#as the means of preventing adelaide from becoming a monster

[thedragonagelesbian]

you first

Adelaide didn’t have a lot of things to take from the Cuddly Rockfish. Since destroying everything she owned by burning down her childhood home, her efforts had focused primarily on rebuilding her wardrobe: sundresses and miniskirts and ruffly shirts and stylish handbags and enough pairs of shoes she could afford to lose them to her new monster hunting pastime. She had her toiletries too, of course, and enough makeup and skincare products to fill one of the cardboard boxes Gwendolynn had been oh so generous enough to give her, but her temporary domicile was light on personal effects. What, after all, was the point of building anything permanent when she was just biding her time until she burned her way out of town?

She had always known that her stay at the Cuddly Rockfish was a temporary one. She just hadn’t expected these to be the circumstances of her leaving.

She had just packed up her last box when Gwendolynn appeared in the door again, her expression cold and stony.

“I’d like that lock of hair back now.”

Adelaide briefly toyed with the idea of keeping the token Gwendolynn had given her— and the additional magical hold that came with it. But she didn’t want to fight Gwendolynn, not really, so she reached into her purse and held out the small bundle of dark hair.

“Of course. As a token of goodwill, or something.”

Nothing in Gwendolynn’s countenance spoke to any glimmer of appreciation or gratitude.

Then again, that would require that Gwendolynn was capable of showing anything.

“You don’t have to worry about Moony,” Adelaide called out as Gwendolynn turned away again. “I’d never do anything to hurt him.”

“I’m not worried about you wanting to hurt him.” Gwendolynn shot a glare at her over her shoulder. “I’m worried you won’t be able to stop yourself if he gets in your way.”

“He won’t.”

Moony was on her side. Moony had chosen her over Gwendolynn. Moony was helping her. She wouldn’t need to hurt him because he wouldn’t get in her way.

She couldn’t say the same for Gwendolynn.

With a huff, the other woman left. 

Adelaide took a moment to scoop up all her boxes, balancing them precariously on top of one another, and slammed the door on her way out. Eager to avoid the tea shop on the ground floor, she took the back staircase and made her way out to the curb, where Moony was idling in front of his car. He straightened as she approached with a grimace.

“I guess I’ll be needing a new place to crash.”

“You can stay with me as long as you need, Adelaide,” Moony assured her with that smile so much softer than any kindness Adelaide had been shown in years.

Fuck, she was glad he had sided with her.

He moved to open the back door of the car, and Adelaide set her boxes down on the ground to make it easier to move them into the seat, but before she put them away, she gave Moony a sidelong glance, recalling how tired and sad he had sounded pleading with Gwendolynn to take care of herself and be more forthcoming. She remembered what he had said when she came back downstairs: “I can’t do this anymore.”

“How are you doing, after all that?” she murmured.

He shrugged helplessly. “I… I’m still worried about Gwen, but I don’t think there’s much more we can do for her.”

“Y’know, it’s funny,” Adelaide said hollowly. “Given how sanctimonious she is, she’d make a great preacher’s kid.”

Or, indeed, a great preacher, but that was not a thought that Adelaide cared to draw to its natural conclusion. It hurt enough to have implied it during her conversation with Gwendolynn, to have told her I know this kind of care and worry, and it is not founded in understanding or respect or dignity. It is possessive, and it’s a killing thing and to have had it fall on deaf ears.

“I…” Moony grimaced. “Gwen’s a good person. I know a lot of hurtful things were said back there, but beneath it all, somewhere deep down, she’s a good kid, I know it.”

Maybe Adelaide deserved Gwendolynn’s goodness like she deserved her father’s.

“All my friends left me,” she whispered, throat tight and eyes burning and hands balled into fists inside of Nat’s flannel jacket. “I watched them all graduate and leave for college and never come back because who the hell would come back to this waste of a fuckin town?” 

Her voice crackled like so many fires she had lit across Harborview, groaning and splitting like the support beams of the Dellouise Manor or the Yard and Sale greenhouse or the Madison’s farmhouse, the whimpers of something that could no longer hold its own weight.

