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howtolongfurb · 3 years

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How to Long Furb

For whatever reason, furbies have taken over the internet. It’s beautiful and terrifying and I desperately want one. Original 1998 furbies are hard to acquire but that doesn’t mean you can’t make one of your own. Imagine the potential for neck pillows with long furbies! I’m going to walk you through step-by-step how I acquired the supplies and compiled these monstrosities. Note, this is not by any means a comprehensive guide, just my personal experience. I am an ameteur. There is a huge community of furby fans online with tips and tricks on executing a variety of furby modifications. Read more below!

I will start off by saying there were many points throughout this whole process where I got frustrated and set the project aside for weeks at a time. I initially started hand-sewing long furbs but was disappointed with the poor craftsmanship. That’s when I impulse bought a cheap Singer over the 2020 holidays and retaught myself how to use the machine. The point I want to make here is to persevere. Every furby is beautiful! Crooked faceplates and chunky bellies just give a furby more personality. They say practice makes perfect, right? So let’s get started. The main components of a furby are:

1) The faceplate: unless you can get your hands on an original furby, finding a faceplate for your project can be tricky. There are a variety of people online selling furby faceplates. You can also 3D print faceplates using files from thingiverse. I’ve even seen faceplates pressed in resin. My favorite faceplate is from MrDsPrintedCreations on Etsy. The iris of the eyes are recessed so you can easily insert glass eye chips. The first thing I do with my faceplate is glue a piece of fabric behind it so it’s easier to sew into the head. I paint my faceplate with acrylic craft paint and top it off with a clear gloss coat. 2) The spine: for a poseable long furb, there needs to be a flexible inner piece. I thought thin wire from Menards would do the job, but once it’s in the plush it doesn’t hold it’s shape. I found plastic doll armature works well as a spine. It even creaks when bent for that extra spritz of cursed, spooky energy! You can also use a flexible coolant hose as a spine. I’ve ordered doll armature online from CR’s Crafts: the 1/8th and 1/4th size works well. The 1/2th inch armature is hard to stuff around. 3) Fabric! Fur and belly piece: In order to make furbs, I knew I first needed a sewing pattern. Tumblr user Cavity Sam created a template based on the 1998 furby and I used this to make my first furb with my new machine and scrap fabric lying around. My friend Gunnar 3D printed a rudimentary faceplate to use. After using Cavity Sam’s sewing template, I modified the pattern to use for long furbs specifically. You can download that sewing pattern here.

You’ll need the following supplies per one 3-foot long furby:

quarter of a yard faux fur fabric (9 inches x 44 inches)

patterned fabric for belly, ears, feet (~3 inches x 44 inches)

sewing machine (thread, needle, scissors, pins)

faceplate, 14mm eye chips, eyelashes

E600 glue, scrap fabric

paint (acrylic or nail polish), paintbrushes, clear top coat

spine (plastic doll armature)

cotton stuffing (I cut open cheap pillows from Walmart)

Step one: Use the sewing pattern to cut fabric pieces for the head and body. When cutting on fur, make sure to trace the pattern on the flat backside of the fabric with the fur flattened in the right direction. For example, the hair on the Y-mane piece (back of the head) should be pointed downwards. I made notes on the paper pattern pieces where you can eyeball more or less space. The mane piece should have more rounded corners, for example. I made my furbies 3 feet long, so the front belly piece was 2 inches wide by 3 feet long. The back fur was 6.5 inches wide by 3 feet long.

Step two, feet and ears: Depending on how small you cut your fabric, it can be really hard to combine two separate pieces. For the feet I folded a piece of fabric in half and sewed the C-shapes before cutting them out. Using tweezers made it much easier to turn them back right-side-out. After cutting the ear pieces (making sure the hair on the fur was pointed in the right direction, inside out) I pinned them together before sewing. Turn back right-side-out.

Step three, head: Line the pattern pieces up so the Y-mane is in the middle. Sew the sides of the head to the mane first. Once that is one solid piece, fold it in half to sew the top curve of the head. I have pinned these pieces to ensure they don’t slip when going through the machine. Slow and steady wins the race; make sure to turn the fabric as you’re curving the top of the head. Finally you can sew the piece under the ear together, leaving a gap for the ear to go in.

Step four, ears: Everything up to this point has been done on the machine. I haven’t figured out a way to attach the ears with the machine, so this step was done by hand. With the ear facing right side out, pin the ear to the inside-out head. Make sure the patterned part of the ear is facing outwards (where the faceplate goes). By hand, sew the ear to the hole in the head. After the ear is secured, turn the head right side out and voila!

Step five, body: Lining up these pieces is important and a little tricky. You’ll want some excess belly fabric on the top to merge with the bottom of the beak on the faceplate. See the diagram; rotate everything 180 degrees to begin sewing. The fur hair needs to be pointed upwards and the belly fabric pattern is facing down on top of that. After sewing the belly fabric to the fur, fold it over to sew the other side. The fur should be on the inside of the sausage/ body piece. Once you’re finished sewing, the finished piece needs to be turned fur side out.

Step six: Faceplate break time! This step can be done at any point in the process, up until you hand sew the faceplate into the head. To start, glue a piece of fabric behind the faceplate. The faceplate itself should just be the eyes and the beak, making it easier to sew into the head of the furb. You don’t need that extra plastic around the bottom of the beak (or at least I haven’t figured out how to sew that in convincingly). I used grey scrap fabric and E6000 glue to adhere the faceplate. Then you need to paint the faceplates. In earlier furbs I used acrylic paint topped with clear DecoArt gloss varnish on top. You can also use colored nail polish with a clear coat on top. In the pictured furbs I tried sealing the faceplates with mod podge but it dried tacky/ uneven. Optional: you can accessorize your furb with jewelry!

Step seven, inserting the faceplate: You need to sew this part into the head by hand as well. Start from the top center (head inside out, faceplate facing into head) and work your way down the right. Make sure to use a thicker needle and poke the needle through as close as you can get to the faceplate to ensure the fabric fur is flush to the face. The needle may be stubborn (poking through the hardened glue) so use a thimble or bottle cap to help push the needle. When you get to the bottom corner of the eye, the fabric may not line up perfectly. Use excess fabric to sew a seam, effectively acting like a cheek. This part takes a little finessing. Finish attaching the fur fabric one third of the way down the beak. This is where the belly piece will connect to. The final step (later) will be to put the eye + glass chip in.

Step eight, attaching the head to body: I was able to use the machine for this part. Turning the head inside out, pin the head to the outside of the back fur. The head and back should line up so a gap is left for connecting the patterned belly to the bottom of the beak (that step comes later). After the head is connected to the back, I do a second pass to make sure there isn’t any gap in the seam. When turned right side out, you’ll see that excess patterned belly spills out the top. Keep the furb inside out to connect under the beak.

Step nine, connecting the belly to the beak: On the excess patterned fabric sticking out the top of the body, trace the shape of the “M” to cut out. See the highlighted yellow portion in the picture, as well as the printed sewing pattern piece. The piece directly below the beak needs to be done by hand. If you can manage it, you can sew a diagonal line with your machine before trimming the patterned belly. I found it easiest to start from the right and work my way to the left. The acute angle under the cheek will need finessing, but with small and tight enough stitches the end result is good. Turn the furb inside out to see your long sausage of a creation!

Step ten, spine insertion and stuffing: Now THIS is where I may have messed up (i.e. got frustrated multiple times) and need feedback from the furby community. The furby is essentially complete, it just needs the butt and feet attached to seal it off. Because of this long sausage of a furb, it was hard to push stuffing all the way up into the head/ ears, even using a yard stick. Maybe if I printed my original sewing pattern at 115% or 130% size, the completed project wouldn’t have been so narrow. (The ears are a perfect size now that I think about it, so maybe just the head pieces need to be bigger.) This resizing would make for a larger in diameter, plushier furby too. I thought I could insert the spine after stuffing, but the opposite is true. Insert your wire or doll armature after the ears and head are stuffed but before you begin stuffing below the beak. Alternatively, you can fasten the top of the spine behind the faceplate before stuffing. I taped a cup to the end of a yard stick and that helped push handfuls of stuffing into the furb at a time. Leave 2 to 4 inches of the bottom unstuffed so it’s easier to sew on the bottom circle. We will leave a small gap for the rest to be stuffed before totally sealing it off.

Step eleven, connecting the feet and bottom: Stuff the feet and seal them off with a couple stitches. Don’t stuff the feet completely full, the top seam should lay flat. Place the two feet on the bottom of the belly, pointing upwards. Sew the feet onto the belly in a straight line. Now comes the part that takes more finessing, the bottom. When you line up the bottom circle, make sure the hairs of the fabric are pointed backwards. If you can manage it with the machine, sew the bottom circle to the bottom of your furby where the feet connect to the belly, about a third of the way around the full circle. The fur of the circle should be facing down, touching the belly of the furb. Once you’ve attached the circle to the feet, you can fold the circle back to see the butt starting to take shape! You can give it another pass on the machine, sewing the opposite side/ flip the furby so you can see the backside of the belly. Leave enough room to stuff the rest of the cotton and close the gap by hand sewing. Now that your furby is essentially complete, you can add the finishing touches! I always leave the eye chips for last so I don’t scratch them in the process of turning my furb inside out. You can print or paint the eye designs to place behind the glass chip. Use clear glue like superglue or E600 for the best results. Gluing eyelashes on with superglue is an optional last step.

Aaaaaaand the furbies are done! Again, I’m an ameteur sewer who’s learning as I go. I’m always open to suggestions and feedback; if there’s a way to revise this process to make more efficient and better quality furbs, I’d love to know. Thanks yall and enjoy making these cursed friends!

#furby #long furby #long furb #furby community #furby sewing pattern #sewing guide

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lindstromm · 3 years

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Simplified Bookbinding: Buy Good Glue

In the first post in the Simplified Bookbinding series (How to Make a Cheap First Book), I explained the four steps to binding your own book. Because it was a crappy first-effort practice book and I didn’t want to ask you to buy anything special, I used Elmer’s school glue. You can see what’s already happening to the book. The end papers are pulling off the cover; the cover is coming off the boards; even the binding has split and pages are going to start falling out.

The most important bookbinding supply to upgrade immediately is the GLUE. In this post, I’ll go through the four standard steps of bookbinding and talk about what kind of glue you need for each step. Here are the steps:

Step 1. Format the text and print it. (No glue required.)

Step 2. Create the text block. (The glue is incredibly important for this step and I will tell you exactly what to buy.)

Step 3. Create the case. (You need a decent craft-strength glue. I’ll explain some options, but there’s a lot of leeway in this glue choice.)

Step 4. Attach the case to the text block. (I’ll give you a couple of pointers, and then you can choose your own glue as you develop the technique.)

If any other bookbinders @renegadepublishing want to reblog and add glue comments, please go ahead. There are so many glue tips and tricks, and what you can get varies with what part of the world you’re in, so the more perspectives, the more helpful it is.

Long post with pictures and astonishing amounts of glue geekery under the cut.

Step Two: Create the text block.

To put the pages together, whether you’re perfect binding or sewing signatures, you must use PVA bookbinding glue. The description should also say things like “archival quality” and “acid-free” and “PH neutral” and “non-toxic.” There are several brand names of PVA bookbinding glue. I bought Lineco brand from Amazon.

Step Three: Create the case.

The glue to create the case is basically any glue that permanently sticks paper and cloth and cardboard together. I watched Sea Lemon’s glue video and went to a craft store with my list of glue brands she recommended and couldn’t find any of them. So I picked up a bottle of Aleene’s Tacky Glue and an Elmer’s Craft-Strength Glue Stick mostly because that was all the store had. They’ve worked out great and I’ve never tried anything else.

Check the glue descriptions for those important words like ‘archival quality’ and ‘non-toxic.’ I figure any glue that claims it’s safe for photos is safe for bookbinding.

A case for a book is made out of cover boards (stiff, strong and thin cardboard) which are covered in either bookcloth or cardstock (See Simplified Bookbinding: Cardstock Covers). Those things will all warp if they get wet. Glue is wet. Creating a case means using enough glue to stick it together without using so much glue that your cover warps.

This is one of my first books, in which I spread liquid glue over the entire cover board. I think I was still using chipboard for the cover boards at this point. You can see how badly it warped:

Then I figured out you should only put glue on the edges of the board, and my covers warp a tiny bit or not at all:

I do not use the PVA bookbinding glue on the covers because the PVA bookbinding glue is very runny/wet. The Tacky Glue is thicker. The glue stick is thickest of all. I know some people are leery of using a glue stick, but I’ve had great results. The craft strength glue stick says it was formulated to use on photos, so I figure it won’t turn yellow and rot ordinary paper either.

Step 4: Attach the case to the text block.

There are two places you use glue in Step Four. One is to glue the end paper to the text block. For that, I use the PVA bookbinding glue, applied with one of these methods.

Method 1:

Dipping the end paper in a line of glue gives you a nice thin and consistent line of glue on the crease.

You can also apply the glue directly to the text block, but that risks getting a glue blob somewhere, and then that spreads out and glues a bigger area than you wanted to glue.

Method 2:

Put some trash paper and wax paper between the end papers, and between the end paper and the first page of the text block (so you don’t glue pages together). Set wax paper on top of the text block, put some heavy books on it, and let it dry.

Is it dry? Moving on.

The second place you use glue in Step 4 is to attach the end paper to the case. In the pic on the right, I used liquid glue spread only at the edges. Maybe you can’t see it very well, but the paper is wrinkled like any paper gets if it gets wet and then dries. If you put a piece of paper in between the end papers while it dries, it absorbs some of the moisture, but I still get wet wrinkles sometimes. The one on the left was glued with a glue stick, and you can see how smooth it is.

I apply the glue stick only to the edges. (Notice I cut off as much of the spine cloth as I could.) Any glue on the end papers, whether glue stick or liquid glue, should only be applied around the edges:

Glue sticks dry really fast, so two sides are already drying out while I took this picture. One drawback to using a glue stick is you have to work fast. It might be easier to practice with liquid glue so you’ve got an extra few seconds to get the text block set straight in the case. Otherwise, you may have nice smooth end papers, but your entire text block is crooked. If the end papers are bad enough, you can always cut them off and start over with Step 4.

And just to keep glue in perspective, if the end papers get really screwed up, it probably isn’t the glue’s fault. This one is me not smoothing out the end paper very well before putting it under a heavy stack of books to dry:

Summary: Find good craft-quality glue and experiment to learn how to apply enough glue to stick your case together without applying so much that it wrinkles. That’s just a matter of practice, which is why I suggest making a few blank practice books before trying to bind something that really matters to you.

Good luck and have fun with it!

#simplified bookbinding #bookbinding #renegade bookbinders #renegade bookbinding #glue #lindstrom2020 #op #renegade publishing

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namjoonchronicles · 4 years

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finer arts | th

↳ genre fluff, slice of life, domestic, husband-Taehyung ↳ words 4.6k ↳ summary inspired by the Baumgartner Restoration channel on Youtube, Taehyung is written as a fine art restorer. This fic centres on the point where arts and science collide. Also, long haired Taehyung. Unedited. :’) ↳ song miley cyrus ‘when i look at you’ slowed ver.

Very soft. Taehyung’s hair, at this length, had always been soft. It’s been awhile since he told you he wanted them to grow longer, and it’s finally paying off. He looks terribly soft with bangs going just a little over his brows and poking his eyes. Gathering his hair into one apple sprout and tying it up has always been your favourite way to start the day. He was humming Frank Sinatra's in the living room as it played on the bluetooth speaker when you found him. Always so hardworking. You leaned on your side by the wall, folding your arms and watching your husband pouting at the document he was reading as his head hung low. Big round glasses sliding down the slope of his Godly carved nose he learned to hate, growing up. Parker Fountain Pen in his slender fingers, cross crossing, underlining, circling the paper in a professional manner makes you remember why you had fallen for him. Slowly, but surely.

He lifts his eyes, noticing another presence in the room, and briefly smiles before returning to his writing pad again, greeting in a deep voice, “You’re awake?”

“Yes, I am…” you nodded, indulging the view still. When he starts to repeatedly push his hair away from his face, you take off your own hairband and have him sit down on the floor, with his back leaning against the couch. And you gather his hair with your finger raking the locks gently, tying an apple sprout hair. His eyes were glued on the work he brought home.

“I take it that you’re leaving home for the studio today?” you tipped his head back, chin pointed upward, demanding his attention. He chuckles through his nose as you leaned in for a chaste kiss on the lips, where his beauty mark is and then the tip of his nose and the skin between his brows. With the chuckles alone, you knew you were right. Judging from the wrinkles on his forehead when he crosses out the plans he had, you knew that he was handling a semi large painting.

Taehyung is a fine-art conservator-restorer and because of it, his work consumes him. He treats his client’s painting like his own wife; each with their own time, loving and care. Instead of being envious towards the time he puts in them, you weigh more on the term ‘admiration’, towards his work and dedication. He truly is invested in his line of profession. It was only natural for an art lover like him to eventually become an artist himself, but after some unfortunate series of art blocks, he began to turn to conservation midway through college. You were always supportive of his aspirations. Although you don’t share the same passion for arts to actually go to a college as an art major like him, he always says you should have been an artist rather than scientist when he saw you sketch a lion behind your notes, after being frustrated about writing papers on your research.

Ever since then, you and Taehyung shared an art studio at your shared home after marriage.

“Polyurethane,” he let out a deep sigh. One word is enough.

A big part about restoration and conservation is perfection. When the previous conservator uses polyurethane as varnish, the next restorer, in this case is Taehyung, will have endless scrapings to do. Polyurethane becomes embedded in the paint, which makes most restorers emotionally frustrated. This poorly chosen varnish not only becomes a part of the paint, it makes it difficult to remove because it is scraped along with the original paint by the painter and artist. This then, leads to more restoration work because the objective of a restorer, is to… restore. Using polyurethane just adds into the time working on it. The last time he dealt with polyurethane paintings, he went home with colors drained out from his face. He spent a week on them because he needs to be extra careful to get most of the polyurethane out with minimal damage on the painting.

