#and in dying to save everyone he became a kind of ghost in the machine

[empty-dream]

70-72 commentaries (No pic, spoilerific nonetheless)

The most important thing: S3E70-72 have no visual for Hockney's face. I, as a Hockney fan, can not deny my disappointment. Though his head from the back does something to soothe my ache.

I want to scratch Yasratcha's face so much.

So I googled and found that the name of the game, Gakjadosaeng (각자도생) literally translates into "Self-Help", and is an idiom meaning "Each one tries to make a way out of it." Fitting. Tho I’m actually surprised Yasratcha doesn’t name the game “Cat Game”

This entire kill-the-prisoners-who-just-wants-freedom-to-get-what-you-wish-for thing is not gonna do Bam good. It's foreshadowed already.

I have a feeling the special gift Yasratcha prepares in Yama's map are the same canine species as Yama. Either way, being Yama is gonna suck now.

I wonder what Evankhell's map is like since it's not shown. And also what's up with Kallavan's map, the goal is right in front of his face?

White: "I can't believe I had to get my feet wet." Me: I can't believe that's the first thing you say after 1 year hiatus.

White as an enemy is an anoying trash talker. White as an ally, however, is a satisfying trash talker. I forget if he's always able to honestly admit his pride gets hurt when someone blocks his sword, or if this is because of White's Clone effect on him? Last time I remember, as Hoaquin he exploded when Boro did it.

That Lyborick minion is so fucking unlucky to run into both Dowon and Karaka. This duo is not what I expect to find here but now I'm looking forward for their dynamic. She actually calls him "Kid." I know she’s ancient and all but. still. Karaka. A KID. LMAO.

I have no basis to say this but what if AA will face Maschenny's minions and they give hints about Maria and lit up the path to Khun Family Arc. I don't think said little brother is Ran, tho. The Wiki states Ran wants to kill Maschenny, and I feel like she is the type that will sardonically call any Khun male younger than her as "little brother."

Hansung really says "Me? Wanna be a hero? Nuts."

But anw, what is 'Where it all began?' Why is he "the only one mad for Jahad and the Great Families for turning their back against morals'? Am I forgetting something about Hansung's past or is it really not touched upon yet?

I still can't believe I start with "I hate Yu Hansung" and now I'm all "I love Yu Hansung."  Or the fact that Hansung, Karaka, White and Kallavan, all antagonists from previous long, long seasons, now are allied with Bam. What kind of fever dream is this.

Flash news: Yasratcha is into mixed furries.

*Haratcha spewing those words on Hansung* Me: Wow he really hates heroes huh *Haratcha's past is shown* Me: Wow he really hates himself huh.

So Haratcha's past is basically Elaine's but so much bloodier. And it's tragic in a different way because unlike Elaine's family, the Rashangs didn't start off such greedy bastards. They were just a good minority group that was being persecuted. But when they got to taste wealth, comfort and power for a bit too long, they became cruel and lazy.

And "How People Change" is a common theme in TOG. Just look at Bam in general, or Floor of Death arc with Joe, or Jahad and the Great Family Heads who, as Data!Eduan and Data!Jahad stated, were not like *that* before.

Haratcha's dying scene is unnerving because of how much this stays true. The ghosts (?) of the Rashangs are still so greedy. But when he offers them the only thing he has left, his mark, they just curtly say 'we have that already.'

His dying thought is correct: The Rashangs had no ambition. They never learned. They were given multiple chances to go back to living normally and safely, but they busted them all. They had passed the point of salvation because, as narrated, " They could no longer stand it if anyone had even a little it more than them. They developed a habit of demanding equality, but they made no effort to make things truly equal."

But that didn't go one way. Haratcha was the one enabling the Rashangs to depend on him and eventually leech him off. He said "I will give you power"; he never said, "Let's become strong together." He shot himself on the foot by becoming their wish-granting machine. Just like how he accused Hansung of doing, Haratcha was trying to be a hero for his marginalized people. But one fundamental mistake and several unfortunate things kickstarted his downfall.

Hansung himself also highlighted this. Hansung was not a hero trying to save anyone. He encouraged races trampled under Jahad to stand up for themselves, he made use of people, he left those dragging him. All of these were not things Haratcha did.

Said fundamental mistake, at least for me is that it got worse for Haratcha because unlike Elaine who still had her subordinate, he was alone. He was the lone leader of the group and the only one Yasratcha transformed into a feline. There was no one to raise with him nor to fall with him. No one understood what he really wanted, no one truly asked or argued more with him.

So when the pre-greed Rashangs worried about him and he waved them off with the words "Ask me anything, I'll give it to you!" they believed him and took it literally. After that he just kept giving and giving despite everything until it drained him and led him to kill everyone. And the reason why he couldn't be as harsh as Hansung is, why he is the wannabe-hero one, is because it was out of unconditional love that he did everything for his people.

(I'm just a fan of Hero Deconstruction so don't mind me spitballing about one minor character's past.)

By the way, SIU's narration and drawings to show Haratcha's past is insanely good and chilling. Right to the very end, it was *chef kiss* God I miss SIU so much it's so good to have him back.

#tower of god #tog spoilers #random saying

[nekojitachan]

Okay, so this is... IDK what this is. I guess this is the bare bones of my take on The Old Guard with the Monsters/AFTG.

Uhm, warning for people dying/violence, not in very nice ways, some of them (Nicky’s is vaguely tied to canon if you think about it).

*******

Somehow, it didn’t come as a big surprise to Anders when he and his twin came back to life after being killed by the raiders who’d stormed their longhouse, along with everyone else. The strangers had sneered at him and Aron, the ‘living’ vessels of their people’s twin gods, then invoked the name of their own unknown god as they shoved their bronze swords repeatedly into their flesh. Anders had a small knife he’d hidden beneath his robes, but he hadn’t been able to put up much of a fight against trained warriors.

(He’d repeatedly asked to be taught to fight, but Tilda had just laughed and ignored him, too busy soaking up the attention she garnished as the mother of a god’s vessels. Too busy drinking fermented berries and milk to care about how Knut, the elder, mistreated them.)

No, unlike Aron, Anders considered being unable to die (well, to remain dead) a curse instead of another sign of the twin gods’ favor, proof that the Fates took great pleasure in tormenting them. They didn’t age and they healed no matter how badly they were hurt, yet they weren’t immune to starvation, cold temperatures or other things which made life difficult.

They had no choice but to constantly move on, with no family to take them in and strangers suspicious of them if they remained in one place too long. Aron soon grew bitter when he realized that no woman would want him anymore once she continued to age and he didn’t, and it was much the same for Anders if he felt an attraction for another man.

It went on that way for almost eighty years, the two of them isolated from the rest of the world by some terrible curse, until they were driven from sleep one night by the image of a teenaged boy with long, dark auburn hair and pale blue eyes, beaten and bloodied, being held down by two men while an older man with similar pale eyes and red hair cut close to his scalp grinned as he slit the boy’s throat.

Only the boy didn’t remain dead, because the next image showed him alive (and covered in blood) as he stood by a pyre with a woman’s body on it, then as he scavenged through the ransacked sheep farm for anything useful he could find before he took off running. Anders stared at his twin as the images faded away, at the shock in hazel eyes the same color as his own, and knew they shared the same thought as well as appearance; it wasn’t just a dream, and they were no longer alone.

They set out to find the redhead, but the young man proved as elusive as a dream. Anders took to calling him the rabbit, because it felt as if they were chasing such a creature through a forest during the night, fumbling along like a bunch of clumsy fools while it vanished with ease into the thick foliage. The occasional dreams were of little help, because as soon as they figured out the redhead’s location in the dream, he always was gone by the time they finally got there.

Anders was going to cut his tendons a few dozen times when they finally caught up to the flighty bastard.

So six hundred years later, when they had another dream of a tall youth with black hair and green eyes being killed in battle, they wasted no time tracking him down to the island of the Celts. Caoimhín wasn’t a runner like the rabbit and refused to leave until he (along with Anders and Aron) almost ended up as a solstice sacrifice.

Funny how almost being set on fire while alive motivated one to see the world.

Anders began to regret the whole ‘let’s save a fellow immortal’ thing after a decade or two, when Caoimhín proved to be an annoying know-it-all. If the tall bastard wasn’t so good at fighting… he did come in handy whenever Anders managed to ‘upset’ the locals for interfering whenever the assholes were selling slaves (especially children) or mistreating servants – which was often. Aron yelled at him for having the subtlety of a raging bull, but the Persians got on his nerves, as did the Romans, and the Huns and the Franks, and… well, any bastards who thought because they had a bit of land and enough people with pointy weapons that they could boss everyone around.

(Caoimhín said he had a problem with authority. Aron said he was an asshole.)

And through it all, the rabbit. Kept. Running. And. Running.

They finally ran into another immortal who’d been ‘reborn’ a couple decades before when in Damascus, of all places, as Salah ad-Din fought Europe’s Crusaders, and learned that perhaps there was a reason why the rabbit kept his distance. Riko was a viper in human form, and after he did his best to dismember Caoimhín, Anders ‘killed’ him in front of some of Salah ad-Din’s men, leaving them to believe that the other immortal was a djinn when he ‘came back’ to life.

The three of them had no problem abandoning Riko in Damascus, wrapped in iron chains and sealed in a cave.

They kept wandering and fighting what seemed to be hopeless battles, especially with the rise of the Catholic Church. There were times when Anders (now Andrew) wanted to retreat from the world, to find an isolated, empty island and never leave it, but there was Aron (Aaron) and Caoimhín (Kevin), who weren’t quite ready to give up, and a damn rabbit with the clearest blue eyes he’d (sort of) seen who haunted his dreams and taunted him by always being just out of reach.

Then in the 1600s, the three of them dreamed of a new immortal born in the New World, one beaten and starved to death by monks. Unhappy about the thought of the long voyage, Andrew and his fellow ‘monsters’, as he’d come to think of three of them, headed across the Atlantic. It took them almost four years to find Nico, the son of a native woman and a conquistador, who’d been killed because of his attraction to men. The young immortal broke into tears to finally be with his ‘own’ kind, to be safe at last, and was a cheerful presence.

He was even more annoying than Kevin.

They spent a few years wandering the New World, but were drawn back to chasing the rabbit once again; he’d gone to ground in China, leading Andrew to hope that for once he’d stand out and be easy to find, but the damn bastard had developed an almost inhuman skill for learning the local language and blending in wherever he went. Kevin grumbled about him being a damn chameleon, while Aaron wondered if perhaps he’d truly died and they were hunting a ghost.

For some reason… that thought bothered Andrew.

Things carried on as they had before, only it seemed that every time Andrew turned around, the world had changed in some manner. A new country had formed, an old government had been overthrown, a new religion had been invented, yet another senseless war broke out, someone created an invention that upended things in a startling way…. He still remembered how for so long everyone had used bronze swords until someone had figured out how to smelt iron, how there’d only been longhouses and small farms until all of a sudden towns and then cities began to appear.

Change was inevitable, as was the fact that humans would twist some of those changes into something bad.

Still, he never thought that those changes would lead to things that would enable him and his monsters to travel the world in days (and then hours) instead of months or weeks, that wars would break out that spanned continents and could destroy entire cities in minutes. The four of them saved what they could, but soon it became impossible to keep up, not just because there were so many lives in danger and so much being destroyed, but because they could no longer fade into the shadows with ease with things like digital records and cameras in existence.

They learned as much as they could about modern technology; Nico (Nicky) and Aaron took to social media without any problems, while Andrew and Kevin picked up some hacking skills. They bought the best fake IDs possible and did everything they could to leave no trace online.

Yet they couldn’t stay in one place very long, not when they kept working, when they used the skills they’d honed over centuries to help people in need. Which was why they were traveling from France to England via the Chunnel; Andrew refused to give up his customized Maserati just yet, so they’d take the car with them on the train.

They didn’t expect any issue with their papers, especially since they’d used them a few days ago, so it was a surprise when a customs official in Calais frowned when he scanned Aaron’s while the machine beeped several times. Then the same thing happened with Nicky’s. Andrew tensed and tugged the cap on his head further down as he prepared to fight while Kevin did the same; their weapons were hidden in the special compartment in the Maserati, but they were good at improvising.

However, before they could react more than that, a familiar voice called out in French to the customs officials, one Andrew recognized with ease from his dreams over the last three millennia; the rabbit, dressed in a customs uniform, his dark auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail that trailed just past his shoulders, tapped the official who held Aaron’s documents and said he’d check it out, that there was an issue with the scanners. He purposely didn’t look at any of them as he did something to the scanner then ran the passport again, which beeped once in an ‘all clear’. Then he went to do the same for Nicky’s as the fool gaped at him.

As soon as Andrew was cleared, he stalked after his quarry, who to be fair didn’t try to run (for once). He grabbed the other immortal by the wrist and spun him around, part of him noticing that the rabbit was only a couple inches taller (which was a welcome change, considering how for the last few centuries, everyone towered over him). About to curse the bastard out for leading him on a merry chase for over three. Fucking. Millennia, he found himself stunned silent when the rabbit smiled.

(Maybe he should have considered what would happen when he finally caught the redhead.)

*******

Yes, Andrew, what does happen next???

I’ve never taken the Chunnel, so sorry if I messed something up there (I wrote what I did to fit the story). It’s a bit vague, but the twins are Scandinavian Bronze age, Neil is England Bronze Age (around Middle Bronze Age), Kevin is Ireland @ 600 BC, and Nicky is Mexico @ 1600′s. I debated having Andrew and Aaron separated, until I saw the twin gods thing. They were together, but per Tilda’s crappy parenting, they had a very rough childhood with Andrew protecting Aaron.

Mary raised Neil (Ram) to be cautious/wary of strangers. I’m thinking Nathan was a sea raider and... well, he came back years later and that time, he wiped out the farm. Neil heeded his mother’s lesson a little too well, but over time he finally came to learn that Andrew and the others weren’t all bad and finally stepped in to help them (and in a way, protected his own hide).

#aftg #aftg au #the old guard au #neil josten #andrew minyard #aaron minyard #kevin day #nicky hemmick #riko moriyama #the monsters #neil is very very good at running #andrew is very very frustrated by that fact #andrew should have thought about what happens next after catching neil #oh boy

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

songs on taylor swift’s LOVER (2019), a concept album about eliot waugh and quentin coldwater from SYFY’s the magicians, rated by how much they are about eliot waugh and quentin coldwater from SYFY’s the magicians

i forgot that you existed - lmao these dummies will never be over each other. bumped a bit because it would be good on the soundtrack for the fic i still kinda want someone to write where eliot gets brainwashed by the dark king who for god’s sake is not trying to bring back to life his beloved who died because of homophobia and gets catfished by his dead brother but is just a supernatural evil despot manipulating eliot’s pain and erasing his memories of quentin only to be defeated of course by the power of true love. weak showing to start but things quickly improve. 2/10

cruel summer - this is a song about being out of your mind with horniness for someone you would rather die than admit you’ve caught feelings for, which is.... VERY queliot. love eliot watching quentin at a hotel vending machine at night and insisting to himself, “i’m not dying.” good for a non-beast AU where quentin dates alice and eliot dates some non-possessed normie boy and they both get dumped finals week and get obliteratingly drunk in the physical kids’ cottage as bros and hook up and wake up like “LOL haha rebound sex” and then it happens again and they’re like, sure, you know, why not, you’re heartbroken, i’m heartbroken, let’s help each other forget about it by fucking like rabbits, except of course by august eliot is drunk in the back of the car crying like a baby coming home from the bar because he is not fine about all the times he has told quentin it’s fine. ALTERNATELY this is actually just quentin in the mosaic timeline after they hook up and he wakes up in the morning totally ready to talk about how they’re dating now and eliot is like LET’S NOT OVERTHINK THINGS and quentin’s like, haha yeah ok! and they keep having mindblowing outdoor sex but like as bros and quentin regrets every waking moment agreeing to pretend not to overthink things with his best friend who is amazing in bed and who also he is definitely falling in love with. “breakable heaven” is a good description of the mosaic timeline, because many pieces and because it broke by never happening. bonus point because “i love you, ain’t that the worse thing you ever heard?” is SO eliot and also SO quentin in related but distinct ways. 8/10

lover - UGH!!!! SO QUELIOT!!!! “have i known you twenty seconds or twenty years” vs. “i bond fast, time is an illusion.” “can i go where you go” for two people who have been thrown together and torn apart so many times is wildly romantic. “my heart’s been borrowed and your heart’s been blue” = i dated a possessed guy and then became a possessed guy and you are chronically depressed. “you’ll save all your dirtiest jokes for me” is all about eliot’s smirks. i ALREADY have feelings about taylor swift, a human being who spent most of her adult life ruled by the lingering wounds of having been uncool in eighth grade, putting in her big sweet love song the line, “and at every table i’ll save you a seat,” but i have SO MANY MORE feelings when i apply that to quentin coldwater, who ate lunch in the bathroom on days that julia was absent because of the horror of finding somewhere to sit in the high school cafeteria. 9/10

the man - margo says she hates this song because it’s white feminism but whenever she gets drunk at karaoke she makes quentin sing it with her. he always flips his hair on “i’d be just like leo in st tropez,” because he is the only other person besides taylor swift in america uncool enough to think that’s still a reference that conjures up associations of a sexy awesome playboy. 3/10

the archer - FUCKING!!!!!!!!!!! GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!! this is... ok. ok. i’m calm. this is the eliot song of all time. “i’m ready for combat / i say i don’t want that / but what if i do” is about eliot’s reactivity and his fear that on some level he wants to blow everything up more than he wants to be loved. we don’t know what started the fight we see in the mosaic timeline but what we glimpse is very “cruelty wins in the movies”: this impulse to win by pushing the other person away to avoid your own vulnerability. “i’ve got a hundred thrown out speeches i almost said to you” is eliot unpossessed after quentin is alive but before he and alice have broken up thinking about all the apologetic true love confessions he made charlton watch him rehearse. “i search for your dark side / but what if i’m alright right right right here” is about refusing to believe in good things because they are so threatening when your formative experiences of love and family were so unsafe. “i cut off my nose just to spite my face / and i hate my reflection for years and years” is, quite literally, just the exact plot of 4x05. “i wake in the night / i pace like a ghost / the room is on fire / invisible smoke” is more A+ abandonment issues content, and i can’t even TALK about “all of my heroes die all alone” in the context of eliot waugh who FULLY has on MANY occasions raised a toast to living fast dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse and has never himself been wholly sure exactly how much he was kidding. “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men / couldn’t put me together again / cuz all of my enemies started out friends” is first of all a very funny thing for a former high king of fillory to say, and second upsetting because MOSAIC, PIECES, MINOR MENDINGS, ELIOT SEES HIMSELF AS A BROKEN THING, and third devastating because of how much of the Trauma Chalkboard involves times eliot has betrayed other people. ok FINE we can start talking about the refrains now, even though they CAUSE ME THE MOST PAIN. “help me hold on to you” is the subtext of every post-4x13 queliot fic for the very good reason that it’s the most vulnerable and beautiful and real thing eliot could ever say. “i’ve been the archer / i’ve been the prey” is again about eliot as a person full of regret for all the ways he has lashed out in his life against people other than the ones who wounded him so deeply. “screaming who could ever leave me darling / but who could stay” is sooooo eliot, with the drama and affect of it all (“darling!”), and the performed belief in his own excellence combined with his deep insecurity. “they see right through me” is about how he’s secretly afraid everyone can smell on him that he grew up on a farm in indiana, “can you see right through me” is about both fearing and hoping that quentin will see all of him, “i see right through me” is about how hard he’s lied to himself about wanting love. the best song in the world probably. 20/10.

