Atsadi's Shenanigans

It’s all BG3!!!

Holy fuck people made art 🥹:

Drunk Batstarion by @britonell

Eleanor by @lyzelky

Eleanor and Astarion, sitting on a bench by @britonell once again 💜

Eleanors! by @shierke

Astarion is trying to flirt (critical fail) commissioned by @sasseffects and drawn/rendered/colored by @squirrelcurls and @vipermenace

Eleanor and Astarion in their matching outfits! Bonus: Astarion being a total shit. By @lyzelky (😭)

Tent Scene from WSWB chapter 9 commissioned by @allymcfee and created by @summerwarlock

Also Tent Scene from WSWB, commissioned by @allymcfee and created by @crunchyncrumbly

NSFW?

Astarion and Eleanor by @mutualcombat (with more detailed pic of the softness)

Snippets:

Tiddy Cuddles - actually SFW. Batstarion never walks anywhere ever again when he can get uppies.

One Shots (All of them are rated E smutfics):

Stuffing - an entry for Wanksgiving 2023, sexually explicit. Ties into Feeding Alligators.

All I Want for Solstice - happy holidays 2023, have some fluffy smut! Eleanor tries to spread holiday cheer. Astarion tries to spread Eleanor's legs. Rated very much E for explicit sexual content. Technically a two-shot, but whatev.

Valentine’s Day Special - Roses are red, violets are blue, blah blah I’d like to fuck you. Or: Astarion bought a toy. Eleanor wants to give him a night he won’t forget. ASTARION GETS PEGGED.

You Could Just Ask - Astarion is terrible about communicating what he wants. But Eleanor is getting good at translating gremlin. ASTARION GETS PEGGED AGAIN. The man is a MENACE.

Something Full-Bodied and Red - Aunt Flo comes to visit Eleanor. Astarion is thrilled to make her acquaintance.

Tightrope and Lace - Astarion has a proposition: you’d look lovely in rope. And you shouldn’t be the only one who gets to dress for the occasion.

A Misuse of Potions - Pt. 1: Astarion has a plan. A nice, simple plan. His love has been gone for almost a tenday, but now she's back, and he needs her to obliterate him in the best way possible.

Long fics:

All are rated E for sexual content, language, and violence.

Feeding Alligators - Completed:

Turns out, it’s not heart disease that gets you. Not a car crash, the second coming, or even a plain old slip in the shower that removes you from this mortal coil. It’s motherfucking aliens. Your Uncle Randy would be so proud. Or: two losers cheat, stab, and flirt their way to a win.

What Shall We Become - Completed

After tripping a mad wizard’s trap, Astarion—now blinded—must navigate the Underdark with Eleanor back to their crew. These two shitheads must cheat, stab, and flirt their way through flooded caves, monsters, and something hunting them in the dark. All while very confusing feelings begin to muddle up Astarion’s Very Simple plan.

Fingers Sifting Black Earth - In Progress

Don’t think about it. That’s gotten you through a lotta bullshit in your life; you can do it again. You got a whole bunch of mental tools in the dusty corners of your mental broom closet of fucking metaphors and you got a fucking mission. Your first since you got brain whammied and tried to actually kill everybody.

Gale hands you a skirt.

You stare at it longer than you mean to.

“Do you not like the color?” Gale says. “My apologies, let me see if I can—”

You force a smile. Tug it (gently) outta his hands. “All good. It’s very pretty.”

It is, objectively. A light blue with an embroidered hem in a hexagonal pattern just beginning to fray. A couple patches here and there, showing she’s been well-used.

“Skirts just, uh, work different where I’m from.”

It’s a full thing. Has a separate petticoat. Both open completely at the top with flaps and cording.

“How so?” Gale says, that eager gleam to him, even in the dim, pre-dawn light. “You’re meant to step into it. Lift up the back piece, and use the cording to tie it at the front. Then you lift the front flap and tie that behind you. In between, there’s the pockets belt.”

It ain’t southern belle diaphanous, but it ain’t no pencil skirt or mumu.

The pockets belt is exactly what it sounds like: a belt to tie over the petticoat, with two pouches big enough to stuff a whole, live chicken into each side. Once you tie up the over skirt—them flaps leave convenient pocket slits right up the top sides—you got the biggest fucking pockets you ever seen. Bigger than mens’ cargo pants, hot damn.