After the scrapings, he will have to remove the paintings from the old plywood it came with and it was glued with rabbit-skin glue which is the most tedious process, one after the other.

“When it came to the studio, I was holding my breath because the state of it... was just,” Taehyung puffed his cheek and deflated it. Where does he even start? Dented surface, skewed plywood frames, rabbit skin glue, and polyurethane varnish. The owner’s cat sat on the painting. And this painting was already fragile at this time. It was a very old painting auctioned for at least a million dollar. Taehyung almost fainted.

Right. That was how he is. When Taehyung works on a painting, any painting for that matter, of any values of any age, he is consumed by it. Giving it his all, but careful not to leave traces of him as to respect the original painter.Taehyung, as an artist, is mind blowingly authentic. He has unique perceptions towards everything he sees and he was the first few artist you knew that began with taking photographs. Actually, he was the only artist you knew all your life that was intimate enough to have this talk. Back in the days, art students don’t really mingle with science nerds due to unforeseen differences seniors claim to have. You personally were told that art students are too superficial to really want to understand the world and that they see you as a fuss in human form. You believed none of that bullshit.

You have always been the kind to look deeper than what is on the surface, always skin deep. Taehyung noticed this from the first time he laid eyes on you. There was something worth uncovering.

Just like today, when your eyes tunnels into the magnifier to see the photographed version of the painting he was supposed to restore, he gets giddy at the fact that his wife, his forever girlfriend takes so much interest in so many things and is well-versed in all kinds of art despite not being a member of the field. It was at moments like these that he relentlessly wonders why you never considered to seriously take art degrees just like your science stuff.

“Looks flaky, and the dent is so deep…” you commented, craning your neck on his desk as he watches fondly from the side, “You’ll have to patch it up and sew it together…”

The smile melts away and he averted his eyes, tapping his index finger on his knee at the same time. By his demeanor alone, you know that he dislikes this. The work just keeps piling on, and more and more of the original paint is lost. Like a wet on wet painting work, that keeps bleeding color, the painting will have more of Taehyung than it would of its owner. Taehyung let out a sigh you understood so well. You leave the painting’s print on the table with the magnifying glass set away on the corner with the rest of his tools. You bring yourself next to him and put your arm around his neck and the other palm rests on one side of his face, sliding down his chiseled jaws and thumb, tracing his lips. His cologne swims around your nostril, and the smell of his hair that you love, engulfs you. He gathers his arms around your waist, rests his head under your chin and stays like that as long as you both need.

He will be away for long and intimacy of such degree would be difficult to execute. Long tiring week ahead will make you drift you both apart, only to hopefully meet each other like the first time again.

You remember the first time you laid your eyes on Kim Taehyung. He was helping the waitress picking the pieces of fallen tissues after a minor accident. He looked like he walked out of someone’s innate dream. Clean-shaven, dark brown comma hair, boring a dark brown suit and pants to match. The selfless act was something intriguing to you. It’s so rare to find someone who would take the time to help others in such a fast-paced era where everything has to be quick and perfect. You remember turning away and smiling to yourself, grateful that there’s such men still in the world. You never planned to find any attachments that night, it was just a casual formal gathering that you had to attend in order to remain in the social circle. You actually wanted to leave after thirty minutes, and probably watch a late night movie at a nearby movie theatre to appease yourself.

A drink in your hand, a small talk about how good the eclairs were, and a little bit about your short-term plans; apart from that, there was nothing much. You were never the kind to approach people first, finding more interest in the food than you do the people attending. But not your best friend, not Jimin. He is the loudest, most animatic figure out there, talking about all kinds of things, doing a lot of gags and just, a walking entertainment channel, with his addictive laughter and outgoing personality. Jimin would make friends with a broomstick if it attended. It was because of him that you were dragged into this little dinner party. He said if you come, he will join your presentation that he called boring and asked relevant questions. After careful consideration, and losing a couple of friends because of your hectic college schedule, you had no choice but adhere to his demands.

“Hi,” a succulent honeyed deep voice greeted you from behind, “Where did you get those jelly desserts?”

You glanced at him and when you recognised that he was that dude who helped the waitress, you shot your eyes back to your plate instantly, then jerked your head back up, “From the dessert corner, next to the pillar… I think they haven’t refilled them,” you said to him through a smile. Wow, he was so much taller than you expected. And, smells so nice.

“Oh thank you,” he tutted his tongue and nodded once, before he walked away grinning, “Over there right?” He walks sideways to talk to you still. He almost trips over the folded carpet and you got instantly worried before replying in a haste, “Yes! Oh careful, please!”

He gave an okay sign and puffed his cheeks.

Finding the back of your calves began to strain from the long period of standings, you had to find yourself a bar stool and ate your food alone, while Jimin was throwing his head back at a joke one of his new friends were telling. Someone took the empty seat next to you and sat with a huff.

“We already met twice and I still don’t know your name,” he peels his eyes off of his plate and turns sideways to you, “I’m Taehyung, Kim Taehyung.” You said your name in a hurry with an awkward giggle at the end, before poking your fork into the grapes and shoving them into your mouth.

“Did you come here alone?” he asked. “No, but he looks like he is having fun,” you didn’t specify who it was and Taehyung hung his head low with a dry, “Oh.” “You?” you replied. “Alone,” Taehyung said, “Didn’t plan to stay very long…I was going to catch a movie.”

Your eyes light up, “What movie? Because I’m not staying too!” Taehyung pouts, “Haven’t decided… I was going to decide there and then.”

“It’s nice to watch movies alone ha…” “Helps me recharge…” “What major are you? We’re from the same uni, correct?” “I am. I am an art major, and now more to restoration and conservator.” “Oooo, interesting… Meticulous work. That’s amazing.”

Taehyung then learns that you’re a science major, pharmaceutical technology. It sounded foreign to him, he had never known anyone with a science major, let alone talk to one. They always seem so…

“Fussy? Introverted? Closed up?” you listed. He shakes his head, jutting his lower lip out trying to think of a better adjective to describe, shooting his eyes to the ceiling then to the right. “Guarded,” Taehyung tipped his head to the side, looking at you as he spoke. “I get why we seemed that way,” you swirled your fork around the plate of spaghetti you took and nodded in agreement, “But we’re probably thinking about our gazillion unfinished reports and stressed out about why the results aren’t tally, and forgetting our breakfast, lunch and dinner, being high on caffeine…” you shrugged your shoulder, explaining.

“Doesn’t seem like a healthy way to live,” Taehyung commented, “But I understand the struggle.”

Discussing about the stereotypes, the polar opposites of a science versus art majors lasted longer than you expected. Art majors and science majors actually share more in common than you’d think. For starters, both are extremely meticulous and precise. Taehyung spoke about the specification of colours and blending of several techniques into one art requires an extensive studies of observations and practice. As a conservator, he must recognise personalized styles of close to thousands of painters to differentiate a genuine piece from a copy--a skill that would take years and decades to perfect.

For science, specifics come in the definition of science. There has to be hypotheses to be proven, and theories that aligned with the results. Making medication has several strict rules; and the process, the testing are endless. From the drug is being formulated, to the way it is processed, and how it reacts when it enters the human body, to how long it takes to be expelled and whatever happened in between must be noted. Uniformity, size particles, bottling, storage, etc. are all taken into custody when it comes to making drugs. You told Taehyung about the exhausting 48 sets of 100mL volumetric flask being used in order to determine the complete dissolution of 100mG of paracetamol.

“I get cross-eyed having to stare at the mark, trying not to make mistakes,” you smiled and Taehyung giggled. “I understand about getting cross-eyed,” he added. He continues about having to re-color a varnished painting with a limited set of light in the studio, and not being able to determine what pigment it was until daylight reveals that he was wrong.

“I think art and science are two things humans can’t live without,” you started, looking down at your semi empty plate, “I mean, life depends on science, but art is what makes it worth living.” “Rebecca Atwood,” Taehyung cited. Then you both looked at each other for what seemed the longest time, as if you both had found home in each other.

Your heart clearly whispered, “Where have you been all my life?” And for a period of time, you actually believed it was one-sided. How could someone like Taehyung want to spend time with you. But you guys eventually went to the movies together.

Jimin called midway through the movie. You excused yourself and took the call outside the hall.

“Yo, where art thou? The party’s over, don’t tell me you went home without me,” Jimin nags.

“I’m at the movies, I’ll get the Uber, don’t worry,” you hissed, “No, Jimin, I’m going to be fine. It’s not that late, I’ll call you when I get home. Yes, I know there’s class tomorrow at 2pm, alright bye,” you hang up and rush back inside.

Taehyung looks at you with wondering eyes and you felt inclined to explain, “Jimin. Asked me where I was, and wanted to go home. I said I’ll take the Uber.”

“Uber? No, I can drive you home,” Taehyung offered. You don’t think you should be in a car with someone you barely know so you politely declined. Taehyung however, waited with you for the Uber, and waved you goodbye. He didn’t ask for your number, much to your disappointment. But maybe it was a one night thing for him. It’s not like you expected anything, so why do you carry yourself heavily to your dorm?

It was rare to find someone you could connect to in such a short time. Tonight was a miracle at work, and it was short lifted. Laying down in your bed with the light from your phone shone over your face, you scrolled down Instagram to see your married highschool friend cradling babies. Another friend just got married. Another is half a world away. A few are taking pictures of cute dates they went on. And then there’s you, who is now staring at each one filled with envy and discontent, wondering if anyone will ever find the time to notice you and hopefully fall for you. Deep inside, all you ever wanted was to be in love. Despite you plunge yourself into heavy work in the most strenuous field out there, you were inexplicably lonely. It gets increasingly difficult as you grow older, and your options for men decreases.

They say, everyone has a soulmate. But for some reason, you think God forgot to make yours. Real connection is possibly impossible to find. The love you seek probably doesn’t exist.

And as you turn your phone face down next to you, it vibrated a message in.

Jimin: Are you home yet? Hello? Jimin: So you found Kim Taehyung? From arts? Jimin: He texted me the Uber car’s plate number to make sure I know where you are…

You replied,

You: yes.. You: you know taehyung??

Jimin: uh yeah. Orientation week together. Campmates. Jimin: how was it? You: he was nice… Jimin: You cold-blooded women. You: XD

The next day was your presentation. After spotting Jimin in the crowd, you immediately felt better. Some familiar faces would be nice. Final year project presentations can be brutal. Some of the questions you expected would be the purpose, the motive, the need for this project to be funded and why it carries such significance. Sometimes what you expect doesn't happen, and because of that you get very disheartened and disappointed. No matter how brave you decide to be, your body protests and rebels against your wishes. The way the bottle tremble in your hands shows how much this is hammering your dignity. It is as if you expected to be humiliated. You glanced down to your heavily arrowed notes and scribbles, closing your eyes as you stood in the back stage, mentally preparing yourself. How to be bulletproof?

Had he not helped the girl to purchase a canned coffee from the vending machine, he would not have been late, Taehyung thought. Now he creeps in the back of the lecture hall, carrying his own opened canned drink. There was an extra unopened canned coffee drink he snuck in. You had already started your presentations. Does he have the mental capacity for this new information? Of course. There were a few terms he wasn’t familiar with, but it was not enough to bore him. Your simpler explanation the night you met actually helped a lot. The oozing charisma you carry and the calm way you carry yourself was something worth looking up to. It was the kind that he actually envied about you. He had a feeling that you weren’t showing all parts of you and because of that, he was intrigued. Even as he sat there as an audience, completely at awe of your presentation, you were magnetic.

Not a single one person in that auditorium was paying their attention elsewhere. Being able to draw such dedication and passion is a talent. And it was all Kim Taehyung wished he could do.

“With all the existing medication with the same purpose, what good would a research in the same area pose? A renewal?” “And what about the gene-specific cancer studies that are already initiated since 2004? Haven’t we spent enough on that?” “What about the ethical issues surrounding the existing CRISPR, the so-called genetic-specific medications?”

The questions from the PhD holders you presented were all valid. You agreed.

“As a scientist, we understand that our research will continue far after our death. Many researches are done without a clear view of where the finish line is. If we want to talk about ethical issues regarding gene modifications, we have done them on all the things we could consume, grow and breed. If we have the power to prevent abnormality before it becomes one, why do we second guess ourselves? Isn’t the purpose of science to better understand, and then to prevent? To create a better living?”

The room fell into a deathly silence, and you were inclined to go back to your statements but when you dragged your eyes to the corner of the room, you saw some juniors nodding in agreement to what you’ve just said, you regained a little ounce of confidence. “But we haven’t truly understood the after effects of gene modifications. And through all prolonged research thus far, it doesn’t suggest a good result. How do you guarantee a perceptible study in the development of the medication you’re proposing?”

. . . Sniffles greeted Taehyung at the door he pushed opened gently. You were standing by the handrails on the faculty’s rooftop, the papers you brought in scattered around the ground. Some are drained into the pool of water puddle from last night’s rain. Digging the heels of your palm into your eyes, you heard the door creaked open and jumped.

“I’m sorry…” Taehyung whispered. You glanced over your shoulder at him and then turned away. Not because of anger or fear, but from shame. You have never shown anyone this timid side of you. You’re always expected to be strong, and you took that mask on literally. Having someone witnessing your vulnerability is as foreign as the sight of a shooting star. How unlucky for Taehyung, you thought.

“I bought you…” he placed the canned drink on the ground, next to where you placed your backpack, “A canned coffee.”

“How did you,” you sniffed, “How did you know that the presentations’ today?” “You told me the night we met?” he answered, in a confused tone.

And you gave him a lopsided smile, “Oh right. I’m not used to people remembering my errands. Jimin never does. No one ever does.”

“I am not actually good at remembering. But for some reason, yours was unforgettable,” he added an awkward chuckle at the end, scratching the back of his head not sure why he finds conversation with you feel homey. Sincerity and honesty comes naturally like breathing the air in.

“I did a crap job at presenting, didn’t I?” it was a statement, pretentiously laid out as a question.

But Taehyung knew better than to cement the depressive thought. Then he scooted near to you, and coil to your side, to give you a puppy eyed bright smile.

That was when you first knew a Kim Taehyung. Everything else that happened after that seemed like a story written just for you. But loving Kim Taehyung didn’t come without challenges. When you love a man as attractive as that, there will be wandering eyes directed towards him. And you have your own fair share of evil eyes directed at you. How can a science nerd catch the attention of an art student? It was totally unheard off. Had Taehyung paid any attention to those thirsty hyenas, you would have given up the fight. However, this is Taehyung you’re talking about. Once he had his eyes set to a person, he developed tunnel vision only to that person.

For years, you struggled with perfection. And the thing about the struggle is that it was common to everyone, but so few would understand. Perfection quickly becomes a disease to over-achievers. Had it not been Taehyung, you would probably engage in an insufferable discontentment towards life and everything it has to offer. Everything changed when he handed you a paint brush and a 200-sized plain white canvas and a studio to yourself.

You felt liberated.

Not knowing where your illustrations will take you was the first taste of freedom you had ever allowed yourself to feel. Because in the arts, there are no wrongs or rights. And it's uniquely yours. And the look on Taehyung’s face when it's done? Priceless. To the point that you think you began drawing because of him and that he was just saying the things you wanted to hear. Then he hangs your drawings in the open hall, and brings home the comments written by the art lovers to prove that you are wrong.

When it comes to relationship turbulences, Taehyung and you personally respect each other’s space, friendship choices and principles. Such maturity is again rare so you’d like to think that you’re lucky in that sense. However, Taehyung’s family proved to be a massive hurdle. While you were raised in a humble home, and accustomed to having sleep as dinners, Taehyung’s family owns a collection of farms that produces vegetables and fruits, and Taehyung’s favourites happen to be strawberries. He surely is raised in an upper middle class well into his elementary years and then catapulted into first class around his high school time. Not to say that he doesn’t know what it’s like to starve, he has a fairshare of that in his rebellious years; but he was not used to the life you lead. The part-time jobs, the tutoring weekends, the errands. He never had to do those.

When he brought you home to his parents for the first time, you felt out of place. His penthouse, his army of maids, sports cars and spacious area. His parents, they were wonderful. They welcomed you with open arms. Even inviting you to a family-only event, introducing you to everyone, and then letting you see their family photo albums. Taehyung has a massive support system, a healthy relationship compared to yours. No matter how much he wants to convince you that his life isn’t perfect, it was a whole lot better than yours. You remember how he snuck you into his bedroom in the middle of the night when his parents were asleep, the snickering, the whispers and the night you shared, cuddling. You had tears in your eyes that night, because you never thought you’d be this fortunate.

Watching him fall asleep in your lap so soundly really made you think about the last time you ever made someone this comfortable. Is this how it feels to love and cherish? Finding a middle ground is not always easy, and most people take time to reach there. For Taehyung and you, sacrificing a lot comes without say. Your internal conflicts and his willingness to understand your perspective, and vice versa--it all takes time. You can owe it all to Taehyung’s ultimate patience. Just like the way he handles his work. Meticulously, and carefully. Like how chemicals are precise, the paints are too.

In every phase of life, we are being prepared for the phase that comes next. In accordance to what we are made of, we continue to evolve, continue to grow. And it is in this stage that we feel most vulnerable, most bare, most uncomfortable. Sometimes you dread the things that you weren’t allowed to have, much like the doctorate you sought after (that took much longer than others), the way it was withheld from you because life said you weren’t ready yet, even when you thought you were. Waiting patiently becomes the hardest part of it all. Although Taehyung might not understand half the things you went through, isn't he still here? Isn’t he still holding your hand? Isn’t he still singing to you?

Fine arts are creative art, especially visual art whose products are to be appreciated primarily or solely for their imaginative, aesthetic, or intellectual content. If that’s the case, then Taehyung must be finer arts.

:. I wrote a bit about the things I do in university, I’m sorry if you find that boring... it’s the only world I know... I am currently going through mid-semester exams, and I’m not doing well, spark up a fever with 3 more papers to go. Anyways. Have a great day!

