#Side-Power Thruster

[dockingbycontrol]

Once your side power thrusters are installed, you’ll want to learn how to maintain this new equipment best and get in as much practice as you can on the water. You may be surprised to learn how quickly you can go from never having experienced these tools to piloting masterfully in a busy marina.

#side power thruster #bow thruster #boat bow thruster #thruster system #ship maneuvering

[tanoraqui]

In Which Space Orcs are Men

[AO3] A "what if humans are space orcs" take on Dagor Dagorath. (Aka the prophecied apocalypse of Middle Earth. Scifi story accessible to non-LotR nerds!)

Elves weren't really supposed to leave Earth. That's what they told us—the Elves, that is, told people thousands of years ago, when Elves could still be found here and there. When I was born, elves were nearly as much a fairy tale as they’d been on Ancient Earth.

Elves weren't supposed to leave Earth, the Elves said in the fairy tales, and in a few old scraps of records scattered around known space. They literally weren't made for it. They could only do it if they brought Earth with them—Arda they called it, leaves or dirt, water or a rare bubble of air, perfectly preserved in a white crystal. There are tons of tales about Elves losing their lifeline jewels—their hearts, their silimirs—and roping people into epic quests to get them back before they—the Elf—faded to nothingness. 

Even the jewels weren't enough, though. That's why there are also stories about Elves who fell in love with a person or a place and stayed there until they faded, or Elves who charmed someone into following them back to Fairyland on Earth...because whatever they said, Elves didn't really live on Earth. Humans have maintained their home planet as a monitored nature reserve since like the 40th century, open only to vetted research teams and serious Human religious pilgrimages. The most confirmed accounts of Elves that exist are of their ships appearing out of nowhere, with no trace of any tech that would enable it, at random, always-changing points within 100 miles or so of Earth.

Nobody ever came back from trying to follow Elves home. Mostly Elves tried to dissuade people from trying. But there are always crazy and curious people—and Elves usually attracted those, because any Elf who left the home they were "made" for was usually crazy and curious themselves. 

Those were the stories I grew up with. There was a cave near the orphans' creche which was supposed to be haunted by a faded Elf. I didn't really believe it—like I said, the last confirmed Elf was last seen like 5,000 years ago, and not even on my planet. People have met two dozen new sentient races since then. We've discovered that reincarnation is probably real (just functionally untrackable), prompting the Pan-Religious Reform Wars. The last person to see a live Elf was still traveling via natural wormholes—they literally didn't know that you could loop pi.

.

When the Human natal sun started to turn really red, it wasn’t that big a deal at first. It’s a very important, very sad event for any species, but it happens to everyone eventually. It happened to the Hectort just after we invented interstellar flight. There were some unusual gravatic waves around Earth’s Sol, but nothing worth noting to anyone who didn’t already care for personal reasons.

Then the Elves sent us a message.

The local Parks Service picked it up, of course. I bet the Humans meant to hush it up at first—though the Centaurian government still won’t admit anything—but someone leaked it immediately on the intergalactic net. It should’ve only been famous as a joke of a hoax, but…

It was basically just a metal box with rudimentary fire-thrusters soldered on the sides. It contained two things. The first was a recording/replaying device so antiquated that the only way they got it working is that it was already playing on loop, and didn’t stop until someone disconnected it from its power source.

The message was in Ancient Bouban, which some folklorist soon announced is the latest language an Elf could know, since the last known Elf went back to “Arda.” The voice somehow sounded melodic to every species with a concept of music, from the screeching Vesarians to the deep-sea sub-sonic Thinkers, even when translated through cheap, staticky speakers. And to most species, the speaker was audibly distraught.

They said,

This is the final message from the Firstborn of Eru to the Secondborn, and everyone else. The Battle of Battles has come, and we…are losing. If there are any who remember the ancient love and loyalty which bound our peoples, if there are any heirs remaining of Thargalax the Magnificent, of Nine-Fingered Frodo, of the noble Houses of Haleth, Hador and Beor—

The speaker drew a sharp breath, there.

—by great oaths and greater friendship I bid you now to raise your swords and ride to our aid. Ride as swiftly as you can!

We will hold for another year. We will, they said determinedly. After that, it is unlikely that…

Another, shakier breath. A smile forced into a voice which would rather weep.

Fëanáro and Nienna believe there is a way to destroy the Straight Road. If we must, if it comes to it, we will do so, and trap the First Enemy here in this dying world with us. Though I don’t know about—

Hair-aristocrat! a more distant, slightly less perfectly melodious voice called, in a language so dead that they needed computers to decode it. The walls are falling, we need to go!

If you never hear from us again, and no sudden discord arises among you, you will know we succeeded, the first speaker said quickly. If otherwise…I am sorry. Either way, I bid you all only, remember us! Oh beautiful flames, remember us, as we have ever remembered y— 

There was a sudden screech of tearing metal, a defiant, musical battle-cry, and a jarring silence. Then the message restarted.

And that wasn’t even the strangest thing in the box. The strangest thing was the recorder’s power source, which was powering the whole tiny rocket mechanism as well. It was an Elf-jewel right out of a fairy tale, a fist-sized, translucent not-quite-diamond—but instead of rock or water or a much-loved scrap of plant, the only thing it held was light.

...Kind of. It isn’t normal light. It arguably isn’t light at all, as we know it—scientists now think it’s technically some sort of plasmoid aether, except it only acts like a plasmoid aether about half the time. 

It has no detectable source within the jewel. It fully illuminates whatever space it’s in, no matter how big. Its visible radiation is a frequency, the scientists say, that matches a hyper-accelerated version of what the universe must’ve sounded like in the split second after the Big Bang.

It makes people remember things, when they see it in person or sometimes even across a holo. Some remember a similar light in a strange traveler’s eyes. Others, dreamily enchanted valleys where spring never faded, or tall castles, bright swords, and stern and glorious lords and ladies. And some of us got hit with a whole lifetime of memories in one go: an identical gem on the brow of a sober forest king, friends who slipped through trees like shadows save for their merry laughter, an impossibly beautiful gold-haired maiden dancing in a glittering cavern...

(And all the pain and loss that came with them.)

And some people just remember the sight of a distant star—in another world, in another lifetime.

Reincarnation was provable but untraceable…until now. 

The Thinker ambassador on Astrolax Station 5 was the first to kick up a fuss. Most Thinkers never leave their home planet, they're too huge and aquatic. But like I said, there's always crazy and curious people. The ambassador started bellowing the second che heard the message, without even seeing the light, because, "I know him! My Wisdom! We must send aid!" That made some news, and random other people shared their own, less dramatic revelations, and soon a compilation swept the net with timestamps showing that most of them were organically independent, not just jumping on the bandwagon….

Even that might've gotten written off intergalactically. The Thinkers are big in reincarnationist circles, on account of how they claim that deep in their planetary ocean they can hear echoes of their past lives. But being mostly planet-bound means they're not really influential on a big political level. Or it would've sparked another surge of the Reform Wars, and everybody would've remembered the rock, but not the recording. Or there would’ve been a fight over this potentially infinite energy source (though that is so last giga-annum)….

But first it was shown in person to the current Director of the Admiralty of the Astral Alliance, President of the X-ee Empire and Matron of the House of S,sh, Ch’ees/i’i S,sh. I was actually there—I was Captain of her ceremonial Alliance guards, in a last-ditch attempt to salvage my career after Zanzibus. Very ceremonial, considering the X-eee have laser-proof shells and pincers and I have, what, opposable thumbs? Vestigial tusks?

I wasn’t paying attention at first, too busy being suddenly assaulted by all my own memories. So I missed the President freezing mid-step and gasping (in X-eee), “Mother.” I also missed her rising alarm call of an attempt to speak Ancient Elvish without an Elvish tongue or lips.

I sure didn’t miss her snap back to X-eee for a sharp call to attention, and everything that followed: the call to arms! The rousing of the Alliance! A tour of the galaxy, to find anyone and everyone else in whom the Light could awaken ancient memories! And for the love of X'eeh, why had nobody figured out how to get back to Fairyland with this thing yet, and every warship in the quadrant?!

If I believed in the One Behind, or in any other creator god or gods—I'm not saying I do, but if I did, if there really is something out there all-powerful and all-kind—then it'd be because out of every soul in the entire universe, the probably one in the best position to act on the Elves' message turned out to have, from a past life, two parents and a much-loved twin still in Fairyland. Like, that's insane, right?

I stayed with the Director's ceremonial guards for the whole tour, actually more than ceremonial for once—it was the weirdest mission of my life, and I've been on a lot of weird missions. Or supposedly routine missions that got weird (and usually disastrous). My friends joke that I'm cursed. S,sh requisitioned an Inquiry-class ship, so the science boffins could study the Light and jewel along the way, and we started wormholing at weft speed, hitting a new planet every week. Sometimes every day. In each major spaceport and ground-city, S,sh stood with the jewel on the highest available point and gave a recruitment speech for going to save the Elves and fight the oldest enemy of all reality. 

Honestly, it seemed a little redundant? The Astral Alliance was made for this sort of rescue mission (and for escorting trade convoys). But I was...if not happy, then sure as hell more self-certain with my ancient memories restored, and most people who joined up seemed to agree. It was mostly people who remembered, when exposed to the Light, who joined—so before long, we had a whole tag-along trail of mostly civilian ships, trying to get up to Alliance Fleet standard on the road in less than a year.

Three different religious sects tried to kill S,sh for "profaning the mysteries." Five others tried to steal the jewel because we were apparently appropriating a holy object. The boffins announced that, bar the can't-prove-a-negative possibility, the evidently sourceless Light should be counted as an infinite energy source, and at least seven different groups, ruthless financiers and sustainability idealists, immediately tried to steal it for that. And I still don't know what the rival thief-queens of Likkiliani were about, except that I got tied up upside-down from a palmdar tree for two hours trying to stop one, the other paid me 700 cron then threw me off a cliff, and in the end they recognized each other from past lives and just made out on worldwide live-holo before joining our growing fleet. 

It turned out they were the Director's past life's great-grandparents, and a Canid pop princess was her niece. The Thinker ambassador was some sort of ancestor, too. Crazy extended family. 

Most people who remember just remember the sight of a star in the sky. A buddy of mine from Fleet Academy remembered looking up at it as a Human sailor. The historians—and you’d better bet we picked up some Earther historians on this mission as well!—say this jewel or one like it was probably astrologically conflated with the planet Venus by early Humans.

(The more time I spent around the jewel, the Silmaril, the more I remembered, of my first life and more. Lifetime after lifetime with bad luck dogging my steps, killing loved ones in my arms, destroying cities I was supposed to save… One restless, haunted night, I met a Rigilic in the cafeteria who’d been awake with some of the same nightmares, who’d been my dead older sister once.)

The tour was cut short when word came from the Earth system that there was a black hole growing in the center of their reddening sun. 

No, the sun wasn’t compressing into a black hole millennia ahead of schedule—one had just spontaneously manifested within it, like it’d teleported in. No, not literally—that was impossible. We were pretty sure. No, the sun wasn’t falling into it…somehow. Yet. The black hole was only 17 quectometers wide, but it was growing at an erratic but unceasing rate. If their best estimation of the pattern held, it would consume the sun 2 months before the Elves’ deadline, and the Earth 4 to 950 minutes later.

We pulled back to Earth—well, to the dwarf planet Eros, on the edges of Earth’s star system. That’s where the nearest shipyard of any note was, and we were gathering the whole Astral Alliance. This is exactly the sort of thing the Alliance is for. 

I was released back to ship duty. Zanzibus was still a black mark on my record, as was Jorab, and really everything on the AAS Endeavor…and that thing in third year of Fleet Academy… But no matter how bad my curse, I was an experienced captain and one of the best pilots in the Alliance. For this, we needed all the best.

The boffins had pretty quickly mastered limited manipulation of the Light, using modified aetheric resonators, and every day they came up with something new for us to test. They focused the Light into a laser cannon like no one has seen before. They laced it through plasma shields until a fully shielded ship glowed like a distant star. They managed to nearly replicate the Silmaril’s crystalline structure, so they could make “copies” that shone like the original for first a few hours; then, with refinement, a full week…

The one thing they couldn’t pin down with any real confidence was how to get to Fairyland. The frequency of the Light resonated with large bodies of Earther saltwater in a particular way, and models suggested that if the Light source moved horizontally along the water within a certain range of distance and velocity, the resonance would create a wormhole-like ripple in space—but wormhole-like, was the key word, and models suggested. The closest anyone had seen to that spatial distortion was in a logbook of dubious veracity from the Delta Quadrant, four hundred years ago. Alteia, my Academy buddy who’d been a Human sailor, took the Silmaril in an M-wing on a series of highly monitored test flights above the Atlantic Ocean, and space did repeatedly start to hollow in front of bom—so bo had to stop every time, rather than risk vanishing with our single, maybe-one-way ticket.

Then Earth’s moon stopped shining in the sky. Its albedo just dropped nearly to zero, from one night to the next. There was nothing wrong that anyone could figure out—nothing with the orbit, nothing with the surface rock, nothing with the artificial atmosphere. Inhabitants reported feeling colder by several degrees, but no measuring equipment recorded anything.

The black hole slightly off-center in the middle of Sol was now 844.9 zeptometers, and growing more steadily.

We didn’t have time to keep testing. We needed to raise our swords and make our ride, even if we only got one shot at it.

I was given command, for seniority, skill, and because I was the one who managed to talk S,sh out of leading the fleet herself. (If my lives had taught me anything, it was the importance of having someone, anyone, ready to be emergency backup.) Ironically, I was back on the Endeavor, with most of my old crew—though we got permission to rename the ship, in honor of the mission. A lot of people did. Alteia was now commanding the AAS Elendil on my right flank, star-friend in Ancient Elvish. That Canid pop princess had taken over a hospital ship and renamed it Rivendell. An Earth Park Ranger, of all things, remembered being my dad—briefly—and he was leading the Rangers plus my Rigilic drinking buddy on the EPSS Elfsheen. 

We weren’t sure if any ship but the one with the Silmaril would get through. The fleet numbered in the hundreds in battleships alone, not counting scouts and scuttlers. Twelve races had sent ships on top of their typical Alliance Fleet tithe, and S,sh had brought about half the full force of the X-ee Empire. We all just locked tractor beams and hoped. 

I was piloting as well as captaining, with the Silmaril between my forehorns. It was held in place by about a dozen wires and other connectors to the ship, like an old-timey pilot’s headset. We took off in orbit around Earth, as close as possible to the surface—not very close, in warships of Class S and higher, but within range of the oceanic resonance. A Likkilianian thief-queen stood at my shoulder, ready to advise if anything “Musical” started to happen.

Think about what you’re trying to get to, and why, the boffins had advised, so I did—bright-eyed kings and dancing maidens; lost friends, families, cities, planets and all. The jewel got warmer against my skin and shone brighter with every pulse of the engine, brighter than we should’ve been able to see through.

