There is so much to hate in post-season 3 of Fear The Walking Dead, but Althea and Isabelle's love story was so great.
Isabelle was also the first CRM soldier The Walking Dead universe fans saw, and her character development was amazing. I'm so glad she and Al got a happy ending. Thank goodness they didn't show up in season 8, because the last time we saw them was a great ending for these two.
Althea x Isabelle are now a new ship of mine after this episode of Fear the walking dead where they meet but I'm pretty sure it's gonna end with one of them dying, not because they are in the apocalypse but because they are wlws 🥰
It's been a long time since I first fell in love with pre-Searing Ascalon in Guild Wars: Prophecies. But I'm still nostalgic enough that I periodically visit Ebonhawke just to go home to human Ascalon, and I loved this view of it :)
Very important GW2 headcanon update: I’ve decided that I’m not going to try and incorporate all my characters into a grand unified headcanon with each starring in their own AU continuity, since it kind of breaks my brain.
Instead, it’s just the four main Ascalonian ones ;)
So, here’s one universe:
The future Pact Commander is Victoria, a mysteriously orphaned young girl adopted into a noble Ascalonian family who had lived in Divinity’s Reach for generations. Her new family is loving and she’s particularly close to her mother, Lady Julia Langmar, and Lady Julia’s nieces, Deborah and Althea Fairchild, but troubled by the secrecy around what happened to her birth parents.
Although Victoria herself is more like the fierce yet easy-going Deborah, a Seraph who would later become a fellow crusader in the Vigil, she’s actually a bit closer to Althea, who is younger and much more frivolous apart from intense loyalty to her friends and their people. Victoria herself has always felt a bit uncertain of her place in the Ascalonian community they grew up in, despite firmly siding with them, and she finds comfort in her faith in the Six and in using her size and strength to protect the vulnerable. It’s entirely in character for Victoria to rush into danger to help the Shaemoor villagers and relieve Logan Thackeray, but nobody could be more surprised than Victoria herself when holy fire flashed from her mace in the battle.
Months later, after the formation of the Pact against the dragons, she’s even more astonished to turn around to receive urgent news brought by one of the prestigious Lightbringers of the secretive Order of Whispers, and find that the Lightbringer in question is none other than Althea, who had become a spy for the Order while Victoria thought her entirely occupied by gossip and fashion in the relative safety of Divinity’s Reach.
Victoria has to quietly deal with feeling both impressed and a bit betrayed as they work against the dragons, coordinating with two other Ascalonians: Magister Isabel of the Priory, a necromancer who regards Zhaitan as a natural enemy and is prepared to use her research in the fight against him, but readily distracted by possibilities of further knowledge, and Lightbringer Gwen, who is the harshest of the three and ready to do whatever is necessary to stop Zhaitan, but clearly doubtful if the others have what it will take.
@doomdays: it's a free country. in some ways. (al + isabelle)
out here, she almost believes it. the forest has a stillness near dusk that isabelle still isn't accustomed to, despite the time spent at beckett's cabin alone; every now and then, the dead had managed to skirt her defenses, navigate their way through the thick foliage (thinning as the days grow shorter, the crispness of coming autumn entering her lungs with every breath) — but never at sunset. gold-red bleeds to purple streaks in the sky above, isabelle pausing to scan absentmindedly for black dots, heralds of death — fearing the day they hear the skull-numbing thwackthwackthwack of the chopper's blades, the reaper's scythe cutting through the air.
there's nothing up there now except brilliant color: the sun round and full and draped lazily by a cloud, drifting into oblivion, but it's all an illusion. the other shoe dropped; the patch of earth she'd managed to claim as her own scorched, devoured by the relentless machine of the civic republic, because that's what happens. what will always happen. what she's made happen; what she ensured they'd have the capability to do, time and time again, for a year, a decade, a century.
(so that there's more than stories left when they die.)
the grim thoughts show themselves in her expression tearing her eyes away from the bright red sign that'd prompted her to stop — PRIVATE PROPERTY bold and prominent, despite time and weather — in the curve of her brow as isabelle flits her gaze towards althea — unable to stop the miniscule smile that catches in the corner of her mouth, gradually growing into something substantial. it's not enough to overpower the fear shadowing her eyes, but — it's something, isn't it? something to warm her, just as pressing closer to al does, slipping back beneath the canopy of leaves with practiced ease.