You pause to go to your stuff and swap one of them pouches out.

The whole time, you explain zippers and velcro as you get yourself situated. You keep your trousers on under it all—can’t handle feeling bare legs under a skirt, too vulnerable, too exposed. It’s a costume, you tell yourself. You’re in a play, an actor in the role of a refugee mama (that thought makes you cringe but you’re facing away from anyody’d that’d see).

This ain’t real. You’re being sneaky. Using a stupidass (and wrong) perception of you to outfox the feds or whatever and get what you want.

“So it’s fashionable to show the shape of the body, rather than the shape of the clothes?” Gale says, god bless his talkative heart. “But what if fashions change? Your world doesn’t use magic; how would you fit?”

“We got doctors and knives to carve up or stuff up what somebody wants. Or fucked up diets. Ta da!”

He buries his horrified expression as you step out from behind a wall to reveal the stupid skirt. He gives you a supportive smile and the politest clap. Wesa leans against the wall next to him, chewing on a small bone. She gives you the most skeptical look.

“Tribe,” she says and makes a walking gesture. Motions to her feet, to your skirt.

“You can run in these things,” you say. You do know that. “And I can probably stuff a whole head into these pockets.”

She squints, then nods, while Gale winces.

“I…don’t think the stains from that sort of thing would wash out very easily,” he says.

You bet Astarion would know how to get that out.

Goddamnit, Astarion.

Gale clears his throat. “And for you, my lady.”

Them magic words and the magic weaves around and through Wesa and sinks into her skin. Once again, the goblin disappears and an angelic little elementary-schooler takes her place. One that grins them creepy, flat teeth, and cackles.

“Remember the ground rules,” you say. “No stabbing, shooting, or biting unless someone tries to do it to you first. And if they do, try to make sure nobody sees you respond.”

“Tribe.”

“And after that?”

Her grin turns into a sigh. “…tribe.”

“Run and hide,” you say.

Wesa mutters something that might be swearing if you’d ever heard her say anything else.

Gale holds out an elbow. You ain’t really used to touching people (that don’t smell like herbs and basement and, usually, blood) (you are picking up some batshit Pavlovian responses). But you commit and loop your arm through his. He don’t mean nothing by it.

“Be careful, yeah?” Karlach says from her watch post on top a collapsed, stone wall.

Still no sign of Astarion. You hope…well. You just hope.

***

You’re walking along with a man and a child. On the surface, anyway. A nice, little, nuclear family. Everything you’re supposed to want. What you should need. Finally fulfilling your god-given, natural purpose, settling into your proper place, the only true source of joy and contentment.

“Hold on, gotta itch,” you say and drop Gale’s arm and hitch up your skirt to scratch at your ankle.

You got about twenty steps from camp. Up close, Gale smells nice. A woodsy soap, ink, and something vaguely like…licorice? Something to do with his magic, you think. He’s solid built, too. Could feel it in his arm. And he runs warm.

…you should like that. It’s natural to like that. Why in the fuck does it weird you out. Why the fuck does Astarion running room temperature feel…safer. Goddamnit. Your brain is broke to fuck.

You straighten and start walking. Gale pauses a microsecond before following after without so much as a comment. Bless him, may his pillow always be cool, may he never stub his toe.

He’s dressed in a simple tunic and trousers and boots. Got an ordinary bag slung diagonal over his chest. Not his narnia wardrobe bag, just a basic bitch bag with a spare shirt, a water skin, and a tiny pouch in it. Refugee chic and all.

“Sorry about what Astarion said last night,” you say.

“Oh, it’s quite alright. Coming up behind a battlefield, I dare say it would put anyone on edge. In any case, I don’t believe it’s for you to apologize on his behalf.”

He so casually shoots you in the face with that. What you should know (what you do know). He don’t even gloat about it. Just gives you a gentle half smile.

Your neck is hot. “Yeah. I know. Sorry.”

“Another apology.”

You’re a lit fitter than you was on Earth. You still can’t sprint all the way down to the river to wade in and let it carry you to the sea.

