Daily OpusEverything I write is freely rebloggable. Just keep the source and tell people about my books :D [Until I decide otherwise, my pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirself. As in "Ze went to the shops to get hir medication hirself". Thank you for the respect.]
I’m at the best scene in the entire campaign: the deal in Fantasy Costco. You know, THE deal. If Arms Outstretched is the most defining scene story-wise, the Fantasy Costco bit in LIIV would the most memorable comedic bit.
Merle says he’s still saving up for the Flaming Raging Poisoning Sword of Doom, setting up the entire scene. There is a moment where Griffin off-handedly mentions the Slicer of T'pire Weir Isles (pronounced like tupperware), which can be exchanged for someone’s most valuable item with a high enough persuasion roll.
Magnus takes a while deciding what he wants, giving everyone enough time to forget about both the Sword and the Slicer. Griffin brings out Garfield to get some more of Magnus’s… bodily materials, quietly setting up for the end of The Suffering Game, where he’d presumably die. Meanwhile, Justin has been silent this whole time, buying his time.
Then it’s Taako Time.
He keeps his poker voice while buying both the Slicer and – and Griffin himself brings up, which adds to the comedy of the scene as he fails to notice the trap he’s about to waltz into – Rickle Axage’s Pocket Guide to Adventuring, Third Edition, which gives the whoever reads it a temporary advantage on rolls of a single skill.
I can hear Justin keeping his voice deliberately monotone as he says Taako reads the guide for persuasion.
And then.
Taako: “I have one more transaction I need to conduct.
Garfield: “Okay.”
Taako: “Garfield.”
Garfield: “Yes?”
Taako: “I have something that I think is really gonna interest you.”
*beat*
Griffin McElroy, his very soul trembling with realization: “OH MY GOD.”
This scene cemented Taako as my favourite character in the campaign and TAZ as one of my favourite pieces of fictional media of all time. Nothing tops it. Justin is a genius.
Because I can’t stop watching it here’s an animation someone did of the scene
Anonymous asked, "For ficcy: I heard Stacy’s Mom at work today and it’s a fucking bop. Also made me think about Monty Pithon circus AU. What would happen if the twins (specifically Koko) found out another young circus member had a crush on Ming? Kinda like how Koko is thirsty for adult elves but it’s his mom."
[AN: Monty doesn’t need these levels of bullshit in his life. The poor snan(snake man) ]
Being a teenager is awkward for any species. Technically speaking, Elves can be teenagers twice. Once in their actual teens, and again between their seventies and nineties, when they were handed all the responsibilities and expectations of adults and none of the freedoms. For an Elf, though, the time between their twenties and their eighties was just… too many years of awkwardness. On top of the harrowing experience of gaining on adulthood but being prevented from it, there was also the ever-increasing risk of a First Luume.
Or, as the young and lovelorn viewed it, the promise of a First Luume.
There was a thriving market of tawdry books on the topic from the penny press. Young Elf of either or an indeterminate gender with an older, more experienced, and above all understanding mentor in the bedroom. Usually following chapters upon chapters of dreamy longing on behalf of the younger Elf.
The mentor’s point of view, it might be noted, was conspicuous by its absence.
Young Elves of a certain age bought them by the ton.
Taako, who discovered boys on the exact same day his sister did, had been buying, stealing, or borrowing books in that genre for more than a few decades. He had memorised the basic plot of all of them, but that never mattered. If he saw a new title with the plot of a young boy’s first time with an understanding older man, he would snatch it up quicker than you could say ‘impossible attraction’.
If he owned them, he read the covers off them. He read them to pieces. He daydreamed that plot over and over again. Always with himself in the arms of his biggest crush, Kustaad Trifel. He was vaguely aware that he was also the crush of Kustaad’s kid - Kri. What had almost skipped his notice was that Kri was starting to read Those kinds of books, too.
Kri had picked up a lot of habits from the Twins, up to and including loafing off on top of the caravan they slept in. Taako, coming up for air from a particularly nice climax in the penny novel he’d been reading, noticed that Kri was loafing off on the roof of the caravan he shared with his family. Kri also had a battered penny novel with a lurid cover, and the same dopey expression on his face that Koko had been wearing just a few moments before. He rolled over and looked towards the caravan Koko shared with his family -blood and and adopted alike- but not to the rooftop where Koko was lounging.
Kri’s gaze was fixed to the campsite below Koko’s little nest. A dreamy look that fixed solidly on… Koko’s adopted mother - La’Ming Ton. Currently in her riding leathers and scrubbing at a stubborn stain in the washtub.
