#between the war and the apocalypse and whatever else

[finedinereception]

some details on what im tentatively calling wizard married au- in which betty is here from the start and happily magic married to her equally deranged husband.

past

like canon, betty flees when simon first wears the crown. however, there is no portal to the future this time. she finds somewhere else to stay, and during that time, she begins researching. she can tell that wasnt normal. surely if it had just been simon, he would have shown some symptoms of whatever that breakdown was. it had to have been the crown.

she pours herself into her research. it saves her life, because a few weeks later the bombs drop.

she uses her research to attain magic powers, a la magic betty. like simon, she obtains immortality. however, she loses her sanity the more she uses her magic.

a while after the bombs, she finally meets simon again. by this time hes picked up a travel buddy- marceline. the two of them are relieved and happy to see each other.

the apocalypse ironically saves their relationship.

turns out knowing you and your man are going insane and losing your memories is a pretty sobering, emotional thing to really grasp. it ends up breaking the wall between them, and theyre finally, finally able to begin sorting out the issues in their relationship.

this is an important moment between them. even when they fully lose themselves, it becomes the basis of their future relationship. betty starts doing things for herself, and simon starts paying more attention so he can stop her if she starts focusing too much on him again.

its never easy, but for a while, they get a sort of peace. a surprise family at the end of the world.

simon loses it first. during the night, when marceline is asleep, he tells betty that he has to go. hes held on longer than canon simon thanks to betty being around, but hes finally slipping, and hes worried hes going to hurt marcy. sure, betty could protect her… but shed be expending her own mind if she did so. betty knew this was coming, and they agree.

simon leaves before marcy wakes up, taking nothing but a scrapbook hed been keeping from before the bombs, and the clothes on his back. they should have waited- its something theyll regret in the far, far future. he should have said goodbye. but they didnt think they had the willpower to go through with it if they heard her begging. at the very least, betty is there to offer support.

betty continues to hang out for several more years. she gets to see marceline grow up. marcy can see with every spell that betty is becoming more reckless, more eccentric, more distant.

betty finally loses herself protecting marceline during a vampire hunt. she holds on just long enough to get herself away from marcy.

and she begins to travel. until one day, she finds herself inexplicably drawn to a land of ice.

they dont remember who simon and betty are. all they know is that hes ice king and shes magic queen and they love each other.

Betty Grof/Magic Queen

basically the “main character” of this au lol

she begins using the name “magic princess” when she can no longer remember her old one. it feels right to her. she changes to queen when she and ice king get hitched. she doesnt use the name “ice queen” because she no longer pins her identity to just simon. shes got her own stuff going on. hes part of her life, but not her entire life.

magic queens not around the ice kingdom as often as ice king. she likes to explore and travel! a huge amount of the books on ruins, dungeons, and artifacts were penned by her, from hands on research. shes well known around ooo as somebody who can be dangerous, but is also a very reliable source of information.

shes more “grounded” than ice king. she doesnt remember anything from before the war, or for a while after it. as far as she knows she just spawned on ooo ready to dungeon dive. still, shes better at retaining information, and can read a room better. shes still pretty eccentric, though, and likes showing off.

magic queen was the one who beat the shit out of ash and got his magic carpet. she doesnt remember marcy, but like ice king, finds herself inexplicably drawn to her. so when ash hurts her, it puts him on her shit list.

speaking of, she can hold a grudge. she ends up cursing finn for a while because he beat up ice king based on a misunderstanding.

shes the one who had the idea for a giant library in the ice kingdom. ice king helped with the room layout, and she collected the books.

magic queens doing a lot better mentally than canon betty was. her relationship with ice king has become way more healthy and balanced. shes happily married. she has 53 penguin children. shes been able to chase her dreams, and her work is acclaimed and respected.

shes still a creecher tho. girl is skittering through those dungeons. does a backflip and shoots fireworks into your eyes. she is very bold and loves doing crazy things just to see what happens.

gets her own “i remember you” episode where she takes marcy dungeon diving.

ice king/simon petrikov

stay at home husband now lmfao

but fr. he fully supports magic queen, but hes a pretty forgetful and clumsy guy, so they both agree that he probably shouldnt be dungeon diving with her.

he keeps things stable at home. takes care of the penguins and writes fanfic and plays music in his free time. hes come to really enjoy creative pursuits, even when hes not particularly good at them.

magic queen puts a gun to your head and forces you to read fionna and cake. ice queen (simone) and magic king (benny) if you even care btw.

mq ended up putting a checklist up in the home to make sure ik doesnt forget to take care of himself. eat breakfast you goof

instead of kidnapping princesses, he goes out often to find things mq has mentioned wanting or needing for her research. sometimes he steals them and it gets him in trouble. if hes being a real jerk mq will only step in to take him home. sometimes that man deserved to get his ass whooped.

hes already nicer and more stable to start out with since he has somebody to talk to whos nice to him. people wonder why magic queen sticks around and if you ask her she will get mad. hes funny!!! and sweet!!! also hes canonically caked up.

he wants to be a dad soooo bad. he spoils the penguins.

#adventure time #betty grof #simon petrikov #petrigrof #marceline abadeer #wizard married au #they finally have a healthy and communicative relationship and it only took the end of the world #i have a lot of ideas here… maybe ill write out more if anybody is interested. #partially based on their cuter interactions in elements #the playing with birds scene lives rent free in my head

[animentality]

The idea of Durge and Gort hooking up is like sure definitely the idea of them being hopelessly in love is like yeah of course but the idea of them having like. Genuine crushes on each other. As if they’re normal people or something. That makes me crazy. Can you imagine?

The mere thought of like . Durge showing up for a Chosen meeting or whatever, and the moment thee evil cold-hearted 40-something tyrant and war criminal Lord Enver Gortash sees them, his stomach does a flip? Feels the actual physical pang of it? Because he has a crush??? Because he has a crush on the Bhaalspawn. Sickening. Horrible. Just awful

And Durge — they see Gortash’s face light up like the sun just walked in, at the sight of them, and they have to avert their gaze? Yet then out of like 12 free chairs at the meeting table, this murder incarnate harbinger of the apocalypse evil bloodthirsty demigod picks the one RIGHT beside Gortash? And maybe even pulls the chair a liiittle closer to his before they sit down because. Because they just want to be near him. Because. They have. A crush. Oh it’s awful it’s just. It’s terrible

The fact that either of them could look at each other and feel anything innocent? That either of them could want for something as simple as merely holding the other’s hand? That either of them could almost pass for normal people this way. Hideous. Gruesome even

Anyway I hate them. No I’m not crying I just have something in my eye haha

the thought of the dark urge developing a crush on gortash is actually the cutest thing ever.

somewhere in between butchering anything that breathes, this child of murder incarnate is thinking about the way gortash's hand lightly brushed against their lower back, as he tried to scoot by them in the hallway.

somewhere in between slaughtering innocents, the dark urge is blushing like a schoolgirl when gortash pulls out a chair for them.

they've never had a crush before.

they're like forty years old, and they've never felt this way before, and the feeling is unbearable, they wish they could just crush and kill it, the way they do everything else, but it's impossible.

euuuurgh.

#baldurs gate 3 #enver gortash #dark urge #durgetash

[weeewooobitsfallout]

hey! It’s my birthday! Jew, how do you thingk peole in the wasteland celebrate birthdays and shit? Like cannonicly they celebrate Christmas and Halloween but what else?

How people celebrate birthdays in the fallout universe!

I did this by faction, hope that’s ok :)

Do raiders/watelanders know their birthdays? Their parents would have to survive through childbirth and to the point where a child can grasp the concept. Even then, would they celebrate? For many, being born in the post-nuclear apocalypse feels like a curse but do they still value their souls to the point they accept their existence? What about ghouls? Do they still keep living out of fear of the unknown, yet resent growing older with each passing day? Would they still care? 

Personally, I love the concept of raiders being akin to a kindergarten class when it comes to birthdays. Someone brings in a huge box of Fancy Lad Snack Cakes and they go to town. Most likely not presents, but a bit more respect and kindness. After all, isn’t that the best gift in the wasteland? To know someone cares?

The brotherhood would probably award the participating party with half a day off to do whatever. Many probably have family members who are outside of the brotherhood’s ranks, or in Fo4, back in the capital wastes. Giving time off (as a reward) can allow for communication between loved ones, boosting morale and giving something to work for. I can just see a knight stepping out of their power armor and heading downtown to see magnolia sing. 

No one in the institute would celebrate birthdays in a sentimental manner. Many will be recognized for a good job they did since they were first created/employed, but aside from that, birthdays will be scarce.

In the railroad, parties are kinda a big thing, mostly due to decon. Dez thinks it’s all a waste of time, but also secretly enjoys some levity. Lots of pranks and shananagins and cake smashing. It’ll be fun until someone runs in interrupting about some synth or safe house lost.  Then back to business as usual.  - (Side note: I headcannon the brotherhood interrupting during glory’s birthday party :). )

Minutemen is a bit tricky tbh. As a group, they definitely can spare a bit of supplies for a higher-ups birthday. If it’s just a regular soldier, they’ll probably get a pat on the back and a few nice words from Preston, with maybe so ammo. They don’t have a lot of time to spare, as well as materials to make it happen. 

At home, (with the individual families and settlements), it’s hard to day. Depends on the person’s situation and preferences.

I think a lot of people celebrate turning a year older on new years. I’m guessing NYE is kinda a big deal. Like, we survived another year! Isn’t that great? And notjust us, but the world as we know it. Things shift, but they also stay the same. But war. War never changes. 

Thanks anon for giving me this prompt!

#fallout 4 #fo4 #shitpost #fallout #fallout 4 companions #fnv #diamond city #fallout new vegas #Fo3 #fallout ghoul #ghoul #raiders #railroad #bos #brotherhood of steel #BoS #boston #institute #Minutemen #fo4 headcanons #fo4 factions #Asks #hope this works!

[late-to-the-magnus-archives]

Tulips in Spring: a Magnus Archives Fanfic

Martin crawled back into bed like he’d crawled through the burned-flesh hole in his heart, and knew he still loved Jon.

Martin knew Jon loved him, too.

Jon had thrown away godhood for him, like it hadn’t mattered.

Maybe it hadn’t.

Jon loved him, and that meant they could fix this.

All Jon had to do was wake up.

Written for @seasons-in-the-archives' spring event. Takes place immediately after MAG 200.

AO3

------------------------

Cut the tether. Send them away.

He hadn’t thought he could.

Maybe we both die, but maybe not. Maybe everything works out, and we end up somewhere else.

One way or another, together. That was worth the risk.

Then he’d done the hard thing, the worst thing, the thing he’d warned himself he would have to do, and stabbed the one he loved.

The Web’s jury-rigged portal had taken them at once.

There’d been no time to process, no time to think, only to feel as they tore along the skein of pressure and speed, hurtled through the gaping wound between realities.

Martin hadn’t thought they’d wake up at all—never mind in some weird, brown field, three bodies under the moon.

Jon was bleeding, Jonah very dead, and Martin had not seen the tulips then.

It had been night, briskly cold under a star-choked sky. He had spotted a cabin and carried Jon there like he weighed nothing, shouting for help, bellowing himself into a hoarseness that would last for days.

The cabin was empty.

It was also unlocked, and Martin claimed it immediately as spoils of war.

#

There was power via solar panels. There was unlabeled canned food, and a… condition in the fridge of long-spoiled sustenance. None of that mattered.

The water ran clear and tasted fine, though it smelled of chlorine or something similar.

There was no phone. No television. No computer. That didn’t matter, either.

What mattered was the first aid kit under the bathroom sink.

Jon was alive, if unresponsive, and breathing sluggishly, but breathing, and his eyes were open and would not close, but they didn't move, so maybe he wasn’t seeing anything?

Was it like the apocalypse? Eyes open forever, not drying out, just spooky?

Didn’t matter.

The wound gaped like a mouth. Martin stitched, and cried, and thanked whatever goodness there was that he’d sewn so much in his teens.

Jon did not wake.

But he did not die, either.

#

Jon didn’t die.

And he didn’t die.

But Martin couldn’t get him to eat.

Maybe he still “ate” statements. Martin tried to recall ones he’d read before, but without the Eye’s power, he stumbled through them, forgot details, tripped over his own trailing thoughts.

It made no difference.

Jon didn’t die. After three days without infection, without things changing for the worse, without the Fears descending like ravenous wolves, Martin began to believe that Jon wouldn’t.

But he wouldn’t wake, either.

If only he’d wake up.

