#i remain as ever tormented by blorbo thoughts | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ninadove · 10 months

Note

Hades for the ask game>=)

OH GODS THAT IS AN EXCELLENT ASK

Blorbo (favorite character, character I think about the most)

Zagreus. Oh my god, Zagreus. My favourite video game protagonist hands down.

Many of my Felix mutuals like to joke that he would never play video games because of the whole “controlling a character” bit, but I’m here to tell you: he would play Hades, in fact he did play Hades while watching his father slowly die in the hospital, delivering the final blow without breaking eye contact Every. Single. Time.

And of course, he developed the biggest crush on Zagreus.

Zagreus spent his entire life (potentially centuries?) enduring the most horrifying abuse and then just. Woke up one day and decided he had had enough. He dies again and again and and again, always respawning in the very same prison he grew up in no matter what, but he does not let it get to him; instead, he picks himself up and tries again, just for a chance to catch a glimpse of the sun. Not taking any bullshit from anyone, but remaining kind and soft through his entire ordeal.

A model and an inspiration to us all. ❤️🩸

Scrunkly (my “baby”, character that gives me cuteness aggression, character that is So Shaped)

The ace lesbian ever. 💚🏹

(Baby girl please give me your Call boon in every run I’m begging —)

Scrimblo bimblo (underrated/underappreciated fave)

This one is hard because every single Hades character has a significant fanbase, even fucking Bouldy (as he should, I myself love him very much, but he’s literally a rock).

So I’m putting Meli here instead, because I want her in this post and she has nowhere else to go.

When I saw her eyes, I cried. Because one of the first things Zag asked Hades upon learning the truth about his parentage was wether or not he had any siblings. If there was someone like him, out there, going through similar hardships.

I was so happy for him I did not immediately realise that meant we would get a hella sapphic game. 🧡🌙

Glup shitto (obscure fave, character that can appear in the background for 0.2 seconds and I won’t shut up about it for a week)

The one and only Froggo. 💚

(Seriously though, I want to highlight how incredible the release trailer is from a Marketing perspective. The team came up with a checklist of everything we wanted to see, from the long-awaited Apollo to the new love interests, and managed to cram everything in there in just over two minutes. And Froggo made the cut because they knew how much we loved petting Cerberus. It’s just *Chef’s kiss*.)

Poor little meow meow (“problematic”/unpopular/controversial/otherwise pathetic fave)

Nor really “problematic”, definitely not unpopular and certainly not pathetic, but I’ll put Nyx here because she’s a liiittle bit classist and was straight up mean to Dusa:

Let’s be clear, she’s still Best Mum (I do not care for this version of Persephone).

Horse plinko (character I would torment for fun, for whatever reason)

There’s only one (1) valid answer to this one:

But I also think Eurydice could do wayyy better than Orpheus. I haven’t forgiven him for not being a lesbian like I thought he would be when I first saw his design.

Eeby deeby (character I would send to superhell)

And I’d kill you; in a hundred runs, with a hundred different weapons, in any version of this game, I’d find you and I’d kill you.

#hades #hades 2 #hades game #zagreus #artemis #melinoe #melinoë #froggo hades #nyx #theseus #ask games #dragongutsixofficial 💖#And I haven’t even talked about Cerberus and Thanatos! Love ‘em both ❤️🖤

73 notes · View notes

dandelion-wings · 8 months

Text

Sometimes you have writing plans for the day pre-made, but then you wake up in the middle of the night from a wretched nightmare, can't fall back asleep, and end up twisting bits of the nightmare together with bits of canon to torment your blorbos with....

This is a very rough version of last night's 'can't get back to sleep' bedtime story, and I know what happens before and after and how it would go if I expanded it out (and @theabysscomeshome and I have spent today kicking around the sequel where Lisa and Kaeya actually reach Mondstadt XD), but I wanted something I could write in the two hours I was hanging out at the hospital this afternoon so I crunched it down into something that almost fit into that window. Maybe someday I will write the longer version (as if I need more WIPs), but hopefully this will exorcise the worst of the brainworms so I can actually work on the stuff I'd planned for the next week!

---

This is the third time Lisa has been left alone with Anatoli's most prized specimen.

