An absolutely stunning work from AfftiSM - you can just feel the electricity in the air! A spectacular gift from my friend Bungus, of our two characters from the Tavern server. We've got a great community of 5e players together, getting up to all sorts of fun in a westmarch!

The art is ©  AfftiSM - please be sure to give a bunch of love to the original, here! They've more than earned a few faves for this work!

Kalari, the purple-feathered avali on the left, is ©  bunnnnnn
Liyani, the white-feathered avali on the right, is © me, Emberell

After facing off against the cult of Yuan-ti trying to steal souls for their god, the two adventurers return to the tavern and celebrate their newfound bond with a friendly arm-wwrestling contest. Of course, it goes well off the rails as both get very into it! Liyani is not an incredibly strong avali by any means - but she uses cybernetics and technology to augment her strength beyond the normal limits. You can see some of her tech equipped here! Usually she's a lot more heavily armored, but in this scene the high of victory and feeling like for once she didn't need her armor has her feeling comfortable enough to keep it stowed in the chest plate.

Liyani is an artificer armorer - she can expand or retract her armor to cover her body in as little as six seconds! In combat she wields a tower shield and her electrified gauntlets to protect her allies. She's a living wall, or tries to be - though for much of her early adventuring career all she experienced was failure or defeat. Never enough to knock her down or end her - though some of her parties were hardly so lucky. She blames herself for much of those, giving in to unwelcome desires, and over the years worked to make it so she would not be the weak link of her party ever again - even if that wasn't the case to begin with, she wouldn't let it be her fault they failed again.

Here is where her story finally turned towards victory - a major one at that, knocking down an aspiring goddess from her goal aboard a sunken nautiloid. She finally felt strong enough to stand without her armor - though she'll still rarely be caught with it when she leaves the safe havens she knows.