#

Martin was angry, after that.

The cabin sat in the center of a field, with only a distant blue line of hills to frame it.

He tripped over a handle in the backyard and so found the hidden door. Grass-covered, it opened with a hiss and ominous condensation.

Martin let it air out for a few hours before going in.

Face covered with a towel, he carried his anger down, and found enough supplies to keep them fed for years.

Longer, if Jon never ate again.

Worryingly, he also found packages labeled, RADIATION EXPOSURE: #1, #2, #3.

None were open. He did not open them. If they were going to die from radiation, it was probably already too late.

And maybe Martin wanted it to be.

Jon wouldn’t wake.

Jonah lay out in the field, rotting.

Martin had blood on his hands, and though he’d long washed it off, he could feel it there still.

He was angry.

Suddenly, it wasn’t enough that Jonah was peacefully moldering, getting away with everything again, and Martin grabbed an axe and a shovel from this underground storage and took his anger outside.

It was time to dig a pit. It was time to make a mess.

Why worry when you could just make a hole really deep and drop in the pieces?

Why worry when you could chop the man at fault as many times as you wanted, and there was no one around to tell you, that’s enough?

Jonah wouldn’t feel it, but Martin told himself maybe he would. Told himself he was glad Jon had stabbed him, and had stabbed him a lot. Told himself maybe Jonah would know, that Hell was real just for him, that some cultures had it right, and damaging Jonah’s body would damage whatever opportunities arose in the afterlife.

Or maybe this was all there was, and Jonah was released into the ether.

Either way, dismembering the son of a bitch felt good.

Maybe, he thought as gore slicked his hands, Gertrude’d had the right idea, all along.

#

Sometimes, Jon breathed too fast.

Sometimes, Jon groaned, face tight as he shuddered.

Martin held him those times, rocked him, and cried.

He pleaded. Begged Jon to come back, or tell him what to do.

There were no signs given. Nothing changed, and those times, Martin felt more helpless than he ever had.

#

A month, and no one had come.

How did it feel? Good? Terrifying?

Abandoned?

Martin could no longer tell.

He yelled, sometimes. Yelled at Jon, though it was pointless.

Cried at him, too.

He found schoolbooks in the underground bunker (because that’s what it was), blank notebooks, and graphite pencils.

Martin tried not to think about the child who would have used them, and claimed the notebooks for himself.

He wrote and he journaled, and during one of these sessions, he realized he’d forgiven Jon.

Forgiven Jon for breaking his promise, for abandoning the plan they’d devised (okay, the others had devised, and Jon had never liked).

Forgiven him for spurning the Spider’s solution, the one Martin wanted to hear: that there was a magic button to turn the apocalypse off, and it wouldn’t cost anything to use.

Right. In hindsight, Martin felt sick that he’d believed it so quickly.

“I forgive you,” he’d whispered to Jon, and he had: even for swallowing godhood like a cyanide tooth, and in doing so, leaving Martin alone.

He felt like he’d skipped a couple stages of grief and landed in acceptance.

He was depressed, Martin wrote, the graphite smudging his hand. He told me how bad he felt, and that he had no hope, and I didn’t listen because it hurt to think of him suffering like that.

Martin’s breath came stuttered, and he furiously wiped at his tears.

He told me how bad it was. He sheltered me from it, but he couldn’t save himself. I feel stupid. Of course he decided to end everything. I should’ve seen it coming.

It was weirdly gratifying to sit in that and let it hurt, like punishment.

What if he had seen it coming?

He couldn’t have shielded Jon from the terrors of the world.

He couldn’t have “fixed” Jon’s depression, because depression didn’t work that way.

But he could have listened. Accepted. Even if he hadn’t liked what was said.

Here, in this quiet cabin in an empty world, Martin could see that if he had let himself feel the horror that was Jon’s every living moment, he would have seen it coming and absolutely been able to stop what Jon did.

It was a sobering thought. A terrible thought. A thought that made Martin want to go out and dig Jonah up so he could chop his bones some more.

Martin cried.

When he went to wash his hands, he was startled to find he’d rubbed graphite all over his face.

He looked bruised.

Fittingly, the words he’d smudged had stained him.

“Oh, Jon,” he whispered. They’d both wrecked things pretty handily, hadn’t they?

But that didn’t mean it was over.

Martin crawled back into bed like he’d crawled through the burned-flesh hole in his heart, and knew he still loved Jon.

Martin knew Jon loved him, too.

Jon had thrown away godhood for him, like it hadn’t mattered.

Maybe it hadn’t.

Maybe Jon had just wanted the pain to end, and deification was something he had to step on to get there, like a stool to reach the top shelf.

Jon loved him, and that meant they could fix this.

They could still make this work.

All Jon had to do was wake.

“I get it, Jon, all right?” said Martin. “I get it, and I’m sorry. Please wake up.”

Jon didn’t.

“What do you want me to do? I’ll do it. Anything.” Martin held him tightly, trying to find his warmth and heartbeat reassuring, and not just byproducts of eternal sleep.

Jon would wake up. He had to. He had to.

Maybe Martin hadn’t skipped denial, after all.

#

Nights were cold. Martin gave in and used the fireplace, which he’d been hesitant to do because there were no trees anywhere, and the only wood he’d found was already in the hearth.

It turned out his worry was unnecessary. The weird brass lighter sparked to life, and the wood caught—but did not burn.

The fire blazed indigo, like something out of a science experiment. It gave off no smoke, but produced a lovely heat.

The wood stayed intact. Absolutely wild.

Martin decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. This world may have killed everyone in it, but at least they’d invented some nifty stuff before they died.

Stuff hadn’t saved them, though.

Martin tried not to think he and Jon wouldn’t make it, either. He would not think that.

He dared not.

Besides, he’d gotten used to unlabeled cans of savory mush, and his body digested it just fine. He was healthy. He was good.

Jon was healthy, too, if unconscious.

This was fine.

Jon would wake up any day now.

He must.

#

Spring came like a kiss, light and wet and sweet, and only when the fields began to bloom did Martin realize what all the brown things were.

Tulips.

This was clearly once a tended place, like Amsterdam, or something. The flowerbed stretched out from the front door in widening rows, as if the cabin had once spewed beauty.

He walked it; his best guess was three miles of flowers, and all were not, in fact, dead.

He was no gardener, and had no clue how long it had all lain fallow, but he figured he could give it a go.

After all, he knew by now that no one else was coming to do it.

There’d been no planes. Never a voice, or music. Not a motor, or smoke, or a distant, barking dog.

The bunker had tools, books on homesteading, and hermetically sealed seeds.

It also had bones.

He’d found them in the back. Three skeletons, each a little smaller than the other, like a family that had decided to lie down and die.

No flesh. No rot. No bugs. Whatever ended them had cleaned them well. He was grateful for that, at least.

Maybe this whole world really was dead.

It would explain why the Fears were so quiet.

He’d felt lonely the first weeks, but he’d been in full stage-two anger by then, and beat it back with rage and tantrums. It wasn’t the Lonely. It was just being alone.

Maybe the Fears were starving.

Or maybe they were all feeding off Jon, and he was trapped in an unending nightmare, unable to get free.

That thought made Martin afraid he was hurting him, keeping him alive. If maybe it would be kinder to…

Nope.

“You only have to stab your boyfriend once in your life, thank you very much,” he informed the tulip field. “I’ve already played that card.”

It was supposed to be funny, but it wasn’t, and Martin went back to the cabin and cried.

#

Martin buried the family’s bones in the flat, empty field. He didn’t know how else to thank them.

#

He spent a few precious days reading gardening books to Jon.

It felt like some kind of deal. He’d do this, coax the land back to life, and Jon would come back, too.

It didn’t really make sense, but neither did fire-baby messiahs or mannequins that talked, so who knew?

It couldn’t hurt to try.

#

Day after day, he trimmed old tulips, and dug up ones that were dead. Day after day, he cleared out space so the rows realigned, and transplanted the colors that bloomed in the wrong spot.

And day after day, he returned to Jon, and told him about the flowers, and about the poem he was writing. Then he bathed them both, ate some mush, and went to bed.

At least none of the cans were peaches.

Maybe he’d spent too much time in the Lonely to be right in the head, but… this wasn’t so bad.

Carrying Jon to the frankly enormous bathtub felt precious, like a rite. Kissing his scars, holding him in warm and bubbly water, felt like worship.

Sometimes, he sat in the tub with him.

He used the hot water to loosen Jon’s limbs so he could move them, bending his joints, lightly exercising his muscles. He’d learned to do that taking care of his mother, what felt like centuries ago. When Jon finally woke, after all, Martin wanted him well.

If Jon woke.

Often, in the bath, Martin told Jon how hard it was to be alone, and told him he was sorry.

Told him he forgave him for what he’d done.

Begged him to come back.

Jon still wouldn’t wake up.

#

The place he’d buried Jonah grew white tulips, and they were not in the correct row.

They were a cancerous blotch across yellow and red, startling like the scars Jon carried because of him.

Martin decided they’d stay: an ugly monument to the worst bastard he’d ever known.

#

Martin liked to brush Jon’s hair. “You’re not alone,” he told him as he worked the gray-black braid.

It had grown so damned fast; Martin had stopped trying to cut it, and instead just kept it neat, and his graying beard trimmed.

“Whatever’s hurting you in there, I’d chop that, too, if I could.” And he’d laughed. “I think you may have fallen in love with an axe-murderer.”

But if that were true, Jon was a knife-murderer, so it balanced out.

“Who are we, anymore?” Martin kissed Jon’s temple. “Doesn’t matter, I guess. I’m not leaving.”

And: “I’m never leaving you.”

And: “I won’t give up. I love you, Jon.”

Martin liked to believe that Jon’s breathing calmed when he said that, and the time between groans grew longer.

#

By week fourteen, springtime was barreling toward summer, and Martin was pleased with his work.

The tulips fanned out from the cabin in vibrant waves, and in an odd sense, he felt like he’d accomplished something for the first time in his life.

Maybe he had. Every job he’d had was for his mother, to do what he had to do. Every hobby had been hidden, done in secret and embarrassing when found out.

But he’d done this without shame, and he had done it well.

It was good.

He hadn’t taken any tulips inside. In his head, he’d pictured Jon waking, gasping out the window at the cultivated love-note Martin had made for him, but maybe… maybe that wasn’t going to happen.

It was okay, if it didn’t. It hurt; but Martin loved Jon. If this was the rest of their life together, then this was the rest of their life.

In sickness and in health, he thought, and decided to bring the tulips to him.

He cut quite a few. Yellow, for hope. Red, for love. Pink, for luck.

He was pretty sure he’d gotten the floriography wrong, but his personal apocalyptic Google wasn’t functioning at the moment, so he did the best he could.

He trimmed them, placed them in a vase he’d found under the kitchen sink, and brought them to the bedside.

“I saw a bee today,” he said, putting the vase by Jon’s head. “First one. You’d think there’d be more, wouldn’t you? But there aren’t a lot of bugs. That’s only the third one I’ve seen.”

Jon didn’t answer, but his breathing was deep and steady.

“I know, right? Poor Annabelle’s spiders have got to all be starved by now.” He leaned over and smoothed Jon’s hair out of his face.

Jon was beautiful, he thought, scars and all.

“Maybe they’ve all starved,” he said, voice cracking. “I mean, it’s not like you’ve got enough fear to keep them going all by yourself, right?”

Nothing.

Martin swallowed and put his hand over Jon’s—always warm, softer than Martin’s. “I wish you could smell them. They’re lovely. It’s a shame nobody’s around to share them with. By which I mean you, you know.”

Jon merely breathed.

“Please don’t be suffering, Jon.” As he had every night since the Scottish safe house, he got into the bed and pulled Jon against him. “Please don’t. I need you. Don’t you know I need you?”

It wasn’t the first time he’d wept over Jon, helpless in a bed.

Martin wiped his eyes. “You know what? I think you should smell them.” He sat up, holding Jon close, and lay Jon’s cheek on his shoulder. Then, he reached for the vase.

Faces together, he brought the tulips near, closed his eyes, and inhaled.

Beautiful. Sort of spicy; almost citrusy. “They’re like some kind of lemony cousin, right?” he murmured, planting a kiss on his head. “Really refreshing.”

“It’s because of the eucalyptol and ocimene,” Jon said, and Martin damn near dropped the vase.

“Jon!”

Jon’s eyes had closed. His brow had knit, and he was breathing too fast. “Martin?”

“Jon!” Martin tossed the vase back onto the nightstand so fast that water sloshed all over. He was breathing fast, too, which made it hard to reply. “Jon!”

