#but every time i remember that this is a universe in which rook exists and is a real person that the characters know | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

redrobin-detective · 3 years

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Ben 10 lore that exists in my heart regardless of canon

- Ben’s personality in his mid-late teens is a mix of his Alien Force and Omniverse self. On the surface, he’s very cheerful and kind even if he is a bit of arrogant showoff. He makes jokes and plays around and acts as if he isn’t bothered by the things in his life. Those who know him best understand a good portion of his outward confidence and cockiness is just a facade to cover up his insecurities and to project the ideal, effortless hero. While sometimes seen as immature, most beings know Ben 10 means business as he takes his unofficial job and people’s safety very seriously. He’s clever, adaptable, charismatic and empathetic which makes him a formidable opponent and a loyal friend. Doesn’t open up easily but if you get to him, he become so dearly attached.

- Drinks smoothies so much for several reasons. Comfort food go brrr, reminds him of the good easy times with him Gwen and Kev. It’s also a light but generally nutritous food to give him energy for heroing. Anything too heavy and he’ll be puking (both from physical and emotional stress). Though he jokes about his mom’s health foods, his are a crazy concoction of add in proteins and vitamins/minerals bc he knows he’ll out and out collapse without it. (Still has on occasion bc boy still doesn’t eat right/enough)

- While Fame is exciting for him at first he soon begins to detest it. Not the fans, no, he can’t bring himself to hate the people who look up to him. But he hates the constant attention, that he can’t walk outside without being mobbed. the only place he feels safe is his hometown where most people are so used to him and his weirdness that they don’t react much anymore. Takes to wearing a cape and face shield when going out anywhere so he can actually get things done without being recognized and mobbed.

- Part of the reason Bellwood isn’t concerned with Ben is partially because ben’s been weird and alien for as long as they can remember but also many don’t realize how famous/powerful he is. Yeah that’s just Ben Tennyson over there, sometimes he turns into funny creatures- wait what do you MEAN he’s the savior of the universe?? He cried over a spilled smoothie the other day.

- Does mostly online schooling by the time he’s 15. At first he tries to do half day things to maintain something of a normal life but it quickly becomes overwhelming and dangerous him/the school. Finishes his GED early but the Plumbers and Azmuth make him take additional college level and alien courses to prepare him for his future role. Ben gripes but really does love learning all these things, especially on his terms (ADHD and stress + the public school system do not always go hand in hand). He’s a quick learner when he deems the information important and is made accessible to his learning needs.

- Ben definitely has ADHD speaking of which, it was nearly uncontrollable as a child bc his free-spirited parents didn’t believe in medicating. Ben convinced them he needed it and after some trial and error, found meds that worked. As he became more involved in heroics/growing up he had to change his medicine regimen (resulting in him being a bit more off the rails in OV) and needed antidepressants and therapy to manage it better. As an adult he has a whole litany of coping mechanisms (good and bad yes) and regularly checks in with his therapist and doctors to keep things under control.

- Has a complicated relationship with his necrofriggian children. Considers himself their mother and worries after them. They too feel a connection to their parent despite this being unusual for their species. A few visit (some more than others) while they grow while others maintain distance. Ben never breathes a word of them to the media for fear of them being targeted. Still he keeps an eye on them and ensures all 14 mature to adulthood (another rarity for the species). Checks in every now and again with the ones who don’t want to see him and those that do. Two join the Plumbers and Ben is both proud and worried. His youngest becomes partners with Rook Ben.

- Just in general loves kids, they’re his favorite fans and while he’ll grumble at pushy adult fans he always smiles and kneels down for the little ones. Not so secretly wanted to have children of his own but knew it was a risk overall and used a lot of that energy with mentoring and teaching. Eventually had Kenny later in life (late 30s-40s) and was over the moon, becoming such a loving and doing parent or as much as he could be with his hectic schedule.

- Omnitrix can’t come off, never has at any point since it first latched onto Ben’s arm. Azmuth tried and failed to get the device off, doesn’t let Ben know for many years as he feared the consequences. The watch loves and protects Ben even beyond it’s programming making him much more durable to damage and releasing energy charges when he’s threatened. Not even removing Ben’s arm would separate them. They’re stuck for life.

- Ben does have Anodite heritage but the Omnitrix actively suppresses it and uses the built up energy to power the transformations which is why ben is mostly unaffected by what should cause a massive energy drain on him. Theoretically if Ben learned to harness and safely use his Mana at an early age like Gwen he would have been fine but letting it build up without safe outlet meant activation would have killed him. Omnitrix Ben, however, went his whole life not knowing of his latent abilities and how the watch saved his life.

- Ben’s eyes get more green and glowy as time passes from the Omnitrix. At first they think its a trick of the light but by the time he’s an adult his eyes are pretty much glow in the dark. His veins light up too after long stretches of using the Omnitrix. Its vaguely unsettling to people who aren’t used to Ben.

- Max and the Earth Plumbers work so, so hard to keep teen Ben on Earth when half the universe is blowing up their comm lines asking for The Ben 10 to help with whatever problem of the day. Ben himself doesn’t quite understand when he’s younger the prestige and expectations on his shoulders. Max throws up a million and one roadblocks so Ben can live as normal a life as possible while he still can. Still, while doing that he Still overloads Ben with expectations and responsibilities on earth and beyond. He becomes a soldier again with Ben as their greatest weapon. He never forgave himself of losing sight of his grandson underneath the hero esp after Ben’s breakdown.

- Rook partnership with Ben ends not long after Omniverse with his promotion to Magister. Ben tries to play it cool but the thought of another loved one/teammate leaving his tears him apart. Max revealing that Ben most likely wouldn’t get a new Plumber assigned partner since he’s almost an adult and won’t need it and Rook accidentally missing their last smoothie run due to a scheduling mishap causes Ben to snap and have the nervous breakdown that had been building for almost a decade. He completely loses it for a little while and needs to take an extended leave of absence from school and heroics that lasts about a year. Spends time recovering both on Earth and Galvan Prime, does some diplomatic training, learns about aliens, actually confronts the stress and loneliness of his life. He comes out the other side stronger but still fragile and exhausted.

- Ben’s above mentioned breakdown brings him closer to all his friends who didn’t quite realize the extent of Ben’s burden. Rook had been under the impression Ben didn’t like him all that much so the knowledge that his departure was the final straw for friend/hero’s collapse was shocking. Ben and Azmuth also become closer, the Galvan becoming fiercely protective of the boy seeing as his Earth family didn’t do well to keep him safe. It takes years for him to get over his anger at Max for putting so much on his grandchild. Ben makes more friends, in and out of the hero business, finally gets a therapist and gets some of his burdens eased a bit. It’s not a sure fire fix and Ben has several smaller breakdowns the rest of his life but its something.

- Azmuth was straight up suicidal before he met Ben for the first time. Ben gave him back hope for the universe and his ability to create items for peace not weapons. The boy infuriates him, frightens him, frustrates him but Azmuth cannot deny in his heart of hearts that he loves Ben dearly. He’s very upset at Ben’s breakdown and doesn’t know how to handle the worst of the initail outbursts. Azmuth talks Ben down from a suicide attempt. He reaches out to Ben that he Too felt overwhelmed by pressure, thought himself only good for war. Ben’s arrival in his life saved him and now he will do the same for Ben. It’s the first positive step forward in Ben’s recovery.

- For no other reason than I like it, Azmuth primarily refers to Ben as Benjamin (mostly to annoy the kid but he likes the way it sounds too) and Ben in softer, more serious moments.

- Professor Paradox continues to flit in and out of Ben’s life. He says its because Ben is the most equipped to handle universal peril (true) but he’s also just very fond of the boy. Ben, existing in so many forms and having such importance also exists a beat outside of normal reality which Paradox identifies with. Ben is naturally attuned to time related problems because of this (instantly IDing Spanner as from the future before being told later deducing him to be his unborn son). Plus Ben named him, way back when. He’s just drawn to Ben.

- Adult Ben, while being seen as an impressively skilled fighter and champion, really has his strength as a universal diplomat of sorts. Based out of Earth, he helps mediate and defuse conflicts, advocate against tyranny and overall preserve peace and balance. He’s not perfect, he makes mistakes and sometimes is forced to become violent (and yes kill) but overall is regarded as a peacekeeper, something younger ben simply couldn’t understand.

- Gwen gets her degree and primarily does work with advocacy and teaching about magic/alien culture. While she and Ben are still close, there’s a bit of a frustrated divide in that she isn’t helping him share the burden of the universe. Gwen never wanted to be a hero and has enough worth to not shackle herself to a job that’ll burn her out. Ben loves heroing but gives too much of himself away trying to fix everything. They get into screaming arguments that it wouldn’t be so bad out there if she just helped him but she refuses to budge and says he shouldn’t make himself do so much. They always make up and thy still are each other’s closest relationships.

- Ben marries Kai in a political move, Kai is Asexual and Ben Aromantic. They didn’t love each other but they got on well enough and Ben was really feeling the stress of carrying the hero burden so Kai also being involved made him feel like he wasn’t alone. Both were also so tired of the universe constantly asking about their love life and said ‘fuck it we’re married leave us alone’. Gwen was always mad about it feeling Ben deserved better but the two of them were happy with it. They had separate rooms, mostly separate lives but they became strong friends and supports with their strictly platonic marriage. They had Ken via Invitro in an incubator and were loving if extremely busy parents.

- Also from the moment he appeared, Ben knew that Spanner was his future son, Kenny. He played ignorant and then was kind of deliberately teasing him in future encounters. He knew the rules of time and didn’t want to disrupt things further even if he was angry and worried as heck about why Ken felt the need to time travel. When future Ben catches up in the timeline, Kenny gets SUCH a lecture.

- Ben isn’t quite immortal but he’s also not entirely human anymore either. The Omnitrix not only keeps him safe from most harm but it lightens the effect of aging. Ben 10 is active many, many years when most humans would have been forced to retire. He’s not sure how long the watch will keep him alive and it terrifies him. Gwen too is functionally immortal however she ages like a normal human, then when her natural death came, shed her skin and became a fulltime Anodite. So in the end, it was her and Ben together wondering which of them will die first. Gwen has trouble retaining her humanity as pure energy and swears she’ll let herself fizzle out when Ben goes. When that’ll be however...

#Ben 10 #this took sooo long whoops #i wanna write about ben's breakdown so mad you have no idea

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mrs-falcon · 3 years

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Vincent is finally getting his own ref sheet :3 This character is part of universe I created called "Shadows of the Real World", partly drawn, partly written complex story. Character created - 2017 (along with Raven) BASIC INFO: Current name: Vincent Jackson Former/Original name: Dmitry Sergeewich Trutliv (Дмирий Сергеевич Трутлив) (hopefuly english ppl will understand the pronounces xd ) - exhausted (looks like he's chill with almost everything) - can get easily mad/upset - quite slim figure after his mother - can be a loving parent/partner - caring about others he loves - hates his father - took care of Raven he'd found on streets Family: - father: Sergei Vasileevich Trutliv (Сергей Василеёвич Трутлив) (Black Yukon wolf) - mother: Alexandra Antonovna Trutliv (Александра Антоновна Трутлив) (Arctic x Eurasian wolf) - "stepmother": Melanie Manson (Shiba inu dog) - half-brother: Frederich Manson (Black Yukon wolf x Shiba inu dog) - partner: Sherab Azuki (irbis) - daughter: Rozaline Jackson (hybrid) Gender: male Age: 40 years (from the beginning of the written story) Height: 190 cm Species: inclination to Eurasian wolf Spoken languages: - native: Russian - first foreign language: English (American) - second foreign language: Japanese Born country: Russia Currently living in: USA Job: (currently) security guard in metal factory DETAILED HISTORY: [*WARNING - following text contains lots of triggers and mature stuff (such as abuse mention, violence, character's trauma mention,...), please read at your own risk] Born in a cage? First what Vincent, formerly Dmitry, remembers is aggressive voice going toward his mother. His father was a rich (yes - rich, not wealthy) and very famous person in his country for his position - Sergei was a successful communistic leader, business man and ... a professional rook. Living on far east part of Russia wasn't easy and, of course, not cheap. Thanks to Sergei's intelligence and extensive contacts he could easily manipulate with all people in his region, which led to exploitation of the lower classes working under his control, making Sergei's life much more "rich". However, a typical successful businessman has to have a perfect partner, right? Sergei's and Alexandra's encounter was a pure coincidence - Sergei needed a proper wife who would do anything according to her husband, Alexandra needed a man who would take care of her and financially secure her. Alexandra was a very young lady from a poor family. But what was worse than living from hand to hand was her untreated illness - fragile bones, fragile mind and a slowly growing cancer - that all was a secret Sergei never found out about. And due to Sergei's aggression and growing presure from his work and political position, Alexandra had to suffer slowly... and no-one could do anything about it. Not every home is the best After Alexandra gave birth to her son, Dmitry, she became even more fragile and exhausted. Her husband didn't care anymore, he only did his best to keep himself as a successful person in strangers' eyes. And because of that Alexandra had to gave up on her faith, who's a Orthodox Christian, and started to centralize around Vincent, her only hope. However, even in presence of their only child Sergei didn't hesitate to relieve his aggression on his wife. Alexandra was helpless - she could not leave without Dmitry, without money, without her own strength. Alexandra suffered five more years until she finally reached her prayed heaven, leaving her only son behind... Since Alexandra gave bith to her son, her health condition became worse, every day, and with this thought Sergei blamed little Dmitry from Alexandra's death and started developing aggression towards him. Little Dmitry, confused by why his father started hating him so much, tried to enjoy his free days somewhere outside. However, making friends with their long lasting rivals, tigers, was not acceptable, right? Little Dmitry learned another hurtful lesson. It took long time for Dmitry to get used to this life - he hated it, but he could not hate his birth country... which was taken away from him another five years later. Sergei could not handle the situation of his low class employees who finally after so many years started a revolution. Sergei's and Dmitry's home was in a centre of revolution - bricks broke the windows, fire engulfed the furniture... Sergei and Dmitry had to literally run away from this place, once called home, and run away from their country. Better start? America - a place of golden streets, a place of free lands. That was Sergei's new target. But was is exactly as he dreamd of? As other immigrants Sergei and Dmitry lived in crowded flats filled with filth and limited basic life needs. Dmitry was tangled to his father's back luck, whether he wanted it or not. But his father had still contacts. After few months they could move into a large, already rotten and almost fell apart, building with no-one around. Sergei saw a new change, Dmitry only worse start. His father started to get bored of his son's company and started neglect his son even more than before. Dmitry was sick of his new life, worse that before, but Dmitry's new "mother" was even bigger nightmare than he could imagine - a simple streetwalker only few years older than him. However, young people can get surprisingly mean. After Sergei's new mate, Melanie, found out about his fundations, she started to make a plan how to force Sergei leave all of his legacy for her. Best idea? Give him a better heir than Dmitry was. Get onto your own feet Dmitry could not handle the current situation in his life and decided to run away from his abuse father and his new rival. But who would accept a half-wild wolf cup in thier nest? With people's prejudices Dmitry started calling streets his new home since he had no other choice. And returning to his father? He would rather die than that. It didn't take Dmitry long to understand money are a key to, at least, standart life. But due to his low age no-one would employ a kid into their business... except for black markets and perverts. Ready or not, Dmitry knew living only from garbage wouldn't keep him alive for long. As a shadow, as a no longer officially existing person, Dmitry started making money through "gentle work" which left a great trauma on him. However, his first luck appeared - his body started to get features after his father and Dmitry started getting offers for street fighting. It wasn't exactly the best, but definitely better that his previous experience. "Vincent... now this sounds like a fighter!" Now Vincent earned his new identity and could finally afford a smaller flat and a proper food. He visited his "family" only few times since that. After that, he tried to focuse on his new, hopefully better, life. Luck! Luck! Luck! But that doesn't last forever With higher earnings everything went much more smooth. Vincent asked for asylum in a new region for young adults who aspired to find a job a leave the place as soon as possible. The workers of that place gave him few tips for work with recommendation. Another long years of his life Vincent kept up like a security guard. Was it a coincidence or not? The same working place was requested for a quite young female irbis immigrant, Vincent's future life partner - Sherab Azuki. Both of them did not honour the ancient traditions since Azuki was brought up by pair of ibex. Vincent knew this will be his life partner and tried his best to not lose her - he learned Japanese, found another two jobs for better earnings and even bought their own flat, that all only for his beloved Azuki. At the top of it, the pair was lucky to have their common child - Rozaline, tehir sweet Rose. Vincent could not even express his excitement and joy for his new, true family. His daughter and partner gave him new energy for their future life. Vincent tried to do his best he could, tried to be better father then his was. However, Vincents death number appeared once again... After the wolf came back from his work, he could not believe his eyes - Rose and Azuki were murdered. Who could do that? Someone who feared ancestros such as Vincent and Azuki were? Someone who did not accept hybrids? Someone who new Vincent was related to Sergei? There were so many options yet no-one could finds the true sinner of this terrible crime. Waiting for death The new energy quickly vanished, Vincent lost all of his jobs, his flat, his new hope. What did he do wrong for such terrible things that happened to him? Lost in emptiness of his inner world and left with despair, Vincent didn't try to continue in his life. Isolated at the far edge of the large city, somewhere in the middle of ruins, he waited for death to consume him. To quicken his "process" he started damaging his organs, especially lungs. But to the wolf's surprise his younger brother, now successful businessman like their father was, offered him a help. Vincent didn't trust his half-brother, but Frederich's current power over regions forced Vincent to join him. What an irony they ended up in the same place where it all began - in the old rotten building, now one of the greatest and high productionable metal factories in northern part of USA. Vincent wasn't surprised that this all inherited Frederich, now that their father is gone. But why so sudden? Even though Vincent was offered a job and a place to live, his current life was like a street's rat - hidding from the world and waiting for death... That all changed a young cat Vincent found behind the factory almost death, yet still breathing... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Even tho Vincent's past was more drastic, Vincent's and Raven's lives are somehow very alike... This kind of "storytelling" leaves a lots of quetions. Does the Sergei's death and Vincent's murdered family have a connection? And what about Frederich? We haven't heard much of him in this post... Artwork, Vincent, story & SotRW (universe) © MrsFalcon (FalconFeatherTheCat) (me)

#my art #vincent #sotrw #reference sheet #ref sheet #drawing #digital art #digital drawing #Digital Illustration #digital #wolf #anthropomorphic #anthro furry #anthro #original character #original #my oc

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consumedkings-archive · 3 years

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ancient names, pt. xx

A John Seed/Original Female Character Fanfic

Ancient Names, pt xx: hell is empty

Masterlink Post

Word Count: ~7k

Rating: Just mature; some mature themes but nothing explicit.

