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rightshoeonleftfoot · 8 months

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From Afar

Pairing: Simon "Ghost" Riley x afab! reader

Summary: You befriend Keegan, a Sergeant who helps you with your insufferable Sergeant Davidson.

Warnings: MDNI! Stalking (innocent stalking hehe), mutual pining, possessive! Simon Riley, power imbalance, language, slowburn

Words: 1.3k

This is part two!! Part one here.

A/N: This is again, not proofread and constructive criticism is very welcome!! Sorry for the delay, college started and I'm in full gear lol.

Keegan was teasing you as you walked through the hallway. He was walking backwards, facing you as you talked.

"You've got no grounds, Keegan!" You retorted as you laughed a little.

"Is Davidson shitting on you not ground enough? You're telling me the Lieutenant watched you getting essentially bullied and didn't do anything?" Keegan continued walking backwards so he could look at you as you talked. He seemed appalled Ghost didn't do anything.

"Is it really any of his business? I'm not in his unit after all." Excuses were made as you tried to defend Ghost for not having your back.

Keegan just looked at you and shook his head.

"He should've called it out, kid."

You sigh, knowing he was right. There was a moment of silence as you both walked and Keegan almost bumped into someone.

"I'll deal with it for you, promise. She'll be off your ass in no time." Keegan said with a smile. He put a hand on your shoulder before tapping it lightly.

"Thanks, Keegan." You hope he'll be able to deal with it sooner or later, knowing you have to see your Sergeant soon.

"I'll see you later Private!" Keegan taps the side of your arm lightly once more before taking off in a light jog.

You sigh again as you watch Keegan run off, knowing you have no control over what happens with Sergeant Davidson. You tried to bring it up to your superiors multiple times but nothing ever came of it. She was too "valuable of a member". You remembered rolling your eyes at that statement. You walked through the hallways, your eyes wandering to a dark figure that rapidly disappeared from your sight the moment you laid eyes on it.

Curiosity took the best of you as you walked towards where you last saw the figure, rounding the corner to find an empty hallway. You looked down the hallway and all you saw were a few other soldiers walking up the hallway, none of them paying attention to you.

Ghost watched your interaction with Keegan, his eyes scanning every movement, every change in facial expressions. A light scowl appeared on his face as he watched Keegan reassure you, as he watched him promise you he'd take care of the issue. It irked him, it really did. Being thought of as incompetent was not something he was used to, especially not coming for you.

You made your way down to the mess hall for lunch, hungry as all hell. You scanned the hall, happy it wasn't too crowded. You got food and sat down but something felt wrong. You felt watched. You looked around carefully but all you could see was soldiers eating and waiting in the queue for food. You looked around some more, until you felt two hands on both shoulders. You jumped, startled by the sudden touch, a voice behind you whispering a soft "Boo."

"Son of a bitch Keegan!" You whine as you almost hit him.

He looks amused as he laughs and sits next to you. You suddenly don't feel watched anymore. You look around for good measure, your eyes scanning every single corner of the mess hall, half hoping to spot another dark figure lurking amongst the soldiers.

"Come on kid, gotta keep you on your toes."

You roll your eyes but smile nonetheless.

"Next time I swear to god, I'll hit you." You threaten playfully. It's an empty threat, but a threat regardless.

"That's if you can land it." He quips back as he leans forward on his elbows on the table, resting his chin in his hand.

You eat with Keegan, completely engaged in the conversation. He promised you he'd take care of it and you trusted he would. You were even starting to forget you'd have to go to training again, that you'd have to see Davidson again. He was completely into the conversation, as were you, and you were both completely oblivious to the pair of eyes looking at the both of you. Keegan's hand went to your arm as he spoke, the gesture seeming only friendly in your eyes. Keegan was fun. He helped you take your mind off whatever was bothering you at the time. His charisma and happy attitude distract you from the situation at hand, making you feel happy and light. For once you're not being insulted or judged by your fellow teammates, the mess hall being too crowded for anyone to spot you and Keegan easily.

Lunch wraps up and you walk to the training area, dreading what's to come. You're fidgeting, a bit sweaty and very nervous. Your steps are fast but uncertain as you walk, knowing you can't be late as you don't wanna repeat last week's incident with your superior. You walk through the hallways, determined to get there in time. You're looking at the ground to make sure you don't trip and you fail to notice the door to Sergeant Davidson's office open. You bump directly into someone, very harshly. You stumble backwards, nearly tripping over yourself.

Lieutenant Riley looks down at you, his eyes cold as per usual. You just bumped right into him as he was leaving your Sergeant's office. He doesn't seem impressed as you quickly and frantically apologize. He doesn't move or say a word, he just looks down at you. He's tense, you can tell. You look up at him for a moment before he just walks away, leaving you in front of your Sergeant's door.

Taking a peek in her office out of curiosity, you see her with her head on her desk. She doesn't seem happy, actually she seems almost embarrassed. Her arms are over her head and she sighs loudly. She tosses a bunch of paper off her desk in anger, gets up and kicks her desk very hard. She looks up and locks eyes with you, and you quickly scurry to the training session, afraid of what's to come.

The training area is full of people stretching and you quickly find a spot to sit and stretch at. Davidson arrives not much later than you and to your surprise, she's ignoring you. She avoids your gaze as she passes next to you, not even bothering to correct your stance or even look at you. She actually keeps away from you, staying on the opposite side of the training area. "Keegan must've taken care of it." You thought. You feel happy, he fulfilled his promise and gave her an earful. You giggle quietly to yourself as you do the drills, happy to not be distracted and berated by your Sergeant for once.

Ghost watches the training, making sure to give Davidson a death glare every time she gets even remotely close to you. He hangs in the doorframe, leaning against it as he watches over, scanning every movement Davidson does. His eyes drift over to you and he sees you relax as you realize Davidson isn't coming after you. He looks at your body language and sees the visible relief. It feels good. He sees you smile and giggle to yourself when you notice she's avoiding you and he almost cracks a smile but doesn't. He leaves the room, satisfied.

"Keegan!" You shout enthusiastically when you see him after your training. He's just outside talking to Logan.

"You're a lifesaver, Keegan. Like for real, thank you so much." The relief is incredible. She got put in her place and you were beyond happy.

Keegan sees your eyes twinkle with happiness but looks a little confused.

"What did I do?"

A sudden small sense of nervousness takes over as you get worried you might've misunderstood him.

"You uh, talked to Davidson?"

Keegan looks at you for a split second before raising an eyebrow.

"I haven't had the chance yet. I've been too busy, kid."

You freeze before trying to wrack your brain. What had changed? Then you remembered. Lieutenant Riley, that son of a bitch. And now you owe him a big thank you.

#simon ghost riley #call of duty #call of duty modern warfare #ghost x reader #simon ghost riley x reader #simon ghost riley x you #simon riley x reader #simon riley x you #simon riley #call of duty modern warfare ii #ghost fanfiction #ghost #ghost cod #simon riley fanfic #ghost fanfic #ghost x you

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dazuresky · 3 months

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glad to know you're still making art. ive been wanting to get a commission for ages but i haven't gotten the means to yet and i had gotten scared that you disappeared

Oh sorry it seemed that way! I've just been extremely busy as of late, had a really complicated living situation most of last year that kept me from doing art for the biggest part of 2023 and this year I've been contending with the whole process of moving in with my boyfriend in a different country so I've had my hands rather full haha, but I'm still very much making art and soon enough I'll be able to make way more of it! (and catch up with my commission queue that i cant wait to get through as well haha)

#asks

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elisysd · 7 months

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18. And if the storm is hitting I'll try to keep you steady

Masterlist - Previously - Next

Chapter soundtrack: Ember - Tip Stevens

It’s a sheepish looking Noah that came out of the bathroom. Julia threw his t-shirt at him, a playful smile on her face.The poor boy didn’t know where to go and looked like a kid who would have been caught red handed. Niels didn’t seem any better and Julia felt a little guilty. She didn’t want to make them uncomfortable.

“Hey, judgment free zone. I don’t care, guys. It doesn’t change anything.”

