#just use them to pick colors from the color wheel or find the character's texture in the extracted textures and pick from that if you must | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

seyaryminamoto · 3 years

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Do you have any advice on how to draw clothing? I’ve been trying to get into making my own art and all my characters look like they are walking around in socks 😂. Idk how you do it so well

... that the day has come when someone has asked me how I draw ANYTHING is genuinely mindblowing to me xD I know I've upped my game in fabrics lately but this is surreal xD Am I really gonna do an art tutorial, for the first time ever in my whole life?!

Well, for you, Anon, I shall try xD

First off, you're going to want to doodle a basic body shape. I am not going to pretend I am good at doodling body shapes. Nope. But what matters there is getting the position of your character, figuring out what goes where. Once you have that, you go to stage two, and that is putting clothes on 'em!

You can start with basic clothes, the way I did. I simply draw them atop the body outline, then erase whatever bits of the body the fabric will cover up. Depending on what kind of clothes you're drawing, the fabric behaves differently. But what you need to keep in mind is that fabric usually has its own volume, weight, and is affected by a body's movements and positioning. As this body is in a general, simple standing position, the fabric doesn't need to move around MUCH... but it does need to move around a bit if we want it to feel legit.

For the sake of making it look more real, you have to account for where the folds show up more often in clothes. My typical choices for that are locations where fabrics overlap, or where there are joints. Feel free to add a few extra folds here and there, of course, especially if the clothes are meant to be baggy and with a lot of air! The clothes that aren't baggy, however, like (in this case) the gloves or the arm bandages, as they're meant to be tight on the body, won't need folds unless you're drawing something highly detailed with a very peculiar hand shape.

After that, it's base color time! Base color is very very important, as the shades and lighting will be derived from that initial hue. Gotta pick each color right!

Now... SHADING! This is something I used to do with air brush tools. Currently, as I'm working on Clip Studio Paint, I use this fabrics' brush and it has really improved my fabrics' game, so if you can find a good brush that gives your fabrics more texture, it'll help heaps :D if you can't, however, the basic air brush tool, on any art software I've used, can achieve good results on its own.

Normally, when I color, I select the fabric's color, all of it, to avoid unwanted accidents with color bleeding out all over the place. I believe some people just make different layers for everything, but I like pain (?) So, believe it or not, the most important part here is selecting the right color: I leveled up big time in art on the day I started choosing more saturated colors for shadows. I typically went for gray-ish shadow tones, back in the day... but in my humble opinion, it does not hit the same way as more saturated shadows do.

The first one there is the base color, the second one the shading color and the last one is the lighting color. As you can see, I'm not that far inside the black area of the color wheel in the shading one, but I'm choosing a much more intense shade of blue, and that results in a contrast that doesn't require a lot of darkness to feel right.

As for where to apply your shading? That's in fact what the folds are for! :D they serve as guidelines, pretty much, for how you'll shift the color across the fabric. At the shading stage you can even add extra folds you didn't place in your lineart too, if you want, but what matters most is that they will give your clothing volume and texture.

Just as it is with the shading, lighting will lean on the folds as well!

(don't fret, we ain't done yet xD gotta soften that lighting later, naturally...)

I picked a much brighter color for the lighting, and far closer to white. This can work fairly well, but you can also choose a more saturated color if you want to, in some clothes. Makes them feel extra luxurious in my experience xD One of my tricks here is that there will be parts touched by the light that will be brighter than others. Hence why you can see that, while I applied my brush all over the folds, some parts are softer than others. This as well provides texture to the piece, and a dynamic feel that offers it extra volume.

With my base color once again, I've softened the lighting by brushing the base color over it veeeery lightly, and lo and behold! Looks a lot more normal now, right? :D and the colors blend well into each other (if you can't achieve this with a simple airbrush, the blending tool, applied carefully, can result in a similar outcome).

You can use the lighting and shadows to highlight some body shapes too: see how there's shading on that thigh, but instead of flowing right back into the base color, it shifts into the lighting color directly? That helps in giving the fabrics some shape too, therefore, the lineart isn't the only bit that matters in giving fabrics the behavior you may be looking for.

And as I wasn't even sure what number we were at anymore, here we go, step number ?, finish up lighting and shading everything XD I left it with very basic lighting and shading because Tumblr won't let me add any more images to a single post *shakes fist* but usually I play with layer modes, namely Multiply, Glow Dodge, or Color Dodge, to get some extra volume and feeling in clothes. Still, the bulk of the work is what you've seen here :D

Alright, some last tricks I want to share: if you take the lighting shades and brush them veeeeeeeery softly over the edges of each element in the artwork, you can get a really nice contrast that makes the clothes more realistic, to a fault. And one last important thing to point out is... commit to your shadows and lights xD if one area of the shirt is bright and, say, there's another layer of fabric right below it, you have to try your best to follow the pattern of lighting and shading that you set up in the first clothing item you shaded and lit up (?) if that makes sense xD if it doesn't, I'll try to explain it better in another ask, if you send one :D

Anyway! I hope this has been helpful, if it's not thorough enough then I'll have to think of some other way to pack up a proper tutorial that Tumblr won't attempt to destroy x'D but good luck with your next art ventures, and may all the fabrics be on your side in the future! :D

#anon #sokka #I kinda had to #I thought of using Azula but her clothes are... not just more complicated but very armor-y #whenever I draw her :'D #so Sokka felt like a more natural choice for this xD #thanks for the interest in my wonky techniques!#I am by no means a professional but if my amateur ramblings and tricks help anyone I'll be thrilled!#:D

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bltngames · 3 years

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The Balan Wonderworld demo came out yesterday. If you haven’t been keeping up with this, it’s a game by Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima, two of the original creators of Sonic the Hedgehog. A lot of that original team has gone on to do solo work outside of Sega, but this is the first time two former members of Sonic Team have gotten back together to make a new game.

If the demo is anything to go by, Balan Wonderworld (which I keep trying to type as “Balan Wonderland,” because it has a much nicer rhythm to it) is a game that lives deep in the shadow of NiGHTS into Dreams and Sonic the Hedgehog. It is very clearly trying to be an “Old School Sonic Team” experience, which it... sort of succeeds at, for better and worse.

This feels like a game they ripped straight out of 1995, warts and all, and remastered it with modern-ish graphics. I say “modern-ish” because in broad strokes, I think Balan looks pretty good. The character designs are charming, the level themes are interesting, but if you really stop and look at the game, it’s honestly pretty ugly, with simple lighting, limited detail and blurry textures.

One gets the impression maybe that’s because Balan is on everything -- Playstation, Xbox, PC, and even Switch. The gross texture work could be to squeeze the game down for Nintendo’s handheld, but apparently it runs extremely poorly there. On the PS4 Pro, it sticks pretty closely to 60fps, though there are occasionally hiccups here and there. Nothing worth fretting over, honestly.

But how does it play?

This is where the shadow of Sonic the Hedgehog looms large. Balan is designed to be simplistic to a fault: You get one button to control your character. Or, more specifically, every button on your controller will do the same thing (for the most part). This is right out of the Sonic handbook, as that game was also designed to be operable with only one button, as well.

Now, what your one button does can change. Scattered around levels are different costumes for your character to put on, and each costume has its own unique ability. The full version of Balan promises 80 different costumes, and there’s probably half a dozen in the demo. Each one serves a unique purpose, and some of them don’t even have the ability to jump. Which is fine, mostly, because you can carry a stock of three costumes with you that you can swap between sort of like the team mechanics in Sonic Heroes. Once you finish a level, those costumes get added to your dressing room, allowing you to customize a loadout of costumes at any checkpoint.

On paper, that much sounds fine. But this is where things start getting weird.

Costumes are not freely available to pick up. The jewels that hold costumes are locked with a key. This creates an obvious gameplay loop: find key, unlock costume, use costume to solve puzzle, right? Right.

Except that, at least in the demo, most keys are only a few feet away from any given costume jewel. On top of that, keys respawn. Crack open a costume jewel, grab the costume, but hang out for a little while and eventually the key will reappear. In doing this, you can stock up on keys early on in a level, smoothing out the process of acquiring new costumes as you go. I’m not sure why Balan does this. The time between key respawns is a few seconds too many -- just enough that it starts to feel tedious. But, as far as I can tell, there is no penalty for farming up a bunch of keys from the first key spawn point, either. It’s the worst of both worlds. If it was trying to be convenient, keys would spawn more quickly, but if it was trying to plan puzzles around acquiring keys, you can completely side step that by just waiting it out and hoarding keys early on.

You’ll not only want to hoard keys, but hoard costumes, as well. If you’re unlucky enough to take damage or even die while wearing a costume, it’s gone. You can build up stocks of costumes so you’ll always have spares to pull out of the dressing room, but that requires you to specifically go out of your way to get duplicates and bank them. If you don’t, you might find yourself at a puzzle that requires a specific costume that you simply don’t have anymore. When that happens, your only recourse is to backtrack in the hopes of finding a crystal that contains the costume you need, and characters in Balan aren’t exactly fast moving.

The chances of you losing a costume seem pretty low, admittedly. Balan Wonderworld doesn’t really seem like it’s aiming for anything resembling difficulty. Enemies exist, but only in very small numbers, and they’re easily dispatched. Most of the game is more about exploring the dream-like environments and playing around with the various costume abilities in order to solve basic puzzles.

You aren’t working against a clock, there isn’t a scoring system, and you usually aren’t being graded on your performance. Talking it over with some others, the vibe is that this could be a good game for young children. It requires little in terms of controller dexterity and is generous in every sense of the word.

The primary complaint against that, I guess, is that Balan Wonderworld is a weird game. Like, “Elsa and Spider-man Finger Family Youtube Video” weird. Every level is packed full of gently dancing ghosts that phase out of existence once you get too close to them. They’re all the creatures your costumes are based on, but they don’t exist as NPCs in the world for you to touch and interact with. Like I said, they’re ghosts, and they disappear the moment you get within a few feet. Those same ghosts will suddenly materialize when you touch certain checkpoints, throwing you something of parade. They interrupt the level music and everything just to play their own special celebration song. Move more than a few feet and they will fade back out of existence again, taking their special parade song with them, never to be seen for the rest of the stage.

It lends a strangely “uncanny” feeling to the game. I think the dancing characters are meant to add a sense of carefree fun, but they look like people wearing mascot suits, doing the same basic scripted routine over, and over, and over, for eternity. They don’t look like they’re having fun, they don’t appear to be choreographed to the stage’s music, and yet there they are, eternally dancing the days away. It’s kind of eerie. They were performing before you got here, and they'll keep performing after you leave.

The demo pits you against a single boss, which is notable for being someone who has the same powers you do, but combined and amped up. Seeing the same costume motifs come up in the boss as they draw from the same abilities that you have is actually a really fun idea, and the game rewards you for getting creative and swapping between costumes when you deal damage.

Balan Wonderland is a very odd game, and I’m not sure what to make of it. It took me a while to start wrapping my head around its aesthetic and vibes. It contains shades of something like Super Mario Odyssey to be sure, but it feels like it’s trying to elevate itself above that. Again, it’s a game living deep in the shadow of NiGHTS and Sonic, and in particular, it feels like it borrows NiGHTS’ penchant for putting artistic expression at the top ladder rung. Balan often feels like a very inscrutable sort of game, but in a way that seems to be reaching for some kind of greater meaning beyond simply gameplay. Everything in Balan feels like it might be conveying a message of some sort, even if it’s not immediately apparent. Its ideas do not come from a vacuum.

But here’s the deal: even though a lot of people couldn’t grok NiGHTS into Dreams, I did. I love that game to death. But with Balan Wonderworld, even I’m often left scratching my head. Despite its dead-simple gameplay, it may be just a little too high concept for its own good.

But at the end of the day, it’s not a game I hate. It’s strange, and charming, and even if it feels sort of impenetrably "artistic," at least that makes it interesting. The simple gameplay works its magic, making it an easy game to drop in to even if you don’t necessarily understand what you’re looking at.

Like, what’s the deal with the “Isle o’ Tims” between levels? It kind of has the vibe of a chao garden from Sonic Adventure, but the individual “tims” creatures don’t seem to have statistics or anything like that. You feed them so they crank a wheel, which builds a tower that helps them crank the wheel better. It turns in to a bizarre sort of perpetual motion machine. To what end? I don’t know. And what exactly is Balan himself, anyway? Some of his visual cues call to mind character designs for NiGHTS, but he appears to be a different sort of creature altogether. There’s a rather lengthy intro FMV, as you can no doubt see from the Youtube embed, but it’s more about swirling colors and hyperactive animation than conveying what’s going on or who Balan is. How much of this is even really happening, and how much of it is purely metaphysical? It’s very unclear.

I’ll be interested in seeing how the full version of Balan Wonderworld fares. I get the distinct impression that this will be another NiGHTS -- a game beloved by a core audience of hardcore fans, but shunned for being “too weird” by the populace at large.

I’m not quite sure which group I belong to yet.

#balan wonderworld #square-enix #arzest #yuji naka #naoto ohshima #NiGHTS into Dreams #Sonic the Hedgehog #demo #Playstation #video #writing #preview

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thelostandforgottenangel · 3 years

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I'm in need of help from my Tumblr Family!

So I have to make some big decisions and it would mean the world to me if the people who have gotten me through so much these last few years help me pick out stuff 🥰 Namely the carpet, paint, and tile that will be put down in my home after we get the walls up and because I know everyone has different taste in this kinda stuff I narrowed it down to the few that will work inside the house

First up is the Sheet Vinyl

(sorry these are much darker then the pictures look)

#1 The darker set

Natural Paver - a dark gray with black accents and light gray grout that really makes it pop out. I picked this due to the realistic stone look just captured my eyes and would look great for the bathroom (Going to be Mermaid/Ocean/Sea Turtle themed)

Scorched Walnut Gray - a beautiful deep gray with lighter grays blending into the wood like look. It not only looks like real wood but feels like it too

Personally this set was my favorite just for the simple fact that I love dark colors; it relaxes me, but these are bright enough in the small areas to lighten up the room and give it character. Big plus is its thick enough to give just a bit of cushion to the wood floors

#2 The *can work in either area* set

Coffee Diagonal - you really can not see the detail well in the light but it is a beautiful stone look blended with a few colors that bring it out nicely and given my kitchen has that *coffee shop* air thankz to Donnie so it would add to the room. But I say this could work in the bathroom because - it kinda looks a bit like sand

Light Walnut - even though the name suggests a lighter color this actually looks like a darker Walnut to me except for that one little line you can see in the photo. This one look like real wood and it does have the smoother texture

[There is one downside to these two 😭] My mom has the same/similar Diagonal stone tile in her kitchen and although both are thicker then hers meaning it will be stronger both feel a bit brittle to me, my son is in a wheel chair and she's in a scooter her floors are torn up only after two years from the wheels of her cart. Both of the tiles are harder and not as flexible and the ones in #1 so I really have to wonder and worry about not only them breaking if my daughter trips or is playing but tearing if his equipment gets drug across them. So where as I like them there are concerns

Next is Paint Splotches for Bathroom / possibly accent wall

We had to order all brown panels for the walls of the whole house so I will be doing an accent wall in my bathroom and with the current theme I was thinking of a sea foam or lighter greenish blue

🖤 - Pillow Mint

❤ - Glistening Teal 🥰

💜 - Jacob's Jade 🥰

💛 - Soft Schooner Green (My younger sister's pick not one of my faves lol)

(🥰) I'm in love with the top two colors on both middle squares so thinking of using one in my bedroom

Carpet Samples

I'm so never going to be able to pick but honestly all three are beautiful and great for high traffic areas where people might walk in dirt

Dovetail / Coffee Bean

Both are short fibers with a soft feel Dovetail has a

Dreamcatcher Dolphin

Floofy long fibers and soooooo silky soft

Kitchen counter tops

Unfortunately I haven't gotten to look at more counters but I did find this beautiful color that I'm in love with but probably won't be able to get

Again terrible picture but it's a gorgeous black with gray marbled into it. I'm indeed in love with the bits of glitter mixed into the colors

(I will be going shopping at some point and will add to this post 😌🥰)

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illegiblewords · 4 years

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5 Questions for Writers!

5 Questions for Writers

I got tagged by @kunstpause, it looked like fun so figured I’d go for it! THANKS TO KUNST!

Tagging @wouldyouliketoseemymask, @nilim, @azwoodbomb, @peregrineroad, @frostmantle, @autumnslance, @strangefellows, @redbud-tree, @nozomikei, and @rivenroad. No obligation to anyone but full permission to steal granted to anyone else who might like to. I’ll literally be delighted if you pick this up spontaneously and blame me as an excuse lmao.

1. Do you have a favorite character to write? Who and why?

2. Do you have a favorite trope to write? Or one you want to write?

3. Share your favorite description you’ve written?

4. Share your favorite dialogue you’ve written?

5. Scene you haven’t written, but want to?

I made long answers so have a cut!

1. Do you have a favorite character to write? Who and why?

It depends heavily on what fandom and where I am mentally, but I’ve figured out I tend to love writing angsty lameass dudes with blonde hair who are prone to doing really silly things despite taking themselves entirely too seriously. Honestly, I have a pretty huge track record at this point. Harvey Dent, Vexen, Dmitri, Lahabrea, probably more besides. Every one of them fits the right balance of lameass to angst. I like seeing them grow and find fulfillment as people and they are very very cute while still having an edge of badassery and cleverness. Also they’re funny.

Lahabrea is my favorite at the moment, and him reaching that position is an accomplishment considering how stiff the competition is in FFXIV. Loser tricked his way to the top while I was busy laughing at him.

2. Do you have a favorite trope to write? Or one you want to write?

I really, really, really love redemption arcs and people recovering from fucked up experiences. Latter case especially I love seeing characters in those situations successfully connect to the people and world around them, especially if they get to grow together with a partner. I also LOVE “hero saves the villain and villain takes it to heart”.

(You may be sensing a theme here haha.)

There are a few reason these concepts resonate with me, the first being I think they’re really hopeful, inspiring, and something I always wanted to see growing up but rarely did.

People fuck up in life. People get hurt in horrible ways that bring out the worst in them. Sometimes when that happens they dig themselves deeper and deeper into ugliness. The more a person’s bad side comes out, the more hopeless it can feel. And for mental illness especially I’ve found this can be a major issue.

Everyone makes mistakes and everyone has flaws, but I think there’s something really significant in seeing someone who has hit rock bottom, who can no longer imagine a way out, get offered a hand for support and take it. While recovery and redemption (not synonymous of course) ultimately need to be carried by the individual struggling, I really can’t understate how important it is to know in those situations that you’re not alone and someone believes in you.

I think a big part of why this theme is important to me is because mental illness, both genetic and due to trauma, is something unbelievably difficult and painful not only for the sufferer but those around them. The most mentally ill characters in fiction tend to be villains, and are disproportionately more likely to be suffering severe trauma. It frustrated me since I was pretty young to see over and over again cases where a mess could have been avoided if there was any support system in place.

Seeing compassion and connection given that kind of power means a lot to me, as does recognizing that villains are people before they are villains. It’s also very reassuring in the sense of “If this person fucked up that badly but still tried to better themself, I can too. And odds are I’m also worthy of love and compassion, even when my issues make things harder for others. I just have to keep working to improve.”

3. Share your favorite description you’ve written?

Eff.

Straight up I think I’ve written too much to have just one favorite description. It’s been a lot of years and I have hundreds of fics and I’m lame. So I’m going to put a few of my favs.

Anytime there’s a gap in block quotes it’s a different section within the same fic.

22 - A Batman Fanfic

He trembles beneath the weight of their expectations but his smile never fades flashes before cameras microphones under his nose crowds screaming questions bleeding together he answers like clockwork the District Attorney who must bring justice to us all paying tribute to false idols with golden hair and silver tongues we the people bow down in worship to this guardian of the law with words and deeds I believe in Harvey Dent so he swears in hallowed halls to bring prosperity to smite the wicked to damn the criminal with authority invested in him by Gotham’s dutiful children and himself.

***

On the precipice of victory we stand united our voice raised like a torch like a spear like a golden arrow against the beast of Lerna we are gods and monsters we are so much more than good and evil we are order in the court cauterizing corruption our head held high and mighty manifest in Harvey of the doubletalk Harvey who writes himself into the fabric of Gotham’s history Harvey who will not bend before the Roman we command you the unworthy we condemn you the unrighteous we will not be merciful and you will fall before our eyes.

