Oh right, I can still post my stuff to Tumblr!
Instead of having a guild that I have to run, me and my two besties throw all our characters together into a mixing pot and run three-person events with a billion characters, playing several of our alts at a time. And it is called...TEAM SHENANIGANS.
The enormously talented @williamoakleaf put this together of the team and this isn’t even all of our alts it’s just as many as have gotten roped into ongoing plots so far oh god
SIRS ALSO APPEARING IN THIS FILM include @stormcurrent @barrenthebloodless
Anyway my Tief-y boy Finarus Ammon and his snusband (Snake Husband) and the Staff of the Python familiar have a rest-time. They’re husbands. Shaali is a Cleric of Eldath and Finarus is a Druid of the Circle of the fountain and a Warlock.
#rp #N360 from #Shaali motorsports can be ordered for road or track with custom turbo I-4. Weighs only 650 kg. About 10-15 to be built next year. #shaali #n360 #motortrend
Make-up Prompt #2 – Nov. 10th, 2014: In social interaction, everyone ends up wearing a mask of some type at some point. Describe one of the masks your character wears. Does he know why he wears it? Why does he do it in that situation?
((I think I did this just to make it more difficult on myself to track stories...))
Masks
Shashi reached out for the gauntlet-plated hands of the older Vindicator, smiling at him brightly. For once, he was smiling back.
"I have been thinking about a lot of things," he said to her with affection in his eyes. "I have been coming to terms with a lot of things. I think...that I can try to give you the things that you want and need."
Inside, a thrilling flutter settled into the pit of her stomach. It wasn't why she'd helped him try and sort through the problems he was having of course, but..."Do you really think so?" It was cautious, her eyes were on his, looking for any falter, any uncertainty.
"Yes," he said with little to no hesitation. "I do."
And yet...not quite half an hour later, as she was miles away in her head making plans for adventures and things she'd like to do, he was pulling away again. "I am very tired," he said to her with a withdrawn frown. "But I should be around more often..."
Shashi's defensive walls came up hard and immediately, brightly painted, sparkly things full of smiles and waved hands and reassurances. "It's fine!" She said with a too-wide smile. "Really! Some other time!"
Sometimes, if she sparkled and smiled hard enough, she could almost convince herself too.
Nili's eyes moved to the Mage Tower, huge and inescapable if you were standing outside the Blue Recluse which was...well. A thing she did. Around her, the air was abuzz with with comments from Gnomes, Elves and humans interspersed with words in her native language. It made her skin crawl like it always did.
"If we do not go back--"
"If it was me, I'd do to the Orcs what they did to you guys! Make a new Path of Glory!"
"Vengeance is not the way."
"I plan to smash a hundred Orc skulls for every one of us that they slaughtered."
Her arms were tightening around herself progressively, her shoulders were going hunched in, making herself smaller.
"I don't even see what the big deal is. We've beaten the Orcs back before, multiple times. This won't be any different."
It will. You don't even understand.
"I'm so excited for the adventure! I bet there's a lot of artifacts and treasure to be found!"
Looting the graves of my people. Profiting from our pain. Why doesn't anyone understand how different this is?
"If we do not go through, they may come here."
Can't someone else take care of it?
"Well, I'm going whether you are or not. I'm not letting any of that get through here. I'm protecting this world. You'll be fine, you'll see. You're strong."
I'm not strong at all. Why can't you see that?
"I will protect you. I will not let you come to harm."
Nothing could stop them then. Nothing can stop them now.
It wasn't until the voices went quiet, inside and out, that she realized that people were staring at her. She'd been asked a question. "Are you going to go through?" The kro'kul shaman asked her again.
Nili's shoulders straightened and rolled, her lip curled. "Whatever," she said with a sideways weave of her head, strapping on her casual demeanor like she snapped on her metal, bikini-like almost-pants. "Not like it matters anyway."
She walked off with a pointed sway to her hips, clenching her hands against the tremble in her fingers.
Shaali rarely allowed herself the luxury of vulnerability. An orderly world was a world easily controlled, and nothing was messier than attachments to other people.
At times, however, they grew unbidden, despite one's best efforts.