The silver-gold Light twisted and diffused as space did around us. But there was no familiar rippling wormhole boundary—instead, spacetime thinned to a curtain like driving rain, like Vesarian silver-glass.

A ghost appeared next to me. She looked like the oldest, grumpiest writing teacher at the crèche, though I knew that was only in my head.

“There you are,” she said, impatient and relieved like I’d been hiding in the sandbox again, rather than coming to class on time. Her sewing scissors went snip snip snip as she darted them around my body—and a chain on my soul faded into guiding threads.

Before she’d even disappeared again, I punched the engine and blasted through the silver-glass curtain.

Fairy tales said there’d be a peerlessly beautiful land on the other side, green with eternal spring, full of endless light and laughter. They said there’d be sunlit shores and shimmering waves, with welcoming docks for sea-ships, sky-ships and space-ships all…

We flew into the worst battlefield I’d ever seen, in any lifetime. It was more desperately vicious than Jerusalem V at the height of the Reform Wars, more ruined than Glaurung’s wake, more desolate than Zanzibus after the nuclears fell.

Either a massive supercontinent or a small moon had been shattered, leaving nothing but a roiling debris field. The brand-new meteoroids ranged from pebbles to rocks the size of a small space station, and included space-frozen corpses, forests, and what might have once been city blocks.

I gave the helm back to my Pilot Officer—zer had, I can admit, slightly better reflexes for dodging debris—and focused on captaining.

Most of the life signs were clinging to the larger rocks. There shouldn’t have been atmosphere for them, but walls of thunderstorm wrapped around every shard with even a single life sign—wind and water desperately hand in hand to safeguard the last of the Elves. The only thing visible through the impossible storms was the Light of a second Silmaril, on a meteoroid shaped like half a broken eggshell.

A corpse lay at the epicenter of the explosion—what might’ve been a corpse, if it wasn’t also shattered. The broken pieces of a massive stone humanoid, taller than my ship if it’d stood beside her, still bleeding lava so hot that it burned even in frozen space. Another titan knelt at the shards of its head, a figure of towering bark and leaves, wailing with grief even worse than the end of the world. 

A slimmer tree-woman stood with one hand on her shoulder, comforting, and the other wielding a skyscraper-sized club spiked with incandescent wildflowers. Guarding her sister’s heartbreak, she fended off a swarm of bat-sized monsters with wings of darkness and whips of flame. 

Bat-sized relative to the gods of Elves and ancient Humans. About the size of an M-wing, in flight.

Countless more of the bat-things flung themselves at the storm-bubbles, like carnivores chasing the prey hidden inside. They were fended off by an equal army of creatures with wings of light and swords of lightning, led by a towering figure who seemed to dance from one bloody battle to the next.

The biggest battle by far was the farthest away, over where the sun had been. In this dimension of stories over science, Sol was another woman-shape, smaller than the others but burning just as brightly as her star. Also just as blood-red. The light was centered on a fist she kept clenched at her chest, and instead of containing the black hole, the unseeable thing that it was here surrounded her, striking at her with a thousand hungry jaws and grasping legs, and she had only a one-handed whip of a solar flare to fend it off—

But she didn’t fight alone. A warrior tore at the Darkness’s spidery limbs with his fists, image on the cameras flickering impossibly between every hero I’d ever heard of. A snarling figure bit at it with jagged teeth, gored it with horns, shredded it with claws and talons, and generally made every ancient prey-instinct in me scream. And a queen with a crown of stars, a shield like the night sky and a sword like a streaking comet, stood dauntlessly at the sun-holder’s side. 

With all that, and with the speed of even her most exhausted strikes, I thought the sun-holder could probably have gotten away if she’d tried. But I knew how a person fought when they weren’t willing to leave a friend, and a smaller, silver figure lay at her feet, unmoving and drained of light.

But even the battle for the sun wasn’t what grabbed my eye. No—all my attention, all my guiding threads of fate and the quick temper that always used to get me in trouble, before (and sometimes after) I learned to leash it in an Alliance uniform— All of that took me straight to the fight happening orthogonal to the stone giant’s corpse.

It was another one-versus-many. Morgoth, the First Enemy of Elves and Men— Master of Lies, Maker of Chains, Sonofabitch Curser of Bloodlines—towered over even his fellow gods. His shape changed constantly, sickeningly, but it was always black-armored with eyes like dying stars that hated you personally. His maul dripped with lava and every other kind of blood.

He fought against three great gray figures who moved as one. The tallest wielded a star-studded scythe with swift, efficient strokes, and wore the dark gray of corpse-shrouds. The shortest shimmered with more colors than even a Stamotapadon could dream of, and his weapon shifted likewise. The third was the clear, clean gray of skies after rain or tears run dry, and fought with only a shield—and hit harder with it than either of her brothers.

Around their heads darted the only Elves on the battlefield, in small fliers more like sea-ships than aircraft. But they moved fluidly, pestering the Dark Lord like flies, pricking his skin and threatening his burning eyes.

Until Morgoth swung his maul with a roar of fury that traveled even though soundless space. My ship and heart both shuddered. The gray gods all staggered back, and the Elves fell from the no-longer-sky—all but their leader, more fire than flesh, who wore the third Silmaril. Morgoth caught him in one massive black hand and with sharp claws plucked the jewel away, as easily as a ripe berry from a tree—

“All power to fore-cannon and fire,” I ordered—and the jewel on my brow shone bright again as several stored months’ worth of infinite Silmaril-Light slammed into Morgoth’s chest with all the force that the best scientists in the Astral Alliance could engineer. 

He stumbled. He dropped both the jewel and the elf-king (who’d been trying to bite him). The Lady of Mercy tossed her shield to catch them, staying low and out of sight—though she needn’t have bothered. The so-called “Lord of All” had already found his next enemy.

“All ships, move forward and join shields,” I ordered, and met his burning stare though the viewscreen. “Then broadcast me on all external frequencies.”

The wires on my forehead shimmered as we shifted Light-flow to the shields—and to my right, so did the Elendil, and to my left, the Cosmian Blade, and all around us the Minas Tirith, the Elfsheen, the Muse, the Rivendell, the Heart of Zanzi, the Longbottom Leaf… They were still soaring out of the silvery distortion behind me, tractor- and Silmaril-towed: sleek Rigilic eels-of-prey and Centaurian cruisers full of Humans eager to fight for their homeworld, Betan mine-ships and Canid X-M-wings and my own Hectoan starlighters, a full third of the X-ee navy with their X-eee–shaped six-engine dreadnoughts, and hundreds more. 

“This is Captain Pel Cinia, once Túrin Turambar, of the Astral Alliance ship Gurthang,” I said. My words were broadcast from every ship on every frequency in every language that the people of Arda might know, as the Fleet assembled from forty-plus different worlds flew into position. Our Light-infused shields blazed and locked together, until we formed a seamless wall right in the Enemy’s face, with the Elves and their other allies safely behind us.

I’ve never felt more proud to recite the most cliché line in the Fleet:

“We got your distress call. We’re here to help.”

#the silmarillion #science fiction #humans are space orcs #fanfiction #my fic #dagor dagorath #not tagging characters bc spoilers (they're listed at the end of the ao3 though)

[ecoamerica]

Watch the American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 now: https://youtu.be/bWiW4Rp8vF0?feature=shared

The American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 broadcast recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by active climate leaders. Watch to find out which finalist received the $50,000 grand prize! Hosted by Vanessa Hauc and featuring Bill McKibben and Katharine Hayhoe!

#ACLA24 #ACLA24Leaders #youtube #youtube video #climate leaders #climate solutions #climate action #climate and environment #climate #climate change #climate and health #climate blog #climate justice #climate news #weather and climate #environmental news #environment #environmental awareness #environment and health #environmental #environmental issues #environmental justice #environment protection #environmental health #Youtube

[webslinger-holland]

Best Pilot in the Galaxy | Tech from The Bad Batch

Summary: During a mission, Tech has a hard time allowing his ship to be driven by someone else.

Warning: slight angst and argument

Pairing: Tech x Fem!Reader Pilot

Type: Oneshot

The Marauder was sitting on a world in the Outer Rim called Cassander. It was a lush, green planet with a few major bodies of water. However, most notably, the planet was growing in population and had recently become Ord Mantell's most competitive trading rival.

The ship was nearly empty, except for a singular pilot sitting in the cockpit. She was not the rightful owner of the ship, but had been assigned this mission with the group of rouge clones that did own the ship. The squad was located somewhere in the capital city nearby, attempting to steal the package in which they had come for. The pilot waited patiently for the pickup call.

Now, the pilot had been waiting for nearly two hours for the call to come through the comms. She did everything she could think of to pass the time, which included rummaging through the squad's belongings. Though she didn't find anything of value.

The gonk droid made a noise as he waddled into the cockpit. The pilot went through the ship's log, seeing all the planets the squad had recently visited. Their last stop happened to be Ord Mantell where they were assigned this mission in particular.

"Y/n! Come in," Hunter's voice sounded desperate over the comms. She quickly jolted forward in her seat, pressing the button to relay a message back.

"Read you loud and clear," Y/n responded. She began clicking buttons on the control panel, preparing the ship for liftoff.

"We need a pick up. We've been compromised," Hunter explained. He was panting on the other end of the line, which probably meant they were running.

"What part of stealth mission is so hard to understand?"

"Just hurry. We don't have a lot of time. They're sending air support," Hunter warned her.

"Oh great," Y/n scoffed sarcastically.

"I'm sending you our coordinates," Tech interjected over the communications.

As the Marauder departed off the ground, the landing gear retracted back into the ship. The wings moved downwards as the ship was angled towards the sky. The engine roared to life; the ship began flying towards the rendezvous location.

The workers from the trading post were shooting their blasters at the criminals running away from them. They tried to keep up with them, firing relentlessly as they got away with some of their own goods.

It was Wrecker, Hunter, and Tech who were carrying the heavy cargo in the form of a shipping container. Normally, it would take four guys to carry the cargo, but since Wrecker was so strong, he was able to carry the left side without help. Behind them, Echo and Omega fired shots back at the workers. They covered them as the rest ran as fast as they could.

"Whatever is in here, it better be worth it." Wrecker grunted, dodging the blaster fire.

"As long as we get paid," Hunter responded.

The small squad continued running through the vast forest, maneuvering around trees in hopes of using its coverage to their advantage. They came into a clearing with the workers getting closer each second. All of the sudden, a cliff came into their view which caused them to halt in their place.

"Where's our ride?" Echo asked desperately. He peered around his shoulder with his gun still raised.

"There!" Omega pointed into the sky.

The Marauder rounded the corner of the mountain, coming into their line of view. It flew over to the edge of the cliff to meet them. The ramp lowered to hover right by the cliff, allowing the squad to climb aboard the vessel.

The blaster fire was beginning to hit the sides of the ship. The squad fired back, striking a few of the workers down. Once everyone was aboard, Hunter slammed the button on the side of the wall so the ramp was lifted.

"That's everyone," Hunter shouted. "Get us out of here!"

"Roger that," Y/n said.

Pulling a lever, the thrusters sent a powerful volt back which propelled the ship forward rapidly. By steering the ship, Y/n directed the ship back into the mountain range. She could hear the air support coming up behind them. She took a sharp turn to deter them.

The sharp turn caused each member of the squad to loose their footing and grab something nearby to steady themselves. Carefully, Tech quickly made his way into the cockpit. He leaned over the back of the pilot's seat, resting his hand on the panel for support. He hadn't taken the time to remove his helmet.

"That is sufficient," Tech announced to the pilot. "I'll take it from here."

"A little busy here," Y/n stated instead. She turned the wheel to the left, taking another sharp turn which made everything in the ship turn that way. And Tech ended up leaning a little into her.

"Wrecker," Tech ordered. He moved to sit in the co-pilot seat which was where Echo usually sat. "Get to the tail gun."

There were at least six smaller ships following them at this point, firing as many rounds as possible. The Marauder swayed to the left and right, expertly dodging each blast aimed at them. In the tail gun, Wrecker got into position before firing back at the ships. He managed to hit one of them, but it wasn't enough to bring the ship down.

Back in the cockpit, Tech began pressing a few buttons on the control panel. The pilot glared at him through the corner of her eye, knowing exactly what he was trying to do. She maintained her grip on the sides of the wheel.

"Transitioning controls back to co-pilot," Tech announced. He went to press the final red button, but she swatted his hand away. "What are you doing?" Tech demanded an explanation.

"I know how to fly," Y/n said through gritted teeth. Her eyes were still facing forward as she focused on the task at hand.

"I never said you didn't," Tech informed her. "I am simply stating that I am ready to transition controls back to me as I am more capable of flying this vessel than you. It is my ship after all," Tech said as a matter of factly.

Hunter rolled his eyes in the background. He knew it was pointless to argue over the comment.

"You weren't hired to be the pilot for this mission," Y/n argued back. "I can get us out of this."

With that comment, one of the blaster fires struck the right wing which caused it to catch on fire. The two of them peered out the window, spotting the trail of black smoke falling behind the hit.

"You were saying?" Tech replied. He gestured to the damage done to his ship. She rolled her eyes at him.

A few more ships began trailing behind them. They began firing more shots towards them. There was no way one ship could take the whole fleet down.

"Uh guys," Wrecker announced from the tail gun. "We've got more incoming."

Ignoring the comment, Tech quickly transitioned controls back to his wheel before the other pilot could protest. He gripped the wheel harshly, moving the wheel to take a sharp left hand turn. The ship was forced to swerve around the side of the mountain; a few of the enemy ships crashed into the sides as a result. She switched controls back to her wheel, taking a right hand turn. The ship weaved around another mountainside.

Behind the googles of his helmet, Tech squinted his eyes in slight irritation. He changed controls once again. He quickly grabbed onto the lever, pulling it backwards so the thrusters gave another jolt of energy. Now they were flying a little faster.

Nevertheless, another blaster hit managed to strike the back of the ship. The Marauder jolted forward from the force of the blast. The two pilots lurched forward in their seats. The others continued to hold onto things for support.

"You aren't doing much better," Y/n replied snakily. She reached forward to press the button once more. She turned the wheel as far as she could, which caused the ship to completely turn around. She pulled the lever for the extra push.

"What are you doing?" Tech exclaimed. "Are you trying to get us killed?"

Down in the tail gun, Wrecker began firing at the ships flying directly in front of them. With his expertise, he struck down three ships. Those ships exploded into a million pieces, fierce flames erupting around them. The Marauder flew through the fire without taking damage.

The enemy ships needed to turn around before continuing their chase. They quickly swerved their ships. Once the ships were facing the right way, the thrusters kicked in for that extra power. And the enemy continued their pursuit.

"I will only say this one more time," Tech's modulated voice spoke through his helmet. He turned to face her in his seat. His eyes looked angry behind his googles. "Relinquish controls now."

"Over my dead body," Y/n challenged him. She didn't take her eyes off him.

