[ID: A looping gif showing a rough animation of a character sitting leaning forwards on a log. They have a knife in one hand which they flick up and down a couple of times before spinning it around, and their other hand is supporting their chin as they alternate looking left and right. The elbow of the latter arm is resting on the knee of one leg, which is anxiously bouncing up and down. End ID.]
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(On the night watch)
One of my coworkers recced me an actually good animation programme for ipad and so of course the first thing I did was to test drive it with brie on my lunch break :))
I finally got around to writing something for Brie’s backstory!! This doesn’t go into like, huge amounts of detail and is mostly about the Vibe but I rly like how it came out ^^ It kind of summarises their relationship with magic and their siblings up to the current point we’re at in the campaign...
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You're fourteen years old when you realise there's something wrong with you. Something broken. Something that your family doesn't see, or doesn't want to see. It's been a long time coming, but that's when it finally clicks, staring at a small, bright gem in your hand that is supposed to be full to the brim with power and feeling nothing. It's not that you're simply bad at magic, it's that whatever quality they're expecting from you, the one that all your siblings possess in abundance, you don't have.
-
"What does magic feel like?" you'd asked your eldest sibling, in a moment of frustration. She'd looked surprised, as if she'd never thought about it. He probably never had. He'd never had to.
"Feel like?" he'd said, and cocked his head to one side. "Like a river, I guess. A really fast, deep river, that you can just--" She'd darted her hand out in front of her, as if plunging it into the water ahead, but didn't continue.
"Just what?" you asked, trying not to sound desperate. You had to know.
"Just..." He frowned, and shrugged, wafting his hand back and forth in the imaginary river. "Scoop it out. Like from a well."
You frowned in tandem with her. "I thought you said it was like a river."
"It is! And also like a well. And kind of like an ocean, too. Or the sun?"
You hold in a sigh. You should have known you wouldn't get a straight answer - out of her, especially.
-
"What does it feel like?" you asked again, quiet with embarrassment, as you lay on the ground next to your second-eldest sibling, who was nose-to-not-nose with a mushroom that looked half like a leaf and half like a bird.
"What does what feel like?" she murmured, not looking at you.
"When you talk to them."
She'd cast her gaze sideways at you, half-reproachful. "I don't talk," she said, as if you should have known this already, "I listen."
"But what does it feel like?" you pressed, fidgeting with the grass under your fingers. You resisted the urge to pluck blades of it out of the soil, because you knew she'd yell at you if you did.
As if sensing your thoughts, she reached out and grabbed your wrist - but rather than scold you, she pressed her hand against the back of yours and moved your palm to lie flat against the ground, pressing it into the soil.
"It has a voice," she said, "all of it. It sings."
"Like music?"
"...No. Like rhythm." She met your eyes. Hers are a different colour to yours - just like all of your family. As always, you're the odd one out. "Do you feel it?"
"Yes," you lied, and she snorted and turned back to the mushroom.
-
You weren't actually going to ask, the next time. Your third-eldest sibling - your favourite sibling, though you'd never even keep that thought in your head long enough to complete it - brought it up for you, sitting in a tree above the goats you were watching. Well, you were watching. He was listening, and his eyes were sleeping draped around his neck, all 2 ruby-scaled feet of her.
"Roche said you asked her how to talk to plants," he said out of nowhere, swinging his leg in the open air below the branch. You had been doing the same, idly, but you stopped when he spoke, your face heating up.
"I didn't."
"That's a half-truth," he smiled. "What's the whole one?"
"...I asked her what it feels like. To talk to them."
"Hm."
You went back to kicking your feet. Something moved in the forest, and you stilled for a moment, but relaxed again when it didn't come further than the treeline.
"What was it?" your brother asked, and you shrugged.
"Deer, I think."
"How many?"
You cocked your head to listen; footsteps moving away through low brush, soft breathing and snorting. "Five or six?"
