gotta love concepting fics and debating whether i put it all as a single "chapter" / weirdly formatted oneshot or put it in four separate chapters. i have time to think about it but also this line is . fun

Lesson Zero: You are going to destroy the world, and you will do so with a smile on your face.

^ this is the piece that closes the fic. for context.

my submission piece for my school's halloween window painting contest!! yes i got in and yes the jrwi infiltration efforts are going perfectly

more info + closeups under cut ^_^

this looks so shit to me because I was working on a really tight deadline + the world's worst colored pencils but i won the preliminary and got in anyway!! we will be taking a day off school to go on a field trip and hang huge versions of our posters in the windows of stores nearby. (it will look so much better when i get to paint it and redraw it i prommy oh my god)

anyway i chose bitb for this because i needed an excuse to draw them again <3 <3 my mom made me promise when she bought the patreon for me that I would put in (some) effort in my art again and try to get out of my artblock and it worked!! I've been enjoying drawing again as weird as that feels to say :]

also i had like 5 total colored pencils to work with that's why they all look orange don't @ me i tried with what I had dude LMAO (also kian looks straight up wrong im so sorry bbg you're still my favorite of the bugs)

in all honesty I'm proud of how my little sketch looks, it's not the final draft and it will look GOOD when it's in poster form i swear <- lying just a teeny bit but ignore that

5 Things I’ve Made Meme

okay so @tompkins-square-ditmas​ tagged me and made me come do this, 5 things i’ve created in the last year that i’m proud of, in no particular order.

oh god

5. AUTUMN NARALLAL’S COIN

[ID: a transparent drawing of two gold coins, painted over. They both have light blue at the top of the coin, red at the bottom, dark blue on the left, brown on the right, and gray in the center. One coin has a symbol like a rising sun painted in black, while the other has the same symbol but inverted, with the sun going below the horizon line. The coin with the rising sun is labeled “front - life”, while the inverted sun is labeled “back - death”. /end ID]

This was a prop-like thing I did for @mundane-campaign​, the D&D campaign I DM for. it’s basically a membership card for a group called the Chaos Coalition, and the two sides of the coin are customized for whoever makes them but they’re meant to symbolize life and death - the neverending cycle of the world. it was the first time i really tried to make something look like it was painted and while it’s a little old at this point, i still really like it.

4. HUX AIREAIRE AS THE CHARIOT

[ID: a fake tarot card for the Chariot card featuring a kobold with multiple scars. He stands in a chariot, with a scar on his right ear frills, two moon-shaped scars on his shoulders, and a lightning-like scar on his right arm. He is wearing a torn yellow tank top with a chainmail shirt underneath, and the shirt’s tears are in the shape of a square with another smaller rip above and to the left of it. In front of the chariot are another two versions of the kobold. The one on the left wears a black tank top with an image of two crossed battleaxes on it; the one on the right wears a faded yellow shirt and has soot and ash all over him. The original kobold looks ahead with a neutral-upset expression on his face, the kobold on the left looks excited and angry, while the kobold on the right looks scared. The chariot has a pink cupcake on the front of it, and above it is a cloth canopy with a star print. The main kobold has a neon green worm on a string looped around his horns. The entire image has a border with golden circles at the corners and something like train tracks going between them. A tab at the top of the image contains the Roman numerals “VII” and a square at the bottom reads “CHARIOT”. /end ID]

A few weeks ago in @horizons-campaign​, we started talking about Horizons characters as tarot cards, and then i sat down and made this and never thought about it again (oops). Hux is such a good character and i care about him so goddamn much, and doing this was really fun and a weird but interesting way for me to try and figure out how to apply tarot symbolism and imagery to this dumb idiot man. The border to the image was done by @zagreuses-toast​ (ty eliza <3)

3. THE PICTURE OF CECIL SMYTHE

[ID: a more realistic drawing of a white man, staring to the right with a small speech bubble next to him with the rainbow flag inside of it. He is wearing glasses, and has a slightly red face. He looks mildly serious, and is smirking. His hair is dark at the roots but fades into being blond. He has a few freckles dotted over his face, and is wearing a pale blue collared shirt with pinstripes and little dark blue spots all over it. /end ID]

This was a thing i did as a joke for an english presentation - basically i set out to make a joke about a quote about how Oscar Wilde’s “sin” is only known to those who have committed it, and how because I did the research, I know what Wilde’s “sin” is but i clearly haven’t committed it. as soon as i mentioned in my presentation that Wilde was queer, this image would come up, a parody of the painting’s transition from normal to showing all of Wilde’s “sins”. it makes a lot more sense in context but it was also a lot of effort for a dumb gay joke and i wouldn’t trade it for the world. it’s the most realistic i’ve ever tried to make a drawing and while i don’t think i’d try it again, i’m still proud of it.

2. THE STAG AND THEIR MEADOW (JUST, IN GENERAL)

Alright, so this one isn’t a work of art, but I’m still very proud of myself for the work I’ve put into TSATM (or fawnsverse). it’s an original novel i’m trying to work on, about a series of four people all dealing with new parts of their lives to understand and adapt to - one character’s college romance, another character’s experience coming out, etc. it’s a long process but even though i keep going back and back and back and rewriting all my old stuff, it’s still fascinating to see how far my characterization has come since the original drafts of the main characters.

