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lunamadrigal · 2 years

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Did someone say part three to the Road Trip drabble? 👀

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🗺📍Map Quest // Road Trip (part three)

The stale hot smell of pizza replaced whatever earlier stench had been festering inside our VW bus. Even the breeze that whipped through the rolled down windows hadn’t managed to carry the scent of meat lover’s pizza outside. Two large pies were hardly enough for the five of us after Ignacio and Auri destroyed half each, downing a bizarre mixture of every flavor of soda the fountain drink dispenser had available with it. The sight of them chugging the ‘diabetes in a cup’, as Angelina called it, made my teeth hurt and judging from their blue tinted lips I half expect them to regret that decision shortly.

“It looks like you made out with a Smurf dude.” Ignacio blurted out with a devilish grin while mid-scroll on his phone.

“Have you seen your own lips Ignacio?!”

“Oh, not just mine duderino.” Nacio raised an eyebrow in my direction with his snarky remark.

“Why me? I didn’t even say anything?”

Javi snorted between laughs in the passenger seat and turned barely enough to face us. “I’m calling you Smurf-iego from now on.”

Ehh.. That one should bother me but the Smurfs are kinda cute… Right? Right. They’re adorable. Who doesn’t love a Smurf. Well I guess they’re singing is a little annoying but other than that, cute. Doubt worked its way into my mind, thinking it over though.

“Mi sol..”, Auri’s breath nipped at my neck where he whispered, “.. some of the uhhh–” His finger tapped his own lips lightly as a smile crept up and fought the blue stain for attention.

OF COURSE. There weren’t two sets of Smurf lips sitting in the back of the bus. Nope. There were three. At least there wasn’t 200 grams of sugar floating down my bloodstream to earn it.

“So.. Is blue my color?” I wiggled my nose at him, teasing him back.

“BOYS. HONEYMOON.” It sounded like a playful threat but best not push Ignacio so I leaned myself back again, not taking my eyes off of Auri who added one of his famous eyerolls at the comment.

“SHUT UP AND LOOK!” The bus came to a sudden sharp stop, so sharp that it was only luck that we hadn’t gotten whiplash from Angelina’s driving skills.

“LOOOOOOK!” Her dainty fists gripped the wheels tighter, shaking it with excitement. Good thing she was inside the bus or she probably would have floated off into space, seeing stars.

A pristine white stretch of road signaled the start of the resort with every type of tropical plant even Isabela would be envious of. The palma de cera were unmatched in height, towering along the sidewalk and casting their own shadow puppets onto the stone, offering visitors below a quick relief from the sun.

“Names?” A serious voice interrupted from the driver’s side window as we all stared out ahead at the resort.

“It’s quite something but if you want in I’ll still need those names.” The woman nudged her glasses back up her nose before fixing a strand of her amber hair, looking as if she has had her fair dose of unruly teens for the day.

“It’s under Madrigal.” No nonsense Javi blankly stated while handing Angelina the reservation print out.

“And you all are —” The woman paused, studying us and while her expression remained stoic her eyes gave away something. “— unaccompanied?”

Maybe she was just showing concern? But surely having a group of teens isn’t that out of the ordinary, right?

“Listen —” Ignacio jumped to his feet, ducking inside the small space in the bus and pushed his way up to lean out the window at her. Oh here we go. Fasten your seat belts. I cringed half expecting some hilarious remark from Ignacio but he fell silent. “Uh– R-E-E-M..” He read her name tag in the most unsure tone possible by his standards.

“What??” Auri shot up, squeezing over the seat’s headrest to peek at what flustered Ignacio. “No dude, it’s R-E-A-M, see..” He pointed at the white and gold trimmed tag on her buttonup shirt.

“Looks like R-E-M, ya know like rem sleep…” Javi added matter-of-factly from his passenger seat.

“Nahhhh bro! It's pronounced Reem.”

“Rem.”

“Reammmmmm…”

“EXCUSE ME!” The woman hollered, holding back a smile. “It’s Reme. For Remedios.”

