Manong Zevlor

Manong Zevlor

can we take a moment to just think about how incredibly scary magical healing is in-context?

You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.

You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.

You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.

You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?

Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog? 

Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.

Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.

But man.

That stuff is scary.

Actually. Y'all know those animal videos that are like My Dog Was Raised By Cats And Now He Purrs or This Duck Thinks He's A Dog or Mama Cat Raised Puppy Alongside Kittens?

That is. Probably what happens to Owlbear Cub.

Because he's not really being raised as an owlbear. He was, for a bit, but he didn't have a mom for very long. His primary role model now is Scratch, a goodboye. Owlbear Cub is, basically, being raised as a weird dog.

So it seems natural that he'd start copying Scratch's behaviours, to bond with his new family. And those would become habits, settled in beside his instinctive owlbear behaviours.

Scratch likes to play fetch? One day, it's Owlbear Cub who returns the ball to Shadowheart.

Scratch gets up to go lay his head on Astarion's chest when he starts to twitch and sob in his not-sleep? Owlbear Cub will go with him, and curl up there too.

Scratch enjoys chewing on Wyll's socks? Owlbear Cub...doesn't like chewing in general, really, but he does learn that if he steals companions' things and runs around the camp with them, they will chase him, and he thinks that's great fun! Gale's trousers, discarded on the floor of his tent. Astarion's shirt, snatched off the drying line. Minsc's underpants, at one point, which is still better than trying to eat Boo.

(They still haven't managed to stop him hunting small critters and dropping the bodies in people's laps, though. They're not sure where he got that one from, but Tav is sure he keeps doing it because Lae'zel and Astarion keep praising him for it. Their justifications are, respectively, "The creature is a drain on our resources; it is good that it is proving useful as a pest repellent," and, "Ooh, yay, fast food.")

Anyway, yeah. Little dude thinks he's a dog send tweet

calm down please