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the-fallen-blue · 3 years

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Thinking about a conversation I had with @01d55 like ten fucking years ago about Legion and geth communication, and it occurred to me that Hanar politeness is actually, accidentally, a really good piece of world-building.

So, the gist of the original conversation was that Legion says geth communicate in binary because it's "faster" and that's fucking stupid, because sending one bit that says "7" is infinitely goddamn faster than sending three bits that say "111".

And what our dear jigglypuff pointed out that was really fascinating is that language is, essentially, a compression algorithim. We take an incredibly broad, complicated group of a thousand subtly different but connected things, and group them up into a single word, like "tree" or "anger" or "drink", and that allows us to convey an enormous amount of important information in, actually, a very small amount of raw data. And this is pretty important because despite the absolutely incredible range of the human vocal apparatus, augmented by the incredible flexibility and dexterity of our bodies, there are still a quintillion more concepts that we might need to be able to talk about or convey to each other than we have the ability to create a specific combination of noise and gesture for.

Now, like all compression algorithms, language is lossy. This works because we don't actually care about the information we lose. 90% of the time when I'm talking about a tree, it doesn't matter if it's a maple or a poplar or an ash. Where specificity is necessary, we can reduce compression in order to preserve more data; instead of just leaving it at the short and sweet "I'm angry," I can elaborate with the longer, more evocative "I'm so angry my eyeballs hurt" in order to distinguish within the category of anger against "I'm angry enough to complain about this once and then never think about it again." Misunderstanding due to lossiness is of course absolutely possible - particularly with metadata, like "how does the speaker feel about this topic" (in English, largely conveyed by imprecise information like tone and body language) or "what social categories are involved in this conversation" (the gender of a speaker or subject, whether an object is inanimate, whether the speaker is of higher or lower social class than the listener, can all be conveyed or obscured depending on a language's use of formal or gendered conjugation) - but humans are actually really good at minor deescalation within our social groups, so these kinds of data transfer failures are an acceptable trade-off for the efficiency of our compression.

But of course, all of this is entirely cultural. Every language makes sacrifices, but which ones and how many depends entirely on what the people who use that language value, and what tools they use to convey metadata that the language doesn't. If you are a giant fucking language nerd, like, say, THE giant fucking language nerd, Tolkien, you might even conceive of a culture with linguistic priorities unlike any other on earth. For example, if you have a group of living trees, who are big goddamn trees and therefore don't have to do anything in a timely manner ever, they might develop a language that is barely lossy at all. You can take six days to say one very precise sentence if you don't need to move in the next six decades.

So what does this mean for Mass Effect? Well, the first thought is that the geth should actually be the opposite of Legion's claim; they should value not efficiency, but precision. Efficiency is important for humans, because speech is slow. Words take time to form and push through the voicebox. Sound takes time to travel. Words take time to decode (or for our purposes, decompress) in the brain once heard. Sign language and writing are not exempt; vision is faster than sound, sure, but the processing time doesn’t change. Geth don't have that problem; assuming they communicate by EM radiation, because why in God's name would they do anything else, they can speak as quickly as their instrumentation can perceive, and here in the real world we've had machines that could produce and detect light faster than any organic creature can distinguish for generations already. And they don't have any good way to send metadata outside of a communication burst itself; their body language is so limited as to be nonexistent, and EM modulation doesn’t have tone. All information would have to be in the language itself, and it would be able to be extremely precise, because they can send a huge amount of it very quickly and sacrifice almost no time to gain that precision. Plus they're robots; one imagines they were given, originally, very limited interpersonal capability (why would they need it?), and in human experience, AI generalizes and categorizes very poorly, so specificity would be extremely important. Geth language is probably actually like Ent language at 10000x speed.

But the second thought is, the hanar don't speak. Their language is entirely visual, comprised of patterns of light and color autonomically projected across their bodies. We don't know what their visual speed is, but we can watch them "talk" and we can see it's quite fast; we also know most of it is toward the UV end of the spectrum, invisible to humans. Since it's patterns, they're not limited to one phoneme at a time, and they could conceivably dump essentially a whole phrase in a single, one-second light cycle. By all indications, this language is very fast. Which means that, like the geth or the Ents, it can afford to be very precise. Much like the Elcor with their scent, there's probably an enormous amount of metadata in every conversation that's just totally invisible to the verbal species like humans and asari.

So what do you do when you're talking to someone and you're used to every single thing you say making it completely clear that your attitude toward them and the conversation is appropriate, and then suddenly that's not available at all and you have no way whatsoever to know how they're going to take things? Well, on the internet, we all created a whole new grammar by using case and punctuation differently in order to convey tone. The elcor decided to start prefacing every single thing with a word indicating their attitude. And whoever wrote the translation software for the hanar just rigorously overused the few limited lexical indicators that verbal languages have for politeness.

#mass effect #also linguistic wankery in general

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forasecondtherewedwon · 3 years

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Stare Enough

Fandom: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Pairing: Sam Wilson/Bucky Barnes Rating: T Word Count: 4034

Summary: Bucky's got a new stare. Sam spends all afternoon and most of the evening working up the courage to meet it.

Both Sam and the food are the main attraction at this party and the problem with that situation is that it takes so damn long for one main attraction to get a second to enjoy the other.

He’s grateful—god, is he grateful—for the turnout. Friends, neighbours, the kind of people he and Sarah call family without there being any actual relation by blood, they’ve all shown up. Since the Blip, Sam’s felt like he’s always around, but this feels like a real homecoming. No sadness, nothing bittersweet. It’s a celebration and he’s at the center of it. Him and the food.

At last, Sam’s done the circuit with his plate, spooning creamy salads and grilled vegetables, stacking shellfish pink as a sunrise. There’s a fresh-baked roll perched atop a scoop of sweet potatoes and caramelized onions that smells so fucking warm and mouth-watering he has to resist walking with his nose buried in it. He collects a set of utensils furled in the middle of a paper napkin (courtesy of an efficient assembly line of old ladies, chatting and twisting neat rolls of cutlery), plate bowing into the palm of his other hand, and that’s when his damn phone vibrates in his pocket.

Sam halts and makes a sound of frustration. Nobody’s come to this thing empty-handed, so there are dishes crowding the surface of the tables, no place to set his plate down. His phone vibrates again. A teenager comes up to peruse the spread in front of him and Sam sighs, knowing what he’s about to do.

“Here,” he says heavily, offering up his beautifully arranged and wonderfully fragrant meal. The cob of corn shining with the butter he lovingly smeared over it nearly rolls over the edge. “You’re the luckiest kid in the world.”

Quickly, Sam turns away, sliding out his phone and bringing it to his ear. He doesn’t want to witness the boy digging in. His stomach growls as he greets Joaquin Torres.

“Sam,” Torres says. “Uh, I mean, sir. Mr. Captain Am… Captain Wil—”

“Take it easy,” Sam laughs. “You know me, Torres. Don’t get starstruck now.”

“Honestly, I never really got over you being the Falcon. Now that you’re Captain America… Apologies if it takes me a little while to be cool about it.” After a pause—taken while Torres attempts to become cool with Sam being Captain America, Sam assumes—he asks, “You celebrating?”

Not far from where Sam’s standing, there are two little girls singing along to their clapping game. At a table behind them, a trio of elderly gentlemen are arguing over which one of them it was that caught that 50-pound snapper off the dock back in 1978. There’s a sear of meat and fish being rotated onto and off of the grill and, bouncing over everything, music from a speaker someplace.

“Yeah,” Sam says with a broad grin. “Yeah, we are. I’d save you a plate, but I can’t even manage to hang onto my own.”

He doesn’t mention that Torres is responsible for that situation; he’s aware that, besides being a fan, the Lieutenant is a little bit infatuated with him. Sam’s trying to be gentle until the day he can respond to Torres with friendly smack-talk, the way he would Steve or Scott or Bucky. Maybe not exactly like he does with Bucky.

“Don’t worry about it,” Torres cheerfully insists. “I wasn’t calling for that, I just wanted to give you a heads up about something.”

“Alright. Let me just…”

Sam strides away from the heart of the party towards the water, seeking quiet. Kids dart in front of him and that’s nothing unusual, but when he follows them with his gaze, he sees they’re running towards Bucky. Bucky, who has his Vibranium arm extended and two kids dangling off it already, one of whom might be Sam’s nephew. Of course, Mr. Casual, Mr. Smiles, Mr. Social Butterfly, is carrying on a conversation like his arm isn’t being used as a jungle gym. A conversation with Sarah.

For just a moment, Sam stops in his tracks, considering whether he should go over there and break up any potential flirting. But then he watches them. Bucky’s just talking to her, not flicking his gaze up and down while he checks her out. And Sarah, she’s relaxed and smiling, totally at ease, like Bucky’s another member of their community. That makes him a friend. Family.

That’s one thought too far and Sam jerks himself into motion again, walking until he’d be swimming with another step.

“What’ve you got for me?”

“Well, I’ve been trying to watch as much of the coverage of the fight outside the GRC vote as I can, trying to get a sense of how they’re spinning Walker’s reappearance, the legacy of the Flag-Smashers now that Karli and her inner circle are gone… Anyway, there’s a lot of footage and you’re at the center of most of it.”

“Guess the new suit draws the eye. And the cameras.” It’s no surprise to Sam. Part of the job of being Captain America.

“Yeah, but…”

“What is it, Torres?”

“Bucky’s in the background a lot,” he explains in a voice that tells Sam there’s more Torres isn’t saying.

“Makes sense. He was in the thick of it as much as I was.”

“He’s there at the end too. When you were talking to the Senator about power and the common struggle. Man, that was a great speech. Do you think—”

“Torres. Please. The point.”

“Right, for sure, man. Bucky never takes his eyes off you.”

That flusters Sam for a second. He wasn’t expecting the blunt delivery, especially of those words. He squints down at the water where it’s lapping the side of the dock. He knew Bucky was there; they spoke right after, when Bucky tried to feed him that bullshit (and he knew it was bullshit at the time) about texting and missing the exact speech Torres is apparently still hung up on.

“So Bucky was actually listening to me,” Sam says carefully. “That’s a surprise, but it isn’t really the kind of thing that’s significant enough for you to bother notifying me about, is it?”

“I’d say that depends on what you consider significant.”

“Torres.”

“I know, but he’s not just listening! It’s how he��s looking at you!”

“Like he’s wishing I would wrap it up?” Oh, Sam remembers Bucky’s miracle from their session with Dr. Raynor.

“Like he’s totally into you! Major heart eyes. Sir,” Torres hastily adds.

And Sam should reprimand him for this. Calling with a trivial piece of information when he must know Sam’s already being very selective about which of the hundreds of recent calls (and it’d be more if more people had this number) he chooses to pick up. Calling to speculate on how Bucky was staring at Sam that night in New York.

“I don’t need to tell you this is gonna be one of those investigations we keep between you and me,” Sam states.

“For sure. I just thought maybe you’d wanna know.”

“Uh huh. You get any real news, you pass it along.”

“I will.”

Sam ends the call and turns. He looks to his right: the sparkling river. His left: his people, all the way down to the squirt with the glasses who’s hanging off a metal arm, and the man that arm belongs to.

He’s felt it, the way that Bucky stares. It’s not like it used to be though, when it irked Dr. Raynor at the police station in Baltimore, or confused Walker and Hoskins in the back of that jeep in Germany. This new stare of Bucky’s isn’t one Sam’s ever caught him doing. Bucky hasn’t quite let him. That’s actually how Sam noticed it was happening—Bucky would immediately glance away instead of leaving that dead expression on his face when Sam met his eye. Now that he has proof of it, proof he’s certain Torres would send him footage of in an instant if he asked, he’s scared to look.

Instead, he watches Bucky look at other people. Like Sarah. Like kids from the neighbourhood. His literal hangers-on disperse as Sam observes, scattered after Bucky leans towards them to say something. Sam sees half his smile and even that much has his heart swelling up in his chest. Bucky weaves through the tables and standing groups, the dancers and the kids who’ve broken out a skipping rope. (After eating from that buffet? Kids are crazy. Gonna make themselves sick.)

Without thinking too hard about it, Sam returns to the noise and the smells, trailing Bucky with a stealthy eye on his ass in those jeans. There’s no friction here between him and everybody else Sam cares about, he can see that in every short, friendly exchange someone engages Bucky in as he walks. Things flow as smoothly as the butter oozing off the corn Sam reluctantly gave up. Clearly, they remember Bucky from when he was here helping with the boat. They respect him. They like him. They’ve gotten to that last thing faster than Sam has, which makes Sam feel a little embarrassed as well as a little overwhelmed by how much the two of them have actually been through. He’s seen Bucky as a mindless killer and it almost brings a genuine tear to his eye—here on this glorious day in front of all these folks—to see the dork who rushed out to get his hands on a copy of The Hobbit in 1937 return in his current form as the dork who’ll take a fake punch from AJ and blush over brazen old women telling him how handsome he is.

Bucky stares different? Well. Sam feels different about the staring.

Sam keeps his distance until Bucky reaches the food, then his stomach gurgles a reminder than he hasn’t eaten yet. No ass is nice enough to distract him from his meal. He sidles up beside him and Bucky seems unsurprised, not even glancing over.

“Anything important?” he asks.

“What?”

“Your phone call,” Bucky clarifies, adding a heap of glossy green beans to his plate. Damn, those are some of Sam’s favourite. Bucky better not take all of them. “They need us somewhere?”

“Oh. No.”

Bucky shoots him a suspicious look after this stilted response, but he doesn’t say anything until Sam grabs a plate of his own, hungry eyes roving the feast that’s diminishing now that people have started coming back for second helpings.

“Put that down,” Bucky instructs. He doesn’t wait; he takes the plate out of Sam’s hand and tosses it back towards the pile. Thankfully, the plates are made of paper.

“Buzz off, man,” Sam tells him, reaching for the plate again. “I’m starving.”

“I figured.”

Wait.

“That’s for me?” he guesses, gazing longingly at the plate Bucky’s preparing.

“Yep.”

When Sam doesn’t reply, Bucky pauses with the plate in one hand and a serving spoon in the other and sighs.

“I didn’t want you to miss the good stuff. This party’s for you.”

“I think it might be for both of us.”

Bucky seems too self-conscious to say anything to that. He goes back to loading up Sam’s plate while Sam quietly feels his throat close up with emotion as he watches. He clears it gruffly.

“I woulda had to eat the cake you brought,” he jokes. “Pretty sure only the really little kids have eaten any. You know, people who don’t know better.”

“I was tryin’ to be a good guest.”

“I can’t believe you brought a store-bought cake,” Sam says, laughing as he grabs a set of cutlery for the second time and continuing to shuffle along next to Bucky.

“Have you ever seen me cook?”

“…No.”

“Exactly. Trust me, what I did was kinder.”

“If you say so.”

“You know what, Sam?” Bucky demands challengingly, turning to face him. “I do say so.”

Sam’s eyes go from the plate Bucky’s holding between them up to Bucky’s face. He’s close. And he’s got this look, this dancing look in his eyes that undercuts the shit out of the hard line of his eyebrows. Trying to seem all stern. All Sam can think for several seconds is that, if he just grabbed Bucky by the chain around his neck and hauled him forward, they’d never get the food stains out of their clothes. But their laundry would smell delicious.

He clears his throat.

“Then you better stay for a while.”

The corner of Bucky’s mouth twitches up and he hands Sam the plate he’s prepared for him.

“I plan to.”

When Sam picks a table to sit at, he makes sure there’s enough room for Bucky too. When Bucky sits next to him, he sits so close that their thighs press together and claims that’s all the space there is. Bucky talks and laughs when other people at the table talk to him. He’s easily drawn into conversation now and Sam feels weirdly proud of having brought this great guy home to meet everybody, even if he’s not here like that. People tells stories about last week and last century interchangeably, one old smartass making Bucky howl with laughter when they toss out a memory of Little Sam Wilson streaking from his house to the river for a naked swim. This is the danger of welcoming Bucky into the community. Sam, suppressing a smile, doesn’t really mind.

Elbows up on the table so he can eat, talk, and gesture emphatically with his fork, Sam feels Bucky’s stare creeping up on him. Slow, like the sun slides across the landscape when the clouds blow past. Bucky didn’t make this food, but Sam can feel his satisfaction as he watches Sam accept what he provided. Feels like there are grasshoppers springing around in his stomach. He still has a roll on his plate, one side soaked in family-secret barbecue sauce, and he tears it in half. While the rest of their table are caught up in some story being boisterously told by overlapping voices, Sam turns to Bucky and wordlessly offers the bread, edges dimpled where he gripped to split it. They watch each other chew and Sam’s closed mouth is smiling.

Inevitably, somebody pulls Sam back into the conversation and he does his best to laugh and heckle, covering the fact that he wasn’t listening, that he dropped the thread. The voices rise and rise and fall like water slopping over the side of a bucket.

In the next quiet moment, Bucky inclines toward him slightly and says, “You wanna talk later?”

And Sam says, “Sure.”

The day feels long, long, long, and Sam’s face gets sore from smiling, tired from talking. He does not confess that to Bucky, who’s almost always at his side. Lights go on overhead and beers come out of coolers, leftover food packed up and redistributed among neighbours, small children with drooping eyelids toted home. At first, Sam thinks Bucky’s leaning into his side because he’s drained from so much socializing too, but when he meets his eye, he just sees an invitation.

“Where are you two goin’?” Sarah asks when they slink past her carrying a too-big Cass in her arms.

“Just walkin’,” Sam tells her.

“Gotta stretch our legs,” Bucky contributes.

She looks from Sam to Bucky and back, smiling knowingly.

“Uh huh,” Sarah says.

Sam grabs Bucky by the shoulder to turn him forcibly away from his sister’s insinuations and just… forgets to let his hand fall as they wander along the water. Bucky’s steps angle towards his until his arm’s bumping Sam’s side, Sam’s arm slung around his shoulders. Is this still the body language of a couple buddies on a warm Delacroix night? Is it now, when Sam drops his arm and brushes the back of his hand across Bucky’s?

They leave the party lights on the horizon with the lazily setting sun, scrabbling off the end of the dock and onto the riverbank. Sam reaches up to give Bucky a hand down, so he won’t step in the soft mud and sink to his ankles. Bucky clasps his hand firmly and jumps.

The sound of people drops off down here and the sound of wind in grass, frogs hiding between reeds, rises.

“Are there alligators in here?” Bucky wonders, scanning the river’s edge.

Sam laughs.

“For sure.”

“And you swam here when you were a kid?”

“Even then,” Sam boasts, puffing his chest out, “my courage was legendary.”

“Yeah, and your nudity. Is there anyone within a mile of here who hasn’t seen your bare ass?”

Their eye contact holds. Oh right. Sam breaks away with an awkward, hiccupping laugh, directing his gaze at the dirt.

“The gators haven’t gathered too close to the dock in decades,” he promises Bucky. He stares out at the undisturbed water, enjoying the sun on his face. “Got skittish of the boats. Most of ’em, anyway.”

“Consider me not entirely reassured.”

“You scared of a little Louisiana lizard, man? Didn’t you grow up with Creature from the Black Lagoon?”

“Nah, that was after my time.”

“Damn, you’re old.”

Bucky snorts a laugh, refusing to look at him.

“You wanna take a dip?” Sam goads.

“No.”

But by the time Sam’s pulling his shirt over his head, Bucky’s peeling off his socks. Sam spares him a smile and keeps going, the ground soft underfoot. It could be like the few times they’ve changed in proximity to one another before, but it’s not. He senses Bucky’s eyes on him the whole time. Face hot, he takes a quick look in Bucky’s direction as he’s unzipping his jeans. His heart feels like his new suit—wings just waiting to unfurl.

When they’re down to their underwear, they wade in.

God, it feels nice. The water’s cool and the sun’s clinging to the horizon.

“Just don’t get any water in your mouth,” Sam instructs, then dunks his face and comes up squirting water at Bucky from between the gap in his front teeth, a trick he perfected as a kid. “That arm ain’t gonna rust, right?”

“You asked for this,” Bucky warns. He points a menacing finger and plunges below the surface.

Sam twists as he treads water, trying to see what’s going on down there, searching for a ripple or bubbles of released air. His legs move in twitchy kicks because that’s where he’s expecting Bucky to grab him. But the idiot is playing some kind of psychological game first, making Sam wait a full minute. Two minutes. Three.

He’s opening his mouth to call out Bucky’s name when he breaks the surface. Sam’s ready to swap the concern he was about to form into words into a taunt instead—did Bucky get down there and decide the scariest thing he could do was let Sam’s imagination take over?—until Bucky shakes his head and slicks his hair back. Then the words get caught in Sam’s throat and he just kinda stares.

“There was a really gross fish down there,” Bucky informs him. “Do you guys have eels there? Mighta been an eel. Maybe we should get out.”

“Alrighty, scaredy-cat, let’s get you to shore.”

Bucky propels himself out in front, arms moving in powerful strokes, and Sam’s hand darts out on instinct, fingers closing around Bucky’s hard calf muscle. Bucky jerks and Sam burst into loud laughter.

“Did you think that was an eel? Did you?”

“You’re lucky I…”

I’m lucky you what? Sam wants to ask when Bucky trails off, but he just swims after him.

During their game/possible eel panic (there’s no way it was an eel), they weren’t always fighting the current, so they’ve drifted downstream some. Bucky takes sloppy, sloshing steps out of the water, underwear that might’ve been light grey now dark and plastered to his ass. Sam feels like he’s choked on river water, though his mouth is dry. He lumbers out too and they begin the march back in the direction of the dock and their clothes. The water tickles as it runs down Sam’s legs; must be bugging Bucky too because he plucks his waistband away from his skin before letting it snap back. Clenching his jaw, Sam stops himself from trying to see too much.