“I thank you nonetheless,” Gale says. And because he’s a huge nerd with social skills most’a the time, “Now what was it about the lead pipes and the decline of an empire?”

A life preserver ring tossed your way as you flounder around. If you’d never met Astarion (or Karlach), you wonder if you could’a caught feelings for him.

So you explain different pieces of history and theory leading to the decline of Ancient Rome. Which segues into other civilization enders and the general theory of why and how that happens.

Wesa keeps pace in your shadow—bigger with the skirts and you shy away from that thought. She darts out suddenly and snatches something out the air. Some bigass flying beetle thing the size of your palm.

She promptly stuffs it into her mouth and crunches down. A spurt of goo shoots out the corner of her mouth. You got to look away as she cooes all happy and scarfs it down.

Y’all pass some kinda small, wooden structure. Abandoned now. A bench out front collapsed on one end.

“A road kitchen, I’d reckon,” Gale says. “You often see them on the approach to a major city. For travelers.”

Not hard to imagine people fleeing along the road. Snatching up what they could at the approaching thunder of the Absolute’s army (smaller and smaller every day, that’s niggling at you).

“It’s utterly fascinating how much history your people have been able to remember,” Gale says. “With no magic, no less.”

“Lot’s got written down. Or passed down in stories and stuff. And there’s the archeology.”

“Yes.” Oh boy. Gale seems kinda chill and affable, if chatty. Until he focuses on something. And it is wildly unnerving to be the center of that focus. “Hundreds of thousands of years, you said?”

The grass y’all been passing through is mostly gone now. Just the road and brown hills sloping down. The river shimmering in a thick, silver band below. Must’a carved this slope down over eons. The road turns, cuts into the side of a rolling cliff. A giant hill juts up across the river, the dark stain of a city wrapping around it and spreading out to the left. Below, at this end of a long, bumpy bridge (buildings, built on the bridge holy shit) is another cluster of a town surrounded by an arc of a wall. They even got some kinda street lamps reaching up partway up the road to greet y’all.

“They, uh, they found a cave in South Africa—it’s a country—about seventy-eight-thousand years old, they think,” you say. Wesa returns to your side. Makes a low noise in the back of her throat. “Looks like one of the hominid species buried their dead deep in it. Possibly with tools and carvings on the wall.”

“I can’t help but wonder if our peoples—yours and mine—share the same plane of origin.”

“The goddamn strawberries.”

“Indeed.”

You been mulling on that. Food, architecture, the stories. They got a god named Tyr, y’all got stories about vampires and dragons and hell.

“You think we got a Stargate situation,” you say. Which you then got to explain.

“We’re not sure where humans originated, but I’m beginning to suspect your world. Should we survive this, you must come with me at some point, to Waterdeep at least. I know at least a dozen scholars at the university who regularly come to blows over that same question.”

You snort. “You want to toss me in there like a grenade?”

You threw one at his legs, back beneath Moonrise. Tried to take one off to slow him down.

But here and now, he’s tapping his nose and grinning. Saying, “While I suspect you and I share the same philosophy on the importance of the free movement of knowledge, this could well be a source of income for you, in collaborations and lectures.”

It startles you enough to derail the pity train chugging along in your head. That turns over and crashes with a whimper as you latch onto a new idea.

An income.  A life after this. If you ain’t dead or disappeared or whatever. Staying here. Permanently.

“Oh,” you say. All eloquent.

You thought of it before, of course. Uncle Randy. Your cousins. Sasha and your coworkers and pizza and going to movies. You also been trying not to think of it. Got shit to do. Like not dying, which keeps coming up for some fucking reason.

But you are here. Don’t see no way to get back. Might not be a way to get back, and if there were, if the gods of Faerun descended from on high after all this and gave you a bus ticket back to Earth…

Astarion. Karlach and Shadowheart and Wyll and Gale and Lae’zel. Sweetums. Wesa.

“That’s, uh.” It’s jumbling up in your head. Jamming your tongue. “I mean, I could…”

Then you notice Wesa stopped. On a human face, she’s peering intently down the road. Her ears got to be pinned flat, under the illusion.

You follow her gaze. The road. The dead landscape around it. The lamp post ahead…ah.