1. THE MUNDANE CAMPAIGN

finally, we’ve found something i’m actively working on. i started writing a campaign for my D&D group and it’s been such a work of love and so excited and so fun that i can’t help but be proud of it. it’s made me a lot more confident with my storytelling abilities and my abilities to do voices, and over the last year that i’ve been playing D&D but especially now that i have to talk a whole lot, it’s made me feel better about my voice. seriously, the mundane is incredible and i love my players and all the dumb shit we do while we’re playing and im so proud of everyone involved.

hoo boy, that fucker was long. if you wanna do this, go ahead and do it and just say i tagged you!!

TMI meets TMO. (as in, sharing Too Much Info will Talk Me Out of heartbreak, maybe?)

#6.

And yet another week flies by..with nothing to publish. because i haven’t been writing over the week.

Actually, plenty of writing, but, very personal writing. Where it was not happening: my tinyletter drafts. Where it was: my yellow moleskin journal i lug around everywhere. And THESE DAYS I really mean everywhere every day because…………….. well………………… WELL. WELL, HERE:

Let’s start with some context.

My last Mainstage production at UC Davis before graduating was the great beautiful and miraculous The Bluest Eye. I kid you not, I felt in my BONES how much this production would affect me. I needed to be in it. I had conflicts with another show overlapping rehearsal/show times. I got cast (joy!!!!!), then dropped (NO!!!!!!!). I caused a lot of ruckus and trouble lol. I insisted I NEED TO BE A PART OF THIS. My gut was one thooooooousand percent right. I wish this kind of ensemble experience for every student theatre artist. In this show, I enjoyed the presence of the most colorful mothafking cast i’ve ever seen in a play. We understood the importance of our work and the importance of each other in this work. We threw ourselves into shared purpose. We created and held a treasured space for love and chaos. We brewed so much love it was like a drug in a league of its own; we gave and received so much energy together we were all bonafide high off each other’s presence.

This show was selected to participate in a festival and compete for national awards and recognitions. Like 1 of 30 across the country. Part of me cannot believe a theatre production from UC Davis Major University for the Sciences was invited to this robust/artsy-theatre-program-school-type-shit festival. But also, part of me knows how special what we put on was, is, will be. The life-sized puppets, the ensemble work, the story, the purpose — we shared something rare, relevant and powerful. White Theatre Be Shooketh.

As you can tell, i’m fiercly in love with this production. And the point of this context is that we are now reuniting to put this show back together and take it to Oregon for 1 week this FEBRUARY!

and i’m getting to my point now....

That spring, i told you, i knew being in this show was going to impact me beyond words. But what i could NOT have known. What i never expected. What has been haunting me for months: Falling in love with someone in this show. I couldn’t have known that someone I’d never known before this show was going to shake. me. to. my. core. In meeting this person, knowing this person, falling in love with this person, and letting go of this person, i have undergone and am still getting through a terribly overdue re-awakening of my independence.

It gets really messy okay. For me to go INTO it, i need to go into my my open relationship, my relationship with my then partner of nearing 5 years (who was set to move in with me in the end of spring, closing the gap on our LDR), and my trapezing around town with this person I just met. The short version is this: I was careless, reckless, and naive; ignorant of my partner, ignorant of my needs, and of my own spiritual well-being. At that time, with just that person by my side, i felt fucking invincible. But I was being real clumsy.

Fast forward to the end of that spring — my partner moves back in with me, i tell this person we need to just be friends now, and everything feels wrong. I’m lying in bed with my partner, crying my eyes out because i hate letting go of this person. My partner is finally back home with me and I’m crying my eyes out because the truth was i have never felt for anyone what i felt for this person, and that included my partner. This is, of course, when i realize my partner and i need to break up.

I’m dumb in love with the most awful timing — it is absolutely not the right time for me to “be with someone” — and the most obstinate hubris — “I can handle the drama”. The relationship between me and this person is becoming increasingly tumultuous. I feel distance; I feel coldness; I feel confused. I keep biting my tongue; I keep second-guessing myself; I keep killing my impulse. I keep telling myself this is what I want! I want HIM! But what the fuck do I know about what i need? I haven’t been single in 5 years. I can barely recognize myself. There’s so much self-discovery to do. I had no business trying so hard to be with someone, when i didn’t even give myself the chance to consider what it meant to be alone.

I was absolutely in need of time with myself. Time for myself. time alone. alone. alone. alone. alone.

I understood this when I spent the following summer in Vermont. off grid. in frequent solitude. and the fellowship of a beautiful few.

I nearly forgot it when i came back from Vermont, and started trying to be with That Person. Dare i admit i became desperate? I opened myself wide open to you, in such haste, that I nearly hallowed myself of all my hard-earned and beloved sacred energy to make any kind of space i could so that you would fit. so that i could maybe possibly somehow someway make it fit, make it work. Obvious spoiler: it didn’t work.

When i was trying to make it work, i was someone different. My best friend had never seen me in such a state: so in love with someone, and so unable to get a grip on myself. Sitting across from me, or soothing me on the other end of the phone, she is shocked to witness me so paralyzed, so fearful, so insecure. She wants the best for me and i don’t care, i just want him. As I run this back through my memory, I am shocked too. I’m a little embarrassed but mostly deeply empathetic towards myself then: i needed to be alone, but i couldn’t let go. Whatever i was trying to have…Whatever i was holding onto…was suffocating my life. And I insisted on being choked and being fine.

How did this become the cliff notes to my love life? I want to share with you the magnitude of this person’s affect on my heart, so that when i say: I HAVE TO SEE HIM AGAIN FOR THIS FESTIVAL

you understand

the

storm

resurging

in a place i thought was healing.