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hale-13 · 3 years

Text

En Pointe

By Hale13

For the Summer of Whump Day 24 Prompt - Stitches

No matter how much she hates the Red Room, ballet is still Natasha’s go to stress relief. Peter is just curious and eager to learn.

Words: 2311, Chapters: 1/1 (Complete), Language: English

Fandoms: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)

Rating: Gen

Relationships: Peter Parker & Natasha Romanov, Peter Parker & Tony Stark

Characters: Peter Parker, Natasha Romanov, Tony Stark

TW: Broken Bones, Blood

Read on AO3 or below the line break.

“You do ballet?” Peter asks curiously as he watches Natasha tear the shank out of her new pointe shoes. Her old pair is still in pretty decent shape since she only dances on occasion now but its always been relaxing to sew and break in a new pair and it never hurts to have a few back ups.

“Sometimes,” she answers cryptically as she steps on the toe box with her bare heel to flatten it out, Peter watches her fascinated, venturing further into the room and sitting cross-legged a few feet from her. He’s careful not to touch any of her old shoes or the ribbons and other tools and materials spread out in a semi-circle around where she’s sitting. “Why?”

Peter’s fingers are twitching where he has them pressed into his thigh like he’s holding back from touching. “I did ballet as a kid. Just a few months of classes before my parents died and I was terrible but it was fun.”

Natasha hums as she reinforces the toe of the shoe with glue and fans it a little to dry it out. “You probably wouldn’t be so terrible now,” she tells him as she bends one shoe and then the other, enjoying the cracking noise they make as she works them in. She looks over to Peter to consider him for a moment. “Want to try?”

“With you?” He squeaks and its kinda adorable how nervous he is. Nat suppresses a smirk as she puts on her toe spacers and worn out toe pads – the lambs wool she modified these with is absolutely perfect and she won’t even consider using another pair until these designate around her feet.

“Of course,” she answers, standing up and bending first one shoe and then the other before going up en pointe and squatting to work in both shoes. She’ll need to dance on them for a few hours before they start feeling really good but they aren’t too bad right now. Sometimes new shoes just aren’t right no matter how well she prepares them but she has a good feeling about this pair. “You seem mostly coordinated as Spider-Man at least, I think you can handle a few basic positions.”

“Uh yeah,” Peter says, jumping to his feet like an over eager puppy and making Natasha smile a bit. “Yeah that sounds great!” She can almost see his tail wag.

She gestures to the barre running the length of the studio Tony had put in the compound just for her and has them face each other, correcting Peter’s posture as she goes. His sneakers are ratty and falling apart and she wrinkles her nose at them. She taps them with the hard side of the box of her shoe. “Lose those. I don’t have a pair of men’s shoes lying around so you can just go barefoot for now.” Peter hastens to do as she steps into some resin, crunching the small rocks into powder and rubbing it into the sole, box and sides of her shoes. By the time she’s done, Peter has positioned himself back at the barre, barefoot and with the hems of his pants cuffed up to mid calf.

He looks a little nervous and intimidated so Natasha give him a little smile as she hands the barre with her left hand and adjusts herself into first position as Peter stares intently. “We’re going to do some plié to start I’ll show you the positions; this is first.” Peter’s more graceful than she expected, his legs easily falling into place without shaking or him losing his balance like most new students was. She’s almost impressed.

Peter’s a surprisingly quiet student – she’s seen him in the lab with Tony and in the field where the kid is definitely what she would describe as a chatterbox. He asks a few questions here or there but, for the most part, he just observes and follows her lead. He picks up the positions quickly and Natasha puts on some music and instructs him through her usual warm up. By the end he’s sweating a little but he looks relaxed and a little pleased with herself.

“Can you teach me to spin?” He asks her a little shyly but with an undercurrent of excitement, shifting his weight from foot to foot like an overeager puppy and Nat gives him a soft smile.

“Sure,” she says, ditching her point shoes and slipping into some flats. “So you want to start off…”

He falls over the first few times but he nails a sloppy spin the fourth time. He stumbles a little once he stops, arms akimbo and legs spread for balance with a surprised look on his face. He looks at her for a second with a clear expression of ‘did I just do that?’ before letting out an excited laugh and fist pumping. “Holy shit!” He says under his breath and Natasha laughs with him – his good humor infectious. “That was so fun!”

“Try it again,” she says. “And this time keep your arms tucked in tighter and you head fixed on a point. Like this,” she demonstrates again, focusing on a dent in the wall to keep her head from spinning with her body and to keep her from getting dizzy. Peter tries again and cleans up his form a little.

“I think I’ve got it,” he says after another few turns and then he starts again, spinning once, twice, three times and, on the fourth rotation she sees his ankle twist as if in slow motion. Peter lets out a grunt as he loses his balance and, instead of falling, tries to stick to the floor with his abilities. His momentum continues to pull him though and she hears his leg crack in a sound that echos through the studio over the soft music and makes her hair stands on end.

“Fuck!” Peter exclaims and he drops, hitting the smooth wood floor hard and immediately dropping onto his back, face ghostly. His tibia has broken cleanly in two near his ankle and twisted to break through the skin in a grotesque fashion, leaking blood onto the previously pristine floors. Natasha immediately falls back into her extensive first aid training and drops to the floor next to Peter, tying one of her leftover ribbons around his upper calf in a crude tourniquet.

“Let’s get medical down here FRIDAY,” her voice is calm even though her heart rate is elevated. Peter looks about two seconds from passing out but pushes himself up with prodigious effort only to turn green when he sees his leg, turning away from her abruptly to gag and retch. “Get it all out,” she tells him, rubbing a hand across his clammy back.

“It’s…” Peter gags again. “The bone… I…”

“Don’t look at it,” Natasha says firmly, pushing him back to the floor. “Tony told me you were accident prone but I didn’t know you were this bad,” she tells him with humor, pulling off the shrug she had put over her leotard and leggings and mashing it firmly into the wound, making Peter moan and turn white.

“It’s Parker Luck,” he tells her, sounding out of it. He looks like he may pass out and that just won’t do – she needs to keep him awake.

“What’s that?” She asks, brushing the hair off his forehead in a tender gesture and massaging his scalp a little.

“Just my specific brand of bad luck,” Peter says a little sardonically, his voice wavering from the pain. She wants to ask more but the door at the opposite end of the studio flies open hard enough to hit the wall and bounce back as Tony – helicopter mentor extraordinaire – skids into the room and literally trips over his own feet to get to Peter’s side. Natasha would roll her eyes if she wasn’t so concerned herself.

“What happened?” Tony asks her, tone accusatory and Natasha gives him a sharp look.

“We were doing ballet and he spun just a little too hard,” Peter groans from the floor, this time from embarrassment and covers his face with his hands muttering ‘just let me die’ under his breath. Tony flicks him on the forehead.

“Don’t be a dramatic little shit,” he chastises, still looking more worried than anything. “Only you would manage to give yourself a compound fracture learning ballet of all things.”

“Don’t be mean to me,” Peter whines. “I’m injured!”

Natasha can’t hold back her snort at this, the situation would probably be a lot less humorous if she didn’t know Peter would likely be completely back to normal in a couple weeks or less with his healing factor. The kid was like rubber.

“What did you do this time?” Bruce calls from the doorway, pulling a gurney and followed by a small gaggle of nurses. Natasha steps back and away as one of them takes over putting pressure on the still bleeding puncture and pulls Tony with her. She knows that if he had his druthers he would glue himself to Peter’s side and aggravate Bruce and the other medical professionals to death.

The team is quick and efficient in stabilizing Peter’s leg with a temporary splint and loading him on the stretcher, bustling out of her studio with Tony following just as quickly as they came in. Nat isn’t a big fan of crowds so she stays behind, cleaning the tacky blood off the floor before it dries and sets. As it is, the fine grains of the wood are tainted and she knows she has no chance of cleaning all of it out and resigns herself to dealing with flaking blood on the toes of her pointe shoes for the foreseeable future.

Satisfied with her clean up job, she slinks back to her room and showers, washing the remnants of Peter’s blood off her hands and forearms and the sweat out of her hair. She changes into some loungewear and dries her hair and, figuring she’s probably stalled long enough, grabs a book at random from her bookshelf and makes her way to the medical floor.

The halls are silently when she arrives thankfully and the waiting room is empty bar Tony. He’s seated in one corner facing the hall that leads to the operating and recovery rooms and tapping something into his StarkPad, reading glasses perched onto the tip of his nose and in danger of slipping off the end. He looks relaxed which she takes to mean the Peter will be just fine – not that she expected any different.

Tony jumps when she settles into the chair next to him, glasses falling to the floor and nearly fumbling his tablet. He sends her a glare without heat – he’s always complaining about her sneaking up on him but its not her fault he isn’t observant – and sets the tablet aside.

“Well?” She asks, quirking one eyebrow in expectation.

“He’ll be fine,” Tony tells her, relief clear in his voice. “They’d normally have to put in a pin or two but, with his healing, they just want to flush it out really well to prevent infection and then reduce the fracture and throw in some stitches and a brace. He’ll be on bed rest and crutches for the next week or so until the stitches can come out and he can transfer to a boot but he’ll be back up in no time.”

Natasha nods, she expected all of this really and pulls her legs up to sit cross-legged in the small chair. She didn’t do a cool down after her work-out and she can already feel all of her ligaments tightening up – her hips and knees crack as she adjusts and make Tony wrinkle his nose in obvious disgust. “He was doing pretty good for a while,” she says breezily. Kid’s got natural talent.”

“He can’t walk across a flat surface without tripping,” Tony tells her. “Don’t let all of his Spider-Man acrobatics fool you – Peter’s as clumsy as they come. His aunt should have wrapped him and put him in a bubble years ago.”

She laughs, elbowing Tony in the side and dodging his returning nudge. “He’s good for you,” she tells him honestly and Peter really is. She’s known Tony for a long time, considers him one of her closest friends barring Clint and this is the happiest and most settled she’s ever seen him. It makes her happy.

Tony blushes and clears his throat, trying to hide it but she can see the satisfied little smile on his face. He can’t deny his happiness. “Anyway,” he tries, changing the subject swiftly – she lets him. “You’ll have to help keep him entertained since part of this was your fault after all.”

“Not my problem the kid’s an accident waiting to happen,” she says with no heat. She already plans to hang around during Peter’s recovery. She can teach him more about ballet if he wants, he could shape up to be a pretty decent partner with some practice and she thinks it might help him a little with his balance and enhancements. Control of your body is important for both after all.

Later when Bruce leads them to Peter’s recovery room he gives her a knowing look that she ignores in favor of perching on the edge of the bed and teasing Peter about his poor technique. He’s high as a kite from the enhanced pain meds and cackles at her good natured jokes. Tony threatens to put him in a cushioned room for the rest of his life and Peter rolls his eyes like this is all par for the course.

He falls asleep again pretty quickly, drooling onto the pillow and twitching a little as he dreams and Natasha feels her chest feel with warmth.

Yes, she thinks Peter will make an excellent student.

#summerofwhump #summerofwhump24 #Prompt: Stitches #irondad #spider man #Summer of Whump 2021

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whaleiumsharkspeare · 4 years

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I was so inspired by the headcanon made by @letthemsayfuck and expanded upon by @newsies-of-corona about Varian’s season 3 outfit that I had to write a quick one shot about it! It was such a cute idea and I couldn’t get it out of my head, I had to write it down. Hope you enjoy!

New Threads

It had been a couple weeks since Rapunzel had returned to Corona, and things were starting to return to normal after the Saporian attack had been quelled. Well, almost normal. Thanks to the attack, Frederic and Ariana were not currently fit to rule since their memories hadn’t yet been restored, and as a result, Rapunzel was now the acting queen of Corona. The people of the kingdom were grateful to have their beloved princess back, and Rapunzel was happy to be back as well, even if there was a certain empty spot in the castle that was hard to ignore. Coming back to Corona after losing a friend was hard, but even though she’d lost one friend, Rapunzel was happy to have gained back another one. Now that Varian had turned over a new leaf and was back on the right side of history, he and Rapunzel had managed to start laying down the bricks of their rebuilt friendship. He was a lot happier now that his father was free, and he was almost never not by his side, stuck to him like glue. Rapunzel was happy for him. She’d truly felt awful that she had let him down all those months ago after being unable to save his father, and watching Varian go down that dark road, feeling so lost and broken, had been difficult. Rapunzel never, ever broke a promise, so finally being able to keep hers had been a wonderful feeling. But even though Rapunzel still cared greatly for Varian and had forgiven him for his misdeeds, it didn’t mean that the kingdom had. Varian had never exactly been a very popular boy, not very well-liked in his village, and now he was reviled even more. True, Varian had helped save the kingdom from the Saporians, but not everyone in Corona was as quick to forgive as their princess. Varian couldn’t hardly go anywhere alone without having insults and sometimes objects hurled his way, so he hadn’t been around much since Rapunzel came back. As a result, if Rapunzel wanted to see him, she had to go visit Varian in his own home. Today was one of those days. Rapunzel journeyed happily to Old Corona, hoping to see her young friend. As she walked through the village, the people who had come back after being displaced smiled and waved at their beloved princess. She returned their greetings, happy to see her subjects out and about. She climbed the familiar steps of Varian’s home and knocked on the door.

“Oh, Princess!” Quirin greeted, opening the door.

“Hello, Quirin!” Rapunzel smiled. “How are you?”

“I’m doing much better, thanks to you.”

“That’s great to hear. I’m really glad I could help,” said Rapunzel. “Is Varian home?”

“Yes, he’s home,” Quirin replied. “He’s in his lab. You can go on in.”

“Thank you!”

“Thank you, Princess,” said Quirin as he stepped aside to let Rapunzel in. She smiled as she walked past him and went over to Varian’s lab. She stood outside the door for a moment, listening to the familiar sounds of Varian’s tinkering. She closed her eyes briefly, remembering her friend of before. But he was still her friend, and hearing the usual cacophony of his lab helped her remember that. She pushed open the door and went inside. Looking around, she spotted him in the corner working on some new machine she hadn’t seen before.

“Hi, Varian!” she said brightly. He looked up suddenly from his work.

“Oh, Rapunzel! Hi!” he looked at her with a smile on his face.

“What are you working on?” she asked as she peered at his machine in curiosity.

“Oh, this?” he stepped aside to give her a better view. “This is my newest invention. It’s a machine that’s designed to reverse the effects of the Saporian memory wand and restore your parents’ memories, since I, well...” he trailed off, his smile fading. After a moment, he sighed softly. “I’m sorry, Rapunzel.”

“It’s...well, it’s not really okay, but I trust that you’ll figure something out. You’re a smart guy. You can fix this,” she assured him.

“Thanks. For...for trusting me,” said Varian quietly. “I-I know I don’t really deserve your trust, but-“

“Varian,” Rapunzel gently interrupted. He looked up at her. “I know you feel sorry about everything. And the fact that you’re working to help me already shows me that you’re worthy of being trusted.” He gave her a little smile.

“Thanks.” He loosened up a little after previously feeling a bit tense. “So, uh, what are you doing here?”

“I just thought I’d come and check up on you, see how you’re doing,” Rapunzel replied. “Do you need any help with your machine?”

“Actually,” said Varian, his eyes brightening. “If you could pass me my tools when I need them, that’d be great.”

“You got it!” Rapunzel said cheerfully, handing him a screwdriver.

Rapunzel spent the rest of the afternoon in the lab with Varian, helping him out with his machine, watching him work, and listening to him explaining its function with rapt attention. He also talked a lot about the past couple weeks that he’d been reunited with his dad. He spoke excitedly about how happy he was to be back and how much he missed the simple things they used to do together, like having dinner in the evening, but how glad he was to get to do them again. Rapunzel loved listening to Varian talk about the things that he was passionate about, and hearing his sweet laughter again after so long was a pleasant and beautiful sound. Watching him work and hearing him talk, it made Rapunzel feel like nothing had changed. But things had changed, even in very subtle ways, and there were many indicators about just how much time had passed. As Rapunzel watched Varian tinker away on his machine, she noticed that he wasn’t quite so little anymore. Granted, he was still a “little guy”, as Eugene had called him, but Varian had grown. He was taller than he had been the last time she’d seen him all those months ago before she left. It was evident in where he now stood in comparison to Rapunzel and in the way she noticed him absentmindedly tugging on the sleeves of his faded blue shirt every now and then, as if trying to bring them down further on his arms. It could have also been a subconscious desire to cover his hands, since he was now working with his hands exposed because the black gloves he used to wear had melted off while Rapunzel was in her trance. Looking at him, she could tell why he always wore those gloves, since working without them had left behind tiny cuts on his hands from the lack of protection from his alchemy and metalwork. Really, he had simply started to outgrow his outfit. Even though Rapunzel could tell that Varian was a little bit skinnier now as a result of eating nothing but the prison food for months on end, she still noticed that his old blue shirt was starting to be too small. The way Varian shifted his feet around while standing and talking indicated that his shoes were too small as well. And even if his clothes fit him perfectly, the patched sleeve of his shirt and the old, worn fabric were signs enough that he was in need of a new outfit.

Surely he must be uncomfortable she thought as she watched him working. Then, realization struck her and her heart sank as she thought about why Varian was still putting up with clothes that weren’t exactly fit to be worn anymore. Not everyone in the kingdom had forgiven Varian yet. There were still some people who were harboring fresh wounds and weren’t ready to extend him a helping hand yet. He couldn’t even walk around without his dad nearby for fear of being harassed in some way. Even if Varian wanted to go out shopping and buy himself some new clothes, he couldn’t do it without facing persecution from the citizens who were still angry with him. But not everyone was upset. Rapunzel saw in him a good heart and she knew he had changed for real, and when she saw that a friend was in need, well, she couldn’t just sit idly by without trying to help. So when it was time to leave and she told Varian goodbye, she headed straight back to the castle with newfound determination and an idea burning in the back of her mind.

“Hey, Sunshine!” Eugene greeted warmly when she arrived back home. “How was your visit to Old Corona? Is Varian doing okay?”

