he enjoys teaching at veth’s young adventurers’ summer school, but he loves the greater time and deeper curriculum that comes with being a professor. it allows him to delve down rabbit holes to his heart’s content, and with his style of teaching that’s almost like folklore, first-time are always surprised when everything turns out to be relevant
he likes to save his adventure tales as rewards for after difficult classes and exams. it encourages students not to skip
the cats stay in the room during class
he doesn’t have a favorite age to teach <3 just kidding it’s 10-to-12-year-olds
he has an incredible radar for which students are struggling and how to explain the concepts to them in a way they’ll understand. the cats help with this
on the other hand, it’s very hard for him to teach students who are being bullied, mistreated, or abused, because there’s only so far he can step in. the cats help with this, too
he does love his students, but when no one shows up to office hours it’s an instant relief. teaching takes so much social energy
teaching allows him to work closely with astrid and other members of the cerberus assembly, which is even more exhausting, but he chooses to believe that this is the world where advocacy can lead to justice
he always has a ta or other messenger on hand to tell the class what’s up if he gets in trouble for his anti-imperial sentiment. usually the academy only reprimands him, but one time the crownsguard hold him under arrest his students protest every day that week
he doesn’t want his friends to think he’s forgotten them now that he is more or less settled in one place and can’t travel for long during the school year, so he tries to include them in any way he can. he invites beau and yasha in for demonstrations on support casting. veth has all the credentials as a wizard to guest lecture. he asks jester what snacks he should bring his students and how to sneak jokes into his problem sets. the mighty nein help plan dubiously safe field trips. basically, he never has to be somewhere that at least one of his friends isn’t.
Not many people ever get to see Lip Hennessy looking this serious. Without her usual affectations, she is almost unfamiliar. Her perfect brows are furrowed, her glossy lips pressed into a tight line as she concentrates on the task in front of her. Carefully, she cleans Casey’s wounds, then dresses each with sterile gauze from her bike bag. She knows a thing or two about first aid, at least.
“You didn’t need to do that.” She doesn’t realize how quiet she’s been until she hears herself speaking up. “I mean, you shouldn’t have done that. Whatever they were saying about me, it’s nothing I haven’t heard before. It isn’t worth getting hurt over. Hold still, this is going to sting.”
She holds Casey’s hand as she dabs at the split skin along her cheek, avoiding eye contact to focus on the bloody edges instead. All this for what? A bloodbag’s honor? It’s not funny, but Lip wants to laugh. She wants to do something, anyways. There’s a strange tightness in her chest, and she chews her lips as she works, unsure what she’s holding herself back from saying.
“Maggie!” The call rings out, friendly and gleeful over the ambient noises of a near-empty street. The distant wash of traffic, the muffled thumping of some club somewhere. “Maggie, oh my gawd, I haven’t seen you in forever!”
Lip isn’t sure why they picked Maggie. Maybe she looks like a Maggie somehow, this stranger, or maybe Lip met someone named Maggie earlier today and it just stuck in their head, and maybe they’re focusing in on a completely irrelevant detail to distract themself from the terror of the scenario.
It could be paranoia. It could be nothing. But Lip knows the outlines of the scene, glimpsed from afar as they bike home: the woman, walking alone at night; the man, walking a little too slowly some distance behind her. The distance closing. Lip’s stomach is turning, but now they’re slowing down, now they’re gliding to a crawl next to the woman on the sidewalk. The woman who is not named Maggie, who isn’t their long-lost friend, who has nothing to do with them.
“It’s so good to see you again,” they babble with the same cheerful loudness, swinging one leg over the bike’s rear tire to dismount and walk beside not-Maggie. Their face doesn’t match the pep in their voice. From behind, the man won’t be able to see what gives the lie away. The fear in their eyes, their knuckles white on the handlebars. They don’t like being on foot at night, but it’s not like not-Maggie knows them well enough to accept an offer to ride on the back of the bike.
