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Tumblr has denied me a notif about you answering my ask. Very rude. Anyway i Big Care Mosca and Ash now and ending on Ash calling Mosca kadan took me Out. Pls tell me about their one-sided enemies-to-friends speedrun (or anything else you wanna), I'm all ears (P.s. it doesn't matter when you answer this, could be a while from now and I'd still be interested, i don't wanna drag you into typing up essays for me if you've got more pressing things to put your energy towards!!)

haha, my evil plan to inflict my blorbo feelings on my friend has been a success!! I am an evil genius!! (also, I appreciate the concern, but don't worry, I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. this brainrot is terminal)

okay, the one-sided enemies-to-friends speedrun, aka the first week or so Mosca and Ash knew each other. I'm gonna try my best to make this readable and coherent and not go off on long tangents, but where the story of the first udaak fight took place mostly over a single session, this story spans many, and draws a lot more on both characters' backstories, so it's probably gonna be a bit more scattered. and longer. definitely longer.

So this story actually starts many months ago (both in and out of game), when Ash first got pulled through a portal from his home world of Thedas to... somewhere else. See, this game is a multiverse game, with characters drawn from a variety of different worlds who ping around the multiverse working to stop chaos on the behalf of a strange group of mutiversal entities called The Quanta. Now, I wasn't there when the game started, so all this information comes courtesy of my good friend who plays Ash. Ash took this transition outwardly pretty damn well, but inwardly... he'd been raised in an anti-magic cult (which is a gross oversimplification of things, but a full explanation would be long and complicated, so this will do), taken from the only home he'd ever known, was now stuck with people who he previously would've considered purposeless things, didn't speak the language particularly well (apparently even worse than currently) and was constantly surrounded by unsettling, fucked up magic. There was a lot going on for him that he lacked the ability to express or anyone he trusted enough to express it to. So he kinda just... sat with it, until slowly things got better. He learned to trust and care about the people he was with, he learned to be less scared of magic (some of the later involved talking to a Skyrim dragon which I wish was a joke but is not).

So time goes on, and we jump forward to the moment Mosca joined the party. See, Mosca also unexpectedly got pulled through a portal, but Mosca got pulled through a portal in the middle of a fight. As in, they were fighting, and a portal appeared and swept towards them, and then on the other side of the portal the party was also in a fight. Which means their introduction to Ash is watching him in a rage use the skull of an undead to kill another undead. It was... memorable to say the least, but not necessarily in a good way (yes Mosca also killed a bunch of undead in that fight, yes one of those kills involved violent decapitation, I never said they weren't a hypocrite).

So Mosca is introduced to the multiverse, and let's just say they don't take the change gracefully. They're not as scared of magic as Ash was (or is), but they don't like it and they don't trust it, and they are suddenly surrounded by it. They had also spent the last six months without seeing another living person, and the change to suddenly being with a party at all times is jarring to say the least. By their second day they're curled up outside a tavern having a panic attack. And the one who ends up sitting with them is Ash. See, Ash understands what it's like to struggle with the transition and sees a lot of himself in Mosca. It's cathartic for him to have someone else who doesn't trust magic, and he has a lot of empathy for them.

Mosca, on the other hand, does not trust him in the slightest. Ash is Big and Strong and Very Clearly A Threat. This is unfortunately and accidentally only amplified by an interaction maybe two days into knowing each other? After another fight in which Mosca is triggered to hell and back by the smell of gunpowder (backstory thing), they end up screaming at Ash to fuck off when he attempts to help. Ash actually takes this fine, but Mosca, once they calm down, is afraid they've made him hate them, which they need him not to do only because their patron is starting to make it clear that they're going to be stuck with these people for at least the foreseeable future. So Mosca goes to apologize. Ash waves the apology off, but in the process of trying to explain why an apology isn't necessary because he understands what they're going through, he ends up explaining what happens to mages in the cult that he was raised in. I'm... not going to explain here because it's... uncomfortable and a bit graphic, but suffice to say, Ash does explain. And Mosca, who previously had been hunted for having magic, takes this very, very badly. In their mind now Ash is a ticking time bomb, that will explode into violence the moment he figures out that they have magic (which they have been attempting to hide... poorly).

So this is where the one-sided enemies-to-friends comes in, because Mosca is convinced that there is a very real possibility of Ash killing them at some future date, while Ash could not be more chill. Mosca is in the corner plotting way to try and fight him if necessary while Ash is just like "neat, new companion, they seem like they might be cool". He is completely unaware that Mosca is terrified of him until...

Well, while traveling the party found a massive, and massively magical, skull, and some of the party decided to fuck around inside said skull and then came out with funky colored eyes and temporary magical bonuses and Mosca, well... kinda snapped.

"Grave of the gods, you're all insane! The only one here who has any sense is him" pointing to Ash, "and he-"

And there they very abruptly cut off, suddenly aware that you shouldn't accuse someone of plotting to kill you. Because either you are right, and they will, or you are wrong, and because of the accusation they then might.

"And he what?" Ash asks. Mosca makes no reply at all, just silence. The party eventually moves on. That night at camp Ash tries again.

"Do we have a problem?"

And Mosca, in one of the worst lies in their life, just says, "No."

Ash is, of course, not fooled by this, but understands there's no trying to talk to them about it now. He's patient. He can wait.

He doesn't have to wait long, because this is where the speedrun comes in. I can't remember the exact timeline, it might've been that night, it might've been a few days later, but not long after all that, Mosca has a dream. They've had a few interactions with the patron, but up to this point their patron hasn't been particularly direct, not since the making of the pact. They are, after all, dying. Their communications have been sparse to nonexistent. But Mosca gets a dream from their patron, where they end up in a cabin sitting across from them, as their patron explains that there are no more living people in their home world. The only thing left are the undead. That's why six months passed without Mosca seeing anyone else. There was no one else to see. Mosca's quest to save their world from the undead has unequivocally failed. And their patron does set them on the path to fixing thing, pointing them in the direction of, essentially, time travel. Reverse time to a point before the undead curse happened and then make sure it doesn't. But in the moment, Mosca can really only focus on the overwhelming weight of their failure and being the last survivor from their whole world.

After this dream they spend two hours alone on watch, stewing in all these feelings. And then the end of their watch comes, and they wake their replacement, who happens to be Ash. And they should just go back to bed, but. They can't. How in the world do you even begin to process something like that?

Well, for Mosca, they ended up spilling it to Ash, just to say it out loud to someone. It's disjointed and awkward and not at all the whole picture, but they tell him they can't go home. That they're the only one left. And he responds by telling them he can't go home either. The cult he grew up in would kill him on sight if they ever found him. And when Mosca explains that they never hated him but that they were scared of him, that they've been running for years from people who want them dead, Ash says that they're part of the group now, so he's going to protect them, and that their problems are the group's problems, and if those people show up, they'll take care of it. And Mosca, in the grip of grief and desperate for any comfort or reassurance, believes him. Maybe not fully, maybe not completely, not yet, but enough to understand that he's not a threat to them, and that he understands what it means for them to have lost their home and be surrounded by magic they're uncomfortable with. And they stand with him on watch for the next couple of hours, but they do so not wearing their mask. The symbol of their paranoia and lack of trust.

Because no matter what else happens (and so much has happened since then) Mosca and Ash's trust in each other is complete and unshakable. For all that Mosca doesn't trust themself, and for all that they believe that Ash shouldn't trust them, he does. And for all that Mosca is a terrible, suspicious bastard who trusts no one, they trust Ash. That, more than anything else, is the foundation for all that has come since, and no matter how often they argue (and boy have they argued), that trust still stands unbreakable.

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