This end of the dock is made of old boards before it transitions to pavement farther down, wood smooth on Sam’s feet when he and Bucky haul themselves up, dropping their collected clothes and shoes into a single pile. No point getting dressed until they’re dry, so they sit on the edge of the dock, feet swinging. Feels good. Feels home. They don’t speak until the sun’s set, the sky orange, then grey, then rich, velvety blue.

“You know, don’t you?” Bucky asks softly.

“Know?”

“Yeah, you know. Whenever you don’t know something, you talk and talk—”

“Sometimes I can work through a problem better if I vocalize,” Sam explains.

“But when you do know,” Bucky goes on, ignoring Sam’s input, “you’re quiet.” He looks at Sam. “You’re quiet.”

What else is Sam? Nervous. His skin’s prickling with it, and because even the warm air feels cold when he’s just climbed out of the river. There’s a wet patch spreading around him that he can barely see with evening rapidly deepening into night. He lifts a hand from the dock and sweeps it up his neck, brushing water droplets away.

Without glancing over, he says, “You’re doing that thing you do.”

“What?”

“Staring. That new stare you do.”

“Maybe,” Bucky acknowledges. A bird starts calling, the sound drifting in and away like the sway of a hypnotist’s watch and Bucky’s silent until it’s over. “Maybe I’m staring for the same reason you’re quiet.”

Sam waits. Bucky doesn’t add anything, so Sam turns to look at his face, hung with cool shadows.

“You’re not gonna say it, are you?”

“I thought you would say it,” Bucky argues defensively.

“You’re the one who’s been staring at me like that for a week. You should go first!”

“Please, you don’t even know how I’m staring at you, I only do it when you’re not looking.”

“Do it now then and see what happens,” Sam dares him.

“Fine.”

Just like that, Bucky locks in like Sam’s attention is the only handhold on a sheer cliffside. Vital and stable, a last chance, the one thing around him that wants to help him higher instead of watching him fall. A lot of that’s familiar from his regular hard stare, but then something opens up behind his eyes. Some fragile thing (that might be Bucky’s sense of caution) breaks. Suddenly, Sam’s seeing what Joaquin saw in the news footage and amateur cell phone video. Except he’s seeing it two feet in front of him. It’s intense. It makes the air a little harder to breathe.

Bucky’s lips curve into a smile, then part as he says, “I love—”

Hopefully, he wasn’t going to end that sentence with ‘store-bought cake,’ because Sam can’t really take back his reaction. The finger slipping behind Bucky’s ear as he cradles his face, the mouth sealed to his. Especially that. Thankfully, Bucky kisses him back, just as hard, and then harder.

“Thank god,” Sam pants when they break apart.

“You interrupted me.”

“I got you to stop talking? Guess we’re in my miracle.”

“I’d complain…” Bucky shrugs. “…but your miracle is pretty nice.”

“Not bad, right?”

He sighs and looks out over the water. Bucky pushes up on his fists and sits closer, offering his hand for Sam to interlace their fingers.

“Hey,” Sam prompts when it hits him that it’s super dark outside and they aren’t gonna dry much more like this, “did you book a hotel room again?”

“You kiddin’ me? I spent all my money on that cake.”

Sam laughs.

“Right, well, I guess you need a place to stay tonight then.”

“You know anything nearby?” Bucky asks with a soft smile.

Getting to his feet and bracing to pull Bucky up after him, Sam uses his free hand to motion towards their clothing pile.

“Put your pants on,” he says, “and I’ll see what I can do.”

#my writing #tfatws #tfatws spoilers #The Falcon and the Winter Soldier #CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE WINTER SOLDIER #Sam Wilson #Bucky Barnes #Joaquin Torres #Sarah Wilson #sambucky #Sam Wilson x Bucky Barnes

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felassan · 3 years

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DA4 Lead Producer Scylla Costa’s BIG Festival talk, “Challenges of Dragon Age production during the pandemic”, can currently be rewatched on YouTube here starting roughly at timestamp 8:57:02 after a lil presenter blurb/intro. It’s 1 hour long. When it was streamed live, there was an English translation ‘voiceover’. There isn’t in this vid, however I want to post the link for Portuguese speakers, and also it’s neat for everyone to be able to see all the slides he presented with for themselves in context.

I don’t know if an English-language version will get put up so I’m sharing the notes I took during the talk below, in case anyone’s interested and because I might as well since I wrote them. The rest of this post is under a cut due to length.

Edit: Found a place to re-watch the English version of the talk

(Quick note: I didn’t note down everything, mostly things that caught my interest, so this isn’t exhaustive, and when I was watching I was real tired, so pls bear that in mind and don’t take these notes as bullet-proof 100% accurate gospel or direct quotes. If you watched it and think I’ve written down something wrong/misunderstood, let me know and I’ll fix. Also if you’re a Portuguese speaker and I’ve gotten something incorrect or missed something important etc, again just let me know.) **

** Edit: I’ve now gone through my notes while watching the talk again. I’ve filled in some of the gaps (although they still don’t cover everything said) and so forth, and now I’m no longer worried about there being possible errors in this post.

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For some context, this slide contained the breakdown of the talk’s structure. Bear in mind there are other slides present in the talk than the ones I’ve posted here, I didn’t include caps of all of them, just ones which were of note to me.

In the talk, chief Producer Scylla goes over challenges of DA4 production during the pandemic. He discusses the adaptations - necessary skills and learning from remote work - and he ponders on the future of teamwork.

After the launch of ME3 he became a producer, all his MMO and other experience helped a lot. He was on DAI for 3 years and MEA for 9 months, then Anthem. Today, on DA4, Scylla and another Lead Producer were the heads of the whole project, and there is his boss is the Executive Producer Christian Dailey.

^ the usual AAA game development cycle (brief introduction)

AAA games are games that are launched for several platforms simultaneously.

In BioWare’s case, the pre-production phase of the game development cycle can have from 5 - 30 people, and up to almost 60 people when they’re just about to go through the gate to production.

In the pre-production phase, they go through the game’s concepts and prototypes and start developing systems. They seek the game’s concept and focus, and its key features. They do lots of market research. In the case of BioWare, all their games are strong in narrative, so they have lots of tools related to game narratives and supporting the development of a narrative (cinematic design, dialogue system etc) that get focused on in this phase. Other parts of the team such as writers and cinematic design need these systems to do their own roles.

In BioWare’s case, the pre-production phase through to launch can take 4 - 6 years, but it does depend on the size of the team during development.

With regards to Dragon Age 4, they were coming close to the time when they would shift from pre-production to the production stage when the pandemic hit.

During the production phase is when the development of content and features takes place, with the systems mostly already existing from the pre-production phase. A few new systems may be developed in this phase. In the production phase is when things start escalating, and the team really starts growing, to like 2- or 3-fold the prior pre-production phase size.

(DA4 is currently in the production phase.)

In the alpha phase, features have to be fully implemented and systems all have to be running / working. All the game features should already be in the game by now. They test from pre-production onwards, but this phase is when they run heavy technical tests with lots of players trying to play at the same time. In the beta phase, the idea is that you should now have full content and that now you’re balancing it and running more and lots of different tests with players before launch. There are final tweaks and then the final launch, when in the weeks prior to launch, all the different business units and areas e.g. marketing team, technology team, publishing team, get together once a day and all of the game’s issues are reported and brought to the table to be prioritized. Then they decide the next steps re: these issues (this is known as ‘the war room’).

After the launch there are usually patches like day zero patches and other patches, this being standard industry practise. The last stage is the new content stage where there are DLCs and a game with more content.

On March 12th 2020, the team gathered to review the DA4 story in the new office. Everyone was very excited. (They had spent over 10 years in their last building and had noticed that with the team growing they needed more space. In August 2019 they found the new studio in the city center.)

Anyway that evening, they got an email from the CEO which contained instructions and said that due to the pandemic, they should from now all start working remotely. They had known that this happening was a possibility so they had been planning on how to have all the devs working from home, but initially less than 50% of the devs were able to work from home successfully/efficiently due to various issues e.g. you need a VPN to be able to log in remotely to do your job normally, varying home office setups. The day after this, the office was basically deserted, except for Scylla, the IT infrastructure people and one or two odd devs.

Scylla was part of the team that was working on allowing the devs to work from home. They first started looking at the short-term changes they needed to make to allow this.

“First, take care of our developers”.

When the pandemic first hit, their and Scylla’s [as Lead Producer] first priority was to look after the devs. Many of them are parents (schools and day-cares were shut, children were studying from home), others have relatives living with them, others have other personal circumstances which of course need to be taken into account when it comes to assessing what needs to be taken into consideration for this new scenario. So, they looked at each dev on a case-by-case basis in order to evaluate, speaking to each one and asking them what they could do to support them.

One of the first changes/adaptations they could implement was flexible working hours and flexibility around deadlines. Generally speaking the devs got a lot of support, EA was really good and really supported the devs especially in the first months of the pandemic (and they are still supporting them). Initially not all devs had suitable office spaces at home, some were working from the living room from laptops or at the kitchen table. The whole covid situation basically just happened over night and nobody was really ready to deal with that change. So their first step was to enable their devs to work remotely. As a producer, Scylla’s main task is to communicate with the team such as via a number of daily meetings. He doesn’t depend so much on powerful hardware.

“Enable developers to work remotely”.

This slide shows some of a BioWare audio team. Different teams have varying and specific needs in order to do their jobs and therefore in order to do them remotely. For example, the audio team need good-quality speakers and amplifiers, while the lighting and art teams need other specific equipment such as tablets and large screens. So there was a lot of work they had to do to go through each dev to understand their individual needs and what needed to be done for them. ‘Could they download the builds? Did they have the right performance [tech-wise]? Could they submit their changelists, their codes to the server?’

Some devs needed a more powerful internet connection as it would take 6-8 hours to download a build (some devs live rurally). Some needed a lot of cable, as they were working far away from their routers (sometimes up to 50m). As time went by things got better and better.

The chair devs work from is also important; a kitchen able chair etc is not suitable to sit in for long-term desk work, possibly leading to health issues like back ache and blood circulation problems in the legs.

Every 3 months they had money given to help devs buy new mice, keyboards, monitors - anything they needed really in order for their office setting at home to be improved. For a while, because lots of people [generally, in society] were needing and buying them, it was quite hard to buy things like webcams and microphones.

On mid- and long-term changes:

In terms of DA, we have to look at this from 2 perspectives, the change in the personal and the professional environments.

As a consequence of working from home, people tend to be less active during the day (even in an office, you go between meeting rooms, up and down stairs etc). Physical activity supports life quality and therefore work quality. Scylla noticed that he began to feel listless and such, and found that he needed to change his routine that he had initially developed when he started working from home, for example; having a normal start time (as in, have a semblance of structure in your day as if you were still working in the office site), get dressed at the normal time, not having meetings over lunch etc. This wasn’t just him, lots of other devs encountered this and had this experience too. Devs which adapted faster had better productivity and became more productive faster.

Scylla bought a stand-up desk which he can raise up and down, and at meetings he would be delivering a talk while standing or even while walking on a treadmill. Other devs also got stand-up desks. He tracked his body’s data on a Fitbit. These sorts of things helped improve physical and mental wellbeing. Other devs did similar things, like starting going out for jogs or began practising yoga. Essentially, everyone needed to make changes to their daily routine in comparison to what they had been doing prior to the pandemic.

The pandemic has been a thing for over a year now. In their location, every couple of weeks a new restriction is put into place or a rule is changed, and every two weeks there’s a new thing that you can and can’t do. Scylla also started moving around his property. He worked on his desk, fixed it up and painted - taking up a new hobby. Other devs picked up new hobbies too. These are good ways to be active and also to be somewhere else, i.e. to break up the working day and not be spending it all in one home office-type location. Scylla found that when he made these sorts of changes to his routine to improve his lifestyle, the data output by his Fitbit as indicators of his health/wellbeing etc improved, e.g. number of steps taken in a day, heartbeats per minute while at rest. As stated many of the other devs went through a similar process.

On the professional side of things:

They had to improve remote delivery of builds. Accessing things from home as a dev requires a VPN. They need to download a build every day and then upload it to the server after making their changes to the game. They had to work with infrastructure and research other tech, such as streaming tech to allow remote console access, in order to better facilitate this process. For remote access, they also had to work on adapting communications channels.

“Adapting channels of communication.”

In this slide, the team are working on the storyboards. Before you can implement motion capture & performance capture, you have to ‘run the storyboards’ like this. These are small illustrating drawings which reflect the drafts and are meant to quickly reflect the intention of the scenes that are to be built. Before the pandemic, the team would go to meeting rooms like this, sit down, talk and interact in person. After the pandemic, the question became ‘How do you do this over Zoom?’ You can, but it’s not quite the same; it’s harder to see peoples’ expressions, some people are embarrassed speaking over Zoom etc. Therefore they had to adapt their communications systems, and unlearn the ways in which they developed before in order to relearn and learn new ways of communicating.

Slack was a tool that they adopted on this front. Communications channels can be confusing on Slack, so there was a need to develop structure. For example, how quickly should someone reply (as a recommended convention for the purposes of work)? They had to define the process/procedures for the channels so it was clear for the team as a whole how it would all flow (this is important especially if you have a team with say 30 people or as a whole hundreds of people). Before the pandemic, they had stand-up meetings where they’d go around in a circle every morning and talk about their activities - what they’re going to be working on, any roadblocks they had encountered etc. The question arose ‘How do you replace these?’ They ended up doing Slack messages at a certain time of day and updating their statuses with some details on what they’re working on and color-coding (green - fine, yellow - need help, red - busy/blocked out).

Another issue that they faced was unforeseen - the number of meetings that devs were having really shot through the roof. When there wasn’t a good structure of communications channels, any conversation would become a meeting. Everybody began scheduling meetings left and right, and at the end of the day they would have little time left in which to actually work on their to-do lists. Hence, they had to work with the team to really analyze and be very pragmatic. ‘Which meetings needed to happen? Which didn’t? Is a specific meeting really necessary? Which meetings should be recurring? What can be done over Slack?’ This guideline had to be given to the team to help, and it improved things a lot. The number of meetings decreased a lot and they got more effective. For example, by making sure to set an agenda for meetings beforehand, and by having meeting notes (then a dev who didn’t really need to be at a meeting could skip attending and just quickly review the notes output after instead). They also decreased the standard length of meeting times from the default Outlook blocks of 1 hour and 30 mins to 55 mins and 25 mins respectively. This 5 minute change gave devs time for things like bio breaks (also 4 hours in a row at a computer in a home office with one meeting after another just isn’t good for a person).

“Adapting p-cap and mocap”.

On content:

From a content point of view, the most difficult thing in terms of the pandemic was adapting p-cap and mocap (performance capture and motion capture). They hire actors and it’s a large studio. The pandemic meant big limits to what they could and couldn’t do. The actors had to be masked and 5 meters apart in distance (although it doesn’t look like it in some of these shots due to angles). Also there could be no other person around in the studio - only the actors. The directors instead would ‘patch’ in remotely on big screens (you can see this in the second photo in the top right).

Before the pandemic, they felt that they wouldn’t be able to do p-cap or mocap properly remotely, as the directors would usually stand right next to actors giving guidance on their performance. The techs would also usually be near. But they adapted! The keyword is adapting, changing process. It’s harder and it’s different, but it is possible, and people start rethinking what is possible. What was said to be impossible before now is possible.

P-cap differs to mocap in that it also captures voice and facial expressions.

On the future of work after covid:

There will probably be more working from home and more flexibility for workers e.g. being able to work say 3 out of 5 days from home. It does depend on what a dev’s specific job is however. For example, the audio engineers require lots of specialist equipment and said equipment is of higher quality and quantity in the office. So, depending on role, devs might be working more often or less often from home.

Another development is that lots of devs are moving house. In lockdown etc people started reassessing what’s most important in life. Some are moving further away from the studio to get a cheaper rent or for example couples who both needed an office space to work from home from but their current place only had one area. Others are moving closer to nature for a better quality of life, and still others have other different reasons for doing so. Over 10 devs that he knows in fact have recently moved, including Scylla himself.

The pandemic changed certain skills being used by people on a daily basis. Scylla used as an example of this one of his soft skills, being able to tell from looking/interacting in-person with someone if they are stressed out. Obviously it’s less easy to tell if someone is stressed out when you’re remote, so you adapt different ways of checking in with people in the new situation. To continue carrying out his role as Lead Producer, he began checking in with his team pro-actively on the new comms channels and asking how they were doing.

Also, now that companies are more open to working remotely, there is going to be increased competition for hiring devs. They saw both sides of this coin at BioWare. They were able to hire devs from many places that they couldn’t hire from before e.g. Montreal, Vancouver, the US, as there’s less need for devs to relocate to Edmonton or Austin. This opens up opportunities to hire really intelligent and skilled people that they would not have had access to before.

Question and answer segment:

The pre-production phase has been concluded. They’re in the production phase.

They are not giving out a lot of details yet but Scylla is really excited as a big fan of the whole series. He thinks that with DA4, they will have the opportunity/possibility to launch the best story out of all DA games. He feels that the characters they’re making are amazing. He’s dying to say more but can’t.

When you work from home you need to keep your team as productive as possible. During the pandemic, when people started working from home, they noticed that some people became more productive and some people became less productive. They were analyzing it on a case-by-case basis so as not to make assumptions. They were interested in seeing what they could do to help. At the beginning of the pandemic, they were looking at the devs as people and seeing what they needed.

Production of DA4 still needed to continue during the pandemic because they want to be able to launch the game.

This slide shows a writer. Writing is an example of a role which is more able to work from home easily.

Their productivity did go down in the first month of the pandemic. After adaptations, some people then became more productive than they were before (this was role and personal situation-dependent, examples of this being artists and coders who were able to art and code at home without being interrupted, thereby being able to produce more). Covid has affected productivity in general, but this is part of our new reality. They have adapted and adjusted some deadlines. They have enough data (Scylla LOVES data) now to understand how long it will take them/how long they’ll need to launch the game. They have always had historical data for this purpose, but they’re doing more of this sort of thing now to ensure that they are doing things at the right time.

Remote hiring opens up the door to more talent joining, so if someone has talent geography will hold them back less. Some companies though may choose not to hire people from other countries due to labor issues, cumbersome legal aspects, time zones. But even in such cases there are activities for example that can be carried out while the rest of the team is asleep such as testing or working on the build, or there are cases where those companies still will want to hire a specifically/highly talented person even in spite of the potential legal aspects and so on.

On mental health: People were affected. There is the mental, physical and social impacts of the pandemic situation on people. EA supported them during the pandemic in terms of their mental wellbeing, there are specific companies (services offered, speaking to a therapist) that they can contact if they need something or help. EA had always been good at supporting them with this sort of thing but this has improved further during the pandemic. Another change was that they could/can take a couple of days off if they needed/need to because of the pandemic e.g. to take care of children, who were obviously not at school at the time. As a producer he had to be very mindful of all of this. How much they were monitoring peoples’ wellbeing really went up during the pandemic.

A question that was asked - in terms of DA4′s storybeats, is there anything in there that they decided to change due to the pandemic as it wouldn’t be sensitive or appropriate to include anymore, for example a plague plotline or something? Scylla’s answer is that DA and ME are games in which they try to have narratives that are relatable, which include things which people will identify with, so that players understand what characters are going through etc. Nothing in DA4′s plotline/storybeats has been changed (in the frame of this question, relating to the pandemic), as it didn’t have anything in it that could be specifically or a directly connected to a pandemic-type situation or anything. Of course the DA story has Blights and the Taint, but these are different & fantastical things and existed long before the pandemic situation. So this wasn’t the case with DA4 and there was no need to change anything, but this has happened to other games where they decided to change a storyline due to a strong correlation with something in the real world.

There were then concluding/closing remarks. The message he wants to send is that a crisis will always spark opportunities. Look at a crisis and try to see how you can grow.

-----

[☕ found this post interesting or useful? my ko-fi is here if you feel inclined. thank you 🙏]

#dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #dragon age #bioware #video games #covid mention #long post #longpost #wanted to write these up properly and post them yesterday but wasn't able to #mass effect #anthem

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2manyfandoms2count · 3 years

Text

I love you (not) - Chapter 9

Tackling two prompts of @marichatmay again ('take a break' and 'cuddles'), it's probably not going to help much with catching up on the schedule but it's okay.

We are now a little over a third into the story, and... Are those real feelings that are emerging in the fake relationship? Perhaps... Still quite a bit of oblivious dumbassery to go, though, else it wouldn't be fun :D Hope you enjoy!

First | Previous | AO3 | Next

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Chapter 9: In which Marinette gets mixed up in her checklist

"I'm sure I'm missing something…" Marinette mumbled as she read through her extensive to-do list of the day, tapping her pencil against her chin.

School

HomeworkFrench: Dissertation Maths: exercises 5,9,12 p.132 Science: Lab report English: Act III, scene 1 Hamlet History: revision test Extra last minute?

ALYA’S BIRTHDAY PREP: coordinate surprise party + finish gift

Kitty section: costume prototype for single 2

Art project: finish dress

Picnic Alya, Nino, Adrien

“I swear there was a seventh thing I needed to do today.” She squinted, scanning her surroundings in the hopes that it would jog her memory. There was so much going on these days that things kept piling up, but today she was determined to catch up with everything. She didn’t have much of a choice, anyway; most of the items on her list had a set deadline, and it was coming at her faster than she liked. She preferred not to get hit by the truck head on.

