Turned someone down: That implies that I’ve ever been asked. Like, unless we’re counting the former friend from high school who I try to avoid now because he didn’t get the concept of, “No, I do not want your tongue in my mouth. I am not interested in you. Stop it” — oh wait, no, I think I actually kinda have turned someone down.
One of the guys in my game night group — let’s call him Chris, because…… that is his name? — was kinda into me for a while, and he actually asked Jake (the game night group friend I’ve known since seventh grade for me / ninth grade for him) whether he was being literal when he called me a lesbian, or if it meant something more in the vein of, “bisexual but more often into ladies,” or, “bi or pan but saying lesbian in the same way that some bi or pan people sometimes call themselves, ‘gay.’” Jake had been doing the latter, because in fairness to him, I wasn’t sure on the lesbian thing at the time either, for several reasons, and had given him permission to do the thing.
Anyway, Chris came up to visit the members of our group who live in Michigan a couple times — one of which involved him, me, Jake, and Ben getting together at Jake’s parents’ [he was dog-sitting for them] to play our game of Black Crusade (xx, ***) irl instead of over one of the different chat clients we’ve used, and it was one of the best and coolest days of my nerdy little life. Partly because that game was just amazing overall……
and partly because Luke [the dog being babysat] decided that I was his favorite, so I was pretending to be a grizzled and traumatized outer space war veteran with a chainsaw sword named Requiem, who’d been a literal poster-boy for the armies of the Glorious God-Emperor (like, when the PC’s had their first, “you all meet in a bar and stuff happens” encounter, he was still on the Imperium’s “come enlist!! even humans can serve the glory of the Emperor!!” propaganda posters and the bar had one of them hanging on the wall behind him; Chris’s character’s response to Vincent’s presence was p much, “holy SHIT, what are YOU doing here? you’re one of the Empire’s latest Big Deals”)
Then, he’d fallen to Chaos after seeing his entire squad, including his [male] lover, murdered on the orders of their superiors
[……technically, it was more that their superiors let them all die, by sending them into a battle with Chaos forces that they had no hope of winning and my guy only barely survived — but that didn’t really make a difference to him, and the gist of, “superiors sent them off and they all died because of said superiors’ negligence, ignorance, and obsession with securing their own power at the expense of the little people. Anyway, his name was Vincent. He was a warrior-poet and he’s still one of my favorites of my history of RP characters]
and now, in the game, he was adventuring around with two super cool ladies and trying to revive Malal, the lost Ruinous God (who was sort of a casualty of copyright bullshit but is seriously one of my favorite things in the entire Warhammer universe), so that they could proceed to lead one of the titular Black Crusades in Malal’s name
[said cool ladies were: Rozea (Chris), a fallen Inquisitor and scholar who’d gotten into Chaos by researching certain old prophecies about Malal’s rebirth and then deciding that spreading Chaos was actually cooler and a better way to advance her quest for The Truth than destroying Chaos;
and Kalia (Ben), the Chosen One of Malal, possessed of super rock star swagger and some PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER!! that she didn’t entirely have control of yet, who went from eager to just go adventuring for the sheer fun of it because FUCK YEAH SPACE ADVENTURES!!!, to actually caring about Malal’s cause of upending the established order of things, even within Chaos itself, and challenging everyone to be better than they think they are, also spreading anarchy and setting shit on fire]
[Granted, Vincent was initially just passively helping to revive Malal, since he was tagging along with said cool ladies to be their melee fighter and muscle, while planning to leave them when he found his own thing at some point, and NOT planning to end up adopting them as his new found family and essentially his surrogate sisters.
He didn’t get really onto Team Malal until after a long arc wherein he was technically kind of unaligned, but leaning toward Khorne, the god of bloodshed and hella slaughter and edgelords who love killing the shit out of everyone whilst screaming BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD, SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!!!
—only to slowly realize that he’d been lied to about all notions of Khorne having any interest in things like honor or protecting those who can’t protect themselves, and really, with Khorne, Vincent would just be getting more of the same shit that had driven him from the Imperium of Man, except it would dress all in black or red and work at Hot Topic and think it’s totally hardcore because it can scream BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!!! when you slightly misspell its name on its cup at Starbucks]
[if it sounds like I think Khorne is kind of stupid, there’s a reason for that. Namely: yeah, I think Khorne is kind of stupid.