In the background, Hunter and Echo seemed to raise their eyebrows at the two pilots. They looked between them, half expecting one of them to cave in and go back to flying the ship. But neither of them faltered.

"Uh guys," Omega interrupted them.

Both of them directed their line of attention back towards flying the ship. With a quick maneuver, they managed to dodge the mountain they were heading straight for at the last second. A few more ships crashed into it.

"You're both going to get us all killed if you don't figure something out," Hunter shouted behind them.

Reaching forward, Y/n went to press a few more buttons, but Tech swatted her hand away this time. He went ahead and pressed his own buttons. He was punching in the coordinates for their destination.

"You are not the best pilot in the galaxy," Y/n claimed. She glanced at him through the corner of her eye. He kept putting in the coordinates.

"Hardly a measurable cause," Tech said with a roll of his eyes in annoyance.

"You haven't made the Kessel Run in fourteen parsecs," Y/n added. It was like she was insisting that it could be measurable.

"I have a theory that it can be done in twelve," Tech stated as a matter of factly.

"I highly doubt that," Y/n chuckled at the comment.

Suddenly, Y/n pressed the wheel forward with all of her might. The ship began to descend down at a rapid pace, shifting into a nose dive position. The ground was growing closer and closer with each second. The enemy ships following right behind them, firing non-stop.

Both Hunter and Echo were holding onto panels behind them. The force of falling forwards was pushing them back. They were unable to move.

"You have to pull up--" Tech ordered in a slight panic.

"Oh for the last time," Y/n shouted over him. "I know what I'm doing!"

At the last possible second, the wonderfully skilled pilot pulled the wheel into her chest so that the ship was pulled up. It was so close to touching the ground, but it missed it by a hair. The last two ships crashed into the ground, exploding suddenly and sending debris flying.

Now that the threat of the chase was finally over, Y/n could relax in her seat a little. The rest of the squad was completely silent, realizing that she had managed to get them out of the situation with little damage in the end. Beside her, Tech kept his eye on her since he was still angry with her.

The Marauder started to climb in altitude, shifting towards the edge of the planet's atmosphere. It finally passed through the atmosphere, flying through space. The stars throughout the galaxy sparkled as the planet grew small and smaller. It was now all behind them.

"Are the coordinates to Ord Mantell in?" Y/n wondered. Her voice was so much calmer now. Her shoulders slumped at her sides. But she refused to make eye contact.

"Yes. They are in," Tech informed her softly. His eyes softened behind his helmet. He studied her carefully, trying to figure out what she was thinking in that brain of hers. He quickly shook it off, directing his attention back towards the void of space in front of them.

Without thinking, Tech and Y/n went to reach for the lever to send them into hyperspace. Their hands grazed each other's with neither of them being any closer to the lever than the other. They both awkwardly pulled their hands away upon contact.

"I'm sorry," Y/n muttered under her breath.

He wasn't sure if she was apologizing for the situation they just came out of or the situation that just occurred with the lever. Nevertheless, she reached for the lever once again, pulling it back to send the ship into hyperspace.

Back at Ord Mantell, the Bad Batch went back to Cid's Parlor. They stood on the other side of her desk, having just delivered the cargo that she paid them to retrieve. She peered into the package, checking to make sure everything was there.

Behind the group, Y/n stood there in total silence. Her eyes were trained on the floor as she shifted in her place awkwardly. She waited for their boss to address them.

Beside her, Tech stood about an arm's length away. He glanced at her through the corner of his eye, taking note of her odd demeanor. He raised his finger and opened his mouth to say something to her, but he was rudely cut off.

"Looks like everything is here," Cid announced. She closed the cargo container. She began rummaging through her drawers, collecting the correct amount of credits to pay both parties.

Now Y/n went to take a few steps forward and made her way through the members of the squad. She stood in front of the desk. Her boss went ahead and placed a handful of credits in her hand.

"That is your cut," Cid told her. She handed the rest of the credits to Hunter. "And here is your cut. I'll call you when I have another job," Cid claimed.

There was a brief moment of silence in the room. Cid went to cross her arms over her chest. She narrowed her eyes at the company of six standing in front of her.

"You guys work well together," Cid said honestly. "You should work together more often."

In response, Y/n breathed a scoff under her breath. The boys turned their heads to look at her, slightly surprised at her reaction. She shook her head in denial.

"Yeah. Like that's ever going to happen," Y/n rolled her eyes at the notion.

Without hesitation, she spun around on the heels of her feet in order to head towards the door. She purposely bumped into Tech's shoulder a little too harshly. She left the room with the door closing behind her.

"What's wrong with her?" Cid scoffed. She looked at the rest of the squad for some form of explanation, but none of them said anything. "Fine! Be all quiet and mysterious. See if I care," Cid said.

By the time the Bad Batch left Cid's office, Y/n was nowhere to be found in the bar. They went to sit down at the bar so they could order drinks to celebrate another successful mission. They sat in complete silence, thinking about what transpired during the mission.

"Where do you think she's gone?" Echo wondered.

Though they never pulled missions together, the Bad Batch knew that the pilot worked for Cid and was stationed at Ord Mantell. They had seen her quite often over the past few months. They had grown familiar of her. And now they worried about her.

"The odds are that she returned to her flat," Tech explained. He pushed the bridge of his googles up to be more secure on his face. He kept his focus on his data pad.

"Probably," Hunter shrugged his shoulders. "But it's late. Which means it's dark out."

"Astute observation," Tech claimed sarcastically. He gave a single nod, but didn't take his eyes off his data pad.

"And she's walking back to her flat...at the edge of town...late at night," Hunter further explained.

"She will be fine," Tech stated. He knew where he was going with this. "She is always saying how she can take care of herself and doesn't need our help. Why would that change now?"

The other members remained silent. They turned their heads to take quick glances at one another. With a silent agreement, Hunter rose to his feet and went to stand by Tech. He roughly grabbed his shoulders and hoisted him out of his seat, much to his dismay.

"Go find her. Make sure she gets home safe. And apologize to her," Hunter ordered.

"I do not see why I have to be the one to apologize when I did noth--" Tech began. He was quickly cut off.

"Tech," Hunter said in a warning tone of voice. He crossed his arms over his chest, showing that he meant business.

"Fine," Tech said in defeat. "I will apologize."

With some hesitation, Tech grabbed his helmet and fitted it over his head. He began making his way towards the door of the parlor, leaving the rest of his crew behind. He walked through the deserted streets of Ord Mantell, passing a few shady people in the process.

Now Tech knew that she lived near the edge of town because she had once mentioned it during a conversation. Besides that, Tech really didn't know where to look and simply hoped he'd bump into her before she got home so he'd know she was safe. He passed by a few alleys, peeking through each one briefly.

The Marauder was parked in a hanger bay only a few blocks away from the parlor. Just as Tech passed by the hanger, he heard a familiar voice coming from his very own ship. He backtracked by taking two steps backwards. He peered into the hangar bay to glance at his ship.

Stepping into the bay, Tech tilted his head to the side in slight curiosity. The right wing of the ship began to move downwards until it lay completely horizontal. A few seconds later, Y/n began descending down the ramp with a toolbox in hand. She walked over to the wing of the ship.

Upon seeing her, Tech sharply inhaled. He felt the back of his throat close up and his shoulders tensed at his sides. He hesitantly took a few steps forward, fiddling with his fingers nervously.

Reaching upwards, Y/n placed the single toolbox onto the flat surface of the ship's wing. She proceeded to grab onto the wing before hoisting herself up onto it. She climbed to the center of the wing to assess the damage inflicted in the crossfire.

At this point, Y/n had no idea that he was also in the hanger bay with her. She opened the toolbox, rummaging through to find the right tool. The damage done to the right wing was a massive gaping hole with burnt edges from the fire. It would eventually need a panel welded to cover it up again. But for now, she focused on the internal repairs.

Thankfully, from the assessment, nothing major had been hit. A few bolts had gotten loose and a few parts needed to be replaced. She focused on that for now.

After grabbing a socket spanner, Y/n leaned down to place her arm into the gaping hole of the wing. It went so far down that her chest was practically pressed against the surface of the wing. She used the spanner to tighten some bolts.

"What...are you doing?" Tech decided to finally announce his presence. He stepped forward until he stood in the light coming from the opening of the hanger bay.

Upon hearing that familiar voice, Y/n only rolled her eyes to herself. She continued her work as she preferred to focus on repairs rather than on him. She grunted softly, making sure that first bolt was nice and tight.

"What do you want Tech?" Y/n wondered. She pulled her arm out of the hole to assess her work. She didn't even bother to glance towards him, knowing he would have sent her a look of disapproval for working on his ship.

Slowly, Tech began to lower his gaze to the floor. He contemplated his next words carefully, fighting the urge to lash out at her for meddling with his ship. He liked things to be a certain way and would have much preferred if he did the actual repairs. Now Tech didn't want to fight with her so he changed his approach.

"I analyzed that you left the parlor on your own and thought it would be better if I accompany you back home," Tech explained. She huffed at his answer.

"I've told you before," Y/n began. "I can--"

"Take care of yourself," Tech finished. He adjusted the lenses of his goggles though he still wore his helmet. He noticed how she fell silent. "Yes, I've gathered that much."

"Why are you really out here?" Y/n wondered. She went to lean down again in order to tighten more bolts.

"I...could ask you the same," Tech replied slowly. He honestly felt like this was the first civil conversation they had ever had.

"I wanted to make some repairs on your precious ship since it was apparently my fault," Y/n claimed. Her tone sounding a little harsher now. She tightened two more bolts in the process.

"That is not what I meant," Tech interjected. He took a step forward. He gazed up at her figure perched on the wing, attempting to reason with her. "I was...caught up in the moment. Shouldn't have said those things," Tech confessed quietly.

"Well, don't worry. As soon as I finish up these repairs, I'll leave and you'll never have to see me again," Y/n responded.

For some reason, Tech couldn't combat a response to her comment. He simply nodded his head understandingly. He lowered his gaze to stare down at the ground and allowed her to finish her repairs in silence. He thought for some time how he could fix this relationship since it wasn't his strong suit. Fixing things was more his style.

"Blast," Y/n's voice pulled him out of his train of thought. He glanced up at her.

The sleeve of her blue flight suit had gotten in the way of her repairs. She had rolled her sleeves up to keep the material out of her way, but the sleeves continued to fall back down to her wrists every time she placed her arm in the hole. She pulled back and rose to her feet.

Without hesitation, Y/n's hands flew to the top button of her flight suit. She began to undue the buttons in which she revealed the black tank top underneath. All the while, Tech studied her carefully as her nimble fingers worked steadily. His pupils dilated behind those goggles of his.

Upon reaching her waistline, Y/n had stopped unbuttoning and shrugged the suit off her shoulders. She tied the sleeves around her waist. She dropped to her knees to continue working without the distraction of her clothes getting in the way.

Slowly, Tech raised his hand to the side of his head and clicked the bottom to save the recording to the drive. He records everything and he was certainly glad he recorded that. He wanted to revisit the recording later for his own 'research' purposes.

"There," Y/n sighed. She sat back on her knees, wiping her dirty hands on the pants of her flight suit. "Repairs are finished."

Naturally, Y/n began to pack away the tools she used and placed them back into the box. She closed the lid of the toolbox, tossing it over the edge of the wing for it to land on the ground with a thump. She then proceeded to jump down off the wing of the ship, landing a little hard so her knees buckled slightly.

Just like she promised, Y/n had every intention of leaving the hanger bay so that they'd never have to see her again. She went to walk away, but just as she passed beside him, Tech reached out and grabbed her forearm. She halted in her steps.

Neither of them could look at each other. She felt his gloved fingers digging into her bare skin, but not hard enough that it would leave marks. She slowly turned to look at him, but he kept his head down.

"I...really came here to apologize," Tech confessed. When Tech lifted his gaze to meet her face, he saw how her eyebrows went up in slight surprise. It definitely caught her off guard.

"I see," Y/n thought about his words carefully. She shifted her balance from one foot to the other. "So all those things you said back on Cassander where just...what?"

He closed his eyes, seriously regretting everything he said. "Like I said earlier, in the moment, I was incredibly frustrated with you."

"Because I wouldn't give up the controls?" Y/n said flatly.

"No, because I recognize that my levels of dopamine are elevated when I'm around you and I distance myself from you in order to prevent that from happening,” Tech confessed before he could even stop himself.

But now, hearing what he just said, Tech quickly averted his gaze away from her. He was thankful to be wearing his helmet so she wouldn't see how bright his cheeks had gotten. He released his grip on her arm, letting it fall back down to his side.

For once, Y/n actually understood what he said. Her eyebrows rose in surprise at this sudden confession. She definitely did not expect him to blurt out his emotions that night, especially after their fight on the ship. She knew better than to tease him at a time like this.

"I-I don't understand why," Tech said rather sadly. That was the first time that he'd spoken those words out loud.

What broke her heart was the tone of defeat laced with his words. It told her that he'd been wrestling with these foreign emotions and thoughts for some time. He didn't know how to react around her and so he acted with defense. He pushed those feeling away, fighting against it.

Hesitantly, Y/n lifted her hands to the sides of his helmet. She went to remove his helmet slowly, revealing his face to her for the first time today. She tossed the helmet to the side without a care in the world, but he still refused to meet her gaze.

"You are probably repulsed by me," Tech began. "From the way I treated you and the words I said to--"

But Tech wasn't able to finish that sentence. Because Y/n had taken his face in her hands and leaned upwards to press her lips against his own. He froze in his place.

His eyes were wide open in surprise. His hands were elevated on either side of him because he didn't know what to do with them. He could feel the softness of her lips still against his own. Before Tech had the chance to process what was happening, Y/n pulled away from him.

The two of them were standing so close together; the chests being pressed against one another's. Their breath mingled as their noses bumped together once or twice. He glanced down at her lips because he wanted nothing more than to taste them once more.

His hands found their way down to her hips with one hand sneaking around her lower back. He pressed that hand into her back which brought her body even closer to his. She released a small gasp.

"Apology accepted," Y/n whispered to him. She played with the edge of the plastoid armor on his chest. "And I'm sorry for the way I acted towards you."

"Why cyare?" Tech wondered. He raised his hand to the side of her face, tucking a single strand of hair behind her ear. He held his hand against her cheek.

"I should have given up the controls. You are the better pilot and it is your ship," Y/n explained with a shake of the head.

"I am not the better pilot," Tech stated firmly.

There was a moment of silence between them. "I can't make split second decisions and calculations like you do when you're flying."

"Well, I've never done the Kessel Run." Tech argued back playfully. He smiled down at her. "At least, not in twelve parsecs."

"Fourteen," Y/n corrected him. "I did it in fourteen."

"Fine. Fourteen," Tech caved in.

Slowly, Tech tilted his head to the side and began to lean down with every intention of kissing her again. But the two of them were interrupted when someone cleared their throat over by the entrance of the hanger bay. The two of them quickly pulled apart and turned to face whoever had interrupted them.