“Can we keep what you saw between us, I don’t want anyone to know…” said Noah in a low voice, almost ashamed.

“Whatever you guys are doing is not any of my business. As long as you are both happy, that’s what matters to me.” Julia said.

“It’s not serious. We are not in a relationship or whatever.” said quickly Noah and Julia thought she noticed a glimpse of disappointment in Niels eyes.

“But even if you were…” she started to add.

“But we are not. And we will never be, so drop it.”

And with that, Noah left the room, slamming the door and making both Julia and Niels jump. Niels sighed before tidying up his room. Julia could see that he was trying to distract himself. She approached him, putting a hand on his shoulder and forcing him to look at her.

“I’m sorry…”

“It’s not your fault. Like I told you, it’s complicated. He doesn’t accept himself. So it’s just hook ups here and there, when no one is around.”

“But you like him.” she stated.

“Am I this obvious?”

“No, you are not, but I think I’ve known you enough by now to be able to see when something is bothering you, and Noah walking away like that and saying you guys are not serious, I saw it affected you.”

“Yeah but I can’t force him to come out, you know. Anyway, I have to focus on the race now.”

And that was her queue to leave. She joined the rest of the team and took place in front of the screen. Soon, it was time for the race and her eyes frantically searched for the navy blue car before remembering Ethan was starting from the pitlane. She then looked at the grid and the empty grid box that was where Ethan was supposed to be, before her gaze moved to the red car behind. She was sure Martin would have an aggressive strategy to try to gain a few positions at the start, and she knew Ethan would try to do the same. She just hoped for no crashes at the start. But as expected it was messy as Martin tried to quickly overtake Noah who did his best to hold his position while going wheel against wheel with the Ferrari. From the side she could see Ethan trying his best to keep up and find the space to engulf his car. Sadly, Noah, too busy trying his best against the Ferrari didn’t and couldn’t see the Maserati and, as Ethan tried to slip past him, bumped his front wing with Noah’s side, sending him away in the wall.

Julia scrunched her nose as the yellow flag was raised and soon the safety car was deployed. She could see on the broadcast Ethan leaving his car, visibly frustrated and angry. Julia wished she could go to him so they could talk but she couldn’t leave the garage, not now at least. She focused on the race, and on the white Skoda cars as they were trying to hold their positions.

In front, Elijah and his Ferrari were fighting with Romy, who was on the way to win her first Grand Prix. Even if Julia would love to see Ferrari on top, she wanted her best friend to win and shut every single person that had once told her she would never achieve it, that she would never be enough. She hoped she wouldn’t break under pressure. She only had two laps to go but Julia was sure that the Ferrari had a better tyre management than the Audi and that it would make the difference. Elijah was taking back almost three tenths per sector and was getting closer and closer until Romy couldn’t do anything else but let him overtake her. She fought with everything she had and Julia knew it was not her fault, but she could almost see and hear the disappointment in Romy if she was closing her eyes.

As for Noah and Niels, they managed to bring back the cars, still out of the points but at least they were no damages to report. As Julia was about to head for the podium celebrations, a blonde guy that she started to recognize all too well was waiting near the garage, already out of his racing suit and dressed with his team t-shirt.

“I would say good race but I will refrain from commenting on what happened.”

“It happened. I miscalculated the space I had.”

“Still. Martin was way too aggressive on Noah. Trying to overtake from the inside in the corner at the start was stupid. Noah couldn’t give any space to anyone, it was too narrow. And Martin was so damn persistent about it! You were lucky, you could have spun and that wouldn’t have been pretty.”

“Thank you, Julia. For trying to cheer me up.”

“Hey, always. Come here.” she said, throwing her arms around his neck.

First surprised by her sudden burst of affection, Ethan didn’t know how to react and Julia took it as a way that he preferred to be alone. As she was about to pull away from him, he caught her by the waist and pulled her in his embrace, burying his neck in her shoulder and breathing in her scent. She smelt like rubber and petrol but he didn’t care. He was expecting her to leave his embrace quickly but she stayed. She nuzzled her nose against his chest and he felt her sighing and he soon felt tears wetting his shirt.

“Joolsie?”

“It sucks, Ethan.” he heard her mumble against his chest.

“What did they do to you, today?”

“I… I feel useless and disrespected. I feel invisible. And I feel like shit. I just want to help, you know and they don’t care about me. Maybe I’ve been wrong all along, maybe I’m not that good. Maybe I didn’t work hard enough, maybe they are all nice to me because of my dad and they want to be on his good side and…” she was rambling and spiraling.

“Julia. Hey, stop right now. You are damn good. You know me, you know I wouldn’t lie to you. And those white, cisgenre and old men? They are threatened by how good you are. It scares the shit out of them. You can do their job a hundredth time better than they would ever do it. Believe me. Please.” he took her face between his hands and forced her to look at him. Her eyes were glossy and even if she tried to avoid his gaze, she couldn’t.

“I don’t know what to do… I can’t quit. I would have to pay them back… And I don’t have the money to do that. And I know my dad could help but I don't want to involve him.” she confessed.

“We will find a way… I promise you we will.”

She nodded and Ethan pulled her in one last time before they both headed to the podium celebrations. Julia couldn’t help but feel proud to see her best friend up there but she knew Romy’s smile was fake. She was, once again, second. Of a race she could have won. She was frustrated, she could see it. And Julia felt conflicted. She was disappointed for her best friend but happy to see her dad on the highest step of the podium. She didn’t forget to snap a quick picture before sending it on her family group chat so her dad would also see it later. When the crowd started to finally scatter, she left Ethan, saying she would meet him back in the hotel room. She needed to find her dad first. She wanted to congratulate him personally. After all, she better than anyone else knew the struggle and hardships his dad went through since the beginning of the season.

The garage was all too quiet for her liking. They couldn’t have already stopped celebrating. She knew they had Japan next week but still, a few glasses of champagne weren’t forbidden.

“Julia? What are you doing here?”

She turned around to see Martin, his racing suit laying low on his hips.

“I’m here to see my dad, any ideas where he is?”

“In his office, I think, some people from a Spanish sponsor came to see him.”

“Thanks. Congrats, by the way. Your maneuver on Noah was a bit out of line, especially since it cost Ethan his race, but beside that, well done.”

“We were about to go downtown to celebrate with some guys from the team, do you want to come?”

“No, I don’t think it’s a good idea and Ethan is waiting for me back at the hotel so…”

She could see him clench his jaw but he didn’t add anything. He waved to her before heading towards the exit of the paddock. Julia looked at him for a brief moment before walking to her father's office. She was about to knock when a man, wearing his black hair in a catogan, left the room in haste, followed by her dad. She didn’ have the time to see the man but his voice, she could recognize it from anywhere. It was one she had heard many times when she was accompanying her dad on the tracks when he was still driving.

“You can’t threaten me like that, Carlos! I rebuilt this team, I hired the engineers and the strategists, you can’t impose your people on my team. That’s not how it works!”

“Yeah, and look at where Ferrari is. Barely able to fight for the top positions. How many races did you win this season? One. This one and it’s only because Lamborghini’s car was not made for the track. Most of the time you are barely able to stay in the points. I’m investing money in this team Charles, for you to be able to develop a car that is the best out there. If you and your team can’t do that, maybe it’s time for Ferrari to find you a replacement.”

On these words, Carlos Sainz turned around and left, leaving Charles disconcerted and with a worried look on his face that Julia was only rarely seeing.

“Dad… Is everything okay?”

“Not right now, but it will be,” he sighed.

“Is there anything that I can do…”

“If you can magically make our car go from P4 in the constructor’s championship to P2 or even P1, let’s be delusional, it would be perfect.”

“That’s what Carlos was doing here, right? He was coming to put some pressure on you.”

“He has always played dirty, more or less. But he wants my seat. And he has always been very influential inside the Scuderia, he still has some friends here. I fear he won’t play nice to have it. But stay out of it and don’t worry. It’s my business and I can manage.”

“I could do that, you know. Making it faster. Well maybe not this car but… the next one?”