—which says a LOT for me actually, because in tabletop RPGs, I LOVE playing characters who are, like…… berserkers, warrior poets, former pit fighters who end up going on odd adventures with a bunch of endearing weirdos, gay mutants who can turn into large fluffy therianthropic wolf-men to fight bigger and badder mutants and who were previously the muscular defenders of their NPC no romo soulmates (…who now gets to just be in my own original writing because we had to let Seb’s game go, sadly, but I’d written too much for him to do absolutely nothing with it), or otherwise end up being the party’s main melee fighter.
Like, we’ve played a few different rounds of Warhammer: Fantasy where our characters were vampires, and in all but one of them, my vamp was a Blood Dragon, or, “the vampire bloodline that is pretty much the undead incarnation of COME AT ME, BRO!!! They call themselves Blood Dragons because their founder wanted to get powerful enough to fight a dragon and drink its blood, which is what most of them also aspire to, though a lot of them suck at it and get themselves killed before they’re anywhere close because they just HAD to go being a little edgy mcedgelord, jfc.”
ffs, the first game we had with the Game Night Group, or at least some incarnation of the group, back in 2011? It was based on Neon Genesis Evangelion (the premise of the game itself being, “play at NERV bases in places other than Tokyo, and ffs, get in the robot”), which I hadn’t seen yet but my character [Tanya] was a Manufactured human like Rei (though Jake toyed around with some of the NGE-canon world-building a bit for the sake of making things make sense in a way that ran smoother as an RPG), and her character class was Berserker, i.e., “no really, she wants to get in the robot and go fuck up some Angels.”
And that’s exactly what she did. Her EVA was named Cernobog, she thought of him as a friend, he kind of shipped her with Elsa (Chris’s girl and the team’s strategist/point-man), at least once Tanya/Elsa became a Thing that happened in-game…… and a lot of the strategies for battles tended to involve some variation on the idea, “So, Tanya charges in and starts ripping it to shreds in the EVA equivalent of hand-to-hand combat, and the rest of us back her up in varying capacities.” In one battle, Tanya was so scary-good at EVA hand-to-hand that the Angel turned tail and tried to flee.
—but Khorne is just on a completely different level of MUCH WARRIOR VERY PUNCH SUPER STRONG RAWR, and the level on which Khorne exists is the level that is incredibly freaking stupid, because his entire schtick — literally everything that he is about — can be summed up as, “He makes Kylo Ren look like he has his shit together and causes even more wanton destruction for even less of an arguable reason.”
Like, of the Ruinous Gods, Khorne is the big hulked out musclebro who’s high on murder and couldn’t think his way out of a wet paper bag and has yet to realize that his, “solve all my problems by punching them in the face and/or stabbing them” approach? Actually just tends to create more problems.
(Depending on who you ask, Khorne may or may not also be so deep in the closet that he’s burned Narnia to the ground, come out the other side of things, and somehow wound up in Pokémon’s Distortion World.
Based on someone’s opinion about that, it’s sometimes suggested that the real reason why Khorne hates Slaanesh so much is that he wants to fuck them and, by just existing and being: a. simultaneously all genders and no genders, and b. the hottest sentient being you have ever seen in your life, Slaanesh doesn’t let Khorne run from how gay he is.
This aside is really only relevant because, given that Vincent was gay, this was — in modified form — kind of a part of how Jake characterized and wrote Khorne during this game, and specifically, how he tried to imagine Khorne’s interest in Vincent, which was a mix of, “wow, this kid is SUPER TALENTED AT MURDERING PEOPLE, I gotta make him turn into one of my Daemon Princes”
and, “Khorne looks at Vincent and sees a human who very strongly reminds him of himself, based pretty much entirely on their shared desire to kill a lot of people and despite several rather glaring differences — which Khorne is completely ignoring because some of them are things like, ‘Yeah, no, Vincent’s gay and he’s pretty okay with it, actually?’
“and, ‘No, seriously, Khorne: Vincent’s gay. His very male lover of eight years was in his squad with him — you know, the squad whose total utter destruction was The Last Straw that sent him over to the side of Chaos and really fueled that desire to KILL ALL THE THINGS that you love so much. He has written enough gay love poems to fill several volumes. He is a lover AND a fighter and really fucking gay in space, and this fact is tied to several of his motivations. Also, he’s a looot more into vengeance and justice than mindless slaughter and, again? He wouldn’t have the big blood-lust thing that you adore about him if not for being a big gay man in space who lost his male lover due to the callousness and ineptitude of their commanding officers.’