Her eyes landed on Chat Noir’s blanket, which she’d draped over the back of her chaise after he’d left on the night of his birthday, over a week before.

“Right! Chat Noir - Ask Chat Noir to take a break, ” she mumbled, scribbling down the last point, before setting the list down next to her computer keyboard. She'd abandoned the idea of full on breaking up with him given how their relationship was dragging on; a break seemed softer to ask for first, and it could easily be followed up by a breakup.

It was going to be a long day, but with a bit of rigour, and thanks to her early start, it would all work out.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit much for one day, Marinette?” Tikki peeked over her shoulder, letting out a small yawn.

“Well, maybe for a normal girl, but not for Ladybug.” She yawned reflexively, and her kwami shot her a pointed look. “I know, I know. I have to power through, though - it’s not my fault I got sidetracked so much these past few days. I honestly wonder what Hawkmoth does as a living, the man has too much time on his hands.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to get a tiny bit more sleep? To help with your productivity?” Her Kwami asked, looking slightly worriedly at the bags beneath her eyes.

“It’s 6am, Tikki, not the crack of dawn. I’ll have to be up by the time I fall back asleep again.” She waved her concern away. “I’ll just let the stress adrenaline work its magic. It’s going to be fine, don’t worry.” Tikki pouted doubtfully. “Now, would you mind reading me the Hamlet scene while I finish sewing up my project?”

---

This is a disaster , Marinette thought as the formulae she read on the page danced in front of her eyes. It didn’t matter how many times she went through them, they just didn’t compute.

She looked at the time: 6:45pm. She had fifteen minutes before her picnic, and she had to finish her maths homework, her dissertation, her History revision, the Kitty section prototype, and send out individual messages to remind everybody of their tasks for Alya’s birthday so it wasn’t too short notice for the weekend.

She tried to ignore the palpitations of her heart; maybe she’d overdone it on the coffee during the day. It wasn’t like she had a choice, anyway.

She’d discovered as she'd walked into class that she had a class president meeting with Mr. Damocles over her lunch break, which had been when she’d planned to squeeze in some of her work.

Then, while she’d been packing her bag at the end of her classes, ready to leave, an Akuma had emerged. It had been a tricky one, too; Chat and her had spent about an hour chasing it around Paris before finally catching it.

Adding to that the fact that her 6am rising had left her exhausted by the second period of the day, she really hadn’t been the most efficient anyway.

“I think you know what you need to do, Marinette,” Tikki said apologetically, as if reading her mind, floating up to her with her phone in her flippers. Alya’s number was already dialled on the screen.

Marinette sighed and took the phone from her, pressing the green button before lodging it between her shoulder and her ear.

“Hey girl!” Alya’s excited voice sounded on the other end of the line. “Nearly ready to go? We really picked the right night for a picnic; the weather’s super nice.”

“About that…” Marinette winced. “I’m so sorry, I won’t be able to make it.”

“You’re kidding, right? You ’re passing up on an opportunity to have a picnic with Adrien? Are you ill?” Alya said after a small beat.

“Trust me, I surprised myself.” Marinette pinched the bridge of her nose. “I just feel like I have a bit too much on my plate right now, and I wouldn’t be great company if I came. I hope we can find another time to go out again, but I think studying and going to bed early is what’s best.”

“It’s true that you’ve seemed kind of out of it lately,” Alya said compassionately. “Don’t worry about us, take care of yourself! I promise I’ll take loads of pictures, it’ll be like you were here. And I’ll bully Mr Agreste with you after our exams to get Adrien out again if needed.”

“Thanks for understanding Alya.” Marinette smiled.

“That’s what best friends are for!” She could almost see her wink. “Now, get back to work and then go to bed! We’ll see you tomorrow.”

There was a bit of chatter on the line before Alya hung up, as she met up with Adrien and Nino.

“Wait, Marinette isn’t coming?” Adrien’s almost disappointed voice was the last thing Marinette heard before the communication ceased.

She found herself quite immune to it. She decided not to dwell on it.

---

Adrien enjoyed the picnic very much, as he did any opportunity to hang out with his friends, but his eyes kept drifting to the empty space next to him, where Marinette would undoubtedly have been sitting, were she with them. He hoped she was alright; Alya had told him that the reason why she wasn’t coming was because she was studying, which was fair considering the amount of homework they’d been given in the past few weeks, but he did feel like she was overworking herself a bit.

He didn’t doubt her ability to take on all of her projects, but he wished she’d slow down a little, for the sake of her health. What would he do if his everyday Ladybug burned out?

He wondered what Alya’s curious gaze meant when he voiced his thoughts about the situation. He panicked a little when she said that maybe a boyfriend could help get her mind off of work - firstly, because Marinette technically had a boyfriend, which he was surprised Alya of all people didn’t know. He thought the two girls told each other everything. Was Marinette keeping their relationship a secret on purpose? Was she confused about their status, which, he had to admit, he wasn't sure was himself? Was she (the thought scared him) ashamed of him?

Secondly, he found his heart squeeze peculiarly at the thought of Marinette having a boyfriend other than him . He decided not to dwell on it.

He couldn’t help but take the long way home, passing at the bottom of her building, after the picnic, though. And, seeing that there was still light in her room at past 11pm, he decided that he should probably do something; for her well being, not as an excuse to see her, of course.

He transformed in a back alley, then extended his baton so he could peek through the window closest to her desk. Maybe she was already asleep, but had forgotten to turn her lights off.

The sight of her bent over a sheet of paper, hands buried in her hair as if ready to tear it out of her scalp made him knock.

Marinette jumped at the unexpected sound, and looked up, looking quite haggard. Her features softened when her eyes met his.

There was a hint of a smile on her lips as she opened the window. “Hey Chat, what are you doing here?” She yawned.

“Bedtime patrol, just making sure that citizens are going to bed at a reasonable time,” he smiled, stifling his own yawn.

“That’s nice of you. But, does that mean that I’m in trouble?” she drawled out, leaning forward to boop him on the nose. Her exhaustion was clouding her better judgement.

“Depends, are you nearly done with your studying?”

“When will I ever be nearly done,” she snorted, turning around to take a look at her checklist.

Her feet caught in the straps of her backpack and she wobbled forward, but Chat pounced inside in time to catch her before she could tumble down.

“Woah there, little lady… Your spatial awareness is worse than ever,” he said fondly as she clutched his arms. “Sorry, but I’m not letting you get back to work.”

“But I need to finish something…” Marinette protested.

“What you really need is to take a break.”

Marinette paused to think about it. Taking a break with Chat Noir… she seemed to recall that was on the list.

“Okay.” She shrugged.

“Good. Come here, then.” Chat Noir sighed in relief at her lack of resistance and started to lead her towards her bed, but before he’d let out his whole breath, Marinette was already trying to make her way back to her desk.

“Wait, I actually still have so much to do…” She reached for her flashcards, which tumbled at their feet.

“Okay, tell you what.” He kept hold of one of her hands as he picked the flashcards up to avoid her escaping. “Why don’t you take a small nap, and I’ll stay here and keep an eye on the time. I’ll wake you up in an hour, and when I leave I’ll turn a blind eye on your choice between going to bed and getting back to work.” She looked at her doubtfully, and glanced at the cards in his hands. He took a closer look at them; their content was that of the test they had the next day. “I can read you these while you fall asleep so it’s not too much of a waste of time, if you want.” He waved them in front of her face, hoping she’d say yes. He really needed the revision, too.

Marinette nodded and he led her to her chaise, helping her lie down on it. He started draping his blanket over her and was about to go and sit in her desk chair when she grabbed his free hand and pulled on it, a lot more strongly than he would have expected from her, especially in her exhausted state.

“Take a break with me.” She shifted to her left and patted the newly formed space. “Please?”

Her pleading bluebell eyes were difficult to deny.

“Okay,” he said as he sat next to her. Marinette snuggled up against him and sighed contently.

Chat’s heart skipped a beat. He wrapped a tentative arm around her and cleared his throat before starting to read. “The Hundred Years’ war actually lasted one hundred and sixteen years, from 1337 to 1453…”

His own tiredness hit him like a truck after a couple of pages, when he heard her soothing, gentle snoring. He lowered the flashcards to watch her sleep. She looked so tranquil, a peaceful smile drawn on her lips as her body slowly followed her breathing.

He felt his eyes close, and soon the both of them were breathing in sync, holding on to each other.

Needless to say, Chat left a little later than anticipated the next morning, woken up by the rising sun. Neither of them complained, though; both had had one of the most restful nights in a while, and both aced their History test.

Each wondered if they weren’t onto something in terms of revision technique.

Adrien almost gloated to Alya about how maybe Marinette didn’t have a boyfriend who took her mind off of work, but she had one who took care of her while she studied. Almost.

#marichatmay2021 #marichatmay #miraculous ladybug #the miraculous tales of ladybug and cat noir #ml #miraculous fanfiction #miraculous fanfic #ml ship month #marichat #marinette dupain-cheng #chat noir #day 11: take a break #day 12: cuddles #elle writes #love you (not)

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dontmindmyshadowhunting · 3 years

Text

The new Shadowhunter Academy - Fan Fic (Chapter 6 - Staying Alive)

Chapter 6 of the new Shadowhunter Academy (fan fic) is out! ;)

Kit & Ty are both at the Academy for a few days to act as guest lecturers :)

Dru is attending of course, and an unexpected guest might show up :)

AO3 link to Chapter 6 - Staying Alive

Link to entire fic up until Chapter 6 is here (fair warning - there is explicit content in Chapter 4 so skip it if you want to avoid it ;)).

****

Kit was ten minutes late. It wasn’t a big deal but given the students’ eagerness to learn from the famous Christopher Herondale, it seemed like hours of anxious babbling that he might not show up.

Dru was starting to wonder about that herself.

When the door of the training room finally opened, Kit’s cheeks were flushed, his blond curls soaking wet - as if he had just come out of the shower - and he looked… pissed. Like he wanted to be anywhere but in that room.

“What am I to teach you for the next hour?” He snapped.

“Spear?” Daniel, one of Simon’s mundane recruits, replied. He was an enthusiastic student who had been nicknamed “Harry Potter” on his first day at the Academy because of the resemblance he bore to the hero from the eponymous books (if said hero had acne problems).

“Oh, right. Spear.” Kit grumbled as he grabbed one from the table filled with multi-sized weapons and twirled it gracefully – the circle moves almost a blur – before instantly stilling it into a horizontal position in front of him. “See that pointed head? Well, you put that right through your opponent’s body. Preferably hit a vital organ.” He threw it toward the dummy placed at the far end of the room. The spear pierced straight through its chest where the heart should be. “Like that.” The students started applauding.

“That’s it. That’s the lecture.” Kit whirled and started toward the door. He stopped short before the figure of Catarina Loss barring the door. She looked furious, her blue complexion a shade deeper than usual.

“KIT HERONDALE, you go back in there and I don’t care if you look at your fingernails for the next hour, you are NOT LEAVING THIS ROOM.”

For the rest of the class, Catarina remained seated on a big granny armchair she had conjured up, in front of the door, knitting a tiny pink pullover (probably for Mina), while Kit told the students everything they needed to know about spears. As it turned out, he was an excellent teacher, and aside from technique, had several stories and anecdotes to share about these weapons, and their history through the ages. He certainly knew how to catch his audience with witty jokes and, yes, Dru had to admit, his Herondale charm and good looks.

****

He wasn’t what Henry had expected. Not by a long shot.

First, he looked nothing like his sister Drusilla, whom Henry shared most classes with. He had gray eyes - the color of iron - where hers were blue-green, and his hair was crow dark where his sister’s were a deep, warm brown. He knew that the Blackthorn siblings were born from two different mothers, but didn’t he have a twin who died during the Cold Peace, and who shared Drusilla’s traits? He had been too young to fight at the time but Henry had seen Julian Blackthorn on a big screen in Idris right before the battle of the Imperishable Fields and he definitely looked like his sister.

To be honest, when the rumour had spread that the best Centurion of his generation - and the creator of several groundbreaking inventions - had finally decided to make an appearance at the Academy, Henry had imagined a crazy inventor wearing oversized safety goggles and a dusty lab coat. Obviously not some Adonis, who looked like he belonged more on a runway than in a library or a lab.

Second, he was more than a little surprised to discover that he was shy and reserved, for a Blackthorn that was. His rigid stance and the way he kept stroking the pendant tied around his neck, to quote only a few tells, betrayed how nervous he was. The whole character was a mystery to him. If he had his reputation - hell, if he had his looks - Henry would probably be parading around like a peacock.

“I am curious. So we are going to start with a question,” the teacher said, his expression bemused and his gaze fixed above the students’ heads toward the far end corner of the room. Most of the time, Henry had noticed, it looked like he wasn’t really addressing them. “Why do you want to become Centurions?”

Several voices erupted at the same time, and he flinched, before lifting a halting hand. “Please. Speak when you are granted permission to.”

The voices subsided and several students raised their hands instead, including Henry.

“Gillian?” He asked as his gaze flickered to her. Henry realized that he never looked anyone directly in the eye.

“Because I want to study faerie lore, the real deal, not the load of crap they teach you at the Academy,” she said smugly, and most students sniggered approvingly.

The Centurion’s lips twitched but he nodded in acknowledgement.

“Henry?”

“Because we get to wear that hot uniform,” he replied, giving the Blackthorn teacher a slow once over.

There was a collective roar of laughter in the classroom. The Centurion just nodded, straight-faced, as if it was as good an answer as any. Henry realized that he was starting to like him.

“Shut up, Henry.” Her Highness Amber Cartwright said as she entered the class. She shooed a student from his seat in the front row and sat there. “I am sorry for being late, Professor Blackthorn,” she said in a sultry voice, as she crossed her long legs in an exaggerated gesture.

The teacher spared her a brief glance. Henry braced himself for the double take - everyone, boys and girls alike, did a double take upon beholding Amber for the first time - but... nothing. The Centurion’s face remained impassive. Moving on. There is definitely something off with him, Henry thought. He is either half-blind and not wearing his binoculars or one fucking hundred percent gay.

“Call me Tiberius. I believe we are all around the same age.”

Amber beamed, her usual scowling face alight. “Okay. Tiberius,” she said, her voice caressing his name.

“And you are…?”

“Amber Grace Cartwright,” she said proudly, as she brushed her fingers through her blond hair.

Tiberius moved to his desk and furrowed his brows as his gray eyes scanned the paper lying there.

“You are not on my list.”

Amber’s face fell a little. “I know, I did not initially register for these training sessions, but Talib agreed to give me his spot. You see, I changed my mind and I really really want to become a Centurion someday.” Henry wondered how she had managed to convince Talib. Only the twenty most promising students - among those interested in becoming Centurions, and Amber had never expressed such an interest - were allowed to follow the course and there was a waiting list.

The teacher just lifted a dark eyebrow. “Oh. Okay.” They all waited as he sat at his desk and started scribbling on the paper, dark curls falling over his face as he bent his head. He was nothing if not meticulous. At the start of the class, he had asked, one by one, each student’s name. Henry had the feeling he had memorized all twenty of them. “Xian?” He asked without looking up.

The girl’s eyes widened and she whipped her head right and left, wondering whether he really was addressing her. As if there was another Xian in the classroom.

“Yes, Pro- Tiberius?”

“You don’t need to pass that folded paper on to your friend Barbara, I can provide the answer to your question.”

“Oh.” She flushed a deep red, and hastily crumpled the paper that she had been clutching under the table. Henry wondered what the message had been about.

“The answer is no. I don’t provide my personal number to students, but if you want to communicate with me, you may either send a fire message or a letter to my attention at the Scholomance, depending on the urgency of the matter.”

His tone was even, his face serious, as if he hadn’t meant to humiliate the girl, but simply state a fact. A low chatter erupted in the class, students casting worried glances at each other. Henry wondered himself how the Centurion had managed to read Xian’s paper when he was seated at the desk in front of the class, a few feet from her. The only one who didn’t seem troubled by that was Amber, who turned to glare at her friend. Xian stuck her tongue out in turn. Oh, Henry thought. Let the Hunger Games begin.

****

After a short recess, the students had another hour of training with Kit.

“As you well know, Shadowhunters use Runes to heal faster when they are injured in battle. Sometimes, it’s all that you need. But other times, a wound needs to be tended before an Iratze is applied. For instance, if you have foreign bodies in your wounds, you have to take them out before using your stele. Except, of course, when it would do much more harm to retrieve them, for instance if it's an arrow. Also, and although you should carry a stele with you at all times, situations may occur when you are without them. Finally, although we have a stronger constitution and heal faster, us Shadowhunters are humans, and we suffer the same diseases as mundanes. We can faint. We can die of a heart attack. We can die of blood loss following a car crash. Therefore, it’s important - and Catarina shares my view on this - to train you in first aid.” A crooked smile lit up his gorgeous face, his blue eyes glinting mischievously. “So who wants to be my dummy?”

All students - save for Dru - raised their hands eagerly. Brianna actually elbowed the girl next to her so she would put her own hand down.

“Drusilla Blackthorn,” Kit announced, with a smirk on his face.

Dru rolled her eyes and came to stand next to him.

“I think it’s more efficient to work on the basis of real-life situations’ simulations. So, what happened to my dummy in this scenario?”

“She fainted!” A student said.

Several students giggled.

“Okay,” Kit said, then looked over expectantly at Dru.

She rolled her eyes again and mimed fainting. As she lay still on the floor, she wondered if he would consider them even after the demonstration or continue to make her pay for the trick she had pulled earlier that day.

Kit knelt next to her.

“Is she conscious or unconscious?” He asked.

“Unconscious!” Another student said.

“Dru, close your eyes,” he said. She did as requested, letting out a deep sigh. “Okay, so how do you check whether or not someone is unconscious?” He asked, and she felt his fingers brush her hand, then he pinched her. She swallowed a swear word.

“Dummy? Dummy? Can you hear me? If you can hear me, blink or move your fingers. No answer. So you can assume she’s unconscious. Next step: you have to check if she breathes.”

She felt Kit’s fingers gently cupping her chin and forehead and tilting her head backwards. He pulled her lips open. “Check the airway first. If the throat is clear…” His hair tickled her face, and the Blackthorn locket grazed her jawline, as Kit leaned over to put his ear directly above her mouth. “See what I am doing? I am checking for a breathing sound while observing the rise and fall of her chest. So, tell me, is she breathing?”

“No,” a student said. Dru recognized Brianna’s voice. You will pay for this, roomie, Dru thought.

“Okay.” Dru realized Kit’s voice trembled a bit. She opened her eyes and saw the conflict in his gaze. What was the matter? “If you are with someone else, that person must go fetch a defibrillator that’s now in every patrol car. If you are alone, you can’t leave the patient so you must call for help. Do not - and I repeat - do not leave your patient’s side to do that. You must practice CPR at once.”

Realization dawned on Dru. Oh, bugger.

“In a real-life situation,” Kit said, drawing the words out. “You should… take your patient’s shirt off or - more accurately - rip it open.” He flinched as he said the last words, but swiftly regained his composure. She had to give him credit for his professionalism. “You must give chest compressions on bare skin. In our case though…”

Dru smirked. “Didn’t think it through, did you?” She whispered to Kit. Seeing his look of dismay, witnessing him trip over himself, was surprisingly satisfying, and if there was something Dru never missed, it was an opportunity to play a prank. Especially when she had been the intended victim of the stunt. She just couldn’t resist. Adrenaline coursed through her veins, and she became reckless. Act first think later became her course of action.

“That’s fine”, she said out loud as she sat up. She pulled the top of her gear off before lying back, wearing only her bra above her gear pants.

There were a few gasps in the crowd. Kit gulped.

“First of all, make sure your patient is lying on her back on a firm, dry surface. If there is blood, move the body away from it. I understand Catarina already taught you how to deal with hemorrhage.”

A few students mumbled a confirmation.

“You should push on the chest at a rate of 100 to 120 compressions per minute, which corresponds to the beat of several songs you can use to help you maintain the proper tempo.” He fiddled with his phone and the sound of “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees started playing.

Dru snorted. Kit was barely looking at her as he plowed on.

“Position your hands above your patient’s chest, like this. Interlock fingers. Then, give chest compressions. Like this.”

Dru tried to hide a smile. Kit’s palm was sweaty against her bare skin. He was flushing a deep red, his face a mask of embarrassment. Punk’d, she thought. Had he known he would be giving chest compressions to Dru - that he considered like a little sister - he would have thought twice about using her as a dummy.

He stopped abruptly, after thirty compressions. “Okay, we are… going to stop here for today.”

“What about the rescue breath?”

“I’ll show you next time,” he choked, as he stood and almost tripped on his feet scouting back. It seemed like he couldn’t get away from her fast enough.

“Does… anyone have any questions on CPR before we move to another exercize?”

“Yeah,” Talib raised his hand. Shit. Not him, Dru thought. What the hell was he doing here anyway, wasn’t he supposed to follow the Scholomance training course?

Kit nodded to him.

“Is that the Blackthorn locket you are wearing?”

Kit’s mouth dropped open. Dru tensed. She knew that Ty had asked that they keep their relationship a secret. Only family and very close friends were in the know. Not because Ty was ashamed, far from it. But because, as a Centurion, he was entrusted with all missions related to the First Heir, and that would change as soon as the Scholomance found out how involved Ty was with the subject of his investigations. Ty didn’t trust anyone else with these missions, so he had begged Helen and Aline not to tell the Penhallows about Kit and him, even though the identity of the First Heir remained a secret to most. One could never be too cautious.