“It was good,” she replied. “It was really good to see him. He’s doing a lot better. He’s back to inventing and doing alchemy.”

“That’s great to hear,” he said. “I’m glad the little guy is starting to become more like his old self.”

“I am too.” She smiled at the thought. But then she remembered what she’d been so fired up about. “Oh! I have to go see the royal seamstress,” Rapunzel said as she began walking off towards the beauty room where the seamstress worked.

“You planning on getting some new threads?” Eugene called after her.

“Something like that.”

Rapunzel entered the quarters where the seamstress worked, sewing up new clothes for the royal family. She looked around through the curtains of dresses and suits that hung all around.

“Faye?” she called.

There was a ruffling sound and a bundle of fabric was suddenly tossed through the air and a short woman with pins in her mouth poked her head out from behind some more rolls of fabric.

“Oh! Your highness!” said Faye, the seamstress. She took the pins out of her mouth and pushed them into the mini pincushion she wore on her wrist. “How can I help you? Is there something wrong with your dress?”

“Oh, no, it’s fine. Just as beautiful as ever! But I have a special request for you,” replied the princess. She took out her journal with a new painting on one of the pages and showed it to Faye. “Do you think you could make me something like this?”

Faye studied the picture Rapunzel had made, looking over all the details and specifications.

“Absolutely, Princess! I’ll get started right away.”

“Thank you, Faye!” Rapunzel said cheerfully. “I know it’ll be just great!”

***

A few days later, Rapunzel once again made the trek to Old Corona, this time with a package in her hands. She had a skip in her step as she thought about her little surprise. When she made it to Varian’s house, she entered his lab enthusiastically.

“Hi, Varian!” she announced, her voice bright.

“Oh, Rapunzel! I’m glad to see you,” said Varian. “I wanted to tell you more about my progress with the new machine.”

As he spoke, Rapunzel glanced down and noticed his hands.

“Hey, new gloves!” she observed.

“Oh, yeah,” said Varian, looking down. He was wearing a pair of new alchemy gloves, dark brown this time, with little pressure gauges on them. “Dad bought these for me the other day when he went into town. I had mentioned that it was harder doing my alchemy without gloves, and I guess he was worried that I would burn myself or something. But I’m glad to have them, it feels more normal. Anyway, I’m not quite finished with the machine yet, I’m still working out the kinks,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. “But in the meantime, I’ve been working on some potions that I think could help with restoring your parents’ memories. I’ve just gotta test them.”

“Sounds like you’ve been busy,” Rapunzel said.

“Yeah,” Varian agreed, laughing lightly. “So, what brings you here so soon after your last visit? Not that I’m not happy to see you,” he added quickly.

“Do I need a reason to come visit?” Rapunzel teased.

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“Maybe I just wanted to come say hi! But actually I do have a reason.” She brought the package out from behind her back and held it in front of her so Varian could see it. “I have something for you!”

“For me?” Varian looked down at the package in her hands in surprise. “W-why would you get me something?”

“Can’t I just be nice?”

“Of course, you’re always nice. But, why me?”

“Because I thought you could use it.”

“What is it?” Varian asked.

“You are seriously missing the point of a surprise,” Rapunzel replied. She pushed the package into his hands. “Just open it and see for yourself.”

Varian set the package down on a nearby table and used the sharp edge of one of his tools to open it up. He peered inside and his eyes went wide.

“Wait, Rapunzel, really? This is for me?”

“Of course! I hope you like it. I designed it myself and I had the royal seamstress sew it up based on my pattern. What do you think?” she asked. Varian lifted the carefully folded clothes from the box and held it up to himself.

“I, wow, I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, go on!” Rapunzel said, making a shooing motion with her hand. “Go try them on! Let’s see how it fits.”

Varian picked up the box and left his lab, going up the steps of his house and to his room. A few minutes later, Rapunzel could hear footsteps coming down the stairs and Varian came back into the lab, and Rapunzel smiled at his appearance. Instead of his old blue shirt with the patched sleeve and his pants with frayed edges, he was now wearing a new dark maroon vest with gold buttons going down either side, and underneath that was a beige long-sleeved shirt with a collar. He also had a new pair of pants and a belt, plus a new shorter tan apron that tied at the waist rather than higher up on his chest like his old one. He even had a new pair of boots, with a thicker toe on them to protect his feet better from broken glass or just the usual chronic clumsiness that Varian seemed to suffer from. Rapunzel’s eyes lit up when she saw him.

“Hey, you look great!” she complimented him warmly. She got up and looked him over. “That’s a nice color on you, and it looks like it fits you better than your old shirt. Hmm, except for the sleeves,” she noticed, seeing how the cuffs almost covered his fingers. “But that’s okay, we’ll just get you some sleeve garters to wear and it’ll help with that. How do your boots feel?”

“Rapunzel, I...I can’t accept this,” said Varian softly.

“Why not? Should I have gotten you blue instead? You seem to like blue.”

“No, it’s not that.” He paused briefly. “I just don’t deserve something like this.”

“Varian, why would you say that?”

“Rapunzel, just look at everything I’ve done. I-I stole the sundrop flower, I kidnapped the queen, I tried to hurt you, worse, even. I took over the kingdom, I erased your parents’ memories. Why would you want to be nice to me after everything I did? You saved my life, you saved my dad’s life. That’s more than I could ever ask for. Why would you keep on giving me things? I don’t deserve your gifts,” said Varian sadly, nervously rubbing at the too-long sleeve of his right arm. Rapunzel put her hands on his shoulders so he’d look at her.

“Varian, it’s true, you did a lot of things that hurt me. But I can see that you’re sorry for them, and you’re working to make up for them. I know you have a good heart and that you really are a good person. You had a pretty...rough patch, let’s say. But don’t think for one second that you’re any less valuable as a person because of it. You still deserve to be treated with kindness because I can see that you still want to give kindness to others, and you’re a human being just like everyone else. That means you make mistakes just like everyone else, and it means you deserve to be treated kindly just like everyone else. I know you’re mad at yourself and that takes time to get over, but please don’t think that you’re unworthy of love or friendship because of your past. What you need to focus on is the present. Don’t talk badly about one of my friends,” she said earnestly.

Friends. Varian’s eyes lit up at the word and he gave her a smile. He liked the sound of that. He took a step back and turned around to look at himself in a mirror in his lab. He smiled at his reflection, turning to look at himself from different angles.

“So, what do you think?” Rapunzel asked eagerly.

“I think...it looks good.”

“So you like it?

“Of course I like it.” He ran his hands over the fabric softly. He’d never had such fine clothes before. “And you’re right. This is a nice color,” he laughed lightly. He looked up at Rapunzel.

“Thank you, Princess.”

“You’re welcome, Varian,” she replied with a smile. She gave him a hug and she stuck around to listen to him talking about his further progress with his machine. When it was time to say goodbye, she waved and headed back to the castle. And for the rest of the day whenever Varian caught a glimpse of his reflection, he couldn’t help but smile.

***

Not too long after, Rapunzel decided to raise her kingdom’s spirits by bringing them together for a community project, namely to help rebuild the castle’s throne room after the Saporian attack had damaged it. Several members of the kingdom had volunteered to come, and Rapunzel was both surprised and delighted to see that Varian was one of them. Finally shaking off his fears of traveling to the capital city alone, he showed up at the castle with a backpack full of tools, ready to help.

“Hello, Varian! It’s good to see you out and about,” she said.

“Thanks. It’s good to be out and about. I know I’m a big part of why the throne room is damaged, and I’m sorry about that. But I’m ready to get to work rebuilding,” he replied.

“Well, thank you. I appreciate it. We can use all the help we can get.”

At that moment, Eugene entered the room and spotted Rapunzel talking to Varian. He looked him over in surprise.

“Varian! I like the new outfit! You’re looking sharp, buddy.”

“Thanks,” Varian replied with a smile. “New outfit, new day, new me.”

And it was true. The new, special clothes looked good on Varian, and not just because the color was nice. It was a different, more mature look and it reflected Varian’s growth, in more ways than one. It was still perfect for alchemy and inventing, he hadn’t lost that part of himself. He was still the same sweet boy he’d always been, but he was changed. He really was a new person, still with all his same quirks, but now he was bigger and stronger, and not just in size. His return to kindness had ushered in a new change, and change looked good.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed!

#tangled the series #rapunzels tangled adventure #tts varian #varian the alchemist #princess rapunzel #I love their bond so much #whaley writes

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sheliesshattered · 4 years

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Clearly my spacing and stitch sizing is a little off, but for a proof-of-concept and just eyeballing the distances as I stitched, I think this (very) rough draft of the embroidery for the Oswin apron turned out pretty good! For the real deal, I’ll have to iron that linen fabric, and then lay out my stitches with a ruler, make sure both the length and the width is closer to screen accurate than it is here.

The late night lighting on my craft table makes the red look really orangey, but it’s actually a perfect match for the red of the dress, which is somewhat of a miracle considering that I ordered them online from two different sources, sight-unseen. I would have been happy with close enough, so that was a nice surprise.

Doing all the embroidery for the apron will definitely take quite a lot of time, but even just this little bit was so relaxing and satisfying, I’m suddenly really looking forward to this project. I’m going to try to keep myself focused on finishing the belt in time for Halloween -- and I actually made really good progress on the most complicated bit of it today -- but once I have a little more free space on my craft table I think I might work on getting the first part of this prepped and measured out, so I can start embroidering in the evenings. I’ll probably start with the middle of the neckband so that my roughest stitches will be the least visible.

But first, the belt!

I really do want to get the belt finished in the next two weeks or so, so I can have the whole base costume to wear on Halloween. I have all the pieces for the belt pulled together, but nothing is actually assembled yet, and I don’t want to start attaching things to the belt until I have all the individual pieces made, so I can figure out the spacing. I’m making several of the weirder bits from various odds and ends I have lying around, but the only thing I’m making completely from scratch is the wedge-shaped oddity:

The screen-used one was probably a bit of toy the prop department dug up and painted, but since this costume has no pockets or bags of any sort, I want to turn that wedge into a flap-top pouch to stash my phone and room key and such in -- on the assumption, of course, that someday I will eventually get to wear this to an actual con.

My original plan for it was pretty simple, just a wedge-shaped bucket pouch with a flap that secures with magnetic snaps, make a faceplate out of foam to replicate the look of the screen-used one, easy peasy. But my phone is so big that keeping it upright made the wedge way too big compared to the rest of the belt. Turning my phone sideways helps, but to keep the pouch from getting too wide, the phone really needs to stay at the top of the wedge -- which then leaves a weird smaller wedge of empty space below it.

So now I’m thinking an upper pocket, accessed by lifting up the flap, where the phone will lay sideways, parallel to the belt itself. Then below that, a smaller pocket in the lower part of the wedge, which turns out to be perfectly sized for room key, credit card, ID, cash, chapstick, etc -- all those small but important things that I hate not having a way to stash on me while I’m in costume. That bit will have a zipper closure, hidden under the flap, so I can make sure none of that important stuff falls out.

Which all sounds like an excellent and useful final product, but trying to think my way through the 3D shapes involved was seriously breaking my brain earlier. I ended up spending like 30 minutes just sort of staring into space, imagining moving the fabric around, how I would connect the pieces together, where the weak points are likely to be (specifically, the bottom of the pocket that holds the phone), how to make the whole thing hold its shape when built out of scraps of wool, suede, and craft foam, and how to machine-sew the seams in the wool in an order that won’t result in being unable to sew something without sewing the whole pocket closed.

I think I have it. I’ve drawn out the foam faceplate in its true size, based on the size of my phone, and I’ve sketched all the pattern pieces for the wool lining in miniature. There are a couple of places where cutting the seam allowance from a flat piece of fabric will be a little odd, but I think I’ve managed to shift those to the corners that can survive having small holes (ie, my phone isn’t going to fall through a hole that size, but something like a safety pin might). Tomorrow I’m going to cut the whole thing out of paper in its true size, tape the seam allowances together, and make sure it actually works.

Did you ever make those 3D papercraft cubes as a kid? Where the six sides of the cube are printed on a single sheet of paper, with fold lines and extra little tabs so you can overlap it in places and tape it down? This is just like that, only it’s an irregular wedge shape instead of a cube, and the interior is broken up into two parts, with a solid wall in between them. And for the real deal, I can’t tape the edges, I have to pass the wool through a sewing machine, hopefully without any of it getting too fiddly. But hopefully the paper-and-tape version tomorrow should point out any flaws in my plan before I start cutting out the wool pieces.

I also did a proof-of-concept today on gluing both wool and craft foam to suede, and it seems to have gone well. Suede (and leather generally) is odd in that sewing it actually weakens it, so my plan is to make the interior out of wool, with a bit of (faux) horsehair braid to give it extra structure along the straight lines. Then I’ll glue pieces of suede cut to size onto the outside of the wool, to provide the outer body of the pouch, and give the whole thing more structure and strength. The back panel of suede will extend up and over to become the flap that covers the top and front of the pouch, and onto the exterior of that I’ll glue the foam pieces with all the details to match the screen-used one. I think with all those together, it’ll have enough strength and structure to keep its shape, but the wool interior will provide a soft and quiet lining, so nothing in the pockets is banging around.

But honestly, I’m mostly using these materials because I have scraps of black wool and black suede that have been lying around in my fabric stash for, oh, let’s see -- just over 9 years for the wool, and almost 18 years for the suede, though the suede at least has been used in other projects since then. These are small enough pieces that this is really all they’ll be useful for, and the black should be unobtrusive enough that the only thing anyone will actually notice will be the foam faceplate that looks like the screen-used one.

That’s the theory, anyhow. We’ll see how it all comes together. This is by far the most complicated bit of the belt, and it’s up there with how complicated it was to flat-draft the pattern for the drape at the neckline of the dress. Once this is done, putting together all the other little bits for the belt should go a lot faster, really just combining pieces together, gluing them down, and painting.

Not counting today or the 31st, there are 17 days left until Halloween. I should be able to knock out the whole belt in that timeframe, but only if I don’t let myself procrastinate too much. And on that note, maybe I’ll start on that paper mock-up tonight rather than putting it off until tomorrow...

#my costumes #my cosplay #my sewing #my embroidery #Oswin Oswald cosplay #Clara Oswald cosplay #Doctor Who cosplay #one of those weird days when I accomplished a lot but don't actually have anything to show for it #but hey the planning phase of stuff like this is super important too #hokay back to work

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quicktothebatjalopy · 4 years

Text

The Creative Process, or: How to write a novel.

“Find something you would like to create with. This can be with plasticine, papier mache, words, pipe cleaners and sequins, colored pencils, construction paper, popsicle sticks, or other media. -Sit down and fidget with your materials. Build a little hut out of words and popsicle sticks. Call it "Abraham Lincoln's Log Cabin, No Trademark Infringement Intended." -Put it on your desk and be proud. Feel refreshed. Show it to your friends. Six months later, notice it collecting dust. Think, huh, that could be better. -Take it apart. Put it together. Fix the roofline. Use some plasticine for stickum this time. Give it a styrofoam chimney. -Put it back on your desk. Six months later, add some pipe clearer smoke to the chimney, with the cool wooly pipe cleaners. Call it "Abraham Lincoln's Log Cabin V. 2.0, No Trademark Infringement Intended." Take the pipe cleaner smoke off again. Call it "Abraham Lincoln's Boyfriend's Log Cabin, No Trademark Infringement Intended." -Make bricks for the chimney out of sequins. Pin them on with straight pins. -Color the popsicle sticks in with magic marker. Decide you don't like it. Start over with fresh popsicle sticks. Call it "Not Your Daddy's Lincoln Log Cabin, No Trademark Infringement Intended." Decide you don't like that either. Make little pipe cleaner people and animals and put them around. Act out their soap-opera daily dramas. (Oh, Momma, Billy's in with the sheep again!) Call it: "When Laura Ingalls Wilder Went Down On The Farm, No Suggestion Of Libelous Intent Intended." -Try tempera paint this time. Hmm. Better. -Dab white glue on the chimney sequins with a q-tip because they are too shiny and don't look like real bricks. Color in the tempera-painted popsicle sticks with charcoal and chalk, to add shading and texture. Experiment with watercolor. -Collect spruce needles and pine cones. Start gluing the spruce needles around the base of the house as foundation plantings. Call it "My Farm In A Time Of Hard Drought, or: This Is Not The Tempest." Snicker about it when people ask. Notice a beetle infestation. Spray. Leave it outside until the smell comes off. Start shingling the roof with pine cone scales. -Realize they clash with the sequins. -Unpin the sequins. Replace them with glued-on dried navy, kidney, black, and pinto beans. Hey, it's a fieldstone fireplace. what? Make a ragged door out of piece of bark. Realize you do not know how to hang it. Lean it up against the side of the house. -Steal the brass knob off the top of the pepper mill for a doorknob. Whistle when your husband asks you if you've seen the little bit that goes on top of the pepper thing. Turn the house around to face the wall for a week or two. Finish shingling the back of the roof. Get some sphagnum moss and tiny silk roses, and go around under the eaves with it. -In the back. -Where nobody will ever see it. Defend this by saying it was how your grandmother said one should finish a quilt, even the bits on the inside. Well, she didn't say sphagnum moss, exactly. Take off all the pine cone scales are try again with a different species. Hmm. Maybe maple helicopters? Figure out that you can hinge the door with bent sewing pins and scraps of leather shoelace. It hangs crooked. Put a hook-and-eye latch on the other side to straighten it out. Call it, "My Side Of The Mountain With A Builder's Permit." -Spend about a day and a half fiddling with your Real! Working! Door!, making the little pipecleaner people go in and out. Borrow your brother's skillsaw. Cut windows. Realize the tempera and charcoal detailing looks faker than fake. -Glaze the windows with hand-split flakes of mica. Put tiny christmas lights around the edges of the windows so they glow from within. Forget to make a hole for the plug. -Borrow the skillsaw again. Go on vacation with your family. Spend the entire time sitting on the beach fiddling with sand and shells, thinking about patterns. Come back and add a driftwood tree, and a sea-glass walkway border. Try to figure out how to glue down sand so it doesn't look terrible. -Ask for a skillsaw for the holidays. Realize that if you use a THIRD species of pine cone for the roof, you can make siding out of maple helicopter shakes. Spend about five weeks painstakingly applying these by hand. -Realize the result looks like ass, but you finally got the roof right this time. -Take all the maple helicopters off again and use them to make furniture instead, with rose-hip chair cushions. -Realize that you could have just used spray adhesive. Suffer a crisis of faith. Berate yourself as a stupid failure. Play with the little people and the furniture until you calm down. Get some cat-tail stems. Split them painstakingly in half and cut them to size. Glue them over the popsicle sticks. Now, *that* looks like a cabin. And nobody will ever notice that bit in the back where the overlap is a little rough. -Tuck some sphagnum moss into it, just to be sure. -And a tiny silk rose. Realize it's done. -Look at it for a day or two, just to be sure. Set up all the pipe cleaner people, give them tiny little acorn cap hats and flowerstem walking sticks. Give one a pair of dragonfly wings and another one a feather. Realize that no, the feather goes on this one, instead. Call it "Midnight In The Garden Of The Fairy Hut." -The best pipe cleaner animal is always the pony. You don't know why; you just have a knack for ponies. -Love all the little pipe cleaner people and animals so much it's very hard to do what you have to do next. Realize that the pine cone scales, in the cold of winter, have wept tiny golden droplets of sap all over the roof, where they catch the light and smell of summer. Realize you never could have got that effect on purpose in a thousand patient years. -Stall. Make a tiny, tiny lashed ladder from birch twigs and bark. Run it up under the eaves to the attic window. Secure it with a drop of Krazy Glue. -Hey, it dries clear. Nobody will ever know. -Stall. Finally, on a bright cool day in early June, take the whole thing outside, set it on the patio, douse it in lighter fluid and set it on fire. But make it look like an electrical fire, not arson. -Take pictures before and after, and all the while it burns. -Go through and pick out the best ones. Be surprised by the color of the flames. Call it, "Ladder in the woods." Hang the pictures in a gallery. Try to look uninterested as you listen to people exclaim, "I really think she should have used sequins for the chimney!" and "Hey, there's a bit in the back here where the cat-tail stems are messed up" and "You know, the pony is much better than all the other animals," and "Oh! Look! A tiny silk rose!!!" -Love that last person with all your heart. Love them so much you have to leave the room for a moment to compose yourself. Think, I knew I put that rose there for someone. I just didn't know at the time that it was you. Looking at the pictures, realize you have figured out how to do a better job on the chimney after all. -And the next one is going to have a barn. And a second story. -And maybe a pub next door, God willing. Leave the pictures on the wall of the gallery. Walk away, thinking, "That doesn't look a thing like the house, really, but I still kind of like it." Endure a moment of intense melancholy while you think about the pony. When you go home, rake the cool ashes for the bits of sea glass and the knob to the pepper mill, and save them--cracked and discolored--in an opaque jar on the corner of your desk. When your husband wanders in and asks what smells like burning, sniff thoughtfully and pretend you don't notice a thing.”

