pretty woman/there’s no need to feel down
pretty woman/pick yourself off the ground
young man/walkin down the street i said, young man/ the kind i like to meet
young man/walkin down the streeti said young man/ the kind i like to meet ^Haiku^bot^0.4. Sometimes I do stupid things (but I have improved with syllables!). Beep-boop!
statistics teacher: *showing us a graph of results of rolling a 10 sided die 100 times* student: is that even possible? a die with ten sides? statistics teacher: there are dice with ten sides, yes. me: theres dice with twenty sides too. and four, and twelve, and eight. friend sitting next to me: how do you??? even know that???????? me, who thinks im hot shit because i carry around a dungeon masters guide and ate dice for breakfast that morning:
It’s a little girl, and this baby is the fucking apple of Taako’s eye.
He showers her with affection and gifts. He gives her ridiculous nicknames. He pontificates over her bright and glorious future and coos about how smart she will be and how many esteemed magic and science awards she will one day win. Every time Angus comes over to visit, Taako just stands by the door making huffy noises and doing a grabby hands motion until Angus sighs and hands her over. He sits her on his lap and makes magic sparkles appear in front of her and gives her tastes of frosting off of the cake they’re having and basically does everything a baby’s favorite person in the world SHOULD do.
So Taako is eternally salty that Kravitz is the baby’s favorite and pretty much has been from day one.
This is so goddamn perfect.
Imagine her growing up knowing how to cook **everything** because she’s spent a significant portion of her formative years as a captive audience on Taako’s countertop. They go out to eat somewhere as a family, the waiter brings her a kid’s menu and receives ***the most blisteringly judgmental glare of their life***
Her room is full of wooden ducks of various shapes and sizes, painted ducks, ducky mobiles, but she’s not allowed near Magnus’ workshop after The Incident. Magnus is just indignant. (“Oh, but Taako gets to do HIS thing??! He’s got knives and fire and stuff flying through the air in there, but she teaches herself how to operate *one* power tool…!”)
She never seemed to wake them up crying as an infant, and Angus solved that mystery when he got up to check on her one night and found a skeletal Kravitz rocking her to sleep, singing thousand-year-old lullabies to her in their ergonomic sliding baby chair. Taako’s status as Favorite has been secretly nuked from the literal cradle.
Taako keeps pestering Angus and his SO to have “at LEAST one more!!” because “what if she gets lonely???” Angus navigates his mentor’s trauma by laying a hand on Taako’s shoulder and saying, “Look sir, I know you’ve been through a lot in the past with losing Miss Lup, and it’s obvious you’re pretty torn up about it. Are you feeling isolated or insecure at all? Do you want to go for a walk and maybe talk about some of these feelings you’re having-” by which time Taako is three planes away and never brings procreation up to Angus again. He’s learned far too well from Merle.
Lup takes to her adopted role as Fabulous and Powerful Great Aunt of Mystery like a fish to water. She’s constantly sweeping in and out of the girl’s life like Miss Frizzle or Mary Poppins possessed, taking her on adventures that Ango and his SO eventually have to insist that she schedule with them first to avoid overlapping with school projects, tests, or major life events. The child has gotten out of more than one dentist appointment this way.
Barry, meanwhile, is shit with kids and he knows it(, and kids know it). One of his few attempts to connect end with the great-niece narcing to Kravitz about the location of Barry’s shrunken head collection. He cannot more-desperately wish she were just a *little* more grown up, but when they can finally have a simple conversation together, he becomes the go-to adult for science fair projects. Angus takes slight offense that he can’t quite compete with a necromancer rocket scientist for dramatic flair at the tri-county Junior Scienceplosion and Physics-off
Mookie babysits, and she *loves* him, they have the most fun together and he’s always up to her energy level and ready to wrestle or catch fireflies or play flashlight-swords around the living room. He’s like, the only other *cool* kid she knows, and she becomes a staple at Merle’s Extreme Teen Adventures from an impossibly early age
She enters one of those kids’ cooking competitions eventually to flex her prowess, and win or lose her entire family is there to cheer her on. At multiple points, the gang has to physically intervene to keep Taako off the stage/away from the competing children. Her precociousness and ridiculous levels of self-confidence make her an audience darling, and she releases a cookbook shortly after.
On her next stay at Merlegaritaville she begs to be allowed to bus tables, only to be found an hour later behind the bar serving drinks, having kicked out the actual bartender in dissatisfaction. When patrons ask about the legality of a little girl serving up their whiskey sours, she just stares at them, hands on her hips, and says, “…I’m [X Name] Mcdonald, the world’s greatest chef. From TV.” When word reaches Taako, pride and joy overwhelm him and he sobs on Ren for a full half-hour before calling his lawyers.
Mini-Ango knows the lawsuit for what it is: a show of respect.
I love this so much.
Maybe one time Angus is helping the boner squad out trying to clear out a cult of followers of Orcus or Vecna or something, and one of these young cultists decides that a great way to get the Worlds Greatest Detective off their trail is to take his daughter for ransom. Maybe it’s been about a generation since Story and Song. Maybe they were too young to really comprehend the 7 Birds, have only heard the story in bits and pieces.
This is a task in an of itself, but eventually, two of the lower level cultists find the minute to snatch this, 11 or 12 year old girl from an ally, and are patting themselves on that back when they present her to the head lich in charge.
“She’s the McDonald child, Ma'am, we left a note, told ‘em to leave off until after the rituals’ complete or she’s dead,” says one of the cultists proudly.
“Idiots,” hisses the head lich.
Little (maybe??) Louise McDonald is scared. She’s in a dark cave standing in front of a lich surrounded by cultists and even though she was blindfolded on the way in she heard the tell-tale click clack of skeletons towards the entrance of the cave. She’s knows she’s a hostage and she knows she’s here to stop her family from interrupting whatever ritual these people are planning.
She also knows, without a doubt, that all 7 Birds plus probably Neverwinter’s entire police force have all already mobilized to find her.
And she could tell the lich that, say it in a way that barely betrays how scared she is in this moment.
But Kravitz is her favorite, so instead she says “Death will come for me,” (the best thing to be when you’re scared is melodramatic - Taako and Lup) and does what she always does when she’s scared, and starts humming the lullaby he used to sing to her when she was little, still sings to her when she wakes up from nightmares.
(The fact that this song is actually an ancient prayer to the Raven Queen, and so therefore immediately alerts Kravitz, Lup, and Barry to her location is purely coincidence. Kravitz has definitely not been trying to condition this into this child for the last 12 years, nope, definitely not)
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
