#phrenotobe

Comaduster - failure2

You got it, Maxo!

It’s slow, first, the brush of lips against skin, a cautious, halted breath exhaled across bare skin. Say’ri freezes, bites her lip. In the dark, she can’t see Tiki, but she can discern her movements - the places where the shadow bends, where the darkness shimmers faintly. Her scales reflect what little light creeps through the window, absorbing it like a sponge. Tiki kisses her again, and Say’ri knows for certain that it happened. Her lips are rough against Say’ri’s bare shoulder, and then her neck, and Say’ri shudders under Tiki’s fingertips.

She hears the motion of Tiki’s shifting, and pressure against her legs as Tiki presses their bodies closer. She is more certain than Say’ri will ever be.

But Say’ri tries. With a deep breath she plunges forward, softly, slowly, shyly. Her lips glance off Tiki’s cheek and there’s a giggle in the dark, and then hands against her chin, guiding her lips. Tiki tastes warm and feels soft against Say’ri’s lips, but it’s just a taste - Say’ri dips her head, knowing that Tiki must feel the heat of her cheeks in the dark. 

“Is something the matter?” Tiki’s voice is too close, and chased by lips against Say’ri’s ears.

Say’ri steels herself. “No, my lady.” 

She kisses her again, with more courage. Lips against Tiki’s eyelashes, tracing down her cheek, before she bows again, unwilling to press lips to a god.

3. A game that holds a special place in your heart?

Okay this is gonna be kind of a weird one, but it’s EA’s 2004 RTS The Battle for Middle-earth. It was one of the first “big” games that I played as a kid--it needed a whole 256 MB of RAM! (Nowadays that seems laughably small but the computer I had at age 10 was chugging *hard* whenever I booted it up). I bought the strategy guide and everything! It’s still somewhere in my stuff, taped together more than once by now. And I still remember all of the battalion names I’d give my Gondor and Rohan troops during the main campaign: fun, alliterative stuff like “Sauron Smashers” and “Morgul Manglers.” Most notably, though, the BFME modding groups were the first online community I was really involved in, and that led indirectly to me being here and making friends. So I always look back on it fondly.

24. Hardest boss fight you’ve been in?

The one-on-one duel with Darth Malak at the end of Knights of the Old Republic. Admittedly this fight is not actually supposed to be as hard as it was, but I’d kind of stacked the deck against myself: I’d rolled a back-line Scoundrel/Consular as player character, specializing in Light-side Force powers--meaning that while I got a lovely number of skill points to spec into Persuasion and Engineering and a wide variety of useful buffs to apply to my teammates, my hit die were very small and I didn’t have many combat-oriented feats. (Which becomes a problem when I suddenly had no front-line to tank for me.) And compounding that problem is the fact that Malak will fully restore his health *at least* once during the boss fight, meaning that out-sustaining him becomes that much harder.

In the end I managed to win by getting as close to the boss arena as I could without triggering the cutscene, then laying down every single trip mine I had gathered over the course of the entire game. Plasma mines, frag mines, sonic mines, of all qualities, all stacked in the same piece of floor. For the first part of the boss fight I backpedaled around the arena whittling Malak’s health down with Saber Throw while getting hopped up on medpaks. Then once he’d used one of the stasis tanks to restore his health, I destroyed the rest of them (still running away), then kited him into my one-square minefield. He died instantly.

30. Why do you game?

I love you so much Max, and I’m so proud of you! I’m really glad you’re working on something you love.

teach me how, i’ve been writing nothing but slow burn for the last year and a half

(I lost the sauce on this template, apologies for that, if anyone knows it LMK and I will edit accordingly)

Is my shadow wizard Siras and his partymates Windy (@phrenotobe) and Patience (@basiliskdragon), a paladin and cleric respectively who follow the same god.

holy shit, congratulations!