The final chapter! Which means that their story has come to an end at last - but not before we see what the future has in store for Tav, Astarion, Cerrik and Rhylfein, and Tav gets to stretch his bat wings. 🦇
These two have meant a lot to me this past half year that I've been obsessed with BG3. Thank you so much to everyone who has been following along with their story, you are the best and I'd never have written 100k if not for all those wonderful and encouraging comments. ❤❤❤
~
Being a bat was pretty fun, Tav had to admit. He might even make it through an entire council meeting, as long as he got to experiment with his new hearing. It turned out that bats were really good at hearing things—he could now hear objects in total darkness, in a way that was completely unlike his dark vision.
“Let’s play hide and seek in the garden when we get back,” Tav said.
“Aren’t you a little too old for that?”
Despite the smugness in his voice, Tav could hear that Astarion was pleased.
In the weeks since he’d bound himself to Astarion, they’d slowly grown closer once more. For Tav, nothing had truly changed. This was how he’d always imagined it would be—helping Astarion achieve all his desires, trusting him in everything, the way Astarion had once followed Tav after the Nautiloid crash and given him his trust.
“Oh, I know of a way to spice it up,” Tav said, flapping his wings to take him right up to Astarion. “The loser has to pay a forfeit.”
“And what forfeit would that be?” Now Astarion definitely sounded amused, small bat ears tilting towards Tav. “You are already mine, aren’t you?”
Tav gave him a toothy smile. “You know, I’ve always wondered something. How exactly do bats have sex?”
For everyone who asked: a dialogue parser for BG3 alongside with the parsed dialogue for the newest patch. The parser is not mine, but its creator a) is amazing and b) wished to stay anonymous.
UPD: The parser was updated!! Now all the lines are parsed, AND there are new features like audio and dialogue tree visualisation. See below!
Patch 6 dialogue added!
If you don't want to touch the parser and just want the dialogues, make sure to download the whole "BG3 ... (1.6)" folder and keep the "jscssetc" folder within: it is needed for the html files functionality (hide/show certain types of information as per the menu at the top, jumps when you click on [jump], color for better readability, etc). See the image below for what it should look like. The formatting was borrowed from TORcommunity with their blessing.
If you want to run the parser yourself instead of downloading my parsed files, it's easy:
run bg3dialogreader.exe, OPEN any .pak file inside of your game's '\steamapps\common\Baldurs Gate 3\Data' folder,
select your language
press ‘LOAD’, it'll create a database file with all the tags, flags, etc.
Once that is done, press ‘EXPORT all dialogs to html’, and give it a minute or two to finish.
Find the parser dialogue in ‘Dialogs’ folder. If you move the folder elsewhere, move the ‘jscssetc’ folder as well! It contains the styles you need for the color coding and functionality to keep working!
New features:
Once you've created the database (after step three above), you can also preview the dialogue trees inside of the parser and extract only what you need:
You can also listen to the correspinding audio files by clicking the line in the right window. But to do that, as the parser tells you, you need to download and put the filed from vgmstream-win64.zip inside of the parser's main folder (restart the parser after).
You can CONVERT the bg3 dialogue to the format that the Divinity Original Sin 2's Editor understands. That way, you can view the dialogues as trees! Unlike the html files, the trees don't show ALL the relevant information, but it's much easier to orient yourself in.
To get that, you DO need to have bought and installed Larian's previous game, Divinity Original Sin 2. It comes with a tool called 'The Divinity Engine 2'. Here you can read about how to unstall and lauch it. Once you have it, you need to load/create a project. We're trying to get to the point where the tool allows you to open the Dialog Editor. Then you can Open any bg3 dialogue file you want. And in case you want it, here's an in-depth Dialog Editor tutorial. But if you simply want to know how to open the Editor, here's the gist:
Update: In order to see the names of the speakers (up to ten), you can put the _merged.lsf file inside of the "\Divinity Original Sin 2\DefEd\Data\Public\[your project's name here]\RootTemplates\_merged.lsf" file path.
Feel free to ask if you have any questions! Please let me know if you modify the parser, I'd be curious to know what you added, and will possibly add it to the google drive.
Drow begging Astarion to piss on him and Astarion going through 5 different emotions in under 10s would be pretty funny to witness. How would Astarion react to it?
Tav and Astarion make one final deal to bind themselves together forever...
~
“You know, I have been thinking,” Astarion said. “You can still walk in the sun. Which means that you retain the gift I gave you.”
Tav nodded.
“Then surely that means that the bond between us can’t be truly broken.” Astarion stopped and gave him a serious look. “Think about it. I might no longer be able to compel you, but my power lingers in you. And I gave you more of my blood. By any right, we should be even closer now.”
“I’m not feeling any desire to start a coven of my own and overthrow you, my lord Astarion,” Tav said, giving him a playful bow. “In any case, you know I could never leave the cats behind.”
“That’s true.” Astarion looked pleased. “So many ways of blackmailing you, my love.”
Tav felt a smile tug at his lips. If Astarion could joke about what had happened, then perhaps they could truly overcome even this.
“I—I thought about it as well.” He hesitated for a moment, then reached into a pocket and pulled out the parcel that had arrived for him earlier this morning. He handed it to Astarion.
“I asked Gale to make it for me.”
Astarion raised a brow, then unwrapped the layers of silken cloth. He uncovered a small, slender collar made of gold with a single amethyst at its center.
Up until this point, it always felt like that despite all the discourse on tumblr and twitter, you could just do your own thing and post your fic to AO3 and have a good time.
Now I got weird comments by two different people in a short amount of time, after half a year of posting smutty AA fic without any problem.
Has patch 6 emboldened people to just be dicks to strangers in public, instead of just reading the tags or using their back button when they realize that something might not be for them?
wait you understand that kinks are ok because they're fantasies that make you happy right? you all get that you don't need to have trauma for your kinks to be okay? right? like none of you think i witnessed a tragic accident on the pool toy assembly line right?