***

I am Dionysus divided at the altar of Tyche O Fortuna O Fortuna give me guidance in the light of the moon you dance sacred silver dollar I see and obey the wax and wane your whim Wheel of Fortune the card I am dealt your servant your slave venerated puppet of flesh blessed is your wisdom bestowed upon I am your disciple wine-mad twisted chanting your word becomes law holy splendor against gavels desecrating your name defiant in denial extend your will through me and we shall strike the innocent enlighten the ignorant or spare them all for now.

Doppelganger - A Spider-Man Fanfic

She asks him to tell the story of himself, and like Scheherazade he begins anew each day.

As with many other things, this comparison is imperfect. The Ravencroft Institute is hardly a palace and neither of them could pass for royalty. She sits in a chair across from him over a carpet the color of sawdust. Her walls are lined with insects pinned on display. Not many butterflies, quite a few beetles. On a bookshelf Dmitri sees The Metamorphosis nestled between non-fiction texts more relevant to her profession. He thinks maybe it's an inside joke she has with herself, but doesn't say so.

He's received an invitation to call her Ashley instead of Dr. Kafka and doesn't know whether to accept. It might be to make him more comfortable. It might be something else. In her late fifties Kafka is built from delicate features, and he suspects the lines around her eyes mean they crinkle when she smiles. Short black hair, beige suit, only jewelry a pair of diamond stud earrings. Dmitri thinks she looks like a mother, but not his.

Her weight sinks into leather, darker than the floor. The couch he rests on matches. He finds himself leaning forward with one elbow propped on his thigh, the other locked in a cast suspended by his neck. There is something reassuringly empty in the gray fabric of his uniform, cheap and utilitarian and harmless. Dmitri’s wrists are thin, but then he's lost a lot of weight recently. He probably wouldn't be able to run as fast as he used to, but then circumstances would be the same anywhere he went so that really doesn't matter. His espionage days are over. His free arm is shedding in flakes but at least his skin is dry. Clean.

Dmitri no longer looks like anyone, unrecognizable to himself. A face without much in the way of edges, short nose. Weak chin. Mismatched eyes that shift between green and blue and brown and every other natural hue as moments pass into minutes pass into hours. Dark blotches interrupt his forehead and chin. They will peel in new patterns across a span of days. For the most part though, he is pale enough to trace veins where his body seems on the brink of spilling out.

It's been a while since he shaved his head and the hair that grows back is almost foreign. An unruly mess of black, blond, brunet, and red—strands as unlike in texture as anything else. The mask that made him Chameleon was white plastic embedded with hardware. Left deformed after trying to resemble others in flesh too many times, it allowed him to duplicate any face, any body he could remember. More than holograms, the most complete sensory illusions technology could perform.

Without it, Dmitri feels stripped.

When Kafka looks at him she’s receiving constant signals and missing none of them. The moments he needs to turn away, flat monosyllabic turns of phrase he chooses or resorts to or blankly accepts as his own. It doesn’t have to be this way. It isn’t comfortable and he doesn’t even trust it’s not calculated. But she’s going to notice no matter what he does at this point, and lying about it doesn’t do anyone much good. They both know why he’s here.

***

“We were poor. We worked hard to keep ourselves fed and clothed and less than an embarrassment. I probably could have worked harder. Mother,” he begins before stumbling over himself.

The story he’s telling isn’t hers. Whatever else she was, Sonya Smerdyakov wasn’t Mrs. Bates. He remembers her voice as the beginning of an echo, forever following someone else’s lead.

And so he followed her.

She was bright like a light going out. She was gentle without being kind. Her fingers were short and delicate and she touched him as little as possible. He found her attention in the way she avoided his name.

***

In the privacy of his room, Dmitri began talking to himself.

Celebrities. Teachers. Children. The flat, steady rhythm of his father’s voice. The words and intonations favored by mother. Sergei’s laugh. He lost himself in a fantasy of conversations, strode through space to mimic confidence he didn’t feel, flashed teeth in front of his mirror like other people.

Once, Dmitri raised his voice. And when his older brother came, eyebrows knitting in confusion, he found himself full of stammered explanations, hands fumbling at his elbows, stumbling over his tongue to make sense of it.

Just making stories for himself. A game with no ending. That was all.

***

He would have died in that town under the eyes of speechless parents. Dmitri remembers the confusion that took his peers when he found a job for people who spoke for themselves. They thought he might be growing up.

He could lie. And when he began he understood it would always be a game with no ending.

Dmitri lost himself in a fantasy of conversations with real people and a voice that didn’t belong to him.

They asked a stranger to sign their yearbooks without even realizing it.

And then he was eighteen, and he left to continue elsewhere.

He didn’t announce his departure.

From Umbra - A Final Fantasy XIV Fanfic

It was probably a dream.

Lukewarm water crept down his throat, nearly making him choke. A skin pressed to his lips, insistent. He coughed, and for the first time there was moisture enough for resistance.

The face that obscured his vision was shrouded in white cloth. Cenric found he couldn’t focus on it. Mismatched eyes, one light and the other dark. Impossible to say if blindness caused the inconsistency.

A string of shells dangled from the figure’s neck, rattling gently. The skin pulled back for a moment. Careful. Patient.

It returned only once he'd grown quiet. Cenric drank for as long as he could. Impossibly, a great deal remained by the time he relinquished his hold.

There wasn't enough of him present to say thank you. Cenric barely registered being dragged, being carried onto a cart. Awareness was altogether gone by the time they started to move.

***

…to the blessed traders who enrich our lives we’re bound to pay with our lives in turn aether born fire-walker your will sees us to rest we entrust ourselves to your sight forged of oschon for peace and prosperity and an ending you do not weep for father azeyma lives in the earth with you her fan brings no breeze the air is hot and thick and breathless your domain a silent place that does not stir have you forgotten the sound of your own voice have you known what it is to live and fail have you been alone do you know what it is to die how can a god pass judgment without being judged nald’thal lord of departures of flame and sand whose coin purse overflows who knows not what it means to starve what it means to spoil the legacy of one who loved you nald’thal who holds shells and souls and precious stones as if their worth were equal nald’thal who cannot know mercy without knowing pain who are you to weigh mortal affairs?

***

In darkness he unwinds the black bandana, steps first from his slops and then his kurta. Yuyudana has provided robes, which rest neatly on a small rock nearby. It crosses Cenric’s mind that the bones of his knees, his hips, his wrists, even his face have all started to protrude strangely. He looks less hyuran than before, maybe less than he ever has. Closer to something priests would exorcise than anyone deserving aid.

He wonders if this idea has occurred to them.

The water, when he advances, is cold. Goosebumps raise across his skin as slowly, gingerly, he wades in to his waist.

Cenric ducks under.

His hair is a long and tangled wreck. Being wet only disguises this slightly. It drifts past his neck, comes to float near the surface. Cenric holds himself in silence, eyes open, watching the silver scatter of light over stones and plants and fish. He remains for as long as he can bear.

His vision stings afterward. Gasping, he can’t tell if the cause is exposure or something else. For a time he simply waits, breathing hard through his nose, hunched so that his lips are partially submerged.

He thinks of nothing, pretends that this time instead of no future he has no past.

Only one moon remains. Maybe the sky aches for losing Dalamud, but better that than the blow which scarred Eorzea.

Stalemate - A Final Fantasy XIV Fanfic

He is presented with impressions of a horse, gaunt and fetid and decayed. Spreading ruin wheresoever it goes. Occasionally it sloughs off portions of its own flesh, which collect flies and blacken any land that surrounds. On its back rests a world, and alongside it does the herd struggle under their own burdens. But even beasts of such endurance have limits. Theirs are reached. When the rotten steed lags, its companions cannot afford to falter. Cannot turn. Without its ability to bear loads, this aberration has no place. Falling is inevitable.

Yet a heart still beats and lungs yet swell.

The Ascian shivers in his grasp, but does not attempt escape.

Here, something festers. Something bleeds. An old wound exacerbated over time.

Fevered, coated in a film of self-disgust, the core of Lahabrea convulses.

Don’t…

Don’t leave me like this…

***

Teeth and tongue. Lingering, wet, disembodied. Another finds his hip. Another his thigh, slipping beneath what clothes remain.

And another.

Warm, human, seeking. The Warrior tightens his hold, uses the moan crawling from his own chest as incentive. Barred by naught but fabric, driving close as he can manage. Lahabrea makes a strangled sound, his gasp crushed empty. A new mouth finds the dark knight’s ear in response.

These are parts of him no one dares touch, no one dares acknowledge. Slick now, attended with something like reverence. Supplication.

He resolves to fuck the Ascian senseless for this, presses his intent deep into Lahabrea’s aether. He is going to steal all his fancy words away. Make him squirm.

“I… I…” Tight, airless, like a plucked string. The Warrior feels Lahabrea’s voice reverberate against the roof of his mouth.

The feeling is difficult to describe. Cracked ice. A fraying rope. Such is Lahabrea's response, fumbling and disoriented as it is.

The Warrior lets go.

4. Share your favorite dialogue you’ve written?

Just imagine me weeping over here lmao. Same deal as before, I’VE DONE TOO MUCH SHIT.

Spare Change - A Batman Fanfic

"Stop," he gasps, "I wouldn’t—"

"You would Harvey. You did. It’s what makes you such a damn good instrument. You had to test yourself, prove that you’re not a real person.” He can feel fingers grinding against bone. His knees bend. Harvey kneels, shuddering, gazing up into the destruction of his own visage. Two-Face meets his eyes, blue on blue. “People are weak. People are ruled by what they want and don’t want. You’re capable of anything if the wind blows just right. You can’t even stop yourself.”

"I wouldn’t," he repeats, numbly.

"Did you," demands Two-Face, forcing him down further, "or did you not flip for their lives, Harvey Dent?"

"We…We aren’t the same people anymore."

"Of COURSE we’re the same people!" Another shove and he’s on the ground, Two-Face sitting on his chest, teeth bared, coin clenched tight between them. "Do you really think you can close your eyes and pretend you aren’t capable of these things? They’re alive," and there is something hideous in his expression, something certain, "because they were lucky. No other reason.”

"The coin is gone! Even if I wanted to listen to it—I can’t!”

"If you’re so sure," says Two-Face, "then how about you improvise?”

And with one motion the silver dollar is under his tongue, forced back so hard he feels himself gag and begin to choke before his eyes open.

The Inquisitor’s Letters - A Dragon Age: Inquisition Fanfic

To His Worship Inquisitor Mahanon Lavellan of Skyhold, My name is Isell from Amaranthine and I’m seven. My mum is helping but says I can send you all by myself. Thank you for fixing the hole in the sky and also the one by the dead man’s house. There were demons but they’re mostly gone now and people are going outside now. Da says Amaranthine has been through too much and can survive anything and he says you’re an elf like us and the Hero of Ferelden was an elf too. He says people used to think elves can’t be heroes but now they don’t. Have you met the Hero of Ferelden? Also I heard that even though you’re Dalish Andraste helped you in the Fade and that humans let you be in the Chantry because anyone Andraste likes must be a really good person. What’s Andraste like? The Chant says a lot but it’s different meeting someone I think. Also I think I saw you a little before but Mum wasn’t sure because you had a helmet on and we were far away and there were a lot of people but I bet it was you. Da wasn’t sure I should write because he says the Dalish don’t like city elves like we are but I think you must be nice and Mum agrees with me. I’ve been playing demon hunters with my brother Arrion (he’s just five still) and Da said templars are who fights demons usually and elves can’t be templars. People thought elves couldn’t be heroes and inquisitors though and we are so I bet I could too. Is it hard fighting demons? Da says they’re real scary but I’m not scared. Thank you for helping us and everyone and I hope you kill lots of demons. Sincerely, Isell U’venlan

From Umbra - A Final Fantasy XIV Fanfic

Cenric sits on the floor, draped in a white cotton tunic. It might have been snug on a Roegadyn but anyone else would find ample room. Behind him, Memesu stands on a cot holding shears. Gold earrings dangle on either side of her face.

“I fought at Carteneau, you know,” she mentions casually. There is a soft hsssssshhhh. Click.

Hair hits the floor. Coils.

He starts to shake his head, aborts the gesture partway through. Stills. “…you saw Bahamut?”

Memesu snorts. “I’m sure everyone this side of Hydaelyn saw Bahamut.” Click.

“That’s probably true,” he concedes. The dragon is what everyone knows, everyone remembers. He can't imagine the proximity. “What about the Warriors of Light?”

“Pff.” Gentle tugging at his scalp. Cenric does not open his eyes but leans into the motion. “I wasn’t of rank to see their like. Not that I’d remember. Stop moving.” Click.

Cenric hesitates.

“What do you remember, then?”

For a time, the only sound comes from blades and a thousand strands cut short. This lasts for several minutes. Cenric resigns himself to secrets.

Then, “I used to think I was special too. As a twin. My sister was Memeni. We studied together.”

Was.

The exhale hits him slowly, quietly.

“She died?”

He can feel the shrug in her hip against his shoulder.

“It was Carteneau,” says Memesu. “Of course she died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?” Click. “It had nothing too do with you. If you keep trying to claim responsibility for every misfortune you find, you’re going to get self-important.”

Cenric only grunts, quiet and non-committal.

Click.

“Carteneu was so much worse than people remember. Only four years later and already we hurry to dispose of details.” There is a hard undercurrent to Memesu’s voice, but what contact she makes remains light. Careful. “I remember the arcanist from Limsa who didn’t dodge a magitek canon in time. Miqo’te. Spells come faster in that discipline, so there’s less stress on distance than thaumaturgy. Girl got careless.” Click. “The mess smelled like rotten eggs and charcoal. Her face was… melted.” Click. “I try not to look in those situations. They only make casting harder. But she was so close.”

Cenric doesn’t move. Doesn’t say a word.

Memesu continues. “One of our own gladiators, an Ala Mhigan, took to mutilating any pureblooded Garleans he could catch. The man had a string of eyes hanging around his neck. I’m pretty sure one enemy officer wet himself before he started to beg. Not that it particularly mattered.”

Click.

“Memeni… didn’t anticipate what she was getting herself into. She saw magic as a way of being useful to craftsmen. My focus has always been theoretical. Right side.” Startled, Cenric lets her guide his jaw to get a better view of his profile. Click. Click. “Meni used to think I was a priss. She preferred to develop magitek kettles alongside alchemists. See if she could find a way to capture light like the Mhachi did. She still enjoyed fishing when she could, even though it smelled awful. Never outgrew the braids she wore growing up. ” Memesu sighs. “…just understand she died afraid, in pain, and with things left undone. My sister didn’t even resemble herself at the end.”

Cenric is very still. Thinks carefully.

“…I wish it could have gone differently,” he says at last.

Memesu’s mouth slides up in a small, crooked smile. She tousles the neat, ear-length hair before her. “So do I.”

Eclipse - A Final Fantasy XIV Fanfic

It ends at Elidibus’ untimely arrival.

“Lord Zodiark,” he says, so smoothly that were he not searching for it that the anger would be undetectable, “appreciates your attentions.” His gaze does not waver from Lahabrea as he speaks. “But there is work to be done and I’m afraid there are words I would have with your Speaker.”

They disperse.

Nabriales, careful and curious, folds himself out of sight beyond the chamber then makes his way back to its edge.

Lahabrea, farthest from the exit, attempts to steal some small dignity. Turns to face Elidibus.

The Emissary makes him wait. Expressionless red masks matched by those who wear them.

Then, with more speed and force than typical for his demeanor, the Emissary closes distance to trap his colleague against the wall.

“It was my error,” hisses Elidibus, leaning in, “to have stayed silent upon rescuing you. A mistake I will remedy now, so we can be on no uncertain terms.”

Lahabrea lowers his eyes. Nabriales notes that despite the dread they all share of such reprimands, the man does not brace.

“You know as well as I that these words offer less succor to our Lord than action,” continues Elidibus, his fury quiet and no less sharp for that, “just as we both know your thoughtless action is the cause of repeated missteps these past centuries. Make no mistake—for all the strides you’ve made, your fixation and your impatience have cost the rest of us considerable time.”

Silence.

“Do you truly think this is your best service to Him?” asks Elidibus. “To us? Compromising your ability to fill the hours? Even Emet-Selch agrees these displays are disgraceful. You have ever borne them poorly, but being a 'paragon among paragons' naturally you continue ignoring your own better judgment with ours to continue this exercise in futility. Idiot.”

A twitch of the head. Almost a flinch.

It is one of few moments Nabriales has seen the Emissary express his anger so openly. Even after the Thirteenth fell to Igeyorhm’s error, Elidibus allowed the Angel of Truth to lead and voiced his own reproach with a more typical icy demeanor. Scathing though it was.

“I can be of use,” says Lahabrea softly. “Only three of us remain, and I—“

“You,” Elidibus snaps, “cannot follow the most simple instructions for the good of us all. Not for Him, not for Amaurot, not even for yourself. Your pride has made you not simply an embarrassment but a liability.”

Neither man speaks for several moments after that.

And then, at length, Elidibus exhales.

Says the Speaker’s name.

Receives his attention.

“What would you have me do?” the Emissary asks. His tone now is almost weary. “Clearly it would be unreasonable to trust you’d simply listen. Must I mind you like a child?” This is what breaks Lahabrea’s composure.

Knowing the man’s temper, Nabriales had expected him to lash out. Even on the back foot their orator is perfectly capable of defending himself from insults.

Instead, he embraces Elidibus fiercely—face just within the bounds of his pauldrons. Jaw locked shut firmly enough to hurt. Expression downcast.

Elidibus remains perfectly still at first. In the absence of conversation it is possible to hear the rush of Lahabrea’s breathing. Only through the nose, withheld briefly between each inhale as if that offers some means to steady himself.

As if that would make it better.

Tentatively, Elidibus holds him back. Lahabrea's fingers contract, and though he remains upright when his knees begin to give it is the Emissary who helps him kneel.

“Easy,” he murmurs, and Lahabrea removes one hand to run it reflexively over his face—coming against the mask.

Nabriales finds himself staring, searching. A puzzle with missing pieces whose image he may yet divine

“It was not,” says Lahabrea roughly, “my intention to…”

Elidibus reaches beneath the other man’s cowl, finds the hair and skin beneath. Draws him in once more.

Naught that would be shared with or among the Sundered. Nothing so personal as that.

Nabriales has worn his own share of flesh. Bedded lovers, adopted companions and families of vessels to fulfill a purpose. Passable enough, perhaps, but never for him. Not in truth.

It’s as if he looks upon two strangers.

Parched - A Final Fantasy XIV Fanfic

The door closes behind them. Lahabrea, projecting his preferred likeness over the host, waits on a couch within.

It’s admittedly a surreal sight. Ishgardian finery with its gilded edges, its elaborate wallpapers and marble floors. A collection of creams and blues and greens, fine furniture with velvet seat cushions. All ostentatious in the extreme… and then Lahabrea. Masked and cowled. Pouring three glasses of La Noscean arrack.

Elidibus freezes, and though none of them can see his eyes the confusion is clear enough.

“What is this?”

“Your turn,” says Emet-Selch, lightly but less flippant than he might have been.

Lahabrea proffers a cup from where he sits.

Elidibus neither moves nor speaks.

Emet-Selch approaches. Takes the drink. Presses it carefully into the other man’s hand.

“Don’t think,” he says smoothly,” that I won’t let you drop it.”

Mercifully, Elidibus has a good grip.

“Sit,” says Lahabrea, gesturing with his own glass to the sofa across from him.

Elidibus sits.

Emet-Selch sits.

Takes his own glass, perhaps a bit pointedly.

Elidibus’ mouth is pressed tight. It opens briefly, as if to speak. Shuts again.

“Explain,” the Emissary manages eventually.

Lahabrea meets his co-conspirator’s eye. Downs his arrack in a single attempt.

It is a long attempt.

It lasts several moments.

The other Ascians watch.

“Elidibus,” says Emet-Selch as Lahabrea endeavors to catch his breath in the aftermath, “Lahabrea and I are concerned that you may be experiencing some difficulties in recent years.”

“I’m fine,” replies Elidibus coldly. Holding his drink. “Why did you think this necessary?”

“Because—“ wheezes Lahabrea.

“Because you’re practically a mammet,” says Emet-Selch, picking up Lahabrea’s glass. Moving it just out of reach. “Truly. It’s been what, two hundred years? Three? Neither of us can remember the last time you so much as spoke of matters unrelated to the Rejoining.”

Lahabrea reaches. Elidibus pours his arrack into the other man’s glass before nudging it back toward him.

Elidibus makes eye contact with Emet-Selch.

“I remain focused,” he says evenly. “Nothing more.”

