strange spaces

Location Information:

Caledon Forest is a nice easily-accessible map for everyone, and Mabon Market even has its own dedicated waypoint (that is, Mabon Waypoint)! I imagine we'll kind of scatter out across the market and beach, so don't take my exact location in this screenshot too seriously!

Time & Squad Details:

As we always do, we'll be having two parties - one on EU servers and one on NA ones - with an hour break in between. People tend to arrive early and/or jump between accounts as soon as the break comes up, so don't be surprised to see tags and announcements going up ahead of schedule!

The first party will be on EU servers and begin at 9pm Central European Time (aka 3pm Eastern Standard Time or 4 hours before in-game reset). I’ll be hosting on my EU alt account, so to join either /squadjoin or whisper Aemryn of Dusk for an invite.

The second party will be on NA servers and begin at 7pm Eastern Standard Time (aka 1am Central European Time or at in-game reset). I’ll be hosting this one on my main account, so to join either /squadjoin or whisper Kirslyn for an invite.

Closing Words:

A few days ago some nasty info came to the surface about various GW2 sources being scraped for AI purposes, with tumblr tags specifically being mentioned. Though I certainly wouldn't blame anyone for being discouraged and not wanting to draw at all (even this post was delayed because of it), I think at the end of the day, even if you don't post anything publicly, you still shouldn't deny yourself the company and community of your fellow creatives! If you'd like to make this art party have more of a focus on screenshots, or even just hang out and not draw at all, please feel free - your presence is what makes these parties...well, parties, after all!

If you are still interested in posting your artwork though, please check out Glaze and Nightshade as potential ways to protect yourself (and hurt AI datasets) if you haven't already! And even if you don't do that, make sure to slap signatures/watermarks/etc wherever you can. This may be a disheartening time for us, but it doesn't mean we have to stop doing what we love.

               They stand on the precipice of The End.

               Tattered wings cannot full blot out the sun, but the noxious condensation playing at being clouds attempts to do so, and what little light goes through is a sickening green. Mouths upon mouths scream and writhe against the fight above.

               They fight below. Blotting blood spilled coats the ground beside them, old rancid stuff filled to the brim in bodies that should not rise again but rise—rise—rise. They come back with teeth and nails, pushing, and screaming for the victory of the beast above.

               “My dear,

               Full glad am I to hear that you are well despite the state of—well, everything. Orr sounds fascinating, I am quite certain; however, it sounds a mixture of moist and rather unpleasant things. Still, I do hope you will send me more letters, or return before your next one is to arrive. That is certainly the hope given what you say is to transpire with the Pact’s intentions.

               While neither of you wishes to join arms with one of the darling Orders, I am happy to hear you have been able to avail yourself of characters besides Ronald’s delightful personality.

               Pomona sends her regards as well, and she is over my shoulder telling me to write that, as well as: hi. Ah, my apologies—hi with an exclamation mark. I believe she is rather lonely since Billy went off on her adventure with that Kiddo friend of hers. I will defer to your expertise that Kiddo oversleeping in their dream was not a slight against Billy, but still—poor Billy was quite hurt waiting for them all that time.

               Pixie, please keep in mind I am not a believer in some delight of martyrs. People are better off alive and flourishing. Do not throw yourself at something you will not walk away from. Promise me that much, my sweet thing. Pomona has many new tasks for both you and Ronald once you return to Divinity’s Reach.

               Give Ronald my regards.

Magdalene”

Sap stains their features, sticky heavy stuff in their eyes as they brace for the waves and corpses. One eye closed, Pixie breathes in. Hand readies their rapier, bouncing it before their voice breaks the scene. “Hold on.”

        Arm up—the moment lasts a second, the moment lasts an hour. Light distorts around them, a shield thrown up that holds, catches and splashes with the incoming deluge. In the dazzling shifting of colours—they can barely see the skies above and the great dragon faltering, its wings falling askew.

Faeriebell is an anamoly, a thing of magic that defies reality and creates it at once. Time and space bend to them, break to them. The unreal, the boundaries between planes finds itself weak and leaves spaces liminal where they go. They are old and new at once. Whole and a fragment of something far larger.

But--let's really talk about what I want to talk about with them. They were a heck of a journey to get to, and I love them very dearly.

I'd say I've been workshopping this character since probably 2016? with the original Pixie Styx. I wanted this strange, broken magical thing for ages. Surreal and a delight for me. It... didn't work out. I thought maybe being too indulgent with my favourite themes simply wasn't something I could pull off.

I love where Pixie Styx went, do not get me wrong. But it took them 2 years before I really settled on who they felt comfortable as. And the concept of this strange wisp of something that bent time around it--just fell to the wayside.

Rach and I decided to replay Guild Wars 2 as a whole in... man? late 2020 or early 2021? Either way, I was like: I'm going to do it! I'm going to be indulgent!! And then turtle-shelled and was unable to really move forward with any of my ideas. They sounded silly, frivelous and barely coherent to me (no matter what others told me). At the time they were called Newbloom Sapling, because I didn't even have a name. I just knew I wanted to give my Pixie Styx 1.0 stuff another shot.

