My, My! What A Beautiful, Brave, Cutthroat Of A Woman! >:D

My, my! What a beautiful, brave, cutthroat of a woman! >:D

S'pose I could say the same to ye. What ever will two beautiful, brave cutthroat women do left to their own, I wonder?

unfortunately for you, my love language is gift-giving. thank you for letting me shout about anne! psd is from calisources!

“Dumb shite,” Anne scoffs before lapsing back into silence. She’s no doctor, untrained in wound care outside of tourniquets and splints and the like, but if Dena’s talking, she’s at least probably not going to pass out. …right? The only thing Anne knows for sure is that sleeping might become dead if she can’t find Dena help first.

She knows better than to offer help, same as knows better than to think Dena doesn’t need it. They’re alike in that respect, unwilling to seek charity even when it might save their sorry arses to try.

Sweat runs in rivulets down the side of Anne’s face before she forces them to take a pause, wiping ineffectually at it before grunting and nudging Dena, trying to get her to lean on the wall for a moment. Free from the excess weight, Anne’s quick to shrug out of her jacket and tie her hair back. She even takes the jacket and ties it around the injury to the best of her ability before slinging Dena’s arm back over her shoulders.

“Hup and at ‘em—there’s a girl. Ye better start workin on yer alibi for when we get t’help. ‘Less ye’ve decided ye want t’catch a charge, of course, in which case at least wait for me to make my exit before selling our hides up the river.”

She just needs to get home, and once she does, she can stitch herself up like a champ and sleep off whatever insanity she'd been through. Small problem with the plan: the little lady may have lost a little more blood than she initially anticipated. Maybe, just maybe, she isn't entirely safe to get herself home. She isn't going to ask for help, though. That's stupid.

She's just taking a little break on her journey that's taking way too long. It will all be fine.

The voice is enough to perk her back up, ocean eyes lifting to blink once, twice. Lighter without all the blood, huh? Dena snorts, because drifting in and out of consciousness or not, a good joke is a good joke. "I can probably still walk, you know." She points out. "You don't have to help me, lighter or not. Besides, it's not that much blood. I was just taking a break on my way to patch it up."

Please ignore the idiot. She doesn't know how to ask for help nor accept it.

She guesses it could be worse. She could be getting dragged to a stranger by a stranger to patch her up. She isn't the most pleasant thing on earth when her side isn't seeping. She's downright insufferable when she's in any sort of pain. No one wanted that. A bottle of whiskey and a steady hand were just as good, and she'd already be dead if it were anything vital. What's one more scar to add to her collection?

@neverhangd said: ❛ thought you’d be lighter without all that blood. ❜

More about Anne in BG3/D&D, because I’m incorrigible and also would love to feature these things:

Anne still has to be cajoled into drinking enough to get drunk; while less of a teetotaler than in some other verses, she simply doesn’t drink much, if at all.

She doesn’t sing very prettily, but when drunk, Anne will crow and clap along to just about any song that starts. She may even bring out the spoons, if you’re particularly unlucky.

Since landlubbers are generally less likely to judge her for the habit, Anne does eventually start reading without hiding first. It takes a long time, though: old habits die hard, and they die all the harder when they were secret old habits.

Once she gets comfortable with the party, Anne sits around the fire spinning tales that rival the best of Wyll’s monster stories. Sometimes she tells of her own exploits, her friends’, her lovers’, but often time its tales of supernatural dread and horror that Anne shares.

Having spent most of her adult life at sea, Anne knows very little of “landbound” customs unless they appear in her books. She misses being at sea quite a bit and can’t seem to get a handle on some landbound traditions.

For the same reason as listed above, Anne knows very little about magic, magical creatures, monsters, etc.. She distrusts these things and prefers not to mess with them as often as possible.

…my girl is very stubborn, though, and so will often act as an expert on monsters she knows the lore of. Oftentimes she’ll even dismiss them as being unreal.

Secretly, Anne worries she’s more burden than boon to the party. Past abuse has taught her she’s “only tolerable when (she’s) helpful,” and a lot of the helpful functions she used to perform on the Ranger aren’t so helpful here. (Examples: Anne would help set the course on ship, sometimes pointing out shortcuts and hidey holes when she knows of them, but on land she’s just as dependent on the map as the rest of them. Anne helped with keeping track of supplies and ordering rations on the ship, but on land everyone seems to be doing that.) The only crossover point she can find is that she’s good in combat, and this has made her paranoid that the party will vote to kick her out. A more emotionally intelligent person might recognize this as projection and catastrophizing, probably born from a fear that her old crew planned to maroon her, but good luck trying to get her to understand that.