I was healing. I was letting go molecule by molecule. I was steaming off the memories layer by layer. I was cutting myself off from dangerous dwellings. I was doing my god. damn. best. to thoroughly leave this person in the past where this whole thing belongs.

Yet, The Bluest Eye is reviving for at least one more stretch in February. I’ve just come back from Davis (last night Sunday); we had our first full meeting and puppet rehearsal. This is to say, i saw the guy, in the flesh, and spent the whole week prior bracing myself for it. In the spirit of self-effacing honesty: i nearly didn’t go. But i decided it is a test of strength and it is a test of independence and it is allowing my craziness to overcome my insecurities. I was going to be in a room with this guy for 5 hours and dig my nails into myself, stay loyal to myself, and be Who I am unyieldingly. I felt really good about it when i left. I proved to myself that i could be the open and loving person i am even if the guy wrenching my heart is 5 feet away. 

Being so distracted and confused by the pain and longing that i missed the opportunities to exchange energy with the rest of the room around me would have been my biggest regret. 

As i said, i left feeling quite good, proud, and at peace with my vulnerabilities.

Maybe i’m not 100% recovered, but i’m clearly, very clearly, in the THICK of recoverING, and i am truly growing, and moving forward step by step by step. 

In Davis, my good friend tells me: “if it’s not good for you, it’s not love”. Before I left for Davis, my best friend reminded me: “you’re trying too hard to fill in the blanks.” I’ve learned: “You can’t give what you can’t give.” (More familiar is the saying: you can’t give what you don’t have.)

To be completely honest, this beautiful show getting this beautiful chance at national recognition has ripped open such deep, old, ill-healing wounds in my heart. with a GIANT sigh, i am re-facing re-surfacing emotional ghosts, hurled back into combatting some very volatile mood-swinging emotional crises. In my personal journal this week i worked up a motherfkn STORM. My journal may as well be dripping from all the gel pen.

and meanwhile, my tinyletter’s been blank blank blank blank empty dusty blank………… and somehow, addressing my lack of tinyletter-ing, has revealed a very private part of my life. it is true: i was very busy private journaling, i didn’t have steam to write for the blog.

now i feel kind of sick this is the story for this week, i mean this is what came out, but this is all “VERY PERSONAL TERRITORY KEEP OUT”’. it’s honestly sort of unfortunate that this week’s letter has be to about my love life.

well there we go anyway.

Wow, Well, To leave on a more caustic, casual note~

THOUGHTS I KEEP COMING ACROSS AS I USE HINGE............

so many Del Playa/Newport, suit wearing, beer touting, IM ON A BOAT white bro motherfuckers (this is the first demographic i kept seeing on my recommended. happy to say hard passing each and every one of them has changed the algorithm).

why tf is pineapple on pizza such a hot topic lmao

BUT WHAT’S THEIR ENERGYYYYYYYYYY LIKE??????!!!!!!

But how old are these pictures man *scrutinizing any available time stamps*

Oh, :O HE’S………not the cute one in the pic………….

Pictures say 33 but profile age says 23, iooonnooooo sir

weird flex weird flex weird flex

if you think they’re 20 miles away from you, always add 20 more…………..

am i having an averse reaction to your profile because you remind me of someone? ~_~

am i really attracted to your profile because you remind me of someone? ~_~

ARE THESE SHENANIGANS THE BEST USE OF MY TIME???????????

It seems this is what comes out of me when I have nothing prepared to write about...

Nothing like rashly revealing too much info to motivate a better, more though-out next week. LOL. 

wish me luck, and see you then.

* * *

i’ve committed to being vulnerable in writing every week. if u want it straight shot to your inbox: https://tinyletter.com/rose-artrat

previous letter:  #5.) God Bless a Good Mess

for random thoughts, random questions //

http://monolid-monologues.tumblr.com/ask

The Price of Aetherium: Outline

The Price of Aetherium was a retconed story arc for Pythia, until I overhauled her. I’m too proud of it to delete it, so i’m posting it here. This is the outline of the story, which gets wordy at points. 

Part 1 Nightmares

Done

Part 2 Reunions

Done

Part 3 Ozymandias

team leaves early in the morning 5am ish all on horseback. pyth, saulian and andoryan have cyrodiilic horses, do’kikhtar and motabe ended up buying  draft horses once reaching skyrim bc she knew it would be easier going back that way. brief description of traveling, mostly uneventful and nonstop.

once outside the ruins, the horses start getting nervous bc of the tremors. they dismount and tie the horses to a tree nearby or to some of the dwemer hitches. theyre all achy and hella sore, and andoryan bitches the most obvi, pyth and saul deal with it and do kinda agrees that shes stiff as fuck. a tremor shakes the ground and they all get a bit nervous, wondering if its safe or not. they got all the way here theres no way they're turning back now after coming all this way,

they head inside explore a bit and find katrias body but her ghost dosent show up bc saul radiates holy but they dont know that. they make their way along blah blah its fuckin boring pyth explains kinetic resonators, notes how they're not usually found in skyrims dwarven clans. basically she kinda takes the role of katria in explaining shit. do gets cut by a falmer in the area between shoulder and neck but saul heals her some so they keep going, pyth gets hurt by chaurus hunter.

they reach the summit (where the resonators are n you gotta shoot them) and pyth studies katrias journal before getting it in one go however comma andoryan knocks on one of the centurions and wakes it up. the team gets fucked up by it bad, but everyone is alive so far. they go and get the crest and its tired celebration and they start to leave. and because god hates pyth especially, a swarm of falmer shows. team is weak from the centurion fight so they get murdered. saul gets pulled over the edge by one jumping on him, Motabe runs out of magic and gets fucked and do flies into a rage, kills 5-7 and then gets overwhelmed and succumbs to poison. at the last second andoryan fucking tanks the shit and wipes the rest out right as pyth is about to get offed. she is hurt super bad and he pins her down reveals he is a Cunt. takes the aetherium for himself, decides to take all of it, including the aetherium in her eye. takes one of the falmer axes and uses it to cut out her eye. he then drags her to the edge and throws her over.

