#why ali

Apologise To No One

Nettle remembered little of her birth parents. They loved her, she assumed, but couldn’t really know for sure. When she was very young, she had taken it for granted that they had, and when she was slightly older she had assumed that they hadn’t, and now with about fifty years behind her she thinks she’ll never really know how they felt about her, except that they had loved each other more than they had loved her. She can hardly fault them – they had chosen each other, but hadn’t chosen a tiny stranger, and while even two tieflings was enough to cause suspicion, three of them – a family no less – would have been downright dangerous.

Her father had had deep red skin, she thought, and curling ram’s horns like hers, while her mother had dark, dark brown skin, almost black, and shorter, straighter horns. She thought they both had longish hair – there were vague childhood recollections of tangling her hands in it and laughing – but everything else about them was a mystery, even the colour of their eyes lost to time. This loss didn’t bother her overmuch anymore, though this wasn’t always the case. That hurt faded as she grew her hard shell after years in the orphanage they left her in, keeping her soft squishy parts protected from the outside world. That is not to say that the orphanage was very terrible[1] ; she was, after all, fed and clothed and sort of educated, and it taught her a valuable lesson about the outside world: your vulnerabilities will inevitably be exploited, so hit the other guy before they can hit you and maybe you won’t get hurt.

After some years, when her shell had grown dangerous spikes, she deemed herself sufficiently ready to leave the orphanage. The matron, of course, disagreed, but then the matron also thought she should have a proper boy’s name, so what would she know. And so the sixteen year old bared her teeth and turned her back, and named herself Nettle to remind herself – and warn others – that by god, she would sting, and apologise to no one.

The next handful of years were taken up with the process of slowly and painstakingly learning how to live alone in a world that just didn’t really care about you, unless you got yourself noticed too much and the world was actively attempting to run you out of town. The good thing was, you learned the basics very quickly, or you weren’t alive to learn the rest; but Nettle had built her shell and built it well, and it kept her face hard and her teeth sharp and her eyes eerily blank. It kept her hands in fists and her magic always underneath her tongue, and it kept her alive.

After the initial learning curve, bare subsistence became easier, and Nettle was almost happy as she moved from city to city to city, staying just slightly longer than was prudent, and even earning herself a reputation. This dark-red tiefling was dangerous, not to be touched, not to be messed with, but could be counted on in a hard spot by the right people. It was nothing much, but it was enough that she had some enemies and, surprisingly, some friends in various ports. Those friends were often other hard-shelled girls, children of a world that would crunch your bones beneath its teeth if it could, who stood hunch-backed and strong-footed in its jaws and gritted out that the world would have to try harder. And it was one of these friends who tracked her through three cities and five provinces to dump a squirming bundle in her lap and leave with a wry smile.

Nettle’s heart stopped, she will freely admit that. She had always tried to be careful – even if she thought she understood her parents’ reasonings, she wasn’t sure she condoned them, and didn’t want to put that to the test, not when an actual tiny person was at stake. And this certainly wasn’t the evening she’d expected to have, holed up in one of the skeezier taverns the city had, a tankard in one hand and the bag holding all her wordly possessions clamped between her knees – and now an infant awkwardly cradled in the other arm. However, as she looked down at this tiny soft creature, carefully wrapped in rough cloth, she begrudgingly realised that there was room in her shell for two after all.

Life from that point was… not the same, but similar. Nettle still drifted, still made friends and enemies, still crackled with magic and smiled with sharp teeth, but also she kept her precious child slung against her chest and justified that surely, she could have this one vulnerable thing. And she kept her safe and innocent for as long as she could, showing only her soft hidden underbelly to this sweet thing and presenting her spiny shell to the rest of the world, cooing into the child’s ear between eldritch blasts, smoothing the downy hair on her fragile head when she sat in the shadowy corners of shadowier bars, cradling her between her knees when they slept under bridges when it rained. In hindsight, Nettle would probably say that she overcompensated for the fact that she had a baby strapped to her chest, but somehow she ended up with more friends than enemies in that period, so it all turned out alright in the end.

And suddenly, more than thirty years had passed since she stepped off the porch of the orphanage and shrugged on the mantle of her name, and now she had contacts in most of the major cities on this side of the continent and foes to match, and the daughter that had once fitted comfortably in her arms was too tall for her to carry without them both looking ridiculous – which is not to say that she didn’t still do it on occasion – and she was kind of alright with slowing down, and maybe they’d see if this city on the horizon (Haven, was it?) would be where they’d stay a little longer.

    I once described Nettle as ‘aggressively gay’ for a laugh, and then realised she was aggressively everything that she was, and then realised that when I said ‘aggressive’, what I meant was ‘unapologetic’, and how interesting that I would conflate those two things in my head. Thoughts for another time. Anyway, being herself with lack of apology is pretty central to her character, thus the title, which is actually a reference to the V for Vendetta film :P

 One more interesting factoid: Nettle and her daughter (Pandora!) are characters from a one shot set in a world that a fully-fledged campaign is happening in, so they’re basically background characters now (though we haven’t run into them yet), and occasionally we think of them during the campaign. One of these times was during a dawn-raid style attack on the city by a metric shit tonne of pirates, and we were wondering what they were up to, and I said something along the lines of “If Pandora tries to get up and go join the fight, Nettle is telling her to sit back down and go the fuck to sleep!” and the whole group laughed uproariously at me bc while I am the Mum Friend TM this is not my usual style of parenting

Honestly tho I feel like the older version of this character that I ended up playing (she was going to be much younger, but then Lauren also had a warlock tiefling and we couldn’t resist making them related) is like that one fanart of Bucky Barnes where he’s wearing shorts and a wide-brimmed hat and watering sunflowers while also scowling furiously and yelling “I am morally ambiguous!”

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh 

uuuuughhhhh

incubus omg 

ehehehehehheeee

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