“You’re real?” Jon’s peek was fearful, as if he thought Martin might sprout sharp teeth and bite him.

Martin tried to say something intelligent, and instead, burst into tears.

“You’re real,” said Jon, and then they were both crying, and kissing, and clutching as if to merge into one.

“You’re awake!” Martin sobbed. “How? What happened?”

“They’re gone,” whispered Jon, who was trembling and weak and weeping. “It worked. I held on. It’s over, Martin. It’s over,” and that would have to be explained, but what with the crying and the kissing, it would take a good long while.

At some point, they knocked over the tulips, and they both managed to laugh as Martin cleaned up the spill.

#

They sat on the porch, sharing a blanket, and watched the moon descend the sky.

“You heard me?” said Martin.

“I heard everything you said,” Jon repeated, head on Martin’s shoulder. “You have no idea. It kept me sane, what you said.”

“I didn’t say nice things,” said Martin.

“But you said you-things. You were saying them, not any… nightmare-version of you they produced to make me let go. I don’t know if I could’ve hung on if I hadn’t heard you. If you hadn’t kept talking. You saved me.”

Martin swallowed. “From what?”

A gentle breeze wafted flowery scent over them like a prayer, and they both paused to take it in.

“When you tried to cut the tether and we fell through, they were unmoored from the world, but they were still connected to me because I survived.” Jon swallowed. “So when we came here, I had a choice.”

Martin groaned. “Please don’t tell me you could’ve let them go, and you didn’t.”

“Yes,” said Jon. “Not that it would in any way make up for what I’ve done.”

“You self-righteous idiot,” said Martin with frustrated affection, and kissed the side of his head. “Why did you do that?”

“I had to, Martin. This world isn’t empty,” said Jon, which was a surprise.

“It’s not?”

“No—though most of this continent is. At least it’s been cleaned since their great war; their technology is much better than ours. That’s why you aren’t dying from radiation poisoning.”

Martin shuddered.

“I couldn’t let the Fears loose here, Martin. Not on these people. They’d been through enough. I had to hang on.”

“So they were feeding off you,” Martin whispered. “For weeks and weeks.”

“It took billions of people to keep them alive, and I wasn’t enough,” Jon said, low and dark. “They starved to death, and it hurt.”

“It hurt you too, Jon!”

“I had to make them die,” said Jon with a viciousness Martin had never heard before, and hoped Jonah had in his final, bastard moments.

“They’re really gone?”

“They’re really gone. The Web was the last. Tried to trick me into letting her free.”

Martin swallowed. “You didn’t, though.”

“A manipulative fear, let loose in a world that already survived nuclear apocalypse? Of course I didn’t let her go.” Jon paused. “She said ‘good luck’ at the end. Like Jonah did. But… I almost think she actually meant it.”

“Ugh. Jonah said ‘good luck?’ What the hell?”

“Had to get the last word,” Jon sighed. “White tulips are an apology, by the way. I don’t know if it means anything, but there you are.”

“Bastard man is not forgiven,” Martin said warmly, and kissed him, and Jon laughed, and it was a good and grateful moment.

The breeze moved, but that was all; no traffic. No construction. No voices.

This really wasn’t so bad.

“If we do decide to travel, it’ll take weeks,” said Jon, “so we’d need to go stocked. Not to worry—there’s an underground garage you didn’t find, with a solar-powered vehicle, so we wouldn’t have to go on foot.”

“Jon,” said Martin, wary. “You still know an awful lot of things, for the Eye being dead.”

“Past things,” said Jon, and smiled. “Now, I don’t. I won’t know names, or traumas, or whether anyone means us good or ill. I’ll know absolutely nothing without learning it the old-fashioned way.”

Did that mean Jon would finally need to eat? “I found seeds. We can plant them. We can grow food that isn’t mush. We could just… stay,” Martin suggested. “At least for a while.”

“You know what? We could.” And Jon didn’t sound disappointed at all.

“We could. We did our part, Jon. We don’t have to go anywhere.”

“Nobody knows who we are here,” whispered Jon. “Nobody’s coming after us, or trying to make us do things, or seeking revenge. We’re free.”

Martin laughed, a shaky, too-much sound. “We’re free.”

“We’re free.” Jon turned his face to Martin’s shoulder. “And I’m sorry.”

“I know. And we’ve got all the time we need to talk about that later,” said Martin, because the sting was gone, and such sweetness had taken its place. “I forgive you, you know. This is what I wanted, if I’m honest. Just… us.”

“Just us,” Jon whispered. “We’ve got a proper second chance. Like those flowers, practically resurrected.”

“A little hard work is all they needed.”

“They needed you.” Jon kissed him, lidded and lingering. “So do I.”

“Making me blush, Sims.”

“Not nearly enough, Blackwood.” Jon touched his cheek. “I love you.”

“I love you, too. Let’s stay out here a little longer? I’m afraid I’m going to wake up.”

Jon touched his lips. “This is real,” he said, and didn’t blink, and his eyes still weren’t fully human.

They were Jon’s eyes, though. That made them wonderful. Beloved, under the moon. (And Martin knew what his next poem was going to be about.)

Martin laughed again. “I can’t believe it. Everything worked out.”

“One way or another, together,” said Jon. “You didn’t give up on me. Thank you for not giving up on me.”

“That’s never, ever going to happen,” Martin swore, and sealed it with a kiss.

They stayed until the moon sank low, and the breeze promised warm days and clear skies, and when they finally went to bed, they both knew they’d sleep well.

-----------------

NOTES:

Written for the "Spring in the Archives" event, centered around the general themes of rebirth, healing, growth, and also new beginnings.

Rebirth, healing, growth - they both need these things, and I knew Martin needed some time alone to find them.

I think I can safely say he did.

This truly is a happily-ever-after

#Spring in the archives #seasons in the archives #mag 200 #somewhere else #tma spoilers #the magnus archives #the magnus archives spoilers #tma s5 #post mag 200 #jonmartin #jmart #teaholding #jonathan sims #martin blackwood

[yall-hate-kids-tourney]

Round 2: Qiqi (Genshin Impact) vs. Mabel Pines (Gravity Falls)

Propaganda below the cut

Qiqi:

she's hated for being a bad character meta-wise and people are always agonizing over getting her when pulling for a rate-up character, but she's cute and she's sad. she was a civilian that got killed as collateral in a war between gods & other immortals as a child, was turned into a jiangshi, and had to be sealed bc the immortals that accidentally killed her put too much power into reviving her so she went berserk. her normal childhood & very life was ripped away from her by forces that were too powerful. she can't remember many things and forgets things way too easily. she's been "living" a facsimile of a life as a corpse child who perpetually forgets things. she's my tragedy baby who always gets dunked on by the majority of the fanbase for taking away whatever rate-up character they wanted in gacha.

Mabel Pines:

I literally saw a tiktok today about how Mabel is a bad person. She’s 12! Like yes, she has made some mistakes and bad choices, but so has everyone else. And I never see any of the other characters in the show criticized the way she is. Everyone in the show has made mistakes (Grunkle Stan commits crimes practically every episode ffs) but because Mabel is a 12 year old girl and acts like it, she gets the most hate. Mabel deserves to be loved 🩷

----

girl gets so much flack for being... immature and kind of selfish at age 12? like she had whole video essays made on why she is a horrible person who deserves punishment. god forbid girls be silly

----

!!! Spoilers for Gravity Falls last 5 episodes !!!

This has gone down a lot but when the Weirdmaggedon arc was happening, the finale of the series, a big part of the fandom started hating Mabel because she accidentally caused the Weirdmaggedon (basically an apocalypse + bizarre shit like the water tower becoming an eight-legged monster with a giant mouth).

For context, in the episode that starts this arc, "Dipper and Mabel vs The Future", Mabel is really excited to the end of their summer vacation at Grunkle Stan's house, since it will be her and Dipper's 13th birthday and they will enter high school (her idea of high school of course coming from teen movies). But then this whole idea starts to shatter when Wendy tells her that high school isn't like a Disney musical, but it's okay, she will get through this since she will be with Dipper, her twin brother...

Except, that Dipper receives an invitation by Grunkle Stan's scientist brother Ford to become his apprentice after summer ends, staying in Gravity Falls, without Mabel. When she discovers it, she gets really mad at him and in a fit of rage, she accidentally picks Dipper's bag instead of hers and runs off to the woods.

When she gets there, Blendin, a time-travelling friend of theirs finds her and tells her that he has a way of making her brother stay with her, and make the summer take a little more to end, and that he just needed a little thing that Dipper has in his bag. That thing is a dimensional rift that Dipper and Ford contained to not cause the Weirdmaggedon, but Mabel didn't knew about that and gives it to Blendin. Blendin then breaks it and it's revealed that Bill Cipher was controlling Blendin to get the rift and release the Weirdmaggedon. He then traps Mabel in a bubble, starting the final arc of the series.

So, a few episodes later, that bubble she's in is revealed to be a world of fantasy that she controls, and that she didn't want to leave that world, as she was scared of growing up etc.

Context given, A LOT OF PEOPLE HATED HER FOR THIS. Suddenly people started seeing Mabel as just a selfish girl who wanted things only her way, when she was only a 12-year-old scared of growing up without her twin brother (they do end up going back together at the end but still).

The worst part is that apparently the people behind it took note of this, and on the comics that where released after the finale, she is a selfish spoiled brat. I haven't read the comics though so I'm going off what some people said about it.

#yall hate kids tourney #round 2 #genshin impact #genshin #genshin qiqi #qiqi #gravity falls #mabel pines #cw child death

[trashcanwithsprinkles]

Wow, I'm mad at myself for being late to the favorite fic subject coming up /j

Personally, I'm a huge sucker for cya and have itysg as a second(however, if we decide to count your other fics then... itysg would be third while your smile makes me smile would be second). I think it's the amount of world building that makes it so interesting for me along with the fact that it takes place before the archon war. Like, there hardly passes a day where cya doesn't just... scoot right over into my thoughts making it kinda hard to reread cause it know it so well </3.

I am sad to say that I haven't checked out BitA yet. When I first saw it while looking for some other fic of yours to read, I didn't really like apocalypse stories much. I might check it out though cause I'm a lot more open to those kinds of stories now. I also remember starting every good intention, but I don't remember why I stopped... I think I had to get off my phone for a bit and just... forgot to continue? Idk I really should check those two...

You really get me Sprinkles- those murder mystery fics are so good! I remember reading one of genshin that was also mixed with a time loop and I just ate it up-(it was sadly discontinued and then deleted from ao3, but not before I managed to download it for future offline reading-) I'm honestly interested in those wriolette ones you mentionned, may I have a few recs if you don't mind? I need more wriolette in my life.

i do in fact have some wriolette murder mystery / cop mystery recs

A Match Made in France by oooohscar - not a murder mystery per se but it does contain mystery investigations. it's basically furina trying to matchmake neuvillette and wriothesley and she quickly discovers they work well as investigation partners? and so she starts trying to get them to investigate things together, but then shit gets out of hand. it's so fucking good and so fucking funny. like it's pre-reveal furina but i can forgive the mild ooc and- y'know, furina portrayal pre-trauma-reveal (?) just because it's so well written and hilarious (and also she's not portrayed entirely as a brat, i find her more absurdly histrionic than anything). also it's not just furina pov, it switches between all of them. it's incomplete but updating, and absolutely worth a read

The Gambler's Debt by Marsrevale - much more serious than the one above, this one is a murder mystery through and through. the mystery is still only starting, so it probably has a long way to go, but i'm patient so i'll keep up. it's basically neuvillette and clorinde going to investigate a series of murders in the fortress of meropide (this is a sort of modern au so meropide is a gambling house / hotel i think) and wriothesley is the main suspect, but there's also stuff going on between neuvillette and wriothesley bc they knew each other long ago but only wriothesley recognizes him. idk how else to describe it, it's really intriguing so far, i hope the mystery pans out nicely

Hold my hand, never let me go by Jinnmi - also a proper murder mystery, this one is about what is essentially a branch of fontaine's police force for criminal investigation led by wriothesley and the many interconected cases they have to solve. neuvillette is sent as a consultant to keep an eye on them, but ends up basically joining the team as they all try to solve a big case that seems to threaten the country whole and is also somehow connected to wriothesley's past. this one is very good, the murders might be a bit too gruesome for sensitive people? but still, really nice. i love the unsettling vibe of whatever the one behind this all is planning, the suspense is also really good. still updating and i rush to it every time a new chapter comes out, it had me in a chokehold when i first found it.

hope those sound interesting!

