@babblish Gifting a full example of two characters bantering who won't!! Be quiet!! And I love them for it haha
A sneak peek from an upcoming chapter in And so it is...
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Vit sat on a stump, then started to roll their arms, massaging the muscles here and there. Their head was aching, and their stomach kept grumbling.
“Aha, there’s that fresh face,” said Balor from the window of his wagon. “Hope the town is treating you well.”
“You know,” said Vit, while helping one had to wave with the other, “I’ve done a lot of things before… becoming a farmer…”
“I’m sure.”
“And not once did those things involve a pick axe.”
“Ah…”
“And I’ve carried people who weighed less than 10 pieces of wood and 10 stone put together!”
“Pardon?”
Vit slumped a little, “nothing, I suppose I’m just… grumbling now.” Their hands twiddled, despite the growing tiredness seeping into their bones, Vit needed something to do with them. They patted themself for the tobacco pouch. “Don’t mind me…”
With a whole town full of people, it was interesting how Vit found how comfortable it was to talk to Balor. Perhaps he simply gave off the air of someone easy to talk to. And he’d smile, with that smile that didn’t reach his eyes, that was as multifaceted as gem caught in the light… and listen… and who knows what he’d do with the information he’d hear, and yet you couldn’t help but ramble.
Dangerous stuff.
Vit stuck a filter between their lips while breaking the tobacco up. “I probably should have told Ryis to meet me somewhere instead of lugging it around searching for him.”
“That would have been wise,” said Balor, watching the filter bob between Vit’s lips.
“Want one?” Vit offered, while evenly spreading the tobacco on the thin paper with their thumb.
“I…”
“Hm?”
“I’m good, thank you.”
Vit nodded, not taking their eyes off the rollup as they removed the filter from its safe keeping between their lips, and pushed it into place.
Vit paused, realizing something, “Balor?”
“Hm?”
“Do you… uh… sell tobacco?”
A grin grew on his face. “Interesting question, that.”
“Don’t be coy, please, you’ll get wrinkles.”
The grin dropped from Balor’s face, as he touched his own face. A small chuckle danced from Vit’s mouth, and, realizing the joke, Balor’s grin returned.
He stretched into a more nonchalant position then. “I suppose Terithia has to get it from somewhere.”
“Yes, which leaves you, or the general store.”
“Which I also do supply shipments for.”
“Which you also do supply shipments for. So the real question is,” Vit stuck their tongue out, licking the rollup cigarette closed, taking a moment to observe their handiwork, finding it good, and placed it between their lips to bob as they spoke, “what are your tobacco prices? …Balor?”
Balor returned from wherever his thoughts drifted to, face giving nothing away. “I heard you. I was just thinking…”
“Oh?”
He pointed at Vit, “what would you say if I told you I sold tobacco at 300t?”
Vit halted the search on their person for a tiny matchbox. “300t?!”
“If only to help deter you from continuing the habit.” Balor’s grin was down right villainous.
“Are those the same prices you give Terithia? Or the general store?”
“I’m not talking to Terithia or Nora at the moment, and since you didn’t arrive to this question better informed to negotiate…”
“You’re pulling my leg, you have to be!”
Balor shrugged, it was beautiful and infuriating all in one. “So? What would you say to 300t?”
“A box full?”
“A pouch.”
“Get out.”
“Oh I’m afraid I’m deathly serious… light?” Balor shook a small matchbook.
The rollup swirled around Vit’s mouth like an irritated cat tail. Balor’s grin widened. Vit stood, and made their way over, slouching against the wagon, towards Balor.
Before Vit could hold out their hand for the matchbook, Balor struck a match, producing the flame like some sleight of hand trick.
Vit blinked impressed, nodding a ‘wow’.
Balor nodded a ‘thank you’, and brought the flame closer.
Vit hesitated, “how much will this cost me?”
“For you Vit? On the house.”
Vit grinned around the rollup, and leaned it into the fire, inhaling the thing to life. Satisfied, they took a moment, before slowly exhaling the smoke away. A steady languid stream.
“Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
Wind rustled through the trees above, a small rattle like sound came from the wagon, birds chirped, and the cigarette burned.
After a while of enjoyable silence, Balor asked again, “well?”
“… what would you say, if I just stole the tobacco? I mean let’s face it 300t, that might as well be robbery in itself.”
