Part Two Of That Ridiculously Long Post About AU Skul And Val, This Time Covering Where They Are Located,

Part two of that ridiculously long post about AU Skul and Val, this time covering where they are located, what they do, who their followers are (including relevant characters) and their dynamics with other groups. Again, long post. Stuff alluding to more stuff I will talk about in the future. Pretty standard for me, overall.

Group demographics: as I said in the previous post, they technically lead two different groups of people. Skulduggery’s group is the necromancers, including but not limited to the Wreath gang. He’s now considered the king of them and so the majority of necromancers in Ireland (and some surrounding countries) follow his orders and live with the group.

Valkyrie’s group is a lot less clear-cut, but her group generally consists of people who either want power, want to fight gods, or have some flavour of criminal record and therefore don’t feel safe living in Roarhaven with the Sanctuary tightly running everything (definitely with some degree of prejudice).

Which characters are there: needless to say they have a decent number of followers, but I’m just going to list some of the actually relevant characters in here.

Melancholia and Solomon Wreath are there, and while they technically follow Skulduggery they also both love Valkyrie to a stronger degree than the other necromancers. When they came back from the dead, they decided that Skulduggery being in a situation where he pushed himself to accept his necromancy more was a good thing and so they kind of just…chilled in the background for a couple years while they worked out the kinks in their plan. They also didn’t tell anyone who wasn’t in their very specific group of necromancers, hence why Melancholia avoided telling anything to Valkyrie in AMFoM.

Anton Shudder is also present and works as Valkyrie’s second-in-command, but the way he got here is a little different from the others. This is all part of a very elaborate idea I have that I might write out in detail at some point, but for now I’m sticking to a summary. When Anton comes back right after the wand explodes, there is a lot going on. Cadaver is there, Valkyrie is there, Skulduggery is there and wearing Lord Vile’s armour, and Ghastly is there with a squad of Cleavers in order to fight them. Lots of stuff, and Anton is immediately confused. However, he ends up latching on to Valkyrie because she seems normal. Skulduggery is being weird, Ghastly is acting vaguely like a dictator and he has no idea what’s up with Cadaver, so he sticks to Valkyrie‘s side while she explains the situation to him. When it’s all over, Anton is given the choice to either go with Ghastly so he can be properly assimilated back into modern reality, or he can go with Valkyrie and she’ll help him best she can. Again, Project Veritas is a thing and Anton chooses the safer option and enters what is pretty much social isolation with Skulduggery and Valkyrie. He…did not love finding out about the Lord Vile thing.

The only reason he didn’t leave right there and then was because he didn’t exactly have anywhere else to go and he was also in the middle of figuring out his own unfortunate powers. His gisting ability is still there, it’s just altered. So instead of summoning a gist and having it fight for him, his being sort of fades in and out of reality while being replaced with the gist for few-second bursts at a time. It impacted him similarly to Valkyrie turning into a god, except to a lesser degree. When she decided to split off from the rest of Roarhaven, he kept on following her because again, he didn’t have anywhere to go and was vaguely worried that other people would see him as a demon. Nowadays, he works as a high-ranking member of the group and has a tendency to emotionally adopt younger soldiers, possibly trying to make up for the misdeeds he actively commits as a soldier. Like, this man feels crippling guilt for what he does but also legitimately loves Valkyrie and sees her as his little sister and has so become pretty good at just…shutting off his thoughts. He’s very sad and very good at his job, and Valkyrie worries about him in her more lucid moments.

When Anton needs to get away from it all, he leaves base for a few hours to go find a secret room he found in the ruins of the Dublin Sanctuary (although it had since been renovated. And then turned back into ruins) to talk to a series of echo stones that contain Erskine Ravel, from several hundred years in the past leading up to a few weeks prior to him betraying them, with a new stone for about every fifty or so years. He talks to them as a weird sort of therapy, because he has complicated feelings regarding Erskine and so he has someone to talk to who isn’t loyal to Valkyrie or Skulduggery. Nobody else knows about this place because Anton doesn’t want the two of them to find out lest they destroy the echo stones in a rage against Erskine.

Nefarian is also present in the group, and he hangs out a lot with Valkyrie because she finds him funny, even in her apathetic god form. Nefarian originally left Roarhaven because he didn’t totally trust Ghastly to not prosecute him for his crimes and so left to go join his only friend, who was happy to have him. He’s silly and he makes annoying remarks, but he’s also careful to do his job well so as to stay in Valkyrie’s favour. He’s in the process of learning how to be what currently counts as a normal person, which involves him dealing with emotional issues galore. I need to know more about his relationship with his family, because there is a damn reason he’s so attention-hungry and I can probably pin it on those guys.

Dusk is technically also a follower of Valkyrie, but he sort of fades in and out of the group. He left Roarhaven for a similar reason to Nefarian and left a bit after, deciding that he knew and therefore trusted Valkyrie enough to not kill him for being in her encampment. He now spends some of his time working for her and some of his time chilling in the wilderness, avoiding other vampires who might want to kill him for his crime of killing Moloch. Some of the other members of the group don’t like him but Valkyrie is extremely patient with him.

Where they’re located: I want to say that their main base is in whatever’s leftover of Dublin, since it’s close enough to Roarhaven that Valkyrie can keep and eye on them, it has resources and room for the people to live, and it has some degree of familiarity/emotional meaning to her. If Dublin wasn’t already fully empty by the time the full group of them showed up to take it over, whoever was there either left, was killed, or was assimilated into the group. The base in Dublin also most definitely has a time-locked cage in it for the purpose of containing Dusk at night. But while their main base is located in Dublin, they most certainly spend a large amount of time outside of it. However, they don’t spend all their time in Roarhaven. It’s quite normal for large groups (and sometimes even all of them) to leave camp to go on a little crusade to kill a Faceless One or attack some nearby enemy group. So while they’re generally located in Dublin, it’s far from a sure-fire way to find them and they’re often out wandering the wastelands in search of a fight (often headed by Skulduggery, Valkyrie, or both of them).