#in case you're wondering babysitting has nowhere near any of the angst that the average apocalypse story has #like it's a found family speedrun more than it is an apocalypse #the apocalypse is just the setting hahah #anyway #hnnnn thank you;;;;;;;;;;;;; #ily <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

[thewickedkat]

i can't help but think that some folks were expecting...less humane more hubristic PCs here. not that the hubris isn't present (because it very much is; all of our characters see events in terms of themselves first and foremost and think of how the world affects them; yes, even Zerxus), but i think some were expecting to see the grandiose, sweeping arrogance emblematic of many wizards in d&d.

instead, they're just folk. granted, they're incredibly powerful, inherently magical and wondrous folk, with the equivalent of bottomless money at their fingertips, but still. just...people. who have no idea of what is coming. and why should they? everyone's focus is narrowed to the realm of their own experience and interpretation: Laerryn is cock-a-hoop with glee at the possibility of...doing whatever she's been faffing about with? Loquatius is focused on branding and networking and keeping his monopoly on news locked down. Patia is neck-deep in wizard guild dramacide. Nydas is busy being a hypercapitalist. Cerrit and Zerxus, to be honest, are the only two of the party who can start to see how pieces of this Rube Goldberg Apocalypse Engine go together--but even then, they don't see what we the audience sees (esp those of us who have been picking up on the lil easter eggs laid out). they don't know that they don't have all the pieces, they don't know what they don't know--and why should they? when a catastrophe is unfolding, we only see all the pieces in the aftermath. and we point and say 'o noes how could they not See' well because when you're so close to it, it looks just like any other day. a day with quirks, sure, but just another day ending in -Y.

and we did not expect the families of our players. sure, there's a shared history amongst them all, but families? loved ones? kids? i remember when people were shocked in C2 when Veth revealed she had a husband and a child. suddenly the stakes are more real. actions will have consequences outside of the party.

all of those children bouncing through Avalir will die. all of them. Brennan knows this and is reminding us every chance he gets. that man does not fuck around. he understands the stakes, what can happen in catastrophes and wars, and he sure as shit groks what a god is to a mortal.

i do not think our PCs understand what a god really is--look at how their society views the Matron of Ravens! as if ascension to godhood, divinity, apotheosis is just something you do before afternoon tea! like it ain't no thang! and their society, like it or not, does influence how they perceive things around them: exhibit A, how Purvan was 'welcomed' and treated. i mean--fuck, i am a dyed-in-the-wool Agnostic to hell and back, but if someone came round and was introduced to be a Champion-with-a-capital-C of a god? i might not believe but i sure as shit wouldn't be rude about it! at least have some fucking manners, rich tit wizards! cos that's just tempting fate!

someone else here on tumblr (forgive me, i read much good cronchy meta last night before sleep and i can't remember who wrote it, apologies) mentioned that disconnect between the gods and the citizenry of Avalir. that (and i'm paraphrasing) the gods are just basically seen as...mortal plus. mortal with spice. and i think that person was bang-on accurate in that assessment: there's anthropomorphising your deities in order to make them seem less Awesome, less terrifying; and then there's making them more like us so that we could tear them from the heavens. to make them killable. both aspects can be dangerous. especially in d&d because the gods have teeth (so to speak), and actively participate in the Prime Material plane. member that whole parable about being welcoming to strangers, in case they're an angel or god in disguise? d&d gods are like that but moreso. and i think the citizens of Avalir do not see that. at all.

as for the Betrayer Gods and the whole 'whom were they betraying?' well. we do know that history is indeed written by the winners--or, in this case, those on the ground who survived and had any context whatsoever for what City life was like--and we also know that villains seldom see themselves as the Bad Guys. they might know that others see them as Bad and Not-Good and Big Big Meany Dookyheads--but themselves? seldom. they have reasons, justifications, through-lines of logic to explain why they are doing what they do (monster-logic but logic nonetheless). it doesn't matter if their contemporaries agree with them, much less mortals. i do not think there's going to be a woobification of the Betrayer Gods (and i wouldn't want one, either; sometimes we just need villains who are villains and we don't always need to soften their jagged edges, thanks), but if we get a supplemental narrative for what their angle is on this whole CalamityFest is? i'm down.

i will probably have more pointless rambles as this miniseries progresses, but so far i am enjoying the ever-loving shit out of it. last night was a roller coaster of me being riveted, flapping around like a wounded duck, and screeching gleefully into cushions so as not to wake my partner. and i can't wait for more.

#critical role #cr spoilers #exu spoilers #exu: calamity

[gardenofnoah]

like real people do

for @medusashima's rise of the dead collab. i blacked out and wrote this in like 4 hours because something about a fucked up prompt speaks to the grimy little freak that scratches around in my skull

wc: 1.8k ish. tags: MDNI, dark content, zombie!au, death. angst no comfort (unless you think cannibalism is comforting, i don't know your life), blood, graphic depiction of infection/injury, gn reader. read at your own risk thx love u

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a virus of unknown origin. researchers hypothesize that it was a spillover transmission event—the wrong rat stumbled across the wrong person at just the right time. some new, distant cousin of the rabies virus, with unexpected symptoms—most notably, the consumption of uninfected people by the infected. some suspected this was due to the genetic make up of the virus itself—it seemed to be fine tuned for longevity, and targeted specific motor functions controlled by the certain portions of the brain. this, combined with the rare psychosis symptom reported to be associated with rabies, may cause an uncontrollable compulsion to spread the infection, or, as others postulated, could convince the brain that uninfected bodies were a remedy for its suffering. 

at least that was the hypothesis, when the researchers were alive to articulate it. 

with the authoritative voice of science effectively silenced, there was more than enough room for conspiracy theories and hysteria to wiggle in and take hold. it was around that time that the media began to circulate the "zombie" rhetoric, and with no scientific name or official explanation (or government sanctioned placation) in place, an official zombie outbreak took shape. the violence that followed was as deadly as the outbreak itself, and served as another painfully efficient route of transmission. whoever lived through the war in the street died of the virus shortly thereafter. there'd been doomsday folks to warn of the end of times for as long as there'd been a time to be alive in. it was strange, then, when they'd fallen silent too. 

you and kento had joined in with a ragtag group of strangers early on—with strength in numbers, you successfully isolated yourself in an old, abandoned cabin in the woods a few miles south of town. you got lucky enough to have a few in your group that some construction experience—before you knew it, you had a fairly well reinforced fortress, where you could continue your game of chicken with death. from there, you could ignore the fact that fewer and fewer of your newfound troop came back with each expedition for food and supplies. 

there were books to read there, and if you let yourself, you could even find some joy in cooking meals with whatever kento could find in the pantry. he'd wake you up between moth-bitten sheets with breathless kisses, the two of you just grateful to have the opportunity of another day together. when he dragged you out of bed and twirled you around the creaky floorboards, you could pretend the apocalypse outside of your fenced in oasis was little more than a scary story. sprawled across his chest in the afterglow of some indulgence far removed from your reality, you could ignore the way death lingered on the outskirts of your camp. 

you could ignore it, until it was your turn to fetch the necessities. 

it was fine until it wasn't, as most things tended to be. you'd located a gas station that your group had missed on previous trips—a little farther out, but with how remote it was, it wasn't likely that it had been completely ransacked. if nothing else, you could figure out how to siphon any gas left in the tanks, and hope it was enough to get the old work truck left in front of your fortress running again. if you were mobile, your chances of survival would raise exponentially.

you'd tried to jimmy the door open with your shoulder as quietly as possible, but time and neglect had caused the wood frame to swell and distort around the metal. you grit your teeth when kento put a boot to the door. splinters of wood and glass shards flew as the scrape of metal rattled your bones. for a sickening moment, all was silent. and then you heard the screeching, and the dragging of rotting limbs against asphalt. 

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"fuck, fuck," you grit through your teeth, arms looped under his armpits as you drag him behind the checkout counter and into the first open door with the latch still intact. a storage closet, apparently.

you set him down for a moment, and it's—really, really not good. there's a deep laceration in his slide from a particularly nasty piece of glass. it's nearly eviscerated him.

you don't have the opportunity to fully process what that might mean—all at once, it feels like someone has lit your hand on fire. when you look down, you see a perfect outline of human teeth across the back of your hand. 

you reel back from kento. "oh fuck."

you have no idea what to do, looking around wildly as if the storage closet holds the answers to this god forsaken outbreak. and it might, you realize, when you spot an extension cord, coiled up on one of the shelves.

before you can even make sense of your own actions, you're tying one end of the cord to an exposed pipe sticking out of the brick wall, and the other around your neck. like this, your range of motion is just limited enough to keep you away from the door, and away from kento. 

but in your haste, you haven't packed his wound. he's going to bleed out at your feet. if you untie yourself, you're probably going to eat him. he's dead either way.

as if he senses your realization, he meets your eyes for the first time.

"where?" he rasps.

it's a moment before you can find your voice. "my hand."

he sighs, squeezing his eyes shut. "i'm so sorry, my love."

"why are you sorry?"

"it's my fault," he's too quiet, and far too uncertain to match the kento that's carried you through the last year of this outbreak, "i drew them to us."

you shake your head, but you're silent. wanting so badly to find the right words, and having a hard time getting your brain to catch up to the current moment. he was upright and steadfast, and now he's staining the tile beneath him. all in the matter of a few seconds.

"you need to untie yourself, love."

"no." you say firmly, barely giving it a second thought.

“you’re just going to watch me rot until you starve to death?” he laughs harshly, choking on it—sputtering a little. he takes a deep breath and he, despite you mentally willing him to stop, continues. 

“no,” he rasps, letting his eyes close, “don’t do that. you can have me—it’s okay.” 

“stop,” it leaves you with a groan, squeezing your own eyes shut and shaking your head, as if you could dislodge his words, “stop—” 

“this won’t end with you and i,” you hear him reach for you, limp arm dragging across the floor. he falls short—you can't bring yourself to meet him halfway, even if you had the range of motion to do it. “you know that, don’t you? locking yourself in here won’t change that.” 

and he just keeps talking, keeps prying open the wound you can’t see. "i just want you to make it out, my love. in case they can find a cure."

you can’t answer him. you want to laugh in his face, you want to scream at him and shake him. but you can't do anything—can't even tell him that you don't want to make it out without him, because when you look down at your hand again, you find that the tissue surrounding the bite has turned necrotic far too quickly—as if you were watching yourself rot, sped up or on loop. you know what comes next. 

you know you’re out of time.

the burn radiates up to your neck. your vision blurs a bit with the pain, and then with hot tears as it hits you—these are the final moments of your life. you wonder what you ever did to deserve to watch the love of your life bleed out in front of you. what could have been so bad, to then be forced to desecrate his corpse.  

“ken,” you choke, curling in on yourself, chin dropping to your chest. it’s an animal attempt at self-soothing—like a house cat that knows the end is here, you feel the instinct to isolate—to protect the others around you—even now. you are reduced to only primal senses: fear, grief, love. the need to survive. to ensure the survival of those you love, even in the final moments.

he’s fading just as quickly, but he’s stubborn. 

“c’mere my love,” he slurs, blinking slow, “it’s alright.” 

against all of your fleeting senses, you find yourself unraveling the cord from around your neck. if you looked down, you’d see that your arm is now blackened to the elbow. 

some part of you already knows, though, so you don’t bother. 

you’re focused on his face, through your tears—the blue eyes that hold yours despite the puddle of blood that you now crawl through. the smell is nauseating, but so is everything else about this—you feel it soak through your tattered jeans as you pull yourself toward him on your three remaining limbs. 

you stop when you’re over top of him, breathing heavy and dripping tears and drool onto his face. he doesn’t mind, and you’re not sure he can even feel it anymore with the way he’s looking at you like nothing about this is abnormal. 

“ken,” whispered, because one last secret between you is a luxury you feel entitled to, “i’m afraid.” 

“i know, my love,” there’s a soft smile on his face that wraps around your heart like barbed wire, “one more kiss? before we meet again.” 

“are you fucking crazy—” 

“please,” he croaks, and you see the fear mirrored on his face for the first time, “please. just one.”

you shake your head stubbornly and yet you reach for him, hands on both sides of his face. you ignore the way you see every one of your veins in your periphery, bold and darkened with decay, pulsing and searing as they trail up your shoulder. with the way you feel it creep up the side of your face, you imagine you have only a minute at most before the virus reaches your brain. 