“You would need to start to work on it now, Ju’. And you are under contract with Skoda. Even if they released you at the end of it, you would be under gardening phase and would probably be only working on the car in two years. I don’t have two years.”

She knew that. Of course, she did. An engineer couldn’t go from one team to another just like that, there were too many things involved. Manufacturing secrets, plans for future upgrades… But would it stop her from helping her dad? Never. Even less after what she had heard.

“You wanted something?” He turned towards her and for the first time she could see how tired he was. The season was taking a toll on him and she was sad that her mom was so far away. He would need her.

“I just wanted to say congratulations for the race. And give you a hug. You look like shit.”

“I could use a hug from you, right now.”

She didn’t need to get asked twice. She rushed into her dad’s arms and allowed herself to forget about everything. She was safe there, protected, away from the cruelty of the world. Her dad had always been her hero. She was looking up to him so much. Of course he was not perfect, no one was, but she didn’t care. To her he was perfectly imperfect.

When she entered the hotel room, it was silent. And empty. Ethan wasn’t there and she wondered where he could be, especially since he had told her they would meet there. It had been a tough race week and she couldn’t wait for it to be over, to go back to her routine and to not share a room with Ethan anymore. It had messed with her head and awakened feelings she didn’t want to have. She needed space. And a part of her dreaded the moment she had to go back to her old ways with lonely hotel rooms.

She enjoyed the fact of being alone to take care of her, going through a long but needed self care routine before getting into a comfortable jumper and sweatpants. It had been an hour and Ethan still wasn’t there. She thought about texting him, asking where he was, but gave up before hitting the send button. Maybe he didn’t want to spend time with her after all, maybe he had other and better things to do. She laid in the middle of the bed, removing the stack of pillows and took her notebook, flipping though the pages and scribbling down ideas when some were coming to her. She thought about what happened between her dad and Carlos and it made her angry. She knew how important the team was to her dad. He dedicated his whole life to it and thinking that, from out of nowhere, he could loose everything he fought so hard to build didn’t sit right with her. She couldn’t stand by and watch the events playing in front of her without doing anything. And after all, it’s not as if she had better things to do.

Watching Julia breaking down, twice, because of her work made Ethan feel powerless and angry that he couldn’t help her. Like a lion in a cage, as he was waiting for her to come back to the hotel room, he paced back and forth until he made a decision. Maybe it wouldn’t lead anywhere and maybe it was stupid but still, he wanted to try. She deserved so much better than how she was currently treated.

That was how he ended up in Christian’s office, team principal of Lamborghini, ready to beg him to help Julia.

“Ethan, I like you, a lot. But, I can’t do anything.”

“She is talented, Christian! She is really, really good at her job. She needs to be in a team that can help her give her all, that has the budget and the capacity to let her develop her skills. She is fading away there. They are stealing her ideas without even giving her the credit.”

“And what do you want me to do, exactly?”

“Buy back her contract. If we do it now, she won’t need gardening, the car development for next year has not started yet.”

“Our engineers teams in Lamborghini and Maserati are full, Ethan.”

“Can’t you try anything?” Ethan was almost begging now.

“Maybe in F2 but I doubt it’s where she wants to be. I have to think this through. I’m not promising you anything, okay? Don’t get your hopes up there is a high chance that it will be a no.”

But it was not. Not one from the get-go at least. So Ethan had hopes and he just prayed with everything he had that they wouldn’t get crushed. Back to his room, he found Julia asleep, completely spread in the middle of the bed, her notebook still in her hand. She looked cute and slowly he approached her, careful to not wake her. He removed her notebook and his eyes fell on a drawing in a corner of the page. She drew eyes. His eyes. And he felt himself blushing.

He changed his clothes and got in bed next to her. He didn’t have much space but he didn’t want to force her to move. So he laid on the edge of the bed and fell asleep. He woke up the next morning, feeling warmer than usual before slowly opening his eyes to see brown hair on his pillow and a hand a few centimeters from his face. From up close, he could see her freckles and was almost able to count them if he wanted. She also had a frown on her forehead and Ethan had to resist the urge to touch it to erase it. He stayed still, looking at her but slowly, as if there was something that was pulling him to her by an invisible string, he felt his chest moving to her and his hand found its natural place on her hip. He wanted nothing more than to pull her against him. Maybe if he pretended to be asleep, she wouldn’t get mad?

But of course, she would. So he refrained himself and got up, showered quickly before going downstairs for breakfast. When he came back, with a few of Julia’s favorite pastries he had managed to snatch for her, he was surprised to see her up and ready. She was packing her suitcase.

“Are you already leaving?”

“If I want to fly with my dad, I have to leave in an hour so… yeah.”

He didn’t want her to leave. He wanted to keep her inside this hotel room. Just for a few hours more. He wasn’t ready to see her leave and he was aware how dramatic he was sounding. He would see her the next day, she wasn’t going to war. It was a stupid reaction.

“Or maybe you could fly out with me? I mean… with us. As in Kyle, Ludwig, my teammate Harun, and I’m pretty sure Romy will join us. You don’t have to leave, now.”

What he wanted to say was: You don’t have to leave me, now. But thankfully it stayed in his head. The last thing he wanted was to make her uncomfortable. Not now at least. He liked to embarrass her, but not today. She looked at him with her big eyes and he involuntarily gulped.

“You want me to fly out to Japan with you?”

“Ye…yeah? Not only with me. I just… I think it would make Romy happy. And a happy Romy is a happy Kyle. And a happy Kyle is a happy me. So you are contributing to my happiness. By extension.” he stuttered.

“I’m contributing to your happiness… I don’t know if it’s cute and if I should feel flattered. Be careful, or I might start to think you actually like to have me around.” she joked.

“You know, I do.”

She opened her mouth to say something but quickly closed it and suddenly her suitcase seemed to be very interesting.

“Niels wanted to go to the panda zoo in Shanghai… would you be interested? We wanted to make it a group activity with everyone we are close to. You don’t have to say yes or to feel like you have to come. Maybe you think you are too cool for that kind of thing, and…”

“Count me in. I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“Nice. Great.”

“That was all you wanted to ask?”

“Yeah. I’m all good.”

“And about the flight…”

“I… I would really like to come with you.”

And Ethan couldn’t help but hope that when she meant by you, it was himself and not the others.

They were the last ones to arrive at the airport and everyone was surprised to see Julia next to Ethan. Romy even squealed, getting out of Kyle’s embrace to rush to her best friend before dragging her away with her. Most probably to gossip, thought Ethan. But still, he picked up Julia's suitcase and dragged it along with his to his friends.

“Oh look at you carrying your girlfriend’s baggage, how cute.” laughed Ludwig in the sole purpose to rile Ethan.

“I can’t let it in the middle of everything.”

“A few weeks ago, you would have. You would even have hid it just to piss her off.” he retorted.

“Yeah well things change.”

“You are so in love, oh god, I never thought I would live to see this day coming.” he was now fully laughing to the point the girls started to look in their direction.

“Fuck off. I’m not in love! I’m trying to be a good friend, okay!”

“Well show me how much of a good friend you are, here’s my bag.” said Ludwig, handing his suitcase to Ethan that was starting to feel really angry.

“You know where you can fit your suitcase, Lu?”

He saw his best friend gulping, taking back his bag and walking fast to the boarding zone. As Ethan was about to follow him, he noticed Kyle standing on the side, not really moving and keeping his eyes shut.

“Bro? You're good.”

“Yeah, it’s just that I must have stayed under the neon a bit too much. I have a migraine. And it’s getting kind of blurry.”

“Do you want me to do something?” Ethan was worried. “Do you want me to get Romy?”

“No, certainly not. I don’t want her to worry. It’s okay.”

“Do you still have your appointment with your ophthalmologist?”

“After the Chinese Grand Prix, once we’ll be back home.”

“Does Romy know?”

“No. And I don’t want to tell her, she will only worry and she doesn’t need that.”

“I don’t like that Kyle… If your eyesight issues last, it’s going to impact your career.”

“It won’t. I’ll find a solution. It can’t be that bad.”