“When I first met you and Gwendolynn, when we started hunting monsters and hanging out together, I thought…” She muffled a sob. “I thought that was all over… I just want it all to be over.” Tears pooled in the corners of her eyes, the kind of thing she should’ve been able to repress with a mere swallow, but she hadn’t yet recovered her defenses since their conversation last night about her dad trapping her there. Every part of her was raw, a bleeding, picked-over wound exposed to saltwater and gnawing deeper. “I want to stop this,” the magic, the pain, the hurting others, the being hurt in return, all that latent monstrosity that Gwendolynn had condemned her for, she didn’t want to be like this, the kind of person who could not hold their power in check, “but I can’t… I can’t stop until I get out of here…”

“You will,” Moony replied with a conviction fit for a congregant of the First Church of Her Will. “We’ll get you out of here, I promise. Now, you need help with those boxes?”

Sniffling, Adelaide rubbed furiously at her eyes with the back of her hand and nodded.

“Yeah, thanks…”

Moony took care of putting everything in the backseat, and Adelaide shuffled around to the passenger seat. A minute later, he climbed in as well, but rather than turning the car on, he fidgeted with his keys for a moment before looking at Adelaide.

“Just… promise me something, yeah?”

Adelaide stared into the eyes of the one person in the whole wide world who knew what she had gone through over the last six years, the one person who had seen just how bad she was and still thought she deserved kindness.

“Anything.”

Moony frowned back, face drawn tight with worry— the real thing, not  Gwendolynn looking at her like a ticking bomb, not her father looking at her like a broken doll.

“If someone tries to kill you… you kill them first.”

Adelaide’s mind flashed to the sleek barrel of a jet black, military-grade sniper rifle and a cold brown eye pressed to the scope.

“Yeah, I reckon I can do that.”

#adelaide posting #no editing we vomit our feelings into google docs at 11pm and post it an hour later like MEN #GOD THEYRE SUCH FUCKING DISASTERS. JFC. #its so interesting to watch gwendolynn moralize to adelaide and try to make her feel guilty about all the bad shit shes done #(and #lets be clear #adelaide has done a lot of fucked up stuff) #as the means of preventing adelaide from becoming a monster #when (and i think ive played this very faithfully) from the beginning what was going to save adelaide was connection #she needs that baseline human emotional intimacy before she can start growing #and its interesting and also like super fair that gwendolynn doesnt want to extend that to her #but it also means gwens current anti-monster tactics are not only poorly suited but guaranteed to blow up in her face #like what a good way to get adelaide to double down on her independence and self-prioritization #meanwhile moony has moved her so much closer to synthesis just by. talking. to. her. #and being someone she can trust as someone who actually cares about her #and doesnt just yknow view her as an imminent catastrophe

[tonkicollective]

Elex wiki slug beast

#Elex wiki slug beast windows 10

Advertised as beneficial to all citizens, it was in reality a contingency plan in order to save the Board and corporations from annihilation. The Board, knowing it could never sustain the population and maintain their power in the current situation, decided to implement a Lifetime Employment Program. The Stranger takes command of the ship Unreliable and soon becomes embroiled in a vast conspiracy that threatens to destroy the Halcyon colony. The Stranger can either help MSI regain their strength or unite with the semi-anarchist organization, the Iconoclasts.Ī rogue scientist named Phineas Vernon Welles discovers the Hope, rescuing the Stranger from the Hope and sending them to Terra 2. This corporation, mainly their CEO Sanjar Nandi, was trying to recover their place in the Board by implicating another company in their illicit activities on the planet declared off limits by the Board. However, one corporation took advantage of the chaos and remained on Monarch, re-branding themselves as Monarch Stellar Industries. With the terraforming process triggering uncontrolled mutations in the local flora and fauna, the Board was forced to abandon the planet, leaving it a lawless and dangerous place where only criminals and monsters dwelled. Alas, the animosity between Edgewater and the Deserters prevented the cure from being spread among the town's population.Īnother problem for the Board was their first failed colonization attempt on the planet Terra 1, now known as Monarch. However, those who chose to leave the town and became Deserters, lead by a woman named Adelaide McDevitt, found a way to grow crops on Terra 2's soil using ground-up human remains as fertilizer, and discovered a way to fight the disease. With the only food source within the town's walls being the locally-produced canned saltuna, the population started to develop symptoms of the plague. To make matters worse, malnutrition caused a new disease, commonly known as the plague, to spread among the citizens of the Spacer's Choice-owned town of Edgewater. This suppressant was supposed to be used in a form of tooth paste and would allegedly allow to reduce the amount of resources that people consume, thus winning time form the scientists to devise a more permanent solution. To counter this, the Board commissioned their chief scientists to develop any means necessary, such as powerful appetite suppressant, derived from raptidons. The main problem being slow and subtle starvation of the entire population due to Earth food being too low in nutrients. Despite the assurances of the Board, life in the colony is far from perfect. Thirty-five years later, the colony is in fact on the verge of complete collapse. The Hope is moved into orbit over the ice planet Typhon and its existence covered up. Since Halcyon was colonized through other means, the Hope is unexpectedly found adrift with its colonists unable to be revived and the Halcyon Holdings Corporate Board decided to abandon the colonists. During its journey, the ship's skip drive malfunctions and it is forced to continue using its sublight engines, extending the trip from ten years to sixty. The Stranger, also known as "the unknown variable", is a passenger aboard the colony ship Hope, which is bound for the distant Halcyon system, wholly owned and operated by corporations. The game takes place in the year 2355 in the Halcyon System. As a result, Theodore Roosevelt never succeeded McKinley as President and large business trusts were never broken up, leading to a hyper-corporate, class centric society dominated by the power of mega-corporations and robber barons, which by the distant future, have begun to colonize space. The Outer Worlds is set in an alternate timeline, with the point of divergence beginning when United States President William McKinley was not assassinated by Leon Czolgosz in 1901. A Nintendo Switch version was also released on June 5, 2020.