Emet-Selch gestures to the bottle.

Elidibus sighs.

Refills his own glass.

“There are matters I must attend myself. As is the case with each of you.”

“Undoubtedly,” replies Lahabrea more evenly. “But with few exceptions, you haven’t done so.”

A hard stare from behind the mask.

“What would you have me do? I can’t very well take time off.”

Emet-Selch sips.

“A negligible amount of time,” he says, “taken sparingly, may be forgivable.”

5. Scene you haven’t written, but want to?

Lmao see this is a plus side/minus side deal. Minus side, it’s being asked just before I embark on a MASSIVE ASS FANFIC. And I basically am excited for all of it. Plus side, there are things I refuse to spoil.

So... putting it vaguely, in no particular order:

- Lahabrea and Hydaelyn meet a second time after Praetorium.

- Moonfire Faire

- Thancred

- Conversations over mulled wine

- Silvertear Lake

Some of these are sex scenes. Most aren’t. But I am very hyped.

7 notes · View notes

honeylikewords · 4 years

Note

Poe or Santi or both! Plus something fallish, whatever you want, pumpkin picking, apple picking, hay ride...

Oh, how absolutely sweet! I love this prompt so much! As such, I’ll write both, because one can never have too much autumnal adorableness! So, without further ado, let’s begin!

“You know,” Santi murmurs, eyes on the road, hands carefully moving the steering wheel, “I haven’t really ever done anything like this.”

Christmas music tumbles out of the car radio as they cruise down a largely empty country road; somewhere in the back of Santi’s mind, he registers some level of aggravation that they’re already playing songs like these. His eyes follow the curves of the road, darting up to the steady lines of the trees that surround the road, some of them so densely clustered that their branches hang over and form an archway over the road, dripping red-orange leaves down onto the pavement.

“Really?”

His sweetheart looks up from the map on her phone in surprise, and Santi glances away from the road to meet her eyes, smiling sheepishly.

“Yeah. I never really lived anywhere that got cold around fall, so stuff like, uh--” --he takes a hand off the wheel and gestures with it, as if trying to tug the missing word down out of the air-- “--’leaf viewing’ wasn’t part of my fall experience.”

“It’s just taking a scenic drive to see the colors,” she says softly, raising a brow. “You never did that before?”

“My parents and I lived in Florida,” replies Santi. “Our little corner of the panhandle didn’t get changing leaves. We’d have to go pretty far out to get anywhere like that, which sounds like it’d have been a hassle for them, so no. And where I was in Columbia wasn’t inclined for fall, either, so, again, no.”

“Well, what was your fall experience like, then?,” she probes, giving him a curious, questioning nudge with her elbow. He shakes his head and chuckles.

Santi turns his gaze forward once more, looking out the windshield to admire the brightly-colored trees in their autumn plumage. The vibrant reds, oranges, yellows, browns, and holdover greens all make up a new skyline, one unfamiliar to him yet so easy to imagine as being just the way things are supposed to be. It is picturesque; quintessential yet alien to him at the same time. He sighs out through his nose and shrugs, trying to conjure specific memories of what his own past had been like, and trying to determine if it was relatable enough.

“We’d get pumpkins from grocery stores and carve a few,” he says after a moment. “Mostly me and my dad. My mom hated the feeling of pumpkin guts.”

“Did she, now?”

Santi knows she’s just trying to tug a little more conversation out of him; he’s surprisingly coy about his childhood memories, almost evasive, and she always wants to know more. He smiles to himself, casting a quick glance at her, and finds himself pleased by her intrigue. It’s sweet that she wants to know him so well. He supposes it wouldn’t hurt to share a more about his family, and decides to indulge her.

“Mhm, she hated the texture; she was always picky about that kinda stuff. But my dad loved carving the pumpkins, and sometimes did two or three a year on his own, so we’d end up with a huge bowl of the guts, and my mom would tell us we’d better not be wasteful, and so my dad and I would have to hand-pick every seed out of the giant bowl and roast them to eat.”

Turning the car to follow the bend of the road, Santi chuckles airily at the memory of his father elbow-deep in the massive steel bowl of gooey pumpkin guts, fishing for individual seeds one by one, the man’s sleeves rolled up and some wayward strands of pumpkin innard smeared on his forehead and glasses.

“And then, you know, we had Halloween, and then Día, which was really mostly just for my dad, and a very loose version of Thanksgiving that centrally revolved around my mom and dad making way too many dishes and then trying to negotiate who got the TV; Dad always wanted to watch the game, and Mom always wanted to watch the parades.”

“What did you like watching?,” she asks, and Santi turns to see her leaning her chin in her hand, watching him intently.

He pauses, then takes a hand off the wheel, patting her thigh with it affectionately. He can’t get over how cute it is that she cares.

“I liked both, if I’m being honest. But I especially liked watching the parades with my mom; she’d get all excited about the singers and the cute kids walking the floats and stuff like that. It was infectious, her enthusiasm.”

Santi feels her take his hand and lace their fingers together and smiles, warmth flooding his cheeks, creating a comfortable kind of sting against the cold air.

“And she’d always ask me if I knew what character the balloons were, because she had a hard time remembering them all,” he continues. “So I’d tell her. And if the commentators were talking too fast for her, I’d translate what they were saying into Spanish, and she really liked that.”

He trails off, still smiling.

“I think her favorite balloons were the Snoopy ones,” he adds. “She knew Snoopy. Liked him a lot. Oh, and she liked the marching bands; I remember she wanted me to do marching band at my school so bad, probably because she thought that it’d mean we’d get picked to go to the parade or something.”

“Did you ever join? Band, I mean?”

Santi pauses, turning to eye her with an air of incredulity, doing his best to keep a straight face and not give the game away. Try as he might, though, he can’t entirely keep the smile off his face as he takes in her inquisitive eyes, her anticipation, her burning need to know.

“Snare drum,” he says bluntly.

She shrieks and grips Santi’s hand tighter, and Santi can’t help but let out a brief little chuckle himself.

“Please, please, please tell me you have pictures,” she begs. “I have to be able to pair the image of my big, strong special-ops officer with the scrawny band geek I just know you were. My life depends on it.”

Santi snorts loudly, a sound that shocks him: he hadn’t even meant to laugh, much less make such an unbecoming noise. However, just as the self-consciousness begins to descend on him, Santi hears her laughter joining his own, and he relaxes into the feeling of being known, being seen, snort and all. It feels strangely natural.

The car stalls at a red light and Santi takes advantage of the moment of stillness to turn his head to fully face her, a silence permeating the car as they look at one another and see familiar features and yet, somehow, something new, something still unfolding. He clears his throat.

“All that stuff is great," he murmurs, “But... I’m... I wanna make new memories, too. Have new experiences.”

Her eyes sparkle in the bright grey autumn light that filters through the windows, her cheeks rounded by her loving smile. His bubbles with boyish excitement at being so near to someone he feels so deeply for, and, both unable and unwilling to resist, he leans across the seat and kisses her forehead, lingering for the barest breath of a second before seeing the light turn green. At this, Santi returns safely to his seat to push the car through the intersection, but still feels the brush of butterflies inside his belly.

When he looks over at her as they pass under the light, he sees her watching him once more; she’s trying to gauge his reactions to what he’s seeing, trying to determine how he’s feeling. Santi softly pulses her hand, giving her a fond smile.

“Come on, then,” he says, doing his best to re-invigorate the conversation. “Tell me how you’re liking the leaves.”

Noting the change in tone, his beloved turns her face to look out the window and sighs, but in a way that strikes Santi as sounding quite contented rather than disappointed or distressed. Santi watches her breath leave a little fog against the cold clearness of the windowpane. She nods, seemingly satisfied by her leaf-watching, then turns back to him, squeezing his hand once, twice.

“I love how big the trees get out here,” she says. “They’re so old and tall, and getting to drive through these--” --she gestures out at the over-arching branches that form the forest tunnel that the road winds through-- “--Is like being taken somewhere far, far away... somewhere magical, you know?”

Santi encourages her to go on by giving her hand a matching sequence of squeezes.

“And I can’t believe how these are all real colors, right? It’s amazing that plants can do this, and how it changes the whole atmosphere!”

He strokes his thumb along the smooth hills of her knuckles and hums in acknowledgment as she tells him all these things; in her own attempt to keep the conversation light and breezy, she talks about previous leaf-viewing drives she’d been on, and how they all pale in comparison to this one. Santi listens carefully, but finds that he is less concerned with the practicalities of the venture than with just being there, in this moment, with her. Listening to her voice. Watching her mannerisms, admiring her natural movements. Being infected by her enthusiasm.

He watches her talk for a few moments more before pulling over, parking the car in a patch of flat land off the side of the road. Santi’s sweetheart looks over at him, cocking her head to the side, questioning. Santi merely smiles and unbuckles himself, then steps out of the car and rounds it to reach her side and open the door for her.

Santi reaches his hand in to help her out and onto her feet, then guides her into leaning on the warm hood of the car by his side, one of his arms wrapped around her waist. They sit in silence, listening to the chatter of birds in the trees, the susurrus of the leaves, the distant hum of cars on roads further on from them. She leans her head on his shoulder, and the two watch the leaves overhead shift and billow in the breeze, flipping their pale bellies up to the sky to flash their fiery colors down to the onlookers below.

After a span of many long, uncounted minutes, Santi breaks the peaceful reverie.

“When we get home, I’ll show you my band pictures.”

She abruptly turns her head up to face him. He can see the unbridled glee in her eyes.

“I had a uniform,” he continues. “Feathered hat and all.”

“Oh my god,” she whispers ecstatically.

“I know.”

“I love you so much.” She grabs his shoulders and stares into his eyes. “But I am going to make so much fun of you when I see those pictures.”

Santi tips his head back and lets out the loudest, most unabashed snort-laugh of his life.

“I still can’t believe you actually are wearing that.”

“It’s not my fault,” Poe grumbles, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans as he walks up the hill towards the farm’s entrance. “Leia’s just so... Well, it’s not like I could say no!”

“You could have taken it off in the car,” his sweetheart counters.

“I feel like she’d know, somehow!”

Poe fishes his hands out of his pockets to grab at the hem of his sweater and tug it out, looking down at the pattern on the torso with a wrinkled nose. He eyes the knitted cornucopia and embroidered pumpkins warily, the ironed-on autumn leaves stirring his gut with their kitsch. Poe finds himself sighing and allowing the sweater to flop back down into place as his beloved chuckles to herself, her hand slipping around his forearm, linking them side by side.

“Well, if it’s any consolation, I think you look very cute,” she offers, squeezing his bicep affectionately. “You look like you’re going to bingo night at the senior’s center!”

“Don’t start,” gripes Poe as he rolls his eyes.

“Do you need my help crossing the road?,” she continues. “Can I get you some denture paste? Perhaps a hard candy that tastes like dust?”

“You’re so mean to me.”

“You’re cute when you’re grumpy.”

They crest the hill and pass through the front gates of the farm; families with young children pose for photos in front of the farm’s sign, little kids run to various animal petting areas, and people comb through rows and rows of pumpkins to find the one just right for them.

Poe draws in a deep, contented breath and smiles, looking over at his lover with excitement, then gestures widely with his hand at the expanse of the farm.

“Where to, young lady?,” he asks jovially. “You get first pick.”

She hums in thought, surveying the surroundings, taking her time, and Poe watches her with anticipation. He hopes she doesn’t want to pick pumpkins right away; he’d be lugging them around all day, and he hates the thought of having his hands full with heavy gourds instead of being able to hold her hand or, if the opportunity presented itself, being able to pinch her butt.

After a moment, she responds with her choice.

“I wanna see what they’re selling over there,” she states, pointing at a little stand. “Do you wanna go?”

Poe nods chipperly; thank God it wasn’t pumpkins.

They walk towards the stand together as knee-high children zoom past, chased by anxious parents, and nearby animals bray and nicker in their stalls. The populous din reminds Poe of his own childhood on the farm, and as they pass a paddock of lowing cows, he passes his hand over the muzzle of one nearest the fence, smiling fondly to himself.

Arriving at the stall, Poe is overwhelmed with a wonderful, warm, treacly smell; cooking sugar and the sharp crispness of fruit mingle in the air, and Poe grins, rushing closer to the stall and tugging his beloved along with him.

“Oh, you picked the best part of all!,” he beams. “Caramel apples!”

He studies the golden-coated apples as the glimmer under the stall’s soft orange lighting, already salivating at the mere sight of them. He holds up two fingers to the seller behind the stall, then squeezes his beloved’s hand as it still rests on his bicep, turning back to face her again.

“You have such good taste, darling. And not just in men!”

At this, the woman on Poe’s arm rolls her eyes and kicks at the toe of his boot playfully, then reaches her free hand out to accept one of the offered caramel apples from the vendor. Poe follows her lead and takes his own, thanking the vendor and fumbling in his pocket for the requisite bills, handing them over a little awkwardly as he tries to balance his sweetheart’s hold on his arm and the sweet in his opposite hand.

After receiving and pocketing his change, Poe pivots and walks with his lover, taking his first, gooey bite of the apple with great relish. He makes a happy groan as he chews, looking to her with a giddy expression, as if to wordlessly ask “isn’t this the greatest?”

Chewing her own apple, she nods at him, a little caramel left on her lips catching the light. Poe finds himself staring at her mouth, then at all of her face, watching her as she looks around at the farm and its attendees. He admires the shape of her eyes, the color of them as the light filters through her irises. He watches her lashes when she blinks, her brows as they make minuscule journeys to mark her reaction to the sights around her.

Poe watches the rise and fall of her cheeks as she chews, the form of her chin, the curvature of her neck. He notes the way her hair moves as they walk, and how her breath forms tiny, fleeting clouds in the brisk air.

Slowing his gait until he comes to a standstill with her by his side, Poe allows his eyes to slide back down to her lips, transfixed by that little remnant of sweetness perched on them. Noticing they’ve stopped, Poe’s beloved turns her head and quirks a brow, swallowing her most recent bite of apple.

“Something wrong?”

“No,” he says softly, gaze unwavering from her mouth. “Hold still.”

Tenderly, he unlinks their arms and uses his free hand to lift her chin up, then ducks his head down, pressing their lips together with a contented, pleasured sigh.

A certain kind of relief fills Poe; taking in all of her beauty had built such a pressure up in his chest, located somewhere behind his sternum, and the kiss seems to alleviate the ache, the longing for her. As he turns his head to deepen the kiss, she makes a soft sound of surprise, but adjusts to the kiss quickly, her freed hand slipping up to his shoulder to tug him closer.

Half of a heartbeat passes before she is surprised once again, this time by the feeling of Poe ever-so-lightly swiping his tongue over her lower lip, probing her mouth coyly. He loves the sound she makes at the unexpected move, and he can’t help but chuckle into the kiss at her adorable reaction. The honeyed taste of caramel sings on her lips, and Poe gives another pleased sigh; kissing her is, in and of itself, one hell of a treat.

Poe pulls back with a satisfied, almost smug expression plastered on his face, eyes scanning her visage to gather her reaction. She blinks, taken aback, but does not seem at all unhappy with what just happened. Poe can’t help but think that she looks adorable as she stands there, dazedly holding a caramel apple with one hand, another on his shoulder, her eyes wide as she reels, trying to understand what could have prompted such a passionate gesture.

“W... well, that was very, um--” she stumbles at last, her words getting mixed in a girlish giggle as she puts her free hand on her cheek, as if to ground herself and check that she was really here, experiencing all of this.

“You had a little schmutz,” Poe offers, his tone jaunty and flirtatious. “Someone had to deal with it, get you cleaned up and presentable.”

“O-oh, mhm, yeah, absolutely.”

Her voice sounds vaguely hazy, somewhere far-off and dreamy. That’s the effect he’d hoped to have.

“Though I must say, it was a little, ahem, uh, jarring? To be kissed like that while you’re dressed like... that.”

To punctuate her sentence, Poe’s beloved pokes his belly, right in the middle of the felted foliage on his sweater. He balks; he’d forgotten how he looked, too caught up in the savoir-faire smoothness of his wooing of the woman before him. All of a sudden, he feels an embarrassed heat rise to his cheeks, realizing what a goon he must’ve looked like, wearing this gauche sweater and kissing her so abruptly and intensely.

He puts a hand over his eyes and groans.

“I’m gonna go lay in front of the tractor,” he mumbles. “Gonna let it run me over.”

“No, nooo, no!,” she coos sympathetically, rubbing a hand on his shoulder, unable to suppress a little bubble of laughter. “It was super cute!”

She tugs at the collar of his sweater, lowering his face to hers again, and she pecks each of his cheeks repeatedly, the smell of caramel and her particular perfume filling Poe’s senses. He can hear her giggling to herself as she smooches him, and he finds the sound infectious enough to lower his hand from his face, if only so he can have an unobstructed view of her smile.

“C’mon, don’t be shy, honey! I loved it!”

“You sure?,” Poe pushes, pressing his forehead to hers. “I’d hate for you to feel like you just got Frenched by a geriatric.”

Poe watches her roll her eyes and gently shove at his shoulder as she steps back, linking her free hand with his, weaving their fingers together. She rocks their hands back and forth, swaying them as she begins to walk. Poe follows suit, still burning with lingering shame.

“I’d let you know if it bothered me, dearest,” she hums as she takes a bite of her apple, chewing it thoughtfully. After she swallows, she turns and meets his eye. “Now, do I have any schmutz?”

Poe smiles shyly.

“Maybe a little...”

“Would you mind getting it for me, then?” She tilts her chin upward, giving him a teasing smile. “I think you’ll do a thorough job of making me presentable, was it?”

He grins from ear to ear; he fully intends to do a very thorough job, indeed, gaudy sweater be damned.

#messages #long post #santiago garcia #poe dameron #gif warning #oh my GOD i took forever writing this because ive been In A Weird Brain Zone #im so sorry i took so long!! and these are still somehow so short!!#but at least i got it donezo so that's nice!!#also why am i posting this at 2 am? because i had to make myself finish it or it'd never get done! but now it is so :3

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sylleboi · 5 years

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𝕻𝖎𝖈𝖐 𝕬𝖓𝖉 𝕸𝖎𝖝 ︱ 09/09/19

𝕮𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖆𝖌𝖊

During our second day of the course, we were introduced to making collages, inspired by the way that the surrealistic artist Hannah Höch creates the majority of her artwork. Collages are a practice in which you collect pictures, shapes, etc. in a variety of different kind of mediums, and then putting them together to create something new. You can use different aspects of other peoples artwork/things that somebody else have created or produced, to make your own piece of art with a different meaning to what the initial meaning might have been.

To try this out ourselves, we cut out three random and automatically made shapes out of printed and patterned paper. Each one of us then laid out our three shapes onto a table at the end of the classroom. Now we could select three new shapes that you hadn’t made yourself from the selection laid out on the table. Once we had chosen our three new shapes cut out by other students in the room, we started looking through magazines to find objects, faces, body parts, letters, etc. to cut out and put together in a new but preferably odd way, to fit the theme of surrealism. A second theme that you could adapt was anthropomorphism, which could be done by cutting out different bodyparts from animals. For each shape, we made one character, leaving us in the end with three different and incredibly abnormal-looking creatures that we then sketched in a different style and then named. During the last bit of the lesson, we went over and evaluated what we had come up with and wrote down a few words that we thought described our sketches the most accurately.

𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕭𝖗𝖎𝖊𝖋 + 𝕴𝖓𝖙𝖗𝖔𝖉𝖚𝖈𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓

We continued elaborating a bit on the Exquisite Corpse game, now going over what we had done previously and evaluating what we did and why we did it. Through this, I was taught the importance of taking notes for you. Not only did I learn how it’s important to write down everything you feel is important information to keep in mind for the future, but also how helpful it can be to actually illustrate it in steps. It doesn’t only help with remembering it, it also makes it easier to figure out what is what once all my notes start building up throughout the course.

The picture above is a digitalized version of what I chose to illustrate in my notes on the Exquisite Corpse game, which just shows the way to fold the paper and how to draw each bit before giving it to the next person to continue.

𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕭𝖗𝖎𝖊𝖋

We then went over the Brief. This mainly included learning about visual language. This included both understanding what visual language involves as well as learning about how you can apply visual language to context.

Here is a visual mind map sort of thing of what visual language includes:

Now, what do the individual words actually mean? Welp! I was smart enough to take notes, so here goes!

Tone: Tone, also known as shading, is an important aspect of drawing. It is used to guide and direct the viewer's eye. With shading, you can create different moods for your audience to pick up on. Light values often feel open, lighthearted, fun, calm, relaxing, welcoming, inviting, warm, gentle, etc.

