Nat& Spectrum System - θ∆

got commissioned by @crepe to do what is probably my favorite emote commission that i've ever done (the final version is cropped down so it reads better as an emote but i needed to share the complete version here lol)

wizard whose face is only made of stone

You snap awake.

Cultists, fucking cultists. Occult vermin. You expect a few to go running whenever you start kicking rocks over; they're not usually brave enough to try anything on with a real arcane talent.

You hadn't seriously considered for a moment that a spate of dead wizards was a cult thing. Else you'd have been more careful; left Monica behind, for a start.

You lever yourself up on your elbows. The sickening crack of the lead pipe across the back of your head was the last thing you were conscious for; if they've hurt her in the meantime—

Your eyes aren't working right. You gingerly grope for the back of your head.

You've had worse, but it's not great. Shattered shards rattle around in the base of your skull as you move. They must have had a real fucking shock; you carefully put your hand in the back of your empty head, where they smashed it open like a dust-filled eggshell, feel around the rough-textured back of your face until you locate where one of your mother of pearl-and-malachite eyeballs has popped loose, and lever it firmly back into its socket with a satisfying billiard-ball clack.

If you had a mirror, you'd be able to see the glamours that soften the lines of your face smear it back to lifelike.

You blink a couple of times at the dark, and then—

"Ah," you say rustily, looking into the corner of whatever shitty impromptu cell they've stuffed you into while you were inert. You and Monica, who seems unhurt, except that she's been shut into a dark room with an imitation person she's previously thought of as human and her friend, who's she's watched have its head bashed in, then lie there lifelessly for probably hours, then abruptly stick its hand in the back of its entirely hollow skull.

She looks extremely fucking freaked.

She's a necromancer. The way you not-even-died but were suddenly visible as never-actually-alive, followed after hours by the instantaneous reassertion of the enchantments that fake it, is probably upsetting her even worse than if you were real and had been murdered in front of her.

You cradle the back of your skull, to prevent the fragments from falling out; it'll repair itself quicker if you glue as much as possible back into place, but you'll probably need to take it easy for a week or two.

Fuck.

Hey

Hey yourself

Can I get the code to the armory? They changed it

You

You want me to send you the armory code, over an unencrypted network

Over a network that anyone can access by either looking at our individual devices or by connecting to the central security hub or the front office desk

You want me to send you that code. That code that will let anyone at all just saunter in and take the single shotgun we keep in there

Oh be a pal

Ok it's 1337

You are a lifesaver

Go ahead and help yourself to the whisky in my locker, the code is 0404

Nice

But don't touch the amulet in there. It starts a really shitty sidequest

More games need to render the game in a smaller area and just use the excess area for UI elements. Why the fuck are all UI minimalistic bring back all encompassing UI elements.....

The reason it kind of gets to me too is when you consider how bloated a lot of average AAA game UI can be? It's simultaneously minimalist in overall design sensibility, but when active, the hud covers a large area anyway!

At that point in a weird way I feel like more static UI elements would be preferable. Maybe this is just me being an oldhead, idk. But honestly I'd rather have a static UI conveying to me all the information than an overall large area being taken up by fading in and out text and numbers and compasses and whatnot. Maybe that's less 'immersive' but I don't really feel immersion in that way anyway, so uh! Who knows.

Me being the weeb I am I do tend towards thinking about it in PC-98 titles more than anything else but honestly it seemed like it was at least done in a fair few western dungeon crawlers and whatnot too. Wizardry 8 up there is from 2001!

The resolution does feel kind of tiny on a modern display though, so we don't use it.