Part 4 Myth

pyth wakes up. saul is there looking fucked. she tries to move but saul stills her. she's missing an eye and her arm is broken. saul got a concussion and pyth asks if he healed her, he did not. she is confused. saulian nods towards a towering figure with its back to them. theyre cooking something on a fire within the ruin. pyth looks at saul and he shrugs. the figure finally stands and kneels by them, its ncz. checks on pyth, checks on saul, reminds saul not to sleep bc concussion. pyth falls back asleep

At this point add ncz (Nczek was Nchand’s early name) to the expedition roster.

Part 5 Pyre

ncz and continues to take care of pyth and saul until theyre well enough to leave. ncz helps bury what remains of her friends and katriah. pyth is very quiet and ncz and saul do most of the talking. ncz leads them to the entrance and sees them off. they make for falkreath

Launch ncz’s (Nchand) blog

it kinda switches to sauls pov because pyth is like. shell. he notes that hes moved her to his horse because she keeps falling asleep and hes worried she'll fall off the horse literally. he states that aside from the 4 days spent with ncz, they stayed in falkreath for 3. he notes that they really should have stayed with ncz longer because concussion and broken arm and missing eye but he wanted to get her to a town just incase they needed something food/potion ect. he states that he keeps an eye on her at night because of his own insomnia and that every night since first waking up at nczs shes had night terrors and he knows shes not taking this well. think oitnb piper post branding! eventually pyth picks up enough to ride on her own horse and talk some but shes still very distant. they go to her house only to find it in shambles like someone trashed the place. pyth steps into the back room/workshop and saul yanks her back just as a fire rune explodes. as a result the house catches fire bc wood.

saul tries to put it out but between trying to keep pyth from rushing in and trying to save stuff, he cant do much. he drags her out and holds her still as they watch her fuckin house burn down. as the moons rise they start on the road to whiterun.

Part 6 Untitled

Arrive in whiterun to somekind of bruhaha but saulian avoids it and goes straight to the temple of kynareth so pyth can get properly looked at. Scene ends with saulian leaving the priestess to do her work while he goes to figure out what was going on.

Scene picks up when pyth wakes up and she asks saulian what happened. She passed out on the horse on the way there and saulian brought her to the temple and a pristess set her arm in a splint and it wasn’t actually that bad and that regarding the situation, she should be okay but she cant use it. “Oh. thank you.” saulian asks if her brother works in whiterun she says yes, in the drunken huntsman. He asks if he also left valenwood under the same circumstances as she did she says yes. Saulian sighs and takes her hands. He’s dead. Pythia stares at him, clearly not believing him. He elaborates. Apparently he was seen walking with a hooded stranger last night and they found him along the wall. Murdered right in the city. Pythia breaks down sobbing and the scene ends.

A few days pass (2-3) and pythia has lost everything, essentially. Her eye, the use of her right arm, her friends, her brother, her home and now her life’s work. All she has left is the gold she had on her (roughly 200 septims) and saulian. At this point in time the vigilants are still around and saulian hasn’t found or refurbished the temple. Saulian says that he needs to go back to the hall of the vigilants, he’s been gone way longer than he should have and hes sorry. He says that if she needs him or needs help to go there. Pythia nods and says okay. Saulian leaves and now shes alone.

Jump cut to pythia burying aralas under the ashes of her home. Cue more crying.

Jump cut again to pyth making camp in the hills of the reach outside of rorikstead. 

Part 7 Atlas

This is the chapter about regret! I.e. pythia bearing the weight of the situation. Its mostly inner monologue

Actually it’s more of a sped up version of the stages of grief. She gets angry at herself for bringing them, at saulian for leaving her alone, and finally at fuckin andoryan. That cunt. She sits in silence by the fire brooding before realizing that the Dark Brotherhood is a thing that exists. Sure, she’s got a little less than 200 septims to her name and andoryan could be literally anywhere by this point but she’s going to have to try. That is, after her arm heals and she sees about getting a faux eye. Can’t wear gauze forever. She gets up to set some traps and heads to bed.

Here would be where the plotline would be opened up to interactions within the current timeframe. Would be open to muses that travel/hunt, or live in rorikstead/the reach.

Part 8 Two Graves

After 2-4 in timeline interaction have a call for someone in the brotherhood and plot with them

Points to remember, pythia is poor like. less than 200 gold. Pythia’s arm has healed and she no longer has a splint (recovery time is lower bc healing potions and magic) this dude could be ANYWHERE and is affiliated with the thalmor.