The other members of the Bad Batch stood looking at them near the entrance of the hanger. It was initially Hunter who had cleared his throat to garner their attention; he stood with his arms folded across his chest just as a disapproving father would. Beside him, Wrecker and Omega were practically squealing with each other. They couldn't contain their excitement. And Echo averted his gaze in an awkward manner.

"Care to explain yourselves?" Hunter hinted. He glanced between the two of them with a playful smirk on his face.

"I think they finally confessed that they like each other," Wrecker interrupted. His words coming out louder than anticipated. He nudged Echo who stood beside him.

"You think?" Echo glanced at him.

"It's exciting, isn't it?" Omega smiled at them.

Meanwhile, Tech quickly collected his helmet off the ground and placed it over his head once again. He hoped it would cover the blush creeping up his neck to his face. He knew he wouldn't hear the end of the taunting from his brothers anytime soon.

"Well boys. It looks like we got another member on our crew," Hunter said slowly. "Welcome to the Bad Batch."

#the bad batch #the clone wars #tech bad batch #tech x reader #tech x y/n #tech x you #star wars #the marauder ship #tech oneshot #tech fluff #tech angst #tech imagine #hunter #crosshair #omega #wrecker #echo #tech

[cybergrinding]

Routine Maintenance

You gently laid down on the table and unbuttoned the top of your uniform. It was time for your mistress to perform your routine maintenance, your heads-up display notifying you of recognized issues. It was all part of the job, and perhaps for any other doll engineer, would be as bland and clinical as working on any other machine. Your engineer, however, your mistress, was different. She reveled in getting to play with your wires and parts more than anyone else that's ever worked on you. You squirmed on the table just thinking about what she had in store for you today.

You heard her speak from across the room, she was still getting her tools ready. "Alright Eris, any problems you're currently having? Any parts need replaced?" She spoke casually to you, using the nickname she made for you rather than your proper designation, E-415. She may have been reprimanded had any of her higher-ups witnessed her casual conversation with you, let alone what her maintenance entailed.

"Sensors have recognized a bulging capacitor in section A, number 3 specifically. No other issues of note currently."

"Mm, I'll probably have to replace the whole section. You'll also want to keep notice of any other ones too, if one has reached its end of life, the others probably aren't far off. No issues with connecting to your weapons?" She walked over to the table, holding a screwdriver and a toolbox of common replacement parts. She was already wearing her anti-static wristband. Though your external armor was plenty capable of warding off damage to any of your interior circuitry, you would still be pushed to the limit so regularly that bits and pieces needed replaced frequently, necessitating every frontline combat doll have dedicated maintenance staff.

"None, all weapons were fully operational when last connected, high altitude thrusters functioning normally. All weapons disconnected without issue."

"Good, good. Sounds like this won't take too terribly long before we can get to your favorite part." She shot you a devilish grin, you could hear the fan on your back spinning faster to disperse the heat. Not giving you a moment to calm yourself, she took the screwdriver to your abdomen, removing each of the screws holding the steel plate in place. She then pulled the plate off, and set it aside.

“E-enabling hot-swapping mode, mistress.” Though most maintenance staff would set their combat dolls into a low power mode while swapping parts, mistress always preferred to keep you largely powered, doing the minimum to allow parts to be replaced over without causing you to blue-screen.

She took a small flashlight in her hand and shined it into your now open abdomen, looking for the faulty capacitor in question. “Yeah, I see it here, shouldn’t be too hard to replace.” She placed the flashlight in her mouth, and grabbed out the necessary parts. A portable desoldering tool in one hand and the new capacitors in the other, with a soldering iron to the side to set the new ones in place. She reached in with the desolderer, and began working to remove the faulty capacitor. “You know, used to be that I’d need to pull out this whole board to remove the capacitors, but nowadays you can keep your insides inside while I work” She continued giving casual conversation as she worked, hard to understand with the flashlight in her mouth.

Before you knew it, all four had been replaced. Ordinarily, that would’ve been it, your engineer would give you a quick look over and close you back up. Mistress had other plans, of course. “Okay, I think we’re ready for a bit of stress testing.” She removed the flashlight from her mouth and set it down. “Are you ready, machine?”

Machine, there was always something about the way she called you that, so formal, yet so sensual whenever she said it. Nothing else made being a doll feel so good in your mind. You eagerly nodded your head.

She gave an amused chuckle and continued. “Very well, how about we start with…” She reached her hand into your open abdomen, and unplugged a small 3 prong connector from its socket. The fan on your back quickly slowed down and came to a stop. “It’s always important to test for these things, right?”

“A-ah, yes mistress.” You could feel yourself begin to warm up, you still had more than enough airflow to keep yourself from overheating, though to have your wires played with still excited your mind, the disconnected fan prompted a warning on your heads-up display, which you quickly dismissed.

“Hm, How about we test your radar tracking next?” Before you could respond, she disconnected the cable to your camera, leaving you unable to see. Another warning popped up, another warning dismissed. Despite this, you were still able to track what your mistress was doing, no combat doll would be limited to visible light camera for tracking targets.

You tracked your mistress as she clambered onto the table with you, and sat herself on your hips. She leaned forward slightly, and suddenly your vision came flooding back, the connection being restored. Actually seeing her now, on top of you, overwhelmed your senses.

“I’m almost done here, there’s just one last little thing I’d like to test before I’m satisfied.” The playfulness in her voice excited you, until suddenly all feelings of bliss cut off. Another warning popped up, notifying that another cable had been disconnected. You looked up to your mistress, she was holding a small 4 pin connector in one hand, the one that controls all feelings of pleasure. In her other hand was a paper clip.

She unfurled the paper clip until it was just a bent piece of metal wire, and leaned in again moving the metal wire towards the pins the connector used to be plugged in at. “So, all I have to do here is touch this to the first and fourth pins inside you, and…” A jolt of pleasure surged through your body, stronger than you could have ever imagined. By bypassing any sort of control and monitoring system, and simply shorting the two pins, she could overload your mind from sheer ecstasy leaving you, the once fearsome aerial combat doll, little more than a quivering mess on her mistress’s table.

After a couple more taps from the metal wire, you couldn’t focus on anything anymore. You hardly even noticed when your mistress got off of you and began reconnecting everything she unplugged. It was only when you heard the cooling fan on your back spin up that you finally came to your senses.

You looked over to your mistress. She was screwing your abdominal plate back into place, a content smile rested on her face. At all other times, you were E-415, an Excelsior class combat doll. But here, in these few tender moments you had, you were Eris, a machine loved by your mistress.

-----

I really hope you enjoyed this little thing I wrote, its my first time putting anything like this out on Tumblr, and I really enjoyed writing it^^

#dollposting #combat doll #microfiction

[inbabylontheywept]

Tactical Sulking

The human ship started the conversation by dumping all of its magazines into blackhole Kepler 92A. The PDC depleted their reserves within two minutes and the spinal mount took about twice as long. It would have been an impressive display of firepower if the Attali didn’t know for a fact that even a direct hit from any of the rounds would fail to punch through their hull. 

So instead of worrying they watched with the kind of morbid fascination that adults get while watching a child have a tantrum in public. They watched the ship light up, shitting ton after ton of tungsten coated iron into the corpse of a dead star until at last they ran out of ammo. Then and only then did the Attali send a second message over:

Are you quite finished? 

The response came back immediately. 

Gimme a moment, I’m just finishing a little math problem. But yeah, if it’s urgent, I can talk to you. What’s up big man? 

The Attali barely spent a second parsing over the message. They’d seen human bravado before. 

We sent you a request to surrender, acknowledging that none of your weapons are strong enough to pierce our hull. You opened fire on a blackhole for about five consecutive minutes. Tantrums and sulking do not impress us. 

The human ship took a moment to respond. 

Well, that’s a pity. The two things I’m best at are tantrums and sulking. The third is juggling, but in zero-g that’s… well. Easy. We could host a little talent show here though, if that would impress you. 

Are you going to discuss your terms of surrender, or are we going to have to kill you?

There was a longer pause before the ship replied back.

You know, a minute or two ago, that would’ve been a very scary threat, but you’ve got about ten seconds before shooting us becomes a mutual suicide. We’d strongly discourage that route. 

The Attali commander actually rolled his eyes. 

It’ll take a minute to charge our capacitors. I can promise it won’t be painful. Your bullshitting is a credit to

The message was cut off as a swarm of something ripped through the lower quadrant of the ship. The targeting sensors lost their minds - the projectiles were coming out of the blackhole. 

What the fuck. 

Main thruster was down, as were the nav lines. He had enough presence of mind to direct the side PDC, using recoil to push out of the line just in time to avoid the brunt of another burst of fire. A standard human ferroslug was caught by the lidar, but it was moving so close to C that instrument error was putting it at superluminal.

A second burst of mini rounds blew past the ship. They didn’t catch the brunt like they did the first time, but the stragglers in the burst tore through what remained of engineering. Casualty estimates in that quadrant went past 60% as the capacitor bank blew out, shorting out the main power conduit to their weapon systems. 

Without even PDC recoil to steer, they’d have been trapped, forced to take barrage after barrage of mysterious black hole bullets, if the human ship hadn’t taken the time to intervene. 

It rammed their craft. 

It was not a combat ram. It was a 15 mph collision that gradually turned up the gas. The little human ship chugged along, nudging the Attali cruiser out of the way, avoiding the next barrage by a mere 500 meter gap. 

It shouldn’t have been possible for a ship to look smug, but it did. 

The Attali sent the first message over. Telecom still worked. Life support was running on fumes, but of course the luxury systems were fine. 

What the hell was that? 

Gravity assisted munitions, the human ship replied immediately. The Attali captain had the damndest sense that they’d typed that in minutes ago and were just waiting to hit the send command. 

He took a moment to parse that.

The bullets weren’t being fired into the blackhole. They were being fired very, very close to it. Enough to slingshot around with stolen momentum. 

It was a stupid, stupid trick. And yet. 

What now? he asked. 

Well, the human ship replied. It was awful nice of you to not just kill us on sight. I suppose we could return the favor. Feel like surrendering today? 

There was a long, long pause from the Attali ship as the captain attempted to swallow his pride. The task was not made easier when, a few seconds later, another message came in. 

Chop chop. Tantrums and sulking do not win wars. *Exceptions may apply.*

#hfy #science fiction #tactical sulking

[carionto]

Just a little push

The conflict between Humanity and the United Federation was in it's early slow stages. After the rather unexpected attack on the symbolic Death Kebab there was a lot of buzz and light skirmishes in the nearby systems, but no noteworthy confrontation.

The placement of the Death Kebab was provocative by design, and with both sides so far away from one another, there could not be any mass fleet formation without plenty of advance notice. Special operations units, however, are everywhere.

Unlike Humanity, who currently only has Earth as a planet under their direct control and with a notable population, the Federation is vast - core worlds surrounded by buffer manufacturing and agriculture and all manner of other production focused systems, which themselves are further surrounded out by new colonies, annexed planets, "contract" aka slave worlds.

Getting close to Earth without being spotted by any number of civilian organizations is nigh impossible, and when you count the military intelligence and surveillance networks, there's hardly an atom that remains unregistered. Certain people with, let's say, less than honest intentions, still manage to find ways to keep their activities hidden. For a while at least.

These kinds of skills, when employed by a trained operative with the highest grade equipment, make them virtually invisible everywhere else. A poorly guarded third-rate mining colony? Why, with just a little preparation, you could float an entire Dreadnought up to their atmosphere before they noticed. Assuming they would even care after offering a slightly more lucrative deal than the Federation.

For this particular mission, however, they would care.

Vrontaria was a very productive system with nearly a dozen orbital shipyards and hundreds of mining, processing, and export operations that account for roughly 4% of the entire Federation military hardware supply, and nearly a fifth of all their capital ship production. Thus, it was quite heavily guarded, with every nearby system monitored for any suspicious activity.

What they didn't monitor all too well were the mostly useless planets and moons within the Vrontaria system itself. Of particularly little interest was the resident gas giant - Omk.

And why would anyone bother regularly scanning the interior of a gas giant for foreign matter, everyone knows entering the "atmosphere" of a gas giant will just crush everything. Right?

*glances sideways*

:D

It took the better part of a month, but the special unit managed to covertly install about five thousand gravitational pulse thrusters and all necessary power generators within the upper layer of Omk, but just far enough below the storms to make their activity not make any visible change. For comparison, one such thruster can accelerate an entire Dreadnought. Slowly, sure, which is why they have at least 6 to be able to maneuver, and Omk was not the largest gas giant in the Galaxy, about two thirds of Jupiter.

So, one day not long after, someone on Ja'Ulnika, the main planet of the Vrontaria system, noticed that Omk was a little bit further along its orbital path than it should be.

Concerning.

Then they took more precise measurements and realized it was going faster than before.

Very concerning.

Finally, they had someone go up to it and then they noticed all of the thrust force coming from one side of it, changing its orbit to get far too close to Ja'Ulnika for comfort.

Panic inducing to say the least.

By the time a full force of combat ships arrived to sort out this mess and start disabling all these planet-moving thrusters, scans showed they had self-destructed. Even if they had the ability to retrieve anything from the inside of a gas giant, at this point it would be worthless scraps.

The final orbit of Omk would put it on a course to capture Ja'Ulnika in its gravitational well in two years time and take it along for a joyride to orbits outside the habitable zone, rendering it inhospitable in around 5-6 years. Not to mention the carnage tides would cause on a world without its own moon. Or any other catastrophic events that might occur when a planet is essentially kidnapped into a becoming moon.

Wars are fought on many fronts. inevitable devastation and unavoidable future reduction in capacity force you to act in ways you would rather not. Sometimes creating a logistical nightmare that your enemy has to deal with no matter what can be the greatest killing blow that a swift and spectacular showdown space battle could never be.

#humans are space orcs #humans are space oddities #humans are space australians #humans are deathworlders #humanity fuck yeah #carionto

[ecoamerica]

Watch the 2024 American Climate Leadership Awards for High School Students now: https://youtu.be/5C-bb9PoRLc

The recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by student climate leaders! Join Aishah-Nyeta Brown & Jerome Foster II and be inspired by student climate leaders as we recognize the High School Student finalists. Watch now to find out which student received the $25,000 grand prize and top recognition!

