Tag: critical role

Indefinitely Postponed

Rating: E
Pairing: Perc’ahlia
Wordcount: 5995
A tale of two idiots who’d rather get naked than talk about their feelings. Until they do.
A smutty character study. Please be nice to a first time smut writer, and by nice I mean tell me how to do better. Politely.

Arbitrarily finished in time for @returnofismasm’s birthday. Go wish her a happy birthday, you nerds. Also special thanks to my editors @everknowing, @actualinspectorkemp and  @yashas-strong-arms. Love you all.

Part 1: The Door

 He’s shaking as he’s closing the door, even though she is the
one standing there without any clothes on. It’s almost enough to make
her feel bad. Almost. If he hadn’t come here to talk, the least they
could do is get something
out of the way.

 “Are you alright, dear?” She asks, inching closer, head cocked
in concern, and almost but not quite dropping the mocking tone to her
voice.

 “Yes,” he answers, as quickly as his eyes dart up and down her
naked form again. “Yes, quite.” Then he uncorks the bottle of what he’d
referred to as Courage and takes a long swig.

 Vex raises her eyebrows at him and crosses her arms, careful to
do it in a way that pushes up her tits for some totally accidental
cleavage.

 “Do you honestly need to be drunk for this?” Now her tone swings
back to sardonic and mocking. “I mean, by all means, do go on, this is
only the second least flattering thing that happened to me in the
bedroom. But once you accidentally call me by my brother’s name, I’ll
have to throw you out.”

 Making him choke on it was indeed an excellent way to get Percy
to put down the bottle, though it’s probably a shame about the
undoubtedly fancy liquor he’s coughing up. She graciously steps closer
and slaps his back to help with the process anyhow.

 “Great,” he manages to say between coughs, eyes transfixed on her collarbone for some reason. “Now that’s something for me to worry about.”

 She laughs at that. “I think you’ll do fine, dear,” Vex assures
him, cupping his cheek with the hand that had been slapping his back.
“And if all else fails, try using my full title, that should clear
things up. I mean, assuming you are… Uh… On board?”

 Now it’s his turn to laugh. Or at least chuckle under his
breath, while still avoiding looking at her eyes or anything beneath her
collarbone.

 “I came to your door, on the eve of battle, with a bag full of
alcohol,” Percy dryly sums up the evening’s proceedings so far. “I
thought we’d just sample some local spirits, and maybe after that we
could braid each other’s hair or play a round of chess. That is
absolutely all my plan entailed.”

 “Well then,” she snorts. “I’d say I’m so sorry for derailing
that, but, really, I’m not.” She pulls him closer by the collar of his
shirt (Percy wisely forwent putting on that coat for his, thank the
gods) and begins to press kisses up his jaw line. “Also,” she whispers
as she gets closer to his ear, and admires the goosebumps her tickling
breath sends down his neck. “I’ve grown rather tired of being all proper
and waiting for your move, really. You can’t just leave me hanging for
ages.” And she nibbles on his earlobe for good measure, making sure to
press her entire naked form against him as much as she can.

 “Four days,” he groans weakly, now finally touching her as well.
It’s just his hands on her waist, and probably only to steady himself
as her ministrations make his shivers return, but it’s a start. “It’s
only been four days since the woods.”

 Vex pulls away just enough to look at him, eyebrows raised mockingly.

 “Darling, if you seriously mean to tell me this thing here has
only been going on for four days, I actually might throw you out,” she
chides him. He laughs nervously.

 “Didn’t you give me the option of talking after?” Even his voice shakes at this point, his entire body taut with tension. “I choose that.”

 “Very well,” she says, putting on the lowest voice she can muster. “Then you better hope that Courage kicks in soon and start touching me.”

[Continue reading on AO3]

Hot take: If all it took for local government to allow anyone to kill Jester on sight was playing a prank on a noble, chances are her mom had good reasons to keep her locked away before then. Doesn’t make it any less tragic, but, you know. If that’s how people treat tieflings in Nikodramos, mommy had a point.

“I’m sure my German teacher is very proud right now!” – The German of Episode 8

[Episode 7] [The entire series]

There was finally a lot more German in this episode again! Or attempts
at German by people who weren’t thanking any teachers. Either or, I’ll take it!

So first off, Liam used the words Danke, Schwester, and Geburtstag. They
mean thanks, sister, and birthday. Thank you, or a more polite version, would
be Dankeschön. Thank you very much would be Vielen Dank. There’s other ways to
say it, but those are enough to get by. And even though it’s finally a
reasonably long word, Geburtstag just literally means day of birth.