i think he knows - my favorite thing about adult taylor swift referencing anything about adolescence is that taylor swift had a totally deranged abnormal adolescence because she spent the whole thing first trying to be famous and then actually being outrageously famous. so i love it when she says “it’s like i’m 17 nobody understands,” because when she was actually 17 she was dating a jonas brother for like 3 months and then writing break-up songs that made it sound like she was never that into it, so it’s like this idea of being 17 and hormonal in some kind of normal context where you actually are thinking about sex all day instead of meeting with your branding team. this is a fun idea to extrapolate to eliot & quentin, who were both miserable at 17 and never got the experience of devoting your brain full-time to all-consuming horniness for the first person to ever give you an orgasm, but who can now experience that with each other. also “his hands around a cold glass make me wanna know that body like it’s mine” is a queliot line because of my very strong personal headcanon that eliot is obsessed with quentin’s hands. 6/10

miss americana and the heartbreak prince - see above re: tswift & teenhood. "when i was 16 / lost in a film scene” is even better because actual teen taylor swift spent many hours of her life literally acting out on film these like pathologically normative high school scenarios that she never lived because she dropped out after ninth grade, and because this song is all about like, image vs reality but is also itself a fantasy? fucked up and weird, i love it. taylor swift spent so many years portraying her specific teen shame as being about her deep dweebery and i think it’s really funny that in this song she is still an outcast but now it is because she is like, too sexy and misbehaving, both through the line “they whisper in the hallways she’s a bad bad girl” and by setting it to basically a lana del rey track. i feel like this is a very eliot move, to rewrite your own history of exclusion as more glamorous and flattering than it was, to portray yourself as like this debauched rebel instead of a sad gay kid in a homophobic environment. eliot obviously was never enamored with this kind of stock teen americana imagery the way taylor was, but i think he has that same tension of deeply resenting one image while being very drawn to another one. extra point because “heartbreak prince” is such a hilarious and amazing way to describe quentin. 7/10

paper rings - good song for a very chill no-beast AU. “i like fancy things but i’d marry you with paper rings” is very eliot. it’s cute to imagine eliot reading all of the books besides quentin’s bed not because he likes them but because he wants to get to know quentin better. “i want your dreary mondays” is a nice thing for either of these dudes to hear. 5/10

cornelia street - all songs about being overwhelmed and terrified by love are about eliot waugh!!!!! especially songs where someone does something casually that is clearly not casual at all. it rules that both of the key metaphors in the verses are extremely quentin images: fresh page on the desk / card sharks playing games. stories and magic! thinking about eliot and quentin barefoot in a kitchen together makes me want to cry, for normal reasons. 8/10

death by a thousand cuts - i have to be honest, for a long time i thought it sucked that the best song on this album was actually not about queliot, but then i saw the light and realized that this is a song about how totally incomprehensible it is that you’re supposed to just move on with your life when someone you loved absolutely is no longer yours, so ACTUALLY, this song is totally about quentin after the mosaic! “i ask the traffic lights if it’ll be alright / they say i don’t know.” trying to be normal while secretly dying inside. “i look through the windows of this love, even though we boarded them up / chandelier’s still flickering here” = i said it was chill when you compartmentalized our 50 years as soulmates as something that happened to other people but actually the me i am right now wants you real bad! “what once was ours is no one’s now” because it happened in an alternate timeline that never existed. “you said it was a great love / one for the ages / but if the story’s over / why am i still writing pages” = you said it was kind of beautiful but also that wasn’t really me but if so then why do i want to bone you so bad. gets even more fucked up if you extend it properly into season 4. MY HEART MY HIPS MY BODY MY LOVE / TRYING TO FIND A PART OF ME THAT YOU DIDN’T TOUCH: a line i can only ever type in all-caps and about which i can say nothing because it is perfect. “gave up on me like i was a bad drug” is also very quentin reflecting bitterly on eliot. saying goodbye to your possessed ex is death by a thousand cuts because that’s how many times the monster sockpuppeting his body is going to randomly show up in your apartment covered in blood. the morning comes and you’re not my baby, because you have been possessed. flashbacks waking me up because i have PTSD now from watching your body murder like 80 people.  8/10

london boy - lmao. no 0/10

soon you’ll get better - I Feel Weird Jokingly Assigning A Rating To Taylor Swift’s Very Sad Song About How Taylor Swift’s Actual Mom Has Actual Cancer Based On How Much It Relates To A Fictional Couple In Which One Person Has A Parent Who Dies Of Cancer So I’m Going To Rate This Not Applicable. N/A. great song tho

false god - jesus, does she really go london boy / soon you’ll get better / false god? her sequencing is so deranged. anyway i know i was JUST talking about my interest in fic where quentin and eliot get together but don’t necessarily talk out every single one of their 800 issues in the timespan covered by the story, but this song about make-up sex is still not very queliot to me, possibly because i cannot get past the dorkiness of taylor swift calling herself new york city. “you can't talk to me when I'm like this / daring you to leave me just so I can try and scare you” is pretty good though. “if you want to live your life live it here...” damn eliot waugh and taylor swift really are like the same person on the level of psychological architecture. i know i keep saying it but it keeps freaking me out. 4/10

you should calm down - eliot unfollowed jonathan van ness on twitter after the video for this came out. he unfollowed antoni too but then refollowed him because he’s hot.  -1000000/10.

afterglow - so THIS song about fighting actually DOES have very queliot vibes. and it’s funny, because i keep talking about eliot’s fear of lashing out and hurtfully pushing away people he loves, and i think he does have that impulse (”if you want to live your life live it here...” what did you MEAN eliot), and i also think he’s SUPER afraid of that within himself, partly because of how the dynamics of his childhood make anger and conflict really fraught for him... but actually the character we more often see being a huge dick because of his own issues is, in fact, quentin, and that is who this song about. we all know i am obsessed with the scene where quentin comes sheepishly back to alice apologizing for being an asshole because it’s so vulnerable and honest and such a powerful moment of growth for him... as robbed as i feel of like tearfully joyful queliot reunions i also feel robbed that we never got to see quentin and eliot have a moment like that together! 7/10

me! - absolutely not. -30/10

it’s nice to have a friend - i like this song but the way taylor talks about it always makes me kind of sad, because she draws this equivalence between being excited about a friend as a kid and being excited about romance as an adult that really does make it sound like she thinks in adulthood romance takes over a place that friendship used to occupy, instead of co-existing with it... but she’s also talked a lot about the importance of finding who her real friends are so idk maybe i’m being too hard on her and also oversensitive because of certain plot developments. “call my bluff / call you babe” is cute. card sharks! pet names! 5/10

daylight - R U KIDDING ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THE QUELIOT ANTHEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! two people who have been hurt and hurt others, who have spent a long time running away from their own hearts, who have been confused about what they want... “i wounded the good and i trusted the wicked / clearing the air i breathed in the smoke” about every mistake and regret and fuck-up... “maybe you ran with the wolves and refused to settle down / maybe i’ve stormed out of every single room in this town”... the trauma chalkboard, the fight outside the hedge bar... the people you become to try to erase the person you’re afraid you are... and then! “throw out our cloaks and our daggers because it’s morning now / it’s brighter now”... to find peace in the person you never need to hide yourself from... the transformative power of letting yourself be seen... “i can still see it all in my mind / all of you all of me intertwined”... i can still remember this other life that never happened which matters not because it’s where i fell in love with you but because it’s where i revealed my whole self and learned that whole self could be loved.... and of course above all most crucially, “i once believed love would be burning red / but it’s golden / like daylight”... the very beautiful story the magicians accidentally almost told was a story about letting go of the narratives you’ve been taught to want and realizing that as much as real life and hard and scary it is also lovelier than any of those wan old stories... “i wanna be defined by the things that i love, not the things that i hate, or the things that i’m afraid of”... please!!!!!!! 100000000000000/10

#the magicians #queliot #we're doing. great. just. just having fun normal times qreating quarantine qontent #no readmores we alienate our followers like men #if u can't handle me at my Completely Fucking Losing My Entire Mind About Something Fully Unhinged #this is not the blog for u my friend

[lisatelramor]

Be a Better Me

Hi, I’m back with angst fic. >_>

So with COVID19 going on I 1) had more time to write + 2) have had a bit more background anxiety with the world, and stress + time = angstfic for me most of the time. So this got written in about a  month. Instead of any of my WIPs =_=;;;;; Hope other people are up for some angst. Either way I'm being sent back to work next week so I'm glad it chose to finish when it did.

This was 100% inspired by @ickaimp's Robo!Kaito fic and has probably low key kicked around my brain for years since I read it back in like 2011.

Chapter 1

His arm aches. Kaito flexes his hand, blood running down from the bullet graze that feels like fire. The robot that impersonated him is wires and synthetic skin smoking in a pile. He feels sick in his stomach, both from almost dying after a few days trapped in a lab and because he’d just seen something that had run around with his face blow its own head off.

It’s just a robot, but it’d thought it was human. It’d thought it was him, had seen his memories, just hadn’t quite been human enough to understand life, death, or morals. What kind of sick fuck made something like that?

Kaito shudders. His hand flexes again. Bandages. He needs bandages, and maybe stitches, or maybe to just. Go lie down.

His skin doesn’t feel quite right but that’s the shock probably. A lot’s happened in a couple days’ time. Like finding out someone with his face killed someone. A creepy scientist who also kidnapped Kaito, but yeah. How anything that had Kaito’s memories and personality could do that… He shudders again.

Kaito isn’t a megalomaniac in disguise right? He has lines and morals and things he’d never do in a million years, even if some of his morals are grayer than others. He doesn’t hurt people. Not physically permanent. And not any other way if he can help it.

Blood drips from his fingertips.

There’s a laboratory burning down with a corpse of a man who tried to make a man from metal out there and Kaito doesn’t want anything more to do with it.

He turns away. He has a gem to return and a budding reputation to save.

o*O*o

He feels weird for a while after that. It’s the trauma probably. Kaito can’t say his life has ever been normal. His father was a stage magician, both his parents turned out to be thieves, and he puts on a white suit to stir up shadows to try and find out why his father was murdered. That’s hardly the sort of thing a teenager usually goes through, but killer robots and kidnapping were new. His balance a bit off for a day? He spent two days strapped to a table. His arm took a bit to work right? He did get grazed by a bullet. Swimming takes a bit more effort than the last time he did it? Not weird since he generally avoids swimming in the ocean if he can. Aoko’s mop swings seem a little slower? He’s kind of hyper aware of attacks lately, so he’s just paying more attention.

Things are different but not that different so it’s just his head being weird about it all. Life goes on, he stops feeling a bit off and he keeps on going as usual. Bait Aoko, play like a good student, perform magic, and pull of the next heist. Simple.

But then there’s suddenly a magic wielding witch and a detective trying to sniff him out, and life just keeps getting weirder. He doesn’t remember it being this strange before he became Kid, but it must have been at least a little weird. It’s just that practicing magic and acrobatics with Aoko and actual magic and jumping off buildings are very different things. It’s a miracle he’s managed not to break anything. What with the roller coaster, or jumping off buildings, or getting shot at, or ghost(?) pirates, or being attacked by a hoard of hairy rats… Yeah. Life is weird.

So if Kaito’s a little weird in it, well, he fits right in, now doesn’t he?

o*O*o

Kaito’s chest is aching and there’s a nasty bruise forming. He supposes that’s what happens when a gem blocks a bullet. It’s yet another miracle the sapphire didn’t shatter let alone that the bullet hit it instead of him at all. Aoko liked her birthday gift but it had taken all Kaito had to set that up for her and he’s dead on his feet now.

He might have a cracked rib too. He winces, easing off the costume. It has a hole—two really where the bullet deflected—that will need patched and the usual bleach treatments to keep it white. White is the worst color for climbing around rooftops and crawlspaces. He’d change it if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s one of Kid’s signature identifiers at this point. Thanks, Oyaji.

The bruise is worse than he first thought when he gets his shirt off. Mottled purple all along the left side of his chest. Like someone took a wooden mallet to him.

Thankfully there’s an x-ray machine down in Kid’s hideaway. It’s old and definitely not something he’s going to ever use much because, well, radiation, but he’d rather know if he’s managed to break a rib or not so he knows how much acrobatics he can get away with.

It takes a bit to set up and a bit longer to figure out how to get everything to work, but fifteen minutes later he’s got x-ray film developing in a little darkroom off to the side because apparently his dad had a little bit of everything thought out down here. He loves and hates it in equal measures sometimes.

He sighs, feeling the deep breathing ache, and looks at the forming image. And frowns.

He’s not a medical expert, far from it, but he has a general run down of the human body and has seen x-rays before. What Kaito’s looking at? Not what he’d expect to see. There’s ribs, yes, but they’re not quite right, and too dark. Then there’s all the metal. It’s like his nervous system is registering as wires, radiating out like something from one of his textbooks, same with the circulatory system that’s a bit too dark on the film. Should he even be seeing that? Heart, maybe, but branching signs of the rest of his veins and arteries? His lungs aren’t the right shape. The vague shadows of organs aren’t right either. And there’s… there’s the shadow of screws and pins and mechanical bits that shouldn’t be there. There’s wires instead of tendons that shouldn’t be showing and he has to stare.

His chest throbs and he looks down at it. Bruising. At the film. Barely resembling something human. He hurts. Aches. Yet there in front of him is mechanical parts.

Feeling like he’s floating, or maybe sinking, Kaito plucks one of his razor cards from its deck. He slides it along his finger. Skin parts, blood wells up, pain registers dimly.

But is it blood?

It drips, just a few drops, already clotting as he stares. It’s red as any blood he’s seen. The pain is real. And yet. He looks at the film.

Kaito hasn’t thought about the robot in months. Why would he? It’s over and done. He’d read a police report about the lab in the paper. About the body found and the equipment sitting in police evidence for ages as the murder case went cold. They didn’t know to look for a robot. And the robot had been left for scrap. Kaito doesn’t know what had happened to its remains.

There hadn’t been a second body found.

He looks back at his hand and finds it shaking.

The robot’s face had peeled off, but when he tugs at his cheek he just feels pain. Same with his hair. He feels. He eats and shits and sleeps and bleeds. His breath is coming too fast and it hurts.

It’s a mistake, right? He could take another scan and it’d be normal. Human. He could scan his hand and it would be bone and tendons and the ghost of muscle, not wire and metal joints that would make a prosthetic expert weep. Not too-dark veins and tendrils of nerves that shouldn’t be visible.

His lungs were the wrong shape, he couldn’t breathe.

“Shit.”

He’s Kaito, right? Just a normal teenager with an abnormal life. Just a normal, human teenager.

The robot thought it was human.

The robot thought it was Kaito.

Kaito doesn’t remember being taken, he just remembers waking up strapped down. But the robot barely passed as human. But Kaito has wires in his chest.

He looks at the film again. “Well. No cracked rib.” He laughs. It’s not funny at all. He can’t breathe. “What do I do?”

The empty basement hideaway his father left him has no answers at all.

Like usual, it’s just Kaito facing crisis alone.