“i love you,” he breathes against your lips, and you can taste it on your tongue—his love and his leaving, all in three words. if you were a better person, you’d let him go peacefully. 

you think you can feel it, then, when it hits your brain stem. latching on to every nerve, every synapse—choking the life—the willpower— out of you, one cell at a time. 

“please,” he rasps, and you don’t know if he’s begging for you to let him go, or if he's pleading with someone else, now. 

you don’t let yourself deliberate. you drag your lips down his jaw, vision spotty. you hover over the faint pulse of his jugular, hyper aware of how hard his body is fighting to keep him alive right now. feeling the fluttering of arteries, fighting to find something to circulate through themselves.

for a reason you hope you won’t have to justify if there is an afterlife, you open your mouth—whisper one last apologetic declaration of love against his skin—and you bite down. 

you bite until teeth touch teeth again. sinew shreds underneath, and you let it flood your mouth. you hear it when it starts—the death rattle, deep in his chest—and rip yourself away with a piece of him and squelch that should make your stomach turn, but doesn’t. 

he loved me, you think, forcing yourself to swallow. feeling him slide down your throat in some sort of sick last rite—an act of closure that suddenly feels fitting as he struggles to suck down one last breath. he loved me.

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this fic belongs to me (@gardenofnoah). i do not allow anyone to repost, edit, or reproduce this work.

#911? i've killed my husband please help #the way that i kicked my feet writing this #i want to write more of this #rip my mans though #nanamin #nanami kento x reader #nanami x reader #nanami fic #nanami kento dark fic #collab: rise of the dead #fic: like real people do

[anhttydbookfan]

can you tell us more about how Movie! Hiccup ended up in the bookverse? like, which Which Way did he go through, at what point in the timeline, and how he changes the plot of the books perhaps?

ah, the Stop Resting AU! Genuinely don't remember if i was the one who initially had that idea or if somebody else did. But, in terms of Which Ways, i'm thinking that these are AUs where sufficiently hot dragonfire can burn the Which Ways open. and/or moving extremely, unbelievably fast, so much so that you'd punch right through them. That seems more plausible with the "they don't know how they got here or even where 'here' is" premise. But the Which Ways are really just a contrivance to get the various Plots of these AUs to Go

Sometime between the first and second films I think, since the premise is "everything was going great for Hiccup until bam! Thrust in the middle of a Dragon War he doesn't actually understand." And the Stop Resting AU is also an inversion of the Rest Stop AU in premise as well as name.

As for if/how he changes the plot of the books... if the Rest Stop AU is a Mystery (who is this strange Dragon Rider and What is his Deal/What... is this place) that evolves into a story about responsibility, guilt, and going home (the Dragonriders want to keep Rider the Red from going Home at first because... look at him. He doesn't deserve whatever happened to him back there. HHHIII wants to go home for obvious reasons and doesn't feel like he deserves this rest and comfort until he finds the Things or at least finds Fishlegs. His Fishlegs. When things are more out in the open they work together to find a way back) then Stop Resting is a bit more... Survival Horror/post-apocalypse, if that makes sense?

Hiccup the Tinker threw in his lot with Hiccup the Outcast and agreed to help him on both of his Impossible Quests. Hiccup the Outcast just wants to get Hiccup the Tinker back to his paradise of a home where there isn't any Dragon War. Tinker refuses to let Outcast go it alone.

("But i'm not alone"

(The first thing he said to him was in Dragonese. He didn't even notice.)

"Well you'll be less alone with me.")

In other words: Dreamworks Hiccup refuses to leave until they infiltrate Prison Darkheart together. Book Hiccup has no say in the matter. I have no say in the matter. I wanted him to be in and out within the time between Sword and Jewel, but Tinker looked at this tiny, jumpy, homeless kid whose answer when he asked how old he was was "i might be fourteen by now", then looked me in the eye and said "no", so here we are.

#httyd books #rest stop au #stop resting au

[hotlink907]

General requests are currently CLOSED for the foreseeable future. But feel free to submit idols for this dice writing challenge! Asks are always open and my DMs are always open if anyone just wants to chat. Thank you so much everyone!

Hotlink’s Masterlist and Info

Hello! I'm Hotlink, a dedicated fanfiction writer and fan of kpop. This is where I post all my little stories--everything from fluff or angst, to imagines, to AUs, to headcanons, to smut. I happily take requests and I love to answer asks and DMs!

Kpop and writing are my two comfort hobbies, so say hi! I'm happy to talk about any ideas you might have, or idols you like, or whatever might be on your mind.

Groups I prefer to write for:

(G)I-dle (ult group)

Blackpink

Loona

Aespa

Purple Kiss

kep1er

Mamamoo

Dreamcatcher

If you don’t see your favorite group here, I might write anyway! Don’t hesitate. I don’t usually write for boy groups, but I would consider it!

Bias List (by group):

Soyeon (ult), Miyeon (wrecker)

Rosé, Jisoo (wrecker)

Olivia Hye, Kim Lip (wrecker)

Giselle, Karina (wrecker)

Goeun, Dosie (wrecker)

Yujin

Hwasa, Moonbyul (wrecker)

Handong, Gahyeon (wrecker)

Please know that I support ALL members of these groups! I am not, and will never be, a solo stan. All members deserve our support and respect--these are just the ones that speak to me on a personal and creative level. My muses, you could say.

I will happily write for any member of a group!

Preferred Kinks:

Light, fluffy stuff

BDSM

dom!idol

sub!idol

chastity

denial

overstimulation

spanking

g!p

feet

body worship

humping/grinding

This is far from a complete list! If you don't see your kink here, that doesn't mean I won't write it. Feel free to request it anyway--just ask, and don't be shy!

AUs:

Mafia

Superhero

Cyberpunk

The Witcher

Zombie apocalypse

Reader as member of group

Fantasy

College/boarding school

Spy

Star Wars

This is not a complete list either! If you have an idea that you think could be cool, let me know. This is just a list of things that I've thought about writing in the past, but I'm open to pretty much anything!

Limits:

Absolutely no underage idols

No nonconsensual scenes

No blood/other bodily function play

Please understand and respect my limits. If something makes me uncomfy but it's not on this list, I will politely and kindly let you know! That's not your fault, so please don't worry!

Kinktober

I am doing Kinktober this year! See the link below for the prompts I have chosen. If there's more than one for a day, it means I am still deciding OR will combine the prompts.

Masterlist:

Asks and Personal Posts

About Hotlink Posts

(G)I-dle Stories

Soyeon stories

Miyeon stories

Yuqi stories

Soojin stories

Blackpink Stories

Rosé stories

Jisoo stories

Jennie stories

Lisa stories

Loona Stories

Kim Lip stories

Hyunjin stories

Yves stories

Aespa Stories

Giselle stories

Karina stories

Winter stories

Purple Kiss Stories

Goeun stories

Kep1er Stories

Mamamoo Stories

Moonbyul stories

Dreamcatcher Stories

Handong stories

Jiu stories

Yoohyeon stories

Dami stories

Siyeon stories

iPunk - Cyberpunk AU

Ch.1 || Ch.2

Kinktober Stories

Kinktober 2022

A Little About Me

I love writing. It's one of my favorite things to do. I've been writing for fandom communities for several years now, and truthfully, I was feeling a little creatively burned out. I had finished a number of LONG projects, and didn't have it in me to start anything else major

So I decided to give Tumblr a try! So far, it's going great.

My other hobbies include collecting action figures and statues, video games, kdramas, RPGs, and comic books.

This blog is a safespace for people of every gender, sexuality, and race imaginable. If you are any sort of -phobic at all, please leave. You are not wanted here. This is a place of inclusivity, positivity, and love. If you ever need someone to talk to, please reach out.

I do prefer to use they/them pronouns, but please don't worry if you forget. My picture here is a purple robot that turns into a jet, so I understand if you forget.

Please also be understanding of the fact that I value my privacy.

#hotlink speaks #kpop fanfic #kpop smut #kpop imagines #kpop x reader #girl group x reader #girl group fanfic #girl group smut #girl group imagines #masterlist #kpop masterlist

[quillomens]

@book-omens-week THANK YOU for sponsoring this! I am so looking forward to reading and reblogging everything over the next couple of days. <3

With permission, the person who got me into the novel is @shabby-blog, and I am heavily and happily influenced by their Crowley.

Full story is here on Ao3

BOOK OMENS DAY SEVEN: SOUTH DOWNS

(I couldn’t think of anything I had time to write for Role Reversal.  Hangs head in shame.  But here is the rest of the marriages of convenience stories, all happy endings and sap and a dash of romance!)

--*--*--*--*--*--*

It is only through the miraculous nature of ethereal and occult memories that Crowley and Aziraphale keep an accurate count of the number of times they successfully use marriage to avoid general inconvenience.

There’s 1056, in the years leading up to the Arrangement, when they dream up not only a marriage but a divorce, which allows a monk in a monestary in Scotland to keep up steady correspondence with a semi-satanic Nun in Wales.  (The resultant legend of the Monk and the Sister is achingly romantic only because none of their actual letters are ever found; primarily, the monk complains about the food and the Sister complains about the dress code and they both complain about the weather.)

There’s the second century BC, when Aziraphalius insists on spending two decades puttering around organizing the Library of Alexandria, and his slender wife is allowed visitation rights most women would be denied. (This is the first time the marriage vows involved saying, “I love you,” which is awkward for everyone involved, but Aziraphale shimself with the fact that not all love is romantic.  He would only realize this love was in the wake of a certain Apocalypse, and by then, why worry about it?)

There’s the 18th century, when Crowley is a sort of fifth prince of the seven seas, well known enough not to be scoffed at but hardly a Blackbeard or Mary Read.  He has a solid ship, though, and occasionally offers trips to a certain blue eyed gentleman who is thoroughly protected from any sort of molestation by his mateloge with the Black Crow’s captain.

There’s World War I and World War II, when marriage isn’t just a cover but the best way to know if the other is alive as their offices send them across the theaters of war – they are brothers, or husband and wife, or uncle and nephew, whatever they need to be that the other will be told if one of them is killed in all the fighting.  It is stubbornness and the Arrangement and luck that keeps them alive.

It’s a good con and good insurance, and somehow they keep getting away with it, year and year, century after century.  Almost like Someone is looking out for them.  But…nah.  They wouldn’t.  The creator don’t pay attention to angels and demons these days.

--*--*--*--*--*--*--*

It’s May 29, 2014, and Crowley actually has a ring when he asks.

He doesn’t get on a knee, of course, or hide it in a pie, or anything else too cliché.  Being the cool, collected person he is, he’s sprawled on the sofa in their living room, head being thoughtlessly petted, when he says, “Let’s get married.”

Aziraphale doesn’t immediately look up from his book.  “We could bury a wall in marriage certificates, dearest.”

“Yeah.  But let’s get married for real, on purpose, just to get married.”  He reaches awkwardly (but coolly) over his head to hold the simple gold band between Aziraphale’s eyes and the words on the page.

The angel turns the page right into his knuckle before letting out a startled “Oh!”

Finally, storm cloud eyes turn to bright yellow.  The latter is the color Aziraphale insisted on painting the kitchen (“I like seeing it in the morning, it makes me happy,” he’d bossed as he picked it out, and it had taken two weeks for Crowley to suddenly realize it was the same shade as his own eyes); the former the inspiration for the new, shared bathroom and its ridiculously large tub. 

(They vehemently deny sappy sentimentality, even as they practically luxuriate in it.)

“I know you know what tomorrow is,” Crowley continues, giving the ring a shake.  This isn’t the most comfortable position to keep his arm in.  “And I know all your little trips have been blessings and temptations in Parliament.”

The angel pinks a little.  “I don’t know what you mean.”

“’Course not,” the demon agrees.  “We told Adam we’d stop ‘messin’ about’ with humanity, and you are an angel of your word.”

Their smiles are conspiratorial.

Aziraphale gently takes the ring, manicured hands as soft as ever.  Crowley squirms to a sitting position with all the grace allowed in a spine that wouldn’t pass a basic x-ray, but works well enough for him.  “Where should we go?”

“Well, here, of course,” Crowley says, sharp gaze on the ring.  “And then…anywhere you like.  Cardiff.  Edinburgh.  London.  Get hitched as many times as we want.  Drink all the celebratory champagne and cut a dozen cakes.”  He pauses.  “You do have to say yes first.”

