it’s a riswynn! i’m not fully happy with this but people seem to like it so here i am posting it anyway. i really like drawing characters with loads of hair so it was pretty fun!
When a magic storm is rolling in, and the magically attuned child is reacting badly, but the normal babysitter is busy making a shelter for said storm. (chibi bases are from Cosmind)
Riswynn didn't do half-bad as fill-in babysitter. Her story-teller background came in handy. (the snow-cones were from Gil)
(Read Ruby Makes Dave a Gift and Other Magical Tales first!)
Dave fumes. This gift exchange idea is fucking stupid, but of course Riswynn insisted on including everyone and pushed a piece of paper into his hand despite his protests, smiling her broadest, and now he's stuck with a note that says Stieletta.
He is not fucking giving her a thing. He is not. The woman is insufferable at best and outright sociopathic at worst. Let the cleric stand there with her puppy eyes looking disappointed. He is not giving Stieletta a present.
The next morning, he wakes up to what looks like a neatly folded purple cloak lying outside the entrance to his tent. On top of it lies an envelope with a rose seal.
His throat tightens. Did fucking--
He grabs the envelope and furiously tears it open, narrowing his eyes at the letter within. He stares at it for a while, glances towards Ruby (she's beaming at him from where she's braiding Riswynn's hair in front of their tent). He looks at the letter again.
Well, it's not from fucking Khyta.
He puts it down, wary, and picks up the cloak, looking at it critically. It's handmade, looks knitted, but the fabric is softer than it has any right to be. Fuck, how long did this take? He turns it around and sees the letters "FYG" written on the back in gold thread. The fuck does that stand for?
He remembers, and blinks, and squints at it, then at Ruby. She's grinning at him. What? He snorts out a disbelieving laugh before he can help himself. Ruby made this? Ruby?
Dave shakes his head, still smirking, and, after a moment, cleans the dirt off the cloak with a Prestidigitation and puts it inside his tent.
As he turns back around, he eyes Stieletta crossing the camp with an envelope and placing it among Mistil's things. He scowls again as he remembers his slip of paper and sits down to practice his Prestidigitation. Fox. Mantis. Cat. Anglerfish. After a minute he's creating and dismissing random lumps in rapid agitated succession. Fuck. Fucking Ruby and her stupid cloak.
He stops and rummages irritably through his bag, pulls out the ink, quill and parchment. Very quickly, he scribbles:
Fine, I'll do the fucking gift thing. Pretty sure nothing I've got would be up to your incomprehensible standards, but I'll clean your dress (or whatever the fuck you call that thing) sometime if you want. Magic, no fancy water and scented soap shit. Take it or leave it.
Dave
He folds the letter twice, roughly, then narrows his eyes towards Stieletta. He hesitates. Then he produces an Unseen Servant and makes it carry the letter over to her while he magics more trinkets into his hand.
This kind of should have been two parts, but oh well.
Dave is shaking as he ducks into the alley by the pub. He staggers, supporting himself against the wall with his hand, then heaves and retches, leaving a puddle of alcohol vomit on the street before he stumbles to the other side of the building, out of view, into another narrow, empty alley.
Sterling. Fucking Sterling.
"For what it's worth," says Khyta's voice in his head, "I do not condone the temple-burnings performed in my name."
"Fuck you," he says, and he means it more than ever before, but he still can't muster the force he wants to put into the words. They come out shaky and pathetic.
"I do not deny there are extremists among my followers. But it sounded like your friend was not one of them."
Dave's using every ounce of willpower he has to slow down his breathing, but his body refuses, hyperventilating uselessly by the wall like the air is running out of oxygen. "Yeah," he manages to spit out, his voice wavering. "Fat load of fucking good that did him. You could've fucking stopped me but you didn't care." More shivering, strained breaths. "You don't fucking care if your worshippers get killed. Lhira didn't fucking care either. Fucking--fucking gods."
Khyta is silent. Dave sets off walking aimlessly in a random direction as the alarm blares from the pub. He's swaying on his feet, Sterling's fucking wide-eyed frost-covered face staring at him any time his eyes close. Fucking Sterling, fucking Sterling, can't he leave him the fuck alone?
He's not sure why he's even trying to run. Run towards what? Continuing to serve the fucking monster in his head, the same one that inspired the temple-burners? It'd be better if they did arrest him, throw him in jail where she can't force him to do anything because there's nothing he can do.