“Don’t look back,” they whisper. “Someone’s following you. Do you have somewhere safe to go? I can walk with you.”
talk about... (spins a big wheel) lip's feelings on vampires and their decision to purposely embody the role of victim to cope
Oh BOY. So I already talked on this a bit here, but let’s go deeper. (Okay, there’s gonna be multiple other posts linked throughout this post, because that’s just how I roll, but if you only have time to read one of ‘em, make it that one.)
As described in that earlier post, Lip’s fascination with replaying the attack¹ came from a desire to take control of the narrative— a way to retell the story while casting themself in a way that put them in control of it.
The nature of their work is also, in a way, a reaction to years of enforced hiding. By bringing the action to an audience, they bring it out into the open, to a point where it cannot possibly be denied. ...Well, kind of. Their performances are showy, but the truth of the first attack isn’t something Lip ever shares. In a way, their current routine is actually just a different way of hiding. In the same way that they’ve camouflaged the first scar by simply covering themself in more scarring, they hide the reality of their victimization by covering it in the glitter of stage victimhood. They grew up with their family’s rules, pretending the thing that hurt them never happened. Now they’re out on their own, living by their own rules, and they pretend the thing that hurt them doesn’t hurt at all.
Under the cut I’m gonna talk more about the history of their behavior, as well as addressing the other part of this question. Warning for discussion of grooming, abuse, addiction, self-endangerment, mentions of suicide.
Lip started experimenting with feeding vampires when they were 16. They would lie about their age, of course, on the off chance that anyone ever bothered to ask them, but it wasn’t as if anyone cared. Not at the parties they went to, anyways. They’d sneak out, find their way downtown, mingle with the creatures of the night, and inevitably find someone whose hungers were compatible with their own.
In Lip’s world, of course, there are moral vampires. There are vampires who are careful, ethical, and compassionate in how they choose to feed. These sorts of vampires don’t fucking feed on 16 year olds, so everyone Lip was hanging out with at this stage in their life was... the other sort.
Like a lot of predators, the crowd Lip fell in with was great at making them feel special, mature, desirable², and in control. Lip’s only other social contacts at the time were their family (who ranged from abusive to clueless) and their it’s-complicated best friend. In that context, their new crowd felt like a godsend.
Hanging out with their new friends made them feel good. Here were people who could see the side of Lip that was always hidden, and would never call them broken for it. Here were people who got them. Here were people who could give them what they wanted.
The reality, of course, was that Lip never mattered to any of them as anything more than a piece of meat. When they ran away from home, the illusions started to fade. None of their new friends would put them up for longer than a night. A few might toss Lip pocket change after taking their fill of them, but it was never a fair trade. Looking back, Lip knows they’re lucky that none of those “friends” felt like taking them in, knowing there's no way any such arrangement could have ended well for them, but at the time, they were just a desperate, homeless teenager, watching the people who’d sworn they were there for them shut doors in their face.
Unfortunately, it was a little late to get wise. At that point, getting bled felt like the only way Lip could cope with their world. It wasn’t about reclaiming their narrative anymore, or empowering themself to face the darkness, or anything like that. It was about getting through the night.
And it sucked! It nearly killed them! On multiple occasions!
Talking about Lip’s journey out of that place would be another long-ass post entirely, one that I do hope to write someday. Not right now, though.
For now, I’ll say Lip is doing a lot better. Not perfect. They’re not anyone’s ideal of what a model Recovered Addict looks like, and not only because they’re not trying to go abstinent-only (that’s not a criticism, I honestly think avoiding the A.O. approach is best for them). Even working within their own paradigm, though, they’ve had some backslides. As of the point in time I write as their mainverse, they have only barely begun the part of the process where they’re realizing that if they’re not actively going out to try and throw their life away every night, they need to find something else to do with it. And they have no idea what that something else could be. But still— they’re doing better. Sometimes they feel like no one else would understand how this could be what better looks like for them, but they’re doing so much better.