-E. Bear

#one of my favorite essays on writing/creating #the creative process #e bear #i saved this to my computer YEARS and years ago #i think she posted it on LJ originally?#writing #fanfic #to this day when someone notices something in my fic #i think ''they found my tiny silk rose!! :D''#long post

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queen-of-deans-booty · 4 years

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Changing Channels: Part Two

Pairing: Dean x Reader

Word Count: 2,539

Warnings: typical supernatural violence, language, angst, blood, you know the usual

Author’s Note: I do not own anything from Supernatural. All credit goes to their respective owners. Any and all comments on these are appreciated. I really want to hear what you guys think about this one!

Feedback is the glue that holds my writing together.

Tags at the bottom

Looking at your surroundings, you bit your lip nervously. There was no murder at the old paper mill. The Trickster was behind all of this, you can just feel him around.

“Dude, what the hell,” Sam commented as you three began walking throughout the corridors.

“I don’t know.”

“No, seriously, what the hell.”

“I don’t know!”

“One theory. Any theory.”

“The Trickster trapped us in TV Land,” you voiced your thoughts.

“That's your theory? That's stupid,” Dean scoffed.

“You're the one who said we're on Dr. Sexy, MD,” you pointed out.

“Yeah, but TV land isn't TV Land. I mean there's actors and, and lights and crew members, you know? This looks real.”

“It can't be. Dean how can this possibly be real?” Sam asked.

“I don’t know,” Dean groaned.

A woman doctor passed by the three of you, and she smirked at Dean and Sam.

“Doctors.”

“There goes Dr. Wang. The sexy but arrogant heart surgeon,” Dean explained as he moved onto another person who was sitting on a gurney looking very sad until another woman doctor came up to him. “And there's Johnny Drake. Oh, he's not even alive, he's a ghost in the mind of her, the sexy yet neurotic doctor over there.”

“So, this show has ghosts? Why?” you asked.

“I don't know. It is compelling,” Dean shrugged.

“I thought you said you weren't a fan.”

“I'm not. I'm not,” Dean scoffed, looking the other way towards the elevators. His eyes widened at the man walking towards him, but he couldn’t seem to say anything intelligent.

“Oh boy,” he whispered.

“What is it?” you asked.

“It’s him.”

“Who?”

“It's him, it's Dr. Sexy,” he hissed just as Dr. Sexy approached the three of you.

“Doctor,” Dr. Palmer a.k.a Dr. Sexy, said as he looked at Dean.

“Doctor,” Dean looked down, hiding the obvious smile on his face.

He was such a fanboy in this moment, you almost forgot the assault that happened earlier.

“Doctor,” Dr. Palmer addressed you.

“Doctor?” you posed it as a question.

“Doctor,” Dr. Palmer finally addressed Sam.

However, the younger brother could only nod, and that caused the older one to smack him in the back from behind. Sam gave the fictional character a tight smile as he said it back.

“Doctor.”

“You want to give me one good reason why you defied my direct order to do the experimental face transplant on Mrs. Biehl?” Dr. Palmer asked Dean who was clearly confused, yet disappointed that he upset his fictional idol.

“One reason?” he asked, and the recipient nodded.

Dean looked down in half-shame, about to give an answer when he spotted the doctor’s shoes. His face went from panic to anger as he shoved Dr. Sexy into the wall.

“Dean!” you hissed.

“You're not Dr. Sexy,” he ignored your attempt to bring him back to sanity.

“You're crazy.”

“Really? Because I swore part of what makes Dr. Sexy, sexy, is the fact that he wears cowboy boots. Not tennis shoes.”

“Yeah, you’re not a fan,” Sam scoffed.

“It’s a guilty pleasure,” Dean argued without taking his eyes off the imposter.

You took a closer look at the doctor, and your eyes widened when you felt the energy pulsating from the being. This wasn’t a doctor, it was the Trickster.

“Call security,” Dr. Palmer said to the nearest person.

“I know who you are. You’re the Trickster,” you blurted out.

Dr. Palmer smirked in your direction as two female doctors and a security guard came rushing your way in a calm manner. Just like that, they and the other extras freeze-frame. Everyone except for you, Dean, Sam, and Dr. Palmer were able to move. Suddenly, Dr. Palmer morphs into the Trickster.

“You guys are getting better!”

“Get us the hell out of here,” Dean growled.

“Or what?” he asked, grabbing your boyfriend’s arm and twisted it. Dean winced in pain as he let go, and he took a step back to join you and his brother’s side. “Don't say you have wooden stakes, big guy.”

“That was you on the police scanner, right? This is a trick,” you observed.

“Hello? Trickster. Come on! I heard you three yahoos were in town. How could I resist?” he laughed.

“Where the hell are we?”

“Like it? It's all homemade. My own sets,” the Trickster raps on the window in a nearby door then indicated to the frozen extras, “my own actors... call it my own little idiot box.”

“How do we get out?” you asked.

“That, my friend, is the sixty-four-dollar question.”

“Whatever. We just, we need to talk to you. We need your help,” Sam tried his method that you discussed earlier.

“Hm, let me guess. You three muttonheads broke the world, and you want me to sweep up your mess.”

“Please. Just five minutes. Hear us out.”

“Sure. Tell you what. Survive the next twenty-four hours, we'll talk,” he grinned.

“Survive what?” you asked.

“The game!”

“What game?”

“You’re in it.”

“How do we play?”

“You’re playing it.”

“What are the rules?” you asked, raising your eyebrow in suspicion.

The Trickster matched your eyebrow game, grinned, then vanished in a burst of static. The extras unfroze and resumed their lives as if nothing happened.

“Oh, son of a bitch,” Dean groaned.

A blonde doctor pushed past the three of you, calling out Dr. Palmer’s name in a frenzy.

“Dr. Sexy? Dr. Sexy?”

“Come on,” you sighed, leading the group down the corridor after her.

“Oh, by the way, talking with monsters? Hell of a plan,” Dean antagonized his brother.

“Just, what do we do now?” Sam asked.

Before anyone had anything to say, the male doctor who slapped your ass from before came walking around the corner. When he saw you, you knew from the look in his eyes that he was gonna slap your ass once more. Before he had the chance to do it, you grabbed his arm, twisted it behind his back, and shoved him into the nearest wall.

“You even think about touching me, I’ll break your arm,” you threatened.

All the man could do is laugh as he shrugged out of your grasp.

“I love that fiery passion you have. Makes for a great night,” he grinned, winking at you as he left.

“What the fuck is going on? What are we doing here?” you asked loudly.

“You know what I'm doing? Leaving,” Dean declared.

He turned the corner only to come face to face with Dr. Piccolo, the woman who slapped Sam earlier. She reached up and tried to take another swig at him, but Sam was smart and dodged it easily.

“Lady, what the hell?”

“You are a brilliant, brilliant—”

“Yeah. A coward,” he interrupted her. “You already said that, but I got news for you. I am not a doctor.”

“Don't say that,” she choked up. “You are the finest cerebrovascular neurosurgeon I have ever met, and I have met plenty. So that girl died on your table. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't anybody's fault. Sometimes people just die.”

“I have no idea what you're saying to me.”

“You're afraid. You're afraid to operate again, and you're afraid to love,” she sobbed, leaving his side to run down the hallway in tears.

“Yeah, we're getting out of here,” Sam nodded.

“Hey, Doctor?” a man asked, stopping you in his tracks.

“Yeah?”

“My wife needs that face transplant.”

“Look, I’m sure you’re a very nice man, but none of this is real, okay? Your wife doesn’t need jack shit from me,” you snapped, continuing on your way.

“Hey, Doctor,” the man said once more with a look of agony on his face.

He lifted a gun to your chest and pulled the trigger, missing your heart by a few inches. Instead, the bullet went straight through your lower back. He escaped down the hall as your eyes widened in shock.

“Real,” you gasped as blood started to pool on your coat. “Dean, this is real.”

Gasping, you fell to the floor just as Sam and Dean realized what you were trying to say.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no—hey! We need a doctor!” Dean yelled as he knelt by you.

Both him and Sam yelled around frantically for some help. Closing your eyes, you tried to use your magic to heal yourself, but something was wrong. It wasn’t working which was scary to you since you’ve become so dependent on it. When you opened your eyes, you weren’t in the hallway on the floor, but face down on an operating table, staring straight through the headrest at several pairs of white tennis shoes.

“What the hell is going on?” you asked.

“BP is eighty over fifty and dropping,” one of the nurses announced.

“Doctor,” a scrub nurse said, holding out a scalpel to one of the brothers.

“What?” Sam asked, exchanging glances with his brother.

“Fuck, do something. One of you,” you hissed from down below.

“We don’t know how to use any of this shit,” Sam whispered to you.

“Figure it out,” you snapped.

No one did anything for a while, and the nurses began looking at each other worriedly as you bled.

“Fuck this,” Dean muttered to himself before speaking up to the nurses. “I need a penknife, some dental floss, a sewing needle, and a fifth of whiskey.” Sam and the other nurses looked at him silently, not sure how to react. “Stat!”

As soon as the order was barked, the nurses scrambled to get the things that Dean requested. When he got everything he needed, he began sewing your skin up like he would do normally if one of you got a wound from hunting.

“We okay? How's it looking?” you asked when you didn’t feel anything else happening.

“Yeah, you’ll be fine, sweetheart. I’ll take care of you,” Dean grinned.

Even at this stage of your relationship, he still managed to make you blush like a schoolgirl. The tennis shoes in you view walked away, and you stared at the blue carpeting. There was a shift in the air, and you no longer heard the clanging of metal that is normal in an OR. Replacing that, clapping started erupting and lights started flashing. The blue floor transformed into two blue doors that opened.

No longer were you on an operating table but strapped to a machine that has a slot for a pole with two large balls at the end that were roughly the size of your chest. Sam and Dean were in a similar position, but they were standing in shoes glued to a platform with only one ball attached to a pole. A Japanese man come out of the doors you were staring at with two women trailing behind him.

“Let's play Nutty Cracker!” he yells, and the audience sheers. He says something in Japanese before pulling out cards from his jacket.

“Sam Winchester,” he said, speaking the question in Japanese. What was the name of the demon you chose over your own brother? You three didn’t understand a lick of what he was saying, but it didn’t matter to the man.

“Countdown!” he announced once he was finished.

The big countdown clock started ticking backwards from twenty.

“Uh, what am I supposed to say?” Sam asked you and Dean.

“You think I know?” Dean screeched.

“Uh, I don't—I don't understand Japanese,” Sam said to the host who only repeated the question in his native tongue. “Is he screwing with me? I—I can't speak Japanese.”

The screen behind him reached zero which sounded off a loud buzz. The host said something in Japanese, saying the answer in English.

“Ruby! I'm sorry, Sam Winchester.”

“Sorry? Sir? For what?” Sam asked in a panic.

The host could only laugh just as the ball attached to Sam’s platform rushed up and whacks Sam in the crotch. Dean is clearly horrified, and Sam doubled over in pain as much as he could. The crowed cheers at this, but you were growing angry at the Trickster for doing this to you. Your eyes shined a bright blue in an attempt to save Sam some of the pain, but when you moved your hands up to use your magic, it shortened out and fluttered away in sparks.

What the fuck was going on?!

“Nutty Cracker!” The host yelled.

“Sam?” Dean asked. His brother makes an inarticulate noise in response. “You okay?”

Sam could only glare at his brother since he couldn’t seem to form the words on his own. Dean looked at his own platform, saw the ball, and began to panic.

“I can’t use my magic. Something is very wrong!” you urged.

The lights on the door began flashing which could only mean that someone or something was coming through those doors.

“What now?” Dean groaned.

The door opened to reveal Castiel, and the crowd cheered at his presence.

“Castiel?” you gasped.

“Is this another trick?” Sam asked once he gathered the nerve to.

“It's me. Uh, what are you doing here?”

“Us? What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you. You've been missing for days.”

“Get us the hell out of here, then!” you yelled.

“Let’s go,” he said, raising his arms to touch Sam and Dean on the forehead.

However, after taking two steps to you, he vanished in the same manner as the Trickster did on the set of Dr. Sexy MD.

“No, no, no, no,” the host tsk’d, and reached into his jacket pocket for more cards, “Mr. Trickster does not like pretty-boy angels. Dean Winchester.”

The host moved onto the next brother and asked a question in Japanese. Would your mother and father still be alive if your brother was never born?

“Countdown!”

“What do I do, what do I do?” Dean panicked when he saw the clock count down from twenty. “I don't wanna get hit in the nuts.”

“I don't know, I—I—I—wait!” Sam gasped.

His mouth began moving, but you weren’t really focusing on his words. Your blood began to boil at the games the Trickster was playing on the three of you. He doesn’t get to come into your life and start screwing with it. Your magic worked before, and with a little more concentration, you knew you would be able to use it to get out of these binds.

“Screw you, Trickster,” you glared, using every ounce of strength you had to get out of the binds.

The countdown reached zero, but before it had a chance to buzz, Dean pressed his button. Your magic bubbled up inside of you before tipping over the edge. Dean answered the question in Japanese just as the metal covering your chest blew up. The metal pieces flew all across the stage, and everyone stared at you in shock. Stepping off your platform, you glared at the host in anger.

“Tell the Trickster he can kiss my ass.”

“Dean Winchester! The Nutty Cracker Champion!” the host changed the subject, congratulating the winning brother.

“We play the roles to survive, but I wouldn’t advise doing that again,” Sam said to you.

“Yeah, I’d like to see him stop me,” you growled just as your eyes flashed bright blue.