He’s never felt worse.

o*O*o

Eventually, he picks himself off the floor. Eventually he changes into new clothes. Eventually he slides into bed and sleeps, terribly, but sleeps. He sees his face melting in his dreams, a broken metallic skull leaking fluid and smoke and blank mechanical eyes staring at him. His skin peeling away to show metal bones and wires as everyone he loves stares in horror.

Kaito wakes up feeling like he’s going to throw up, in a cold sweat. He can dream and sweat and feel sickening terror, surely he’s wrong. Surely.

But the x-ray is the same damning image this morning as it was last night.

Kaito’s hands start shaking again.

If he goes into class, Hakuba will take one look at him and know something’s up. Hell, Aoko will notice. He laces his fingers together. Poker face. Poker face. Whatever is going on, he’s still been Kaito for months without noticing anything wrong so. So maybe he’s… a cyborg or something. A robot wouldn’t be having a panic attack about being a robot. Who would want to make a robot capable of having a panic attack in the first place?

He doesn’t know what the hell is going on, but he needs answers before he can do anything else.

Kaito calls in sick, leaves Aoko a message so she doesn’t show up demanding he get ready for school. Eats plain toast without tasting it—how can he taste it?—and slides on his shoes. His chest is a mass of dark bruises just like a human body that had a bullet deflected should be. But nothing under his skin is apparently human.

It’s easy to slip into the police record room with a borrowed face, and a matter of minutes to seek out the mad doctor’s case record. His charred remains are photographed in gristly glory front and center, but his cause of death isn’t fire. Kaito knows his hands don’t have the sort of strength to do what that file describes.

He almost throws up looking at it.

There’s lab equipment listed off, melted computers and bits of paper files to survive the destruction kept in evidence files. Kaito might need to come back and see what he can salvage from them. If he’s… not fully human, he might need some of the doctor’s research no matter how much the thought makes his skin crawl. There’s nothing in the file about the robot, but there is notes about unfinished pieces parts sifted from the wreckage. Police notes only speculate what they thought was going on in the labs.

The file doesn’t mention another body.

Kaito does a quick look into active unidentified male bodies found in the last few months, but none of them are young enough to be him. None of them recognizable. It should be a good thing.

It should be.

Instead it has Kaito’s breathing tight again because what if he died and no one ever found the body? What if he rots somewhere and no one will ever know he’s not. That’s Kaito’s not.

He leaves the police station.

There’s a disconnect between his self and emotions and it’s something he’s done before, but rarely outside of a heist. His poker face, most of the time, is an act. This is different. This is shutting bits of himself away because otherwise he couldn’t function. This is putting off a breakdown knowing it’ll be that much worse later. This is shutting a door knowing it’s going to open later and drown him.

He heads for the lab. It’s the only place he can think to go.

o*O*o

The building is condemned. It’s a burnt husk of a thing and a surprise that it hasn’t been torn down yet. Perhaps the doctor had owned it and it’s in the air what to do with it. Either way, Kaito approaches with detached caution.

He can remember leaving here in a rush, the explosion that followed not long after he made it out. He can remember the sickening glimpse of a body on his way out, trying not to look too hard and knowing it’d haunt his nightmares. Kaito steps inside and pinpoints the twisted metal that was once where he was strapped down, the shattered remains of the memory transfer machines still imbedded into the wall behind it.

The police had removed a lot of things, but they couldn’t remove the scorch marks on the walls and floor or the dark bloodstains in the corner. He shivers.

What is he doing here? The scene was gone over by police. It’s not like he’s going to find something they didn’t, and it’s not like he’s going to know what any of the machine bits left can do beyond the memory transfer one.

It’s damp and drafty inside. It smells like wet ashes and chemicals and he wants to turn around and leave, especially when he sees a metal start of a skeleton still bolted to the back wall. How many had this guy made? How many robot failures before the one that Kaito fought? How many thought they were human? How many other people were kidnapped in the process of building these things?

Things. Robots were things. And Kaito was…

The wall had collapsed along one side, and no one had bothered to clear the rubble. If Kaito was a crazy robot building scientist that kidnapped teenagers, what would he do with them? Ok, he’d been strapped down to the memory machine. But if he built a robot and implanted memories in it, he’d want to compare, right? He’d want to prove that he’d done the transfer right, so he wouldn’t just get rid of the teenager. The robot Kaito faced had transferred memories fine, but the emotional and moral processes hadn’t been right. The doctor had been basing it off Kaito and if Kaito was. If he was then that meant the transfer had worked right on Kaito. Probably. And maybe the scientist had been trying to duplicate whatever happened with Kaito or maybe they’d been two different models for different purposes. Who the hell knew at this point? Certainly not Kaito.

Kaito prods at rubble. If there’s one thing he’s learned about people who have secrets to hide, things aren’t as they appear. This is a lab, but it’s missing living space. It’s missing storage and a metal foundry. The pieces that built the robots are too specialized to not be custom made. The cabinets that had existed had to have been full of wires and polymers and the fine details bits that you’d want a nice open workspace to better work with, but there had to be a place the doctor had done the base work and he’s not seeing any sign of it here. Just the start of the skeleton on the wall that’s missing its head and lower half.

He can’t look at it. It’s somewhere in between the scan Kaito took of his chest and the metal chassis from the robot he fought, its skin peeling back and—

There had to be a basement. Still is a basement probably. But the door is either hidden or buried, and Kaito’s not sure what to do first. Test the shattered remains of cabinet bases? Try scrounging through rubble? See if anything still hooked into the wall shifts and shows a hidden room like his painting at home?

The basement wouldn’t have been legally added or the police would have its existence on file for the building blueprints. But most of this place can’t have been legally built. Not with the amount of equipment secreted away. People would have asked questions. So. Hidden door.

Kaito estimates wall thicknesses versus the interior versus how dangerous it is to get close to places where the ceiling and walls are still crumbling bit by bit.

There’s a cabinet with shattered glass cases and medical supplies that have all been taken away as evidence. Kaito vaguely remembers it before the explosion. Despite half a roof caving in around it, it’s still in one piece structurally and that means it’s built stronger than a cabinet should be.

It takes twenty minutes of careful prodding and digging and tugging to get it to budge and when it does it shrieks like rusted hinges. But Kaito keeps pulling and gets a space big enough for him to crawl through, stairs traveling down.

It’s dark and even mustier than above. The floor must have cracked or the foundations, and it’s growing mold, but Kaito’s surprised to find it isn’t completely dark. Somehow there’s still power running here, probably underground. The overhead lights are shattered but in the gloom are a few red blinking lights of appliances.

Kaito wants to turn back but he’s never been one to shy away from the truth.

Glass crunches under his shoes as his small pocket flashlight illuminates fragments of the dark. A table. A kitchen. A bed, all in the first room, but heavy metal doors beyond. They’re warped though, and the ceiling sags ominously where a support beam crumpled slightly from the explosion above. Kaito has no idea how it didn’t get destroyed with the rest of the place, but it had to have been the placement of explosives.

He creeps further, leaving the eerily normal living area for one of the metal doors. It’s stuck, but he gets it to move enough to squeeze past, his ribs protesting the movement. It’s fine. It’s not important. The room is the metal foundry he’d expected, casts and tools and carefully disguised air vents branching off. It’s heavily reinforced, probably also muffled so the metalwork didn’t make too much noise. He sees finished metal bones, all sorted neatly into labeled bins and racks of molds. There’s a half-finished skull just sitting there on a work bench, empty eye sockets unnerving.

Kaito wrenching his eyes away from it. There’s papers and diagrams, documents on the doctor’s research about how the robotic body comes together, about alloys and density and weights that Kaito should keep if it ever becomes something he needs—He drops the thought into that emotional void growing in his head.

If he needs anything from here, he will take it. And will not think about what it means.

The documents about the muscular, nervous, circulatory and digestive systems aren’t here. Might not even exist anymore. But there had been a personal computer in the living space and it had glass littering it like the floor, but it wasn’t destroyed. It was one of the blinking red lights, so maybe…

Kaito’s taking that when he leaves.

The other metal door is warped worse than the foundry. Kaito has to go and get a metal femur to lever the gap wide enough to pass through and he’s surprised to find the inside almost fully intact.

One light flickers on, the only bulb not destroyed. He’s not sure at first what the room is. There’s a filing cabinet by the door, sure, but also a chest freezer and something that looks like an opaque glass case except there are wires running to it and an electric hum that’s louder than the freezer. Something in his instincts prickle and Kaito can’t explain the heavy terrified feeling bubbling in his gut the longer he stares at the simple room in the dim, flicker light.

Glass crunches and he tugs the freezer lid up. He’s half expecting to find a dismembered corpse in there. There’s not a corpse but there is vial after vial of dark liquids with strings of numbers on them and containers labeled ‘skin’ with numbers after them. The liquid looks a lot like blood. Kaito’s stomach lurches. The other containers are opaque and thankfully impossible to tell the contents of, though they could be organs, real or synthetic. Kaito really hopes the skin is synthetic.

He lets the lid close and tugs the file cabinet drawers. Locked, but he can easily get in them later. That leaves the glass case.

It has a computerized box attached to the front with strings of numbers displayed that mean absolutely nothing to Kaito. There’s controls too, but the only one he cares about is the one that opens the glass case. It unlocks with a pneumatic hiss, like its contents were under pressure and Kaito swings the glass up.

And stares down at his face.

Peaceful. Like it’s asleep. He’s asleep. But his lips are bluish and his skin is pale and, when Kaito reaches out with a shaking hand, he’s cold to the touch.

The police never found a second body.

The room goes a little sideways and dark and Kaito realizes only after his face is mashed against the metal edge of the glass case that he’s hyperventilating.

“Shit,” he hisses through chattering teeth. “Shit.” His hair’s standing on end and his whole body is shaking and he’s having a panic attack next to his own corpse. “Shit.” It shouldn’t be possible to have a panic attack when he isn’t even real.

The room keeps spinning and blinking bright and dark as he tries to control his breathing. Shit, how can he hyperventilate when he doesn’t have real lungs and maybe not even a real brain—unless. He pops back up like a man drowning and scrabbles for the case.

He tilts Kai—the body’s head one way or another, but there’s no sign of it being cut open. The hair’s the same wiry texture he feels when he touches his head and there’s no injury he can feel. The knobs of its spine along the neck are intact. There’s wires, now that he’s looking, glued at the temples, but they’re not going in the body. There’s wires other places too and he has a stupid, fleeting moment of gratitude that at least the sick fuck that did this left Kaito’s underwear on. The body’s. Shit. There’s no marks and no indication of what happened, but the body isn’t breathing and there’s no pulse at its throat and it’s Kaito’s body right there.

It’s him but it’s not because Kaito isn’t.

He has to let go of the body and take three steps away to empty the meager contents of his stomach on the glass-littered floor. Stomach bile burns his throat. Is it even stomach acid? Is it even—how is he digesting if he’s wires and not-quite-organs? What is he?

He’s crying and hiccupping and he can’t quite seem to stop, the sour taste in his mouth and the smell of mold in his nose. What was the point in making a robot so close to human it can’t tell the difference between flesh and machine? What’s the point of a machine that can cry and vomit and panic like a real person? What’s the point of killing a teenager to replace him with a machine?

He crouches for an unknown period of time until the panic sort of flat lines and his tears dry. His hands stop shaking and his throat is raw, each breath a rasp. He bleeds and feels pain and emotions and—

Kaito goes back to the body. His body. Say the memory transfer worked. Say that Kaito in his entirety went from human flesh and bone to this. Intact. Say that the process fried Kaito’s brain and the doctor was left with a comatose teenager and a robot that didn’t know it was a robot. What would the doctor do with his mistake? Was the case to preserve the corpse? To keep the body as reference or had there been another purpose?

Or maybe the process hadn’t fried Kaito’s brain. Maybe the real Kaito had looked at his double. At the other Kaito and tried to break free. Maybe he’d been sedated or something else went wrong. But maybe that Kaito had died in terror and left an imposter in his place.

Kaito will never know.

There is no sign of decomposition. No sign of the body going through rigor mortis or any kind of trauma. Like he’s just sleeping. Like a few tiny stimuli could open the hidden blue eyes and the body would rise up and express how frigging cold it is in the case.

Maybe, for a scientist playing god, that had been the intent. Make a man from scratch achieved, next step bring back the dead. The first person to successfully revive a cryo patient.

Kaito closes his eyes, then closes the glass case. He can’t look at his own body anymore. He can’t. It seals with another hiss, preserving the body for however long the machine keeps running.

What the hell is he supposed to do?

He presses the heels of his hands against his swollen eyes. It’s not right to leave this here. It’s not right for any of this to be left here. It’s not right for Kaito to take the place of the real Kaito either but he doesn’t know what the hell to do. He’s been taking his place for months now; what else is there for him?

Is it better or worse if he is, in fact, a complete imprint of Kaito’s brain? Would he even know the difference if something is missing?

Worst of all, no one noticed. Not Aoko. Not Kaito or Jii. Not Kaito’s own mother. No one.

Kaito died alone. And no one noticed.

He’s crying again, not sure if it’s for himself or for the body at his back. Months. Months.

The overhead light flickers out and all at once Kaito can’t stay here. It’s like he’s the one in the box, trapped and slowly running out of air, and he squeezes out the door and up the stairs before he can even process moving. He doesn’t stop until he’s up a tree and breathing smoke and mold free air and trying to stop trembling. ‘What now?’ his mind asks. ‘What now, what now, what now?’

It’s night when he finally moves. He doesn’t know how long he sat up a tree, can’t remember the sun going down, only knowing that his body aches everywhere from stillness and unforgiving solid tree limbs beneath his ass. He makes a call. “Jii?”

He doesn’t know what his voice sounds like, couldn’t pick up his poker face if he tried right now.

It must be horrible though because Jii’s voice comes through the line sharp and worried. “What’s happened?” he asks.

There’s no way to start, no words to draw on to explain the mess that this is. How does someone say that they’re dead? That they’re dead and not, human and not, all at the same time?

“Kaito-bocchama?” Jii says sharper.

“How good,” Kaito says, voice gone all wobbly and out of control, “is that friend of yours with robotics?”

“…Kaito-bocchama?” Jii says a lot more dubiously.

Kaito licks his lips with a dry tongue. Dry mouth. Probably dehydrated and doesn’t that make no sense for a robot to have that feature. “There’s a problem. And I don’t know what to do,” he admits.

He can’t say it. How can he say to Jii that Kaito’s dead, like Toichi is dead, to Kaito’s mom that he’s dead and there’s just this remnant body of wires and meat-mimicking mess wearing his face left? How can he do that?

“Where are you?” Jii says, the sound of him getting clothing, maybe or a coat in the background.

Kaito hesitates, but gives the address of the burned down lab. “How good is your friend with robotics?” he asks again.

“…It isn’t his specialty,” Jii says after a long moment.

“Ah.” Too much to hope for. Still, maybe this mysterious friend Jii gets the occasional gadget from will know how to read the research notes better than Kaito would. Keys jingle as Jii locks his front door. “Jii?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry, in advance,” Kaito says knowing it’s not enough. He hangs up before Jii can say anything in response and doesn’t pick up the return call. Instead he stuffs his phone in a pocket and covers his face with his hands and just breathes. If nothing else makes sense, at least he can do that.

#magic kaito #detective conan #robot kaito #fanfiction #my writing #not really shippy this time guys #but there's a lot of skirting the lines later #and much friendship #you know #between the angst moments

[theangrypokemaniac]

Ma and Pa James's Second Biggest Fan (we plough a lonely furrow) continues to find Ma Jess's appeal mystifying, since everything about her is negative:

1. Signing up for Team Rocket suggests someone of a morally dubious character to start with, but the truth lies in the clothing, and she's in black!

Black!

It's code for her personality:

• Jessie wears white:

Pure, beautiful, innocent, sweet-natured, not really bad, dealt a severe hand in life but a fighter.

• Cassidy wears black:

EVIL!!! EVIL, EVIL, EEEEEEVUL!!! FOUL SIRENIC TEMPTRESS!!! EVIL HEARTLESS BITCH STEALING JAMES'S NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN WEEPINBELL!!!

Speaking of which:

2. She was Madame Boss's best agent.

You don't get there being kind.

To reach that standing requires hundreds of successful heists, and we aren't talking nicking gold bars. It's living things.

How many Pokémon do you imagine she stole with merciless efficiency?

How many children did she set upon, pinching every animal they had?

How many innocent lives did she ruin by depriving kids of the pets they loved, never to see them again, eaten away with the not-knowing and the false hope?

The glory of her reign ran on the fuel of blood and tears.

What fate do you envision awaited those Pokémon? It's not exchanging one master for another, it's entering slavery.

Jessie and James aren't the epitome of Team Rocket. They are minnows on the outskirts, despised and mocked by most of their fellow members. The actual group isn't particularly famous for prioritizing Pokémon welfare.

The preferable outcome is being handed out to agents to help catch other victims. Otherwise it's transformation into a war machine, forced to fight on and on to the point of exhaustion and death, no doubt tortured and tested on to boot.

What happens if they don't come up to scratch or are pushed for years until too aged and broken to be of any use? Are Team Rocket ready to pension them off to animal sanctuary?

As if. It's euthanasia or on to the streets to waste away, if not fed to the strongest first.

Ma Jess knew this and worse occurred thanks to her, yet paid it no mind, and felt not a single twinge of guilt in that time of service, then met her end trying to draw another Pokémon into imprisonment.

