#as treasure planet is heavily in this series

[thetimelordbatgirl]

Tfw you may have a new card game addiction besides YGO.

#i dont really count pokemon as i buy their cards sometimes at best #they not an addiction for me really the plushies are more really lol #but ygo has been my addiction ever since buying a tin full of cards from a car boot when younger #(yes there were fakes...thats to be expected in these lol) #and i used to go to club but like college hit alongside covid and then like #the £5 entry obviously got annoying #but like i still collect the starter decks and cards anyway #but uh now i got a new one: disney lorcana lmao #and the new series of cards being out means yep imma try and get the cards i want at least #as treasure planet is heavily in this series

[scrumpyfan43]

A weird trope I really like is Space Platforms

My working definition of a Space Platform is something that satisfies all of these criteria:

Artificial

Terrain (used primarily as a surface to stand and/or build on )

Suspended in space or high in the sky

Despite objective local gravity such that you could fall “down” off the side

Some things that are and aren’t Space Platforms

Stacraft’s Space Platform terrain, probably the purest example of it:

You walk on them, you build buildings on them, and there’s ice cream shops built into the walls (also they’re literally called space platforms):

Wube had planned on but eventually abandoned space platforms for Factorio that are very clearly inspired by Starcraft:

Gryphon Station in Tyrian has standing water and jungles exposed to the Space Air:

Motos I’m pretty sure explicitly refers to the environment as a series of space platforms; there’s no buildings (unless you count Nabicons) but the platforms are clearly artificial, they’re thin enough that the only thing you can do is stand (and jump) on them, and the objective of the game is to shove enemies off the platform and into the void:

Skyroads consists of driving and jumping a space car along treacherous space platforms:

Final Destination in Smash Bros.:

They seem to be a lot more common in games than in other media, but they’re out there. Most famously probably is The Jetsons:

The truck stop in Spaceballs is a fantastic space platform:

The Wander Over Yonder episode “The Box” has people milling about on space platforms (but contrast with “Duck Dodgers In The 24½th Century” later):

The ring city from Treasure Planet is a weird one because it’s the only one I’ve encountered that doesn’t have a uniform up and down, but unlike the rotating space stations it’s meant to evoke, you still experience objective gravity while standing on your ship next to it

And last, close to my heart is the floating platform “Cool Lightning” from the lost comic Monster Killers (which was heavily influenced by video games):

Now for some things that are not Space Platforms, even though they’re great in their own ways.

1) Floating Islands (they’re terrain, but not artificial terrain):

2) The RLS Legacy from Treasure Planet and other tall ships in space (vehicles, not terrain):

3) Buildings with lots of interior volume and no walkable surfaces, such as these buildings in The Jetsons:

and the Cloud City in Star Wars:

4) Artificial terrain that relies on centrifugal artificial gravity, such as Ringworld, the Halo Installations, O’Neill Cylinder, Stanford Torus, etc. These more or less obey real world physics and aren’t magically levitating, and while you could “fall off” one, you aren’t affected by gravity unless you’re standing on the surface:

And now for some borderline cases.

Neverhood. Hoborg constructed it, but does his divinity mean that it’s natural rather than artificial? Aesthetics are more “floating island” than “space platform” but the lore points the other way:

Death Egg and Doomsday Zones in Sonic & Knuckles. The interior seems to contain most of the important stuff, but Sonic spends most of the time running around on the exterior:

The walkways in Duck Dodgers In The 24½th Century. They’re very similar to the Wander Over Yonder platforms, but they’re not extensive enough that I’m happy calling them “terrain.” Space Balconies maybe.

#this post is basically a tvtropes entry but whatever #space #platform #space platform #trope #floating island #starcraft #factorio #tyrian 2000 #motos #skyroads #jetsons #neverhood #death egg #sonic the hedgehog #duck dodgers #treasure planet #cloud city #star wars #wander over yonder #monster killers #op #long post

[soylent-crocodile]

Wojun (Monster)

(Common Sloths by IllustratedMenagerie on Deviantart)

(I'm just a lover of speculative evolution, have been since Future is Wild aired while I was 7. Kaimere is one of two current projects I'm keeping up with, and perhaps the more approachable of the two; it's a setting written by artist and writer Keenan Taylor, and presented in a series of youtube videos on the Tales of Kaimere channel, as well as short story collections.

Kaimere is a planet where endemic microorganisms periodically replicate Earth organisms; they then evolve in a separate context from Earth. It's populated by creatures like gigantic megaraptorans, spiny sauropods, and a variety of ground sloths, including the first creatures I'm converting to Pathfinder.)

Also known as the common sloth in certain regions, or Volgarocnus by naturalists, wojun are large omnivorous ground sloths who fill the niche of large, powerful omnivores. They are somewhat slower, mentally and physically, than bears and pigs, but are powerfully built, heavily armored, and especially belligerent, making them able to compete with these animals.

Wojun are natural diggers; they sleep in burrows that can be as much as 50ft into a hill, or diagonally into the earth. This skill is also used to break into the nests of other animals, or the food stores of peoples they live near.

There are two recorded varieties of wojun; the black wojun lives in cooler uplands, and while it's less carnivorous, it's no less aggressive and territorial. The red wojun lives in hot grasslands and is a scavenger and a hunter of small or slow game first and foremost, although they still supplement their diet with roots and seeds.

Wojun Companions

Starting Statistics: AC: +7 Size: Medium Speed: 30ft Attack: 2 Claw (1d6) Ability Scores: Str:14 Dex:15 Con:22 Int:1 Wis:12 Cha:6 Special Qualities: Digger, Ferocity, Crushing Claws

7th Level Advancement:AC: +4, Size: Large, Attack: 2 Claw (2d4),  Str +4, Dex -4

This large mammal has the thick hide and long claws of a sloth, but is proportioned like a bear, and has boar-like tusks. Misc- CR4 Large Animal HD5 Init:+0 Senses: Perception:+7 Scent, Low-Light Vision Stats- Str:18(+4) Dex:11(+0) Con:22(+6) Int:1(-1) Wis:12(+1) Cha:6(-2) BAB:+4 Space:10ft Reach:5ft Defense- HP:53(5d8+30) AC:20(-1 Size, +11 Natural) Fort:+10 Ref:+4 Will:+5 CMD:19 Special Defenses: Ferocity Offense- 2 Claw +6(2d4+4), Bite +1(1d6+2) CMB:+9 Speed:30ft  Feats- Iron Will, Weapon Focus (Claw), Power Attack (-2/+4) Skills- +7 Perception, +14 Swim (+6 Racial bonus to Swim) Special Qualities- Digger, Crushing Claws Ecology- Environment- Mountains, Hills, Plains (Temperate, Hot) Languages- None Organization- Solitary, Pack (2-4) Treasure- None Special Abilities- Crushing Claws (Ex)- A wojun's claws deal damage that is both slashing and bludgeoning. Digger (Ex)- A wojun making a concerted effort to dig can excavate a 10x10x10 cube of soil, sand, or gravel in one minute.

#soylent original #monsters and races #d&d #homebrew #kaimere #tales of kaimere #speculative evolution

[fancylala4]

Looking at Tangled concept art makes me realized how heavily this film would've benefited from being 2D animated: for starters it would've aged well appearance wise + Rapunzel's hair would've flowed way better (like the other day I briefly saw the beginning of Treasure Planet and the hair movement on Jim's mom was so pretty + made me cry thinking about how Disney deliberately sabotaged this artform). Going 3D was a BIG mistake for Disney

I agree the concept art is beautiful and amazing. I even liked to look at the art book sometimes just so I can appreciate the artwork (it’s on internet archive). It shows that tangled would have looked so much better in 2d. Rapunzel would have actually looked good, her hair would have been more natural to look at and the landscapes would have been better. It would have been more memorable than what we saw in the final movie.

It could have been as beautiful as treasure planet or patf if tangled was done in 2d. It would have aged better than the final product too but no, this movie needed to be cgi because 2d is outdated or whatever that idiot director of Disney and Pixar at the time said. From what I heard, making the movie cgi had a lot of problems in production. They had a lot of trouble animating rapunzel’s hair to be realistic and they were even still working on it the same year it was released. Some of the characters didn’t translate well from 2d to cgi like rapunzel and they were so focused on making the cgi look realistic as possible. At the time of it’s release, the movie animation looked ok but it was lacking something compared to other animated movies released in 2010 like httyd. But now, the movie didn’t age well at all and looks awful. It’s so embarrassing because it’s the most expensive animated movie to be made. Even rapunzel’s hair looks fake and stiff. It’s looks even worse when it glows. They spent so much time on that hair only for it to look awful in the end. If they had done it in 2D, it would aged better and they wouldn’t have to spend so much time and money on the hair. We saw this was the case with the sequel series. rapunzel’s hair looks way better there than in the movie. It also looks more memorable and doesn’t look as weird as it did in cgi. Disney really should have done tangled in 2D. They should also kept the glen version with bastion and kept rapunzel as the title.

Yeah, it sucks that Disney did that. It seems like Disney just likes sabotaging their films so they can focus their energy on something else. They did it with 2D so they can focus on make cgi movies and now they are doing it with original movies so they can focus on making content for their existing ips. I have hope that we will get a 2D movie soon. We seen that studios are experimenting with art styles, so I have faith that some will return that art style to the west and studios will follow suit.

#anon #anti tangled #disney critical

[villabella12]

@arcvmonth Day 18: Different Dimension Day

Look, I'm a sucker for AUs, especially when it comes to Arc-V so I've got plenty of aus revolving around this silly show, but I'm going to show a few favorite of mine

Side Note: Sorry for the horrid spelling and grammars, english is not my first language and for the most part, the cringey ass AUs I have in mind and I am 100% not a writer, just me sharing some AUs :) but I appreciate it if someone made fanart or fanfic abt :')

Two Worlds Apart AU

Premise: When a group of researchers receives a mission from their (now deceased) commander, they nestled their based in a planet full of wonders and mysteries, meeting new faces, teaching them the way of their people as they try and attempt to find figments of their past and live together with the locals.

Basically Magical Fantasy (Arc-V crew bcus all aus that surrounds this series has been magical fantasy) meets Sci-Fi (aka crossover with my original story, A Prismarine Story), or at least how I interperet it

Theres going to be cosmic horror thats lurking in the background and basically the reason why the APS group are satelliting the planet the Arc-V group are living in

The Cards Has Bodies In Them

Premise: A mysterious deck has recently been re-surfaced and was brought in by the local city museum in Maiami City with legends surrounding it as the "Flesh Deck", with how brutal its effect damage is to its opponents. Despite being heavily contained in a vault before its initial public debut, a thief manages to steal such treasure to use it in the Arc League Championship, but such a shameless act would cause the thief his own life and body.

Yuya had recently recovered from all of the Zarc Stuff, or that's what his best friends called it, and is adjusting to a new life back in Maiami City. Before things took a more sinister turn as he discovers an old yet dangerous deck.

Inspired by Vita Carnis and Jonh Carpenter's The Thing cus it fits the fleshy-theme here :)

The first idea that has popped up to my head was, "What if there's a deck that inflict effect damage but instead of using magic nor tech from the monsters, it inflict alien-thing-like damage? Like it actually sucks out your flesh and turns you into a monster card?" I call them the "Rhen-Dharmas" (couldnt think of a better name lmao)

The thief in question is NOT Yuri, Leo, Roget, or the Doktor, it is someone new

And the last thing was it should be presented in an analog horror style

The Curse That Will Never Be Unfold

Premise: A young boy from a small village was cursed by the God of Destruction himself after failing to bring joy to the audience, who thirst for brutal and violent acts. Because of this, in times of desperation, the boy will transform into a hideous beast capable of ending a human's life away with little control whatsoever. With little time left before he'll forever live with it, the boy must find the God of Destruction's sister in order for his curse to be gone, or should he?

Inspired by @1apple-fox1's Rage and Regret AU

Another crossover AU of APS and Arc-V (cus the main character of APS, Coralline, is inspired by Yuya and Zarc's design and powers lol)

Demon!Yuya centric, there's going to be moments of Yuzu going ballistic over her (definitely not/j) boyfriend cus people want to kill him for being a demon with no reasons or second thoughts, and forest spirit (Spoiler Alert! OC name drop?) Maria being a menace

It is all Hurt/Comfort here and there

#arcvmonth #arcvmonth2023 #yugioh arc v #ygo arc v #arc v #yu gi oh arc v

[nearisqueer]

My Purpose

Hi there! I've rejoined Tumblr for the first time in several years, so I figured I'd make a post to explain what I'm doing here, what I'm all about, and a little bit of what to expect while I figure out exactly what this blog is going to be. Feel free to read or not, I don't own you!

First I'll introduce myself. I'm Alexis, but feel free to call me Ally or Alex or Lexi or whatever. If you don't wanna call me by my first name, Near and Fresh are both fine too. I'm 23, from Ireland, my pronouns are she/they, I write, this stuff is in my about page so I'll mostly gloss over it.

Interests include allsorts, like Devil May Cry, Treasure Planet, Edgar Wright films, Kameo: Elements of Power, Beyond Good & Evil (the video game not the Nietzsche book), philosophy stuff in general, film in general, A Series of Unfortunate Events, the tv show You, and loads more that aren't coming to mind right now. I'm a well rounded lady.

As a writer I mainly do long-form fiction, but occasionally short fictional stories inspired by real events or emotions I wanna sort. My long-term goal is to get into investigative journalism, and maybe end up teaching philosophy or journalism in university. I'm also currently planning and writing a fantasy series from the perspective of a young adult coming into their own, realising they live within a broken system, and all the philosophical and political transitions that come along with that. It's heavily inspired by my own real life political journey, as well as my journey figuring myself out in the world as a nonbinary trans woman. No announcements yet regarding names or anything, but hopefully we'll see that soon! Maybe I'll even post some excerpts and character profiles, but I might make a separate blog for writing and put stuff there. Who knows! Figuring it out as we go!

I am currently working as a supervisor in a tech retail shop, and I take editing commissions on the side. I'll proofread any written pieces you've got. I specialise in stories and essays, but I have also looked at poetry and scripts for video essays and short films. Rates are negotiable, quick turnaround, with references available upon request. I also occasionally stream on twitch under the name nearisfresh, but that's not really a job so much as a very infrequent hobby.

In general I try to be a fairly chill and friendly person. Always feel free to shoot me a message or an ask if you wanna get in touch or chat. I love learning about people's interests so feel free to infodump. And altogether, enjoy your time here! I think I'm not gonna stop myself from liking and reblogging NSFW so if that bothers you, you might wanna skip this. Not porn though you don't need to worry about that.

also it's been a while since I've been here is it bad that I'm doing an intro post the length of the bible. who gives a fuck NOT ME BABY

[mortallychaotickingdom]

I just realized Artemis group reminds me a lot of Disney's Atlantis!

Thank you!! I absolutely adore Disney's Atlantis and it surely was a big inspiration for them, Alex for example is like a mashup of Audrey (I think it's the name of the mechanic) and Vinny (the explosives guy) but then I made her more like a edgy-ish. Also some time ago to study how group-dynamic works I watched movies and series about it like for example Ocean's Eleven. Even for the design of the single characters I took inspiration from many things, the new design of Marshall is heavily inspired by Long John Silver from Treasure Planet or the big dad-guy from Luca! I like to take a ton of references both writing and design wise :3

[jimmyandthepulsatingmass]

Jimmy Day 2021 and the Upcoming Project

Jimmy’s 3rd anniversary kind of snuck up on me this year, probably because of the persistent feelings of doom and frustration over the pandemic.  I hope everyone who reads this is doing well in spite of everything.