#ACLA24 #ACLA24HighSchoolStudents #youtube #youtube video #climate leaders #climate solutions #climate action #climate and environment #climate #climate change #climate and health #climate blog #climate justice #climate news #weather and climate #environmental news #environment #environmental awareness #environment and health #environmental #environmental issues #environmental education #environmental justice #environmental protection #environmental health #high school students #high school #youth #youth of america #school

[mlm-writer]

Jericho (Conner Kent x FtM!Reader)

Pairing: Top!Conner Kent (YJ ver.) x Bottom!FtM!Alien!King!Reader Rating: Explicit (or Mature if you skip the last part) Words: 1565 POV: Second Summary: You fight the final battle to free your people from alien invaders (and then have sex with your bf after) Note: Gayden wanting to write plot vs y’all wanting smut. Inspired by Jericho by Iniko. Reader’s body is described as ‘his true form’, so you get to pick whatever that means for you. Tags: action, murder, alien reader, your nemesis misgenders you but they also murdered your people so idk what you feel like is worse, established relationship, epic fight scene, fluffy sex, Conner low key a service dom, oral (reader receiving), fingering, anal/vaginal sex and cockwarming

The light of your photon-sword was blinding as it tore through your enemies one by one. The purple blood of the invader species coated almost every inch of your armour. The call of your name behind you made you turn around, just in time to see another intruder trying to lunge at you. It screeched as you sliced its torso clean off its hips. Your eyes were glowing with the rage of battle, but even in this enraged state, you could smile at the man who had warned you. Conner was not from your world, but he had fought by your side nonetheless. As long as you were here, it was his home too and he would defend it until his dying breath. 

“I will hold them off, do what you have to,” Conner called from where he was fighting off six pawns at once. Were the lives of your people not endangered, you might have marvelled at his strength and prowess in battle, but time was running out. 

“I will come back,” you assured him. When your eyes met briefly, you could see he was as sure as you were of that promise. You lifted your arm to access the control panel of your armour. “I love you,” you added, just in case, before activating the anti-gravity matrix. Your feet floated off the ground and soon after, the thrusters were taking you up the tower. 

Heavy grey clouds circled the tower, lighting and acid rain protecting the general of the invaders. Your armour was maintaining its integrity through it. It seemed an eternity ago that the structure descended from the sky, bringing trouble with it, but today would be the day you’d make it fall. 

The structure rumbled as you landed on the platform on the rooftop. “Your trespassing ends today!” You roared as you came face to face with the alien that had been in your nightmares for the past years. You were not the same since the first time you were face-to-face with all those eight eyes. You could feel the changes in your body, the power granted by your ancestors rushed through your veins and vibrated through your bones. 

A demonic laugh made the air tremble around you. As the brute hollered in your face, you got a clear view of their three rows of sharp teeth. “It seems the princess has learned how to hold a sword. You really think pretending to be a boy is enough to stop me?” You clenched your teeth, your rage fuelling your sword. Blue flames engulfed the hard-light, illuminating the space between the grey clouds in a cyan glow. 

“The ancestors have granted me my true form and I am about to give you your final one!” You bellowed, before lunging at them. Your sword was like lighting between the clouds. The grief of war and desire for it all to be over burned in your heart. Your foe had underestimated you, but after you cut one of their many limbs off, they were sure to not make that mistake again. Even as your blood mixed with the rain, your energy never faded. 

The battle seemed to drag on forever. You thought you had them cornered, when a limb you had not accounted for seemingly came out of nowhere and knocked your sword out of your hands. The temporary confusion was enough for your nemesis to fling you across the rooftop. You ended up on your back, sliding across the wet roof to the edge. You dug your gloved hand into the floor, slowing yourself down just in time, head already hanging off the edge. 

The heavily wounded beast closed the distance between you, a heavy foot ending up on your torso. You clawed at their ankle, trying to free yourself as they loomed over you. They lowered their monstrous face, a smug look taunting you. “Your ancestors have failed you, little princess,” they snickered as they slowly shoved you more and more off the edge. 

“Fortunately, the king still has a boyfriend!” Instant relief washed over you as you heard the voice, before Conner dashed from below, punching the monster right in their face. They stumbled backwards, giving you the window of opportunity that you needed to get back up your feet. Conner called your name, before tossing you your sword. He was wrestling with the general right after. You caught your weapon mid-air, waiting for Conner to make the beast’s back face you. As soon as it did, you dashed forward, delivering the final blow. There were no last words, just a rumbling scream and then the dark clouds thinned out. The light of your two suns broke through the sky, signalling your people that it was done; it was over; they were free. 

You sighed and collapsed onto the wet roof, the glow in your eyes dying out as exhaustion took over. Conner flew you down to a healer. The people celebrated that night, but you were quick to retreat to your chambers. It smelled weird after not having been used for years, but it was all still intact. You had gotten rid of half your clothes and collapsed on your bed. 

“Can I come in?” You heard Conner through the door. You shouted for him to come in. His warm laugh filled your ears, when he saw you. “After today, I don’t blame you for resting, but you’re missing a great party,” he spoke with amusement in his voice. You groaned and rolled over, now lying face down on the soft sheets. You felt a weight dip the mattress beside you. “Allow me to help,” Conner whispered, before his warm fingers helped you out of the rest of your clothes. 

You used to dread being naked, but in this new body your ancestors gave you to fight the invaders, you looked forward to being naked around your lover. His hands were still on you, pressing in the knots in your back. It was not that good of a massage with dry hands, but you relaxed anyway. 

His touch lingered at your waist and you spread your legs a little in reply. His lips gently kissed your back as his hand travelled between your legs. You lifted your hips a little so he had all the access he needed. Conner rubbed you in all the right places, turning you into a dripping mess. “On all fours,” he whispered against your shoulder. After you complied, a free hand started toying with your nipples. He used your juices to lube up your ass and his cock. 

You moaned as his fingers entered your hole. You hadn’t realised you were leaking so much that it could be such a smooth slide. With hooded eyes, you stared over your shoulder, watching his concentrated face. Then you saw that Conner was leaking as well. He had stopped playing with your nipples and was stroking himself instead. His gorgeous cock spilled precum all over your hole that his fingers pushed inside. "I'm ready," you sighed between small whimpers of pleasure. 

Conner pulled you up to your knees. He was behind you, holding his cock in place as you sunk your down on him. You moaned in relief as you finally felt him inside you. When you got too eager and tried to sink down faster, Conner held you in place. It was maddingly slow, but eventually you found your ass resting on his thighs. Conner's fingers rubbed you again, making sure you felt pleasure everywhere. "Come on, start moving," he encouraged you. You couldn't move much in this position, but Conner helped you with gentle thrusts. Your bare back connected to his chest. His moans were audible right next to your ear. 

"Please, Conner, I'm so sore from today," you whimpered as your legs started to hurt. Conner pushed you off and manhandled you onto your back. You reached out for him and he immediately returned to your arms, kissing you deeply, while lifting your legs and wrapping them around his waist. Your lips stayed close to each other as he re-entered you. Your moans mixed between your mouths, his every thrust drawing another sound from your body. "Don't draw this out. I just want to cum," you huffed. Conner chuckled against your lips. You would never get tired of that sound. 

"Of course, my king," he joked, before pulling out. You groaned and tried to coax him back inside, but instead his head dipped down and before you knew it, he was licking and sucking you as if he needed you to cum just as badly as you needed it. You almost screamed. Your hand flew to his head and your fingers tangled into his hair. Conner hummed as if a deep need had been fulfilled. Two fingers entered you and with the right curl of his fingers, you could feel your orgasm crash through your whole body. 

Conner made sure you got the pleasure you sought and then laid you down on your side. He spooned you, putting his cock back inside as he did so. "Now rest, my king," he whispered into your ear, before pulling the covers over you. You smiled, enjoying having him still hard inside you. You drifted off into peaceful sleep, knowing that when you would wake, your people would be safe and you'd get the dicking of your life. 

#conner kent #conner kent x reader #ftm reader #male reader #trans reader #conner kent x ftm reader #conner kent x you #conner kent x male reader #Young Justice #dc #dc x reader #dc x male reader #dc x ftm reader #dc x you #superboy #superboy x reader #superboy x male reader #superboy x you #superboy x ftm reader #superboy x trans reader

[apod]

2024 January 30

SLIM Lands on the Moon Image Credit & Copyright: JAXA, Takara Tomy, Sony Co., Doshisha U.

Explanation: New landers are on the Moon. Nearly two weeks ago, Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) released two rovers as it descended, before its main lander touched down itself. The larger of the two rovers can hop like a frog, while the smaller rover is about the size of a baseball and can move after pulling itself apart like a transformer. The main lander, nicknamed Moon Sniper, is seen in the featured image taken by the smaller rover. Inspection of the image shows that Moon Sniper's thrusters are facing up, meaning that the lander is upside down from its descent configuration and on its side from its intended landing configuration. One result is that Moon Sniper's solar panels are not in the expected orientation, so that powering the lander had to be curtailed and adapted. SLIM's lander has already succeeded as a technology demonstration, its main mission, but was not designed to withstand the lunar night -- which starts tomorrow.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240130.html

[jpitha]

Between the Black and Grey 41

First / Previous / Next

They streamed aboard the frigate. Fen, Northern, and Zhe ran to the command deck while Stormy headed to the AI core. After a minute or two, they could hear her over the ship's PA.

"Fen, this place is brand new! It still has that 'new starship smell'. I haven't smelled that in a millennium at least!"

Zhe sniffed the air, and her ears flicked. "It doesn't smell different to me."

"No, no, like it's a metaphorical smell. The ship is brand new that's all. I'm used to Starjumpers that have been in service longer than nations."

"While I appreciate all of this camaraderie-" Northern began, "The fact remains that we are under attack by the Empire and should leave."

"Sheesh. Is she always like this?" Fen could hear the smile in Stormy's voice. "Sit down then ladies, and buckle up."

As the three of them sat, belts snaked out from the seats and wrapped themselves around them and pulled just this side of too tight, and then when Fen breathed in, they loosened. There was a wobble in her inner ear as Stormy lifted off and the gravity changed from Picaresque to the ship. Fen heard a whining whirr above the normal thrum of the engine.

"Stormy, what was that?"

"Oh, I just freed the weapons. Call it experience, but I think we're going to need them. Speaking of, permission to apply War Emergency Power?"

"Uh, Yes? What's that?" Fen glanced at Northern.

"Ancestors, what a newbie. Northern, explain it please."

Northern ran her hand through her hair. "Human starships have always been over powered. If you run a high output reactor at a lower output it lasts longer, right? So that means that we always have power to spare. War Emergency Power means that you give Stormy permission to remove all the limiters and fuses on the reactors. Power output will greatly increase. She'll be able to wormhole link multiple times in succession - no waiting for the capacitors - all while firing the main battery and the slug throwers."

Fen raised an eyebrow. "But?"

"But it's dangerous." Stormy answered. "It's rare, but reactors can overload. Link the wormhole generator away, blow the battery, hell, blow the whole ship - though that's only happened once or twice. Most of the time a reactor overload is just a hassle." There was a pause and the thrum of the reactors seemed loud on the deck. "We're up next though, so you're going to have to choose."

"I approve War Emergency Power, Stormy, but do be careful."

"Hah! I'm always careful Fen. How do you think I lived this long?"

"Yes, but how many bodies have you gon---eeeeek"

As soon as they cleared the hangar, Stormy applied full thrust and fired a brace of juke charges along the side of the ship. Normally used only for last minute ducking around missiles, Stormy was using them to steer the ship in an erratic way as they thrusted away from Picaresque.

"Contact! Four Super Dreadnoughts trying to hide in the corona." Northern was hunched over a sensor station. "Seems like they're doing some wide angle scanning. They haven't changed their behavior yet."

"Four of them?" Zhe looked over at Fen and her ears flattened. "They don't know about you, right?"

"I don't see why they would. They're looking for the Empress. Speaking of-" She looked up at Northern. "Do you see her yacht in the system?"

"Negative, they must have linked away before the party started."

Suddenly there was a sound like cloth tearing, but lower, deeper. Fen felt it in the soles of her feet. It was the slug launcher. "Stormy, what was that?"

"Sorry Fen, I'm a little busy." Fen's inner ear did backflips as Stormy applied the thrusters asymmetrically and they spun in place. There was a sound like a thunderclap, and then three more in quick succession. The main battery. "Hooo, the Empire loves to pack the weapons on. I swear I didn't have this much firepower when I was a Starjumper!" Stormy is laughing.

"What's going on, Stormy?"

"Just watch on the screen."

Fen activated the screen at her seat. One side was a wireframe map of the system, and the other was a virtualized overview of the current battle. The four Supers were still out in the corona, but there were two battlecruisers that had linked in just moments ago and were firing missiles at the ships streaming away from Picaresque. Fen watched as there were white flashes as the missiles appeared in front of a ship, and rocketed into the nose. It exploded in a silent fireball.

"The missiles have wormhole generators?" Fen's voice cracked and her eyes were glued to the screen.

"Yeah, I remember when they thought of it. Back then the generators were too large and power hungry for it to work. But, I suppose with some of the knowledge transfer from the Sefigans and the Gren's miniaturization tech..."

A lucky shot rang off the hull, sounding like a stick hitting an empty can. The displays at Fen's chair flashed orange and the wireframe of the system was replaced with an overlay of the frigate with sections towards the rear outlined in orange.

"Fen, we've been hit!" Zhe is scrolling through the readouts as fast as she can. "Looks like mostly superficial. The ablative coating on the hull took most of it, but if they hit the same spot again, we're in trouble. Er, in more trouble."

"We're not going to take on four Supers." Stormy continued to evade the shots, but she was right, they couldn't take on the attackers. "Captain, where are we going?"

"I don't know, Stormy, I didn't think I'd have to decide right this second." Fen looked around the room. "I'm open to suggestions!"

"We could go back to the Heap, Daddy told me where they moved to." Zhe looked over at Fen, her eyes bright with hope.

"You know where the Heap is?" Stormy sounded impressed. "I figured that place was just a legend. It's up to the captain, but I'm up for the trip."

A sound like hail assaulted the hull. More lights lit up on Fen's display.

"That'll be the slug throwers. They're too far out to do more than annoy, but Fen, really. It's time to go."

"Uh" Fen looked at the radar, and then the ship schematic and then up at Northern and Zhe. They were both staring at the pads at their stations, trying to figure out what to do next. Fen was pulled against the seatbelts as Stormy did another aerobatic maneuver to get out of the way of something. "Fine, fine. the Heap. Stormy, link us to the Heap please. Zhe give her the coordinates."

"Already entered in, Fen. Stormy, do you see it?"

"I got it Zhe, Linking away now."

****

Fen sat up. She was in the K'laxi ancestral forest again. Ma crouched near her on the balls of her clawed feet. "Hey Fen. Doing some traveling? I don't see you for nearly a year your time and then you show up in quick succession. Makes me think you miss me." Ma winked and her ears flicked.

"Ma, I miss you every moment of every day. So many decisions would be easier to make if you were still with me." Fen pushed her self into a cross legged position.

"Well, I'm only a link away." Ma sat on her lap. "What's wrong hon?"

"Gord removed the Nanites."

"Yes, we know. What do you think of that?"

"I don't know. I think it's good?" Fen shook her head, like she was trying to clear it. "They didn't seem like they had my best interests in mind, but also they had a lot of power. Maybe I could have used that."

"Maybe you could have, it's true." Ma nodded. "But used it to do what? You know what the Nanites want."

"They want me to be Empress."