Some might say it was a case of what goes around, comes around. As her behaviour led to God knows how many Pokémon dying alone, leaving their loved ones to wonder and grieve, so in turn did she die alone in the snow, and Jessie had to carry on without her.

I'm not against Ma Jess, I neither feel like or dislike, but I don't understand how so many fans can happily overlook her murky past of inflicting pain, instead elevating her to a semi-divine tragic heroine, yet apparently Ma and Pa's heinous offences of not stealing and treating Pokémon well are beyond forgiveness.

3. It's the Red Ribbon Army! Save yourselves!

Jessie joined Team Rocket to follow in Ma's footsteps. James went with her. Both moved (upwardly in scale, downwardly in morals) from Sunny Town's gang of petty thief kids to a complex Mafia organisation stretching its wriggling tentacles around the world to crush the air from its lungs.

Why? Ma Jess's baleful influence led the two down that path.

Of course Jessie wants to copy Ma, how and where else can she feel close to her?

There's not even a grave to visit!

Rising in the ranks and Giovanni's favour is both to strike it rich and take her place, becoming Ma in essence. That would make her proud, which is all Jessie ever wanted.

What alternative is there? Stay with Chopper and Tyra forever, ekeing an existence pickpocketing and shoplifting, until mortality comes calling sooner than is welcome, or get loaded quickly and retire early?

James theoretically could've gone home at this point, but when it came to which angry redhead he preferred to beat him up, he chose Jessie.

He was henceforth obliged to go whenever she led, even if it meant following the ghost of her mother into the jaws of evil.

They have an excuse, but what was Ma's for getting involved?

However much they boast and revel in their wickedness, the motto proves the couple still believe themselves on a noble quest, despite everything to the contrary, and why?

Jessie isn't about to accept that Ma Jess, whom she's probably idolized as one of few people to love her and a role model of how a woman should be, was nasty or unpleasant. If she was in Team Rocket, it must be good, whatever the outer appearance.

Except Jessie and James are bad at being bad. They are not master criminals. All their plans fail, rendering them poor and starving in consequence. The inner circle of Team Rocket will always be barred to them because they lack the inner darkness it requires.

The joke is they flourish in any other occupation, whether that be Salon Rocquet, reporters, or flogging merchandise and food at the League. If employed elsewhere they'd be better off, but they have to stay because Jessie can't let go, or bear the thought she might be a disappointment to her mother's name. A different career looks unworthy by comparison.

What, so Ma and Pa have got no son because of Ma Jess? They just wanted him to be a gentleman!

If she hadn't set such a terrible example to her daughter she might have an increased quality of life, but then had she done so Ma wouldn't be dead in the first place.

4. Can't pick 'em can she?

What was it that first attracted Ma to Windy Miller? Does she go for the rustic charm, or the promise of a lifetime's supply of bread to feed the abundance of babies planned?

Don't do it, Ma! He's an alky!

Some birds are like that you see. It's the maternal instinct gone haywire. They find a local reprobate and somehow decide he's really a damaged soul crying out for love, the scapegoat of a cruel society.

He's not evil, he's just misunderstood!

This is why you get nutters wanting to marry the Yorkshire Ripper: they put his 'mischief' down to bad women mistreating his gentle heart, but they of course are devoted to his happiness. They can change him.

You don't know him like I do!

In their fantasy, under the influence of a 'proper' woman he'll transform in to a flower-picking hippie, but not too much, they still like him to be dangerously 'manly' (keeps 'em on their toes), then they can feel smugly superior and more truly female than the 'lesser' breed who failed to tame his sexy pashuns.

And if there's one thing Windy has in abundance, it's raw animal magnetism.

Stop it, Ma! You can't help those who don't want helping!

She put up with the boozing, the flour dust and his somewhat limited communication skills, but what really let him down was the company he kept.

Ever after she would insist Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grub led him astray. That's firemen for yer.

Cuthbert? That name's died out.

Sure enough, some point after Ma Jess was stuffed up the spout, old Windy legged it back to Camberwick Green, like the rascal he is, and not a sweet penny piece did she receive in maintenance, the bastard.

At least Ma James got pregnant by a man who stood by her.

She wasn't married to Windy Miller!

Oh, you mean they were living over the brush? I see.

It's all in your head!

Do it my way, and we have Pa Jess. Do it yours, and we're back to a cavernous emptiness. Unless you can supply a picture of the 'real' (pffft) Pa Jess, this is the best available.

Anyway, 'Jessie Miller' just sounds right.

Coincidence? I think not.

5. She went to look for Mew dressed like this.

I could forgive it had she gone in her normal uniform, that's just whimsy, but to have made some effort emphasises that it's not enough!

Some part of her understood a mountain might be a bit parky out, but this was deemed sufficient coverage!

What happened?

She bloody died didn't she?!

6. Ma Boss points the way to doom.

Ma Jess was at least loyal to the mistress she served, but it was a wasted dedication. She squandered her life obeying a heartless virago who could cast aside apparently valued staff without a qualm, whatever thanks she owed them.

The millions Ma Jess accumulated for Madame are probably uncountable, yet she was so worthless that, when dispatched to the mountain, on her own, expected to catch a Legendary Pokémon, by herself, which many doubted even existed, and wasn't likely to come quietly, or put up with orders, but then didn't come back, Madame Boss allowed her only child to sink into poverty and the infamous 'care' of the State.

Everyone knows what goes on there. Entering a home has replaced the workhouse as the place of dread.

Jessie might have been killed or attacked and it didn't remotely concern Madame Boss, unwilling to spare a meagre fraction of her massive fortune to give the girl she made an orphan any comfort or security.

What did she matter? Her mother failed. Why reward that?

In her turn, Jessie became just as obsequious to an undeserving master, who went further than his mama and actively tried to murder her, and still she suffers to please him.

Team Rocket devoured her mother, and now it's swallowed her.

Oh, and Madame Boss got her way upon discovering Mew's fossil, so Ma Jess died for nothing.

7. This.

I'm not surprised Mew wouldn't go with Ma. She probably sensed the vivisection awaiting, and didn't give a toss about the avalanche in revenge.

Mew hasn't got where she is today falling for any old shallow promises from a stranger, thank you.

Suppose the mission had worked, with Mew caught and gift wrapped for Madame's delectation: what then?

Perhaps Mew's power, proving so impressive, would've pushed any cloning scheme aside, leaving Mewtwo unborn and Mew as the mightiest weapon. Or in greed Madame Boss demands more, and in arrogance the scientists promise the earth, the seas and the heavens.

Mew I could see subjected to some non-lethal form of dissection, just to understand how she ticked, that is if they could build the cage to hold her.

As they couldn't, and catching Mew was never a possibility, then Ma Jess's sacrificed herself on a fool's errand, which was obviously one from the outset. If Mew was easy to handle she'd have been captured long before now.

Either Ma dies, Mew's safe, but Madame Boss starts the cloning scheme anyway, or Ma's victorious, Mew is a tool of Team Rocket and the scientists have more sample to experiment upon. Mewtwo is still made, alongside short-lived creations and dozens of unseen freakish abominations preceding.

Now Mewtwo isn't what you call at peace with himself, nor has he received a particularly wholesome experience. One could think Ma indirectly caused that. Her branch of the project may have fizzled to cinders but she still played her role.

What would her legacy have been but to help bring forth the being that wiped out mankind? Where's the future for Jessie when there isn't one?

It's not her fault, but she died in the name of cloning a biological disaster, the creation of synthetic life leading to the destruction of it all.

8. Let's have a gander at Ma in the anime:

• Can afford rent.

• Can afford a tray.

• Can afford crockery.

• Can afford condiments to add flavour to food.

• Can't afford any actual food.

Something's wrong there.

I intended to include affording clothes too, but now I'm not so sure.

I never took Ma to be a brown-all-over kind of woman. At least she gave the fancy stuff to Jessie.

For years I've assumed she wore a brightly coloured jacket, but now I suspect it's a red one heavily patched up, because buying a replacement isn't an option.

Really old clothes are being mended with whatever can be salvaged from even more worn-out clobber.

Best agent Madame Boss has and she's practically living in her own filth.

Team Rocket takes care of its own, eh?

Oh no, let's not get a proper job, one that allows me to provide for my daughter and doesn't ask for my life. Let's stay in this one!

9. Look at Jessie's face!

By her own admission, being tricked into eating snow is the best thing that ever happened to her during an 'otherwise wretched childhood', to the extent she doesn't know it was wrong!

I don't hear Ma and Pa doing that. The only ice James got was an ice-cream sandwich.

What kind of infancy did Ma Jess give the girl for her to be nostalgic about almost dying of malnutrition?

If we say that's a foster mother as in the sub, it means Jessie's fondest memory is after Ma died, which is too brutal for me.

Yeah, thank goodness she's snuffed it.

You think Ma might have taught her not to eat snow! She left her so ill-prepared!

Consequently the sub version makes Ma Jess an awful creature, although I don't see why that Jessie would so desire to mimic a mom she apparently doesn't care about.

10. She's not even bloody here!

I have no picture to signify absence, therefore I must show whom she left behind.

Ma Jess is Pokémon's answer to Bobba Fett: background figure, barely involved, no information, dies early, yet became a fan favourite nevertheless.

If nothing really exists, what is there to like? Why are you contented weaving smoke?

When Rocketshippers put forward the manga as proof, the Anti-Ships used to insist that it 'didn't count' for being set in a 'separate universe'.

If that still goes, and only the contents of the anime apply to the anime, well then it's bye-bye to Ma Jess and Madame Boss, because they aren't real either.

I sometimes think that's true. However traumatic, would Jessie not have acknowledged her mother by now otherwise?

We grasp the characters all had two parents in a nebulous fashion, although not being real people means they don't 'technically' need them, but Ma Jess is the only one who vanished to be granted a face. Why is she then ignored?

She's briefly glimpsed in a passing scene of a single episode of the first series and is never seen or referenced again. The sub doesn't even have that. Where was the use in creating her if only to leave that thread of the tale billowing in the breeze?

We may decide her actions affect Jessie's but we're only imprinting assumptions. She might as well have remained unwritten for all that's made of her.

What we can glean doesn't bode well, irrespective of things left unmentioned.

Her one redeeming deed was dying, thus at least she didn't choose to abandon Jessie. We may presume she'd have stayed with her girl given the chance.

By my reckoning that puts her as Fifth-Best Mother Of Pokémon, behind Ma Brock, Ma James, Dame Ketchum and Ma Boss, in that order.

Then they're those who claim she never died, so she just pissed off like everyone else, rendering her devoid of a single positive quality.

This is the woman you sigh and agonise over for decades.

Ma and Pa are right there, man! Show 'em some love!

#team rocket #ma jessie #jessie's mom #jessie #jessie's dad #madame boss #mewtwo #kanto #snow way out! #the birth of mewtwo

[phantomphangphucker]

I(’m) Miss-Counting Stars

HO-HO-HO and HELLO @ax-n-shious I made it on time YO. 🎆 New Year's surprise! Here’s your Holiday Truce Gift!🎇 This fic took a trip, grew legs, and flew away from me while cackling at the stars. I went with ‘Danny chilling, just, watching the stars’. Stars are wonderful things and I’m a major stargazer myself! Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort. (also on AO3, feel free to let me know if you’ve got an account on there so I can officially gift it to ya)

Danny’s always been a stargazer, even more so when life (or half-life) got tougher. It made for a great coping mechanism, but there’s a reason over-reliance is unhealthy.

Stars were something he had adored all his life. He’s sure he can even remember the first time he laid his tiny baby eyes on them. Bright, beautiful, and twinkling; yet so very far away. So utterly out of reach. Even still they filled his vision with their vast quantities. Endlessly filling up every night sky for the rest of his days.

They had been a constant in his life. Not just his love of them and nights spent watching from his place on the ground. Still oh so very far away even when he scaled up the tallest buildings his home had to offer, just to have a closer look. A look more free from anything other than the night sky in his peripherals. But the real true constant about them, was how they never truly changed. The stars were always there. Regardless of what happened or changed. Regardless of days where he hurt or hated the world. Regardless of drifting apart family members or fights. There they floated in the sky every night, like his own personal Eden waiting for him. Sure he knew it wasn’t really all for him. Anyone else could see them. Just not from the same angle, not with the same vision or mindset. So he was alone in his unique appreciation and childhood wonder.

They were also always out of reach. Up far above his head. Surrounded by clouds and the moon. Unfathomably far away. Their touch or truly being able to see one in its entire glory, was absolutely out of reach. There was something nice about that. Something comforting. Something so distant, so out of reach. Something that could never truly touch him or be touched by him. Something he couldn’t truly see or been seen by. It meant they could never hurt him...and that he could never hurt them.

Sure he dreamed of reaching them, trained and yearned to. But it was just that, a dream. A pipe dream at best. Besides, even if he did grasp that goal -everyone so sure he could and would- it would hardly matter. The beautiful wondrous twinkling things would be as unreachable as ever. Too far for any rocket ship to truly reach. With his skin and eyes always to wear the barrier of a space-worthy suit or the metal of a ship. Never having true real contact with the vast expanse of space. So unchanged and unchanging they’d be. All that would change is where he could gape at them from. How unique he could make his view of them. He may change, his sight may change, his way of life may change, and those around him may change. But the stars, they’re stagnant. So regardless of it all, he could always look up and it would all be the same. So that he could be with them for a time, exist outside of time and its changes. Let everything else fall away and pretend everything was as it was when he first laid his eyes upon them.

Before the childhood stories of ghosts that interrupted every other full nights rest with nightmares. Before other children lashed him with words and fists. Before uncles that he just wouldn’t see any more. Before his sister learned how to do everything the two of them needed. Before home went from a baby's playpen to a glowing biohazard. And long before the portal sapped away all his parents time, years of their lives; and eventually... half of his. The stars got to be his Before. So he’d repay their glory and home in his life with his endlessly watchful eyes. As they were constant things, so too were they his constants.

Or at least they were. They used to be. That ‘real true constant’ stopped being ‘real’ or ‘true’. The far off comfort, the unchanging nature, the inherent inability to be touched; had winked out like a dying star.

That accident, The Accident, had changed so much. Changed everything if he felt like being honest with himself. The stars were the one thing excluded from that ‘everything’. Or was anyway.

He had taken solace in them. Sure his DNA had changed, his species had changed; and sure, the last clinging strands of his idea of ‘safety’ had been brutalised. But they were there. They were the same. Then that ‘were’ became a little too literally past tense.

At first his flight, his ability to completely nullify gravities pull, had been something of pure glory. Not even the tallest building could compare to this. To how close he could be. To the angle he could gaze at them from. To how he could really feel like he was part of them, floating in a vast darkness with them. But they were still oh so wonderfully distant, still so untouchable, still unchanged. And that had been a fact to him, of course it had. Until it wasn’t.

He didn’t really get to appreciate his first trip into outer space. Too busy with a fight, with the villain of the week, with the sorta love of his (half)life, with the world and its complications and its changes. To really star gaze amongst the stars. In outer space. In their land. In their world. Their vast sea of oxygen vacant black. But that night? After his whirlwind of a ‘life’ had settled down? His mind calmed as much as it ever could those days and with his head hitting the pillow? Well his eyes had snapped open and he knew what he had to do. And once he got up there, existed in the space of stars. Floated there just as defying of gravity and exposed to all that space, as his glorious stars. It was like he had actualised with his very being. Had become one with the stars, become one of them. And so thus they became less unobtainable, more something he knew. But he hadn’t really minded, he still couldn’t touch them after all. As much as he could experience existence in a state similar to how they existed, it was hardly the same and it was free from any kind of true physical contact. They were still things out of reach. He was closer, yes he was, compared to any other living creature. Or half living for that matter. But they were still far off. Still those imperceptibly massive twinkling things from his childhood. Still the same sea of soft glow that comforted him when everything hurt just a little too much. They still couldn’t see his weakness, nor morn over it. They still couldn’t be bruised, broken, or snuffed out as yet more collateral to his existence.

But he...he should have known better. He had learned the lesson that ‘inevitable’ didn’t exist. He should have known ‘unbreakable’ and ‘unreachable’ and ‘unchangeable’, were things that didn’t exist either. Should have known that ‘comfort’ wasn’t something that was supposed to exist within anything remotely close to him. He was here to, was made to, break and bleed and suffer. Why should he be allowed any reprieve from that? Even in or from something as distant and aged as massive balls of burning gas.

But he did learn his lesson, so that was something. That night, that honestly had no right being called a night anymore. Nights were supposed to be secretive and wondrous. But maybe that night did have its place being called ‘night’. Night’s when all our demons come knocking after all. When our broken hopes and our mountains of secrets come to suffocate us in our beds. Though for him night had hardly been that. They’d been stars and freedom, then battles and still yet freedom. Night was the time where Daniel James Fenton got to win. So it just wasn’t right to him, to lose the greatest truth and comfort in his existence in the dead of night; surrounded by glowing stars, unhampered by a single cloud. The only thing floating in the atmosphere being him. Who was a glowing thing himself. That night, like many others since his DNA was rewritten by the apathetic will of an entire dimension, it was him who was the sole cloud. It made him an easy target. Not that he minded nor cared really. Valerie did though, always. And logically he should be worried, cautious, about that fact. But since saving little Elle, the spitfire clone that had become something of a little star to him. His little star. Valerie has been something approaching kind to him. And he did oh so wonder how she viewed the far off stars, the vast of space, the solace night; from that board of hers, her little flight machine. Of course it wouldn’t be the same, everyone alone in their personal drinking in of all they see.

