#braxford

[wonders-of-ebott]

[calleo-bricriu]

um. what did you do yesterday that's got you all idk what day it is today??

I spent the majority of yesterday dueling with @braxfordthebeater.

It’s been a few months, actually; he’s been traveling, I’ve been busy, all that fun.

The thing about the sort of friendship Braxford and I have is that he can turn up to a duel using schools of magic I've only read about, throwing in experimental modifications of other, more familiar magic  and do things that would absolutely be lethal if he were to let them run until completion,and my reaction will be along the lines of, "Neat! What was that and how did you do it?"

And I can do the same to him and get the same reaction.

Yesterday, I found that essentially telling him I might have accidentally figured out the combination of magic so destructive that it still warrants almost its own chapter in nearly every European magical history book written in the last 45 years, add in, "but, I think I did it backwards, the fire bit should have been second and on a trigger," and have him go with what can be condensed down to, "Nice! I'll have to read up on that!"

Still not entirely 100% on that but, we'll find out in a few weeks as we're going back to check and see if anything has started growing back. I don't think it will. Not with that combination.

Oh, AND! And! He took a gamble with a--kind of shrinking shield thing--if you’re outside it, it’s a shield anyway--he’s got that’s complicated and difficult to dispel on purpose. Thing is, Braxford is much larger than me, so by the time it was starting to push him down I just shifted back into a bird and flattened myself on the ground.

He swapped places with his jacket, which he’d left outside the shield but, because it’s a difficult to disarm without exploding sort of thing (which, as an aside, is by his own design!) something went off and it went off and he took, ‘Okay my wand is now several feet away’ as the end of the duel, which is fine by me. We were both a bit wrung out by that point anyway.

Also, he never whines that I “play too rough” and vice versa.

[wonders-of-ebott]

VERDANT CENTRAL: PART 10: Exposing a phony.

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[calleo-bricriu]

Okay but areyou sure you and Braxford never played spin the bottle as kids

I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life.

@braxfordthebeater is one of my closest friends and absolutely not my type in terms of looks, which is just as well as I’m absolutely not his type either.

We have a mutual, “Ew, no.” reaction to each other in that regard.

We’re very close, we’ve known each other since 1975, he repainted his bedroom to make my obnoxious orange hair stand out so I’m easier to hit when I make it past his wards without tripping an alarm, most of my family adores him, he very patiently put up with the walking disaster I was in my 20s, I once spent an entire month living at his house because I locked myself out of my own wards and was too stubborn to just break them down and picked my way through them, we often have back and forth between kind of harassing each other at work (I took the weather at [STRICKEN FROM THE RECORD], made it smaller, and threw it into his office--pretty sure it stormed for a month solid in there before he figured out the counter), he’s the spell creator to my modifier, he’s absolutely brilliant and I love him to death but I wouldn’t ever want to touch him in any way that wasn’t strictly and thoroughly platonic.

And I know him well enough to know that his answer would be the same--apart from the bedroom repainting because he damn well better know by this point that he’s not ever going to find me sleeping in there anyway if, for no other reason, when he tests my wards its to see how they stand up to brute force which sets off every possible alarm so even if I were sleeping in there, I’d be awake and out of there before he got to the door.

Oh, and before you ask, I wouldn’t consider it.

Neither would he, and I’d wonder about his sanity if he ever did.

[calleo-bricriu]

So,  I’m writing a thing with Braxford over Discord.

And this line is the funniest damn thing:

“Braxford's face had done as predicted; it endured many transformations and contortions that likened him to a severely uncomfortable walrus at several junctions“

Wording aside, I’m old enough that my brain immediately thought of this:

[calleo-bricriu]

This is the face journey Braxford makes almost every time Calleo talks to him.

@braxfordthebeater

[calleo-bricriu]

Fourth Owl of the Night

((This owl is an actual owl that will incessantly bang its beak on the window of whatever room Braxford is in until he lets it in. ))

@braxfordthebeater

Braxford,

Two things:

1) I have a proposition for you that can't be discussed via owl. Let me know when you're next free.

2) My wards have been redone for almost two solid months now and you haven't tried to bash them in with any part of you yet. Are you busy or are you just being lazy?

- Calleo

[calleo-bricriu]

Hmm...

@braxfordthebeater what would it take for you to do the following for me:

- Let me drag you to another cousin’s wedding as my +1.

- It’s on the continent; mum’s side.

- Punch my Uncle Nik in the face and into the wedding cake, but make it look like it was his fault entirely.

You can add onto whatever payment you’d take for that a bonus if it gets me dis-invited to future weddings of family members until I’m dead, at which point they’d still have my ghost barred from showing up.