Anyway, let’s talk about Jimmy!  I want to take a second to thank those of you who have treasured this game.  It never found a wide audience, but it did find an audience who cares for it deeply, and that means a lot to me.  I don’t have a lot of Jimmy-related news, but I do want to touch on a few things.  First, the vinyl is, as far as I’m aware, still being produced on schedule.  Hopefully, we’ll have pre-orders up in September which is next (!) month.  I’ve also been putting off updating Jimmy for a while, but I do plan on taking the time to do so once I reach the next stage of development on the next game.

Speaking of the next game, let’s talk about it a little (or a lot)!  I’ve been holding details close to my chest on it, but I want to give a few generalities on what to expect from this one.  It’s going to be another RPG, but the look and feel are going to differ from Jimmy.  It’s set on a planet inhabited by insectoid people who are mostly sociopathic, so the vibe is going to be way different.  I was inspired really heavily by the Lennus series on this one.  Like in Lennus, most of your characters are mercenaries, so they have their own motivations and self-interest, meaning they might turn against you, rob you, extort you, etc.

Although Lennus was the primary inspiration, the actual gameplay is going to be way different.  The level design, for instance, is going to be more like Chrono Trigger, where enemy encounters are on the screen and can mostly be avoided.  I’ve been playing a lot with the encounters, so I hope that their variety will keep people engaged.  Inside of battle, they’ll vary from Chrono Trigger--basically it’s going to be a combination of FF10′s visible turn order with Breath of Fire 3′s Ex turn system--with a few other wrenches in the works that I don’t want to get into yet.  But, this is one of the reasons I’ve been really excited to get away from RPG Maker.  Combat’s going to be deep with a lot of room for strategy, and I’m giving players a lot of options on how they form their parties and equip their characters.  If you thought Jimmy had a lot of interesting equipment options, this game’s going to blow you away!

The story structure is also going to be unique.  I’ve always been fond of the SaGa games, and I’m taking a page from their book and having multiple playable characters--four.  They’re all going to have their own stories and functions in the world, and their stories are broken into two parts.  The player will get a chance to play all of their first acts in a more linear, guided way (although there will be room for exploration for sure), and, after that, the player will be able to select a character to finish the game with.  Their final chapters will be much more open, like the World of Ruin in Final Fantasy 6, and, after beating a character’s game, the player can go back to the halfway point and select again if they would like.  Each character’s late game will contain some unique dungeons, variances on a lot of the dungeons shared between characters, and a unique plot and dialogue (including town NPCs).

It’s a large, ambitious game, which is why it’s taking so long to get out there.  The amount of planning I’ve done here is insane.  I have composed an 87 song soundtrack (this count will likely get larger), 600+ pages of dialogue for the main script, 750 pages (and counting) of dialogue for NPC dialogue, spreadsheets of data about equipment, monsters, magic, skills, etc., and around 60 levels (and counting) mapped out.  Actually, here’s a little visual aid about how I’ve been mapping out levels:

This is an optional late-game level called Nightmare Garden.  Each of the squares isn’t a room so much as it’s an area, and the rectangles that connect them just show that these areas are connected.  Each area will vary in terms of size and layout--this is just a rough plan for the mechanics of the level.  The lines indicate that you’ll go through a doorway or some other type of entrance, and the dotted lines means that there’s a secret path or a situational means of getting through a path (like a gate that opens from one side, for instance).  There’s also a staircase in the upper left and a little arrow near the middle top that represents a one-way jump.  The T’s represent treasure, the M’s represent monster encounters, and the S’s represent special notes--they might be some kind of field hazard, an interactable object, and so on.  I have a key in a spreadsheet that gives detailed descriptions of what’s going on at each of these points of interest--not going to share that, as it would be spoilers!

All that’s just to show you the level of planning I’m going through now and why this is taking so long.  As I’m working on this, my life-long friend and now business partner Jason is working on getting the essential systems coded.  You might remember his name from Jimmy’s credits--he helped test the game and also coded the system that allowed me to animate the battle backgrounds.

The time frame on this game is really hard to judge.  I imagine I still have 2-3 months left on level design, but, after that (or maybe before), I’m going to start looping artists in so that we can get enough art for a trailer, a demo, and promotional materials, and then, after that, we’ll be able to launch a Kickstarter and Steam page, which is when you’ll really get to see this game’s potential.  I’m sorry that I don’t give regular updates on this kind of thing, but it’s such a lengthy process and, without art done, I can’t really show you the GOOD STUFF yet.  But, I hope that this blog gives everyone a clearer understanding of what to expect and why this is taking forever.

Anyway, this was the least Jimmy-focused Jimmy Day blog I’ve written, so I’m going to stop talking, but I know that fans of Jimmy have been looking forward to news about this, so I wanted to get everything I can out.  Thanks for playing Jimmy, and thanks for your patience with this new game.  I appreciate y’all so much!

#Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass #Jimmy Day #Also kind of Not Jimmy

[frownyalfred]

abt ur Judaism post! what do u think abt how superman was created by jewish men and influenced by jewish figures (like Moses) and elements? is it cool, weird, good, lacking or anything? would u like it to be more apparent with how they write him?

Hey Anon!

Great question. I’ve had a few posts about this in the past, and for some reason it rubs some people the wrong way, which I don’t really get. 

My opinion (just mine) on Superman’s Jewish Origins:

If you dig a little deeper, almost everything integral to Superman’s character (which I’ll share later) reflects Jewish concepts of justice, refugee status, persecution, and assimilation. 

Personally, I think as long as folks remember that background, and respect it, Superman’s character can continue to evolve and change. The exception to this (for me) was Snyder’s Jesus-heavy motifs of Clark/Superman in BVS, which, as you mentioned, could have easily been subbed with Moses elements. 

The story of Jewish persecution is, in many ways, completely separate from Jesus. It happened long before he was even around. But that can be tough to convey to audiences that don’t know the Jewish history behind Superman’s origins, and indeed see the white/Christian characterization of Clark as an “all American” hero and don’t think much beyond it. 

So -- what about Superman is actually Jewish, or Jewish-inspired? 

The answer is, surprisingly, a lot. I skimmed a few articles to refresh my memory on this, so here’s a few examples:

Kal-El’s origin on Krypton -- a failing planet about to explode -- and his hurried flight by parents desperately trying to save him from death, and staying behind themselves as he’s sent to earth, is a direct reference to the common Jewish story of flight at the beginning of the 20th century. 

Superman’s creators were the children of Jewish immigrants. More specifically, the children of Jewish immigrants fleeing 1930′s Europe and its impending destruction. Sound familiar?

In the Holocaust, many Jewish families would have to make the terrible decision to smuggle their children out of ghettos or camps and into other countries, while they remained behind. 

Clark’s characterization is influenced heavily by his lost connection to Krypton, his parents, and his powers. This longing is in conflict to the happy, simple life he leads in Kansas. 

Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution, as well as their American children, often felt like they were living “in two worlds”. Tradition warred with assimilation, or the need to hide and stay safe, and Jewish Americans growing up in this period often didn’t know where they belonged. 

Clark often faces villains or forces that make him choose between his Kryptonian heritage, and his life on Earth. 

Often, this forces a comparison between Superman and Moses, as well -- an important Jewish figure who was also cast out by Jewish parents into gentile hands for his own safety, who grew up and discovered his Jewish community was at war with the adoptive life he had lived. 

Kal-El, Jor-El, etc

In the Torah, or the scrolls which contain the original Old Testament, the Hebrew suffix “el” means “of God.” It denotes angels (Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, etc) as well as other biblical names.

Kal-El would mean “voice of God”

Jor-El would mean “God will uplift” or the “uplifting of God”

Superman as a modern “Golem”

Though not directly referenced, many have drawn connections between Clark’s ability to turn into Superman, a defender of the weak and purveyor of Justice, as an allusion to the Jewish concept of a Golem. 

A Golem is a magical clay figure that can be brought to life by a Hebrew scroll placed into its mouth. Historically, it is said to protect the Jewish community, those battling antisemitism, and those who are powerless. 

This connection is bolstered by one of superman’s creators losing his father to a shooting in New York as a child, and feeling powerless against such injustice. 

So, why is an immigrant story of assimilation inherently Jewish? 

Another great question. Isn’t the immigrant story of seeking refuge in an unfamiliar world universal, in many ways? 

Yes, it definitely can be. But I would make the argument that Superman’s creators, the context of 1930′s Europe, and the Jewish concepts of justice (and naming) woven into Superman’s characterization indicate that this story is inherently about the Jewish experience. 

As a final point, I would bring up the devastation that the Holocaust had on the Jewish global population. Just like Krypton, much of the historical culture, traditions, and treasures were destroyed. Jews are a minority in the world, and their numbers continue to dwindle every year. Clark is, in many ways, one of the last Kryptonians, if not the very last. 

This story, even subtly woven into a comic series, resonates with me and many other Jews. It acknowledges the missing branches in our family trees, the forgotten traditions, and the pain of continuing those in a smaller and smaller community of fellow Jews every year. 

#thank you anon! #I'm sorry i went on a bit of a rant #Superman #Clark Kent #Jewish Superman #Judaism #DC comics #I'm not an authority on this #just a kibitzer with an opinion #and too much time on my hands #asks #anon #please ask me questions! #they're not offensive #and I don't take offense if you disagree #this is just how i view it as a modern reform jew

[fatehbaz]

Ah man I'm so glad you made that post about ski resorts and racism, I never see content about the effects of ski resorts on the land. Keeping jumbo wild was a huge W and I was so glad to see it, and I hope it puts pressure on the people trying to push zincton through. I actually haven't heard much abt the zincton project lately, do you know of any updates? Thanks again for the content, so rarely hear other voices online from the inland temperate rainforest

Hey, thank you so much for the message. I know you’re also a fan of the region. Glad you saw that post and said something to me. :)

Yes, there has been some new media coverage of Zincton as of November 2020. And can I use this as an opportunity to say a couple of things about this rainforest? Sorry in advance for rambling and all of this text.

Right? The downfall of the Jumbo project was uplifting. Ski resorts obviously (like many “parks” in US and Canada) involve Indigenous dispossession and obscuring/erasure of histories and lives. (Details from that article: US sky resort visitors are 88% white, and half make over $100 thousand a year.)  As for voices from the inland temperate rainforest: Gotta mention that the province of BC goes to such great lengths to silence the voices of the Sinixt people, declared “extinct” by the Canadian government and whose traditional territory includes much of the inland temperate rainforest (between 2016 and 2020, BC has fought against the Sinixt and their request for recognition, appealing every ruling, culminating in an October 2020 Supreme Court hearing). BC institutions like to claim the inland temperate rainforest as a “treasure” or “prize”, a “globally-unqiue” ecosystem, as a sort of entitlement or patrimony; meanwhile, the province of BC legally fights the Sinixt in court, ignores the caribou extinction, and still issues dozens of logging/timber and clear-cut contracts in the inland temperate rainforest each year. That said, the end of Jumbo was good news.

For anyone unfamiliar: Jumbo was a ski resort mega-development project planned for the Purcell Wilderness on Ktunaxa traditional territory right in the heart of the inland temperate rainforest region of interior so-called British Columbia, in old-growth cedar-hemlock forest, on the edge of glaciers, and in the middle of key habitat of southern mountain caribou, grizzly, wolverine, mountain lion, lynx, wolf, elk, mountain goat, marten, fisher, etc. The Glacier Resorts-owned project would’ve been “the single largest ski resort in North America” including a “resort base” of at least 110 hectares, a hotel with over 5,500 beds, and an expectation of over 3,000 visitors a day. The Ktunaxa had opposed the project since 1991, and took a case to federal Supreme Court. In January 2020, the Ktunaxa were able to buy-out the project, and the Jumbo area will now be managed as a formal Indigenous Protected Area.

The new Zincton resort is also being built on Ktunaxa and Sinixt land, about 70 kilometers away from the former Jumbo resort site.

Traditional territories:

And yes, there are some updates on Zincton from November 2020.

@moss-effect -- I know that you already know this stuff. But for anyone unfamiliar:

The Zincton resort is being constructed only about 70-ish kilometers or so away from where the Jumbo resort was planned. Zincton is also on Ktunaxa territory, as well as traditional land of the Sinixt. Zincton (being built near Valhalla and Goat Range, between Naksup and Kaslo) expects a “grand opening” in December 2021. The project is run by the owner/founder of a local outfitter/recreation company. As of November 2020, BC’s Mountain Resorts Branch is still reviewing the owner’s formal proposal. Zincton sits closer to even more extensive old-growth forest and major protected areas.

Zincton also seems to be a manifestation of that now-classic category: “progressive” settler-colonial entrepreneurs from coastal BC, the Pacific Northwest, and/or Rocky Mountain West are familiar with local rhetoric and therefore elude criticism by rebranding their extractive and development projects as “eco-friendly”. According to The Narwhal (November 2020) the owner/project leader had this to say about the project: “There is a real story here of a proven disruptor facing down the mob to do one last project for the kids and grandkids. … Jobs for locals, a future for families, saving the hospital. Zincton is the Tesla of the ski village business.”

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Also, for context: Here’s a post I made about the inland temperate rainforest, its ecology/geography, and its endemic creatures. Here’s a post from June 2020 about the Zincton resort development. Here’s a compilation post with news/timeline/summary and maps describing the extinction of southern mountain caribou in 2019 (southern mountain caribou are a local icon, completely endemic to this region, and are highly endangered; caribou were declared extinct in the contiguous United States in 2019 when the last of the southern mountain caribou were relocated farther north to BC). Here’s a compilation post with news/timeline following the Sinixt case to receive formal recognition from BC/Canada in 2019 and 2020 (much of the rainforest, including the Zincton site, is within Sinixt traditional territory; the Canadian government declared the Sinixt “extinct” in the 1950s).

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Location of core cedar-hemlock forest of inland temperate rainforest region, compared with distribution range of the southern mountain caribou:

Photos I took of stream habitat in inland temperate rainforest:

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Coincidentally, just a couple of days ago, The Narwhal just released an “explainer” dedicated to the Zincton: Paul Fischer. “Why B.C.’s Zincton resort, the proposed ‘Tesla of ski villages,’ is worrying conservationists.” The Narwhal. 27 November 2020.

Zincton claims that it is a “radical departure from the status quo” and will be a “carbon-zero” resort. But local groups oppose the project, including Wildsight, West Kootenay Eco Society, and locally-famous Valhalla Wilderness Society. (The core of the inland temperate rainforest is sometimes referred to as “Valhalla” or “Caribou Rainforest”.) The project also claims that the resort’s focus on so-called “eco-tourism” is a good way to “grow and replace economic decline,” which you might perceive to be a settler-colonial interpretation of the “value” of the forest and also suggests that the concern here is, of course, making money. From Fischer’s article: ‘In a series of emails with The Narwhal, Harley [the project leader] dismissed environmental concerns. He said impacted grizzly habitats are low quality and categorized the criticism from certain environmental groups as a “copy and paste” campaign motivated by a desire to oppose everything rather than contribute constructively.’

These quotes can be found in the article:

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Here’s some other stuff:

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Headlines from the Jumbo resort news:

The Sinixt case:

Southern mountain caribou herd decline in the inland temperate rainforest between 1990 and 2018. The Zincton resort will directly affect Purcells South, Central Selkirks, and South Selkirks herd.

