day 6: my wrath did grow
@malevoversary day 6 giving me the perfect opportunity to grant eidolon abilities to our beloved little brain demon...
john can have a little dutiful retaliation... as a treat
[ read it on ao3 ]
~
John was furious.
How many fucking times would they have to run from some unexpected monster in the dark? How many fucking times would he have to idle uselessly in Arthur’s eyes and hand and toes while Arthur, fragile, mortal creature that he was, had to blindly run and hide and fight to keep them both alive?
He felt like the butt of some grand cosmic joke. He suspected Arthur felt much the same.
Every corner they turned, literally and metaphorically, there was some new horror waiting to ambush them or chase them or persistently hunt them.
He hated it.
He hated it.
It made him yearn to be the King again and he hated that, too.
It wasn’t that he wanted to go back to being cruel and malicious—he liked being his own person. He liked learning about what it means to be human and he loved bickering with Arthur and he wanted to experience more, more, more. But he hated being so… useless. Trapped. Just pair of stolen eyes and a voice locked in a cage. Five slender fingers and some wrist bones.
He didn’t want Arthur’s body anymore.
He just… wanted to be able to help.
“TO YOUR LEFT!”
He wanted to do more than shout directions he hoped would cut through Arthur’s panic.
“The door! Arthur, the door!”
“I’m fucking working on it, John!”
The heavy wooden door snapped closed mere moments before a heavy impact on the other side rattled it on its hinges and sent Arthur stumbling back a step.
“Can we lock it, or- or—”
“I’m looking, I—there! Propped against the wall to the left of the door. It looks like a thick wooden beam for blocking the door.”
It felt like it took ages for them to struggle the heavy beam into the brackets on either side of the door. (John was so fucking angry that the world wouldn’t let Arthur stop long enough to eat. Didn’t it understand he needed to recoup some strength to continue fighting every goddamn horror it wanted to throw at them??)
“Jesus Christ,” Arthur muttered, voice tight with terror. “Ok, that should… that should hold, right?”
The creature slammed against the door again. It shook, but not as violently with the beam in place. Whether or not either door or beam was rotten…
“At least for now,” John said.
Arthur ran a hand through his hair, dragging it up out of his eyes and off his forehead. “Right. Ok. So where are we now? Is there another way out?”
There was a pause as John looked around for the first time, seeing…
Well.
Shit.
“The room is small, carved of the same dark stone as the rest of this place, mostly empty save for a crumbling and rotted desk toward the back…” he trailed off slightly.
“… and?”
“And there’s no other exit.”
Two loud crashes echoed from the door.
John could hear Arthur seethe in the way he breathed and wished he had lungs to do the same. Both of them, trapped and seething like two furious peas in a pod.
“Fucking… typical,” Arthur snapped. He took a deep breath, perhaps trying to let go of his own fury to clear his head as he often did. John picked his fury up and carried it for him. “Right. Ok. Maybe we can use the desk as a weap—”
It might’ve been a good plan, had the door not burst into a shower of splinters under the weight of the creature’s last furious attack on it.
John shouted a warning, but even if Arthur had been able to react in time there was nowhere to go. The room was too small, littered with new tripping hazards, and the gnarled bulk of the creature blocked the doorway. Arthur stumbled backwards as it leapt forward, falling prone with a cry of pain as its weight slammed into him. His right arm swung up and over as he tried to roll to the left out from under it, to try to make a run for the door, for a weapon, for anything.
The scream that tore loose from Arthur’s throat when the creature’s jaws snapped shut on his forearm with a sickening crunch was another that would haunt John for months to come.
The jaws unlocked and Arthur cried out again as his arm dropped to his chest, blind to the creature rearing back above him, aiming for something more vital.
John no longer cared about the minute details.
He knew that Arthur was hurt.
He knew they were probably going to die here.
He knew that he was so.
fucking.
angry.
The creature’s jaws plummeted downward toward Arthur’s neck and John howled with all the rage and hatred and anger and frustration he’d been carrying for days and weeks and months of watching his friend suffer.
Time seemed to hang still, caught in the space between seconds, as reality drew taught and brittle, cracks splintering through it before something. snapped.
A beat, and John’s vision burned bright, technicolor afterimages of tendrils and claws and cosmic fire seared into his eyes.
A beat, and silence and stillness reigned.
A beat, and time stuttered back into motion.