#Elex wiki slug beast windows 10

The game was released on the Epic Store, Windows 10 store, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One (as well as Xbox Game Pass) on October 25, 2019, with the Steam release to follow in 2020. Outer Worlds, as a result, is heavily inspired by the Fallout franchise with many elements being ported over. The game's development is spearheaded by Fallout creators Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky. Development on Outer Worlds began sometime prior to Microsoft's acquisition of Obsidian Entertainment in 2018 Private Division had also managed to secure publishing rights before the buyout.

#Elex wiki slug beast

[asagimeta]

on the one hand I do wonder about Jason, but on the other it could be possible that Jason's off-beat movements are just something he learned by watching his mom? Kinda like how you don't realize you do something the same way as your parents until its pointed out to you

Yeah, I mentioned that was possible in my post too, and honestly it does seem like the more likely option, as Jason is conveniently both the most difficult to swap … and the only one who couldn’t say anything if he had been

Ofcourse the problem is that Pluto is not only the only one with a major physical difference (the burns) that would certainly have been noticeable if he had been switched recently, but he’s also easily the least human of all of them, with the animalistic sounds and movements and even the way “Red” was treating him, more like a dog than a child, and though I’m afraid I couldn’t hear all of what “Red” said in reference to Pluto’s burns, it did seem like she indicated he had been “thrown in a fire” right after birth, so the burns weren’t exactly recent

… On the other hand, there are a couple of ways to poke holes in this otherwise tightly woven identity if one really wants to

For example, the relationships between “Red” and Jason and “Adelaide” and Pluto are kind of odd in comparison to the others, throughout the movie “Adelaide” frequently spends more of her attention on Jason, and it’s Jason who gets lost not once, but twice before the Tethered arrive (once at the beach, once at the house), she seems the most concerned about his safety and the most reluctant to let him out of her sight, now wile this could easily be explained away as Jason simply being her younger child (the “baby” of the family) or possibly being neurodivergent (his mask seems to be a comfort item rather than a toy, given his reluctance to let go of it, “Adelaide” has to plead with him more than once to just “eat something”, implying that he has a history of not eating, and Zora tells the twins that Jason has “trouble with attention”) and thus legitimately needing more of her attention, it becomes odd when you notice that “Red” and “Adelaide” have an odd attachment to eachother’s sons

This is most important to note because it conflicts with how they treat eachother’s daughters, “Red” has seemingly no attachment to Zora, and wile “Adelaide” was unable to flat out kill Umbrae herself, she didn’t seem to have much of a problem with her death in general… whereas with Pluto, when he walked back into the fire, she seemed extremely distressed, even screaming “No!”, “Red” herself seemed less willing to see Jason hurt, consistently missing out opportunities to kill him, even the relationship “Red” has with Pluto is starkly different than what she has with Umbrae, who she describes as “a monster”, whereas she seems to treat Pluto with as much love and affection as she’s capable of, she worries about Pluto and is, atleast momentarily, concerned for him during the movie, wich is something she doesn’t show for Abraham or Umbrae, why is this? Maybe because “Pluto”, like her, was once a surface-dweller who was forcefully swapped and she identified with him?