He listened too, but shook his head after a moment and leant back again. "Your ears are better than mine," he said with a small smile, and you tried and failed to suppress a grin. You never get to be the best at anything, but you can do this: listening, watching on alert - when you don't get distracted, that is.
You can do other things, too, and well, but not anything anyone cares about. What's the point of being able to hit a target dead centre at sixty feet when someone else could disintegrate the whole thing with just a thought?
You sighed. You could feel your brother's attention on you, keenly.
"Not everyone has to be the same, you know," he said gently. You rolled your eyes, and he gave you a chiding look even though you knew he didn't see it. "I'm just saying, just because it's not magic doesn't mean it's not worth doing."
"Easy for you to say," you grumbled - the guilt that followed was near-instant, and you pressed your lips closed.
Everything sat quiet for a while. Your skin felt like it was crawling off your body.
"I just want to be able to do it once," you blurted, eyes stinging, "Just one time. If I can get it right one time, then maybe--"
Maybe they'll leave it alone. Maybe they'll stop pushing. Maybe they'll care about literally anything else.
He put an arm around your shoulders and pulled you in towards him. The pseudodragon he'd been wearing as a scarf puffed a smoke ring of indignance and slid her way into his lap instead.
You sniffed, pathetically. "Sorry."
"Don't be."
He didn't say, "You'll get it eventually." He didn't say, "Just keep trying." It was a relief.
"...What does it feel like?" you asked, in a voice so small you could barely hear it yourself. He didn't answer for a long time, but you could feel him thinking about it, in the motion of his hand on your shoulder and his nails tracing a line down Em's spiny back.
"Like grabbing something in the dark," he said "You can't see or hear it. You have to know where it is - some people know by instinct, others have to get directions, or wait to find it by chance."
You nodded, ever-unsatisfied with yet another answer.
-
"Have faith," said the fourth-eldest, followed by a nod from the fifth. You think it's that way round - no-one ever really seemed to keep track of which of the two of them had been born first, and maybe it didn't matter.
"You need to trust it, or else it won't work."
"But trust what?" you asked, trying not to huff about it. It felt like people always skipped steps one through through nine and pretended you had asked them about step ten instead. Like you were trying to get them to teach you how to read and they just handed you a novel.
"The connection you have," said the fifth, followed by a nod from the fourth.
"With your god, or nature, or whatever else."
But what if I don't have one? you wanted to scream, barely holding it in. "But how do you make the connection?"
"By believing in it," the fourth said - slowly, as if they'd already told you this and you hadn't been listening. But listening has never been the problem; you just don't understand.
The other one gave them a slightly reproachful look, and then turned back to you with a sympathetic smile - pitying, the hurt part of you whispered, and you forced it down.
"What she means is that you have to trust that it's there to begin with. When you use your bow, you trust your hands and your eyes to know what they're doing, right? It's the same thing."
They both met each other's eyes and nodded, as if to confirm that this made perfect sense. But it didn't. You could trust your aim and your skill with a blade because you'd practised them, over and over until the motions were familiar as breathing and you could know where a knife was spinning in its arc without looking at it. There was no use in trusting your hands at the start, when they'd slipped on the bowstring and fumbled their catches at every turn, but your lack of belief in them hadn't made them stop existing.
"Don't worry about it too much," one of them said, and you didn't bother looking up to see which. "You've still got your whole life ahead of you, you know."
-
"Hey," came the whispered voice through the dark, and you sat up immediately - instantly awake and too excited for drowsiness to cling to you.
"Is it finished?" you asked as the light of a candle flared past the doorframe, and your sixth sibling - the next youngest after you and the most chaotic - slipped into the room with a wide, frantic grin.
"You wanna see?"
"You know I want to fucking see," you whispered impatiently, though still smiling - sarcasm doesn't go down well when it comes to the work she loves so dearly, so you have to settle for the blunt version of the obvious answer.