Arthur’s breaths came in quick, ragged gasps, struggling through the pain and panic. John wanted to reassure him they were fine, but couldn’t get his own thoughts to stop spiraling long enough to form words.
What the fuck just happened??
Bad would be some kind of intervention from an entity they already knew (the list wasn’t long, and none of them were kind).
Worse would be some kind of intervention from a new player.
But…
“John!”
John blinked. That didn’t sound like the first time Arthur had said his name.
Oh.
And they’d moved. Arthur sat now, back pressed to the room’s far wall, arm held gingerly against his chest.
“I’m here. I… sorry.”
“Oh thank God,” Arthur said, in something just shy of a sob of relief. “I thought… I don’t know. I thought you were gone again. I don’t know where the creature went and—”
“It’s dead,” John interrupted. While the jury was still out on how exactly it had died, it was very much very dead. The room was a mess.
“… What? How??”
“I… think I killed it…?” He trailed off for a moment before barreling on, lest his own spiraling thoughts drag him away again. “When it bit you I… I don’t know. I hate seeing you get hurt and not being able to do anything to help and I… Jesus, Arthur, I don’t know. I lashed out?”
Arthur was quiet for a long moment. Long enough for John to start to feel uneasy. Would he hate him for it? Accuse him of trying to take over or revert back to the King? They were arguments that felt long since settled, but were things that had briefly occurred to John in his moments of spiraling.
“Jesus…” Another pause, another breath. “You’re sure it’s dead?”
Not… exactly what he’d been expecting, but ok. He didn’t sound upset. John could work with this.
“Very.”
Nervous laughter filled the space as Arthur struggled to his feet, John’s hand bracing him against the wall.
“I don’t think we can trust anything that seems like a boon right out, but… Jesus, John. Have you been able to do that the whole time?”
“No.” That much he was certain of. “I’m not sure how I did it this time, or if I’ll be able to do it again.”
“Right… well,” Arthur paused to readjust his arm, hissing in pain as he did so. “Maybe next time you can do it before the thing gets its teeth in me.”
John hummed thoughtfully, moving his own hand up to gently cradle Arthur’s broken and bleeding arm. “I’ll certainly try.”
14 notes
·
View notes
could i ask the reasoning behind your dungeons and dragons dislike? is it with the format of the game, the general playerbase, the material, or something else? i dont play and i always think im missing context when i read your posts, but appreciate them nonetheless
haha so for specific context it's probably important to disclosed my first ever job was teaching board games & i did that for ten summers from age 14-24ish. so i have a particular exposure to/long-running beef with certain parts/aspects of the games industries which are both serious & well informed but also kind of inside jokes to some degree with my fellow GMing friends.
Wizards of the Coast have so many problems i don't know where to start, but the recent licensing changes suck for all the poor folk who have cared enough to try and fix their crappy system, a lot of the lore is racist, and I'm friends with MTG fans but not qualified to start explaining what the fuck is up with all that. but even disergarding that, D&D itself has gone through so many evolutions thru its editions that even hardcore fans will disupte which ones are good and which ones are total shit. (the intersection of "catholic priests who are intense about church canon" and "3.5E diehards" is really funny for instance, in my overly specific experience.)
but honestly my beef is that in the wake of the truly absurd and evil fearmongering of the stanic panic, generations of nerds have clung to D&D as the end all be all of TTRPGs to the point that total newbies are told it's a good entry point for the medium which ???? it's not ????
the only reason D&D is a good "first ttrpg" is because it's the most likely be something people you know already know how to play. it is a self-sustaining monster that gobbles up impressionable people curious about this weird, kind of cool hobby. and watching people homebrew D&D to be the game they wish they were playing in total opposition to the core, fundamental design principles of the system because they have been told it can be anything they imagine.... even when the mechanics hinder that. D&D was a dungeon crawler that took over the world, it's a combat game, it can be PLAYED narratively-focused but if that's what you want, you can do so much better i prommy. i think modding games (video or ttrpg) can be its own joy, but D&D isn't even particularly friendly to it without turning it into a different thing! & at that point, you're better served tweaking something else!
it is no individual person's fault. but please for the love of god play ltierally any other game: you can give your money to a passionate indie creator instead of WOTC, it will cost you less, you can work much less hard to get the gameplay you crave, there's something for everyone, there are less complex-to-start/explain systems, etc. noooooooo don't play d&d your so sexy lol <3 and here's beau @beeelderly's RPG training wheels doc for ideas on where to start!
6 notes
·
View notes