ficbit time!!!
BG3 brainrot incoming. What can I say, the sad arrogant wizard got to me. I will not apologize.
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“What in Mystra’s name were you thinking?”
He keeps his voice below a shout, barely, but Arden flinches as if he hadn’t. Still, their voice is level when they reply,
“What do you mean, ‘what was I thinking’? You were there, in my mind. You know. You saw.”
‘What I saw was a stubborn fool with more power than sense,’ Gale does not say. That would brand him the most egregious hypocrite on the Sword Coast, after all. Instead he exhales deliberately though his nose, searching for calm before he speaks again.
“Your mind is a maelstrom, Arden—” fuck, he can’t quite keep the awe from his voice “—and I’m no illithid master of the psionic arts. At least, not yet. So I ask again: what in the Hells were you thinking? Did nothing I said, no impression of the severity of the situation get through to you?”
“Of course it did!” They snap back, eyes flashing in a very literal sense. “The situation seemed very urgent, so I chose the most expedient solution available.”
“How does ‘pouring your entire life force and then some down a drain’ register to you as a solution at all? Let alone the most expedient!”
“This, coming from the man whose apparent life plan is to find the darkest corner of Faerun to detonate his mistake, rather than find a way to fix it. Your self-preservation record seems as black as mine, Gale of Waterdeep.”
Before Gale can sputter out a reply to that comment, they continue bitterly,
“There’s a hole in the Weave sitting in your chest, and I’m brim-full of the stuff that threads the loom.”
Lightning crackles between their fingers as if to illustrate.
“It’s just…so much. It stood to reason that enough of it could er—fill the hole, as it were.”
(There’s more to it than that; Gale’s no fool. The sorcerer’s hands have balled into fists, some deep-seated frustration robbing them of their usual eloquence. “Brim-full”. “So much”. If Gale had to guess—with that part of his mind not worried about the apocalypse in his chest—he’d conjecture that Arden suffers under a problem diametrically opposed to his own. He shelves the thought for later.)
Arden at least has the decency to look ashamed.
“Clearly, I’m outclassed—I’d never encountered Netherese magic before last night. I won’t— I won’t apologize for my actions, but I did not take you at your word and for that, I am sorry.”
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There's like, 2k in this doc so far and I'm not quite done with this piece. I'm thinking it'll be a series of oneshots(actually 2 series, companions) that vaguely follow my playthrough as Storm Sorcerer blast-first-questions-later Arden. We have a good time, and Arden's vowed to vaporize everyone who's ever hurt their friends, up to and including the gods themselves.