Warnings: None, just Elliot's mouth and like uncalled-for sadness, John's a baby. What's new.

Notes: Hi henlo! I cannot believe we have one chapter and one epilogue left of this. I'm trying not to be emotional about so IT'S FINE but we're gonna keep the notes short otherwise I'm gonna get sappy!!

I want to thank you to @shallow-gravy for lending me her eyeballs on this and letting me stress out over nothing to her all the time; @lilwritingraven for being just an absolute peach a girl could ask for and listening to to me whine and cry; and @baeogorath, one of the first people to read this and suffer through the memes and dumpster fire writing to be here. Thank you all for loving my girl as much as you do!

@starcrier, idk man you know what's up. Elliot wouldn't be in any universe without you, and this fic just simply wouldn't have happened. I love you wit all me heart!

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Cameron Burke had failed.

That was the flat, bare truth of it now, as he kept the blonde clutched to him. Elliot’s entire body was trembling; she was soaking wet, and her teeth chattered, and she looked like someone had been throwing her around for sport. Even though she was crying softer now, gentle hiccups rattling around in her chest, she felt small—tiny, and battered.

Yes, Cameron Burke had failed, and if the rapid decline of what was supposed to be a by-the-book arrest in a tiny Montana town wasn’t evidence enough of this, he certainly had enough evidence before him. Now, with John Seed looking at him as a man incensed. Now, with the eyes of the other Seed siblings pinned on him—the most unsettling of all being Faith’s large doe-eyes. All of them, bleeding in and out of his vision, the world swooning as the effects of Bliss rushed around in his bloodstream.

Now, with Elliot in his arms, having been laid out like a lamb for slaughter.

“I’m s-so—” The blonde’s voice hiccupped, fresh with grief. “I’m s-sorry, Burke, I—tried to find you—”

“Stop,” he managed out, his voice hoarse, “stop, Rook, I don’t—you don’t need to apologize, it’s not...”

Joseph was saying something over their conversation, but he only caught snippets of it; the voices echoed and overlapped as the world swam, so it was easiest to be focused on quieting Elliot. As his hands went to her face, he thought he heard a sharp intake of breath from someone; he couldn’t have said who even if he thought he knew.

“Well, we can’t stand around,” said John, impatient and brisk. “Elliot’s going to get pneumonia again if we do.”

“Can’t have that,” Jacob rumbled amusedly. “Why don’t we let her and Burke play catch-up back at the compound?”

And then Jacob looked at Elliot—and Burke could tell, because her cries were quieting and she seemed to be trying to steel herself—and the redhead said, “I’m sure they have a lot to talk about.”

“I’ll take Elliot back to get cleaned up,” John insisted. “And then they can chat all they want.”

The brunette turned and looked at them. Burke could feel Elliot’s heartbeat, held this close, and for a moment he was violently reminded of the way that it had felt when he was a child, catching wild rabbits that had hidden beneath the brush around his home; their pulses had been frantic, hard and fast and almost violent, and now Elliot’s was—

John extended his hand. For all it mattered, Burke might as well have not existed at that moment; the man was only looking at Elliot, perhaps mentally willing away Burke’s existence. He said, perfectly composed with only a thin tenor of venom in his voice, “Come on, El.”

Burke felt before he saw the way Elliot went to take his hand, like instinct, like she didn’t even have to think about it anymore.

He didn’t like it. He especially didn’t like John so casually using a nickname with the rookie, like they were familiar; thinking back on it, Elliot had seemed less angry about being baptized and more angry at not getting pulled out sooner, and had said his name like they were familiar, and—

He tightened his hold on her. “No,” he ground out, biting the words through his teeth.

John’s eyes flickered up to his indignantly. That spark of anger, of fury, gave Burke a tiny bit of vindication. Serves you right, you fucking psycho, he thought viciously, even as the Bliss pumped through his system and made it feel like every thought was being dragged through molasses.

“You don’t want to start this with me,” John said, his voice pitching low and poisonous, “Cameron Burke.”

I know you, he was saying. I know your fucking name, and maybe that would have bothered Burke before but it didn’t, anymore. He’d fried bigger fish than fucking John Seed, that was for sure.

“Fuck. You,” Burke spat. “John Seed.”

“Stop,” Elliot said, her voice wobbling. “Stop, it’s—”

She pulled back just a little, still shivering, her gaze darting between them like she was trying to find the best way to say something; but then her eyes stayed on Burke, like the person she needed to break something to was him, and he felt his stomach lurch.

Not you too, he thought, faintly, somewhere in the back of his mind. Tell me they didn’t get you too.

“John,” Joseph said, having wandered over, “we have a lot that needs to be discussed. Perhaps Faith can take them back to one of the bunkhouses in the meantime?”

“I’d be happy to,” Faith said sweetly. Her voice sent a violent jolt of panic down his spine, and Burke swallowed thickly, his head snapping to the source of her voice. She looked exactly the same as she had before, when she—

“No complaints about that?” John asked venomously. Burke looked at Elliot, his brows furrowing for a moment before he took her hand. He wanted to say no; he wanted to say fuck no, no fuckin’ way I’m following that siren of yours anywhere, but each time his eyes darted to her, the words got caught up in his throat.

Elliot said firmly, “We’ll go with you, Faith,” and it took everything he had to not swallow back the sound of distress that tried to come out of him.

He was Cameron Fucking Burke, and the idea of being remotely close to alone with Faith Seed had words failing him, his feet bolted to the ground. But Burke couldn’t tell if it was more favorable to letting John wander off with Elliot, and in the end—at least this way, they would be together.

Whatever that meant.

“Fine,” John snapped out. With Elliot no longer tangled up in Burke’s protective embrace, Joseph took this opportunity and snagged Elliot’s hand, placing it over his heart.

Joseph did not look at Burke a single time when he said, his voice slick with a rich, warm timbre that Burke was sure had to be practiced, “You make a most beautiful child of Eden, Elliot.”

Elliot swallowed. Burke’s grip on her hand loosened, just for a moment, but when she threaded their fingers together for a little extra support he saw the way that her jaw was clenching and her lashes were fluttering. They hadn’t doused her in Bliss, he thought—if he could trust what he saw in the clarity of her eyes, anyway—which somehow made the allowance of Joseph’s hands on her all the worse.

When Joseph moved away, and said something lowly to Jacob, John closed what little distance remained and took Elliot’s face in his hands; Burke’s grip on her tightened, waiting for John to do something. Threaten her, grab her—anything to live up to the reputation he had so carefully and diligently created for himself.

He did not. John took Elliot’s face in his hands and he leaned in like a lover. There was a moment as he did that where Elliot’s chin tilted, taking her mouth just that much out of his reach.

And they were looking at each other, like that. Like it was a game. Like they had done it before; John, chasing her for a kiss, just like this, because then the man grinned half-wicked and kissed her.

No fucking way, Burke thought, and waited—waited for the kickback, for Elliot to bite him, anything.

It didn’t come. His stomach sank. Not you too, Rook.

“I’ll come find you,” John said into her mouth, “when I’m done.”

It should have been a threat, coming out of his mouth—John Seed didn’t say shit like that without it being a threat—but after he said it, he leaned in and kissed Elliot again; longer this time, his hands only dragging from her face when it was time to step back.

John’s eyes fixed on Burke as he pulled away. Fucker, he thought with no absence of poison. You fucker, you got your fucking fangs in her, you and your fucking psycho siblings, and—

There was little time to think about it, around his anger. Elliot’s fingers stayed laced with his, and as Faith moved back up the slope to the compound and they trailed behind obediently, Burke could feel the eyes of the Seed brothers on him. Lingering. Watching. Calculating.

Faith looked back at him over her shoulder and flashed a smile that felt more wolfish than it should have for a girl in a white dress. It made his spine crawl. She took Elliot’s free hand, interlacing their fingers and bringing Elliot’s hand up to her cheek lovingly, her lashes fluttering.

“I didn’t know you and Elliot were that close, Mr. Burke,” she said, her words sugared and echoing in ripples around him.

Burke swallowed thickly. “She’s a good kid,” he managed out hoarsely, lamely, because the second he thought about telling Faith to go fucking die he felt his chest tighten. God, how long had he spent in that nightmare with her? It couldn’t have been longer than a week, maybe—but after she’d left? How many days had passed that he’d been trying to survive off of creek water and whatever food he could find in empty houses speckled across the Montana countryside?

Faith laughed. They were like a little daisy-chain, the three of them, speckling the early morning woods until they came out into the compound—and then there were eyes on them. Less than Burke remembered. Where had the rest of them gone?

“Well, that’s certainly right,” Faith continued, turning to face them and walking backwards as they slipped under the intricate white trellis caging the majority of the yard.

She stopped walking; Burke would have nearly ran her over if he hadn’t been paying so much attention to how close she was to him. With deliberate honeyed timbre, Faith murmured, “We love her around these parts,” and planted a chaste kiss on Elliot’s fingers, tangled with her own. “Just ask John.”

“We’re here,” Elliot said, a little too quickly to be casual, to be normal, and Faith shot her a sly look before she turned around and opened the door to the bunkhouse. Inside, it was mostly bare; as they walked in, Elliot released both of their hands, and Burke could see a duffel bag unzipped and laying open on the nearby tiny table, filled with a few books and clothes.

Like she was planning on staying, he thought tiredly, at least for a little while.

“Play nice, you two,” Faith said from the doorway.

The door clicked shut. They were left in silence for a moment, Elliot gathering up some of her things and putting them back into the duffel bag—like she was trying to tidy up her home for an unexpected guest. The idea of it made Burke’s stomach wrench.

“Hey, you don’t—” He started.

“—’m sorry, it’s—”

They both stopped. Burke rubbed his hands over his face, exhaling through his mouth.

“Let’s,” he tried again, “start from the beginning.”

“Okay,” Elliot murmured, swallowing thickly. “Okay, I can do that.”

“Great.” Burke pulled the chair out from the table and sat down; the world sighed in relief around him when he did, woozy and dreamy and green—all green, except for Elliot, in that blue fucking dress.

“Go on, then.”

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“What the fuck was that?!”

John could feel it—he could feel the strain, the anger, bubbling high in his voice, pulling tightightight until he thought it might snap. The second the three of them got into the chapel, Jacob sauntered toward the front as though nothing had occurred at all, as if it were business as normal.

“John,” Joseph cautioned, his voice pensive.

“No, I’m really curious,” John seethed, soaking wet and freezing, “why it is our brother felt the need to bring the U.S. Marshal back alive.”

“‘I’ve got it under control’,” the redhead intoned, his voice coming out flat and biting, “isn’t that what you said, Johnny?”

John stared at his eldest brother. There was just a shred of his self-control left—just one tiny shred, and the only reason he still had it was because the look on Burke’s stupid fucking face when he’d kissed Elliot was singularly propelling him along.

This was bad. It was bad, because Elliot was still in a fragile state of being: she was still thinking about things rather than just doing what felt good and right, and that was the most troublesome fucking thing about her—that those gears were always turning, always rattling around, even when he managed to make them go the other way for a moment.

He didn’t want her gears shut off. He wanted them working for him.

“I’m—” John sucked in a sharp breath. “Burke was supposed to be dead. This is an unprecedented—”

“If everything’s under control, then why the fuck is Burke being alive a problem?” Jacob replied sharply. “I’m thinking about the long game, John. I’m thinking about sending you to live underground in a fucking bunker with her and some of our people. But mostly—” His voice came out between gritted teeth. “—I’m thinking about us. You know, our family? You’ve been acting like a loose-fucking-cannon this whole Goddamn time, and if one person Elliot’s known for a handful of days is going to derail your entire operation, maybe you don’t have everything under control.”

Fuck you, John thought viciously, but the words wouldn’t come; they stayed strangled in his throat, because a part of him said maybe Jacob was right, and maybe that meant that things weren’t going to go as well as he planned.

He pushed the thoughts from his head just in time for Joseph to say, “I do find this troubling.”

John took in another short, sharp breath. “It’s not a problem,” he insisted, feeling more than a little frantic. “It’s not. You just—you don’t see what it’s like when—”

“John,” Joseph said, sounding almost tired now, “she looked right at you and chose Burke instead.”

“She didn’t! She didn’t choose Burke, she just—she just—” He swallowed thickly. “She wants me to reveal her sin. Why would she do that if she didn’t want to be with me? With us? She wouldn’t just say that, and—and maybe seeing Burke again made her feel something different, but it’s like you said, Joseph, she’s strangling the person she used to be and that’s—”

“She’s becoming,” his older brother articulated, “more trouble than she’s worth.”

“And might even be a bigger problem,” Jacob added, “isn’t that right, John?”

John’s mouth twisted as he tried to figure out what exactly it was Jacob was alluding to. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, you’re not using protection when you’re fucking her, are you?” the redhead snapped, and Joseph sighed—a long, suffering sound. John didn’t want to feel shame, but when Joseph tilted his head to the gray morning light filtering through the chapel’s window as though for a respite from this conversation, he did.

Jacob plunged on, “And since you felt the need to kick your fucking window open the other night, I got a real good idea of how much self-control you actually have when it comes to preventing problems.” His eyes narrowed. “You’re practically begging for a mishap.”

No, he thought furiously, pushing the memory of Elliot gripping his jaw and telling him to beg for it out of his head, no, this is not how this fucking goes. This is not how this goes at all.

“I’m finishing Elliot’s baptism,” he bit out. “She’s mine—”

His brain halted and stuttered on the words, and when his brothers looked at him, he amended, “My wife, and she’ll join us. She will. She almost already has. I have it under. Control.”

For a moment, silence reigned supreme. Finally, Joseph said, “We are out of time, John.”

“We’re not, we planned for at least another week of reaping.”

“That was for emergencies only,” Jacob bit out. “What, you want to fucking push the end of the world?”

“One week,” Joseph interjected. “You have one week. I want our deputy’s sin revealed, I want her converted, I want her under control.” His voice was hard now, flinty and unforgiving, when he looked at John. “If she is not, John—”

“She will be.”

“If she isn’t,” he continued, his mouth twisting, “you understand the consequences.”

The Gates of Eden will be closed to you.

John swallowed thickly. “Yes, Joseph.”