He grinned wider and came to sit down on the end of your bed, already fussing with a velvet pouch as he set the candle down out of the way. "Eyes closed."
Begrudgingly, you complied, because you knew this dance and that this was the only way to get through it untrampled. You held out your hands in front of you without having to be asked, and waited until you were given the order before opening your eyes to look at the dense, warm weight they'd just placed in your palms.
"Wow," you breathed, bringing it up to the light and watching it shine. In gold and coloured glass sat an sharp-edged reconstruction of a hummingbird, tiny wings tucked close to its sides and eyes flickering with startling liveliness in the wavering glow of the candle.
"That's not the best part," she told you, her eyes gleaming with that same wild light as he leaned forward and stroked a finger down the curve of its back.
For a moment, nothing happened, and then the tiny thing jerked, and stuttered, and lifted into the air with a whirr of fluttering metal. Carefully, you guided it upwards from your cradled hands, and watched it wobble back and forth through the air, the reflection of candlelight on its wings casting quick-flashing fragments of colour across the walls and ceiling.
You met each other's eyes with matching delight and then turned back to watch again, one of you in awe and the other in ecstatic satisfaction. You wished so desperately that you knew what that felt like.
"How do you do it?" you sighed without thinking, and earned yourself a frown.
"What do you mean how? You've watched me. Using a forge and an anvil."
"Well, yeah, but--" You fidgeted with the blanket, uncertain of yourself. "Even if I copied everything that you did, I still wouldn't be able to make it work. I don't understand how you..."
You trail off with a gesture to the hovering contraption, its delicate wings and shining glass eyes. You understand the mechanics of these things, can track the progress of clockwork from start to finish and see where potential becomes motion, but you can't bring a machine to life like they can, nor can you fathom how it's done.
"Hm," he said, "I guess I never thought about it."
You stayed quiet, knowing that her brain is as delicate a machine as any of her creations, and just as likely to explode if you tamper with it before she's ready. You both watched the bird sway and spin above you, and the seconds ticked away.
"I think they want to be made," she said after a few minutes. "The shape of them... it's already there, somewhere, it's just a matter of finding it. Sometimes I don't know what's going to come out until I'm almost done. It's like being a conduit for something else's energy."
"That sounds terrifying," you told him nervously, only to be met with a shrug.
"Not really. I choose to do it, and I have faith in the process."
"So you're saying you just have to trust it?" you asked in a half-groan. This was starting to sound all too familiar.
"Oh, absolutely fucking not," she said, looking back at you in alarm. "Magic is pure chaos, you can't just close your eyes and hope for the best."
"So then how do you control it enough to use it?"
They made a frustrated noise at you, rapidly waving off the notion. "It's not about controlling it, it's about finding a piece of it that wants the same thing that you do. And even then--"
Above your heads, the delicate wings of the hummingbird shattered to pieces, showering you in bits of metal and glass. You flinched and ducked away from the hail of it, but she just sighed.
"You can't guarantee that it won't change its mind," he grumbled, and started to collect the scattered pieces together. "It's too volatile."
"Then why bother?" you asked, carefully picking tiny gears and snapped springs out of your hair and adding them to the pile. They only shrugged, their attention already drifting to the next problem, and the next solution.
"Sometimes it works."
-
All of that only confirmed what you'd already suspected - the reality that you had no gift for magic and never would, that no amount of endless trying harder was going to let you discover something that simply did not exist. It was before you turned your talents to achievable imitation instead of the genuine, unattainable article, and miscalculated it all so badly that your only option was to make a break for it before they all figured out the truth: that the only thing you had shown yourself capable of was a very convincing forgery.
-
Not everyone appreciates the point of a magic-less magic show - or at least not at first. You've yet to get through a performance without even the most scoffing tavern patrons starting to quiet down and send sidelong glances your way: if not magic, then how? you can hear them thinking, how are you doing it?
