#kryptonitic

our incredibly patient dm: [x] is the WORST thing someone can do in this world. it has EXTREME repercussions on the rest of the game. here’s a 5-minute explanation on why it’s a bad thing that you should not do.

Brad had absolutely no chance of escaping once they’d spotted him; there he was, just an innocent bystander in a war he couldn’t even begin to grasp, yanked into their crosshairs before he could so much as flinch.

“Brad, help us out here,” Josh said, in no way making his involvement optional, “Hypothetical question time...if two different monsters, say, a Dracula and a Frankenstein, decided to bone, would that be considered monsterfucking?”

Before he could open his mouth to put in his two cents (‘I’ve never in my life heard those words strung together in that order and I think I need a second to process’), Chris spoke up, “It’s not - if they’re both monsters, it’s not monsterfucking, it’s just fucking...or, y’know...doing the monster mash.”

“If they’re two different species of monster,” interrupted Ashley, her fingers pressed hard into her temples and her words coming out in short, frustrated bursts, “Then it’s by definition monsterfucking.”

“You guys are such fucking plebs...this has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with psychology, as I’ve been saying: If Party A perceives both themselves and Party B as monstrous, then no, it ain’t monsterfucking...but if Party A perceives themselves as typical and Party B as monstrous...”

As he’d learned to do fairly early on in their friendship, Brad waited until the three of them were too busy arguing to pay any attention to him...and beat a very hasty retreat.

In retrospect, it was sort of odd, really...his parents had never once taken him aside and had The Talk about the dangers of heavy metal or rock and roll or that ever-present Midwestern worry about Satan’s insidious influence over teenagers. They’d never thought it necessary, honestly, because at the heart of things, well, there was no question in their minds that he was a good kid - an awkward and unfortunate gosling caught between molts, maybe, nothing quite fitting right or attaching exactly where it was meant to, but a good kid nonetheless.

He always had friends, for example, and that had to mean something; true, yes, the kids he brought home tended to be as mismatched as he was, girls who wore collars and growled if you didn’t call them by their wolf-name, boys with spiked bracelets who wore trench coats on sunny days, once a bizarre little miscreant who sat at the dinner table and regaled them in a language they swore up and down was Martian...but they were just...creative types, and they’d grow into those eccentricities one day and blossom into artists or musicians or tv talk show hosts, God willing.

If anything, they worried for him, worried that the world wasn’t always the kindest place to creative types, that there would be those who saw his ever-changing hair, eyes, voice, identity as a weakness to be exploited. He wasn’t a fighter, their son, had really only passed phys ed by the skin of his perfect teeth, and so it seemed pointless, maybe even comical that they should have to worry about him.

And that would turn out to be a grave mistake - awkward and gangly beginnings, after all, marked ugly ducklings just as often as snakes stuck in their first shed, eyes cloudy and dim but bodies coiled tight until ready to eat their way through their own pasts.

The dolls needed to stop talking, that was the thing.

Well, okay, that was sort of a gross understatement of the situation - a lot of things needed to stop talking: the dolls, the walls, the broken mouse skulls under the register, and whatever the good goddamn that whisper coming from the back room was - but the fact of the matter was that there were too many voices swirling their way around his head to form a grey, wispy corona of warning, and they were making it so fucking hard to focus on the task at hand.

“Hmm,” he said as menacingly as he could (which wasn’t, to be fair, all that menacing at all when one factored in his dime-store Dracula accent), “Hmm hmm hmm...” Eli lifted his eyes from the cards spread out on the countertop and narrowed them thoughtfully as he met the other kindred, the one that had been all sharp, angled excitement until he’d stepped foot into the shop, then lowered them to the cards again, thinking, thinking, thinking, waiting for the moment where the endless whorl of hissed threats would organize themselves into one neat promise: Some sort of hint of what was to come, or what might be to come, or what had already come, or what could come if only he did the right thing at the right time.

“Sooo...” the one who’d introduced himself as Billy asked (emphasis on the B, obviously, really had to push it out from underneath the diaphragm), his gaze never lingering on any of the shop’s other faces for too long, “Are those, uh...telling you where we should go next, or...?”