What? Koko lined up the angles to make sure. Okay. Ran an Insight Check just to be sure. Okay, fine. Good news: Kri was over his crush on Koko. Bad news… he now had a crush on La’Ming.
“…gross,” Koko muttered. He’d have to talk to the kid about this nonsense. Sort him out. Set things… back to normalcy.
He got his chance after dinner, sitting with his ex-crushee as they both worked their way through Lulu’s five-alarm stew. “So… uh. Gettin’ over the heartbreak okay?”
“Sure. I know having a crush on you was… a little bit immature.”
Koko didn’t know whether to be offended or relieved. “Into the more… uh… mature scene, eh?”
“Yeah,” sighed Kri, looking dreamily in the direction of La’ming… currently in the world’s ugliest khaftan and arguing with Lulu about exactly how many chili peppers the average intelligent lifeform could safely withstand.
“Yeah… uh…” Koko tried to figure out how to do this. “So… uh… Romance books are fine ‘n’ all… but -uh- reality’s kind’a… not that.”
Kri was a picture of innocence. “Why not?”
“Uhm. Well. People who write books… uhm… they don’t write stuff that actually happens?”
“They’ve got real names, though,” said Kri, whose picture of innocence might have used a little bit more scrutiny, but Koko was otherwise distracted.
“Yeah, but… uhm. The good adults? The ones who actually care? Uh… They… they’re more likely to -uhm- Have you heard of the ‘off switch’?”
“Oh, but the really good ones would want to help in the best way.”
“Uuuhhh… Depends on how you define that… I’ve met the bad ones, and… yeah. It’s not as great as the books make it sound.”
“Aaah, but they sound so nice,” he said. “I wanna help her through her next Luume…”
“Yeeks. Nope. No. Don’t go there. She’s gonna fuckin’ adopt ya, pal. You know why?”
“You mean the other kind of adopt… as a bedmate. A lifelong bond…”
“She’s old enough to be your parent. She’s gonna adopt you as her kid because you are a kid. There’s no way a grown-ass adult is gonna want anyone like you because… they’re…” The ‘oh shit’ landed heavily on his heart and shattered it to bits. “…’cause they’re gonna feel like parents around us…” He wiped away the sting in his eyes. “It’s the bad ones who do the stuff in the books.”
All his daydreams came crashing down around him. He didn’t see much of the world outside his head from that moment on. He was peripherally aware of Lulu coming to comfort him, because she was the one person who could understand his pain before he could articulate it.
He certainly didn’t notice Monty, Kustaad, and a few other circus people slipping Kri some shiny new coins.
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Been rereading your works, again, cuz their so good. And that one with Taako and Angus running into homophobe made me think, how would Kravitz react to homophobia? He is like several millenia old, and ancient cultures are a bit hit or miss on the whole sexualities thing.
[AN: I’ve headcanon’d Krav as being 2K+ years old but I suppose it doesn’t matter for the narrative…]
It was a word, in many ways much like any other word. In many ways, it was not like any other word. It had once been a weapon. It had once been his death. His hand slipped from Taako’s as his beautiful Elf husband whirled and said, “You’re just jealous that I know I got real love. I didn’t have to knock mine up to force him to stay.”
If the woman he was with showed any sign that that was true, Kravitz wasn’t watching for it. He was watching the unthinking man’s fists. Fearful of a fist for just a handful of seconds.
It was only a handful of seconds, though, before he remembered what he was, now. He went Reaper and said, “Beware, mortal, where your path might lead you.”
Somewhere outside his tunneled vision, Taako said, “Hot…”
The man with the foul mouth retreated, and Kravitz reverted to his mortal form. He was shaking. He was breathing fast. His knees wanted to give out.
“You okay, babe?” Taako was close. Warm. Holding him up more than a little.
“Bad memories,” he managed. His eyes stung.
“Not gonna lie, that was bad ass,” said Taako. “There’s a tea place real close t’ here. I gotcha. I gotcha.”
Taako’s perfume helped ground him. As did warm, sweet tea and some sweet foods that couldn’t hold a candle to Taako’s usual offerings.
“Breathe deep, babe. We won. Remember? Married and all.”
Kravitz wiped his face. “There’s still so much hate, all over the world.”
“Yeah. I’m taking the victories we got.”
“We haven’t really won until all the hate is gone.”
Taako sipped the tea. It was all key lime gogurt to him and, therefore, he couldn’t criticise. “Gonna be a long time winning, then,” he mumbled.