“And, well, okay, Khorne can’t completely ignore all of these things, so he is going, ‘Yeah fine whatever, the kid will grow out of that vengeance and justice shit and come around to the side of MURDER MURDER MURDER BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD’ and putting all of his effort here into very strenuously ignoring the fact that Vincent’s gay, because if he ignores it, maybe Vincent will mistake that for acceptance until he is just magically not gay anymore, and if nobody else ever in the entirety of all creation notices that Vincent’s gay, then nobody will think that Khorne is gay or so much as associate him with gayness due to having a big gay champion.”
I would just like to reiterate: repressed gay or not, Khorne is so painfully boneheaded and no disrespect, but I have no respect for Khorne.)
Tzeentch is the one who’s intellectually super brilliant but he KNOWS it and it makes him act like a douchebag and he’s also the one who’s most likely to wear a fedora and wonder why miladies don’t like him when he’s such a Nice Guy (also, sometimes he turns into the Space Riddler but with magic and shape-shifting and it’s kind of obnoxious).
Nurgle is a walking bio-hazard who thinks he’s totally super-romantic for kidnapping an Eldar (space elves) goddess to be his wife (in Jake’s headcanon version of things that he uses whenever he runs one of the Warhammer 40k games for us, she eventually breaks free and kills him… which he eventually recovers from because he’s a god, but still, at least Isha gets the fuck away from that walking bio-hazard named Grandfather Nurgle).
and Slaanesh is my canon fave because they’re all about three things:
1. Decadence and parties and basically anything that you might possibly associate with Dionysus
2. #Aesthetic
and 3. being hella gay and fucking all your preconceived ideas about gender IN SPACE
but sadly, canon is usually reeeeeeally gross about Slaanesh because canon was primarily written by a bunch of straight white nerdbros who are often misogynistic af, homophobic af, transphobic af, and think they’re allowed because obviously, girls and LGBTQ people neeeeeever play tabletop RPGs (and while most of them at least TRY not to be super racist…… they’re often kinda hit or miss, and then there’s one in particular who’s misogynistic and racist enough that even some canon diehards have gone, “yeah, uh, if Matt Ward wrote it, we’re just gonna ignore it because fuck that guy”)
so I tend to put my fingers in my ears about canon, and live in my happy headcanon land where the gross parts of canon are gone and Slaanesh gets to hang out with Malal, the weirdo anarchist who likes setting things on fire and being kinda like the Deadpool of the Ruinous Powers]
[also, lol, Vincent had a super-awesome moment when he finally defeated the Black Knight, a Chaos Space Marine who was a recurring not-quite-antagonistic NPC for him, who’d been there for the actual facts Horus Heresy before eventually defecting to Chaos for very similar reasons to Vincent’s (albeit with a bit less gay warrior poet-ness), and becoming one of Khorne’s champions……
then realizing that Khorne was completely full of shit and that, in waging this constant war against life itself, he’d become something horrible and unrecognizable to himself, only for Khorne to get REALLY MAD!!! that his champion was considering defecting, so he gave the Black Knight cursed power armor and condemned him to live forever, until he could finally be beaten in single combat — which was not meant to be a mercy, because when he died, Khorne was supposed to get the Black Knight’s soul for all eternity and subsequently punish him forever for having tried to, “turn coward and deny his Lord.”
WELL, FUNNY THING ABOUT THAT PLAN OF YOURS, KHORNE
……It sucked and Vincent did not like it very much at all, sir — not that he was actually aware of it at the time, but……… Khorne sorta made him aware of it after he fucked it up, because Khorne was REALLY MAD!!!!!!
See, the Black Knight was suffering in his eternity of murder and being the very best of all possible warriors. Finally, after eons of this constant fighting, the Black Knight meets Vincent, and he thinks it’s gonna be just another round of kicking some little shit’s ass for Khorne and being super miserable and alone and so on.
However, even on like, the party’s second adventure, Vincent was pretty dang skilled, and in their first battle, he’s the first person in LITERALLY MILLENNIA who actually managed to land a hit on the Black Knight and injure him, even if it was only a little bit.