She can't say she's developed a routine with him so soon, but he doesn't look surprised when she deactivates the shield around his cell and steps inside. Lisa reaches out, slow and careful, but all her care can't keep him from flinching when she touches the clasp of the shock-collar he's wearing. She keeps the static of her Electro Vision firmly tamped down so that at least she won't set it off as she takes it off him.

The shock-collar isn't supposed to keep him from talking, only from too-sudden movements. But it's tuned to its highest sensitivity, and she's seen it light up, crackling, when he cries out. She would go silent too if any exclamation ran that risk. Besides, no one on Anatoli's research team cares to listen to what he has to say.

He swallows a few times, his throat working, and looks up at her from under the loose fall of uncut bangs with his one remaining eye. His voice is small and hoarse and thick with suspicion as he asks, for the third time, "What do you want?"

"I have a question for you, Kaeya."

It's almost what she'd said the last two times, though she'd had many questions then. She knows his name (Kaeya Alberich; he'd looked at her warily as he gave the surname, as if he expected her to recognize it, and seemed almost disappointed when she didn't), and how long he'd been here (six years, by his best estimate), and how he'd come (he'd snuck onto a ship to Sumeru, looking for his family, and been caught in the desert by bandits who sold him on), and what, exactly, they've done to him (though there was only verifying what Anatoli's records already say). She knows that, whatever Anatoli says, the curse hasn't twisted his mind as it has his body. He's reacting exactly as any rational human would to the conditions he's lived under for the last six years.

Lisa would start biting people too, if they only ever touched her to cause her pain.

"Just one?" For all the suspicion, she can hear a thread of amusement in his voice.

"Just one, tonight." Lisa holds up a finger. "Wait a moment, though, sweetie. I have to do something first."

She steps back out of the cell, leaving the shield down, and takes what would look to any casual eye like a Canned Knowledge capsule out of her robes. It takes only a moment to sync with her Akasha Terminal; she waits for the double-chirp that confirms it's scanned her thoughts and is replicating them for the Terminal, then takes it off and sets it aside. If she's being monitored, the terminal will only pick up that she's still here, asking Kaeya the same set of questions she has the last two times she was trusted to supervise him.

Unless Lord Sangemah Bay has sold them a false bill of goods, or is cooperating with the matra. Lisa doubts the second, and has to simply trust the merchant's reputation on the first. They've certainly paid heavily for all she's sold them.

Once her terminal is, hopefully, disarmed, Lisa takes another of their purchases out and steps back into the cell. She sees Kaeya fix a wary gaze on the little device in her hand--shaped and sized almost like a terminal itself--and smiles at him as warmly as she can muster with her skin prickling with trepidation. She's very aware that she has her back to the door. Anyone who comes through will have a few seconds' advantage on her, and Lisa has no good excuse for what she's doing. None but a moral argument that Anatoli's team doesn't care to hear.

Cyrus had made it directly and passionately, to Anatoli and then to the Sage of Spantamad, and been turned away both times. Cyno had made it bureaucratically, filling out all the paperwork necessary to report a breach of academic ethics, and had seen it dismissed out of hand. By the Akademiya's ruling, Kaeya Alberich is a monster, not a human, and thus a designated test subject to be treated as Anatoli's team sees fit. He has the curse of Khaenri'ah, after all. It's active in him, manifested in his blackened and Cryo-lined right arm; that Anatoli's own records showed that he had triggered it deliberately in Kaeya's second year here didn't have any effect on the Darshan's decision.

Their options had been to take it all the way to the Six Great Sages, or to try another tack. The Six Great Sages, by a ruling of four to two, had determined that Cyno, in his youth, was a similar such test subject, and *he* didn't bear the curse of Khaenri'ah, nor elemental powers from the Abyss. None of them had expected that it would go any better in this particular case.

Lisa had already been slowly becoming disillusioned with the Akademiya. This was just the last nail in the coffin. She doesn't mind burning her whole career down behind her when she goes, and that's why she's here, late at night, holding the key that will deactivate the wards on Kaeya's cell.

"Kaeya, would you like to get out of here?"

"*Yes*," he says, in that low, hoarse voice, strained by desperation and a hope she can see him trying to restrain as his eye meets hers.

"Good. I will ask you not to do anything rash once I get them off of you. We don't want to set off the alarms."