"You spoke with the current Empress, what did you think of her?"

Fen turned and looked Ma in the eyes. "She seemed... broken? She was trying so hard to look normal, collected. But you get more than surface deep with her and there was this howling, screaming loneliness, this sadness that permeated her."

Ma leaned back onto Fen's collarbone. Fen put her arms around her wife and hugged her tightly. "Sounds like Gord did you a favor then."

"Maybe, but now what?"

"Now what indeed."

****

Fen awoke, still strapped in her chair, to Stormy's voice. "Oh, she's one of those."

"Be nice Stormy, you've had captains that have trouble with wormhole links before." Northern chided. "Fen comes back faster than most."

"My wife's there." Fen's voice sounds fuzzy, distant.

"Your what?"

"Ma-ren. She was - is - my wife." Fen's eyes glisten. "She died back home when we were trying to escape with Gord on Spyglass. Shot in the back by one of Tam'tarr's goons as we were running." She sniffs. "I see her, every time I link. We talk. It-" Fen sobs loudly "-it feels like we're still together."

Fen breaks down, hands covering her face. Zhe undoes her buckles and gets up and hugs Fen. She just stands there over her, hugging for a few minutes.

Fen catches her breath and looks up. "What are we going to do?"

"What do you mean?" Northern asks quietly.

"I mean, what are we going to do? Gord and Chloe and the Empress are off on some kind of mission to destroy the Nanites, and I didn't want any part of that and so we ran away. Gord let us go. Said he wasn't going to make us come with him. We leave Picaresque only to get caught up in a battle with the Empire while they're looking for Meredith. They have no idea who we are or how close we were to her. If they did we'd be captured... or worse. Now, we're in the same system as the Heap, and... now what?"

Northern undid her belts and stood. She came over to Fen and Zhe and hugged them both. She was a little awkward at first, but after a moment squeezed them tightly. "We'll do what we always do. We'll figure something out. If it doesn't work, we'll figure something else out. As long as we're still alive, that's what we do." Northern straightened, the front of her shirt damp. "For now, let's go see Zhe's dad again. Maybe we'll get some work."

The siren was startling. The three of them must have jumped a meter. "Stormy! What's wrong?"

"Sorry to interrupt things, but someone just linked in. It's a Super Dreadnought."

Northern looked down at the ship displayed on Fen's pad. "Fuck me."

#humans are deathworlders #humans are space orcs #sci fi writing #humans are space oddities #humans and aliens #jpitha #writing #humans and ai #humans are space capybaras #humans are space australians #Between the black and gray

[justatalkingface]

WTF happened?!?

Alright, so for context? I took a break at... *checks bookmark* 395. And looking at that chapter really quick, I'm reminded why I stopped reading for all this time!.That's ten chapters behind, for the record, and from what I can tell from my occasional glances at the critical tag? Those ten chapters were... something.

Welp. I read them. And then experienced instant regret.

Let's start with the first big thing: Armor Might. Somehow, looking at Armored Might, my first thought isn't WTF, because I've seen the spoilers, but the way that mask frames his smile reminds me of Redestro? Like, what the hell, he actually looks villainous like this. Still, though, the way powers are supposed to be the students isn't just cringe beyond belief it's... actually really dumb?

Like, step back from the ham handed metaphor for a minute, and look at this as a set of powers that someone decided to put in one suit. Ignoring how they stuffed so much shit into a suit, which even for MHA tech breaks my SOD, much less how this is surviving hits that causally blast through buildings, but it's just... inefficient? Let's ignore such choices as 'talking to animals' and 'powered by sugar', which are clearly relics of a different manga and don't make sense to use at all, but just these powers as a package. Does it make sense to put something like, 'make acid' with super strength'? Or 'sound waves'? Etc, etc? Wouldn't you want things that synergize together, so the suit is... I don't know, sturdier, or more effective, rather than having to build in a bunch of random devices just to do a reference? That explains why half of them aren't even same powers, it's just pointlessly pasting the names on things built to counter literally this situation, a reverting AFO, even though they had no possible way to know it would happen. Like a Uravity 'thruster'. Which has fuck all to do with canceling gravity.

Seriously. Cellophane and Blackwhip are literally the same damn thing, as in, literally they're the same tentacles. He's 'using' 'different powers' to retract them. And the sugar power is a... rocket kick? I. Can we just admit this doesn't actually have the entire class in it and move on?

Also, the fact that AFO is apparently super predictable and apparently has never adjusted his tactics once since beating Nana? Bitch please. He's been leading you by the nose since day one, and the only reason you ever beat him is because you out-powered him because you're bullshit and he's nerfed.

As a side note, AFO isn't controlling his reversion. He's not 'choosing' to rewind faster to heal himself, it's just happening, and Eri's Quirk just doesn't give a shit about anything, the acid would just be gone. Eri's Quirk has literally never given a shit about anything, ever, including but not limited to it's target, the person using, or the laws of nature because it's not a healing Quirk, its reversing fucking time.

Honestly, reading this, I'm not even angry about how bad the writing is anymore, I'm just cringing. Both All Might and All For One sound like complete morons, the fight is stupid, it's just.... this is just pathetic and it hurts to read.

I. Is AFO the shining baby. I pretty sure a bunch of people made jokes about the baby coming up but. Is AFO the shining baby?

Why is Stain even here? Why is the suit talking?! Like, they didn't even do anything, it didn't even buy any time, it just dragged out the chapter so we could another cliffhanger!

...Finally. Finally, Momo gets a fucking gun. I guess at this point Hori thought it couldn't harm anything to let her actually be competent, and it looks like a copy of Bakugou's new gear because of course it is, but I don't care just let me have this.

What the fuck is even the point of AFO's mouth ripping open? Like, what is the in-setting reason his cheeks tore apart?

Bakugou: fucking dies.

Bakugou: gets his heart patched together with jeans and a prayer soap bubble.

Bakugou: is instantly jumping into high intensity combat.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Are we really bring back the 'wishing energy' bullshit? Are we bringing back wishing energy and Bakugou is using it?

And now we have Nighteye. Nighteye.

...

You know what? I'm angry again.

Holy fuck. I read the posts, but I didn't believe they were real. Bakugou restarted his own heart. Like. What even is his Quirk, at this point. Like, what is it actually supposed to be, Favoritism Sweat?

All Might, solemnly: Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight.

Me, vomiting:

God, I pity whoever eventually has to voice act that and say that line at all seriously.

And, to the surprise of absolutely no one except the people who actually thought Bakugou died and were angry about it, Bakugou gets his heart impaled and came out the other end with a power up.

Let me sum up my thoughts on that with one simple sentence: The Lion, The Witch, and The Plot Armor of This Bitch.

Here's my impression ten chapters later, after a month or two without reading: I... I did not miss this story.

#bnha critical #mha critical #bakugou critical #what the fuck is this #i can almost feel my brain melting #Bakugou's Favoritism Sweat #my instant regret reading these chapters

[edupunkn00b]

Meus ex Machina, Chapter 15: From This Day Forth

Edited public domain image of two hands reaching for each other, lit in deep blue and neon green.

Prev - From This Day Forth - Next - Masterpost - [ AO3 ]

Distant history and some time later. Plus, Logan's time with The Muse revealed more than anyone expected.

WC: 2655 - Rated: T - CW: descriptions of treating injuries, the 'comfort' of hurt/comfort

“I do.”

Half-hidden by his wild auburn fringe, Luc’s eyes glowed. Not from his Power, not today. No, today Luc’s eyes glowed from within, the natural deep brown soft and warm and bathing him in love.

Janus smiled back at him, squeezing his fingers. “I know you do.”

Their nerves—and their focus—dissolved in quiet shared laughter until Patton’s pointedly cleared throat brought them back to their vows.

When Janus looked up, Patton smiled and inclined his head, his Illusioned officiant’s robes rustling with the movement. “And you, Janus Gates, do you take Lucas Hart to be your love, your husband, and your light from this day forth?”

Swimming in the gentle depths of Luc’s eyes, Janus nodded. “I do.”

~

Janus tossed his tablet onto the couch with more force than he’d intended. Luckily, it merely bounced twice and flipped over, deactivating the screen. His relief was short lived, though, and the droning news report made him almost wish it had cracked. 

Back straight, he perched on the seat beside it and forced a slow breath, giving his attention to the flow of dry, cool air in his lungs and the—

“Governor Aldi has called in three NatGuard divisions to quell the uprising at Humane Care—”

Patton clicked off the newsfeed. Janus fought to push down the molten lead bubbling up in his stomach but finally it burst out. “When will they ever stop? When we teach them a lesson?”

He smacked the table, the sharp sting doing nothing to calm the fire in his bones. Patton’s hot chocolate rattled against the pair of teacups set on either side of it and the force of his hand shook even the pictures on the wall. 

“Now, Kiddo,” Patton inhaled, exaggerating the movement and giving him and Luc a gentle smile. Luc leaned closer, fingertips brushing his sleeve. “Let’s all take a—“

“No! I will not take a breath!” He sounded precisely like Ro in one of his tantrums but he just couldn’t stop. “And I will not calm down and wait for the Powerless running the government to follow the arc of progress or whatever pacifying bullshit—“

“Language!”

“Papa Bear, it’s alright,” Luc said smoothly. The soft purr of the old nickname brought warmth to the elder brother’s cheeks but his expression didn’t change. He picked up his cocoa and watched the newlyweds with his lips drawn into a thin line.

Luc nodded slowly and reached over the coffee table, brushing Patton’s hand, calming him. “Let him get it out.”

“This isn’t simply some phase I will get past!” Janus nearly growled, jerking away from the other two. “We’ve been trying things your way for three years now and look where we are?” Arms flung out at his sides, he looked around their newly finished HQ. “We have to hide away behind a forest laced in tripwire because all the Powerless know how to do is hate us.”

He stood, shaking his head as he stared at the vidscreen, the latest atrocity playing out in full spectrumed splendor. “Maybe it’s time we used our powers for real change and made them stop.”

“Love?” Luc’s eyes were wide and he made no effort to hide the concern roiling through him.

Janus deflated, sinking back down and accepting Luc’s outstretched hand, bare skin intertwined with his own gloved fingers. “I don’t mean…” He gestured vaguely. “There just… there has to be another way.”

~

“Jan?” Luc’s voice was quiet, barely audible over the whine of the transport’s thrusters as they raced away from the Inn.

Eyes focused on The Muse, unconscious and strapped in his own seat, Janus shook his head.

Luc was completely silent until they’d landed at HQ and he waited until they’d gotten The Muse hooked up to a med bed before addressing Janus again. “Love, there’s nothing you could’ve—”

“ Nothing I could’ve done?” Luc stepped back, the full force of Janus’ rage seeping past his lowered voice. The final threads of his control were fraying and Janus… he wasn’t sure what he might do when they snapped.

Still, Luc reached for him, eyes dimly glowing. “Love, calm down. You didn’t know—”

Janus jerked his hand back, keeping an empty med bed between them. “I didn’t know what? I didn’t know Andrew would betray us? Or I didn’t know you would lead us right into a trap?”

“Wha—” Luc’s mouth moved like a fish and his hand flopped back to his side. “What are you saying?”

Tears swam in his eyes, sparkling in amber light as Luc wrestled his own emotions into control. Or manipulated his own tears. Sour, jagged guilt stabbed Janus’ chest at the thought. Was it his own conscious speaking?

Or Luc’s?

‘Re will be fine, you’ll see. He just needs a little calming, a little extra control.’ Luc had been so sure this outing would work. ‘He’ll have both of us there, both of us to keep him and everyone safe. He deserves a good birthday. He deserves to celebrate a little.’

Janus scrubbed at the blood staining his shirt, his gloves, the man’s final cries echoing in his brain. “What did he offer you?”

“What?” Luc acted like he hadn’t heard him.

Janus stared back, fighting past the buzz of alcohol singing in his veins. Plus gods knew what else that traitorous bartender had slipped into his drink. “What did he offer you? How much were we worth to you?”

“What!?” Luc crossed his arms over his chest, eyes brighter than the med bay’s lights. “You think I—”

Guilt and malice and rage swirled between them, cutting through the lingering dizzy haze. “I can feel your guilt, Luc. You know you can’t hide it from me.”

“Love, no…” Luc’s voice broke, tears finally spilling down his cheeks. “Please listen to me… You’re not feeling that from me, I swear! Here…” He slid around the med bed, both hands outstretched. “Jan, please… Take my hand, you’ll see. You’ll—”

“Don’t you dare touch me!” Janus pushed the bed back between them. “No, you just want to make this all go away and you can’t, Luc. You just can’t. He killed that man! And it’s because of us! Because of y—”

Too late, his mouth snapped shut.

“You really believe I could…” Orange flame for eyes, Luc shook his head, lips pressed together, a gash across his face. When he spoke again, his voice was low, an almost monotone, his words carefully enunciated. “Very well, then, Janus.” He blinked, slowly, bathing the room in cold darkness, then turned and left.

Rooted where he stood, Janus listened to Luc’s footsteps fade before they eventually returned, pausing just outside the med bay. Janus held his breath, waiting. Listening. 

There was nothing more to hear but the curt zip of a bag and the woosh of the front door opening and closing.

Luc was gone.

“Jannie?”

Janus had no idea how long he’d stood there before The Muse’s whisper pulled him back to that room. “Jannie, please help him.”

~

Jolted upright in bed, Janus swore when his grandmother’s repurposed album fell off the side and hit the floor. His dream—his nightmare—tightened its grip on his mind, claws sinking into flesh, The Muse’s plea wrapping tighter and tighter around him.

-”Jannie… Jannie…”-

He forced his eyes open and only then did he register the green lights flashing along the ceiling’s edge. The voice was no dream. -”Muse? What—”- He yanked back, blistering from The Muse’s thoughts.

-” Jannie, please help him !”-

He grabbed his gloves and a robe on his way out of the room and collided with Pat in the hall.

“I checked the breakers, I checked the shield,” he stammered, barefoot and clad in sleep shorts. “Everything’s working. I don’t understand—”

“He’s out in the hall.” Virge nudged them forward, pressing a tablet into Janus’ now gloved hands. “With Mac.”

Tears poured down The Prince’s face and he leaned close to Virge.

While Pat ran to the med bay, Janus watched the camera feed. Machina’s chair sat abandoned in center frame. The Muse’s lower half, writhing in a tangle of thorny vines, was the only part of him visible. Was Machina still inside? “Get him comfortable,” he ordered to Virge, nodding at The Prince. 

Pat returned, zipping up his jumpsuit, the largest medkit tucked under his arm. “I’m ready.”

“He’s trying,” The Prince whispered as they passed. “He just can’t help it.”

“I know.” Eyes closed and with one hand pressed to the wall for support, Janus reached out. -”We’re coming, Muse. Hang on.”-

~

With Pat’s help, he made it onto the elevator and down to the basement. He used the brief trip to stitch together a semblance of a shield, filtering what he could of the turmoil in The Muse’s mind. “I’ll need you to—”

-”Hurry, hurry, hurry…”- The Muse broke through. Why wouldn’t he just go back inside his room? Why had he even left? Had Machina somehow lured him out? He understood what the shield meant to him… didn’t he?