Granted, he didn’t injure the Black Knight by a lot in that first battle, and he still completely got his ass handed to him, but the Black Knight was all like, “*starry eyes of adoration* omg someone who actually hurt me, you might actually grow up to be a match for me in combat, AND you are a plain vanilla human who hasn’t even gotten his first weird Chaos mutation yet, like GODDAMN, omg omg omg!!!”
—so he spared Vincent’s life after that first battle and then he periodically dropped in while the group was on other adventures or when we were cooling off between them, just to see how we were doing and if Vincent was capable of defeating him yet.
Eventually, the answer to, “Can Vincent possibly defeat the Black Knight, or at least give him an ACTUAL fight before they both die of blood loss?” was, “yes,” so the party paused mid-adventure to deal with the Black Knight showing up and going, “VINCENT!! FIGHT ME!! PLEEEEEASE??!!”
—okay, in-character, he said things more like, “You understand, this time neither of us will stay our hands? One of us has to die, if we do this now.”
Vincent: “If I die tonight, then at least it’s at the hands of someone I respect.”
Black Knight: “No. I am not a man worthy of respect. So many of my victories are from this damned armor I cannot remove. But you.... I think you can challenge me anyway. I have missed risking my life.”
Vincent: “Well, you have my respect regardless. Shall we continue with the repartee, or do you want to get right to the risking your life part?”
Black Knight: “*draws his sword* Khorne desires only that I butcher my enemies. I would prefer to have to fight them. You may be the last time I can deny him something.”
—but stripped of all the fancy parts, the Black Knight’s motive in this big scene and what he was saying in it? came down to, “VINCENT! FIGHT ME!!! BE A REAL BRO AND GIVE ME A CHALLENGE! FIGHT ME PLZ!!!”
(also, I don’t have this memorized; I pulled up my old chat-logs to find it because it was a really epic session and I wanted to reread it.)
(Also, right before the combat started, the Black Knight legitimately said, “Come at me, boy” as his challenge — because we are a bunch of Very Serious roleplayers who always take all of our pretendy fun-time games Very Seriously.)
Kalia, Rozea, and Runa (our adorable NPC Space Marine sidekick and team medic, who was a total sweetheart and a plucky go-getter, and she went on to be a space pirate after the game ended)…… they pretty much just broke out the popcorn and ran a running commentary on the fight as it went on, complete with guessing as to the different motivations Vincent and the Knight both had here and what role Khorne actually played in all of it, because??
Well, I mean, there was little else that they could do right now, in the face of two hardcore career warriors who are dead-set on dueling each other in an honorable single combat and finally settling once and for all who is the worthier of them
I think it’s a huge credit to Jake as a DM that he was fully prepared to let Vincent die and go, “okay, Kass, make a new character for the rest of the campaign” if I lost that one-on-one, which made the stakes even higher than they already were, which?
In-character, the stakes here were high to begin with, and even higher than Vincent was initially aware because he didn’t know about the whole eschatological drama llama funtimes going on with Khorne and the Black Knight, at least not the whole story and he definitely didn’t know enough to give informed consent to the, “FIGHT ME, BRO!” challenge (but in the end, he only held it against Khorne, since the Black Knight was ultimately a victim in this situation and everything was Khorne’s fault).
On an OOC level, the stakes were high because Jake and I both kept rolling pretty dang decently, and both Vincent and the Black Knight had killer stats and skills, so the battle was more or less evenly matched. We even had a moment of terror as the Black Knight out-rolled me on a few big checks — disarming Vincent of Nocturne, his chainsaw-axe, and then lifting him up by the throat and going, “Look me in the eye before you die, boy,” and headbutting Vincent square in the face and doing enough to nearly kill him with that — but since Vincent didn’t die and got back up, the fight was still on……
……and we followed that by completely disarming the Black Knight, like knocking Regret (his chainsaw-sword) clean across the room, and finally landing some legitimately damage-inducing hits with Requiem, like good enough to cut him deep, and eventually, Vincent scored a head-hit that totally destroyed the full facial coverage that Black Knight’s helmet had given him, and revealed that he looked an awful lot like Vincent because Rule of Symbolism
—like, seriously, this is how I described Vincent in the first, “characters all meet in a bar and stuff happens” session (which happened on my 23rd birthday and it was awesome):
“Vincent is a tall man with dirty blond hair and three-day stubble, fit and muscular and currently wearing carapace armor over top of his clothes. As one of those looking ragged, worn, and eager to drink his problems away, he’s hunching over the bar, mostly keeping to himself and occasionally jotting things down on a dataslate, and on his back, he has a nasty-looking chainsword.”