Anne was very quickly taken off of cooking detail when the others learned her full cooking portfolio consisted of tea, coffee, and boiled potatoes.

Despite this, Anne will often offer to help prep. She’s known to sit up under a tree away from everyone else with two buckets and the produce sack. (One bucket for peels and cores and one for the meat of the thing.) Anne avoids the company of the others because peeling reminds her of being back in the galley, and she’s been known then and now to sing sea shanties to herself—a fate she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy.

Anne truly has no plans and no purpose on being kidnapped from her ship. Baldur’s Gate is only her destination because it’s the others’, her only goal for a whole being to remove the tadpole. She eventually makes the decision to recapture glory on her own terms, but initially, Anne is treading water and pretending she isn’t.

“Untwist yer knickers, Shady One,” Anne replies almost immediately. Gods above—is this what dealing with her is like? Unpleasant and mean without a real reason? …what a stupid fucking question. Of course this what dealing with her is like, right down to the dismissive assumptions. Anne isn’t used to dealing with someone like herself; James and Jack were loud, brash arseholes, and Read was a serious, quiet shadow at her shoulder. She doesn’t miss James, or Jack, or any other shit-dick excuse for a sailor on the Ranger save Read. They were always a good sort. “Didn’t say I would stop ye. Hells, didn’t say I wouldn’t help ye!” She also didn’t say she would, but that’s another matter. “Just lookin t’understand. Ain’t met something I’d risk my everything for like that.”

She thought she had, twice.

Both times she’d been sorely mistaken.

Anne rolls her eyes when she’s accused of jabbering. Leaves crunch underfoot and a breeze stirs the trees, but without the sound of canvas snapping against it, it just doesn’t seem like real wind. These others, except the elf, they all seem so…unbothered by it all. Like they’ve spent their whole lives traversing woods and caves and what all else, likes midges and flies and mosquitoes and goblins are just run of the mill nuisances one must suffer to continue living. She’d known the sea was a world apart from any other, but the unexpected loneliness of that truth keeps driving Anne to do stupid shite she wouldn’t normally.

Like all the talking. She usually enjoys being reticent, closed off, let alone—but maybe Read’s broken something in her, because now being totally alone feels…lonely. She has to choose between horrible hyper-awareness of the leech in her skull, being alone with her thoughts and unoccupied hands, or making an arse of herself to distract from it all. It’s an easy choice to make, despite looking so out of character for her in the face of it.

Besides, she isn’t jabbering. The Blade fella jabbers. A never-ending source of sound, that one! Always on about his exploits or trying to woo one of the women in the party. He reminds her of Jack in that way, and she can’t trust herself to go ply him for talk. Might end up with her blade in his belly out of reflex.

Anne scoffs at the idea of rotting her gut the moment they make port. “Is that yer best? ‘Sailors are drunkards, har-har’? Pull yer head outta yer arse.”

Truthfully, Baldur’s Gate is only her destination because that’s the heading her companions have taken. Anne isn’t from these parts, wasn’t even before she turned pirate; she’d been born and partly raised in a different country of Toril altogether, and hadn’t spent more than a few years in Faerûn before marrying James and running off. She has no home here, no home anywhere as of ten minutes prior to ending up kidnapped by the squids. The question of her fate is an uneasy one. The uncertainty and the terror of it threaten to choke her: frankly, if it weren’t for the whole becoming one after part, letting the little bugger in her brain finish its bidding might just be a mercy for her. No more living in lesser men’s shadows.

“I done more drinking at camp with you lot than I done in all my life, gods’ honest truth.” There was always something to be done on the ship, after all; knots to check, tighten, tie, supplies to be accounted for, training to be had, navigation, mending, polishing, cleaning, and in the few stolen moments she’d allow for it, Anne would bury herself in more shameful pursuits. Read aside, the things she misses most about the Ranger already are the books she’d so unexpectedly left behind. Jack would toss them overboard if he found them, and only him and Read actually know that Anne can read at all. To be a woman at sea is already to be considered cursed, and each thing Anne is after that is another curse compounded upon her: not just a woman, but a learned woman. Not just a learned woman, but in fact the captain’s whore wife. And more! The result of an illicit inter-class affair, red-haired and left-handed, a murderer, a law clerk—all of it too much! All of it that could be hidden away kept just so. She forced herself to use her right hand until that became an easy, unconscious ruse. She’s disguised herself as a boy and, when that was discovered, quit her place as a law clerk. She left her father’s name so it would never be tied to her and feigned ignorance in the face of arithmetic and literature. The first murder was swept under the rug, the rest justified as battle.

And now she’s hiding one more thing. In a world where it isn’t as bad to be a woman, or even a learned woman, it’s considerably worse to be a pirate.