But back to the first part of this question: Lip’s feelings on vampires. Which are... complicated. As much as Lip has pretty much built their professional life on vampirefucker behavior, it’s... nowhere near as simple as they make it seem.
Given everything I’ve just said in this post, it would make sense to assume Lip has an overall negative feeling towards vampires. But it’s nowhere near that simple, either. They don’t bear any ill will towards vampires as a group. They don’t think vampires are monolithic. There are vampires they like. There could even be vampires they might love. But- well, the best way I can put it is that being around vampires makes them feel very aware of how killable they are. Which they don’t necessarily think of as a bad thing; killable also means alive, and they’re willing to do a lot of things to feel alive.
But there is... something else to how they feel about the idea of vampire existence, which is, like, a certain sort of hypocrisy. In Lip’s worldview, other people can be vampires and still be good people. Other people can be vampires and still add positive value to the world just by existing exactly the way they are. But Lip? No. Lip would rather die than ever live as a vampire. (With, in the whole of the multiverse, one possible exception.) This is why I don’t have any AUs where Lip is a vampire— outside of the single aforementioned exception, if Lip was ever turned vampire, they’d be dead by their own hand as soon as possible.
¹ When I say ‘replaying the attack,’ it's worth noting that the exactitude varies. Some nights, Lip’s performances have no similarity with the attack at all beyond the mere fact of being bitten. Other nights, the action plays a lot closer to home.
How do they reconcile their belief that other vampires can lead meaningful and positive lives with their own personal feeling that death would be preferable? Mainly by thinking about the second thing as little as possible. If anyone tries to offer them eternal life as a vamp, they’ll laugh it off and say they would have no idea what to do with all that time. After the initial brush-off, if anyone got pushy about it, Lip would panic and cut ties completely. There’s a lot of bad treatment they’ve endured without feeling the need to cut the other person out of their life, but the idea of ever finding themself on the other side of this hunger is... completely beyond bearing for them. They’ll do anything to avoid that threat.
····· ····· ····· ····· ·····
² Given what I’ve said about Lip’s feelings on their own attractiveness, it may seem slightly contradictory to say they have a need for the feeling of being desired, but oh boy, they do.
so veth is tam lin, right? the more you hold onto her, the more she changes shape until she becomes herself
as an audience, we meet her when she’s already died and come back as something else, something she doesn’t consider her. but the only way we can make sense of her is through how she is now. so veth has this neat trick of transforming before our eyes, long before caleb’s spell restores her halfling form – it happens when she tells her whole story. knowing nott used to be a halfling (and has always been, since we met her, a wife and a mother and a revenant) changes how we perceive nott. and as soon as we know, we have to wonder, how much of nott is true to who veth was? and to who she will be in the future?
i think the answer is just, everything. everything that is and was nott belongs to veth, too. despite what sam said on talks, i personally don’t think becoming a goblin, in terms of the physical change itself, had as much impact on her personality and actions as the trauma of dying and transforming did – drinking, for instance, is a way of coping with self-loathing and fear, which were always parts of her. so even while she’s changing shape, in the audience’s eyes, in the other characters’, nott reflects everything about veth.
and for her, from her own perspective, there’s something to be said about transformation as both loss of identity and restoration, and maybe about restoration versus redemption. we know beauty and the beast. you’re cursed, you lose yourself, you’re set free, you become yourself again. but veth never wanted to be herself until she became something else! a restorative arc could not have meant anything to her, not emotionally, until she came to terms with herself in any and every form. nott has to change how she perceives goblins as subhuman (sub-halfling?), largely by going to xhorhas and meeting them, seeing them in a society that is in part built by and for them. she has to love the nein, who show her what‘s worthwhile and good about herself. she has to have all of that before she can make real, concrete plans with caleb. she has to see living as a goblin as a viable path before she can make a new one. before she can say “i do want my body back, even though i despised it, because it’s mine.” it’s restoration but it’s a redemption, too!
his use of we doesn’t go unnoticed. it’s quite clever, really: an appeal to some shared nature between them, as fellow magicians. to an extent, it even works. aster can count on one hand the number of magicians she’s met on this side of the veil, and she does feel a certain kinship with caleb as a result.
with anguis, it was always we. us, ours. you and i, together alone. he said they were the only ones of their kind, but now aster thinks they were very different kinds after all. she doesn’t yet know what “kind” caleb is.
