#debatably you could also say “dealing with known moth traffickers” was her dumbest move | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mantisgodsdomain · 6 months

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Asks for the Random Character Asks

Marigold: 12, 13, 15

(for this ask game)

12. Crack headcanon

The reason she has so many flowers in her mane is because she fucked up with a transmutation early on and rooted them in there and her mentor Didn't Help At All so now they're just stuck in there as a permanent part of her body.

15. Worst thing they've ever done

As previously mentioned, "worst thing they've ever done" is ridiculously hard to define and extremely subjective at best. For Marigold specifically, it's even harder to define than most. She... doesn't do really things directly, after all.

She's a catalyst, and though she acts to make the situation immediately worse, she generally has little interference beyond that. She's an observer, not a direct actor, she's an alchemist, not a poison-brewer - part of what makes her so difficult to pin down and immune to consequence is that unless it's to gather test subjects for raw field data, she's almost certainly just... not acting directly. There's a medium. An in-between. A client, somewhere along the line, asking for her charms.

Though the "what they would think of when asked the question" question might work under normal circumstances, Marigold is an exception to the rule - as previously mentioned, she would not personally consider any of her actions to be immoral. She's done things that weren't amazing, of course, but it's not like she'd consider herself a bad person - just someone with professional pride. You wouldn't expect her to offer a subpar product to a customer, would you?

Beyond that, there's the issue of pinning down a single individual case. Marigold isn't a... "one and done" kind of villain, she gains the sort of status she has from low-profile but consistent evils. She doesn't do anything obvious, she doesn't do anything that can be pinned on her - people disappear, and monsters turn up after, and if they're especially valuable or they survive the period it takes for the transmutation to settle in their bones, she'll trap them somewhere to harvest for more transmutation-fuelling parts later.

That, of course, could be considered a "worst" - but it's still not one single thing you can point to. It's dozens and dozens of things, spread out over years of activity, people who mysteriously vanish off the streets and never turn up again. There is no single monolith of evil that can be pointed to, because Marigold isn't the kind of evil that does big gestures like that. Just... a slow, steady flow of charms into hands that do harm with them, combined with a slow, steady flow of people who leave their homes and don't come back.

...if we had to choose it would probably be something along the lines of experimenting on prisoners provided via negotiations with criminal factions and then bargaining with the factions those prisoners were taken from to sell them back already transmuted into monstrous forms and entirely incapable of resuming their previous lives. She got paid by both sides for it, both for developing specified new strains of transmutative on the prisoners and for returning them to their original faction. The client didn't specify what to do with them after they'd served their purpose, after all.

13. Dumbest thing they’ve ever done

Well! This one's very nearly a Story.

A fun fact about charms: they're not always perfectly consistent, especially if you're making new ones. That's why you test them before applying them to paying customers. That's why you take a constant flow of people unlikely to be missed for experiments. That's why you do experiments in the first place. If something goes wrong, then you need to know what to fix it, and if an unexpected variable throws the experiment-

Well. It could go very, very wrong, or very, very right. But you never turn your back on the experiment. You never assume you know what will happen next until it's good and tested, you never assume things will work out until you're 100% sure, you never assume that nothing can possible go wrong - Marigold knows this, of course, and she acts accordingly. Lab safety is a priority, not an afterthought. When the things you're working with might kill you if it breaks containment, you never leave things up to chance. It's simple safety precautions. Nothing ever up to chance. Nothing ever allowed to fail. And if anything were to fail - well, you being on-hand gives the best possible chance of getting things back under control.

And then, of course, someone comes calling at the door. You're too early into the experiment to excuse watching it as a delay, of course, and you know they know you're home - you mentioned you'd be home just the other day, after all. Reputation is valuable, and the monitoring built into the cage will work just as well, won't it? It might need a few more trials, but you can't really afford to be rude, and you especially can't afford them coming to find you - these parts of your lab are blocked off to guests for a reason, and you can't simply disappear a guest to your house.

Surely, it won't do any harm to leave it for just a few minutes. Surely, it'll mean nothing to leave the transmutation to finish unattended. You return back downstairs not more than five minutes after you left, ready to finish what you started.

The cage is open.

#asks #ask games #ocs #marigold #we speak #she survived ofc but it was very dumb and she nearly died doing it #debatably you could also say “dealing with known moth traffickers” was her dumbest move #or “dealing with people known to stab people in the back”#or a great deal of her criminal dealings actually #but like. this works better because the rarity of her craft means she actually has a decent protective buffer #simply in the fact that she's the only person who can do the job she's doing and it's impossible to Just Replace Her #and has enough connections that she can afford to be dealing-to-all-parties neutral because killing her would piss off Everyone Else #it pays to be the only supplier of a limited resource and it Especially pays when its an artisan thing and can't be competently reproduced #it takes years of apprenticeship to make a charmsmith and even that won't guarantee the same specialty #marigold herself couldn't make her old mentor's works if she tried simply because inanimate transmutation doesn't click with her #and her former apprentice's area of specialty with medical charmcraft doesn't overlap much with either of them #anyways. very normal moth. she is morally grounded and normal.#every time we say anything about marigold assume it can be summed up with “yea its fucked up”#shes very. fine

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