And this is how Jake described the Black Knight when Vincent knocked his mask off and the Knight saw the world with his own unfiltered eyes for the first time in millennia:
“Your sword hits him clean in the face, and this time, the helmet tears off with a rending screech of metal. You can see his face, for the first time. He’s a handsome, blonde haired, blue eyed man, looking surprisingly angelic and knightly, his face unmarked by mutation, but heavily scarred by old blows and injuries, including a heavy slash across his left eye.”
so…… basically, yup. Rule of Symbolism required them to look scarily similar, and they did, and this is what happens when you leave literature and history-loving nerds alone with wicked awesome tabletop RPGs—
Black Knight hits Vincent and almost kills him. Vincent hacks his sword arm right the frick off and sends him toppling over. And the Black Knight realizes that he is finally getting his wish of death, but has some words of wisdom to impart first:
Black Knight: “His [Khorne’s] mark is not yet upon you. This armor... it was given to me, when I tried to... to deny my lord.”
Vincent: “You tried to deny him?”
Black Knight: “It is the mark of a coward. Or so he claims. A mark of shame, that its bearer knows only slaughter, not battle. Why did you turn on the Emperor?”
Vincent: “I lost too many people. His service took the lives of everyone I loved most.”
Knight: “I watched him... I watched him kill an entire world for the crime of loving him as a God, to... to make a point to an errant child of his. I could never serve a lord so callous. One who betrayed so many as ‘pointless’ to chastise one Primarch he felt mattered. And yet... here I am. Serving the only thing in the galaxy worse than he.”
Vincent: “*Worse*?”
Black Knight: “The Emperor does not care about you. Has never cared for you, or anything you loved. He does not care what you love, or hate. But Khorne... Khorne will not allow you to love, or hate at all. Only to kill. Do not... mistake the enemy of the Emperor... for your friend, as I did...”
Black Knight: “Please, carry on... whatever you do, carry on and destroy the corpse-Emperor, somehow.... but do not make my mistakes. Khorne does not care who deserves to die.”
And hereabouts was when things got Mythic.
Well, more accurately, I should say that they got Psychomachic, because this was some straight-up, “battle between conflicting cosmic forces for the human [and/or Space Marine] soul” shit.
See, one of the things Jake had done with running Black Crusade for us was that he would sometimes have the Ruinous Powers (meaning mostly Malal, but also sometimes Khorne) drag the characters into little reveries where the rest of any given scene would carry on, business as usual, but they’d have a little Chaos God on their shoulder for a bit, to various kinds of effects.
So, when the Black Knight starts up with the warning for Vincent, Khorne stomps into the scene and he is SO MAD!!!!!, because his accurséd baby coward is about to die and is trying to keep him from securing a new fave champion — so he storms into Vincent’s head, jumping up and down and screaming and having a temper tantrum, going, “FINISH HIM FFS, YOU WON AND HE LOST AND IT WAS TOTALLY HONORABLE COMBAT SO STOP LISTENING TO THAT WHINY WHINER AND MURDER HIM OKAY! BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!!!! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!!!”
Enter Malal, stage inside of Vincent’s head, offering a different proposal and going, “This is one of those big choices in life that you can never go back from, kid, but still: it *is* a choice” — only Malal isn’t expecting this to have more options than, “Vincent kills the Black Knight, and sends his soul to Khorne” or, “Vincent saves the Black Knight’s life but prolongs his suffering because he’s still condemned to a life of constant slaughter in the name of a god he’s come to hate.”
In fairness to Malal here? As far as he knew, Vincent had a tendency to be kinda, “all or nothing”-minded.
Like, when he was with the Imperium’s army, he earned his way onto the propaganda posters by virtue of being hella dedicated, hella skilled, hella committed to the point of never letting himself quit and needing to be pulled back from shit that probably would have given him a glorious martyr’s death when someone else saw that… no Vincent seriously, there is a way to save the people you care about AND it doesn’t involve you dying to do it, and rolling ridiculously well on his Fellowship score, so he was persuasive as shit and a total “face made for posters” pretty boy.