On the other side, dark values can often feel uneasy or create an atmosphere of mystery, sadness or something ominous.

Connected to tone is the concept of contrast. Shortly put, it is the difference in light and dark values. Low contrast means that there isn’t much difference between the light and dark values. This can create a calm or subdued mood. High contrast results in very light and very dark values to be next to each other. That can create the mood and feel of excitement, conflict, agitation, drama or distress. Using contrast is incredibly useful for directing the viewer’s eye because naturally, out eyes move to where the highest level of contrast is.

Colour: An example of what colour could mean in the context of art and visual language, could be how stereotypically the colour red symbolizes something evil or bad, but let's break it down a bit more;

Colour is a very important factor in visual storytelling. Like tone, colour is most often used to create mood and emotion, as well as directing the eye and emphasizing different parts of the image or frame. There are fundamental tools that artists use to apply colour efficiently in their art. One of the first things that might come to mind is the colour wheel:

So why is the colour wheel so useful, and why do art teachers in secondary school never shut up about them?

Well, they allow us to clearly identify visually similar colours (which are also known as analogous). These colours are what you’d describe as fitting together. They complement one another really well, and the colour wheel makes it easy for us to see which ones do exactly that. They are close to each other on the wheel. An example of this could be red, orange and yellow.

Contrasting colours are further apart, and an example of this being blue and green.

Finally, there are also complementary colours which are opposite each other on the colour wheel, so an example of that could be red and green.

With the use of contrasting and complementary colours, it can really aid to direct the eye and our attention. Notice how super vibrant this combination appears to the eye? It’s almost as if they clash.

Like mentioned before, analogous colors do the opposite; notice how natural and cohesive they feel? Like they belong and/or fit together.

Like mentioned earlier about the red colour often signaling danger or something bad, each color on the wheel has its own individual influence psychologically. Here are some examples of this;

This colour comes across as being calm and relaxed:

Now, comparing this to this vibrant red colour, it appears much more alarming and alert!:

Shape: Similar to lines, shapes can be connected to feelings and what you read when you look at the different shapes. To give some examples to explain this, triangles can convey speed, action, and tension:

Circles normally appear more friendly:

Squares appear strong, reliable, and stable:

Shapes can also be seen when looking at or studying composition, as you can with for example lines. Shapes can be organic (curved edges and continuous) and geometric (sharp edges and angles)

Line: With line, you can do more than you’d think. You can essentially, when breaking it down, tell a story from a single line. Lines can have many different qualities. Some examples of this could be that you can change the direction in which the line is going and which way it points. You can also change the weight of a line to be either thin or thick. You can also vary the shape of the line as well as adjusting the pressure at which you are drawing. With these different quantities kept in mind, you can apply them to convey meaning.

To give some examples, you could make a line with the feeling of being nervous or distressed like this:

You could make a line with the feeling of being angry:

Or a line which expressed a feeling of being calm:

All of the principals shown above are all used to convey scenes, feelings, characters, and environments in films, drawings, animations, etc.

Form: This could be connected with things that are 3D, (threedimensional) meaning there is an aspect of extra depth that you can’t normally archive with 2D. This is emphasized by light and dark values. (low and high contrast)

Texture: There are two types of textures;

- Implied texture is basically texture that appears to be there, but it’s an illusion.

- Actual texture is texture that exists and can be felt by touch.

𝕰𝖛𝖆𝖑𝖚𝖆𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓

During the evaluation of the class, we talked a bit about why this might be a useful thing to do the Exquisite Corpse in the future. I personally thought that it was very freeing to do. It allows you to let loose with ideas without having that inner voice nagging you saying “This isn’t good enough, that could be better.” The collaborative snapshot of the game definitely gives you inspiration for future ideas and art since you can compare what you did with what everyone else did. Of course, that could result in some toxic thoughts rather than anything that could be useful for oneself, but that is an inner battle every artist in every field has to fight over time.

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gwiiyeoweo · 5 years

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Somnus draped one end across Ardyn’s shoulder and fell back onto his stomach, shuffling close to his brother’s side and draping the other end across his back. It was barely large enough to cover both of them, but with Somnus snug against Ardyn, they managed to fit themselves underneath the comforting weight.

“Good?” Ardyn asked, lightly bumping his shoulder against his little brother.

“Good.”

Somnus rested his head against Ardyn’s arm, eyes following the text on the page and ears listening intently to his older brother’s voice, finding solace in the warmth of each other’s presence.

He remembers simple times filled with simple joys.

Somnus used to pick out his weekly book from the family library. Ardyn used to pitch a blanket fort and read stories to his little brother, picking out the black text by the light of their glowing magic.

Pairing: Somnus & Ardyn Rating: G

The wheels rattled and creaked along the floor as Somnus struggled to tug the ladder across, dragging it over to the towering shelf of mismatched books and spine colors. It's rather late at night, and he hoped he didn't make too much noise. If his keepers found out he's out of bed at this hour, he's likely to get an earful, and he'd rather not listen to Madame Celine's raspy voice, which could only be a punishment in itself. So despite the light burn in his arms, from manhandling the uncooperative ladder around, Somnus quickly climbed up the bars, only stopping at the tenth row to pluck out a sizable book set in a deep red binding.

He's had his eye on this one for a while, ever since the servants hauled in the cart full of texts his father had bought from a caravan of traveling merchants. He flipped the book over in one hand, admiring the leaves of gold embedded into the worn cover. If he had the time, he'd love to savor the texture of the smooth leather underneath his fingertips, but he needed to get out of the danger zone. If someone caught him now, all his efforts would be for naught. He hadn't memorized the shift changes and patrol schedules of their watchmen, their regular routes and lazy shortcuts, only to be thwarted now of all nights.

With the book clutched to his chest, Somnus carefully climbed down the ladder, minding his feet in the dim light of their perpetually lit torches, a Caelum innovation fueled by oil and family magic.

He rounded a corner, expertly navigating his way through their maze of a library, took several turns here and there, and cut through the one row of shelves with the splintered side. He paused at the grand entrance, an open archway that reached the ceiling, and sidled along the wall until he could peek his head out into the hallway. He waited, straining his ears for the telltale sound of footsteps and the iron scabbard striking against metal buckles, until the faint echoes grew close — dangerously close — before fading away into the distance once more.

Somnus darted out, bare feet quietly padding across their marble floors, both arms clutching the book to his chest and cradling it like a precious egg. He weaved through the labyrinthine halls and corridors, took each twist and turn as if they were straight and narrow paths, pausing and ducking away to avoid the patrolling nightguards.

It always came with a sense of thrill, that risk of getting caught sending a little bit of adrenaline to his tiny boy heart. Sometimes, he added a bit of flair and imagination, pretended to be a valiant spy stealing a kingdom's secrets or a dastardly villain escaping his prison cell. The scenarios changed, depending on his mood or latest inspiration, but the end destination was always the same.

Somnus slowed as he reached the twin doors, one set slightly ajar in invitation. To keep everything hushed and silent, no knock or whispered request to be allowed inside. There was only the quiet creak of the hinges, as he pushed the door and let himself in, and the click of the lock when he closed the door behind him.

“Ardyn?” he quietly called out, as if the very walls could hear him.

Somnus squinted his eyes, trying to see through the thick of darkness that settled in the room, with nothing but the light of the stars and the waning moon outside the tall windows. “Brother?” he tried once again, wondering if Ardyn fell asleep on him.

A soft pink lit from the corner of the room, and Somnus could make out the blurred outline of the thick veil that muted the light and within it, the vague shape of someone curled up. Just as the light that sweetly glowed, he felt his own mood brighten with the relieved smile that crept onto his lips, and he quickly fumbled through the furniture to join Ardyn. He didn’t even complain about stubbing his toe on Ardyn’s favorite armchair.

Closer now, Somnus could make out the wooden chairs and the short table propping up the blankets draped over them, even recognizing the quilt their late mother made for each of them. It was dark, with nothing but Ardyn’s pale magic to guide him by, but he could recognize the pattern and her handiwork anywhere. He briefly ran his fingertips across the worn fabric, before reaching a corner and lifting it up to slip himself inside the blanket fort.

He’s always amazed by how spacious it was inside. Perhaps it was the illusion of the darkness outside that kept him from seeing just how large it was, or perhaps it was the extra touch of magic that Ardyn had a knack for but Somnus had yet to master. But it’s cozy, and he couldn’t remember a time it never was, with all their finest pillows and extra bedding padding the floor and sides.

In the middle, Ardyn sat with his legs crossed underneath his nightgown, his hands nurturing a loose orb of glowing magics that tinted the space with a gentle scarlet. He looked up from his hands to shift his gaze toward Somnus, a teasing smile on his lips. “I thought you got caught, since it was taking you so long.”

“Hey, I wasn’t that slow,” Somnus retorted, watching the light flicker and float to the ceiling of their blankets. He fell to his knees and ducked beneath the quilt, crawling into the space of their little haven. He handed the book to Ardyn and made himself comfortable, grabbing an extra plush pillow and propping it underneath him as he flopped onto his stomach.

While Somnus busied himself with getting settled, Ardyn ran a hand over the unfamiliar book’s cover. “Oh, this one’s from those merchants?” he asked. He untangled his legs and took on his little brother’s same position, laying on his stomach and snuggling up to Somnus’ side. He propped the book up for both of them to admire — but now under a different light, he noticed. Somnus had conjured up his own little blue light, adding it to Ardyn’s above, turning the light red hue into something more purple.

“Yeah, I think it’s an anthology?” Somnus said, running a finger along the golden script of the cover.

“I guess we’ll find out.” Ardyn opened the book, flipping past the first few pages until he found the table of contents. It looked that Somnus was right, considering nature of the list and its titles. They both quietly read down the list, Ardyn silently memorizing the ones he’d like to read later, because he always let Somnus do the picking.

It’s just how they fell into step, no delegating tasks or arguing for the position. Somnus was responsible for choosing the book or story, since he had a knack for picking out the interesting ones; and Ardyn was the grand storyteller, due to his penchant for theatre and the dramatics — and because Somnus, on one particular night, said he liked his older brother’s reading voice.

“That one,” Somnus said, pointing a small finger at Chapter Six: Ten Years and One Night. “Page eighty-four.”

Ardyn obeyed, turning through the pages to the mentioned chapter. He kept quiet, not reading out just yet, as he waited for Somnus to finish up his final touches, who suddenly sat back up on his knees and spread his hands before him. In a quick fizzle of sparks, Somnus pulled out a blanket from the aether, a thick quilt embroidered with soft patterns and blue and white fabric. A memento from their mother, just as the one atop their blanket fort.

“Good?” Ardyn asked, lightly bumping his shoulder against his little brother.

“Good.”

Somnus rested his head against Ardyn’s arm, eyes following the text on the page and ears listening intently to his older brother’s voice, finding solace in the warmth of each other’s presence.

Somnus would probably fall asleep halfway through the story, remember even less of it come the morning; Ardyn would probably fall out of character and fail to stifle a yawn, but he’d never fall asleep before his brother did. Either they would fall asleep here, in their nest of pillows and blankets, or Ardyn would find it in himself to haul his brother out and into his bed. But no doubt the servants would be wondering where Somnus had run off to, only to realize he slept through the night in Ardyn’s room, meaning the young boy must have snuck out past his bedtime. There may be a couple lectures, from Madame Celine and her ear-grating voice, one for Somnus and his bad bed habits and one for Ardyn and the mess of his blanket fort.

But they’d continue this, their little escapade from reality and into their world crafted for just the two of them, for stolen hours and old books and mother’s quilts.

Or so their naive hearts had believed, Ardyn thought.

He kicked at the rubble and splintered wood at his feet, shuffling the fallen stone and broken metal around. It's old, dusty, and all terribly broken. Ever since the fall ten years ago, he didn't really think to visit Insomnia again, didn't care to see the broken skeleton of the once grand city. Watching it burn and collapse was all the delight he had ever wanted, and seeing the old ruins were like scavenging the old ashen remnants of those mesmerizing fireworks on that fateful night.

Maybe it's some subconscious pull or a last ill-made joke from Fate, but he found himself wandering through the broken remains and into a small library. Whatever guided him here, he didn't know, but he wasn't going to dwell on it. Despite all the destruction, the Citadel and her towers were quite intact, aside from the gaping holes, cave-in's, and fallen floors here and there. This little reading haven had certainly seen better days, with her shattered shelves and burnt remains; but hidden among the rubble, Ardyn could spot some salvageable books.

It's small, compared to his old family library, but he's sure there's a larger, main library hidden away somewhere in the Citadel. Still, nostalgia and childhood memories ebbed through him, sweeter times of simplicity and innocent shenanigans rousing the bit of humanity he had left. He must be getting old, to be thinking back on distant childhood days with such fondness and melancholy — two thousand years and a few decades would probably do that.

Maybe he'd go treasure hunting later, search for the main library hidden hidden among all these layers.

For now, though, he's content with picking up the survivors and brushing the concrete and ashes off them, stashing them away in the aether should they be in decent condition. The less fortunate, the ones torn or burnt beyond recognition, he left behind.

Ardyn kept a book in his hands, flipping through the charred pages as he walked along. He wrinkled his nose at the contents, some scholarly study or textbook about cryptic sciences, and tossed it to the wayside. Academia made for poor bedtime stories.

He left something of a trail of books on the way to the throne room, picking through his small collection and weeding out the less interesting texts. By the time he finally ascended the dais, he had less than half of what he had picked up. Ardyn reached into his infinite magic pocket and plucked out a sizable cushion to toss onto the throne. For whatever reason, the ancient kings had decided to keep the seat as hard and flat as possible; even more mysterious was how they had all managed to sit upon it for hours and still keep something of a rump at the end of the day.

He opened the gates of his arsenal, let his little collection of pilfered books fall and clatter around his feet and the throne, before settling himself in his seat and making himself at home.

Ardyn picked up a tattered book at random, testing the weight and feel of it in his hands. Worn and gritty but still legible. There's a golden script on this one, that he hadn't noticed before, so faded as it was.

Somnus had quite fancied the ones with pretty covers and ornate lettering.

Ardyn liked to think his brother's influence still held here, that Somnus somehow had a hand in guiding the book to him. It's sobering, almost. Through all the years imprisoned at Angelgard, Ardyn had thought nothing but rage and pain and betrayal. And even after his release, he did nothing but plot and scheme, feeding his desires for vengeance and substituting his agony with a certain mania.

In all the time he had, he never truly let himself ponder about Somnus, too engrossed with bitterness and spite to think of his brother as anyone other than a vile traitor. Out of fear, maybe. Because, underneath it all, no matter how much he had wished otherwise, he still held a love for his little brother. He knew Somnus held the same, but Ardyn had refused to acknowledge it. It had been by accident, when he had been toying around in Niflheim’s archives and playing with Verstael’s computers, when he found the data cataloguing old Lucian artifacts, found the translated texts of an old king’s remorse and regrets for a forgotten brother. Ardyn had nearly blown up the entire research facility, with the surge of confused anger and no proper outlet to direct it upon.

Now, with nothing but his thoughts and the cold silence, he had plenty of time and space to do just that — to ponder. He wondered when they had stopped reading together, when Somnus grew more lively and bold while Ardyn turned more quiet and reserved. He wondered how he had never seen that rift between them, why he never stopped to mend that first tear in their bond. He wondered how they were each so blind to their own ambitions and methods, combined with pride and some extreme morph of sibling rivalry, that they never stopped to see and consider the other's reasoning.

Somnus had been strict and utilitarian, sought to burn the entire garden to rid its disease. Ardyn had wanted to pick through each petal and leaflet, scrutinize every wound and rot in excruciating detail. Somnus would kill it all, blooms and weeds; Ardyn would die before he even got through half of it.

Ardyn hadn't wanted to admit it, but it had been his own folly that led to his demise. He had been a fool, to think he could heal the entirety of Eos. He was but one man, and not even the gods could stop the Scourge. Somnus, of course, had his own failings and faults, but both of them were to blame.

And with his impending death looming over him, he just simply did not find it in himself to hang onto the dredges any longer. The resentment was gone, the fury snuffed into dying embers. He was weary and exhausted, and all he wanted was to rest. With nothing but past memories and the promise of oblivion.

He thought of the possibilities, of his end. Nothing was ever clear cut with the gods, and he was never told of the specifics. Would he simply cease to be? His soul, having become one and the same with the Scourge, may as well just be cleanly wiped out of existence. Or perhaps, there was true salvation at the end, and he would be shown grace and allowed to pass on. Whichever the case, Ardyn wouldn't argue for one over the other. He just wanted it all to end.

Though, if he would be allowed a last request, he wouldn't argue against that either. And with how sentimental he's feeling, he'd be quite fine with a simple one. It would be pleasant if he could briefly relive those small joys, those precious hours spent reading under the light of their magic and the protection of cozy blankets.

But if he couldn't have it, Ardyn would just have to make do. Because he was here, in the throne room and with the dying Crystal chained above. Here, where the Kings of Yore would most certainly gather, within the Old Wall that held splinters of their sleeping souls. He couldn't call upon them, not without the Ring and certainly not with his qualifications, but there was a tether here that tied them from the Beyond to the living. And if nothing else, Ardyn had an imagination and a tiny hope in his heart.

He popped open the book, foregoing the introductory pages and skipping straight to the first chapter. He imagined his little brother at his side, sitting on the arm of the throne and peering over his shoulder to read along. He imagined the heavy quilt on his shoulders, sharing their mother’s gift between them and wrapping it around themselves. He imagined they were children again, little boys with too much time on their hands and not a care in the world.

“Wait just a while longer, brother dear. And perhaps I'll read you one last story?” He spoke to no one but himself, yet he liked to think Somnus was here, waiting and watching from the other plane.

He read out the first lines, his voice carrying across the empty space and echoing off the grand walls and tiles. If he felt the brush of a hand across his shoulder, he didn't pull away or lean into it but kept his hands settled beneath the book. If he saw a flicker of blue light from the corner of his vision, he didn't look but only kept his eyes on the pages, reading aloud as he once did in what seemed like lifetimes ago.

He had waited two millenniums, so what’s a few more days? They’d see each other again soon enough. So here, now, he let himself drift into their little world again, filled with crafted visions and wondrous tales of fantastical creatures and heroes, with Somnus ever at his side.

#ardyn izunia #somnus lucis caelum #ff15 #final fantasy xv #i can type

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ladygloucester · 6 years

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Scáthach - Chapter 1

Well guys, I think this is probably my most personal work ever. I know it will sound quite outlandish (ha.) and even feel Claire and Jamie out of character. One thing I love about fanfic writing is that I feel so comfortable with these characters that I feel like I can bend them in ways I wouldn’t be able to do with others I created from scratch. So apologies if this is too far from what you like to see.

Watch out for language, triggers and all that stuff.

Prologue

I won’t go all David Copperfield on you. I consider you smart enough to recognize that if I’m here, talking to you, I might as well have been born in order to do so. What a presumptuous prick, that David. Anyway. Even though I’ve gone through basically the same stages of life as any other human being, I can’t say that I consider myself so. Not fully, at least. I’m what we call a Scáthach. Yeah, pretty much as the celtic deity, we’re that very original. Calling myself a warrior woman in the middle of the XXI century will sound… well, probably as presumptuous as our friend David. But it’s the truth. I am a warrior indeed, one that fights shit you wouldn’t even imagine before I told you so.

I won’t bother you with the same boring pest I had to deal with when they first approached me. You’ll thank me for that later. But the thing is, a Scáthach is pretty much what whoever that has ever played a video game, read a fantasy novel or watched a tv show would call a demon hunter. Well, demon falls actually a bit short. There are all kinds of disgusting beings, if you may call them so, in the Dubnos, but for anyone that’s not familiar with the hierarchies and classifications of the The Deep, we can stick with that. Demon.

I can hear you rolling your eyes so hard at me. I understand it. I used to think this was all bullshit. But well, I’ve had enough of my share of experiences —and whisky— to quiet my skepticism. But I’ll help you swallow this rather thick pill. Have you ever realized your friend, your coworker, even your neighbor is suddenly behaving completely out of character? Have you heard of those people that change their lives in the blink of an eye, turning it upside down and destroying themselves in the process? Have you even felt it? That unforeseen sting of desperation in the bottom of your heart when everything seems to be going perfectly well. That fit of lust that drives you into the arms of another person while your partner is happily waiting for you at home. That outburst of anger that pushes your feet on the gas pedal, terrorizing every other driver in the highway.

I thought so.