Joseph looked at him for a long moment—a moment of suffering, of John waiting for something, anything that would indicate where the conversation was going to go. Blessedly, Jacob remained silent too, and another set of agonizing heartbeats passed before Joseph spoke again.

“We will be collecting the last of the supplies from Fall’s End and anything within quick reach,” he said, looking down at the map on the table and adjusting it. “You have until then, John.”

He opened his mouth to say something, his mind scrambling; I will, Joseph, I can do this, I know I can, but his older brother lifted his hands to stop him.

“We’re done here,” Joseph said. “Leave us, John.” And then, almost as though to soften the blow of his words: “You’re going to catch ill if you stay in those wet clothes.”

John swallowed thickly. He looked at Jacob for a moment; his words were still ringing in his head. I’m thinking about us. You know, our family?

“Yes, Joseph,” he managed out after a moment, turning and heading toward the door, the sound of his footsteps echoing lonely and cold in the mostly-empty chapel.

I am too, he thought. I’m thinking about us too.

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Burke’s head was in his hands.

He was disappointed.

All things considered, Elliot thought that maybe this was the best way this conversation could have gone. After all, Burke wasn’t her father; he was just a man, a U.S. Marshal, and at one point in time he’d talked her through a firefight with a bunch of cultists and then she thought she’d died but she hadn’t. That didn’t make it any different from telling any other person about this, right?

But that was wrong. It was different. Because Burke had looked at her file—he saw her restraining order, her psych eval—and the only thing he’d said to her was he was glad she was around and she’d kicked ass at the Academy. It was the first time she’d ever felt anything close to regular with someone who wasn’t Joey Hudson. Even Whitehorse hadn’t stopped looking at her like she was a loaded fucking gun.

“So what now?” she asked after a moment, shifting on her feet. She’d rushed through changing into dry clothes in the bathroom and came back out to tell him everything—about the other cult, about Joey. About John, too.

She’d skipped over that part as much as she could. Now that she thought about it, she’d had to muck painfully through a lot of things she had been trying to tell Burke.

“You see, don’t you?” Burke asked, lifting his head from his hands. “You see that they’re fuckin’ with you, right?”

Elliot sat down on the floor, her back pressed up against the bunk. She rubbed her eyes tiredly. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment, and he groaned.

“Rook.”

“I mean it, Burke,” she protested, her chest tightening at the pure, unadulterated exasperation in his voice. “It’s—if you saw the way Joseph talks to him, and... The things he said to me—”

“You mean the things that the cult lawyer said to you?” Burke asked. “You’re smart, Rookie. Too smart to fall for this shit.”

Elliot’s stomach wrenched violently at his words. “Well—” She started, her voice hitching. “Well, I don’t know what to tell you, Burke, I—I tried, you know, I did it fucking by myself for this whole time, alone, and then they took Joey from me and I—” She sucked in a sharp breath. Her brain felt like it was rattling around in her skull, pain pounding behind her eyes; the most unforgivable crime had been committed, that of letting down one of the only people who looked at her like she was normal, and she had been the one to commit it.

“Rook.”

“I—” She felt her lashes flutter, her heart stuttering against her ribs in a painful mockery of what her heartbeat should have been. “I f-fucking—I f—”

Cameron said, gentler, “Elliot.”

“I f-fucking tried,” she told him vehemently around the wobble, and she pulled her knees up to her chest, I’m just a girl, I’m just a girl, this wasn’t supposed to be my life. How was she supposed to say to Burke that sometimes, she felt like she was a passenger to herself—sometimes, the world felt like it was splitting in half and more than once John Seed had taken her face in his hands and put her back together, let her dig her nails and teeth into him to feel real? How was she supposed to tell him and make him understand?

All of those times, and the way John had said, I want a home with you, and the way he said, I’m yours, and—

“I know,” Burke said, his voice quieter now. “I know, kid, I—”

But she shook her head, because he didn’t know, not really. “I tried, even though I was alone, and now I’m—now you’re here, but I’m... I’m t-this and I don’t have anything left and John, he—h—h—”

He swallowed, coming down off of the chair to sit next to her. Burke’s hands found one of hers, still cold and chilly from the river and maybe from something else and brought it to his neck. She could feel his heartbeat there; just like before, it was fast, but steady as his body burned through the Bliss he’d been exposed to.

“How long’s it been?” he asked. “Since we tried arresting that psycho.”

“I don’t know,” Elliot managed out, having mimicked Burke’s breathing patterns already, without thinking very hard about it. “Two weeks? The—season changed—”

“Yeah. Leaves falling. Maybe two, probably closer to three,” Burke murmured, sighing and rubbing his face with his free hand. “Fuck. This whole thing’s gone to shit. My guys—they should be swinging in here any minute now.”

“Your—guys?” she asked.

“Yeah. You know, the government?” Burke looked at her for a moment. “What, you think they just send a guy in and he fucks off for three weeks and no one asks what’s up?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Elliot replied uncertainly. Of course the government was going to come and figure out what happened. They’d sent a U.S. Marshal to arrest a man leading a cult. Why wouldn’t they try and check in and see what was going on when he failed to show up? “Jerome always said that—it was just up to us now.”

Burke tsked his tongue, shaking his head. “Yeah, well, that’s his—that's a small-town militia, you know. And in his defense, shit was pretty fucked up. No phone lines? No signals? Feels apocalyptic.”

“Yeah,” Elliot whispered, remembering Dutch’s words, “yeah, it does.”

He stared at her for a moment longer, finally letting her hand go but not moving from their close proximity, like maybe he was afraid she was going to teeter off the edge again at any moment. She didn’t like that feeling. She didn’t like thinking maybe Burke was starting to be afraid of her, the way that Whitehorse had been afraid of her.

“We gotta play it normal,” Burke said after a moment, rubbing his face with one hand. “You and me both, kid. You sounded like you had a plan, before?”

She nodded after a moment, clearing her throat. “I was going to go through with the whole… Baptism, or whatever, and then try and get to this radio they have in the chapel,” she explained. “John’s been—I told him I want to leave, but I didn’t tell him that I planned on trying to get in touch with someone.”

The older man watched her, his dark eyes quiet. Finally, he nodded. “That’s good. You stay not telling him, got it?”

“Okay,” she said, and there was a wash of relief that flooded her. It reminded her that she wasn’t, by any means, someone who wanted to be in a leadership position—she didn’t like making executive decisions. The only reason she’d made it this far was because she’d been making executive decisions for bare-minimum survival. The idea of getting to the radio had only just been rooted in her brain, the ticking of the channels scanning the only noise that had been in the chapel the last time she and Joseph had been alone.

When John had left them alone, because Joseph had told him to.

I want a home with you.

But she wasn’t sure that John did—not in the way that he was letting her think. It was easy to think all of these things when it was just her and all she had to rely on was her own murky brain, but what about now? What about now that she had to look at Burke and explain how she’d caved a man’s skull in with an empty gun?

Joseph was right. There was no life for her, not really, not after this; not after everything she had done. But that didn’t mean she had to let him get off free, either.

“Play it normal,” Burke said again, lower this time. “Whatever you have to do to keep them focused on you, but not suspicious of you. Don’t bother with the radio—I’ll figure something out. Sounds like it might be a military kinda radio, could have better luck if I try to get in there and see if anyone’s even in the area.”

“And what about—” Elliot paused. When the dark-haired man waited expectantly, she took in a little breath and said, “What about John?”

Burke stared at her for a moment, working his jaw before he exhaled sharply, letting his head loll a little. He clearly didn’t enjoy what he was going to say next, and Elliot worked her fingers against her palm absently, worrying the muscle there.

“Not making any promises. That man’s got a rap sheet about three times longer than whatever you’re convinced you’ve done,” he said finally. “But if he cuts a deal—agrees to testify against his brothers and Faith, no holds-barred, maybe there’ll be a lighter sentencing in there. Not a non-existent one. Just a lighter one. I don’t fuckin’ know, I’m not a lawyer and I’m not gonna put my ass on the line for that fuckhead.”

She nodded. It just confirmed for her what she had been afraid was already true—that maybe it had been over-ambitious to think she and John could just up and leave. At least, now that she knew that someone was coming to clean up this mess.

Regardless, it felt good to talk to someone who wasn’t a Seed—and it made her painfully aware of how much she missed Joey, a deep and bottomless grief that kept swallowing her up over and over. Just like that, it felt like the scales had fallen from her eyes. Like Saul.

“You should probably try to avoid talking to me,” he continued after a moment. “Make up something about how—I’m a big asshole, or something.”

“So tell the truth,” Elliot ventured, a little smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Burke rolled his eyes and nudged her with his foot.

“You always been this mouthy?” he asked, taking a swig from the water bottle she’d given to him to try and help his sobering gentle up a little.

She said, “Only with people I like.”

“Cute.”

A moment of quiet silence passed, comfortable and easy, before Burke reached over and gripped her shoulder with his gloved hand. She looked at him, and for a second, something crumpled in his expression.

“Elliot,” he said, his voice lower, “I’m sorry. For all of this—fuckin’ garbage you’ve had to do.”

She blinked at him, feeling a warm, fresh feeling expand and grow in her chest. It was sadness, she realized too late, the tears already starting to burn in her eyes; sadness, and a little bit of relief, because she couldn’t remember the last time someone had looked at her and said they were sorry she had suffered.

“It’s fine,” she said automatically, without thinking, because it was—she was here, and breathing, and fine, so that meant it was fine, right?

Burke shook his head and said, more firmly, “I never wanted to leave you alone, kid. I mean it. And I’m not gonna let that happen again, okay? You and me, we’re a team.”

Elliot swallowed back a hiccuping little cry and nodded her head, passing a hand over her eyes just once so that she could gather herself and push the tears back. Burke hauled her in and gave her a firm, one-armed squeeze.

“Said we’re gonna get the fuck out of here,” he said into her hair. “And I fuckin’ meant it.”

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When John returned to the bunkhouse—the one that had become his base of operations, not Elliot’s—she was there.

“I’m surprised,” were the first words that came out of his mouth, before his brain even had time to register in what order the sensory details were coming into his brain. First that she was there at all, without Burke, giving him a pleasant little thrill; second, that she seemed to have shucked a sweater and jeans in favor of sporting only his shirt, loosely buttoned up just far enough to cover her but not all the way to the top; third, that she was tucked up in the bed like that was where she was supposed to be always.

And it was where she was supposed to be, always. Where he could have her.

Elliot’s eyes flickered up from the book she’d been reading. He tried to catch the title of it, but she dog-eared the page and tossed it onto the floor face down before he could.

“About?” she prompted. He let the door swing shut behind him and moved to the bed, stepping out of his shoes before making his way to the dresser so he could get out of his wet clothes.

“Well,” John said casually, trying not to let the words sting on their way out, “I thought you’d still be with Burke. You know. Visiting.”

Whatever the fuck that meant. He still hadn’t shaken the irritation at hearing Burke tell him no—like he had any idea what kind of person Elliot was, like he had some kind of claim on her. It had taken everything in him not to blurt out that Elliot was his wife, his girl, his—

“We did,” Elliot replied. Her eyes were on him as he changed and then doubled-back across the room to sit on the edge of the bed. She snagged his hand as it slid up her bare thigh and brought it to the juncture between her neck and shoulder; his thumb swept along the front of her throat. “Visit, I mean.”

“And yet, here you are.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t be?”

John hummed, low and non-committal, before he leaned in and pressed his mouth to her neck. She sighed; he dragged his lips downward, tracing over each bruise there from Kian’s hands; things he had memorized, that he thought he could tell Elliot liked, because her breath hitched in her lungs when he did. Maybe it felt like he was erasing Kian from her, or maybe she just liked the sting.

“I can’t imagine Burke’s very thrilled with our...” His words trailed off. “...Recently-developed relationship.”

“You’re right. He’s not,” she said, and she nudged him back so that he was sitting upright and she could swing herself onto his lap. This close, with her arms draped over his shoulders, John could smell the faded scent of his cologne on her; his hands slid up beneath the hem of the shirt to splay against the dips of her spine, and he nuzzled the hollow of her throat. “He’s—protective, that’s all.”

“So what did you talk about tonight?” he asked. He pressed his mouth to the spot just below her ear that made her squirm in his lap. “You and daddy Burke.”

Elliot guided his face to hers and kissed him; but it was an unkind kiss, and she dragged her teeth against his lower lip until John made a low noise at the punishing pace of the kiss, and she said, “Do not call him ‘daddy Burke’, John.”

“Fine,” he defended against her mouth, “I won’t, I’m just curious as to the nature of your conversation. And your relationship.”

“Yeah? Okay, I told him that I let you fuck me filthy in a variety of places, sometimes covered in another man’s blood,” Elliot snipped. “What do you think I said?”

“It’d be pretty good if you said that.”

When her mouth left his, he made a small sound of complaint; she trailed her lips down his throat, and she smoothed her hands along the bare skin of his chest, fingers dipping and running along the curves of his scars, tracing the shape of the tattoos that he knew were there. She didn’t need to look at them to know their shape now.

“El,” he murmured when she nudged him back until he was laying on the bed and she could trace the lines of his Sloth scar with her mouth. The second he felt her tongue flickering against his skin, he felt a bloom of heat spread through him. “El, I want to talk about—”

“So talk,” Elliot replied, and then she kissed a spot on his chest reverently. “If you want. I want to enjoy you.”

John exhaled sharply out of his mouth. He’d never gotten to indulge a more wanton Elliot—their moments had always been heated, slipping through his fingers, faster than he would have liked and more brutal than he would have thought—but this was different. She was in his shirt, and she smelled like him, and her breath fanned hot against his skin and she was touching him like he was—

Something good. Something holy.

“Are you distracting me?” John managed out, just as Elliot settled back on his lap, and fuck that was so unfair, watching the shoulder of his shirt slouch off of her, too big and a little loose from being worn, just as she pressed herself against him. “So that you don’t have to—t-to—”

“To?” Elliot replied. “Talk about Burke? I told you, I want us to have—” She paused, lashes fluttering for a moment, and then rested her chin there on his chest. “I don’t plan on going through the system and the paperwork after this. Not after everything I’ve…”

John sat up a little, looking at her. The blonde moved seamlessly with him—no clunking movements, no awkward tangle of their limbs; when her attention was fully on him and nothing else, it felt like they had been made for each other, like they had always been each other’s fate.

“What if—” He stopped, watching her. “What if we didn’t do…Any of that?”

Elliot regarded him for a moment, a little tense. “What do you mean?”

“What if we stayed,” John ventured, “here?”

She blinked. Sat on his lap, wearing his shirt, her cheeks warm and her eyes bright and clear, John might have had more apprehension about saying the words out loud. But this time, it wasn’t like he was coming clean about a lie—it was more like… Shifting plans. Just a little. Just testing the waters, that was all.

“So what if we did?” Elliot said at last, watching him.

“We could just stay,” he murmured, taking her face in his hands. “You and me. We could just stay, the two of us, and—”

“Stay with your brothers,” Elliot clarified, “one of which is a cult leader.”

“Well—”

“And the other being a Darwinian elitist who admitted, out loud, he wanted to kill me ‘more than anything’.”

“That’s just Jacob,” John relented.

“This is not what we talked about,” Elliot said, her brows furrowing. “We did not discuss staying here with your—psychotic brothers—”

He felt the way her voice pitched up, felt it high in her throat, like a panic; her little rabbit heart fluttering hard and fast, and he leaned in and kissed her, felt the dig of her nails in his arms where she gripped him.

She said, “John,” into his mouth, a warning; one single warning, and that was all he was going to get, his little rattlesnake. He knew her well-enough by now.

“You and I both know that there isn’t a normal life waiting for us,” he said urgently, against her lips. “We both know that. I know that you don’t want to sit down in a bunker—”

“Stop—”

“—but regardless of what you think of my family, they understand you, Elliot—”

The blonde shook her head, her nose brushing his as she did so. “No. Fuck that, John. Fuck that, and fuck you for—”

“For what?” he demanded, pulling back to look at her. “Wanting to be around people who get it? You’ve killed a hundred people—maybe more, fuck if I know. I see the way you get. I’ve been there, and you know I have, and we can have that safety. We can have a place to belong, Elliot.”

She slid out of his lap. Her fingers carded through her hair; she looked like she was trying to parse through something, pinning out the wings of a butterfly that she couldn’t quite get a grasp on. Come on, he thought, come on, Elliot, come on, you’re mine and you know it.

