i bet u thought i forgot about these LV asks. wrong. i’ve been thinking about them. Yes, of course LV dances. Well…that’s one word for it. If the raising and levelling of imaginary landscapes—the mastery of flood and volcanism—if the unravelling of matter itself (from both sides) can be called a dance, then yes, she dances. A dance of accelerated entropy, you might say. A dance best watched from a distance—thought there’s certainly a kind of magnetism about it, and not just the magnetism of raw power (though there is that). She can be very evocative, in her violence. Her dance is its own music—a cacophony become eloquent—and it’s hard not to want to let that sweep you up, even knowing that that dance is Death. She can dance less destructively, too, and more in the usual way. I wouldn’t say she’s especially good at it—not at first, anyway. She’s hesitant and awkward and clumsy. Mischance more or less taught her to ‘dance’—as we think of dancing. Early on she would only watch—the first time on accident (mischance was a very private dancer), and it was only some time after that that she admitted she’d seen them and asked if they would dance for her again—intentionally, this time. Mischance blushed furiously, no doubt, but they accepted. They danced very shyly at first, but as this became a more regular request they grew more bold and playful with their demonstrations, until one day—quite unexpectedly—they laid out a condition. “I will dance for you,” they said, “but only if you dance with me.” LV declined. Several days later she asked again, and was met with the same offer. Knowing well that three is a magical number, she did not ask again a very long time.
When eventually she did, it was more a formality than anything: she knew already what they would offer, and knew already that she would accept.
@theghostisametaphor re horns: hhhhhh yes, yes they are horns, and they ARE lovely & i have a lot of feelings about them because:
- the horns were mostly ancient-era LV thing, when she was a more classic Dark Lord with the Dominate and Destroy goals and so forth. Her backstory is still (i think) sympathetic but she was also legitimately horrible in this era and more or less deserved what she got, namely: a comprehensive defeat, whereafter she was left to rot in the ruins of her own fortress.
- as a part of her defacement, her horns were broken off at the root, leaving these scar-holes in her skull. the scars still hurt her, and even though she’s a shapeshifter she usually can’t manage to shapeshift her horns back onto her head. when she does manage it they’re extremely painful, and she can’t maintain them for long.
- she didn’t show mischance her horns for a very long time for the above reason and also bc she’s...not exactly proud of what she used to be, especially re mischance (whom she believes is too good for her / would leave her if They Really Knew).
- at the same time she’s also kind of insecure about how broken/depleted she is in comparison to her former self, and making up her appearance to resemble what she used to be feels like a pathetic farce.
- when she eventually does manifest the horns for mischance it’s a Big Trust Moment(TM)
- she lets mischance touch the horns and expects it to be painful but instead it feels...nice?? like relief. (i think u already saw but i doodled this Moment also)
----
ALSO YEEEE OMG SHAPE OF WATER AU ALL THE WAYYYY. that would be so PERFECT. omg i just realized this but elisa has such mischance energy. pERFECT Tiny Enchanter aesthetic: spritely, unassuming, charming, would absolutely fuck a monster. VERY GOOD.
it sounds very mundane to put it this way but LV more or less has pretty intense depression. like, the epic fae version thereof. and when she falls into a bad phase there’s is nothing mischance can do. which is upsetting, because whenever mischacne is off LV can (if she is present and has the spoons) usually make it ok. that she be there and motivated and engaged is enough. but mischance can be at the top of their game and still powerless to help. she’s unreachable. which is part of why i describe it as depression---it’s not something she can be reasoned out of. kind of like if your friend is catatonically depressed you can maybe help them to get help, or you can support them so that their life doesn’t fall apart while it’s going on, but you can’t go into their brain and change the bad chemistry. and mischance can’t find anything like a fae antidepressant that’s compatible with her (she’s a very weird and particular fairy). anyway this might be another part of how mischance starts getting into trying to make drugs
@any-shadow oh....those are Mischance’s rooms. She’s given Mischance parts of the fortress to be theirs and to do with as they please, since Mischance (as we all know) is very Particular and is happiest if they have some spaces over which they can maintain complete control. LV doesn’t generally spend a whole lot of time in these rooms, especially without invitation. So the worry here is more “o shit did i fuck up mischance’s Perfect Rooms o god im a monster im out of control i destroy everything i touch.” she’s not being super torn up about it here though; it’s more just a background “ugh why am i like this”
it’s usually just the crown that drips (in this scene it’s just the crown), but sometimes it’s her whole self. the occasional uncontrollable dripping is a new thing since she’s started working again in this era. in the previous era (before her defacement and subsequent period of dormancy) she wasn’t especially drippy and had less difficulty controlling her form and magic. in general, she has a complicated relationship with her memory of what she was then: on the one hand she’s ashamed of it, or afraid that she will relapse into Rage&Destruction mode, but she also kind of lives in the shadow of how unbroken and effortlessly powerful she used to be. she’s had to adjust to new weaknesses and new strengths, and it’s still sometimes frustrating to her when things don’t work the same way they did in the past.
also, your comments in the tags on my fic have watered my crops and cleared my skin.