Kaeya holds rigidly still as Lisa undoes the wards, one by one, that hold him physically restrained and his Abyssal powers in check. She can feel the cold rising off the stump of his right arm as she looses that ward, the Cryo veining it eager for release. It's the one she's tensest for, ready for him to lash out, senseless as it would be--he has no reason to trust her, and no reason to think her anything than another of her tormentors. She'd stood by and watched while they took what remained of the lower limb off to the elbow just two weeks go.

(She'd had to build trust. After Cyrus and Cyno's efforts, Anatoli was wise enough to be wary of her. Even after she'd repudiated Cyrus as too soft-hearted and said some truly horrible things about Cyno, it had taken time to convince him that she was truly breaking away from her academic clique. He hadn't let her start taking shifts supervising his specimens until after she'd managed to keep herself largely impassive through the collection of that particular 'tissue sample.'

If he'd known what she'd been fantasizing about at the time, he wouldn't have wanted her within a mile of his lab. Lisa has a perfect test designed for *his* pain tolerances, if the opportunity ever happens to arise.)

But he doesn't attack, as rigidly still when she'd finished as when she'd begun. For a moment Lisa wonders if the key had actually worked. Then he takes a deep breath, shivers all over, and lets it out. On the exhale, he rises smoothly to his feet.

"Robes," Lisa tells him, mostly so that he won't panic when she goes for the bag she'd brought with her tonight. Tossing the notes at the top aside--she won't need them anymore, and may Anatoli have whatever joy he may get from her careful records of Kaeya's answers--she holds out the bundle of fabric to him, then turns away.

The cold at her back puts a chill down her spine, but at least now she's looking at the door. She just has to trust that he'll maintain his restraint even with her back turned.

It seems to take a tortuously long time for him to get dressed, though Lisa has no intention of rushing him through something he hasn't been allowed to do since he was, by his own accounting, eleven. She doesn't look down at her jammed terminal or back over her shoulder at him. She watches the door and counts the seconds passing in her head.

Despite the tension of the wait, Kaeya finishes well within her time window. Lisa turns to see that she's guessed his size well. He still looks swamped in the robes, even though they end at his ankles, but that's an unavoidable consequence of the caloric pittance Anatoli budgets for him. At least it helps hide the missing end of the right arm.

She holds out her arm to him instead of reaching for his. Kaeya hesitates a moment, looking at her warily, then grasps her wrist with his left hand. His grip is far stronger than she'd expected for how few fingers he has left, almost bruisingly tight, but Lisa makes sure to keep smiling at him as she starts for the door.

The corridors of the lab are dark, barely lit. Anatoli's tight-fisted grip on mora will help them here. Lisa leads Kaeya through the turns in utter silence and a tingling aura of static and cold. She can't entirely suppress her Vision, jangling with both her own nerves and the close presence of Abyssal power, and she can't expect Kaeya to suppress his own abilities when control has only ever been imposed upon them from outside. That he's not giving her frostbite at the moment will have to be good enough.

Humid air hits them like a wet sheet across the face as they step out of the climate-controlled laboratory and into a summer night in Sumeru City. The heat damps the chill, the moisture the static, and Lisa sighs in something not quite relief. Kaeya gasps aloud, then flinches, going tense, no doubt anticipating the collar's buzz. Lisa turns to give him another smile.

In the next breath, he lets go of her and jerks away sideways, flinging himself down the path at a run. Lisa hisses under her breath and puts a hand to her Vision. It's her own fault; she should have expected that. But she can't let him get away.

Electro flashes at her throat, and a gleaming elemental barrier rises to his left as he careens down the street. His atrophied muscles are working in her favor, even with desperation driving him. He flinches away from the barrier and turns the other way, towards the rightward path. Lisa scrambles after him.

Just after he rounds the corner, she hears a grunt, and a yelp, and a crack of Electro. She comes around after him to find Cyno clutching him tight. Kaeya is limp in his grasp. It's his instinctive reaction to the shock-collar, which will keep reacting until he stops moving; Cyno's jolt must have felt just the same. The look on his face is one of open betrayal.

"Don't try that again," Cyno tells him, setting him back on his feet as Lisa approaches and holding him there until he takes his own weight. "If you run into any other matra, they would know you weren't a student, and you'd be lucky if they sensed the Abyss on you and killed you outright. It's more likely they would take you for a confused Elezear patient and return you straight to the Akademiya."