Science tries to give it an explanation. A man suddenly murders his entire family while his friends can’t understand how the loveliest of fathers would stab the love of his life to death. Psychiatrists say he had an underlying disorder. One nobody ever noticed. Not a single action in his behavior ever betrayed it. And yet, we all swallow it down, nod and thank God and pray that science will save us all. Put a tag on our diseases and magically cure them.

If only it was possible. I wouldn’t be here.

That is the doing of a demon, clever enough to make us believe that our brains would do that to ourselves, defying millions of years of evolution and self-preserving instincts. They find a way to sneak up on us and infect us. Of course there are people depressed. Angry people. People obsessed with others. Demons are not the cause of every single evil in the world, illogical as it may sound. But those unexpected explosions that ultimately breaks the person that feels them, of those they are responsible. Don’t fool yourself.

So I take care of them. That’s what I do for a living. Well, not out in the open, that’s for sure. In “real life” I volunteer at The Royal London Hospital. It’s most convenient to have access to quick meds and professionals when you work in a field like mine. But not for me, I… well, my body behaves slightly differently. Which is an advantage, you’ll see. Whenever I’m free and I have the time, I drop by the hospital and take a quick look to see if they need a hand. They once tried to put me on a schedule. It took them a couple of days to realize it wasn’t going to work, so since I’m nice and useful, they usually let me do my thing without making much of a fuss.

So far, I’ve told you about (a bit of) my job, my other job and what I am. But I haven’t told you my name yet.

I’m Claire.

And I’m alone.

Not that I care. I mean, it would be nice to have someone to have a Sunday lunch with, but it won’t keep me awake at night. Not most of the nights, at least. I’ve never been one to have many friends. Mainly because my line of work is an unpredictable one. People use to get tired of you when you cancel dates and plans more often than you make it.

Ok, now wait a second… I’m painting a fairly sociopathic image of myself. I may not win Miss Congeniality this year, but I’m not a bad person. Well, I wouldn’t say that I qualify as a person either, but you get what I mean. I do this to help others that can’t help themselves. So I think that should give me a few points.

Are we clear then? I slay demons, people live to see another day and I go home all by myself. Again, most of the nights.

The day it all changed I was about to leave the hospital after a short shift helping around, wheeling some elderly patients around and trying to crack them up with my stupid jokes. I loved to hear them laugh with their shot voices, always reprimanding me for being too crude. I know it’s a weird hobby, getting a chuckle out of those old crocks, but I guess it’s one of the quirks of being an orphan, unable to joke around with your own folks. Yay me. When my cellphone beeped, I snuck it out of my black jeans and checked it.

Frank. Shit.

“Tell me.”

“Hi Claire, how’s your—”

“Cut the crap. What is it?“ I demanded as I walked into a nearby alley. The sun was already setting and I knew I’d be in need of a dark, secluded place to open the Membrane sooner rather than later. Oh, wait. The Membrane, haven’t told you about that yet, have I? Well, just let me get through with this asshole.

“Ok,” the voice came through the speaker colder and snarky. “There’s a situation. You need to cross and take care of a deamhan that has found an weak spot in the Membrane. There’s a human involve, but don’t care about it. We’re already counting him as a hero.”

A hero. Yeah, they were hypocritical enough to give that name to the humans that died as a result of an unexpected encounter with a deamhan. Sometimes we were late and there was nothing we could do. Other times, fewer, I got orders to leave them be. Very ethical.

“Ok, show me.”

I hung up and closed my eyes. The image began to solidify in the back of my mind, slowly adding detail, color, texture, even smell. Well, stink. Even a foul taste flooded my mouth. I got it. Let me tell you about the Membrane, quick and dirty. In order to cross to the Dubnos, The Deep, if you prefer, you don’t have to pay the boatman to sail through the Styx lagoon. Though it would be pretty cool. No, between our two worlds there is a separation, a physical barrier that only a few of us can cross. The Membrane, that’s it. It works like an osmosis process. There’s part of you that stays back in the world of the living, and another that’s able to pass through. The Dubnos is restricted to the demons. So… yeah, you guessed right. I’m part demon myself. That’s why I can cross the Membrane back and forth, and live in both sides of it. Hope I didn’t freak you out. I don’t have scales or a pointy tale or bug eyes. Well, those I only have them in the Dubnos. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to see shit there. But they usually fade after a while once I’ve come back. Don’t look at me that way, I’m sure you’ve ended a few nights out looking far worse.

With the deamhan crystal clear in my mind, I opened the Membrane. I usually can open it anywhere. I just need it to be a dark place, without sunlight directly on it, and without prying eyes around, if only not to scare them to death. So I did it once again. I extended my hand with my fingers firmly aligned, acting like a blade able to cut the viscid film. It slowly pried open, parting like a primeval womb not giving pass to life, but rather absorbing it into its depths. I was already accustomed to the transition, but it always felt like losing a part of you that you were never positive you’d be able to gain back.

The first thing that hits you when you enter the Dubnos is the smell. There’s nothing that can compare to it. Like a mixture of ammonia and really, really rotten eggs. Only stinkier. I could only perceive it in the back of my nose. Once I cross the Membrane, most of my human senses are left behind and… well, demons aren’t particularly squeamish about stenches. Their sense of smell works differently, like a hound’s, but only sensitive to selective traces. I had the odor of that deamhan Frank had sent me still vivid in my nostrils. I sniffed around, trying to pick a scent. The path became distinct in a few seconds, my eyes able to discern it as if it was marked with bread crumbs. An eerie synesthesia, but definitely a useful one.

Even though it works as some sort of shadow of the reality, a muffled copy of the real world, time and space work a little differently in The Deep. Demons don’t have a natural sense of any of them, since they’re maleable, bendable. The same rules we have don’t apply there. So reaching the coast took me less than getting to the tube from the hospital. I’m a bit faster here as well, so by the time I could feel the power of the waves crashing against the jagged cliffs, I slowed down and crouched. There it was.

A thread, thinner than the thousandth part of a hair, came out of an amorphous blob of flesh, almost transparent, like muddy water. I frowned. If I recalled correctly, the human was already far gone. But the the opposite end of that thread was attached to a man. I could distinguish his form, a nebulous, barely distinctive shape on top of precipice. The deamhan was having a rough time pulling form its end. Usually once they were able to tie it to a person, the effect was instant. Most of the times there wasn’t even a struggle. But this wasn’t one of those. He was fighting. Even with his bare foot sticking out of the rock into the void of an indomitable sea, he was still holding on for dear life.

I could wait. You see, I could let the deamhan do its thing and let that poor bastard fall to his death. But remember when I told you that sometimes I get orders to leave them to their own devices? Well. I’m a shitty minion.

The fight was over before it began. By the time the demon became aware of my presence, I had already inserted my left arm all the way into its body, while I was tangling the thread around my right in order to withdraw it. The beast started to convulse, I clenched my teeth and looked away. It was stronger than I had foreseen. Painfully slowly, it initiated the process of swallowing my arm. I could feel its juices pouring on my skin, burning it. I pulled back but it was too far stuck. The thread broke. It was a shit show. I was there, a human about to kill himself and I, to be eaten and digested.

I closed my eyes. If I wanted it to work, I had to work quickly. With my right arm free, at least I was able to use it. The thread was surrounding it, hurting like acid on an open wound. I placed my palm against the slimy surface of the deamhan while I grabbed its insides with my other hand, and pulled. I pulled so hard I felt the muscles of my back strain and break. The energy started to condensate on the tips of my fingers. I hadn’t had to use it in quite sometime, so it took me longer than I expected. But by the time the bastard realized what was happening, it was a smoking spot on the floor.

I fell backwards, out of breath. Or I’d be if only I breathed there. Took me a second to remember the human. I looked at where he had been a second before, but he wasn’t there. He was already falling.

Fuck.

There was no time to think. I could see his shape plunging through the air, near the hair-raisingly sharp rocks of the cliff. Time slowed down to a tortuously lethargic cadence, enough for me to leap forward as fast as I could —which is, to be honest, faster than your eye could see—, as I opened the Membrane and pushed myself through. It slowed me down, but I had got enough momentum, more than enough to counter gravity. With the agonic rush I completely miscalculated the strength I was going to impact on his body with. I felt his shoulder pop out of the socket and his mouth crash against my (rather thick) head as I catapulted us over the cliff. I managed to protect him from further damage as we landed by, well, basically using my own body as an airbed. Not the best sensation, it crossed my mind, as I became aware of the size of the man. He lay on top of me, a dead weight that almost kept me from breathing properly, a few seconds before I crawled from underneath and turned him over on his back. My arms were still burned. In the Dubnos I was able to heal rather quickly, but once I crossed the Membrane back, my human body would became a burden. I still healed at an abnormal pace, but it was much more painful.

I could feel the ligaments of my jaw tightening with the pain, but I had no more time to waste. I straddled his waist, tore his shirt open and he, opportunistic as hell, decided it was the best time to come back from the dead. Or the unconscious. Whatever. So picture this: luckily, last thing he’ll probably remember is jumping off a cliff. Now he regains consciousness and a woman with black scleras and burnt arms is ripping his clothes off. If I’m the slightest bit less lucky, he’ll remember me, emerging from thin air, looking like I’m flying —and damn, I wish I could but that’s actually something I’m completely unable to do— and tackling him into safety. And ripping his clothes off, no, there’s no way to elude that.

��A Dhia…”

He tried to squirm out of my grasp with the arm he was still able to move, but I pushed him hard against the soft grass.

“Quiet,” I hissed while I gave him my most terrifying look. Which then was, well, actually the only look I had. He froze, trying to puzzle his memories, to instill some kind of reasoning into them, fighting the unlikeliness of it all. I arched an eyebrow, staring at him, waiting till he finally made up his mind provisionally. He had felt my strength. He knew, somewhere deep inside, he was at my mercy. Then, his eyes left mine for a second only to discover the wounded skin of my arms.

“Mary, Michael and Bride, your arms are burnt!”

“I. Said. Quiet.”

The fight behind his eyes began again for a few seconds, but he finally stopped wriggling and I was able to inspect his chest. Remember what I told you about the demons? About how they corrupt human beings? Well. that was precisely what that this human had been subjected to. Good thing I still had my bug eyes. I wouldn’t win a beauty contest, but it made it easier for me to find the corruption inside a body. I already suspected where it was. Despair was usually inserted near the heart. I placed my hand on his left pectoral and focused. This one was deep. I began pulling and his face became shadowed by the pain. It’s not the most pleasant process, but I’ve always found humans to be quite receptive to it. As if they knew, somehow, that the pain they feeling is a curative one. Gradually, a conical shape, with a dirty forest green shade, emerged from the flesh.

I let myself sat on the soft grass and sighed, looking at it. My human side felt the call of it, the words in the back of my mind, the pain that would conquer me if I let it. The waving surface was almost mesmerizing. I fell on my back and indulged in the cool feeling of the pasture and the first drops of rain. I heard him move, sitting up and closing his shirt. I could smell the blood from his broken lip. That could be a problem and staying there would only make it worse.

“Who are you?” He whispered, probably not sure if he had dreamt the whole thing, lost his mind or was having the worst trip in history.

I stood up as the rain began to pour down, appreciative of the coolness it impressed on my burns.

“You’ll be just fine. Don’t ever come back here. If you go south you’ll find a small train station if you want to go to the City. There won’t be enough light to go anywhere else.”

I rubbed my hands against my jeans and shrugged, not knowing what else to say. He wasn’t moving and kept staring at me like he was seeing a ghost. Which wasn’t too far from the truth, so who could blame him.

“Well, I—”

“Wait.” He grabbed my wrist and raised my arm, inspecting my clearly healing wounds.

“Do you really want to freak yourself out any more?”

He looked me with those slanted, incredibly blue eyes, as I realized for the first time, and let go of my wrist.

“What’s that… thing you pulled from my body?”

It was my time to freak out.

“You can see this?” I showed him the green cone and raised my eyebrows in absolute astonishment. He nodded, frowning.

“Why?”

“You aren’t supposed to be able to see a Fang. Nobody can.”

“Well, not nobody,” he pointed with indisputable common sense.

I was gaping like a fish out of water. I’ve seen plenty of terrifying, upsetting, disgusting, crippling stuff. Enough to make me almost immune to surprise. But this caught me perfectly out of balance. My eyes travelled from the Fang to his eyes, and I could tell he was waiting for an explanation. Probably more than one. Then, my gaze felt unavoidably attracted to the cut on his lip. My heart was already racing, and I didn’t know how much I could restrain myself.

“This— Remember what you felt when you jumped off?” A semblance of shame covered his features and nodded. “This is it. It wasn’t you. This made you jump.“

“But…”

“I have to go.“

“Wait!” He grabbed my wrist again but I pulled violently as soon as our skins made contact.

“Just wipe that fucking blood of your face!” I snapped, and it was his time to be caught off guard. I started pacing around, nervously. “I can’t stay. I can’t help you anymore. Go on, live your life and all that shit.“

And I vanished.

#scáthach #outlander #outlander fanfic #outlander fanfiction #ladygoutlanderfic #Jamie Fraser #jamie x claire #claire beauchamp #fanfiction #modern au

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laetro · 3 years

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Sonja Stangl: Weaving Wondrous and Magical Illustrations

Sonja Stangl: Weaving illustrations with colors, textures, and stories and sprinkling animation to infuse life into her art

Sonja Stangl is an award-winning Illustrator and storyteller from Vienna, Austria. She is a graduate of Multimedia Art from the University of Applied Science in Salzburg. Since 2012, she has been working with clients in advertising, animation, and children’s education. Her work has been exhibited (Vienna, Brussels, London) and she has been awarded for her work at the World Illustration Awards in the professional advertising category.

Her specialties lie in creating editorial illustrations, product prints, pattern designs, and interesting animated illustrations. She also curates creative solutions for Brands.

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Q. What led to the birth of Illustration as a professional career for you?

Sonja Stangl: My art teacher in college once said: “the way you hold a pencil, you will never be able to draw properly!” After that, I started drawing every day just to prove her wrong and discovered that I can imagine myself drawing every day for the rest of my life.

Then there was Erik, the owner of a small graphic design studio in Ireland where I did an internship. He encouraged me that a career in illustration is possible and did let me work on all the illustrative projects coming in. I got to illustrate beer labels and maps and we had a “Painting Friday” every week. During that time I also met some established, full-time working illustrators and got a little glimpse into the world of professional illustration. My mind was set to give it the best try that I could and see where it goes.

Oh, and since then I have met a few great artists along the way who also hold their pencils in the same weird way I do!

Q. After graduation where you studied Multi-media Art, what was the first professional project you worked on?

Sonja Stangl: While I was still studying I worked on some smaller projects with an organization that helps adults change their career paths and find further education. So straight after I graduated I already had my foot in the door and managed to get a bigger project from them.

I got to design a character as their mascot and made little comics and illustrated cards and posters as well. Specifically, witnessing my work all over town, in trains and buses, so soon in my career was extremely rewarding and motivating.

Q. What does the process to turn a colored pencil illustration into digital art look like for your projects?

Sonja Stangl: I like to start all projects on paper. For ideas and sketching it just comes more naturally to me. While colored pencils are great because they help with picking a limited palette and I love the mark they make on paper. Finding three nicely fitting colors out of a pack of pencils is way less overwhelming than sitting in front of photoshop’s color wheel.

When I go digital I take the sketch and more or less start over. While digitally it’s a lot easier to refine the composition and balance out the contrast of sizes and shapes. Often I still use analog parts in my Illustrations like scanned pencil or ink marks. They do feel more real and alive.

Q. Which software do you use to dabble in animated illustration?

Sonja Stangl: It depends on the project and where I am physical. Specifically for frame-by-frame animations, whenever I am in the studio, I use Photoshop. On the go, I use proCreate. Whereas for motion graphics and cutout animations, I go with After Effects and Spine. Every software has its pros and cons so it depends on what is needed.

Q. What is the reason that the majority of your illustrations channel a childlike innocence in their perspective even with varied themes?

Sonja Stangl: Maybe because I am still quite a bit of a child myself.

For me, illustration was always something wondrous and magical. It can expand reality and show things how they could be different. Especially how I would have seen them as a kid or wanted them to be like them.

Q. Why is children’s education so important to you and what do you hope to create next in this sphere?

Sonja Stangl: I can still remember most of the illustrations I saw as a child very clearly. They were quite important for me and I loved to add extra stories to what I saw in drawings. Even an old Bruegel painting we had in the living room and that I used to stare at for hours imagining worlds and stories in there. An illustration could make every mundane thing much more interesting.

So I kind of wants to pass that gift on. Inspire kids to visualize and to explore and imagine.

I am dabbling in some ideas for projects to come, but nothing concrete I could talk about yet. At the moment I am also fully submerged in a big project for a museum for alternative energy. A project dear to my heart, where I can playfully help people to understand complex topics and the need to take care of our environment.

Q. How does the creative process differ when you create a character design as opposed to creating art prints to be featured on products?

Sonja Stangl: When it comes to character designs you need to fulfill a very clear purpose. They need to tell a story and are part of a specific world. That’s why most of this kind of work starts with writing, brainstorming, and setting rules to be followed. Then I can create within these rules.

When it comes to more decorative or playful projects there isn’t so much rule-making. I would sometimes just start by putting marks on paper and see where it goes. And or dip whatever I find in my studio or the yard or the forest into ink and see what that makes on paper. Then scan and go further, add more details and turn it into an illustration.

“When I go digital I take the sketch and more or less start over. While digitally it’s a lot easier to refine the composition and balance out the contrast of sizes and shapes. Often I still use analog parts in my Illustrations like scanned pencil or ink marks. They do feel more real and alive.”

Q. Where do you hope to showcase your work after exhibiting in Vienna, London, and Brussels?

Sonja Stangl: Well, the pandemic brought me a bit away from the exhibition phase and more into the creation phase again. We will see where it goes from here.

Q. How many sketches do you create before feeding it to create a moving illustration?

Sonja Stangl: It depends on the project, the client, and also my mood that day. Sometimes things hit off straight away and I don’t need that many sketches and sometimes I need some more days to get to where I want.

I love the animation feature on proCreate to just flesh out stuff though. I can instantly try different things and have a rough idea about the motion and timing.

You can follow the award-winning illustrations from Sonja Stang on her website and Instagram.

Stay tuned for more exciting new artist interviews and follow Laetro on Instagram and Twitter.

#SonjaStangl illustrations laetro colors textures art arts

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thecradlerocks · 4 years

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Best Toys and Gift Ideas for 1-Year-Old Girls

Buying the best toys and gift ideas for 1-year-old girls could be quite difficult because you want it not to be only unique but also safe and helpful in their development. Kids love toys and gifts, and though, they might forget your name, but they can’t ever forget what you buy for them! That is why we've picked and reviewed the top 28 best toys and gift ideas for 1-year old girls in this article, hoping that it will help you in making the choice to choose the best toys and gifts for your cute little one.

Top 28 Best Toys and Gift Ideas for 1-Year-Old-Girls 2020.

1. Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn My Pretty Learning Purse

Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn My Pretty Learning Purse View On Amazon Why we like it: The baby is introduced to early learning of ABC’s, numbers, colors, opposites and manners and it also helps build her imagination. The pretty female child will finally start feeling sort of a lady. Carrying her stylish colorful purse around will make her look even prettier. The straps are of the proper size to suit the baby’s height and shoulders. This fun play toy has various accessories that will help the baby in learning alphabets, numeric, colors and also the way to act sort of a lady. The purse features a handle and a zipper that activates sounds and songs once opened/closed. Also, everything fits within the purse perfectly and that they also can add a couple of more toys and celebrate imitating mummy or playing pretend. the color is additionally very girly and therefore the design is pretty and sturdy. Pros Attractive colors to suit the baby girl. Have fun accessories to form the small one-act and desire a woman. Good quality. Sizeable straps.Cons Speaks English only.Buy On Amazon Now 2. Corolle Mon Premier Calin Charming Pastel Baby Doll

Corolle Mon Premier Calin Charming Pastel Baby Doll View On Amazon Why we like it: It’s a light-weight doll, thus easy for your baby to hold around. it's also very real and therefore the baby will celebrate playing pretend. You will love the look on your baby’s face as she cuddles, hugs and snuggles this soft beanbag filled doll. This doll is about 12 inches tall, and scent like vanilla with a smooth face and is dressed in pink and white color and a matching little hat. Your baby will definitely love this doll because it appears so real and also naps; this is due to her miracle eyes that open when she sits and shut when she lays down. As such, it'd make it easy for you to convince your baby to require naps by just laying their doll down. Her hair also can be combed because it's been densely rooted, so again they will make their dolls hair as you create theirs, thus a win-win for everybody. Also, if you’re preparing your baby to be an enormous sister, get them this doll. It’s so realistic and it'll make things easier. Pros Looks so real. She is adorable and super durable. Easy to wash. Very pretty.Cons Doesn’t speak.Buy On Amazon Now 3. Fisher-Price Brilliant Basics Rock-a-Stack

Fisher-Price Brilliant Basics Rock-a-Stack View On Amazon Why we like it: Babies are little explorers and this may be an excellent addition to their toys. It also introduces them to the idea of sizing and stacking at a very young age. Your baby will discover this game by collecting, shaking, categorizing and stacking five different rings. The rings are available in different sizes and colors and are stacked on the swing base of the toy. From the most important moment to the smallest stacking, the child also learns the concept of size The topmost and smallest ring has rattling beads and a shiny reflective surface. to assist your baby to develop good balance and coordination, place the rings faraway and in several directions and see how the small one will make an attempt trying to succeed in bent them. And with the features explained, it is also chosen among the top 25 best toys and gift ideas for 1-year-old girls. Pros Good for bath time play. Rattles and perfectly sized. It’s a visible stimulant for babies. Super easy to wash.Cons Only the red ring rattles.Buy On Amazon Now 4. Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Magical Musical Mirror

Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Magical Musical Mirror View On Amazon Why we like it: this is often a tremendous toy which will help baby explore, discover, develop confidence and may be a wonderful play fun toy. He takes care of a curious child, trains his body and creates enthusiastic characters. Finally, the little princess will begin her fascinating sessions with this magical music mirror. Keep various accessories. Playing with mummy, lipstick, comb, bracelet and soft puff bracelet has never been this much fun. The child also knows how to identify numbers, colors, and alphabets, and to distinguish textures. There are 15 melodies, songs and sentences that are activated when the charter is opened/closed. And, when the baby involves the top of learning and play, the accessories are neatly packed back to the vanity. It’s very pretty and of high-quality, so if your little miss is showing interest in mirrors or if they wish to imitate you as you set your structure on, this magical musical mirror is definitely a must for her. Pros The baby is introduced to numeric, alphabets, colours and textures early. 100% safe to play with. Encourage budding personalities. Baby and mom have a bonding play time. Learns to doll up using the various accessories that accompany the toy. Cons Not so big but an ideal size for the small one. A bit pricey but worthwhile .Buy On Amazon Now 5. LeapFrog Learn & Groove music table

LeapFrog Learn & Groove music table View On Amazon Why We Love It: This is an amazing toy that babies can use to train their memories, develop their motor skills and stimulate visual and auditory senses. It is also very colorful to grab their attention and entertain in general. This is an interesting toy that your baby will really love. It includes close to different 40 melodies and 15 activities to keep the child entertained and busy for hours. The baby explores these different activities by rolling, rotating, typing, and sliding the various buttons and buttons to get different songs and melodies. If you are looking for ways to introduce small numbers, alphabets, and shapes, this is the perfect toy. It also contains a variety of bright colors, so they start to dominate. It is very durable and versatile, so the baby will not get bored quickly. And it comes with ready-to-use temporary batteries. Pros Has legs that can be worn when standing up. Do various activities so that the baby does not get bored easily. 100% safe for babies. Bright color Fixed with two volume settings.Cons Sings in both English and Spanish, but the music mode is similar.Buy On AMazon Now 6. Playskool Discover N 'Grow Busy Top Popper

Playskool Discover N 'Grow Busy Top Popper View On Amazon Why we love it: A toy that can be easily moved with a full groove to make learning and playing interesting. It contains different colors and songs and your child will be busy hitting the ball for a long time. This fun toy features 5 colorful balls that rotate, roll and fall from the ramp. When the button is pressed, the balls pop up and return to the driveway with live music and fun sounds just to cheer up the game. If one of the balls falls, you will love how this baby has eye-tracking and motor skills work to get it back. It's the perfect toy to help your baby develop eye-hand coordination, motor skills, cause-effect concept while staying very active. It is also a musical toy with 8 live songs for more fun. The overall quality is durable and the design is safe for the little ones. Suitable for children from 9 months old and above. And with this, it is chosen among the top 25 best toys and gift ideas for 1-year-old girls. Pros Comes with 5 balls. Has a volume switch for loud and low noise. Help baby practice motor skills and visual senses. Durable and affordable.Cons Batteries are not included.Buy On Amazon Now 7. Melissa & Doug Classic ABC Wooden Block Cart Educational Toy With 30 Solid Wood Blocks

Melissa & Doug Classic ABC Wooden Block Cart Educational Toy With 30 Solid Wood Blocks View On Amazon Why we love it: A durable and simple toy that the baby will enjoy playing and learning with. This colorful wooden trolley, with a pull-out cord, has 30 blocks where babies can learn the alphabet, numbers, pictures, and colors. Your baby will enjoy stacking, sorting and assembling large blocks of small ones. The development of motor skills and research is also applied here. The toy is durable and also safe for babies. Also, it is lightweight and therefore easy to carry around. It is also best not to have to find a storage bag to store all the blocks after they are finished playing with it. Just put it back in the storage cart that comes with it and keep. Pros There are wheels and cord for smooth movement. Durable. 100% safe Cons Small, but is the right size for young children. Buy On Amazon Now 8. Melissa & Doug Sunny Patch Finney Fish Ball

Melissa & Doug Sunny Patch Finney Fish Ball View On Amazon Why we love it: It has a blue ocean color showing the theme of outdoor or beach games. This classic rubber ball has a blue background and is decorated with green and orange fish. It is an ideal game where you play outside and learn a game. This stunning colorful ball improves your general motor skills, social skills, and great outdoor games. Pros It's lightweight and easy to play. Little child is able to develop motor and social skills. Perfect size for little hands of kids.ConsHas a small size, but it's perfect for baby.Buy On Amazon Now 9. Playz 5pc Kids Playhouse Jungle Gym with Pop Up Tents, Tunnels, and Basketball Pit

Playz 5pc Kids Playhouse Jungle Gym with Pop Up Tents, Tunnels, and Basketball Pit View On Amazon Why we love it: A great toy for any occasion that keeps the little ones busy for hours. This adventurous 5 piece tent is the biggest outdoor toy for the little ones. It has interchangeable parts that you can customize to create the best combination. It includes a 5-hole hole, a ball reel for 200-1000 balls, a basketball ring, and a breathable and flexible mesh tunnel. Specially developed ground anchor rings protect the tent on windy days. Pros It opens and closes in one second. It has a zipper pocket for easy storage. Has different colours.Pets Can also play in themConsIt is only good for outdoors.Buy On Amazon Now 10. Musical Dancing Penguin Toy

Musical Dancing Penguin Toy View On Amazon Why we love it: An ideal toy that babies can use to learn their cognitive and coordination skills. This colorful bump and go Dancing Penguin is the perfect and best toys and gift ideas for 1-year-old girls. It acts moving around and playing music or telling stories. Children will be entertained with the story mode, that is, it'll tell different stories, music mode also plays different types of music while dancing, and learning mode, that is, you'll be asked to touch certain parts and follow the instructions. When the penguin moves and hits an obstacle, it automatically changes direction. Pros Colorful toys. Made of safe ABS plastic .Comes with spare batteryConsComes in small size, but it is perfect for your cute little one.Buy On Amazon Now 11. Amy & Benton Piano Keyboard For Kids

Amy & Benton Piano Keyboard For Kids View On AMazon Why we love it: A music set to train the musical abilities and talents of the baby. This is the ultimate toy for your little musician. These 24 multifunctional dolls help increase self-confidence, increase brain development, improve music-theoretical perception, improve hearing and improve eye-hand coordination. There is a record and play button that the little one can use to learns and correct their mistakes. Pros A 24 multi-functional toy that has various tasks. Entertaining.Elegant.ConsHas a small size.Buy On Amazon Now 12. Wooden Pull Along Toy Set Of 3- Beautiful Giraffe

Wooden Pull Along Toy Set Of 3- Beautiful Giraffe View On Amazon Why we love it: Little ones are introduced to nature early. And also how to deal with pets. These 3 sets of wooden toys put together, consist of an elephant, a giraffe, and a zebra. Young children will like strolling in and out with their new pets. An early introduction to nature and the wild for the little ones. It also helps hand-eye coordination, improves balance, and helps babies learn to walk early. The baby learns wild animals, their colors and body parts. ProsPortable.Perfect for both outdoors and indoors.Durable.ConsMay hurt the baby if thrown.Buy On Amazon Now 13. Amy & Benton Kids Birthday Cake Toy with Counting Candles & Music

Amy & Benton Kids Birthday Cake Toy with Counting Candles & Music View On Amazon Why we love it: A sure way to improve your motor skills, pretend to be playful and count the little one. Birthday parties are a sure way to appreciate the little children in our lives. With this little toy, your toddler will have a birthday party every day. Different keys/buttons perform different tasks, eg. sing birthday songs, light candles and even ask the little one to make a wish. Pros Help the baby develop imaginary senses. Create perfect bond time for mom and child.Has colorful lights that inspire the kids. ConsHas a small size.Buy On Amazon Now 14. Radio Flyer 4-in-1 Stroll ‘N Trike

Radio Flyer 4-in-1 Stroll ‘N Trike View On Amazon Why we love it: It's a great product for the little one to grow with. As they grow up, different features are also dropped.. This 4-in1 trike will make mummy and me strolling time more enjoyable as the baby grows with it. The trikes include infant trike, steering wheel, learning to drive and the classic trike. Each of these functions can adequately meet the needs of the baby and enable children to learn and enjoy every moment. it has a piece of 3-point safety equipment with a high back seat to ensure child safety, a removable safety tray that has a cup-holder and an adjustable seat. An adjustable handle for the adult to steer while strolling, a UV-protection removable canopy and pedals are other features. In the early years of young children, pedals act as a footrest. Pros It is very durable. It improve the baby's visual senses.Provides a great connection time for babies and mothers while walking.Cons It is a little bit difficult to assemble but you can read through the manuals. The tires are made of plastic, but are not inflated. Buy On Amazon Now 15. Discover & Play Piano Musical Toy

Discover & Play Piano Musical Toy View On Amazon Why we love it: This colorful toy helps young children improve their listening skills, support language development and improve their visual skills. Music is one of the languages that young and old people appreciate. This little piano introduces babies to instruments, animals, and numbers. The baby touches softly designed keys and has fun in instrument mode with great sounds of drum, violin or horn sounds. While animal the mode produces sounds from animals such as meow, woof or quack, the number mode introduces numbers from 1 to 5 in English, Spanish and French. ProsIt is portable.Has easy-to-touch soft keys.Great volume control.Comes with free battery.ConsKeys are not separate.Buy On Amazon Now 16. Lamaze Fifi The Firefly

Lamaze Fifi The Firefly View On Amazon Why we love: This toy has a clip that you can use to attach it to baby's diaper bag, baby strollers or the baby carriers. Lamaze Fifi The Firefly is an incredible hug and cuddle toy for the little one. It has several features in its layered wings. A baby mirror to admire and discover their face, focus, and track images. It also has clicking rings to awake the baby's auditory senses, a squeaker that connects the baby's hearing, a knotted chewing antennae and a ladybug teether to soothe the baby's gums. It has a colorful soft tummy and a black and white pattern on the back that helps the baby to stay focused. Pros Very portable. Awaken children's hearing and focus,Has a teether that soothes baby's gums.Cons Rings may fall-off when pulled by older children.Buy On Amazon Now 17. Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Learning Kitchen Event Center

Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Learning Kitchen Event Center View On Amazon Why we love it: Thanks to this toy, the girl will begin to acquire feminine qualities and values. This kitchen, which teaches and plays in English and Spanish, is an ideal toy for the little ones to develop their imagination and listening skills. It is a fun toy and engages the baby for hours from stirring the soup to making sure the food cooked in the oven is cooked well. There is a song that will entertain the little one when opening / closing the refrigerator. Warm-up time is filled with music with more than 20 rhymes, sound, light and 4 modes of play. And since it's a two-sided toy, the baby will be able to explore it. Pros Improve the baby's imagination and listening skills. Speaks both English and Spanish.Perfectly safe for the little childrenCons It easily easily tip over when baby tries to use it as a support to stand up, but it is very durable.Buy On Amazon Now 18. Fisher-Price Brilliant Basics Stroll-Along Walker

Fisher-Price Brilliant Basics Stroll-Along Walker View On Amazon Why we love it: No need to worry if the baby comes to the stage when they make their first steps when the stroll along walker has got your back. This beautiful stroller offers support and helps when the small one takes her first step. Music is played at every step or when the portable device is pressed on the belly. Their hands will be busy as there is a spinner, a roller band, and a flipbook. The stroller helps babies develop their motor skills, play early roles and protect them. It has a large, stable base, an easy to grasp handle, so you don't have to worry when the baby is busy. The stroller is also large, so the baby is generous enough to go for a walk with a friend. Pros A well-built stroll-along walker . Easy to install. Very stable and durable. cute Cons It doesn't come with a doll.Wheels can't be locked.Buy On Amazon Now 19. VTech Baby’s Light-Up Laptop, Pink

VTech Baby’s Light-Up Laptop, Pink View On Amzon Why We Love It: This durable baby's light-up laptop will help keep your baby off your own computer, develop their motor skills and help them learn numbers, letters, shapes and more. Finally, the little one will have her own laptop to play and learn. The baby's laptop has 9 buttons, out of which 6 are of different shapes and colors to teach the baby alphabets, shapes, colors, English and Spanish. In addition to learning, there is entertainment; This mini laptop has 3 key piano. A LED display screen, volume control for quieter play, and a small mouse are among the functions that will spice up their playing time. This makes it worthy to be among the top 25 best toys and gift ideas for 1-year-old girls. ProsAn educative toy for the young one.Has a volume control switch.Has a handle for carrying.It looks very cute.ConsThe piano has just 3 keys.More features should be added.Buy On Amazon Now 20. VTech Spin and Learn Color Flashlight – Pink – Online Exclusive

VTech Spin and Learn Color Flashlight – Pink – Online Exclusive View On Amazon Why we love: When using this flashlight toy, the little one will use it in the dark thanks to the flashing lights. It is also long-lasting and fun. This early learning flash-light contains exciting songs, colors, and music that teaches the baby about numbers, animals and colors. The flashlight combined more than 50 songs, sounds, music, and phrases. The beautiful ladybug activates the sounds and ensures that the baby's attention is fully captured. There are five rainbow changing colors that are not too light or too dark for the baby's vision to improve. The flashlight uses batteries and turns off automatically if not used for at least 45 seconds. It also has volume control for quieter playing time. It is easy to pack so that the baby can take it with them anywhere they want to go. ProsVery portable and educative.Has beautiful bright colors. Automatically shuts off when not in use .It also has a volume control for quieter playingCons There's no way to turn off the sound and just have the light only.Buy On Amazon Now 21. VTech Sit-to-Stand Learning Walker, Pink

VTech Sit-to-Stand Learning Walker, Pink View On Amazon Why we love it: A student learning to walk and a teaching aid. This step-by-step walker is suitable for babies between 9 months and 3 years. It is equipped with adjustable wheels that can move on hard surfaces, including the mat, to accommodate the first baby steps. It includes features like a pretend telephone, to help develop the imagination of the little baby, 5 piano keys to encourage creativity and produce musical notes. With about 70 sing-along songs, rotating rollers, shape sorters and light buttons, sound effects and expressions, the little one is guaranteed to not only train but also develop motor skills and learning. ProsMade of quality material.Has an extra baterry.Stable.Has a removable panel.ConsMusic plays continously.May tip over if baby leans on it too much.Buy On Amazon Now 22. Green Toys Dump Truck for Improving Gross Motor & Fine Motor Skills

Green Toys Dump Truck for Improving Gross Motor & Fine Motor Skills View On Amazon Why we love it: It's the perfect toy to develop the little one's gross car and fine motor skills. A nice and educational toy. This dumper is made of recycled plastic and does not contain BPA palate, outer coating or PVC, which makes it safe for the little ones. The girl child learns the hauling sand techniques to develop her motor skills and fine skills. She will learn the dumping technique by practicing through her imaginary skills. The tires are threaded together so that this dump truck can easily withstand any terrain. With a deep and large body, this damper can carry a heavy load and move back and forth during loading. It is suitable for both indoor and outdoor use and is very easy to wash. Pros Easy to wash - it can even be put in the dishwasher. Very portable.Rust-free.It doesn't has any metal axels.ConsIt is not as big as it appears in the display picture.Buy On Amazon Now 23. Step2 Whisper Ride II Ride-On Push Car, Pink

Step2 Whisper Ride II Ride-On Push Car, Pink View On Amazon Why we love it: It's a fun toy to revive the imagination of the little ones. This super child's pusher is designed to imitate an automotive. It consists of a seat belt, a horn, two baby car cup-holders for the little one, and the mummy when strolling and needs to hydrate or have some snacks. If the little one needs to carry its little treasure, there is plenty of storage space on the car's bonnet to look after it. It has a simple folding handle for adults to improve folding for storage and transportation. This makes it worthy to be among the top 25 best toys and gift ideas for 1-year-old girls. Pros Stylish design. Easily foldable handle for easy transport and storage. Learning and playing toys at the same time.ConsSmall cup-holders.Buy On Amazon Now 24. B. toys – One Two Squeeze Baby Blocks – Educational Baby with Numbers, Shapes, Animals & Textures

B. toys – One Two Squeeze Baby Blocks – Educational Baby with Numbers, Shapes, Animals & Textures View On Amazon Why we love it: It comes with a beautiful reusable bag and is completely unique. Blocks are suitable for various activities. Great for toddlers and babies. These are BPA-free super soft blocks, so the little ones can gnaw, pinch or stay on their own without disturbing the parents. The nice thing about these blocks is that little ones stack them to form a wall and later kick it down while having their fun. There are ten blocks, each with different images, to entertain and educate the little kids. And since it has attractive colors, it will really interest them and keep them busy for hours. The baby also learns the colors, numbers and hand-eye coordination. When the game time is over, the blocks are neatly placed back in the reusable bag. And this also makes it worthy to be among the top 25 best toys and gift ideas for 1-year-old girls. Pros Super soft and BPA free.Very educativeHas high resistantCons When it is new it has a strong smell, but it disappears after unpacking. Buy On Amazon Now 25. LeapFrog Shapes And Sharing Picnic Basket

LeapFrog Shapes And Sharing Picnic Basket View On Amazon Why we love: Increase your baby's creativity, sharing and social skills. An ideal picnic basket for little ones to discover, introduce, listen and learn while having fun. This popcorn picnic basket contains 6 pieces, 2 plates, 2 forks, 2 glasses, 1 blanket, and a basket and 14 pieces. The baby will be able to develop imaginative skills, discover colors and shapes, have fun with songs and develop motor skills. There are many activities and if the baby is sleeping, sleeping, sorting and emptying the cart, it will be busy for hours. This makes it worthy to be among the top 25 best toys and gift ideas for 1-year-old girls. ProsIt encourages sharing. Very eductaive. A perfect toy to boost the baby's creativity.ConsThis might not be fun and so boring for older kids.Buy On Amazon Now 26. Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Smart Stages Chair

Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Smart Stages Chair View On Amazon Why we love it: With its automatic smart levels and palm function, it offers a great learning experience to kids of all ages. Each child grows at his own pace. With this magical smart chair, parents can choose the most suitable stage for the baby. Just slide the button or enter the child's age, it will be activated automatically. The little one can learn the right songs, phrases, and sounds. Music is activated while the child is sitting in the chair. Press the light remote control for more information on numbers, colors, and shapes. There are surprises when the cushion is raised. The smart stage chair has several levels: 12 m + first words and very curious sounds. Level 2: 18m + has simple questions and instructions. Level 3: 24m + creative entertainment and games. ProsVery educative. Learning contents varies according to the age of each child. Easy to install. Value for money, not expensive.ConsAvailable in one colour only. The manual doesn't provide much guide so it's up to the adult/child to figure it out.Buy On Amazon Now 27. Baby Einstein Take Along Tunes Musical Toy

Baby Einstein Take Along Tunes Musical Toy View On Amazon Why we love: The baby is in control; she chooses music to entertain her. Finally, the baby has her own MP3 player, and she can choose the playlist she wants to hear. With 7 different pieces of classical music from masterpieces like Mozart, Vivaldi, Chopin, and Rossini, the baby can change the genre by pressing the change button. There are dance lights that appear on the screen, which makes it more enjoyable. It is a light take-away toy with a simple grip so you can enjoy baby music anywhere. Also, it helps to stimulate the child's visual perception and auditory development. There is also a volume control for quieter playing. ProsThe toy has a perfect volume control button. It helps to develop the child's visual and auditory sense. Entertains the child. Perfect sizes for the little one.ConsThe songs are short, but they are all enjoyable.Buy On AMazon Now 28. Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Say Please Tea Set

Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Say Please Tea Set View On Amazon Now Why we love it: The little ones learn more when they feel at home. If you combine these familiar objects for them as toys, they will learn a lot. The little one will now start organizing her tea parties, where she can connect with her family, friends or favorite doll. As soon as the tea port is opened, greetings begin and some silly songs go with it. The teapot also makes a sound of pouring tea on the cups when the teapot is bent. Pressing the tea bags brings more fun and expressions like "please" and "thank you" which your child will also learn. This tea set includes 2 cups, 3 teatime teeth-able cookies, that come in different shapes like triangular, square and round shape, which perfectly fit the serving tray and the teapot. The baby learns about numbers, manners, shapes, music, imagination ideas, and greetings. It also improves their social skills and sharing concepts. ProsThe toy teaches the child how to share. It also build the child's imagination. Very educative. Teaches the child the problem-solving skills.ConsBatteries are not included.Buy ON Amazon Now Best Toys and Gift Ideas for 1-Year-Old Girls Verdict The best toys and gift ideas for 1-year-old girls listed above have been done in no particular order or range. They're all good toys and gift ideas for your cute little one to make them learn and have fun while you're busy with your day-to-day activities.