So he hadn’t minded nor torn his eyes away from the twinkling stars when she had flown near him. Maybe he should have. Maybe things would have been different. It wouldn’t have been, thinking otherwise was a fool's game. But life and death was a game and he was always their personal fool.

Her words, still clear to him now, had been both jarring and warming.

“Funny thing, from the ground I thought you were a star”.

Her tone, something so unforgettable, made it clear she meant her words. And that was the thing, wasn’t it? Those words rang true, he had known as much, had wistfully believed as much actually. He was as much a star as the ones that peppered the sky, endlessly far above his lair. Sure any could see the most basic of similarities. The floating, the glowing, his whites against his blacks. But he also knew it was more. So much more. To them, to the mortals, the full humans. He was beyond them, an otherworldly creature they could hardly fathom. He was an unbreakable force, the warrior that never ever failed in battle. He was a nightly sight, his glow against the backdrop of night. He was a comfort, flashing smiles and friendly waves. He was...a constant, ever-present whenever he was needed. But they could touch him, speak to him, truly see him...harm him. So it wasn’t truly the same. Similar to the stars he was, but with just one too many differences. What a fool he had been. They weren’t different at all.

He had nodded to her then without taking his eyes off the skies, and she had taken the gesture for what it was. Joining him in casting their eyes upon the crowd of stars above. Watched the swirling dance of dying light eons away, that one could only just barely pick up if they stayed still long enough. And that’s when it all came undone. When that first stray fabric of his fragile belief in the constant and in comfort, had been snagged by a stray DALV Space Analysis Station and begun unravelling. As a far off star, that wasn’t quite as far off as many would be comfortable with, began a crash course. Of course all it would really crash into, really smash apart, was Danny’s one lone constant. Perhaps if it had been a meteor instead. Hadn’t been something that was supposed to be untouchable. Hadn’t been something that was supposed to never change. Hadn’t been something that wasn’t supposed to hurt him. Perhaps he’d feel less hollowed out in the end. Still have something untouched by his existence. Still have something unbroken by what qualifies as his luck. Because the stars couldn’t be his Before, his unchanged comfort, when they became the next villain of the week. Became one of his battles and wars, instead of the backdrop and reprieve from them.

The two, halfa and hunter, had been there watching that very backdrop, taking in that very reprieve. When he had known something was off. When he had to look at the skies, at the stars, like he did the streets of home; in search of the threat he knew was there. One star was just a little too big. Was different. Had changed. It hadn’t been long after that when the world began its great alarm. A star was falling, and it was falling into them.

With that news, he had fallen too. Impacted the ground, with flesh no worse for the wear. But he had shattered. His comfort, everything that had been right with his world, his dreams; hit the pavement and blew apart as an unseen, untouched, unheard supernova. He couldn’t lay there, couldn’t stay, and just watch his view of the stars crumble and rain down in the form of one single star. He broke. And then, he disappeared.

As he lost his constant so too did Amity. Terrified and doing anything to bury their heads in the sand, over their missing hero. Vlad had given them everything they could ever need to crush and pulverise their worry. Masters Blasters. Failed missions. The Reveal. Holding a world hostage. The elder halfa flying off to ‘save’ them. But in the end, it just hadn’t mattered. All ghosts have Cores. Even the crazed and half-formed. But Vlad’s was all heat and flame; a Core of fire. And stars, they were things of near heavenly and apocalyptic infernos. And when you throw a lit match at a forest fire, the stronger cannibalises the weaker. Consumes it to fuel its own flames. Maybe if things had been different, the elder halfa could have gone to live on in the void of space, amongst the stars. To wander just as they do. Instead of combusting in instantaneous destruction.

But this end, the fall of a deranged madman with delusions of grandeur, became a form of duct tape for Danny to patch his shards back together with. In a sense, Vlad being burnt to ash and nothing was a return of comfort. They, the star, still couldn’t be touched. Everything else was wrong and changed, but there was that little ounce of something like a constant. And he...he had a battle to fight. Had a bit more of himself to lose. Had to give up just a little bit more by refusing to truly give up. He had to be Phantom.

Of course though a fool he may be, he hadn’t been enough of one to think that the burning star could be made to pass harmlessly through the Earth. Or even get arguably anywhere near the planet. Vlad’s plan would have never worked, no matter what. Damned from the start. Passing a star intangibly through a planet would just destroy it. The whole planet to drown in its heat and fire and blinding light; instead of just one small lost man. So Danny had faced it like he did everything, head-on and shouldering the awaiting suffering. In another time he would have been able to stargaze away the hurt after saving the day, the usual. Throw his suffered body and mind into the vast of space and unreachable twinkling things. But times not kind, and it’s treated him in kind.

And it’s funny, almost enough to be a comfort, how Amity Parks returning constant that was Phantom, made everyone more okay. While he had flown off towards becoming less okay. Toward the star. One that he would see. That he would touch. That he would change. That he would harm. The last may not have been a guarantee, but that’s simply how things went for him.

Logically taking the same actions that obliterated the only other like him was foolish. Getting close and...touching. But he was ice at his Core. Cold to sooth heat and frost to chase away flames. Sure it might have eaten him up all the same, part of him had been content with that potential. But he would change its course, send the star to orbit and soar elsewhere, before he’d even consider letting himself succumb to anything. So up he had gone, to grab at the wisping and ragging flames; had tried to ignore how it had looked oh so much like how his ghostly tail would move, giving off light just the same as well.

It had been bright, it had been beautiful. It had been all he had always known any star to be. But it hadn’t been so small or so far away. It had been part of his existence, his surroundings, in more than just name and adoration then. More than just something his eyes gazed upon from a comfortable distance. It had been here, truly been with him. And as he had grasped his hands to it, had really touched it. A star. He had felt like a dying star himself. Like those broken chunks of himself had melted to a gooey mess and seeped out of him. He had wanted to cry. To sob and choke. But Phantom can’t do that. Not under the mortal worlds watchful eyes. His constant, his comfort, his one unchanging truth; may had been tearing down around him, but he had refused to let the mortals lose Phantom as their constant. He was good for that at least.

But like always nothing ever went as he planned, as he hoped, as he wanted. Instead cold and heat had raged against each other. Chipped away at each other. His body, his ice, and the stars body, it’s fire; went to war, space the battlefield. Tainted even the void of space. And as he had watched, having always held levels of fear of his power, he had wanted to wilt away. Like a fresh lily tossed into a snowbank. As the star had shrunk and shrivelled, its energy and fuel being eaten up by his Core. By the cold of his ghostly flesh. He knows he did cry then, the tears turning to hot steam and cold mist in an instant. Till he had been staring down at a small seemingly insignificant ball of fire. Of all his ideas of comforts and constants and freedom and then knowingly misplaced peace. Before it had flickered out, like a candlewick between wet fingers. The last burning candle of his mental safety net being drowned and buried ten feet underground in the process.

His arms had fallen limp while even from so far away he had been certain he could hear the cheering mortals. They were saved, like always. While he had barely had the mental fortitude to keep himself attached at the seams. He had let himself plummet back to earth, had passed his fall off as exhaustion, and slinked away. Had ignored their desire to congratulate or heal him. Had ignored the sounds of claps and cheers and words that had seemed more like gibberish than anything he spoke. His mind had vacated the crowd long before his body had, but both left with haste. And even once he had been alone, he had ignored his physical state. The burnt flesh, that surely smelled something foul. The patchwork of clinging chunks of jumpsuit. The brittle and crunchy texture of his bones. The odd organ he actually kept around in ghost form, that had been boiled.

So in that state is exactly how he finds himself now. Floating just out of sight, high above his lair. Just watching the stars, as they seemingly spin around and around far faster than could ever be possible. His eyes blurring and feeling like every little star, so very far away and out of touch, were seconds from actively shooting bullet holes through every inch of his flesh. Leaving everything he was to crumple with fleeting dream of lies. Makes sense, he guesses, lies made up most of his self and days. Those very lies guided him, like the stars to a lost man at sea. But stars have the option to ignore where they point. Because they can’t touch you. Can’t hurt you. But his current state screams how that’s a lie, and lies drag you with them like the tide. So he lets himself float wherever his body seemed it wanted to go. Where the spinning stars wanted to pull him. Some imperceptible ghostly instinct being all that kept him within the bounds of his lair. Occasionally feeling the burn of the stratosphere when he winds up a little too high. Each burn reminding him of that one star all over again. The one he held in the palm of his hands and snuffed out. The one star he had gazed at, that had gazed directly back.

End.

#Danny Phantom #phandom #angst #hurt/comfort #mild gore #mild body horror #MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH #major character injury #Phantom Planet rewrite sorta #stars #outerspace #holiday truce #holiday truce 2019 #self-sacrifice #self-destruction #self-reflection #unhealthy coping mechanisms #mental health issues #mental break down #heroism #poor danny #my writing #valerie gray #vlad plasmius #phantomphangphucker #fanfic #phan phic #have a fic suck my dick

[starforged]

general general and skywalker: a post-tros finnrey

He dislikes the desert. It’s too hot. There are two suns. Who just has two suns? And the sand, it’s everywhere. It’s in his mouth and his eyes and he doesn’t know how, but it’s in his pants. Against his skin in places nobody wants sand to be.

But…

It isn’t Jakku, so he supposes he can give Tattooine the smallest of passes.

Very small.

The cantina is full of tired humans and aliens, and some that look like they would shoot him if they could. It’s the only place with people. The only place where he can pay for information.

“Listen, I am General Finn. You know, of the Resistance?”

The barkeep, a gaunt Twi’lek with skin the color of dying grass, stares at him. Mostly, that tactic works. General, Resistance. Everyone eats that up, and it makes Finn’s life easier and keeps his pockets kind of heavy. Metaphorically speaking. Because credits didn’t actually have weight.

“Finn what?” the barkeep finally says in return. It’s not an answer to his question.

Finn blinks and takes a deep breath. “Just Finn. No, not just. General. Point being, I am looking for my friend. A girl. She carries a lasersword. There’s an orange droid. Can you tell me where she is?”

The Twi’lek holds out his hand. Rubs two of his fingers together.

Finn transfers over the credits.

“You must mean the Skywalker girl. Homestead has been empty for years, but I knew the family that lived there. Owen and Beru and their kid, Luke.”

This is too much information to receive all at once, and Finn doesn’t know how to process any of it. Skywalker girl? Luke? What?

--

Rey is waiting for him outside of the little home, built right into the sand. A moisture farm, the barkeep called it. Finn doesn’t get it, but there she is, standing in the middle of the sandy yard. BB-8 beeps with delight and rolls up the incline to him. He asks about Poe, who isn’t here with him.

Poe is busy. Everyone is busy.

“I’m confused, you’re a Skywalker now?”

Her lips part, but she doesn’t have anything to say about it. So her shoulders lift in a shrug and a faint smile paints over her lips. “What are you doing here?”

“I missed you.”

They’ve all needed time. She’s never told him all of it, what happened down on that planet’s surface while he had been on the destroyer. And then, a few months later, she was gone. Something she had to do. She’d be back.

That was three months ago.

And now here he is, on this dreadful planet, standing before Rey Skywalker.

They move towards each other at the same time, without having to think about it. Her arms loop rightly around his neck, his around her waist. They press together, too warm, but it feels like it always has: a missing piece slotting back into place.

“I missed you,” she whispers into his shoulder. When she pulls away, he tries to not feel disappointed. “Let me show you around.”

The machinery for the moisture farming is, surprisingly, fascinating. And it’s nice to talk about something that isn’t war or death or First Order or who the hell is gonna run the Republic now because most of the Senators were blown up and who is going to trust any of them. They’re no Princess Leia or Mon Mothma, who he hears was fantastic. This is just weird rustic living.

He hopes whoever his parents were or are, that they aren’t moisture farmers.

She makes him dinner. He helps to clean the dishes.

The room she lets him sleep in has old models of x-wings and other ships. There are spare parts buried in bits of sand, nothing that is good enough to salvage. The room vibrates with this energy of more.

Luke Skywalker must have been some kid.

--

“What are you really doing here, Rey?”

“I buried Luke and Leia’s lightsabers,” she tells him.

“In the sand?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“I don’t think they minded.”

She seems different. Well, they all are, so that’s a stupid observation. But she feels more calm, more sure of herself. This is not the Rey he knows. She’s still there, the bright eyed girl from Jakku and the angry girl during the war. There are just parts of her that he feels but doesn’t know. He wants to.

He’s always wanted to, and she was too wrapped up in her anger to understand that he wasn’t going to leave. That he wasn’t scared of her, but for her. She kept trying to be alone, and all Finn has ever known is working as a unit. As part of a whole.

He feels that this is what’s happening now, too.

“I’m sorry,” Rey says, cutting through his thoughts. There’s a certain flicker of grief that crosses her face, of regret and pain.

He reaches out, across the table, pushing her cup of tea out of the way. He takes her hand. It’s warm and rough. He remembers the first time he took her hand, when it had been rough and sweaty against his palm. “Me too.”

“Ben saved me,” she whispers. Her dark eyes are downcast, lips parted.

“Ben? Solo. Ben Solo, Han and Leia’s son? Our enemy? Who was hunting us?” Sometimes, Finn feels like his mind is splitting apart. When he thinks of Ben Solo, there’s only Kylo Ren. The ghost stories the troopers spoke of him in whispers during training. The feel of his blade striking against Finn’s when they fought. That mask.

But when Rey raises her gaze to his again, squeezing his hand, he sees parts of Ben Solo that are just Ben. It doesn’t change his opinion of him. The guy was a monster. And he is dead.

“He gave me his life. There’s this ache, like a part of me has been hollowed out.”

He swallows. Hard. “Tell me about it. All of it.”

She does. And he does his very best to understand the things he doesn’t get. He doesn’t ask many questions, afraid that she’ll shut down on him again. Shut him out again, and Finn doesn’t want that.

And he thinks, while she tells him her story, her past, her future, her other half, he understands what love fully is. Love is not a continuous act of sacrifice for someone else, but it is a helping hand and a listening ear and an acceptance of some things that he can’t change. He’s not jealous. No, okay, he is, because other half is such a serious notion and if Ben was alive… Finn would love Rey enough to keep an eye on a reforming monster so that she could be happy. And he would move on.

He can’t change who Ben Solo and Kylo Ren were to Rey anymore than he can change what Poe and Rose and Jannah are to him. He can’t change that her power is something he can’t exactly touch. He’s never wanted to change any of those things.

--

A month passes. It’s a hot, sandy month. Farming is hard work. But it’s good work.

--

A month passes. He begins to learn the names of the regular crowd at that cantina. They teach him card games and how to gamble. He’s terrible at it. Rey is great at it. Nobody likes to play with her.

Trusk slaps a card down, rattling some machine parts on the table. “Where’s the wife, Skywalker?”

Finn frowns. “It’s General.”

“General General?”

He realizes how stupid it sounds the second Trusk says it. “Yeah, yup. General Finn General.” It only takes him another second for him to register that Rey was referred to as his wife. The wife. To his husband. His cheeks burn hot, and he’s thankful for both the darkness of the cantina and of his skin.

--

Rey teaches Finn to lift rocks. Small ones, at first, because he tried a rather large one and nearly took out the rear section of their home. He learns how to build instead of destroy. He learns to reprogram. He learns that he is not a Jedi.

He learns that she has six different smiles and a storm in her heart.

--

“He’s still with me,” Rey confesses one night. It’s cool when the suns are down, and they sit outside.

“He’s always going to be with you,” Finn says.

“No. I mean - he became part of me, when he gave me his life force.”

“I - what.”

“And his ghost--”

“Nope.” Finn holds out his hands, shaking his head. “Nope, I don’t do ghosts.”

Smile number five comes out, brighter than any number of suns combined, a wide grin that stretches across her face and reminds him of how young they really are beneath the war wounds.

“Oh, so having him part of me is fine--”

“No that’s just weird. The Force is weird. Jedi are weird.”

“I just wanted to say that, if you kissed me, you’d be kissing part of him.”

Finn gapes. It takes a few moments for everything to catch up with him. Time, breathing, his brain. Rey’s cheeks are burning red in the faint light he can see her in. But her gaze is even, steady.

“Do you--” He coughs, because his voice becomes high pitched and he remembers coming into puberty all those years ago and how squeaky he sounded. He lowers his voice an octave. Manly, smooth. “Do you want me to kiss you?”

She takes her time, thinking that question over. He waits with a patience he didn’t think he could have in this situation, because really, all he wants to do is grab her and kiss her until they both run out of air. That’s all he’s wanted to do since the day she looked at him, him.

“You had something to tell me once,” she says instead of answering him. “What was it?”

All those missed moments, all of Poe’s butting in and the near death, and his desperation for her swell up inside of him. “I love you. I always have.”

“The thought of losing you hurts me,” she tells him. Her hand is over her heart. “Here.”

“What does that mean?”

They stare at each other, and his body is twitching to move, and his mouth is itching to kiss her, and his mind is screaming at him to do something, say something. Her eyes are glassy, and he’s ready to face the rejection. He can do that, for her. So she can heal.

“I love you.” Her voice is a whisper. “And I love him.”

Competing with a kind of dead man who may or may not live inside of her soul and also probably comes to visit when he isn’t around isn’t exactly an ideal situation.