Aziraphale laughs.  It’s a rare, open laugh, not one of his usual low chuckles. His face lights up with it and sets off an embarrassing warmth deep in Crowley’s cold chest.  “While I maintain it’s too late to say no,” he says with a smile that literally brightens the room (like his touch, Crowley once thought that kind of holy exuberance would burn him, but it doesn’t, not at all; it is like coming home, like being on their own side, like heaven and hell don’t matter but this does), “but for the sake of your demonic pride, I’ll say yes.”

“Don’t do me any favors,” Crowley smirks back, definitely not resisting the urge to shout a little “wahoo!” 

“I never do.”  This is a lie.  They’ve been doing each other favors longer than humans have been counting in years instead of moons. 

Aziraphale brushes his fingers along the ring.  It’s very simple, very human, but cool to the touch, and the Sense of letters along the inside can’t be inscribed or comprehended by any mortal.  A demon’s True Name, as a ward and promise. 

He hands it back.  “Give it to me tomorrow,” he says with certainty, “and I shall give you yours.”

“As many times as you like,” Crowley reminds him.

“I’m holding you to that,” Aziraphale grins back, and his lips are still curved in that smile when he kisses one demonic cheek.

--*--*--*--*--*--*

There is a cottage in the South Downs that is bigger on the inside.  It has to be, to accommodate a library, an unreasonably large and luxurious bathroom, and a bedroom designed perfectly for two.  The two beds sit close together, in proud 1950s sitcom style, though they are doubles rather than singles – the demon likes to sprawl, and the angel has a regrettable tendency to stack books over half his bed.  This is fine.  The demon doesn’t mind the angel sharing his bed when needed, all that lovely angelic warmth to cuddle up with, soft hands to pet his hair, the occasional warm kiss to his temple.  What a delightful temptation for them both.

The décor is eclectic – one bed pristine white, the other an eye-boggling quilt of tartans.  There’s only one wardrobe, as only one of them owns actual clothing, which leaves more space for their shared knick knacks on an ancient shelf.  There are works of art each worth more than the house and all the land around it (most with oddly religious themes for a bedroom, including several plump angels with satisfied looking snakes, but to each their own), and verdant green plants that are no longer terrified, but certainly experience a great deal of Pride. 

It’s the wall across from the bed that draws the eye.  Almost every inch of the old-fashioned wallpaper is covered with something.  In the center, a pair of paintings that immediately remind the viewer of the works of Leonardo da Vinci.  They hang so close that they share one frame, a merchant and not-quite-lady watching each other boldly.  In a special glass case is an ancient square of stone covered in neat scratch marks.  And around the paintings – beautifully illuminated certificates, simple registry forms, unrolled scrolls and delicate papyrus.  Each carries two signatures, one purposefully messy, one perfectly embellished.

If you happen to visit after March of 2014, you will find a selection of modern registry forms from no less than thirteen major cities throughout the UK (Crowley insisted on the thirteenth, barely before midnight and both of them tipsy and happy and tired), each one covered in colorful signatures of other couples, other men, other women, other nonbinary couples.  Love and celebration are in the molecules of the ink – held there by both a demonic miracle and an angelic one.

The photograph is from London.  Rainbow confetti and flags fly behind an odd but charming pair: a slightly older gentleman, plump and proper, his dark blond curls tangled with bits of paper, his smile somehow bright in a way that is not at all metaphorical; and a slender fellow with fine cheekbones and dark sunglasses and a smile that is a little too-broad and a little too-sharp but perfect just the same.  They are in each other’s arms, surrounded by joy, and on their fingers are matching rings rich with power and protection.  With a promise first shared in front of a woman long, long forgotten by everyone else in the world: to protect, to support, to keep each other safe. There is a cottage in the South Downs where a demon and an angel live in comfortable retirement.  The garden incites envy from every gardener in town, and the car out front from every automobile enthusiast, and there are snakes in the garden and tea cups occasionally cluttering the little table under the apple tree, and humor, and history, and love in every stone.

#book omens #good omens #aziracrow #quill writes #book omens week #air conditioning #consenting bicycle repairmen

[fishing-lesbian-catgirl]

Since you filled my dash with this Bridget character I got curious and watched the Guilty Gear Strive trailer. I am honestly more confused now than ever before. The cool guitar wielding witch is a bad guy? Not to be confused with the guy who's surname is actually Badguy. A creepy grey guy named Happy Chaos is offering world peace. WMDs are going off so that offer was probably not genuine. There's a green dog and someone fights with her hair. What is this game even about?

Long response incoming

Well it’s a fighting game so it’s about punching your opponent until their health bar is empty. But the gameplay and the lore are mostly unrelated, however the lore is fascinating to me so I’m gonna give a real answer.

You have asked the right person if you want loooooong summaries of Guilty Gear lore, and the wrong person if you want it succinctly.

Short version: it takes places in the 2170s after multiple apocalypses, magic replacing all electronic technology, a 100 year long war between humans and magical beings called Gears, and everything else caused directly or indirectly by a sentient magic AI that exists in a magic alternate dimension that influences the real world hell bent on eradicating humanity so that it can create its own version of humanity.

I am going write out a long version of the summarized guilty gear background lore because I wanted to do it for a while anyway and this seems like a good opportunity and also because I am bored at work. Quick answers to your specific questions followed by long form summary below the readmore:

“The Guitar wielding witch is a bad guy?”

-Yes and No. Due to circumstances beyond her control she was made the vessel of the power of all of humanity’s hope to survive and make a bright future, granting her godlike power, which was then taken from her along with her human desires, leaving her as a time witch who is also a broken person. She has used her time powers to save all of humanity in the past, but in Strive she is trying to reclaim her power and become a god which everyone else wants to stop.

“Sol Badguy isn’t a bad guy?”

He got the name “Badguy” by destroying US military weapons, the US military didnt know who he was so they just called him Badguy, which he liked and kept as his name.

“Happy Chaos is a creepy guy offering world peace?”

-Happy Chaos is an extremely powerful being who doesn’t experience time in a linear fashion. He also doesn’t really care about anything other than causing chaos. Whatever he said about world peace is almost certainly false.

“WMDs?”

-I’ll be honest I don’t know what’s going on with that. If you’re talking about the brief clip of like the thing that looks like the inside of a missile silo in the opening movie that could be any number of things. I have to admit that I haven’t actually watched through Strive’s story mode movie stuff yet, I’ve just spent my spare time at work reading the guilty gear wiki.

“Green Dog?”

-The “green dog” is Rei, the spirit wolf companion of Giovanna, who is a member of a special ops team tasked with protecting the US President. The wolf fights alongside her.

“Person who fights with her hair?”

-That is Millia Rage, she was orphaned during the war and was taken in and raised by the Assassin’s guild. At some point in her time at the guild she read “the 6th Forbidden Spell” which turned her hair into a transforming weapon that she was trained to use lethally. She later leaves the Assassin’s guild and has her own story arc but I’m guessing the hair thing was what you were curious about.

But anyway I’ve wanted to write out a summary of the guilty gear lore for a while anyway, so I’m going to do that now because I’m bored at work, even if it’s largely irrelevant to gameplay.

Okay here we go, very long (summary) version of the core parts of the lore:

In the late 1900s, a man who will become known as The Original discovers an alternate magical dimension that influences the real world, he calls it The Backyard. In the backyard are 2 powerful entities without will or intelligence that in the past when they interacted caused The Backyard to fuse with reality in an event called The Absolute World, resulting in the 5 great mass extinctions in Earth history.

So the Original captures the entities and seals them into the two seeds of the Absolute World. Somewhere around this time The Original created a magic information being that would become known as Universal Will. He “programmed” Universal Will to use the influence the Backyard has on reality to ensure the prosperity and happiness of humanity, however he failed to define what a human is. Universal Will looked at humanity and found it flawed, so it found a loophole in its “programming” that it could just say humanity doesn’t exist yet, and gave itself the goal to eradicate all of humanity so it could create its own humanity.

Universal Will attempted to do this in 1999, by taking control of and/or deactivating all electronic devices and broadcasting globally the message that humanity would end soon. The United Nations gathered and got every nation in the world to comply with confiscating and destroying all electronic technology, and society began to collapse.

At this time of electronics apocalypse, The Original brought his discovery of magic, through the use of the powers of The Backyard, to the public and spent the next decade reforming the world’s society to use magic based technology instead electronics. This led to magical science becoming a legitimate field of study. The Original then gave the seeds of The Absolute World to one of his disciples, who would later be known as That Man, and then The Original returned to The Backyard to try to stop Universal Will.

That Man, wanting a backup plan in case The Original failed to stop it, started a research project to create magic based life. Working alongside Fredrick (who would later be Sol Badguy) and Fredrick’s lover Aria (who would later become a lot of things) they developed the first Gear cells, cells that are part living being and part magic in about 2008.

That Man learned that Aria had a terminal illness and begged her to enter cryosleep so she could survive until she could be cured, she wouldn’t accept because she wanted to spend her last moments with Fredrick. So That Man implanted one of the seeds of The Absolute World and gear cells into Fredrick (without his permission), turning him into the first Gear, a person fused with magical power. Now that Fredrick was an indestructible Gear, That Man convinced Aria to enter cryosleep. The 3 of them disappeared and the research project was halted.

Decades later, the US Military restarted the Gear research project, for the purpose of creating weapons. That Man joined the project under an alias to learn what they were doing so he could stop it. The US Military succeeded in creating new Gears that weren’t transformed people and had no will or control of their own, which they began mass-producing for nefarious US Military use. At this time That Man began creating the ultimate Gear with the power to control other Gears, in the form of essentially a giant mecha named Justice he did this by turning Aria and the other seed of the Absolute World into said ultimate Gear.

In the 2060s the US Military started rolling out their mass produced Gears and sending them to their allies all over the world, putting most of the world under US control, so Fredrick made it his mission to use the powers bestowed upon him to destroy as many Gears as possible. The US military, not knowing who it was that was destroying them, simply referred to him as “Badguy” which Fredrick liked and took as his last name. (He would later get the Sol part when he met the immortal vampire with a thirst for knowledge, Slayer. Slayer said that Fredrick’s knowledge shown like the sun, and gave him the name “Sol”).

In 2074, That Man activated Aria/Justice for a test run in Japan, but when he did this Universal Will intervened and took control of Justice. It used Justice’s power to begin infecting everyone in Japan, turning them into unrecognizable living bombs. That Man, fearing that in mere hours this would spread and infect the entire world, activated Justice’s manual override and blasted the entirety of Japan with a massive Gamma Ray, turning the entire island into a hole in the earth. (The few surviving Japanese people were all sent to colonies in the Mediterranean Sea, North America, and China that wer protected by magic barriers by instruction from the United Nations. The colonies were actually to observe and contain them because they were affected by Universal Will’s infection to some extent, but they told the world it is because they need protection). Universal Will then used its control of Justice to start a worldwide war between humans and Gears that would last 100 years and become known as The Crusades.

The war was long and hard fought an a large portion of humanity died because of it. During the Crusades, all of humanity’s desire for a brighter tomorrow and their directed emotions created a Magical Focus on The Backyard. The Backyard “interpreted this as an error that would destroy the world” and sealed the focus in a single human consciousness and body, I-no (the cool witch with the guitar). This granted I-no godlike powers, particularly control over time. The Original saw this and feared what one person with the power to become a god might do, so he removed her human desire, her sense of self, and some of her power. Universal Will saw this and punished The Original, fusing him with what he took from I-no and turning him into Happy Chaos. Happy Chaos became a being with strange powers that experiences time not linearly and appears throughout various events during the Crusades and after solely to cause chaos (this included the event that destroyed Baiken’s colony and took everything she ever knew and loved from her) these chaotic events would all be pinned on That Man, as he was seen as the enemy of the world because he created the Gears in the first place and everyone assumed he had done so maliciously.

In important battle, Ky Kiske, an important captain of the human battalion was killed. His death led to the eventual loss of the war and ensuring the doom of humanity, so I-no went back in time to ensure that Ky lived. Ky, Sol, and a number of other playable characters would then go on to defeat Justice and seal her in a dimensional prison, thus ending the war. The remaining lifeless Gears were rounded up and destroyed.

The time since the end of the war involved the slow rebuilding of the world, with many countries and global powers being rearranged completely (for example most of Europe is now one kingdom ruled by 3 kings). And that’s the end of the explanation of the backstory leading up to the first Guilty Gear.