Kyle’s tone made Ethan understand that it was not up to discussion anymore and his friend set off, leaving him hanging. He looked behind him and intercepted Julia’s gaze on him. She arched an eyebrow, silently asking him if he was doing okay to what Ethan gave her a slight smile. He didn’t know if he was reassuring. Truth be told, he was worried about Kyle. The flight was about to be a long one.

As usual, Harun was already in the jet, hiding in a corner in a way Ethan always found creepy. He took a seat, next to the window and as Julia was passing by to sit opposite of him, he took her hand and forced her to sit next to him, as Romy and Kyle sat in the seats facing them.

“Sorry, it’s just that I don’t want Ludwig next to me.” he confessed.

“You could just have asked me, you know. No need to rip my arm out.”

“Oh nice, and where am I supposed to sit now?” complained Ludwig seeing the group altogether.

“With Harun.” answered Romy.

“Great… I’m gonna spend nine hours trying to make conversation with a wall. I hate you all.”

“No, come on Lu, after the take off you can come here and sit on the floor.” said Romy in an apologizing voice.

And Ethan couldn’t help but think that it was going to be a very long flight.

Author's note: I know that I did Carlos dirty in this chapter but he makes a great antagonist, don't you think? What do you think will happen next? Let me know your theories, I love to read them.

Don't hesitate to leave a comment or an ask, as well as reblogging and leaving a like. It helps a lot for the story to find its audience. I also have a taglist for this story, so if you want to be added so you never miss a chapter, let me know.

Taglist:

@herondalism @aundercover @musingsbyshreya @karmabyfernando @reengard @mycenterfold @smoooothoperator

#writing #fiction #charles leclerc #f1 fanfic #f1 fic #charles leclerc fanfic #max verstappen #max verstappen fanfic #f1 story #f1 x oc

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canmom · 9 months

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Das Abenteuer der Canmom in Köln (zur Gamescom)

It's time for canmom to have another adventure! What will that wacky lil porygon do next?

[you may be wondering, whatever happened to the plan to transfer l'aventure de canmom à Annecy to the main site for easier reading? that's still planned to happen, hopefully pretty soon! I've just been very busy.]

So: I work for a small VR games company called Holonautic. I've been working for them for around four months now (time flies)! This week some of us were in Cologne, Germany, attending Gamescom. Until this trip I hadn't met any of them in person, and indeed only had a vague idea what they looked like, because the modern world is wacky that way.

What's Gamescom? It's a major industry expo where game devs show off their games to the public and journalists, and otherwise have various industrial sorts of chats. The event fills a massive convention centre (the Kölnmesse), similar to the Excel Centre in London. Thousands and thousands of gamers enter in massive queues, and once inside, they queue up some more to get a chance to play some work in progress games at massive display booths.

Or maybe they go to the indie room, where there are hundreds of tiny desks just wide enough for a dev to set up a computer with a demo... or the retro games area, where various old consoles were set up for people to play... or one of the zones set up for laser tag or something like that. There was a lot going on!

Even Cthulhu came down to check out the games.

My own experience of Gamescom involved very little of that. With my Trade Visitor badge I could skip the queues, but most of my time was spent in a corner of the Business Area demoing our game to influencers, other devs and members of Meta and Unity, and then heading out to restaurants to have dinner with other VR devs in the evening. I had a good time though! It was great to meet the rest of Holonautic in person, and get to see the sights of Köln a tiny bit. And it was a very rewarding feeling to see other people enjoy the game I'd been working so hard on.

So in this post I'm going to talk about my trip, do a bit of amateur sociology, think about the place of videogames in the world and all that - and also talk a little about how the game sausage gets made - at least as far as I can without breaking NDA. Sadly, the game I spent most of the weekend demonstrating remains under wraps, so I'll have to tell you about that another day. I didn't get to see a ton of games but I'll also talk about the handful of indies I did see!

This time I travelled by train (non-transport nerds, feel free to skip this paragraph), taking the Eurostar from St. Pancras to Brussels, and then the ICE 19 to Cologne. Although it was slower and a bit more expensive than flying, once you factor in the time it takes to travel out to the airport, and the security generally being much more straightforward, I think I much prefer the trains. I spent my journeys drawing other passengers (coming soon to @canmom-art) and reading Osamu Tezuka's manga Ayako (which will be its own post). It was all told very straightforward and comfortable.

[minutiae: I thought I was clever by getting an Interrail pass instead of just buying tickets the usual way, but I didn't realise that you also have to pay for seat reservations, so in the end the Interrail probably cost about as much for a 'there and back again' type of trip.]

By far the most expensive part of the trip was the hotel room. We stayed in a hotel pretty close to the centre of Cologne, but it turned out that its proximity to be about 15 minutes walk from public transport, so we didn't end up saving that much travel time. Since I ultimately spent almost no time in my hotel room, I think if I go next year, the call will be to stay at a hostel. But anyway, let's talk games.

How a game gets released on the Quest

So, Holonautic specialises in VR games. I wrote about our previous games in this very nerdy post, but in brief, there are broadly two major types of VR game: PC VR and standalone VR. For PC VR, the game runs on a computer, and the headset just contains a screen and something that can be tracked. For standalone VR, the headset is essentially a powerful Android smartphone with a custom OS; it uses the headset's cameras for tracking and does all the computing on the headset.

With the success of the Oculus/Meta Quest series, standalone VR became really, really popular - much more so than PCVR ever was. It makes sense: for native games you don't need a powerful gaming PC and there are no cables to trip over or expensive base stations, but you can still play PCVR games if you want to. Almost all of Holonautic's games are Quest-native.

For PCVR games, you can use one of various APIs, such as OpenXR, to wire up your game to VR tracking and input. Moreover, Valve built pretty good VR support into Steam, and since Steam is pretty much anything-goes, it's pretty easy to release a PCVR game in a way people can get it - but marketing is all on you, as with any Steam game.

The Quest is a different story. Compared to other consoles, Meta (which absorbed Oculus a few years ago) occupies a bit of a strange position in this industry, simultaneously the hardware manufacturer, the only publisher, and also a developer of first-party titles.

I don't have any good pictures for this part so here's me in a massive cathedral. Metaphors? No no. It's just a holiday photo...

There are two ways that games can get released on the Quest. There's the store, which is heavily curated: here, Meta acts as a publisher, releasing only games they think will sell, but they also put games through months of QA and handle all the marketing for you (i.e. putting it in front of people when they boot up the Quest). To get on the store, you basically need to have an in at Meta - there's a whole process, I'll talk about that in a moment. There's also 'App Lab', which is much less heavily vetted - but also it's a lot harder to get an audience on App Lab. If a game is particularly successful on App Lab, Meta may end up promoting it to the store. But a lot of games just languish there.

Of course, just because you have a liaison at Meta does not mean you have a free pass onto the store. There's a whole series of stages you have to go through: first you write up a detailed pitch, then if approved (based on what else may be in the works, Meta won't approve two overly similar games), you have a few months to make a 'Minimum Viable Product' prototype of your game and show it to Meta. I joined the company about a month before the MVP was due on our game.

Assuming your contact at Meta likes the MVP, you get a few more months to make a 'Vertical Slice', which is essentially a small portion of your game that's more or less complete. (For example, a single level.) Then, you show this to Meta again. If you make a good impression, they'll give you the go-ahead to finish the game and release it on the store.

Here's another random picture of Köln from the famous Hohenzollern Bridge. Are you saying this wall covered in padlocks is symbolic of something? Overactive imagination, I tell you.

So if yo uwere wondering, the last few weeks of intense work were all about making that vertical slice be as good as possible (and it got pretty clutch at the end). Since we were all going to be at Gamescom, we agreed with our guy at Meta that we'd demo the game in person.

The upshot of all this is that selling a VR game is heavily heavily shaped by Meta, and specifically the individual at Meta who makes the call. Holonautic has a longstanding contact with a laid-back American guy I'll call W.; he has in the past championed some of our games like Hand Physics Lab that left other Meta staff unconvinced. (As it turns out, W. was right and Hand Physics Lab was successful.) But he's not shy about saying that a game doesn't make the cut and should go to AppLab instead. Our game would live or die based on W.'s opinion.