Ok, damn it, just what is the thing above LV's head? All I'm getting is melting ice cube? (Yes, cylinder, I know. I promise I know my shapes)
ah, glad you asked!
I’ve drawn pictures in which it’s little clearer (idk maybe this one), but it’s supposed to be a drippy inverted crown. (or a halo that drips in the shape of something vaguely like crown.) Uh, obvs still working on perfecting that imagery, my bad that it’s not quite clear what it is XD. anyway:
- here’s a concept concept for what it looked like as a proper crown. (This would be way before she met Mischance)- Here’s why it’s not right-side-up anymore (that era didn’t end so well), and incidentally why the horns are gone etc etc.*- here’s uh a nifty thing she can do! :P It can change size pretty dramatically too.
The inverted crown is her insignia throughout the era in which she was working with Mischance (their combined symbol was an inverted crown with a diamond floating inside). I’m pretty sure she left it when she died and am considering the possibility that LV’s crown actually now encircles the Cardhouse and acts as one of its gates.
*she’s still a pretty vigorous shapeshifter but there are some limitations on which forms are easiest for her to hold. post-defacement it’s really hard for her to hold forms that aren’t broken in some way. She can manifest horns but it’s painful and they don’t tend to stay in place. She managed to pull the crown up out of her collar so it’s no longer constraining her, but either she couldn’t get rid of it completely or just decided to keep it as a floating inverted crown-halo-thing. Anyway it’s gloopy and drippy like she is.
LV when Mischance corrects her on something trivial: ah, thank you Mischance! i’m so glad you caught that. this is exactly what i keep you around for, THIS IS THE PRODUCT WORKING AS INTENDED.
LV when literally anyone else corrects her on the same shit: eh you’re right, i suck at this. you know what i don’t suck at?
3...2...1
Technically, the Cardmaster doesn’t remember being Mischance.
He doesn’t even remember the full history of the Cardhouse: it’s crucial to his delusional “stability” that he exist in a kind of eternal present. But he hates the idea of losing information permanently, so he’s not purged any part of his memory out of existence entirely. He’s externalised it. He’s put in a box and put that box in another box and mailed it to Oskyod who has buried it in their labyrinth of an office somewhere. Theoretically, he can still access it if the need arises. Obviously memories of LV and of being Mischance are buried the deepest (Oskyod has access to a lot of history, but I’m pretty sure they don’t know who LV is): the Cardmaster must have hid that early on somewhere within or beneath the House itself.
But the externalisation is imperfect. His history has marked him in ways that he can never fully separate from his present form, and a lot of what he misses about being Mischance can be read through those imprints. Here are a few things he really obviously misses, to give you an idea:
1. He misses not feeling diseased.
So the Cardmaster in fact bears literal marks, all over his body. They look a bit like black handprints and they always bleed through no matter what form he takes. As if this isn’t bad enough from a cosmetic perspective, these marks have a tendency to spontaneously mutate into dark residue (which is lethal to him), so he has to medicate constantly to keep them under control. He’s effectively the most contaminated and volatile thing in his house. Not many of his denizens know this. Anyway, it’s a huge pain, and very upsetting. He is repulsive to himself. He knows there was a time before the marks, and he’s always trying to find a way to get back to that and be free of them.
2. He misses getting out.
On account of the immunodeficiency problem, the Cardmaster and all his denizens can no longer venture beyond the White Desert. Mischance frequently journeyed deep into Faerie, alone or with LV, and even the Cardmaster could get out now and again before the problem got too bad. That was recently enough that he remembers it clearly, and now and again he does miss it. Relatedly, i think on some level he misses not being hemmed in by his own neuroses all the time. Mischance was always a little nervous about Going On Adventures, and the Cardmaster even moreso (he’s just a very anxious fairy)—but it was important to Mischance that they did not let their fears rule them. The Cardmaster hasn’t faced his fears in at least 500 years. He doesn’t remember how to: if he’s really afraid of something, he simply Can’t Do It. He probably lost the ability to get out largely because he stopped going out with any regularity. I think he misses feeling brave. Was Mischance fearless? Gods no. But Mischance was not a coward.