Balor nodded, considering this, then with a pleasant nonchalance opened a switchblade dagger and stuck it into the wood of the wagon as he leaned forward. “Unadvisable.”
Vit eyed the blade then Balor’s smile, which had become just as sharp. Vit matched it with their own smile. “I can see that.” Vit took a drag. “…You ever been to the Squatters and Toad inn?”
Balor slowly turned the knife, face still pleasant as ever. “I’m a traveling merchant.”
“And I’m a farmer.”
Their eyes only broke contact when Vit turned their head, so not to blow smoke into Balor’s face.
/ end! These two are infuriating!! I adore writing their tip tapping words haha
wait I just thought of this and i need to tell someone it's so silly. veilguard protag character concept idea; qunari mage healer/necromancer quNARI geddit 😂 qunari nari
Hehe, okay, this was supposed to be a comic from the Demon!Barbara AU that you can... probably find in the art tag, and it was supposed to be a convo between Walter and Barbara, in which Strickler, that one principality who was once supposed to look over monks (the history recording ones), ask Barbara, the demon of progress, how she fell. Here is the script, called tentatively “The Walk-Out”.
S: So… how did you fall?
B: I didn’t. I sort of… walked out.
B: …now that I think about it, I did the first even union strike. I should add it to my record.
S: That would mean that… you disagreed with the policy.
B: Oh, I disagreed the hell out of that policy.
B: Do you know what kind of stuff I was in charge of making during the creation?
B: I made Black Holes.
S: …you worked on something that dissolved the the very thing we were making.
B: Not dissolved. Moved. Everything has its natural finite point. The entropy of the universe is life itself, and without it there is no change, no growth. Nothing should exist in a constant, otherwise we are faced with nothing but stagnation. I just helped it move along a little.
B: This is what I always did. Sometimes I just had to get inventive about it.
S: That sounds almost noble. I doubt your management supports that.
D: Please. My side is many things, but they are really not very good at long-term planning. They try. But it goes about as well as you think, if you remember how the Up- or shall I say Down-rising went.
S: Disastrously?
B: That would be a word to describe it. But at least they did something.
S: And so did you.
B: Later. After the fall but before the apple thing. I actually suggested it. There was a pie chart involved. Very fancy.
S: So your disagreement was about the apple?
B: Yes, it was about the flipping apple! We made all these things, we made whole worlds, moving, growing. And for what? For two creatures actually capable of exploring and studying and marvelling in those creations to just sit on their asses in one garden doing jack? If that doesn’t sound like a complete waste of everyone’s time, I don’t know what is. And which ever ass though that putting that tree right there in the middle, that’s just adding an insult to the injury.
B: So yeah, as I told HER, if SHE thinks I will sit, just like the rest of them, and watch paint dry, she is wrong.
S: Was SHE upset with you?
B: I don’t know. SHE didn’t say anything. Or maybe I didn’t hear over the sound slamming the gates behind myself on the way out to find an organisation that would appreciate my ideas.
S: Did it work out?
B: You are a scholar. You tell me.
S: It’s… fascinating to observe. All of it. The good and the bad.
B: As all life should be.
In other news, Demon!Barbara invented both the Fidget Spinner and the Suffragette movement, and I can’t even begin to describe how bored she was during the Dark Ages. Also, she still “works” as a doctor, except she just miracles sick people to health while muttering medical mumbo-jumbo because she can’t be arsed and writes it down as “facilitating bad habits in mortals”.
Her name’s Sofia. She was created when I was 15 and has gone through quite a few versions since then. A large part of her development was me attempting to explore asexuality (while having no idea that term even existed). Later, I revamped her to be an out ace with a pretty good life while I was in college as a way of self-validation. In some ways, she feels like an old companion, so I’ll probably always keep her around in some shape or form in my original writing.
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14. What’s the most research you ever put into a book?
For the Cruise Ship Story that never was, I spent a significant amount of time researching cruise ship layouts, routes, etc. to help me plot out where the ship would head during the narrative. At one point I even managed to have diagrams and ship layouts (from an advertisement a family member got that they they gave to me).
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23. Single or multi POV, and why?
Multi. I like being able to jump to different places in a story, to show what’s going on with different characters (and their perspectives on things).