But not just W.; Meta itself as an organisation is also looking for certain things, shaped by its internal politics. They have new features they want to tout - so if you can come up with a game that uses mixed reality, hand tracking and shared anchors that's probably going to count in your favour. And they have certain directions they are keen to push: sporty exercise games are in favour at the moment.

What does this mean for the evolution of the medium? Well, of course people will make the games they want to make, and just because Meta likes an idea doesn't mean it will sell. But Meta does have a lot of power to dictate the general direction of VR games - and if the Apple Vision Pro takes off in a few years, Apple will no doubt end up with a similar role.

It's been interesting to see the forces that shape a game up close: our ideological desire to make things that are new and different and meet our personal tastes, balanced against the need to have successful games to keep the company afloat (good old M-C-M'), and the need to satisfy Meta; all of this leaves its fingerprints on the game.

To not keep you in suspense, I think the demo to W. went pretty well; I can't really say more than that. It was also a good chance to tell the Meta guys about the parts of their APIs that are jank and hard to use - and to their credit they were apparently rather desperate to get feedback and I feel hopeful that they'll make it better.

It's hard to talk about Meta, because it's just such a massive organisation. We can talk about massive erosion of privacy, enabling genocide in Myanmar, and so on - but we're dealing with a small sub-corner of this huge beast, which is less a social media company and more of a games publisher and console manufacturer. But I definitely understand why someone wouldn't want to let a Facebook device loaded with cameras into their house! I could go more into privacy and the Quest 2 but it would be way too long a tangent. Ultimately this is probably a 'no ethical consumption'/'we live in a society' type of deal - one day Meta's domination will erode and we'll have to deal with a different superpower.

Whatever happens, we can continue to explore what's possible in this medium! I think of all the ethical bargains that must be made with the tech industry, I have done OK.

What Cologne is like

On Tuesday, I arrived in Cologne Central Station (Köln Hauptbahnhof) and walked over to my hotel, where I met my colleagues. Most of them looked fairly similar to how they'd set up their VR avatars... but none of them had realised I'm super tall. surprise, bitches ;p

We went out to an Indian restaurant where we all ended up ordering biryani. This being Germany, the portions were massive, so I asked for mine to be in a box to finish later, forgetting that my hotel room had no fridge or microwave and I'd have zero time to eat it (rip). Overall I think I hit it off pretty well, and we chatted for a while about games we liked, the mess that happened at Za/um, movies and the like - it was good to get a chance to interact more casually in person instead of only ever talking about work stuff. Everyone was exhausted from travel so we turned in pretty early, though probably not as early as the restaurant would have liked...

The thing that surprised me most about Cologne is how much it didn't feel strange or unfamiliar. If not for all the signs in German and cars driving on the right, you could drop me in an area of Cologne and tell me it's an unfamiliar part of London and I'd easily believe you. The parts of the city that are filled with business parks and glass-fronted chain stores could exist almost anywhere on Earth.

That said, there are some ways the Germans do things differently! One is restaurants. I visited three different restaurants and two of them worked on a 'self-service' model. Essentially, you order your food at the bar, and they give you a little buzzer device. When it buzzes, you go back up to the bar and collect your food. Nobody would wait tables, there would just be one person behind the bar taking orders and such (though someone would still have to clean your table).

Restaurants also close very early in Cologne. I think a couple of times we put staff in an awkward position of wanting to go home but having to sit around until our party was done. That said, at one point I walked through a riverside area with a few dozen steakhouses, and that seemed to stay open a lot later.

Köln has a decent amount of graffiti, a surprisingly large portion of it in English. Under most bridges there's usually a good number of tags. I didn't manage to get any good photos but shout out to the person who wrote something like 'this world is too damn loud', which is a big mood for autistic girl walking away from a convention centre lmao.

Wednesday: in which our heroine finds out what an influencer is

The next morning we all went down to a German bakery (pictured above). According to my colleagues, the thing to get is a Bienenstich, or 'Bee Sting', a kind of cake with crispy honeyed almond flakes on top and cream in the middle. Here's a really bad photo:

It was pretty tasty!

We scooted over to the convention centre on the metro, and made our way in. I started getting used to navigating the Messe. Our company didn't get our own booth this year, but XR game devs are pretty tight-knit, and Niantic, creators of Ingress and Pokémon Go, there to promote their new phone-based AR Monster Hunter game - lent us some space in their booth to do a demo to the popular VR influencers Cas and Chary.

We headed over to Hall 8 and none of us could find the Niantic booth. Eventually we figured out why: the Niantic booth was outdoors. On a very bright summer day.

The Quest 2 has a bit of a finicky relationship to light. If it's too dark, the cameras can't pick up anything and tracking can fail - hand tracking is especially susceptible. But bright sunlight is also a problem. Essentially, the controllers on the Quest 2 contain small infrared LEDs, which are tracked by the headset's cameras. This works very well, in general - but in the sun, the background infrared radiation can completely overwhelm these LEDs and the controllers become essentially unusable. You also have to be very careful never to let the sun shine through the lenses inside the headset when you take it off, or the focused sunlight can destroy the screen.

So, an outdoor demo was a problem. Luckily, Niantic had an air-conditioned tent in their little zone. We all filed into the tent and started testing the headsets. Even inside a tent, it was too bright for the Quest 2 hand tracking... but we managed to figure out the Quest Pro still worked (since it uses cameras in the controllers for tracking), and rushed to test everything would work. Before long, Cas and Chary arrived, and we demoed the game. Look mum, I'm in a tweet:

Before this convention I had very little knowledge of the whole world of VR influencers, and honestly I still don't, but it seems to be a big thing - a good word from an influencer is a massive boost to a game's chances. I'm still not entirely sure what the difference is between an influencer and a journalist; both are in the business of reviewing new tech and games and rely on a reputation of unbiased analysis for credibility, and both are courted by devs hoping to promote their games. I guess an influencer is like a fully independent journalist? In any case, Cas and Chary were really sweet in our extremely brief meeting, and it was amazing to see the first people from outside the company having fun with our game.

We got word that bHaptics, a Korean company which makes haptic suits and gloves for use with VR devices, had some space in their booth and were willing to let us do some demos there. So we set off back down the entire length of the convention centre to go into the secret Business Area.

Wednesday at Gamescom is restricted to trade visitors, meaning it's much less crowded than the later days. On those later days, that restriction only applies to the three halls designated as the Business Area. Like regular Gamescom, these halls are divided into flashy booths trying to sell you stuff, but in this case it's mostly companies trying to sell services and tools to developers: backend services, special 3D pens, anti-cheat... also a bunch of stands selling merch and figurines for some reason (maybe because they want to manufacture tie-in merch for your game), as well a bunch of national organisations promoting the game development scene in xyz country.

The Belgian stand functioned as a meeting spot, and they were also handing out vouchers for free beer. A strategy that seemed to be quite effective, judging by how crowded their booth became that evening.

We tested our headsets in the bHaptics zone, and discovered DOTS Netcode's prediction/rollback is good enough to make the game feel smooth even on public convention centre wifi, which was rather satisfying - so you know, good job Unity! Unfortunately the Shared Anchors continued to be a pain. We briefly ran into the head of DOTS at Unity and arranged a demo, scooted off to meet W. from Meta who bought us drinks, scooted over to Niantic again to meet some members of XR Bootcamp (a training course in XR game dev, whose cofounders Ferhan and Rahel seem to be the glue that holds the whole XR dev scene together), and at last wandered back to the Belgian zone...

...and then I went back to bHaptics to have a go at their gear. I didn't take a photo (rip) so here's a photo by CNet showing the full bHaptics getup, which in combination looks... kind of like you're the member of the SWAT team on washing up detail...

(source: Scott Stein/CNet)

I had never gotten to try any sort of haptic suit before this, so it was quite novel. Essentially the vest contains 40 (or 16) vibration motors; the gloves contain further motors on the tips of each finger, and there's another motorised ring between you and the headset. There are also motorised wrist bands, motorised ankle bands...