Elliot turned to look at him. She looked emotional—her nose and cheeks were pinker, her bottom lashes dotted with unshed tears. It pleased him a little, to see her like this; before, she’d worked so very hard to make sure he never did.

“No,” she said, standing in his shirt, one arm across her chest and the other propped on it while she dug her thumb nail into her lip. “No, I’m not fucking doing it, John. I’m not getting in a bunker with your fucking peggies—”

He sighed, passing a hand over his face. “Elliot—”

“—and I’m sure as fuck,” she bit out, “not asking Joseph to take me in. Fuck. That.”

“You are impossible,” John ground out.

“I am literally the most flexible person!” Elliot exclaimed, her voice bordering on hysteria; there, something in him said, there’s the switch, there’s the flip, all that venom she’d been holding onto. “There’s nobody more go-with-the-fucking-flow than me, John Seed. Oh, a second cult takes over my hometown? Cool, I’ll evacuate everyone. Oh, they have my best friend captive? The one that you were supposed to be taking care of? Whatevs, it’s super fucking cool, she’s fucking dead and my family’s gone and everyone I’ve ever known is fucking gone, might as well be dead, and I can’t fucking go see them. I can’t, because I’m fucking—”

She sucked in a breath, dragging her hands through her hair. “I’m fucking covered,” she seethed, “in blood, I will never be normal again, and none of this would have fucking—”

“Elliot,” John started, coming to a stand, because he didn’t want her to say it; he didn’t want her to say none of this would have happened if it weren’t for you, but he felt it, right there, sitting between them. “Hellcat, come here.”

“No.” Her voice broke. “No, I’m so fucking tired of coming to you, John.”

“Then I’ll come to you,” he insisted. Maybe it was a little dirty—maybe he was thinking, this is perfect, I need her just like this, raw and desperate and turbulent, and when he crossed the small space between them and reached for her she didn’t shy away from him; just turned her face and fixed her eyes on the wall. “Joseph gave me everything,” he said urgently, pressing their foreheads together. “In a way—he even brought you to me. I don’t want to stay here forever. So what if the world doesn’t end? Then we get out of the bunker and we go wherever we want to go.”

“This is fucking insane,” Elliot said, her voice wrecked. She sounded so tired. “That you’re even asking me to—”

“I’m asking,” John clarified, “for you to be realistic. About the things that you’ve done. That I’ve done. At least—” He turned her face to look at him, and he thought, come on, you little viper, come on. So fucking close, we’re so close. “—tell me you’ll think about it.”

She watched him and sucked her teeth. He could hear the draconian gears in her head turning—churning, grinding, and hopefully for his benefit.

Elliot said, “How long do I have to think about it?”

“A week,” he replied earnestly. “I can’t reveal your sin until these bruises clear up a little, anyway.” He reached up, skimming his fingers along the wine-colored bruises dappling her skin. Her lashes, soft and damp, fluttered; she worked something in her jaw, molars grinding as she stared at him, like she couldn’t figure out what it was she wanted to say to him.

Finally, she said, “I don’t like feeling like this was what you wanted all along.”

“I meant it when I said I wanted a home with you,” John replied, and it wasn’t a lie.

“If I tell you I want to go,” she began, “then what?”

That won’t happen. “Then we go,” he murmured. “You and me.”

Elliot nodded once. Her mouth twisted, like she wanted to say something else, but when John leaned in to kiss her, her expression relaxed a little; he felt it like a sigh, his fingers knotting into the hair at the base of her skull.

“I’ll tell you,” she said into the kiss, “what I decide. When I decide.”

“Yes,” he murmured. “I told you, Elliot—"

"I know." This close, their foreheads pressed together, he could feel her lips brushing his with each word.

"Anything I want."

#far cry 5 #fc5 #fic: ancient names #my writing #john seed x female deputy #I HATE IT HEREEEEE #i'm not emotional don't @ me #john seed x original female character #far cry 5 fic #ch: elliot honeysett #ch: john seed #otp: death keep off; i am your enemy #alternative title to this chapter is elliot has a meltdown all the time #let her rest!!!

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al-n-cartoons · 4 years

Text

The Multiverse in a Blender: Prologue

"Hello? Is it-yes, the light's on. I think that means that it's recording. Let's see...where do I start? Well, first of all, my name is Ben. Benjamin Kurby Tennyson from the realm 1.1, alternate name "Soma Benton".

I've been dimension-hopping for a few years now, and it's gotten me in trouble more than once. I've also time traveled a while ago, but that's not important. There were a few 'spats' between dimensions, too, called the "Wreckonings", but they...they're also pretty irrelevant. Anyway, I like to go to different dimensions or realities or realms during my down time, although I normally find them while trying to keep someone from tearing apart the fabric of reality.

That how this whole mess came to be. See, there was this dealer guy, kind of like a bipedal porcupine, his name's "Argit". He'd found a weapon from old stories, swearing to the stars it was real, and made to sell it. I was there only because some other low-lives, as well as the leader to an intergalactic armada, were there and I needed to keep tabs on things. I doubted that the weapon was real, but kept it in mind.

The weapon was called something like "Annihilator" and "barge", it's function was to delete an entire reality and leave it an empty void. Argot got his hands on it, tried to profit off of it, but accidentally set it off. I was saved from being erased only because I'd been in the form of a higher being, Alien X. In that form, I can make anything happen, so long as the two other personalities of the form and I are able to come to an agreement. It's nearly impossible to convince them. By the time I did, though, it was too late, all we could do was make a copy of what once was. I...didn't want that.

Remake the universe and walk around, surrounded by lifeless husks? Because that's what they would be; empty and lifeless, entirely hollow. As Alien X, I could feel the life essence of everyone and thing around me. Bacteria, the grass, the birds, the people. Rook. It was all whisked away, burned and obliterated! I-

Sorry, I got a bit...loud there.

No, I couldn't do that. I grabbed the nearest fistful of realities and yanked them closer, making us whole. Two, three, four, five? Maybe more? I don't know how many in total, but suffice to say there were a lot. Some of them fit nicely together, like Rex's and mine, others are only partially connected. I'm not a hundred-percent sure yet, but if I were to cross certain geographical boundaries, I can cross into another world. I learned that while I was flying, one second a recognized hero in Summer the next a strange beast in the Fall. It was disorienting, to say the least.

So far, I've found and talked with people from three realms. Only the people I'd known of or met before all of this are aware of the change, because now they-you-have multiple different memories of the past. For example, there'd been an enormous explosion of a research facility some years ago that devastated the world, spreading micro-no, wait, sorry-nanobots, that infected every living thing. These caused mutations, most of which happening in the span of a few seconds, turning what was once a perfectly normal individual into a violent, maddened beast. There was an organization for these sudden bursts in mutations, "Providence", but I'm detracting. "Providence" exists in my world now, as a separate branch of the organization I help out with, the Plumbers. Bad name, I know, but it's better than the "Secret Scientists" or the "Men in White". I need to trash that last group fast....

Some people remember the event, some people don't. It depends on where that person is. If someone were to go to an area where, I'm the last, had high E.V.O. activity and had been effected in the world it originally came from, they would have the set of memories from that world. If they're in my neck of the woods, they remember the armadas and invasions instead.

Here's where things get hairy; the walls between our realm are thin and getting thinner. It can't keep the otherworldly beasts out anymore. If the last week is any indication, life will be getting a lot more tough for all of us. That's why I'm contacting you. I am personally delivering copies of this recording to the people I used as links, not just as an explanation, but as a warning. Be careful. Our enemies are probably going to catch wind of this soon, or be otherwise empowered, and we can't just sit back and wait for that to happen. Now, more than ever, we need to talk to one another.

The day you find this recording, around noon, I'll show up at your door. If you decide you don't want to continue on with this ordeal, then you can ask me to leave. If you'd like to help out, ask questions, or meet the others, invite me in and we'll talk. Some of you are more mobile than others and won't need my help getting around. For those of you without some way to fly around the world, I'll give you an all expense paid trip to some place were we'll all meet. Don't ask how, just know that I make bank off of copyright stuff. People really like to merchandise me, and I get a nice percentage off of anything they use my appearance, history, or abilities in.

I just explained it, didn't I? Well, one-take-wonder, keep it rolling.

One last thing, I wouldn't share this message with anyone other than those I wrote on the disk. Just a friendly reminder, not a threat. I told my partner and some of my friends, so they took me off duty for a mental health break. I spent all of this Sunday in a mental hospital until I could convince them that I was fine. They think I had a mental break down from the stress and suffered from a small delusion. Not. Fun.

We'll be in touch."

#ben 10 #ben #Soma #au #crossover #prologue #Chapter 1 #Rex Salazar #Danny Phantom

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zombiescantfly · 5 years

Text

Words About Games: Unreal Tournament (Epic Megagames, 1999)

In 2291, in an attempt to control violence among deep-space miners, the New Earth Government legalized no-holds-barred fighting.

291 years earlier, I heard that for the first time. Unreal Tournament begins with a narrated flythrough explaining two very simple things: there is a Tournament, and you are going to win it. After the lonely melancholy of Unreal, that's a pretty abrupt pivot. Why, after getting through most of the 90s with platformers, pinball, and fighting games, did Epic Megagames barrel in headfirst to the multiplayer arena shooter market, a playground run exclusively by industry already-giant id Software?

Because they wanted to.

As I mentioned in the Unreal essay, that game's multiplayer was a fun shell filled with horrible, horrible problems. Epic set to fixing it, but realized that beyond some quick and dirty surface-level patches, there wasn't a lot they could do within the same scope. So they broke away from a simple expansion pack and landed on creating a full separate release by the name of Unreal Tournament.

Unreal Tournament, UT99 from now on, was released on November 23, 1999, to an almost absurd level of praise. Quake 3 Arena, id’s latest offering in the Quake franchise and first multiplayer-only title, would come out just over a week later on December 2, pitching the two games into a deathmatch of their own which still rages to this day almost 20 years later.

Let's talk about Quake a bit. Shooters, up until around the time the first Quake came out and probably still after that, were commonly referred to as ‘Doom clones’ because, well, many were. Any unambitious dev could buy an engine license, whip up some sprites on a lunchbreak, and ship a game. There's a parallel to be drawn between that era and the current ongoing avalanche of Unity and Unreal asset flips, but you can turn to others for opinions on all that.

Quake was, famously, id Software’s followup to Doom 2, and an early frontrunner of fully-3d shooters. It was so popular and noteworthy that it even caused the term Doom Clone to fall away in favor of Quake Clone. Quake expanded the popularity of online play, and saw the creation of the some of the first AI bots made exclusively for deathmatch. Quake 2 came along not too far after and pulled in even more interest. If you remember from my Unreal essay, that was when it grabbed my own interest, and I became a frequent over-the-shoulder spectator of many a Quake 2 deathmatch.

But then, UT99. When I first played Unreal Tournament, I was blown away. By the bots. Meaning that they killed me a lot. I was very bad at it. I didn't even strafe back then, just ran forward and turned with the mouse. But I learned.

UT99 is actually quite an accommodating game. Bots have 9 skill levels ranging from drooling idiot to a fittingly-named godlike, and I remember bumping them up a level at a time over the years. UT’s bots were one of its largest selling points back then, and the cornerstone of the Tournament part of its name.

The titular Tournament in Unreal Tournament is a series of botmatches of increasing difficulty over the game’s five primary gamemodes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Domination, and Assault. A final series of three 1v1 matches caps off the Tournament, the third of which pits you against the Big Bad Reigning Champ, a robot named Xan Kriegor.

There were a handful of firsts in that short bit, so let's take a look.

As stated, Quake 2 was the de facto king of online shooters at the time. But Quake 2, for all its fame, only had three gamemodes available: deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag. Unreal had dabbled with alternative styles of deathmatch and team deathmatch, but all of them were, more or less, the same gamemode, save one. In a unique take on King of the Hill, the first player to score a kill got a permanent damage boost until they were killed, at which point that buff was transferred to their killer. Killing the King awarded more points, matches were first to X points, you get the idea. RtNP added Cloak Match, a take on this KotH concept where instead of a damage boost, players fought for permanent partial invisibility and infinite jump boots.

Unreal Tournament was a little more ambitious than just reflavoring deathmatch, however. Domination used its own unique rotation of maps centered around controlling three points. Your team scores one point per every couple of seconds, per point held. Touching a point is enough to flip control of it to your side, and the result is a fun, frantic match with enough additional focus to guide it away from just another deathmatch. Map control becomes something more than just controlling various weapon spawns, and demands you keep your attention between the three points. Random respawns instead of near your team’s current territory and the instant capture of points meant the game never ground down to just being spawncamped, and helped reduce the prevalence of one-sided victories. Domination was great, the extra effort put in to creating its own category of maps was great, and games today still use the gamemode. That said, Destiny 2 really needs to make capture instant and not have you sit around for 5 seconds in a tiny room, like come on.

Domination may have been new for the time, and DM, TDM, and CTF made their own waves that I'll get into later, but Assault is what really caught people's attention. Assault was an attack and defense mode where one team was tasked with completing a series of varied objectives, while the defenders tried to stop them. The most similar thing we get in games now is pushing a cart down a predetermined path in TF2 or Overwatch. Payload gamemodes in those games are similar in the sense that one team must progress down a path to get to a specific location, and I suppose it might come across as a streamlining of the idea, but Assault is just more interesting.

UT99 shipped with seven Assault maps, and each one presented a different scenario. Assault was not just replacing the objective on an existing map, the same as Domination had its own maps. Each one had a little story it presented, from the attempted hijacking of a supersonic train, assaulting an ancient fortress on an alien planet, sabotaging an underwater research facility, stealing a Navy battleship, escaping a medieval castle, destroying an experimental battle tank, and even a recreation of the D-Day landing. Assault maps varied in how linear they were, with maps like Guardia, HiSpeed, and Overlord being fairly straightforward, to the more open-ended OceanFloor and Rook. It was, by design, an asymmetrical experience, but that design went so far as to change in-level as the attackers pushed further and further in. On HiSpeed, for example, the attackers start in a helicopter hovering over the rear of the train, and drop down largely uncontested. There's a full car where they can grab weapons and powerups, and then they reach where the defenders have spawned.

As objectives are met and various places in the map are reached by the attackers, spawn points start to change. On the same map, attackers spawn with a serviceable loadout of shock rifles and pulse guns (we'll get to the weapons later), both good options for the mixed-distance encounter they'll be facing as they move towards the next car. The defenders, however, spawn with access to flak cannons and rippers, which in the close quarters of the car’s interior are absolutely brutal. Once the attackers push far enough in to it, though, that car becomes their spawn point and the defenders are moved further back, thus giving the attackers access to those weapons for the next part of the map.

The same sort of design echoes throughout all seven Assault maps, and it creates a varied and frantic experience that was new at the time and still hasn't really been copied. The feeling of actually taking part in an event in the game’s world added so much to even the relatively sparse setting, and it remains a great example of an excellent piece of very quiet but highly effective worldbuilding.

The other gamemodes were again, team and free-for-all deathmatch, and as standard as that was at the time, UT99 made some weighty impressions on the genre. At the time of Quake 2’s release, it was common practice to just repurpose singleplayer campaign levels as the multiplayer maps. Quake 2 would get its own suite of maps designed explicitly for multiplayer later in its life, and Unreal shipped with 14 multiplayer-only maps, with a further 9 added later as free updates. UT99 shipped with multiple dozens of maps, each one presenting a different take on design and execution. You have a standard collection of flat-ish arenas, some truly impressive vertical design, maps with stage hazards, big maps, small maps, maps with areas of low gravity, and maps with secret passages leading to hidden weapon spawns. A handful of Unreal’s maps were even remade for UT99, and two in particular became series mainstays - Deck 16 and Curse. Both are still thought of as iconic maps, and for very good reason. They're well-balanced and play to the strengths of the game they're in while also, going back to Unreal’s bit here, feeling like they're a real space.

Because while UT99 may be a multiplayer-only fragfest with no real story, it has lore.

The opening narration is just a small bit of fluff, but it sets up a whole lot that the various designers had a ton of fun expanding on. Official weapon descriptions in the manual talk about the (in-game) real-world applications of each, and even set some up as not even being explicitly for combat. The Translocator, a personal teleporter by way of launching tiny disks, is a repurposed tool given to miners to help escape cave-ins. The GES Biorifle is a vacuum cleaner for toxic sludge instead of dust. The Impact Hammer is a jackhammer but sideways. The in-universe justification for those few weapons doesn't mean anything to the gameplay, but given that the Tournament was set up by Liandri Mining Corporation, it adds a bit of fun sense-making to the whole thing.