❛ magic— magic is a gift, ❜ she tells him. ❛ once you’re given it, it’s yours to do with as you please. and in this country, i’ve seen it do terrible things. ❜ many people wish they could bring reality to its knees, and many people would not use that power kindly, or wisely. she is loath to create another anguis who will bleed the world dry. ❛ i would not hand you a knife without first knowing how you’ll use it. ❜
caleb found eye contact difficult to balance even at the best of times, when he was young. before a queen, it is an impossible thing. even if she weren’t a queen, maybe, for he is --- what he is. what he is and isn’t and always cannot be, now. so he stares too long or blinks too hard and fast or, as now, looks down at the meager, hoarded collection of magic words in his spellbook and away from her.
“magic is – a loan. to me, it would be.”
he wonders what would happen if he said, so have i. magic is his great joy, perhaps the only thing in his life that truly gets his heart working. ( except... except for nott, but she is not a thing, and he can neither bear the thought of losing her or of keeping her. ) he also knows that he has done great harm with his so-called gift. he cannot promise not to do terrible things again.
“it can be earned, paid off. or taken away.”
frumpkin puts out his paw to trap caleb’s finger as it travels up and down the book’s binding. his green eyes flash. caleb does not try to interpret the look.
“although i do not suppose you would let someone do that to you.”
✼ When it comes to worldbuilding, what are some ideas you’d like to explore in rp? / ◑ What is a side to your muse you want to show off, but haven’t had the chance to yet?
also @entales who sent the exact same symbols too jshfjsbfjsjd
✼ When it comes to worldbuilding, what are some ideas you’d like to explore in rp?
hmmmm. the first thing that comes to mind is my dimension traveler verse. i don't think i ever explored it enough. not the repetitiveness and the scale of it, but the length of time he spends in one single dimension. the immortality of his existence. he could spend a decade or a hundred years in one world --- decide on a mission and see it through to the end --- before leaving for the next one. some people could know him their whole lives and view him as a constant while to him they're a fraction of his long life. Also just the mechanics of fitting a dimension traveling time hopping little demon into every new world + adjusting his connection to time and space in every universe is *rubs hands together* IDK! COULD BE FUN??????
also i would love to explore my AUs more,,,, just like. all of them LOL esp my tm.a crossovers
◑ What is a side to your muse you want to show off, but haven’t had the chance to yet?
when it comes to elliot i haven’t explored his teen / adult life nearly enough tbh. when i first created that AU i intended to write mostly about his career as a freelance hitman / thief but it’s been 2 years since i started writing in that AU and he’s a near perpetually 13 year old menace still KSHBVKDHFBV i mean ... im not complaining too much bc i have a lot of fun writing him as the bratty antagonistic troubled kid that he is and he’s accumulated a veritable army of pseudo-adoptive parent / sibling figures over the years. but ahhhhhh. writing a kid is kind of limiting and he has a lot of unexplored potential as an adult that i would love to sink my teeth into.
“ i don’t want to hear it. “ he almost covers his ears, but he gives her the benefit of the doubt. maybe she won’t keep talking about it. “ i can believe in a lot of things, sure, but i can’t do it. can’t do a haunted house, you know, a real one. halloween horror nights at orlando? i’m on it. not that one place around the corner where everyone has seem something in the broken window and all the kids go there as a right of passage. “