"And right back to Anatoli," Lisa adds. "Kaeya, this is Cyno. He's going to help us get out of the city."

"A *matra* is helping you steal a specimen?"

"A friend of mine," Lisa says, firmly, "is helping me get a badly injured young man away from those who injured him."

Kaeya gives her a dubious look, but doesn't argue further.

"Follow me," Cyno tells them, starting off down the side-street towards the darkness at its end. "We don't have much time if we're going to slip out between patrols."

Lisa holds her arm out to Kaeya again. He shakes his head, but starts after Cyno. She follows him, watching his increasingly heavy step. This is more exercise than he's been allowed for years, and their night has only just begun. Forcing contact, though, is only going to make him more nervous. There has to be a point at which he unleashes his Cryo in earnest, and she'd rather not push him to it.

Their path leads them through narrow gaps between buildings, alongside the brightwood stands behind them, and, eventually, out to the farmlands on the city's northern side. By the time they break out onto the slopes down to the river to its north, Kaeya is stumbling outright. This time, when Lisa offers him her arm, he takes it and leans into her a little. Lisa can feel him shaking through the robes.

"You're sure you're not going to get in trouble for this, cutie?" she asks Cyno. "You can't make General Mahamatra and reform the matra from within if you get accused of helping me out."

"There's a Kshahrewar scholar ready to swear that I've been drinking with him all night. If we'd run across a patrol and had to deal with them, there might have been trouble, but no one has any reason to guess that I noticed that hole in the schedule before you took advantage of it."

"Good."

As they reach the shore, a faint firefly-light glows just above the water. A literal fire-fly light; there's a handful in a jar, sitting at the feet of a young man in a canoe. Lisa can't make out much by that dim illumination, but he has long, pointed fox's ears, and she sees the whisking of a fluffy tail behind him.

"These are your passengers?" he asks Cyno, standing to look Lisa and Kaeya over.

Cyno nods, then turns to Lisa. "This is the Forest Ranger I told you about. He'll take you wherever you've chosen to go. Make sure to avoid Port Ormos. The matra there recently got an updated connection to the Akasha, and they'll know exactly what to look for before you can get there. But Caravan Ribat and Gandharva Ville are still on the old system and should be safe."

"Which way do you want to go, sweetie?" she asks, turning to Kaeya. "East or west?"

He jerks his head up and blinks at her as if coming out of a daze. Then he shakes his head. "Not back to the desert."

"East it is, then."

"Good," the ranger says. "I hate the desert. There's a mercenary and her company that I've heard good things about out that way, if you needed a trustworthy guide, but there's no guarantee you'd be able to hire her. It's not a good idea to go straight through Gandharva Ville, since we might be seen by other Forest Rangers, but I can take you past it and over the border to Lumberpick Valley in Liyue by myself."

"Thank you, cutie." Lisa gives him a warm smile, then turns to help Kaeya into the canoe.

He collapses onto the bench more than sits on it, and all the tension thrumming through him can't keep him from keeling over onto Lisa's shoulder once she sits down beside him. She puts an arm around him to steady him, but keeps her touch light so that he won't feel trapped. The ranger exchanges a wordless nod with Cyno, then pushes away from the bank.

They start off down the river, picking up speed as they go. Lisa yawns, giggles a little when Kaeya echoes it, and then giggles more when the ranger yawns, too, and grumbles under his breath about it. Settling more comfortably onto the seat as Kaeya grows heavier and heavier against her, Lisa looks up through the trees and the mist at the first gleam of light off in the east as they make their way towards the dawn.

#references here to medical experimentation and dismemberment (and imprisonment and dehumanization and- listen it's mad science)#also it's not how it ACTUALLY goes even in the longer version but all the same #i would like anyone here familiar with leverage to envision:#lisa standing up from a table where cyrus and cyno and tighnari are all gathered #and smiling at them as she says 'let's go steal a khaenri'ahan'#because that's been in my head all morning and i want to share #fic bits #goddamnit i STILL don't have a lisa-and-kaeya tag #lisa isn't lazy she's just efficient #kaeya is a bundle of knives behind a smile #test subject au

17 notes · View notes