Maps, too, are part of that lore package. Each map throughout the Tournament ladder has a short description, and it's almost always about what this particular arena’s place in the world is. Most boil down to “this is a site built for the Tournament” or “Liandri bought this and made it a Tournament arena,” but it's about the tiny details hidden in the lines. Deck 16 is a toxic sludge refinery, but it's also a single deck of the spaceship Gaetano, rented out to Liandri whenever it's in drydock. Curse is an ancient temple that was an archaeological site until Liandri bought it after funding ran out. Arcane Temple is a Nali worship site on Na Pali left abandoned after the Skaarj invaded. Oblivion is a Liandri passenger ship that tricks Tournament entrants by being their first arena. Hyperblast, the final stage of the Tournament, is Xan Kriegor’s personal spaceship made specifically to be an arena.

The whole thing paints the Liandri Mining Corporation as this quirky half-malicious corporate giant, as big and influential as any sci-fi megacorp but out of an innocent love for their decidedly not-innocent game. It's a world where humanity spent seven days on the brink of destruction at the hands of the Skaarj, where the Corporation Wars tore entire planets apart, and where despite that everyone can get over it, crack some beers, and watch people blow each other away on live television, kept safe by technology that respawns them within seconds.

Character backgrounds, too, drop hints in their two to three sentence lengths. The bots you fight against or with all have tiny snippets of who they are, making reference to revolts, arrests, rebellions, other worlds, secret government experiments, and revenge.

The important thing to take away from this is that all of this was put in but none of it had to be. It doesn't affect the game and it's not even immediately noticeable unless you let every map and character description load before entering a Tournament match. Just going to map select for a practice session/instant action game doesn't show the same descriptions, so you have to go through the singleplayer ladder. It's work put in that shows a genuine and earnest excitement for the world the devs had created, and I still get a smile thinking about it. Unreal Tournament is such a weird celebration of every gritty science fiction trope, but turns them all on their heads to create a world for this game that feels exactly as expansive as it isn't. Because Unreal Tournament doesn't have anything to do with the lore it hides in all these corners, it's just a multiplayer shooter with no story beyond “kill better than the other guys.” And boy do they ever make that part feel great.

For better or worse, Wolfenstein 3D cemented FPS weapon progression. Ever since and with only a few minor alterations here and there, the loadout progression is melee weapon, bad pistol, automatic weapon, shotgun (though those sometimes switch position), a better version of one or both of those, some kind of explosive option, sniper rifle (that was a later addition), and then a superweapon of some kind. From Doom to Quake to our old nemesis Half-Life to our slightly newer nemesis Halo to Call of Duty, you get those weapons in roughly that order.

So let's talk about Unreal again for a second. I didn't mention that game's weapons because I wanted to bring the whole discussion in at once, but it does require me to go back in time a year and talk about where the series landed on its own weapons. The first thing to know about Unreal is that it was not immune to the Holy Progression of Gun, but it did make some incredibly noticeable changes. Unreal saw a videogame gun, famous for being a thing you can left click on men with, and asked “what if you could also right click on men?”

I'm moving a rough sort of progression, so be aware that this is only the general order you get these guns in. In Unreal, the first weapon you pick up is the Dispersion Pistol, a projectile-firing semi-auto gun that doesn't do a whole lot of damage. One fun thing about it is that its projectiles cast a real-time light on the environment so you can use it as a way to peek into dark areas before going in them with your vulnerable body. But another thing about the Dispersion Pistol is its alt fire, where you hold down the right mouse button to charge up a shot which then acts essentially as a rocket launcher shot - it deals better damage, it deals splash damage, and it can gib enemies. In-universe, the Dispersion Pistol is a Skaarj weapon, and you can also find hidden upgrades for it that boost the damage of both firemodes at the cost of taking more ammo per shot. Luckily, as your holdout weapon, the Dispersion Pistol recharges its ammo passively.

The second weapon you get is the automag, a basic hitscan pistol. Primary fire shoots a fairly accurate shot, alt fire has you hold the gun sideways to increase the fire rate at the cost of accuracy. It's dumb and I love it to this day.

Third up, the Tarydium Stinger, a projectile-based minigun with an alt fire that acts as a projectile shotgun. Here's where the lines start to get a bit blurred, but we're not totally out of the usual progression just yet.

After the Stinger you get the ASMD Shock Rifle, a famously curious gun that, as its primary fire, shoots a hitscan beam, and shoots a fast-moving projectile orb as its alt fire, trading perfect precision and speed for a little bit of splash damage. The thing about it is that if you shoot the orb with the beam you get a giant explosion that does an absolute ton of damage.

Moving from that piece of sweet hardware brings us to the GES Biorifle, a rapid-fire goop-throwing mine layer with a charged shot as its alt fire.

Then, the Eightball Launcher, a rocket launcher that has not two but four firemodes. Click primary fire to shoot a rocket, fast moving and with splash damage. Hold primary fire to charge up to six rockets that fire in a spread pattern, or click alt fire while charging to shoot them in a spiral formation. Also, you can get a mild lock-on effect by holding your mouse cursor over an enemy for about half a second. Alt fire is the same as primary but with grenades - click alt fire once to lob one, hold to charge up to six. The grenades bounce around for a set period of time, and also blow up on contact with an enemy.

Then possibly the series’ most famous weapon, the Flak Cannon. Primary fire is a projectile-based shotgun that fires individual shards that bounce around the environment for a bit, allowing you to fire around corners or even up at the ceiling to bank a shot over cover. Alt fire is another grenade launcher, though this one fires its shells at a shallower angle, a higher velocity, has a smaller up-front splash radius, and still creates little bits of flak that bounce around for a short time. This gun is my and many other people’s favorite gun in videogames.

The Razorjack is a strange gun that fires disks that bounce around the environment at scarily high velocities, and even have the ability to decapitate enemies if you hit their head, a useful feature in the Skaarj-infested levels where you first find it. Alt fire is a tricky system that lets you influence the path the disk takes, though its high velocity, bad turning radius, and small size makes “influence” a more appropriate word than “guide.”

Next is the Rifle, a high-powered hitscan primary fire with an alt fire that zooms in. Headshotting enemies decapitates them but other than that it's just a sniper rifle, let's move on.

Finally, Unreal has the Minigun, a hitscan bullet-spewing beast that shows up near the end of the game, leaving you with just barely too little time to get to use it as much as you want and also to realize that hey, it's just a minigun. Primary fire shoots with a short spool-up time, alt fire shoots faster but less accurately. Unfortunately this does not make you hold the Minigun sideways like the Automag.

So that was Unreal’s loadout, and it made some big waves at the time. Physics-based projectiles? Well sure, Quake had the bouncy grenade launcher, but the Flak Cannon and Razorjack made being aware of and using the environment second nature to players. The ASMD’s ability to produce a BFG shot on demand if you could combo properly was amazing. And the upgradeable nature of the Dispersion pistol made what was usually a loadout slot reserved for being sad about having to use a legitimate late-game complement to your arsenal.

So it stands to reason that Unreal Tournament barely changed it.

UT99’s arsenal did change a little bit, but not too drastically. Most changes were to damage or fire rate, and every weapon got a new model. Some weapons were slightly renamed, like the Automag becoming the Enforcer or the ASMD receiving its full title of ASMD Shock Rifle, the Eightball Launcher was just called the Rocket Launcher, the Rifle became the Sniper Rifle, and the Razorjack was renamed the Ripper.

The next level of changes was tweaking some alt fires. The biggest change here was the new Ripper losing its guided blade in favor of an alt fire that shot an explosive disk. Unlike the primary fire, it didn't bounce, and while it had only about half the splash radius of the Rocket Launcher proper, its fire rate and projectile speed were both much faster. Other than that, the only change to another gun was the Sniper Rifle getting a thematically appropriate overlay when you zoomed in, instead of Unreal’s Rifle not displaying anything. Additionally, because it seems to fit here more than the next bit, if you manage to find another Enforcer lying on the ground, you can pick it up and dual wield. It's pretty rad.

Larger changes came in the removal of both the Stinger and the Dispersion Pistol, and the addition of the Impact Hammer, Pulse Gun, and the series’ first superweapon, the Redeemer.

I'm personally a bit conflicted about trading the Stinger out for the Minigun. On one hand, UT99’s Minigun is a great piece of visual design - massive, chunky, and bold, with the added flair of seeing your arm holding onto a forward grip to really sell the vibe of that one scene in Predator. On the other hand, there's something to be said about a projectile weapon over a hitscan one, especially since so many high-powered hitscan weapons exist in the game already. But at the same time, UT99 does have an answer to the automatic projectile weapon, the Pulse Gun.

The Pulse Gun should be instantly familiar to anyone with a passing understanding of id Software’s early titles. Primary fire is just the Pulse Rifle from Doom, and alt fire is the Thunderbolt from Quake. But put together, married in this suitcase-sized brick of green polygons? A thing of beauty.

Let me at least address the Impact Hammer before moving on: it's a melee weapon you can charge up. It'll kill someone pretty good if you charge it up and manage to make contact. It has a pretty fun and inspired visual design but ultimately the only reason it's there is because you can run out of ammo with the Enforcer you spawn with. The end.

Alright, the Redeemer. The Redeemer is a man-portal nuclear warhead launcher, kind of like the Fat Man from Fallout 3 except way, way cooler. Primary fire launches a relatively slow-moving projectile that, on contact with anything, explodes in a shockwave that does enough damage to instantly gib anyone without 199 health and a Shield Belt powerup. It goes through walls, too. It's a very good superweapon. Making it better is its alt fire, where you take personal control of the missile as it travels, allowing you to guide it around the map with a surprising degree of maneuverability. The BFG may have a classic flair, but the Redeemer took the idea of a superweapon to a whole other level.

So how did all of these weapons actually play together? How did an arsenal designed for and balanced around a singleplayer game with fixed enemy spawns translate to a multiplayer arena? Quite well, in fact. Epic didn't design the game in a vacuum, and as Quake 2 was the reigning champ at the time, they didn't have to look far to see what worked and what could be changed for the better.

UT99 plays fast, hard, and unrelenting. People load into a map and immediately start running around picking up weapons and letting the lead fly. Now, it's time for my bias to show a bit. I only ever watched Quake 2 multiplayer, but I have in fact played Quake 3 and Quake Live, as well as a handful of hours of Quake Champions which I know isn't really comparable but it uses the same weapons so I'm still mentioning it. UT is my series, I have a preference for it, and this next bit is all my own opinion and observation.

Quake only has three weapons.

Quake is a game where movement is fast, projectiles are fast, and time to kill is fast. It's a fast game. But it's so fast that only three weapons end up mattering - the rocket launcher, railgun, and thunderbolt. They're the three highest-damage weapons in the game and they make up pretty much the entirety of its arsenal. Quake matches inevitably all play out as taking potshots at each other with rockets as everyone strafejumps around like crazy, switching to the railgun if someone manages to be in the open for more than half a second, and swapping to the thunderbolt if you manage to get close enough that another character model takes up more than a handful of pixels on your screen.

Quake is a very fast and chaotic game, and I'm not saying that this kind of play isn't skillful, it's just so fast that actual duels never really happen, and people just kind of end up taking damage from one end of the map when they're on the other. Quake’s other weapons just may as well not exist, because if you find yourself using your starting shotgun, the nailgun, or any other weapon you want to be close for, you're likely doing so in range of someone's Thunderbolt and that's not a race you're going to win.

It's a difficult point to make, so let me move back to UT and why I prefer it. UT is a small but noticeable bit slower than Quake in a way that I feel greatly benefits it. Overall, it comes down to bringing the action in a little closer, really making the fights seem more personal, and really giving players more of a chance to dance around each other rather than hopping around the level on their own accord until they find each other by chance. Projectiles are both slightly slower and much more visible than in Quake, so trying to slam a rocket into someone's face from three hundred meters isn't really going to happen. So, from further away, you'll want to use a hitscan weapon, but since your target will be smaller they'll be harder to hit. Unless you want to zoom in with the Sniper Rifle, but then you lose a bit of awareness of your immediate surroundings. Close up, the Flak Cannon is king, but its range is short enough to matter. The Pulse Gun’s alt fire is just the Thunderbolt, and it'll tear someone apart pretty handily, to say nothing of putting the Minigun into overdrive with its own alt fire. Even flipping your Enforcer sideways will get bullets into someone quickly, and with fancy enough footwork you can save yourself from a gruesome fate with the starting gun. Or, if you're trying to keep someone away, quickly laying down a gooey minefield with the Biorifle works just as well as filling a hallway with a dozen bouncing Ripper blades.

Every gun in UT99 can kill someone, and not just in theory. The game balances each of its weapons almost perfectly, and nothing ever feels totally useless or has an obvious better version (I am not counting the Impact Hammer or Enforcer in this statement). Jumping over or dodging away from rockets to close with the Pulse Gun’s alt fire is just as reasonable as forcing someone to switch away from their Flak Cannon by retreating backwards as your Biorifle makes it impossible for them to safely advance. Lobbing a Flak alt fire over that minefield is alway an option though, so be ready to get out of the way, and maybe pull out your Shock Rifle to push them backwards. A fully stocked Minigun can keep an approach locked off, but a quick sniper bullet right to the face will put an end to it.

Alright, admittedly the Biorifle is historically a bit ignored, and the Ripper didn't even show up in subsequent games, but both still had a purpose. I, personally, am a staunch defender of the Biorifle’s utility as an area denial tool, and the ability to charge its alt fire will instantly kill someone no matter their health and shield level, if you can hit them. It's certainly better in team gamemodes like Assault or CTF, though. But just shooting at people with the weapons does not an arena shooter make. For there to be the proper levels of frantic action, movement needs to have a strong focus.

As in Quake, you'll want to get familiar with your spacebar. Strafe jumping isn't a thing as far as constantly upping your own speed, but it sure does make you harder to hit, and getting decent at dodging rockets always helps. Double tap a movement key to do a quick dodge in that direction, useful not just for avoiding projectiles but for snaking down corridors. On an elevator? Jump just before it reaches the top to get a massive boost and go flying. The Impact Hammer isn't ideal as a weapon, but a quick blast downward makes a decent stand-in for a rocket jump, if at the cost of significantly more self-damage. Capping it all off is the Translocator, the aforementioned teleporting-disk-thrower. Primary fire to shoot a disk in a pretty generous arc, alt fire to teleport to it. Disks emit light and can be destroyed, if you teleport while carrying a flag you drop it, and yes, you do fall faster than the disk travels upward. Truth be told, I usually play with the Translocator turned off, but that's mainly because the bots, as good as they are at the rest of the game, are less than stellar at putting those disks where they want, often leading to a cluster of them bouncing their shot off a wall just inches under the ledge they want up to, and not taking any action until they get it. I think it has to do with the accuracy modifiers based on bot skill level, but I'm not sure.

The bots are great in every other respect, though. Sure, they'll never actually replace a human player, but they're more than good enough for a few hundred hours of offline play. All the tricks the Skaarj demonstrated in Unreal are on display again, and tuned up to use every weapon. Bots jump and dodge, retreat if they're low on health, make decisions about what weapon to use based on their proximity to you as well as their own inventories, switch between firemodes when it makes sense, and plenty else. Upping the bot difficulty doesn't just make them do more damage or give them more health (it doesn't even do that in the first place), it makes them smarter. Or ‘smarter’ if you really care - it changes their reaction times and how accurate they are, how aggressively they'll act, and even how good they are at using the weapons beyond just aiming. A low-level bot might not get close enough to hit you with the Pulse Gun’s alt fire, or will use a Rocket Launcher in close quarters with all the risks of splash damage and self-death that entails. Higher difficulty bots will bank Flak shots off walls and bounce grenades around corners, lay fields of Biorifle goop, or be deadly-accurate with a sniper rifle from above.

The bots are what really put UT99 firmly on the ‘classic’ shelf, because its contemporaries just didn't offer the same thing. Again, Quake 2 had bots, but they served the purpose of being moving targets and not much else. Driving UT’s bots was a dead-simple, if tedious to implement, system. If you'll indulge me, I'm gonna pull back the hood and reveal the not-at-all-secret ways Unreal Tournament made all of its bots so good at playing each map.

