout her childhood.
Here's an age chart!
As a result, Ember didn't even know she was a Tiefling until she was around 4 or 5, when she began to present as a sorcerer and accidentally undid the disguise spell (she ends up a bard thanks to her mom, but her control of magic comes from sorcery).
Before the events of the game, the most time she ever spent as a Tiefling was when she was 13- when her mom died and her dad disappeared, the disguise spell having relied on her mum's magic. She went through hell for a while after that and as soon as she could learn how to cast the spell herself, she jumped at the chance and went back to living as her old half-elf self. So when she gets taken by the Nautiloid, it's her being forced to actually live as her real self and as a Tiefling for the first time. As a result she doesn't have great control over her tail, because she's just straight up not used to having one.
She also spends a lot of Act 1 jumpscaring herself whenever she walks by a mirror lmao.
I do plan to do some comics that are set earlier in the game at some point, and those ones will explore more of her backstory. What I've done so far has just happened to be set in Act 3, after she's already sorted a lot of her shit out. I just have no idea when that'll actually be!
Ppl going "waaahh unpopular opinion but Alice is kind of annoying and obnoxious and I don't think I'd like be her friend irl" is so funny to me bc like.
God forbid a cast of characters be multifaceted and have actual flaws and unpleasant aspects other than "grr angsty hero" and "whoops i'm so clumsy". Sometimes character dynamics and arcs need to be prioritized above "who would i personally be niceys with irl"
2. bro just WAIT until you hear about season 1 jon lol
i still find it so interesting how jackie is (was?) largely defined by her niceness, her friendliness. she's not the strongest, or the smartest, but she can bring people together. so when she is mean to the other girls, you notice it. she's mean to taissa when she feels like her position as leader is undermined; she knows that taissa is just as much of their leader as she is and it scares her. she's mean to shauna when she finds out about jeff; understandable considering what a huge betrayal it is (at least on the surface). but the girl she is by far the meanest to is nat.
and there is no good reason why anyone should be mean to nat. she is kind of treated as a punching bag, and taissa especially resents her because she doesn't like the idea of nat threatening the team's performance with her day-drinking or whatever. but nat is by far the kindest, sweetest, most compassionate, genuine member of the team. even as an adult you can see that she might be jaded and grieving and ruthless, but she's still at her core a good person. young natalie especially though is someone with a very strong moral center and uses those guiding principles of kindness to define who she is.
she's more mature, capable, and sure of herself than the rest of the group, because before ever landing in that forest, she's had a much harder life than the rest of them. we see that van probably doesn't have the best home life, but the rest of them are living comfortably. even if they don't have great relationships with their parents, they still live in middle to upper class households. nat grew up in a trailer park with a father who horribly abused her and her mother (until the day she witnessed him accidentally shoot his own face off). these circumstances made nat more resilient, braver, and more empathetic than the other girls.
and i think jackie recognizes that, whether or not it's a conscious recognition. she knows that nat is everything she herself is not. nat is confident in herself whereas jackie is terribly insecure and relies on external validation to uphold her own identity. where nat comes from poverty, jackie grew up in a huge house. where nat is comfortable having sex with boys, jackie is too repressed to have sex with her longterm boyfriend because she's terrified of having to confront the fact that she won't actually like it. natalie expresses herself through alt/grunge fashion, music, and culture, whereas jackie is as preppy as it is physically possible to be. natalie is jackie's perfect opposite: a poor outcast who is nevertheless comfortable enough in her own (hetero)sexuality to present in a (gender) non-conforming way and not care what others think of her to jackie's rich popular prom queen soccer captain who is debilitatingly insecure and sexually repressed, conforming perfectly to society's expectations of her to the point that she'd rather die than explore the possibility that she might like girls.
jackie has negative interest in travis, but she breaks him and nat up and steals him from her anyway. and the thing is, nat doesn't even care. she forgives jackie. when lottie locks jackie in the closet (ha), nat is the one who comes to her rescue. when travis apologizes to nat for sleeping with jackie, she says it doesn't matter to her. jackie is horrible to nat, but nat is genuinely mature enough that it doesn't even bother her. jackie wears her insecurities on her sleeve, and nat sees right through her. she doesn't put up with jackie's bullshit, but she's also gracious enough to not gang up on jackie with the rest of the girls, even though she's the only one who actually has any right to be mad at her. nat is generally apart from the rest of the team, not only because she's an outcast, but because she's simply above their petty dramas.
jackie doesn't have a good reason to be mean to her. she's the kindest, sweetest girl on the team. but jackie is mean when she feels threatened, and nat's existence threatens her very identity.