Anne stretches her arms over her head and tries to relieve the pain in her back. These fucking packs are awful. (That’s another thing; no need to carry all of your effects with you at sea.) In all the ways that Shadowheart can sense the sea on Anne, Anne is all but insensible to the Sharran influences on Shadowheart. Like her father before her, she isn’t sure if she does or even can worship a god, though also like him and her mother she knows them all to be real. Her mother instilled a fear of the gods into Anne before her passing that her father only plastered over with his indifference to them. Though unaccustomed to the company of other women, Anne is confident that the things she does sense in Shadowheart are more telling, anyway. Aside from being a fellow utter twat, Shadowheart’s hiding a hurt in plain sight. The strange black mark on her hand she sometimes rubs as if it pains her when she thinks no one is watching. Anne doesn’t need to know its story to recognize that it’s nothing, in the same sense that the scar on Anne’s own back is nothing. She knows better than to pry uninvited into nothing.

“S’pose I’ll figure out my fate when it arrives.” Anything’s better than what she’d had, and even has now. She pretends she doesn’t feel the tadpole shift, but her small flinch at the sensation says otherwise. It’s less subtle than the waver in Shadowheart’s voice, making it harder to ignore. “’Less it gets figured out for me before then.”

@neverhangd sent: “So…let me get this straight. Ye’ve got a magical doohickey in yer possession of foreign origin and unknown purpose, and it just so happens t’be keeping the tentacles at bay…and ye still plan t’hand it o’er when we get t’the fucking Gate? Does that apply even if the wriggler’s still present for ye?” She isn’t judgmental of the religious aspects of the cleric’s plans—that’d make her one hell of a hypocrite, her own sordid past considered—family’s family, whether that family’s a torture cult or a band of thieves—but the lack of self-preservation continues to astonish her. Especially seeing as Shadowheart’s yet to present such an astonishing lack of care for the self, both in battle and in camp.

The plan was intended to be simple. Horrendously dangerous and almost certainly liable to result in her own death, but simple.

Steal Retrieve the prism, keep it safe and out of unsafe hands, and deliver it personally to the control of her sacred enclave. This changed the moment she discovered its true capabilities. The moment she learned it was all that stood between them and their agonizing mutation. Not just a permanent end, but a resurrection into something monstrous and unfathomable. A mindflayer.

She still intends to carry out her mission in its entirety. Failure is not an option she is willing to consider, but she's not immune to doubt. To the grim reality of what obedience means for both her and her fellow companions. To choose between thoroughbred faith, and the atrocious violation of body and mind to live onward as illithid, well, such a decision is beyond what she's prepared to handle.

Still, if there's anything Shadowheart can rely on, it's faking it. And she will fake it until she makes it, or, until it breaks her.

"There is no outcome that ends in me forfeiting my duties. I will deliver the artifact, with or without help, and will face whatever consequences as they come." It's nearly imperceptible, almost invisible, but her voice wavers. She is scared. "… if you intend to stop me, I won't show mercy. Anyone who stands against me will be brought to their knees, through force, if necessary." A well-placed, violent threat might add a bit of credence, and she was eager to prove herself worthy of the responsibility placed upon her shoulders. Not that she needed to prove anything to anyone, of course.

The group treks onward, carving a route through a mountainous forest. Sun speckled polka dots filter through the canopy, still hours away from dusk. The day had been long, and it only promised more to come. Their journey's been anything but peaceful, and more than anything, Shadowheart just wanted to go home.

"We're a long way from the Gate, though. Might want to conserve your strength and focus on the more pressing matters at hand. There's a decent chance we won't even make it that far, especially with you jabbering my ear off." A rather abrupt plea to end the conversation. Shadowheart isn't chatty even in her sunniest of dispositions, and much less so when she feels cornered and probed.

"... and what of your fate? I can only imagine you'll find the nearest leaking tap and drown your gullet in pints of ale." Or rum. Or mead. Or whatever it is that seafarers seek to fill their barrels. That's what Anne is, no? Either a caster of nets, or an explorer of tides, or a castaway sailor seeking glory. Her story is sealed away, hidden behind chapters unopened, perhaps permanently. Shadowheart has pieced together a small bit of Anne's heritage, based on the odd off-hand comment or educated observation of the redhead's wardrobe. She smelled of the sea, as well. Whiffs of salt breezed water and a sun-kissed complexion. All the trademarks of a seasoned mariner.

Baldur's Gate is a port teeming with much of the same breed, and the Sharran would recognize their stench a mile away.

Ships, please! 🥰⛵️🏴‍☠️

Based off my blog, what other characters could you see me Roleplay as?