She had finally returned from the shore that in this timeline had never contained a house, a laboratory, an adolescent boy's room, a harpy book. No reservoir of mana potions and crystals, no carefully constructed security traps to keep wandering madmen out. No chains and worn mattress in the basement. No lush bear rug, no fireplace, no mirrors. No fire-warded perches and carefully stored motes of flame. No shattered bedside vase. All of that history, all of those people and those events that those things represented, gone. Had never existed.
When she found him in his room in his ancestral manor, the one that had existed in this timeline, Arcaerin was laying on the bed. He had quite obviously not been up in several days. The remains of conjured food were scattered around the bed and the floor. He was laying and staring at the mildly unsettling portrait he'd done of her rather than at her, the actual person who was standing at his bedside.
She settled next to him, attempting to be reassuring. Attempting to be soothing. No doubt thinking that he'd been abandoned had shaken him. But she hadn't...couldn't he see that? Why did that not change anything? Could he not see how difficult reaching out was for her?
There was something that she still needed to know, however, something that he'd refused to answer on the shoreline and had instead fled back to the safety of his home. "Do you anticipate that there will be a time when you can find it within yourself to take an interest in all of that? In the person who I was before I came here?"
Arcaerin was silent, he turned to stare at the portrait instead. "We'll see what we can work out," he said finally, morosely resigned and withdrawn.
She couldn't help but stare for a moment. Was he really still, after she nearly left...she blinked. Yes. Yes, he was.
The haughty tightness returned to her jaw, which came up with a narrowing of her eyes. The weight of the legacy of the Sin'dath family, the pressure and the expectations and the bloodline of the nobility straightened her back. She rose and smoothed the lines of her robes with a prim sniff.
"I see. Well. Should you need me, I will be in the room that you have been letting me use. For now."
With a prim, precise turn of her skirts she turned on her heel and left, leaving him to work out whatever it was that he was attempting to come to grips with, what it was that was so difficult about taking any sort of interest in her as a person rather than as a muse, a lovely warm body, an assistant, an object in his home's vast collection, on his own.
Mostly for my own reference but it might also be handy for people trying to figure out the tangle of interconnected stories for these characters...
Shashibala/Divya Stories (in chronological order)
Tales from a Life in Exile: How I Met Your Mother (many years ago)
Tales from a Life in Exile: A Wrinkle in the Plan/Reunion by thegoddamnhawkman (many years ago)
About a Girl (many years ago)
Do You Want to Build a Robot? (Many years ago to 6 years before Warlords of Draenor)
8 Simple Rules for Dating my Teenage Daughter/Payback by thegoddamnhawkman (two years before Warlords of Draenor)
First Day by thegoddamnhawkman (about a year before Warlords of Draenor)
Scorpion (eight months before Warlords of Draenor)
Question O'Clock (seven months before Warlords of Draenor)
I Know You/Night Watch by thegoddamnhawkman (six months before Warlords of Draenor)
Flower (three months before Warlords of Draenor)
Care Packages (two months before Warlords of Draenor)
How I Met Your Mother: Redux (one month before Warlords of Draenor)
Strange Things by thegoddamnhawkman (three weeks before Warlords of Draenor)
The Ties That Bind (three weeks before Warlords of Draenor)
A Good Man by thegoddamnhawkman (just before before Warlords of Draenor)
Awake by thegoddamnhawkman (one week before Warlords of Draenor)
Masks (just before Warlords of Draenor)
Shashibala story note: Stories set around her conception, birth and early childhood are labeled as "many years ago" due to problems with the Blizzard timeline created by the Warlords of Draenor expansion locking down the events of the fall of Shattrath to 35 years go. Because the timeline of events is much more condensed now than it was implied to be previously, I'm just kind of ignoring the fact that she would potentially still be a child now in the "clarified" timeline.
Jalanili Stories (in chronological order)
Blue as the Water (36-ish years ago)
Spider/Blue as the Sky/ (7 years before Warlords of Draenor)
It's a Crystal Thing/What the Fuck is a 'Crystal Thing' (4 months before Warlords of Draenor)
Prompt #6 – Oct. 15th, 2014: “I’m sorry I can’t give you better news.” Who said this? Why? What was the news?
Loss
The sun was setting over the ocean. It was deceptively peaceful over still waters, almost the entirety of Eversong had been spared from Deathwing's rage-filled tantrums that tore large swaths of the world asunder...