“Hmm,” Eli hummed again before straightening up and flicking his hair out of his face, abandoning the spread of cards when the voices refused to take on the shapes he needed them to, “I couldn’t tell you, Billy...I haven’t the slightest idea of how to read tarot - ” and before he could register the look on the other vampire’s face, he turned to gather up his things, “ - so maybe let’s just, I don’t know, check Craigslist for blood dolls, they’ve got to have something, probably.”

Fandom: Dragon Age Characters: OCs Rating: G (some language) Author’s note: Welp, I haven’t posted anything like this in a grip, but I couldn’t help it - here’s the (unlikely) meeting of a couple of my fav side characters from an rp my buds and I have had going for a bit. Contessa is @malum--in--se’s, and the as-yet-mysteriously-unnamed Avvar is @kryptonitic’s ;P ---

“It seems to me that a captain should be at the helm of his ship at all times.”

To acknowledge her presence, the Avvar simply chuckled, one corner of his mouth curving upwards in a hooked smile. In the full light of the moon, he seemed to be cast in a pale silvery glow, his skin taking on the pallor of a waterlogged corpse. He made no effort to turn towards her, and indeed did very little to interrupt his own comfortable lounging; he sat suspended a foot or so above the waves, reclined in a makeshift hammock of netting attached to the side of the boat.

To Contessa, it did not appear to be a particularly safe perch. It would be so terribly easy for someone to slice through one of the ropes and simply send him down into the chilly waters of the Amaranthine. “You trust your men to handle your vessel, then?”

He did not speak for a long while, instead continuing to stare out across the water. As Contessa drew nearer (still well outside of striking distance), she realized one of his arms hung out over the nets, his hand obscured by foamy crests of water. “A strange concern for an Orlesian,” he said after some time.

when the strange little gremlin creature peers out her door, she's only half surprised to see you, a giant fucking moth, waiting there for her. your antennae are perked, your red eyes gleaming, your body...well, there's no other way to say it, you are sort of throwing yourself against the porch light. a lot.

it's just so beautiful.

"i was wondering when you'd arrive," she says, slowly replacing the bowl of candy inside the house. "i - will you quit it? quit...you're not going to get inside the light, you know."

"i might," you say, giving it another go. "don't harsh the vibe, man."

she sighs, adjusts her tin can crown, and waves you away from the light. you pay her no mind. "i got something for you," she says, scuttling behind the door. then, louder, ostensibly so you'll hear her, "OH, I'VE GOT SOMETHING FOR YOU!"

when it becomes clear you won't be entering the porch light (not tonight, anyway), you sit on the step-stoop, covering it with all your wing dust. it's sort of ashy there already anyway. and there are...ducks? yeah, that checks out.

when the strange creature returns, she's holding something behind her back. she waits until you're looking at her, then smiles a wicked smile.

"happy halloween!" she grins, and sets the object down in front of you.

Had Jayco accidentally caught sight of himself in a mirror and found something like...that happening to his eyes, he wasn’t quite sure what he’d do, but...but it wouldn’t be whatever the fuck it was that Eli’d been doing. How he was managing it, he couldn’t begin to fathom, but it sure felt like every time - every single time - he looked his way, that gangly weirdo was all but pressed against whatever reflective surface he could find, glancing this way and that, his perfectly white, perfectly straight braces-teeth on full display as he reminded himself time and time again that the eyes staring back at him were his own.

It was really, really, really starting to creep him out...more than Eli usually did, anyway.

“You know, you might wanna chill with that if we’re gonna be in public for a while - most people aren’t, y’know, thrilled when they spontaneously develop cataracts, and you seem pretty, uh, well, yeah, thrilled.”

“Forget thrilled,” Eli began, his playacting accent slipping for a fraction of a fraction of a second as he grinned into the mirror, “I’m happier than a pig in shit!” His grin faltered a second later, and when he turned from the mirror to glance Jayco’s way, Count Chocula was very firmly back in the house; “Which is something we say in the old country,” he drawled slowly, certainly, pupils bone-white and impossible too look at for more than a moment or two at a time, “In case you were...wondering...about that.”