Final Words On Best Toys and Gift Ideas for 1-Year-Old Girls

Children learn by watching, touching, listening, seeing and so on. And everything is upon us to make their learning and general development accessible at all stages of their lives. In one year, they have already reached a huge milestone of development and may need a toy swap to assist in the next stage. That's why we chose the best toys and gift ideas for 1-year-old girls to help you choose the right toys for your needs. The list is long and I am positive you will find perfect toys or gift ideas for your cute little 1-year-old girl. Good luck! Read the full article

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haload701 · 3 years

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Gta 5 Immersion Mods

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Immersive Pickups is a total overhaul of Grand Theft Auto V's pickups system for, as the name implies, immersion. Did you miss GTA IV's Pickups System? Or simply looking for a different, more immersive experience than what the game offers by default? Look no more, because this mod is tailored for you. SUMMARY OF FEATURES: Organized all pickups.meta files and documented the main. The goal of this mod is to bring about more action oriented events and eventually callouts that are more in the spirit of Grand Theft Auto. This initial release features 5 calls: Active Shooter Ambulance Hijacking - Chase down a hijacked ambulance.

Gta 5 Immersion Mods 2

Gta 5 Immersion Mods Mod

Gta 5 Immersion Mods Free

Cars are basically the core and soul of GTA V.

Grand Theft Auto V ditched this top-tier wanted level, but this mod puts it back in place. Get five-star notoriety and you’ll be pursued by the nation’s finest. Get five-star notoriety and you.

But now it's time to get serious, and talk about the mods which take elevate GTA V to a new level of immersion and realism. Sure, there's plenty of fun to be had in firing vehicles from a cannon.

But there just seems to be something missing whenever you look at the car roster that the game has to offer. There are some fantastic cars in the game, no doubt about it. But some of the world’s best and most famous car models can make a massive difference when cruising in the streets of San Andreas.

I’ve compiled a list of mods that fully changes the way you’ll see cars in Grand Theft Auto V.

Most of these mods are cars that you can add to the game, but I’ve also threw in a few mods that change certain car mechanics and visuals to make driving more realistic.

Download one, two, or all – it’s up to you how much you wanna ball out!

30. Real Wheels Pack

This fantastic mod adds plenty of new wheels to the game, mainly using the assets of the Forza Horizon games.

It introduces plenty of new rims as well as aesthetical modifications to some of the vanilla wheels in GTA.

The mod also introduces custom tires and even real-life brands to the game, which fits in perfectly with basically everything else listed below.

Combine this mod with any of the cars here and you’ll have quite a customizable selection of rides to pick from in your GTA playthrough.

29. Porsche Gauges

As its name suggests, the Porsche Gauges mod simply changes the way gauges look in the game to make them look like they belong on a sports car.

And let’s be honest, in a game like GTA we all want that look.

This is a fantastic mod if you want to get some fancy sportsy whips in your game. And even more so if you’re a fan of Porsche rides.

It’s a very simple mod, but just the thought of having these gauges makes it earn a spot on my list.

28. 2016 Honda NSX

Honda has some beautiful sports cars on the market. And the NSX 2016 has managed to make its way to the GTA universe with this fully customizable mod.

You can take this baby to any garage that you want and have it recolored to your taste. And those of you who like to play in first person will also be able to enjoy the interior of the car, which is also custom made and dope as hell.

This is the same model used in Forza Horizon 3 which is why it looks so great.

You’ll find that many of the car mods in this list are conversions from Forza games, as they fit perfectly into GTA5.

27. Maserati Ghibli S

The Ghibli S is the first Maserati in my list(yes, there will be more than one).

And even though the modder hasn’t managed to make it fully breakable, the beauty of the car and the perfection added to the model makes it a quality addition.

The Ghibli S with custom interior shows the manual transmission stick, and truly makes you feel like a millionaire while you drive.

The windows of the car are fully breakable, though. And even though the paintjob damage is not as good as it is in other mods, it’s still a brilliant car worth testing out.

26. Hummer H1

Take a trip down memory lane with the Hummer H1 in GTA V.

Remember a few years ago when everyone wanted one of these bad boys?

Well I might be a few years too late with this one, but this H1 mod will allow you to ride this beastly truck in ways you’ve always dreamed of!

The interior is fully customized and I absolutely love the way the engine looks. I’m sure you’ll love it as well if you’re a Hummer fan.

Overall it’s a very well-made car that it fits right into the GTA universe.

25. Mercedes Benz CLS 6.3

A fully customizable Mercedes Benz in GTA is the stuff dreams are made of.

This might not be one of the fanciest sports cars on the list.

But this car can be tuned to your taste at any auto shop in the game.

The Benz drives as you’d expect and with no bugs thanks to the constant work and updates from the mod creator.

The CLS is a beautiful car and you’ll be able to see its interior in excruciating virtual detail.

24. 1967 Chevrolet Camaro

No GTA V car mod list can be complete without including one or two classics.

And the ‘67 Camaro mod is surely one that should be in a spot here.

This traditional car looks absolutely beautiful in GTA V given its history in America. And I have to say, it does seem like the type of car that Franklin would love to drive. He looks pretty slick in the driver’s seat.

A Camaro never really gets old. And with this mod it’s finally time for you to give it a try!

I know you’ll love it once you hear that engine purr. It’s hard not to love this thing with how detailed this mod is.

23. 2013 Lamborghini Veneno

If you’re into these types of sports cars then you definitely need to give the Veneno a try.

What a fantastic model from any Lambo(and there are plenty!)

Not to mention how well it was implemented into GTA.

All of the car doors (including the trunk) work just like they do in the real-life model, which makes the immersion of the Veneno far greater than what you get in other cars.

The reflections of the car are truly realistic as well. The creator did an amazing job with this mod and it’s worth a gander even if you test it and uninstall afterwards.

22. 1967 Shelby Mustang

Fans of old cars rejoice.

The classic Mustang makes its way to GTA in one of the best car mods ever created.

The maker of the mod has made sure to fully map the interior or this Mustang and make it look as close to reality as possible.

Many similar colors have been used to create the most natural feeling for the car from all angles. And the ride itself feels much like any other car in GTA.

This bad boy allows you to install plenty of car parts on it as well – including some that are often seen in traditional cars such as hydraulics and even audio systems.

21. Ferrari 458 Italia

I could never finish this list without a Ferrari.

And the 458 Italia is by far one of the best models from this manufacturer.

It resembles some of the vanilla sports cars, but this one just looks fantastic. The interior is identical to the one of the real car and you can see the Ferrari logo in the center of the steering wheel.

The car looks and handles like a custom ride since the design was fully imported from Forza.

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The creator of the mod did a lot of work with the retextures, though. And it shows in the way the car looks – both on the inside as well as the outside.

20. 2017 Rolls Royce Dawn

Even though there’s already one car in the game that looks like a Rolls Royce, there’s nothing better than seeing the actual brand in the game.

Sometimes we get picky, you know?

This fantastic car mod is fully customizable and comes with a 3D engine which breathes life into this classic ride.

The different paint jobs that you can do also make it quite interesting to customize, including one of the pre-designed paint jobs which gives off a wooden feeling like no other car in the game.

19. Mercedes Benz G65

I know that many of you are here mainly because of the sports cars. I’m kinda here for that too.

But let’s face it: plenty of us love Mercedes.

The G65 allows you to have an in-depth experience thanks to the realism of the collisions of its parts, and the way the car interacts with mud(very well mapped).

It might not be the car to take you from 0 to 220 mph in 10 seconds. But it’s still a beautiful car that seems to fit Michael more than any other character.

18. Range Rover Evoque

These SUVs are fantastic, and people from all over the world who can afford them seem to be getting them now more than ever.

The popularity of these SUVs is helped by the fact that they’re developed by Land Rover, and the quality of the vehicle and the beauty of its design are undeniable.

As such, adding it to GTA V seems like a no-brainer. And this mod practically requires no brains to get it installed, too!

This mod adds the Range Rover Evoque to the game with a fully custom interior, and fully HD interactions between the glass windows and the lighting outside.

17. Mercedes-Benz AMG GT R 2017

This two-seater is one of the latest beauties created by Mercedes.

And if you’re still playing GTA V you’ll absolutely want to see how it looks in your game.

The vehicle is textured using HQ images which makes it look insanely realistic in every part of the game.

This is one of those cars that you’ll want to have a custom lighting mod to try out, as it makes the ride look even better the way it reflects its surroundings.

16. 2017 Nissan GTR

Now here’s another one of the car mods on this list that was originally converted from Forza, which means you can expect a high-quality interior as well as fine textures all around.

The creator of the mod has made sure to make the Nissan 2017 fully capable to be tuned, as well as compatible with first-person driving thanks to the details on the wheel and the inside of the car.

Worth trying if you’re a GTR fan but totally one you could skip as well. But it’s also a more “conservative choice” for rides, which I think deserves a higher spot. We don’t all want Ferraris!

15. 2015 Koenigsegg Agera

This fantastic model is made to have some of the most realistic collisions that any car of this list is able to present.

Sure, Koenigsegg might not be as popular as Ferrari or Porsche. But this luxury sports car is by far one of the most beautiful designs that made their way to GTA(with modding, of course).

There’s been a lot of care placed into the development of this mod. You can see this in how you drive with your hands on the wheel, and everything seems to be well-made to scale.

Scale is often the most difficult part of modding any car for a game, so the creator of this mod hit the nail on its head with this one.

14. Porsche Cayman GT4 2016

A Porsche with dirt effects, breakable glass, a high-quality model, and a custom interior that allows you to play in first person?

Sign me up.

The Cayman GT4 2016 brings the traditional Porsche look to the universe of GTA V with a fantastic car mod that uses HD textures.

The scale of the car is perfect, and the mod has been updated to work with the latest GTA patch too!

13. 1970 Dodge Challenger RT 440

Being the highest-rated classic model in my list, the 1970 Dodge Challenger meets expectations with a fantastic car design.

This really does take you back to the good old days of the 70s.

The model passed the test of time and remains a fantastic vehicle to be used in today’s modern world, as well as one that looks good in the hands of a tough guy like Trevor.

12. 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder

The exterior of this car is just beautiful, but the interior is just so well done that you’ll struggle to find another car with one as fantastic as the 918 Spyder.

Some modders really take a step beyond to make sure that their creations are superior to the rest.

And the 918 is close to making one of the top 10 spots on my list because of this exact reason.

11. 2015 Lamborghini Aventador LP700-4

Worry not friend: there are still a couple of Lamborghinis left.

And the 2015 Aventador could never be missing from this collection.

The car is completely destroyable for those of you that need that car damage to feel realistic in GTA. And the model of the car itself is of a fantastic quality.

Lambos are particularly difficult to map, but they’ve done a fantastic job with the Aventador on this mod.

10. 2015 Ford Mustang GT

What, you thought I wasn’t going to mention a Mustang GT on this list?

Being one of those cars that everyone seems to have wanted at some point in their lives, the Mustang GT comes to GTA and you can try out how it feels to drive it in the virtual world Rockstar has created for us.

This is another one of those cars with a fantastic interior too, so first-person players rejoice!

9. 2015 BMW i8

Probably not as aerodynamic as the rest of the cars listed here, the 2015 BMW i8 brings something unique and modern to the table.

Gta 5 Immersion Mods Mod

This car is not as destroyable as I’d like them to be, but the design is fantastic and seems to fit right into the taste of most GTA fans. The textures are extra HD as well so that’s a nice touch.

Gta 5 Immersion Mods Free

But if you’re looking for an even cooler BMW then check the next mod link.

8. 2015 BMW F82 M4

Custom spoilers, tires, and add-ons.

The BMW F82 seems to have it all in the world of car mods in GTA.

It’s a fantastic model with HD textures, which can look even better if you download one of the GTA graphic enhancement mods that we’ve covered.

I may never get a BMW in the real world but I can still ball out with this GTA alternative.

7. Bugatti Veyron

The Adder is clearly a copy of the Bugatti Veyron in GTA V. But if you’re tired of seeing it instead of the original car in the game then give this mod a try.

The Bugatti Veyron mod is fully customizable and allows you to incorporate one of the world’s most expensive cars into the game: fully functional, crushable, and destroyable!

6. 2013 Lamborghini Aventador

Another one of the Aventador models makes far up in this list, this time with the 2013 version of the car.

The rear window of the car can be lifted and the vehicle itself is fully tunable, as the modders have made sure to add many custom parts in the game to be compatible with the Aventador.

If you’re a fan of Lambos then give this one a try. It’s sure to please!

I also love the details of this car, too. It comes with an interior like the ones you see in modern racing games, which does make everything feel right in place if you like to do your GTA first person style.

5. 2014 McLaren P1

Much like the Adder is clearly the Bugatti Veyron, the T20 is basically a version of a McLaren sports car in GTA V.

Progen, the manufacturer of these cars in the game, is basically McLaren in the world of GTA.

However if you wish to try out a real McLaren in the game, then the 2014 P1 might be the first mod you’ll want to download.

It allows you to put carbon and chrome textures on it, and the engine of the vehicle is fantastically detailed to boot.

It’s an overall amazing car with an amazing modder and I fully recommend it to any McLaren lover reading this.

4. 2015 Ferrari LaFerrari

As far as single-car mods go, this 2015 Ferrari is the highest rated in our list.

This fantastic adaptation of the classic Ferrari look fits right into the game, and does a much better job at fulfilling the needs of many players who just want a clear sports car feeling.

The flaps on this ride are fully functional, the car is fantastically well mapped, and the details that it has make the immersion great. This is true of both first person and third person alike so it’s really just a brilliant car to add into your next playthrough.

3. Vanillaworks Extended Pack

Sure, it’s nice to have a ton of real vehicles added to the game.

But not everyone likes to break the vanilla feel of GTA vehicles or to push the lore too far.

In fact, to many players the brands of the GTA universe are part of what makes the experience such a unique one.

But the variety of models still leaves a lot to be desired – even with the many vehicles that come in the vanilla game. Hence this fantastic add-on to GTA 5.

The Vanillaworks mod adds countless new vehicles to the game, all of which are “manufactured” by the same companies that appear in GTA V.

It adds dozens of new cars to the game while keeping in line with the story too. This provides some much-needed variety that is sure to make even the oldest veteran GTA player feel like the game is brand new again.

2. GTA IV Vehicles in GTA V

Are you missing those classic rides from GTA IV and wondering why no one seems to have imported them to San Andreas?

Well, this mod basically does that. For free, I might add!

Imagine that a shipping container with the best GTA IV rides came to San Andreas and the cars from the previous game started being sold around the city. Then you can jack ‘em and ride them around yourself.

With this mod installed you’ll be able to drive some of your favorite classic GTA IV rides in the newest installment of the game.

1. Realistic Driving Mod

Now this mod was in development for over three years, and the quality definitely shows in the final product.

Realistic Driving is a rework of every single part of the driving mechanics in the game.

It makes cars move far better, handling is easier, and every car also feels unique. The creator of the mod really made sure to spend time developing driving mechanics for each car individually.

Now you can probably see why this took years to finish.

Even the roads and surfaces where you can drive all feel more realistic.

Basically if you want to completely overhaul the driving experience in GTA 5, you’ll want this mod in your stack.

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ciathyzareposts · 4 years

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Game 371: Amberstar (1992)

I suspect the title font is in amber, but someone let me know for sure.

Amberstar

Germany

Thalion Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1992 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS

Date Started: 20 June 2020 Amberstar is the first game I can remember that starts better if you haven’t read the manual. First of all, the manual is 168 pages–and it explains so little about what you experience in the game’s opening hours that it might as well be written for a different game. Second, it sets up a less interesting quest than the game itself. The manual’s story is all about the standard evil wizard trying to take over the world. The Amulet of Yendor that can stop him has been broken into 13 pieces, each one hidden somewhere across the land. Yawn. It made me realize that we have the terms Amulet of Yendor or MacGuffin for the Artifact That The Hero Must Find, but we need a separate term for when the MacGuffin is broken into multiple pieces. Anyway, the actual game begins with no mention of any of this. Instead, the starting character is in a cemetery, mourning over (in my case) her parent’s graves, recalling how they were recently murdered by a band of orcs attacking their carriage. Left with nothing to do, the character heads into the nearby city and starts looking for adventure.

The character is reminded of the backstory when she gets to her house.

If you read the manual, there’s quite a bit of confusion at the beginning of the game when it comes to character creation. The manual tells you that you can have up to six characters, and it sets up a pretty standard Dungeons and Dragons-derived system for their creation. Races are human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfling, half-elf, and “half-ork.” Attributes are strength, intelligence, dexterity, speed, constitution, charisma, luck, magic resistance, and age. Races have the usual advantages with attributes (e.g., dwarves and half-orcs get the highest strength, halflings the highest dexterity, humans are average across the board); the highest value that anyone gets is 100.

Classes are warrior, “paladine,” ranger, thief, monk, white wizard, grey wizard, and black wizard. The wizard classes are interesting. Like Thalion’s previous Dragonflight (and, oddly, like Final Fantasy), magic is split into white (mostly healing) and black (mostly offensive) varieties. I figured “grey” wizards would be able to cast both, but it turns out they have their own set of spells, focused mostly on adventuring (“Light,” “Magic Compass,” “Identification”) and buffing. Paladines get some white magic abilities, monks get some grey magic, and rangers get both white and grey. There are typical racial restrictions on classes. That is, humans get to be anything. Mages otherwise have to be elves, half-elves, or gnomes. Dwarves can only be warriors or monks, half-orks only warriors or thieves. That kind of thing.

This interesting screen precedes the more boring title screen.

There are ten derived skills: attack, parry, swim, listen, find traps, disarm traps, pick locks, search, read magic, and use magic. Thieves so far outclass anyone else for swim, listen, find traps, disarm traps, pick locks, and search that it seems foolish to travel without one, although both monks and rangers have some skill in those areas.

Anyway, most of this setup is ignored during actual character creation. You only get to make one character, and I guess it’s a human since the attributes are all rolled on a scale of 60, but the race isn’t specified anywhere on the character sheet. Neither is the class. She gets no initial magic statistic at all, nor any thief-specific or mage-specific skills. Your only choices are sex, name, and the ability to hit “reroll” as many times as you want for the initial attributes. I was a bit disappointed that I couldn’t create a six-character party, as I had a whole “color wheel” thing worked out, with characters named Violet, Indigo, Magenta, Vermillion, and Chartreuse. Then it turns out that the game only displays the first five letters, so I changed Violet to Viola.

Too bad no class favors both strength and intelligence.

The character starts in the city cemetery next to her parents’ graves. She has clothes, shoes, a knife, and a small, random number of gold pieces. The cemetery is presented in top-down, iconographic form, but most of the rest of the city uses a first-person interface. Either way, movement is turn-based and tiled.

A little bit of backstory for the character.