Additionally, if “Jason” is the real Pluto who was born underground, that would explain his own eccentricities

His mask may be less of a comfort item in and of it’s self and more to do with the fact that he wore a mask when he was underground and is trying to replicate the feeling, his reluctance to eat could have significantly less to do with not wanting food, but not wanting what he’s being served, we saw “Adelaide” was a vegetarian/vegan, maybe “Jason” is too, but is being encouraged to eat something beside the small range of vegan foods he likes for his own health (it’s pretty unlikely that a kid his age would be gung-ho on eating a bunch of greens, grains, and other “yucky” food, his diet may only consist of a few things, wich he can’t live on) or in contrast he might not be used to eating normal food yet and may be craving what he ate as a Tethered underground…… this also can explain his attention issues (and as noted in the video, he was building a tunnel, for some odd reason, instead of a sandcastle?) Going back to “Adelaide”‘s childhood issues, she was diagnosed with PTSD, but we know that her muteness actually came from being a Tethered, we don’t know how Tethered typically behave when living a somewhat normal life, our only example is “Adelaide”, but I’d be pretty willing to bet that if you’ve lived underground for most of your life and are suddenly getting a taste of the sun, you’d have some attention issues too for the first several years, as everything would look pretty and bright and interesting

Here’s where the tough part comes in though, the obvious part- the burns

According to “Red”, he received those burns right after birth, but did he really? Remember that “‘Red”‘s story, wile containing shards of truth, was still worded like a bedtime story, she never specifically said when she threw Pluto in the fire, only that it was after he was born, it was implied that she meant directly after he was born but unless this was part of what I couldn’t make out from her story, she never actually said that he was burned immediately after birth- or even that he was a baby at the time

Jason is… what, nine-years-old maybe? If Pluto sustained those burns as an older baby or a toddler, the timeline would work out- by timeline, I mean comparing Jason’s development to “Adelaide’s”

Now surely if Jason had just gone mute one day his parents would have noticed, but what if he was switched before he started speaking? What if Jason was around nine months to a year old when, on a trip to Santa Cruz (or the beach house nearby, more likely) he ended up switched somehow? The baby the Wilsons got back would have had very limited- if any- speech at this point, as is normal for that age range, it wouldn’t have been terribly out of the ordinary for him to be delayed, especially if he is classified as being neurodivergent in some form, and learning to speak would have taken him far less time than it took “Adelaide” due to his age, kids under the age of four have the highest capacity for learning, it wouldn’t have taken him nearly as long as it took her to learn to speak

“Pluto”, on the other hand, may have gotten those burns to prevent him from speaking, or maybe from crying, do Tethered babies cry? In general Tethered are mute, grunting and groaning is pretty much the extent, but as we saw with the twins, they can’t even properly vocalize a laugh, maybe “Red” realized quickly that her child was switched- or she switched him herself after seeing the opportunity to act as a Mockingbird- and, to prevent him from getting hurt by the other Tethered, sealed his mouth shut to keep him from crying…. but “Red”, knowing this child is more like her than any and maybe seeing him as more “clean” than the children she was forced to have by what, essentially, was rape- she mentioned very clearly that she didn’t want to be with Abraham but was forced to be- and thus bonded with him far more than she had with Umbrae- or with the original Pluto for that matter, and tried to show him love and affection, wich, due to her very limited capacity to display such things, ended up giving them more of a human/dog relationship than a mother/child relationship… if this is the case, then eight-ish years is a long time- long enough for the boys to develop their signature traits, but not so long that they’ve completely unlearned things from their infancy….

It’s also important to note that Jason and Pluto were the only clone-pair who displayed any legitimate interest in eachother, even Red and Adelaide’s relationship was fairly one-sided and only had interest from “Red’s” part, “Adelaide” would have been all too happy to run and never see her again, but Jason and Pluto seem to atleast attempt communication, Jason seems morbidly fascinated by Pluto and Pluto seems to legitimately want a freind- even if his idea of a “freind” is a person to murder, why is it just these two? Is it their age? Why are none of the other pairs interested at all in figuring eachother out but these two are?

Also note that at the end, Jason is somehow the only one who notices “Adelaide” is really Red, and he chooses to keep quiet about it, assumingly because he knows that it wouldn’t matter and acknowledges that whoever raised him is his true mother, but how did he know that she wasn’t right to begin with? Unless he was one of them….

Ofcourse this is just a theory, we sadly don’t have any way of knowing the truth just yet, but hopefully Jordan will tell us someday if this theory sticks or not

#US #horror