#some smaller stuff is still being worked out but this is the bigger things/timeline of the canon

[fluffyselfships]

hey guys! i know yall have been waiting for this for a few days and im proud to say that i finally have the whole timeline/backstory for bunny and i's adventure time ship lore sorted out!!!

so im proud to present our lore in extreme detail, its kinda rambly and very long!!

for yalls sake, im putting it under a read more 💀

kitty note: a lot of at’s canon events still happen, most of canon resides in the past, betty never comes back, so golb is never summoned. islands happens but no humans come back to ooo in fear of vampires, which are still an issue since marceline isnt alive either (referring back to the fact wk has ice marcy, implying something bad happened to her). some other canon events happen later on, so the timeline compared to ats is all over the place lol 😭 this has nothing in common with the f&c canon outside of the bare bones

for colored quotes, pink are for kitty, bold purple is for bonbon, blue for the wk and red for bunny :)

ik/wk gets ahold of the crown & puts it on in front of betty

betty doesnt get summoned to the present, she moves on after leaving simon

ik/wk meets marcy & has her for a couple of years before passing away (either due to the radiation from the gmw or due to the oozers that came from the radiation)

the original ice kingdom builds up around 500 years after gmw

kitty becomes princess of the stuffie kingdom about 700 years post-mushroom war

they meet princess bubblegum during a princess day celebration

this one is hosted in the breakfast kingdom

they get along famously during this princess day meeting & become fast friends

kitty meets ik/wk due to his princess kidnapping tendencies

kitty, once settled into his ice cell, informs him that theyre a lesbian

ik apologizes & they end up talking about girls until they get rescued

kitty & ik’s relationship mirrors marcy and simons post i remember you

BIG father/daughter type bond

after 150 years of friendship, kitty & pb persue a romantic relationship

their relationship is pretty healthy to begin with while both of their kingdoms are in infancy (725 years post gmw)

after ~200 years, theres a communication breakdown between the two of them, leading to their breakup

it takes a good amount of time before the two of them get back together- koo’s election still happens & she loses the ck for a while, which allows for their reunion to happen

bella noche gets summoned & ice king becomes simon again

this is the first time kitty gets a glimpse of who ik truly is

this, obviously, is an eye opener for them & they want to help ik gain his lucidity once more

kitty takes betty’s place in punching bella noche

marcy, as stated before, has passed & hambo is long gone, which prevents simon from creating the portal to apologize to betty

after bella noche’s defeat and kitty’s discovery, they ask bonnie for help in their quest to fix/cure the ik

bonnie agrees & offers to do some preliminary research on ik’s crown while kitty is away on royal business

bonnie uses the machine from “broke his crown”

ice king comes along with gunter

while ik and bonnie are using the machine & preoccupied, gunter is bored & starts pressing any and every button on the machine

this causes the machine to overload and explode

this accident transfers the curse of the crown from ik to bonnie via electric shock (from the explosion)/magic (the explosion malfunctions ik’s crown & the curse is transferred)

bonnie has amnesia from the crown curse

kitty returns from royal business and cant find ik anywhere and finds bonnie’s lab destroyed

kitty comes across bonnie, now bonbon, first

“…trying out a new look bonbon?”

“who’s bonbon? who are you? how did you get in here?”

bonbon is kind of aggressive, her mental state is adjusting to the curse

kitty, freaked out, goes in search of the ik, who is now the winter king

they finally come across wk while searching deep in the newly-forming winter kingdom

they ask him what happened & he genuinely has no idea what happened exactly, but offers to use his newfound conscious thought to help figure things out

kitty thanks him & they return back to their own kingdom

over the course of the next six months, kitty tries to adjust to bonbon’s changes & tries to help her remember

bonbon shows no interest in kitty, as the curse’s infatuation sets her sights on wk

kitty tries (and fails!) to ignore this & they try to help bonbon regain her memories

“i just got you back and ive lost you again” energy

kitty approaches wk & tells him that theyre going to be leaving to find a cure for bonbon’s madness & they werent sure when they would return

kitty’s sibling becomes the main one in charge in their absence & it stays this way

they lose touch with the wk after some time, leading him to believe they might be injured or worse- dead

kitty spends ~7.5 decades looking for a magic cure where both wk can continue to be wk and bonbon can turn back to normal to no avail

kitty meets magic man outside of the wastelands of ooo, where he promises to help in exchange for a favor

he’s still trying to steal glob/gob/grob/grod’s residual powers

the process malfunctions due to an interruption & magic mans powers transfers to kitty, making them magic woman

for the remaining 25 years before they return, they do intensive and obsessive magic studies in order to find a cure

they also occasionally watch bonbon from afar, watching the candy kingdom be rebuilt & just seeing how she’s doing

it is very painful for them but they miss her so much that they cant help themselves sometimes

bunny, age 24 by the time the 100 years have passed, meets winter king while assisting the ice scouts with another one of cq’s kidnappings

bunny is related to finn since josuha treated being an adventurer like a family business, so the tradition carries

impressed by their skill, wk appoints bunny to be his personal body guard due to their skill with a sword

since theyre always together, wk and bunny get to know each other rather quickly & become fast friends, bonding over magic and science

after some time, wk finds himself falling for bunny and he is not shy about those feelings in the slightest

he constantly flirts with them & makes it known that he likes them

bunny is oblivious + has had a crush on wk by this point anyway

wk takes bunny to some royal business & they get stressed out by all the people there/feeling like they dont belong due to the fancy event

wk takes bunny aside and gives them a pep-talk, a sweet one at that

“i wouldnt have invited you if i didnt think you wouldnt belong”

his hand is gently sliding towards theirs, interconnecting their fingers

“i brought you as my date for a reason..”

bunny.exe has stopped working

they confess their feelings to each other & they spend the rest of the event away from everyone, talking the night away.

wk and bunny enter a romantic relationship

two years pass & wk needs to go to wizard city, bunny accompanies him

the two run into kitty, causing a whole mess of emotions to run through wk- not good ones

kitty starts coming around more & becomes friends with bunny

kitty’s sudden reappearance is stirring up a lot of bad memories, thoughts & feelings with wk. despite this, the two are slowly rekindling a friendship

due to the bad feelings, wk is pulling away from bunny & is drowning himself in his work, this is a slow process, it takes a few weeks before bunny says anything

the stress of emotions is reaching to the point where he’s starting to see so much of betty in bunny & its scaring him

not to mention he’s feeling guilty about something…👀

during wk’s slow pull-back, bunny and kitty are venting to each other about their respective issues

my sona reveals that bonbon wasnt always the way she was & tells the story from their own perspective

bunny, having no idea this ever happened, decides to confront wk about his distance & why he never told them that he knew what was wrong with bonbon

during this confrontation, wk finally breaks down and reveals to bunny everything about what has happened & his thoughts

“you remind me so much of her..”

he also reveals the fact that there is a cure for bonbon’s madness that he discovered during kitty’s absence, but the caveat is that he would become the ik again. theres no way to be fully rid of the curse.

“are you ever going to tell kitty?”

“no. ive worked so hard for what ive had & i dont want to lose it.”

“but you really should, its unfair to them to hold onto hope that isnt th-“

“im not telling them!” he snaps at them

after he snaps at bunny, they decide that they need to think about things for a while & they spend the next few months in the magic man house with kitty

at some point during this period, kitty decides to go on a date with bonbon, mirroring bespoken for

rather than getting angry and frustrated like betty, they get progressively more upset and sad

during their breakdown, they reveal to bonbon that they used to date

bonbon later thinks about this & it begins the crowns obsession/infatuation slow shift from wk to kitty

this date doesn’t go well & kitty ends it early

bunny’s sona is the one to give the tiny manticore speech

“maybe you're going after someone who doesn't exist anymore. why not take her as she is? after all, you’ve been through a lot of changes yourself”

kitty takes bunny’s speech to heart & they think it over, but not immediately

on wk’s side of things, he is miserable and alone & wants nothing more than to apologize to bunny

he seeks out kitty, who takes him to the magic man house

he apologizes profusely

“i never meant to push you away.. ive just spent so long trying to avoid these feelings that i ended up exploding. i’m horrible at dealing with negative emotions, but i want to work on it for you. i am so sorry, bunny”

bunny, after hearing his apology, forgives him & they return back to the winter kingdom with wk

bunny & the winter king, once reunited, try and figure out a way to tell kitty that there is a cure to bonbon’s madness in a way that they wont freak out/blow up/snap

during this time, kitty comes back bonbon to give their date another shot, apologizing for how abruptly it ended last time

they end up having a simple spaghetti dinner & kitty realizes they have more in common now then they did 100 years ago

this date goes well & they continue to go on dates, falling in love with each other all over again

bunny and wk finally find a way to tell kitty that there is a cure but it would reverse everything in wk

my sona, interrupts them before they can say more than “we found a cure-“ and tells the two that they dont want to fix bonbon anymore & that things finally feel the way they should now, ending my sona’s arc

the four of them can finally relax & enjoy life once more & they all become close friends once more :3

#long post #a lot of this is rambly i am so sorry #some smaller stuff is still being worked out but this is the bigger things/timeline of the canon #other stuff might change & evolve too and if it does ill just edit this post lol #🍬🩷 candy buttons 🩷🪡 #❄️winterbun🐰 #selfship #self ship #f/o #mod kitty🐱

[fugitive-steven-au]

Big Update Time!

