Imagine leaving more and more stuff in Astarion’s tent as your relationship with him develops.
It starts small, maybe you just forget that shirt you usually wear at night. Astarion just picks it up and carries it with him in his pack, slightly irritated by your forgetfulness. It smells so pleasantly of you though. And the smile you give him when he hands it back to you gives him that weird warm feeling in his chest. You keep *forgetting* it on his bedroll in the mornings. But Astarion has stopped questioning it. Just takes in your lingering scent and then packs it time and again with a small smile on his lips.
Then suddenly you also keep forgetting your comb. Another time it's the book you've been reading recently. Adventure doing a thing to your focus, huh? The vampire just packs them up along with his stuff.
Implicitly, you both know that you're doing it on purpose, at least you do. But there's something about putting your finger on truths right under your nose. And you don't mention it to him.
Astarion still doesn't fully get why you're doing it. But he surely doesn't mind you having to come and *retrieve* your stuff all the time. Until it's your wholeass pillow and blanket and he can't keep quiet about it anymore.
Is he supposed to carry *your* pillow around now? What kind of weird thing you are trying to pull on him? But when you pout at him and argue that you have to drag it over to his tent every night anyway because you haven't used your own tent in weeks, it finally clicks for him.
Those things you leave with him just go to show what neither of you can't put fully into words yet: that there's a desperate desire in both of you to be close to each other, always.
Finally! I can’t thank enough @rakimaiirisa for her awesome screenshots of my favorite FO4 eye candy. This artwork was originally requested by @slothssassin as a part of a six fanarts challenge I’ve never had time to properly finish.
The Fallout TV show has brought back Fo4 vibes. This artwork is three years old but I still love it so much and it makes me remember the time I was painting portraits. 😊
Hey, so if you have Windows 11 installed and have been losing your mind over the fact that you can't find your own files because Windows is now prioritizing internet search results first, you can fix it by following this guide:
Stop the OS from pulling up web results when you just want files and apps.
As someone with over 900 GB of intentionally and properly named files on her computer (I do a lot of digital art and digital media work that requires high-volume files that function off of dependencies), this feature was making me furious. I followed the above instructions and can confirm that the method outlined solves the problem.
so a while back i made an ao3 workskin for rendering cyberpunk 2077 styled text threads within works, and i've built myself some lil tools for generating the html that renders them. i've been meaning to share this since i spent so much time on it. i got a nice compliment today that inspired me to open it up!
i've put together a codepen that generates the HTML and renders a preview, along with some instructions on how to use it.
OG COLORS:
2.0 COLORS:
you can see this in action in most of my current ao3 works.
threads are still readable if readers have skins turned off / on ereaders
i tried to make an interface that's easy to compose threads on the fly (rather than building a UI for adding messages one by one)
handles rendering the timestamps so all you have to think about is "how long did B take to respond to the last message?") (edit 12/2023: you can leave off the timings now and it'll add a realistic amount of time between messages)
you can also download the thread as an image if u want
(new 1/2024) can add image attachments to messages
open to questions & suggestions (especially how to make this more accessible for screen readers!)
if you end up using it i'd love a shoutout or at least drop a message here! feel free to edit to your liking too, but again i'd appreciate a shout :)
worst thing about free time is deciding what to do with it. it is a travesty that it is impossible to knit, draw, write, read, watch a movie, listen to podcasts, and play a video game all at the same time
I mostly do photography for my personal entertainment/art reference collections/travel journaling but this absolute curmudgeon of a barking owl needs to be shared
Feeding and Diet
It's actually more complicated than just "they bite you and eat your blood." Plus what they're able to eat; how often they need to eat; what happens to you if they bite you and what happens to them if they don't feed- spoiler: it's unpleasant.
Incidentally, you should reload and kill Cazador again.
(I was comparing stuff across editions and compiling it into something more coherent and then figured I'd info dump about it in case my fixations are useful to somebody out there.)
DISCLAIMER: There are two things to note about the lore presented here:
First, while the standard stat block in the monster manual is the default, in terms of lore vampires have this annoying tendency to be incredibly, stupidly varied. They are magical monstrosities ruled by the power of symbolism and superstition above anything else.
The next is that D&D is decades old, spans five editions, several settings and hundreds of writers. One guy establishes a piece of lore, and then the next picks it up goes "nah" and writes something else. I collected info from four different source books, all from different editions, which naturally don't entirely agree on how vampires work. Lore never stays consistent and may contradict itself. You may see information somewhere else from a source I don't have that contradicts what I wrote here. If you read this and like some of this stuff but not other bits, take the good and ditch the rest.
