In peacetime, the ruler grows their hair long. In war, they cut it short.
A ruler with long hair is held in great esteem, for defending the peace.
The traditional declaration of war is for the ruler to send their cut-off hair to the enemy ruler. The statement carries greater weight the longer the hair: to receive long hair says that you have angered one who is slow to anger, that you have incurred a wrath not easily woken.
Violent war-mongering leader frantically and aggressively tries to shave just a LITTLE hair off the top of their head into an envelope.
A faraway king receives a heavy wooden crate filled with a coil of the longest hair he has ever seen.
A despised ruler finds hundreds of pounds of cut-off ponytails at her castle entrance, each one belonging to her own people.
A young emperor refuses to cut their hair and insists on trying to make peace with invaders. The enemy leader steps forward, draws their blade, and cuts the emperor’s hair themselves.
Hellen cuts her hair off and throws it in Cathy’s face at her son’s soccer scrimmage.
This is literally the most bomb-ass D&D story I’ve ever read in my life oh my god.
Holy shit ._.
Some RP sessions have better stories than actual fiction. I mean, goddamn.
For those having trouble reading the text:
We had a campaign in D&D where we assembled a steampunk-ish time machine. After many sessions travelling through time, uncovering mysteries and learning harsh lessons about changing history, we had to stop a time-travelling cult from destroying the gods, and therefore the world. We failed.
Our machine crashed, we were stranded earlier than we had ever been able to travel. We found the Gods, but only a few of them were present – it was as if some had never existed. Then we realised – we had to become those Gods. Our party was entirely divine (Cleric, Paladin, Avenger, Invoker), and each of us was a worshipper of a god who had been unmade – and we were the only people in existence with enough knowledge of the forgotten deities to assume their roles.
But two of the players were worshippers of Io (in his twin forms of Tiamat and Bahamut, who would of course form later after Io’s ‘death’), and only one could become Io. The other would have to be the un-created Asmodeus.
So the most just, honourable and dedicated Lawful Good paladin I’ve ever seen roleplayed became the god of tyranny and evil. If he hadn’t, the gods would never have defeated the primordials, and the world would never have been completed.
In our setting, Asmodeus is every bit the epitome of evil you would expect him to be. Nobody but the gods who abide his presence know him as otherwise. He adheres to his role because he knows he has to – and that in doing so, the world can exist. He can never tell anyone his duty, and no-one who knows can ever discuss it.
In the farthest recesses of the Nine Hells, in a chamber sealed tighter than any other in existence is a pocketwatch of finest gnome craft with a photo of his family in it – his wife, son, and little baby girl.
They were killed by an orc army marching under the orders and banner of Asmodeus. Their deaths are what drove him to become an adventurer.
maryse: so alec’s gay now?
isabelle: yeah he turned all the paperwork in last week and his acceptance letter came this morning, it was all pretty sudden
How about a slightly different take on a soulmate AU? Like
yes, when you’re united with your soulmate you see the world in colour instead
of in black and white and shades of grey, but not until you realise they’re your soulmate. For some
people it’s mundane, and a slow dawning as you fall in love with the person you’ll
want to be with forever (however you choose to define soulmates in this
context) and individual shades start to filter in. Or sometimes it’s a massive
bang of colour all at once, here you
are, the other shoe hath dropped, good fucking luck my guy.
Like with zimbits, there’s the scene in the kitchen where
Bitty throws flour at Jack, and as the dust clears and Jack opens one of his
eyes – one of his arctic blue, stunningly beautiful eyes – Bitty has a dawning
realisation of “Oh fuck I have fallen for a straight boy.” And it’s not just
blues as it gets worse, as he starts to see more colours. He sees the blues in
the sky, and then the faint purple at sunset, and then the purple in a
blueberry pie, which transitions into deep reds, then the bright red of their
Samwell jerseys, and by the time Bitty is crying in Jack’s/Chowder’s room
singing Halo, he knows that his favourite hoodie is the same colour as Jack’s
eyes, and he knows that he’ll always see the world in colour but he’ll always
be alone because he fell for a straight boy.