The first demo was designed to showcase the features of the suit and wristbands, so you could try out various actions like shooting guns or putting stuff in a backpack with and without haptics. A second demo focused on manipulating objects: no wristbands, just the glove and hand tracking.

Of the various devices, the most convincing was probably shooting with the haptic suit. Vibration motors are well-suited for brief, intense pulses, and firing guns definitely felt more impactful with the suit on - not a perfect simulation of impact, but a strong effect. The backpack demo was especially impressive: it really felt like dropping heavy objects into a backpack. You also got to shoot at your own mirror image and feel the bullet/laser impacts, which felt like a rather roundabout way to give myself a back massage, but I could see it being effective in the right game.

The hand demo convinced me less. The problem is that vibration is a poor simulacrum of pressing against a solid surface, so it just felt distracting to have a vibration pulse when i grabbed an object - and you still had the usual physics jank associated with manipulating objects in VR using hand tracking. The final section of the hand tracking demo was social interaction: you were faced with rotated clone avatar, and you could shake your hand, punch or slap yourself, or give yourself a hug. As someone who lives half a world away from most people I love, I think giving someone a hug in VR would be a fantastic use of the technology, but sadly this hug was... not entirely convincing. It is very hard to simulate a steady touch with vibration motors.

Ultimately I think the best use for this haptic gear may not be simulation fidelity, but more abstract: similar to the haptic suit used in certain public demos of Rez Infinite, pulsing in time to music. Such uses are mentioned on the bHaptics site, and I'd love to have been able to try that kind of demo. (And yeah, I'm sure you could hook it up to the other kind of remote-controlled vibrating devices if you so desired, though you'd probably have to do a bit of work to wire everything up.)

It was really cool to finally get to experience haptics, and I was very grateful to the bHaptics members for taking the time to show me their gear.

After I'd satisfied myself, I caught up with the gang; we went out to dinner with other XR devs at a Turkish restaurant called Bona'me near the river. (The food was tasty and had a decent amount of vege options, once again in huge portions but this time we split them between the table. ...and once again we were the last table to leave by a long way, and I feel bad for the staff who had to sit around waiting for us.)

There, I met a solo dev called Ben Outram, who's spent the last three years working on a game called Squingle, a fascinating psychedelic game about manipulating bubbles in a world of DMT-core abstract visuals. (Honestly, check this game out, it's nuts. Meta are sleeping on it, it should absolutely have a full store release.)

Thursday: chaos reigns

On Thursday it somehow ended up that in the space of an hour, we would be demoing our game to the head of DOTS development at Unity (whose name I somehow never managed to catch), demoing our other game Cybrix to Cas and Chary, and then doing the big important demo for meta. Then it turned out that our metro line was blocked by an accident up ahead. We hurried out to get an Uber, and our driver gave us a rather... exciting ride; he rolled down the window to argue with another driver and dropped us off in the middle of the road while we waited in traffic. Rather harried, we arrived back at the bHaptics corner and set up for the demos in an unused area of floor nearby.

I'm not sure if I can say too much about how our demos went, but unfortunately we ran into some versioning issues and were not able to show Cybrix to Cas and Chary before they had to rush off (we weren't the only one to face transport issues that morning). Lesson learned: test everything, not just the part you're worried about. It's not the end of the world, though, and we all headed over to W.'s hotel, into a swanky suite with a nicely laid table for the most important demo of the week. We had the room for maybe 20 minutes, then we were out the door again to the lobby of another hotel to talk it over.

After that... suddenly the afternoon was free, ish. We went back into Gamescom and ate some very expensive ramen. Then, word came that some more influencers wanted to try out our games, so it was back to bHaptics and well, the story gets a little repetitive at this point :p I can't say much more than that without talking about our game, so I will just have to say that the demos went well.

This was my view for most of Gamescom.

At the end of the day, I had a couple of free hours to scoot over to the indie games area and try out some games before everyone went home. At this point my social batteries had run very dry indeed so I was glad to get some time to just play games.

The indie zone was divided into lots and lots of small booths, typically just wide enough for one computer. And even late in the evening, it was very, very busy...

This is just one small corner of the indie area.

Not really knowing almost any of these games, my 1337 MLG Pro Gamescom strat was to wander around until I spotted an empty chair and then play whatever game was going and chat with the dev if they were around. This worked out pretty well! I'll write up the games I played in a moment, but first I'm overdue to wax philosophical.

What was really striking about walking around the indie area is just how many games there are. Wandering around you can pretty quickly spot patterns and influences just by glimpsing at screens (here's a combat tutorial, there's a crafting/survival game, and yonder a narrative game that's borrowed the entire interface of Disco Elysium).

I've seen, up close and personal now, just how much fiddly effort and dedication it takes to make a game. There's something kind of strange and alienating to me about encountering all this creative output in a massive aggregate, where you can only give it maybe half an hour in a noisy room, surrounded by a dozen more or less similar games, in a way that kind of demands you rapidly assign it into a broad, combinatoric category: x art style, y core mechanic, z emotional register. Presenting this game this way really seems to file them all down to Content, which can be boxed and tagged and matched to a consumer with the appropriate set of subculture flags.

One thing that is distinctive about games as a medium to me is the very strong separation between 'mechanics' and 'presentation'. To produce a game you don't just need a system to manipulate, but also associate it with a narrative to make it comprehensible and lend it some sort of affective impact.

So you could theoretically make a game with the exact same mechanics as, say, Half-Life 2 - the same movement, the same enemy hitboxes, the same collision geometry and shooting mechanics and progression - but a completely different presentation style and telling a completely different story. Indeed, a typical early stage of game development has placeholder 'programmer art' and 'greybox' levels.

Equally, you could lift the iconography of a game and drape it over a completely different mechanical substrate - and indeed, it isn't at all uncommon for major franchises to launch spinoffs in different genres.

So games as a medium consist of all these different pieces which you can attach in various ways to define a game which you can name. And once this is done, that game becomes in a sense 'concrete': we act as if Half-Life 2 is an object with a distinct existence. It's a powerful social construct. Then, a successful game is then one which manages to unify all these disparate elements into some sort of whole that feels coherent. Game development sees all the possible elements of a game gradually collapse into whatever gets released. It's highly stochastic: an arbitrary decision by a tired dev, or even a glitch, might later become fixed as one of the core icons of the great 'Franchise'.

When there were less games around, and it was a lot harder for people to get their hands on dev tools, it made sense to think of games as solid, discrete things. Whatever you got on the cartridge or disc was pretty much immutable. Now, though, most major games operate as a 'service' that is constantly modified, and it is not uncommon either for players to mod a game, on a continuum from small changes like injecting shaders or changing music, to total conversion mods that are a 'whole new game'.

And indie games, then... you've got a subculture which heavily emphasise sharing techniques, and it's just as beholden to genre as AAA games. The existence of all these games side by side, even though each one has its own name and identity, seems to further break up "games" into combinations of pieces. When I encounter a new third-person action game, it's as a variation on a kind of broader, abstracted super-game. My first task is to discover the particular quirks of this manifestation of the third person action game. The days when we had a shared culture of 'games everyone has played' are basically already gone, but we still have a certain degree of shared context, because each game is a probe into that constantly evolving game-space, which someone has gone to the trouble to fish out and decorate...

I suppose this is all coming back around to the otaku database thing, isn't it? Or just semiotics in general...

Anyway, here's what I found on Thursday:

I played an FPS called Serum, in which the core conceit is that you inject big syringes into your arm to give yourself powerups. Otherwise, it seems to be a game about gathering and crafting. Sadly the demo computer didn't have headphones, so I was missing sound, and seemed to be a bit underpowered for the game. Nevertheless, I walked around a bit, manufactured a healing serum, and shot some wolf and rabbit monsters with a bow and arrow.

I feel like I was rather ruder than I intended to be, because in talking to the dev afterwards, the first thing I mentioned was the performance issues and he had to apologise like, yeah, we're running it on a laptop (it sounded like he said with a 3070? but I must have misheard him, unless he has very high standards for underpowered), it does run better on a proper computer. The environment design in this game was definitely really strong. Not quite sure how the serum mechanic would work in practice - it sounds quite like Bioshock's plasmids, but the demo didn't really give the opportunity to try out the different options.

