Decided to draw the beginning of chapter seven of my fic Her Embrace, Her Tears. They were wearing clothes in the scene, so I guess I probably have to draw clothing at some point? Bummer.
Elion from my fic God of Ambivalence specifically chapter 10 when he makes Gale a prosthetic hand, after some rabid bhaalspawn ate the other one right off.
I love drawing, but it is still very much a skill I am developing slowly and with a lot of frustrated curses. This one, super simple picture was harder for me to create than some entire novels I have written.
Posting this for a little accountability as I'm drawing more lately, but still feeling pretty reluctant to share anything. I tried to challenge myself by doing a bit more with lightning, and by drastically changing the references I was using, but then I also gave myself a break by making sure their hands and feet are bare, because I really like drawing hands and feet.
This is Cherry & Vovka (Vovka appears in chapter 19 of Appetites), my newest OCs, on the day they met, and he became her patron, some years before their Bg3 adventure and here's them in game after they've had a few years to become besties:
On the one hand, I need to stop making new tavs and new playthroughs, on the other hand NO
But, can I at least? stop? making?
pink ?
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tiefling ?
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warlocks ?
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?
Also no.
So, Vovka is in my fic Appetites, though that story takes place in a totally different universe than this playthrough, because he and Cherry definitely didn't get kidnapped by mindflayers in the backstory of Appetites; they were both far, far away from all that nonsense.
But I wanted to play a game in the universe where Cherry did get snatched up by the mindflayers while minding her own business in Baldur's Gate. On the ship, she called on her patron to come rescue her. Vovka appeared right away, but didn't rescue her, instead, he also got infected. Oops.
Vovka doesn't join up with the rest of the party fully though. Having a cambion around narrows your options, because it's so common to just attack them on sight, so when he does join the rest of the party, he's usually using a disguise self spell unless they are looking for a fight anyway.
Instead of trapsing around the sword-coast, looking for healers, Vovka is checking with his contacts in the hells, trying to find out more information and bringing Cherry aid (modded items, mostly) when he can manage it. He's also a bit a lot though, usually encouraging her to make less morally upright choices, and often screwing things up in his attempts to help. But like. He's honestly trying. He's just not emotionally equipped for this, and needs a lot of patience, which luckily, Cherry has.
They met when they were both still pretty young. In Appetites, his human half-sister sister Isolde tells the story of him getting kicked out of the house when he was thirteen and how she hasn't seen him since. Basically, Vovka was a street child for a few hours, before he got in trouble with the law right quick, but he was disguised as a human at the time, so instead of killing him on the spot, he was arrested.
Cherry was also arrested that day, because she got caught pickpocketing, and she thought her life was over. It probably would have been fine, she hadn't successfully stolen anything, the guards were just holding her overnight to teach her a lesson, and also being a bit racist which made her nervous.
And that's what the scene I'm depicting is supposed to be. He removed his human disguise and approached her in their shared cell, proposing that they escape.
Vovka gathered that this tiefling girl had a family and siblings and parents who cared about her. And that she had a safe place to stay once she was released, so he manipulated her into a pact so that the two of them could get out together, in hopes that her family would take care of him too.
This might have actually worked, except that using his cambion nature and making a pact with someone, for the first time ever, reminded his fiend parent that he existed, so right after their jailbreak, mama succubus promptly came and took him back to the hells for proper programing and cambion education.
He and Cherry stayed pretty tight in the years that followed though. She's his only warlock and with everything in hell being shit, and with Cherry being so young and in his mom's words "completely useless as an asset" their pact wasn't interfered with or altered in any way. Instead, it afforded him opportunities to sneak off and hang out with her when things in hell got to be too much. "I need to check in with my warlock" is one of the few excuses he ever had to not be around for horrible hellscape shinanigans.
Cherry got a lot of shit from her family about taking a pact with a half-fiend (not as much as Wyll, obviously, but like she was for sure grounded for a full year) and she refused to actually use her powers for a long time. She was embarrassed and mad at herself for panicking and making the deal in that moment of weakness, and she was mad at Vovka too, though she does come to see his side of things as they spend more time together, and ultimately admits that she's pretty lucky to have a patron who is so chill and so low maintenance. Also, she's had numerous opportunities to forsake the pact, but won't do it, because in the end, she actually does like being a warlock and has a strange feeling that the power will come in handy some day. Besides that, she's also worried that if she does forsake the pact, she'll probably just never see Vovka again.