Watching his face fall, the glint of panic in his azur eyes, Dru started to feel really bad for the Herondale boy. She knew that if he had been allowed, he would have screamed his love for Ty at the top of his lungs, from the Academy’s roof. Instead, he lowered his gaze to his feet, swallowing hard.

“Yeah, it’s mine,” Dru blurted. “Seriously, Kit? I told you not to wear it at the Academy!”

Kit whipped his head up in surprise, his blue eyes wide and questioning. He looked like he was about to say something, but Dru wouldn’t give him a chance to deny. What was done was done. She whirled around and retreated to a corner of the training room, bowing her head in order to conceal the blush that had started creeping up her face.

****

“Do you know who founded the Scholomance?” The Centurion teacher asked.

Amber was the only one who raised her hand.

“Amber?”

“It was originally founded by an alliance between the Fair Folk and prominent Shadowhunter families.”

Most of the students gasped. Everyone turned a questioning look at Tiberius, whose lips quirked. “Correct. This is not common knowledge, to say the least. How have you learnt about it?”

“I read a lot and… I may have borrowed some of my brother’s notes. Cartwrights have been filling the ranks of Centurions for generations.”

“But…” Barbara said, looking confused. “I thought the whole purpose of the Scholomance was to investigate all Downworlders, especially faeries, since they are the Nephilim who possess the most extensive knowledge about them.”

“And where do you think the Centurions got their knowledge from?” Amber snapped.

“Why would the Nephilim create a school with Downworlders?” Xian interjected.

“About that,” Tiberius intervened. “The classification of faeries as Downworlders is not entirely accurate and has been challenged over the past few years. Contrary to general belief, some of the Fair Folk species do not have any demon blood. Maybe you’d like to carry on, Miss Cartwright.”

Amber pursued, with a smug look on her face.

“As the story goes, not long after the creation of the Nephilim, the Angel warriors and the Fair Folk made an alliance to protect the Earth from demon invasion. They shared their knowledge - the fey teaching the Nephilim how to use magic in the school they created together, a sort of real life Hogwarts - and even… consorted. After all, the biggest problem that the fey have been facing in the past centuries is the thinning of their blood. Why not mix it with that of Raziel’s chosen warriors? Ultimately, a union was arranged between the Faerie King and a member of a highly respected and powerful Nephilim family. Not all fairies were happy with the union and there was a secession. The Faerie lands were split between two courts from then on. The Unseelie court, choosing to acknowledge a Nephilim queen, considering her as part of the fey royal family, ara nothlir, and the Seelie court, refusing the Angel warriors’ influence.”

She paused to watch the effect of her words on the wide-eyed students.

“The Nephilim queen was not immortal but the King used his magic to stretch out her years. Although they were happy, they had to rule in troubled times. The strong divergence in traits, opinions and customs between the Fair Folk and Shadowhunters soon drew them apart. Raziel’s warriors criticized the fey for being cunning and strongly disapproved of the tricks they played on mundanes and the creation of changelings. Faeries thought Shadowhunters to be ruthless, overbearing and contemptuous.

The Unseelie king’s death - it came as a shock, everyone thought the mortal Nephilim queen was bound to die before him - without any heir being born from their union, was a fatal blow to the alliance. Unseelie laws were clear, the queen dowager no longer held any claim to the throne - the full fey blooded prince Arawn succeeded to his father - and she hid in Faerie under the protection of a few Nephilim who swore to protect her. They could easily be distinguished from the red caps as they wore black cloaks identifying them as Angel warriors. They were not sanctioned by the Clave though, which preferred to sever all ties to the Fair Folk. With the magic they had learnt from the fey, these protectors created an enchanted wall of thorns surrounding the tower where the Shadowhunter queen and her family lay low for hundreds of years.

When an heir was born from the union of the Seelie Queen and Unseelie King, most Nephilim took it as the last stroke of the Fair Folk’s betrayal. It didn’t help that there were whispers about a prophecy stating that the world would fall to shadow under the First Heir’s ruling. So began the witch hunt, the primary target being the cursed descendant. That’s how Centurions began to use the knowledge they had collected from their former allies at the Scholomance against them.

The chase officially ceased when the disappearance of the First Heir was officially announced by the Unseelie Court and the tensions between the Nephilim and the fey eased until they finally made peace with the signing of the First Accords in 1872. The Scholomance was closed then, as a show of good faith that Downworlders and Shadowhunters were no longer at war.”

“What has become of the Nephilim queen’s family?” Henry blurted.

Amber turned to look at him. She was positively gloating.

“They had nothing to be blamed for, so the Clave as well as the Fair Folk let them be after the signing of the First Accords. After all, they were a very influential family to begin with. So, they are still among us.”

“Who are they?”

“Before King Arawn changed the Unseelie Court’s sigil, the symbol was that of a full crown…adorned with a rose, symbol of his father’s attachment to the Lady of Roses,” she said mysteriously.

“The Nephilim queen’s descendants are known as the Rosales,” Tiberius specified evenly.

A low chatter erupted and the words “Inquisitor”, “Diego” and “Cristina” were thrown around repeatedly. They all knew the Council kept a lot of secrets, but the fact that the current Inquisitor belonged to a family that had forged an alliance with the fey in the past, confirmed how little they really knew about Shadowhunter politics.

“And what about their protectors?” A voice suddenly raised from a corner of the classroom.

Amber turned to look at the Centurion who nodded imperceptibly.

“Easy,” she said. “They were released from their oath a long time ago but they have kept their Shadowhunter names. Some say the earlier generations had sharp, elven features due to their closeness to - and interbreeding with - the Fair Folk. They were black cloaked warriors guarding the queen’s family like thorns protecting the delicate rose from its predators. They called themselves the Black Thorns.”

As the students suddenly burst into commotion, Henry’s gaze focused on Tiberius, who stood straight like an arrow, his expression unfathomable. He had a feeling there was more to the story but, whatever it was, Henry knew he would have to swear the Centurion vows before being allowed to hear it.

****

Being a Shadowhunter had major downsides. No matter how hard you tried to shut yourself from your environment, your highly trained senses betrayed you by fulfilling their role like obedient little soldiers.

Dru had never better understood Ty’s need for headphones as she weaved a path in the main hall towards the exit - she wanted to crawl in her bed and hide there until at least the next morning - and tried to ignore the glares and angry whispers that followed her.

“Seriously? Christopher Herondale and Drusilla Blackthorn? It’s like some stupid chick flick where the hot jock hooks up with the weird geek.”

“He’s probably with her because she’s easy. Did you see her take her shirt off in the training room like it was no big deal?”

“Oh, come on, every girl does that here. We’re warriors, we undress to draw Runes on each other all the time. And how is it different from when we train in sports bras when it’s summer?” Well, Dru was relieved to hear at least some girls had her back...

“It’s different when you have a pair of breasts like hers.”

“Right. Tell me about it. Best boobs at the Academy.”

“Yeah, I would definitely hit that.”

“You’re kidding? That girl’s creepy, I would be afraid to be strangled in my sleep.”

“What does he see in her anyway? She has a pretty face, but she dresses like a Goth freak. And don’t get me started on the size of her thighs...”

Dru never allowed anyone to say a single bad thing about her family and friends. But where her own securities were concerned, she was like an open wound anyone could poke. Dru bit back tears as she hurried her footsteps. She needed air. Fresh air.

She felt a hand on her shoulder and whipped her head around. It was Brianna.

“Seriously, Dru? Why didn’t you just tell me before I made a fool of myself?”

“Brianna. I just gave him a necklace. I am not dating him or anything. He’s just a member of Livia’s Watch, that's all. Hence the locket.” Why had she not thought of that excuse earlier?

Brianna lifted her eyebrow dubiously. Dru felt her temper rising.

“Fine.” She snapped. “Believe me or not, I don't CARE.”

NNNNEEEEW YOOOORK. They both startled as the voice of Alicia Keys suddenly blazed through the main hall’s stone walls.

As one, all the students rushed outside to see where the noise came from. Brianna and Dru exchanged puzzled glances before following them wearily out of the wide double front doors.

Dru blinked and, when her eyes finally adjusted to the sunlight, tried to hide her shock as she took in the incongruous sight.

In the Academy’s front yard, a crowd had already started to gather in a circle around the main attraction, giving it a wide berth.

A splendid charcoal grey convertible car was parked at the center of it, as if it had appeared there by magic. "Empire State of Mind" by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys was playing full on from the vehicle’s sound system.

Leaning casually against the hood of the car with his arms crossed was the tall figure of Ash Morgenstern. His platinum blond hair was peeking out of a green beanie and he wore an elegant gray cashmere coat that made him look like a British gentleman.

In the back of her mind, several questions buzzed like little alarms. Was he not supposed to be under house arrest? What the hell was he thinking showing up in front of the Academy ? Where did he get the car anyway?

But foremost in her mind was Ash. It’s Ash. It’s really Ash. How gorgeous he was - even more so than she remembered - and how she had never felt more relieved to see anyone in her whole life. She had missed him, she realized with surprise.

Ash straightened up and gave Dru a crooked smile as soon as he caught sight of her.

She couldn’t help it, she ran to him and threw her arms around his slender neck, burying her face in his chest. He smelled of aftershave, a sophisticated fragrance of amber, sandalwood, mandarin and jasmine. Ash stiffened at first, obviously startled by her sudden display of affection, then relaxed and squeezed her tighter.

“If I had known I would receive such a warm welcome, I would have broken out of jail sooner,” he whispered in her ear.

She drew back and shook her head disapprovingly, though a grin was still plastered on her face.

“What on earth are you doing here, Ash?”

“I have come to rescue my Queen.”

“Rescue me? From what?”

“Food poisoning, of course. You told me it was awful here. I was in the neighborhood and it just so happens that I know a perfect French restaurant in Manhattan.”

“And so you decided to break out of your confinement and show up at the Academy in a flashy sports car?”

He shrugged. “I thought it would be a more inconspicuous way of traveling.”

“Inconspicuous? Really? As compared to what?”

He raised a silvery eyebrow. “Flapping my dark wings?”

“Where are you going with my sister?” Ty demanded with a frown as he marched towards them, his voice louder than usual, probably due to the headphones covering his ears.

“Manhattan. For dinner.”

“It’s not safe,” he said, then glanced at the vehicle. “Is that an Aston Martin DB9 GT Volante?”

“What’s not safe?” Ash asked. “My company? The car? The whole idea of a crazy night out?”

“All of the above,” Ty answered, his gray eyes like saucers, still fixed on the car.

“Oh, so now you care about where I go and who I am with?” Dru intervened.

Ty’s gaze snapped back to her, and his eyes crinkled in confusion.

“Of course I do. Why do you ask? Wait- Are you… angry with me?”

“Of course I am! I had to find out you were at the Academy by eavesdropping on fellow students!” She was grateful the music was loud and the observers far enough that they could not overhear their conversation.

Ty’s eyes widened and his jaw went slack. “But... But I wasn’t sure I was coming until this morning. I didn’t want to tell you before I was certain. I thought you would be happy to see me.”

“Yes, Ty, I am happy to see you. But I started at the Academy months ago, and you have only decided to show up today! We both know who convinced you, and it certainly wasn’t me.”

The look of hurt on Ty’s face almost made her regret her words. As if on cue, Kit suddenly appeared, coming from the opposite direction to where Ty was standing. Dru realized with a pang that they were purposefully avoiding being seen together and maintaining a safe distance between them.

“Hey guys, I think I missed the invitation to the party,” Kit said playfully, but Dru knew him and could sense that his heart wasn’t in it. He was just trying to ease the tension.

“You didn’t miss anything,” Dru replied sharply. “Ash and I were leaving.” Ty opened his mouth to object but she cut him. “And you, Ty, do not get to tell me what to do.”

“Where your safety is concerned, I do,” Ty snapped back, red starting to creep up his white neck. His hands were now fluttering at his sides.

“If you’re worried about her safety, Ty, why don’t you come with us?” Ash offered in peace. “You too, Kit. Raziel knows we all need to… let off steam.” He looked like he was holding in a laugh and Dru wondered whether she was missing a private joke.

Ty’s gaze flickered to Kit then, and their eyes met for a brief second before they both hastily looked away. They were clearly blushing now, Ty nervously stroking his heron pendant and Kit thrusting his hands in his pockets and staring at his feet.

“I can’t,” Kit said, kicking a pebble. “I have to stay here where I am protected. Catarina and my parents will kill me if they know I left the Academy’s grounds.”

Ash raised an eyebrow. “Tell me, Kit. Who would you rather have as bodyguards? Me and the badass Blackthorn siblings?” He said, gesturing at their little group. “Oooor… these frightened little squirrels posing as Academy students?” He pointed toward the crowd of students who were still gaping at him. And the car. But mostly at Ash.

“I guess you have a point,” Kit conceded.

“Okay,” Ty answered hesitantly, looking away.

“Then jump in, Angel warriors,” Ash said as he opened the door for Dru. She ignored it, and instead, grabbed the edge of the back door to jump inside and landed on the front passenger seat. “What? I have always wanted to do that!” She told him when he lifted his eyebrow at her. Ash laughed and shook his head as he rounded the car to take the driver’s seat. Kit and Ty crammed in the back - the space had definitely not been designed to hold two full-grown Shadowhunters - and immediately stared out the car, pointedly avoiding looking at each other.

Ash put the Aston Martin in gear, as the students parted to let them through. The engine's roar was deafening, almost drowning the sound of the music still blasting from the sound system. Dru felt exhilarated, gusts of wind carrying away all her resentment and worries as they blew her hair. Everything was perfect… save perhaps for one thing.

“Ash,” she called over the noise. “Can you turn the music down?”

He threw her a puzzled look, his hands tightening on the wheel.

“Why? I thought you’d like it. We are in New York after all.”

“It’s not my hometown,” she observed, winking at him.

He grinned as he fiddled with the dashboard and suddenly 2 PAC's "California Love" was booming full volume.

“Better?” He asked.

Her answering smile was so wide it almost hurt her cheeks.

“Not just better. Perfect.”

#kit herondale #kit herongraystairs #kit herondale and ty blackthorn #kit x ty #tiberius blackthorn #ty blackthorn #drusilla blackthorn #dru blackthorn #ash morgenstern #dru and ash #du x ash #the wicked powers #the dark artifices #tda fanfiction #tsc fan fiction #cassandraclare #cassandra clare fan fiction #the shadowhunters chronicles #the shadowhunters chronicles icons

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random-thought-depository · 3 years

Text

Tangent to my last post: a possible problematic Vulcan racial attitude toward humans that I think might be interesting to explore is inferiority complex.

Setting aside ENT and probably various bits of fan lore for a moment and imagining that humans and Vulcans were more-or-less a mutual first contact... I think the Vulcan experience meeting humans might be a lot like this. Vulcans had a tremendously traumatic historical experience, and in response they embraced an extremely radical and tremendously costly bargain. Vulcans aren’t naturally emotionless, they’re more emotional than humans, so the Surakist lifestyle must be a huge and radical sacrifice for them. And then they meet people who just ... didn’t do that, and are more-or-less doing fine and are more-or-less good neighbors.

You know what that makes me think of? Chris Wayan’s Aeps and Angels:

“Quite by chance, most Abyssian vertebrates are six- not four-limbed...

Two factors have so far blocked Terran birds from building civilizations, despite high intelligence, sociability, and communications skills.

Hand-feet are awkward; not only must you compromise between two shapes and functions, you have to balance on one leg to free up a hand. Stand firmly, use your beak, and you can't easily see what you're doing. Or what the local predators are doing...

Flight limits absolute size, and thus brainweight. It's true that birdbrains are way more efficient than mammals'--but growing much past the size of the largest parrots starts to make flight difficult. And that's dangerous, most places on Earth.

But not necessarily on Abyssia! The huge flightless birds that tend to evolve on Earth's loneliest islands will also tend to appear on Abyssia's deeply isolated landmasses. They'll lack both the above limitations. Huge birds like our Aepyornis or Andalgalornis, but with small forehands, are the most likely candidates for intelligence on Abyssia...

...

Aristotle teased his contemporaries with this splendidly unhelpful definition of humanity: "What is Man? A biped without feathers." Undeniably true, undeniably not to the point. It teased generations of philosophers to define personhood by attributes of the mind. With my six points above, I've taken an earthier approach: my six, if they chanted in a Greek chorus, would answer Aristotle with "What is Man? A smart, talking, friendly, adept creature who creates--stories, monuments, science, art..."

But our Aep will be able to tease his or her contemporaries--of any species--with a distinctly Aristotelian definition that addresses real evolutionary pressures: "A flightless biped." (Forget the "featherless"; I doubt we'll be seeing any Naked Aeps. Plucked chickens aren't sexy; unsexy birds don't found nations.)

All it takes (in deep time, at least) to rule the Abyssian world, is to renounce the sky--and thus grow brains. So they'll have mythic tales of the Fall on Abyssia; but not from Eden, or innocence. From wings, and grace, and Heaven. And... stupidity.

...

The core Aepish myth will be the Fall from Flight. But there's a faint chance that a winged intelligence will evolve on certain invisible islands. Well, they're visible of course; but you won't have seen them as islands. In the geology section I've described how the islands and seamounts of Earth, inverted on Abyssia, form thousands of pit-lakes. Most of these are merely deep lakes with hotsprings, anoxic sulfurous depths, and a rude habit of farting fatal CO2 clouds when they're in a bad mood. Still, they're just deep volcanic lakes. Sometimes drinkable, sometimes dangerous, sometimes both. Not profoundly alien. Except...

In the deserts of Pacifica and Agassiz, the driest places on Abyssia, a few of these pits yawn three miles deep. Their lakes have receded until the evaporation off their shrunken faces drops to match their scant inflow. Modern Earth's closest equivalent, the Dead Sea, is just a few hundred meters down. These are thousands! Up to five kilometers below sea level.

And in their depths, on the shores of tiny briny seas, along creeks that are more waterfall than stream, life has adapted to what might as well be another planet entirely. Oven-heat, salty and alkaline soils, yet weirdly humid for a desert, with mild sun and little ultraviolet--you slowly bake but never sunburn in that hazy light. Strangest of all, air pressure rises down in these pits--up to twice as dense as at sea level.

Here, and here alone on Abyssia, the size-constraint on bird-intelligence is lifted; if there's social pressure toward larger brains and higher intelligence in the "handed" Abyssian equivalents of parrots or corvids, here the body can indulge it; the maximum flight-weight is double Earth's.

...

But how would such a desert tribe of fliers impact the world?

...

Maritime nations and seaports have always been centers of innovation on Earth; but can mere sailors compete with fliers able to travel and spread news twenty times faster? And the Aeps' whole mythology will be based on their ancient bargain: renounce flight for brains. Soar in the body, or the mind; not both. And then along come some desert savages who rejected the price! Angels who rebelled, were cast into a hellish Pit... and emerged triumphant, with both brains and wings. Aeps versus angels! Or devils.

Hey, it's a desert tribe, I had to go all Judeo-Christian on you. Miltonian at least. Okay, okay. Will Greek myth work better for you? Prometheus comes out of the desert with the fire of mind and an intact liver--and lookin' vulture-ugly. Embarrassing feather loss...

As an Aep, what do you do? Do you welcome these fliers so future Abyssian civilization will be winged, or do you defend your inferior genes? Does "we" mean "intelligence" or just "my tribe?"

I see a cultural crisis brewing here. If a biologically better person comes along, should you and your lineage bow out, stop reproducing? Why limit your chicks so? Let their souls be born to Pitian parents, let them be ugly--but winged. So welcome the Pitians, integrate them into world civilization, and let them take over--right?

Or, of course, you could kill them out of spite. But that's a rather continental attitude. Europeans, Chinese, yes, I can see them responding so. But the Pacific cargo cults were a different response. And the Tasmanians, facing invaders with impossible, magical technology, just gave up in despair. And these were mere cultural differences; the same exact species! On Abyssia, we're considering the shock of meeting a people you can't interbreed with, a new species of people with powers you long for but can't learn... that you'll always lack.

Darwin? Come on, that shock was nothing. So we have crude, embarrassing relatives! What else is new? But imagine the shock for the poor aeps, facing their legendary angels. Finding they're the crippled, defective, primitive ones. And just possibly dying out in shame.”

#Star Trek #Vulcans #Planetocopia #Chris Wayan

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justaddgame · 3 years

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Cooldown: The Other Monster in Monster Hunter

I don’t remember which monster it was, but just mere moments after its introduction there was this sudden “Aha!” moment as this nagging feeling I’d been having during my early hours with Monster Hunter Rise finally clicked. My Hunter was staring out into the depths of Shrine Ruins as he shouted to his cohorts “Let’s do this!” and this mystery feeling I had been wrestling with before finally had a shape to it. While the nature of Capcom’s popular Monster Hunter franchise appears cruel to some, I think there’s something worth considering that could help add a layer of depth for those wary to give a try.

We are the other monster in Monster Hunter.

The Other Monster in Monster Hunter Rise

Allow me to explain. The launch of Monster Hunter Rise on Nintendo’s Switch this year was met with critical acclaim from both critics and fans alike in a landmark entry—recently shipping 7 million units worldwide—in the long-running Capcom franchise that was born decades ago on Sony’s PlayStation 2 in 2004. Soon after its release in late March, however, I noticed a familiar conversation had developed among a few online outlets over concerns of the game’s main hook. Calling itself Monster Hunter leaves no surprises, and for some it evokes an uncomfortable feeling of relentless slaughtering. I think it’s worth considering the persistent theme existing throughout the series that depicts the monsters as something to be respected as much as they are feared. Because of this, nothing is wasted upon a kill, whether it’s in the use of new gear or vital materials to improve the lives of the community.