The novelty also counts for something, and the fact that you can juggle several knives without losing any fingers. It's enough to make ends meet, and you're happy, in an absent sort of way. It feels like a transient purpose, but you're content to drift through it until you manage to figure out what the hell else you can or should do.
The break comes in the form of a job offer. As it turns out, casting blades through the air with precision is a very transferable skill.
You find yourself pulled into adventuring despite yourself. It's more dangerous than you would like, but the gratitude of the people you help is addictive like applause after a show, and for the first time in your life you feel useful. None of your new companions see what you lack, only what you add, and you're determined that it's going to stay that way. You play off your aversion to magic as a matter of principle, as if you could do it if you really wanted and simply choose not to.
It's scary, but it's fun, in its own sort of way. And you're good at it. Really good at it. So you stick to it past the point where things start getting really dangerous, because people need your help, and so do your friends, and because it's nice, for once, to be appreciated.
-
The storm comes on faster than you would have ever thought possible, even for a product of wild magic. One minute it's a mass of black clouds and blue flashes over the hills, the next everything is turning shades of sapphire, and there's nothing to do but make a run for it.
You've never been good at retaining information when it comes to the arcane, but you know enough about spellstorms to not want to be anywhere near one. Especially as lightning cracks down from above and a wall of blue flames rushes out from the scorched ground where it hit, rippling outwards towards you like a tidal wave.
The treeline is nearly a mile away, and you almost make it there in time. Almost. You're fast, but speed means nothing when your foot lands in a rabbit hole and sends you tumbling to the ground in a heap. Your face only meets the dirt harder.
You scramble up and turn just in time for the tide to hit you at full force, your gasp drawing it into your lungs and scorching your throat, electrifying you from the inside. Everything goes bright and blue, the whole world on fire and yet silent as the forest behind you. It feels like you're a burning ember plunged underwater.
Something... cracks. Like the first strike of a battering ram against a great stone door.
And then it's over, and you're still alive. Glowing brilliant cyan and nauseous from fading adrenaline, but alive. Alive as ever. The others, too, are all still there, no more than perturbed at most, or mildly irritated by the inconvenience of being a walking beacon. You just need to shake it off.
And yet, as the seconds turn to minutes turn to hours, you can't. You feel off, disoriented, buzzing in your chest and at the ends of your fingertips. It's not the simple anxiety of having escaped death by a hair again - you know that feeling intimately by now, and this is something else, something more. Something terrifying. Even when the colour fades, the feeling remains, like it's trickled down and stained something somewhere deep.
You resolve not to think about it.
-
You're not built for endurance, is the thing. Speed, yes, and dexterity, but you rely on being able to get out of the way in a fight, not on being able to take a hit. Sometimes one is all it takes, and you've reluctantly accepted it as an occupational hazard you try to forget about when possible. The aching void of sudden, unplanned unconsciousness is familiar to you by now.
Or at least, it was.
The lights go out, and everything goes sapphire blue, and shining gold, then senseless black. And the next time, again. Over and over. Butterflies dance in your unconscious mind, you awaken with unfamiliar music ringing in your ears, with each return to the world it seems tilted slightly from where you left it. A dream, obviously, a concussion, something one of the others is doing and forgot to tell you about.
But every time you gasp awake with blue light fleeing the edges of your vision, that terrifying idea curls a little closer.
You're worried that you now know the answer to that question that haunted you for so many years, and that you don't know what to do with it now you have it. The idea that magic is not an ocean, nor a voice, not an object in the dark or a leap of faith or a spark on the anvil.
You're worried that magic feels like blackness in your vision and a fire in your lungs. You're worried that you are, after so long wishing for exactly that, nothing more than a promising pile of dry and tented kindling with an ember at its heart, waxing and waning in time with every chance gust of wind, a heat that singes the ground underneath it - and most of all, you're worried about what is going to happen when that ember manages to finally catch hold, to take your wooden bones in its teeth, and every last bit of you goes up in beautiful, uncontrollable flames.