The interface and I are going to struggle a bit before we come to some accord. I suspect the game really wants you to play with the mouse. To move, you can either click on the movement pad or on the map window itself, where the cursor changes to an arrow indicating direction of movement relative to the party’s current position. If you right-click on the movement pad, other options appear: look, listen, talk, mount/dismount transport, cast spell, camp, automap, battle formation, and disk options. Clicking any of these might change the pad to show even more options. In any event, the numberpad on the keyboard always corresponds, positionally, to the buttons on the screen pad. So far, so good, but if you want to use the keyboard in conjunction with the mouse and you’re right-handed, you have to awkwardly position your left hand on the numberpad while your right hand controls movement with the mouse. You don’t want to control everything with the keyboard because constant switching between the action options and the movement options is annoying. I really need to invest in an external numberpad for times like this, but it would have been nice if the developers had mapped the action items to sensible keys, like L)ook and T)alk, or at least used the QWEASDZXC cluster as analogues for the action pad and left the numberpad for movement alone.

The options on the “action pad” change depending on what screen you’re on.

Also annoying is that the “Look” and “Talk” commands bring up a cursor, which you then have to click on the object that you want to look at or talk to. Since you can only ever look at or talk to things immediately adjacent to the character, it would have been more intuitive to have the player specify a direction after using those options rather than clicking on something, particularly since it’s easy to mis-click on the wrong thing. If you mis-click too close to the character, it opens the inventory screen, which is particularly annoying.

Viewing statues in Marillion’s tomb.

The cemetery has some statues and gravestones that you can look at, plus a sub-area inside the Tomb of Sir Marillion. If you wander into the tomb, you find statues dedicated to Gala, the goddess of life, and Bala, the goddess of death. A memorial to Marillion says that “his life was dedicated to light and his soul will escape from the shadows.” Marillion ties into the game’s backstory, which has to do with the return, after a thousand years, of an ancient wizard named Tarbos. I’ll summarize his full story–which takes up 79 pages of the manual–later on, but for now suffice to say that he was the mortal spawn of the King of Hell and he tried to conquer the world (called Lyramion) a millennium ago. A cabal of wizards gathered in the castle Godsbane and cast a spell that banished him to one of Lyramion’s moons. Knowing that the only way for him to return is if someone cast a counterspell within Godsbane, the wizards magically sealed the castle with an artifact called the Amberstar, then divided the star into 13 pieces. A group of knights kept watch over the castle for the next thousand years. Recently, the castle was invaded by a dark wizard named Marmion, who killed the knights and their commander, Sir Marillion. Marmion used magic from the King of Hell to get into the castle without the Amberstar, so now someone needs to reunite the 13 pieces of the Amberstar to get back into the castle and stop him from performing the ritual to recall Tarbos.

All of this is far in the future for our orphan, though, who leaves the top-down cemetery to find herself in a first-person city called Twinlake. Size. A competent automap keeps track of where you’ve been but not the names of various locations and services, so I made my own. The map occupies 32 x 30 coordinates, but using worm tunnels and still leaving a lot of space unused.

My map of the opening city.

Twinlake has the usual slate of RPG services: a couple of shops, a healer, a food store, a stable, guilds for wizards and thieves, a sage to identify equipment, a tavern, and a store selling rafts. The PC’s house is also here, and both it and the tavern switch to a top-down map for exploration. The textured corridors of the first-person section are pretty dull and featureless, so the game’s approach seems to be to switch to an iconographic interface whenever it wants to do anything interesting. There are no combats in the city itself.

The automap works okay except that it shows nothing where the iconographic sections are.

There are a few NPCs wandering the corridors. Some of them offer only a quick scripted dialogue, but others allow you to ask about keywords, including an option to type in your own keyword if it’s not on the list. While I like such keyword systems, this one seems to retain in the list every keyword that you’ve ever gotten from any NPC. This is a bit annoying because I feel like I have to click on each keyword just in case.

Speaking with the ghost of a dead knight, I still have options to ask about the COOK in the town’s tavern.

A wizard warns me that magical items have limited charges. A ranger suggests I take unidentified items to sages and pay them to identify them. A guard warns me to avoid bubbles in swamps because they release deadly gases, and another guard warns me of orc activity north of Twinlake. A young girl named Sunny wants my help finding her lost cat, Felix, for which she promises to tell me a great secret. The cat was lost near the cemetery. In a castle-looking configuration in the southeast of town, I run into Lord Karwain, apparently the ruler of the town, who is looking for someone to descend into the sewers, where something is stirring and soldiers have disappeared.

The first major quest of the game.

My parents must have been pretty wealthy to have such a big house in the middle of the city. I entered using the key that came with the character; keys disappear when they fulfill their purpose, which would have been a nice addition to The Black Gate. There was one locked door in the house, but also a key to open it. Among the various rooms, I found a few hundred gold pieces, a set of chainmail, a short sword, a pair of boots, and a few other items. Right now, my undeclared character can’t wear the armor or wield the sword. The family dog is still in the house, hanging around the kitchen, and I feel bad that I can’t take him with me. Is he just going to starve to death?

My old bedroom.

It takes me a few minutes to get used to the game’s inventory system. If you’re going to make me use the mouse, then let me drag items from chests directly to my character portrait (like The Black Gate) rather than forcing me to click separate buttons for “take item out of the chest” or “put item in the chest” first. But there are things I like about it, particularly the ability to click with the eye icon on any object and get a full rundown of its statistics and what classes are able to wield it. A screen like this should be required by law in every CRPG. Not really, of course, because that would be a huge overreach of governmental powers, and impossible to enforce in an international industry, but you get what I mean. On the negative side, ammunition (arrows, sling stones) seem to show up as individual, unstackable objects, which I think might be a dealbreaker for using those weapons.

The short sword’s stats show me exactly how much damage it can do and who can equip it.

The tavern was a large building also in iconographic form. Initiating conversation with NPCs is a bit different in this interface, but the result–including the selection of keywords–is the same. A beggar tells me that the ghost of Sir Marillion appears at his grave at midnight. A family friend invites me to make use of his father’s old house, north of town, where many of his “inventions” still sit unused. A dwarf worries that all the orc and troll attacks lately heralds Tarbos’s return. (The game is inconsistent in whether it’s spelled “orc” or “ork,” unless it intends two different creatures. I guess I’ll use the standard spelling from now on.) One cook lost his ring down the drain (perhaps to be found in the sewers); the other wants me to retrieve a decent bottle of wine from the cellar, where something “large and slimy” has lately taken up residence.

Trying to talk to something in the tavern’s kitchen. Maybe it was a cat.

Most important, I soon find my first companion: A shaggy-haired, mustachioed man incongruously named “Silk.” Like me, he’s an undeclared class. He’s looking for the thieves’ guild and wants to join. It just so happens I have already wandered through the illusory door to the thieves’ guild accidentally, so I know where it is, but when I visit both it and the warriors’ guild, the options to join are greyed out. I assume this is how you declare your class, and I further assume that we’ll need some combination of experience or money before they’ll let us in. I don’t know where the other guilds are, so I wonder how long you have to play the game if you want the main character to be a “paladine” (the game is consistent about this, so I’ll stop using quotes) or ranger or mage.

We find the guild but not anything to do there.

The rumor about Marillion’s ghost intrigues me, so I returned to the cemetery (also to search for Felix) and wait in Marillion’s tomb until his ghost does, in fact, appear. Unfortunately, it just rants about the attack on Godsbane and doesn’t have anything useful to offer. There’s a locked door in the tomb, so I expect some later quest allows me to interact with him more productively and unlock this door. I don’t see any sign of Felix.

Marmillion is clearly reliving his death.

At this point, I already have four explicit quests:

Find Felix for Sunny

Figure out what’s going on in the sewers for Lord Karwain

Find the cook’s ring in the sewers

Get the wine bottle from the tavern cellars

I decide to try the tavern cellars first. I struggle with the interface for a while before I figure out how to light a torch. I don’t see why clicking on it isn’t enough; you have to click the “use” button first.

Dungeon exploration is pretty straightforward. You get atmospheric messages as you move along. If you want to search something more thoroughly, you stop and hit the “eye” icon. The automap works as long as you have a light source. Unfortunately, torches don’t last long, and I only started with two, so after the first dies, I light the second and make a rush back to the stairs. Clearly, I’ll have to go to the store for more.

The game shows in its iconographic sections, tells in its first-person sections.

Miscellaneous notes:

There is only one save slot. Saving the game is bizarre when you have party members, because for some reason you also click on the “save” button to get rid of them. The game presents this to you with the question, “Would you like to let members of the group go?” and then presents two options: “Exit” and “OK.” “OK” makes it sound like yes, you want to let members of the group go, but if you hit “Exit,” you don’t save. In fact, what “OK” does is get rid of members that you’ve selected while simultaneously saving, so to keep the party as-is, you just hit “OK” without selecting anyone. It’s still ridiculously confusing like a lot of the interface.

How would you interpret this screen?

There’s a day/night cycle, and NPCs in the iconographic parts of the game keep to a schedule, retiring to bed at night and moving about during the day. In the first-person side, NPCs are constantly present, but stores open and close based on the cycle. The character finds a magic painting in his house that changes based on whether it’s day or night, allowing her to determine the rough time even in a dungeon, though I can’t help but think a watch would have been more convenient.

Acquiring the useful-but-cumbersome painting.

There’s a food system, but you don’t have to eat to stave off hunger. Rather, you simply have to have food in your inventory if you want to regenerate hit points and spell points when you rest. Both only regenerate 10% even if you have food, so I assume there’s going to be better mechanisms for this. There are pools in Sir Marillion’s tomb that regenerate both, for instance.

If you decide you don’t like your main character and change him or her during the game’s opening stages, reloading your saved game will just replace the character but maintain your auto-map, dialogue keywords, and save position. I haven’t tested how it affects gold or inventory, as I hadn’t spent or acquired anything when I changed my character. I assume there’s a point at which this is no longer possible.

I have a hard time spotting some doors in the iconographic sections. I have an equally hard time telling what some of the icons are supposed to be.

One of the tavern rooms. There’s a door in the west wall. There are tables with place settings on them, but what are the four objects lined up north-south on the right-hand side of the tables? And what is that thing in the far left-hand side of the screen?

The game apparently has no sound effects, just music. Town exploration is accompanied by a theme-and-variations composition. The theme is eight bars and goes through eight variations with different instrumentation and ornamentation. Each variation takes 10 seconds, and the A section is repeated, so you have 90 seconds of music before the piece cycles back to the beginning. I say all of this because the game gets praised for its music, and I wanted you to know I took time to listen and analyze before turning it off permanently.

It always feels incomplete when I don’t have the opportunity to even taste combat for the first entry, but this was already getting pretty long.

I end where I started: This is a promising beginning to a game that would be more promising if I didn’t already know it was going to devolve into a quest to collect 13 pieces of something to save the world. My idea of a perfect RPG is one in which my highborn ingénue, now forced to fend for herself in the real world, slowly develops the skills she needs to survive, assembles a team around her, and solves local problems until she’s strong enough to take on the orc band that killed her parents. Take her from Level 1 to Level 8 during this process and leave plenty of room for continued growth in the sequel.

This is the type of quest I enjoy.

The only thing I can hope now is that the game doesn’t make the collection of the 13 pieces completely uniform and bloodless. Like each one is at the bottom of a 10-level dungeon. That would suck. A couple ought to be at the bottom of 10-level dungeons. A couple ought to be acquired by solving some kind of puzzle. A couple ought to be for sale. Mix it up. Keep the player guessing. Let him hope that the next one might be easy. Ultima VI did it well with the map quest, for instance. At first, I had some hope that the entire trilogy would be about finding the 13 pieces, and Amberstar was just the beginning, but a premature trip to Wikipedia killed that theory.

At least the game understands the concept of “side quests.” As I return to the rich world of Britannia, I’m reminded that ORIGIN never really got that concept right, not even in The Black Gate, which admittedly has more than the previous titles in the series.

Time so far: 3 hours

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-371-amberstar-1992/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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ladala99 · 5 years

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Spyro Reignited Countdown Super Bonus Round - Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled

I really did not expect the Spyro Grand Prix to drop before Spyro Reignited came out of Switch, but it did! I cannot describe the hype I experience watching the trailer, and of course the wide grin on my face using my hoarded Wumpa Coins to unlock everything I could on day 1.

So, now that Spyro is a playable character, Crash Team Racing is a Spyro game as per my weird definition. So, here’s a review!

Gameplay

It’s a kart racer, with the original game debuting on the PS1. That means it has to be pretty simple, right?

Wrong. It’s inspired by Mario Kart for sure, but it has a mechanic that makes it stand out: drift boosting.

You can hop into a slide and boost three times before you must hop again. Each boost gives you a little more speed, and you build up what fans call “reserves,” in which your speed keeps going even after you stop boosting. These reserves also apply to the boosts you get from boost pads, which are more powerful than you can get from drifting alone. New to the remake is Blue Fire, the fastest you can go. It’s really intense keeping control of your vehicle while continuing to boost so you don’t lose your fire!

And then there’s powerups that almost all have a direct equivalent in the Mario Kart series: you’ve got your rockets (red shells), bombs (green shells), warp orbs (blue shells), clocks (lightning bolts), masks (stars), shields (horn thingy? except automatic), potions (banana peels) and canisters (mushrooms). There’s also TNT crates, which stick to you and only go away if you hop a few times.

Another difference is the fact that you can “juice up” these items by collecting 10 Wumpa Fruit, which are sometimes scattered around the track but usually are in specific crates. The juiced up effects make the powerups stronger and/or last longer, and also make your kart go faster, like coins in more recent Mario Karts. Yes, Mario Kart copied Crash. Antigrav was in Crash first as well, but it’s not in this game.

It has really steep learning curve. If you want to play it like you play Mario, Easy Mode is the only mode for you. Because Medium assumes you have some skill with the boost system. But there really isn’t any bonus to playing any particular mode, so it’s pretty forgiving.

Playable Characters

You start out with eight playable characters, split into four categories:

Polar and Pura are Turning-based characters. These characters turn very sharply, which is nice when playing the game like Mario Kart, but is actively bad when you are trying to drift down straightaways. They’re also really slow. Once you have a handle on the game’s mechanics, these are the hardest to do well with, but when you first start, they’re a bit easier to navigate with.

Crash and Cortex are Balanced characters. They’re slow, but not as slow as the Turning characters, and they turn sharply, but not as sharply as the Turning characters. You still will have a hard time drifting down straightaways. They’re slightly more usable than Turning characters once you’re skilled, but they’re still really difficult. Also: the visible stats lie.

Coco and N. Gin are Acceleration-based characters. They can reach high speeds and still will turn fairly easily. As you get better, you’ll find these characters easiest to play, as you can drift straight or turn relatively easily. Again: the stats lie. They’re better than they look.

Tiny Tiger and Dingodile are Speed-based characters. Experts will use these characters most of all, since they are, naturally, the fastest. Their awful Turning stats make it so they can drift in a completely straight line, but makes it difficult to turn with them. Not impossible, though, as this game’s hopping mechanics make turning possible, if you just get used to it. These guys are difficult for beginners, but once you’ve mastered them, it’s hard going back to anyone else.

More characters are unlocked in Adventure Mode, one by completing Time Trials, and an ever-increasing number through Wumpa Coins (which you earn by doing just about anything). All characters fall into one of the above four categories, essentially making them skins of one another. There’s also actual skins and other aesthetic differences available, but obviously these don’t make any difference to gameplay.

Game Modes

There’s several:

Adventure Mode is the story mode. A lot of things are unlocked here, including characters, karts, and paint jobs. Also, you know, there’s a story.

Single Races let you pick an individual course to race on with various rules. These courses include the Adventure Mode courses, courses from the game Nitro Kart, and all courses made available by Grand Prix (and the PS4-exclusive track is here too, if you’re on PS4).

Cup Races lets you race in cups of four pre-selected tracks. They’re not all covered by this mode and there’s not custom nor random cup, so it’s a little pointless. It is the only non-Adventure-Mode location to show Podium animations, though.

Time Trials let you race the tracks with a timer. If you’re good enough, you’ll unlock time trials by N. Tropy and Oxide himself. If you beat all of the Crash Team Racing and Nitro Kart times set by those two, you’ll unlock N. Tropy and a special skin for him respectively.

Battle Mode has some special courses and types of competition. I never use this mode outside of what I have to for the Grand Prix.

And of course, the Grand Prix itself. There’s various challenges spanning many modes that earn you Nitro Points. These points will unlock new karts, skins, characters, and other related aesthetic unlockables. This is where Spyro is located, and he’s only located here this month. Unless they repeat it later or something.

Wumpa Coins?

You gain a small amount of these every time you do a race or a battle. You can earn a lot more of them online, as you get a 5X boost for 30 minutes of on-the-track time (which depending on loading times can last for about an hour to about two hours in real time. The Switch’s load times in particular are awful).

You can also get Wumpa Coins through *shudder* microtransactions. And because of that, you need to be connected to the server to get coins at all. Only online races require a subscription to your console’s internet service, but everything in the shop (called the Pit Stop) is balanced more to the online race reward rate than the normal reward rate.

What if no internet?

Then no coins, no Grand Prix and no Pit Stop. You still can earn things through Adventure Mode and Time Trials, but the rest is blocked.

If the servers shut down right this minute, anything you have already bought with Wumpa Coins or earned in past Grand Prix would still be available to use. You just would be unable to earn or buy more things.

Given that this is a remake/remaster/whatever this counts as, and everything that was in the original is obtainable through its original methods, while this state isn’t ideal, it’s fair. You’re not losing out on any gameplay, and unlike Skylanders Superchargers, you still can access anything you’ve already bought.

Spyro’s Role

Spyro is being introduced into the game in a Grand Prix, timed to celebrate the launch of the Reignited Trilogy on the Switch.

This Grand Prix features Spyro as an unlockable character through the Nitro Gauge, and Hunter and Gnasty Gnorc buyable in the Pit Stop. Spyro is a Speed character, Gnasty is a Turning character, and Hunter is a Balanced character.

I think these make some sort of sense: Spyro is pretty fast, especially with a Supercharge powerup or in the Speedways. Hunter can do a lot of things, so him being Balanced has logic. Gnasty at first seems more of a Speed type from his boss fight, but the fact that his level is made of dangerous twisty paths makes being agile and Turning-based make sense.

There’s also a track specifically based on levels in Spyro 1. This track changes Wumpa Fruit to gems, and crates to chests. Anyone who gets an invincibility powerup or is rescued from being off-course gets Sparx rather than a regular mask, and the three Spyro characters have Sparx as the “mask” no matter what course they’re in. This includes Gnasty, as little sense as that makes.

Other characters gain skins for this Grand Prix, but not many are direct references to Spyro. Some are generic fantasy or fantasy-related skins, and a couple are direct references to a different Crash game that has nothing to do with Spyro.

There’s also three new karts, one having a scale-like plating and Spyro’s color scheme referencing Spyro, one that’s spiky and has an underbite referencing Gnasty, and one that’s... Arkeyan. Referencing Skylanders.

And that is what made my grin go full-on tears of joy. It’s not just Classic Spyro, it’s Skylanders as well. And Legend, as the Decals (patterns for the vehicle for the paint to go on) have designs extremely similar to menus and architecture from that series.

Beenox is really going all-out, and I love it.

The Pit Stop paint jobs are all gem-based, with facets that give them a really cool texture, and the wheels are Elemental-based, and I’m not certain if they’re Skylanders or Legend-based. Perhaps they’re both?

AND Spyro’s alternate color schemes include Dark Spyro as well as I guess Reignited gives him patterns with the powerups. But Dark Spyro! Based on the Skylanders version of him. But Dark Spyro!

I’m just full-on hype, it’s a dream come true, it’s new Classic Spyro content (Reignited Spyro content, I suppose) and it shares love for the rest of the series, too, even if the focus is on the first game.

Conclusion

I don’t have anything bad to say about this game. It only got on my radar because of the Spyro Grand Prix, was worth every penny from what was included in the box from the get-go, and the Spyro Grand Prix was everything I hoped it would be and more. The only thing I would change is have Elora or Bianca present, but really I expected no more than Spyro himself so I’m satisfied.

This is primarily a Crash game, celebrating the Crash series. It’s a difficult as a Crash game is known to be. And that makes it fun. “Dark Souls of Kart Racing” ha, Dark Souls is the Crash Bandicoot of... whatever genre Dark Souls is.

Of course, I’m reviewing while still in hype mode, but I’ve put so many hours into this game, and loved it. I can see myself playing it for months to come, and perhaps coming back to it for fun after years.

#spyro #crash bandicoot #crash team racing nitro fueled #video game review #spyro reignited

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