The Problem With Me Is That I Really Like Recycling Plot Ideas. Usually Because I Like The Plots I Suggest,

The problem with me is that I really like recycling plot ideas. Usually because I like the plots I suggest, and I wanna play them out in a bunch of different ways with a bunch of different outcomes. Like canon characters, they’re different every time and so rich to explore!

Anonymously send me your favorite detail about how I play my character.

I will publish and respond OOC.

Ah, poor fucker. Camp rations are better, fresher, more varied fare than she’s used to—but then, most others would lose their minds on the hardtack diet she’d grown accustomed to. She could almost pity Astarion in some ways; hadn’t he said the first night how unused he was to the quiet of it all? Something about nightlife and the city? She could remember some things about when she’d been a spoilt city girl, about her first lonely night without a bed beneath her. It hadn’t been easy then, for a variety of reasons. For an entirely different variety of them, Astarion is no doubt having difficulty with it all.

Sick in the dead quiet of the night and trying to keep your business your own—Anne empathizes immediately, and probably would have left with an only slightly awkward good-bye and a warning about the damned deer…if only her pride didn’t have a hair trigger. She’d agreed to take orders from the party-voted leader, and while that sure as shit wasn’t her—the suspicious, violent, rage-fueled sailor, she didn’t blame them in the slightest—neither was it him.

Anne wasn’t about to take orders she hadn’t agreed to. It was a matter of pride. And besides, there was the buck to consider—and, more importantly, whatever had scared it. Two fare better than one in a fight.

“En’t the buck I’m worried about. Like ye said: something spooked him first.” Anne turns the dagger in her hand and starts a bit away from the tree, trying to peer through the shadows across from them. The forest is deeper in that direction, harder to see through. Is that where the buck came from? “Empty yer gut and I’ll help ye back to camp. Between the squid-men and the tadpoles, and now the damned goblins, we need to stick closer together. ‘Specially when unwell.” It’s impossible to say where the deer came from; the brush is undisturbed to her untrained eye. Fucking frustrating; it only serves to remind her of how out her depth she is here.

“…I’ll give her what privacy I can. Did ye see which way it came from? I’ll go have a look, give ye time to finish up.”

@estarion

Anne flit between dream and meditation fitfully, as she did more nights than not: even before the leech in her brain, peaceful sleep had eluded her grasp at every turn. Its gross, wiggling presence certainly didn’t make sleep any easier. Despite all of this, and every other warning sign in the night, it was base need and base need alone which finally dragged Anne back into the waking world. If she ignored the issue much longer, it was going to manifest, with or without her blessing.

Anne turned onto her side and fished for the dagger she kept under her pillow, only changing the unnatural brightness of the dying fire’s glow after she had it in hand. Between the fire and the glare of the full moon, she elected to do without another light, walking a short ways off into the woods. Wouldn’t do to attract unwanted animal visitors, after all, especially not to where they slept. She stopped nearby the short ditch instead, a ways off of where they made camp; it seemed a safe enough distance to her, though some might argue it was excessive.

Her hands stilled on the fastening of her trousers when a scuffle echoed up from the ditch. The nearby corpse of trees rattled with the sounds of it. The dagger was naked in her hand before Anne could blink, abandoning her chosen latrine plot to sneak up on the trees down the ditch instead. She slid down the short hill, staying low as she crept nearer the trees. When the young buck came galloping out, Anne dove to the side, barely missing being trampled by the wide-eyed beast. Even without knowing the habits of deer—and why would she, having been at sea all her life?—Anne could tell that whatever had scuffled with that deer was something mucking about with the natural order. In the dead of night like this, anything could be prowling about…but something big enough to tussle with a deer-sized opponent could certainly try tussling with an Anne-sized one, or some other in their company. Best to deal with this quickly, away from the others.

Anne picked her way through the corpse as carefully as possible, moonlight making shadows between the tree roots below and through its branches above. She stayed as close to the shadowed trunk as possible, hoping for the element of surprise—only to lose it in the next moment, too startled by what she finds on the other side of the tree to remember secrecy.

He doesn’t look well; he’s always been pale, mind, but he looks especially bloodless in the moonlight in a way the campfire prevents one from seeing. Or perhaps that’s not a trick of the light, and rather than it being moonlight robbing him of all color, it might be his health. He truly doesn’t look well, tired about the eyes in a strange sort of way Anne’s only seen once before, a very long time ago. She can’t quite place the look now, but she knows she’s seen it. They haven’t traveled together long, but even so, she’s moved to concern for him. It’s that damned look. It isn’t good news.

“You alright there, Astarion?”

« how many lives you plannin’ on ruinin’? »

Don’t Starve starters - part 2

Funny question. Anne lowers her gaze to the table to consider it, but lets herself think aloud. It doesn’t matter what Mary does or doesn’t hear from her anymore; that ship has long since sailed.

“Huh. I don’t plan on ruinin’ any lives other than my own—maybe an ex or two’s—but that don’t mean I won’t ruin others, I s’pose. I imagine ye’ve ruined a fair few more.”

Few were the women brave enough to brave these waters; fewer still were the women hard enough to brave them as outlaws. A marvel ashore and at sea, Anne was used to be gawked at. She was used to being used worse, too, but that is truly neither here nor there. A woman in the world of men, she was used to having to be three times the pirate for half the recognition; never in a million years would Anne have thought herself interesting to a god/dess, but here she was.

Given the choice, she would sooner have lived the rest of her life landlocked than risk this kind of attention. The stories are nothing if not clear about what happens when humanity and the preternatural collide.