“I know,” Finn reassures her. He takes her hand and kisses her knuckles, one by one.

One tear falls, then another. They make silent streaks down her face. “It’s not a competition.”

“I mean, I’d kick his ghostly ass.” His smile is fragile, wobbly. “Rey, whatever you want to do, I will be here for you. There’s no rush.”

“I know.” And then she closes the distance between them, her mouth on his in a gentle kiss, sweet and undemanding. She tastes of sand and soup and power. She tastes of love.

He tries his very best to not think about kissing Kylo Ren.

#star wars #the rise of skywalker #tros spoilers #the rise of skywalker spoilers #finn #rey #finnrey #canon compliant #so there is reylo #rey tries to grieve #finn becomes a moisture farmer #i needed him to finally tell her his something #sequel trilogy fic

[ranier-layarte]

LONG Character Survey: Ranier Leveilleur

BASICS.

FULL NAME: Ranier Kyran Layarte Leveilleur

NICKNAME: Ran, Raven

AGE: 21-25 (depending on expac)

BIRTHDAY: 1st Sun of the 2nd astral moon

ETHNIC GROUP: Au ra (Xaela)

NATIONALITY: Eorzean – From Ul'dah

LANGUAGE(S): Eorzean,

SEXUAL ORIENTATION: No

ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: Isn't this the same as the above?

RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Married

CLASS: Weapon Master

• Proficient in almost all martial weapons.

• Tends to carry multiple weapons at all times.

• Prefers Axes out of all the bladed weaponry

HOMETOWN / AREA: Ul'dah

CURRENT HOMETOWN/ AREA: Shirogane Mansion

PROFESSION(S): WoL, Scion, Machinist, Businessman, Crafter

PHYSICAL: Extremely fit, exercises daily. Muscular build

HAIR: Black/Dark Blue

EYES: Crimson

NOSE: Average, straight, roman-esque

FACE: Straight essentially a greek nose. (At least if I had to try and describe it)

LIPS: A bit on the thinner side, very lightly pink.

COMPLEXION: A mix of Fair and Medium?

BLEMISHES: None

SCARS: Scar on left thigh from stab wound, Scar on left midsection, and upper right thigh.

TATTOOS: WoL tattoo on the palm of his right hand. (Working on giving him another)

HEIGHT: 7'4

WEIGHT: 330 LBS/ 150kg

BUILD: Tall, Muscular, Fit,

FEATURES: None

ALLERGIES: None, at least not yet.

USUAL HAIRSTYLE: Long hair parted in the middle framing the face. Pulled into a ponytail and held with a silver bead big enough for the tail.

USUAL FACE LOOK: Around 40% expressionless, 30% Scowling, 20% Reflective, 10% happy.

USUAL CLOTHING: Higher end clothing generally a mix of casual with formal preferring long pants and a short sleeved shirt. Boots of some kind and armor of some kind at all times. Either under or over the clothes having a preference for the bulkier armors.

PSYCHOLOGY.

FEAR(S): Dying and thereby becoming unable to prevent future deaths and incidents. A fear of the unknown. (Which is part of why he tries to prepare for so many things)

ASPIRATION(S): Being able to amass enough wealth to live comfortably and to continue making the lives of the less fortunate easier. Helping create a better society for all.

POSITIVE TRAITS: Empathetic, Compassionate, Humanitarian, Perseverance, Fairness, Courageous, Loving, Self discipline, Reliable, Thoughtful, Patient

NEGATIVE TRAITS: Bossy, Jealous, Secretive, Grumpy, Harsh, Aloof, Stubborn, Cruel (Only to enemies but that doesn't really matter to people does it?) Arrogant (In some things though less now)

ZODIAC: Pisces

TEMPERAMENT: Mix of choleric and melancholic.

SOUL TYPE(S):  King, Warrior, Server (In that order)

ANIMALS: Raven, Bear

VICE HABIT(S): Training, Fixing machines, Drinking, Rubbing Chin, 

FAITH: The Twelve (Loosely)

GHOSTS?: I mean if you've seen them you can't deny them.

AFTERLIFE?: With everything we see there has to be right?

REINCARNATION?: Yes, it's clear there is.

ALIENS?: Yes.

POLITICAL ALIGNMENT: Leftist

ECONOMIC PREFERENCE: Prosperous, everyone has what they need. Along with the means to go beyond that if they are willing and able.

SOCIO POLITICAL POSITION: I think there’s enough to go on.

EDUCATION LEVEL: Higher end of the spectrum, attended sharlayan schooling for a few years of his life. (Around three) Was home taught and by other teachers. Extensive knowledge in numerous subjects such as Machinery, Technology, Gunsmithing, Gemology, Business. Holding the equivalent of a mixture of Graduate or Masters in the subjects.

FAMILY.

FATHER: Kyran Layarte

MOTHER: Sahar Layarte

SIBLINGS: Kyari Layarte

EXTENDED FAMILY:

NAME MEANING(S): Ranier (Rainier with out the first I Meaning Wise army apparently)Kyran (Beam of Light) Sahar (Early morning or Dawn) Kyari (???)

HISTORICAL CONNECTION?: My families connection to history? My connection? My father was one of the survivors of the hotgo tribe also. Does fighting in the Calamity among all the other events count?

FAVORITES.

BOOK: Whatever has his current interest, it can very.

MOVIE PLAY: Does this mean Movie or Play?

5 SONGS:

• “Shock me” Baroness

• “Up In The Air” Thirty Seconds To Mars

• “Rise” League of Legends, Glitch Mob, The Word Alive

• “Unbreakable” Of Mice and Men

• “Drown” Bring Me The Horizon

DEITY: Halone

HOLIDAY: Valentione's day

MONTH: March

SEASON: Fall

PLACE: Beside his wife or workshop.

WEATHER: Light rain

SOUND: The turning of pages, the sound of rain, metal moving against each other.

SCENT(S): Smoke, Metal, Old books, and sweat

TASTE(S):  Dulcet, Spicy,

FEEL(S): Rocks, Silk, Smooth metals,

ANIMAL(S): This was listed before.

NUMBER: 1? I don't know.

COLORS: Black, Blue, Red, Gold, Silver

EXTRA.

TALENTS: Metalworking, Singing, Sewing, Gem Cutting, Technology, Smithing, Machinery, Dexterous.

BAD AT: Getting rest even now, Not over exerting himself, Not overthinking potential scenarios that may never happen. Dealing with almost all animals, Even now sometimes talking about what bothers him too well, but he’s gotten much better over the years/expansions.

TURN ONS: Caring, Helpful, Courageous, Educated, Aggressive. Listening, Reliable, 

TURN OFFS: Selfishness, Boastful, Belligerent, Cruelty, Intolerant, Racism, Weak willed, Careless,

HOBBIES: Creating new things be it machines, armor, clothes, weapons, tools, etc. Working on the same as before. Reading, Exercising, Cooking. Shopping.

TROPES: Pragmatic Hero, Bad ass boast, Big Fancy House, Chekhov's Gun, Determinator, Don't You Dare Pity Me, Genius Bruiser, Heroic Build, It's All My Fault, No Challenge Equals No Satisfaction, Super toughness, Friend to All Children, The Chosen One, The Ace, Ain't Too Proud To Beg, Always Save The Girl, Berserk Button, Death glare, Excuse me while I multi task, Game face, Hypocrite, Lady and Knight, Not So Stoic, Not So Invincible After all, Red Eyes, Take Warning, Stern Teacher, Undying Loyalty, The Power of Love

AESTHETIC TAGS: Workshops, Tools, Kitchens, Weaponry, Guns, Armor, Fine Clothes, Rain, Feathers, Azure Skies, Romance.

VOICE CLAIM(S): Keith Silverstein, (Speaking voice) John Rzeznik (Singing) John Baizley (Singing)

FC INFO.

MAIN  FC(S): Free company? Azure Talons.

ALT FC(S): What?

OLDER FC(S): What?

YOUNGER  FC(S): What?

GENDERBENT FC(S): What the fuck?

MUN QUESTIONS.

Q1: IF YOU COULD WRITE YOUR CHARACTER YOUR WAY IN THEIR OWN MOVIE, WHAT WOULD IT BE CALLED, WHAT STYLE WOULD IT BE FILMED IN, AND WHAT WOULD IT BE ABOUT?:

• I genuinely don’t know. Something with the grandeur of lord of the rings maybe? But with the ability to add comedy and romance in the proper way. I'm all for serious movies but I enjoy the ability to add a well executed joke or sweet moment. It also would probably not just be a single film. Taking the general events and using my fics as material would probably be fine.

I’d have to think about it a lot more than I will right now

As for the name, well, I don't really have many options. But, probably something with Final Fantasy XIV as the main title. Give it a JRPG title I suppose as a sub title. Sort of like Warriors Dissonance or Uncovered Stories.

Q2: WHAT WOULD THEIR SOUNDTRACK / SCORE SOUND LIKE?:

• Ambient, switching to full of energy, able to convey emotion. Again mentioning LOTR, the score by Howard shore is really great and able to accompany many scenes in such a fantastic manner. As for the other bits perhaps the addition of artist tracks such as from favorite bands and those songs that have meaning to him. Like the ones listed above. 

Q3: WHY DID YOU START WRITING THIS CHARACTER?:

• As a way to work on and show that, a character doesn't just have to be overly reliant on tropes and cliches. That those are good as part of them but not as defining traits of them. Along with breaking some of those. Like how all protagonists always have dead parents, what's up with that? I enjoy seeing characters that try to break their molds and be more than that.

Q4: WHAT FIRST ATTRACTED YOU TO THIS CHARACTER?:

• My general thing in any game where you can create your own character has always been. To make who you'd want to be in this universe. I did that and then worked on it and reworked things until I got what I have now. So also, yes, he was a self insert.

Q5: DESCRIBE THE BIGGEST THING YOU DISLIKE ABOUT YOUR MUSE:

• Hard one I suppose but. I'd say how he is capable of doing so much. Even though I work with it as it is a key part of him, it's still hard to make him feel right, feel human when he's got these clear incredible strengths. He's very proficient at so many things some would maybe say he's a mary sue type of character. I make an effort to work on how he became that way to offset it. So it's a lot of extra work than if I had him being a more archetypal hero of his type. I may dislike this the most but I also like it. Love hate relationship you know?

Q6: WHAT DO YOU HAVE IN COMMON WITH YOUR MUSE?:

• A good part of our attitudes and personality though on his end they are greater generally. Along with our want to be as best as we can at certain things. 

Q7: HOW DOES YOUR MUSE FEEL ABOUT YOU?:

• Honestly, and in my current state. He would probably be very upset with me and to just know me or the hand I have in his creation and self.

Q8: WHAT CHARACTERS DOES YOUR MUSE HAVE INTERESTING INTERACTIONS WITH?

• Alisaie Leveilleur – She is the main one being his main love interest, girlfriend, and wife later. Though overall he sees her as an equal and a partner, which is part of the reason their relationship grows as much as it does. Along with giving someone who he can trust in and rely on, and vice versa.

• Finn Hogveart - Who harasses Ranier often enough especially with his pet and regarding moogles.

• Alphinaud Leveilleur - and him sometimes get along strangely due to Ranier's relationship with his sister. For a long time he tried to spy on Ranier and make sure he was good for his sister even though he knew he was a good person.

•  Cid Garlond - Ranier sees him as a mentor of sorts, along with someone that he can bounce ideas off of and work with on projects leading to a solid relationship between the two. The two sometimes bicker regarding their work but it's always just them being passionate for the projects.

• Gerolt Blackthorn – Similar to cid in some ways. Ranier looks up to Gerolt and his ability to continue making such amazing creations. Wanting to learn more regarding the processes means Ranier visits him when possible, bringing some drinks for him when he does. Almost having a relationship like bros. Ranier also sometimes has gone to try and sway Rowena on his behalf to lower his debt.

There are more but I don’t want to make this too much longer.

Q9: WHAT GIVES YOU INSPIRATION TO WRITE YOUR MUSE?

• I do not control the write, also Alisaie.

Q10: HOW LONG DID THIS TAKE YOU TO COMPLETE?:

Uhhhh maybe an hour all together. Over the course of three hours.

==========

Tagged by: @amandafullmetal​ @lyllyan-weiss

Tagging: @heyafinney​ @anikisbox​ and anyone who wants to do it that sees this.

#Ranier Leveilleur #Ranier Layarte #I did the best I could with it with the time i put into it. #I'm not the best at these either Hopefully someone finds new things or interesting #things from it

[zaraegis]

Over 2k Words of Elaborate Undertale Headcanons

There are like, a lot of these, and getting them into words was kinda hard

that is why it took so long

also this is five pages in Word so longpost under cut

firstly: the Void and inventories-this is largely adopted from scrollingdown’s headcanons

there is a place, or nonplace, or metaphysical state of (non)existence, called the Void. the Void is not real. Like, that’s its defining feature; it’s where paradox flotsam and reset timelines and things that aren’t real go. The universe’s garbage bin and error handler and general catchall for things that need to exist for causality reasons but don’t. And where all sorts of various random nonsense are, because everything in the Void can change, and interact with other things in the Void, including itself, and twist and change or just not affect things it normally would.

That includes all the laws of physics and common sense.

The Void is where all the deleted/dummied out rooms are, along with the Gaster followers.

It’s also the location of inventories, and the ultimate source of all magic, which leaks into the world in lines and nodes and monster souls, and the souls of humans who’ve spent enough time around monsters or in areas charged enough with the kind of magic monster souls give off/have to gain magical ability.

Inventorying something is the process of using some DT and some magic/soul power to mess the metaphysical ‘tags’ of an object, dropping it into the Void. The DT is vitally important, as it forms into an 'anchor’, keeping the Voided item from changing properties and 'encoding’ a way of fixing the corrupted metaphysics and dropping the item back into reality at will, allowing the DT to be reused at any time.

The inventory-user 'claims’ a small bit of the Void with their DT, allowing for a certain number of inventory slots. The maximum size of an item that can fit in a slot, the number of identical items that can go into the same slot, and other inventory properties vary depending on the person.

The Box System is artificial inventories, which link to the soul of whoever is using the box to help them access their items.

Putting people in inventories is possible but requires a great deal of trust; the Annoying Dog suddenly being in Frisk’s inventory was probably a bad experience! Suddenly, there is a DOG in their SOUL VOID POCKET DIMENSION and it’s not even stasised it’s awake like a party member! And it stole Toriel’s phone and took it to the Void.

The Underground is less real than the Surface, allowing Frisk/Chara to SAVE and LOAD much easier and giving a lower threshold to the ability to use magic; post-pacifist Frisk probably went a few days unable to SAVE, not because of a lack of determination but rather because all their magic was tied up in keeping their inventory working, especially without Charrator helping them.

I had to include the Charrator pun it’s so amazingly bad.

The least real area in the Underground is Waterfall, which is kind of an eldritch location. There’s the giant plank structure nobody lives in, the Temmies which are reached by phasing through a wall and walking on air, all those deleted rooms and stuff, the echo flowers including the room full of them that creeps Papyrus out so much be pretends to be a voicemail, the alien geometries of the map (look up a map of Waterfall sometime; the Disproportionately Small Gap room connects two horizontally distant rooms…with a horizontally tiny room), the weird hydrology, Gerson who leans on the fourth wall all the time and has infinite cloudy glasses implied to have belonged to a fallen human, the weird puzzle rooms like the dog artifact, the dog that gets IN THE PLAYER’S INVENTORY WHAT THE HECK and gives you some kind of…inventory virus item?? where using it fills your inventory with more dog residue items and sometimes edible items that aren’t inventory virus items??

anyway…more weird Waterfall stuff…Gaster is here, for some reason, in a hallway that is usually not there-like you normally just, skip that hallway, walking from one end of it to the other without crossing the intervening space. The disappearing water is bizarre; nothing leaves the Underground so where is the water going?  The plaques about monster history are just scattered at basically random, what the heck, why are they not all clustered on a wall or in a museum? What’s with the random abandoned statue that looks a lot like a Boss Monster that’s supposed to be holding something and is surrounded by shattered statue bits? It sorta maybe looks like a memorial statue, like the one that was in the CORE that Mettaton got rid of, but it’s just abandoned in Waterfall? Three of the four ghost monsters we see are definitely from or currently living in Waterfall, and ghosts are really weird.

And, finally: What’s with the giant black abyss in the middle of Waterfall? It’s like someone punched a hole through it into the black edges of the Void.

Or maybe that’s exactly what they did.

Gaster’s followers mention a risk of Alphys going the same way he did-which would be a really odd risk if the CORE is the creation Gaster fell into, as Alphys doesn’t really have much to do with the CORE.

It’s more likely to be something inventory-box related; Alphys links Frisk’s phone to two separate box systems, and she works with DT.

So: Alphys invented the box system. Gaster nominated her for his successor, stole most of the credit for her work, and created Something based on the box system, and it punched a hole in spacetime in the middle of Waterfall and took a significant and semi-randomly-distributed chunk of Waterfall out. 

But why would he do that?

Maybe he was hiding something. Something big, and terrible, and he wanted people not in on his dark secret anyway to be unable to find out, and his attempts to erase it from the minds of others went horribly, horribly right.

In the True lab, there is a weird machine at one point. The weird machine has, as part of its design, what looks like a dark red SOUL-like the colour Frisk’s, and presumably Chara’s, flickers to during invincibility frames.