Fuck this im tired

Speaking of my dumb story ideas, I’ve been thinking some stuff to flesh out the Cathedral Game’s setting! RANDOM IDEAS AHOY LONG POST AHOY

* I’m thinking I need to make some concrete ideas for the villains maybe. When I first had the dream that inspired this all, it was just some sort of ambiguous ‘demon army’, kinda like a mindless zombie plague or i dunno, maybe the demons were sentient but they were all evil except for florin anyway? It was a more boring cliche kind of enemy than I usually write, with no moral grey area. Just an endless wave of foes that would justify the setting where everyone is stuck living inside a church and you have to defend it and try and turn it into a little town. And I guess if we had to have a 100% evil enemy with very little character development then it makes me less uncomfortable if theyre some sort of supernatural nonsentient plague instead of a bunch of people born evil. But then Florin existing as your sidekick was like the first part of the dream and it was never explained why he was the only non evil, completely sentient demon. Plus now I have a different zombie-themed story so mindless plagues would be samey. PLUS... welll... I need to stop being all ‘because I saw it in a dream it is somehow a cosmic message that it has to be in the story and can never be changed’. Kinda the point of being awake is that i can look at things more rationally and plug the ol plotholes, yo!

* So anyway, the idea I had was that it would... just simply be an actual army of actual villains with actual motivations and moral ambiguity. I was thinking maybe the setting could be like the perspective of civilians trapped in-between a civil war between two countries, just trying to survive and hoping that the promise of reincforcements coming to evacuate is actually true. The gamneplay of holding the fort and constantly gunning down enemies could be even more depressing when you know that not all of them are necessarily evil, they’re just soldiers doing their job. Maybe its ambiguous whether your country or their country shot first, maybe its like their country is suffering from some form of recession or illness or lack of resources and they’re only trying to conquer this other country because their families are dying at home? Maybe its some form of religious conflict, or maybe its even something with a very villainous dictator running the show but the people working underneath them are just normal citizens forcibly drafted into a war they dont believe in. There’s a whole pile of different possibilities for moral ambiguity, yo! Not sure yet which would work best, hmm...

* Might possibly be an opportunity to use a character I’ve been sitting on for a while but couldnt find a story that suited her. After I played Fe: Awakening I felt really uncomfortable about how the game treated Excellus as if he was hateable only because he was ugly and ambiguously gay/transgender. like.. he’s a horrible jerk of a villain yet the plot really overfocuses on insulting his appearance and gender rather than retaliating against the things he actually does. Made me feel sympathy for a jerk I never wanted to feel sympathy for! So I kinda ended up being inspired by the wasted potential and thinking up an idea for a similar character who actually IS sympathetic, and has the ambiguous LGBTQ aspect properly explored as a plotline. I think it could actually be powerfully sympathetic to see this villain who’s constantly degraded and misgendered by her teammates, and has a lot of reason to believe the worst of humanity. Someone who could switch sides if shown some basic decency by our heroes, maybe? And I felt it could be good if she did have a very similar personality to Excellus, just like a good version of it. She could still be a comic relief egotistical person, but not a murderous monster. And the ego could be like... sad, because she’s purposely trying to act unaffected and secure and like she loves herself, when really she’s being treated like shit and doesnt know if she deserves it or not. And I was thinking also possibly she could be a greedy merchant type character, like Anna? (also from Fe: Awakening) That could be the role she takes in the town once you recruit her, she could be a savvy businesswoman badass! Playing rune factory 4 makes me appreciate how cool a trader character can be, Arthur is so neato~! He talks about it like its the most amazing job ever, I just feel like it could be even cooler if we had that passion along with a more goofy greedy personality. Like ‘hahaha im only in it for the money’, but no, she really has this kinda cheesy cute reason why she does the job, she just really enjoys meeting new people and being able to change the world a little piece at a time. It reaffirms her faith in humanity after all she’s been through. (Tho also she’s still a total badass, since she was a former general of the villain country, after all!)

* Oh and I was thinking of a really tragic alternative route for her if you don’t recruit her. You could fight her multiple times throughout the game and then when you get to the final one and she realizes there’s no escape she suddenly drops the comic relief act and it gets really somber. I was thinking maybe she could have a mentor type character or a friend or a love interest or something? Or some other something she was trying to keep safe all along, some reason why she still had hope, some reason why she was fighting for an army she didnt believe in, just to save up enough money for... some sort of life goal? I dunno, maybe she has a sibling who’s in the hospital and she’s trying to save up for treatment, and then on the day of the final battle she gets a telegram hearing that they died and she wasnt even there to say goodbye. (And the death would somehow be directly caused by the player’s actions, thus determining whether you recruit her or not) So even though every time before she always flaked out like a coward with a comedic quip as soon as it looked like she was losing, now she just doesnt have anything else left to lose. This time she WILL NOT LET YOU redeem her, she will not let you SPARE her, she doesnt even speak a single word in the entire battle. Her difficulty spikes immensely in this fight to the death, and she only cracks a smile and gives a parting quip once you’ve dealt the final blow. And I was just imagining it could be EXTRA depressing combined with her plot of facing predjudice for being transgender! She’s spent most of this time being treated by the other commanders as ‘sir [name]’, gritting her teeth and bearing all this degredation, trying not to stand out too much. But in the end now nobody else is here to put her down, all those other ‘brave knights’ are the ones who ran away like cowards and left the ‘coward’ to take the last stand. And she doesnt care if she dies anymore. So she hangs up her armour for this fight and instead decides to go out in all her finery, wearing the dress she’s kept locked away in her trunk the whole time. Walking onto the battlefield like a bloody bride, and being one hell of a monster boss battle despite missing all of her platemail. A whirling dance of death! To go out smiling! To maybe make her family proud, and if she can meet them on the other side she could do it with the face she always wanted to wear.