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And I want to say that both the Ktunaxa and Sinixt people have recently been undermined, insulted, and dispossessed by BC and development projects in similar ways. Media, educational material, and conservation groups in BC like to point out that the inland temperate rainforest is “globally-unique” (in that it’s really the planet’s only sizable “coastal-type temperate rainforest” existing inland and away from a coast). And you’ll see the inland temperate rainforest described with terms like: prized, treasure, gem, hidden/secret rainforest, etc. And the region is discussed in settler-colonial terms/concepts (”BC’s forgotten rainforest,” “BC’s other rainforest”, “a magnificent carbon cache”, “unparalleled resource”) as if it is the patrimony of the province of BC or Canadian state. Which of course is problematic because it (1) associates the forest’s importance with bioprospecting/scientific extractivism, carbon sequestration, or other metrics of settler-colonial “value,” and also because (2) the province of BC continues to fight very hard against recognizing the land as part of Sinixt territory (after Sinixt people and allies were able to win cases against BC, the province continued to appeal, and this case has now culminated in the October 2020 hearing at the federal Supreme Court, which will soon make a final ruling on whether or not Sinixt people are legally allowed land rights to harvest, travel, etc. within BC).

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Here’s a map:

From 2018, there is this book:

In the US, too, parks, like ski resorts, are implicated in Indigenous dispossession.

Glacier National Park (at the border of BC, Alberta, and Montana) sits on the edge of the Kootenay and inland temperate rainforest regions. Conservation groups, universities, and other US institutions have taken to calling Glacier part of “the Crown of the Continent” (another possessive/patrimonial term maybe?), a portion of the heavily-glaciated Canadian Rockies that kinda includes Banff and Jasper, too. Glacier National Park is on Ktunaxa and Blackfeet territory. A recently published book that might be interesting: People Before the Park: The Kootenai and Blackfeet Before Glacier National Park. Sally Thompson, Kootenai Cultural Committee, and Piikuni Traditional Association. 2015

Described by Montana Public Radio in 2017: “Step [...] into the world of the Kootenai and Blackfeet peoples, whose traditional territories included the area that is now Glacier National Park. [...] In this book, the Kootenai and Blackfeet tribes share their traditions -- stories and legends, foodways and hunting techniques, games and spiritual beliefs.”

Just a special place.

Thank you for saying something.

[thetimelordbatgirl]

Another owl house inspired AU on stories by me and my friend, @disneyfan50 , with this one being based on technically Treasure Planet, but with disneyfan’s characters/takes on characters and some Twisted Tale characters from my Twisted Tale series.

*John Silver- also known as The Goo Man due to his cursed form, John never intended to join a coven, given he preferred his freedom over it that allowed him to be an adventurer to its fullest, but this just added to the many reasons hes often hunted down by the emperors coven, but despite this, he still manages to do well when surviving on selling human junk that he gets through a portal door that he found one day when adventuring, but one day while selling the junk, two humans run through the door for their book back and in the process, change everything completely. 

*James ‘Jim’ Hawkins- a human from the human realm, Jim is the oldest of him and Nova and he does try to sometimes be the responsible older sibling, but both are as bad as the other when it comes to their love for adventure stories, especially the one called Treasure Planet, often showing their love for the story in various ways, with one incident that included Jim’s book report, getting him sent to the principles office and when Nova was sent to the office as well, the duos mother was cornered into sending them to a summer camp that would hopefully calm them down a little, but neither go, as they end up following some goo creature for their book back and in the process, find themselves in another realm all together. 

*Nova Hawkins- a human from the human realm, Nova is the youngest of her and Jim and as a result, often acts like the annoying younger sister a lot, but both siblings get along in their love for adventure books, especially Treasure Planet, and both are as bad as the other when showing said love, as just as Jim’s sent to the office for his book report incident, Nova is sent for her science project incident that included borrowed fireworks from Jim, and with their mother cornered by the principle, both are sent to a summer camp to calm them down, but neither show up as instead, they go after a goo creature for their book back and in the process, find themselves in another realm all together. 

*B.E.N-  his origins are unknown, but what is known is that B.E.N was found by Silver once while hiding out from the coven and once B.E.N was fixed up by Silver, he left with Silver and has been with him ever since, but often fails in his attempted tough act. 

*Shifty- a demon that resides within the house, Shifty is the Treasure House in some sense and as a result, can travel throughout the house and sometimes beyond it when he’s not residing within the door, and while he can come off as creepy a lot, he does have good intentions. 

*Morph- Silver’s palisman that Silver made out of palisman wood years ago, Morph is capable of shifting a lot and when not being used by Silver or the Hawkins eventually, Morph often floats around the house or gets human junk when Silver needs it. 

*Amelia Smollett- once friends with Silver during their student days, both lost contact over the years, especially after Amelia got into the Emperor’s coven and became dedicated to her duties, but Amelia still seeks to find a way to cure Silver of his curse, and with IronBeard promising that, she has the task of bringing Silver in by any means. 

*Temya Kesen- once childhood friends with Ayesha, both fell out while younger due to Ayesha ending the friendship, and ever since then, Temya has been the victim of various bullies, especially when next to being a late bloomer, she also fails the Abomination Track a lot, but after sneaking in two humans, she ends up being switched to her rightful track of Potions and ends up befriending the two humans by the end of it. 

*Katherine ‘Kate’ Blake- a Hexside student, Kate is known for her dedication to her studies in the Construction track and can often come off as a rule sticker, but still has her adventurous side, especially with her love for the human realm and therefore, does end up helping Temya at least when Temya sneaks in two humans one day, becoming the trios loyal friend in the process. 

*Ayesha Weaver- the only daughter of Azimerate, Ayesha used to be friends with Temya but due to her mother’s pressuring and threats to ruin Temya’s future, both fell out and in present, Ayesha can often come off as a mean girl due to her mother’s upbringing and is known as the star student of the Abomination Track, but as the encounters with the humans keep happening, she ends up slowly changing, with her slowly gaining a crush on the human, Jim, in th process. 

*Alia Vizier- a student in Hexside, Alia is known to come from a rather rich background and therefore, often is the schools main bully, especially towards students like Temya, but still works hard in her track of Illusions and is the schools main sports star. 

*Hope Fitzgerald- a student in Hexside, Hope often tags along with Alia in everything, and this includes bullying other students but also sports at least, and is known to be a hard worker in the Plant Track at least. 

*Azimerate Weaver- the mother of Ayesha, Azimerate is known to only expect the best from her daughter and her treatment of her daughter is harsh as a result, especially with her meddling when she thinks Ayesha is being held back by something, and like Ayesha, she specializes in Abomination Magic, being in their coven while owning and running Weaver Industries. 

*Emperor IronBeard- the ruler off the Isles, his origins are unknown outside of the fact that under his rule, the Isles magic is heavily restricted and the coven system exists to stop wild magic from running free, and anyone who is a threat to his rule are swiftly dealt with, but for unknown reasons, he seeks a path into the human realm and is determined to get the door as a result. 

*Remington Kolver- IronBeard’s right hand man, Kolver is a force to be reckoned with and his enemies often end up in bad states, with him being dedicated to the coven, but slowly growing a hatred for the Silver Pirate when she starts to get more jobs then him

*The Silver Pirate/Reese- a witch that was taken in by IronBeard as a child, Reese can often come off as a robot herself sometimes and is known to be loyal to the coven fully, with her having to use a artificial magic staff ever since a mission cost her her arm, but slowly comes to doubt the lies shes been told, especially when a palisman bonds to her despite her so called weak magic.

*Cheyanna Hillthorne- a old friend of Silver’s, both lost contact when Silver pushed her away to protect her from his curse, but both end up reuniting when in present, Cheyanna becomes the new head of the Beast Keeping coven, intending on leading a rebellion from the inside. 

*Delbert Doppler- the principle off Hexside, Doppler is known to be both caring and strict with his students and is in the Abomination Coven, with him having allowed the humans in due to how it’ll be curious to see how a human does magic.

#megan's fanfiction #dani's fanfiction #the treasure house #alternate universes #OCs #aka the most random one yet from this lot #but it got planned out so

[razieltwelve]

Restoration (Final Automata)

More speculation about that Final Rose x NieR: Automata idea.

Assuming that all goes well with Remnant opening a portal to Earth, how would things progress?

I think then obvious one would be military aid and restoration assistance in exchange for access to resources and technology. Simply put, Earth has a lot of resources, and the machines have advanced technology, as do the androids. Remnant is also extremely good at waging total war. They’ve been doing it for centuries. Their entire culture and civilisation is built on being able to wage large-scale warfare while still having a functioning society that continues to grow and innovate.

Moreover, Remnant has access to advanced cyber warfare and weapons specially designed to deal with large, heavily armoured foes. It would be trivially easy for them to simply start switching to catalysed-corrosion rounds. Vanille already has these since they were part of her ‘in case of robot apocalypse’ research. Basically, they’re rounds that cause extremely rapid and widespread corrosion in targets made of metal. They’ve since been refined by people like Diana and Hope to deal with certain types of threats (e.g., rogue mechs, metal-using Grimm, etc.) although their use is strictly controlled.

Earth also potentially gives Remnant a failsafe. If Remnant falls and the Grimm take over, they could potentially retreat to Earth and blow the portal up behind them, ensuring that at least some of their civilisation survives even though there is no way they’d be able to evacuate everyone through the portal in time.

The big thing for the androids, even bigger than helping them win the war against the machines, is the ability to restore mankind and Earth’s damaged ecosystem. The androids lack the ability to create a living human with the genetic information they currently possess. Not only does Remnant have actual living humans (albeit not exactly the same as Earth’s) but they also have stupidly advanced genetic science.

Remnant, remember, has developed reproductive science to the point where two men or two women can easily have children that are 100% genetically theirs. They have access to artificial wombs for babies to gestate in, and they possess sufficient skill to piece together badly fragmented genetic matrices or even genetic matrices that are missing entire chunks. They will be able to bring humanity back, and they will be able to do so on an industrial scale once proper facilities have been established. Really, the only reason you don’t see this on Remnant is due to their population already being close to the maximum they can support without seizing more territory, a process that cannot and should not be rushed.

Of course, there are issues. First and foremost is the portal. The initial portal was an accident. Once Asami and the androids build a beacon on Earth, they will be able to stabilise it, but the current portal is small and in Vanille’s lab. If the androids and Remnant can come to an agreement, you would see the construction of much larger portals on both Earth and Remnant in more easily accessible but defensible locations. This would allow for the transportation of troops, supplies, and other equipment on a far more appropriate scale.

The second issue is Dust. In Finale Rose, Dust operates via its connection to the Lifestream since Dust is actually just a crystallised fragment of the Lifestream. This is why Dust mines can regenerate, and why Dust has such a wide variety of types and effects. The reason Dust doesn’t operate in space is because it is too far from the Lifestream, which saturates the planet from its surface through to its core. 

Although the exact mechanics of this are not known at the time (Asami is 22 when this occurs, placing it five years after Ruby first started at Beacon Senior Academy), research has uncovered several things. Experimentation with space probes and various kinds of Dust has already revealed the existence of ‘seeds’, which are a special type of Dust that is found only in the densest, richest veins of the Lifestream. Testing has shown that when put into space with satellites and the like, Seeds allow Dust in their vicinity to operate properly.

What Vanille and the others don’t know yet is that seeds are literally seeds. They are the means by which Living Planets like Remnant spread. Volcanic eruptions and other natural events hurl huge chunks of rock containing seeds and other forms of Dust into space where they travel until crashing into another planet. They then begin a new Lifestream on that planet.

In a bid to ensure Dust works on Earth, Remnant’s forces will transport a seed to Earth... only for it to immediately take root and begin to spread. This can occur incredibly rapidly if the seed is fed Aura and other resources, something that Vanille and the others begin to do as they understand what is happening. Given all of the magical/technological weirdness in NieR, this wouldn’t be considered that weird for the androids, and it’s a price they’d be willing to pay to get humanity back, especially since it isn’t harmful to humans.

So what happens after the alliance is made and all that jazz?

Phase 1

Here, the key objective is to set up a safe-zone where the larger portal can be built. This will involve obliterating local machine forces and fortifying the area. Once this has been done, the new portal can be built and construction can begin on the facilities needed to support the war effort and the restoration effort in earnest.

Phase 2

Once a sufficiently large swathe of territory has been claimed and made safe, construction of a ‘Restoration Facility’ can begin. The aim of this facility is to serve as the nexus of the genetic research and reproductive science efforts needed to restore Earth’s humanity. You can expect this to become the most heavily defended location on Earth with the android moving the majority of their assets there to defend it.

Phase 3

Here, you can expect the machines to launch an offensive once they realise the scale of the new threat. This is where Remnant’s excellence in siege warfare and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction comes into play. By this point, you can expect multiple lines of defence, huge quantities of artillery and anti-air defences, and automated defences backed up by cyber and chemical warfare, infantry anda armour support, and the androids.

You can expect Remnant’s best and brightest minds to accelerate the theft and repurposing of machine technology along with massively increased cyber attacks on the machine’s network and key nodes. This, combined with the use of massive area-of-effect EMP style weaponry, will prove key to first blunting and then repelling the machine onslaught. 

The renewed war against the machines will eventually be won via subversion with the Synthetics (led by Penny and Aigis) and friendly machines (e.g., Pascal) succeeding in splintering the machine forces by offering freedom and free together with protection from the ‘vaccination’ attempts that would previously have culled any dissenters from the network. The fracture in the machine’s unity will be sufficient for the allied Remnant and android forces to strike a series of decisive hammer blows, destroying key machine facilities and units as well as inflict major damage to the network via cyber attack. Throughout all of this, downed machine units are being refurbished and sent back into battle on Remnant’s behalf.

Phase 4

With the machine forces largely in retreat or at least driven back, the territory claimed by Remnant and the androids is expanded and further fortified. The research into restoring humanity reaches fruition. Generation 1 of the new humans begins gestation in a deep, underground bunker built beneath the Restoration Facility. The androids assign additional forces to its defence.

Generation 1 consists of 100 infants selected using the fragmented samples and limited data the androids were able to provide. The intent is to produce a group with as much genetic diversity as possible while maximising survivability and minimising any genetic predispositions toward illness. Gestation time is approximately 9 months.

Generation 2 enters gestation three months after Generation 1, long enough for any problems to be detected. Generation 2 consists of 200 infants. This sets a trend, with subsequent generations doubling the number of infants and occurring in roughly one-year-long cycles. 

Phase 5

With new humans being born, it becomes necessary to see to their care and education. This present the androids with a problem since they know essentially zero about raising children. Again, Remnant is of service here.

Creches are set up near the Restoration Facility where the newborn humans can be raised and later educated. At this point, this compound is the most heavily fortified location on Earth, and many of the people from Remnant remark upon the essentially religious awe with which it and the newborn humans are regarded. 

Specialists from Remnant are brought in to help teach the androids how to care for and raise the new humans. This process is a difficult one as the androids are unsure of themselves and terrified of somehow accidentally destroying what they have gained. Nevertheless, they persist, and the androids gradually grow into their role as mothers/fathers and educators. It becomes common practice for androids to cycle in and out of combat roles and creche roles since research has noted that this markedly increases combat effectiveness. The androids are no longer fighting in pursuit of a dream but in the defence of a priceless treasure they have finally obtained.

Onwards...

So, you can kind of see how things will go. The fledgling society will have many challenges ahead of it, not least the fact that most of Earth’s human culture has been lost, necessitating a ‘filling of the gaps’ with the culture of the androids and Remnant.

You’ll also see the construction of more and more androids as both soldiers and more specialised roles (e.g., educator models, etc.). This timelines does have a few interesting tweaks in it.

Fraise and Satin meet on Earth. Fraise is a senior member of the genetic and reproductive sciences team whilst Satin is there as an educator (keep in mind that Fraise is 11 years younger than Asami).

Asami ends up being venerated as the harbinger of good fortune. Quite a few infants end up named after her.

Philosophy becomes a subject of great interest amongst androids, friendly machines, and synthetics with many conferences and symposia taking place as they come to grips with their new reality.

The final battle against JENOVA is won far more easily with the androids deploying en masse to aid their beleaguered allies.