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androgynousblackbox · 4 years

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Crafts I have done during quarantine

I was bored so decided to rate and review all the crafts I have done while I had nothing else to do. Working in felt Pros: -It’s fairly easy to do, even kids could try it, given that someone checks on them to be careful with the pointy stuff like scissors and needle. -You end up with something cute and soft that is going to be your very own plush, like wow, don’t you feel accomplished for making your own plush. And you can make it however you want, adding as many details as you could ever want. Or not, whatever, it’s your own choice. -There is a lot of free patterns for a lot of things online available. Do you want to make a beetle? Have a pattern for it. Do you want to make a bear? Have a pattern. And in case you don’t happen to find the pattern for the thing you want, you can always just make it yourself or adapt a prexisting one for the thing you need. -You can add details in embroidery if you want, to give something extra. Cons: -To work with felt you will either need a lot of glue or develop a second skill, that is sewing so it will take some practice before you are making the lines straight or as close as they need to be. Or else risk getting all untangled and have the fucking thing have it’s filling picking on a corner. -Time consuming. Between making/printing the pattern and cutting the parts there is no much trouble, that will feel like a breeze. Depending on the size and the level of detail, It’s the fucking sewing that will take you forever and, again, if you are not used to it, I hope you enjoy getting pinched, having the thread tangled up it’s own ass, having to redo a stitch because it came out way too fucking ugly and thread that motherfucker through the needle’s eye again and again, because you are going to do a lot of that with each single piece. Don’t try to make it perfect or your eyes will get tired. Which is a shit advice if you WANT to get it perfect and cute and exactly as the pictures show, but you won’t because you are just starting so, fuck, embracing the potential ugly it is. Take solace in the fact you made that ugly and that ugly wouldn’t exist without you. -3D images objects like balls for heads or body will take even more time and maybe especial patterns if you can’t just do them from your own imagination. -The plush will never end up exactly as you imagined after you put the filling the first times. Just deal with it. Rating: 6/10 because fuck sewing. Cold porcelain Pros: -It’s easy to make and if not, cheap to buy, infinitely cheaper than polymer clay and, on my case, so much easier to find. -Some cold porcelain can come in certain colors, but if you don’t have access to those that it’s okay, you can grab the cheapest paint you have on hand and kneed it together with just the tiniest amount. Your hands will end up a mess, but at least you can have all the color you could need to do anything with one single package. -Speaking of packages, cold porcelain is usually sold in bigger quantities than polymer clay so you could do a lot with just one. -You don’t like how it turned out in the end because the thing dried way darker than you expect? You can paint it over with acrylic paints no problem. -Did I mention that is cheap? The ideal glue for cold porcelain is white glue, the same shit kids use for school. Just a tiny amount will be more than enough to join any pieces together as long they aren’t too heavy, so with buying a big bottle you will served for a pretty long time. This only work as long the piece hasn’t dried completely, though. -If for whatever reason you want to save on glue, use water. In general you can use water to make more intricate details, join two pieces so they appear as one or smooth something out. -I have used three different brands of cold porcelain and I had never had a problem in which my fingerprints got stuck all over it. -Are you a terrible cooker that gets bored waiting for the food to cook, gets distracted with something else and come back to find you overcooked? Or rather, get so nervous about that happening that take out the food before it’s completely done and had to stand eating something undercooked because put it again on the oven sounds like too much of a hassle? Don’t worry, because cold porcelain doesn’t need an oven. Just make sure the thing can dry on the position you want and let the air do it’s job. -It’s completely non toxic so literally anyone can work with it. -It usually smells like nothing or like glue, so if smell is something important to you on your craft, this is not bad. Cons: -Cold porcelain can be sticky as fuck, especially when you add water or just kneed it with paint, so you will have to use some kind of moisturizer on your hands to handle it easier. Oh, and for this too you will need to cut your nails and clean your work station because once a little hair or unwanted particles get stucked there, good luck taking it out if you don’t want to paint over afterward. So, hey, this could be a pro actually, because if you are someone that doesn’t remember to clean your hands as much you should, cold porcelain will force you to do it and maybe help develop the habit. -Depending on your environment, it could take one, two or even three days for it to dry completely, so you will need to develop some patience for this. The more intricate your piece is, the more you will have to wait for each of them to dry some before putting the details or join together so it doesn’t become too heavy. This could also be a pro for some because you can take all the time you want to modify or add whatever you want. -You must be careful about cracking because what looked like a tiny line during the modeling could turn into an abyss once it’s dried. You will usually be able to fix it easily putting more cold porcelain on top or covering with something else. -Everything you do will be reduce in a 30% in volume, so the figure might never be as big or the size your expected it to, unless you can actually calculate that kind of stuff before time and, like, who has time for that. -Depending on the shape of the figure, you may have to keep turning it from one side to another while drying so it doesn’t warp. You can avoid this by putting the figure on top of a bunch of paper tissues. Rating: 10/10, fucking love it. Punch needle Pros: -Once you understand the basic principles (don’t pull the thread, don’t make punches too far apart, hold the needle right), then it’s very easy to do. -You can make your own pins, plush, pillows, handbag and, truly, anything you can imagine with the fabric. -You have a double effect in which one side looks all smooth and the other one it’s all fluffy and soft, so you can combine both to make something really cool. -There are different size of needles so you can work with embroidery thread or yarn. -It’s very satisfactory to “punch” on the fabric, going with the needle just up and down and up and down during the whole process. You don’t need to be extra careful with it for fear of hurting yourself by accident so you could get your hand busy with that while watching a show or seeing a video. -If embroidery seems like too much work for you, this is the easier version of it even though, as said, the effect and the way of handled it is not going to be the same. Cons: -You will need especial made needle for this, so if you don’t have easy access to them you are kind screwed. There are some needles that come with different options for different threads, but the cheaper one is going to be a single one of one size with which you are only going to work with one type of thread. -You will spend A LOT of thread in one single piece so you better have a lot in hand to complete it. -You will need a especial type of fabric in order to punch it without completely destroying it. -There is not a lot of people who do this kind of craft, so you might struggle to find people interested on it or that publish their work so you can get some inspiration from. -It is, after all, time consuming because you are going to spend a good while just filling up one single are. If you are doing an entire area, that is going to take even longer. Raiting: 8/10 because impatience. Wet felting Pros: -If you are still a terrible cooker, but somehow find the action of kneeding relaxing, then this is the craft for you. It’s so easy that it’s a good activity for kids too. -Low level concentration required because once you get to work the thing with your hands, you can be doing anything else with your eyes and it won’t matter because you are just working with wool, soap and warm water so you can’t hurt yourself even if you do get distracted. -You can do practically anything with this, from clothing for dolls, dolls themselves, accesories and more. It’s up to your imagination and the ways you find to make it. You can even use it to wrap a bar of soap and then not only will help rid of dead particles easier when you use it, but it will last longer. -You can use embroidery for details once it’s dried and ready, or also needle felting.

-Any type of clothing made with this will be the warmest shit you ever had when it’s cold, will last the longest and will keep you drier than other fabrics. Wool is fucking awesome. -Two pieces done the exact same way are never going to look the exact same way. There will always be something unexpected that will give it a unique touch. -Because all you are doing is working with soap and water, your hands will be all clean and nice by the end. -This is an old as fuck technique so you know it must mean that works. -You can dry it around any shape you want, like a vase, and it will permanently take that shape no matter what you do with it after. Cons: -You must be able to get access to natural sheep wool. Synthetics might have pretty colors, but they won’t stick to each other like natural wool does. This can get expensive the more colors you want to add, if you happened to be a lazy fuck like me who can’t be bothered to learn how to dye it. But, you know, there is that option at least. -Making this is an entire process: you need an area where you don’t mind if some water gets spilled onto the floor, space big enough that you can kneed it all you need, put plastic or a towell underneat, don’t mind that your own clothing can end up a little wet and have access to warm water. If the dyed of your wool starts coming out, your towell will end up tainted with it. -If you are doing something 3D, once it start drying, your piece will reduce it’s size and become tighter the more you kneed it so don’t expect it to look the same as it was when wet. And it will take a long while to dry completely until it’s able to be used, like two or three days depending on how big it is. -If you like a smooth kind of look, this is not the thing for you. It doesn’t matter how much you work the wool or how well it’s made, there will always be some hairs sticking out so you will have to learn to live with that and take it as part of it’s charm. But unless you are extremely sensitive about your skin, it won’t be itchy to use either. It just feels warm and comfy. -You try to find people who dedicate to this on the regular. Just try. Rating:7/10 because it’s a lot of work. Crocheting (amigurumi) -Very forgiving type of craft unless your warn suddenly decides it doesn’t want to untangle and end up with an unexpected knot or breaking something trying to pull it appart. -There is A LOT of information, resources, groups, channels and more for you if you are a begginer. Plenty of patterns are also available for free and there is a lot of inspiration to take from that you can easily customize to your own needs. -It’s extremely satisfactory see a shape slowly being formed through your work and in the end you can something soft and cute all for yourself, or whoever you wanted to give it to. -You can do your own dolls, doll’s clothing, figures and creatures adding or taking whatever detail you want, no one is stopping you. -Yarn as a source material is easy to get for most people. A crochet hook are not that expensive either. -Since the warn and the needle are bigger than what a needle for sewing and thread would be, sewing parts together or for adding details it’s not that diffcult. -If you don’t like sewing not even then, or you want something to look a very particular way, you can needle felt it. Cons: -High level concentration required, especially if you are a begginer, because you must count a lot and if you miss even just a single step, the entire thing will look forever weird to you, but aren’t willing to go back all the other steps to find out what went wrong either. -It will take a while getting used to hold the hook and the warn in a way in which the work doesn’t end up too tight or too loose. -Patterns can and will confuse the fuck out of you in the start because you first need to learn an entire vocabulary in order to interpretate them. It’s like reading music, it’s just a bunch of meaningless symbols without that aknowledge. -If you have any kind of cronic pain in your hand, you will need to take a lot of breaks because a lot of crocheting will only make it worse. -The limit of what you can do is always going to be how you descipher the right way to crochet it. You can’t just do the thing, escupt it like on the cold porcelain and then it’s done, there is what you wanted, but you must work it row to row with a lot of care so you don’t miss anything or overdo it. -There is a lot of ways to hold your hook, your work, to do this or that, but all amigurumis are always going to have the same samey texture and look, so you must really be sure you are all about it before getting into this. -Also, if you want to create a new pattern or modify a prexisting one, you will need math. Fuck that noise. Rating: 5/10 because numbers suck. Needle felting Pros: -Excelent stress reliever since you are literally stabbing the wool to do your betting. -Because you are working with a needle, you can be as precise as you could ever want, making sure your work looks exactly as you wanted it to be. -You can sculpt the wool into any shape you want, but unlike cold porcelain or wet felting, there is no drying time required. The work is done and ready when you say is done and ready. -You can do great dolls with this technique since the wool is so flexible and maleable. -You can work with the wool and a needle, or combine this with other techniques to make something more unique, like on the case of amigurumis, welt felting or punch needle. It doesn’t need a especiall fabric either, you can use it on any to add fun details to your liking. -You don’t even actually need wool if you don’t have it close. If you lack any specific color, you can get it’s equivalent on yarn, make fluff out of it with a steel brush and use that for felting just the same, or use the yarn directly. Although if you do that last one you will need to work it a little more to get rid of the original texture and make it smooth. Cons: -The more you work on your wool with the needle, the more firm and less hairy will be, unlike wet felting in which you have to live with it. Problem is, this could take a lot of time and even more so if you don’t have any especial holder and are working with just a single needle in your hand. We are talking about hours and hours of stabbing and stabbing, so make sure to take breaks and let yourself breath before keep going. -High level of concentration required because the moment you get distracted, you will end up stabbing yourself. There are accesories you can put to cover your fingers, but if you don’t have access to those, be careful because those needles can get pretty deep. For this reason I wouldn’t recommend it for a child. -Compared with other type of crafts, there is not a terribly lot of resources for people interested on this and a lot of it is tutorial videos in japanese for some reaosn. If you speak any other language but that one or english, even less than that so a lot of your journey is going to be experimentation. -The needles might have no trouble piercing your fingers, but they are still very fragile, some more than others, so you can’t just grab whichever and go ham to town with it because it will end up broken. If a needle seems like it bends too easily it can be used, but carefully and once the piece it’s too firm for it to penetrate you will need to change for a sturdier one. You will probably need multiple needles of varyin sizes to finish one single work. Rating: 9/10 because I saw a neede literally piercing my finger and that wasn’t fun. String dolls

Pros -I love them?? There are so easy and so cute, omg??? And you are telling me that I can add embroidery, felt, wool or anything I want into it but all I need for the base is yarn? And no math or couting stitches required? Fuck yeah. -Anyone could do any of this, with or without an armature, and as long you have the glue to make sure nothing comes out of place even after some handling, then you have something a keychain, a figurine or doll exactly to your liking. -There is not a lot of resources for people to make these, but those that do exist are fairly easy to customize. Most of them were done by kids so, yeah, definitely they can do it too if they want. -Theorically you could make them as big as you want, but there is nothing wrong with just having something small and adorable. -You can recycle little balls of paper or scrapped yarn in order to make the filling for the head. Cons: -Unless you construct them very well and use a lot of glue, and depending the level of details integrated, they might not be the most durable thing on the Earth. They are relatively easy to repair at least. -Because they are usually small, like small as the palm of your hand small, you might not have space to make it extremely detailed. You can try, though, I guess. -Medium level of concentration required because you have to make sure that the yarn is tense enough that will keep it’s shape and not unravel the moment you let go. -If it’s too firm but you still need to add something with a needle, good luck forcing it’s way through it. Raiting: 10/10 would string again.

#craft stuff

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dr-spencer-reids-queen · 5 years

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Please Save It

Characters: Spencer Reid x Reader, Derek Morgan, Emily Prentiss, Aaron Hotchner, JJ

Word Count: 1,418

Warnings: angst, minor fluff

Summary: The only thing that will save your life is Spencer, and how well he could sew skin together.

Square Filled: Roadside Surgery

Author’s Note: This is for @badthingshappenbingo and if you have any requests, please send them in! this is unbeta’d and every mistake is all on me. Thank you @kendall-michele for the idea. if your tag doesn’t work three times in a row (three stories I post in a row) then I will be removing you.

Feedback the glue that holds my writing together

Tags at the bottom

“Spencer,” you gritted through your teeth, “I love you with all my heart, but please drive faster.”

“I’m going as fast as I can,” he panicked.

“No, you’re not. The blood is coming out faster, so I need you to drive faster. Find a way to go faster,” you gasped when blood poured over your fingers and onto the leather seats. Hotch had sent you and Spencer to approach what you thought was the unsub’s hideout. It was remote, secluded, and very quiet. The hideout resided in the middle of the woods, and Hotch thought the unsub was taking his victims here to kill them before taking them somewhere else to dump the body.

As soon as you got there, you could confirm that Hotch’s theory was right. There was blood spatter on the walls, remains on the floor, and everything else you needed to convict the man. The only thing you and Spencer didn’t calculate is that the unsub might have been home. All evidence pointed towards him going out to get another victim, so you two didn’t worry about anyone being home otherwise there would have been more backup.

It turned out that the man was home, and he was prepared for an attack. He took out Spencer first despite his lanky form. With only you to take care of, he got rid of your gun before he used his knife on you. He got a few cuts on your body, but those were nothing compared to the gash on your leg. There was a split moment where you thought he was going to do something other than what he did, and he slashes your leg badly. When Spencer woke up, the man left since he knew you two would be busy with your injuries to catch him. He fled the place, and it was up to your boyfriend to get you to a hospital before you bled to death.

“We’re almost there,” Spencer tried to calm you down, but there was nothing he could say to make this better. It wasn’t his fault you got stabbed, it was yours. If you didn't hesitate, you would have taken him down without this gash.

“No, we’re not. We’re in the middle of the fucking forest, Spencer!” you yelled as the pain spread. Spencer was forced to drive slower in the mountains since there were so many twists and turns that is he wasn’t careful, he could drive you off the side of the road.

“I’m going as fast as I can,” he stressed as he kept his eyes on the road. There was no cell reception out here so there was no way to contact the rest of the team to tell them what happened. As far as Hotch or anyone else knew, you two were heading home perfectly healthy.

“I’m not going to make it until then. There is too much blood coming out,” you whimpered. Both of your hands were covered in your blood, and the air was starting to smell of the metallic substance.

“No, you have to hold on. You need to fight it,” Spencer urged, hating the fact that he couldn't do anything but drive.

“You need to pull over,” you gritted out as you thought of the first aid kit you had in the back of your car.

“What? Are you crazy?”

“Spencer, I have a first aid kit back there--”

“A first aid kit isn’t going to help us, Y/N!”

“Spencer! It’s not a normal first aid kit! Please, just pull over so I can stitch this up myself,” you yelled. Spencer weighed his options: he could either ignore you and drive with the big risk of you bleeding out or he could listen to you and you could roughly patch the wound up so that no more blood comes out. He chose the latter as he pulled off to the side of the road before getting out and grabbing the kit from the trunk.

“What the hell is this?” he asked as he opened the passenger door. There was no way you would be able to move your leg to face him, so you just sat still and moved your head to look at him.

“Believe me when I say this isn’t the first time I’ve had to patch myself up. I’ve done plenty of roadside surgeries on myself. Just give me the alcohol,” you begged. He didn’t waste any time and gave you the item you requested. Popping the top off the bottle, you began drinking the poison so that when the next part comes along, you wouldn’t feel as much pain as you would sober.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Spencer sighed.

“Just hand me the floss and needle,” you sighed shakily. With a deep sigh, he took the unscented floss before tying it to the needle. With a shaky hand, you took the needle before removing your other hand. Without anything in the way, blood gushed out of your wound even more.

“You’re shaking like crazy.”

“No shit, Sherlock. It’s my nerves. You need to do this for me.”

“What?”

“Spencer, my life is literally in your hands. Please save it.”

Spencer took the bloody bottle of alcohol in one hand and the needle in the other. He knew a great deal about medical procedures, but he has never performed one. On the other hand, if he didn’t, the love of his life would die. Blood coated his hands as he wiped some of the blood away so that he could see what he was doing.

“This is going to sting,” he wanted before pouring the alcohol over your wound. Throwing your head back, you let out the loudest scream you could possibly muster. Your boyfriend flinched at the sound, but he hooked your skin with the needle before roughly sewing it together. Snatching the bottle from his hand, you took another big gulp of the substance as tears rolled down your cheeks. Whenever he poked your skin, you couldn’t even feel a thing since the pain from the gash was too great to notice anything else. Your disturbed nerves made your whole body numb, your leg especially. Spencer made quick work of the sewing before he wiped his hands on his jeans to clean his hands as best as he could.

“You’re done. Come on, I have to get you to the hospital,” he said as he threw the kit on the ground before closing the door. He rushed to the driver’s side, got in, and skirted out of there. With the wound now temporarily closed, you were able to somewhat relax knowing that your blood would stay inside your body.

“What the hell happened?” Hotch snapped as the rest of the team walked into the hospital. Spencer was covered in your blood as he didn’t have time to wash any of it off. Bloody handprints were displayed on his jeans and his hands were stained with your blood.

“The car is much worse.”

“What. Happened.”