* ....basically make it super depressing so you regret your actions and go back and see what the other option leads to. But also so badass that people wouldnt regret seeing the scene, yknow? And this might be the height of her character arc, kinda, but she’d be able to have whole new character arcs if you choose to recruit her. And you can make your own badass battles with her now! * Not sure tho whether maybe the family member/mentor/whoever might die either way though? That could fit the bittersweet found-family themes of the game, pretty much everybody’s someone who’s lost their biological relations and found new people to love in this new community. It could just be like... the choice between this person dying tragically and causing merchant-general-lady to commit suicide, or them passing away naturally due to their illness after saying goodbye to her, leading to her joining the heroes to try and prevent tragedies like this. * A possible other EVEN MORE tragic idea I had- an alternative where this person has already been dead for a long time before the start of the story, and the villain leader has been lying to merchant-general in order to keep her working as their minion. So the player choice would be like... you can reveal it to her and purposely send her into a suicidal spiral as an attempt to destabilize the enemy forces and win an important battle. Its a complete dick move, yes, but it could save the lives of all your family and friends! But then if you believe that this merchant-general is actually redeemable you could like... do the same thing but with different motives, in a different way. Reveal it in less of a sadistic, tactically-planned way, and more of a ‘no seriously this is why you cant trust your boss’ way. And she’d be likely to actually believe you if you’d been befriending her before now. * Or perhaps maybe her sibling died years ago and she heard about it but was unable to accept it, since it was her only reason to keep on going. Maybe she feels guilt that she was too busy making money to try and save them, and that meant she wasnt there to hold their hand when they passed away. So now she keeps on hoarding money for no purpose at all, except because this routine keeps her going. And she keeps writing letters to someone who’s already dead. * buuuut that might be too similar to Malachi’s plot, since he has memory problems regarding a tragic event in his past. Though it was his own death rather than a family member’s! ....actually I dunno, maybe a twist could be that he’s actually her lost sibling? That’d kinda be wrapping things up too coincidentally though. But on the other hand it could be an interesting plot to explore his relationship with his newly returned biological sibling, compared to the adoptive relationship he’s been developing with Florin. RIVALS FOR TINY BABBU’S LOVE! Buuuuuut I also liked the idea of Florin’s death being very far back in the timeline, and he’s been sleeping underneath those ruins for over a century. It could be cool to have him experiencing a lot of things for the first time, and to get a perspective on the past before the war...

* ALSO ANOTHER POTENTIAL CHARACTER IDEA * Another enemy recruit maybe! I seem to be going in twos, I made two demon characters and now two redeemy people XD The idea I had was that this could be just a random soldier that you keep as a prisoner, and have to decide whether to execute him or not. It can be hard to keep prisoners of war when you’re stuck in this seige situation and you barely even have enough food to keep your own teammates alive! Tensions could run high because you’re choosing to keep this guy alive when its making things worse for us all, plus we cant really trust him, seriously?? He surrendered but maybe its just a trap to infiltrate us! He claims a sob story of his country being forced to invade us because of famine, and being drafted against his will, but can we trust anything that comes from the mouth of one of those scum?? And then there’s the question of what exactly you’ll do with him if you think he cant be trusted! Are you able to execute him in cold blood? Do you set him free and hope this decision doesnt come back to bite you in the ass? Do you try and execute him while pretending you didnt- setting him loose in the forest to die of exposure or at the hands of his own former comrades...?? And its very annoying because the entire time he’s insistantly begging you to kill him, and generally being a huge downer! :P This is what convinces you to spare him, if you pick that option. It starts off as just ‘I’m gonna spite you, I won’t let you die if its what you want’, but eventually you realise he really never wanted to be part of this war, and he’s weighed down so much by his sins that his pleading for suicide was completely genuine. There’s no spy plots, he was just a simple farmer thrown into battle with nothing more than the clothes on his back and the sharpest pitchfork he could salvage from the wreckage of his old farm before it was torn down. The famine ruined his business and he had no way of surviving unless he sold his land to the army, to be bulldozed and turned into the site of a new weapons factory. And even after that he ended up forcibly drafted when things got even worse, losing what little livelihood he’d managed to scrape together again. He doesnt have a home to go back to, he just wanted to die on the battlefield, and by all odds he SHOULD HAVE! This is the condition of this latest round of ‘soldiers’, nobody even wastes armour on them, theyre just disposeable fodder to be mowed down as a distraction. What shitty luck, that he just happened to get captured by some bleeding-heart fools who refuse to chop his damn head off! So basically I’m imagining him like a Nanu-esque depressed grandpa who’s kinda sassy sometimes but also really really needs a hug. And like... model prisoner, to a comical degree. When he comes to terms with the fact he aint gonna get killed no matter how much he begs, he’s just like ‘dammit i cant help but help’. He’s just a normal good guy at heart, he’s not really on your side so to speak, he loved his country but he didnt agree with them wanting to wipe out your country either. he misses how his country used to be, and he doesnt know anything about your country or whether its any better, he doesnt have much hope. But when he’s stuck with nothing to do all day, he just cant help subconciously falling into kindly grandpa behaviours! Gotta clean up this cell! Hey, do you want some cookery tips, mr guard? Oh whoops, mr guard you dropped the cell keys, here have them back! Hey this bar over here has poor structural integrity, I tried to rope it back together with a braid of my own back hair! All the time he’s trying to trick you into agreeing to execute him, and being a total sycophant agreeing with everyone who says he’s evil. CMON IM TOTALLY EVIL, PLEASE STAB ME, I’LL BAKE YOU COOKIES! And then as time goes on he just becomes less of a prisoner and ends up making friends with everyone, winning the trust of even those who opposed him the most at the start. All entirely unwillingly! Agreeing with all their oppositions so hard that they stop opposing XD He ends up just pottering around doing odd jobs as a janitor/groundskeeper type guy, even ends up being the one in charge of keeping the keys to the jail he started off in. Somehow the most trustworthy man in the whole town, cos he’s the one person who will never say he’s trustworthy! His humble goodness just shines through~! And he could help out a lot cos he has inside info on the enemy army, and is able to give a sympathetic perspective of the everyday citizens’s life, and just how much dissent there is, how few people are willingly cooperating with the war and how they can find allies and destabilize this regime based entirely on fear instead of loyalty. He’s like a ray of hope that changes everyone’s perspective on this big seemingly-inpeneterable all-evil army! A grumpy suicidal ray of hope, who never shuts up about how hopeless it is! XD of course, eventually he’d be able to find new reason to live in this own, and make friends, and have hugs and joy~! But it’d be a hard journey! And a journey filled with a lot of ‘geez grandpa stop joking about suicide holy shit’ *disciplinary hugs* * Tho actually I dunno if a farmer would be a good career choice for him, I just picked it cos its the easiest to imagine him losing his livelihood in the war. His career in the town would be being this janitor kindly advice man/treasurer sort of guy, but i dunno... if he was a banker before then that makes him too similar to general lady :P ...maybe he was a janitor on someone else’s farm...? Honestly I would love an excuse to have a badass sympathetic janitor man and go on a bit of a small rant about how service work is very physically demanding and deserves a higher minimum wage yknow. RESPECT JANIGRAMP ... actually the name Jani is a good name his name is now jani it is law Jani the groundskeeper, because jani the janitor sounds dumb. SYNONYMS!