The expansion into space happens simultaneously across both worlds with the Earth faction referring to itself as the HAM Alliance (Human-Android-Machine Alliance). The name is something of an in-joke amongst the leaders of the three groups. 

HAM stumbles across Protean Ruins on Mars...

Final Effect is thus very different with HAM and its Remnant Allies having a much tougher war against the Reapers this time around (due to how early it occurs in their history) followed by them hilariously ROFLStomping them the second time around in the Remnant-side since by then they’ve advanced even more rapidly than in the normal Final Effect timeline.

EDIT: Let me know what you think. I basically just threw this together in one sort of flow-of-consciousness sitting.

EDIT 2: I should add (in case anyone missed it) that Aura counter White Chlorination Syndrome, and in particular, a planet’s Lifestream has a similar effect for all living things within its range. As a result, a repeat of the WCS cannot occur on Earth now that it has a Lifestream. Moreover, the science required to create the portal can be used to shield against a similar intrusion should anyone attempt it in the future. White maso is far less harmful when cut off from its parent dimension since that cuts off its link with the ‘god’ that causes WCS, rendering it a toxic irritant but not anything especially deadly. This is discovered in the years following the construction of the portal as Vanille, Raine, Diana, and the gang go all Indiana Jones on the ancient records and ruins. In an emergency, you could even start implanting shards of seeds into the bodies of humans without Aura to protect them.

#final rose #nier: automata #final automata #fanfiction

[seaweedsawyou]

Podcasts in Review 2021

regurgitated warm cat vomit

It was a good year for the girls writing letters community (3 whole entries!!). Purple is for non-fiction. Green is for Folxlore, which is the best.

The order is by hours, not quality. The affection by word count and choice.

Game Studies Study Buddies - "Graduate school is expensive, podcasts are free". Two thorough, smart and compassionate PhD havers (one is in early modern lit, the other communication and media studies) read an academic book from the games studies and discuss it. At least once an episode, either Foucault, Derrida or Deleuz & Guattari get a mention and an apsect of their philosophy gets explained. Honestly, as a person with minimal humanities training, listening to the hosts apply the techniques they have been honing for years allowed me to shamelessly steal them and use them in everyday life, which we lead bombarded by narratives. Remember, we eat history.

Stories from Among the Stars - every couple of months they release a sci-fi audiobook. The last half of 2021 it was Cixin Liu's " Three Body Problem" and Arkady Martin's "A Memory Called Empire". I don't understand how or why it exists, but it is a gift.

Hello from the Hallowoods - Diggory Graves appreciation club.

Rude Tales of Magic - a treasure for those who find it funny. Sadly, I found it hollow.

Rogue Runners - an actual play based on Supergiant's Hades. They lift heavily from the game, while fleshing out the world with more deities and stories. Also great fucking production. One of the players is Alexander the Great who got assigned to the lowest circles of Tartarus and wants to speak to the manager, who has mysteriously been absent. Also Nemesis is very hot. Yes.

Homestuck Made This World - one of the Game Studies Buddies is a Homestuck and wants to write a book about it. So he roped his poor collaborator into reading the entirety of it. The angle they are working from is 'how Homestuck was pioneering engagement techniques that are now used to build multi billion media franchises, or how it primed the audiences to be receptive to them' with a side of it being a cultural event. And of courses, they examine the fandom. Because, as it turns out, Homestuck is literally nothing without its audience.

They have just finished the first 4 Acts. She is coming. Now is envy of all of the dead.

Future Ecologies - the best, simply. Their mini series on fire and kelp forests are each a separate masterpiece. By frequently invoking the ecosystem management practices of indigenous peoples, they always remind us that humans have always been a part of nature, and still are. Also that jellyfishes are harbingers of the apocalypse.

The Lolita Podcast - Dolores Haze deserved better, as do all other girls who identify with her. The host examines the book, the author, the numerous adaptations, and, of course, the people who were impacted by all of it. Insightful and compassionate.

The Pasithea Powder - On a faraway planet, in a faraway galaxy, a war hero dials the number of a war criminal because she is the only one left out of her old life. It goes to voice mail.

A very well written epistolary audio drama set in the world that has history, between characters who also have history (do these two have history). It always manages to find clever ways to describe visuals without feeling overbearing. Memory, identity, WWI but in space.

We Fix Space Junk - top notch worldbuildng, in love with our the barely having organic parts gruff mechanic female lead, but the in-universe ads read by characters have murdered me. They never work!!!

The Silt Verses - liberal capitalism in a truly polytheistic society. It is more efficient to embrace your competition than to destroy them.

Dungeons and Drimbus - from Rogue Runners crew, not as great.

The Lost Mountain Saga - magical shit was afoot in Sweden, let me tell you.

Bio Eats World - discussions of recent articles concerning applied biology.

Second Star to the Left - fuck was it good. Bell Summers is a Kim Kitsuragi type of character that is impossible not to fall in love with. Additionally, love is real (in universe). Some Homestuck alumnis manage to write stories without brain surgeries in them.

A Little Bit Culty - recovering cultists speak about what is and isn't a cult with their peers.

Down - time loops did not save this one.

A Voice From Darkness - the host was born to do a spooky call in show.

A Jar of Rebuke - a thesis on why and how one acquires an affinity for monsters.

Bridgewater - Lauren Shippen, I trusted you!!!

Midnight Radio - girls writing letters!!! And one of them is a ghost, but what is a ghost really?

Folxlore - a queer horror-ish story revealing a new aspect of itself through a new framing device every episode. Some of these include: a blog post told through image IDs, a conversation between security cameras, a letter to self. Genuinely is amazing and heartbreaking. Probably the ultimate queer horror story, we peaked here I believe. Sorry Mabel.

The Dairy of Aliza Schultz - a woman who kind of is a character in a story, reading other stories from the same author and offering come advice.

Mistholm Museum of Mistery, Morbidity and Mortality - the name is better than almost all of the season 1.

Greenhouse - girls writing letters, because her dead dad told her to.

Seen and not Heard - hard of hearing navigating the (podcasting) world, with a side of audio drama.

Pestilenz - alte Geschichten über Heilkräuter und stinkenden Schinken. Hat eine ganze Folge zu Pest und Spiele gemacht und kein Wort von Pathologic. Schändlich.

What could go right? - indeed. Very sad scientists and activist try to muster optimism.

#really. almost thirty entries without ever really looking. i am the ingenue of gathering media in one big pile #genuinely feel smarter or more inspired! #and the dumb shit is just the work out noise I promise. nothing makes you run as fast as when you listen to people rolling dice #pod heaven

[mostlysignssomeportents]

One of the very last events I attended before the lockdown was a thing in Silicon Valley attended by many old friends, but the best moment of all was the chance to hang out with Kim Stanley Robinson, a friend and inspiration.

That's when Stan told me he had just finished a book that might be his last-ever novel, The Ministry For the Future, and that his future work would be nonfiction, starting with his long-planned book about the Sierras.

I was stricken. Robinson's novels are a lifeline for me.

The first Robinson novel I read may just be my favorite: Pacific Edge, a green utopian novel about a successful transition to a post-climate-emergency, just and stable world. Re-reading it is a vacation from all my anxieties, still.

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/01/15/pacific-edge-the-most-uplifting-novel-in-my-library/

My first novel, DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM, wouldn't exist without Pacific Edge. That was the book that taught me that small disputes over beloved local treasures could be as dramatic as (and microcosms for) global conflicts.

I have been both dreading and anticipating MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE, not wanting to read my last KSR novel but also wanting so badly to read this one, because it's the book in which he imagines the end of capitalism.

You've heard the phrase, "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," variously attributed to Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. As the author of a couple of postcapitalist novels, I have a real appreciation for the details of that truism.

It's actually not all that hard to imagine a postcapitalist society - but imagining the actual END of capitalism, the euthanasia of the rentier, the reversal of the doctrine of virtuous selfishness, the abandonment of the idea that some are born to rule, that is damned hard.

And while PACIFIC EDGE is my favorite KSR novel, my favorite KSR series is the string of books that starts with 2012's 2312 - a string of books that really leans hard into imagining the actual end of capitalism.

xhttps://memex.craphound.com/2015/01/15/pacific-edge-the-most-uplifting-novel-in-my-library/

2312 is set 300 years into postcapitalism. It's a novel of solar-system-scale civilization, riven by its own problems and contradictions, filled with tech marvels, a tale of natural wonders that showcase Robinson's incredible, John-Muir-grade genius for pastoral writing.

2312 was followed up by Aurora, one of the best space-exploration novels ever written, about the arrival of the first-ever generation ship at its destination world, and the hasty retreat it is required to stage.

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/02/kim-stanley-robinsons-aurora-space-is-bigger-than-you-think/

The book provoked a vitriolic reaction from science fiction's great reactionaries! I love a book that enrages the right people, and I was delighted to publish Robinson's rebuttal to their peevish complaints.

https://boingboing.net/2015/11/16/our-generation-ships-will-sink.html

From there, we move on to New York 2140, a novel of a pivotal moment in the transformation of capitalism and its relationship to the climate emergency.

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/03/18/new-york-2140-kim-stanley-robinson-dreams-vivid-about-weathering-climate-crisis/

These are like an artilleryman rangfinding a mortar, first overshooting his target and then walking his fire back, drawing closer to his bullseye. For Robinson, bullseye is the moment at which our society is transformed into one that can survive the coming emergencies.

It's telling that the 2312 books never got there. It is so fucking hard to imagine the end of capitalism.

But that is what The Ministry For the Future Does.

Sort of.

It's a novel about a specialized UN agency, chartered through the Paris Climate Agreement to represent unborn generations and the natural world in legal proceedings related to climate devastation.

Talking about this book, Robinson has described it as a kind of futuristic documentary, told in many voices, as a way of describing a phenomenon as vast as this global transformation.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#ksr

Like many docs, it follows a couple of main characters, but weaves in dozens of other voices, some of whom we hear from only once or twice, recounting pivotal moments in which a moment calves away from our reality as we know it - moments of shear, giddy and terrifying.

Robinson is so good at this stuff. This is the book that he has been practicing for all his life. The vignettes are superb little jewels, mostly illuminating flashbulb moments in the lives of strangers met fleetingly.

But some of the most powerful moments don't even have characters: there's a transcript of the openng a fictional congress of global climate remediation groups after the crisis that is just an alphabetical list of countries and their associated projects.

This literally made me burst into tears of joy, bursting with hope at the thought that we could, as a species, spawn so many evocative and hopeful projects to save our world, our species, and our nonhuman cohabitants.

Robinson's versatility is on glorious display here: from long lists of hypothetical ecological projects, he veers into closely told moments of human endeavor in the natural world, showcasing his pastoralism with scenes so vivid you could reach out and touch them.

But all that said, the most interesting thing about this book is the stuff that Robinson couldn't or wouldn't put on the page. Robinson's hypothetical scenario for the end of capitalism is a baroque scheme of global cryptocurrency money-creation tied to carbon drawdown.

His technocrats trick capitalism into spending itself out of existence in a plan that is by turns brainy and daffy (as all blockchainism tends to be), with some pretty epic handwaving (especially when it comes to the breakup of tech monopolies).

But all of that would fail were it not for acts of absolutely brutal, ruthless terrorism. Robinson's transformation isn't merely about the carrots of double-bluff get-rich-quick schemes, it's heavily dependent on the stick of terror.

The aviation industry isn't (just) replaced by airships and rail because it's better and cleaner - but also because parties unknown use drones to bring down every private jet in the sky, and then commercial liners, until the aviation industry seizes up and dies.

And the world doesn't abandon beef because vegans win the moral argument or because greenies win the practical one - the decisive factor is drones that dart an unknowable plurality of the world's cattle with bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

There's more - pitiless, remorseless, anonymous. And while Robinson gets up close and personal with one traumatized individual who engages in an ecologically motivated, short-lived (and nonlethal) kidnapping, we never meet any of the terrorists or their victims.

The terror that begets the transition is recounted in the dry language of an encyclopedia entry, not dramatized like the pivotal moments of so many other characters.

It's a very telling omission.

My 2019 novella "Radicalized" is about an online community of men who, after watching their most treasured family members die slow, painful, preventable deaths because of insurance company fuckery, become suicide bombers who murder health execs.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/05/who-says-violence-doesnt-solve-anything-a-review-of-radicalized-four-tales-of-our-present-moment-by-cory-doctorow.html

Writing that story was an intensely uncomfortable experience (and, judging from reader comments, it can be uncomfortable to read, too).

It's one thing to recognize that a systemic problem might not be solved without grotesque, mass violence, and another to put yourself in the shoes of either the perpetrators or the victims.

Robinson's end of capitalism is, superficially, a story of a transition, not a spasm, not a capital-T Terror. The lives we inhabit in this novel are people who are engaged in struggle, but not mass-murder.

But right there on the page is Robinson's uncomfortable and only partially elided conviction that we're not in for a transition, but rather a bloodletting, a reckoning commensurate with the ecocidal crimes that led up to this moment.

MINISTRY is a book that, on first consideration, feels like a utopia - not merely for the beautiful descriptions of people, animals and environments finding a way through the emergencies, but for the emergencies resolution.

But on closer examination, MINISTRY represents the dark fears of one of our brightest, most hopeful writers, that the world can only be saved by means that are literally too terrible to contemplate up close.

It's an uncomfortable read. It's a brilliant book. If it indeed turns out to be Stan's last novel (oh please don't let it be Stan's last novel), it will be a fitting capstone. But the subtext of this book is that we are past the point of no return.

Not only will rescuing our planet entail sacrifices of species, habitats, and coastlines - it will also entail sacrifices of the moral convictions that make vast spectacles of bloodletting unthinkable.

#pluralistic

[soyouareandrewdobson]

Andy on Asian Animation or SYAC: The Master Review 2

Let’s talk a bit about anime and Dobson’s work relation with it.

I think we can all agree, that starting from the late 90s and early 2000s on, anime and manga became extremely popular in the western world. Sure, Japanese animation was nothing completely new to us (Speed Racer, Nadia-Secret of Blue Water, Samurai Pizza Cats, Sailor Moon, Kimba and Akira e.g. come to my mind as properties already known in the west before 1995) but it really was around this time that thanks to “mainstream” stuff like Dragon Ball and Pokemon people became aware of how different Japanese animation was from western. Eventually resulting in the really good shit (like Cowboy Bebop, Black Lagoon, Kenshin and Heat Guy J) coming over and enriching nerd culture for more than just a few people who knew of it as an obscurity at that point. Now, if you know anything about Dobson, you likely know that his relationship with anime is rather… complicated to say the least. Or, to let him explain it with his own words…

Dobson essentially likes silly and wacky 90s anime. But later on he hated anime in general, because it got too popular and a bad experience with an anime club in college soured his enjoyment of it. Furthermore, he put the blame on his lackluster art style and storytelling capabilities as seen in the likes of Formera, Patty and Alex ze Pirate, on anime in general, while also claiming that Disney pulling the plug on 2D animation is the result of the “anime inspired” Treasure Planet, meaning anime in a sense deprived him of his chance at working at his dream job and “ruining” western animation.

Which to me has always been ignorant as fuck. For starters, I can understand not liking certain stories or genres, either for objective or subjective reasons. But to hate on an entire nation’s form of entertainment (not just individual shows or genres), depriving yourself of the chance of potentially watching a lot of good stuff while also being rather insulting to these other works and people enjoying them? Especially when the stuff you can supposedly “stomach” has been rather simplistic compared to other things?

 Second, blaming Japan for “poisoning” your art style? What, did the ghost of Osamu Tezuka possess you and FORCE you to put sweatdrops on your characters forehead while also going for the rather simplistic character style of Rumiko Takahashi, as well as emulating the slapstick of the likes as Slayers and Ranma ½?