Persuasiveness was a good thing for him to have, too, because he was usually the first to start going on about how the Imperium is the best, and long live the glory of the God-Emperor, and generally defending a bunch of shit that was actually a huge mess in which thousands of people got brutally murdered in service of an Empire that’s put all of its people in so much danger by poking in places where it shouldn’t have poked (and it’s in space, so there’s some fucked up stuff that can kill you for looking into Things Humanity Was Not Meant To Know), because he wholeheartedly loved the Imperium and its people, and believed that everything had to be amounting to something better, something that was going to be for the good and to the betterment of everyone ever.
And then that didn’t work out so well, and there was no gradual fall to Chaos here. Vincent did not descend slowly or do the fall thing like Good Omens!Crowley saunter vaguely downwards.
It’s more like…… everybody he loved died.
No one cared and his CO’s didn’t understand why he was fucked up about this, revealing that they really did think of their soldiers as little more than statistics with freaking chainsaw-swords, and couldn’t even be bothered to listen about how all of this could’ve been avoided because They Know What’s Best McKellar Now Shut Up And Go Look Pretty For The Propos.
Face-crack of the century, followed probably by a lot of anguished screaming as over a decade of repressed questioning and a lot of grief that he didn’t let himself feel and fear and horror and rage and so on all bubbled up to the surface of his mental and emotional landscape again, all at the same time because feelings all suck like that, and it all fucking hit Vincent head-on like a big yellow school bus……
After which he went, “Fuck you guys” and did a complete one-eighty to go find his vengeance and justice by joining Team Chaos and working to destroy the Imperium and protect those who cannot protect themselves and actually make defend the ideals of helping people and improving life across the board for everyone, like he was told he’d be doing when he first enlisted.
So…… yeah. Malal had every reason to think that this angry Hufflepuff in space — whom he’d basically just met and was mostly invested in due to Kalia being his Chosen and counting Vincent as a part of her found family — would likely not do very well at finding any third options in the situation with the Black Knight. Malal even genuinely believed that there was pretty much no way in Hell of saving the Black Knight’s soul from Khorne.
But that is exactly what Vincent did (albeit mostly by accident).
He didn’t want to just kill the Black Knight because that would send this fellow warrior, someone Vincent respected and liked pretty well (who was currently using his last moments of life trying to save Vincent, not trying to save himself)…… off to Khorne, someone who’d been using, abusing, and torturing the Black Knight for literal millennia.
He also didn’t want to force the Black Knight to live a life of constant torture and enslavement to Khorne, which meant fueling Khorne’s power at the expense of the Black Knight’s everything, because…… well, this meant forcing a victim to forever stay in the grip of his abuser, who gets more powerful every time the Black Knight kills someone, because he derives power from murders committed in his name. “Blood for the Blood God” is NOT an exaggeration; Khorne THRIVES on that blood.
Oh, and there was the little exchange:
Vincent: “You really want to die?”
Black Knight: “The armor... it has been taking everything. Leaving only an automaton of slaughter. I do not remember my name. I barely remember why I hate the corpse-God.”
Black Knight: “Khorne... wished to make me what he wanted me to be. What he wants all his Chosen to be. I cannot leave his service, except by death, for I bear his Mark.”
Vincent: “What would you do if I didn’t kill you now? Would we just do this again later?”
Black Knight: “I do not know... You were my chance... I’m sorry to have used you. But please...”
Black Knight: “Please... before I am nothing but what Khorne wants me to be. Please let me spite at least one of the Gods I... I hate.”
In response to which, Vincent nodded, genuinely told the Black Knight, “I forgive you,” and killed him.
Then shit got Weird for a hot second, because Vincent had unwittingly said the exact right thing to release the Knight from the hold that Khorne had on his soul.
Like, the way it worked was that by showing the Knight compassion and forgiveness and not blaming him for his desperate actions when Khorne is the actual source of everyone’s misery in this situation — by showing him some of the humanity that Khorne had been systematically denying to him for all of these centuries — Vincent got the Knight to open up his mind to the possibility of something other than suffering and bloodshed, and to open up his heart to Malal, and that was all that Malal needed to get him away from Khorne and to get him an eternal rest, rather than an eternity of suffering-in-death, spent with his “literally godly, as in that he is an actual facts god” abuser.