“The unsub was there when we got there. He took me out first before he got to Y/N. He stabbed her leg and created a huge gash which caused a lot of blood loss. She was going to bleed out if I didn’t sew her up.”

“You sewed her skin together?” Derek asked.

“It was either that or death, Morgan,” he snapped, feeling stressed from the events.

“Where is the unsub now?” Emily asked.

“He got away. When he figured we both valued her life more than catching him, that’s when he made his escape. He’s probably long gone now. You should have seen that place, Emily. Bodies everywhere and blood was on the wall.”

“All that matters right now is that Y/N is going to be okay. I’ll have Garcia find out where he might have gone next. Maybe there is a backup place he goes to.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Spencer sighed.

“Kid, you need to go home and take a shower. JJ and I will stay here, but she’s in surgery right now.”

“Yeah,” Spencer whispered when he registered just how much blood was on him. “Can I take your car? You might need to trash Y/N’s. It’s like a horror movie in there.”

“You got it,” Derek said as he tossed his keys to the young doctor. He had to repeat to himself that you were going to make it out alive. It’s the only thought that he cared about right now.

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aliceslantern · 4 years

Text

Beyond this Existence: Atonement, chapter 6

Ansem always had a penchant for strays, so it's not at all surprising when he takes in the orphaned child Ienzo. The boy's presence changes everything, far more than Even is willing to admit. Ienzo's brilliance seems promising, but the arrival of a young Xehanort pushes the apprentices onto a dark, cruel, inhumane path which will affect the future of the World. And even once it's all over with--once Xehanort is dead--they still must pick up the pieces, forgive one another, find a way to atone for their atrocities, and struggle to accept the humanity which has been thrust upon them.

Or: Even's journey from BBS through post-KH3 Chapter summary: Vexen returns to Radiant Garden and becomes Even again, but relationships at the castle remain tense and awkward. A new arrival further mixes things up.

Read it on FF.net/on AO3

---

He finds the boy outside, his eyes turned skyward. He looks exhausted; Vexen’s able to get uncomfortably close before Ienzo notices his presence. The boy’s head snaps down.

They hold eye contact for a very long time.

“Even,” he gasps.

He smiles. Sweat is crawling all along his body, pain in his chest; but he tries to remain composed. “Oh, little one. It is good to see you.”

“This was your doing," he says. “You… you could’ve told me, you know.” A wry smile.

“I’m a coward. What else can I say? The thought of speaking to you again was more than I could bear. This was the only way I could begin to atone.”

Vexen can see the weight of exhaustion within him. He’s positive the poor boy hasn’t rested a whit more than was necessary to remain alive. “I suppose you know you were successful,” he says softly. “Xehanort is dead. It’s over.”

Vexen’s feeling faint now. “Is that so,” he says.

“Even?” Ienzo asks. “Are you alright?”

He collapses before he can say anything more.

When he wakes, he’s in his own bed in his old quarters, not the med bay. His fever has broken, leaving him covered in a thin, unpleasant film of sweat. His body feels odd to him, achy. And while he feels a faint throb of remorse, it’s not nearly as strong as after the first reformation. He forces himself to his feet, wincing at the pain in his head.

All of a sudden he feels old; his joints ache in a disorienting way. He knows he’s nearing fifty (or, depending on just how long he’s been hiding, has passed it), but for the first time it’s a tangible number.

Even forces himself to his feet and lurches over to the mirror over the dresser. He’s breathing hard. He looks terrible--flushed, sweaty, his hair disgustingly greasy--but this doesn’t matter.

His eyes are green, not gold. The piece of Xehanort’s heart inside of him has perished. He knows this almost instinctively.

It truly is over.

Perhaps for this reason, he sinks to his knees and sobs.

---

Just because Xehanort is dead and Even is human again, that doesn’t mean there’s time for leisure. He’s weak and underweight from his weeks of hiding, but he tries not to spend undue time in bed unless it’s unavoidable. He stumbles through interpersonal contact--reunions, conversations--in a numb haze.

The castle is exactly the same, but it’s gone through hell. Everything is either filthy, or broken, or misplaced, or some combination therein. His own human clothing, when he roots through the drawers, has been eaten by moths and mice alike. And seeing that Ienzo has co-opted his lab coats for himself--in the moment he needed them far more--he spends more time in those early days sewing than anything. It feels good to make something with his hands.

His lab is desolate, desecrated, fragile glass doors broken, supplies stolen, missing, or compromised. He spends days cleaning and reorganizing. It doesn't seem to do much good.

They've been left another replica by one of the true vessels. It was its user's desire that it go to Naminé. With Kairi presumed dead, it was a logical fallacy to figure out how to seek her heart; he and Ienzo spend hours in circular discussion, but neither of them can come up with anything good. The best they can do is prepare the replica for implantation, and wait. Ansem, quietly, is nearby, as he seeks to apologize to the girl. Apparently he wasn't the only one who suffered a great deal of moral degradation. This is actually a comfort to Even, because as the days pass, his remorse again goes heavier. He lacks composure; often he gives in to fallacies of weakness, breaking down almost distantly when he has moments to himself.

It doesn't take long for Naminé to arrive. It occurs to Even that not everything about the heart is possible to understand. When she wakes, the three of them are there. It will always give him a thrill, to see the replica go from a genderless, colorless sort of mannequin to a realized human being.

She sits up. Slowly. She seems a bit dizzy. Ienzo tries to assuage her, but it's Ansem who speaks first. "My dear girl," he says. "I am truly sorry for what we've all put you through. I realize we have not made your existence easy; that, in fact, I have made it something of a hell. I hope that, with this new chance, you can find peace. And if there's anything--any small thing--we can do to assist you, let me know at once."

Naminé seems to struggle with her words. Even takes her vitals, notes with a distant pleasure how stable they are; she's taken to this body like glue, exactly as easy as Roxas and Xion did theirs. "Where's Roxas?" She asks.

"At Destiny Islands, waiting for you," Ienzo says gently. "Riku has arrived to bring you there, should you desire it."

Her blue eyes gleam. "Yes. That's what I want." She looks slowly at each of them, but it's Ienzo's eyes she seeks (she's had the smallest amount of trauma with him) when she asks, "Kairi… where is she?"

"We're not sure," Ienzo says. "Sora is seeking her… I'm sure he will find her, if he's determined enough."

Even has known Ienzo for years. He knows when he is lying. Zexion was better at it. Despite Ienzo's trepidation, Naminé nods. "Then I should wait for her," she says. "I can just… go?"

"Of course," Ienzo says gently. "I can escort you, if you like."

She shakes her head. "That's okay," she says. "Thanks."

"It's the least we can do." Ienzo gives her a gummiphone, a brief tutorial on how to use it. "So you can be in contact with your friends."

"My friends." She smiles. "He's just outside?"

"Yes. He'll be waiting."

They all watch her go. There are a few moments of awkward silence. Ansem faces Ienzo. "You've done well, my boy," he says gently, and though Ienzo nods, Even can see his eyes on the floor. "You should get some rest. You look exhausted."

"There's still so much to be done," Ienzo says. "The computer must be tidied up--I'm afraid the committee and Sark have--"

Even touches his shoulder, feeling the boy flinch just the slightest at the unanticipated touch. "You've worked so hard. I know human exhaustion is still unfamiliar to you, but your body is more fallible than a Nobody's. You need rest, fluid, and dare I say it, a few square meals." He tries to smile. "Please sleep, Ienzo. You are no longer so alone."

Even wonders if he's imagining it, or if Ienzo's eyes are watering. "I… will try," he says softly. "Please don't hesitate to wake me if you need anything."

"I'd much rather see you healthy," Ansem says. "Go, my boy. It's alright."

They watch him go. And then it's the two of them.

"Well," Even says. "I do have some affairs to attend to. I should like to write a report about Naminé's implantation."

"...Certainly."

Even takes a few steps, then hears Ansem's voice:

"Even?"

"Yes, Master?"

"How are you faring?"

He meets Ansem's rusty eyes. There's still something missing from them. "Healthy enough," he says. "Realizing I am old, as well as a fool. I've no idea where to begin unraveling what I've done."

"You're not the only one," Ansem says. He shakes his head.

"What is it you've done?" Even asks, incredulous.

Ansem chuckles darkly. "More than sit limply in the realm of darkness, I'm afraid."

"...I see." His heart is beating hard--anxiety, and repulsion. "If it's… all the same, I should like to take my leave."

"Of course. You needn't my permission anymore."

He scoffs a little. "I wasn't asking for it."

---

Even doesn't feel quite right; he doesn't feel at home here, and neither, he suspects, do the others. For the most part, they avoid one another aside from the lightest and most superficial greetings. Even knows he needs to confront them, for any number of reasons--their mistreatment of the boy Ienzo, the atrocities they committed in the Organization, the fact that they threw Ansem into the darkness--but he does not feel able. He doesn't feel able to do much at all, actually.

He can feel the basement in his periphery, its suffering, his own follies like a magnet--

Even finds it difficult to consistently keep down foods, to sleep. He knows it is likely stress, and he sees the numbers when he draws his own blood. But how to alleviate any of this pain? How to begin? How to start to atone?

With the weight of his own burgeoning humanity, he feels nearly incapacitated. He tries to write, to create reports detailing all that happened--if so to organize his own thoughts--but often he finds himself staring into space. For the first time he despises his awareness, his intelligence, because Even is acutely aware he is becoming depressed.

Nobodies’ minds largely reject mental illness, mostly to ensure survival of the body. But as a human, it’s all coming back, the repercussions. And if the mental health situation was bad for Radiant Garden before, now it’s completely desolate.

Worsened by facts of the Fall.

Ienzo brings him tidings of it, quietly--the young man went to visit with the restoration committee, to see if there was any more news worth passing on. He’d left his lab coat at the castle. Without apprentice or Organization garb, the boy looks downright strange in civilian clothing. His teal eyes are empty, and drawn from exhaustion. “Even,” he says in an odd voice. “Have you several moments?”

“...Of course. Ienzo? Are you alright? You look ill.”

“Leon was… catching me up on town affairs,” he says slowly. “I knew this world fell, and was restored, but to hear the stories of it…” He swallows thickly and won’t make eye contact. Even gestures for him to sit on one of the stools in the lab; he does, heavily. “He… was kind enough to insist that it was not our fault. But we planted the seeds. Even. ”

“...I know.”

Slowly, Ienzo nods.

“I’m sure what you feel must be overwhelming,” Even says softly. “You’re no longer used to emotion, how it physically impacts the body. But don’t let it weigh so heavily, Ienzo. You were a child--mentally ill and manipulated. This has nothing to do with you.”

“I should have known better. And that doesn’t begin to touch what I did after.”

He doesn’t know what to say, where to even begin. “Child--”

He swallows, blinking quickly. “I… I have something I must attend to.”

Even should’ve followed him, tried harder--but he can’t.

---

In strange moments, he finds himself thinking of Demyx. Not quite with fondness, or even concern, but curiosity and a sort of worry. If Xehanort’s heart had been purged from Even, it should have been purged from the boy as well--meaning he’s lost his means to travel. Yet, he worries. What if a piece of Xehanort remains? The others worry about it too, to a smaller degree; they talk about it in hushed voices. Easier to discuss this than the emotional rot.

It turns out he doesn’t have to worry long.

In a moment ripped clean from the past, Dilan approaches him in his quarters. “Have you a moment?”

“That depends.”

“There’s something I think you’ll want to see.”

Dilan brings him not to the med bay, but rather to one of the empty apprentice rooms--one of the ones that, had they been graduated, would likely have belonged to Isa or Lea. Even sees the black heap on the bed. “We found him about half an hour ago,” Dilan says. “He was asking for you.”

Even approaches Demyx slowly. He’s unconscious, shuddering--no doubt in the throes of a fever like Even was.

“Why has it taken so long?” Dilan asks.

“Dilan, I know it’s been a while since we’ve been researchers, but I trust you did not forget about relativity.” If Demyx has been shuffling from world to world--each with its own different time signature--it makes sense that, to him at least, this is only happening now. To his body, Xehanort has only just been defeated. “I know what this is. The part of Xehanort’s heart that’s been instilled in him is dying.” He rolls up the boy’s sleeve, begins taking his vitals, wondering all the while if his were anything like this. Racing heart, fever, low blood pressure. “Would you do me a favor and get the boy some blankets?”

“Will he--” Dilan hesitates, and his lip curls. “What will become of him?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“But this means he is--”

“Unable to leave Radiant Garden, yes.” Even looks at him. “Please. Sooner rather than later. He is very unwell.” As gently as he can, he eases off Demyx’s boots, his ragged and muddy coat. No doubt as soon as the pain started, the boy sought him for help--he knew no one else to turn to. He settles the boy onto his side, a precaution in case he should vomit, and covers him.

Dilan watches this with a sort of morbid fascination. “He really did help you?” he asks, incredulous. “He really… turned against the new Organization?”

“In his own way. I’ve no idea why--but I’m grateful.”

“I should tell the others.” He shakes his head. “Do you remember the boy’s name, from the old life?”

Even frowns. “You know, I don’t,” he says. “I’m afraid I never paid much attention to the neophytes.”

“Very well. I’m sure he’ll tell us when he wakes.” With a scowl, Dilan leaves.

Even brushes a strand of hair out of his own eyes and looks back towards the boy. “You couldn’t bear to let me have a moment of peace, could you?”

Almost as if in response, Demyx shudders more intensely and curls in on himself.

Even sighs. “Very well. My work is cut out for me, I see.” He takes a pen light out of his pocket, pulls the boy’s eyelid back. Unpleasant, yes, but he has to know. The boy doesn’t react hardly at all. Even notes with relief that the small sliver of iris he can see is Demyx’s natural teal. “Get some rest,” he murmurs. “Goodness knows you’ll need it.”

It isn’t long before the cavalry comes. Ienzo and Ansem, in tandem, like nothing’s changed. Ienzo’s expression is stricken; morbidly fascinated. “...He’s not a vessel?”

"I don't believe so. I've already checked his eyes. Not gold. Look." He demonstrates for them.

He hesitates. “Do you think he’s trustworthy?”

"I do not believe he'd cause any harm to us," Even says. "He was rather helpful with the replicas." "The boy holds no ill will. We did not speak much, admittedly, but he seemed all too happy to get a move in edgewise," Ansem says. "I believe he was merely swayed. And we can sway him back to us, if need be." "I'll monitor him, but he should be up and about before long." Even shakes his head. "Nasty business. At least it's all over now." He takes the coat. "I'll put this filthy thing in the wash with mine. Best to hold onto. Just in case." If he’s learned anything, it’s that nothing is impossible.

Ansem follows him out the door, but Ienzo remains, an odd, unreadable look on his face. “...This is what you went through?” he asks softly.

Even looks over his shoulder. “Oh, yes,” he says. “Much the same. It’s just us that went through it this way. He’ll be human before long.”

Ansem nods. “I suppose you and he only have fragments of a heart, rather than a whole one, like the others.”

“...I presume.”

“What does that… feel like?”

Even stares at him. “I’m still puzzling that one out, I’m afraid.”

Ansem nods slowly. Like the rest of them, the clothing he’s bought is secondhand; gone were the days of pristine, professional garb based on their status. Back to patching, darning, mending. He looks more like someone’s grizzled grandfather than a former king.

Even’s sure he himself doesn’t look much better. “I should like to draft a report about this,” he says. “Unless there’s something else you need.”

“We should figure out what to do with the young man,” Ansem says.

Even shrugs. “Demyx is an adult. As… eccentric as he is, he’s capable of deciding his own fate. Nor is he an amnesiac. Once he is well, he can leave.”

Ansem sighs. “Should he have nowhere else to go?”

Even scowls. “You and your strays,” he spits. “All that’s done is get us in trouble.”

The little readability in Ansem’s expression is quickly replaced by indifference. “You’re a different man, Even.”

“Well, what did you expect of me? It’s been twelve years, multiple transfigurations of the self. I’m no longer so amenable, and for that I apologize.” He feels his nostrils flare.

Ansem smiles darkly. “No, you’ve hardened.”

“I would not have survived the alternative.”

The words fall, heavily. Ansem crosses his arms. “...Quite. Well, I’ve my own work to do.”

Even launders both cloaks, revulsion making his skin prickle. Demyx, when he checks, is still unconscious, though his fever has broken. He’ll wake soon. He’ll likely have many annoying questions. Perhaps Ienzo can field that for him--the boy seems to have more patience now that he’s human.

Even, on the other hand, has less.

---

Demyx’s presence does shift things. To Even’s annoyance, the boy truly doesn’t have anywhere else to go. It’s as though he’s puncturing a hole in their insular world, forcing them to confront things they wouldn’t have otherwise. He’s quieter, less effervescent than he used to be. For the most part, he seems unsure of what to do with himself. This is perhaps the sole thing, aside from their reformation, he and Even have in common.

He examines the young man one last time. Aside from being too thin, he’s otherwise healthy. “Now, tell me, what was the process like for you? I’m still trying to understand it. We were the last two Nobodies whose reformation didn’t necessitate some sort of murder-suicide. It goes against almost everything we’ve learned so far.”

Demyx hesitates, flinching a little. “Painful,” he admits in a low voice.

When he says no more, Even scowls. “I seem to recall a time when I could not get you to shut up. Now, when there’s actually matters of interest, suddenly you become as taciturn as Aeleus.”

Demyx drops his eyes. Even feels his frustration building. Truly, along with anger and guilt, this is all he really feels.

“I’m trying to understand so that I can help you,” Even says slowly.

The boy takes a moment to gather himself. Gone is Demyx’s quick, though nonsensical, tongue. Even wonders if there’s some deeper change, if his sense of self has shifted like Ienzo’s. Of course it would impact the younger members all the harder. Even himself dimly remembers those days (a lot longer ago than he would like to admit), when the struggle to find oneself was a constant. “It just started hurting at one point,” he says.

Even jots that down. “Your heart?”

“Yes. Well, I guess not technically. And then the pain just got worse, and I felt like I was dying, and then I tried to open a corridor to find you, but it took a few tries. I passed out and then when I woke up it was gone.”