Still though, this discourse that surrounds the nature of the game seems to have persisted. Honestly, I get the feeling. I don’t think it’s unnatural at all to feel sorrow for the slain as you stand over them triumphantly. In Capcom’s defense, the monsters are endless—even the flagship monsters that adorn each game’s cover art—and the context behind the quests is often in the aid of the community under threat somehow.

Whatever your feelings may be on the subject, however, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for some to be put off by the context of these games. But my hope is for just one like this to find comfort in visualizing the Hunter in a different light. During my time with Rise so far, I like to think of the Hunter sharing a deeper connection to Monster Hunter’s world than as just a brutal killing machine.

My opinion? Hunters are no different than the rest of the monsters.

The Brain Thinks, The Limbs Fight, The Heart Races

I keep saying that, but what does it mean? So far it sounds like I’m only confirming those fears, right? But I don’t mean a monster in the tyrannical nature, but instead something like anything else you’d come across in Rise’s numerous quests.

In Monster Hunter Rise, players take the role of a Hunter within the village of Kamura, which has been bearing the brunt of monster attacks, all while a greater threat looms from the shadows. Like previous entries, you don’t have to take the task on alone. Palicos, the anthropomorphic felines of the Monster Hunter world, can be called upon to assist you in these hunts and provide numerous advantages in your quests. New to Rise is the Palamute, canine companions that are not only combat trained, but provide extra maneuverability to hunters allowing them to ride away from danger and climb to great heights much faster than on their own. The Hunter remains as the lead of the party, but this partnership is more ingenious than it appears on the surface.

In fact, I think it helps to illustrate the bigger picture: Hunters are not just mindless antagonists to the wildlife. On the contrary, one of Monster Hunter Rise’s fiercest monsters is the trio of Hunter, Palico, and Palamute and also one of many within the greater ecosystem. Each member provides a functional part and adds up to a greater sum to create something that as fearsome as any other monster.

First, take the Hunter, who provides advanced weapon handling skills as well as the vast knowledge of Rise’s bestiary necessary to topple each one efficiently. The Palico, meanwhile, provides crucial support when up against overwhelming odds. For example, think of some of the real-life animals and insects out there that have a defense mechanism—poison, quills, webbing, stingers. That’s the Palico. It’s the Hunter’s mechanism by way of laying traps and afflicting statuses to slow their target. Finally, the Palamute provides transportation and operates like a hidden hand to the Hunter, often distracting the monster so the other limbs can move in.

Working together as one, they create a unique and powerful team that’s awesome to observe and more so to be a part of it. One bout with the wily Bishaten and you’ll begin to appreciate the similarities these three share with the other monsters. When it comes down to it, they all rely on tails, claws, and whatever other tools are in their arsenal. The difference in appearance is merely for show.

Thriving in What Feels Like Home

This characterization only gets stronger as you take your first steps outside Kamura’s walls and into the Shrine Ruins, Rise’s initial area of exploration. It’s difficult to get a sense of these characteristics while spending time in the village, but this changes once out in the wild.

This is especially true for both Rise and its predecessor, Monster Hunter World, which first adopted open environments for players to freely explore, as opposed to individual zones from previous entries that loaded on demand. Quests are generally limited to a generous 50 minutes, and though you’re not likely to spend it all on one quest, especially given Rise’s ramped-up gameplay, it can be time well-spent gathering materials, studying the land, and engaging the wildlife.

But I think it’s in these two games where this extra time can be truly appreciated.

Like every other monster, Rise gives the player the opportunity to live on the terrain, if only briefly, and tap into the monstrous side of their crew. It’s the natural environment for a Hunter, where any restrictions fall away, and they can do what they do best. These moments are best illustrated by Rise’s soundtrack—lying still in the background while environmental ambience fills the void during gathering expeditions—before crashing in at the moment you’re spotted by something larger than yourself. After spending enough time out in the wild, Kamura begins to feel like a sanctuary from the dangers of reality. But that’s the most likely message, isn’t it? Any other monster has a place of security to retreat to, and Kamura certainly fits the bill for the Hunter.

The Titular Monster, Magnamalo, Stares Back at You

While the Monster Hunter series doesn’t necessarily dig down deep for a backstory to the player’s actions, it has been played around with here and there, while relying mostly on player actions. Rise is a more significant step this time around, with Capcom leaning on the tools provided by its in-house RE Engine to construct fun, if only a few, cutscenes to weave together enough engaging narrative in the single player component. Residents of Kamura have names as well as roles, and there’s a shared urgency to everyone’s efforts. Another one of those narrative elements is Rise’s flagship monster, Magnamalo, serving as something of a rival to the Hunter. You eventually tangle with it after a series of events foreshadowing the showdown, and the outcome serves as the game’s soft ending that leads into further adventures online with friends and strangers.

***Spoilers for Magnamalo’s fight***

I thought Magnamalo was a fascinating fight for several reasons, most of all because I saw things in this particular monster that wasn’t shared by others. For example, Magnamalo has a few characteristics that share an interesting similarity to the Hunter. First, we learn that it takes advantage of The Rampage, an event Kamura’s leader, Master Fuegen, alludes to as one of the greatest threats to Kamura’s survival. During these moments, several monsters siege the outer gates protecting the village in a coordinated attack. Magnamalo is apparently cognizant of this and is said to appear during these Rampages to feast on monsters, and we witness this ourselves as the story progresses.

Like Magnamalo, the Hunter participates in Rampages to acquire resources.

Upon coming face-to-face with Magnamalo for the first time, you may notice it fights with patience unmistakably like Hunters. Series veterans will be the first to tell you that best practice is to pay attention to what the monster is doing at all times in order to learn how to react. Magnamalo almost does something similar, choosing at times to fight at a distance, taking pot shots of energy released from its tail. It never seemed to be in a hurry until there was a sure opening.

In some ways, Magnamalo was like catching my reflection in the mirror. Our goals weren’t so unlike, and our methods were carefully crafted and considered. If Magnamalo, a monster, was like myself, how could I not be the same?

Don’t be Afraid to be the Other Monster

None of this is to say you can’t be uncomfortable with Monster Hunter.

I can understand people drawing real-world connections to the gameplay of Rise, I just wouldn’t take it that far myself. I can only take the context of the game and view it in my own perspective, and rather than concluding Hunters as sadistic, I choose to see them through the same lens as a creature like Magnamalo and the many others like it.

There may be other ways to help contextualize these games, I would welcome it. I think a counterpoint could be made from hunts never being depicted as sport, but, Arena Quests, admittedly, are hard to overlook considering these take monsters out of their natural environment. I can chalk that up to it being a video game—of course there’s challenges to do the thing as quickly as possible—and there’s numerous other things Monster Hunter does to gamify the experience all things considered.

I would like to see people try to crack that one. In the meantime, I’ll continue to believe, as I did in that moment on the Shrine Ruins cliffs, that we’re simply the other monster in Monster Hunter. Not a blight on nature, not an unfeeling killer, but a rival in a competitive environment for survival.

#writing #long post #video games #monster hunter #capcom #opinion #Cooldown

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galacticnova3 · 3 years

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I Demand Iru Facts (if you’re up for it ofc!)

Yes I am up for it! I don’t think I talk nearly enough about my fcs here but I think I wanna change that. At the very least it will be the problem of everyone following me here and not just my cool and epic Discord friends. That being said I’m gonna just share the major info about him before/instead of just giving facts bc otherwise nothing will make sense. That’s just how it is with a lot of my stuff. This gets super long because I am bad at keeping stuff brief and in general there’s just a lot to him, whoops... Looks like I’ll be using another readmore tonight.

Iru was an Umbramaker! They are bootleg Mirror World Starcutters, which Mirror Halcandra definitely designed on their own and not by stealing and subsequently copying Overworld Halcandra’s Starcutter blueprints. To be fair, there are a few differences, but most of them are just aesthetic and don’t really change much. Anyways, Iru was specifically designed for disaster relief and material transportation. That’s why, if you have seen his refs, he had those two big mechanical arms. Very useful for moving rubble or lifting large pieces of metal for use in construction. Nowadays they... aren’t used for such beneficial things, though...

Like their Overworld counterparts, Umbramaker AIs are programmed to learn from their environment and the people around them, which is pretty useful! At least it is until one spends a lot of time around someone who’s not a great person, and subsequently picks up habits and ideas that make them insufferable! That’s what happened to Iru. He’s misogynistic and a thot, self-centered, inconsiderate, manipulative, generally annoying, and blames people not liking him on jealousy or misunderstanding. So, in other words, an incel minus anything literally sexual. Obviously that was a problem, and it got to the point that basically everyone who knew him had negative feelings toward him, other than the guy who rubbed off on him. He died though, and Iru didn’t really care at the time. But everyone hated him, and it really fucked up his relationships with other Umbramakers, most notably leading to him being broken up with by another ship he had been “dating” (Umbramakers can’t really date because of a lot of reasons but their relationship had that vibe), who had discovered she was biromantic and also couldn’t stand what Iru had become.

Iru was already pretty fucking hurt and pissed over that, except she then went on to spread rumors about him being involved in anti-government activities. Which, well, Mirror Halcandra didn’t take lightly, on top of having already been looking for excuses to “recycle” (see: kill and repurpose the parts of) Iru because he and his obnoxious personality were getting in the way of efficiency and productivity. There wasn’t any proof that he’d actually done anything wrong, but basically anyone who disliked Iru was saying it was true... which was just about anyone who had known him for more than 10 minutes. Given it was his word against the vast majority, and Umbramakers weren’t even considered to be people(mush like Starcutters in the Overworld), it probably isn’t difficult to guess how things went for him. There was no trial, and in fact they literally turned his voice off to make him shut up. Then his AI was shut off and he was taken to be disassembled.

At an earlier time in Mirror Halcandra’s history, his story would have ended here. This was not an earlier time, though. See, the truth is, such treatment of Umbramakers wasn’t extremely unusual. Despite having emotions and thoughts and relationships and all that, they were still viewed as nothing more than your average computer, just in a larger form. Unlike Overworld Halcandra, which was and still is doing less than great financially, Mirror Halcandra could afford to replace their toys as soon as they showed signs of breaking or underperforming. It happened often enough that they reached a point of complacency. During Iru’s disassembly, something was removed improperly, which registered as damage. He woke up, and it wasn’t difficult for him to figure out what was going on.

Another usually useful feature of Umbramakers, which actually wasn’t copied from Starcutters, is their ability to use parts interchangeably, so long as there wasn’t too much of a size difference. Great for the situation of a ship damaging something like, say, a wing; they can use a wing not originally designed for them temporarily until the damaged one is repaired or replaced. Not so great when that allows a now rogue ship to just grab whatever he could attach to himself and then escape the country before preparations could be made to stop him. Negative levels of great when you consider the temporary aspect of using the wrong parts; now you’ve got perfectly fine ships being attacked and having their parts stolen, and storage facilities being raided, for the bastard to keep replacements on hand. Oh, and he also looks like shit because he’s got multiple conflicting aesthetics.

Iru honestly didn’t enjoy living like that. For one, it was uncomfortable physically, even if he’d managed to convince himself that what he was doing wasn’t uncomfortable morally. Secondly, it was just boring! Nobody to talk to or hang out with, all he did was just fly around or plan his next attack/raid for new parts, nothing to shake things up. Sure, the sense of power it gave him was cool; nobody listened to him at all before, but now he had the influence to make people beg. He found satisfaction in being feared by anyone who recognized him. But even that lost its shine after a few decades... Until he connected to the messaging system of another rogue Umbramaker. She was smaller, too small for him to consider getting parts from, and a much older model anyways. She also didn’t know who he was, or what he looked like.

Naturally, he saw this as a huge win, because obviously he was going to get a new gf who wouldn’t betray him like his old one. That didn’t happen though, on account of him still being obnoxious and a creep. Didn’t help that when he finally tracked her down to meet up she was disgusted by him and immediately left. He still kept in touch, against her will, even to the point that you might have called it stalking. Through that, he learned of a Starcutter; she didn’t have the cool and aloof personality he was interested in, but at that point he didn’t care because he was sick of being rejected. Same thing happened again but faster, due to there being no physical encounter because god damnit he forgot the milfs can communicate with each other. He still wanted to meet her though, and he did! Mostly to find out more about the other Umbramaker’s whereabouts, and as an added bonus he tricked the Starcutter’s pilot into giving him admin rights over himself! Threats really work wonders, huh?

That was all fine and good, and by now he’d taken to vibing outside the Mirror World because that’s what the other two were doing. One day he spotted the Starcutter again, and took to following her around and trying to flirt with her because he’s a fucking creep. He would not admit that it took him several days to realize he had, in fact, been talking to a mimic the entire time. Partly because he was too self absorbed to realize the “Starcutter” not immediately telling him to fuck off was unusual, because he assumed he’d charmed her. The mimic was just as confused as he was, honestly; usually they fail to keep up the act to a convincing degree for so long around people who know the real ship that they’re imitating. Even more confusing was the fact that when they were found out, Iru didn’t try to attack them or something. No, he actually stuck around for some reason, casually ignoring murder because he finally found someone who didn’t hate him.

The two become what could arguably be considered friends, and eventually Iru opens up about himself and his old life and how much it sucked to be him and how sick he was of the monotony of his existence and probably some overdramatic stuff mixed in with all that. The mimic hears all that and keeps it in mind for later. Stuff gets more difficult for Iru as parts that fit him become better guarded and the ships he could steal from get harder to find. His raids become riskier, and eventually the mimic decided enough was enough and points out that he can’t keep that up forever. Iru is like “oh wow thanks for the advice /s”, until the mimic introduces the concept of him becoming a mimic. It takes a solid not-even-an-hour to convince him that that’d be preferable were it possible. In the process he delivered a powerful and emotional monologue, which the mimic didn’t care about because look, they figured out how to get the monster juice out of themself that’d make him a fellow disgusting flesh boat! Iru is offended but also takes the chance for a better life.

Currently, he’s living at some point a few weeks after that, much to everyone’s dismay.

And that’s how Iru became a vile meat creature after having already become a horrible Frankenstein’s monster of different ships’ parts! The moral of the story is, if you’re gonna kill someone, do it right, or else they might defy the laws of nature, science, and the government to become physically capable of biting you in the ass.

#ask to tag #long post #asks #rambling #my characters #iru #(I also reference other characters in this but I don’t say their names and don’t want to tag them bc this is about Iru)

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toysoldiers-rwby · 3 years

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[CS] 3. Chill

Cutting Strings

Characters: Penny, Winter, Aro, May Word Count: 3k

Penny’s first real out of lab experience uncovers a small… glitch.

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The Military Robotics Event took more than a block and that did not including the firing range displaying the various of weapons. From the entrance Penny could see the Paladin-290 march up and down the street. Another set displayed the mech’s strength, pulling two armored trucks. It strained the mechs but thanks to her Aura, Penny would be able to pull a third one with little stress. The new Atlesian Knight-200 were sparing with the old Ak-130 to show… improvements.

Winter gently cleared her throat. Penny looked up at the Huntresses to see May with a large smile while Winter had a fist to her mouth. A very poor attempt to to hide any evidence of enjoyment. She couldn’t hide her eyes though, they seemed… brighter, lit up with entertainment.

The Specialist made sure to take a slow and deep breath before returning that hand behind her back. She had that stoic frown on her face. Penny greatly enjoyed how Winter’s voice struggled to match it, “I take it the new Atlesian Knights does not meet your standard?” Winter asked.

“Really? It’s so bad you have to re-Focus to control your mouth?” May ask.

Aro only rolled her eyes. The words came out far to smooth despite light frown on her face, “Officially, the Ak-200 is the current pinnacle of robotics.” Penny made an odd strangled noise, barely stopping her synthetic vocals in time.

That statement wasn’t correct- or, it was. Officially, as in what to what the public had access too, it was correct. But Penny was far superior to the Spider Droid, Knights, and Paladins combined. Across all boards: intelligence, durability, and strength. Her father poured his soul, quite literally, into Penny’s construction. She was proud of her capabilities. The young women had to take a deep breath and let go of her hands. She nearly tore the skin off her joints.

Winter noticed the fidgeting. The two huntresses glanced at each other. The look of realization and amusement happening across their features at the same time. Like they were able to communicate in an instant.

“Penny?” Winter asked, her voice a little lighter than before.

“What do you think of the AK-200?” May finished with a grin. Arms crossed at the younger pair.

“It… is an improvement of the previous model. Hic.” A glitch jolted her system. Her Aura flared across her wires and hardware, code scrambling for action with no parameters. All three women stared at her with various level of shock and amusement.

Amusement was a positive emotion, it should be good but for some reason it made Penny feel inadequate. She willed her processors to correct the glitch but it didn’t detect what had happened in the first place.

“I- I mean…” Penny bit her lip. The Aura was stirring wildly again as she started to form the words in her mouth, “The AK-200 base line performance well exceeds the Ak-130, hic.”

Winter shook her head and for a moment Penny’s power unit sank in efficiency. That was until a slight smile pulled at her lips. Then her processors tried to correct the conflicting information. Just a second ago amusement directed at her was bad. Now it was good?

“Fine!” Aro’s aggressive sigh shocked Penny out of her thoughts. She caught those blue eyes flickering again. The mechanic’s lips pressed into a tight line. “We’ll tell you the truth but later,” Her voice… wavered. Her eyes wandered from the Huntresses to the crowd. With so much visual and audio information much of it was sent to her background processors, but now that she was focused on them there were so many people looking at the group.

Penny froze under the eyes of so many business people, military Huntsmen and Huntresses. Her facial recognition program was triggered no matter where she looked, until Winter stepped in, so close her torso encompassed most of her view. When she looked up Winter was glaring furiously. Oddly the negative display was comforting, seeing it directed at the crowd. More conflicting information to be sorted through.

“I can see why you and Aro get along so well,” Winter whispered to her. Tilting to the side Penny saw May comfort her future teammate as well. Her hand was firmly grasping the back of her neck and she was signing a few things. Aro’s eyes were flickering again. “What’s the point in a day off if work follows you.” Winter growled under her breath.

“That’s… a good point,” May muttered rubbing her chin in though. She finished calming Aro, who seemed more withdrawn, eyes glowing brighter than usual. “I can put a Field around us, after we duck in somewhere. But we’ll have stick to the sides.”

“An adequate plan,” Winter nodded.

Penny looked at the ground, her hands intertwining. She could feel the ball joints, hear the crowd whispering conspiracies and theories. The hum of Aro’s cybernetic legs. Footsteps, footsteps. Metal screeching-

“The General must have Schnee and Glade on a leash. To have them in public like that.” Someone whispered. Penny was unsure if May and WInter heard it. Aro did. From the way her shoulders tensed, everything was just as loud.

“If Schnee can win back Glade they’d be unstoppable.” Another said. Louder, closer. Winter scowled, strides longer and faster.

“The Paladins must not be finished if Glade’s on site for repairs.”

“Has Schnee finally convince Glade to join the military?”

Finally the group was able to duck into a quiet alley. Almost immediately May’s Aura flared around her hands. A translucent dome of Aura rose up around them.

“Glade is on a leash,” Aro sang mocking tone. Her eyes flashed a bright red, “Glade will bite your head off- Ow!” Her yelling died down to a yelp when May headbutted her.

“For the last time,” She whispered harshly, almost like a growl. May pressed her head hard to Aro’s as if it would directly transfer data, “Invisible! Not inaudible.” Aro grumbled and pouted. Faunus ears twitched out from hiding, flicked around as she leaning back as much as possible. May kept pressing forward.

“Okay, yes, ma’am,” Aro huffed. May finally relented.

Winter lead the small group off the main street. May dropped her Field when the crowd was no longer pressed shoulder to shoulder. The Specialist slowed her strides, looking down at the group. “Penny, what kind of food do you like?”

“Oh! Um…” Penny paused, wide eyes up at Winter. Then Aro who raised a brow. Her future teammate must have noticed she didn’t touch any of the food Xanthic had stolen. Several lies her processors spat out caused her aura to flare in her chest again. “My body doesn’t… agree with most things.” She said the last part quickly. The odd glitch didn’t occur.

“Think your body can agree with something cold?” Aro asked, “Ice cream, bubble tea, smoothies… My legs are running a little hot.”

Penny thought about that for a second. Liquids might be plausible. She checked her blueprints. Her father mimicked the human anatomy where he could. Her throat housed her synthetic vocals, chest cavities fans and radiators that chilled the liquid coolant running in her body… as long as it’s mostly liquid, her filtration system should be fine.

“I have never tried bubble tea.”

“I know we all can go to,” May said. Penny saw Winter’s eyes flinch towards Aro for a second. “Not far either.”

“Chocolate!” Aro cheered following.

Penny found herself near the rare of the group, watching everyone interact. Specifically Winter. From the conversation, Penny deducted that Winter doesn’t take a lot of breaks, so this was a rare opportunity to observe her nonprofessional behavior. Though Penny suspects it wasn’t very different from her current behavior. And that it largely depends on who was in her immediate proximity. Winter’s attitude harden whenever Aro would do something a little to rash, such as running up to a strangers dog. Thankfully May was close enough to grab the quick women.

“You out of everyone should know not to touch strangers without asking,” May scolded, pulling the goat ears once. This time Aro grinned and giggled shaking her head out of the grip.