* Thinking of ideas for the fictional religion I’m gonna create for this world! Its more fun if we have a completely fictional set of traditions that’re just a general metaphor for topical questions about real life religion n stuff. And it would sidestep the problem of plots accidentally seeming like theyre ‘oh this one religion is evil and false’, when really the point i want to make is about how people of all religions are capable of perverting their faith’s peaceful teachings and using it as an excuse to wage wars. hell, athiests have done the same thing! ‘this religion is inherantly evil bwaaaah’ stuff IS athiests using their own beliefs as an excuse to hurt others. Thats the kind of athiest I never want to be! I completely respect religion and I think that we can never have an answer as to what’s true about creation or an afterlife, we can never know until we die. I don’t believe in heaven, but I dont think I have absolute proof it’s wrong, and I dont care about proving myself right or converting people. I feel inspired when I see people draw strength from their religion, even if I don’t believe in it! Lots of great things have been done in the name of different religions, just like lots of terrible things have. Human beings are great and terrible things, human beings make choices. This doesnt tar everyone with the same brush of whoever made the wrong decision, just because they believe in the same gods! ....man, sorry, I went off on a mini rant there. But yeah, what I hope to do is to have religion as a framing device and discuss some problems with certain so-called religious people, but also show the positive side of it via the protagonists. I mean, the whole point is that you’re living in a church, after all! The idea is that you’d hear a lot of horror stories of other people acting very ungodly in the name of god, both in the enemy army and in the hidden secrets of people in your own country’s government. But the goal is that you see all this hellish stuff and you still choose to be a bastion of what you believe is good and true, you learn from these mistakes and try and make the true sanctuary that everyone was seeking when they fell into the traps of those other monsters. And also I was thinking it;d be like the protagonist’s exploration of being agnostic, after her faith was shaken from her original church being destroyed in this war. She was the only survivor, maliciously left alive by [currently unnamed main villain rival guy], who wanted her to suffer the grief of knowing she’d failed her role as protector. But instead she travelled onwards and found this other church full of defenseless people that need a new guardian, and she is FUCKING DETERMINED to never fail again! It started as just seeking revenge against that evil overlord, but instead its become about protecting these new people and regaining her faith in humanity. And that doesnt necessarily mean regaining her faith, that’s up to the player. She has a journey of realizing that some things about her former church may have actually been corrupt, and that she was just blindly following instead of making her own decisions, She has her hero worship of her dead comrades dismantled, and has to come to her own conclusions about what’s right and wrong in the scriptures she’d learned, and what she’ll do as she goes forward. Its up to the player to decide whether she regains her faith or decides to become an athiest in the end, or even remains agnostic and decides she isnt able to find an answer yet, but either way she will still be forged into a true blue hero, no matter the reasons behind it! I wanna make all options an equally good ending, its just a personal choice that changes some scenes but not necessarily the course of the story.

* Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah! Religion ideas! I was considering possibly the legend could involve something about ‘an absent god’. The traditions say that humanity failed the creator long ago, and they left us behind because of it. The direction of all religion is based around this idea that we are inherantly born sinful, and have to do certain things in order to appease our ancestors’s sins and bring the gods back. I’m thinking it would be a good idea to create multiple sects of religion that’re variants on the same original holy text, that’s something that fictional religions dont tend to do for some reason. In this case it could be different perspectives on how exactly god dissappeared, and what exactly god saw as our sin, what on earth we have to do to make up for it. And I was thinking that the idea could be that god shattered into a million pieces that were scattered across the world. This leads to territory wars over places that’ve been determined to contain remains of god buried beneath the earth, and people invading indigenous civilizations in the name of holy tasks to dig for these relics. Power struggles over how many god burial grounds your country owns at any given time, controversy every time a digging operation fails to find a crystal. Pieces of god being used practically as currency, used to power magical weaponry in these wars... lies and deceit over fake godstones that no-one can prove you don’t own... * And this way even though magic does clearly exist in this world, it leaves it ambiguous whether religion is true, and whether any of the different sects is more accurate about the true will of god. It would seem reasonable that athiests exist here even when magic exists, thats usually a problem in fictional settings, you have gods right out here in the open yet some people still dont believe in them? XD It’d be like... yes maybe all these crystals that grant magical powers are actually fragments of an absent god. Maybe they grant those magical powers because of the reasons scripture tells us. Maybe if you bring them all together you can meet god and be granted one wish, maybe you could end the war. Buuuuuuuut.... maybe there’s just a natural crystal that grows underground and grants magical powers. Maybe nothing happens when you put it all together. Maybe it’s just like how people considered electricity to be unpredictable divine punishment before we learned how to harness it for ourselves.