First of all, I want to apologize for the unplanned hiatus. I need everyone to know, I made this AU suddenly, and I was entirely unprepared! I certainly wasn't expecting this much interest in it! I am often unmotivated and dissatisfied with my work, so that did not help me, especially once my hyperfixation died down and I got pulled into other things. And lemme tell you, hyperfixations are real strong! I feel really bad about disappearing suddenly, but I've never made something and had this many people be really interested, that is completely my fault for being unprepared.

I'm not sure how many people are still interested, but I was doing some thinking recently, and I'm not satisfied with how I ran this at all. So, some more news;

I am planning on revamping this AU!

Yup! I wanna redesign some characters, definitely do more research on the timeline and such with the show, try and get my motivation back! I don't want to get anyone's hopes up, so I don't plan on starting anything until I have a concrete plan for this story, or at least a structure so I'm not coming up with stuff as I go. I'm hoping to make this AU even better! I can't promise things will be consistent when I start again, but I still want to get this story out there. I'm most likely going to drop the "main" comic, and focus on smaller things that can allude to a bigger picture as we go. I don't trust myself to maintain anything really big like a comic series or even a fanfic, but there will be art and hopefully some mini comics and one-shots! I would love to be able to answer asks with art or a short story.

Ah, I completely lost track of what I was saying! Sorry for rambling -

TLDR; I want to restart this AU with a better structure. No large scale comic or fic, but I will continue to tell a story, and hopefully post more often.

If anyone has read this far, that means a whole lot to me. I hope you know how much I appreciate it. I hope I don't disappoint anyone again! (At the same time, I don't want to stress myself out! Please bear with me haha)

#update post #long post #fugitive steven au #steven universe #steven universe au #might change the AU name #I'm incredibly socially anxious and insecure and that is probably another reason I just kinda dropped it #I'm trying to remind myself that this is for me!! I wanna create it and share it with people!! I don't control other people's feelings!! #sorry anyways #🧡🧡🧡🧡 #thank you all so much

[cottoncandy-cult]

So, I'm listening to Arankai's paint it black right now, and I'm feeling creative to a sinful degree. So, on here I'm putting a Floyd smut and a preview of an Ikemen Sengoku Kenshin X Reader X Kanetsugu smut that I am considering making into a book of smuts and scenarios for the trio. Like I'm gonna start this out hard on the smut, you should probably play or read Kenshin or Kanetsugu's route before you read it since this will take place after the stories and in a period of time after Kenshin and Reader are married. Remember to make sure your age is in your bio before interacting with the preview, as with any of my smut. I don't want to block people because I do post fluff too, but I'd rather not know that a minor is interacting with my smut. So please put ANY age above 17. Also, this book in its entirely will be on Ao3 because I can't count on being able to fit a full chapter into one post and I still suck at setting up my Masterlist and its sloppy already. I will start posting chapter previews if you gets need links, might go back and do that for my Ao3 exclusive books like "Crystal Waters" and "Trend Chaser" Just to give you guys an idea of what's to come in each chapter or just remind anyone new or who forgets that I do have longer options for stories on Ao3. I still have stuff to transfer over to Ao3, I'm gonna split some of my oneshots on here into anime specific books if they are from anime I plan to write more of or a book of characters I've done out of requests. I'm currently trying to decide if I want to do a mass update for my wattpad or if I want to just use it purely for reading and posting previews of available content on here. I'd do a poll and let you all decide but I'm not sure my follower count justifies that kind of thing yet and I don't want to make an ass out of myself and act bigger than I am.

Either way, be ready for more to come from me. Nothing has been discontinued I just work by inspiration, there are oneshots I plan to make part 2's to once I have at least some semblances of an idea out. I do plan to continue Lilly Among Thorns and the others, I'm just working out a general timeline of some stuff. I have to do Sayuri's first day of school before I can do some of the holidays I have inspiration for, as well as certain other events. but I do have smaller inconsequential ideas I can fit in between so be ready for that.

#candy cult vault #candi rambles #updates about what's to come #can't wait to celebrate Floyd's birthday #will make something for Jade after cause I don't know what to do yet

[stanielman]

Chapter Five: The Nina Project

- Aw man Will doesn’t have his painting :((

- They’re not being kind to their house

- NO FUXKING WAY ITS BRENNER

- OH MY GOSH

- Nooo they’re not being nice to her

- Holly’s so much bigger oh my gosh 😭😭

- In season one she was just eating ham with her little plastic fork and now she’s sitting up straight wearing earrings

- “God we need Will” IM GONNA CRYYYYYHGH NO

- Caption says *will sighs* like Will’s not always sighing

- NOT THE CAPTIONS SAYING “TENDER, EMOTIONAL MUSIC” WHENEVER WILL LOOKS AT MIKE THIS IS TORTURE

- Oh yes Will we all know you would know best how scary it is to say how you really feel

- Wow way to go Argyle ruining Will’s coming out

- What does Hopper mean with crooked spines and eyes popped out?? Does this have to do with Vecna too?

- I really want Brenner to be a good guy. Like really badly. But at the same time I’m not getting that vibe

- I miss Mike solving mysteries, I wish he was with them

- Wait for the plane to land and then knock him out??

- They’re doing really well switching through locations and storylines except that it’s hard to keep track of timelines. How long has El been in this cycle?

- It literally looks like they just made Millie smaller this is so funny 😭 Small Alice

- I love this orderly guy. He should be a model. Who is he??

- LOOK TEN IS STILL THERE!!!!

- The captions did NOT have the same phone number

- The “oh my god”s and singing from Will was pure Noah Schnapp

- Oh snap it’s some Holly Jolly shit

- This poor girl gets bullied wherever she goes

- Joyce always takes for freaking ever to grab stuff

- Why do they keep cutting to black? We know they aren’t dead. They cut to the next scene to come back in just a scene of dead bodies??

- So Eddie’s being hunted, Lucas and Dustin are being hunted, Hopper was being hunted, I’m sure Joyce and Murray are now being hunted, the Cali crew are being hunted, El is being hunted, Nancy and Robin are probably still being hunted offscreen, and technically Max is being hunted

- They could’ve had Brenner work on her in secret so she didn’t know

- YES EL!!

- Congrats the worst thing that ever happened to you and what has defined your entire life is back

- In the best friend challenge with Noah, Millie said that she has a birthmark on her back. I can see it now!!

- No not Papa and Daughter

#me thoughts #st4 spoilers #stranger things

[xoxo-ren-xoxo]

Unpopular Opinion /lh /rp

Talking about dSMP character’s heights and sort of their body types? Not in a weird way just in a ‘how I imagine them’ way. Loosely based off of their irl heights, but some of them I don’t know, so it’s mostly guesswork and vibes. Also if you disagree you’re wrong. (Just kidding leave your ideas in the tags/replies)

Obviously this is all roleplay/character stuff. None of it is intended to be weird or to reflect on the irl people! I’m just having fun with headcanons :)

Tommy is 6′3 and very very lanky. This child is not short. Stop drawing him short. He’s taller than Techno. He’s not as tall as Wilbur, but he’s tall. He towers over most people. Emphasis on most because everyone is so tall on this server what the hell? 

Anyway I think the mental image of this super tall kid actively trying to make himself look shorter/smaller is heartbreaking. Like imagine him curled up into a corner trying to make himself as unnoticable as possible in Logsted. Imagine him slouching when living with Techno to try to make himself seem like less of a ‘problem’. Imagine Dream telling him that he’s a ‘big strong man’ and that he shouldn’t need help, he can defend himself, so when he goes back to Tubbo, he tries to make himself look *tiny* as a cry for help. He wants comfort.

But he’s also incedibly skinny. Back in L’manburg and Pogtopia, he developed some muscle from all the fighting. His shoulders broadened out and he looked slightly intimidating. But like most teenage boys, he was still lanky as hell. This only got worse when he was exiled to Logstedshire, with little food (and no drive to eat the food, or get up, or exersise) he became more malnourished and he just looked *small* despite being 6′3. This probably isn’t helped by the constant use of golden apples when he moves in with Techno, which give him energy and strength but no real nutritional value. Techno was just trying to get the kid to eat normally. When he finally stands at his full height, Techno is shocked that he didn’t notice all the slouching.

Anyway Techno is 6′2. He’s taller than a lot of people but not as tall as his brothers. He makes up for this with muscle and strength and a healthy body. Wow, the only healthy person on the server. Amazing. You love to see it. Good for him. He could win in a battle of raw strength against anyone else on the server. He’s quite broad, which makes him look bigger generally.