One of the problems I think I had with writing Pale Lady was that I felt writing solely from Morgana’s perspective was extremely confining. By comparison, I’ve loved jumping around in Pieces and seeing how the characters’ actions can affect each other.
It's a short DND Campaign! It probably won't ever get off the ground because everyone involved is the worst at scheduling and staying on task. Basically, they're tasked with getting the chosen one to this ancient city so he can learn magic and save the world....shenanigans occur and it really doesn't go as planned.
I answered this one already a little bit here, but since I’ve already started a personal, rambly answer to the other question down below, I’ll add; pretty much everything. I know that’s vague, but, since I was little, writing and stories have been my way of connecting to the world. I was born with a syndrome (that I’m not, as of yet, comfortable revealing online) that caused me to have a speech impediment. Thus, when I was little, no one could understand what I was saying most of the time (and various experiences with speech therapists taught me my way of doing things was just plain wrong).
I first turned to creating stories in my head as a way to entertain myself in a world that I struggled to communicate with. My inspiration came from looking at the world as a kid, not understanding it, and trying to figure things out.
Then, when I got older, I sort of realized that, for all I was terrible at verbal communication, I was fairly good at this written word thing. Thus, I used writing as a way to express myself, to say everything I stumbled with vocalizing.
Subsequently, I grew up with the notion that that writing is one of my strongest allies. My inspiration for it comes from a desire to understand, express myself, and communicate (generally whatever I happen to be interested in during whatever stage of life I’m in at the time).
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50. How did you get into reading and/or writing fanfiction?
I think I’ve mentioned a couple times that sharing my first Trollhunters fanfic was part of a New Year’s Resolution to share my writing again back in 2018, so I suppose I could expand on that.
Back when I was a teenager (and in early college) I wrote a lot, and shared almost all of it. I loved creating worlds and talking about them. Admittedly, the biggest reason I won’t post anything now to Fanfiction.net (or its sister site, Fictionpress.com) is because I was on both of them quite a lot back then.
I didn’t stop because people didn’t respond, so much as because of how they responded. It was a well known fact among family and family friends that I wrote, so occasionally it would come up in conversation. They’d express interest…and it just took me a while to realize that that interest was polite interest and they didn’t really want me to start going on and on about my stories.
(also known as that moment when you’re neurodivergent (except you don’t realize it until a couple years later) and are terrible at picking up on people’s social cues, so when they say they’re curious or interested about that thing your passionate about, you take them at face value. You don’t realize, to them, it’s just a polite conversation and that they’re never going to follow through with reading what you give later (even if they tell you they will). So, you get your hopes up and then get hurt when things don’t work out, over and over again, until you just stop reaching out.)
I stopped working on my stories altogether. I didn’t see point in all the editing I was doing for things that would do nothing but sit around on my computer anyway. That went on for a couple years (until I made my new year’s resolution to try again).
What Goes Bump In The Night was, honestly, one of two options I had at the time (the other was an original fic featuring a few of my OCs celebrating Chanukah). I chose to share Bump because it was the one that would hurt less if things went badly.
I chose to do things differently too. Post to AO3 instead of Fanfiction/Fictionpress (and under a new pseudonym too). A few Trollhunters characters instead of my own. Have more distance between myself and the writing.
Worst case scenario, I figured, it would just be a failed attempt with characters I didn’t have the same emotional attachment to as my own.
I truly didn’t think things would go as well as they did. I kept with it bc it started to feel good, really good. I didn’t have to worry about people only reading to humor me. I could be as weird as I wanted and that was seen as a good thing (like a joke about a troll husband was celebrated instead of passingly accepted).
A lot of my early writing in the toa fandom, tbh, was really me just figuring out that I could be weird here, pushing “but how weird can I be until the quiet rejection comes?”, and that rejection never really coming.
Honestly? There’s this one Starbucks I’ve known about since high school. A part of me hates that I still go there, but I also really like it bc it’s big enough that I’m just another anonymous person at a table with a laptop no one’s paying attention to (or judging).
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2. Favorite part of writing.
The moment when things start coming together and the world around me sort of falls away and I get lost in the story for an hour or two without realizing it.
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31. Hardest character to write.
Dictatious, he’s not one I can easily get into the mind of.
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32. Easiest character to write.
Barbara, she’s this perfect blend of developed enough in canon that there’s something to build off of but has enough left out that I can do my own character development for her without worrying about going ooc.