All over a map, there are invisible waypoints hand-placed by the designer. The goal is to make a rough trail of waypoints to each part of the map. Bots see each waypoint and have the ability to travel in a wide radius around each. Weapons, ammo, health, armor, and special powerups all act as special waypoints that a bot will see and travel to if they don't already have what that pickup is. Players and other bots are considered waypoints as well, and when all that comes together, a bot will very intuitively move around the level. Placing a waypoint higher in the air will make a bot jump to reach it, so having them move over obstacles is simple. Like I said, it only requires a loose sort of web across the level, as the world geometry itself is also something a bot sees. Going around a corner or a box in the middle of a room is no issue provided the waypoints are good enough.

So now that you know how the sausage is made, what does that mean for the game? Well, quite a lot. Bot support is built into every single one of the maps UT99 shipped with, which is no small feat considering the base game came with 53 maps across four gamemodes (deathmatch and team deathmatch use the same maps), with a further 30 maps added for every gamemode but Assault over the course of four free downloadable bonus packs.

Every single one of those is playable, to this day, offline with a complement of bots just as ready to rock as they were almost twenty years ago. And that's not event counting the thousands of user-made maps still available for download, but we'll talk about modding in a bit. Because right now, it's time to talk about another excellent thing present on each map - the music.

Returning from Unreal are indisputable gods of music Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos, who trade the previous game's subdued alien score for a soundtrack full of some of the boppin’est, crunchiest, hypest EDM tracks of the late 90s. (Can you tell I don't know anything about music?)

Run, GoDown, and Organic provide the upbeat bleeps and bloops to murder by; Save Me, Razorback, and Superfist let you rock out with your shock (rifle) out; while Forgone Destruction, Skyward Fire, and The Course chill things out a bit so you can focus on getting sick headshots. The quality of the music in Unreal Tournament is impossible to overstate, just as it was in Unreal. Brandon and van den Bos are unrelentingly good at their jobs, and the mishmash of styles all grinds together across UT99’s broad palette of maps like butter full of shrapnel. It's good, is what I'm saying. The music's really good. Listen to it. Please.

Stage music is something I personally miss from shooters, if you'll indulge another tangent. I love hearing the gameworld as interpreted by the composers, it adds so much to the whole package, and we just don't really get it anymore. The rise of the modern military shooter in 2007 with the runaway success of Call of Duty 4 kind of slammed the door on stage music with a tactical-lite focus on identifying footsteps and directional fire, but even Halo’s deathmatches were filled with a blank silence. Or Halo 2, I suppose, since Halo 1 didn't have online play, except for the PC version, which did. No stage music though, that's the main takeaway.

UT99 had a truly odd mix of contemporaries, from the last days of Quake 2 and the imminent release of Quake 3 a week after UT itself came out, to Half-Life creating a mod scene in its multiplayer, to Halo a year or so later. The turn of the century would bring with it the generally-accepted death of the arena shooter, but they all went out kicking, and the few hundred people still populating UT99 servers to this day are a testament to its tight, clean design and no-frills focus on gameplay.

Unless, of course, they're playing a mod.

Truth be told, I never actually played much UT99 online. I was very bad, you see, and when I got better my horrible social anxiety had progressed to the point where the idea of even playing a game with faceless strangers was terrifying. I was 8. But anyway, modding! You may have, in your travels as someone who presumably plays videogames - an assumption I'm making because you're reading this - heard of the Unreal Engine. In a hidden bit of Trivia, Unreal was the first game on the Unreal Engine, and Unreal Tournament also used it. Wild!

Along with the game itself, both releases also shipped with the Unreal Editor, or UnrealEd. UnrealEd is the exact development tool the fine folks at Epic Megagames used to make those games, and they just casually handed them to the players. The result echoes throughout the game industry to this day, and while Epic was hardly the only developer supporting mods, they were the first to do so on that kind of level. As a result, there are thousands if not tens of thousands of user-made maps scattered around the web, along with new gamemodes, fan-made expansions for Unreal, new character models, weapons, and mutators.

Ah, mutators.

Mutators can be thought of as ‘mini-mods,’ if you want. There's a list of them you can select before each game that all change, or mutate (see?), the gameplay a bit. Superjump, low gravity, replacing each weapon spawn on a map with another, big head mode, stuff like that. Mutators are a fun addition that can mix up a usual match, but don't bring with them the sweeping changes of a full mod or total conversion. They were a way to illustrate how flexible the development options were, and a nifty thing for players to have available to them.

So, Unreal Tournament had lots of ways to keep the game fresh, either built-in or crafted by other players. Turn a small map into Explosion Hell with the Rocket Arena mutator, or download a player-made weapon pack filled with weird goodies. Wondering how Quake’s iconic maps play in UT? Somebody's made them. Hell, someone's even made a bunch of UT2004 maps for UT99, complete with de-made character and weapon models. A lasting legacy of creativity is what UT99 brought above all else, and the fact that so much of what it did can remain as the primary example of how to do something right says more than I can about its impact on videogames as a whole.

Unreal Tournament is a fast, brutal game balancing all of its various systems on the edge of a spinning razor blade, and it does so with a mastery that I feel was not seen among its peers of the time. From the weapons, the movement, the maps, and the gamemodes, Unreal Tournament presents you the player with so many options, but it never feels like a generic crowd-pleasing paste has been slathered over everything. The game's core is simple and well defined, and everything else builds on that. It has a certain tightly-realized identity that I feel is missing from a lot of games that try to have the same sort of arcady arena vibe - Halo was probably its closest rival as far as small genre shifts go, and looking at Destiny 2 as the latest version of that is a weird mix of procedurally generated weapons, hero abilities, flat maps, and very few projectile weapons. Skill has been taken out of some areas and added to others, but the design feels looser, less actualized. Call of Duty is fast, but still has that small desire to be somewhat tactical, so there are recoil patterns and weapon attachments, the rich-get-richer killstreaks, and a progression system that murders any attempt at balancing their arsenal. Quake Live, from what I understand, has a healthy enough playerbase, but my preference has already been stated. Quake Champions tries to marry its classic gameplay with that of Overwatch, and the reactions have been mixed. Team Fortress 2 has been bogged down with more and more weapons that blur the lines between classes, and the official map rotation - already small on launch - has barely been added to in twelve years.

This isn't a “games are different now and that's bad” sort of thing, my point is just that UT99 had a much cleaner mission statement, if you will, than what we get now. The industry's gotten bigger, and budgets followed. Expectations of sales rose, leading developers to want to bring in as many players as they could. Games can't really be niche anymore.

Or maybe that was true five years ago, but now the indie scene’s getting huge, and you can find a revival of your favorite genre just about anywhere. Most aren't super well polished, but isn't that what made games like Unreal, Quake, and Half-Life into what we remember? They all had more ambition than was perhaps warranted, and each made their huge impacts despite a healthy amount of blemishes. Endless polish makes for a good player experience, but maybe not as much of a memorable one.

Unreal Tournament all but made me into an FPS fan, and I think it's great that we all have so many types to choose from now. Public tastes have shifted and evolutions of the genre happened. I've enjoyed my fair share of Calls of Duty and Battlefields, I plugged hundreds of hours into TF2 throughout highschool, I've ridden the Overwatch hype train, and I love poking holes in walls and getting sneaky kills in Rainbow Six: Siege. But Unreal Tournament is my oldest bastion, and one I return to every now and then when the whim takes me. It occupies my top slot, though admittedly in an endless 1v1 with Unreal Tournament 2004.

But there was another Unreal Tournament between the two, one that came and went with mild fanfare while paving the way for what I feel is, hands down, the best game ever crafted by human hands. Check back at the end of the month for a short look at the odd little Unreal Tournament 2003.

#unreal tournament #ut99 #words about games #videogame #review #essay #fortnite #unreal retrospective

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lushscreamqueen · 3 years

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THE KILLER SHREWS on the Schlocky Horror Picture Show

August 03, 2008

OPENING: Hello, good evening, and welcome to the Schlocky Horror Picture Show. I'm your host, Nigel Honeybone. As the 1950's grew to a close so did the era of the giant radioactive beast. Spawned from the nuclear fears stemming from World War II, the movies saw dozens of animals super-sized due to one of the popular catch words of the time: Radiation! By decades end, just about every manner of giant beastie had been seen. Lizards, spiders, ants, grasshoppers, the list goes on. The major studios had lost the inclination to finance such projects, and gradually re-focused their attention on new trends like nudies, bikies and gothic horror. That is not to say that movies with ginogorous critters didn't exist. It's just that, more often than not, it was left to the little guy, the independent producer or filmmaking rookie to unleash such monsters. Witness tonight, if you dare, as a group of people trapped on an island during a storm must contend with a bunch of whippets in wigs, in the 1959 anti-classic, Attack Of The Killer Shrews! BREAK: Don't go away, we'll be right back with more dogs In drag, and then after the ads we'll get back to the movie. MIDDLE: Welcome back to the Schlocky Horror Picture Show. Attack Of The Killer Shrews, also known as just Killer Shrews, was the brainchild of Texas millionaire Gordon McLendon. Born in Paris, Texas in 1921 he would go on to win a nationwide political-essay contest, attend Yale University where he studied Far Eastern languages, work for the campus radio station, and served as business manager for the Yale Literary Magazine, all before the U.S. got involved in World War Two. After the war he bought an interest in a radio station and built up a following for his live baseball game broadcasts. Having built up quite a name for himself as a pioneer in the radio field, McLendon now turned his attention to film...a regrettable decision for producer and audience alike. He and his family owned several drive-ins and theatres. Like many drive-in owners discovered, their outlets for screening films were considered the bottom of the barrel by the pretentious lot in Hollywood and many in tinseltown tried their darndest to keep their films out of the drive-in chains. This only led to the drive-in owners taking the next logical step, they financed their own films. In 1959 McLendon financed three films: The Killer Shrews, The Giant Gila Monster, and My Dog Buddy, none of which are remembered as sterling examples of cinematic skill, if they're remembered at all. James Best, known far and wide as Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane on television's original Dukes of Hazzard, plays Thorne Sherman and captains his own ship. Sounds cool, but sadly it isn't any bigger than the SS Minnow, and the only person he has to boss around is Rook. He's a glorified gopher, delivering supplies out to Doctor Craigis on his island. Sherman is a man's man, which by 1950s terms means he drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney, has an appreciative eye for the ladies and is ready for a fistfight on a moment's notice, the kind of simplistic brute we are gradually evolving away from, a little too slowly if you ask me. His Honour Judge Henry Dupree plays Rook Griswold and looks like he could have played the title role in that live action Fat Albert movie: Hey, hey, hey! He's Sherman's sole crewman, although the two seem to share a real friendship rather than just bossy Captain/abused crew dynamic. Poor Rook is the first person to bite it in The Killer Shrews, or more accurately, the first to get bitten. Repeatedly, as a matter of fact. In this way this film helped start the stereotype of the token black character becoming the first victim in horror films. You may think films like Night Of The Living Dead and Alien were breakthroughs for the token black character in American horror, but a pessimist might say they simply get more screen-time before being killed-off. Baruch Lumet plays Doctor Marlowe Craigis. He may not seem like much, but he fathered one of Hollywoods greatest producer/directors, Sidney Lumet, famous for

Twelve Angry Men, Failsafe, The Pawnbroker and Dog Day Afternoon. Speaking of dogs, he also directed the all-black musical The Wiz starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. Nobody's perfect. Anyway, Craigis says he hails from Sweden, and has come to the island of The Killer Shrews to further his scientific work, but you and I both know it was to keep his sexy daughter out of the Swedish porn industry. Craigis wants to shrink people, or at least slow down our metabolisms so the Earth's resources will last longer when overpopulation becomes a big problem. I think a bigger problem might be smarmy foreign scientists who screw around with Mother Nature... Swedish-born Ingrid Goude, a former Miss Universe, plays Ann Craigis, Doctor Craigis sexy daughter. She claims to be a zoologist, which is about as convincing as Nicole Kidman playing a brain surgeon. Though to be honest, I wouldn't mind checking-out her knowledge of biology, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Ann serves no purpose here other than to scream on occasion, and to provide Captain Sherman with a new First Mate, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Ken Curtis, another famous redneck, plays Jerry Farrell, part of Doctor Craigis research team. Curtis was inducted into the Hall Of Great Western Performers in 1981 for his performance as Festus in almost 300 episodes of Gunsmoke. Jerry's vital role in the mission is whining, cowering, boozing it up and generally being a waste of skin. He despises Sherman from the start, probably because he recognises that Sherman is much more of a man than he ever will be. I wouldn't get attached to Jerry if I were you. Played by Gordon McLendon, the Texas millionaire responsible for this mess Doctor Radford Baines is another one of the scientists helping Doctor Craigis with his work. This guy is really devoted to his work. In fact, he can hardly think of anything else and walks around muttering things like "Hematoxic Syndrome." His last moments on Earth are spent in devotion to science and furthering the understanding of mankind, instead of doing something really important like trying to get laid or run away. Unknown Alfredo DeSoto plays Mario. Despite the Italian name, Mario is apparently Mexican. He's most likely a servant of some kind, though his main duty seems to be as a device to advance the plot. Whatever he does, it doesn't involve too much physical labor, as Mario's mid section is expanding faster than a balloon. He isn't around much. Just long enough to say things like "Si, senor," "No, senor" and "Aaaahhhh!". It also explains why the shrews ran out of food. Mario doesn't look like he was missing any meals... Attack Of The Killer Shrews gives real meaning to the phrase Low Budget. Filmed on a mere handful of sets and featuring scene after scene of people talking, often with their back to the camera, with little in the way of action, and one could easily dismiss this as pure manure. The fact that the giant shrews are played by dogs in drag when they're not being represented by clumsy puppets, and one could not be blamed for turning up their nose at this movie. If there is a saving grace, it's the short running time. So yes, there's lots of boring talk, but there is also enough monster action to satisfy fans of such schlocky goodness. Besides, I shouldn't have to explain how funny it is to watch somebody scream in terror at a Collie wearing carpet remnants, when the dog is rolling over on his back obviously expecting a belly rub! And it's with that thought in mind we now return you to the carnivorous canine creepiness that is Attack Of The Killer Shrews! CLOSING: It's alright, you can open your eyes now. How exactly do Killer Shrews assimilate poison into their systems, anyway? For instance, I love to drink Absinthe, and I do mean Absinthe, not that over-the-counter swill. I've consumed hundreds if not thousands of litres of it over the years, over three thousand litres just in the last fifteen years, but I still haven't started frothing with green poison yet. If I can't assimilate my own favourite

beverage after drinking thousands of bottles, how can the shrews do so with poison after just one sampling of it? Anyway, please join me next week so I can poke you in the eye with another frightful excursion to the backside of the Public Domain, filmed in glorious 2-D black & white Regularscope on...The Schlocky Horror Picture Show. Toodles!

by Lushscreamqueen

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the-roanoke-society · 6 years

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tag masterlist.

a reference for the tags i use at least somewhat regularly was requested, so feast your eyes on the information below the cut. put below a cut because it got rather long. this post may be reblogged as changes are made. if any post anywhere is mis-tagged, in whatever fashion, please bring it to my attention.

updated 9.22.19. probably still missing things. feel free to use the inbox, as mentioned above.

and do keep in mind on top of what’s under that read more--i am an absolute tag goblin. i revel in hiding shit in the tags. so keep your eyes open. never know what you may see.

first it should be noted that every agent has their own tag, and if you don’t right now, you will here in a bit. i use these to reblog from everyone’s ‘source’ blogs, and also to add in aesthetics, music and such, like presents. tags like #x’s camera roll and #x afield are also a thing, along with #conversations with x, #x’s photo box, #x’s saved messages and #things x has definitely said (sometimes while drunk or otherwise impaired).

there are also what i like to call ‘affection’ tags. it’s pretty easy to tell who’s who, because they’re pretty much always used adjacent to an agent tag, but if you want a list (again, if you don’t have one yet, trust me, one is on the way): our loyal and true (lycan), our guiding light (succubus), our comfortable silence (annabelle), our pathfinder (nova), our robin hood (sprite), our tall dark and magical (elfin), our changeling (houdini), our uplifter (arizona), our eyes in the skies (zed), librarian fair (the scribe), our safe depths (ondine), many voices one heart (specter), our restless warrior (sentinel), our hart (@gentleknighted), listening ears & a warm shoulder (raziel), our good doctor (rougarou), our guardian angel (cherub).

ship tags.