“not much of a country left.” al's seen it from the sky, just as she has — how empty, how hollow the ground feels below. cratered cities and masses of dead, cracked highways stretching like dried veins in a long-dead corpse. (the civic republic hidden, a dark shadow cast across the land.) her smile twitches into a grimace, and isabelle turns her attention towards the cabin across the clearing, cloaked in darkness, but enough light filters through the trees to reveal the caved-in roof, ruling it out as viable shelter. “—still feels weird, walking onto someone's property. even if it's just passing through. maybe that's stupid.” with everything she's done, trespassing — if you could even call it that, really — should hardly cause her to stumble — but there's the overwhelming thought that someone lived here once: it had been a home. maybe now it's a grave. it seems almost disrespectful to disturb it.
her jaw clenches, teeth gritting as she pushes past the glaring sign, keeping her footfalls light and short, a hand on the hilt of her blade. “... c'mon. it's getting dark soon.”
So in terms of bastardry (the bastard chart) he did put most of his points into Superiority Complex. He seems pretty unassuming at the outset but he does think he is the most Correct person to ever live, more or less. Which means he's completely justified in his bullshit, and the fact that he causes problems is really not his problem. Usually he pulls the "burn the letters" kind of move where he does something bad not to cause a problem but because he's Right, but of course it causes a problem because it was bad. But you know he will piss off Emma on purpose, because they're often sparring with each other in the least romantic way possible. As for Performer, Donovan is a man with an agenda. His biggest performance to date was of course convincing a couple dozen people to crew his "move to Ensaum" vanity project, though that wasn't exactly a feat of trickery (he did deliver exactly what he promised!). I think he was low-key tricking himself though because he believed in his whole "no capitalism 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻" spiel even though deep down he wanted to get away from his own trauma and put Sid into a controlled environment. But he is a master of lying by omission, dodging the question, having an excuse, &c.
But actually my favorite thing about Donovan these days is that despite obviously sucking ass he gets to be the shitty parent both capable of and willing to change. I mean, push had to come to shove off a cliff, but you know. And his dynamic with Emma is so deliciously weird and toxic like they're obsessed with each other. They pull each other into their schemes. They've been married for like 35 years and they know everything and nothing about each other. They can't agree on anything but you can practically see it when they align into a united front. Donovan's greatest fear is that Emma will leave him. But she never will, because she'll never get another man so wrapped around her finger, and she's not done fixing him yet, and also she loves him. Donovan will never admit that he's constantly torn between "her challenges are interesting" and "when will she understand that I am Right". Basically they're trapped in mutual tinkering forever and Sid had the terrible fortune to get born into the crossfire.
The Danneville family! They are our local woodcutters. Usual pictures included: family photos, house, community lot business, and the addition of the woodlot where they will gather some more wood than just from what's at their home.
My fun geek necromancer (GW2) is now level 36 or so. In general, I still do prefer my mesmer’s pink lasers (though it’s not quite fair as a comparison since my mesmer is my level 80 long-standing main, wasn’t even my first GW2 mesmer, and my GW1 main was also a mesmer, so I’m a lot more familiar w/ that class and have access to many more aspects of it).
In any case, I do enjoy a lot of the mechanics—the necro didn’t have a single death until level 36(!). I’m running through the Character Advancement tracks from the anniversary update, and it’s a nice way to have both concrete goals and decent rewards for them. I imagine it provides some help to people who aren’t as familiar with the game, also, since it can be a pretty complicated game at times. And I’m gathering just about everything possible (...even onions. so many onions) to funnel into crafting (or selling, in order to finance more crafting).
It is interesting that necro is considered one of the easiest classes by contrast to mesmer (or worse, elementalist). I do personally find mesmers much easier to play, but again, it’s probably not fair when my main is lvl 80 and decked out in everything I could afford or luck into (quite a bit via 10 years of laurels), and it did originally take awhile to adjust to clones and timing Diversion and such (and no Backfire, my absolute favorite skill in GW1 that would be ludicrously overpowered in GW2. RIP <3). But a whole second health bar does go a long way, ngl.