The bus was silent aside from the soft music coming from Angelina’s playlist in the background. Nobody dared argue with her.

She sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, “Just call me CJ.” She breathed out.

“THAT’S NOT EVEN CLOSE TO REEM.” Ignacio laughed, narrowing his eyes at the tag yet still pronouncing it wrongly his way.

“Reme.” The correction came swift like a dagger but the woman’s smile hadn’t faltered. “Head on in. Drive down to the circle, parking is in the back…” She motioned down the road before leaning in and crossing her arms over the open window.

“Oh, and kids—” A smirk played on her lips, suddenly erasing her earlier serious demeanor. Maybe she saw something in us before?

“In case you need a guide…” In one smooth motion she slid a small flyer from her waist. Where the hell had she been keeping that? Were there more? I scooched in closer to try and catch a glimpse of her outfit.

A wink was all she gave us to finish that sentence. And something told me by the sparkle in Ignacio’s eye that we’d definitely be taking her up on that offer. Sketch adventure and all.

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I found the idea of teens being lil turds and not figuring out how to pronounce Reme's name very funny in my head 😅

Reme belongs to @clichejoe

Triplets belong to @artsynellyyy @cheesy-cryptid

#its reme guys #adults getting migraines from teens is a classic #but they're so cute idc #what sort of adventure guide would reme be #road trip drabble #encanto oc #encanto fic #encanto drabble

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honourablejester · 12 days

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D&D Character Concept: The Druid in the Walls

You know when weird bits of inspiration combine from very disparate sources? Specifically to give you extremely horrible backstories for a character?

Because I’ve been walking the dog the last while, and I’ve been noticing a lot of the wall plants. You know, the bits of plants, pennywort and red robin and the like, that grow in the cracks in the walls? Between the stones, in the gaps in the plaster. They’re really pretty, and I just love the stubbornness of them, to wind their way into wherever they can anchor and just bloom there.

I’ve written some things before on urban druids in D&D, and I was thinking idly about making a character in that context. The plants that grow in the cracks in the walls. And, because this is D&D and tragic backstories are, like, the thing, I was considering …

Beyond just general urban misery, where would you be where the sight of a stubborn little weed growing in the crack in a wall might be the one beautiful thing you can see and a seed that becomes a focus for your whole being?

Prison is an obvious answer. A cell, looking up at the bit of green growing near a high window. But the idea merged with a crime documentary I watched on youtube, which I cannot find again, about (warning for child death) a Victorian/Early 20th century murder of a child. A society woman who’d had a child out of wedlock as a teenager collected her young daughter from the woman who’d been caring for her, brought her to the cellar of her new husband’s house, and murdered her, without realising that one of the maids witnessed the deed. Which, yes, extraordinarily dark. But.

A child in the cellar. An illegitimate child, hidden away. A bit of green in a high window.

For some reason, my first thought was half elf, because D&D has some options for visibly illegitimate children. But then I remembered we can go one further for social ramifications. We could have a tiefling. A tiefling druid, who spent her first years in the care of a nurse, until she was old enough that they knew she would survive, and then was violently taken away and hidden. Because she is living proof of a … of an indiscretion. A sin.

There’s a bit of me that wants to go with the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide tiefling variants as well, here. Because, while we’re on this very bleak trip into victorianesque worries about the physical markers of illegitimacy and immorality, there’s the alternate appearance descriptions for variant tieflings: “Your tiefling might not look like other tieflings. Rather than having the physical characteristics described in the Player's Handbook, choose 1d4+1 of the following features: small horns; fangs or sharp teeth; a forked tongue; catlike eyes; six fingers on each hand; goatlike legs; cloven hoofs; a forked tail; leathery or scaly skin; red or dark blue skin; cast no shadow or reflection; exude a smell of brimstone.”

… Tieflings really are playing on a lot of … of very old fears and prejudices. So yeah. But if we’re consciously playing with that, here. It does work.