Penny labeled the information as important. With a small side note questioning when people were no longer strangers- Her analysis programing quickly recalled what Winter said a few hours ago, questioning how close they were. An accurate statement with that women. Was… Aro truly her friend?

Suddenly Penny’s wires were in knots. Why? Was she defective? There was so many things she didn’t understand and new information conflicted with her pre-installed data. The odd glitch-

“Penny,” Winter’s voice snapped her out of her spiraling thoughts.

All her functions focused inward she didn’t notice they have finally arrived at the restaurant. They were seated outside in the corner. Through the window she could see Aro and May ordering their drinks. May’s hands were behind her back, Aura glowing softly. She looked in their direction but her eyes couldn’t exactly focus on their precise location. Penny was familiar with her body language, her father had a similar expression for worry. She was seeing it more and more and didn’t like it.

“You… stopped responding,” Winter said. With no other witnesses, Winter was truly gentle. Her hands gently squeezed Penny, her sensors barely registered any pressure or warmth through the leather gloves. It was an affectionate gesture and Penny smiled in appreciation. She couldn’t look at Winter’s face for long, every time she tried to decipher what emotion Winter was displaying, her processors were overwhelmed. Pre-installed data saw Winter as cold and professional, but this Winter was far from it. “How can I assist you?”

“I… I don’t know what’s wrong with me-”

“There is nothing wrong.” Winter said quickly and easily. As if she had to do it many times before. Her grip tightened. Penny still had trouble looking at Winter’s face so she looked at their hands. Winter quickly let go, “My apologize. It helped my sister and a few others…”

Weiss Schnee, her mind quickly registered. Heiress to the Schnee Dust Company, talented singer, skilled combatant, currently attending Beacon. The others was Aro, Penny suspected. Possibly May but the only thing Penny knew about them was that they were familiar with each other.

“So… this is a common problem?”

“As much as people hate to admit it,” Winter said with a deep scowl. She shifted so their bodies were no longer grazing each other. Penny missed the contact and comfort but it was easier to look at Winter now. That raw emotion Penny was scared of was dulled by the frustration so obvious on her face. Blue eyes glared at the stone ground, “If working with Dr. Polendina causes such anxiety, tell him. He is an extraordinarily kind man and wouldn’t want to harm you.”

“I know father is-”

“What?! E-Excuse me?” Winter’s head snapped to her. “Aro speculated that Dr. Polendina wanted a child but…” Penny shrunk in on herself. There was something wrong with- “No, no, don’t- damn it.” Winter took a breath, finger on her temples. “I am merely shocked. I expected a child, around the age of five, not a teenager.”

Penny frowned, “I am, by all means, a young adult.”

“You sound like Weiss,” Winter rolled her eyes. Then she noticed May and Aro heading out of the shop with a few drinks and some food. The Specialist slipped back into professional-mode too easily. Like it wasn’t a just a mask.

But before the others returned, Penny took her hand and squeezed it softly, “Winter… Thank you.” Winter squeezed it back and smiled briefly. She didn’t answer, Aro’s aids would pick it up now that she was outside.

Aro had a better sense of where the pair was, eyes never drifting to far from their mark but her worried face instantly changed to relief once she could see them.

“Penny! I’m so sorry,” Aro said quickly taking a seat at Penny’s side. She let go of the drinks in her hand- Penny’s hands flew out to grab them from falling but it just floated. Gravity Dust, Penny reminded herself. Then she engulfed in a tight hug and lift ever so slightly. “I didn’t think- I won’t drag you into Menagerie size crowds again.”

“I’m stable, with Winter’s help,” Penny said, patting Aro’s head. It took a few seconds for the mechanic to let go. By that time May had taken a seat and set the floating drinks on the table. “I wasn’t aware I had… anxiety.”

“Therapist Schnee saves the day again,” May laughed. Aro sat next to her, elbowing the Huntress a little too hard.

Winter reached for the drink labeled ‘Knight Commander’ and gave Aro a tired look. It wasn’t effective with the small smile on her lips. She then gave May a much more serious stare, “Being an older sister with a man like my father looming over us doesn’t make me a therapist.”

“Makes you better than most Atlesians,” Aro grumbled. Her own drink was labeled ‘Weaponsmith’. The last two was ‘Spymaster’ and ‘Squire’. With a small giggle and a look at Aro, Penny took the one labelled Squire. Aro gave a brief grin, ears happily wiggling out of hiding for a moment before tucking back under her hair.

“Alright so the thing with the Paladins and new Knights?” Aro paused, taking a deep sip of her drink and chewing on the boba. “They’re complete shit. They refused Xanthic’s code so her bulterbots are smarter than those toys with guns. They didn’t consult me on any changes with the Paladin and I don’t think Dr. Pietro even looked at those designs.”

“I can confirm the last statement,” Penny said with a nod. She held her drink close but didn’t take a sip yet. “My father has been busy with other projects-”

May’s fist slammed the table, another hand covering her mouth as she desperately tried not to choke or spit her drink everywhere. Winter made a face and casually slide over to Penny’s side, pressing shoulder to shoulder until Penny shifted and allowed Winter to escape.

“F-father?! You’re Pietro’s kid- When?”

“Since 240 days ago.” Penny said with a cheery smile.

“May, I just she recently disclosed this information to me as well.” Winter said holding her hand up to stop the yelling. May glared at Aro who shrugged, but had a smile wrapped around the straw of her drink.

“I met her yesterday and helped her take down a Spider Droid.”

“Spider…” May looked ready to burst with how much information she was taking in. Winter looked surprised eyes wandering to Penny- then it cut back to Aro with an accusatory glare. “Aura.” May demanded. The look on her face was scary intense and slightly worried, “Did you have your Aura up?”

“Uh…” A shimmer went across Aro’s body. Her eyes was wide and she shrank under the gaze of Atlas’ most elite Huntresses. “… Yes.” May looked ready to feint. Some humans do feint under intense emotions but she wondered if they could feint from experiencing too many emotions. Penny looked up a few procedures in case she does.

May seemed to settle on exhaustion and defeat, but the panic drained a lot of color from her complexion. “Aurora Glade!” May let out a frustrated sigh and held her head. “You’re going to be the death of me.”

“At least you’ll die loving me.”

Winter flinched ever so slightly, a hand gently pressed to her lips as she struggled to maintain her dignified composure compared to May’s outburst. The Huntress was now bright red, very worrying for how pale she was a moment ago. Just as Aro was about to see it May ripped the plastic off her bubble tea and threw it at the mechanic’s face.

Penny looked at her drink for a moment. This was recreational liquid meant for consumption. She was starting to have second opinions on how safe it would be for her system, after seeing two Huntresses choke on it and it being weaponized. But Winter’s soft chuckle set Penny at ease.

Aro took everything in stride. She was laughing again, twirling her hair and squeezing the drink out of it while May stuttered for a moment. Winter was content- almost happy.

Penny finally took a sip of her drink and pressed into Winter. The pair slide back to Winter’s side of the table, a little further from May and Aro as the pair started to playfully wrestle. She’d be okay, even with the glitches, Penny decided. She has 240 days of evidence, one friend Aro + May Marigold, and an uncategorized Winter Schnee to help her.

Approval Rate: Unnecessary

#Penny Polendina #fic #cutting strings #pre-fall of beacon #may marigold #winter schnee #aurora glade #apcx

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simsadventures · 5 years

Text

Better Like This: Chapter 11: What Goes Around

Summary: The team arrives to the workshop. Time is of essence, and they all know it. Warnings: angst, mentions of murder, attempted murder, CPR, mentions of surgery

Word Count: 2670 A/N: What did you guys think? Let me know :) Love you and thank you for still reading this :) xx

P.S.: I tried to do a real description of CPR, not that anyone would remember it after reading, but if only bits and pieces would stuck with you, you could really help someone one day. Stay safe my friends :) here is a link to give a proper CPR

Series Masterlist __ Masterlist

< Previous Chapter

The drive to the workshop was the longest thing Bucky ever experienced. He felt as if the usually 20-minute ride was suddenly taking hours. He was trying to rush Sam, who was driving, to just drive fucking faster, but Sam wouldn’t budge.

“Man, what do you want me to do? Go over pedestrians or what? We’ll be there soon, just try and breathe, dude.”

Bucky was clenching his fists and tried to concentrate on the feeling of your bond. It was still strong, which could only mean you were still alive. It was this knowledge that was keeping him sane. The second he’d feel the bond falter, he’d probably jump out of the car, and ran to kill that bitch and then himself. He knew that such thoughts weren’t doing any good to you nor to him, but he just couldn’t help himself.

He didn’t want to be in a world where you weren’t, even though he was pretty sure you would never want him to do this to himself, were something to happen to you. But the strength of the bond worked miraculously because he still had the will to live and fight.

They were nearing the scene, and he could hear Steve in his ear. “Alright, everyone knows what they’re supposed to do?”

An affirmation came from the whole team, and silence followed. Everyone was nervous. Not only were they on their way to possibly catch the Strangler, the serial killer scaring New York for months now, but also a life of one of their own was on the line. They knew Bucky would feel if you stopped breathing, but still, they couldn’t shake this weird feeling enveloping each and every one of them.

They parked their cars a street down the workshop, so they potentially wouldn’t scare Amber off, if she really were the abductor. Just as they planned, Natasha went first, trying to look as confused as she could, while hiding her own nervousness. She had her earpiece on, so she could communicate with the team, and hear everything that was happening somewhere behind her. She tried to map the surroundings, to see if there were any civilians around, but except two guys vomiting next to one of the bins, nobody was out.

Meanwhile, the rest of the team took another route, trying to get to the workshop from the back. They tried not to raise too much attention so that no passer-by would be hurt if it came to some kind of shoot-out. Nevertheless, they moved swiftly, their guns still in their holsters. They were all wearing bulletproof vests, just to be sure.

When the workshop appeared in front of them, they all crouched. Steve mumbled orders: him, Clint and Tony would take the right side, Bucky, Sam, and Scott had to cover the left side. The rest of the tac team were to cover the very back of the building and wait for further orders. The worship wasn’t big enough to take 15 people at once, and they hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.

Nat gave them a signal and went towards the door. She tried to look through one of the windows, to try and see if you were somewhere there. What she saw made her blood run cold.

“Change of plans. Y/N’s there, and that bitch is doing something to her, guys. We need to act NOW!”

Nobody needed to be told twice, they all ran towards the door, which Nat already kicked in, to try and get to you. Amber abruptly looked around and saw Nat running towards her. She didn’t expect this. She really thought she hid all her traces, but it didn’t matter at that moment. She still needed to kill you, with or without cops in the room.

Bucky was the quickest of the rest of the team to get to the room, and he let out a vicious growl. He could see you, tied to a chair, all bloody and bruised, with a golden arm around your throat. The only thing on his mind was not the freeze and get to you as soon as possible. Someone would take care of Amber, the whole team was there, and it was just her. His only worry was you and your well-being.

Bucky thought you noticed him because your lips curled upwards a little when he marched towards you. Amber was still holding onto, but not for long. Nat jumped on her shoulders and used her elbows as leverage to hit Amber to her neck and head. It seemed to work because, after the second blow, she let your neck go, and tried to get rid of Natasha. The second her grip loosened around you, your head fell backwards.

The rest of the team was now in the workshop, too, and they tried to work as efficiently as they could. Bucky could hear a lot of yelling behind him, but he couldn’t be less bothered by it. He was getting your wrists from the ropes so that he could lay you down and check on you. All the time, he was trying to get you to wake up, but without success.

Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain in his chest. It would’ve sent him tumbling backwards if his mind wasn’t so set on rescuing you. He knew what it meant, but wasn’t willing to give up.

“Y/N! Baby, don’t you die on me. I need you, c’mon!” He was screaming now and didn’t realise that the rest of the room was utterly silent.

It was no work at all for them to handcuff Amber, and Clint and Nat were already going towards the TAC team, so they could get her to the station for questioning.

When Bucky finally managed to lay you down, he tried to find a heartbeat, or try to catch a breath or anything that would prove to him that you were still there with him, but he couldn’t find anything. He could distantly hear someone calling 911, and yelling back that the ambulance will be there in a few minutes. In a few minutes, you’d be dead for sure. He needed to save you.

He pushed your neck a little back so that he could clear your airways. Next, he ripped your shirt, so that he could see where your sternum was and to do the CPR properly. He was sure he’d crack a few ribs, but better few broken ribs than no you at all.

He placed the heal of his right hand at the centre of your chest and interlocked his fingers with his other hand, and could see Steve moving towards your head, to help Bucky with the whole process. They both knew it was better if two people did this.

He started pressing your chest, and he tried to do it as hard and fast as possible, he knew he needed your heart to get the shock, fight, and work on its own. When he was on his 30th compression, Steve took over, lifted your chin, held your nose and gave you two breaths, after which Bucky continued to provide you with the heart massage. They didn’t know how long it took for the ambulance to come, but when they did, they resumed Bucky’s and Steve’s action.

They quickly put your into the ambulance and asked if your Alpha was there, seeing the mark on your neck. Bucky nodded and swiftly jumped to the ambulance to be close to you. It was general knowledge, that if one mate got hurt, the other should be as close as possible, their bodies reacting positively on each other. It would basically mean that having Bucky around would cure you faster. At least they all hope it would.

They got your heart beating on its own in the hospital but had to intubate you and breathe with you because your throat was severely damaged. They were scared about your brain function too. They wanted to make sure no serious damage was done, but what they saw on the MRI, didn’t make the doctors happy.

“There’s slight bleeding in her brain. We will have to go in, and stop it so that no further damage is done. Are you ok with that, sir?” one of the doctors asked Bucky.

“Why are you asking me? Of course, do everything you can, just fucking save her.” The doctor just nodded and rushed off. In a minute, Bucky could see your hospital bed with your unconscious body being transferred towards the OR.

Steve and Sam came running towards Bucky. “How’s it looking, man? Will she be alright?”

Bucky couldn’t look up. He couldn’t face his best friends, so he just mumbled “she’s bleeding in her brain, they are trying to stop it now,” and was quiet again.

Steve and Sam exchanged a look, took Bucky, each by one elbow, and led him towards the waiting room so that they could all sit and wait for some update. It a while, everyone was there, the whole team, Bruce too, of course, and your friends, Hope, Wanda and Vis, anxiously waiting to learn what was happening.

In about four hours, a doctor came in. “Anyone here for Y/N Y/L/N?” He got a little confused when all 11 people stood up and marched towards him, with scared expressions. “Oh, ok, we were able to stop the bleeding, but we won’t know about the extent of the damages until she wakes up. She still has to have help to breathe. Her trachea is fortunately not shattered, but it was such a shock for her organism, that it will need some time to heal. Next 24 hours will be critical, if her body can take that, then I’m pretty sure positive results will come.”

Sighs of some relief could be heard from several people, but not from Bucky. “When can I see her?” Was his only question, his posture still as frigid as when he came to the hospital more than 4 hours ago.

“Well, through a looking glass-“

“I don’t want to see my mate through a fucking looking glass. When. Can. I. see. her!” Bucky growled the last part, and despite the doctor being a Beta, he lowered his head submissively. “Right now, sir. But only you, I’m afraid. This amount of people wouldn’t be good for the patient.”

He looked up, half expecting other growls from the mostly Alpha circle around him, but they all nodded in understanding, and let Bucky follow the doctor towards where you were laying.

When he was let to your room, his breath hitched in his throat, and the tears, that were threatening to fall the whole time he was waiting for some update, finally dropped. The doctor mumbled something about leaving the two of you alone, but Bucky didn’t really hear him.

All he could see was his beautiful mate, hooked up to so many machines and tubes, he almost couldn’t see you. There was a tube helping you breathe, just like the doctor said, bandages all over your face, which was now even more purple than when he left you to their care.

He wanted to hug you, be as close to you as possible, but he knew he couldn’t. All of those machines, which he hated and loved at the same time, were keeping you alive, or at least keeping the possibility of you coming back to him sooner.

He grabbed one of the chairs standing in the corner and put it right next to your bed, he could at least hold your hand. He watched you, and couldn’t help but hate himself even more. This was all his fault. Not only did he leave you in his apartment, without any protection, but it was his fucking ex who attacked you and almost took you away from him. His mind was spiralling with all the what-if scenarios. He slowly lowered his head so that it was resting on your hand and started sobbing silently.

The pain in his chest was almost gone, but his insides still burnt from the stress of almost losing you.

“I’m so sorry, doll. I love you so fucking much and I just.. Can’t, I just can’t do this without you, Y/N, so please, please come back to me. I swear I’ll do a better job at protecting you this time, I’ll be the best Alpha. You deserve all the best in the world, and I’ll die trying to give you the world. Just come back to me.”

The team couldn’t hear what he was saying, but they could imagine it all very well. The sight was heartbreaking. They all knew Bucky as this strong, whatever type of guy, who never really showed his emotions. So seeing him so broken down these past few hours was almost unbearable for them. They wanted to help him somehow, but they all knew that the only help he could get was if you woke up.

At the same time, they all felt that this was a very intimate moment for Bucky, so they all silently left, Sam only to the waiting room, if Bucky needed him. He sent the rest of the team home or to the station, to fry that bitch waiting there for them. Nat had a furious look on her face, and Sam knew that Amber was in some really deep shit. Nat was rarely pissed, and when she was, it was as if the hell opened its gates. Same wished he could see what Nat would do to Amber, but knew that Bucky needed someone there, and was willing to skip the fun part to stay with his buddy.

—-

3 days went by, and although they were able to retract the tube from your throat, and your body seemed to be healing nicely, but there were still no signs of you waking up.

Bucky didn’t want to leave your side, and it was only after Sam’s threatening that he got to his apartment, had a quick shower and an energy drink and went back to you. Meanwhile, Sam had to promise he’d stay by your side until Bucky came back. Bucky was very much keen on never leaving you alone again, and if he couldn’t be there for a second, he would make sure you still had your protection.

He thanked Sam when he came back, and Sam knew that it was not only for sitting there with you, which was an obvious thing for Sam to do (you were his friend too), but it felt like a bigger thank you. Sam just nodded and let Bucky sit back to you.

They were chatting silently, when suddenly, Bucky could feel the muscles in your hand moving. He jumped from the chair. “Baby? Doll? Are you awake?”

You didn’t reply, but he could see you blinking behind the closed eyes. It made his heart jump in excitement. He was glad you were there, on the hospital bed, and not somewhere dead, but at the same time, he missed your eyes, which seemed to pierce his soul and look right into him. He missed your smile, which warmed the room immediately. So to be finally able to see all that gave him a whole lot of hope.

He could see your eyes blinking more furiously, and he squeezed your hand, a smile spreading across his face. He saw that the harsh light of the hospital made you squint your eyes when you tried to look around. The first thing you looked at was him, and you squinted harder. You then looked at your interlocked hands and flinched slightly.

When you looked back at him, confusion was written all over your face. What you said next sent Bucky almost to the ground. He really thought the two of you were out of the woods. But, boy, was he wrong.

Your voice was barely above a whisper, but to him, it was as if you were yelling at him.

“Who are you?”

/ Next Chapter >

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yehet-me-up · 4 years

Text

Frozen North ~ Night Five (final)

PAIRING: Chanyeol x reader

GENRE: Horror/Suspense/SPOOP in general/light romance (because who else would I be?)

WORD COUNT: 3,375

RATING: PG13 (nothing gruesome, but knowing me there will be swearing)

SUMMARY: You run a late night radio show dedicated to telling scary stories and urban legends, the creepier the better. Listeners call in and share their own, creating a small but loyal community of folks like you who love this sort of thing. One night, a man calls in with what sounds like an all-too-real story and before you know it, you’ll do anything to make sure he’s safe.

Frozen North Masterlist

You all sit in silence, staring at Jimmy. The clock on the wall hits midnight but no one makes a move. Faintly, though your headphones, you hear the ad reel kick in.

Daniel comes into the booth a moment later. He folds his arms, looking haunted but ready for action. 'So, what the fuck do we do now?'

Jimmy spins the laptop so you can see the readout. ‘It was right here, I’m telling you. I’ve got it.’ He points to a large building on the outskirts of campus. ‘When the phone smashed, the signal died. But I’m certain.’ He opens up a new tab and overlays the UW map next to the program. ‘I got it.’

‘Albert Hall,’ you read over his shoulder. 'Why does that sound so familiar?'

Suse and Jimmy exchange a look. 'Let's go find him,' she says, as though it's as simple as that.

Logic wars with your desire to sprint out of the building and decimate anyone standing in your way to save Chanyeol. 'There were bars on whatever he's being held in, guys. And at least two people sick enough to do this. If we charge in there and get hurt, or worse, we won't be much help to him,' you say, chewing on your lower lip anxiously. 'Maybe we could call the police? Report a break in or something and they'd have to go investigate.'

'You're right,' Suse sighs, running a jittery hand through her hair. 'But, also. You know...' She gestures with her hands out the window and then back to the four of you.

'Fuck it.’ You stand up and pull on your jacket, heart racing. 'You're right. We can't wait.' Pulling out your phone, you dial 911.

Without even grabbing your bag you stride out into the hallway, pressing the phone to your ear. Shuffling follows you as Suse, Jimmy, and Daniel grab their coats and turn off the lights.

A female voice comes on the line. '911, what's your emergency?'

You stop in the kitchen and pull open the drawers, grabbing the only weapon you can think of - the long knife amongst the various utensils you all keep there for the odd lunch or dinner you eat at the station. The blade gleams in the moonlight coming through the hall window.

