crystal

[bouchonne]

FORM: Crystal
SENDER: Byerly
RECIPIENT: Everyone
NOTES: Let's play some dumb "would you rather"s, throw scenarios into the comments.

Would you rather walk on your tip-toes for the rest of your life, or have extraordinarily long earlobes?

[ You all know how this game works. Propose dumb scenarios. It's late, everyone's sleepless, let's do this. ]

Comments

[illithidnapped]

I already walk on my toes and have long ears...[well] all right, not the lobes specifically, but you catch my drift regardless.

[A beat, and then:]

Become the Divine or the next Black Fox?

[bouchonne]

Oh, definitely the next Black Fox. I need to wrap Bastien's heart in chains and make it mine forever.

Lose your voice or lose your good looks?

[illithidnapped]

Darling, you've already done that.

[Don't ask how he knows; he just does.]

But I don't blame you for wanting to play the dashing rogue, it's a remarkably enchanting line of work to involve oneself in....or so I hear.

2/2

[illithidnapped]

Anyway, my voice is the only natural answer. I realize it'd be a tragic loss, but at least if I'm to play the figurative Not-so-little Mermaid, I'll look gorgeous all the while.


....hopefully avoiding turning into seafoam at the end, I might add.

[bouchonne]

[ Hm? ]

What's that about a mermaid?

[illithidnapped]

Oh, it's an old—

[A pause.]

Actually, come to think of it, I don't quite know if it's true or not. [An inherent scholar of literature or aquatic life in Faerûn, Astarion quite unsurprisingly is not.] So.

Grain of salt, perhaps.

Still, these days, it's just an oddly romanticized story about a mermaid falling in love with an elven prince after rescuing the man from drowning. Merfolk, you see, are purely aquatic creatures: they can break the surface of the water to sunbathe or sing, but they can't survive on land for prolonged periods of time— they're not meant to stay, essentially.

Two entirely different worlds.

But, smitten as most young things are when they see a pair of exceedingly pretty eyes for all of a few minutes before darting back into the surf, she couldn't stand the thought of being apart. [And ridiculous as it seems, considering Astarion's own fondness for a world very far away from dark shadows filled with glittering claws and snapping fangs and the pressure point of someone else's voice ringing in his ears, he finds himself not entirely unmoved by the notion.] Slipping away in desperation to plea for aid from a sea witch of all things. Which, from what I hear, isn't all that different from the near-trickster rumors about certain Wild Mages in Thedas: the witch agreed, and gave the mermaid a potion that'd turn her entirely and utterly elven—

With the caveat that the Prince himself needed to love her back.

If he didn't, and chose someone else— anyone at all to marry in the ironclad ways of so many elves— the binding spell would unravel, and she'd turn into nothing but seafoam come the following dawn.

[His scoff is a wry, blackened thing.]

I take it you can guess already how things turn out.

[But for the sake of completion:] Payment for it was rendered by offering up her voice, completely. And just like that, she drank the potion, washed up naked on the shore, and found herself in possession of legs rather than a tail or fanning fins.

The Prince, pining for his rescuer who he only vaguely remembered in a dreamlike haze, paced the shoreline day in and day out, hoping to find her— and instead, stumbled across a poor, abandoned thing who couldn't speak. Couldn't tell him who she was, or just how much she'd sacrificed to stand at his side across sunlit sand.

Regardless, love finds a way, as they say. She wasn't wrong in the end; he fell for her charm just as readily as she fell for his open heart and warming kindness.

But a royalty is royalty, and a fish is— alas— just a fish.

[A practical story, Astarion supposes, if nothing else.]

He was betrothed shortly thereafter. Months or weeks later, I can't remember— an arranged marriage to another prince or princess, something like that. And she, inevitably, had his heart, but not his hand, as magic's specificity demanded.

So, in the end: just seafoam.

[bouchonne]

[ Dear Maker. What a horrible story. Byerly pulls a face, but says, lightly - ]

See, that's the problem with marriage.

[illithidnapped]

I'd argue that's the problem with trusting a so-called benevolent trickster.

[There's humor in his voice when he adds:]

But tell me; I'm curious, now.

[bouchonne]

The significance hung on it. It's just a contract, after all. For a curse to hinge on marriage, rather than love? Why, one might as well hang a curse on whether or not one is able to move a particular law through the Landsmeet.

[illithidnapped]

Maybe so.

But then there's also an argument to be made that signing one's name to a contract, particularly when so much is at stake, is in and of itself a gesture of love—

Or pushing a law through Landsmeet, too, I suppose.

[Ha ha, Astarion.]

Hm.

[Actually, that gives him yet another would-you-rather idea:]

Shun the wedding proposal and marry your mermaid, knowing all the trouble it'd cause, or let it return to the sea and spare your kingdom a great deal of strife?