#interesting!!!!

[pwurrz]

wrio when he’s by himself: *beats the shit out of a cult leader and rewrites his own rules so he’s allowed to do so*

wrio when he’s with neuvillette: “alright, alright. i was only joking about beating that guy up. i’ll just bring him to you :)”

[croszukis]

some nick/cole/kirby juice from the home opener vs the leafs

[ace-and-the-rpg-horrors]

i don't pay attention to JP Sekai for two secs and Shousuke's got a boyfriend

[clown-eating-pig]

The concept that Jon and Martin released the fears into all other universes under the assumption that those universes didn’t have The Horrors, but in actuality the horrors in those other dimensions just weren’t the capital “F” Fears is sooooo fun and interesting to me.

[landonorissian]

to be fair lando not wanting to play with others only really became a thing when he got back to gaming in the later part of 2024 (may or may not have anything to do with the bigger shit show of the season for him). Like even with Bankai, who used to be a default part of their tarkov squad, and even before others started playing so it wasn't about the squad being too big. there were several weeks toward the end of the season where mf/ln would do duos and bankai would ask in max's chat if he should join and max would either ignore it or he would ask lando who would audibly be less than enthusiastic about it (though in fairness bk seems to be very good about it now bc he said on stream recently about how "the international superstar sometimes just wants to play with his best friend [and that's understandable]"). He'll play with Connor now (except when connor is playing with bankai) so it may be a thing about keeping his circle tight to real life friends.

ah yes the classic tight circle of lando, his best friend, and a crowd of several thousand people watching and babbling in chat 😂 i'm grateful he still plays while max is streaming and lets us hear him sometimes, i don't take that for granted at all. i hope he's able to do it and enjoys it this upcoming year too

[moonclanmadness]

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm

[b-a-pigeon]

Nanowrimo Update - November 13 Word Count: 2257 / 24285 (total)

First: I am so close to the halfway point but I am running out of steam and have other things to do :') Tomorrow, though!

Second: I have (mostly) recovered from my various ills and am trying to put my life back together... but here is a pretty simple and messy synopsis of the story so far!

***

So: Ara is a vampire; his memory has been tampered with through some mysterious magical process that has yet to be diagnosed. Most wizards assume his amnesia results from a curse gone terribly wrong, but the magic itself shuts out any attempts to pry into it, so all they can do is theorize aimlessly.

After spending unknown centuries searching for a cure, or at least an answer, Ara gives up. He passes a few decades living and working at a remote monastery, receiving snippets of magical information and news about the outside world from the travelers who pass through, otherwise isolated.

Our story opens when Ara decides to set out again, having forgotten the hopelessness that led him to hide in the first place. He hops trains across a now-unfamiliar landscape, transformed by a period of rapid political and technological change. The world he finds is inconsistent with the shadowy memories he retains; it's more connected than ever (trade, airships, steam trains) but also more divided (policed borders, wealth gaps), and he finds it all very alienating and overwhelming.

Still, he keeps pushing forward. His destination is the house of a wizard who holds his collection of old journals for safekeeping, its address scrawled at the front of his new journal so he wouldn't forget. But police and bureaucracy trap him in the border city-state of Avei, and he's forced to wait.

He only has one contact in the city, a stranger who turns out to be a scholar in the academic study of magic (who we'll call N). N is so fascinated by Ara's case that he agrees to house and study him while Ara figures out his way forward—and offers him work on the side. This is, obviously, a pretty sweet deal for Ara, who accepts.

It's supposed to be a temporary measure, but Ara feels increasingly trapped there. He waits for the local government to find him a way across the border, but they keep demanding bribes as they drag their feet; N seems to have outsourced all of his study of Ara's case to his conman of a wizard, L, who seems disinterested in anything but making money.

With time, Ara ends up increasingly drawn into the competing schemes and loyalties of N's employees as they all try to use him as a pawn to manipulate each other. He has his own mystery to solve—but there's a conspiracy brewing right in front of him, and he's not sure he ever had the choice not to get involved.

***

...and, so far, that's it! The last two paragraphs hint at what's to come, but otherwise this is just where I'm at now, optimistically 1/3 of the way through this story. There's just so much background info I want to explain that I've made it really hard to succinctly summarize this book, lol.

All I'll say about the rest is that everyone is hiding something, but some of those things are less dramatic than assumed; (obviously) there is a common thread connecting all these mysteries; and everyone in this book is either a vampire of unknown age, history, and motivation, or a wizard... and Ara helpfully shares in one of the first pages that you cannot trust chance or coincidence when it comes to wizards :)