#about acerbus

[piffyocs]

I found the tropes page on the wiki for the old campaign’s brief foray into GURPS and it’s one hell of a trip down memory-refreshing lane.

(I don’t have spoons for comprehensive tagging rn, so read at your own risk, but it’s mostly violence and shit like that.)

Highlights I’d forgotten:

Asking Janus to never ask him to kill anyone was Acerbus’s first request ever in the time Averna had known him.

Averna’s specific words when telling the NMSE sealed in Abe where to stick its fell bargains when she realized the body it had given her as a demo to entice her into accepting was Made Of Acerbus were: “He’s mine, and this wasn’t part of the deal. Bring. Him. Back.” (Acerbus got better in 20-30 minutes when the “trial period” ran out.)

The party had the Three Faces of Eve and a gender-flipped The Hecate Sisters as ensemble tropes, completely by accident. (Averma, Diane, and Penny as the Seductress, Wife, and Child respectively, and Abe, Janus, and Cass as the gender-flipped Maiden, Mother, and Crone)

Averna uses Buffy Speak when trying to descripe supernatural phenomena

Averna Loves the Sound of Screaming.

We never made it to this point in the campaign, but Acerbus was going to get worse before he got better once he started getting treatment, because at the time he’d had his condition his whole life and on some level didn’t know what he was missing. In his current incarnation the progression of his symptoms as a child was different, but I play him so little that I haven’t really had the chance to show him or any bumps in his in-progress recovery, so?

Abe was the emergency moral compass for the whole team until Diane, Vermillion, and Penny showed up.

Janus was The Only Sane Man until an NMSE drove him mad and this torch was passed to Diane.

Janus might not be able to directly threaten Averna with a gun, but he sure can threaten himself with one and that’s just as effective. Apparently this happened twice! I only remember the one where he thought she was another NMSE-induced hallucination.

More than half the party, Averna included, are listed as Walking Disaster Areas, because death, disaster, and chaos seem to happen no matter where they go.

On the very rare occasions Averna is frightened enough to scream, she Screams Like a Little Girl.

Acerbus has no fear of death.

Conclusion: Averna needs more wacky and/or harrowing adventures going on around her. 

[piffyocs]

When did you find Acerbus, Averna?

((I see what you did there, anon, making me pick an age! XD I guess I’ll go with 19 like the original campaign? I’m less likely to forget that one.))

“A little under five and a half years ago. I had to move because the place I kept my stuff at was going to be torn down. Some piece of human garbage moved out of her flat nearby, and when I moved in, there he was, along with a bag of groceries he couldn’t prepare and all the furniture she couldn’t fit into the taxi.”

[piffyocs]

I’m tempted to make a Hazbin Hotel AU for Averna, but it would have to be one where she and Acerbus got dimensionally displaced escaping the Nightmare Ship just as it started to warp to the NMSE hell dimension.

She’d be at the hotel because, even though she acknowledges she deserves to be in hell, she doesn’t think Acerbus does. But she promised him she wouldn’t abandon him like his bio mom did, and he hasn’t gotten treatment yet, so he really does need her to take care of him. So anywhere he goes, she needs to go.

[piffyocs]

Oh wow, hold on, I had Acerbus at 15 when I first started him and Averna on this blog? I completely forgot. He was 19 in the original campaign, so I just assumed that was still the case.

Huh. Not sure what I’m going to do with that.

[piffyocs]

Acerbus has dang cold hands when Averna hasn’t possessed him lately, though. He’s just one of those people whose hands almost always feel like he habitually holds iced drinks.

[piffyocs]

https://youtu.be/2MBxcdv8EDc

This is the base for the kind of rice bread and cakes Averna is used to, and the kind she makes at home. It’s a rice adaptation of a very basic cornbread recipe, and she adds veggies, shrimp, nutrient yeast, and/or (if she’s feeling fancy) fish to make it not boring.

We don’t talk about the hardtack version.

[piffyocs]

So that sonic brain surgery thing is really interesting. They use micron-width bubbles and targeted ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier in a specific brain region while leaving it intact everywhere else. Then they inject a rewritten virus that slips in through that gap and writes in a gene for a new receptor that only responds to an artificial neurotransmitter designed to only activate these receptors. This means the effect only happens when the patient gets an injection of the artificial neurotransmitter, so the effect is reversible.

Right now they’re using it to give mice amnesia by turning off the hippocampus, but possible applications in humans include shutting down seizures or treating depression.

Which makes it exactly the kind of wacky sci-fi-sounding stuff that I’m considering something like it for Acerbus.

[piffyocs]

Acerbus’s reaction to Averna killing people: *no response*

Acerbus’s reaction to Averna leaving a bar without paying her check: *saves up his allowance to pay for it behind her back*