[ID: Several rough drawings of a slim elven character with straight mid-length hair. The page is divided into two sections; the top section has three drawings of them moving from left to right looking anxious and determined, first removing a top hat, then their blazer, and then reaching up to tie their hair, all the while still looking forward. Dividing the two sections is a white bar with black text that reads "Is it good to be home, little one?"
The second section shows a forest scene with several gnarled trees lining a path, with two more blocking the end of it that almost look like they have faces. The same elven character from above is standing with their back to the viewer on the left side of the path, while another version of them wearing a cloak and robes is on the right, walking towards the viewer and looking back over their shoulder with a nervous, guilty expression. End ID.]
I want to call this a wip but we'll see if I get any further with it lol
Anyway tfw half your village gets kidnapped into the feywild and forced to party 24/7 for the nobility's entertainment & while you may be completely magically inept, you sure as shit know how to put on a good show
Another party member generated a height chart after a discussion of "wait, maareya is HOW tall??" and I couldn't resist drawing over it lol. This group is so tall person biased now that we no longer have our dwarven druid
[ID: A digital drawing of a slim, tan-skinned elven character with straight, mid-length brown hair, shown from the hips up. They have their arms stretched up above their head and their fingers linked together as they smile off to their left, and are wearing a loose off-white tank top and navy blue trousers. End ID.]
I have enough siblings for a full lineup now!! From left to right: Cam (plus emily and bertrand) (he/him), Roche (she/they), Mozzy (any pronouns), and Brie (they/them) :>
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[ID: Four drawings of elven characters with slightly differing shades of tan skin standing in a row in various poses. From left to right:
A character of medium build, dressed in dark blue and black robes and brown leather bracers, with long dark brown hair worn in a high ponytail. He's got a gentle smile on his face, facing the viewer with one hand on the head of a large grey dog with a long tail, almost twice the length of its body, which is standing behind him and comes up to about his hips. His other hand is supporting a tiny red dragon perched on his shoulder - both animals have their tails wrapped protectively around him.
A tall, slim character with curly brown hair worn in a puffy ponytail with two loose sections framing her face. She's wearing a white half-cloak with a hood and multiple layers of plain and patterned brown and green robes with a yellow patterned sash, as well as a book in a leather holster on her hip, and she's holding a wooden staff in front of her that appears to be covered in mushrooms.
A muscular character with mid-length brown curly hair and numerous scars. He’s standing with his legs in a wide stance, holding a large warhammer with an infinity design across her shoulders, and is wearing a dark leather blacksmith’s apron, sleeveless cream button-up shirt, loose brown trousers, and buckled leather boots, as well as sections of plate armour on her forearms and thighs. They also have a pair of goggles around their neck, and the hand that’s not carrying the hammer is planted on her thigh as she leans forward with a small smirk and lidded eyes.
A character of light build and medium height. They have straight brown hair worn in a shoulder-length bob, and are wearing a top hat, a red blazer with a yellow handkerchief hanging out of the pocket, baggy blueish trousers, and loose brown boots. They're standing on their toes, fussing with their hands in front of them as they look innocently off to the side. The following four images are each of the characters individually. End ID.]
[ID: A series of drawings of a slim, tan-skinned elven character with straight hair in a mid-length bob. They're wearing a red blazer and white shirt with an upturned collar, as well as navy blue loose-fit trousers, brown boots, and a navy blue top hat with a lilac ribbon. In some drawings they also have a thigh holster which holds a dagger on each side.
They're shown in various poses in a mix of full-body and bust views - lying down with a sigh, waving a yellow handkerchief above their head, spinning in place with their face obscured by their hair, holding up a piece sign over their shoulder, grimacing, smiling, looking sulky, and looking pained. A couple of speech bubbles read "why does it always have to be stupid magic bullshit every fucking time" and "I'm doing it! Leave it alone!" End ID.]