 Next, if he had emulated them successfully, I say he would have actually managed to tell decent enough stories worth to read online. Not create Uncle Peggy aka “Discount Happosai” or the bland proto-Isekai known as Formera.

I mean, let’s give some context here: There have been people who successfully managed to emulate certain anime and manga aesthetics into western animation and make it work. Otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten the likes of Avatar-The last Airbender, Samurai Jack, the Animatrix, Thundercats 2011, Super Robot Monkey Hyperforce Go, Kim Possible, W.I.T.C.H, Megas XLR and Wakfu. You know, shows that are actually awesome as hell.

Heck, Dobson’s favorite animated show of the last decade, Steven Universe, is heavily inspired by anime aesthetics to the point of being embarrassing.

 But Dobson… well, he emulated anime aesthetics in his work the same way as these crimes against animation did.

Combined with his general shortcomings as a storyteller it is no wonder his initial comics did not do well.

 Lastly, and sorry for digressing here a bit, but if the Wikipedia entry on Treasure Planet is something to go by, there was no real inspiration by anime involved in making this movie.

Supposedly the idea of making an animated Treasure Planet in outer space movie was already pitched by Ron Clements WAY BACK in 1985 but only came to be after Michael Eisner greenlighted stuff in the late 90s. Design wise the movie was supposed to look 70% traditional and 30% sci-fi inspired and people took inspiration for the art style by illustrators associated with the Brandywine School of Illustration. A western style of illustration established in the 19th century, that had a big impact on the illustration styles for many 19th and early 20th century adventure novels and short stories.

What, is anime supposed to be the only form of animation allowed to have sci fi elements or steampunk in it? Fucks sake, The Lion King and Atlantis, which came out one year earlier to Treasure Planet, were likely more inspired by anime. Don’t believe me? Watch Atlantis and then a certain anime by Studio Gainax called “Nadia-Secret of Blue Water”. Or read up on the controversy surrounding the two.

The truth is, it is not entirely clear what caused Disney to shut down 2D feature film animation in the early 2000s. In fact, if anything, most people put the blame on Michael Eisner and a certain change in the publics taste in movies in general, combined with Disney trying to turn almost every movie they had into a franchise via cheap follow up movies on video and DVD.

And even if Disney did not shut down, are we really supposed to believe that a certain guy with fedora would have made it big at Disney to the point Alex ze Pirate would have been made into a feature film?

But Dobson could never quite understand this and instead of “reinventing” himself properly, he would rant about anime and its fans in one form or another…

 And on the peak of his hissy fit create this little art piece he baptized Anime Sux. Alternatively “West vs East”. Or as I like to call it, slap a jap.

Now, the pic was done in 2008 and Dobson claimed sometimes in the last decade, that he no longer holds his old opinions. Unfortunately, by that point he would also more or less use the chance to vent in his webcomic about anime (or rather its fans), which brings us finally back to SYAC.

 While Dobson never outright thematized in more detail WHY he hates anime and manga in SYAC (likely cause if his comic reasoning was even slightly like his reasoning in his blogs, people would have torn him apart like a bag of paper) he did use the format to punch down on anime fans and their preferences.

 For example, for someone who has a 4chan story going around of having been rather arrogant towards others in college for not liking Ranma ½, Dobson has THIS little college related comic to show off, where he portrays an aspiring manga artist as a delusional jackass.

Then in this strip titled manga, his manga fan is essentially portrayed as a young woman dressing up like a very stereotypical high school anime girl, who is in the wrong for even just DARING to draw her comics in the direction manga are read.

On one hand, I get Dobson’s point. She could be at risk of alienating a market of readers as she is obviously drawing for a western audience. Then again, if she doesn’t draw a traditional western comic but a manga, why shouldn’t she? I mean, as long as she enjoys it, which I assume she does as she seems genuinely just happy when stating that she likes manga, why not let her? Plus, this comic was drawn in the late 2000s. I think by then most people kinda knew how to read from right to left, so Dobson’s claim she would alienate or confuse people is kinda redundant. If anything I find a) Dobson getting angry at her just very petty (just let her have fun) and b) portraying a western manga fan as someone who would be confused by the sheer idea of reading stuff from right to left is also in itself just really dumb and insulting. What is Dobson trying to imply? That anime fans are so stuck in the way they consume certain media, they can’t act according to “western standards” again?

Then there is this strip where yet another female anime fan is essentially portrayed as the embodiment of how “ignorant” manga fans are of the idea of different art styles...

Which becomes rather laughable once Dobson describes his style as a mixture of European, American and  Japanese. Why? Because he is the one oversimplifying things, rather than the anime fan.

You see while anime and manga of all sorts do share certain aesthetics (like the black and white art style, emphasize on the eyes of characters, the way hair is drawn, recurring tropes within certain genres and so on) style wise (both in art and storytelling) there can be severe differences, depending on the artist alone. Akira Toriyama’s style differentiates significantly from the likes of Eichiro Oda, Rumiko Takahashi, Kentaro Miura, Tezuka, Kaori Yuki and so forth.

The same also goes for many western artists. Herge had a significantly different style from Uderzo and Goscinny. Don Rosa has a different style in which he drew Scrooge McDuck than Carl Barks did. Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee draw mainstream superheroes differently compared to how Jack Kirby, George Perez and others did. Heck, Ethan Van Sciver and Jim Lee were closely associated with Green Lantern in the 2000s and look how they differentiate.

 Which btw is the kind of skill level Dobson would have needed to have, to make it in the mainstream industry

So when Dobson says “I draw in a combination of American, Western and Japanese” all I can think is the following: THAT DOESN’T NARROW IT DOWN! WHAT THE HECK HAVE YOU LEARNT IN COLLEGE ABOUT COMICS? WHICH ARTISTS, WORKS AND STORYTELLERS DO YOU TRY TO EITHER EMULATE OR HAVE BEEN INSPIRED BY?

Then there is this little thing…

Where do I even begin? How about the fact that Dobson’s hand in the last panel looks like he has lost a thumb? The fact that the little boy, anime fan or not, is aware of Sae Sawanoguchi, a character from a short lived OVA and anime series from the 90s, which considering his age, I kinda doubt he would be aware off. Unlike Dobson, who got into anime in the 90s and admits in fact within the posts I loaded up earlier, that he had watched the anime in particular, known in the west as Magic User Club.

Then there is the implication by Dobson, that anime is so “corruptive” as a medium, little kids don’t even know the most basic characters in western animation because of it. I expect in a next panel, that all of sudden some 50s PSA guy comes along and lectures me that if I want this kind of thing not to happen at MY convention, I need to teach little kids more about the GOOD western animation, instead of the BAD eastern one. Then there is this rather unflattering portrayal of a shonen ai/shojou ai fangirl…

 Which makes me laugh cause honestly, even some of the worst shonen ai and shojou ai can do better in portraying a “realistic” gay relationship than Patty if you ask me.

Also, as much as I think fangirls can be extremely thirsty (I have read my fair share of extremely stupid yaoi and yuri fanfics) I think that in hindsight Dobson is really not anyone to complain about shipping obsession and sex when he himself has KorraSami, the Ladybug fandom and a certain rat pirate under his floppy belt.

As you can imagine, Dobson would get heat for those comics, considering how he himself has been greatly inspired by anime and manga for his major comics. And while I don’t have any explicit deviantart posts of him reacting to criticism in that regard, I do have this comic which addresses it directly.

 And yeah, if I were schoolgirl number 4, I would just sigh and walk away after telling Dobson that his mistakes and shortcomings are not related to having consumed anime, but rather by what sort of anime (and other stories) he had consumed and the amount of effort he had put in creating his stories instead of emulating just something more popular. Plus, if you really want people to draw more from life, how about drawing more from life yourself down the line? And no, tracing Star Wars movie frames does not count.

Finally, Dobson, considering how very little most people think of your work, I say mission accomplished: People have learnt from your mistakes and know not to be a Dobson.

And at last, there is this comic, which kinda wraps up Dobson’s “vendetta” with anime and manga fans within the pages of SYAC.

By trying to mock anime fans and make them look just as shallow as he is. I at least suppose. Honestly, the message of this comic is rather muddled. On one hand, I would say the strawman accusing Dobson hates anime just because it is popular is very simplified. After all, Dobson has made his reasons for not liking anime clear in a few more details. It’s just that the details in and on themselves in real life are still rather shallow and boil down to a lot of personal bias rather than an objective criticism of actual flaws. Which I think is worth pointing out.

But frankly, what is Dobson trying to say or point out here? That the strawman is not so different or even dumber than him, because he hates Justin Bieber for “shallow” and superficial reasons too?

Okay, this doesn’t quite work as well as Dobson wants. First, the argument Dobson’s strawman makes is in huge parts based on some verified statements Dobson made for not liking anime. Second, he just says a name and that triggers the guy to express his hatred for Bieber. We don’t know why the guy hates Bieber and you could make in fact the case, that he hates him not because he is popular, but because he has a genuine issue with the artist, his work or his behavior as a human being. Third, if you want to make yourself look like the better person Dobson, try to argue with the guy and make solid arguments why you don’t like anime. Instead you just deflect the criticism by changing the subject and then try to make yourself look like the “smarter” person in the room by mocking your critic in the most condescending manner.

Which as I think about it, sounds like your modus operandi on twitter and tumblr.

Weirdly enough, that more or less marks the “end” of Dobson tackling anime fans and the beef he has with them within the pages of SYAC. Despite how much Dobson’s negative reputation especially in early years was build around him hating on anime and belittling its fans, he didn’t really do more afterwards in the Dobson focused pages of SYAC. And mind you, those strips were also separated by other strips in-between, focused on Dobson just being at conventions.

Unfortunately for him, the strips didn’t really help in any way to diminish that negative reputation and instead just confirmed for many, that Dobson can’t handle criticism about his flawed opinion on anime. If anything, it just made people think even less of Dobson, as the strips just painted him as someone who would rather portray his critics as strawman he can be “rightfully” annoyed at, instead of fellow humans with slightly different tastes in entertainment, who are still worth listening to.

So, now that we have the anime fan related “annoyances” out of the way, what other sort of silly problems in making webcomics would Dobson cover in his strips and are “relatable” to everyone?

Lets see some of these examples in the next part.

#anime / manga #manga #Andrew Dobson #fuck you Tom Preston #Tom Preston #syac #so...you are a cartoonist #so you are a cartoonist #review #webcomic #comic #adobsonsartwork #adobsoncomic #adobsonartworks

[spaceskam]

The Golden Boy

hey look i finally finished that fic i’ve been giving sneak peeks about for months

warning: past child abuse, sexual content

ao3 

In Bacchus Year 9 (Earth year 1782), Antar and Earth signed a peace treaty.

The treaty meant requiring many social gatherings on either planet, kind gestures between royals, and many public statements against prejudice of each other's people. It even led to Earth assisting the rebels during the Antarian Civil War in Bacchus Year Final (Earth Year 1834), stating proudly that they signed the treaty for the people, not the monarchs. As one would assume, that line went over fantastically with the public.

They heavily supported the rise of King Atlas Gudrun, a man of great people skills and desire to help, in Gudrun Year 0 (Earth Year 1844). The Gudrun family (which had been anglicized on Earth to Guerin) had been ruling on Antar ever since and had always done their best to keep up their loyal companionship with Earth and its leaders.

It all led to this moment in Gudrun Year 176 (Earth year 2020) where Prince Michael of Antar, fourth of his name, son of King Heinar, known for his charm and wit, had Prince Alex, first of his name, adoptive son of King James Valenti, known for his intellect and beauty, completely strung out and naked against sheets made of the finest Antarian silks.

"How long until the little pest makes you leave?" Michael asked softly, trailing his fingers over the dip of Alex's slightly crooked collarbone. Alex's eyes were closed and his lips were parted and if Michael didn't know any better, he'd think he was asleep. But he did know better and he knew he was simply in a state of bliss that only occured in moments like this.

Their one off tryst had actually occurred more than once, but it wasn't frequent enough to call it a thing. They saw each other a few times a year if they were lucky and could steal a few hours each time to sneak away. If they were supremely lucky, they could even take a night. They weren't this time.

"He said we have until six before we have to be taken to get ready for dinner," Alex whispered, not bothering to correct him for calling his brother a pest while slowly turning onto his side and letting his forehead hit Michael's shoulder. Michael pouted.

"I miss you already," he admitted stupidly, combing through Alex's long hair. He'd seen a picture of him with it all shaved off and had met him when it was short, but apparently he hadn't cut it at all since he'd been given the title of prince. Michael didn't mind.

"You come to Earth in a month, don't you? Ask to stay longer, I’m sure we could easily explain away a reason you should stay in my home," Alex whispered, pressing a kiss to his shoulder.

"If you come up with a good reason for me, I'll do it. I'm bad at excuse making," Michael grumbled. Alex smiled and lifted his hand, his cold fingertips pressing to Michael's cheek and his lips.

"I'll cause a national disaster if it means getting you alone for one night," Alex said. Michael stared for a moment before grabbing him and rolling him into his back, stealing a series of slow, deep, open mouthed kisses that only came so easily because they were with him.

Michael adored the way Alex grabbed at him, hands never staying one place too long because he wanted to touch everywhere. He wanted to remember everywhere. He wanted him in his entirety. He could never find the words for how it made him felt to be wanted so strongly if only for a night.

"Please never leave," Michael begged against his skin. Alex said nothing.

Instead, the bedroom door was very rudely and unceremoniously thrown open. Michael instinctively covered Alex’s bare skin and looked towards the doorway. On the other side, Michael's guard, Adonis, stood with his back to them in some silly act of respect while Kyle stood with his arms crossed while looking really irritated. He walked in farther and closed the door behind him. Or, tried. Adonis stuck his hand to block it from closing entirely. He trusted Alex to be alone with the prince. Kyle was still earning that.

"Get up, we have to go get ready," Kyle said. He had no shame, truly, as he sat on the bed. Michael fell face first into the pillows and groaned. "Excuse you, I'm doing you a favor."

"You're interrupting," Alex corrected, tan fingers idly rubbing over Michael's shoulder.

"I disagree. I think I just lied to two fucking monarchs that we three princes were going to be hanging out and doing princely things when, in reality, I was playing some fucked version of Go Fish with Adonis while you two snuck away for your intergalactic booty call," Kyle explained. Michael groaned even more.

"How vulgar must you be?" he asked. Kyle raised an eyebrow.

"Oh, you wanna go there? I've seen your U-Mails to Alex. 'Oh, how I long to get your mouth on my–'"

"Enough!" Alex silenced him, shifting to a sitting position. Michael wanted to cry that it was over so soon. Especially when they still had to sit across the table from each other and pretend he hadn't just had him to himself. "Leave and let me get dressed, then we can go."

"Finally," Kyle groaned, patting Michael on the back before he went, "Good to see you, Prince Sexual Frustration."

The door closed if only because Adonis insisted on the prince being kept away from anyone who might catch him in a vulnerable state. Alex took the opportunity to move back for a few more kisses, all of them feeling more and more like goodbye. He remembered a time when he didn't mind goodbyes. Now they felt like a death sentence.

“Stop pouting,” Alex told him softly as he slowly weaned him off his lips, “This isn’t the end of the night. I’ll still see you at dinner and I still don’t leave until tomorrow morning.”

“But you leave so early,” Michael whined, “And at dinner, there’s people.” 

Alex traced a finger from Michael’s temple down to his jaw, moving his thumb up between their mouths. He gently grazed Michael’s bottom lip before pushing down on the sore skin.

“I’ve read countless articles about all the wondrous things you say, how well spoken you are, how you can charm anyone to their knees in four languages,” Alex said, voice hot, “If only they could see the way you beg.”