I played Dead Pets Unleashed, an adventure game about a demon girl in a struggling punk band. One of the devs was hanging out with this one and generally had a great vibe, joking about how almost nobody picked a certain option and suggesting the route that would get the most out of the demo.

The game uses a sidescrolling perspective with hand-drawn sprites. The art style is very consciously flat, its population of monster people allowing an impressive variety of colours. It broadly alternates between conversations with choices that adjust stats (e.g. +punk, -social) and a variety of minigames - there was a music minigame of course (the conceit being chasing away intrusive thoughts), but I also washed a dildo, constructed a hot dog, and waited tables. Generally it oozed style, absolutely nailing the punk vibe, and had a bunch of cute features like changing your character's outfit. You can play the same demo on Steam. I think this is one I might well get when the full release comes.

And then I played... a game I can't even find now! I really should have made a note or taken a picture or something. It was a kind of Amanita-like point and click game in which you play a tin can person, manipulating objects as you try to rescue your can dog, descending into a city made of cardboard boxes. The puzzles were occasionally a bit obtuse, but the cute style really carried it. The devs weren't on hand for this one, but they did have a wall where you could leave postit notes with your comments on the game, including one with a fairly essential hint for the first puzzle. It was called something like 'can world' or 'box world', but at this point, I can't find it anywhere. It's a shame because I thought it was neat.

That was all I had time for on Thursday: I zoomed off to another restaurant by the river to eat some more falafels. Someone let off some fireworks for some reason.

We started to make our way back, across the famous Hohenzollern Bridge, which is one of those bridges with a tradition that lovers will attach a padlock to the fence to symbolise how long their relationship will last.

At this point the padlocks have started to resemble kudzu, hanging down in strands of linked padlocks, or even growing up onto the superstructure of the bridge on chains. Questionable symbolism or not, it all makes for a fantastic textural effect, especially since it maintains the sheer density of padlocks for the entire length of the bridge.

While we were crossing, a boat passed under the bridge carrying some kind of a party. From a distance, all you could really see was a mass of glowsticks, and all you could hear was the ghost of the beat. It was a cool sight.

At this point I was pretty much completely exhausted so while there was some kind of industry party I definitely could not handle the crowds and walked home past the cathedral for an early night, eager to head in early to Gamescom tomorrow with a good night's sleep...

Friday: just like in my Bloodbornes, amirite gamers?

Predictably I overslept. Since I'd only get a few hours at Gamescom, I decided to visit the famous cathedral. I took that photo that I posted earlier, where somehow my little phone camera absolutely nailed the lighting, even if the cathedral is severely out of focus...

I headed inside the building too.

Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom) is a bit of an oddball, historically. While it wasn't uncommon for cathedral-building projects to last a century, after working on this thing from 1248–1560 they downed tools, leaving the city with a half-finished cathedral for about 300 years.

They had the front and back of a cathedral, with a big crane on the front part.

In the 1800s, the middle ages were in and the state decided it would be a good idea to have a big cathedral - both to make their new Catholic subjects happy and a symbol of THE NATION. After raising a stonking amount of money with one of the world's first NGOs, they built the rest of this thing, which briefly became the tallest building in the world. Hooray, said Emperor Wilhelm I. I love being a big strong nation with a big cathedral dick.

The cathedral survived the first world war, but got hit by a lot of bombs in the second - though the towers remained standing. After the war, they put it back up again. Now, it's a tourist attraction. Transsexual atheists can walk in and turn their phone to funny angles to try and capture the ceiling...

You can call this a Deutsch angle, because... ok whatever guys they can't all be winners.

They've got some old school Christian-style guro in here.

The interior is pretty cool: huge vaulted ceiling, massive stained glass. The stained glass unfortunately photographs really poorly on a phone, the colours washed out pretty much no matter what. They did have this funky ladder contraption, which I assume is probably used for maintaining/washing the windows...

After a little while in there I decided this was pretty neat but I'd go to Gamescom, to say goodbye to everyone and maybe get a glance at some of the mainstream game zones. As it turned out we had another demo lined up, so we went back to The Corner Near BHaptics and did the routine. This time the audience was mostly other VR devs so I got to have some nice technical discussion.

At last, I had about an hour before my train. I thought about exploring the indie game zone some more, but decided I should really at least take a glance through the other halls. What I discovered was... queues! Many many queues. And various elaborate dioramas.

Sometimes they had actors to go with them. I decided to include the people taking the photo because... I don't even know what I was going for with this one to be honest, it seems kind of banal.

Here's a queue of people waiting to play Rogue Trader, which boldly tells you it's the first(!) CRPG in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, hopefully not also the last. 'Warhammer CRPG' is a concept that 16-year-old Bryn would have gone completely insane about. 31-year-old Bryn was still a bit curious, but not enough to wait for a sitting down queue with less than an hour left at the con.

I didn't take a lot of photos of the Extremely Gamer Shit, but for a taster, this lady was DJing a set on something called the 'Leet Desk', which appears to be a desk with built in RGB lighting, billed as 'the desk for gamers', because we can no longer contain the rainbow puke. When I walked past, she was playing an EDM remix of a tune that I vaguely recognised from a movie or a game but couldn't place specifically, which felt about right. Maybe it was Skyrim?

A lot of people walked around with the Hoyoverse bag, Hoyoverse being the collective term for the games of Chinese developer miHoYo such as Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact. Their slogan was 'tech otakus save the world', which thanks to their cunning move of handing out large bags, was soon paraded all over the convention. I feel like the jury is still out on the impact (ha ha) of tech otakus on the world...

In the end, the last hour was spent briefly walking around to see the halls and then I left to say my goodbyes and hop back on the train. The journey back was totally straightforward. I finished reading my manga and drew some more train passengers, who were generally pretty happy to be drawn.

Cosplay

It's a con, there's gotta be cosplayers right? Sure enough, the crowd was peppered with stormtroopers, kitsune, army men, luffies and various spooky skull guys... I didn't get many photos but here's a couple.

Obligatory stormtroopers. Luckily, the inside of the con was airconditioned, those suits look toasty.

These three kindly stopped to pose for me. I don't know what game they're doing, Dead by Daylight maybe? DbD girls, tell me ^^'

This robot-girl cosplayer's costume is neat: when you look close you see it's made of old PC parts. Or at least the casings of them. I spotted a graphics card and an old VR headset. She also has built-in stilts so she towered over everyone, big respect. She was hanging out in the hall on Wednesday, so she might have been there in an official capacity, but I didn't get a chance to talk to her.

Observations of demographics and stuff

It's been a good long while since I've been to any sort of nerd convention. Mostly I've been to scifi/media fandom cons like Nine Worlds and Worldcon, or general nerd-shit cons like MCM Expo, and in the old old days, Warhammer cons like Game Day. But this event being specifically a gaming expo was pretty new to me.

Predictably the demographics skewed male (but not overwhelmingly) and white/East Asian (almost without exception). The various national organisations present were primarily European (which tracks for an event in Germany) but there were large stands e.g. promoting Korean game dev or the Guangzhao region of China. In the indie zone, there were a good handful of Japanese devs, and I spotted one game that was fully in JP. Here and there, you'd spot banners promoted other gaming expos - a lot in Europe, but also there is apparently a Gamescom Asia in Singapore, and a Tokyo Indie Games Summit which sounds pretty fun. By contrast, while I don't have any real stats to substantiate, I would say I saw very few organisations were promoting game devs from South America, Africa or Oceania.

Beyond that... this is very definitely a place for nerds, but there's a lot of different varieties of nerd you can be now. So sure, T-shirts with slogans and cargo shorts for many, but equally you could dress super goth, you could show off all your tattoos, you could go in your colourful coordinated kitsune cosplay or just wear some bright hair die. I'm confident I saw a few other girls from the isle of 🏳️‍⚧️, but 'hello I clocked you let's be friends' is not the best introduction even from another trans girl lmao - in general I didn't really talk to people besides the group I had arrived with. I think if I'd gone alone, it would not be the sort of con where you make a lot of friends, but who knows?