Wilbur is 6′5 and also he is a stick. Just. Straight up and down stick. Nothing there! He is just a pale sickly stick. This gets worse the further into the timeline you go. When claiming L’manburg and fighting in the war he starts to get insomnia, causing him to look like a corpse half the time. When in Pogtopia, he’s too busy to take care of himself properly, so he only looks worse and worse. His hair is a mess, his skin is far too pale, and he only eats enough to be able to hold his own in a short fight. There’s a reason he doesn’t wear armour or really try to fight at all. He’s subconciously self-destructive, then actively so when he blows the place to the ground. He’s always been too busy for self-care.

Ghostbur is a much more healthy, younger version of Wilbur. I would say he’s ‘water rising’ era Wilbur. The life returned to his body, in a morbid kind of way. He’s still tall but he prefers to make himself seem shorter just to be less threatening.

Phil is 5′11. He has an average build, with slight muscle from the years of playing in hardcore. He’s older, now, but he can still kick your ass. Also, he taught Techno how to fight smart, not hard. He doesn’t need to be super strong because he’s intelligent enough to outwit most people on the server. He has a wordly knowledge that others don’t possess. He also has wings, large and grey, clipped so he could get onto the server (there is a no flying rule after all).

Fundy is... 5′10, just a little shorter than Phil. His fox genes make him smaller, despite his father being 6′5. He’s got a healthy, svelte build. He’s sneaky and light on his feet. In the wars he built up some muscle, but it was quickly lost since he prefers to take a backseat to any fighting outside of those times (especially now) and he’s built for spying.

Schlatt is an interesting one because a lot of people are gonna fight me on this, but he’s not actually old. Everyone calls him old but honestly I think he’s younger than Wilbur (in canon, I feel like Wilbur is in his late 30s, early 40s, simply because). I think Schlatt’s around 35-ish, but he looks older due to his shitty health. People call him an old man either to demean him or because they see his actions and appearance and go ‘yeah, this guy is old’. Which is fair enough, because irl Schlatt and c!Schlatt both act like they’re from the 1950s.

This guy looks like shit by the end, but he looks alright at the start. Slicked-back hair, sharp ram horns, golden animalistic eyes. He’s intimidating. And loud. Then everything shifts, right towards the end. He’s frail and deteriorating throughout his short presidency, and by the end of it he’s practically a corpse, just like Wilbur.

He’s 6′3, with broad shoulders and a silhouette that seems strong not only because he carries himself as if he can fight, but also because of the percieved power that comes along with it. In reality, Schlatt is a poor fighter, and the abuse he ends up putting his body through (working out excessively to try to fight his condition, and turning to alcoholism as an escape) completely destroys him, making him probably one of the least healthy and weakest people on the server. It doesn’t really show until his death scene, since he’s covered up the deterioration since day one. Basically, mans is dead. 

Glatt, or Ghost Schlatt, or whatever you want to call him, would be a healthier Schlatt. Again, from the ‘water rising’ era. I headcanon him to have longer hair in that era. Not sure why.

Ranboo is the same height as tommy, but is more naturally lithe than made that way by lack of food. His enderman DNA can be blamed for that. He’s healthy most of the time, but may have spirals where he doesn’t take good care of himself (perhaps he forgets) and he looks pretty bad. If he goes a few days without keeping up his self-care routine, he looks a lot worse than he actually is. Sleep tends to be his biggest issue, his mind keeping him awake all night and leaving him looking like shit in the morning. Really, he’s just a kid with a troubled soul, and it shows sometimes. Most days, though, he looks very well put together.

Tubbo. He’s 5′6. He’s more childlike than Tommy, which only makes it worse when he acts in the way he does in season 2. He has burn scars across one side of his body, from his execution, and he is partially blind in one eye because of it. He takes very good care of himself, since he has to look good while being president if he wants those sweet sweet approval ratings. But when he’s super stressed, he will pull all-nighters and forget to eat. He’s got a lot of issues, but his body is very normal and healthy, all things considered. 

Quackity is 5′8. Which is really funny because that’s his actual height. He’s less sharp (?) than a lot of people on the server, but he has some muscle because he’s constantly training to ‘take down Technoblade’ (in reality, it’s a habit he picked up in Schlatt’s era, and never had the heart to drop). He tries his best to stay healthy (again, to better kill Techno) and he’s careful with his life, knowing that it’s his last.

Niki is 5′5. She’s also able to kick so much ass. That is all.

Dream is a bitch and therefore I will not be discussing him. Also he’s a blob or whatever so I guess height is irrelevant. Or maybe he’s a mysterious figure with a mask. Who knows.

No one else is important enough to talk about /j (but really I’m tired so I will stop here). Put your own thoughts in the comments, tags, and rbs. This was all in good fun, so don’t get mad haha.

#dreamsmp #dream smp #jschlatt #tommyinnit #wilbur soot #tw alchoholism #tw self-destructive behaviours #quackity #tubbo #dream #ranboo #philza #technoblade #niki nihachu

[maleksrami]

gif tutorial ✨🎥

I got a few requests to make a gif tutorial so here it is. hope it helps :) It’s quite long so I’ll put it all under a read more. If you have any questions, feel free to ask or PM me directly for help!

Alright....sooo, I don’t remember the last time I made a gif tutorial on this site, but I figured I would even though I use the same method a lot of gif makers have been using for years. I have never strayed from this process and I’ve been making gifs on this site for a decade. 

There are a couple methods to making gifs. You can import your video directly into photoshop and cut your gif there. OR you can use a separate video player that has a screencapping tool, then import all your frames into photoshop; this is the method I use and it’s how I’ve adapted and perfected my giffing skills over time. 

This post will be long, but I want to be as detailed as I can and explain it step by step. It’s really NOT difficult once you get the hang of it, which is probably why I’ve always done it this way. 

Disclaimer: There are three programs I use and I highly suggest you look for reliable links yourself if I’m not able to provide one. I use pretty old versions of KMPlayer and Photoshop (I’ll explain why later), so be careful where you go looking for downloads. There are some photoshop downloads here, but I can’t vouch for them.

Let’s start :)

DOWNLOADING VIDEOS

I use a program called 4k Video Downloader to rip HD videos from Youtube. 1080p is the way to go, but obviously that’s not always possible. It’s ridiculously easy, all you do is click the “Paste Link” button and it’ll download your video. Clicking the “Smart Mode” button will let you set the default quality and the folder you want all your videos to be saved to. 

As you can see, here are all the videos I’ve downloaded recently for my gif posts. You can clear this download history list at any time.

SCREENCAPPING 

After your video is done downloading, I open the video in KMPlayer. Now, I use an OLD version of this program because this was exactly how I learned to do this back in the day. You can find old versions online, I don’t really know exactly which version mine is because I’ve had it forever, but it’s the old school one that looks like this.

When you open the video, it might stretch the player to full screen so I always adjust it by dragging the corner of the player inward so it shrinks to a more medium size. This will also make your screencaps not so GIANT, which will take longer to load into photoshop. 

Anyways, you’re gonna open your video and right click anywhere on the video to select Capture > Frame Extract... (or Ctrl+G on Windows). This window will come up. Make sure all your settings look like this to ensure a really smooth gif.

The first thing you should do is click that little “G” button next to the window size at the bottom. That’ll lock in the dimensions of however big you’ve made your video window, and if you stretch it you’ll see these numbers change. If you start capping without remembering to push that and you make your window smaller/bigger, your caps might be a wacky size or look stretched and you’ll have to go back and do it again. Also note the extracting location at the top. All your caps will go directly to a default folder titled “Capture”.

Once all the settings are ready, go to your desired section of the video, pause it, and hit “Start”. Play the video, pause the video when you’ve got all your caps, then hit “Stop”.

Locate your “Capture” folder and doublecheck you got all the caps you want. This is where I take a moment to delete any caps I don’t want in my gif, that way you don’t bother loading them into photoshop and making it take longer than it needs to. 

MAKING THE GIF

You’re gonna open whatever version of Photoshop you’re using. I hilariously still use CS3 to make gifs because the next script I’m gonna run doesn’t work in the free download that I have of CS5, but that’s what you get sometimes when you don’t pay for stuff. Hopefully whatever more recent version of PS you use, you have no problems.

Go to File > Scripts > Load Files Into Stack...

This window will come up. 

Hit “Browse” and locate your capture folder. Highlight all your caps and press OK. You’ll see them all come up in a list as shown above. Press OK again. Your caps will start to load into one big stack of layers. This will take a minute or so.

When it’s all loaded in, you’ll see them all stacked in your Layers window (Windows > Layers). You’re gonna open your animations timeline (Windows > Animation) and click the little drop down button in the top right corner of the window and select “Make Frames From Layers”. 