At no point does anyone in the game acknowledge that it looks like a SOUL.

It’s entirely possible that that SOUL is Chara’s, stolen by Gaster and used as part of the CORE-the part that intersects with the True Lab.

It’s not being used to break the barrier-probably for good reason; at the end of the Asriel fight, when he breaks the barrier, he notably says he’ll break it then let everyone go free, but lets all the souls go free as he breaks the barrier, as if doing so is a required part of the process.

Also, in the epilogue walkaround, all the coffins in Asgore’s basement tomb are open and empty. Chara was taken out of theirs to be buried in the Ruins, so that’s them accounted for; but it’s like all the other fallen humans got up after Asriel broke the barrier and walked away.

My headcanon for both those weirdnesses is that the Barrier was meant to be broken by willing human magicians working together-with all the human souls willing, and at least one alive. And it has a failsafe-smashing it open with only the souls of dead humans would result in it exploding or something and bringing down the cavern roof. So Asriel had to resurrect everyone and use their power to open the Barrier at the same time-and the Barrier would react noticeably and negatively different to the soul of a dead human, such as Chara.

Their SOUL was the only one checked against the Barrier after death, and it was assumed that the process of merging a single human soul with a single boss monster soul, and then the merged soul dying again and having the boss monster part of the soul disintegrate, damaged the soul somehow and made it unfit for breaking the Barrier with. So Gaster 'borrowed’ it for 'research’ and 'scanning’.

And just didn’t give it back, instead integrating it into the CORE.

A process which woke Chara up-and let them haunt anywhere the CORE’s light and power reached.

Gaster realized that he had an angry royal spirit haunting his power generation infrastructure, and this spirit might be able to figure out how to manifest properly and tell on him, or try to murder him. But he had a solution worked out. He’d toss their mind into the Void and make people forget all about them.

His machine was more unstable than he realized. It may have even dragged in beings from the world of Deltarune and given them bizarre powers; I’ve seen theories that the skelebros, or at least Sans, are from Deltarune, which would certainly explain why Sans has a concept of Hell.

Chara was partially forgotten. Most notably, their name was totally erased; nobody except for Flowey/Asriel, raised from the dead by a massive amount of determination (metaphysical inertia, stubbornness made substance, anchors in the Void) ever uses their name, and Frisk (who overpowers Flowey, DT-wise) can fill in the name-shaped hole in reality left behind. Asgore mostly remembers having only a son, and usually doesn’t mention his adopted child because usually he doesn’t consciously remember them. It takes many monsters working together to tell the story of the Royal Siblings in even a short format, since they have to overpower the memory effect.

Chara themself was slammed into unconsciousness and remained unconscious for, possibly, years.

Until Frisk lands on their grave, and a link between their souls is formed, waking Chara up.

(The technicians working on the CORE note that they’re using less of the CORE’s capacity than they have since Alphys became Royal Scientist. Chara feels better than they have since they were alive. And Frisk thinks that wow their ghost buddy narrator sure is draining like half their magic gain. Probably necessary to help with inventory management, SAVE point management, healing at SAVE points, and all those little illusionary head’s-up display and information box things.)

(Nobody except Undyne and Flowey remembers that there didn’t use to be a Waterfall Abyss. Undyne assumes that it’s no big deal, since nobody else cares about it. Flowey’s long since given up trying to make people remember anything about how weird Waterfall used to not be.)

(And the universe tossed a random related thing into the gap of why, exactly, Alphys was royal scientist.)

Incidentally some headcanons that aren’t part of that big headcanon tangle up above-

Mt Ebott isn’t the only place that monsters are sealed away. There might be monsters already living on the surface, from other barriers being broken; or maybe there’s a big road trip in the post-pacifist future of mage humans going around breaking barriers.

Different sealing locations have different monster demographics, different monster species, etc.

Most monster species have few members and little genetic diversity per sealed population, but they do have a lot of magic-based reproductive medical tech etc; using genetic data from members of one species to shuffle genetic data of a member of another species, asari-like, to allow for cross-species reproduction is a commonish thing, as is cross-species offspring carrying.

boss monsters are either a. the result of human-monster hybridization, or b. monsters that usually have litters of kids, not just one, but…big screwed up royalty family tree+terrible luck=toriel and asgore being the last two boss monsters in the Ebott Underground and then having a singleton child

also they’re all lop-eared as babies but most of them grow out of it, toriel and asgore are baby-faced

time on the inside of a barrier tends to pass differently from time outside of the barrier, usually slower (the barriers are meant as time capsules) but eventually the temporal gradient gets too much and it gets faster inside than outside

monsters still live in the underground post-pacifist; it only goes empty during Asriel’s boss fight. at first this is just, gotta get infrastructure and stuff set up, book hotels or whatever, logistics!! you can’t pack up and leave yet, citizens, it’s a whole day’s walk at a dog monster or human’s pace to the nearest town, there are logistics

and then it was like…the surface isn’t that much better, really? not that it’s bad more like the problems the Underground had were…mostly due to being sealed off, and it’s much better now there’s things like trade, and the option to move

and then there were also climate concerns and people going Actually I’ve Lived Here For 200 Years And I Don’t Want To Change or whatever (plus, also, Gyftrot)

and so the Underground became more sparsely populated but not empty. Some of the residents are humans, moved in from the Surface, as well.

all sealed monster populations are really good at things like recycling and so on. like they basically totally obsolete the local recycling plant in like two weeks and that was all setup time.

frisk is mascot not ambassador, asgore is not actually 100% right on what the word ambassador means in English since they’re keeping up on modern English based on what wound up in the trash and that includes phrases like “ambassador animal” so asgore, naturally, assumed the word had become something more like “mascot”

#undertale #meta #long post #submission

[casino-lights]

OCs as Companions - Eva Lee - Fallout: New Vegas

(This is based off @instishoot‘s wonderful template, found here!)

Basic info:

Race: Hispanic Gender: Female Affiliation: New Canaanites Role: Freelance treasure hunter Location: Courtyard, Sierra Madre Villa / The Strip Base SPECIAL: [S: 5] [P: 7] [E: 5] [C: 5] [I: 7] [A: 7] [L: 10] Tagged Skills: Speech, Energy Weapons, Lockpicking Perks: Black Widow, Fortune Finder, Miss Fortune Companion Perk: The Midas Touch - while Eva is a companion, the Courier finds twice the normal amount of bottle caps in containers.


Eva Lee can be encountered for the first time in the courtyard of the Sierra Madre fighting a pair of Ghost People near a Sierra Madre Vending Machine. She is essential until the quest “Curtain Call at the Tampico” begins, at which time she will become hostile if Dean Domino is killed. If she is not killed, she will help the Courier escape with all thirty seven gold bars from the Sierra Madre Vault by adding a temporary perk that offers them unlimited inventory space for the duration of the “Heist of the Centuries” quest. Upon completion of this quest, she and Dean will be found talking by the fountain. Eva can now be recruited as a follower.


Companion Comments:

Use Melee: “Getting personal, are we?” Use Ranged: “They’ll never know what hit ‘em.” Open inventory: “Don’t take too much. I earned this.” Stay close: “I’m right behind you, don’t you worry.”
 Stay close: [already doing that]: “Any closer, darling, and we’ll need a room.” Keep distance: “I’m starting to have serious doubts about our relationship.” Keep distance [already doing that]: “How far back do you want me, exactly?” Be Passive: “I don’t mind letting you take the lead for a while.” Be Aggressive: “Don’t mind if I do.” Wait here: “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Follow me: “Aww, I missed you too.” Sneaking: “I knew I should’ve worn my other shoes.” “Let’s travel together”: “Finally! I’ve got some heists I saved just for you.” “Let’s travel together” (already have a companion): “No offense, but I’m none too keen on being your third wheel.” Leaving companion at the Lucky 38: “As long as it isn’t full of toxic mist and immortal freaks, I’m good.” “I wanted to ask you some questions”: “What’s eating you, darling?” “Tell me about yourself”: [First time] “Interested, are we?” [Subsequent asks] “I’m all yours.” “What do you think of the NCR?”: “Hah. Buncha kids playing soldier in everyone’s backyard. Can’t say I look on them too kindly, what with their taxes. Lost a good bit of treasure to those goons before I figured out how to dodge ‘em.” “What do you think of the Legion?”: “I suppose they’re the big bad boogeyman of the West, but some of those crimson fellas I’ve met seem downright pleasant. Seem to like pretty girls, at least, so they’re human enough. Could use a couple lessons on respect, but otherwise I don’t mind them too much.” “What do you think of Mr. House?”: “Ooh, the Mojave Mystery Man. [laughs] I can’t say I have an opinion. Long as he doesn’t try to run my life, I don���t much care about his.” “What do you know about Benny?”: “Seems like a strange one. But how can you not be when your boss and your best friend are television screens?” “What do you know about the platinum chip?”: “Sure is a pretty thing. I’m surprised I didn’t find anything like it in the Sierra Madre, but your man House said it was one of a kind. Don’t suppose you’d let me, ah… hold onto it for a while?” Death: “Blood… is that... mine...?”

Trivia and additional information:
 Eva is scaled at 0.9 instead of the normal 1.0. She can be flirted with by male characters with or without the Lady Killer perk, though she will respond differently. Without the perk, she’ll remark that the Courier is “cute.” With the perk, she will find the Courier charming and will adopt a flirtier tone in future conversations. While she can be flirted with by a female Courier with the Cherchez La Femme perk, she will reply that she “never thought of [the Courier] that way,” but she respects the Courier regardless.
Because of Eva’s relationship with Dean Domino, she will often reference him in her idle dialogue. When dismissed, she can occasionally be found wandering the Strip at his side.

Personal Quest Triggers: 

1. The California Sunset Drive-In: “I wonder if they played Love Sets Sail here. I’d like to see it someday.”
 2. The Aces Theater: “Vera Keyes used to sing on a stage like this one. She had a beautiful voice.”
 3. New Vegas Medical Clinic, surgery room: “Vera Keyes was in so much pain before she died. And Dean never knew. She deserved better.” Giving Eva either Vera’s Dress or the Starlet Wig will trigger additional dialogue: “This… this belonged to Vera Keyes, didn’t it? Either that, or it looks like something she’d wear. I don’t know why you gave this to me, but… thank you.”

Personal Quest Description: Upon finding all three of Eva’s quest triggers, she will approach the Courier and sheepishly admit that she’s worried both she and Dean Domino are still clinging to Vera Keyes. She will ask the Courier to speak to Dean on her behalf, since he refuses to discuss Vera, saying, “He tells me she doesn’t matter as long as he has me, but the way he says it… I don’t know.” The Courier is then instructed to speak with Dean, who tells the Courier that Eva’s the one who can’t let go, saying, “She’s convinced she has to become Vera.” The Courier then faces a Speech check and a Perception check. Regardless of which is chosen, Dean begrudgingly admits his true feelings for Eva if the check is passed, effectively bypassing the next step of the quest. If neither check is chosen or successful, Dean brushes the Courier’s questions off and tells them to “show Eva Vera’s last bow,” which triggers the next phase of the quest. The next step in the quest, unless the Courier passes one of the dialogue checks above, directs the Courier to an abandoned movie theater in Outer Vegas where Love Sets Sail was about to premier. Souvenirs and memorabilia of Vera Keyes’ Hollywood career litter the theater in honor of the film, and Eva will collect all she can in awe. Once the location is cleared, Eva confesses that she feels like she left a part of herself in the Sierra Madre and has been trying to fill it with Vera, whom she so closely resembles. She asks the Courier for advice, and regardless of how the Courier answers, they return to Dean at the Lucky 38. Depending on how the Courier helped Eva, she and Dean will either reconcile and stay together or argue and drift apart.

Personal Quest Outcomes: The Courier can respond to Eva’s request for advice in one of three ways:

1. They can convince Eva that she never lost herself and should pursue her love of her role model, Vera Keyes. Eva’s default outfit will become Vera’s Dress and she will gain the perk “Beginning Again,” which grants her a bonus to defense when her health is below 50%. Her general tone in dialogue becomes more light-hearted and flirtatious, and she is found with Dean far less frequently if she is not the current companion.  2. The Courier can alternatively advise her that she doesn’t need to hold onto Vera Keyes just because of their resemblance, and that despite her traumatic experience in the Sierra Madre, she can heal and move on. The Courier can offer their support in the recovery whether or not either dialogue check with Dean Domino was passed, but if neither Dean nor the Courier support Eva, she will default to the previous outcome. If the Courier succeeds in convincing Eva to move on, her default outfit will become a unique version of gambler attire, and she will gain the perk “Letting Go,” which grants her an additional +10 to all damage resistances. 3. Lastly, the Courier can tell Eva that Dean is the one confusing her, not Vera, which leaves her conflicted and emotional. Her dialogue begins to sound more distant and sad, and she gains the perk “Clouded,” which gives her a 10% damage bonus and immunity to getting knocked out/dying while fighting ghouls. 

Game Endings

Killed with Dean: Despite Eva Lee’s efforts to keep Dean Domino alive, the Courier got the better of them. Her last breath in the Sierra Madre was much the same as her first there: unfamiliar, choked by the Cloud, and tasting of bitter copper. Died elsewhere: Eva Lee, treasure hunter extraordinaire, survivor of the Sierra Madre Resort, companion to Courier Six, met her end in the Mojave Wasteland, surrounded by desert warmth and sandy winds. The final beat of her heart fell with pride, and she knew she would rest easy with her memories of the Sierra Madre.  NCR Victory: As the NCR marched through New Vegas, Eva Lee knew her short time at the top was over. She left her suite at the Lucky 38 without a single item, preferring instead to rebuild her life from the ground up in a new land far from the government’s reach. Soon afterwards, rumors of a treasure hunter brave enough to conquer any pre-War ruin could be heard as far east as the Mississippi River. Legion Victory: Thanks to her quick thinking and clever tongue, Eva Lee managed to retain control of the New Vegas Strip as long as she gave Caesar’s Legion preferential treatment inside its walls. For Eva, the trade was more than acceptable, and she lived out the rest of her days in ultimate comfort at the top of the Lucky 38 as crimson banners flew beneath her windows.  House Victory: No longer welcome in the Lucky 38, Eva Lee was forced to seek her home elsewhere. Rather than remaining in New Vegas, she decided to wander home to New Canaan... only she returned to find them slaughtered by the White Legs. Upon seeing this, she began roaming aimlessly, and she eventually met her death alone and unknown.  Independent Victory: Eva Lee was allowed to keep her suite in the Lucky 38, and her fame skyrocketed thanks to her affiliation with the Courier. She loved having her name in lights, and she became one of the most influential figures in New Vegas with her shrewd communication skills and her quick thinking. Personal quest, Beginning Again: As Eva embraced her connection to Vera Keyes, her relationship with Dean Domino grew strained. Eventually, it shattered completely, leaving them both frustrated and lonely. Though bitter, Eva drew comfort from Vera’s strength in her final days, and made sure to live her life as she thought Vera would have wanted: to the fullest, with no regrets. Personal quest, Letting Go: With the help of her lover, Dean Domino, Eva finally began to heal from her traumatic experiences in the Sierra Madre. Unbeknownst to Dean, she helped him move on as well, and the duo grew ever closer as they shot to the top of the New Vegas social scene. Personal quest, Clouded/incomplete: With her heart still torn between her reverence of Vera Keyes and her love of Dean Domino, Eva never felt whole. One day, she simply vanished into the wasteland wearing Vera’s dress… and was never seen again.

#oc: eva lee #fallout: new vegas #gracewrites #long post

[lord-of-dawn-blog]

My HC Background for Bondrewd (Long)

Around 50 years ago, there used to be a small town called Vancrose located in the far north. There were stories of how it was once a vibrant city full of hope, with a rather robust mining operation that brought profit to all. Yet, one day, the well suddenly ran dry. All that could be found was stone and dirt, the last rich veins of ore disappearing as if over night. Within months, the once large city had dissipated to that of a small town. The rich fled to Seleny or elsewhere, and those that were too poor to leave simply had to stay, praying that they’d find something within the useless earth. It was during these times that Bondrewd was born, during the towns dying days. 

He was born into a world that had no need of him, his mouth being simply one more to feed. His family consisted of only his mother and father, both hardened miners who were too hopeful about the city returning to what it once was to leave. While they were kind to him, they were also dismissive and cold. Too often, they’d refuse to even look at him, instead only choosing to stare longingly at the mine in hopes things would improve.

Every year, things got worse. Crime increased, and food became more scarce. The town had started to fall apart when he was twelve, and his mother and father had been inflicted with some strange new illness the doctors couldn’t cure. Bondrewd could do nothing but stare at them, watching as they slowly died as the winter came and went, surviving off of what they’d left for him strewn about the home. 

It was on the night that the snow finally stopped falling that he found them dead, their bodies bloated with boils and lumps covering their entirety. While a normal child would’ve been repulsed, something changed in him that day. They looked so... strange. As if they weren’t even humans anymore. Walking into the kitchen, he grabbed a knife, returning to their bedroom.

He was found a few days later by the local doctor who’d stayed behind, caked in their dried blood. In his hands, their rotted organs lulled between his fingers, his eyes fixated on how they moved and squished under his ministrations.