Almost.
"Commander Sunlance--" A man in red and gold said from the door, his tones low and respectful.
"I am not a Commander," Shaali's voice sliced through the air, sharp and hard. "I have not been a part of the Guard for some time."
The man seemed somewhat at a loss. "Lady Sunlance--"
Shaali sighed, her grip on the windowsill tightened. "Just tell me what you're here to tell me."
There was another pause as the man bowed. "A body was recovered on the shore."
Shaali tensed. Slowly she straightened, but did not turn to face him. "...I see. Were there any marks, any distinguishing characteristics?" The haughty tightness of her jaw had loosened, a hand went to her mouth and her eyes lost focus as she waited for him to explain.
"We...think it was a young man. His body was in the water for some time...short hair, some scarring, possibly afflicted by the secondary characteristics of mana addiction--"
Shaali's hand went to the windowsill again, now it was all that was holding her up. "He was Wretched, you mean."
The man winced slightly. "Somewhat. He--"
"His name is Asherion Sin'dath. I will be down in the morning to collect his remains and see to their burial," she said quickly. "He was the only one?"
"Yes. So far."
Shaali's back straightened, she glanced a few spare degrees in his direction. "You may go."
The man bowed, hesitating. "...I'm sorry I can't give you better news."
Shaali's eyes narrowed, there was a thin crackle of arcane energy in the air, an ozone-scented warning to those who might linger unnecessarily. "You may go."
As he finally left, the cold reality settled into the pit of her stomach. Her brother was dead, her husband still lost. Under such circumstances, one could forgive one for being overwhelmed by sickness and nausea...but perhaps what worried her most about the entire situation was that she wasn't.
Prompt #4 – Oct. 13th, 2014: Your character has gotten herself lost. Where is she? Why is she lost?
Illusion
Shaali wandered the vast, ornate corridors of the manor that she'd found herself staying in through a series of events that she wasn't certain that she quite understood yet herself...it was an enchanted place. Literally. The ancestral home of a mage as powerful as she was, perhaps...although he had the advantage of a place like this at his disposal, while she had little other than the clothes on her back. It was a distasteful turn of events.
She turned around a corner, and suddenly she was in a forest. Tch...she'd lost the thread again. She brought her arm around in a broad sweep, and arcane runes flared to life along the mossy ground, up the trees...they slowly faded into carpeted floors and pillar-set walls again. The issue wasn't dispelling the enchantments, the issue was knowing what to dispel. The energy shifted constantly, like a revolving puzzle-box where one never knew which side would turn up next...
For now, she was merely exploring. Laying down traces of pathways that she could follow later, after she got her bearings. What sorts of power did this house hold? What sorts of secrets did it keep? For lack of anything better to do, she found herself determined to find out.
Another corner rounded, and this time she was in the center of a cascading volcano. It was harder to wrangle the energy this time, fire was not her specialty. But at heart this too was an illusion, a trick laid out to waylay those who intended mischief. The fire turned to ice, and then to crackling lightning. She subdued each with quick, decisive strokes of her hand in the air and muttered words, conjuring counterspells.
The hallway came into view again. This was getting to be exhausting. Even just staying alert was wearing on her. It would, of course, be easier to simply ask her host if he could show her around. But then she wouldn't learn anything. It had been so long since she'd been properly challenged, and not just worn out by one project or another.
She came at last to the large ornate doors that lead to the deepest mysteries of the manor, the most protected and densely knotted spells locked away its secrets. She raised her hands, prepared to tangle tendrils of raw arcane power into the nigh impenetrable weave of energy that was holding the doors closed--
There was a lurch. The entire room was spinning around a gloved hand, pressed and splayed against the surface of the door. "Lady Sunlance," Arcaerin said with a slight smirk as the world began to reorder itself into bare stone walls and functional equipment, a research chamber.
Shaali pulled herself up with a haughty sniff like she hadn't just been caught with her proverbial hands in the cookie jar, tugging her sleeves down into place. "Mister Felo'belore. I had wondered where you'd gotten to."
"Mmmhm," he grinned, slightly. "Well. I was putting together a few theories on the flamecores that we constructed..."
Shaali followed, studious and attentive to their joined research. For now. Until she might have another opportunity to try her skill at the door again.
