"Don't look up to me, I'm not as tall as you think//
You see I talk a big game but it's bull shit"
...Ok so apparently it's just never going to not be 1am when i think of this so we're posting it at 1am. Featuring 'Bitter Medicine' by the crane wives and Zori and Seremnis' no good very bad times in PoF and EoD respectively...
There's good few songs on each of their playlists that match them pretty well but this one just works so well as a back-and-forth duet...
(Don't you hate it when you and the bestie share an empathic link through your prophecy-assigned dragon daughter and have some similar traumas and can Feel all the emotional repression the other is doing but you can't call them out on it because you're doing the exact same thing and would have to call yourself out in the process and neither of you are ready to face all of that because Everyone Is Relying On You, including and especially them)
Some close-ups without text (and also some additional lore for bonus points) under the cut
Fun lore facts!
-Those two silly little animals are chibi-ish representations of Zori when fully consumed by the power of the idol of balthazar, and Seremnis' shroud form after this event in Cantha, respectively
-Zori looks Like That in the flashback bc she's soulbonded with her fire wyvern, Hendess; soulbonding with Hendess gives her a bit more fire resistance than she normally has, which somewhat helps her withstand the effects of the idol, so they were soulbound for the vast majority of PoF. Which. May or may not have had some consequences for Hendess... like she'll be fine but that probably Did Something, physically and magically and mentally
-Personal headcannon that ranger pets (especially in the magic bonded summoning/soulbeast situation Zori has w them) don't die when the ranger does, even if soulbonded, but a) if they're actively soulbonded at the time it does... affect them, in a hard to define way, and b) the Link between pets and ranger is immediately severed, but may also immediately re-connect in part to whomever the ranger was close to, just kind of enough to Know Where They Are. These connections are... mostly back with Zori, now that she's alive again, but all her pets definitely have Favorites now
-Zori burned to death in PoF. (Still working on the related fic,,)
-She was barely recognizeable, but intact enough to take onto the airship. She was dead for a couple days before coming back (a feat that caused a sort of... complete reset to her body, erasing scars and old wounds and probably doing something Funky with her effective age (bc if it didn't change anything she wouldn't have survived returning to that body at that point)
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-During the final confrontation with her, Ankka made a point to fire a particularly potent round of bullets at Seremnis specifically, that contained an especially corruptive void magic built to target necromantic magic specifically- which disrupted and corrupted Seremnis' ability to enter shroud, or even heal at all. Even when the corruption was reversed by a combination of Zori's fern hound's healing magic and Aurene's influence, her magic was changed permanently by it
-She was already working on speccing her magic more towards cold after PoF, but this event solidified her full transition to a Reaper. Before this event specifically, Seremnis was still just. Base necromancer
(-Ankka does have aetherblade related reasons to target rem specifically but i'm not done writing that fic either;;)
-They never actually, actively removed the bullet. They just kind of... assumed it would disappear on it's own because of how Seremnis' shroud works (it isn't very physically solid, more just a sort of gaseous, vague form made of magic. Or it was, at least).
It's still in there.
Seremnis will fake a lot of things to get the advantage, but puppydog eyes is not one of them. She is ''''above that''''. This means that if she's looking at someone/something like that it is 100% genuine and she will deny it forever
Zori, on the other hand, has weaponized Them Big Ol Eyes since she was a cub and will not stop. She would honestly much rather be seen as a Lil Guy(tm) at this point, if only because that carries so much less responsibility and also lets her get away with so much more than being commander ever will, even if she did genuinely resent it when she was younger. Now... well. She does, very occasionally, appreciate the credibility that 'commander' gives her, yeah, but. Not nearly enough to be worth it......
....Really though. What she much prefers doing (rather than pulling rank) if she Really wants to put someone in their place, is just... Doing the Research. Phlunt drives her up a wall, so she read all of his research papers and brings up their inaccuracies and biases at Every opportunity. She's probably done the same to other priory members on occasion.
The consortium ticked her off by trying to insinuate the priory (that she's? a part of????) didn't have the resources to help her with her excess magic issues (shadowstone sidequest go brr) and she decides that now, in what free time she has, that she Will be taking active offense to this. She hovers around recruitment locations and steals prospective employees to join the priory instead, their contract files keep getting lost, warehouses start on fire, they tried to digitize and keep having the type of system crashes Legends are made of, so those who are already employed can leave whenever they want, and it's all just subtle enough that they can't directly pin it on her or the priory, exactly, even if that's where the majority of their employees are leaving to, because the main recruiting tactic Zori keeps using is just going 'hey. do you want to have a job that. perhaps. you enjoy.'
The consortium has had to resort in recent years to Not treating it's employ like Actual Slaves in order to compete. They offer dental now because the other option is Not Having A Workforce.
.....Zori wasn't even around for the whole southsun thing. She genuinely doesn't know that Canach also has beef with them or she would have looped him in on it.
They just. Dissed the Priory to her face. And she took that personally.
ok so in the process of updating and pinning the Character Post(tm) i realized theres like. a billion old art i never posted. doing that
we got;
Soulbeast merging and pets lore (from an au where zori isnt the commander but other than the scar placement and the fact that commander zori has More pets than this the lore still stands)
Lasca ref I couldn't fit in the Character Post bc of the image limit
Zori in tha priory
Character expression practice sheet where you can watch in real time as i figure out how in heck to even draw seremnis (the solution is :3)
Seremnis as other things (minecraft origins furry and Dragon(tm))
Zori at her wedding not understanding how the boquet throwing thing is supposed to work and trying to support albas and traheane
tha siblingses (first art of lovi and varza, not 100% accurate to current designs for 'em anymore (mostly lovi's armor and weapons are off) but like. pretty close)
Ok i missed actual valentines bc i. slept through it. and am feeling good enough to actually go to work today so here's some sparknotes
I still find it incredibly funny that the expansion with fandom-decided 'most horny for the commander' characters is where I've decided Enkkioh is leading. My Most Aroace Character of all time. She's making normal rational decisions throughout SotO about the voice in her head. Meanwhile if Seremnis had been the wayfinder Peitha would have OHKO'd her instantaneously,
Seremnis' other weaknesses have historically included; centaurs, engineers (which could mean nothing), pirates (which could mean nothing), people who can pick her up like she weighs about as much as a grape (this is like half of tyria), people willing to treat her with basic care and decency (rem the bar is under the floorboards)
...granted if your personality is Rancid that does lose you all points and she does have like. Some other standards. But just not. a lot of them,
Zori generally smells like burnt or wet fur, but on occasion will smell like nice flowery soap bc someone (her wife) has dragged her into taking a bath. It should be noted that Zori does in fact love baths (warm water, the scent of flowers, fingers running through her fur). It's that she just also really likes being picked up and carried,,
Don’t give me too much credit for the background, I basically just drew over a screenshot I took in arborstone but like. It looks pretty and I’m proud of it so here she is! Zori! The first commander!
In deciding how the story goes between the three commanders (zori, seremnis and now enkkioh as of eod i decided) I thought it’d be neat to give Zori more of a reason to back off as commander for a bit, and.
Well now I’m on a page for traumatic brain injury.
So.
Count Zori in for never ever getting anywhere near an airship ever again.
...Might write some short things for this era later on, we’ll see. Sure is turning around in my brain with ever-increasing speeds
also referencey art under readmore bc yes
love that the medium armor canthan mask basically already has a cat face on it