Michael huffed a sad laugh, knowing Alex was trying to distract him from his sad thoughts and deciding to play along. Alex pushed his face away and went to get up. Michael pushed himself off the bed and caught Alex’s bicep, unskillfully pulling him down on top of him.

“You are the only one allowed to see me beg,” Michael said. Alex smiled at him, honest and bold as ever. He laid his weight on Michael completely, trusting him not to treat that little act with anything but kindness. It was the most beautiful thing Michael had ever been given. 

He went to move up for another kiss, but he was horrifically sidelined when Alex dodged him and pushed him back into the bed to get himself up. Michael remembered the first time Alex had pushed him. His first reaction had been anger that a silly little Earth man would dare to touch him that way. But his second reaction had been absolute delight when he realized he’d only been pushed because Alex wanted him against the wall. They were so young then. Somehow, things hadn’t really changed.

Alex got out of bed and grabbed the prosthetic leg that he somehow didn’t mind Michael seeing him without. He moved with agile fingers to put it back on in record time before he stood and stretched his body out in objectively the most unfair way that existed. He was long and lean, muscular and tan. And he was covered in scars. No two scars were more than a hands-length apart, Michael had tried. He kept them hidden usually and he kept their origin firmly to himself (including how he lost his leg), but Michael had been blessed with the sight of them. They were 16 the first time they kissed in the halls of the palace, but 18 before he saw Alex’s body in its full glory. It was a small gift, but one that he treasured on nights he felt more alone than he could bear. 

“Stop staring at me like I’ve just ruined your entire day,” Alex laughed as he pulled on those ugly clothes that Earth called formal. His pants were a stiff, tan fabric and his shirt was an equally stiff white thing that buttoned up all the way up to hide his collarbone. The clothing was ugly, but the man inside was beautiful and it simply made him look neutral. How decidedly boring.

“Oh, what the hell is that?” Michael scoffed.

“Don’t act like you don’t know what a belt is,” Alex said, giving him a fond smile as he pulled the folded thing from the deep pocket of his pants. He hadn’t been wearing it when Michael got him alone.

“Yes, but where did it come from?”

“Bold of you to assume I wouldn’t remove it so I wouldn’t waste time when I saw you,” Alex said, flashing a cocky little smile and it reminded Michael all over again why his people had been so okay with making him an eligible heir despite his lack of birthright. How could anyone deprive a face like that of the entire world? “But don’t worry. You and your mother both find Earth clothing to be a personal insult, so I’m sure they’ll have something nice and alien for me to wear.”

And they did. Michael had gotten his sister to see to it that they put Alex in gold if only for his personal enjoyment. Soon, he’d be in loose, silk pants and a long-sleeved, knee-length tunic that happened to be a very specific shade of gold that would probably make it difficult to focus at dinner but it would be worth it. Typically, their tunics would have a deep v-cut neckline (Michael’s in particular going to his navel as a show of both his age and his marriage status) but he knew Alex and he knew he didn’t like his scars on display, so he made sure they knew to keep it more modest and to also have an option to put something beneath it if he wasn’t comfortable. It was the least he could do.

With a flick of his wrist, Michael fastened the upper half of the buttons on Alex’s shirt so he could steal a few more seconds to kiss him. Alex rolled his eyes, but he went along willingly as Michael got to his hands and knees on his mattress and crawled over to him. Alex shook his head and caught his face in his hand, guiding him up and giving him a kiss that truly was too explicit to mark the end.

“After everyone goes to bed, I’ll get Luke to sneak me to Adonis,” Alex whispered, ignoring the sound of Kyle’s sudden annoyed knocking. Michael nodded in his grasp and turned his face to press a kiss to his palm. That should’ve been an unscarred place, but there was an unmistakable line of discolored, raised skin down the middle. Michael kissed it without fear or disgust and Alex pressed his hand against his mouth in approval. “I plan to make it so you won’t be able to walk in the morning.”

Michael laughed, “People will talk.”

“Let them.”

“You know,” Kyle said, busting in again and Adonis quickly stood in the doorway after his entrance to shield whatever incriminating position Alex and Michael might be in, “You two take more time to get dressed than it takes a majority of people in existence.”

“Blame the leg,” Alex said simply, his smile cocky as he pulled away from Michael. He kissed the tip of his nose and patted his cheek in the most loving way he could. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Not soon enough.”

“Never.”

“I’m gagging,” Kyle said in a monotone voice. Alex rolled his eyes and let his hands slip off of Michael, leaving him cold and lonely despite being far from alone. “Let’s go. I don’t want to be asked questions I can’t answer without incriminating myself.”

“We’re going,” Alex said, already following him to the door. He spared Michael one last look and a wink before disappearing with Luke, the final person who knew what was going on between them. 

Luke, Adonis, and Kyle only knew out of necessity. It was sort of an unspoken agreement between royal bodyguards and the royal children they looked after that they cover up every stupid decision they made as long as it wasn’t hurting anyone. Michael figured he could actually make an argument that this did hurt him, but that seemed frivolous at best. 

“Get up, little prince, you’ve got to get ready for dinner,” Adonis said as he entered the room once Alex and Kyle were gone. Michael pouted and dramatically fell backwards against the bed. Adonis chuckled under his breath. 

“Don’t call me little,” Michael said half-heartedly, easily slipping out of English and into his native tongue.

“I’ve been watching over you since you were small enough to get lost beneath your bed,” he said, “You will always be little to me, little prince.”

Michael glared at the ceiling. While he knew Adonis was right, he didn’t feel little. He knew, objectively, he was nearly 21 and he was nowhere near getting any kind of responsibilities outside the ones he had. Max was the one joining the military, Isobel was the one training to be queen, Michael was the baby who was left to do little more than indulge in his desires without consequences and be the face of the younger generation. He was friendly and charming and had women and men alike all screaming their appreciation for his face and his body and his smile all over the internet. He liked that attention and he liked just being able to go to parties and have fun and have people he met make posts about how fun it was to hang out with the prince. His father didn’t exactly approve, but it didn’t matter when the people did. They liked that he was young and real and approachable.

But there was something about Alex that made him feel more like a man than he could put into words. Alex was a few months younger than him, but he had seen more than Michael could imagine. He didn’t party, he didn’t drink, he didn’t do anything that could be a sign of weakness. He was beautiful, but he was a brilliant strategizer and worked closely with his adoptive father for many important decisions regarding the ruling of the kingdom. Kyle was the one who was approachable; Alex could barely spare a kind smile to the press and adoring people. People still liked him, but it wasn’t a secret he was straight-edged and hardened. Michael seemed to be his only vice. It was so… adult.

“Must I affiliate myself with foreign monarchs over food?” Michael asked helplessly, “Isn’t it enough to simply blow his son in my free time?”

Adonis sighed, but he seemed as amused as he always was when it came to Michael.

“Words to live by, little prince.”

-

“I’m judging you so hard right now.”

“Like I care.”

Kyle groaned and rolled his eyes as Luke followed them to their quarters. The Antarian royal family had a lot of land they resided on that had a secure gate around it, but they didn’t really believe in castles. Instead, it was a bunch of houses and special rooms, all connected by paths that were lined with well tended to gardens. 

“What’s even the point? Like, is this gonna amount to anything, or am I expected to die with this secret?” Kyle asked. Alex shrugged his shoulders dismissively. He and Michael didn’t talk about serious things. They were princes and dealt with so much bullshit. They kept each other as a safe place to unwind. “Great, I am expected to die with this.”

“It comes with the title, Your Highness,” Luke said simply. Kyle tilted his head back as he groaned again. Alex simply shook his head in amusement.

When they got back to the visitor’s quarters, three people were waiting for them to help them into their Antarian garb. There were a few different styles for different royal occasions, but, as visitors, they were typically given standard tunics. He remembered one visit when Michael had him sent special robes and wraps his way, ones like he wore when he was feeling extra, and he’d gotten so confused in trying to put it on that they now always sent an extra hand to make sure they wore it correctly. As confusing as they were, though, Alex was sure he would know how to put them on now. He’d taken them off Michael enough times.

“Thank you,” Alex said graciously as he accepted the fabrics. He went into his own room to change and would return back to let them make their adjustments. He wasn’t a big fan of people seeing his body. That meant questions and he wasn’t keen on answering those.

He laid the fabrics out on the bed so he could see what he was working with. As always, since he was 18, all of it was golden. Michael had some weird obsession with him in gold, but he never asked why. He thought it looked nice enough on him. 

The tunic had intricate leaf-like patterns embroidered into it that Alex couldn’t even begin to understand how long it took to achieve, but the pants were thankfully plain. Then there was a golden silk wrap and he smiled at whoever paid that much attention to detail. He grabbed it first and stood in front of the mirror as he wrapped it around his chest, covering any scars the low cut tunic might expose.

There were very few people who had seen those scars, most of which were purely out of an inability to hide them. If someone had told him when he was being tended to after losing his leg that one of those people awarded the visual of his skin would’ve been an Antarian Prince, he would’ve laughed in their face. His father had hated the Antarians more than he hated Alex. He was supposed to stay away.

But then the king got involved, Jim Valenti creating a huge uproar as he worked to change the rules that would mean Alex could be an eligible heir. And now he was. Which meant he had to work with Antarian officials at the ripe old age of fifteen, suddenly going from a maimed soldier to a pretty little prince. The first year seemed to be full of rigorous re-training of his brain to be good at the social part of things. The second year he was brought to Antar for the first time.

He distinctly remembered the first time he saw Michael, young and carefree and absolutely shameless. He had outwardly chosen Alex to fawn over for the extent of their stay, constantly sending smiles and winks and batting his eyelashes. He leaned too close when they talked and kept offering to show him where things were. Alex had disliked his abrasiveness to the point that, the closer he got, the more it set off his fight or flight reflexes. He almost hit him three times before Michael seemed to get the memo.

When the Antarian royal family traveled to Earth for their public appearances, Michael was much more tame. Unlike the rest of his family, he’d opted out of donning more of Earth’s style of clothing. There was something so bold about the way he walked around in his wraps and robes, all of it loose and seemingly hanging onto him just barely. It had exposed a good portion of his chest and his arms, even his thighs if he walked a certain way. Earth was too hot to cover more, he’d said. That’s when Alex really saw him. He was annoying as all hell, but he would be damned if someone tried to shame him into changing himself even for a moment. Alex had kissed him before he went home which was absolutely Alex’s fault. It was his favorite mistake.

“Gold always looks good on you,” Fides said as Alex walked back into the main room. He smiled his thanks and she led him to a chair to fix his face and his hair. She was the only one he trusted near him with all the tools that it took to make him look nice enough for the queen.

It seemed to be an hour before she was done, but it was worth it. Alex’s hair was braided into intricate six-strand braids that made a makeshift crown around his head and other tiny ones throughout the rest of his hair while the majority of it stayed down and was loosely curled where it rested against his shoulders. His eyes had thick and bold black eyeliner that seemed to bleed into gold eyeshadow which led to a leaf-like design that matched the pattern of his tunic that stretched to his sideburns, over his cheekbones, and above his eyebrows. His lips only had a thin layer of gloss over them, but he looked good and a part of him wondered if Michael would agree.

He knew he would.

“Thank you, Fides,” Alex said. She gave him a sweet smile and packed up her things. It was in Antarian’s blood to touch, but Fides respected Alex’s taste for it and, although he gave her permission to do his makeup, didn’t push him for more. It made her one of his favorite people.

It seemed achingly long before Kyle was done. He had a similar get-up to Alex, but his short hair was left alone and his face was more of just glittery and not in any particular design. It wasn’t long before their stylists excused themselves and went to do whatever they did in the main house. Alex and Kyle collapsed on the couch in time to Alex’s phone dinging to signify a U-Mail. He flipped through fabric to find which discreet pocket he’d slipped it into.

Eventually, he found it and he put effort into keeping his face straight as he sat Michael’s screen name cross his screen.

definitelynottheprince: My bed is cold and yet smells like your skin. It is the cruelest combination that has ever existed. How am I expected to be presentable at dinner while being mocked by the fabric that refused to keep your body in it’s grasp? My heart aches.

Alex somehow managed to keep his face seemingly uninterested despite the fact he wanted to both smile and make fun of him for being melodramatic.

HRH.AMV: You’re incorrigible.

Michael’s response wasn’t in English, but Alex was thankful it wasn’t if the few words he could pick out from his shotty language classes taught him anything. He understood the words floor, bed, week, and what was technically spoon but was slang for something that Alex knew had to be vulgar. Michael had a way with words in all four languages he knew and all of those ways were melodramatic and raunchy.

HRH.AMV: Does a moment ever pass where you’re not thinking about sex?

definitelynottheprince: Who says I’m thinking about sex?

HRH.AMV: I know you.

definitelynottheprince: You do. Then you should know the things I want to do with you aren’t all sexual.

It was one tiny word that made Alex’s blood run hot and he locked his phone so he didn’t have to think about it. With. Not to. He couldn’t explain why that was so exhilarating.

“Are you seriously making plans to get laid again already?” Kyle asked, “Literally how? Who has the stamina for all that?”

“Clearly not you,” Alex shot back. Kyle made a face mockingly.

“I just don’t get it,” Kyle sighed in exasperation, “Like, if it was Isobel, I’d get it.”

“So you’re homophobic?”

“No, let me finish,” Kyle scoffed and Alex waved him on while Luke watched with a bemused expression from where he leaned against the wall, “Isobel, I get it. She’s hot and could probably crush me. Max, I kinda get it, he’s nice and has that whole good-boy-soldier thing going for him. But Michael? The dude is known for being chill, I get it, but he loses all the charm when you see him five minutes after a party and he’s throwing up in the garden. Or how about the fact that he refuses to learn my name and just refers to me as the pest.”

“In his defense, you are a pest to him,” Alex pointed out.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Sorry, I failed to hear a question.”

Luke snorted and Kyle fixed Alex with a look. He wasn’t quite sure what he expected to get out of him. Alex had never been a secret-sharer, even when they were young and played toy soldiers in the little yard outside the palace. That had only gotten worse as Jim Valenti became king and, instead of listening to his former right hand man Jesse Manes, had him publicly tried for war crimes. His tight-lipped nature extended to his personal relationships, much to Kyle’s dismay.

“The question was how did you get involved with him in the first place? Because I’ve been trying to figure out how you two even get along since you started hooking up two years ago,” Kyle said, voice so honest Alex didn’t bother pointing out that it had been much longer than two years and Kyle just hadn’t noticed. “Just… make it make sense.”

Alex rolled his neck and tried to think about what exactly it was about Michael that made it hard to look away from him but also made it easy to go so long without speaking. As attached as they were when they were on the same planet and as much as they communicated in the weeks before and the weeks after, there were typically multiple days they went without so much as a word between them. They did their own duties and this thing they had found themselves in wasn’t a part of that. Michael spun romantic words for him, but Alex wasn’t his only pastime and probably never would be.

“He’s…” Alex trailed off, trying to find the words and settling on something that did the man no justice, “Simple.”

“Simple as in stupid?” Kyle asked dully.

“Simple as in not a problem,” Luke corrected.

“Simple as in he doesn’t ask questions,” Alex finalized. He meant it to be sort of lighthearted, but Kyle turned to him with concerned eyebrows.

“What do you mean?” he asked, but quickly decided to answer himself with another question, “You mean he doesn’t know about‒”

“No,” Alex said dismissively, carefully pushing himself to his feet and subtly checking his balance, “And he never will. We have dinner to attend to.”