Nott then gave us her best guess on what a clock would be called in
Zinnian. Caleb seemed unfamiliar with the concept, maybe because Liam forgot
about Percy spending his later years building a clock tower, much like he
forgot that Percy offered Vax a solution for the smelly armor way back in episode
58. Be that as it may, the German word for clock is Uhr. It’s actually shorter!
Watch, or more accurately wristwatch, would be Armbanduhr. Clock in a bracelet.
And while they tick in German, too, it is nothing like clocken ticken. Though
ticken is the word to tick.

Now for some fun plurals! For the syphilis shenanigans, Liam translated
friends as Freunds. Freund is in indeed the word for friends, but the plural is
Freunde. Freundin (sing.) and Freundinnen (plur.) if they’re all exclusively
female. Another one for the swear jar was when he said Arschloch again – and then
tried to plural it up with an s. There are a few German words that work like that,
but most German words add an -e or -en to build the plural. There’s a bunch of
different ways for different words. Anyways, the plural for Arschloch would be
Arschlöcher – it has an Umlaut AND a different kind of “ch”! Arschloch has the throaty
phlegm sound from hell, Arschlöcher has the hissy y-sound.

Man, I never would have thought this would come up so much. Also, kudos
to Liam for getting the sound right when he said Arschloch! I’m actually kinda
sure his German teacher would be very proud.

Other tidbits: Liam also demonstrated how to count to three correctly –
eins, zwei, drei – after getting a few numbers wrong last time. I didn’t pounce
on that because LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE already had. And occasionally it was hard
to tell whether he was saying good or gut, which mean the same, but the u-sound
in the German word gut is closer to the oo in mood. The t at the end is
somewhat soft, but not a d.

Almost done! Towards the end, Taliesin brought up German Christmas Markets,
which apparently have made it to the US now. I knew people went crazy over them
in the UK, but this was news to me. Basically, for the entire month of December
and sometimes way earlier to way later, most German centers of town, usually
the area around big plazas or close to train stations, turn into a jungle of
tiny wooden huts selling lots of Kitsch, Killefit and Tüdelkram (three somewhat
regional words for knick-knacks), sweets, the German equivalent of food truck
food, and yes, unholy amounts of mulled wine. My current town has like five of
those all close to my university and is it’s the only somewhat sizeable town in
the area, so it is FLOODED by drunk people by 11 AM in the morning for the entirety
of December. Not fun.

(Personally, I prefer cocoa with amaretto in it. Fun fact: I drank an
entire liter of that from one of these giant-ass Bavarian beer glasses during
the Vecna fight.)

And last but most certainly not least, due to the festive occasion,
allow me to demonstrate the directness of the German language in a timely
manner: The German word for baby is Säugling. It literally means little person
that nurses. It uses the same word as Säugetier, which is the word for mammals.
Very descriptive, but not very pretty at all, which is why most people just say
Baby nowadays. In addition, the actual act of breastfeeding is called stillen.
Which basically means to silence, and while I’m sure there’s some deeper meaning
or origin behind this word, like, most of the time you do indeed do this so the
baby will shut up, so yay, descriptive and to the point again!

Aaaand that’s it for this episode. If I missed anything or got something
seriously grossly wrong, feel free to point that out.

PS: Liam’s German teacher was apparently called Mr. di Angelo. I’m gonna
use this to tell you all to check out the Percy Jackson series and the follow
ups by Rick Riordan. Amazing books all of them, and one of the most amazing
characters in it has the same last name!

Be respectful!

There’s a REASON they waited this long to tell us this! Laura’s bodily functions are none of our business! If they want to talk about it, that’s great, but we are not entitled to any information about this at all, please keep that in mind!

And for god’s sake don’t make any of this about the show. Unless it’s knitting cute baby clothes that are Trinket themed. Now there’s an idea…

“We have four jokes in this campaign!” – The German of Episode 7

(Though they didn’t even roll that many nines this time around. Is the curse broken?)

[Episode 6] [Episode 5]

Again, not
a lot of German going on this episode! I think I heard Liam utter exactly three words of German this time, “Verdammt”,
“Entschuldigung” and “Acht.” Now “acht” is the German word for eight. If you’ve
followed along these posts, you might have seen my previous attempts to explain
“ch” sounds, and this one is another one of the throaty coughing noise from
hell that non-natives have trouble with. But Liam tried! That’s great!