All in all, a solid adventure. I'll probably go again next year, if I can find somewhere cheaper to stay. I never did get to see the chocolate museum.

ok, story over - thanks for reading, nerd ;p

#gamescom #computer games #adventures of canmom

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andromedaexists · 10 months

Text

WUPDATE: CALL ME ICARUS

𝚆𝚎𝚍𝚗𝚎𝚜𝚍𝚊𝚢, 𝙹𝚞𝚕𝚢 𝟷𝟿𝚝𝚑 || 𝙲𝚊𝚖𝚙 𝙽𝚊𝙽𝚘

y'all i am so busy rn that i forgot to keep yous updated on my progress. moving forward i am going to try and be more present here, i am going to work my way through my backlog of tag games this weekend and queue up all the writing yous tagged me in.

this month is camp nano and it has kept my mighty busy. here is a list of things that has happened this month:

finished the prologue and chapters 1-10. i got them up for betas to read (if you'd like to beta for CMI, the form is still open to apply here)

got in contact with an artist and started the process of commissioning them for a cover (they just sent me the concept sketch and im!!!!!)

set an official publication date (announcement coming soon 👀👀👀)

submitted a query! (and realized that i don't want to trad pub so i'm self pubbing instead!)

started talking to formatting editors. i'm not sure if i'll be able to afford a good formatting review before publication, but i am in talks with someone who will let me use their Vellum!

started research on how to self pub/what company i want to go through (and actually set up a channel where i can dump my research once i compile it!)

cried a lot over this whole process. a lot.

so yeah! a lot has happened! a lot of good stuff, but a lot of stressful stuff as well! that's okay though, i'm just over the moon that i have an official pub date 🥰

i'm going to push through to the end of camp nano, but i am going to try and get back into weekly wupdates and just talking about writing a lot more. i was a little hesitant about joining camp nano given how bad regular nano went for me last year, but a new server i joined has really helped me find my love of writing again (thank you doom and clanky and so many others that i met through the bird app, i love you all)

anyways, enough rambling. let's get to what you guys are really here for: snippets! i am going to add a couple here (read, a snippet for each chapter i've missed updating here) to make up for my relative silence as of late:

Chapter 5:

There are two more encounters listed below it, but before Icarus can read them over he is distracted by a flash of gold entering the shop. His eyes shoot up, latching to the new patron standing in line with their back to him. It’s normal for bright colors and movement to grab his attention, but this time something feels different. He can’t put his thumb on it, but his brain is telling him that he should recognize them. It’s screaming that he should know who they are. But for the life of him, he cannot make out who it is. Whomst? The fuck? From this distance, he can’t see anything that might tell him who they are. Their plain black clothes could be the tell of an Elysian, but that isn’t a guarantee. The only truly identifiable trait is the halo of blond curls cascading over their shoulders. Why do I feel like I know them?

Chapter 6:

Ariadne whistles, a long and appreciative sound as she sees her husband’s work. The tattoo had been a beast to heal, but the hours of torturous pain and restless nights of endless itching had been well worth it. He spent days ogling the tattoo after it had first healed, the feathers look so real that you can almost feel them when running your hands over the inked skin. It is everything he wanted and then some. A feather-light touch runs down the etched skin. There is only one person who had ever touched him with that kind of reverence, his artist must have gotten up to inspect the tattoo. He is admiring his art—as he should—when he says, “Looks like you should have used more lotion.” He lets go of one edge of the hoodie to flip him the bird. It’s impossible to hide anything from his artist, of course, and he knew that his lackluster care would be noted. There are likely small splotches where the ink had fallen out due to his poor moisturizing regiment, but it’s not like he has much of a choice in that. Icarus drops the back of his hoodie with a sigh as he turns to face the artist again. YOU KNOW? HARD REACH AREA ALONE. His eyebrows raise as he speaks, his signs becoming large and boisterous. He then mimes trying to reach the middle of his back. That gets a chortle out of his artist and Ariadne. He hadn’t thought to consider how he would need to reach every part of his back before getting the tattoo, and the fact that he doesn’t have anyone in his life to help him makes it that much worse.

Chapter 7:

“Look,” Andromeda levels at him, voice growing in intensity as they say, “I understand that you don’t quite trust me yet. I mean, we just met yesterday. Hell, I don’t even know your name yet! But-” “Icarus.” He grabs the hoodie on the left and pulls it over his head. He takes a moment to pull his hair up and fasten it in a ponytail before turning and leaning back against the closet door. “My name is Icarus.” “Okay. Icarus. Y’know, that fits.” Their voice is calmer, quieter, as if that piece of information is enough to placate them. Icarus huffs. The name really does fit him, doesn’t it? Always jumping into things without thinking of the consequences, taking risks, and keeping shit close to his chest until he gets a bit too close to hubris and starts to fall apart. Falling in love with the sun personified. Burning, falling, crashing, drowning. Yeah, the name fits him. The only difference between him and the Icarus of myth is that he died at the end of his story. Icarus has no plans of dying. No, he plans of making it out the other end of his story and living to tell the tale.

Chapter 8:

“I thought the whole ‘Oh, Hestia has a pizza shop?’ ordeal would tell you that I have no idea where to go.” Huh, yeah, that should have clicked with him. It’s not like they could search up directions, they likely don’t have a phone just the same as him. Can’t risk having a way for someone to use GPS to locate him. It’s not like he has anyone to keep in contact with, anyways. “It’s just down the street. Go out the front of the building and head down West Saint Clair, it’s just past fourth street. I’d say can’t miss it but you very much could, there’s no sign out front. It’s the only building that looks like there’s someone living in it on that block, though.” “Got it. West Saint Clair, Fourth Street, not-abandoned building.” Andromeda repeats the directions to themself as they head towards the front door. “Anything else while I’m out?”

Chapter 9:

How could he forget? “Καιρὸς δε, Thanatos,” he mumbles as he stretches his arms out in front of him and rests his forehead on the blissfully cool counter. “And here I was thinking you weren’t gonna remember me.” Long gone is the shrill and timid voice of a sickly kid, replaced by one of the most soothing and deep tones Icarus had ever heard. “…Fair ‘nuff.” The vibrations of a glass hitting the counter top make Icarus look up. A glass of water, just water. He groans, that is not what he wants right now. He’s craving the sweet buzz of an energy drink, but that will require him to get up and walk around the island to grab one. Andromeda chuckles, not moving an inch as they watch Icarus suffer over the glass. “Quit pouting and drink.” He drops his head, turning his face away from the glass. “Oh come on, you big baby. Deja de hacer un berrinche y bebe.” They poke his cheek as he pouts. “Mira, food’s ready. Sit up and eat.”

Chapter 10:

“Why are we running?” they ask, gasping for air after the impromptu sprint. Icarus points to the bird as it hops along the ridge of the tent. He turns to watch their reaction, this is a big deal. Their eyes widen and their jaw drops open, they are just as shocked as he is. His smile has not left, though it dulls as their face drops to sadness and grim acceptance. What? “A crow.” Before he can say anything the look is gone. They beam a bright smile at him. “I can’t believe you found a bird! That’s definitely good luck for us.” But it’s not, their reaction sits wrong with him. He squints his eyes, watches them to see if that glimpse of despair will surface again. When it doesn’t, Icarus forces a smile on his face. If they don’t want to talk about it then he isn’t going to talk about it.

Okay, i think that's enough of a writing dump for now. here's the CMI Taglist:

@flowerprose @isherwoodj @cream-and-tea @touchingmadness @lockejhaven @marinesocks @wildswrites @the-finch-address @writingpotato07-deactivated2023 @leighvalentin @inkspellangel @cljordan-imperium @outpost51 @alleahgrinnon @smol-feralgremlin

Please fill out this form to be added or ask to be removed!

#call me icarus #wip update #writing #writeblr #wip excerpt #wupdate #tragedy #adult fantasy #dark fantasy #andi writes

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