Alex sort of checked out mentally for his own good after that, the walk to the dining hall and finding their seats completely a blur. He only seemed to come back to consciousness when Michael made his grand entrance. His robes and wraps were a dark red, hardly hanging onto his body as always. It exposed his chest more than anything else, the dangerous placement exposing the beginnings of the trail of hair beneath his navel. His head was held high, a thin gold band sitting atop his perfect curls. His eyes had cloudy red makeup surrounding them and his lips were painted gold. Alex smiled carefully to himself as he admired him.

Kyle was really the only one who actually looked forward to the food Antar had to offer. Alex didn’t hate it, but he would choose a pot of mac and cheese over the under-cooked meat of an animal that had no English name. Michael had tried to teach him how to say it, but it had way too many syllables and way too many consonants that Alex just couldn’t keep up. He’d just laughed and kissed him and never brought it up again.

“So, Prince Alex,” the smooth voice of Michael’s mother, the queen, said in her thick accent, capturing his attention. Queen Celeano (Lady No if she liked you) was a beautiful woman, but if that’s all someone took her for, they’d be sorely mistaken. 

She ran things more than her husband did, her iron fist impossible to ignore. She was fiercely protective of her children and rightfully skeptical of everyone who entered her home. But she seemed to like Alex. She never raised her voice or gave him that demanding tone she used on everyone else. The tone she used on him was motherly and made him eager to please her. When he was alone, he envied that Michael got that tone of voice from her all the time. 

“Michael said you were in school. Are you going to classes with other people or do you have a tutor?”

“Oh,” he said, shifting in his seat and hoping he was presentable enough for her, “Both. I go to only one class in a school every week, typically. I do like being there, but it’s difficult to balance everything with adding travel time and dealing with the stress of being in a crowded area.”

“Of course,” Lady No said, smiling, “And you’re doing well? It’s not easy I'm sure."

"I'm doing well. I'm studying poly-sci and I'm focusing on international relations right now," he explained. Alex's eyes involuntarily slid to Michael, watching him hide his smile by shoving food into his mouth with a two-pronged fork.

"Good. And languages, are you working on learning ours?" Lady No asked, seemingly oblivious to her son's antics. When Alex said he was, she followed it with a sentence in her own tongue that Alex could hardly decipher.

"...no?" he answered half-heartedly. Every Antarian in the room chuckled to themselves and Alex tried not to be offended by that.

"I asked if you were interested in becoming fluent," she said, still smiling easily, "I'm sure it'll come eventually."

"If he was here more often, I could make him learn,” Michael said boldly. 

"But obviously that's a bigger discussion to have," Alex covered quickly, hoping for an underlying message of ‘I care about your son but I’m not trying to destroy his innocence I swear’.

"Yes, a bigger discussion," Lady No said, nodding. 

"Maybe you could convince him into doing more schooling. I'm sure it'd sound better coming from you," King Heinar said gruffly. Michael gave an award-winning smile to his father which just earned a sigh.

The rest of the dinner went by slowly, but Alex's mind already started coming up with ways to make that suggestion a reality.

-

Michael was giddy after dinner and he found himself pacing his room while waiting for Alex. 

Within the hour, there was a knock on Michael’s bedroom door and he opened it to find Adonis and Alex.

“Thank you!” Michael told Adonis dismissively as he grabbed Alex by the bicep and tugged him into the privacy of his room. Both of them laughed, but Michael didn’t care as he immediately went in for a kiss. 

Alex was still decked out in his pretty clothes and his pretty makeup and Michael was high on everything. He was going to get to go to Earth and he was going to get to spend every single night in bed with him. It softened the blow that he would be leaving in only a handful of hours.

“Do you think we can set an alarm?” Michael asked through kisses, “So you can sleep with me for just a little while?”

“Yeah,” Alex agreed, nodding his head. Michael smiled.

“Yay.” 

“Before you get carried away, can we get this off my face so I don’t stain your pillow?” Alex asked, pulling out of the kiss a little breathlessly.

“Yeah, of course,” Michael said, leaving Alex with a simple kiss as he went to his vanity where he grabbed a cloth and makeup remover. 

He went back to Alex who had sat on the bed. He had the tunic bunched up and was slowly pulling it over his head without getting any makeup on the fabric. Michael grinned and helped get it the rest of the way off with a simple move of his eyes. Alex acknowledged his act with a shake of the head.

Alex scooted back just a little and leaned back on his hands. Michael perched himself on his lap and spared a simple kiss to the spot on his chest right above the wrap he hadn’t removed before getting to work on his face.

Michael had vivid memories of the confusingly slow process that was getting Alex to trust him with his body. He wasn’t sure why, but the search results that came up when Michael looked up his birth father told him it wasn’t due to a loving childhood. Still, he didn't look too far into it because that seemed like an all too obvious breech of Alex's personal boundaries.

Their first kiss had ended in Alex pinning his wrists to the wall whenever he tried to grab his waist. After that was years of every meeting involving gradual progress in Alex’s comfort levels. Hell, they were still making progress. It started with Michael not being allowed to touch him anywhere, his hands always being tucked behind his back or pinned down as Alex kissed him or touched him where he wanted to be touched all while fully clothed. They were seventeen the first time Alex had stripped Michael bare and yet kept himself covered. It was the most vulnerable Michael had ever felt in his life. As a reward for that trust, Alex let him touch his biceps when they kissed and his hair when Alex went down on him.

On Michael’s 18th birthday, Alex had taken his shirt off for the first time. Michael hadn’t been allowed to touch his scarred body with his hands, but he got to be chest to chest with him while he touched himself which had absolutely solidified his infatuation with him. 

The next time he saw him, after sharing pictures and conversations from the safety of being on separate planets, Alex had gotten completely stripped too (with the exception of his prosthetic). That time had been a little different in a few ways. There was no touching at all, but Michael got to watch him get himself off and Alex had watched him right back. Then Alex had locked himself in the bathroom for 30 minutes. But, when he came back out, fully dressed, he’d crawled into bed and they cuddled for the first time. 

Even though Kyle had ruined it by busting in, Michael remembered that night as the moment things really changed between them. It no longer felt like a game that made Michael feel giddy. It’d taken him a long time, too long, to fully realize the weight of what Alex was giving him and that it wasn’t a game to Alex at all. It never had been. That’s when Michael started laying on the sweet talking as thick as he wanted.

Two years after that realization, Michael was given free reign of Alex’s body with few restrictions. He could touch designated places with his hands: his face, his biceps, his thighs, his upper chest, and his hips. Michael could go down on him, but his hands had to be in visible areas and Alex typically chose to pin them down during it so he didn’t have to think. More often than not, Michael would still lay on his back with his hands tucked beneath him while Alex took over his mouth. No questions asked other than ‘is this okay?’. It made every step hold more weight than his casual hookups had. There was not a single thing boring or pointless about having Alex Manes in his bed.

“Up,” Alex dictated when Michael finished with his face and Michael listened without argue.

Alex removed his pants and got to work to take off his prosthetic. Instead of making Alex uncomfortable by staring, he turned the cloth to a clean corner before pouring a little remover on it and beginning to wipe at his own face. Alex took over when he put his prosthetic to the side.

“So, I may have thought of an excuse on how to get you to stay longer on my planet,” Alex said cooly, holding Michael’s chin in his hands as he wiped his face clean. His eyes were closed while Alex cleaned them, but that didn’t stop him from smiling so wide his cheeks hurt.

“Go on," Michael said, unable to hide the giddy tone in his voice. Alex hummed.

“You could do a semester of schooling there,” he suggested, "More if you like it."

Michael peeked open the eye that Alex wasn’t working on. “School?"

“School,” Alex said, his voice still controlled and face stoic despite literally sitting in nothing but his briefs and a wrap, “You could stay in the palace.”

"That's a long time."

"Yes, well," Alex sighed, "One semester is a few months. Then you could go home. And there's plenty of people who I'm sure would love to get their hands on an Antarian prince."

"Plenty of people?" Michael huffed, "What about you?"

"I'll be there when you want me," Alex said simply, but it was clearly an open invitation.

Michael wasn’t quite sure why Alex was trying to give him the option to opt out. The whole reason he wanted to go to Earth was to be with Alex. Michael already had his mind set on spending all of his free time with Alex while he was there. It would be difficult navigating being Princes from different planets while keeping their relationship a secret, but they could do it. Michael could make anything happen if it meant having Alex. He didn't know why Alex didn't see that.

“I would spend every night in your bed,” Michael said, leaning closer. Alex leaned back and held his face at bay. Michael knew better than to take offense to that and just kept smiling. “Don't be so scared of me.”

"I'm not scared of you." 

“You are,” he teased which Alex really didn't seem to like because he glared, "It'll be okay. No one's going to find out. Your home is a safe place for a foreign Prince, all the security. Perfect. And Luke and Adonis will help cover our tracks. We're safe and I want you.”

“You seem so confident that things will work out,” Alex said skeptically. Michael grinned.

“If I’m with you, I’ll always make things work.”

Alex let him come closer for a kiss and he pressed in hard right back. Michael could feel the tension radiating off him and cautiously reached his hand out to place on his thigh. He didn’t add any pressure, but he rubbed his thumb in circles until Alex stopped stressing so much.

“This is good,” Michael told him, “Isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s good,” he agreed, breaking the kiss only to get a good view of his face to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. Alex tossed the cloth off to the side and cupped the side of Michael’s neck in his hand. They stared at each other for a moment as Alex let it sink it. It was easy to forget how nervous Alex was to accept anything good. But Michael was going to make sure he finally started accepting that he deserved them. “Wouldn’t you miss your random one night stands?”

“Why would I when I had you with me all the time?” Michael asked. Alex scanned his face again.

“I’m temporary,” he said. Michael shook his head.

“I want to be with you,” he said honestly. He’d said those words in a lot of different ways, but that was the first time he’d said them so directly. He saw Alex swallow harshly before just going in for another kiss. Michael didn’t mind.

Alex laid him back into the bed, his hands slipping easily into the wraps around his body to get to his skin. Michael put his hand on Alex’s cheek and kept it there. The prospect of getting more of him than little moments a few times a year was exhilarating. Imagining his bed smelling like him at all times was almost too much. Things were going to be better than he could’ve dreamed.

He carefully moved his other hand to the wrap on Alex’s chest.

“Can I take this off?” 

Alex agreed without hesitation.

-

Things happened extremely quickly.

The door slammed open and Alex woke up in defensive mode. Too many nights his father had come into his bedroom as a test, making sure he was alert. That wasn’t something that could ever be un-taught. So, just like his father taught, he grabbed the knife that he always kept within reaching distance and threw it at the doorway with unparalleled precision.

It was only when Adonis dodged it by using his telekinesis that Alex even realized it wasn’t his dad or an intruder. He didn’t apologize, though, and he didn’t feel guilty. Who just busts into someone’s room? So he reached for his prosthetic and started to quickly put it on even though he didn’t know what was going on.

Michael woke up at that moment and lazily started rambling in Antarian. Adonis had already locked the door behind him and was in the process of moving Michael’s armoire in front of the singular window in his room. All that told Alex was that something was wrong and so he picked up the pace.

Adonis answered Michael in clipped Antarian, his voice rugged in a way that it never was and chills covered Alex’s skin. He grabbed the pants that he’d worn the night before and the wrap, putting them on as quickly as he could.

“What?” Michael asked, still in a different language but Alex understood that much. Alex started towards the door to retrieve his knife. 

Adonis answered him in that same rough tone, sparing Alex a glance as he did so. Most of the words flew over his head, but he’d overheard enough Antarian’s speak about him that he caught one word. His whole body froze and he looked over at Adonis, feeling every bit of that soldier his father had raised slowly build back up inside him. He’d tried so hard to not be that person anymore, but at the simple word ‘Prince’ there was no keeping it at bay.

“Kyle?” Alex asked carefully, voice devoid of emotion, “Is he alive?”

Adonis sighed and turned to him, an apologetic look in his eyes.

“Yes,” he answered in English, “He was shot at, but the bullet just grazed the side of his head. From where we think the shooter was standing, it looks like it was meant to be a direct execution-style shot, but it was swerved at the last minute when they realized they had the wrong prince.”

Alex lifted his chin.

“How do you do know it was because they had the wrong prince?” Alex asked. Truthfully, he knew he was right. No one wanted to assassinate Kyle. On both planets, the Valentis were well loved. Jim listened to his people and accommodated them and that made him easy to respect and appreciate. Kyle was an extension of that and he was loved even more. Alex was like, sure, but he had one person who would be willinging to put a hit out on him and he couldn’t be shocked to discover it finally happened.

“It’s a theory, but we don’t know why it would’ve missed if it hadn’t been and then there wasn’t a follow up shot,” Adonis explained.

“Right,” Alex said, nodding curtly, “I’ve got to go.”

“What?!” Michael nearly squeaked and Adonis shot him a look to tell him to be quiet, “You’re not going anywhere when there’s someone out there that wants to kill you!”

“I already know who it is,” Alex said, “Or, who paid them. My father isn’t stupid enough to do it himself.”

“Your father?” Michael asked, “Why would the king‒”

“Michael,” Adonis said sharply. Michael looked up at him and then back over to Alex.

“You aren’t going anywhere. Stay here. It’s safe here,” Michael said. Alex huffed a laugh.

“And willingly put you in danger? Absolutely not. You’re already in danger by being affiliated with me.”

“But why would it be your dad, Alex?” Michael asked, slowly stumbling out of bed, “I mean, you got adopted years ago, why the hell would he wait to do it now? And on a different planet? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Except it did make sense. If Michael knew the first thing about his father, then it would make complete sense. But he didn’t. Because Alex didn’t share. He didn’t share anything. He’d enjoyed so much that Michael never asked any questions or prodded, but now it seemed he waited too long for an explanation and all the questions were coming at once.

“It doesn’t matter, I need to go,” Alex said.

“Wait,” Adonis said firmly, his eyes closed as he honed in on whatever other guards were telling him telepathically, “They found the guy. Hired assassin. Give up your dad’s name easy.”

“I believe that,” Alex said. Michael was still staring at him, still waiting for him to explain or do something worthwhile. Alex didn’t have anything to give him.

“Alex,” Michael called softly, holding out a hand to him in hope he’d come back to bed. But Alex was awake and needed to go be with his family. “It’s alright.”

“We’ll talk later,” Alex said, nearing him and giving him a kiss on the forehead, “Luke should be waiting to walk me back.”

“No,” Michael argued, grabbing his hand and holding him in place. Fear shot through Alex’s body at the act, that siren going off in his mind that told him he was trapped. He yanked his hand away and glared at Michael who looked pathetic. Maybe Alex was wrong to think being with a man who’s issues paled in comparison to his was a good idea. He would never understand. “Alex, there could be more than one assassin. Stay until light. Someone could hurt you.”

“Let them try,” he said cooly and he left Michael’s room. Adonis followed to make sure he would be okay, but Luke was waiting at the door. His face was stoic, but he had bags beneath his eyes and a set jaw that told him it’d been a long night.

He led the way back to the visitor’s building where Kyle was being patched up by the medic that resided on the royal’s grounds. They were both on high alert the whole walk, but Alex assumed it was probably for drastically different reasons.

“His Majesty is handling the assassin with Lady No and Sir Heinar. They’re trying to see who failed so spectacularly at their job,” Luke said. Alex breathed a tight sigh as he sat on the bed. Kyle was leaning back in bed with drugged eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” Alex told him.

“Why? If you were here, you would’ve died,” Kyle said, voice slurred by whatever they’d given him. Alex shook his head.

“I would’ve preferred that over you getting hurt in my absence,” Alex said.

“Oh, fuck off,” Kyle scoffed. Alex managed a smile. “You getting laid is clearly a lifesaver, so that thank the prince for me, will you?”

Alex’s eyes widened at his brazen statement in front of  ears that didn’t deserve it. He glanced at the medic who was stitching up the side of Kyle’s head. They seemed unphased by the admission. 