The Guilty Gear games primarily take place after the Crusades, and each game has its own complicated series of events that are a lot harder to summarize, and I do not have the energy to actually explain their plots. Multiple of them involve our heroes trying to stop plots to revive Justice. Like Testament hosting a tournament and secretly using the blood that was spilt to revive Justice but being thwarted. Then there was the game that was about a massive bounty being put on the head of Dizzy, a gear who was formed from Fredrick/Sol Badguy and Justice/Aria’s DNA, and all the characters showing up to try to claim the bounty. Then the game about Universal Will having a human host named Ariels who became the first woman pope who is part of a convoluted plot to use newly created Valentine series Gears to enact a series of events that would culminate in using a powerful lightning strike that happens once every 15 or so years (called St. Elmo’s fire) to resurrect Justice. Anyway just know that Sol Badguy destroys Justice once and for all.

Which then brings us to Strive, which had another very complicated series of events that boils down to I-no teaming up with Happy Chaos to restore her to her full godlike power, and basically everyone else trying to stop it.

And that finally brings us to the current point of the game’s lore. You might notice I’ve only mentioned a small portion of the characters, and that is because all of them have their own individual stories, many of which barely play into the core plot at all. I would be happy to explain any individual characters lore, but as for what guilty gear is “about” that’s what I just wrote down.

Wow this ended up being so fucking long. I don’t expect anyone to actually read this far. But I’m glad I wrote it all down.

#guilty gear #answered asks #I’m a lore nerd #save #saved #saving so I can copy it later if anyone else asks in the future lol

[clonewarsarchives]

NOTES FROM THE FRONT LINE (#132, APR 2012)

It’s generally accepted that Walter Murch (along with friend and colleague Ben Burtt redefined the role of the cinematic sound engineer, coining the term “Sound Designer” for Apocalypse Now (1979), which was foreshadowed by his “Sound Montage” credit for The Conversation (1974).

Murch later turned his hand to directing, helming Return to Oz, the 1985 sequel to the beloved classic. It was his friend George Lucas who offered him the opportunity to take the director’s chair again for The Clone Wars season four episode from the Umbaran quadrilogy, “The General.” Interview by J. W. Rinzler

Star Wars Insider: How did you first get invited to direct an episode of The Clone Wars?

Walter Murch: I heard about Bob Dalva, who’s a friend, film editor, director, and cameraman. George Lucas had asked him to be a guest director on the show (Season Two’s “The Deserter”) and I kept tabs with him, checking how it was going. He was having a great time doing it. I think it was a year later that George said, “What about you? Do you want to be a guest director?” Based upon the experience that Bob had, and my own general interest in the interface between art, story, and technology, I thought I would see what it was all about.

Did you choose a script from the four episodes of the Umbaran story arc?

They just said here it is. I didn’t get to choose. I think I would’ve been overwhelmed if I had to choose, because I didn’t know anything about the process other than what Bob and George had told me. It was much better just to get an assignment and not have to make a choice, weighing variables that I had no knowledge of at that time.

What did George tell you about the show?

Not much. He said, “It’s great, you’ll love it!” What he’s interested in with guest directors is people coming on board and injecting whatever it is that makes a metal into an alloy: a little extra something that’s not normally in the metal, but that helps to turn it into something else: iron into steel, brass into bronze, hopefully stronger. There are four directors on staff—very talented directors who are each working on three projects at once in various stages, whereas a guest director is only working on one thing and doesn’t hang around after the job is done. I wasn’t involved at all in the final animation. It’s just a very specific 12-week gig—to learn the software and produce the work.

George also wanted to bring in, with Bob and me and Duwayne Dunham—another guest director who has done two shows—someone who has experience in live action. George wants an infusion of a live-action sensibility into the process of doing animation, so it becomes scene-based rather than shot-based. Animation tends to be shot-based work because of the expense of producing animation; you want to minimize the amount of work, so shoot only what is absolutely necessary. Whereas with the zViz software (a proprietary software platform developed by George Lucas and Lucasfilm that helps directors compose shots), which is what we were working with, it doesn’t cost anything to keep the shot going, especially in a dialogue scene. It’s covering the dialogue the way you would cover a normal dialogue scene in live action from many different angles, which allows you to choose in the editing how the scenes will be constructed.

So you had 12 weeks. At this point was the script already written?

Yes, it was finished and, other than meeting at the end of the process, I never had any interaction with the writer. [Supervising director] ave Filoni did ask, “What do you think about the script? Any ideas?” In this story, the two clones, Fives and Hardcase, have to penetrate an alien airbase and there’s a perimeter fence around it. In the original script, they walked up to the fence and turned it off with some device they had. I thought we should make it a little harder, just to get a bit more action into it; also, if you can do everything with your own devices, it makes the opposition look weaker. So the whole idea of climbing up the tree, and then booby-trapping it to distract the guards —that was my contribution to the story.

So once you did the script, it went to the story reel phase using zViz. Was there anything in between those stages?

There was a lot of work already done in set and character design, all of which I inherited. They just said, “Here it is!” I slightly changed the nature of what some of the weird creatures were—that was another script idea I guess—I made the weird flying creatures into vultures so that they would try to eat the bodies of dead clone troopers. In the script they were just seen as passing clouds, but since they looked like vultures mated with manta rays, I thought, Let’s give them a personality and a purpose. What do these guys do? So that was another thing. I didn’t modify the look of the creatures, but I did modify what they did.

You then moved onto the zViz story reels.

I went to zViz class for the first two weeks. I had a one-on-one tutor and I was learning the software. Co-incident with that, in the afternoons, I started to play with the set and the characters, and reading the script, and working out how we were going to stage everything; just arranging the basic elements of the “soldier” aspect of the work, which is: “Here’s the army. There’s the enemy. Our army is moving in this direction. They’re coming from that direction. They’re in single-file, and so on.” At that stage, only basic camera parameters had been set, so I went through the script scene-by-scene and blocked it out using zViz. I had a team of four story artists who were going to be working with me—Bosco Ng and Dave Brickley would sometimes be standing next to me saying, “Don’t do that. It’s more efficient to do this,” just like when you learn to drive a car. You have an instructor there to prevent you from crashing. I got about two percent into using zViz. Maybe five percent. Maybe I would have been able—for the story reel—to do some actual story reel animation, but this particular show is so full of action that I left it to the artists that were working with me.

What was the next stage?

After the blocking? The story reel. I assigned scenes to the story artists and they would phone me up four hours later and say, “Want to take a look?” And that would give me other ideas and I’d make suggestions and they would work their way through the scenes.

As with live action, do you have to choose the “virtual camera lenses” you use?

Yes. I began to sketch that out in the plotting stage. But I generally left that up to the animators, except for a few specific places like that shot of the first emergence of the scorpion tank: I wanted that to be a telephoto lens.

Did you find it liberating?

Yes, it was. I felt insecure during the two weeks when I was learning the software and not knowing how much more I had to learn. If we had all the time in the world, it would’ve been different—but this is an ongoing series and you have to hit schedule milestones. And I was very happy with the work the story artists did; they saved my bacon a number of times when there were things I couldn’t quite figure out. Based on their own experience being animators and working on The Clone Wars, they knew what could be done and that would trigger ideas from me. So it was a very good collaboration with all four guys.

Did you have any involvement with the direction of the actors?

Yes, once we’d recorded and cut the temporary voices in. and then made any adjustments, we went down to Los Angeles and recorded the actual voices of the clones and Krell. So I was there for the final recording. It’s very important, I think, for the director of the recording.

The episode has a lot of action in it, but is also quite violent. There’s a scene where some Umbarans walk past and the clones shoot them in the head.

That was another idea I had. And another was the amount of stomping that the scorpion tanks do. There are many clones that get killed by being stepped on. This was an idea I came up with based on exploring the ability with zViz to articulate the character’s movement, like a puppet. The scorpion tanks are a six-legged mechanism. It wasn’t specified in the script what those legs could do—it just walked forward and shot. I thought it would be more interesting if it appeared to be alive in an animalistic sense and, working with Dave Brickley, we started tooling around with these creatures. We made them stand up on their hind legs, so to speak, and put the front legs up in the air. Once you did that, it was clear that it would be good.

These ideas arise spontaneously out of the directing process and if nobody stops me, then I’ll do them. It’s grisly—people killed by being stepped on, and the idea of finishing off this Umbaran pilot—and it begs the question. “If they didn’t shoot him, what were they going to do with him?” Then there’s the whole idea of these vulture creatures feeding on the flesh of clones. I plead guilty to the grisly parts of the story, or emphasizing them anyway.

Is that because you think kids today can handle it?

I think so, but I wasn’t thinking about the audience spedifically. It’s shown at eight o’clock at night, and I know that the viewing age ranges very wide. I thought it was my duty—I’d been invited in to do this stuff and they were looking for somebody from the outside. So I guess I was pushing the edge of the envelope. And I think that’s one of the very interesting things about the show. It gets into some pretty deep, philosophical waters about what an army is: Who are the soldiers in an army, and what are they really doing? Do they obey orders without thinking or are they obliged to think on their feet and countermand an order if they know a better way to do it and what’s the cost of that? How does identity emerge out of group of soldiers who, in this case, are literally bred to be the same. And yet different identities do emerge out of their DNA—how does that happen? How do you cohere as a military fighting force where the idea is to sublimate your identity and not be individuals? Once you start thinking about all that, you get into some pretty interesting areas.

It sounds like it intellectually engaged you.

Yes, it did. But all this is not specifically limited to my episode. That whole Umbaran arc in particular is about the assassination of a kind of Hitler. When do you kill the guy who’s supposedly your commanding officer? What he’s doing is wrong and against all military code, and yet you have to obey him. it’s a dilemma that the human species confronts over and over. I looked at maybe 12 other episodes in the course of 12 weeks. and I was really impressed with the range of subject matters and the implications of some of the ideas that were being explored.

Also, I was taken with the density of the storytelling in a 22-minute session; I would be watching one of these episodes, looking at the animation and being impressed with the style and the production design and all of that, and then the seven-minute moment, the commercial break, would come and I’d realize, wait a minute, that felt like 20 minutes not seven! It felt like a lot had happened and it had only been seven minutes. Each of these 22-minute episodes feels like an hour in terms of the visual and thematic complexity of the stuff that’s being explored. Those experiences quickly eliminated any sense that I was making a film for kids. But by the same token, Return to Oz, which is essentially a film for kids, also has some heavy-duty stuff in it. I think kids can take it.

Did you get to see your episode before it went to air?

Yes, but the first version I saw I thought the picture was way too dark. I would not have animated things the way I did if I had known it was going to be that dark. I had been told Umbara was a dark planet, but I didn’t know it was going to be that dark. There’s a saying in England: When you do live-action night shooting, you’ll get the question, “Where is this light coming from?” And the answer is, “That’s ‘Customer’s Moonlight.’” In other words, the audience paid to see the movie—the light is there to allow them to see what they paid for. But when I saw the aired version of “The General”, the darkness had been lightened. I don’t know what knobs they twirled, but there was much mom light. And yet it still looked like a dark planet. So I was much happier.

Is there anything that you’d like to have differently?

The Clone Wars animation is getting on good. particularly for certain characters. that I would like to see them move even more in a live-action sense. There’s still a tendency, especially in the story reel stage, to over-articulate body language. There are lots of hand gestures, kind of in a marionette sense, and you tend to fall into doing that because there is no facial animation at the story reel stage, only rudimentary changes from anger to joy. And with the clones wearing helmets, you don’t see any face, so there is a tendency to over-compensate with body-language. I think that may have been necessary in the early days when the animation wasn’t as sophisticated. Now it’s getting so good, it might be time to back off from the marionette aspect and treat them more like real people, real actors.

Do you think they should invest a little more in that?

Yes, but with some characters I think they’re already there! There’s a wonderfully evil female character Asajj Ventress. She’s fantastic—both as a character and how she’s animated. I love that character.

THE CINEMA OF WALTER MURCH

Walter Murch enrolled at the University of Southern California in 1965. In its School of Cinema, he met George Lucas, future writer/director John Milius, author Donald Glut (who penned the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back), Director of Photography Caleb Deschanel (who shot 1979’s More American Graffiti), and a host of other luminaries who came to prominence during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. After Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola founded American Zoetrope, Murch helped edit and mix sound on the latter’s The Rain People (1969). His résumé soon filled out with a series of Lucas and Coppola projects: THX 1138 (1971), American Graffiti (1973), and The Godfather Part II (1974), before winning an Academy Award in 1980 for his sound design on Apocalypse Now. His subsequent credits include, among many others, Ghost (1990), The Talented Mister Ripley (1999), Cold Mountain (2003), Jarhead (2005) and The English Patient (1996), for which he netted Oscars for both film and sound editing.

#season 4 #408 #crew #insider #i132 #the clone wars #guest directors #got real detailed into the process and the episode!