Kravitz reached out for his free hand. Held it tight. “Long as we’re together? I feel victorious enough.”
Anonymous asked, "Can we get a story where non Baby!Angus Ango does something that crosses enough of a line that Taako and Kravitz have to punish him? (Like ground him out put him on pooper-scooper duty at Magnus')"
It was quite the crime scene. The miasma of burned sugar and almonds filled the house. Half a cake lay under a cover of preservation. Some blackened blobs of… something… lay on a baking tray. Bubbles were frozen in the blobs’ surface, and Kravitz noted with alarm that there was no parchment nor any baking paper between them and the tray, which meant that the tray was essentially ruined.
Opposite the cake and the tray was a spread of marzipan fondant, patterned with candy canes and snowflakes, as evidenced by the rolling pin with embossed shapes on it. There were holes cut in the layer, yuletide shapes of gingerbread men, snowmen, trees, and bells. There were those shapes of cookie cutters laying nearby, as well as a large spreader knife.
This was not a Taako experiment. This was… a series of bad assumptions.
The house was quiet, save for the pleading mewls of the household cats. It was past their dinnertime by nearly half an hour, so they were clearly starving to death. Wait. Not quite silent… there were two separate sets of sobbing.
One in Angus’ room, one in Taako’s.
Kids came first.
He found Angus trying to pack to run away from home. He had an umbrella, which he was clearly planning to use as a bindle stick, and a large scarf upon which he was laying out what he thought of as the essentials. Since he was actually only three and a half, those things were mostly toys and favourite books. And a family portrait.
“Packing to leave?” asked Kravitz.
“I have to,” sniffled Angus. “…’m evil now.”
Um. What? “Nobody turns evil overnight, kiddo… Tell you what… I’ll talk about this with Apa. I don’t know what went wrong,” he could guess, but… “Just like Caleb Cleveland, I need all the facts.”
Taako was in a depression ball inside one of his terrible Candlenights sweaters. The one with the googly-eyed reindeer on it, which he utterly despised.
“Dove? Is there anything you need?”
“…jar of super-crunchy peanut butter an’ a jar of fuckin’ peanuts.”
Aaah, crap. This was bad. He had to be stern with one of them, and Taako was obviously the toughest. “Dove… Taako. I need to know what the fuck happened here. At least come out enough to talk to me.”
He’d let his glamour go, and his makeup run, and his hair tangle. This… was fucking terrible.
“He thought… my marzipan fondant… was sugar cookies. And he tried t’ bake ‘em… while I was on the Stone to Marvellous Magic Magazine. I told him to wait… He didn’t wait… Do you know how long it takes to make marzipan from scratch, Krav? Do you know how long that takes?”
Kravitz could guess ‘more than a little while’ and moved on to the next obvious question. “Why were you making marzipan from scratch, love?”
“Fucking Suzan and her gods-damned neighbourhood Candlenights’ party. Like fuck am I using anything store bought for anything I bring there.” He shuddered and sobbed. “And worse, that baking tray is fucking ruined… It was one of our wedding gifts…”
Kravitz wrapped around him and let him cry it out. “So our boy made some bad choices… In his defence, we had been making sugar cookies all week…”
A shuddering breath in. “I know…”
“He probably thought he was trying to help.”
“I know…”
“So what’s the real trouble?”
“I dunno what t’ do about this,” Taako whimpered. “I might’a overreacted…”
“Angus did tell me he was evil now… and was trying to run away from home.”
“…oh gods…” Taako broke down in incoherent blubbering, but the gist of his teary babbling was that he never wanted any baby to feel unwanted. He never wanted to make Angus feel like he was hated, that life sucked. He was a bad parent and so on and so forth.
Kravitz carried Taako to Angus room so they could both bawl out their apologies to each other under his wing. In this case, literally under his wing… because the shelter of his wings hd always helped both husband and son feel safe.
They finally wound down to coherent words. “I’m sorry I didn’t wait. I wanted you to be proud I could do it all by myself.”
“I’m sorry I overreacted, baby. You’re not evil. And you’re not… anything else I said, I swear I don’t remember a lot of it, and I never meant a word. Apa got way too upset about a silly mistake.”
“All right. Now for a new house rule. You cause a mess, you at least try to fix it.”
“Guess that means tryin’a scrub burned marzipan off’a the baking tray,” mumbled Taako. “I’ll put all your stuff back to rights. Then we all learn Fabricate because fuck making marzipan from scratch after this meltdown.”