It goes about as well as the howling wind and crashing waves of the storm go with the ship. That is to say: poorly. The ship is battered to and fro against increasingly large waves. Eventually water flies in over the railing, slapping them in the face, slicking the deck of the ship further. Whether for this or for something else, Anne eventually goes sailing over the railing of the deck herself, disappearing into the water with hardly a sound.

Anne closes her eyes against the sting of the salt water and waits for her life to flash past her eyes; it doesn’t. She waits for her lungs to cramp up and demand she try sucking in the water: they don’t. She waits to sink deeper into the water, or to start to rise in it: she doesn’t. One minute she’s awake. She closes her eyes to await her watery death. And then she opens them with a start and a gasp that starts her coughing, sopping wet and weak in the arms, cradled from behind by someone she doesn’t know but also doesn’t question: too many things are out of place. The sky is blue and cloudless, the sun cheery and bright. The water is neither dark nor churning, but calm and clear; the sand below is white, the beach pristine, the storm…nowhere in sight. Nor rhetorical ship. Only soft white beach and distant green hills.

There’s no doubt of what’s going on here in Anne’s mind. She’s dead. This is…some waiting place for drowned souls. A bank of the river Styx, a purgatory resembling paradise but never quite reaching it—right? It makes sense.

So she’s all the more surprised when she turns her head and speaks to the owner of the arms around her and her voice comes out weak and rough, burned by saltwater she doesn’t remember swallowing.

“M—may’s well drown me here. ‘M bound for Hell whether I would or no. In-between don’t server me.”

It never failed to amuse Amphitrite that humans tried so hard to conquer the sea. They voyaged out in their little boats and fought the waves to explore new lands, trade goods, or plunder the depths for the bounties it offered. She watched them sometimes, amused as a child might be observing ants going about their tiny little lives, but rarely did she take interest in individuals. If a single human on a ship disrespected her realm, she might drown the lot of them. Likewise, if a handful of humans in a fleet of ships pleased her enough, she might give them favourable conditions on their journey and see them safely to their destinations, or given them the edge in a battle with her waves.

All this to say her relationship with humans was ephemeral at the best of times, and often steered by her mood. So to focus on one human was certainly not something she was known to do, especially when said human did nothing to draw her attention other than exist. And yet, that's the situation the goddess finds herself in.

Pirates were often fun to observe, full of superstition and often holding respect for the seas they prowled, but they were always men. Most humans on the sea were men, but pirates especially, so to find a woman pirate... Well, Amphitrite had been quite interested. She'd watched this unusual mortal for some time, never really inteferering, but checking in from time-to-time to see how she fared among her rough male counterparts. The answer was; fairly well, or as well as a woman could do amongst the morally dubious ship of pirates. She considered once or twice on making contact, but she remained distant and impartial, just observing, never inteferering. Until, of course, the woman had ended up overboard with several others as a storm raged above.

The queen of the seas should've left her to her fate, but that interest - that draw - finally made her act directly. Enveloping the woman's body in her embrace, Amphitrite spirited her away from the churning waters to safety - an uninhabited island humans had yet to plunder and claim like they did all other land masses they discovered.

It's there in the shallows, holding the human from behind against her mermaidic form, that she commands the water to leave the woman's lungs, drawing it from her throat to allow her to suck in air once more.

"Breathe."

@neverhangd

Lore Dump Incoming

So! History lesson first. Port Royale—yeah, like the one from the PotC movies—was actually a bustling port city under the British Empire. Of particular importance to our story here is that Port Royale also had a very important role to play in the real history of the pirates of the Caribbean! As in, like…the real ones, not Disney’s fanfiction ones. (I love them but—come on!)

Port Royale served as judge, jury, executioner, and gravesite for many of the most famous pirates we know of. They would famously leave the pirates’ bodies out to rot on the gallows near the water, as a warning to all pirates as to the fate that awaited them there. Port Royale saw to the execution of “Calico” Jack Rackham, Mary* Read, Charles Vane, but famously not Anne Bonny. (IYKYK 😉)

*blah blah blah, I prefer to refer to them as Read or M. Read because they were at the least transmasc and at the most fully a transman, ask me about it some time

So now we’re getting into what’s only for this blog, thanks for reading along if you were reading for the fun history facts! You’re welcome to read the rest of this. Just please know, it’s all headcanon and bullshit from this paragraph forward.

Port Royale is one of two ports Anne, in any verse that’ll let me have it, will do her best to never visit. The other being a smaller port near Havana, Cuba, for more personal and complicated reasons that I won’t be getting into in this post. Anne’s oath against Port Royale is far less personal: she doesn’t usually willing go where pirates get murdered. Crazy, right?

What I like about this oath is the ways in which it really adds to the drama when you remember the capture of the Ranger in Negril, Jamaica, a.k.a. Anne Bonny and M. Read hold the deck of their ship alone. (History says there might have been one more guy with them holding the deck, but that he went down fast. It was actually his death that set off Read’s famous incident—if there’s a man among ye, ye’ll come up and fight like the man ye are to be!—but I digress.) When they are captured, all of them are taken to trial in Port Royale, and all of them are found guilty of the crime of piracy.

Anne and Read can’t ethically be hung at the moment, so for the next six to nine months they sit in jail in Port Royale. Jack and the rest of the gang are promptly hung to death, but not until Anne’s famous incident (if ye would have fought like a man, ye need not have been hang’d like a dog). Read and their child die of fever. Anne and her child disappear before she can be executed. Blah blah blah blah, you guys know the drill by now. (Anne Bonny was NEVERHANGD!)

Basically any time I get to torture her by sending her echoes of the future I’m in, but I wanna build up to that shit!