on the rocks (zed x roxy)

butterfly knife (succubus x harry)

starry eyes (nova x charlie)

rumcake (ondine x rum)

sour cocktails (succubus x tequila, seraphim x whiskey)(non-end-game ship)

the lost sacrament (seraphim x former agent enoch)(non-end-game ship)

magic & mischief (rougarou x elfin)

hymns & holograms (seraphim x merlin)

anchored hearts (specter x mothman)

lies & lessons (houdini x whiskey)(playlist forthcoming)

body shots (sprite x tequila)

holy water & silver bullets (seance x lycan platonic tag)

agents of sass & class (succubus x seraphim platonic tag)

sleight of heart (annabelle x drake)

puppy love (eggsy x lycan)

holy hell (seance x crowley)

from the ashes (arizona x phoenix)

out to sea (raziel x nereus)

devil bois (jd x chimera)

team halo (cherub x seraphim platonic tag)

ancient cares (sentinel x archivist)

ghost bros (specter x seance platonic tag)

ghostbusters (specter x seance x seraphim platonic tag)

crystals & halos (seraphim x specter platonic tag)

reaching for faith (annabelle x seraphim platonic tag)

the cat squad (sprite x seance x annabelle platonic tag but really could apply to anyone who loves cats. we have several around the manor--see the tag #manor cats--for many reasons beyond pest control, which have been lightly touched on in media such as the mummy (”look what i got.”) and constantine (”cats are good. half in, half out anyway.” ) see also: the (big) cat squad

milky way saints (nova x seraphim platonic tag)

prints on holy ground (cerberus x seraphim platonic tag)

winged ink (scribe x seraphim platonic tag)

mugwort mugshots (succubus x specter platonic tag)

secret gardens (cherub x thorn)

flora & fauna (elfin x chimera platonic tag)

grace & choice (the scribe x lillith)

safety nets (hood x rook)

angel wings (houdini x seraphim platonic tag)

second chances (nephilim x ainsel)

have faith in me (iuniore x seraphim platonic tag)

pastel goth (agave x colombina)

the time traveler’s husband (umbriel x pantalone)

royals & probots (pru x tilde)

the wonder twins (hood x thorn familial tag)

see also:

lepidoptery & lace (domestic/married life tag for butterfly knife)

white hymnals (domestic/married life tag for hymns & holograms)

over the moon (domestic/married life tag for puppy love)

black hymnals (... a bad timeline)

something for the ship tags/something for the platonic ship tags (these are for everyone; keep in mind that #x for comedic value also exists and is generally used for situations where something’s funny and definitely belongs to one of our ship tags). there’s also the #ship prompt/s tag if you need some inspiration for writing, and #x for relevance.

the #kingsman and #statesman agencies also have their own separate tags both for general posts and for posts related to specific agents. all agent!specific posts are tagged with that agent’s handle, or ‘former agent x.’ keep in mind that according to our canon, charlie hesketh was eventually given the title of #agent zenith as a member of roanoke.

it’s also important to remember that the #concerning the golden circle timeline and the #concerning the poppyacolypse tags concern two different canons--the golden circle timeline is the one in which, at the very least, merlin lost his legs. the poppyacolypse timeline is the one where merlin survived the mine in-tact, whiskey was not murdered, and charlie is eventually saved by nova and sentinel under lillith’s direction with the gate. #concerning the valentine incident is used when referring to the secret service canon events.

the #mother universe tag is used exclusively for kingsman-related material; that honor will only ever belong to the story that brought us all together.

npc roanoke agent tags.

former agent jackalope (x)/(x)

lillith (x)

mothman (x)

former agent enoch (x)

agent wearh (x)

techincal officer drake (x)

former agent thunderbird (x)

former agent skinwalker (x)

agent crowley (x)

technical officer longma (x)

the white lady (x)

agent gowrow (x)

ness of the borley council (x)

agent poltergeist (x)

former agent specter (x)

former agent rougarou (x)

former agent odin (x)

technical officer wyvern (x)

agent jotunn (x)

agent thunderbird (x)

agent chupacabra (x)

agent skinwalker (x)

agent tessie (x)

former merlin of kingsman (x)

agent wendigo (x) ... and llewellyn (x)

former agent thorn (x)

agent andhrimnir (x)

agent scape (x)

agent eerie (x)

former agent crowley (x)

agent jackalope (x)

technical officer sol (x)

canon tags.

the order of snow and sun (roanoke’s russian equivalent, based out of st. petersburg)

the borley council (roanoke’s united kingdom equivalent, based out of manchester; the leader of the council is ness.)

the washington avenue project - used for aesthetics for and information concerning north america’s only currently active stargate. (see also: mapped universe. this is a world that the crew in the basement have successfully logged and calibrated into the gate’s operation and can be accessed if given the proper permissions, such as #neon tokyo)

concerning the brennenburg mission (inspi.)

concerning the co-op mission on the moor - the mission in which hymns & holograms became canon.

concerning the mission in the hills (inspi.)

the knights of the shield and crescent (roanoke’s equivalent serving saudi arabia, yemen, jordan, iraq, iran, the united arab emirates, kuwait, bahrain, israel, qatar and oman, based out of riaydh)

dragon echelon (roanoke’s equivalent serving china, based out of beijing)

starlight kingdom (roanoke’s equivalent serving japan, based out of yokohama; #moon enterprise is the tag for their own stargate project)

la société de triomphe (roanoke’s equivalent serving france, based out of marseille)

the annual gala (concerning the huge formal event that roanoke hosts every summer solstice, serving as an opportunity for friendship, diplomacy and bonding and one-night stands. consider this a “mixer” event for all named supernaturally-inclined agencies, friends of known assorted societies, etc., eventually coming to include companies such as kingsman and statesman.)

repubblica dei lupi (roanoke’s equivalent serving italy, based out of milan)

united oceanic regions council (more information about the council can be found over at their own hub blog: @roanoke-uorc-rp)

there are also tags roughly along the lines of #snapshots from other timelines, #in another timeline, #the x au, et. al. for events that happen outside of the scope of our actual canon. some of these are more specific, such as the #the mythology au, #the four corners au/#the same age au (brought to us by @agentargus), #the college au, #the 80s au, #the lord of the rings au, the #the high school au, #the ballet au, and #the ghibli au.

general blog tags.

#foundations - this is the tag i’ve given to the initial posts detailing the society’s founding, function and history.

#meet our cast - posts pertaining to specific agent information, and selfies if we’re really lucky, y’all gorgeous.

#the roanoke society - most generally used for general ronaoke aesthetics, information, anything that can be taken for the society as a whole. see also #society aesthetics.

#canon notes - can pertain to either kingsman/statesman canon or our own.

#society notes - generally only used when tagging posts about society!specific character or lore canon material.

#we are the veil - roanoke’s most oft used motto. put on posts that got a little extra ‘uhmph’ like positivity posts, etc.

#holidays with the society - any holiday-themed post that can be used for festive society aesthetics or has something to do with how we get down at the roanoke estate for certain events.

#these are a few of my favorite things - our community made something wonderful and i want everyone to know that i adore it.

#seraphim speaks - any ‘personal’ posts, or posts where i’m directly addressing y’all.

#this has been a public service announcement - used for awareness posts, anything dealing with general information about society current events, and the occasional positivity/mental health post. related to #community.

#mission photos - photos taken afield by various field agents; see also #on a diplomacy mission, #taken from the chopper and #diplomacy fieldwork (which is most often tagged in conjunction with @agentpru. #taken on a well-earned break and #taken on a well-deserved break are used for photos taken by one half a of a ship tag while on what i just said--a break. rest is very important, as is spending time with the ones you love.

#seraphim’s filing cabinet - seraphim is a senior field agent and has an office in the estate. if an image is tagged with this it’s very likely a physical print exists in a drawer in that room somewhere. can also apply to other documents such as written files and logs, maps, etc. see also: #jakob called jake. seraphim’s corgi has his own tag.

#mission logs - generally dialogue from recorded mission files, quotes, etc. see also #once upon a time in x.

#mission feed - short mission videos, usually on loop (gifs).

#post-mission recovery - generally saved for comforting romantic imagery. what we do is hard. it’s nice to have a soft place to land. for more platonic or comedic photos and things, please see #post-mission recovery shenanigans.

#the roanoke society mix tape - background music for if this ever gets made into anything by someone with more money and resources than i currently possess. fortune favors the prepared and i have an excellent ear. related to: #fight song and #group versus (these are the tracks that i imagine playing when we have to make a team effort to conquer ‘a big bad’)

#in the kitchens - anything food related. most of this is from @agentondine.

#home movies - important video files that aren’t directly mission-related.

#mission files - information directly from a case folder both electronically stored and non. can be a transcribed interview, photographs, video, etc.

#society interiors, #society decor, #roanoke safehouse, #society exteriors, #safehouse interiors, #safehouse exteriors - tags dealing with the architectural/design/decorative aesthetics of the roanoke estate and our safehouses.

#mission themes, #background noise, #theme music - general background soundtrack tunes for both daily life around the estate and for work on the field.

#in the garage - all our toys with wheels. a few with wings.

#things to consider - notes on canon that aren’t verified, but are worth thinking about.

#the things we carry - angst tag.

#mission video, #mission footage - video file from an electronically-saved case folder. view with caution. some files are older and have since been archived. speaking of...

#from the archives - this may include older printed documents, mission files or aged footage from fieldwork.

#life at roanoke - for posts that give a glimpse (or a listen) into what our day-to-day life is like around the estate. best things in life are free, and ‘tis a gift, simpleness.

#bound files - information/imagery from mission folders that are restricted.

#friends of the society - allies of our organizations, both in our timeline and out. (see also #ghost adventures cohorts, #buzzfeed cohorts and #our good doctor; variations on this tag include #friends of the agency and #friends of the kingdom, depending on the context of the associated group)

#we raise up our glasses against evil forces - anything booze related, especially recipes.

#the memory hall - a place to rest in remembrance of those who have gone before us. see also #a moment of silence for the fallen

#field guide - practical information concerning work afield. see also #field notes and #field research.

#from the media room - video files from our general media storage, some related to casework, some not. related to #cursed tapes--a vast majority of haunted or otherwise possessed media has been transferred to vhs because of its “aging out” as a storage device. these are kept in their own storage area on a basement level.

#from the library - books we’ve got on hand, for whatever reason.

#lab photos - imagery processed by the lab crews downstairs.

#mission audio, #audio feed - sounds and audio files from afield.

#resources - important documents/information for work both on and off-field.

#from sprite’s workshop, #weapons development, #tactical gear - concerning contemporary weaponry/weaponry development courtesy @agent-sprite and the lab crew and weapons history. shouldn’t always move forward if you don’t know from whence you came.

#jazz night at the estate - exactly what it sounds like. tune in for the mix.

#mission imagery - general afield aesthetics.

#a well-deserved break, #a well-earned break - work/life balance, people!

#society witches - because we have more than a handful on staff. these are generally aesthetic or appreciation posts for the agents who happen to practice craft. related to #society women.

#the bad timeline - a fucking mistake.

due to tumblr’s asinine enforcement of nsfw material, we do try to take care to tag things that are a bit more citrus in nature (bringing back the lemon tag system of the fandom days of old). #lemon, #lemonish and variations of #deluxe lemon are currently in use. feel free to add to your block lists if you have no desire to see suggestive or explicit material.

#tag list #blog notes #resources #tag masterlist #foundations

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anamelesstraveler · 7 years

Text

Thanks to @semisweetshadow I am FEELING some Bodhi adopting tiny cadet Finn. So here’s my hastily put together attempt at it, that left me pacing the floor in excitement in the middle of writing this. So ENJOY friends! I fudged the ages because STANDARD TIME DOESN’T EXIST IN SPACE Y’ALL so fuck it. Finn’s gonna be about 5, and Bodhi’s mid to late 30′s. So this is like... what, ~10 ABY?

Warnings for obligatory child soldier warning, mentions of past drug use, and a very brief moment of a suicide attempt (the First Order looks down upon their soldiers being captured)

Bodhi wonders at what point he can say he’s getting too old for this. He’s not yet forty, but the number is coming up on the horizon. And on some days Bodhi feels several lifetimes older.

“Commander Rook...”

Some days like today.

“Stand down, Lieutenant,” Bodhi orders, keeping his voice as even and nonthreatening as he can. The blaster that had been trained on him jumps nervously to the soldier standing behind him and back. It’s not the first time Bodhi has had a blaster pointed at him.

It’s the first time the one holding a blaster on him is a child.

Bodhi knows better than to consider any mission routine. Leia asking him to take a squad out to the Outer Rim, specifically to this barren planet in the Baralou system, to scout for Imperial remnants was bound to go wrong somehow. There had been a base hidden among the inhospitable rock and snow of the planet. The base is Imperial. The evidence is clear in every industrial line of the place, an unsettling ghost that Bodhi wishes had been consigned to the past. It’s abandoned, though.

Well, almost abandoned.

The child can’t be older than five. All big, terrified eyes and a round baby face. His dark hair is close cropped in severe military manner, which is just as disturbing to Bodhi in combination with his tiny, perfectly pressed Imperial gray uniform and his equally tiny blaster. A blaster made to fit a child’s hands.

A blaster that is currently aimed at Bodhi’s head with steady hands, even if the child is clearly scared of his mind.

“Hey,” Bodhi coaxes. “Everything’s alright. We’re alright, aren’t we?” He stays perfectly still where he’s crouching in the dim storeroom. The child flinches, but his aim barely falters. “My name’s Bodhi, and this is Tonc. What’s yours?”

The boy’s eyes flick from Bodhi to Tonc, who Bodhi can glimpse lifting his hands a little higher in a show of peace, and back. “D-Designation: FN-2187,” he whispers.

Bodhi frowns, wonders if his enhancers are processing the barely audible words correctly. “Okay. Can I have your name too?”

The child just looks confused. “FN-2187,” he repeats, a little louder. No, Bodhi’s aural enhancer isn’t malfunctioning. “Sir,” the boy amends hastily.

They’ve given the boy a stormtrooper designation. Bodhi has met plenty of “DX”s and “TK”s in his life under Imperial rule. But never like this.

This is something else. Something sickening.

“Okay... FN-2187.” Just saying it feels wrong, the word foreign and inhumane in his mouth. This is a child. “What happened here? Where is everyone?”

For the first time the steady line of the blaster wavers. “I-I... They left. The minders came and woke us up. Told us to get ready and r-report to the shuttles.” If not for the hesitancy in his voice, Bodhi would think he’s speaking with a (very small) soldier rather than a little boy.

“You evacuated?” he asks. FN-2187 nods. “Did you get separated from your family?”

It takes longer for the boy to answer that question. And when he does, his face is screwed up in confusion. “Family?”

“Yes. Your... your parents? Whoever was taking care of you? The people you stayed with?”

“Oh. You mean the Instructors? They were on the shuttles with the other cadets. I... I-I got scared and hid. I wasn’t supposed to.”

“Commander,” comes Sefla’s voice through the comm hooked over Bodhi’s good ear. “I’ve found the control room. No sign of anyone yet. Only cleaner droids here.”

Bodhi carefully presses the talkback on the receiver hooked into the sleeve, his eyes still trained on their little companion. “We’ve got one here, Sergeant,” he says lightly. “No threat, though.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call having a blaster pointed at your face ‘no threat,’ Bo,” Tonc mutters behind him.

Bodhi keeps his smile in place. “Easy,” he hisses, because the relaxing of FN-2187′s arms snap into perfect posture once more at Tonc’s voice.”We just want to know what happened. Maybe get you back to your family.”

“A-Are you Rebels?” the boy asks, his voice hitching higher. A new fear comes into his eyes now.

“We’re from the New Republic,” Bodhi explains gently. FN-2187 only grows more agitated.

“We’re not supposed to get taken by Rebels,” he hiccups.

“Commander, I found something,” it’s Maddel’s voice in his ear this time. “I found the barracks. It’s... shit, Bodhi. It’s a nursery. It’s just kids’ bunks from wall to wall. They’ve got serial numbers on ‘em. They’ve got cribs with serial numbers, Bodhi.”

But Bodhi only barely listens to her, because FN-2187 has finally broken from his frozen fear. And turned the blaster around, pressing the barrel up under his chin. Both Bodhi and Tonc let out bitten out curses, jolting into movement before aborting their knee-jerk attempts to reach the boy. “Wait!” Bodhi gasps. “Wait, wait, come on, son.” Bodhi has never called anyone son in his life. The last time he even remembers hearing the word was Galen on Eadu, coaxing him out of a stim-induced panic attack. “Put that away. There’s no need for that. We won’t hurt you--”

“N-No soldier can be taken alive,” the boy stammers. His eyes well with tears, that roll down his round cheeks in fat, heartbreaking drops. “A g-good,” he starts to sob, wincing as the shaking of his body jams the blaster muzzle harder into his chin. “A good soldier is not taken p-prisoner.”