And this is the sort of house that has a cellar. That has maids. That has nurses. This is urban nobility. But this kid has no memory of wealth, comfort. She just remembers a prison. A cold room with a high window onto street level. And the bit of green, the delicate bloom, the one pretty thing she can remember, shining in the dusty light of that window.

I also, I’ve been handwashing a lot of clothes lately, and I was thinking about the red hands you get from hand laundry. Caught red-handed. And, urban nobility like that, they’d have laundry. Maybe even laundry in the cellar. And I was thinking about the maid in that documentary. And I was thinking … someone freed them. Someone heard the creature in the walls of that house, and the hints upstairs of what it might be, and someone found the compassion in their hearts to do something. Some tiny thing. Even if it was just ‘accidentally’ leaving a door open. And all this kid remembers of how she got out of that prison is … red hands. The raw, boiled red hands of a laundry woman, as she darted past them into the light, in search of their tiny sprout of green.

So she escaped. She lived as a street urchin for a while, a good few years. And she never lost … She looks for the plants. The weeds. The tiny scraps of green the city over. The flowers blooming in the cracks in the walls. Because there’s … there’s an ethos there. A sympathy. A stubborn, determined thing. They grow where they’re not wanted, in the dirt and in the dark, and they bloom anyway. They survive, and they bloom, and they give hope to those around them. It’s a scrap of a thing, a fragile shred of green, but it grows. No matter how unwanted it is. And it gives hope when there’s nothing else.

At some point another druid stumbled across her. An apothecary, maybe, an urban herbalist, or just a vagabond with their own sympathy and appreciation for those shreds of green that all the artifice of urban living could not drive away. She found a teacher. She learned some things. And she gave back some things. Druids have goodberry. Healing word. Spells to help … those who survive in the city’s cracks and crevices. And she wants to. Because of the green, yes, for the hope in the darkness, and also for those boiled red hands. For the servant who helped her, for the faceless person in her memory, that pair of hands, that helped the monster in the walls when no one else would. She doesn’t know who she was. She don’t know what happened to her. The house she came from had a demonic child caged within it. Who knows what they’d do to a servant who interfered in the family business like that? Urban elite, nobility, tend to have … pragmatic solutions to things like that.

Though they hadn’t killed her. Why didn’t they just kill the monstrous child, the proof of their sins? Why hide her, instead of simply getting rid of her? So maybe … maybe there’s hope. Maybe that poor woman, whoever she was, didn’t die for her good deed. I think that is a hope she holds. That she wants to find out what happened to that woman, and maybe, if it’s possible, if it’s not so very much too much to hope, to meet her. Thank her. And … until then. To emulate her. To help. Before anything else, just to help.

I do know I want this druid to have the druidcraft cantrip. Because, yes, it might be largely useless, compared to the likes of prestidigitation and even thaumaturgy. And yes, druids only start with two cantrips, and she probably should take more useful ones. But there is one effect of druidcraft: “You instantly make a flower blossom, a seed pod open, or a leaf bud bloom.” And that’s …

I’m not sure if it’d be ruled that she could create flowers with that. Let small flowers bloom in the cracks with a whisper. But even if she’s only helping the ones already there to bloom, it’s still …

That was her hope. Her symbol of the outside world. The only beautiful thing in her world for years. And she wants to be able to spread that. That was the first magic she learned. The first warmth and hope she ever held in her hands. The ability to make flowers bloom. Even here. Even in the dirt and the dust and the misery. A little tendril of green, stubbornly rooted into the stones of the world. Sometimes you don’t need to be able to fight. Sometimes you just need to be able to provide hope.

(If she could also get herself a Staff of Flowers along the way, she’d love that too)

Maybe a lot of the local urchins know to follow the flowers to find help. You know?

So yeah. Yeah. A tiefling urchin urban druid. A child of sin, with the cherished power to coax hope to bloom, and the stubborn determination to grow no matter what. And to … to repay the small and infinitely precious kindnesses they have received.

#d&d #5e #character concepts #druids #urban druids #tieflings #illegitimacy #druidcraft #urban plants #dark backstories #hope in the flowers

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