And then they'll probably hang him for murder. Isn't it better that way, too, really?
He's stopped, swallowing the bile in his throat, knot in his stomach. He grits his teeth, closing his eyes; he sees Sterling again, dead-eyed and staring, and snaps them open to stare at the wall opposite him instead. He draws more shuddering breaths.
Why isn't Khyta forcing him to keep running, choking him into submission? Why the fuck is she silent?
"You don't truly wish to go to the gallows," she says.
And it's true. It's stupid, stupid and irrational when he's already jumped into a fucking lake, but somehow, right now, the thought of turning back and letting them arrest him is suffocating, paralyzing, terrifying.
He's not sure how, but that clears his head a little, allows him to take a few deep, slower breaths and keep going. He changes the color of his robe and adds a design to it with a couple of Prestidigitations, then starts to make his way back towards the inn. Get his things. And then... he's not sure what then. Still Sterling's glassy-eyed face assaults him any time he blinks.
He enters the Serpent's Wheel still shaking, breathing hard. As he steps through the door his traveling companions, sitting at one of the tables, turn around questioningly. He ignores them and heads straight for his room, hurriedly stuffs his belongings into his bag. Then he stands there for a second, in the empty room, breathing. He's still lightheaded and off-balance, his heart pounding hard in his chest. He leans against the wall for balance, then presses his forehead against the wood. It occurs to him he wants to just stay here, curl up on the bed and sleep off the drink and think in the morning.
He closes his eyes, and there's Sterling, falling, dead before he hits the floor. The image has lost some of its impact by sheer repetition, and he keeps his eyes closed, even as a flash of nausea makes him start to retch again. He punches the wall, then punches it again.
There's a knock on the door. "Dave? You okay? Need anything?" It sounds like the gnome they picked up in the forest.
He takes a deep breath and forcibly opens his eyes. He has to go. The city guards are probably on the way. He changes his robe again for good measure, then opens the door, ignoring the small crowd that's formed in front of it.
The drink's really caught up with him, though, and where earlier some fight-or-flight response kept him reasonably alert, it's started to run out and give way to exhaustion and dizziness. He's stumbling, still shivering, and almost falls by the bar. He grabs the counter and supports himself by it as he grimaces.
He already knows he's not going to make it out of town like this, but he still makes a last effort to head for the door. Immediately he's back at the Witch's Tombstone, heading out the door there, Sterling's dead body behind him, and again he stumbles. He supports himself on a table, sucking in a breath. The dwarf cleric is there, hand on his shoulder, offering help. He tries to muster the motivation to push her away and stand up again, but it's gone. The police are on their way, but even that has begun to seem dully inevitable.
Cold, empty dread congeals in his stomach. He closes his eyes again and takes a deep breath as Sterling stares at him. "Fuck off," he mutters as he straightens himself. The cleric backs off, her smile fading, and he returns to the bar and settles onto a barstool to wait.
"No!" Khyta hisses in his head. "Why!"
He ignores her, looking at the barkeep. "Get me a..." He pulls out his bag of money, realizes it won't make any difference, and just puts the whole thing on the counter. "...something strong."
The hunter elf wrinkles her nose as she sniffs the air around him. Dave turns towards the cleric, who's standing back, hesitating. "Did you know," he says, "Lhira can go fuck herself."
She blinks at him. "...What?"
"Fucking gods. Fuck all of them." An Unseen Servant places a glass of whisky in front of Dave, and he chugs it down. "Hey. Did you know I've got this fucking... this cursed necklace, and it's got a fucking goddess living in it." He pulls his robe apart to reveal the amulet as he speaks, his heart pounding, and he expects any second now the band is going to start to tighten, but it doesn't happen. "She's... she's making me fucking help her ascend back to godhood or whatever the fuck, and she can puppet me around, and if I try to take it off, or don't fucking bow to her every whim, she tries to fucking strangle me with it. Gods are fucking great, aren't they?" He feels Khyta's boiling rage, and the necklace tingles, but he's still in control of himself, still breathing. Almost like... like she can't do it now, for some reason. He looks down sharply in realization and motions to grab the necklace, but the moment his fingers touch it, a jolt of pain shoots through him, and he stifles a yell. "Fuck! See?"
"Fine," Khyta snarls. "I can only use my power so much in a given day, and controlling you at the library this morning took too much out of me. You will pay for this when I've recovered my strength tomorrow, mortal."