But Jack, talking to his father, realises something’s not
quite right, and at first, as he’s heading back to the Haus unsure of what he’s
doing, he sees the black of his graduation robes, but doesn’t realise it. Then the
green of the grass kicks in and he almost stops running because it’s such a
shocking colour and he wants to spend his time drinking it in, and then he gets
to the Haus and sees the red in the “Haus sweet haus” sign Bitty had put up,
and by the time he’s reached Chowder’s room, he sees the teal, and the brown of
the floor and the blue of Bitty’s hoodie, the gold of his hair, and the dark
chocolate of his eyes, and the flush he’s got from crying over Jack. And after
they’ve kissed, he can see the pink in Bitty’s face that’s there for a whole
different reason.
With Shitty and Lardo it happens slowly for both of them. It
happens because they’re lounging in Lardo’s studio together, and Lardo is painting,
and she’s got pretty good at mixing her grey and black paints that claim to be
cerulean or carnelian or ochre on the bottle, and she’s painting something that
her colour-seeing art professor says looks beautiful. Shitty, being Shitty has
been smoking and is lazing about without the majority of his clothes, and Lardo
thinks she sort of loves him for how easy he is to be around. And Shitty
suggests that she paint him, because what is his bare chest if not a canvas,
and Lardo gets a brush dipped in something that calls itself magenta and drags
a great line of – of bright paint across Shitty’s chest. It turns out to be the
same colour as the flowers on the rhododendron outside the art building, and
they both see it. But they don’t talk about it because sometimes one person
will make you see some colours, but another will bring out the full spectrum,
and that day in the studio, the only colour Lardo or Shitty can see is the
magenta.
The next time she paints him in glow in the dark body paint,
and the fluorescent orange shows up in a smooth line across his forehead, and
Lardo just barely resists the urge to get every colour from her palette to
paint Shitty with in the hope that all the colours will appear. It’s gold next,
the gold of the glitter Shitty wanted to wear to Winter Screw, the gold of
Bitty’s hair. She gets purple, blue, green the first time they hook up, but no
true red until the first time Shitty mumbles, half asleep into her neck, that
he loves her.
Ransom and Holster are easy. Ransom had thought, for just a
second, once when he was sixteen, that he’d seen a real colour, but it had just
been a truly spectacular green in real life that had translated to an
especially bright grey that had almost looked like colour. And then on his
first day at Samwell University, his first day at hockey practice, a guy with
sick flow says “We should call you Ransom and Holster. Sick name for a pair of
d-men” and after they enthuse for just a second, they fist bump, and in a rush,
the entire rink floods into screaming technicolour. It’s rare for all the
colours to come at once, for both people in a pair, but it does.
Kent Parson sees blue. He’s seen blue since he was sixteen
years old and he first met Jack Zimmermann at the rink. He sees the ice blue
that fills Jack’s eyes, and he saw the blue of their uniforms. And during the
overdose, the worst night of a lot of people’s lives – Parse’s included – the blue
fades. He still sees it just a little better than he does other colours, but
seeing the world in shades of blue, grey, black, and white isn’t exactly a warm
and comforting picture. He eventually gets therapy and tries to make his peace
with that, and assumes that because he fucked it all up with Jack, he’s never
gonna fix it entirely and this cold blue-grey hellscape is going to be he life,
here in the Vegas desert, for the rest of his life.
But.
But Jordan Troy gets traded from the Schooners, bringing
with him a Seattle-granted passion for craft beer that makes all of Parse’s “you’re
a pretentious asshole” spidey-senses tingle, but they become friends anyway,
and then Troy becomes his A, and then one night while they’re out on the strip
and Troy is trying to explain to Parse’s “uncultured” palate how to tell the
difference between an oatmeal and a chocolate and a porter without the aid of colouration,
Parse realises he can see just the faintest differences in the beer that hadn’t
been there before, and all of the samplers that Troy had ordered from them
range in colour from amber to blond to deep, deep brown the same colour as Troy’s
eyes, because Parse can see them. And it just about kills him when Troy says,
casually, “the blond should be easy to pick out since it’s the same colour as
your hair” and Parse realises that Troy’s been able to see him in colour for
most of the time they’ve known each other. And Troy admits to having had a stupid
crush on him back when he still played for the Schooners, that only got worse
when he got traded, and eventually bloomed into a full rainbow of colour.
Adulthood is literally just a cycle of spending every waking minute wishing you could go to bed until it’s actually time for bed and then it becomes the absolute LAST thing you want to do because going to bed is the thing that makes tomorrow happen and then you have to do it all over again