Basically, in D&D, canon is what you decide it is.
They only need to feed once in a 24 hour period.
Vampires can survive between 3-9 months of starvation, but it's a terrible idea.
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There are three different categories of "Undead Hunger."
Vampires have two of them and actually need to consume more than one thing to stay "healthy": Blood and life force.
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The blood is obvious. This is categorised as a "diet dependency." It's required to preserve their bodies and powers, and without it their powers* are suppressed as their bodies begin to shut down.
*This refers to the powers a vampire gains with age; they cannot lose power they had as a newborn (the base stat blocks given for vampires and spawn given in the monster manual)
A vampire requires the equivalent of 12 hit points of blood a day, or it begins to revert into a corpse-like state. Mentally they slowly regress into a desperate, mindless animal frenzy where they'll kill and drain anything containing blood they can get their hands on.
Ultimately, if they don't get any blood then they revert into a corpse and they're trapped in their own body as it begins to wither and mummify. They're trapped in a coma, vaguely aware of the passing of time in flashes of awareness until somehow they are fed blood. If they ever wake up again, they will probably wake up feral and absolutely ravenous.
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Vampires rely on the victim's blood pressure to expel blood from the wound they create, lapping and mouthing at the wound rather than actually sucking on it.
Being bitten is a highly pleasurable experience that victims can't help but desire, even when they know they shouldn't.
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While the damage done remains, the wounds from a Vampire bite closes itself quickly after the feeding (assuming you're still alive). It does however leave a mark. The bite mark itself is often "less than half an inch in length", and leaves behind a significant bruise that causes no pain or sensitivity to touch.
Other side effects include fatigue and a weakened immune system.
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Vampires typically target sleeping victims (less likely to fight back) and favour the blood of their own race above others. So theoretically, Astarion finds elf blood tastes best.
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Drinking animal blood tastes bland and is health-wise akin to drinking tainted water: yes it might keep you alive in desperate times, but it's ultimately bad for you and will probably make you ill. That said, it has no mechanical detriments and a vampire that's forced to live on animal blood will be just as strong as its kin, but considerably bad tempered about it.
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A vampire's secondary feeding requirement is called an "inescapable craving", which means that if a vampire doesn't get that fix then their hunger begins to devour them instead. The pain is described as a spike boring into the vampire's brain, obscuring their awareness. They begin to obsess over feeding to the exclusion of everything else, they become willing to take ridiculous levels of risk to stop the hunger as they become more and more desperate. As they are consumed they become progressively more feral until they're just a rampaging mindless horror driven only by horrific hunger.
For vampires, their inescapable craving is life force, which a vampire leeches from their prey through touch leaving the victim weak. Direct skin contact isn't required, if you're wearing full plate and/or the vampire is wearing gloves and they lay a hand on you they can still drain you. Mechanically these were combat abilities, energy/level draining occurred when a vampire struck a target with their own body (usually their hands). Before 5e hit them with a nerf bat, vampires could permanently weaken you this way (you could lose character levels from this).
5e also seems to have rolled life drain into the biting, so a vampire can consume your blood and energy at the same time.
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Post feeding, a vampire starts to look alive. Their skin is flushed and warm and they feel elated and energetic.
In contrast, a vampire that hasn't been feeding properly becomes more corpse like and feels "sluggish" (I'm interpreting that as flu-like symptoms). It's purely emotional however, the vampire is no less capable and dangerous and suffers no mechanical penalties.
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Vampires can feed on other vampires, which is actually more filling than living humanoid blood and gives them the ability to communicate telepathically for a few hours. They don't like it though. If a vampire drinks from another vampire then they can be controlled by that vampire and the link forces them to feel affection for each other against their will until it wears off. The results of both vampires in question feeding on each other is described as "debilitating" since they both paradoxically become enslaved to the other's will and forced to "love" each other creating an absolute dysfunctional mess of control, obsession and resentment.
The good news is that it only lasts a few hours.
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Some vampires can eat regular food (no nutritional value in it for them) while others would regurgitate it if they tried. As they retain their tongues, vampires can also taste food.
That said, it's a bad idea for them to eat garlic, even if they can eat solid food.
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Some kinds of vampires don't drink blood. There's all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff a vampire might be required to consume instead. Spinal fluid stands out. Or the bit about ones who drain the ocular fluid from your eyes. Gale might find interesting things to talk about with the magic eating ones who prey on mages. They're much less common, probably something to do with most people not finding that very sexy. I don't think any of them exist on Toril.
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