* And there could be like... sects of the religion who believe god chose to leave us out of shame for our sinfulness, sects who believe a certain group of humans betrayed god and shattered them, thus holy war is justified against that country. Perhaps even sects that believe that god being shattered was a positive thing, that god chose to give fragments of their power to humans so they could choose their own destiny. (This is considered as scandalous as satan-worship in-universe) And there’s a related sect that believes that humans only even came into existance after the shattering event, that shattering into pieces was how god granted sentience and free will to the angelic servants we used to be. And this has permenantly corrupted us, thus the sin that we need to undo in order to retun god is... individuality, in all its forms. I think these are the ones who had the very extreme fanatical members who ran Malachi’s former church, and committed various atrocities including his murder. (Though, again, this doesnt mean that the viewpoint is inherantly evil. Just the people who took it from ‘tranquility, enlightenment and fealty to fellow man’ to ‘LITERALLY NO INDIVIDUALITY EVER’) ....hmmm, actually the morality system could be even more complex if I nail down a set of different factions of the religion and let you choose between all of them in the end. (or choosing none of them, or choosing your own interpretation) And there’d sorta be a fanatical/critical morality bar too, which determines whether you get the good or bad ending. In this case ‘critical’ would be the good option, I mean it more like... ‘I’ve analyzed everything about this scripture and come to my own conclusions, I won’t do anything immoral out of blind belief unless I actually have reasons to agree that it’s the right choice’. Aka how any normal good person decides on a religion to follow. And the fanatical side would be leaning towards never questioning. So sometimes you would have to like... take options that would seem like ‘the bad option’. Dont just blindly agree with everything that points to a particular faction viewpoint, that’ll lead to badness! Sometimes you have to question things, take it from the perspective of a character who is discovering their own faith, rather than a player who already knows from the beginning what option they want to pick.

* Man this has got complicated lol, I’m starting to ramble!

* Anyway, i was thinking this would explain what the ‘demons’ are, in this world. Normally humans can only use magic by using godstone as a power source, demon is a universal term for all creatures that are made of magic and can use it infinately as part of their very being. They’re considered unholy and must be destroyed, because they’re ‘imprisoning’ a shard of god inside them. And its really unfair because its a complete and utter random chance if someone becomes a demon when they die, you can live your entire life thinking you’re a normal human until the godstone in your heart activates and saves your life. Your life which is now ressurected in a monsterous form and can never return to your old family. The traditions say that it only happens to people who are sinful, thus they totally deserve to be slain, of course! Oh, and I think the main evil army guys would be using demons as weapons, which is part of why the anti-demon sentiment is like... even worse than usual in the protagonist’s country. Its incredibly depressing because demons are completely sentient, and the only way they become mindless battle monsters is if they’re tortured beyond breaking point. The same way you’d reduce a human to that state. But the protagonist starts off not even knowing that demons can talk until she meets Florin, she’s only ever seen these demonic ‘soldiers’ that’re really just whipped and beaten prisoners chained together and thrown towards the enemy in the hope both parties kill each other. “Yeah but why do so many demons ally with the empire?” *florin looks into the camera like he’s on the office* And I was thinking maybe a more positive religious interpretation of the existance of demons could be that they’re actually angels instead. (Yeah, even if this religion is very different its gonna probably have a lot of similarities to protestant christianity since that’s what I was raised in. i dont feel comfortable critcising someone else’s religion that I’m not personally experienced with, yknow?) ANYWAY SORRY FOR THAT ASIDE Yeah, there could be some very rare pro-demon religious folk who believe that those who are reborn after death are actually chosen ones rather than sinful. These fragments of god blessed certain people who were pure enough in heart to earn the power to be able to enact god’s love to the world. Because even though god is in pieces, god very much wants to forgive us. These magical beings are sent as god’s messengers to help guide us on the right path to redemption. That’s why they have such great powers of creation! (though others would say its destruction...) A single plant demon like Florin could watch over and sustain an entire forest, revive it from drought and become a cornerstone to build a whole city around! Though even this faction isnt 100% correct or incorruptable, there are those who’d interpret this as demons having a DUTY to do that. There are rogue members of this faction who enslave demons just as much as the people who use them as weapons. I was thinking a plot could be that Florin almost gets suckered in by a band of these guys, he’s just so overwhelmed to find anyone who doesnt hate demons! But they want to imprison him and force him to grow their crops forever until he dies of exhaustion, because that’ll mean he’s ~happily fullfilled his purpose and rejoined god~. I mean, if he says he doesnt want to, thats just so sad! That means this pure angel has been corrupted by humanity’s sin, he doesnt know what he’s saying! * man i have so many ideas aaaaa