[rightpastnowhere]

📝📝 orz

OH HI!!! it’s been a while!!! ur a fren from the marvel days so i’m gonna dust off some of my old marvel ideas :))

1. i really wanted to do more with my mythology au that i wrote some scarvis for for AU-gust (here is the fic if ur interested), and expand it to look at some more of the cast. maybe something with the OG 6, and some sort of first war similar to the olympians vs the titans or whatever. maybe something infinity war adjacent, altho i was sorta running with my own plot or whatever. and i really did want to assign more domains to more of the cast, but i was struggling with some of the bigger domains (aka life) and who i could assign them to (tbh i’m thinking of helen cho just because she deserves more attention but idk)

mostly i kinda wanted to write more of wanda and vision’s relationship - that forbidden romance type shit, but now they’re gods and it’s Dramatic. like the other gods snooping around and trying to see what they’re up to, and playing more with that concept of the divide between two factions. maybe even branching out to those unforeseen consequences hinted at in the beginning, something breaking in the world as a result of order and chaos’ entanglement. idk! i’ve got a lot of ideas for this world but not enough attention span to write it

2. one of those apocalypse aus where it’s just a wasteland. not one with zombies or whatever else to fight, just… trying to live in desolation. trying to start over when the world has been all but destroyed, and the few people left are turning agaisnt each other. the og 6 avengers forming a traveling group that wanders around, taking down the corrupt dictatorial groups or the crazed mercenaries when they can. wanda and pietro escaping from one of those dictatorial groups, one they thought they’d joined for protection, because they’re tired of seeing people hurt and it outweighs their survival instinct, now. vision and helen (his mom because i Have To in any au) taking up shelter in an abandoned hospital, distributing supplies to any wanderers they come across, trying not to be noticed by the big camps or the roving killers. just… wasteland au

you know what?? i also really want to read that for critical role. vox machina as the traveling somewhat vigilantes, but really just a group trying to survive, forced to leave the old house in the countryside they’d used as a base after they run out of resources. finding allura and kima as they travel, as well as zahra and kash and tary and whoever else. stumbling upon percy and cass in their mansion, crumbling apart, the last ones left - and very promptly asking to use like 20 of the guest rooms. again!! wasteland vibes!!

#OOF i wrote more than i meant to #wanda maximoff #vision #scarletvision #helen cho #marvel #mcu #the avengers #critical role #vox machina #jacketpotatoo #asks

[reginrokkr]

𝐂𝐗𝐈𝐕. The second apocalypse, Fortuna and the Neohuman Project.

On the second Apocalypse.

It's important to describe what exactly makes an apocalypse be considered such and not described by other name (like cataclysm) if both are events harmful to Teyvat itself and the living beings that inhabit it. For this, I will make a comparison between Phanes' arrival to Teyvat and the Second Who Came + Nibelung descent with forbidden knowledge.

In the former, although it's unquestionable that the war waged between Phanes and whoever fought alongside him (if any), and the Dragon Sovereigns must've scarred Teyvat one way or another (we know from Sapientia Oramasdis II about the consequences it would take if Apep passed away by releasing all the Dendro energy within it as well as we know that some dragons perished in the combat be it during the first, the second fight when Nibelung brought forbidden knowledge and the Second Who Came arrived or in both, which must've led to consequences on a planetary level), it isn't stated to be in a relevant way worth mentioning. Here, the outcome was clear: the winner would inherit the right to reshape the world, whereas the loser would be subdued. Such was the dynamic between Phanes as the former and the Sovereign Dragons as the latter, and so Teyvat was recreated which caused it more hospitable for the soon-to-be created humans after that.

In the latter, however, it's different. Not only the fact that Nibelung, in all his wish to dethrone Phanes and the Saints, brought forbidden knowledge worsened matters both to himself, his fellow dragons and everything else— but the Second Who Came's presence as well made it so that the entirety of Teyvat as a planet was endangered and it ran the risk of being dying. Not the living beings that inhabit it alone, but the world in itself too. Among the consequences that have been stated, it's known that: forests turned into sand in Sumeru, there was an immense flood that drowned the unified civilization (Enkanomiya fell into an extraplanar conjunction point between the Human, Light and Void realms) and a breakthrough of the plague brought to this world (presumably Abyss energy-related). In order to mend this, Phanes dropped sapphire nails to prevent the world from crumbling so these would purify the land, thus destroying adjacent civilization as an undesired side-effect to his determination to protect Teyvat. Because of the importance of events that befell and what nearly caused to the world, this historical event would be more accurate to point as an apocalypse versus the former discord.

Given everything we've learned about the Cataclysm, even if one could argue that its relevance and what it caused to the world was negative and harmful (which it was), it wasn't on the same level as the apocalypse.

Although it has been teased before that in Snezhnaya it's known that the world will face a new Long Night (or at least among the Fatui, Harbingers and the Tsaritsa) and in René's notes that a catastrophe must be avoided at all costs, this patch of Fontaine shed more light onto what that means: the coming of a second apocalypse. An apocalypse described as a world where no more flowers will grow, a disaster defined for seeing a pool of blood past one's ankles, a world in which after a few hundred years, all birthing waters will dry up and after that, the world will be devoid of light with destroyed civilizations and a shattered sky that can be seen via two methods: through the Book of Revealing or the Looking Glass.

Whatever will lead Teyvat to this state remains unknown, but the Abyss Order's intentions are tellers of an outcome for the world far from desirable given their determination to plunge the whole world to darkness and overthrow Celestia with the power of the Abyss. In essence, the Abyss Order may not be any different than Celestia is due to their determination to potentially change the threads of fate in a similar fashion as there seems to be a divine control over fate that not all gods have access (the Archons) for their own purposes. Even if forbidden knowledge has been erased, there is still a latent star-devouring darkness that endangers Teyvat. Tsaritsa's involvement alongside her Fatui and Harbingers may also lead to undesirable consequences that could lead the world to its downfall, or Celestia's awakening and action may assist in that as well. Perhaps it's all three deeds at once.

This second apocalypse has been prophesied by René de Petrichor and Jakob Ingold, which is not an unlikely thing to happen. A relatively recent element, the Sign of Apaosha, is said to reflect the Abyss and corrupt the land around it (the sign), and it's believed to be a reflection of the "reality" beyond Teyvat's skies. Given that as per René's notes it's known that research on the Abyss [energy] was being conducted as well as other future research that I'll mention briefly, it's not impossible to have witnessed a catastrophe to come. Moreover, according to the Book of Revealing written by René, it's implied that other ancient civilizations might've been aware of this fact (at least the one of the Nameless City or underground palace in the depths of the Chasm, given that these ruins are displayed in the prophetic vision of the future).

On Fortuna.

Fortuna [that which happens without design, remarkable occurrence] (or world-formula, as termed by René) is described as the phenomenon that takes place when a civilization is destroyed and a new one is born from its ashes. Besides prophesying a second apocalypse to come in centuries (since 400 years ago), calculations made in regards of this subject reflect the outcome that no new civilizations will be born unless new variables are introduced "from outside the system". This would increase the magnitude of this catastrophe bound to come.

On the Neohuman Project.

This is the chosen variable by René de Petrichor in order to face the incoming crisis, or better said, ensure humanity's survival in the context that this apocalypse will take place no matter what, hence Teyvat will become an inhospitable world incompatible with life. Starting first with himself and then with Jakob Ingold, René's discoveries led him to learn that the composition of their bodies (changed as a result of these experiments) are closer to that of the Abyss and the Khvarena, paradoxical as it may be. Their bodies don't need nourishment like normal humans do and they possess terrifying self-recovery properties (fact-checked by extirpating ingrown organs close to vocal chords [albeit not for this purpose] and watching them regrow in a matter of few days) and in order to grow stronger, these bodies are nourished with the blood of fell beasts of the Abyss (Elynas in Jakob's case, albeit it was discovered that the Crimson Agate of Dragonspine and Elynas' blood share the same properties). In the present day, Jakob, in the body of an adult human, has been seen taking the form of an Iniquitous Baptist.

This project is seen as a manner of human transcendence in order to adapt to the hostile world that Teyvat will become if the prophecy becomes true. When the neohuman project proved to be difficult and a failure on a new experiment, a new variable has been introduced. Experiments were conducted in more humans and, albeit anti-intellectual and counter-intuitive, it's presumed that in order to transcend one's physical form and personality must be shed and lost and thus a gestalt where memories and other human souls are merged together similar to the principle of merging Oceanids into one by returning to the primordial waters. Ancients (presumably those of the Nameless City) have been already successful in this in the past. René, as the first subject in more modern times (400 years ago), was successful and he was able to see the memories of those human subjects that took part in this project.

#◟༺✦༻◞ events to be remembered in blue veins ┊addendum.┊ #I've been meaning to write this #since I saw it ingame #but also since earlier #as I could read the enigmatic pages #that form the Book of Revealing #it's interesting that at first they started off #wanting to make research in new energetic possibilities #for Fontaine #and discovering the pneumousia annihilation #thanks to Alain's involvement afterward #and then decided that the world has no saving #so they've been preparing themselves to what comes after that #although with questionable means #considering there is a hive mind thing involved too #I wonder what it'll be like the opposite #as in trying to actually save Teyvat #so it won't reach that state #personally I think that that's what Dain is working on #by facing the Abyss Order #which Jakob repudiates and calls primitives #and also compares them to some oppressors #which I presume are the Second Who Came in Celestia lol

[jaehaerysiitargaryen]

Who; Jaehaerys Targaryen and Tyland Lannister ( @casterlygldcs​ )

What; in the aftermath of the first surge of fighting, upon hearing of the struggle faced by the reachmen. tyland and insert your character are within a battle tent, set close to the docks. ten towers is still in the process of being taken

When; Post Jae’s face being burned. 

Where; War camp; harlaw

Note; This is canon banter between muses. Italics = thoughts and actions

tyland: do you understand it is here the tides could turn agains us? jaehaerys; I understand. I know. Be careful. Don't make any rash choices. tyland: and he doesn't break his gaze away from jaehaerys. the king he had nearly lost it all for. they would not expect to see you again.   tyland: show them. show them what your name knows better than any other. jaehaerys looks at him, he doesn't need to explain the damage to his left eye. It won't change his skill with a sword. He was trained by Ser Criston Cole and his Uncle Aemond. jaehaerys; what else do you want me to do? I'll do whatever it takes. He would do whatever it took to make sure people knew his name. Fire strengthened him. It's what they would say. tyland; and tyland's back leans against the chair which he was sat upon; across the map of the iron islands. he had marked an x on each mine, each resource; ready to drain when the time came. tyland: ten towers was always going to be the struggle. tyland: you are not a second. you are a targaryen, with the line of hightower. a prince. tyland: and should you ever wish to claim your crown with fire and blood, your men will look upon your behaviour now. tyland: lead one of the charges. jaehaerys; he stares at the map. his gaze scanning over the x's. running his tongue over his lips he nodded. listening. then he stopped and looked up at the king. jaehaerys; lead the charge alone or do you want me to lead the charge with jason? it was really just jason leading the charge if they did things that way. He is a man grown. It was time for him to be a man. Was the King giving him that?  jaehaerys; I can do this. I've done this. Even in the Dance, he was under someone else's charge. He led from the back of his dragon and on the ground others still held authority over him. He could do this. And one day...he would have his, in fire and blood. The beacon would glow and the streets would turn to rivers of blood. Right? tyland: when did i mention the prince? and tyland stares at him in the aftermath of his words, letting the silence sit between them. the prince would lead his own charge. they would come down like swarms, like the apocalypse, upon ten towers. and again, and again, and again, until they were mere flesh and blood on the floor. tyland: then, do it. jaehaerys; you did not. he was sick of being under the charge of someone else. he admired the prince. loved him. the prince was not the king and jae wanted the king to not regret not killing him. none of it mattered. this was about destroying the dogs of these lands. battering them into nothing. jaehaerys; Anything else your grace? tyland: no, jaehaerys. because he has no reason to doubt him, to think he couldn't handle it. he had made the tactical move, it was a charge that would come in increments. another would come after. and another. tyland: and what have you to say? jaehaerys; he nods, standing, pauses and looks at him carefully. Nothing. nothing at all. I'll see you after the fighting. tyland: and he nods, moving to face the pageboy that stood by the entrance of the tent that flapped in the wind with the sound of smoke tyland: see the prince of dragonstone out, and send me lord marbrand.

#.*. just a bit of banter; jaehaerys targaryen