……Vincent had no idea that that would happen, or that there had been any kind of chance of saving the Knight from Khorne. He was just giving the Knight forgiveness and compassion in his last moments because, if you’re Vincent Alastair McKellar, that’s what you do with someone who’s suffering and who’s sorry for the pain they caused you.
I mean, from his perspective, that was the least that he could do for the Knight, considering that he thought that he was condemning someone he liked and respected to an eternity of suffering no matter what he did, and killing him seemed like the slightly better option, since it would mean that the Knight wouldn’t have to serve Khorne anymore when he didn’t want to (not that an eternity as Khorne’s soul-flavored chew-toy is much better, but at least it would’ve meant that the Knight wouldn’t be forced to act in service of someone who’d used and abused him), and it would’ve meant that Khorne couldn’t gain any more strength from the Knight’s kills.
But that act of forgiveness opened the Knight’s mind and heart in his last moments of life, so Vincent wound up robbing Khorne of his chew-toy. (Kalia and Rozea happened to, “sense something... odd in the Warp. Almost like something grappling for a moment, and then a bellow of purest rage that nearly shatter[ed their] eardrums.”)
Having seen that the Knight had been saved from Khorne — and heard an actual facts honest promise from Malal: “I can’t promise you’ll kill the Emperor, or save the galaxy or anything, but I can promise you’ll be free to try” — Vincent’s next move was to agree to officially tell Khorne to take a hike and join Team Malal. Which led to:
”You hear it this time as well, Vincent. The bellowing, shrieking roar that’s both a sound and entirely inside your mind, as your [gigantic black bat] wings [acquired as one of the gifts of Chaos Mutation that Vincent had earned on previous adventures] begin to melt away and are replaced by pinions of blazing, ethereal light.”
(Said blazing, ethereal pinions basically did the same thing and served the same purpose as the black bat wings, but they were more in keeping with Malal’s #Aesthetic, and Vincent wasn’t attached enough to his own #Aesthetic to care about the swap here when he’d done something he felt proud of for the first time in a long time, which was waaaaaaay more important, in his mind, than what his wings looked like.)
(His other mutations got changed up too, but that’s a lot less relevant.)
So, in the end, Khorne lost both his soul-flavored chew-toy and his new fave potential-Chosen, all because of three little words and a moment of genuine compassion, and he was SOOOOOOOO FUCKING MAD!!!!!!!
……like. He was so mad that a new recurring Thing until the game came to its end? Was that Khorne would periodically send minions to bring him Vincent’s skull (and hopefully, Kalia’s, Rozea’s, and Runa’s, too, since that found family shit was a big part of what turned Vincent away from Khorne in the end)…… and then the minions would get killed, and Khorne would be SOOOOOOOOO FUCKING MAD!!!!!! and send more minions.
Eventually, Khorne got so sick of his minions losing that he sent a damn Bloodthirster — huge fuck-off Daemon, living embodiment of war and murder and shit like that, very nasty — and Vincent killed it in single-combat while barely taking any damage himself, which was Jake’s big cue that the party was ready to take on the final stage of the story, ascend and become the Daemon Prince and Princesses of Malal, and actually see the Renegade God reborn into the world.
It was fucking epic.]
………Yeah, I was up to my eyes in all of that (though the actual facts adventure of the day during that live-session was a mix of trying to win at space fight club while also hunting for The Harlequin, an evil space elf who was a huge pain in the ass and was Kalia’s recurring NPC foil like the Black Knight was for Vincent), while this tiny little Yorkie kept bringing me his toys, or curling up in my lap, etc., and it was great
Anyway.
So, what were we talking about?
Oh, right, we were talking about me and Chris.
Chris and I kinda went to the movies after that? And then we had another kinda-date on his next trip up to Michigan? And it was all helpful for eventually realizing that…… yeah, no, Jake should be very literal when calling me a lesbian? And yeah, I guess that this counts as turning him down, doesn’t it?
And idk, I felt kind of bad about not having had it figured out before Chris asked me out because he is a really sweet guy and if I were into dudes, I’d date him for real? But thankfully, he’s a good friend and a sweet guy, so he handled it really well when I went, “Yeah, okay, no, I like you, but I don’t like you like you.”