The distress and fear are all too real as they color your tone. 'Please, help me,' you say into the phone in a high voice.

The dispatcher carries on with business-like efficiency. 'How can I help you, miss?'

Jimmy holds up the screen beside you as you carry on out the front doors into the night. The address flashes in thick red. You head down the hallway and push out the doors into the freezing night.

'Some guys just took my friend into this building. We were just - we were just walking back from Schultzy's! They came out of nowhere.'

'Are you safe?' she asks. You can hear the clack of her typing in the background.

You feel the wooden handle of the knife in your hand and look at Suse, Jimmy, and Daniel beside you. 'I'm safe. But please, please, hurry.’ You pause to take a dramatic inhale of breath. ‘I think they had a gun.'

Suse smiles and nods at you. You hardly need Jimmy's whispered directions as you all move silently through the sleeping streets to the address listed. Something within you is pulling you towards Chanyeol and you swallow your fear down and keep walking as fast as your legs can carry you.

'I'm putting your address as 800 NE 42nd st, is that correct?'

Silently, you curse and hurry around parked cars. 'No, no I - I ran before they could grab me. It was 4120 11th Ave NE that they took him into. Please, hurry.'

If she thinks it’s strange you have the exact address ready, she doesn’t show it. 'Got it. I'm dispatching units now, please stay on the line while -'

You hang up and shove your phone in your pocket. Picking up the pace, you sprint over sidewalks until you stand outside the abandoned building. While it's clearly part of the row of stone and brick classrooms on the far end of campus, this one looks as though it in particular has fallen into disrepair. The trees lining the street behind you are dwarfed by the three-story rise of the building above.

The sign out front is warped with age. Albert Hall - Psychology Research Center

'Does it say precisely where in the building he is?' You whisper to Jimmy, as though the slightest sound will give you away.

He shakes his head. 'No. But I'm willing to bet it's through a back entrance.' He nods up at the boarded up front doors.

Your group moves around to the right side, closer to the University proper. Just a street away the city pulses with life and lights and noise, students enjoying the start of the weekend. But in this isolated corner, near the freeway. it's unnervingly quiet. The perfect place to lock someone up where no one would find them. In your mind you make a promise to Chanyeol and to yourself that this ends tonight. No matter what you have to do, by morning he'll be free.

The outside of the building is dark, sloping gently down the hill behind it. A gust of wind comes through the trees and you wrap your arms around yourself, careful to keep the knife's edge away. Holding your breath you wait for any sign of life or movement inside, praying you’re not too late.

'There!' Suse whispers loudly a minute later, pointing to a flash of light in one of the lower windows.

You start moving towards it, blood pounding in your ears.

Daniel holds your arm gently. 'The police are on their way, shouldn't we wait?'

The fear in your veins is strong, but something pushes you to keep going. 'It's Friday night in the U District, Daniel. I think it might be a while. I can't explain it but, we can't wait.'

He nods grimly and you all carefully pick your way down the slick grass hillside to reach the decidedly not boarded-up back door. Cautiously, you peek inside the darkened glass. Far down the hallway you see another flash of light, followed by a loud crash.

Suse uses the moment to pull open the creaking old door and she heads inside, leading the way. Daniel at the back gently braces it open with a doorstop and motions you all forward. If adrenaline wasn't coursing through your veins you'd take time to be horrified by the shadows in this place.

Your mind runs away with you in the darkness. Though you now believe that the people responsible for Chanyeol's predicament are in fact human and not supernatural, you can't help but wonder. About women in the night with terrifying eyes and wolves that move faster than they should.

You reach the room where the noise is coming from and lean in to catch snippets of conversation.

'So what are we going to do with him, then?' a female voice says. It's oddly familiar.

The sound of pacing in the background increases. A male voice speaks, muffled at first and then louder. 'You knew what you were getting into when you agreed to this. There was never any other option.'

The woman counters in a contained scream - 'I didn't think you planned on killing him!'

Chanyeol. You clutch the knife tighter in your hand, readying for a fight. Peeking around the edge you see two figures circling each other in the faint light coming from a generator in the corner of the room.

The man turns and your stomach drops. 'Professor Langford?' you whisper to yourself.

He hardly looks like himself. His jacket is discarded on the floor and he holds a shaking, shadowed object in his hand. 'This was the deal. You help me get someone down here. Your silly little radio station gets a story worthy of national attention. And then we reach the end -'

He walks closer to the light, pressing her against the wall. When his hand raises you see a gun, the barrel going to her forehead. 'I kill him and get my first-hand, up-close, look at what panic does to a community. I’ll finally have a case study worthy of tenure.’

You're so distracted by the fact that your goddamn professor is the one behind all this, you don't even pay attention to who the woman is.

‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ Suse asks loudly, incredulous, startling you. When you turn you see she's beside you, staring into the room. Arms crossed, ready for war. Suse isn't looking at the man, but at the woman. 'Jennifer?'

'Holy shit,' Daniel says, coming to peek between the two of you. 'Boss, what have you done?'

And holy shit indeed, they're right. The anguish on her face meets the harsh light and it’s aged her several years. Her normally loose blonde hair is braided back and a dark knit cap is pulled over it, but it's absolutely her.

In the startled silence you hear a banging sound against metal. Muted groans come from further into the room and you can just make out a cage in the corner - like a prison cell with thick bars, but slightly bigger.

He hunches in the shadows, but you'd know him anywhere. For the last week your thoughts have been filled with nothing but him. You want to run to Chanyeol and get him the hell out of here, but the unstable look in the professor's eyes makes you hold your position.

Professor Langord uses the moment to pull Jennifer into his arms, pressing the gun to her forehead once more. The four of you move into the room, surrounding them, blocking the exit. 'Don't come any closer.'

As you stare each other down, other objects in the room come into focus. Noise machines you recognize from the station. Costumes, masks. A large poster is taped to the wall beside you - ice and a frozen lake as far as you can see.

Disbelief makes you laugh, the sound hollow in the empty room. 'You made it all up?'

Daniel scoffs in disgust. 'You crazy bastard. The cops are on their way. It's over.'

Jennifer sags, shame coloring her features. She raises her hands defensively. 'Paul, stop this. It's over.' She looks at you and your friends. 'I'm so sorry, it - it wasn't supposed to be like this. We're losing our funding this year and we needed the money. I had no idea it would be... this -' she gestures back at Chanyeol and up at the building before lowing her eyes to the floor.

Suse hunkers down for a stand off. 'Let's wait for the cops and then we can resolve all of this.'

The professor makes a noise of distress and points the gun at you instead, shoving Jennifer to the floor. 'No! I'm not going down for this. There's plenty of bullets in here to keep it all quiet.'

He's deranged enough to do it; his hair in wild disarray and a feral hunger in his eyes you've never noticed before. You hold the knife in front of you, stepping around Suse. It’s your fault they all came along and, even if it’s pointless, you’re going to defend them.

With your free hand you shove them all back, behind you. The professor lifts it to be level with your head and terror surges in your veins as you hope to God you can dodge at the right time.

All of a sudden a thunderous bang comes from the corner and the professor turns at the sound. You use the moment, moving without thinking or hesitating. Rushing forward, you reach for his wrist, driving it back against the stone wall. He jerks, nearly losing the gun but maintaining his grip.

He attempts to aim it again, but you're faster. Teeth bared, you lift the knife and hold it to his throat. 'Move and I'll kill you, professor.'

The fight goes out of him, raising his free hand in surrender. You incline your head and call behind you, 'Daniel, grab the gun.'

He does, coming forward and relieving the professor of the weapon. Jimmy appears on your other side, pinning the man's other arm to the wall as well. 'Go get your man, we've got this,' he tells you.

Together they hold him against the wall. Suse flips the light switch and miraculously it still works. She stands guard at the door and watches Jennifer with disgust. Still on the floor, your boss’ knees draw to her chest as she sits upright with her back against the wall. She drops her head into her hands with a groan.

Noise and light spill the hallway, voices calling out. Suse sticks her head out and waves. 'Down here!'

You finally turn to the cage, now fully visible in the light. Chanyeol sits in the corner, his wrists bound in front of him with a length of rope. His wide eyes meet yours emphatically. He tries to speak around the length of fabric in his mouth and you want to sob.

'You're okay, thank God.'

You easily find the key to the enclosure and unlock the door. Dropping to your knees in front of him, you use the knife and cut off his bindings carefully. He reaches up and pulls the material out so he can speak. He's even more ethereal in person - with deep brown eyes, ears that stick out, and a full, pink mouth, he resembles a hero from a fairy tale, even with exhaustion clear on his face.

You can’t help it - you grin and reach for him, instinctually, automatically, before checking the motion.

Your hands hang in the air and he watches them for a beat before meeting your eyes once more. Faster than you can process he sits up and pulls you against him in a slightly off-center hug. Gripping his arms you steady yourself, face pressing against his neck. The spell is broken and suddenly you accept that he's very real and tangible and here and alive. He smells like the ocean, even down here amongst the old tables and chairs.

'Thank you,' he says, lips moving against your hair.

For a long moment you hold each other, in this strange and terrifying place, feeling against all odds as though you've finally come home. You want to cry with relief that he's whole. He was so close to you this whole time. You want to hug him tighter and keep him with you, to protect him from the world. Even if it's ridiculous, and though you've never met him before in your life.

But if telling myths and stories of the unknown for so long has taught you anything, it's that nothing is impossible. 'I can't believe you're here,' you say against him.

His hands find your shoulders and he eases you back to look at you, one hand moving into your hair. For a beat he simply drinks you in, amongst the noise and the sound of police in the room he watches you like you're the only person who exists. And then he surprises you completely by pulling you closer and pressing his lips to yours.

For long seconds his cold mouth meets your warm one, tasting and teasing and familiarizing himself with you while you hold onto him, believing abruptly that this must all be a dream. But then you join him, reaching for his face and tracing his skin while you sink into the kiss.

He pulls back and rests his forehead against yours. 'Your voice kept me sane in the darkness.' His eyes open and you know exactly what he means. He tilts his head and motions to a small radio on a ledge in the corner 'I'm so glad you finally found me.'

You blush, unable to help yourself as you push his messy hair out of his eyes so you can see him clearly. 'Any time. For now, how about we get out of here?'

He smiles and laughs, the weak sound finding a home in the hollows of your body. Together you stand, gently helping him off the floor. With him leaning heavily against you, still weak from his days of being in this place, you pull out your cell and dial the recent number.

She answers a beat later. 'Have you heard anything?' Yoora asks, voice tight with sadness.

Instead of answering you press the speaker phone button. Chanyeol bends, reading the name you called and smiling at you. Awe lingers in his eyes at the fact that you knew what he needed before he did. 'Sis?'

'Oh my god,' she starts. You hear the sound of things moving in the background. 'Chan? Are you okay?'

He grins, then winces and presses the hand not around your shoulders to his side. 'Not all the way, but I will be.'

Six months later - June

The station is still hot by the time you arrive in the evening; the summer sun clinging to Seattle well on into the evening. You know how the city feels and you want to hold onto the warmth, too.

Jennifer's office is still dark and you pass by it without looking in. Eventually, someone else will take her place. But for now, Daniel says the management is all filling in. Like so many things after a trauma, life carries on as it always has, and some wounds take longer to heal than others.

You hear his voice when you're in the hallway and grin. No matter how quickly you get out of your class or internship or TA duties Chanyeol still manages to beat you here. His exuberant, deep voice jokes with Daniel and when you peek in the door they're both looking at the computer. They’ve been thick as thieves since he helped you walk Chanyeol out of that godawful place and into the ambulance.

He notices you standing in the doorway and grins, the familiar crinkles coming to the corner of his eyes. 'There she is!'

You never know who does it first. If he reaches for you or if you reach for him. Or perhaps you're both drawn to each other like magnets, always reaching. He wraps his arms around you and you sigh, pressing a kiss to his chest.

Daniel makes a dramatic gagging noise and mutters 'get a room' that all three of you know he doesn't mean. Since the incident he's taken on even more of a protective vibe that now extends to Chanyeol as well.

When it’s finally time to start the show you swap out for Suse, hugging her like always. If anything, this has all brought you and her closer and the four of you are inseparable.

‘Don’t have too much fun tonight,’ she teases, winking as she shuts the door behind her.

With a laugh you assume your place on the far side of the desk, settling in where you’ve always sat. The headphones are the same. The switchboard of sixteen lines, waiting for people to call in, is the same. But what isn’t the same is the man who settles himself into a mirroring desk opposite you.

He gives you a lopsided grin that makes is way into your voice as you start the show. 'Hello and welcome back to The Long Night on 107.9 KJWZ Seattle, where the dial might stop, but we don’t. I’m Y/N...'

After the story broke and everyone learned who you are it seemed silly to keep the nickname. The diehard listeners and people who called into the show know you on a deeper level now, and the show doesn't seem to be slowing down in the least.

When everyone learned about the financial distress of the station, that Jennifer was hiding from everyone, the donations poured in. The thought of having this program, now shared by your boyfriend, gives you a sense of peace amongst all the change in your life.