3. He misses necromancy.
The Cardmaster is still really attracted to dark magic. This terrifies him. Necromancy terrifies him, but there’s a part of him that craves it like nothing else, which makes it even scarier because he can’t trust himself not to cave in a moment of weakness. He makes all kinds of drugs and orchestrates all kinds of scenarios to try and simulate what he wants without actually using dark magic, but it’s never quite satisfying. Mischance got to mess around with necromancy on the regular, and thoroughly enjoyed it (both from a professional standpoint and also in a sex way). The Cardmaster really misses that. He misses it without even remembering it. It’s very disturbing. He frightens himself.
4. He misses being motivated by aspirations rather than fear.
The Cardmaster believes some really depressing shit about the nature of existence.* He doesn’t remember LV, but he can’t shake the impact of what her death “proved" to him about the way of things. Life is cruel joke: try to change things for the better and you will be broken, pitilessly. He can only ever take the edge off of that despair temporarily: it always comes back. He’s miserable by default, and he misses not feeling that way. He misses fighting for what he wanted directly, and believing that he could win. The whole premise of his current enterprise is “if you can’t defeat it, exploit it” because that’s the best he can hope for. Mischance really wanted to heal the wrongs they perceived in the world—things like the fissure between faerie and reality and the tyranny of the mundane—and fought very hard for “justice”, in their way. Now the Cardmaster more or less struck a deal with the tyranny of the mundane and is exacerbating the disconnect between faerie and reality to create one tiny death-free realm, for himself. Just himself. This is not what he really wants. It’s the opposite of what he and LV had been working towards, and a small part of him hates what he’s become. But he’s convinced himself that death is the real enemy, and that he must combat it at all costs. At his very best, he might still entertain some hope that he’s hit upon a way to work towards his true aims again, but it seldom lasts.
5. He misses working with equals.
So i’ve mentioned that the Cardmaster doesn’t exactly love being the sole and absolute master of his House 24/7? One of his biggest kinks is having control taken away from him or being dominated in any way, and it’s a Wild Fantasy precisely because he’s made it fundementally impossible for him to achieve within his House. He has no equal. As Mischance, things were very different. LV was technically much more powerful than they, and Mischance generally preferred to present themself as her subordinate in some way (her apprentice, her jester, her hight hand). Intellectually they were equals, however, and respected one another as such. The kind of partnership they had is really his preferred state of affairs, and even without remembering LV per se, he misses it. He’s constantly trying to replicate it in various ways with his denizens, but at the end of the day they’re still his creations, and he still controls them, and there’s no amount of tweaking he can do to their designs to change that. He can get pretty close sometimes though. Lux was a stroke of genius: he really feels like she has power over him a lot of the time. He loves it when Logus finds flaws in his work and challenges him, or when Jezebel surprises him. It’s almost like working with equals.
6. He misses being whole and self-sustaining.
So the elixir the Cardmaster takes effectively empties large portions of him out and replaces them with fresh substance. Over time, this has weird effects. Directly after taking it, he feels amazing, but after a bit this wears off and a feeling of incompleteness settles in. He feels…drained and cold and hollow and “not himself” and hungry, but nauseous at the same time? ( “Shiver” by The Birthday Massacre actually evokes it pretty well? and is just a really good CM song :P) When he first went on the drug, it wasn’t so bad, but the longer he’s been on it the shorter the “feeling amazing” phase lasts and the quicker the feeling of incompletion comes on, ultimately morphing into a into a craving for more of the drug (i mentioned it’s incredibly addictive). The Cardmaster has been on it so long that if he were to go off, he would fade pretty quickly into something very like a nazgul, and then even that would disintegrate and he’d blow away on the wind. He has to take it much more frequently than he used to, and to conserve resources he spaces his doses out as far as he can tolerate, such that he does have to endure feeling of incompleteness for a while in between. He tries to treat it with other drugs, of course, but the elixir is the most powerful drug he makes and it’s very hard to alter the effects of it with anything else.
*Things like: death negates all meaning and can not be made to serve any good; the tyrrany of the mundane is absolute; the fissure between Reality and Faerie is unbreachable; the power of love is illusory and cOMES TO NOTHING IN THE END, EVERYTHING IS BAD FOREVER AND THEN YOU DIE, and so forth.
LV refuses to learn Mischance’s name for the longest time it’s just
“hey clown”
“wat’s up, you”
“FOOL!”
“listen, jester--”
it’s mischance.
“sorry i didn’t quite catch that”
my name is mischance.
“oh mishap come here let me show you something”
did i stutter?
“good morning mistake”
it isn’t morning, and that’s not my name.
“mis....demeanour???”
-___-