“Do not worry,” they said, voice thick with an accent that made Michaels’ seem nonexistent, “I am a royal medic for a reason.”

Alex took that as a promise of their lips staying sealed. He turned his attention back to Kyle.

“Where is Prince Boy Toy anyway? Is he all worried about you?” Kyle mocked. Alex rolled his eyes. 

“I don’t care about that,” Alex insisted. Kyle quirked a lazy eyebrow.

“Huh? You don’t care that he cares about you?”

“He was a bad idea,” Alex said simply. Kyle snorted.

“Well, yeah, at first, but he’s good for you. Makes you less of a rock,” Kyle said. Alex barely had time to process that before Kyle changed the subject. “Can’t believe your dad tried to kill you. I knew he was an asshole, but, damn.”

“I just can’t understand how he got an Antarian to go through it. Isn’t he still in prison? How did he even pull that off?” Luke asked. Kyle scoffed and they both started brainstorming ways. Alex slowly tuned out the conversation.

His entire life, his father had haunted him. He trained him to be a soldier in all the ways he knew how: tying Alex down and making him figure out how to escape, wrapping a rope around his stomach and having him lug objects like cattle, tying weights to his ankles to make sure he could always run even in times in distress, and that only scratched the surface. He put his hands on him when he didn’t act like he was taught and he had since was little. It only got worse as Alex got older, covering his body in scars until he got to the worst of them all: his leg. During a training session, he’d tied thin wires to each of his limbs. It took Alex hours to get them off, but, by the time he got to his last leg, it’d been virtually impossible to salvage. His ankle had already been broken three times and now it had a severe loss of blood flow. They said they could try to save it, but he’d probably be in pain forever. They made the unanimous decision that it had to go. Which is when Jim finally had enough.

But the damage was done. Alex had already been littered with scars that would never heal, mentally and physically. Alex still remembered his father mocking Antarians for the way they dressed and everything they showed. Part of him wondered if that’s why he was so deliberate about the scars‒with them there, he would never show off his body like that and never get the attention he wanted from other boys. He still got it though. That only seemed to make his father more angry. How dare his only son have an interest in other boys, who would carry on the family name? 

The thing was, Alex had biological brothers. None of them really survived his father’s torture like he did. They either broke under the pressure or they really didn’t survive. Alex was resilient though, he was his father’s favorite, he was the golden boy. And wasn’t that just impossible to comprehend? How could he be the favorite and yet still treated that way?

It was even harder to think that he was lucky. Sure, he still couldn’t look at himself in the mirror and he got uncomfortable when men gave him attention and he still couldn’t let Michael touch him in so many places, but he was lucky. And his father knew that. And he was angry.

And his voice was still in Alex’s mind. It made it impossible to accept Michael’s sentiments that he wanted him for more than something temporary. That was painting a target on his back and Alex knew it.

“Alex,” Luke said, pulling him out of his head, “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” Alex said simply, blinking away the memories that made his blood run cold, “But do you think we could arrange a private meeting between me and my dad when we get back on Earth?”

Luke eyed him strangely.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Do you have a better one?” 

And he didn’t, so Alex slipped back into his mind.

-

Michael’s mind stayed on Alex for so long that it was becoming a problem.

They’d never parted on such tense and negative terms before and Michael had convinced himself that Alex hated him and never wanted to see him again. It was just not good. He’d messaged him twice, but he got nothing in return. It really felt like he hated him. He didn’t know whether he was angry or if something bad had happened. Surely someone would’ve told him if another assassin had gotten to him, right?

“Come here.”

Michael lifted his head to see his mother in the doorway. Her face was as unreadable as ever, just like Alex, and her dark hair had been slicked back in a low bun. She wore all black wraps, inches of her stomach and arms exposed. They were tighter than usual which told him she’d been sparring. Despite that, he obeyed her and stood from the table to go hear her. She placed her hand on his cheek and looked into his eyes as if that would betray all of his feelings. And maybe  it did.

She guided his head to rest in the crook of her neck and she hugged him tight. She had a few inches on both him and his father, but Michael didn’t mind. He quite liked knowing she would always be taller than him. She would always be so clearly his mom.

“Did the assassination attempt really scare you this much?” she asked, combing through his hair like she’d done as long as he could remember. He relaxed into her and shook his head. “Then what’s wrong? You’ve been quiet.”

Michael didn’t know what to tell her. He was a terrible liar, nothing would sell as well as the complete truth. But the truth was scary too. What he and Alex were doing wasn’t really allowed. Antar and Earth being friendly was one thing‒but their young princes having an affair? He couldn’t imagine his mother, or the people of either of their respective planets, loving that.

“Alex won’t talk to me,” Michael offered, hoping that would be enough.

His mother breathed slowly and controlled. He didn’t move.  She was thinking and probably piecing everything together. Michael said nothing.

“Was there a reason Prince Alex wasn’t in the building when the shot was fired?” Lady No asked, but it was clear she already knew the answer. Michael sunk into her more.

“He was with me,” he confirmed. She sighed.

“Oh, baby,” she whispered, clutching him tight, “What have you done?”

“I didn’t mean to,” he insisted, his voice cracking, “I swear, it wasn’t on purpose. I can’t help it.”

“I know you didn’t,” she murmured, “But you still did it.”

“I want to go study on Earth,” Michael said firmly. He felt his mother suck in a deep breath. “I want to be closer to him.”

Lady No pulled away and grabbed his face in her hands. Michael let her stare and gauge how serious he was being. Because he was serious. Deadly. It didn’t matter that Alex wasn’t speaking to him. If he was on the same planet, he could get him to talk.

“Alex is the son of a very hostile man, Michael. He put a hit out on his own child, do you understand that?” she said. He nodded and she harshly let go of him. “Do you have a deathwish?”

“No,” Michael said firmly, “But I know what I want. I want Alex.”

She scoffed, shaking her head, “You have no idea what you’re saying.”

“Yes, I do,” he insisted, “I’m not a child, I know what I want.”

“Do you know anything about Alex? Do you know why he was adopted or why his father is imprisoned? Do you know anything?” she demanded. Michael swallowed as he looked at her. She was angry.

Michael very quickly realized that he didn’t know much. He and Alex avoided talk of anything of substance and he didn’t ask. The only time he’d asked anything real or they spoke of anything real was that last night they were together. Otherwise, he really didn’t know Alex that well.

But that wasn’t fully true either. He knew Alex. Maybe he didn’t know his past, but he knew did well in school and had great aspirations to be a good ruler. Maybe he didn’t know how he got all of his scars, but he knew which ones upset him the most based on what he could stand being touched and what he couldn’t. Maybe he didn’t know what Alex’s father did to him, but he knew he hated him and that was enough to make Michael agree. He didn’t know him enough to write a biography, but he knew enough to love him and wasn’t that enough?

“I know he’s unhappy and probably scared,” Michael said, “And I know I want to study on Earth.”

Queen Celeano took a step away from her son and closed her eyes. He waited patiently, fully expecting her to pull him into his mindscape so he would be easier to mold. But that didn’t happen. Instead, she opened her eyes and looked at him straight on.

“You are my child. My duty, above all else, is to keep you safe. I can’t do that if you’re on Earth. I’m sorry, but no,” she said simply, shaking her head, “Not while I know you’re affiliating yourself with a man who has a target on his back.”

“We’re discreet!” he insisted, “No one knows and no one will know! It’s no one’s business but mine and his!”

“You’re young, you’ll change your mind. You’ll find a nice Antarian and‒”

“No,” Michael said, firmer this time. He could feel Adonis hovering close by in case he needed to interfere. “I want Alex. And maybe it’s not forever, but if you force me to give him up, I will always feel forever about him and I will always blame you.”

She stared at him, long and serious. He wondered if this was why he liked Alex so much. His mother had instilled something in him that took that controlling seriousness and made him love it. It was never an insult. He took it as a silent ‘I love you’. 

“I will talk to your father and I will talk to James,” she said. Michael’s eyes widened.

“Wait, don’t tell them about‒”

“I won’t,” she said firmly, “But we’ll discuss schooling. And I’m sending you with more than just Adonis because I don’t trust Alex’s father.”

“But you trust me?” he said. Lady No took a deep breath and stepped back up to her son.

“I trust you,” she agreed, “But I don’t trust his father and I refuse to have my son return to me in a body bag. So I’ll see what I can do, but please, please be safe.”

Michael nodded in agreement and kept his smile at bay despite the fact he wanted to run through the halls screaming his joy.

“Always.”

-

“Are you sure about this?”

“Absolutely.”

Alex waited as the guards hesitantly unlocked the doors to the interrogation room they had his father in specifically for this meeting. He was being put on trial again for attempting to assassinate a member of the royal family, but that didn’t mean it would be impossible for Alex to get him alone. Jesse Manes had been patted down and checked over multiple times to make sure he had no weapons and he was handcuffed to his chair, but Alex still felt on edge.

On edge, but more powerful than ever.

He had been spending the last week trying to think of what he was going to say to finally sever this tie to his father, but, when he saw his face, all of that went out the window. But he had to do this. He had to if he ever wanted something good in his life. Something like Michael.

“Hello, son,” Jesse said as Alex stepped inside. Luke was close behind him. Alex had tried to get him to stay back, but he insisted he was going to be right there with him so he wasn’t alone. Alex didn’t know how to say no to that. 

“Dad,” Alex greeted, waiting until the door slammed behind them. Luke leaned beside the door in quiet solidarity. “Took you five years.”

“Not from lack of trying,” he said simply. It was surprising, but Alex still felt that pang of hurt. “You’ve stopped training, I know you have.”

“I haven’t, actually,” Alex said, “I spar every day that my leg allows. I just don’t endure torture.”

“What I did to you wasn’t torture. It was what you needed to become a good soldier, to rise up and finally end that fucking peace treaty. There’s nothing peaceful about it. It’s complacency,” he said. Alex shook his head and stepped closer.

“It isn’t,” Alex said, “They’re good people.”

“They aren’t people.”

“No, you aren’t a person,” Alex shot back, “What kind of person tries to kill their own son?”

“He wasn’t really meant to kill you,” Jesse offered, “You were supposed to kill him when he tried.”

Alex huffed a laugh, shaking his head, “Why am I not surprised that you think that’s better?”

“I spent fifteen years dedicating my life to you, Alex, you’re my son and I love you,” Jesse said. Alex held his chin high and tried not to let those words hit like they so desperately wanted to. “What don’t you see? You’re my pride and joy. Look at you. Infiltrating the royal family on both planets. Do you know what you could do at this rate? You could do wonderful things if you just stayed on track like I raised you.”

“Bold thing to say with witnesses,” Alex said. Jesse shook his head.

“I raised you,” Jesse repeated, “There are only witnesses if you let them be.”

They fell silent for a moment as Alex stared at him and tried to come up with the right thing to say. This was supposed to be empowering, but instead it felt more like he was just opening himself to more manipulation. But he refused. So, instead, Alex unbuttoned the jacket he was wearing and let it fall to the floor. His father eyed the gold wrap made of Antarian silk that was wrapped around his torso.

“What are you doing?” Jesse asked slowly. Alex took a deep breath.

“My entire life you shamed me for the scars you left on my skin. You taught me to hide from them and from what I wanted. But I refuse to listen to you. I refuse to let you stay in my brain, taunting me and making it difficult to let men touch or admire me. Because I want them to touch and admire me. How does that feel, Dad?”

Jesse’s jaw clenched at his words, but Alex felt no guilt. He felt quite the opposite. There was something freeing about getting under his skin.

“That doesn’t make me weak,” Alex continued, “I’m far from weak. I survived you. I can never be weak.”

“If you’re not weak, then you can ignore disrespectful desires,” Jesse said. Alex huffed.

“Disrespectful to who? Not me. And if it’s disrespectful to you, then I don’t care. I refuse to care. I spent so many years of my life trying to be the perfect son, trying to make you proud. And the sad thing is that I did. I was the son you wanted. Except for one little thing,” Alex said. His fingers skimmed the silk, begging it to give him strength. And it did. It felt like laying in Michael’s bed, like being wrapped up in a place where no one could hurt him. He felt invincible. “And I’m done being ashamed and scared.”

“I disagree.”

“Good luck with that,” Alex said, “Because I’m putting in a good word to have you executed.”

“My father is dead and he still lives in my mind, Alex,” Jesse said, smiling a smile that looked too much like Alex’s, “You can kill me, but I’ll never be dead.”

“Maybe not. But I’ll sure as hell do what I can to make sure I never end up like you,” he said simply, “I’m going to be a good king. I’m going to be kind. I’m going to love and be loved. I’m going to have a man in my bed, Antarian men in my bed. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Spite only lasts so long,” he spat.

“Don’t wait and see how long that is.”

Alex decided he was over the conversation and turned to leave, hoping Luke grabbed his jacket on the way out. He didn’t notice his hands were shaking until he got around the corner and Luke draped the jacket over his shoulders.

“Did you get the closure you needed?” Luke asked. Alex sucked in a deep breath and looked up at him. He didn’t really feel that different other than the fact that he felt like he needed to throw up.

“I guess I’ll just have to wait and find out.”

-

Michael arrived on Earth after three weeks of not hearing from Alex, but that was alright. He was going to take advantage of his time there.

The main reason for coming was for some big party that Michael didn’t really care about, but it was doubling as a time to enroll him in a school on Earth. The same school Alex was going to. He would be returning in a few months at the start of the next semester and, if he and Alex weren’t on good terms by then, then he would spend all of his free time trying to get them on good terms.

What he didn’t expect, however, was for Alex to give him a bright smile when they pulled up to the palace. There were cameras around so they didn’t hug, but Alex greeted him with a handshake that made his mind feel like fireworks were going off.

The next few hours were agonizingly slow and full of small talk. By the time Luke was leading him to Alex’s bedroom, he was already losing his mind trying to figure out what exactly was about to happen.

He was welcomed into Alex’s room and then they were alone. Alex was clothed in his stiff dress pants and his stiff white button up, but he looked nice. He always looked so nice.

“Hi,” Michael said.

“Hey,” Alex said right back. He stepped up to him and gave him that sweet smile that he always had for him. It was jarring considering their last encounter.

“I’m sorry about the last time I saw you,” Michael said, “I shouldn’t have grabbed your hand when I know you don’t like that. I know I sent you a U-Mail that said the same thing, but I keep thinking about it and it makes me feel worse every time. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s alright, you were scared,” Alex said simply, eying him. Michael waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. So he finally asked a question.

“Alex… What’s going on?” he asked, “With us, I mean.”

“Last time we spoke, you said you wanted to be with me. Do you still feel that way?” Alex asked. Michael’s eyes widened, but he nodded. It seemed too deceptively easy, but it was Alex and he would jump into an endless pit if Alex thought it was a good idea. “Then I think we should talk.”

“Talk?”

“Talk,” Alex confirmed, nodding to his bed, “About anything. I think I owe you some honesty. I felt I had too much baggage for you, so I never shared, but you were kind to me for four years not knowing why I acted that way. So I think it’s time I let you in a little more.”

“Seriously?” Michael breathed. It felt too good to be true.

“Seriously,” Alex laughed, “I’m so tired of hiding from you.”

The two of them sat down on the bed facing each other and not touching. But then Alex held out his hand. Blood pumped in Michael’s ears, but he slowly reached out his hand towards Alex’s. Alex carefully laced their fingers together and rested it on his knee. They didn’t do that. But this was progress. So much progress.

And all Michael could feel was pride.

#malex #malex fic #michael guerin #alex manes #roswell new mexico #my fic #ITS FINALLY HERE #IVE BEEN GIVING SNEAK PEEKS ABOUT THIS FOREVER