Click that drop down menu again and hit “Reverse Frames”. Click that drop down menu again and hit “Flatten Frames Into Layers” (this is so our sharpening action will work later). Click the drop down menu again and select “Select All Frames”. All your frames will be highlighted. This is where you’ll set your animation speed. Under each frame you’ll see “0 sec.” Click on that and select “Other”. Type in your desired speed. I usually go for 0.04 if it has a lot of frames. For less frames, 0.05 or 0.06. This is honestly entirely up to your preference. I actually made myself a photoshop action doing all these repetitive steps so it saves me a few precious long seconds of clicking around over and over. I just run the action after my caps are loaded. If you make gifs a lot, I recommend it.

Next it cropping. The reason I don’t crop right away after the files are loaded into a stack is because I like to see where the subject in the gif moves before I decide where I need to crop. I don’t want to accidentally cut anything off. The subject might sway in and out of frame or be off center if I crop it blindly before seeing exactly where the object moves around. So I’ll play the gif first to see exactly where to crop.

Anyways, you’re gonna set your desired width x height of your gif. I’m making this a big gif so you can see the details better. 540 px is Tumblr’s width for big horizontal gifs. If you’re making a photoset with two gifs side by side the width for Tumblr is 268 px.

Go ahead and crop your gif. It’ll resize itself as well. Play the gif back so you can see if anything gets cut off or it’s not where you want it. You can undo the crop and do it again until you’re satisfied.

Here is what my gif looks like animated and cropped. 

As you can see, it plays nice and smoothly due to our screencap settings from before in KMPlayer and with our set gif speed (I used 0.05 here).

Next is sharpening the gif. I use a sharpening action that can quickly sharpen up to 120 frames. You can download it here. Open the action by going to File > Open and locating the file. It’ll be added to your Actions window. (Window > Actions if you can’t see it.) In order for it to run correctly, you have to have the first frame selected on your animation window, as well as “Frame 1″ in the layers window. Just like this:

Click the play button on the action and wait a few seconds for all the gifs to finish being sharpened. For any gif with less than 120 frames (which I hope is always, good God) a pop-up will come up when it reaches the end of the frames asking you if you want to stop.  Click “Stop”. 

Tip: If you think you want to delete more frames, run the sharpening action before you do it. Otherwise you’ll have to flatten your frames into layers again. The first frame and the “Frame 1″ layer should always be the same (the little eye will appear to the left of the layer to let you know it’s visible when you have that specific frame selected) otherwise the action won’t work. 

Here is what my gif looks like now that it’s sharpened.

COLORING THE GIF

This is where all the fun (or pain) comes in. All your coloring will be done by using Adjustment Layers (Layers > New Adjustment Layer). I usually go in the same order of adjustments, but this is where personal style comes in and you do no have to do it in the same order I do. You can practice with this part all you want and see how you like to do it.

I start with brightening the gif first and fixing the white balance if a scene needs it. I chose this video specifically so you could see this next handy trick that a lot of people don’t even know about. It’s a dark scene and the white balance makes the subject look quite blue. 

I can fix this by starting with a Curves layer. By clicking the third eyedropper tool, you can go and click on a white point in your gif (in this case, I clicked on a white square on his shirt) and bumped up the input number a bit for a little contrast (optional). My curves look like this. Click OK.

My gif now looks like this.

It’s much better, right? The white eyedropper tool will become a lifesaver sometimes, but it’s not always needed. 

Next, I go in with a Levels adjustment to do some more brightening. This is all up to preference, but you can play around with this. I typically like to add more contrast with this layer. I just adjust the sliders until I’m satisfied.

Here is my gif now.

Onto yet another brightening layer. Brightness/Contrast. A couple teeny tiny more positive numbers and I now have this.

Next is Selective Color. I wish I could explain this in a way that makes sense, but this is the layer that takes a bit of practice getting down and boils down to how you like the colors in your gif to look. I personally don’t like a lot of yellow in mine, so I focus a lot on the Yellow and Black sliders in each specific tab. I start in the Reds, then Yellows, Whites, Neutrals, then bump up the Blacks a tiny bit.

Here is my gif now. It’s a bit more cool toned, which is what I like.

Next I’ll go in with a Color Balance layer and play with the Midtones and Shadows. 

Here it is now.

This is usually my last step unless I want to adjust the brightness again (which I do), so I might go back into my Curves and Levels layers to bump it up.

And you can totally stop there, but I would like to mention a few more optional layers to add depending on your gif. If I wanted more saturation, I would add a Hue/Saturation layer at this point, but I think it’s colorful enough so I’m not going to.

Another layer you can use is Gradient Maps. 

Setting a black and white gradient map overtop your gif and setting the layer to Soft Light and lowering the opacity to your heart’s desire (you might need to go to the little drop down menu in your animation timeline and hit “Match Layers Across Frames”) can give your gif a very contrast-y look like this.

Or you can change the black color to something else for a different tone, like a dark blue.

Here is my final gif. 

If you want to add a caption to your gif, you can do so with your font of choice (Arial and Calibri are good) and add Stroke or a Drop Shadow to it by going to Layer > Layer Style. You can make sure the text is perfectly centered by clicking on your top frame layer under all your coloring adjustments, hitting Select > All, then clicking your text layer again and going to Layer > Align Layers To Selection > Horizontal Centers. Then hit Select > Deselect and go to your little drop down menu in your animation timeline and click “Match Layers Across Frames”.

Here is what it looks like with a caption.

SAVING YOUR GIF

Go to File > Save for Web & Devices...

A big window will come up where you can preview your finished gif by pressing the play button on the right hand side. In the bottom left corner will tell you what size your gif is. Tumblr’s gif limit is a whopping 10 MB, so we’re good. 

Your gif settings should look something like this. 

We always want to keep all colors at 256 (the highest). Lowering this number will make our gif file size smaller, but also decrease the quality of the gif itself. If your file size is more than 10 MB, I recommend going back and deleting some frames or making some more curve adjustments. Some users also like to set their gif to “Adaptive” instead of “Selective”. This is up to you.

Click Save and you’re done!

#this took me all day and half the gifs dont even move when you view this post on my desktop theme #LOVE THAT #please view this on the mobile view

[blossom-hwa]

Arc [Coming Home] - MARK |Swing!|

Again, this part contains many events in Spiderman: Homecoming, so spoiler alert! The timeline has also been changed so Civil War happens after Homecoming. Thanks again to @deathbykpopboys​ for inspiring this series :)

Pairing: Mark x fem!reader

Genre: fluff, angst, Spiderman!au

Triggers: a lot of cursing, violence (esp. in this chapter), PANIC ATTACKS IN FUTURE CHAPTERS (I in no way meant to romanticize these triggers. If you feel I did, please let me know and I will fix it.)

Word Count: 7.8k

A school dance takes a backseat to bringing down an illegal weapons trade.

Attach >> Arc { 1 - Drifting Apart | 2 - Coming Home } >> Fall { 1 - Spiral | 2 - Rise }

NCT Masterlist | Swing!

If things were chilly before, they’re freezing now. You and Mark won’t even talk to each other.

Surprisingly, not a lot of people ask about what’s going on between you two. Maybe it’s because they can already sense that you don’t want to talk about it. Maybe it’s because you already told enough people off last year after they decided to pry into your nonexistent love life.

Anyway, even if they did ask, what would you say? Oh, Mark didn’t want to find the root cause behind the group dealing illegal fucking weapons made from alien material, and I did.

You’d get placed in a mental institution.

Patrols aren’t peaceful anymore. You go earlier now since the university labs need to be fixed up, which just means more hours of strained silence as you help people with directions and beat up muggers. The two of you still patrol on the same schedule, but you watch completely different sides of Queens.

You rarely, if ever, call on him for help anymore. It’s not like there’s that much going on anyway.

One week passes like this, then two. You skulk around the university every day after school, trying to find out literally anything about the weapons dealers, but the explosion blew everything up. You come to realize just how lucky you and Mark were to have made it out alive.

Still doesn’t mean you think he’s right.

You head home from the university one evening, ready to go out and patrol for a bit. Normally, you keep your suit at school now – it’s easier to just pick it up to change right after visiting university. Today, though, you wanted a snack, so you came home first.

To your surprise, just as you’ve pulled out your suit, you hear Johnny walk through the apartment door.

“Hey, Johnny.” You walk out of your room and give him a tired smile. “Did you get out early?”

“No, right on time.” Your brother gives you a quick hug. “There wasn’t any extra work to get done today, so we all left on the clock. I was just going to go out and get some food for us – give me half an hour?”

No patrolling tonight, then. That’s fine. “Sure.” You smile.

“Are you all right?” Johnny frowns slightly, leaning in slightly. “You look a little sick.”

You force a laugh. “Not sick. Just tired.”

Johnny still looks unconvinced. “You’ve been like this for a while,” he says carefully. “I know school’s stressful, but you didn’t used to be this tired.” He looks closer, eyes narrowing. “Have you been getting into fights? You look a little beat up.”

“Johnny, what?” You heave a sigh of (faked) disbelief. “I can’t even beat anyone in an arm-wrestling match. How do you expect me to get into fights? I yell a lot, but I’m not stupid. I just get bruises from moving around when I sleep.”

