Andraste

... and now for something I did not dig up off my hard drive, for a change. Written for the Small Fandoms Drabblethon. (If that sounds cool to you, you have until the end of February to write small fandom drabbles!)

Shade (100 words) by Andraste
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dragon Age: Absolution (Cartoon)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Rezaren Ammosine, Original Character
Additional Tags: Drabble

Summary: The other side of the Veil is not what it expected.

Lost Horizons (4755 words) by Andraste
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Dagna/Lace Harding
Characters: Dagna (Dragon Age), Lace Harding
Summary:

Dagna and Harding have different ways of investigating the world, but some Inquisition missions require more than one skill set.

(Looking at my last few stories, I think my 'Dragon Age' brand - insofar as I have one - is 'two characters who never really met in canon have UST.' These two were so much fun to write together!)

Today I finished running my latest character through Trespasser, which means that I have created THIRTY DRAGON AGE PROTAGONISTS. That is really a lot. (I mean, one largely exists as a theoretical possibility in the Keep and another as a Keep worldstate and a cameo in Inquisition. But they're baked into a worldstate that includes a real Inquisitor, so I count them anyway.)

So far I have made fifteen humans, six dwarves, six elves and three qunari. Eleven warriors, eight mages, nine rogues. Sixteen female characters and fourteen male. Nine Heroes of Ferelden, three Orlesian Commanders, nine Hawkes and nine Inquisitors. I have smooched all seventeen love interests, plus Dairren and Iona, Teli AND Mardy on the same night, Gorrim, Bella and Kaitlyn, Gheyna, Jethan and many inhabitants of both the Blooming Rose and the Pearl including a couple of nugs. I would have smooched Scout Harding, too, but the game does not let you get that far. One of these days I will make a female Dalish who loves Tamlen and someone who sleeps with that one lady in Josephine's quest just so I can say that somewhere, in some universe, one of my protagonists has snogged everyone. (Except Cammen, I guess. Not touching that with a ten foot poll.) As of today I've beaten every fight on Nightmare, and have every achievement but one. (My desire to get all achievements is fundamentally incompatible with my desire to play DA2 on Nightmare so friendly fire stays on. I guess there are people out there good enough to get through a whole act without anyone falling in battle on Nightmare, but I am not one of those people. The Origins achievement for playing the whole game without the main character falling unconscious was so much easier.)

So far this has all taken me ... somewhere north of two thousand hours, I think? I've spent nine hundred in Inquisition alone, and I know DAO took me around eighty the first time I played. (After all these years I can finish DAO, Awakening and all the DLC in less than sixty, but that's because I die a lot less and don't read the codex entries any more because I know them off by heart.) I guess some people would feel like that was wasted time, but the truth is I enjoyed almost every one of those two thousand hours immensely and can think of few things I'd have been preferred to be doing. It's certainly been a big part of my life these last (almost) ten years.

I am already antsy at the idea of lasting until DA4 without making a new character, but I am sort of out of worldstate ideas at this point. I guess I could make another Mahariel, Tabris or Surana or maybe an Aeducan who makes it to the end of the game alive, or friendmance Anders or Isabela, but at this point I have seen most of the content and pretty much every scenario I'm really interested in.

I do have a theoretical Perfect World State in mind, but I feel like I at least need to know a hell of a lot more about #The Dread Wolf Rises before I commit to that, and I may even need to wait until I've played it. Just for starters: if I don't know what the race options are or even if there are any, how can I choose what race the Inquisitor should be??? (I mean, obviously the Warden should be a dwarf, because the dwarf origins are the best ones and if you play as Brosca you save them from an even worse fate than what happens to the other origin stories. Also, you get to be a Paragon, dwarves are the best, Q.E.D.)

At once point or another, I have played all of the origin stories in Dragon Age: Origins, but the two dwarf stories remain my favourites. (I think I slightly prefer the noble to the commoner, but they're both wonderful.) While I do have plans for another Brosca in the future, this time around I made another Aeducan. My favourite DA protagonist ever - maybe my favourite RPG character I've ever made - was my first Aeducan Warden, so this guy has a lot to live up to.

( We'll see how that's going ... )