“I’ll get Re,” Pat promised, one arm still loosely wrapped around his waist. The other gripped the tablet and the med kit. “But maybe come back? He might need you.”

Janus nodded, less steady than he would have liked, as the elevator stopped and the door slid open. Machina and The Muse’s cries echoed down the stone corridor, amplified by the small space. They rushed out, Pat barely slowing to grab Muse, remembering just in time to leave behind the tablet before the shield fried its circuitry.

They stepped over the threshold and silence—near silence—fell over the hallway. The world that poured into The Muse’s mind—and relayed into his and The Prince’s—quieted.

Janus hated how his shoulders dropped, his jaw unclenched and he dropped to his knees in shaky relief next to the whimpering heap of blankets on the floor.

“Machina?” He jerked away from the touch, reaching for the closed door. -”Logan.”-

Machina froze, clinging to the thought.

-”Logan, you’re safe,”- Janus sent as gently as he could manage while fighting past the blocks Machina seemed to have instinctively put up. -”You’re safe now.”-

-”Muse isn’t.”- With a groan, Machina rolled and met his eyes, revealing his blood-and-tear smeared face.

Nodding slowly, Janus gently wiped his face clean with the edge of the blanket. -”He will be,”- he promised. -”Patton will care for him. As I will care for you.”-

Machina considered his words, bloodshot eyes darting between his and The Muse’s door. Finally, he nodded.

“May I?” Janus asked aloud, arms outstretched.

He nodded again and Janus lifted Machina up and into his chair. When he resisted leaving behind The Muse’s blanket, Janus simply placed it on his lap and tucked it up and out of the way of the wheels before rolling him into the waiting elevator and upstairs to the med bay.

~

Most of the blood covering his face came from his head and from gashes on his tongue, swollen arcs of bite marks driven in top and bottom. He helped him rinse with a saline solution from the med kit, humming quiet praise at his cooperation. There was more blood on his hands, along with fine strands of Machina’s hair twisted around his fingers. Patton guessed Machina likely bore bloody bald spots that matched the ones on The Muse’s scalp, too.

Just like Ro used to.

“He didn’t…” The Muse hung his head, wincing when Patton found a deep cut near the nape of his neck. “He didn’t mean to. And I…” His voice cracked with that same quiet shame.

“Oh, Kiddo… I know you didn’t want to hurt him. We all do,” Patton murmured and gently dabbed at the wound before reaching for the same skin adhesive he used on the bites in his mouth. “How… Kiddo, how did you…” He paused, letting his work to close up the wound distract them both.

Patton held The Muse’s hair up and away from the gash as the adhesive dried. His eyes wandered around the room. The Muse was dressed for bed but pastels and fresh drawings were scattered over the floor. Lots of them.

Most of the drawings featured Machina in his chair, dark stone walls behind him. Patton looked over his shoulder through the little window on the door. The backgrounds matched. This hadn’t been Machina’s first visit.

He focused on the rest of The Muse’s wounds and, as soon as the adhesive set, he urged him to drink some of the electrolyte. When The Muse finished his cup, he sat curled in the corner, knees hugged to his chest, shivering. Patton fetched the other blanket from his bed and wrapped it over his shoulders. 

“He opened the door,” he whispered, guessing—or, more likely hearing—Patton’s unvoiced question. “He came inside so I could hear him. I tried to stop… I did. I did.  I swear I did. I… He…” The Muse looked up at him, big green eyes swimming in tears. “He’s so lonely, too.” 

Nodding, Patton crouched next to him and opened his arms. The Muse carefully arranged himself in the offered embrace, tucking the folded blanket between his face and Patton’s chest. Patton hummed and stroked The Muse’s hair with gloved hands. 

“We shouldn’t be alone, Papa Bear.” His whisper was muffled against the blanket. “None of us should.”

This close to the door panel’s red lights, The Muse’s curls took on an orange glow and Patton swallowed back a sob. 

“I know, Kiddo. I know.”

~

“Thank you.”

Janus thought he’d imagined Machina’s quiet whisper but when he lifted his head he was met with the other man’s steely blue eyes. “Wasn’t going to leave you there,” he muttered and raised a cup to his cracked lips. “Go slow.”

Machina made a face and pulled away, moving his tongue in his mouth like a foreign object.

Janus nodded and waited, cup at the ready. “You bit your tongue. You’ll absorb the stitches in a few days. Well, if…”

He sipped from the cup then chuckled dryly. “If I wasn't a Powerless, you mean.”

“That’s not how I would phrase it, but, yes…” He tipped the cup again, nodding when Machina took another long drink. “We’ve only used it on…”

“On Remus?”

Cup frozen mid-air, Janus stared at him. The Muse’s old name sent a spark through his veins, Ro’s prepubescent voice calling after his brother, filled with playful indignation.

‘Remus, stop! No fair! It’s my turn to be the dragon!’ 

The cup shook in his hand and he set it down before he spilled it on Machina’s bedding. “Where did you hear that name?”

Machina shook his head, mouth working for a moment before he shrugged. “I—I… In my head? It was… it was just there.” He blinked and shuddered, face twitching.

His breathing stuttered, eyes squeezed shut as panic and shame gripped his mind. Machina shook his head and flailed in the med bed, tugging away the blanket and tangling his stumps in the sheets.

-“No, no… None of that… Stay here with me,”- Janus sent and spoke, gripping his shoulder. Finally, he lay back, hand twisted in the blanket. Still, his mind swirled with images he could not have witnessed himself. -”That’s The Muse’s past… Not yours.”-

Janus smiled when Machina finally met his eyes. “There you are,” he said aloud and offered more of the electrolyte. “You need it. Between the blood loss and…”

He finished the cup and took three sips of the next before shaking his head. “I…” He let out a little puff of air and looked away, guilt thick and sour in his scent. Janus returned the cup to its spot on the bed tray and waited.

“I heard another name… Well…” Dozens of names in The Muse’s voice echoed in his mind and Janus pulled back, throwing up a weak shield.

But not before he caught one final name.

Machina grabbed his sleeve and pulled him closer. “Who’s Lucas?”

#Meus ex Machina #sanders sides #sanders sides fanfiction #ts remus #ts logan #ts janus #ts patton #ts virgil #ts roman #ts lucas #i will make that a tag #Machina #The Muse #The Prince #Silvertongue #Papa Bear #Ultraviolet #Hesper #superpowers #superpower au #logan sanders #and‚ for the tags #roman sanders #janus sanders #remus sanders #lucas sanders #virgil sanders

[mamawasatesttube]

happy wip wednesday thursday!!!

tagged by @deadchannelradio ty monty ily :D i'll tag... who do i know that writes. @misspickman @loisinherlane umm... im definitely forgetting some friends sorry for not having a brain but est quod est and all that. if you wanna pretend i tagged you feel free tho wahoo!

“What’s the prognosis, doc?”

Kon rests his arms atop the back of the pilot’s chair, leaning forward to peer at the yoke in Tim’s hands. The ship is flying steady for now, but the several red, flashing alerts on the screens make it pretty clear that’s not gonna hold forever, not with the damage they sustained getting the hell outta Dodge.

Kon rests his chin atop Tim’s head. “Think we’re gonna make it?”

Tim grunts. “Mn. We’re steady for now, but we don’t have more than maybe… two hours, before that last fuel pump gives out in engine three.”

Well, damn. Those Denebian space pirates just had to hit the engines, huh?

He can feel the struggling fuel pump, shuddering on the fringes of his TTK aura. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot he can do for it, even with his telekinesis; sure, he could pump the fuel through to the converter himself, but without the rotating component from the back of the pumps that completes the circuits, power won’t go through the engine, and the thrusters won’t actually ignite. So he can’t just try to pump the fuel himself to give the overworked last pump a break, and the other two that are supposed to help it are already toast.

“Well, worse comes to worst, I can always get out and push,” Kon offers, only half-joking.

Tim quirks a tiny half-smile at the front window. “I don’t think it’ll come to that, but good to know it’s an option.”

Cassie, leaning in the doorway, sighs and rakes a hand through her hair. “So then, what’s the plan? Did you find somewhere we can stop and hopefully get some spare parts to do repairs?”

“Yeah.” Tim points at the navigation screen to his left. Kon peers at it, then out at the stars. “Planet in the Goldilocks zone in orbit around Albireo.”

“Oh, Erysimon.” Kon nods in recognition. “Yeah, cool.”

“You’ve been?” Tim quirks an eyebrow.

Kon shakes his head. “Nah, not me. Heard a lil about it from Kal. He fought off Brainiac out in the Albireo system a few years back—apparently there was some time travel bullshit, you know how it is—and the Erysimians were real grateful to him for it. He said they’re a nice bunch.”

Cassie snorts. “I mean, not to doubt you, but I think he’d say that about most people. Even ones I’d wanna punt.”

Bart suddenly appears at Kon’s side, shoving past him to plop onto the armrest of Tim’s chair. Tim makes a mildly disgruntled noise but makes no true effort to dislodge him, and Bart rests his elbow on Tim’s shoulder, peering at the navi-com. “Who are we punting?”

“Nobody, Bart.” Kon lightly flicks the back of his head. “We’re talking about landing on Erysimon so we can get some scrap and fix up the third engine.”

“Oh.” Bart hums. “Yeah, we should do that. No point in me having a space-chauffeur if my spaceship is broken and won’t fly.”

“Space-chauffeur?” Tim repeats dryly.

“That’s what I said,” Bart agrees.

“You don’t even pay me.” Tim taps something on the navigation screen, then sits back in the chair, folding his arms over his chest. “How am I in your employ?”

“Classic Tim, being a space capitalist. I should’ve expected this, but it’s still disappointing.” Bart shakes his head. “Obviously I pay you in love, friendship, and taking extra fries off your hands so you don’t have to worry about them. Duh.”

 Kon can feel Tim’s shoulders shaking ever-so-slightly with repressed laughter. “Oh, right. my bad. Obviously.”

#rimi writes #its core four space adventures time babey!!!!! #core four #itll be a While til i publish any of this one but. there they go

[phading]

WIP Alert

WIP Alert … and it’s not even Wednesday!

I haven’t posted a fic for a while, and I have three (hopefully good) excuses. I’ve been dividing my time between these WIPs that are all tugging at my heartstrings ...

STARSTUCK

It was one of those heart-stopping moments when your mind realizes you have totally and absolutely fucked up so bad that your life from this point forward will be unalterably changed. Alan’s throat choked on a swallow that ended up being a gasp.

“Alan!” John’s shout broke through the fog. “Scott and Gordon have already responded! Get a stretcher and a medkit down there. Move it!”

Alan moved it, familiar routines and following orders overriding the need to think. The infirmary loomed, dimly lit and ominous around him as he hastily prepped a stretcher, loading it with standard emergency gear. Reality didn’t hit until the elevator doors split open at the refuelling hangar level.

The alarm was abruptly silenced, no doubt by John, but the residual echo continued to ring in Alan’s ears. The air smelled of fuel and singed metal, cut with the almost fresh scent of flame-retardant foam. His beautiful, red bird was tilted to the side in her silo, rail docks and thrusters damaged, a wing pylon bent out of shape and so many scrapes in her hull that it looked like she was bleeding.

…

CASPIAN (Nutty's Marks and Wings AU)

“Ditch the protocols, Virg, just get as much distance between you and Five as you can. I’m not certain I can avoid a collision.”

Virgil didn’t know what they were about to collide with, nor did he need to. What he did know was that John was doing everything in his power to keep it from happening.

“Understood,” he growled, reluctantly turning his back on his brother and heading for the nearest suit-up station where he found John’s partner closing the last fastening on one of Five’s emergency suits. They were designed to fit all of the brothers, and since Caspian was even leaner than John he was almost lost in the baggy cloud of space-rated neoprene.

Virgil snatched a helmet, settled it onto Caspian’s suit latches and clicked it into place. “C’mon, let’s go!” He grabbed a fistful of loose suit and powered both of them towards the airlock.

“No!” Caspian writhed and twisted in his grip. “Let go of me! I’m not leaving John!”

Virgil half-plowed, half-swam forward, his expression a rigid mask of fear for his brother’s safety. “John’s doing his best to avoid a collision,” he asserted, trying to convince not only Caspian but himself. “We need to launch Thunderbird 3, keep her safe. If this goes sideways John’s gonna need our help.”

…

STARS BEYOND SCIENCE

“We’re done with that one, Gordy,” John said softly, absently watching a fuzzy sun tint the early morning sky pink and orange outside the window. “Hemingway’s a little bit out there, but what did you think?”

He should have been accustomed to the lack of response by now, but John could feel the salty sting of tears gathering in the corners of his eyes.

“I know you’ve probably done Moby-Dick, bro, but I think it’s worth reading more than once, don’t you? Let’s give it a go.” The gentle suggestion went unnoticed but Gordon’s chest still rose and fell in perfect rhythm as John read the first 27 chapters without pausing.

It was Day 4.

…

#thunderbirds are go #thunderfam #thunderbirds fanfiction #john tracy #virgil tracy #gordon tracy #alan tracy #current wip #work in progress #phading #a phade fic

[parachutingkitten]

14 Seconds

pixal's pov of the merge

However severe this mystery storm was, the portal which had brought it seemed to be growing increasingly unstable. It was impossible to say whether the collapse would put an end to the chaos or perpetuate it further, but by my calculations whatever outcome awaited us was coming in just under 14 seconds now.

The eye slits which had opened to peer down on Ninjago brought with them a dense purple haze and an unearthly wind which seemed to be carrying pieces of the world up into its grasp. To where? I couldn’t say. Perhaps it was all simply rising to be destroyed in the vortex of white energy which now adorned our sky. Our mission for the few minutes that had just passed was to minimize damage while attempting to find a way to put an end to the unnatural disaster. While flying pedestrians back to safety, I was able to pick up the interdimensional energy radiating from the cracks in the sky. It was similar to the readings my systems would give me in the presence of traveler’s tea, but this was much more erratic. If I had more time, or less lives to save, perhaps I would have been able to glean a way to coax the rip in space to heal itself properly; but that wasn’t an option at this point. All that was left to me was 12 seconds.

I glanced around at the veritable battlefield that had spun up around me. The city had already sustained a substantial amount of destruction. The team was doing their best to mitigate things, but there were full buildings that we had lost to the sky. In just 7 minutes and 24 seconds these portals had taken not only homes and land, but people. There were civilians subject to whatever was on the other side of this violent, potent, unpredictable realm energy. The number we had lost was already too high. We certainly couldn’t afford to lose more to whatever boiling point we would reach in just 11 more seconds.