Your brother acquiesces. “Well, if anything’s going on, tell me, all right?” He smiles.

“Seriously, dude.” You smile back. “It’s just a little drama at school, that’s all. If you get me my favorite Chinese, I’m pretty sure I’ll be fine again.”

“If you say so.” Johnny starts turning around, then pauses. “How come Mark hasn’t been around in some time?”

Right. That.

“He’s, um, working on a project for Tuan,” you say quickly. “It’s taking up a lot of his time. Tuan wants a paper and presentation done before next month is over.”

“Shit.” Johnny whistles. “You kids just keep getting smarter and smarter.”

“As if you aren’t smart enough,” you scoff.

“You flatter me.” Your brother laughs, ruffling your hair. “Be back soon.” With a quick kiss on your head, he leaves the apartment and you throw yourself onto the couch.

And not two minutes later, there’s a knock on the door.

“Johnny? Did you forget some –”

It’s not Johnny.

It’s Haechan.

“Oh, hi, Haechan.” You smile. “Why’re you here?”

“Hi Y/N! I just wanted to ask you some stuff.” He smiles blindingly. “Can I come in?”

“Yeah, sure. Leave your shoes here.” You close the door behind your friend. “My brother’s out for a bit, but he’ll be back soon. You can come into my room.”

Haechan follows behind as you walk across the small apartment to your bedroom. You open the door.

And you realize your mistake.

“Fuck, wait –” you panic, trying to close the door again. “Um –”

Too late. Haechan’s already seen the black hoodie and pale mask sitting on your bed.

Utter silence reigns in the apartment.

“You’re Spiderwoman?” Haechan finally shrieks, grabbing your shoulders and shaking you. “What the fuck, Y/N?”

You wince, lurching out of his grip. “Don’t call me that,” you groan, sinking to the floor. “Not Spiderwoman. I don’t like that.”

Haechan doesn’t even hear you. “How the fuck did that even happen?”

“God, okay, please just shut up and calm down before the entire neighborhood hears you.” You shove Haechan into your room and close the door. “Do not interrupt me while I explain.”

So you tell him everything – OsCorp, the spider bite, deciding to fight crime. You pause a little after talking about the alien weaponry, unsure whether to go into the details of your fight with Mark.

Haechan looks blindsided. “Jesus Christ,” he mutters. “So on top of school and lab work and AcaDec, you’re patrolling Queens until, like, two a.m.?”

You shrug. “Yeah.”

“Man, what the fuck.” He flops down on your bed. “That’s just…”

Silence comes over the room once more.

“Okay, I’m just going to file away all this information for processing later, I’m too sleep-deprived for this. Keep your phone on, I’m going to send you so many texts later. Anyway, I’m just here because I wanted to ask you what your and Mark’s deal is.” Haechan sits up again. “Because Mark’s being a little bitch and won’t say anything. You know he asked Lia to homecoming?”

Something stings in your stomach at the mention of Lia. “Yeah, I know.” You heard the news last week. “Well, I guess it’s easier to tell, now that you know.”

By the time you’ve finished talking about all of your fucked-up adventures with alien weapons and the vulture man, you think Haechan is going to have an aneurysm.

“So you’re pissed at Mark because he doesn’t want to fight alien guns, and he’s pissed at you because he thinks you have a death wish,” he eventually summarizes.

You nod.

“That’s a mess.”

You snort. “You think?”

More silence.

“So, are you going to homecoming?” Haechan asks, randomly changing the subject.

“The fuck kinda topic change –” You sigh. “I don’t know.”

You have a dress, bought on sale at a department store with Jihyo, Yeri, and Lia. The whole time, you wanted to just curl in on yourself and disappear because you’d already known Lia was going to the dance with Mark, but you somehow survived. It’s relatively cheap, but according to the other girls – even Lia, who seemed very uncomfortable every time she looked at you – it looks great.  

So you have a dress. You also have shoes, a pair of low heels that Jihyo lent you. Yeri has also promised to do your hair. You could definitely go to homecoming.

Whether or not you want to is another question.

“Hey, just go.” Haechan flops onto your bed again, jostling your blankets. “You don’t have to talk to Mark. Just go with Jihyo and Yeri. It’s junior year, might as well celebrate before the year goes to shit.”

“Are you going?” you ask.

“Duh.”

You picture the dress hanging in your closet. You imagine putting on Jihyo’s heels, Yeri’s smooth hands tying back your hair. You imagine laughing in a way you haven’t in weeks as you watch people whirl around stupidly on the dance floor.

With a sigh, you nod. “I’ll go.”

. . . . .

Mark hasn’t felt this nervous in what feels like forever. It’s not the terrifying kind of nervous, the kind that he feels when he’s breaking and entering secure university labs. This is a good kind of nervous – heart pounding not in terror, but with anticipation.

Aunt Mei drives him to Lia’s house after cooing over how handsome he looks in the suit they rented. It isn’t anything special, really, but Mark thinks he looks good. With a last reminder to “have fun!”, Mei drives to her night shift at the hospital, leaving him to ring the doorbell.

Lia’s mom opens the door. She’s a beautiful woman with a wide smile, and she immediately makes Mark feel welcome. “Come in, come in,” she says, waving him into the house. “You can wait for Lia in the kitchen, she’ll be down in just a minute.”

So there he stands, fiddling around with the corsage box in his hands. The house is a lot bigger than he thought – at the party, with the rooms so full of people, it seemed much smaller. He likes this change.

“Oh, hello. You must be Marcus!”

Mark turns around so fast it feels like he got whiplash.

Standing in front of him is who he thinks is Lia’s dad.

Which is bad, because Mark knows him as the vulture dude.

Belatedly, he realizes the vulture man – Lia’s dad? Jesus Christ, now he’s shaking – is holding out a hand. Gingerly, Mark reaches around and shakes it with fingers clammy with sweat, hoping his smile doesn’t look too fake. “M-Mark, actually,” he stutters.

“Well, it’s very good to meet you, Mark. Lia’s talked about you a lot. I’m Adrian Toomes.” That’s all he gets out before Lia comes down the stairs.

Mark is sure she looks beautiful. Her dress sparkles and she’s smiling widely as she takes the corsage and he takes her hand like he’s supposed to. But on the inside, he’s freaking out.

What do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do what the fuck do I do –

“I’ll drive you two there.” Mr. Toomes’s voice breaks through Mark’s swirling thoughts, turning them into a pool of existential dread. “I’ve got a flight in two hours, but I think I can spare the time to send my daughter off.”

“W-where’s your flight, sir?” Mark asks, hoping he sounds politely interested and not deathly afraid.

“New Jersey.” Mr. Toomes smiles at him. “I’m a parts collector, see, so I’m going off to inspect a new shipment.”

Alarm bells start ringing in Mark’s head. “I see,” he says faintly.

He’s pretty sure he’s sweating as he enters the car. Lia goes on her phone, still holding his hand, and smiles at him. He tries to smile back.

“So, Mark, Lia tells me you’re pretty smart.” Mr. Toomes smiles into the rearview mirror. “Considering you go to Midtown, that must be a pretty big compliment, huh?”

“He’s seriously smart, Dad.” Lia smiles back. “He’s probably going to be valedictorian.”

Mark laughs nervously. “Well, there’s still some competition…”

“Oh, hush.” She squeezes his hand. “He’s the best at physics on the AcaDec team, and he works in Professor Tuan’s lab after school! You know, the lab at… was it NYU?”

Mark’s eyes go wide. He knows he spoke during the confrontation at the university, but until now, vulture man hasn’t connected the dots yet. Maybe he just didn’t recognize Mark’s voice.

“This is the vulture dude?”

He winces.

Please don’t make the connection, please don’t make the connection, please…

His stomach plummets as Mr. Toomes’s eyes narrow. “Really? NYU? What do you do?”

“Oh, um, I help Professor Tuan build things, test material strength, write some simulation programs…” he trails off. “Not much.”

“Oh, shut up!” Lia starts talking again, but Mark can’t even think properly. Terror blurs his vision and fills his mind.

What should he do?

He told you he was going to give all of this up. He told you he didn’t want to die because of this mess. But there’s a clear lead right in front of him, the guy definitely recognizes him, and if he doesn’t do something tonight, this new shipment of whatever it is will probably escalate things to a whole new level.

Dimly, he registers the fact that Mr. Toomes has pulled up in front of the school. “Lia, darling, you go on first. I want to have a little talk with Mark here before I let him go.”

Mark feels sick.

Lia just rolls her eyes, oblivious to the turmoil occurring in his mind. “Don’t roast my date, Dad,” she warns playfully.

“I won’t.” He laughs, letting her kiss his cheek. “Now run along.”

Lia’s dad’s eyes turn blank immediately after the car door slams closed. Slowly, he turns around to face Mark.

The coldness radiating off his expression freezes Mark in place.

“Does she know?”

Mark almost squeaks. “Know… what?”

“So she doesn’t.” Mr. Toomes nods. “That’s good. Good boy.”

