Untitled

alas, our dear mister spock, who has been in emotional turmoil these last however many hours, absolutely fails to take it in the way mccoy had intended it.

he thinks, as coolly logical and rational and inscrutable and CLEARLY (lol) amazing at hiding and burying his emotional responses as he is: he thinks that mccoy believed him. he thinks mccoy believed that spock had only saved him for the good of the ship. he thinks that mccoy believed that spock doesn't care about him.

and now it's too late to actually have that honest conversation that mccoy had wanted.

so mccoy's going to die believing that.

and kirk is ThisClose to a nervous breakdown as he deals with the pair of them, because the more spock tries to pin mccoy down the more mccoy's adamantly determined to wriggle free. and obviously kirk still wants mccoy to join landing parties, and kirk not only enjoys when they bicker but also finds it genuinely helpful when he's trying to decide what to do, and kirk would sure rather have his uhhh quite limited free time just be the three of them hanging out again rather than this weird intense pressure cooker of a situation where spock keeps staring intensely at mccoy and mccoy glares right back all while kirk's just, like, trying to play some chess

Don’t they know that murder is illegal? You just know there are a bunch of homicidal maniacs out there who love to read those stories. They write them, too, in between killing people. 

Guys guys guys AZUNE IS 27. He is not a kid. He may have been denied a childhood and that's very sad, but he's a 27 year old man he is not a child wtf are you all talking about.

Demodis Blix is 22! He is also not a kid. Occtis is 20. Also not a kid. However, calling someone 20-22 a kid, especially one in college, is part of language so I'll give you those. Murray infantilizes them bc she's is part of the school leadership so that's like her job.

But I want to take a moment to point out that the reason Shadia has the blades at all is because of Bolaire.

It was Bolaire's idea to steal them from the museum when they did. It's a move that likely would have happened at some point in the campaign, but Bolaire pushed to do it now. To take advantage of the chaos sown in the museum and move the blades before House Cormoray got their claws in too deep. When Brennan sicced Lady Cormoray on him and Hal, it felt like a signal from the GM to the players that it was too soon for them to be making this move, but then he deus ex machina'd them out of danger, and the story went on.

I now think that getting the Pariah Blades out of the museum was a necessary step that would've been happening now, during the Convergence, had Bolaire not thought to do it first.

Because now, we know that these rituals involving the afterlives need an anchor of some sort, forged from an artifact that has changed its purpose. The letter the Soldiers brought back all but spells out that the blood for the ritual needed the Pariah Blades to be there as well as an anchor. Without that specific anchor, the ritual at the Round might've been destined to fail, just like whatever disastrous thing happened with Thjazi and Mara on Reaper's Day all those years ago.

It's not likely to get addressed by the narrative, because the symbolism of Shadia is so very powerful here, but I think there's important symbolism to Bolaire being the one to rescue the blades, too.

He's a historian who fought to keep the history of the orcish people in the hands of the orcs themselves, instead of the greedy human houses trying to twist that history. He's fighting to keep the Truth in the hands of those who will keep telling it, the Storytellers, like Hal. And, given what Bolaire is, there is a high likelihood that Bolaire himself would never have existed had the orcs not chosen to take up arms against Azgra and forge the Blades in the first place. Bolaire is himself an equivalent to a Pariah Blade working to keep his "cousins" out of the hands of the very tyrants he and they were created to oppose.

The Panto Mask, made to kill a god, now working as a historian. The artifact that changed its own purpose, now helping other artifacts to change theirs.

Bolaire couldn't have known that the Blades themselves would end up as part of the play, but now that they have, he may have just provided a key component to yet another powerful ritual taking place in a sacred theater. And there is symbolism in that too, in the theater mask providing a component to the upcoming theater magic, even if Bolaire himself will not be present at the play.