“Entschuldigung”
means sorry, I’m sorry, or excuse me. Sometimes abbreviated to “’tschuldigung”
because it is a bit of a mouthful. For that same reason, many Germans,
especially younger ones, just say sorry at this point. With our dry, throaty r-sounds
that to this day have made it impossible for me to properly roll an r in any
language.

In a
previous episode, Sam tried saying the same, but said “entschuldigen” which is
actually also a real German word. It’s the infinitive of the verb to apologize.
Actually, had he said “Sie” after that, he’d have properly asked for forgiveness,
even. And politely at that.

Verdammt
means damn. Or damned, literally, but it is used like damn. Add that one to
your list of German curses! But since it’s an adjective, there’s declinations
happening when you use it to describe something and not just as a one-word
expletive. Not gonna go into that can of worms, though. Oh boy.

Shakäste might
be a good opportunity to talk about Umlaute (not Ümläuts, people), the funny
letters with dots on top of them which make a U look like a smiley face – Ü.
But these are a thing in a bunch of languages, and that particular name was
very clearly not inspired by anything German, and consequentially, the ä wasn’t
pronounced like it would be in German. Which is basically like you all pronounce
your regular a. Like in Vax.

And I’m
gonna close this out with a German joke or pun or whatever you’d like to call
it, that is totally educational, too! If… You remember all the German words I’m
gonna throw at you now.

So in the
beginning, I think Sam called the columns they saw stalactites, which made me
recall how my grandfather taught me how to differentiate between stalactites
and stalagmites.

So the
German words are Stalagmiten and Stalaktiten. Wow, I have never seen these
written out before and was about to make a joke about how it’s weird to have a
g for one and a c for the other, but hey, we do that, too. Okay, anyway.

The -miten of Stalagmites is pronounced like
the German word for rents (Mieten). And the rents are going up. Now more than
ever, but apparently already a thing 16 years ago. After that, the other
present family members hushed my grandfather, and me, being a wee little thing
of 8 years with little to no knowledge of the world or anything, took a few
years to figure out why.

The -titen
part of the other ones isn’t exactly pronounced like the German word for tits
(Titten), but close enough, apparently. And, well, tits sag. It appears my
family tried to shelter me from this realization, though I have no idea why. Or
maybe they didn’t want to hear their otherwise rather dignified and proper
father say the word tits at the dinner table. Or wanted to spare my grandmother
from having to hear it. Anyways!

With this
nifty German trick (we call them Eselsbrücke!), you too can remember that stalagmites
are the things rising up from the ground (like rents), and stalactites are
coming down from the ceiling (kind of like boobs, if you squint)! This… has
been a PSA? I guess?

PS: The real fun starts when you notice that the Dutch word for rents is “huren” which is the German word for whores. Makes for a fun experience when you’re in some fancy church in Amsterdam and notice that all the pews are whored out.

tricksterclericsarebombdiddly:

youngbloodbuzz:

so are we gonna talk about how jester is clearly the rich trust fund kid who set off on a backpacking roadtrip (with the added bonus of searching for her father)

Am I literally the only one who, when she recognised that ostentatious gnome, thought that ‘hey, maybe her mum has a lot of money because she’s a sex worker’? She’s from a place called the ‘menagerie coast’. Maybe I’m just looking into it too much but damn. It seemed like a big point in that direction..

Between this, the syphilis joke, and the lots of dicks Jester isn’t afraid of, someone else had that idea last week too.

I’m not entirely sold, yet. Like. The plot thickens, and the image of little Jester wreacking havoc like she does at a brothel is pretty amazing, but after rewatching it, it seems odd to me that a low-level political figure in the middle of the boonies would have travelled all the way across the mountains to the coast to… Visit a brothel? You’d think he could find that closer to home. Then again, it was a few years ago.

Jester also only asked about this after she heard that the gnome was involved with politics. So maybe whatever her mum’s running (and I’m not ruling out brothel yet, mind you) is very deeply into politics or smear money of whatever, which could be… Interesting.

(On the other hand, Jester could have just seen a lot of dicks because she likes to have sex with no payment involved. Or has siblings, or her mom has a bathhouse, or nude bathing is very in at that coast she’s from. Going from that to sex work is… A stretch, I still think. She’s also trained as a healer, another profession in which you see a lot of dicks and, especially in a port town, will heal those dicks of syphilis.)