That shakes him to the core.

“I thought I knew your voice.” The man smirks slightly. “It’s all right. I’ve got a few secrets of my own. And I’ll tell you one thing – everything I’ve ever done was for my family. Every. Single. Thing.”

Outwardly, Mark doesn’t change his expression. Internally, he finds his resolve hardening.

How is selling illegal weapons something to do for your family? How is making crime even more prevalent something to do for your family? How is threatening to kill two sixteen-year-old kids something to do for your family?

If Toomes wasn’t the leader of this operation, Mark might back down. But his fancy house? His clear wealth?

That doesn’t give him much in Mark’s book.

“Lia likes you a lot. Likes Spiderman and Spiderwoman too, or whatever you and your little friend call yourselves.” He smirks again. “She’s my daughter. I love her. So for that, I’ll cut you a deal.”

Mark stays silent.

“You walk through those doors. You forget all of this ever happened. You and your buddy Spiderwoman never interfere with my business ever again.” His eyes narrow. “Or I will find every single person you hold dear and kill them in front of you.”

Silence.

“That’s how far I’ll go to protect my family.” Mr. Toomes smiles again, but it’s not a pleasant one.

More silence.

“Hey. I just saved your life.” His voice takes on a sharper edge. “What do you say?”

Mark swallows. “Thank you,” he mutters.

“You’re welcome.” The smile comes back, wolfish this time. “Now you go in there and show my daughter a good time.” He chuckles slightly. “Just not too good of a time.”

Mark nods. He opens the door, steps outside, and closes it.

He leaves his phone in the backseat.

. . . . .

You’re in the corner with Yeri, waiting for Jihyo and Daniel, when Lia walks through the door. Your eyes narrow.

“Where’s Mark?” Yeri expresses your question for you.

A barbed insult rises on your tongue, but you swallow it. Mark, whatever he said to you and you said to him, isn’t a bad person. He wouldn’t leave his date hanging. And sure enough, a few minutes later, he walks in too.

Only he doesn’t head for Lia.

His eyes search the room, clearly looking for someone else even though Lia’s almost directly in front of him. They settle on you, and he immediately starts walking – almost running – over.

“Why’s he coming here?” Yeri mutters. Annoyance starts building up in your chest as well, until Mark gets close enough for you to see the panicked but resolute expression on his face.

“Y/N,” he breathes once he reaches you. “Y/N, please, can we talk?”

The petty part of you wants to say no, but the rational part of you pushes it back. Mark looks like he’s about to have a heart attack. You’ve only ever seen him like this before when he’s full-on panicking.

Like that first anniversary of his uncle’s death.

You nod. “Yeah, sure. Let’s go. Now.”

Yeri makes a noise of concern in her throat, but you flash her a quick smile. “It’s fine, Yeri. Have fun with Jihyo and Daniel, all right? I’ll find you.”

You have a feeling you won’t.

Mark all but drags you out of the decorated cafeteria and into an empty, dark hallway. “Mark?” You grab his wrist, forcing him to turn around. “Mark, what’s wrong?”

“Lia’s dad is vulture man.”

Your knees go weak. “Run that by me one more time.”

“Lia’s dad is vulture man,” Mark says again, looking more and more panicked by the second. “He drove us here and when Lia mentioned I work with Tuan, he made the connection. He heard me talk that night with the explosions, remember?”

You do. All too well.

“He let me go if I promised not to say anything and now he’s going to pick up a fucking shipment somewhere in New Jersey and I left my phone in his backseat so one of us could stay behind and track it –”

You cut Mark off before he starts hyperventilating. “Haechan.”

“What? What does Haechan –”

“He came over one day and accidentally saw my outfit,” you explain. “He knows, Mark.”

Mark just takes it without further explanation. That’s how you know how frazzled he is. “Okay, so –”

You’re already calling him. Haechan picks up after two rings. “Y/N?”

“Come to the hallway just behind the cafeteria.” You hang up.

Haechan appears a minute later, looking extremely ruffled. “What’s going on?”

“Go to the library. Disable the cameras. Track Mark’s phone. We’re going after vulture man.”

“Wait, what –”

“Go!” you snap.

He goes.

“You keep your suit at school, right?” You don’t wait for an answer, just start sprinting down the halls. “Go get it and meet me at the back exit.”

Five minutes later, you’ve stripped out of your dress and are pulling on your mask as you race outside. Mark’s already there. You call Haechan. “Where’s Mark’s phone?”

“On 116th, heading north.” A keyboard clacks in the background. “If you go now, you can catch him. Traffic’s a bitch.”

Mark looks at you. You look at him.

Together, you swing onto the school rooftop and start running.

. . .

After fifteen minutes of nonstop sprinting and swinging and cursing when Haechan tells you to change directions, Mark finally spots the tail of the car. “There!” he yells, pointing to the streets as it takes a sharp turn and disappears.

Something doesn’t feel right. That road doesn’t go to the airport.

In fact, now that you think of it, you’ve been going in the complete opposite direction this entire time.

“The fuck?” you yell, leaping onto a streetlight. “That’s not the way to the airport! Haechan! Where’s he headed?”

“Don’t fucking know!” Haechan hisses into the phone. “Just keep going or you’ll lose him!”

You lose the car five minutes later. Haechan gets you back on track after five more. Fifteen excruciating minutes pass before Haechan finally says the car’s stopped.

“He’s at the old industrial park! You know, the one with the building that’s abandoned and shit? The one that everyone thinks is haunted?”

“Mark!” you screech above the noise of traffic. “I thought you said he was going to New Jersey!”

“I don’t fucking know! That’s what he told me! Obviously he lied!” Mark yells, still sprinting. Cursing under your breath, you follow.

Finally, you can see the park up ahead. The last few steps you take are more like stumbling than running. You almost collapse onto the ground right then and there.

“Okay,” Mark gasps, picking up the phone you’ve dropped. “We’re good, Haechan. Thanks. Just –” he wheezes – “be ready in case we call again.”

“Got it.” Haechan coughs slightly. “Be careful.”

The line goes dead.

The abandoned building looms ahead, dark and foreboding. You swallow.

“Let’s go.”

. . . . .

There’s a very clear reason why everyone thinks this industrial park is haunted. One: it looks haunted. Two: it used to house a very dangerous, non-law-abiding factory, and multiple people died in it. Three: it fucking looks haunted.

When Mark was younger, someone once dared him to come here and stay in the building alone for ten minutes. He didn’t take it, because he was a coward, but he also wasn’t stupid.

Now he’s just as much of a coward, but he’s obtained the stupid. Which is why he’s about to walk into the building that no one willingly goes into because they’re not stupid.

“I’ll go first,” he whispers. “It’ll be better if he thinks I’m alone.”

You nod. “I’ll be on the ceiling.”

Mark steps into the abandoned factory without you by his side. He can hear you stepping quietly above, which comforts him slightly, but it’s still strange to be walking through the empty halls all on his own. Your outline is barely visible to him in the dark.

The inside actually looks clean. Clearly, Lia’s dad has been using this place for some time. Parts and pieces of machinery litter tables spread out between several rooms. Some of them glow.

Mark moves faster. Hopefully he hasn’t left yet, hopefully he’s still here…

He rounds one more corner and turns into a humongous empty room. At the other end, Toomes stands, back to Mark, tinkering with something on another table.

Web strands streak out of the shooter on Mark’s wrist, pinning Toomes’s leg to the floor. The man looks around, barely fazed, and sighs. “Hey, Mark. Didn’t hear you come in.”

“It’s over,” Mark calls, stepping forward. “I’ve got you.”

Despite his words, though, he feels he couldn’t be further from the truth.

“You know, Mark, I really do admire your grit and perseverance.” Toomes turns fully, leaning against the table. “I see why Lia likes you. Gotta admit, at first, I kind of thought, ‘really?’ But I see it now.”

“Why would you do this to her?” Mark presses.

Toomes chuckles. “To her? On the contrary, young man, I’ve done all of this for her.”

Sure.

He must sense the nonplussed look on Mark’s face, even behind the mask, because he just sighs. “Mark. Listen. You’re too young. You don’t know how the world works.”

“Yeah, but I do understand that selling high-powered weapons made of alien materials that could potentially do more harm to citizens than a crate of machine guns combined is wrong,” Mark snaps.

“How do you think people like Stark paid for their shit? Their toys?” Toomes gestures broadly with one hand. “Those people up there, they don’t care about the underdogs like you and me. We clean their messes, fight their wars, and what do they do? They’re powerful. They just do whatever they want. They don’t care about us.” He sighs again. “That’s just how it is.”

Real anger starts to boil in Mark’s stomach. “Do not lump me with you,” he snarls. “On the contrary, I do know what you’re talking about. My uncle died when someone shot him in the stomach, and no one could find the shooter to bring him to justice. Just closed the investigation and let it rot. My best friend’s parents died after some drunk rich kid crashed their car. Daddy just paid off the courts, let the kid go free on probation. You think I don’t know how the world works?” He heaves in a breath. “The difference is, we – ” he catches himself before revealing he isn’t alone – “I’m trying to make it a better place. You’re so rotten that you think making the world worse is setting things right.”