The Bounty wasn’t hard to find. It was at the center of where damage was worst. I tried to make out my teammates through the storm- something made slightly easier by their individual elemental glow. Red, green, orange, and two blue, plus the lightning mech makes six. A small stress lifted off of my systems. They were all still here.

…They were all still here.

8 Seconds.

My attention turned back to the unstable bunch of crackling energy in the sky. Realm energy. I stared at it, attempting to rush the calculations for what lay on the other side, but I knew it was pointless. I only had 7 seconds.

Against what some might call my better judgment, I activated my boosters, heading toward the center of the tears in the sky. I could feel the power increase as I drew closer. It was denser closer to the source, but we were also getting closer to meltdown. We were 5 seconds away. Hopefully that would be enough time.

The energy began to affect my systems. I was losing concentration, but I knew I could keep on holding the thrusters. Just for 4 more seconds.

As the light from the source enveloped my vision, I thought of my friends. I didn’t have a chance to tell them. I hope they might be able to understand.

3 Seconds.

It was a risk. There was a decent probability I was flying into my own death, but I was willing to take my chances on that.

2 Seconds.

Because if there was somewhere else that this storm was taking things, taking people

1 Second.

...Someone needed to be on the other side.

#ninjago #dragons rising #pixal borg #pixal ninjago #writing #the merge #one shot

[inbabylontheywept]

That isn't a ship, it's a cannon with FTL

Aggral Thrawn’s gut was a grotesque thing to behold: Soft and distended, covered with a coarse layering of fur, a fat purple worm of a scar crossing over it’s almost spherical circumference. So vicious was the scar that even gazing upon it brought unwanted imagery of the fat ape-like creature screaming in pain, both arms working as a dam to keep the tidal wave of bloody guts from spilling out of its three-fingered fists

Yet, for all its grotesque horror, he trusted it. That same gut that had almost gotten him killed so many years before had worked hard to save him again and again after. It was what had brought him from mere gangpress, to quartermaster, all the way to the captain of his own pirate vessel.

And right now, it was telling him to call off the attack. The readings he was getting from the craft ahead made no sense. The crew space was too small, the energy readings were off the charts, and there was something almost military about it. Yet, as he looked over the hull, he couldn’t spot a single weapon. Nothing about it made sense.

The crew had enough in the larders to pass on a ship this sturdy. Even as ships on either side of him pulled forward, eager to be the first to raid the craft, he aborted the ram sequence to watch from a distance.

The crew was disappointed. It’d been too long since they’d had a good, solid fight, but they knew better than to second guess Aggral’s gut. It had earned its place as the ship’s oracle by rite of blood, and was to be respected accordingly.

---

There were only four crew aboard the USSN PMAC: Dalton Dial, in charge of weapon systems, Elizabeth Harris, in charge of navigation, and the Pratchett siblings, who worked together to keep the fifth generation fusion reactor that powered the whole abomination within some semblance of working order.

The Pratchett siblings’ love of the reactor (which they had affectionately named “Sun-Son”) was rivaled only by their hatred of the rest of the craft. Elizabeth and Dalton had more mixed feelings on the matter. Elizabeth considered the ship “Perhaps a little ridiculous on paper, but a work of military genius,” while Dalton lauded the idea as “Literally the coming of the Messiah, the only thing I prayed for my whole adulthood, and the answer to that prayer manifest, just for me, to bring me back to the flock.”

Their mixed feelings could be explained away just by describing the craft concept:

The PMAC was not a ship. It was the largest possible gun that could still be attached to an Alcubierre drive, with just enough manpower to steer, aim, and maintain the thing for long term patrols.

The prototype MAC that the life-support, thrusters, and reactor had been constructed around hadn’t even been built with space in mind. It was originally designed as a ground-to-orbit defense weapon. If it wasn’t for the capacitor bank the ship would’ve needed almost a minute between each shot to get enough power, even with the fifth generation reactor. Luckily, it could start out each battle with enough charge to fire off a salvo of four before needing to begin recharging for its next launch.

It had just such a salvo prepared for the pirate ambush that their military grade scanners had picked up minutes earlier.

Dalton was not taking the delay very well.

“With all due respect mam, I’ve had a lock on all three for almost a minute now. I could just fire and claim that I sneezed. The Pratchetts would back me up on this. Right guys?”

Emily Pratchett snorted.

“Why is it that when the weaponsmaster says ‘with all due respect’ he always means ‘fuck you for giving my stupidly giant gun blue balls?”

Thom Pratchett shrugged.

“Maybe he’d say it less if you weren’t so eager to translate it to the navigator for him.”

Elizabeth was slightly amused by the conversation. It was hard to keep things particularly formal while on a crew this small. Still, she was waiting for something. She’d gotten permission from the brass to take a new approach to fighting with the ship.

They’d proven it could win battles. Now, it was time to establish shock and awe. And as it currently stood, dead men told no tales.

Thus, they needed more living ones. And as she watched two pirate ships pull forward, with one hanging back, she knew just who’d live to pass on this particular legend. ---

Aggral watched the ships advance on his HUD, the blips crossing the thousands of kilometers between them and the strange ship in seconds. For a moment he felt regret. Was he making a mistake? Was this going to be what led to some upstart in the crew thinking they could do things better than him?

Then, the world went mad.

The power readings on the strange ship spiked. Hard. He’d thought that the baseline levels were outrageous, but they must’ve had some sort of absurd capacitor bank to expel that much energy that fast. The twin prongs that made up most of the length of the ship gave off some sort of EMP that fried the electronics of the Viscera, his sister ship, cutting off their radio traffic. His crew scrambled to find some way to regain contact when Gods of the Dead, forgive me my sins, and and forget me my debts, the actual weapon went off. The EMP hadn’t even been the attack, it had just been a side effect.

He hadn’t seen a weapon because he’d been looking for one on the hull, some kind of guardian laser, or a missile pod. He hadn’t even conceived that the whole goddamn vehicle could be the weapon. But what kind of weapon would charge up like that? A laser would just fire over a sustained period. What would need a burst like-

He stopped midthought as it hit him: A railgun.

He stopped again as it hit them: The kinetic charge would have to have been moving at almost 0.8c for it to just ignore the evasive maneuvers like that. The ferroslug itself wasn’t detected by any of their defense measures aboard, but the thermal readings of the Viscera made every infared sensor aboard scream in horror. Contact with whatever slug had hit it must’ve reduced the whole thing to plasma. It was almost inconceivable.

He was already screaming out the full retreat call when the ship fired twice in rapid succession at the Rictus, which was still recovering from what had just happened to its partner. The first shot was dead through the center. The second hit some target a few dozen meters off to the side.

A direct hit on an escape pod. Apparently, the captain had tried to save himself. Even in the mortal terror that he felt at that moment, Aggral could take a grim satisfaction at that second shot. To leave all the men that followed you to their deaths was a cowardice that he could not bear to consider. He would rather die.

And now, he was going to. Jump was fifteen seconds away, and the console was telling him that the ship was pinged. They knew where he was, they had him in their crosshairs, and they were going to pull the trigger.

He traced a finger over the purple scar absentmindedly. This was it. He’d been living on borrowed time since that first wound, and now he was to meet his ancestors.

He was ready.

---

Dalton was wincing, even as he maintained his ping on the ship. He knew that Elizabeth was just doing her job, but even by his admittedly bloodthirsty standards, there was something fucked up about keeping a ship in ping like this. It was like forcing someone to look you in the eyes before you slit their throat. Way too personal for his tastes.

Elizabeth was keeping an eye on the craft, making sure that no escape pods were jettisoning. Part of her was hoping that some would, but whatever other faults these pirates had, they were loyal to each other at least. As the ultraviolet scanners gave the telltale flair of redshift, she told Dalton to turn off the ping.

To say he was relieved was an understatement. In the middle of a firefight, he couldn’t question Elizabeth’s orders, but for the first time in a long time, he’d been afraid to pull the trigger. Now he didn’t have to.

He almost slid out of his chair as he asked the question that had been on his mind since the engagement began.

“Mam, what the hell was that?”

Elizabeth smiled warmly at her very surprised crew even as her words came out, cold as ice.

“A message.”

---

Thanks for reading this far! I'm moving my previous works from reddit to here. If you follow me, more will come. If you're impatient, you can skip to the source and read things at https://www.reddit.com/user/InBabylonTheyWept/

#humanity fuck yeah #hfy #humans are space orcs #scifi #humans are space oddities #this was the first story I wrote for the HFY subreddit #I am terrible at writing names so I just steal them #space pirates #bfg #Big Fucking Gun #science fiction

[marlonbrandto]

THE MAYNOS GAMBIT | 4

The interior of the vault is massive! As the Hammerhead and battlesuit escort glide down to the surface of the vault, Aun’Shar stares out the viewport to see what looks like the surface of another planet spanning all the way to a new horizon. D’tano squints at the onboard computer, “this cavern goes on for at least as far as the Hammerhead’s scanners, could cover the whole planet.” Aun’Shar marvels at the fast approaching ground, dotted with old dilapidated skyscrapers and crumbling statues, “a planet within a a planet, the Calamity Equation could be anywhere!” The door of the gunship hisses open.

1. The statues in the distance crack and come to life, four Nemesis Dreadknights flourish their swords. Ancient gears clatter against each other as the Grey Knights resume their watch, rushing the Cadre

2. A hail of psionically propelled shells pepper the Hammerhead from a distance. Then suddenly lightning arcs through the cloud of dust the gunfire created. Pieces of the gunship explode off it’s chassis, and it’s engines darken, gravity causes it to slam into the gravel beneath it . Everyone jolts into action, the new Ghostkeel pilot charges the nearest dreadknight, restraining the manipulator arms. The Crimson Order fires a volley at another, ion smokes from holes in a Grey Knight bedecked in archaic heraldry as his whole suit teeters over, kicking up a churning cloud of dust with the impact.

3. Walking through the wall of a building emerges another colossus, lightning flashes from the pilot, detonating two of the Crimson Order’s battlesuits. Commander Novastorm overcharges his weapons, diverting all the power in the thrusters into the mounted rifles energy output. All that’s left of the Dreadknight’s operator is a hole in the middle of the suit, which crumbles to the ground.

4. The Dreadknight in the center breaks free of the ghostkeels grasp and swings his arm cannon towards Commander Novastorm, recklessly carving a trench into the backdrop with the hot beam of light screaming out of it. Novastorm rockets into the air just in time to dodge the laser, but is unable to avoid the portal suddenly ripped into the folds of reality above him. Unable to adjust his course due to the lack of power in his thrusters, all the commander can do is pull the emergency eject lever. As he is flung out of the battlesuit’s chassis he watches the rift pull it closer, the suit caving in on itself as it’s enveloped by the impossible phenomenon. The Grey Knight then swipes with his Nemesis Greatsword at the Ghostkeel, who flickers out of existence as the stealth drone projecting the hologram crashes to the ground. The real Ghostkeel fires his Cyclic Ion Raker at the Dreadknight, destroying its Psi-Cannon before getting sheared in half by its greatsword.

5. The dreadknight turns towards the stealth suits and begins chanting endlessly about purification as purple flame bursts from him, swallowing and vaporizing stealth team Obscuro

6. D’tano had taken cover in the second floor of a nearby building, only to realize the rest of his fireteam didn’t follow him. Stray bullets burst through the dilapidated wall as the Fireblade takes aim with his pulse rifle, lining up a shot with the dreadknights’ pilot. Before he can properly get a shot, his wrist mounted tacpad beeps in alarm, the Ethereal Aun’Shar’s vitals are dropping! Grimacing at the exposed enemy, he swings his pulse rifle to the floor of the building and fires a few bursts of energy, damaging it enough for the section he stands on to crumble to ground level. Falling into the ruin, D’tano manages to land on his feet as he rushes into the open to support the ethereal.

——————————————————————————

Lighting and hellfire screams over Bo’ran (Commander Novastorm) as he stumbles towards the burning hulk that was once their gunship. A Crisis suit of the Crimson Order, Shas’Vre Nyk’thos of sub-team Crimson Dawn (judging by the markings on its side), rockets by Bo’ran, charging headlong into the raging goliath of a bygone era. Bo’rans’ legs ache from the impact of his ejection system as he breaks into a sprint, but is flung towards the Hammerheads wreckage as Nyk’thos’s suit erupts in a brilliant explosion. Ears ringing, Bo’ran smacks into the hull of the gunship. He wipes the soot from his eyes and rolls off the fusillade, the impact of hitting the ground sends a sharp pain through his ribs. He manages to push him self off the ground, taking stock of the situation around him. Drones whizz around in a panic, intercepting incoming fire. A handful of Fire warriors attempt to establish a firing line before a white hot laser vaporizes two of them instantly. And behind the smoldering wreck is Fireblade D’tano dragging the limp ethereal — Aun…. Char? We never got a proper introduction, Bo’ran muses to himself as he limps in their direction either way, what’s left of his honor guard will not last long against this foe, and I’ve learned the best chances of survival are always right next to an ethereal.

Screams echo across the landscape punctuated by thunderous lightning and wailing laserbeams as Bo’ran grabs hold of the ethereal and helps pull him away from the conflict. A bolt has punctured the ethereals’ chestplate, and as Bo’ran takes a closer look, he sees in place of a wound is a churning rift of psychedelic colors. The ethereal seems insensate, mumbling something about statues.

“He needs more than a doctor!” He shouts as the hammerheads chassis suffers one final explosion, shattering.

“He needs to get out of here first!” Grunts D’tano as a shower of bullets whizz by them and thud into the dirt.

“The only true way out is up, we’re stuck in this hell!” Bo’ran catches a glimpse of a battlesuit in the distance, through all the dust, the familiar glow of plasma flashing towards a large menacing silhouette.

“An elevator. In the building. Found it when we landed!” D’tano forces out between strained pulls. Bo’ran focuses on this new objective.

Almost there! Another explosion lights up the dust cloud in the distance

A few more steps! The screaming in the distance has stopped.

One more push! A hulking figure emerges from the dust, raising its sword, then slices downwards, creating a black rift in front of it. D’tano drops the ethereal and grabs the crank handle of the door, furiously spinning it.

“Inside!!” D’tano wrests the door open, while another rift roars a few meters away from the trio and out steps the hulking dreadknight, but by the time the foul contraption scans the area the Tau had all but vanished.

——————————————————————————

AUTHORS NOTE: I love writing the narrative of my 40K games, but sometimes you suffer a crushing defeat at the hands of a Grey Knights player who brought 4 Dreadknights to a 1000 point game. It was a hard game to play, since it felt like right after the first turn I barely even had a chance at winning, but I hope it at least made an interesting story! After all, if the protagonists of a story never lose, victory doesn’t taste as sweet. I appreciate all the likes I’ve been getting so far and hope you all continue to enjoy The Maynos Gambit!

#fanfic #sci fi oc #warhammer 40000 #battle report #tau empire #warhammer 40k #warhammer miniatures #warhammer oc #warhammercommunity #tau 40k #grey knights #scifi #short story #tau #warhammer #sci fi writing