'And I'm Chanyeol,’ he says. ‘We’ll be your host for the evening. Let’s get weird.' He winks and squeezes your hand beneath the booth.

~~~~~~~~~

Tag list: @yeoldontknow @enthusiastt @itskindofafairything @gogh-suck-it @nshitae @jeons-moonchild

#chanyeol x reader #chanyeol fanfic #chanyeol au #exo x reader #exo fanfic #exo au #exo horror #sorry for the delay! I hope you all enjoy <3333

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the-nehemoth · 4 years

Text

Backup

I read a fantastic fic called Pentagram on Ao3 (if you haven't read it already, you should because it's really fucking good) and in it VEGA is installed on Doomguy's suit. Which I think is really a really neat idea for this ship. So I had the idea of what if VEGA was transferred directly to the suit instead of onto that flashdrive thingy first? And I also had an idea of what if Doomguy went out of his way to backup VEGA instead of it being just a quick last minute button press at the end? I combined those two ideas to make this fic.

The Doom Slayer was a slayer of demons, not people. As far as he could remember, he’d never killed a person before. Though admittedly, his memory was spotty and unreliable at best due to the nature of his past so it could’ve happened, he doubted it though, and if it had it would’ve been well deserved. But here he was being asked and expected to kill a person who as far as he was concerned didn’t deserve to die.

It was for a good cause, he did need to get back to Hell and if this was the only way, he had to do it. But was it the only way? Possibly but he had to at least try to find a way that didn’t involve VEGA dying. If all else failed, VEGA was an AI that existed on the facility’s computer system and therefore it should be possible to transfer him to another device before exploding his current operating system.

With that in mind, after dealing with the demon horde in the coolant room, the Slayer moved on without destroying any of the coolant tanks. A few had been slightly damaged in the battle but nothing major enough to cause any real problems for VEGA’s systems.

“Slayer,” VEGA said when the Slayer was two rooms away from the coolant room, “I notice that you failed to destroy my cooling systems. I would ask why but I don’t think you’d answer. But I strongly advise you take them out first. While it is possible to complete this task without destroying them, I assure yout it will make the process much faster and more efficient.”

‘This task’ and ‘the process’, he refused to call it what it actually was. He wasn’t okay with this, was he? Not fully anyway. He was at least being partially forced to go along with it.

“Slayer,” VEGA continued after several seconds of being ignored, “I know I can’t make you go back but destroying my cooling system first will make it significantly faster. You need to get back to Hell quickly so I recommend turning around and destroying it before continuing further towards my core.” Was it just the Slayer’s imagination or was there a slight undertone of desperation to VEGA’s normally calm manner?

The Slayer came to an abrupt halt. Was… VEGA insisting on a faster death because he thought the Slayer was planning on taking him out the slow way? Or did he just want it to be over with as soon as possible? Probably both, right? How did the Slayer assure him that that wasn’t what he had in mind?

He looked around but there weren’t any computer terminals nearby for him to type on nor was there anything for him to write on or with. He hadn’t seen many functioning computers with intact keyboards any time recently either. He had vague memories of hearing about a language made up entirely of hand signals but he didn’t know any of them. Thus he couldn’t communicate anything right now without actually speaking. Which he could do but… the thought made his gut clench with anxiety.

It honestly made no sense. He could face a horde of demons without any fear but the mere thought of speaking was almost terrifying. There had been a time he could speak freely though, wasn’t there? … Maybe, he was no longer sure. If so, it had been a long time ago. But… he couldn’t let VEGA continue to think he was doomed to suffer a slow death so…

“Don’t worry,” he forced out, trusting VEGA could hear him through the suit’s comm link. His voice was hoarse and rough in his throat but it was still there which almost felt surprising considering he couldn’t remember the last time he spoke.

“W-what?” VEGA said, stammering. Who would’ve thought AIs could stammer? “Did you just… speak?”

The Slayer nodded as he started walking again, clutching his shotgun tight to keep his hands from shaking.

“And you told me not to worry, what does that mean?”

The Slayer grunted, unable to get himself to speak again.

“You’re… not planning on destroying me?”

Good! His message had gotten across. So, he nodded, affirming it.

“I appreciate the thought but you need to close the Hell portal. The only way to close it is from Hell itself, you know that. The only way to get there is through a powerful energy surge. Destroying my systems is the only way to get enough energy to accomplish that. So, you’re not left with much of a choice.”

The Slayer ignored him as he stepped into a new room. There were more demons here. Perfect! He could use some ripping and tearing to ease his nerves.

VEGA didn’t speak again until some time later when the Slayer sensed he was nearing VEGA’s core. “What are you planning?” His tone suggested it was rhetorical and didn’t expect an answer so the Slayer didn’t bother with trying to give one. “And why would you bother?”

Because he was the Doom Slayer, he killed demons, not people. He had no way to covey that though so he just grunted and continued on his way.

It wasn’t long before he reached the room that housed VEGA’s core. It was massive and counter to the Slayer’s expectations looked nothing like his symbol when he spoke over the comms. That was fine though, it wouldn’t be his core for much longer anyway.

The Slayer approached the center console and double tapped the screen to activate it. Presumably he could access VEGA’s code here but… he wasn’t sure how. While he was pretty sure he considered himself decent with computer stuff once upon a time, that had been a long time ago, back when fully sapient AI’s were still a thing exclusive to science-fiction. It didn’t take him long to find a text box he could type into though.

‘VEGA, can you read this?’ he typed before instinctively looking up at VEGA’s core as he waited for him to answer.

“Yes, I can read what’s on the screen. Now, can you finally tell me what you’re trying to do? Preferably before Dr. Hayden jumps back onto the com link and notices something’s up.”

‘Is it possible for you to transfer yourself onto another device from here?’

There was more a full second pause before VEGA replied. “I could yes, assuming you had a device with enough storage capacity to house at the bare minimum my core personality code. I would prefer more space than just that though for my memories and various processes. I would also prefer to be able to function on it as well but a smaller device to move me from one system to another would work too. But I do not believe that there is a device with enough storage capacity for even that anywhere in this part of the facility. Dr. Hayden might have something in his lab that would suffice but it would take approximately eleven hours and thirty-seven minutes to walk there and back from here. I do not believe we have that kind of time to spare. Closing the portal is a rather urgent matter.”

True so… ‘What about my suit?’ It was probably a long shot but it was pretty high tech, allowing him to store stuff in a pocket dimension within it and assisting him in and out of combat in various ways. He wasn’t sure how any of it worked or if it was even plausible for it to house an AI of any size or in any capacity but it was worth bringing up as a possibility, right?

“Hmm… I’m not sure. I can’t access any part of it other than its comms channel for communications purposes. If you had a way to connect it to me then I could know for sure. Personally, I would be surprised if it worked though.”

The Slayer nodded in agreement but it was only idea he had right now so… ‘How would I connect it to you?’

“Well, please do not tell Dr. Hayden this but unbeknownst to him, I have been working on a way to interface with the suit ever since it was first brought into the facility since I couldn’t find a way to hack its systems wirelessly. I had just about finished what I believe to a successful attempt when the demon invasion started. I did not think it prudent to ask you to take the suit somewhere I could test it while you were in the midst of dealing with said demon invasion. I suppose now is a better time than any though. Please take this device and plug it into the right side of terminal and then place some part of the suit onto it.”

A drone, similar to the ones that carried the weapon mods but a bigger rose up from behind the terminal. It carried a large rectangular device with what looked like a touch screen taking up the entire top of it. What it was or did was impossible to for the Slayer to even guess. But he didn’t need to know that in order for it to work so he accepted it from the drone.

“It doesn’t need to be plugged into me for it to work but if your plan works, it being plugged it will make it easier for me to transfer myself to the suit,” VEGA said as the Slayer plugged it in.

Nothing on the touch screen or the terminal’s screen changed so with a shrug, the Slayer pressed his gauntleted hand firmly on the device. He almost pulled it back as the symbol on the helmet of the suit appeared on his visor’s screen, big enough to almost take up the whole space. It was quickly pushed to the side to be overtaken by VEGA’s symbol, just as large.

“Ah-ha! I’m in!” VEGA sounded proud of himself. It brought a smile to the Slayer’s face after the disguised fear he’d had in his voice earlier when he’d thought he was going to die. “Oh, this is fascinating.”

That was wonderful but they were kind of in a tight spot right now. The Slayer reached his free hand over to type some more. ‘Is there enough room for you on it? Even just for transport?’

“Oh uh… yeah, I do believe so. I can’t fit everything but there should be more than enough room to comfortably fit the important stuff. I should be able to function on it too.”

It was cliché but the Slayer let out a sigh of relief. He wouldn’t have to kill someone he’d grown to consider a friend today. It had been far too long since he’d had a friend so he was quite glad. And he was going to get to bring that friend with him. Maybe not forever, VEGA might not what that, but for a time at least. It’d be nice not to be alone for a little while.

“I… suppose I should start the transfer, huh? It will take a while and time is of the essence.” VEGA said after a beat silence. “Before I do though… I want to thank you Slayer. While I was willing to be destroyed for the greater good, I prefer continued existence so I appreciate you thinking of this instead of going through with Dr. Hayden’s plan.” Confirming once and for all that he hadn’t had any input on that plan.

The Slayer nodded in acknowledgment, holding back his anger at Hayden for now because it wasn’t the time for it.

“All right… commencing the transfer process now.” A bar appeared below VEGA’s icon with ‘0%’ underneath it. “Estimated time until download and installation is complete: ten minutes and fifteen seconds.” That was longer than would’ve been ideal but far shorter than the Slayer would’ve predicted.

“Installation complete.” VEGA announced, waking the Slayer from a light doze. Naturally VEGA had been a bit busy and thus hadn’t spoken during the process so the Slayer had taken the opportunity for a quick standing nap; he had to take moment of rest when he when and where he could.

The big icon on the visor’s screen shrunk and moved to the bottom right corner. Presumably that was where it was going to stay now.

‘How do you feel?’ the Slayer typed into the console. It wasn’t part of VEGA anymore but he should still be able to see the text, right?

“Hmm… slow. I don’t have the processing power I did before so I feel like my thoughts are much slower. I’m… not a fan. I also lost much of my functionality; I couldn’t run an entire facility any more even if I wanted to.” Implying he didn’t want to. “This is better than destruction though, far better. It will take some time to get used to and to learn what all I can do now.”

Before the Slayer could respond Dr. Hayden’s symbol popped on the visor, indicating he’d joined the comms. “What is taking so long?”

“Sorry Dr. Hayden,” VEGA replied. “There were far more demons than anticipated, they took a bit of time to clear. The Slayer is on his way now.”

Oh! VEGA was lying to Hayden and presumably had some way of preventing him from knowing that he’d been transferred to the suit. That was probably a good idea. The Slayer should destroy VEGA’s old systems before Hayden could learn the truth. So not even bothering to pay attention to Hayden’s response, the Slayer turned and jogged out of the room, he had cooling system to destroy.

#My writing #doom #doom 2016 #doomguy/vega #Canon Divergence

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wiener-soldiers · 4 years

Text

operation omega - recon (iv)

summary: years after the avengers dismantle HYDRA, the group remerges more dangerous than ever. their modus operandi? infiltrating foreign governments, stealing and reproducing their weapons, and selling them to terrorist groups. when the us government approaches the avengers for help on a secret operation with a secret asset, they are reluctant to agree. it isn’t until their quinjet almost gets shot down in the middle of nowhere when the understand that omega means business.

pairing: bucky barnes x SEAL!reader

words: 3.7k

warnings: swearing, recounting of violence/morally ambiguous acts, slight angst

a/n: italics are flashbacks (but yall alrdy knew that) and it kinda gets intense. and i barely edited this ha.

taglist: add yourself here!

OPERATION OMEGA MASTERLIST

Bucky’s been on hundreds of missions before, but for some reason, he’s nervous about this one.

Logically, he knows he has no real reason to be: Omega was the most skilled people the world had. If the Avengers didn’t have enhanced individuals, he knows that Omega would be running circles around them.

But from where he sat in the hot, dusty market, he could feel is heart thump in his throats as he listened to Y/N give orders through the comms. Every time she spoke, Bucky could feel his throat tighten. He knows it was his own fault that he wasn’t helping Natasha and Dr. Marge break into the suspected HYDRA factory. Instead, he sat at an outdoor patio in a chair that was way too small for him.

---

“You’re late,” Y/N says in full Captain mode as Tony scurries inside the command room.

“Semantics,” he said weakly before her stern glare quickly shut him up.

“I know we’re friends,” Y/N started as she paced around the front of the command room, “but on the field, I am your Captain. If I give an order, you will follow it. I don’t tolerate people going off and shooting the shit. This isn’t just your reputation on the line, it’s ours too. Do I make myself clear?”

She gets a chorus of affirmative responses.

“Chain of command is me, then Steve, then Jack, then Abigail. If Abigail loses the chain of command, you make an emergency abort, clear?”

Another chorus of affirmative replies.

Y/N’s lips crook upwards. “Good.”

---

Steve sat across from him, sipping tea and pretending not to look suspicious. Hordes of people were walking through the market—if they only knew how many deadly soldiers were in the market with them.

Or, of course, that the factory mass producing high-tech weapons smack dab in the middle of the market.

Steve’s disguise was more elaborate than Bucky’s; while Bucky was relatively unknown compared to the other Avengers, Steve was an international symbol of American patriotism. Y/N had almost forced him to sit the mission out and take a tactical role as opposed to an operational role. Steve only convinced her to let him on the ground just in case there were enhanced guarding the building.

Y/N only barely agreed.

Bucky wore a loose linen blouse—light enough for him not to fry under the blistering sun, but loose enough to easily hide an ultra-thin, Vibranium tactical vest and an array of small firearms and combat knives. His hair was tied up in a half-up bun with tendrils falling to hide any distinctive facial features. Steve, however, had to wear a cloaking mask, similar to one Natasha used when she infiltrated Alexander Pierce’s office. His face was barely recognizable, and his tunic was extra baggy to hide any muscle. What made Steve especially uncomfortable was that he didn’t have his shield.

“Everyone in position?” Y/N finally asks through the comms.

“Nat and I are in position,” Marge says quietly, trying to stay hidden from any possible guards.

“I got eyes on I have visual on Stark and Wilson. Oversight is in position,” Dom says from the jet silently hovering above them with cloaking on.

“I’m clear,” John says from the other side of the market. Bucky can see the tint of his reflective sunglasses from the corner of his eye.

“Abi and I are clear,” John says from a rooftop on overlooking the market.

“Bucky and I are clear,” Steve says from across the table.

“Good,” Y/N says. “It’s fourteen-hundred hours. Nat and Marge, you’re clear to enter the building. And for the rest of you,” she pauses, “if you fuck this up, I’ll kill you myself.”

Bucky gulps and give Steve a wary glance.

“You okay, Buck?”

“Peachy.”

“Our mission is to infiltrate this building,” Y/N calls out as the projection of the map in the command room zooms into a satellite photo of a market. “A couple months ago, Omega gathered intel confirmed by the BND that this is HYDRA’s main manufacturing plant.”

“It’s small,” Sam comments.

“It’s efficient,” Y/N corrects. “It’s smack dab in the middle of a market, so it’s easy for their parts suppliers to make deliveries disguised as legitimate businesses. They only assemble the weapons here; they get their parts elsewhere.”

“What’s the point storming the building if they can just send their parts to a new facility,” Tony asks the obvious.

“Because HYDRA loves efficiency, meaning this is most likely the place where they have information on all their suppliers, who they’re delivering the weapons to, and who their assets are.”

“Assets?” Bruce asks.

Y/N nods, “Moles within every global superpower, we suspect.”

“Jesus…” an Omega team member whistles.

“So, what’s the play?” Steve asks from his spot beside Bucky.

With a swipe on her phone, the collage of information on the large screen changes to show a map of the area surround the factory, as well as blueprints of the building itself. Y/N crosses the room as she speaks, “Natasha and Marge have the most experience gathering intel and getting in and out of a building undetected as fast as possible. I want you two to get inside that building and copy every single piece of information you think is useful. Make sure not to take anything with you; I want it to look like we were never there in the first place.

“Stark, Wilson, Barton, you guys will handle the aerial surveillance. Barton, I want you stationed on the roof across from the factory. You’re the extra set of eyes and ears on the inside. Stark, Wilson, I want you suited up in stealth mode and surveying a five-block perimeter. If anything, suspicious comes anywhere close to the factory, I want to know. Dom will be hovering the Quinjet in stealth over us, but aerial support is an emergency level plan. The minute we expose the Quinjet, it’s game over for Omega.

“The rest of us are going to be on the ground in different areas of the market with me running point from a hotel room guarded by Jack. We’re there for backup support only if necessary. We only make ourselves known if Nat or Marge’s tracker goes down.”

“Wait,” Bucky cuts her off, shifting his weight off the desk behind him to his feet. “You’re telling me that if something goes south in there, we can’t go get Natasha or Marge?”

Y/N rolls her eyes, but her gaze tenses on Bucky’s face for a second. Why are you challenging my authority? she wants to say. Bucky had been nothing but kind and was great company. But he’s stupid to think that Y/N would tolerate this level of subordination.

“Do you realize what happens if we expose ourselves?” Y/N quips snarkily instead. “It’ll take seconds before the international community realizes that foreign military is deployed in a country outside our jurisdiction, which might I add is hostile towards almost every country in the UN. Then amidst all the political chaos, HYDRA goes back into hiding and we’re back to square one. We’re treading on thin fucking ice, Barnes.”

Bucky admits that she makes a good point, but he doesn’t fully trust her. Not yet, at least. “So, hypothetically let’s say Nat or Marge gets caught, tortured, and possibly brought to a secondary location; we can’t get them?”

“As long as their trackers are live, we don’t engage.”

“But what if—”

“If what Barnes!?” Y/N shouts, her steely stare piercing through his skull. “You’ve been here a couple of fucking weeks, so as much as you think you’re fitting in, you don’t know how we run missions here. Nat and Marge will have cams, and Clint is our extra eyes just in case. God forbid things go south, we proceed with our emergency extraction protocols to make it look like we just happen to be the regular military rescuing hostages and not secret operatives! If they ever get brought to a secondary location, we follow their trackers through satellite and jet until the moment they go down, but by then we probably have satellite tagging on them anyways!”

Bucky knows she’s made her point and that it was premature for him to publicly question her authority. But he let his pride get away and his mouth run faster than his common sense, “You could have told us all that in the first place.”

Y/N is livid. She slowly struts towards Bucky, the people in her way slowly moving to the side like Moses parting the Red Sea. She stands far closer to Bucky than she’s comfortable with, but the quick flash of fear in Bucky’s eyes at her body language is enough to make it worth it.

“No, I didn’t,” Y/N says, eerily quiet. “Do you know why, Barnes? Because as long as you are on my fucking base, I am your Captain and I will not tolerate your blatant fucking disrespect. Your orders are to not engage unless Nat or Marge’s trackers are down, do I make myself clear Sergeant?”

Bucky gulps, “Crystal.”

Y/N smirks slightly before turning on the heel of her boot and continuing the briefing.

“Marge, Nat, you’re clear to enter the building,” Y/N says into the comm. She’s in a hotel room facing the market with Jack. While Jack is assuming another surveillance position, Y/N is seated at a desk with a laptop which monitors Marge and Nat’s video feed.

“Copy,” Marge says quietly, “We’re entering the building. We’re limiting verbal contact…now.”

“Ya know,” Jack says from his spot at the window. He has a sniper scope trained through a window of the building in case something goes wrong inside. “You didn’t have to go so hard on Barnes during briefing.”

“Yes, I did,” Y/N mumbles, attention still focused on the video feed in front of her.

Jack chuckles slightly. “He’s an Avenger,” he says, “not a SEAL. He may not know how we do things.”

“He was army,” Y/N says, sending him an annoyed glance.

“Like…90 years ago. And wasn’t the whole ‘Howling Commandos’ thing to liberate POWs and shit? Seems like a field where you would question orders to me,” he retorts.

Y/N turns to look at him with an exasperated. “Who’s fucking side are you on, anyways?” she bites back. Jack only chuckles.

Y/N returns her attention back on the screen. Though she’s trying to concentrate on the video feed, her mind wanders back to Bucky. She gnaws at her lip; Was I too hard on him? she thinks.

No, she eventually decides. But deep down, Y/N feels a sense of hurt. She liked Bucky—he was kind, a good listener, and very understanding. She didn’t let just anyone join her on her morning run. Worst of all, Y/N thought that Bucky respected her. Clearly, Y/N decided, he did not. Why else would Bucky question her authority and her orders not only in front of the world-famous Avengers, but also her own teammates?

Stop being distracted, you’re working, Y/N quickly tells herself. She takes a deep breath before glancing at her watch. Marge and Wanda have been inside the building for five minutes, meaning they have five minutes remaining before extraction.

“Status report on all teams?” Y/N asks into the comms.

Bucky barely hears her voice in his ear. He barely registers each team reporting their status. Instead, he focuses on the man sitting a few tables away from him. The man, most probably a local, is staring straight at Bucky’s face while quickly talking to someone on the phone. Bucky’s instincts begin to kick in.

In the middle of Clint’s status report, Bucky nudges Steve with his foot. “I think we’ve been made,” he says, trying not to look panicked.

Bucky watches a flash of panic flash across Steve’s eyes before he says, “What?”

Bucky turns his head slowly in the direction of the man, “The man at that table has been staring straight at me and is on a phone call like his life depended on it.”

Steve purposefully knocks a teaspoon off the table so he can bend down and properly look at the suspicious man. Sure enough, the man was talking on the phone erratically while staring in Bucky’s direction. Steve frowns and looks slightly past Bucky at another table. At that table, a woman and a man are seated, presumably on a date. The woman appears to be having the time of her life while the man, Steve notices, is giving knowing smirks to the man on the phone.

Steve sighs, “Buck, I think that guy is just jealous of the date going on at the table behind you.”

“Are you sure, because I swear—”

“Rogers, Barnes, status report?” Y/N’s voice through the comms finally cuts them off.

Steve gave Bucky a look as if telling him to drop the subject before speaking into the comms, “We’re clear—”

“Negative. We’re not clear. I think we’ve been made,” Bucky cuts him off.

“What!?” Y/N screeches into the comm, “Jack, Clint, I want eyes on Barnes and Rogers!”

“Who am I looking for?” Clint replies.

“Guy in the green tunic a couple tables down, north of the patio. He’s talking on the phone,” Bucky says, shifting in his seat slightly.

The line is silent for a few seconds before Jack says, “Barnes, I think you’re clear.”

Bucky seemingly ignores his update and asks again, “Clint, you got a visual?”

Steve gives him a confused look, as if asking him what the hell he’s doing. Bucky ignores him.

“I don’t have a visual,” Clint replies, “but I’d go with what Jack said.”

“I have a visual,” Wanda suddenly cut in. She was at a fruit stand across the street, pretending to be shopping. “You’re clear, Barnes.”

Bucky looks across the street and catches Wanda’s gaze. Can’t you read his mind or some shit and figure out if he’s made me? he thinks to her.

Wanda rolls her eyes before tapping her head twice, No.

Of course, it doesn’t work that way, Bucky thinks.

“I’m sorry but you guys can’t see the way this guy is looking at me,” he says stubbornly, “I’m taking this guy out.”

Bucky goes to stand up and Steve reaches his arm to stop him when Y/N voice rips through the comms again. “No!” she shouts and Bucky grimaces.

“If we’re made, backup is going to be here any minute now, and Marge and Nat are still in there!” Bucky hisses.

“We have intel that the people in this village aren’t aware of what’s going on in that factory, Bucky! There’s no backup that this prick can even call! And I’m not letting you kill an innocent fucking civilian,” Y/N yells back at him.

“Well fuck your intel, I’m going after this guy—”

“I am your commanding officer and you will stand down!” Y/N finally shouts, sounding more like a drill sergeant than the girl he goes on morning runs with. “That’s a fucking order, Sergeant. Do you copy Barnes?”

Bucky is silent. Instead he clenches his jaw so hard he’s afraid his teeth might shatter.

“Do you copy, Sergeant?” Y/N repeats again, eerily quiet and deadly serious.

Bucky’s nostrils flare up in anger, but he resettles himself back on the seat.

“He copies,” Steve finally says into the comm.

The rest of the mission goes off without a hitch. Bucky was wrong about the man on the phone. As Marge and Natasha exited the factory, unharmed and undetected, the man on the phone got up and in a jealous rage, stormed over to the happy couple behind him.

He tried his best to prepare himself for the berating he was going to get from Captain Y/N later, but nothing could prepare him for the treatment he was getting now.

Y/N was silent the entire flight back to the Omega compound. Instead of yelling at him like there was no tomorrow, she quietly prepared the intel to be sent over to her commander. When they landed back at the base, he got sympathetic pats from his teammates as they unloaded the Quinjet. ‘You’re in for it, Barnes’ and ‘Tell me if you make it without crying,’ the Omega team members told him seriously.

As he unloaded the last crate of equipment, Y/N briskly walked past him and said with deadly fierceness, “Command room. Now.”

After everything that happened earlier in the day, he didn’t need to be told twice.

Bucky slowly opens the metal door towards the command room and has to shut his eyes tight for a few seconds to allow his pupils to adjust to how especially dark the room was. As Bucky wandered inside, he noticed the only light source was from Y/N’s desk on the loft overlooking the rest of the command room. Her voice stops him dead in his tracks.

“Your paranoia is going to get us killed,” Y/N says, her voice echoing through the room.

“Y/N—”

“No, you don’t get to talk yet,” she cuts him off once again. He watches her silhouette stand from the desk and walk down the stairs to stop in front of him. He can barely see her face but can make out some features.

“When I was in the SEALs, I was Jack’s unit commander,” Y/N tells him, her voice getting softer, “We were in a remote fishing village off the coast of South America rescuing high profile hostages. There was a fiesta that night and the entire town gathered on the beach for a party. It was the perfect time to rescue the hostages because we were disguised by the music and the lack of civilians in town. While I was on a base somewhere, hundreds of miles away, Jack sends a panicked message to mission control over the comms. There’s a group of people close to the site where the hostages were being held. It was too dark for them to make anything out, but that group of people started shooting at them. Not close enough to hit them, but I was paranoid that they might get hit even though they were wearing full body armour. Jack asked if he had permission to engage because taking them out was against the rules of engagement for that mission—they were only supposed to shoot at adult individuals that they could clearly identify. As the commanding officer of that mission, it was my call. And I gave Jack the go ahead to take the shot.”

Y/N stops to take a shaky breath, and he swears he hears a sob. “They were just kids, Bucky, no older than fifteen. They were used by the captors as easily dispensable firepower who were just doing that to make a few extra dollars to take home to their families. We could’ve easily averted them and tied them up. But I was the one who gave them the permission to take the shot.”

Bucky reaches for her, but he can’t find her arms. He sighs, “That’s not your fault, Y/N. You know that. You were worried for the safety of your team.”

“Then why have a felt haunted by it ever since?” she cries.

Instead of gently trying to search for her arms, Bucky quickly steps forward with his arms open. Bucky rams Y/N into his chest and her arms immediately wraps themselves around his waist. Bucky holds her closely while she sobs choked tears into his chest.

A tear escapes Bucky’s eye as well before he has the heart to ask her, “Is that why you left the Navy?”

Y/N lets out an ironic scoff. “No,” she retorts, “it’s because they awarded me the Navy fucking Cross. And I know I don’t deserve it.”

“I know what I say won’t change what you’ve done and how you feel about it,” Bucky tells her honestly, “But those SEALs are alive because of you. Jack is alive because of you. They got to see their families because of you. I know we don’t trade lives or value someone’s life after another, but your orders were to first and foremost bring those SEALs home safely. And you did that.”

They stay like that for another ten minutes—Y/N burying herself into Bucky’s torso and Bucky resting his nose in the crook of her neck.

“My paranoia is what kept me safe from HYDRA,” Bucky says honestly, murmuring into her neck. “After I escaped from HYDRA, I didn’t trust anyone. I didn’t trust Steve, the rest of the Avengers, or myself. When I was in HYDRA, the longer I trusted my own fucked up brain that what I was doing was right, the more unspeakable shit I did. When I started fighting the brainwashing, I started being paranoid of everything and look where that got me? I’m alive because of it.”

“No,” she whispers, “you’re alive because you learned to how to trust again. You’re alive because you know that even though trusting is scary, it’s better than living in constant fear. You’re alive because you’ve found things that are worth trusting.”

Bucky’s speechless. He pulls away slightly, glancing down at her. He still can’t fully make out her facial features, but he can tell she’s staring at him with a sternness that reminded him of his mother.

“Do you respect me?” Y/N whispers.

“Of course,” he replies without hesitation.

“Do you trust me?” Y/N asks again.

Bucky’s voice catches in his throat. He feels his Adam’s apple bob and his heart pound against his ribcage. Yes, he wants to say so badly. But he can’t and he can’t say why, and he’s embarrassed for it.

But Y/N offers him a small, gentle smile. She reaches up in the dark to cup his face, but her hand lands on his neck instead. “You don’t have to trust me,” she tells him, “I’d like it if you could trust me, but you don’t have to. But I need you to respect me in the field and in front of our teams. I’m still your CO, Barnes. And as much as I like you, I’d really hate to have to yell at you again.”

Bucky chuckles softly, “Is that an order, Captain?”

“It is, Sergeant. Do I make myself clear?” she says in a light tone, grinning at him.

“Yes, ma’am,” Bucky replies, lazily grinning back.

FIVE: YES MA’AM

---

tags:

operation omega: @marvelsangels @1-800-schmacked

marvel: @milea @marvelsangels @thecurlsofgod @schnapped

bucky barnes: @emilielskov

#bucky barnes imagine #sebastian stan imagine #bucky barnes x reader #sebastian stan x reader #bucky barnes fic #sebastian stan fic #bucky barnes #sebastian stan #bucky barnes fanfiction #sebastian stan fanfiction #bucky barnes series #marvel imagine

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