Their dynamics with the other groups: there are many groups, and so I’m not going to list all of them. I will list their major nearby gangs though.

Mevolent and Serafina’s team: the two groups hate each other to a degree that would be comedic if they didn’t have horrifyingly overpowered leaders. Mevolent’s little gang doesn’t have a main base, and instead wanders around Ireland (and other places when he can access them) in search of bloodshed. Other groups avoid them like the plague. Val + Skul’s team and Mev + Set’s team will also go out of their way to pick fights with each other when they’re in the area with each other. It’s not particularly deep, but it’s this whole well-known thing how much these two incredibly powerful and bloodthirsty groups hate each other.

The Sanctuary: Valkyrie’s friends miss her dearly and want her back. Some of them have become so burnt out from fighting that they’ve seriously thought about accepting her offer to have their souls melded to her (most particularly Dexter and Saracen). Although nobody has taken her up on it yet, she keeps the offer open. She also goes out of her way to protect them from danger she knows is coming (mainly Mevolent), although she tries to not do anything too direct because the Sanctuary has made it clear that she isn’t welcome in her current state. As for Skulduggery, well…there are complicated feelings and a lot more hatred towards him, especially coming from Ghastly. After all, it was revealed to the world that Skulduggery was Lord Vile only a few weeks previous to the magic explosion that kickstarted the end of the world. A lot of Sanctuary officials probably wouldn’t even believe that it was him if not for the fact that he had confirmed it himself. However, these Sanctuary people also place relatively little blame on Valkyrie for protecting him for so long because Cadaver explained in pretty clear detail that he lowkey emotionally blackmailed her into keeping the secret when she was sixteen. In short, Valkyrie is more well-liked than Skulduggery. This is actually a trend across nearly all of the groups still around, actually. Skulduggery is bad.

Winter’s rebellion: I am going to make an entire post talking about Winter and her little group because there is a lot to cover, but she fears her sister. A lot. Valkyrie would never kill her of course, but is definitely willing to injure her and will kill Winter’s teammates if provoked. She also refuses to let Winter kill Anton as vengeance for the death of Mia, which is a huge source of frustration for Winter. It’s also very bemusing to Winter that she, the girl who once tried to take over the world, is now actively working to keep the world free and instead prevent her sister from dominating it. She also has a bit of a dynamic with Skulduggery, but I’d like to cover it later in more detail. Additional info, Winter still hasn’t found out about Stephanie, who is Valkyrie’s current soul-finding project.

Again, there might be stuff I forgot in this post. There is a reason I split it into two parts. Winter is up next and then I might write some stuff about Dexter’s team because I have a weird number of ideas for the seven of them. Have fun y’all, remember to stay hydrated.

I’m considering making a pinned introduction post but first I need to figure out if I have to open Tumblr on my computer to insert links into words. Also I need to draw more of my Sky OCs

I’m on that writing spree hehehehehe

Actually, before I forget, I’d like to talk about how the god-killer weapons are used in my AU! After all, they’re one of the few things that can still kill characters like Valkyrie and Mevolent. This one will be a lot shorter because there’s a lot less to say, just me giving a bit of info about where they’re at.

Valkyrie still has the fragments of the katehedral crystal inside her, so she’s basically a walking god-killer. She’s also gained a stronger control of her power since AMFoM, so she can shoot well-controlled beams and won’t accidentally obliterate her friends. This also makes her an on-sight target for many groups, since she can never be disarmed now. On another note, she cannot absorb the souls of people who were killed by god-killers, so they’re quite a source of frustration for her.

Additionally, the katehedral crystal (I think that’s how it’s spelled?) is actually pretty unhealthy for Valkyrie to have in her system, and it’s had some pretty adverse effects on her magic. Adding on to the fact that some of Valkyrie’s powers are growing weaker in AMFoM, the katehedral is basically draining them and by now it’s nearly impossible for her to access that vein of magic (although she has no problem with her god powers and can still replicate other’s magic). It was originally the Wreath gang who figured out how badly the crystal was affecting her (this being a few months prior to her turning into a god) and attempted to perform something of a surgery on her to get rid of the crystal? It didn’t work, hence why Valkyrie still shoots black lightning.

Other than that, the four god-killers are still around. Skulduggery has the sword, which makes the two of them an incredibly dangerous duo and make other groups avoid them even more. Mevolent got the short end of the stick and has the dagger, which he often uses to execute enemies or prisoners that he never wants to risk coming back. Winter has the spear, and she pretty much keeps it with her at all times. And lastly, Saracen has the bow (the Sanctuary doesn’t have a god-killer but does have Saracen).

Since god-killers are such a rare and useful commodity in this war, there was a several-year effort to try and find other dimensions that they could raid for god-killers (“they” being most or all of the local groups in this context). However, everybody eventually gave up because of how difficult it was to locate other habitable dimensions, let alone other habitable dimensions with god-killers (I’m going to note here that they do not have the knowledge of what the Darquesse society used to find Darquesse. In fact, none of them have probably questioned it).

And that should be all. Nice and short, might come in useful. I like making use of the god-killer weapons.

So.. Yesterday’s yuri quest, huh?

My dad's games out, be sure to check it out :)