Dave shudders despite himself, glaring daggers at the cleric, who's staring at him, eyes wide, before taking a step closer. "No, don't... don't do that." He waves her away with an unsteady hand before taking a sip of the next glass of whisky placed in front of him. "Just go the fuck away and pretend you don't know me before the cops get here."
"Cops?" the cleric repeats, eyes wide.
The hunter elf rubs her temples. "Okay. Can you just start from the beginning?"
"I said go the fuck away," Dave hisses between clenched teeth.
And that's when the guard appears at the door. Dave turns back towards the bar and downs the rest of his drink, staring at the array of bottles behind the counter.
"Barkeep?" he hears the guard say. "Kendall Security Force, need to inspect the premises. We've got reports of a wizard who murdered a man in a pub up the road. Witnesses say he answered to the name of Dave. We're checking the lodging records of every place in town to catch this guy."
He can't see them, but he can hear the cleric give a little gasp. The barkeep glances at him for a fraction of a second, only to pull out a key and say, "I'm afraid we don't keep records by name, but here's our skeleton key. I can show you to each room."
What. She's covering for him? He blinks at the barkeep. Why?
"Follow my lead," the hunter elf hisses suddenly, sitting down beside him. "Hey, uh, Daniel! Good to see you here!"
And somehow, they all band together to help him. The hunter improvises an animated conversation and steals one of his drinks, until the barkeep's led the guard into the west wing. Then, suddenly, the inn is on fire. Dave has no idea what's going on anymore, his brain turned into uncomprehending sludge, but the hunter pulls him up and they run for it in the chaos. When he's stumbling trying to keep up, the clown picks him up and carries him.
"Why are you people fucking helping me?" he mutters, but he passes out before can hear an answer.
Another closer-to-canon episode, covering the journey to Kendall, but with a bit more traumatized Dave.
I have been having this problem where I write this instead of doing productive things, and that is definitely not stopping now because next episode is where they get to Kendall, which is where things started to get really fun in canon. Hint: that one part with the murder is (presumably) next episode god how am I going to get ANYTHING done ever again.
They head off the next morning. Dave's head is splitting open; he pulls his hood over his head to shield his eyes from the sun, avoids conversation as best he can as the merchants finish the preparations, then tries to sleep in the wagon as the caravan sets off, with little success. Eventually he gives up and takes to staring out the window, arms folded. As they pass the lake, the amulet seems to prickle at his neck again, and his stomach twists, but this time he probably is imagining it. He looks down as his heart pounds and keeps breathing. Nobody appears to notice.
They camp before entering the forest. The cleric and the redheaded elf are flirting relentlessly, and Dave grits his teeth, wishing they and everyone would just be quiet for the rest of the journey. The cleric's persistent, beaming smile irritates him every time he sees it out of the corner of his eye, scraping against his nerves like nails on a chalkboard. Fucking Lhira.
"Oh?" asks Khyta in his head. "What about Lhira?"
He ignores her and continues practicing his Prestidigitation by the campfire.
In the night, they're joined by a forest gnome who wants to see the bandits brought to justice. In the morning, a traveling circus rolls by and their dragonborn clown and his dog somehow end up on the caravan too, where the clown reveals he's a fighter. Dave stays sitting in a corner of the wagon, hating the interruptions, hating this bizarre assortment of people accumulating around him.
In the morning, there are strange tracks on the ground near the camp - shapeshifter tracks, deduces one of the elves. Suddenly, without warning, Khyta takes him over, and his voice comes out of his mouth, asking the merchants for a quill and parchment and saying he'll look into its origins at the Kendall library.
Everyone looks surprised to hear him speak. He's nauseous and tries to move, but he can't - he's a prisoner in his own body, locked into looking out through gold-filtered eyes, and as he tries to take a breath and realizes he can't, an all-too-familiar blind terror bubbles up in his chest. His heart beats furiously until Khyta inhales air into his lungs, and even after that, knowing she's not actually depriving him of oxygen, the urgent primal instinct that says he can't breathe because he can't control his lungs doesn't let up. The quill and parchment are handed to him, Khyta sketches the tracks onto it, and then at last the gold fades from his eyes and he's free again. He shudders, rolling up the scroll with the tracks and hurriedly stuffing it into his bag.