“You’re not a prisoner,” Bodhi says. His heart is in his throat. “You are not a soldier. We’re not taking you prisoner. Put the blaster down.” He stealthily shifts his weight, mind whirling.

“Bo...” Tonc warns behind him.

Luck, the universe, the Force - whatever Bodhi can dare to call it, is with them. The stretch of silence afterward is abruptly broken by a flash of red light around them, and the shrill hum of an alarm.

The boy flinches back, blaster dislodging in his shock.

And Bodhi leaps forward, and snatches it from his hand. He passes it behind him blindly, thankful that Tonc has leapt into motion only a fraction of a second after him.

Little FN-2187 wails, in fear or rage, Bodhi can’t say for certain. A wild swing catches Bodhi in the jaw, more jarring than it is painful. He wraps arms around the struggling boy and lifts to his feet, wrestling with flailing limbs. “Status?” he snaps into the comm, rearing his head back to avoid being ruthlessly headbutted by the screaming child. “What’s that alarm?”

“Not good, boss,” Sefla calls back. He sounds out of breath, like he’s running. “Something activated in the control room. Self-destruct. Not sure if it’s remote or was timed, but I don’t wanna stick around to find out.”

“Self-destruct--” Tonc yelps. “Kriff, I hate these Imperial bastards.”

‘So do I,’ Bodhi silently agrees. He shifts the still wriggling FN-2187 in his grip, and activates the comm. “All operatives back to the shuttle!” He’s already following Tonc back out into the hall, enhancer straining to filter out the blaring alarm. With his comm in his good ear, mentally ticking off the “copy that” and “roger, commander”s of his squad, and the alarm messing with his other, he barely hears Tonc ask the question.

“What about the kid?”

FN-2187 has stopped kicking and screaming. Bodhi would have expected the sobbing to come next. But the boy is still and silent in his arms now. And stiff as a board.

Bodhi peers over at his fellow soldier and friend. “We can’t leave him here.”

Tonc winces. “Not denying that.”

“Then we’ll figure the rest out after we’re off this planet.” Bodhi hefts the boy higher on his hip, other hand shifting his legs up instead of just hanging limply. Has the boy never been carried before?

“Let’s go.”

END.

#SniperPilot #Bassian #CassianBodhi #Star Wars #Bodhi Rook #Finn #fanfic #Let me weave you a Dream #obligatory Bodhi adopts Finn fic #ACTIVATE #this accidentally became the same AU as hearts in atrophy #oops #Bodhi your hubby is gonna kill you #just kidding he's gonna be exasperated and charmed

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hopeatermain · 7 years

Text

Assassin’s creed modern au headcanons part 2

PART 2 OF THIS. I still have no idea of when part 2 of tCoI (the Child of Izanami) is coming, but the Unity one-shot will soon be published. So yeah, part 2 of the headcanons. The list is game IV to Syndicate, with Desmond has a bonus.

Edward

Formerly the proof that pirates still existed, now a grandfather that lives with his overworked son, angry grandson and probable future son-in-law.

He doesn’t care that he’s 81 and that we’re in the middle of the winter, he’s going out in short, sandals and t-shirt with shark prints on them. He’s still ripped, so it’s not that horrifying of an image, even if it makes Haytham go mad with worry.

He used to do parkour when he was young. He’s now too old to do that, but his legacy lives on with Connor, to who he gave his blue jacket.

He was formerly a sailor/smuggler/crook/pirate with a heart of gold (once took down a human selling ring because he has limits and this crossed every single one of them), but he was forced to retire after a career ending injury.

He had a lot of women in his life, but Haytham’s mother was the one he loved the most.

Haytham and his best friend Adewalé are literally the only ones to see just how Edward is actually a gigantic loser. The rest of their town thinks he’s either entertaining or awesome, most of the time somewhere between the two.

Shay

The weird friendly Irish psychologist/life coach that lives with Haytham because the whole Kenway family needs help. He also has a Tragic Past™.

HIS. FUCKING. TRENCHCOAT. He never takes the damn thing off unless he’s sleeping, in his apartment (since he practically lives in the Kenway house now, he doesn’t go to his apartment that much anymore) or a good 113 degrees outside (I’m talking in Fahrenheit; it’s the equivalent of 45 Celsius). He wears light colored clothes under the thing.

No seriously, he doesn’t even take it off when doing parkour.

A psychologist who has no idea of why he is basically doing the job of a life coach for Haytham. He doesn’t even really coach him, just remind him to eat, sleep, helps him with his son’s education and let him cry on his shoulder when he’s having too much. He also gives free tips for the people who ask him nicely.

Had a girlfriend back in university, before an ugly break up between him and his former group of friends, from which she was part off, happened. Now, everyone is sure he and Haytham are a thing. He wouldn’t blame them.

Had an ugly depression that almost finished in a suicide attempt. He’s now a successful psychologist living in an eccentric but friendly community. He’s the physical embodiment of things being able to get better. When people remarks how lucky he was, he answers ‘‘I make my own luck.’’

Arno

The French-Austrian adopted son of the rich De La Serre family following the tragic, early demise of his father, and inherited the Dorian fortune. He refuses to use the fortune of his family for personal reasons.

His style could be best described as swinging between ‘‘relaxed fanciness’’ to ‘‘complete and utter dishevelment’’. Depends on how depressed he feels in the morning.

The only constant is his parkour attire: blue raincoat with hood on and red scarf.

He’s a local journalist trying to write a book and works in a little cozy café mid-time to make ends meet. Why someone having every diplomas and qualities necessary to become a detective became a journalist is anyone guess.

He’s in a relationship with his step-sister Élise. They’re not technically siblings, but it’s still somewhat weird. Right now, they’re having a break in their relationship, and he doesn’t take it well, but respect her boundaries.

He has a severe case depression due to a lot of things going on in his life. The result is nights after nights of getting drunk, numbness to everything and sudden burst of crying. Everyone worries about him and bring him baguettes when he feels unwell because he loves baguettes so fucking much.

Jacob

One of the Frye Twins and the most excited, eccentric and friendly of the two.

He has a punk rock clothing style with an heavy dose of steampunk, and god forbid if you make comment about his collection of hats.

He still has the same style when doing parkour, but he takes the hat off and put on a leather jacket with a hood.

He’s the leader of a street gang called the Rooks, which is mainly composed of delinquents and former crooks. Most of the time, they just help around their community and get into street fights because why not? They also are the local weapon and weed providers.

He’s in a relationship with no one right now, but he still flirts with everyone he thinks is pretty. Bisexual. He also has two person pinning after him. He flirts with both of them, so it’s a start.

His reason for wanting to form a gang his both to provide a friendly neighborhood gang if you need someone beaten up, because, say what you want, but crime pay off, and because why not? He also has a soft spot for kids and will do anything to protect them.

Evie

One of the Frye Twins and the most levelheaded, serious and wise of the two.

She has a hipster style with a slight Victorian influence and some leather trinket here and there. She can basically make some flannel look classy.

Like her brother, she just puts on a leather jacket with a hood when doing parkour.

She’s working as a secretary mid-time while in marketing school. She’s also a member of her brother’s gang, but shhh, don’t tell anyone. She just gets in street fights and help with the damage he causes, anyway.

She’s in a loving relationship with one of her classmate that Jacob likes to poke at (the relationship, not the classmate), Henry Green.

She’s utterly exasperated with her brother and the rest of the town antics, but it doesn’t exactly stop her from taking part of them...

Desmond

Poor, poor Desmond... he just wanted a quiet life...

He dresses like in the games: simple white hoodie.

He never takes the hoodie off. Not even to parkour.

He’s a bartender in a nightclub of their district, Bad Weather.

Is in a quiet but romantic relationship with Lucy. His cousin and great uncle don’t approve.

He ran away from his home because his father was an asshole when he was sixteen. He remembered his reasonable great uncle Rashid and his quiet identical-to-him-but-blonde cousin Altair that were from Syria and who apparently lived in a town a few miles away from New York that he met last Christmas, and after packing what he owned, took a bus there. He then questioned everyone on where these two lived until he found their house. Nine years passed, a custody battle happened between William and Rashid, Rashid won, and Desmond is now used to the insanity of the little town, even if he still sometime screams when someone suddenly jumps from a high building just to land in a haystack. Why there is so much haystack in a town of the 21 century, he’ll never know. Maybe because of the horses...

#Assassin's Creed #modern au #part 2 #edward kenway #Shay Cormac #arno dorian #jacob frye #evie frye #Desmond Miles

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macguires · 7 years

Note

I'm so late but I sure hope you're still doing that ask meme because if you are I'm giving you Hannibal and Star Wars. Because I know you too well and I know you'd be waiting ;D - tattlecrimc

YESSSSSSS EDEN BLESS U (i’m assuming you mean this one bc that’s the only one i’ve reblogged recently)

i will ramble horribly on the hannibal one and i’m very sorry about it so i’ll leave that for last so i can put it under a read more

i should probably warn u that the only movie fresh in my memory is the force awakens so all of this is gonna be answered through a v tfa-heavy lens but ok

star wars

three favourite male characters: poe dameron, kylo ren & general hux (DON’T KILL ME i know kylo & hux are awful, the fandom paired w/ my pre-existing love for domhnall gleeson did this to me and i am v ashamed). finn, han solo, bodhi rook, cassian andor, chirrut imwe & luke skywalker are also v dear to me. listen i just have a lot of love to givethree favourite female characters: jessika pava (i’d better see So Much of her in ep8), phasma & padme amidala. & also rey! ‘Needs More Girls’ is my opinion on most franchises but especially star warsfavourite pairing(s): finn/poe, kylo/hux, rey/jessika & han/luke! i also like obi-wan/anakin in the sense that i don’t actively go looking for stuff abt it but when i do see it on my dash my heart does a lil “!!”notp(s): r*ylo is like one of the only ships on my blacklist so that probably tells u something. i’m also p Ew about rey with any of the villains, so that also rules out rey/hux & rey/kylo/hux which i see way too often all over the place. also you wouldn’t think snoke/kylo would be a thing but i’ve seen fics & i’ve seen art and i’ve like cried every single time, experiencing that was my tragic backstory and now i’m a jaded & cynical anti-hero who’s seen Too Much™least favourite character: snoke who’s like me: i’ll hesitantly say padme amidala? i saw the prequels when i was too young to be properly interested in them and i haven’t rewatched them yet so 99% of my knowledge is secondhand, but from what i’ve seen she’s the most relatable most attractive: jessika pava tbh, yet another reason behind me hoping she’s around a lot in the next movie, i am Absolutely in love alreadyfavourite moment/scene: THAT’S MY JACKET(also lowkey the whole starkiller/hosnian system scene, that was shot so impressively w/ the whole ~greatcoat blowing dramatically in wind~ and the brief reaction shot of the people on hosnian prime and the lights shooting across the sky and damn)favourite quote(s): LOTS

“so this is how liberty dies. with thunderous applause.” - padme

“if you live long enough, you see the same eyes in different people.” - maz

“mm. lost a planet, master obi-wan has. how embarrassing.” - yoda

“are you kidding me? i’m blind!” - chirrut

“there’s a problem on the horizon. …there is no horizon.” - k2-so

“so you’re with the resistance?”“obviously. yes, i am. i am with the resistance, yeah. i’m with the resistance.”“i’ve never met a resistance fighter before.”“well, this is what we look like. some of us. others look different.” - rey & finn

“lieutenant, get back to your station!”“just look! we won’t survive. even hux is gone!” - rodinon

“through the ages, i’ve seen evil take many forms: the sith. the empire. today, it is the first order.” - maz

“where is my boyfriend? […] i like that wookiee.” - maz

ok right. now for my favourite thing in the world. the show i don’t shut up about. the universe to which my heart belongs

hannibal

three favourite male characters: will graham, hannibal lecter & anthony dimmondthree favourite female characters: chiyoh, molly graham & reba mcclane (also beverly katz. and freddie lounds. and abigail hobbs. and literally every other girl)favourite pairing(s): hannibal/will, margot/alana, reba/molly, abigail/marissa & jimmy/brian are the ones i pay most attention to, but i’m honestly also down for literally any other f/f ship u can imagine from this shownotp(s): there isn’t anything i would specifically call a notp, but i’m not a huge fan of will/alana or hannibal/alana i guess? just bc as much as i love will & hannibal, alana deserves 1000x better and i lovelovelove her with margot. i also dislike mason with literally anyone for what i would hope are obvious reasons. i also tend to be kinda cringey about abigail with will or hannibal in a romantic/sexual sense bc it’s made very clear that their relationship with her is parent/child and that she’s a teenager so it feels v creepy to meleast favourite character: i like them enough as characters but i’ll say francis dolarhyde & mason verger. bc everything mason does ever makes me feel vaguely ill and my first impression of francis dolarhyde was him stretching and grunting @ his mirror in briefs w/ Glistening Muscles and i was done with That and ready to move on in under 0.00002 seconds but it just….. kept happeningwho’s most like me: peter bernardone, abigail hobbs & s1!will graham most attractive: chiyoh! i was literally Gone from the second we saw her through will’s goddamn binoculars favourite moment/scene: literally every second of dark!will i am so here for that. every moment from when he attacked freddie in the barn and then. u know. ate randall tier with hannibal, the whole ~i’ve given up good & evil for behaviourism~ conversation and the knife exchange in the kitchen. also him bringing randall’s body to hannibal in the middle of the night like some dog looking for approval wtf. and obviously him & hannibal double-teaming & killing francis in the season finale and running the fuck away together and then coming back to eat bedelia like I JUST REALLY LOVE DARK!WILLfavourite quote(s): i have SO MANY. some of them i just think are gorgeous and thought-provoking, some i like for shippy reasons or bc they were super chilling or Ominous on a rewatch/paired with later context, and some i just find straight-up hilarious

hannibal: “i’ve always found the idea of death comforting. the thought that my life could end at any moment frees me to fully appreciate the beauty and art and horror of everything this world has to offer.”

hannibal: “the essence of the worst in the human spirit is not found in the crazy sons-of-bitches. ugliness is found in the faces of the crowd.”

jack: “you remember when you decided to call hannibal?”will: “i wasn’t decided when i called him. i just called him. i deliberated while the phone rang… i decided when i heard his voice.”jack: “you told him we knew.” will: “i told him to leave, because i wanted him to run.”jack: “why?”will: “because… because he was my friend. and because i wanted to run away with him.”

hannibal: “you cannot control with respect to whom you fall in love.”

will: “i’ve never known myself as well as i know myself… when i’m with him.”

hannibal: “when the fox hears the rabbit scream, he comes a-running. but not to help. when you hear jack scream, why will you come running?”

chiyoh: “you have a taste for it now.”will: “for what?”chiyoh: “harm.”will: “do you?”chiyoh: “i was violent when it was the right thing to do. but i think you like it. […] if you don’t kill him, you’re afraid you’re going to become him.”will: “yes.”

freddie: “i’ve interviewed enough serial killers to know one when i see one. […] a very specific brand of hostility. i see it every time i look at will graham.”

gray: “there is no god.”hannibal: “well, not with that attitude.”

hannibal: “hello! i love your work.” (YOU NEED CONTEXT FOR THIS ONE BUT I LOVE IT)

guest: “it smells divine!”hannibal: “it is! i say that without ego. i don’t require conventional reinforcement.”

hannibal: “that may have been impulsive.”

hannibal: “a paradox.”alana: “freddie lounds thinks the two of you are a paradox. she sees something no one else sees.”will: “and what’s that?”alana: “that neither of you is the killer she’s writing about… but together you might be.”

will: “i’d pack my bags if i were you, bedelia. meat’s back on the menu. […] ready or not, here he comes.”

freddie: “what will understands is that if you can’t beat hannibal lecter… join him.”

hannibal: “what’s the meat? veal? pork?”will: “she was a slim and delicate pig.”hannibal: “i’ll make you lomo soltado. we’ll make it together. …you slice the ginger.” […]hannibal: “this meat is not pork.”will: “it’s long pig.” (RIDICULOUS. now they’re both making puns while eating people)

will: “is hannibal in love with me?”bedelia: “could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you and find nourishment at the very sight of you? yes. but do you ache for him?”

#anonymous #asks

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