bloody stones

warnings: descriptions of blood & injury, canon typical violence, mentions of past abuse. lmk if i should add more!

You were fairly certain you had never been as close to death as you currently were. Even while trapped inside of the nautiloid ship, you had felt like you would make it out. Granted, that might have been because you thought Lae’zel was going to kill you if you died, but still. Even then, on a ship that was actively crashing from hundreds of miles in the sky, you’d thought you’d make it out.

That hope is nowhere to be found as Z’rell drives her ax into your lower leg. You have been injured in battle dozens of times but this is the first time your injury has ever made you fall to your knees within three seconds of receiving it. There is next to no pain at first, but then she pulls her ax from your leg, and it feels like… well, like your leg was just split open.

Imagine leaving more and more stuff in Astarion’s tent as your relationship with him develops.

It starts small, maybe you just forget that shirt you usually wear at night. Astarion just picks it up and carries it with him in his pack, slightly irritated by your forgetfulness. It smells so pleasantly of you though. And the smile you give him when he hands it back to you gives him that weird warm feeling in his chest. You keep *forgetting* it on his bedroll in the mornings. But Astarion has stopped questioning it. Just takes in your lingering scent and then packs it time and again with a small smile on his lips.

Then suddenly you also keep forgetting your comb. Another time it's the book you've been reading recently. Adventure doing a thing to your focus, huh? The vampire just packs them up along with his stuff.

Implicitly, you both know that you're doing it on purpose, at least you do. But there's something about putting your finger on truths right under your nose. And you don't mention it to him.

Astarion still doesn't fully get why you're doing it. But he surely doesn't mind you having to come and *retrieve* your stuff all the time. Until it's your wholeass pillow and blanket and he can't keep quiet about it anymore.

Is he supposed to carry *your* pillow around now? What kind of weird thing you are trying to pull on him? But when you pout at him and argue that you have to drag it over to his tent every night anyway because you haven't used your own tent in weeks, it finally clicks for him.

Those things you leave with him just go to show what neither of you can't put fully into words yet: that there's a desperate desire in both of you to be close to each other, always.

kristen aptly filling her role of lesbian friend when she ate that eyeball and IMMEDIATELY spotted the bff's crush getting up to some fuck shit and alerted her to the situation. really the lesbian of all time

tshirt that says MY COCK IS HUGE AND MY GRIP ON REALITY IS TENUOUS AND MY COCK IS AVERAGE

don't care didn't ask plus my cowplant is offering you a piece of cake if you don't take it you're an asshole and you're hurting his feelings btw

hey hey hey

Assigning you a song that makes white people go nuts (from experience)

I didn't even care about the result, the questions here are just delightful

i’m obsessed i think

bonus

I don’t know who this guy is but I’m obsessed with him and have been scrolling through his reviews for the past half hour

WAIT WAIT WAIT if Cassandra was created in the image of Kristen do we think Ankarna’s going to be like Fig???? Metal band tshirt leather jacket spiked jewelry etc???? Thats what im imagining rn im hoping.

screaming crying and throwing up at them guessing garthy so hard for the investigation question. like, the anagram is clearly night yorb.

which they got to by fucking up an anagram of garthy's name.

adaine "so actually you didn't get that you got a crit" abernant

I am super against light pollution, and have been for decades

but I am also super annoyed by the way it's framed as "without light pollution you can see how beautiful the night sky is" way more prominently than it's framed as "hey, did you ever stop to think of how much energy/resources/money are literally wasted by having so much light shine up into the sky?"

so people get the idea that light pollution can only be remedied by eliminating all night-time light, which would make being outside at night very inconvenient, instead of by making night-time light shine only on the ground where, y'know, the people who need it are

The mildest example of what OP's talking about in Dunedin, Aotearoa:

This is just with the streetlamp equivalent of using lampshades. Imagine what truly directional city lights could achieve?

Reblogging this again cause light pollution actually have negative health affects on humans and wildlife. We weren't meant to live in a world constantly bathed in light.

i saw a joke post back when the season was first announced that was like "brennan's gonna make the intrepid heroes take the SAT"

i hope whoever that was is feeling FANTASTIC

ok but all the bad kids were so strategic and effective in the last stand. i know gorgug's crits and fig's spells were huge but everyone really played to the best of their class. look here for the questions and killing blows.

adaine's spell usage was super effective--the mephits granting advantage and blinding opponents. the scatter to get the melee fighters where they're the most effective. using mirror image and her bonus action divination cantrips to not get hit. the use of the portents was excellent--keeping gorgug from taking huge damage from the purple worm and allowing fig to crit on the wyvern enhanced both of their strategy immensely. she split the difference between damage and utility very well.

kristen's bless let the melee attacks hit when they would have missed and she held that concentration the entire time, while intermittently healing and reducing the number of enemies they had to face (skeletons & manticore) and getting out of the way where she wouldn't be targeted. if she hadn't been moved to the side by buddy no one would have caught kipperlilly. absolutely critical support casting. ally really took a lot from playing margaret and applied it here.

fig, despite feeling insecure about her melee attacks, did a ton with her melee cantrip/smite combos (insane) and ambient spirit guardians. by moving around the battlefield strategically and drawing attention as the fake proctor she dealt with the smaller enemies (jellies, stirges, rust monsters, mimic) and actively took down the shrimp dragon, wyvern, and pentacorn.

riz went the other direction; hiding and using the extra action from haste to get sneak attack multiple times in the round. his sneak attacks really served to whittle away at high hp counts when the bad kids had to split focus. plus the clutch defeat of the roper and umber hulk was excellent.

fabian wasn't critting as often as gorgug, but he followed a similar strategy to fig; where she drew attention and killed enemies with AOE and melee, fabian drew attention from single combatants and dealt with them effectively: he practically soloed the hydra and roper with assistance from riz and kept the umber hulk and crab man off of his allies as the final wave converged.

gorgug thistlespring. the crit king. initially he was doing big damage in a similar strategy to riz; he got huge hits on the gorgon and shrimp dragon before taking on by far the most challenging enemy, the purple worm, with assistance from adaine's attack spells. two full turns as the only combatant taking damage from the worm, while knocking it prone every single turn.

this was the battle of the brands for the bad kids, scaled for level 13 combatants. they put everything into this fight.