Silence.

Mark sighs. “Why are you telling me all of this, anyway?”

“Because I want you to understand.” His eyes flicker upwards, and he smirks. “Oh, and I needed a bit of time to get her airborne.”

Her?

There’s a whizzing noise, and then you yell. A loud crunch sounds before Mark can even blink, and then you’re landing on the floor amidst a cloud of concrete dust.

“Should call her Raid, huh?” Toomes pats the flying metal device affectionately. “Pretty good at flushing out the roaches.”

“The only roach here is you,” you spit, standing up. “And the difference is that Raid kills.”

Toomes just lets the thing go.

The next few seconds are a blur. The device moves faster than he ever imagined anything could. Pillars crunch as it zooms through concrete. React or die – there’s no time to even think.

“I’m sorry, Mark.” Toomes’s voice carries through the room.

“The fuck are you talking about?” Mark yells. “It hasn’t even touched us!”

“True.” Toomes shrugs. “Then again, it wasn’t really trying to.”

Several more pillars crunch. Mark’s danger sense goes off like nuts.

Concrete blocks start crashing down all around him.

“If you get out of here, tell Mr. Stark I said hello,” Toomes laughs.

The last thing Mark hears is his voice screaming your name.

. . . . .

Trapped under several chunks of concrete, the first coherent thought that runs through your mind is where is Mark.

Then: how do I get out of here.

Panic bubbles in your chest when you finally register that concrete blocks have you encased on all sides. One pins your legs down. Two more flank your sides. Another rests on top of the others, giving you just enough air to breath but not nearly enough to move. A last block pretty much locks your head in.

You’re fully trapped.

Hysteria builds in your throat. You breathe faster. “Mark?” you yell as loud as you can. “Mark?” Your words turn to dry, choked sobs as you struggle underneath the blocks. “Anyone! Someone, help – Mark? MARK!”

There’s no reply.

You lie there for an untold amount of time, trying to calm your breathing. A few seconds? A few minutes? An hour? You don’t know. All you can think of is that you need to get out of here.

Come hell or high water, you’re finding Mark.

And then you’re going to hunt a vulture down.

Another deep breath. And then another. Your legs are pinned to the ground, not hard enough to break them – another block must be in the path of the more immediate one – but not enough for any movement at all. There’s a little space between your chest and the block above it, though.

You push.

The block shifts.

You push harder.

It shifts some more.

You scream as you shove your hands upward with all of your remaining energy. There’s a loud crumbling noise, a rush of dust that makes you cough and sneeze, and then your torso is free.

Moving the block on your legs is easier, though you’re far more drained than before. Throwing off the other concrete chunks, you stand up and start screaming Mark’s name again.

Time passes far too quickly and far too slowly as you stumble through the mess of rubble, hoarsely shouting for Mark. At some point, the shouts devolve into loud sobs and pleas and prayers to whatever god is listening to please, please help me find my best friend, I can’t live without him, I’m sorry for everything I thought about him these past few weeks, I love him and I want him back, please –

“Mark!” you scream, ready to sink to your knees with exhaustion. “Mark, please!”

You can’t live without him. You can’t. He pulls you from the earth when you get too jaded, softens your rough edges, smooths you into something beautiful that you wouldn’t be without him.

He can’t die.

“Y/N?”

It’s faint, but it’s there. You whip around in that direction, stepping lightly around the rubble to not bring more blocks down on him. “Mark?” you call.

“Here!”

You zero in on a pile of slightly moving blocks. With a chest nearly bursting with relief, you race over and start shoving them away. Slowly, Mark’s face becomes visible beneath a cloud of dust.

The sound of coughing never sounded more like a blessing in your entire life.

“Mark,” you sob, pulling your friend out of the mess. “Mark, holy fuck, I’m so sorry – I shouldn’t have yelled at you about pursuing this – I’m so fucking stupid, I thought you died –”

“Y/N,” he whispers hoarsely, wrapping his trembling arms around you. “Y/N, you’re here.”

He sounds so disbelieving, like he thought you were dead or dying. Maybe he still thinks that. It breaks your heart. “I’m here, Mark.” You bury your face in his shoulder. “I’m here.”

For several seconds, the two of you just sit there, exhausted, crying into each other’s necks. “I’m sorry,” Mark finally mumbles into your skin. “I shouldn’t have lied. I shouldn’t have pushed you away. I’m so sorry.”

You let out a choked laugh. “I’m sorry for overreacting. Sorry for yelling about you not wanting to continue – just fucking look where this got us.”

Mark pulls away. “No, don’t apologize for that.” He wipes his eyes, looking determined. “We’re alive. We’ve got Toomes.” You follow his gaze to an empty billboard just beyond the rubble. Metal wings, pressed together like a vulture’s, glimmer in the city lights. “We’re going to finish this.”

“You sure?” Not that you don’t want to. You’re itching to push that stupid scavenger off of a cliff, but you worry about Mark’s injuries. “You’re not hurt or anything?”

“No more than you.” Mark sets his jaw. “Let’s do this.”

You nod. “What was the last thing Toomes said? Something about Stark?”

Mark bites his lip. “Yeah. Something about telling Stark hello…” His eyes widen. “Isn’t Stark Industries moving a lot of stuff to the Avengers compound?”

Your heart stops. It’s all the news has been talking about for the past few weeks, how Stark is moving business to the Avengers headquarters. Stark Industries stock has been going nuts, apparently. You never remembered the exact date because you didn’t care, but…

“Today’s moving day,” you say grimly. You pat the pocket of your pants, surprised to see that your phone is still there in one piece. A quick text to Haechan tells him to track your phone, if he can.

Mark swallows, looking at the vulture glinting on the billboard. “Let’s go.”

. . . . .

The two of you stumble out of all the rubble just as the vulture is getting ready for takeoff.

A desperate shot of fluid and a leap gets Mark onto the billboard. Another string of webbing attaches him to one of the vulture wings. You stick yourself to the other.

Only pure instinct keeps Mark holding tight to the webbing, praying to the heavens that your synthetic webs will stay strong. He prays that you can hold on. He prays that Toomes won’t notice the two of you dragging along behind him as the webbing torturously swings him around. He forces himself not to look down, even as Toomes flies up higher and higher past skyscrapers and low-hanging clouds.

Mark looks over slightly, just to check on how you’re doing. Even in the dark, he can tell your eyes are squeezed completely shut, fingers gripping your string of webs as tightly as possible. Your lips are pressed together. Probably so you don’t scream.

Good idea. Mark shuts his mouth and looks ahead.

Then he sees the thing that Toomes is aiming for.

A huge jet looms ahead. To anyone down below, it would look like just like the passing clouds – there’s a sort of camouflage on it. But Mark’s close enough to see the outline of the plane, to notice the clear Stark seal on one wing.

His heart plummets even lower, if possible.

Then there’s no time to think because the vulture is landing and Mark is being bumped against the side of the plane and ow, this fucking hurts, this is such a mess –

A purple rectangle glows farther ahead on the belly of the jet. Mark registers you lashing out another string of webbing onto the plane as Toomes disappears into the glowing patch.

He’s inside the plane.

Mark starts sliding backward before he can fully process that thought. He thinks he hears you scream his name but he doesn’t have time to register it. His heart races as he scrabbles awkwardly on the underside of the plane until a lucky shot from his web shooter latches him into place.

And he doesn’t even have the time to take a fucking breath because Toomes is inside the plane and now he has to find a way to fuck around with the plane to take it down. The two of you are going to have to try to get the vulture’s attention.

Somehow, Mark finds himself splayed upside down on the bottom of plane. His palms stick to the jet – he’s never going to take being sticky for granted now – but his feet are scrambling. He finds a foothold in a tile or a bar or something and sighs in relief.

You yell something that’s garbled by the wind. “What?” Mark shouts.

“KICK!”

Without bothering to question you, he does.

His foothold disappears. Mark screams, curses, then steadies himself again. Why did you…?

Toomes climbs out of the purple patch, spitting mad.

Oh, fuck. Whatever his foothold was, it must have disappeared through the purple opening when he kicked it.

Well, it got the vulture’s attention, all right.

Wings shoot past Mark with blinding speed, nearly taking his scalp off. He ducks just in time, but when he lifts his head again, the vulture’s picked you up and is speeding off.

“NO!”

Mark raises an arm, not caring how precarious his position is, and shoots a web into the vulture’s wings.

It stops Toomes, especially after you shoot your own web onto one of the plane’s engines, causing his momentum to slam him backward into the plane right next to said engine.

And then you fly into the engine itself.

. . . . .

You can feel the engine literally trying to tear your clothes apart. One web keeps the engine far enough away that it stops trying to eat your skin, but you can still feel the pure heat and energy radiating off of it.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck –

With a loud cracking noise that you can hear above the whipping wind, the engine begins splitting off from the rest of the plane, nearly taking you with it.