"It wouldn't be so bad if you didn't fly into a panic at the slightest provocation," Khyta says coldly.
"Fuck off," Dave snarls in response, before he realizes he said it out loud. He turns around; the cleric's looking at him, smiling curiously. He curses under his breath and returns to the wagon without words. The cleric, at least, doesn't comment.
In the afternoon they're attacked by a band of gnolls. Dave is on edge during the fight, but Khyta keeps her word and lets him handle it, and it goes all right; he gets away with a mild injury, and she never tries to take over again. Afterwards, he's breathing a little easier.
In the night, they're attacked again, by quasits, and the cleric nearly dies. She's quieter after that, huddling close to the redhead in the wagon, still halfheartedly smiling but obviously haunted as the elf quietly tries to comfort her, placing an arm around her, stroking her hair. Dave thought he'd prefer the silence, but somehow this is worse.
"What's your interest in this cleric?" asks Khyta, amused. "Do you like her? She is cute."
An intense wave of revulsion hits him out of nowhere. Stay the fuck away from her, he thinks before he's even processed exactly what he's reacting to.
"I only asked," she responds.
Whenever he manages to drift off to sleep on the last part of the journey to Kendall, he sees gold taking over his vision and starts awake with a jolt, shivering. Eventually, he stops trying.
This is pretty much just day one of the game, except Dave is significantly more Not Okay.
Dave asks around on all the job offers he can find until he finds this bodyguarding job for a caravan the woman says is headed to Kendall. As luck would have it, it'd probably have been the one he went for either way. A merchants' guild can offer more lucrative compensation than the sorts of people who normally ask for a wizard-for-hire - at least the ones who'd hire one off the street instead of from some guild or academy with a reputation.
He shows up at the assigned time and place and waits for the rest of the 'adventurers'. They're a colorful bunch, but he doesn't pay a lot of attention to the introductions. The amulet is well-hidden under his robe, but he's constantly aware of the weight of it around his neck, his pulse thumping against the band.
(He's already tried to destroy it, of course. Khyta stopped him as soon as he started mouthing a spell, closing his throat and freezing his hand, and calmly told him as he caught his breath that even if he did manage to destroy it, her final vengeance would turn him into dust. He snarled that that sounded just fine to him if it killed her too. For a moment, she was silent, dumbfounded; then, coldly, she said, "Then you leave me no choice but to make you truly regret trying, don't you?")
(He hasn't tried again since.)
"And what's your name, friend?" asks the impossibly cheery dwarf. He snaps back to the present, and as his brain catches up with him, he manages to recall one part of the introductions that clung somewhere: she said she was a cleric in the service of Lhira.
"Dave," he says. His mouth tastes of bile.
"Nice to meet you, Dave!" the cleric says, waving enthusiastically. He doesn't meet her eye.
"Well," says Hermia, the guild leader, clasping her hands, "just one small thing before we hire you on. I'm sure you'll understand, but we need to make sure you've got the skills to defend us if it comes to that."
She takes them to the riverside and tells them to fight each other. He doesn't really want to do this kind of bullshit right now, but when Khyta offers to do the fighting for him, he grits his teeth and Magic Missiles one of them at random, an elf with long, red hair and green eyes. The fight isn't very long, but despite his Shield attempt, another elf strikes him down with a shortsword, and he has to reluctantly accept healing from the cleric. He clutches his torn, bloodied robe close to keep the amulet hidden as she lays a firm hand on his shoulder and mutters a prayer to Lhira.
"Pathetic," Khyta says in his head, her voice icy. "Next time I will do the fighting."
"Hey, you okay?" the dwarf asks as his wounds begin to close. "You're shaking."
"Fine," he growls, and she backs off, giving him an encouraging smile. He fixes up the robe with Prestidigitation, crawls back to his feet and straightens it out.
"Why so gruff?" asks the red-haired elf, smiling. "We're traveling together; we might as well get along, no?"
"This is just a fucking job," he says, but his voice is cracked and trembling, and he hurriedly turns away to head back towards the market, his pulse pounding.
Here is a picture I did last night of my dwarven avenger Riswynn Steelbraid! She carries an executioner's axe as her weapon, that used to belong to her father.
Her mug doubles as her holy symbol. Every time she uses Radiant Vengeance and hits the mug is filled with a holy ale from her dwarven god Moradin which gives her 4 temp hit points in combat!