Taako could re-order Ango’s room on his own, but Angus would need supervision to at least try to get rid of burned marzipan. It was hard work, for sure, and Angus was not allowed to use Prestidigitation to clean it. He had to understand how much recovery was involved in a mistake like this one.
Angus managed to chip most of the bubbly blobs off and scour two burned marks off the surface before Taako declared, “Okay. That’s enough. You’re gonna wait when I tell ya from now, aren’t you, Ango?”
“…’essir.”
“M’kay. Lesson learned. Now for a fun one. Fabricate…”
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Anonymous asked, "Perhaps one night shortly after being adopted by Taako and Kravitz, Angus has a nightmare but doesn’t yet realize that he’s allowed to seek comfort from his parents."
[AN: Sorry for taking WAY too long to get to this. My life is chaos with a side-trip to bedlam]
It was dark, and Angus was scared. He could smell the reek of ammonia and felt a chill that should not have come with the heavy blankets weighing him down. He lay stock still, trying to make the shape of something familiar out of the shadows.
If he moved, if he made a sound, if he cried… he would be sent to the Quiet Room. Angus strained his ears for the faintest creak of bedsprings, tried to find shadows in the darkness that meant that one of the other boys was taking aim.
Carefully, he slid one hand up to grab his pillow. If he could get it before he heard the slide of pyjama pants, he could curl up completely under the shield of its bulk and let the stream pool around him. He’d get in trouble for the pool unless he stayed under the pillow until dawn.
He hated that. He hated hardly being able to breathe for the stench and for the claustrophobic space under the pillow and the faint mildew stink of the pillow stuffing. It always felt like he couldn’t breathe.
Angus barely started to bring his feet up when a weight dropped on the bed. There was nothing like it in his memory, and he remembered a lot of horrible things. He screamed without thinking about it. Cringed and held his breath as the tears began to sting. He didn’t want to go into the Quiet Room! He hadn’t done anything wrong!
Instead of the ungentle footfalls of Nurse Stronginthearm, he heard a pattering of footfalls and a snap as lights came on. This was… this was not the orphanage. The weight on his bed was one of the household cats, currently kneading the comforter and glaring at Angus as if he was the asshole.
There was a blur in the doorway. The colours were all wrong for the orphanage. Angus tightened up in his huddle and at least tried to keep it to a whimper.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” singsonged the blur with golden hair. “You got your glasses right here, sweetie. Here they are…” Dusky brown hands offered his familiar frames.
Angus’ hand shook as he took them, and he couldn’t stop breathing hard as the blur resolved into one of his adopted dads. Mr Taako.
“…’m sorry sir…”
“It’s okay, pumpkin, nightmares in a new place are natural. You want me to sit with you?”
The cat was still treadling the comforter. It was now concentrating on its biscuits and not getting involved in the drama. Another one jumped up and the two felines wrestled with each other in a non-serious manner.
“…’es please,” Angus managed.
Taako sat on the bed, offering his presence as comfort. “I lost count of the nightmares I had whenever I was in a new place,” he said. “It was always the same kind’a dream. I was trapped in the worst place I’d ever been in before.”
Oh. Oh that was… way too close to the bone. He said, “You too?”
“Absolutely. Kind’a a handful of assholes after Saint Vingo’s, I gotta tell ya. After I lived through that one, everywhere else was a field of daisies.” He reached to touch Angus’ hair, but stopped when Angus flinched away. His hand hovered in the air for a couple of seconds but lit once more in his lap. “You were back in the bad place again, weren’t’cha?”
Angus nodded.
“Okay. Okay. Did you ever get into trouble for snapping your fingers?”
“…dunno how to do that, sir…”
Mr Taako showed him, demonstrating and always asking to touch before he did so. He remembered so many bad places. He knew what they could do to a kid. He knew that healing wasn’t easy. He knew that even the smallest things could cause abject terror at a moment’s notice.
“One snap is a little sound,” said Mr Taako. “They can’t track one snap. And it kind’a puts off any targeters, y’know. They think you got something on ‘em.” Mr Taako had a very knowing smirk, “I can teach you a li’l bit of my tricks, too. Give you an edge.”
One of the cats investigated Angus’ lap. It was warm and soft and friendly. The world seemed safer already, especially after he learned how to snap the lights on at a moment’s notice. Most especially after he learned that the Casa de Taako cats were the friendliest creatures in Faerun.
[TAZ Prompts Remaining: 1]
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