I started slowly making a character with the name of Faerie eventually down the line. Trying to piece things together, but it still didn't seem /right/.

So, I looked at a character at the time I loved, but who had fallen deeply to the wayside, Tinkerbell (Eladrin self pictured above). Things I wanted to do with Faerie seemed to brush against stuff I had made around Tinkerbell--liminal things, et cetra. But with Tinkerbell, I had literally not allowed myself to make them a Mesmer in Guild Wars 2 because it had felt too indulgent. They were a Scourge, instead. They had been a bit too disconnected for them to be easy to really play up against other characters, and they did not have quite the momentum I wanted them to have, even if just a wayward curiousity.

And I asked myself: what if I smashed the very basic ideas of Faerie, a sapling who had too much magic and destroyed their pod with a chaos storm that made the Menders have to pull them from the Dream early with Tinkerbell, who played with liminality and wisps...

And I said yeah, they should subsume each other to make a new character. Initially I debated what name they'd keep... And eventually I was like haha, I'll just smash the name Faerie with bell and thus Faeriebell (which I didn't realize was a type of flower at the time).

It's funny--they are so dear to me because I have wanted their strangeness for so long. It's weird I finally feel like I managed to find the voice and the essence of this character who defies being solid.

They exist on the edges of the reality around them, looking in, delighted by the colours of it all and the colours of the sounds. They flit, and they prank. Faeriebell sees things through tones and concepts others might not. Sometimes they play with others, teasing them. It can be hard to tell the difference. They're really fun.

I leave you with a quote from Virginia Woolf's The Waves, from the character Rhoda, because Rhoda has always been key to some aspect of this concept.

Their chest was mangled and revealed the thin petals within that barely hid their skeletal structure.

No true colour had taken their blooms, instead leaving them pale and the only shades the golden sap of their blood.

They were kept away from others those initial weeks within the Grove. Originally, because they slept, still in a half-state trying to claw back to the Dream of Dreams that they had been dragged from, and mostly because they hadn’t really finished growing within the pod. Their echoes and phantasms were sleep paralysis demons for the Menders caring for them--ghosts in the corners of the room while they had fitful sleep.

Eventually they woke more fully, and--they realized they had no memory of the Dream of Dreams, or a name. But at the same time--they had not perhaps truly or fully left the Dream of Dreams, liminal things out of the corners of their eye always catching them. Ghosts that lingered. They existed somewhere between everything...

I am not kidding when I say Serendipity was a 3AM sudden burst of inspiration that woke me from my half-slumber. I suddenly knew what sort of character I wanted to make: someone deeply entrenched and wrapped up in something eldritch, but laughs it off. Initially, I wanted a more magical girl aesthetic to sort of mask the entity they had connected themself to.

My brain decided fate in and of itself is a very eldritch concept, and the Laughing Eventuality was born from that--a slumbering, dead eldritch thing from which fate and those things were pulled, made up of its veins and tendons. Still, it lingers, just outside of everything, just on the edges. But that is neither here nor there, beyond that--that is to whom Serendipity became wrapped up in.

I really wanted them to be more whimsical and bright early on, and they do have some of that, even now. But as I got to know them, a lot of those masks, the laughter, and just general pleasantries and playing wide-eyed--fell away to reveal a very traumatized character. None of which, of course, could be attributed to anything I decided about them or for them.

I think they are one of my favourite characters overall that I have ever made because--they are so messy. They do have a genuine love and wonder for the world, they want to be part of it. They pull the strings of fate to try to help people, even at the cost of the potential pulling the wrong string that pulls all of fate down around them (because wouldn't that be the ultimate joke, that doing something to help really just revealed how empty it all is).

But they've been betrayed, abandoned, trodden down on so much--that when something good comes their way, they shut down.

They became so very talented at self-destruction.

They were meant to be ✨nothing matters✨ (and they believe that, and do act in that manner), but deep down they feel ⚫nothing matters⚫ (and thus, they are not deserving of anything that seems good, because in the end it is all a veneer for the absolute emptiness from which existence plays out a momentary performance on).

I love them. I like them existing in this limbo of starting to get good things, but denying themself over and over and over, because the pain of accepting it, if it fails--that scares them far more than looking into the face of an eldritch, empty eternity and accepting a vast vacuum of nothing.

Their formative time was lost to the Mists. They found the Laughing Eventuality there, an eldritch being of the Mists, of the void. And they found Athaliah, a divine being who held the Laughing Eventuality shackled.

When they eventually fell from the Mists into Tyria proper, Serendipity came into being as a revenant. Their revenant forms being reflavoured. Instead of Demon Stance, they have a stance for Laughing Eventuality. And instead of Assassin’s Stance, they have one for Athaliah.

They speak to those Echoes from time to time, specifically Athaliah’s, who they clashed with while they were in the Mists. On the brink of bleeding out within the Maguuma Jungle during the Mordremoth arc--they whisper jokes to Athaliah’s echo (and her true self steps out of the Mists for a time to help once they’re out cold).