The Doctor was horrified by the discovery, but soon found himself without options. From what he knew of Bondrewd, his parents were the only relatives he had, at least within the village. He’d had no choice but to adopt the young Bondrewd, at first planning to only keep him for a while until an orphanage opened up. Yet, the more he talked to the young child, the more he found himself caring for Bondrewd, thinking of him like a son he’d never had. Taking him under his wing, the man taught Bondrewd all he knew about medicine and the art of surgery. For someone so young, the child seemed to absorb everything said to him like a sponge, quickly becoming a useful assistant to the Doctor as he worked on various patients.

However, the Doctor always knew what he saw... what Bondrewd had done to his parents. Every time he looked upon Bondrewd, that memory flashed in his head, that image of him holding their organs... Even if loving him like his own son, there was something wrong with the boy, something that he could never solve. 

Once Bondrewd had hit eighteen, the Doctor told him it was time for the boy to make his own adventure. He couldn’t keep him there forever, and Bondrewd couldn’t help but agree. By then, the town’s population had dropped to the double digits, and everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before the town itself was whisked away by the wind. But that wasn’t the only reason. He was hoping that if Bondrewd explored the world, he’d iron out those odd kinks of his, like the way he stared at corpses and examined them like they were simply objects, not former people. Giving Bondrewd a few weeks supplies, and almost all the savings he’d accumulated, the Doctor sent him on his way, waving him goodbye as he eclipsed over the horizon.

After a week or so of wandering, he came across a nondescript port city. Docked in its harbor was a medium sized ship emblazoned with over a hundred nations banners. When he asked a local about the ship, they claimed it was one of those foreign medical ships that sailed around sharing their knowledge with local towns people, healing them, and giving them supplies. It was supported by several nations who had gathered together as some type of humanitarian act, and there was at least a few dozen ships like it sailing the seas.

With a small amount of money to his name and the clothes on his back, Bondrewd approached the ship and asked if they would be willing to take on a new doctor. While at first skeptical of his skill, with a well placed bribe and the exchange of most of his provisions, they agreed to take him aboard as one of their own. 

With that, he signed himself up with a foreign medical ship and sailed around the world until he was 20, where by then he’d become an avid inventor and practitioner. He could just as easily construct a complicated mechanism for best lifting crates as he could slice open a body and save someones life. It was during all of this training, however, that he came across word of the Abyss. The words ‘mystery’, ‘riches’, ‘knowledge’ came to his mind as the sailors exchanged tales between themselves. It was at that moment he knew what his destiny was to be; he like many others would become a Delver.  

When the ship one day came to Orth, Bondrewd quickly abandoned his shipmates and sneaked his way into the city, disappearing into the Wharfs. Once his former crew members had given up trying to find him, Bondrewd began to scrub his former identity away. Changing his name, changing his looks, changing his entire history. After two years of submerging himself in the culture of Orth and earning the trust of those who lived in the Wharfs, he went to the Delvers Association. With plenty of witnesses who thought him a long time resident and plenty of character references, he portrayed himself as a humble man born in Orth who was simply down on his luck. They believed his story without too much hesitation.

It only took him four years to become a Black Whistle, something that would normally take ten years or more of rigorous training and practice. Astounding climbing technique, excellent observation skills, and an insatiable lust to learn lead to him being a favorite amongst instructors. Many fellow delvers lauded him and his potential, saying that he’d easily become one of the most influential delvers of the era at the rate he was going. He was a literal sensation for the time, and when he was given the position of command over several Black Whistles, hardly anyone complained. 

Yet, what was suspected to be a new age for Orth quickly fell into one of its darkest years.

The mortality rate of Delvers began to sky rocket. 

More and more were found dead and discarded in varying layers of the Abyss, their camps and temporary bases ransacked and searched through. The injuries covering their bodies were obviously man made, either through daggers or through relics. Many suspected a foreign nation had invaded the Abyss and planned for a hostile take over. 

But, just as soon as it’d begun, the murders stopped. 

There was only two mysteries that remained; where were the murderers, and where did Bondrewd’s team go? It’d been months since anyone had seen him, and while many thought he was still down there, a feeling of unease began to permeate the city. Was he and his team killed? Were they the murderers? It was impossible to say... 

 As these Delvers desperately tried to unravel just what had happened, a new set of mysteries began to unfold; the Soul-Slave Machine Zoaholic had disappeared from its last recorded location. Several people in the Wharfs had identified several shadow clad men carrying a large box through the area, seeming to have tossed it into the Abyss before following after it. Soon afterward, talk surfaced of what seemed to be a small team of men setting up camp within the Sea of Corpses, the group of them lead by a White Whistle. All of them wore strange protective garments, and on their faces were fastened metal glowing masks of varying shapes and sizes. Just who were these strange men? Just exactly was going on in the Abyss? 

The Delvers Association hurried to make a response to all of these rumors, rumors that surely should have never reached the public. Fear began to fill the streets as many though that this was just the beginning of an attack; or perhaps it was the Delvers Association trying to push for more control? They certainly had enough already. Maybe there were ghosts, ghosts of the dead that were haunting the town. The rumors didn’t end for several months.

Yet just as the Delvers were preparing to go and confront these mysterious figures hiding deep within the Abyss, the elevator in the center of town began to rumble. What was that? A triumphal return? That was only used for glorious occasions, such as a Black Whistle returning with Special Grade Relics... or a White Whistle returning home. 

People began to gather within the center of town as the elevator reached the top. From within, several shadowy figures shuffled about, their skin hidden from the sunlight by leathers and masks. As the door swung open, he appeared.

Gasp and awe came from the crowd. ‘A White Whistle?’ they whispered ‘Who are those men with him?’ they asked between themselves. He let them murmur in confusion for a few moments before letting out his first few words. “Ah, a glorious morning. I would like to introduce myself; I am Bondrewd, and it is a pleasure to meet all of you.” The crowd fell silent, an icy feeling running over their bodies. There was no White Whistle named Bondrewd. There wasn’t even a Delver named Bondrewd.

Fear seized the hearts of Orth’s citizens once again as the Delvers Association representatives approached him. At first, their voices were full of rage, but they soon fell silent with a single touch from the masked man. “I am your new champion, your new hero. I’ll return once my base camp is finished. Please, feel free to come by.” And with that, he simply took a step back within the elevator, diving deep into the Abyss once again.

True to his word, four years later Bondrewd returned carrying relics before unseen, accompanied by his mysterious Black Whistle followers. By then, the Delvers Association had no choice but to accept him as he filled their coffers with easily over a hundred relics of different quality. “Please, send the other White Whistles to the Fifth Layer once you feel it right. I have established a permanent base camp there, and have discovered a way to the sixth layer. Now, I’ll be leaving my Praying Hands here to construct a new device, a new elevator down to the Fifth Layer for my own personal use. Have a good day.” 

Ever since then, the relationship between he and the people of Orth has been strenuous at best. They’ve all heard the stories of what he does down there, of the terrible things hes done in the face of mankind... yet they can’t do anything but revere him. For someone to be so evil, so awful, and to be so powerful... if that was what was required for Orth’s prosperity, than so be it. 

As long as he provided them with information and riches, the people of Orth would shake hands with the devil. 

#made in abyss #bondrewd #;notes

[eloarei]

Tagged by @chocochipbiscuit to post my current WIPs. Thanks, Choco! (lol this is going to be self-indulgent and painful XD;)  (As with Choco, I also have more bits and blobs and ideas than I know what to do with, but I’ll focus on the ones that have a remote chance of ever getting finished.)  Active WIPS (I have at least opened the document in the past month and I honestly intend to finish them this year.)  In order of recently modified: OP CM BB -- "One Piece, Cobymeppo, Beauty&Beast" I mean, it's kind of what it says on the tin: it's vaguely a Beauty and the Beast AU. (Factoid: this is at least the 3rd or 4th fanfic I've written based on friggin' B&B. It's my favorite fairytale and I'm weak.) Currently at 12.5k (when did that happen?!) out of, I dunno, 18k? I honestly never intended to write this. It just sort of happened-- and kept happening, which is the weird part. I'm liking it though. Factoid #2: there are a lot of dogs in this fic. JD LLW -- "Jak and Daxter, Love Like Winter" 100% inspired by the AFI song, I won't lie. I've been meaning to write this for at least 7 years. I have a lot of thoughts and headcanons about the Jak and Daxter series, and this incorporates my hardcore favorite: Daxter is a Precursor. It also uses a couple tropes I love: reincarnation cycles, and fated lovers. As with any song, I can't say what it's actually supposed to be about, but I always heard it as the story of, well, reincarnation and fated lovers. "I met my love before I was born", and then switching between he, she, and then back to he. The story became very vibrant in my head! And this format especially allows me the opportunity to explore Jak/Keira as well as Jak/Daxter, because while I'm not a huge fan of Jak/Keira, I don't like just ignoring canon if I can avoid it. Currently at 7k out of... maybe 20k? It was supposed to be a lot shorter, but I'm only on chapter 1 out of 3, so less than 15k is probably not happening. Factoid: I think a lot of people only know this series second-hand, so I feel the need to mention that Daxter does, in fact, have a human form. XD FO4NV -- "Fallout 4, Nick Valentine" A very creative document name! XD; The story will probably eventually be titled "Same Heart" unless I come up with something better. It's a Fallout4 AU(ish) centering around Nick having been recaptured by the Institute, getting a memory wipe, and then living there during the years when Shaun is being raised there. Eventually, he and kid-Shaun break out to explore the Commonwealth and try to find Shaun's parents. I swear it'll be a Nick/Nora story if I ever friggin' get to that part, but right now it's mostly a Nick&Shaun story. Currently at 30k out of, I dunno, 70k to 100k? It's on chapter 7 out of 17, I think. I have this one planned out pretty well chapter-by-chapter, so of all my fics it has the best chance of actually happening. (Aside from the length, which sort of counts against it. It was supposed to be shorter, but I apparently couldn't shut up.) I'm thinking about focusing on this one for my NaNoWriMo, since it has about 50k left to it. Factoid: I get more emotional about parental relationships than I do about romantic ones, despite the fact that I LOVE romance. Stories I write about parent-child relationships always end up being my favorite. BttF On Track -- "Back to the Future, On Track" The only one I've actually started posting. I feel bad because I meant to continue writing this through December and January, but I got lazy and distracted, so it didn't happen. The season is just about right to jump back into it though (Fall is a more BttF season for me), so I HOPE to finish it this year. Currently at 18k (holy shit, seriously?) out of probably 30k. Chapter 3 (out of 6 well-planned chapters) is aaalmost done, but I might have to go reread some of IrisBleuFics stuff to get back into the mood of it. (Or maybe Rae's or Edgebug's.) Factoid (actually a question) : does anyone else have seasonal fandoms? Inactive WIPs (there are lots of these, so I'll put them under a cut for you. Still, these are only the ones I’ve worked on in the past year. Again, from most- to least-recent.) 

HP GOtG -- A silly Harry Potter/Guardians of the Galaxy fic I have like a page of. I was mentally explaining the concept of fanfic to someone and this... happened.

HPCM Ways to Live -- Another One Piece Cobymeppo fic, and AU (or UA) about if Luffy had never met Coby in ep.1 and skipped right over to kick Morgan's ass in Shells Town. tldr Coby and Helmeppo become pirates.

FFXV parents AU -- I was REALLY into this one for a while, got a couple thousand words and a good plot outline on it. It's Final Fantasy 15 AU (or, as usual, a UA) in which Noctis is only a baby when the empire attacks, and teenage Ignis and Gladio have to run away with him, and end up raising him on their own. I 100% intend to finish this one, but it's not top priority at the moment.

A modern prometheus -- A magical-world retelling of Frankenstein. Probably gay.

FO4 WFM-- "Fallout 4, Waiting for magic" On the day the bombs drop, Nora's husband is still at war, while she's several months pregnant and working on her legal cases from home. Her friend Nick Valentine has come to give her some documents and check on her when they're suddenly ushered into the vault and frozen. AKA the romantic adventures of Nick and a heavily pregnant Nora out in the Commonwealth. (Inspired by an Ace of Bass song)

Fo4 Sky-- "Fallout 4, Skyrim" Basically a riff off the previous story, but not the same at all, somehow. Set in Skyrim, Nora is essentially sleeping beauty. Wait. Snow white? Er, yeah. Magically frozen in a coffin, yeah. 

MEA Avi -- "Mass Effect Andromeda, Avi: a sci-fi ghost story" REALLY thought I was gonna finish this one, but I got distracted from MEA altogether. The story of Avitus Rix and his SAM unit, which has begun to think it is the late Macen Barro, its previous owner/partner, and Avitus' longtime boyfriend. Still can't decide how sad I want it, but it'll be pretty gloomy even if I go with a happy ending.

DCo side story AU -- A modern mini-fic about my DamselCo characters going on a double date, except Addisson and Hunter are both late so it's just Ellery and Isabelle being kind of awkward.

FFXV Dear Fellow Traveler -- AU, Prompto was raised in Niflheim and meets Noctis and the others on their (very long, winding) trip to Noct's engagement. Promptis, no war.

FFXV mermaid AU -- More Promptis. Noctis fishes up mer-person Prompto. They have adventures. Ignis has to go looking for Noctis later and meets mer-person Gladio.

OW Sagittarius  -- Eheh, posted the first chapter of this in January and then just gave up. XD;;;; I feel so bad. An Overwatch teenage McHanzo AU, where Jesse is a centaur sold into slavery to the yakuza. Trained by the Shimada clan, he falls in love with the heir, Hanzo, who then helps him escape. Many years later, they meet again in Overwatch. I have a GOOD plot outline for this, so I really have no excuse for not finishing it. It's on the to-do list after the first few.

FFXV Firstborn son -- Question: is a person still consider a trans-person if they're born female, but both raised as and identify as male (because patriarchal bullshit)? If so: trans-Noctis, Promptis fic.

FFXV Mirror Sword Shield -- Yet another FFXV AU, obviously inspired by that one Coldplay song that I love. Hundreds of years ago, Noctis defeated the darkness, but was sealed away inside the crystal, only to return when he needed to do it again. Prompto, Ignis, and Gladio have trained as his guardians all their lives, for the slim chance that he does return. (I really like this idea, but if I write this one, it'll only be after I finish the other FFXV fics.)

OW BB -- Guess what? Another "Beauty and the Beast" fic, Overwatch flavored. Except it's really more like, "the beast and also another beast". McHanzo, of course, featuring a snarky dragon spirit that constantly taunts Hanzo about his guilt.

BttF Ashes -- Hot damn I gotta write this fic some day. I have a GREAT plot outline for it, following a chiptune song called Ashes. I love it, it makes me cry. It's a Back to the Future AU, about Doc dying when his house burns down. Years later, ghost-Doc teams up with Marty to finish the time machine, and then (spoiler alert) Marty goes back in time and saves Doc, pulling his corporeal self into the future ala The Mediator and they live happily ever after the end. XD

PacRim Redefined -- Another one I feel bad about, because I have posted most of what I have written, but I don't know if I'll ever finish it. It's a far-future semi-AU about Newt and Hermann. TBH it's one of my favorite fics I've ever written, but I'm a loser and can never finish anything. Hopefully next year??? I've got much of a plot outline, so.

Bttf Dino prompt -- Braincoins prompted me last year to write a fic about Marty and a dinosaur, and I started to! But then I had no idea where I was going with it, so I stopped a few pages in. ^^; I'd like to figure out an ending to it that isn't both boring and bleak.

Bttf Solving for X -- A series of short AUs about if either Doc or Marty (or both) were women. I'd like to maybe work on this one again sometime.

HxH AU Laughter Lines -- A Hunter x Hunter fic that makes me cry when I think about it XDXDXD Based on the Bastille song of the same name, it's an AU in which Gon is like... a tree nymph. A little hard to explain, it's a sad little Killugon fic, and it should be pretty short, so I ought to just sit down and write it one day.

BttF Thirst for Romance -- I love this idea! Why haven't I written it?! In his 30's or 40's, Marty is a nurse at a convalescent home/ hospice, where he meets Doc, who loves to tell wild stories. He tells Marty stories about adventures that the two of them had in the 80's and with time travel. Everyone assumes Doc is just very creative and lonely, and they love his stories. He and Marty become close, and when Doc passes away, he leaves his meager possessions to Marty, including a mysterious set of keys which unlock his old garage, and a strange old car inside... (Really want to write this one eventually!) (Based on the song of the same name.)

BttF Hell Valley -- A sad AU, taking place in the Hell Valley timeline from movie 2. Marty has run away from his abusive step-dad and finds himself living in Doc's garage. They're just two broken people trying to get by. Marty wants Doc to run away with him, someplace far away, but Doc has a better idea, if he can get it to work. (Inspired by the song Fast Car, the sad-sounding Jonas Blue version. "You got a fast car. Is it fast enough so we could fly away?")

BttF SG fusion -- and last and possibly least, yet another BttF AU, but a fusion with Steins;Gate, because time travel is not complicated ENOUGH, I have to make it WORSE. In this story, Marty is raised in the dystopian future with the goal of going back to the past to kill Doc Brown before he can create time travel. I liked the idea a lot, but to be honest I think I even confused myself with it. I'd sort of like to keep writing it, but it'll take a lot more effort than I can foresee me wanting to put in any time soon. Tagging: (if I can remember which of my friends write) um... @braincoins, @nomadsky, and, uh... I know that more of you are writers, so just... take it and pretend I tagged you! 

#elo talks #long post #elo fics #holy jeez this is long #I have a LOT of WIPs you guys #tag meme #lol I spent hours on this XDl