That all tracks with Even’s own process. “Yes. Yes, my experience was similar. Did you experience weakness, feverishness, and delirium as well?” He shrugs. “Well I did have dreams--but they’ve stopped.”

Dreams? All Even can recall is darkness. “What kind of dreams?” he prompts, the words nearly coming of their own accord. The curiosity, the desire to know more.

“I… I don’t know. This place I don’t quite remember. Something about Keyblades.” “...Fascinating,” Even mumbles. “I wonder if you were seeing some of Xehanort’s memories.” “...Maybe,” Demyx says, flinching a little.

“But if that fragment had bound to you so tightly, I’m surprised it let go as easily as it did. Perhaps Xehanort willed it when he passed.” If only he had other vessels to interview--

Then again, what kind of fool wants that?

Even looks into his eyes again. Still teal. No visible indication of anything remaining. Then again… if Demyx is dreaming… perhaps it might be good that he’s still here. “I have a favor to ask of you.” He hands the boy a notebook. “Keep track of your dreams to see if anything like that happens again. I will as well. Maybe we can divine some meaning from them.”

He sighs. “Homework?”

This is so typical. Of course he wouldn’t have changed as much as Ienzo.

“This is for the advancement of important scientific research!” Even snaps. “Don’t you see what we can learn?” He shut his eyes tightly, a headache beginning to throb. “Why did it have to be you?”

The boy glares at him. “Good question. I’m gonna go now.”

For several moments Even sits, his head reeling. There’s no need to be nasty to the boy, but yet it rose from him almost involuntarily. More like Vexen than Even. Though much too emotionally soft to be Vexen. He’s crammed somewhere between the two.

I’m too old to be dealing with this.

Before long, though, Demyx is back, this time with Aeleus. Something’s shifted. His eyes are wide, watery, and his breathing sounds wheezy, labored--

A sound of nightmares and hours spent consoling Ienzo--

“My powers,” he says quickly. “Where are they?”

Of course nobody else told him. He guides the trembling boy over to a chair. “It’s our biology,” he explains. “Now that we’re human, we’ve no need for our weapons, our powers.”

“...Our powers are gone?” he asks, his eyes dull.

“In all probability--yes. It’s unusual for humans to have abilities as specific and powerful as we did.” Nobody power is tied to the will, an expression of the self in the absence of a heart--though doubtless Demyx won’t understand this explanation.

“Can I get it back?” “I never thought you cared about fighting.” “This isn’t about fighting,” he says desperately. “Without my sitar, I--” Even’s lip curls. “Oh. That. I’m not certain what I could do for you, Demyx.”

He says nothing, but his eyes are wide, horrified. But really what can Even do? Give the boy false hope? What would that achieve?

“You could have a look in the marketplace. You might find something there that might help you make noise. Now if that is all you’re concerned about, I have work I need to tend to.”

With a quick, pained breath, Demyx leaves. For a moment, Even sits with his head over his notes, trying to conclude. Slowly, like honey, he feels something seeping into him.

There was absolutely no reason to be so short with Demyx. Not when the boy has assisted him.

He groans a little and stands, pacing slowly. After a moment, he holds his palm out, calling gently towards his shield. Sure enough, he feels nothing. It’s gone back to sleep inside of him, no longer needed.

It will only be prudent, to follow up with the others. For his reports.

Dilan and Aeleus both answer in the negative when he asks. And while he knows what Ienzo will say--well, it never hurts to be thorough.

The young man is camped at the computer, where he’s more or less lived these past few days, combing through the disaster that is now their archives. The committee saw fit to completely overtake the computer, and whatever codes it’s been fed to try and decrypt things has it working poorly. Ienzo was never particularly interested in computer science; what does the boy need to know?

“Have you a moment?” he asks.

Ienzo does not even look up, still pulling things this way and that. “Of course. Whatever is the matter?”

"You no longer have any of your Nobody abilities, correct?"

He looks up, squinting. “That is correct. Why is it you ask? You haven't either, have you?" "I have tried, and I cannot," Even says. "I wanted to make sure. He found out." "Who? Demyx?" Even nods. "I wonder if my tone might have been too sharp. He did look rather distressed. But what is it I'm to do? I'm not a miracle worker. And if I'm being honest, I'm quite content with how silent things are around here." "Strictly speaking, there is nothing we can do. Aside from have patience. Oh, that reminds me. I was supposed to have dropped off those clothes. My memory has not been great lately." "You've had a lot on your mind," Even says gently. "I suspect we all have. I'll be glad to not see another one of those infernal cloaks. So drab. So… cult-like."

Ienzo looks back at the screen. "Master Ansem said essentially the same thing. I suppose I should take care of it now." His expression is grim, unhappy. Even’s glad that he’s not the only one feeling negatively about this. "I shall walk with you." The decay has only seemed to grow more noticeable. Water damage and erosion abounds, and everything is full of filth. The heavy carpets, once beautifully embroidered, are threadbare. For some reason Even feels the need to chat, to engage. The boy looks so wilted. "It's a shame. Things here were once so beautiful. If the committee were not so busy we could use their assistance. This place is a shell of what it once was." “You have to admit it feels rather significant.” Ienzo and his metaphors. The boy never did give up reading. "Too on the nose, for my tastes.” He shakes his head. "We're not shells of who we once were. We've changed and adapted. You most of all. I miss being so pliable." But Ienzo does not receive this as a compliment. “So I’ve heard,” he says darkly. “I assure you it is not as easy as it looks.” He wishes Ienzo would tell him about it. “My apologies.” Ienzo hesitates. “If only times were simpler," he says. "I feel as if I've no time to look after myself--what with Sora's disappearance and Demyx's arrival." "Sora's disappeared?" He knew of Kairi’s death--but he figured the fool would be back by now. Ienzo smiles tiredly, and explains in a few clipped sentences that Sora sought to find her heart. Despite the gummiphone, everyone has lost track of him. Even blinks. “How curious. I wonder if there’s any of his data somewhere?” "Sora's? I do not know. I'm not sure how his friends would feel if he were a replica, though." Even sighs. "I've tried to recreate Sora's heart, and we know what happened with that," he says. "As proud as I am of Xion's sentience and personhood, unfortunately his heart is so special that it seems to be a moot option. Best not to give them hope." It’s the hesitation that tells him everything he needs to know. "I thought I'd taught you better," Even says. "You should have heard Riku's voice." "I'm surprised you feel so strongly about him, not when you have such poor memories of him." Riku was nothing but a thorn in their side at Castle Oblivion--defying the odds, resisting all attempts at control. But Ienzo’s reaction is completely inexplicable--he flushes and raises his voice. "That was your replica, might I remind you," Ienzo snaps. Even raises an eyebrow. "The Riku replica? What about it?" He stops cold. “Never mind.” There’s something going on here. “Boy, tell me,” he says sharply. Ienzo’s tensed; his hands hover near his throat (in a flash, Even remembers the bruises, the scars). “Ienzo?” Even prompts. The boy gasps, a pained sound; fear floods his eyes. “Oh, Ienzo.”

"If you must know," Ienzo forces out between breaths, "Axel had the Riku replica kill Zexion." "He did?" Even laughs, despite himself. "Axel killed Vexen." And yet somehow the bastard became a guardian of light. Such brutality. But he has no time to think about such things; Ienzo’s distress is clearly the priority. “How is it you’re feeling?” His voice brings back a gut-punch of memory. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand what it is I’m feeling.” He tries to soften. “Intense, paralyzing panic?” he offers. “Yes--perhaps--” He’s breathing like it hurts. "You should sit down and focus on modulating your breathing," Even says. He helps the boy down to the floor. Aside from his size, it’s almost exactly like all those times before. "It's alright. This is a normal reaction to recalling something traumatic-" "Believe me, I know," Ienzo hisses. "I am perfectly aware of what this is." His eyes belie the opposite.

"Count to ten," Even says. "Deep, steady breaths." Even sees him struggle to bring himself back under control. The wild, barely-contained agony he saw when he first reformed is back, flooding Ienzo’s every breath. He feels his heart begin to ache, dully. “Why is it you do not feel that way?” Ienzo asks. "Perhaps my heart is not quite as developed as yours," Even says. "Perhaps it is that I have not processed it all, yet." Yes, that’s it. No wonder he feels so scrambled. "I do not wish to speak of it at the moment," Ienzo says thickly. He pulls away from Even’s touch. "I must… I must go." By the time he can find the courage to say it, the boy’s long gone. “...Wait… Let me help you…” Perhaps it’s because of Ienzo’s panic attack, but Even finds himself remembering that moment with utter clarity. Begging for mercy, for his life. Being struck, twice, pinned down like one of his own experiments. Then a fire within, so bright and hot and not at all instant. Again, he cannot keep down his dinner. This will not do. Even tries to rest, because he can feel his body crying out for it--but despite what he told the boy, he can’t respect his own weakness. He dresses, flinching as his fingers brush the scars (he still has not seen himself fully in a mirror, and he surely doesn’t plan on it any time soon), and begins walking. He has any amount of things to do, but he cannot bring himself to go to the labs. So he walks, noting the autumn chill. He’s forgotten how frigid Radiant Garden can be in the fall and winter; normally he would not mind, but he no longer has Vexen’s immunity to the cold. “Even? Is that you?” He pauses; but it’s only Aeleus. “On a round?” The man shrugs. He’s wearing no uniform, carrying an old flashlight. “I… was feeling restless. Were you as well?” “...Quite.” “Would you mind if I… joined you?” Even immediately tries to reject the invitation, but finds himself saying instead, “Not at all.” So they walk, for a long time in pure silence. It doesn’t feel awkward, but it’s not comfortable, either. “You’re… alright?” Aeleus asks slowly. Even blinks. “I…” He begins. “I know,” Aeleus says. Their footsteps seem almost deafening in the darkness. The night is so calm, Even notes; with darkness withering, it’s cool as silk. “Tell me something, Aeleus.” He chuckles. “That depends.” “You… do you also feel as though you are in between?” He mulls it over. The flashlight casts strange shadows over his features. “Yes and no,” he says at last. This makes Even laugh as well. “I feel as if… I’m meant to be here,” Aeleus says. “In this place, at this time. I will do what is needed, what is asked of me, humbly. And be pleased my fate is not worse.” “...That so,” Even says softly. “I wish to… find my own ways of atoning,” Aeleus says. “Mostly… I would like to be here for Master Ansem, for Ienzo.” “...Have you spoken to him? Ansem.” “Only for a few moments,” he says. “I cannot find the right words to apologize.” The night seems suffocatingly silent. “You were there, that night?” “I… yes.” He looks at his hand, clenches it into a fist. “It was as though something came over me… enabling all the most evil pieces of myself. To give that final shove… was easier than I want to admit. But it’s his eyes I remember most.” Even cannot catch his breath. “It wasn’t betrayal, not like you think. He… he looked at me, and I could tell he knew, knew what we'd done. He said…” Aeleus exhales heavily. Even touches his shoulder, feels the tension there. “You don’t have to tell me.” ““I thought you were stronger than this.”” “That’s what he said?” “...Yes.” Even gives Aeleus space, silence. He admits slowly, “I was going to run.” “With Ienzo?” “Yes.” He digests this. “I wonder what would have happened.”

---

There’s no point in thinking about what might have happened. Because it didn’t. Even isn’t naive enough to believe fate steered him on this path; he’s done this all to himself, to the boy, and to the others as well. The guilt cuts him like a knife. Where to begin? The question cycles in his mind over and over again. As he composes his reports, sitting there, alone, like nothing has changed and yet everything has changed. Where has the time gone? They’ve all suffered and aged, but have they grown at all, the way he told Ienzo they have? Himself, especially? How can he begin to erase his sins? Can he plan while his heart feels like it’s rotting?

#beyond this existence: atonement #even (kingdom hearts)#ienzo #ansem the wise #aeleus #demyx #dilan #beyond this existence #vexen

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chasma-cos · 5 years

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Train Heartnet’s gun: Hades

heyyy guess what it’s time for another prop build.

This is a prop I made of Train Heartnet’s gun “Hades” from the manga/anime Black Cat.

(details under the cut)

Materials I used were a piece of an eva foam floor mat, 3mm craft foam, a cardboard tube, Model Magic, high-temp hot glue, Barge contact cement, wire, embroidery floss and cording, a rubber o-ring, a bit of a boba (bubble tea) straw, pva glue, Rustoleum flexi-dip/peel-coat, acrylic paints, and a semi-gloss aerosol top coat.

Tools used were a rotary tool, a heat gun, a utility knife to cut the foam, wire cutters and pliers to cut and shape the wire, sandpaper, and a high temperature hot glue gun.

I started out with a pattern I made by splicing two manga images together, and then putting it into inkscape to make it scaleable.

I then printed it off, and cut out the main pieces for the body out of eva foam floor mats. I tried to take down some of the texture just by hand sanding, then applied contact cement (I use Barge because it seems to work well with eva foam) and glued the two sides together, making sure to apply enough pressure so that the texture wouldn’t cause gaps at the seam.

After sitting overnight to ensure it was properly glued, I used the sanding drum on my rotary tool to carve out the depressed area around the barrel, round off and even out the edges, and make the handle more conformed to fit in my hand. After using the coarse sanding drum, I used a finer bit to try smooth out the carved parts. I ran a heat gun over it multiple times to get rid of as much fuzziness as I could that resulted from the sanding.

The chamber right above is a cardboard tube from a tensor bandage that I cut to length, and then glued two layers of craft foam to: one layer to make it the correct size and another layer to create the depressions/raised parts of the chamber. I covered the end that would be showing with a circle of craft foam. (I ended up cutting off that extra bit on the right side of the tube, as it was not necessary in my build).

I then cut out the hole for the chamber, and test-fit the chamber to make sure it was the right size.

The gold detailing I drew out, while checking my reference, and then went over with hot glue. It was somewhat tedious to do and didn’t give a very exact pattern, but I figured it would turn out better than carving it or making it out of foam cut-outs. I also gouged out a bit of a hole where the barrel would be at the end of the gun. I then ran a heat gun over it to get rid of any glue strings.

(just some better pictures of the hot glue “detailing”)

I then drew on the “XIII” that appears on either side of the gun, and cut some grooves which I then opened up with a heat gun. In hindsight, I probably cut them too deep, which ended up causing some problems when painting.

For the barrel, I glued on the o-ring with some hot glue to fill in the gaps. The hot glue didn’t actually stick very well, so I then used contact cement to ensure it wouldn’t fall off. I also cut off a bit of boba straw, and glued it into the barrel to add more structural stability.

I then glued in the chamber with contact cement, and ended up having to add some foam shims to ensure a tight fit, as the hole I cut for the chamber wasn’t exact.

For the smaller parts I used both craft foam and Model Magic formed around wire. The sights were a couple layers of craft foam that were cut at an angle and then stacked together and glued on. The hammer, trigger and trigger guard were made by bending wire into the required shape, gluing it into the body of the gun, and then smoothing Model Magic over it. The round parts beside the chamber were also Model Magic that I shaped, glued down with contact cement, and then refined once they were on the body of the gun.

I found Model Magic quite difficult to work with, however since it is water based, I found that you can smooth it and make it easier to shape with water. Just be careful because using more water will also make it more likely to crack when it dries.

(the white dust on the barrel in this picture is from trying to fill some divots with a drywall filler, but it didn’t really adhere to the foam so it ended up just making a mess)

To make the tassels, I followed this video. I then took some cord and looped it through the top of the tassel, and glued it in place. I wrapped the folded part with some red wire to make sure it wouldn’t fall apart.

Once the Model Magic was dry, I added a wire loop for the tassels to tie to, and then began sealing. I thoroughly heat sealed the entire prop with a heat gun and then brushed on a couple coats of pva glue (white school glue), as I found that it helps to hide the texture from sanding, adds a bit more durability, and doesn’t have any weird reactions with the flexi-dip (I’ve had times where it wouldn’t stick to hot glue). Make sure each coat is fully dry before starting a new coat.

Once the glue coat was dry, I sanded it to get rid of any unwanted textures. I then sprayed multiple coats of flexi-dip and peel coat, starting with thin layers, and working up to thicker layers, but not so thick as to cause dripping. (no reason for using both, I just couldn’t find flexi-dip at the closest hardware store, and peel coat is made by the same company, and pretty much acted the same anyway).

After the peel coat was dry, I masked off the areas I needed to paint, and then painted the silver and gold parts by hand with acrylic paint., as well as did any touch-ups/fixing with black acrylic paint. It took several coats just to get the paint opaque enough to minimize the look of brush strokes. I then dry brushed some silver paint on the black parts, and some black/brown paint on the silver and gold parts to weather it. After the acrylics, I sprayed it thoroughly with a semi-gloss top coat.

I then looped on the tassel, and Hades was finished!

I don’t have any pictures, but the holster was made by first making a paper pattern around the gun, testing the paper pattern with craft foam, and then transferring the pattern to a piece of leather.

The leather was dampened, cut out, and then gently formed around the gun. I then glued the edges where I would be stitching the holster with Barge. Because I don’t have proper tools to punch holes in leather, especially leather that thick, I used a drill to drill holes for sewing.

Using a saddle stitch and waxed thread, I stitched the edge of the holster. Once the leather was dry, I burnished the edges, and oiled it with two coats of extra virgin olive oil (just the kind you can find in the grocery store), and then once that was dry, finished it with a type of shoe finish that had beeswax in it.

The straps are nylon webbing that I threaded through slits I cut in the back of the holster, and then sewed buckles to.

This was my first time working with leather so I am by no means an expert. I recommend checking out videos on youtube, as there are many about leather working on there.

(Also most conventions require you to have an orange tip for your prop guns. I used a straight pin that you would use for sewing, glued an orange bead to it, and then stuck it in the end of the barrel.)

#cosplay #train heartnet #train heartnet cosplay #train heartnet gun #train heartnet hades #black cat manga #black cat anime #prop making #morncrist #leatherwork #prop build #build guide #chasma cos

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