Your anxious scrabbling rewards you with one hand on the edge of the plane, but the engine’s still trailing behind.

An idea springs into your mind. A plane is more likely to go down without an engine, and most of Stark’s planes don’t have human pilots.

If you can get the plane to crash…

Your legs slam down once, twice, three times, breaking the engine off completely. You haul yourself into a more stable position, ducking just in time for Toomes to come racing over your head.

Mark shouts something unintelligible. Vulture wings race over to attack him instead. You shoot webs wildly, trying to immobilize the wings, to hold you to the plane, to do something, anything.

One of the vulture wings sinks into the top of the plane.

“Those things were sharp?” you yell, unable to contain your thoughts anymore.

“The plane’s heading –” wind whistles as Mark shouts – “city!”

With wide eyes, you catch on. The plane is literally on course to crash into the buildings just off the beach.

Fuck fuck fuck how do we get it to land on the beach instead –

You lash out with another shot of web fluid, latching onto one of the plane’s wings. “PULL!” you shriek, motioning wildly for Mark to do the same.

Turn turn fucking turn PLEASE turn –

And somehow, as the jet plummets down so fast you can feel it scraping the tops of the roller coasters and buildings lining the beach’s pier, the two of you pull it off course enough to crash land on the empty beach.

You slam onto the sand. Your head throbs. Webbing is still attaching you to the plane.

Everything’s on fire. You can’t breathe. Slowly, with trembling fingers, you pull off your mask, beyond caring if Toomes sees who you are. He already knows Mark. At least he doesn’t know your name.

Air comes a bit easier then, even if the smoke finds a quicker path to your lungs too. Coughs rack your body and you turn to your side, trembling.

“God, what the fuck,” you mumble. Everything sounds muffled, like you’re underwater. Your sit up slowly. A small, dark lump swims into your vision.

Mark.

Something gets you to stand fully and start wobbling towards your best friend. By some fucking miracle, he starts to stir, sitting up just as you fall to the sand next to him.

There’s a second of silence.

Then vulture wings snap out and toss the two of you back into the air.

Toomes stands as you slam back into the sand, barely fazed, with a manic smile on his face. “Hey, Marcus and friends,” he sneers.

“Friends shouldn’t be plural,” you mumble. “I’m only one friend.”

Fast. He moves too fast. You barely lurch out of the way of his leap in time.

Toomes flies out of reach. Mark cries out, snapping out a string of webbing to bring him back to earth.

Mistake. Toomes lets the momentum bring him down.

And starts punching Mark in the face.

A guttural scream rips from your throat – literally rips, it feels like your throat has been torn apart and remade with blood and smoke and ash – and you launch into the air with some fucking hidden reservoir of strength fueled by pure rage to knock the metal-winged man over. Mark groans, rolling out of the way, only for the wings to pick him up again and take him to the sky.

And then he drops.

“MARK!”

You scramble under your best friend’s path, hands up as though you’re saying a prayer. Mark lands on you hard and maybe something snaps, but you don’t care because he’s breathing, his eyes are open, and he’s not dead.

But vulture man decides to play with you next. Before you can even blink, you’re being tossed up, landing hard between the sharp metal wings. He plucks you out of the air as you begin to fall and slams you back onto the earth.

Sharp pain claws through your chest and you just want to give up and lie down forever. But Mark is rolling away, somehow keeping out of reach of the winged man, and you pick yourself up so he doesn’t have to do it alone.

Two claw-like contraptions jet out from the engine on Toomes’s back, snagging both of you by your hoods. The neck of your hoodie digs into your throat.

Is this it?

Is he just gonna fuckin – you wheeze – fuckin watch us choke to death on fumes?

Apparently, he isn’t. He lets you go. You and Mark drop like stones.

“Pathetic.” Toomes stands over your bodies. You can’t see his face between his helmet and your blurred vision, but you know it must be twisted in that terrifying smirk. He takes off the helmet, laughs, and takes off, snatching up one of the less-battered boxes from the plane along the way.

That’s it.

You’ve failed.

You were too late.

You open your mouth to scream some fucking obscenities, but your voice dies when you hear the crackling. It’s not a good sort of crackling, like popcorn.

Electricity.

Mark raises his head and points. “He…” He coughs. “Going to explode.”

Blue sparks rise from the engine pack and shower off the metal wings, like a bizarre show of fireworks. And Mark, lovely selfless wonderful Mark, drags himself up and starts screaming.

“Wings!” he yells. “Your wing suit! Wing suit’s gonna explode!”

A jet of web fluid streaks from his shooter, pulling Toomes down. As Mark starts stumbling, Toomes pulling him along, you send out your own line of webbing. The two of you stand your ground with the last remnants of your strength.

“Time to go home, Marcus!” Toomes laughs wildly.

“I’M TRYING TO FUCKING SAVE YOU!” Mark screams. Tears streak down his face.

A sharp wingtip slices through your strings of webbing. You fall to the ground. From the sand, you can’t do anything but watch the disaster about to unfold.

It’s bizarrely beautiful. Purple-blue sparks rain down onto the beach, illuminating the sand and bits of the still ocean. Lightning arcs along the wings like a miniature, destructive storm.

Next to you, Mark tries to throw out more webbing. You can’t even find the energy to lift your arms. But his webbing misfires, lands on something else, flails in the air. It can’t reach Toomes, who’s now cackling wildly.

There’s an explosion. You’re thrown back further into the sand.

And then the vulture falls.

. . . . .

Mark knows how badly Toomes has hurt him. He knows how badly Toomes has hurt you. Cuts line his arms and face, there are bruises all over his body, and his head aches like it’s been smashed against a solid surface, which it has. You’re in at least the same condition, if not worse.

But he can’t just let the man die. He can stand trial, get life behind bars, but he can’t just die.

So from somewhere, he drags out a final burst of strength, and starts running through the fires to where the vulture fell. His feet fall unsteadily on the sand, but he keeps forcing them on.

Coughing sounds nearby. Mark looks over to see you following, head twisted to the side as you hack out cough after cough. He wants to tell you to go back and rest, but he knows you won’t.

Instead, he slows down for a second and takes your hand before forging on.

The wings have encased Toomes in a sort of shell. With your help, Mark shoves them off to get at the battered man lying beneath them. He grabs his chest. You grab his legs. Together, you carry him off to another part of the beach.

The three of you collapse, groaning and coughing and wheezing on the sand. Mark stares at the black night, stars invisible from light pollution.

Nothing feels real. The sand under his hands glitters ominously in the firelight. The ocean shimmers like a threat. Toomes hacks and coughs, each sound scarier than the last.

And then something warm, something dirty and rough and soft, lands on his hand. Your fingers curl around his palm and squeeze lightly.

Oh.

That feels real.

Your touch grounds him, keeps his thoughts from floating away and disappearing into the void of the sky. He wants more of it. He wants to pull you close, feel your body against his, real, solid, whole, keeping him planted on the earth. But he doesn’t have the strength to, so he just takes what he can from your warm touch.

Mark doesn’t know how long the three of you just lie on the sand. He does know that at some point, you and him gain enough strength to sit up and then stand. You look at Toomes, who stares back, unseeing.

“It’s over,” you mumble, almost staggering into Mark’s side. “We’re done.”

He nods. “Just one more thing.”

. . . . .

Pictures in newspaper articles show up the next day of Toomes, webbed up and immobilized against a still-standing box from the wreckage of Tony Stark’s plane. In most, the photographer has taken great care to keep the ragged note, stuck on Toomes’s forehead, clear in the frame.

The note is messy, written in trembling handwriting on the back of what looks like an inventory sheet. Black soot stains the page, but the writing is still visible.

FOUND: flying vulture dude trying to steal alien weapons and stuff

  - Spiderman and Silk (sorry about the plane)

You don’t care much for it. The day after homecoming is Saturday, which you spend curled up in your bed. At some point, after you’ve finally gained the strength to shower off all the grime and blood and sweat, Johnny makes a joke about how hard you must’ve gone that night. Thankfully, you don’t have many cuts on your face. They’re all hidden under layers of clothing. His eyes don’t linger too long on anything, so you feel a bit safer.

But, Jesus Christ, if only he knew.

By Monday, you feel refreshed enough to head back to school. Johnny doesn’t have an abnormally late shift that day, so you give him a hug before you leave. If it’s a little tighter than normal, he doesn’t say anything, just kisses your head and hugs you back.

You spot Lia in the hallway, pulling stuff out of her locker. Her eyes are puffy and red. Guilt rises in your stomach and threatens to swallow you whole.

Even though Toomes tried to kill you, he was still her father. And now that she knows what he’s done…

That can’t be easy.

“Lia,” you call, walking over cautiously. She turns her head and gives you a weak smile.

“Hey.”

“I…” You shuffle your feet. “I heard what happened. I’m really so sorry. I can’t imagine how you’re feeling right now.”

You are sorry. But Lia won’t take it in the way you mean. After all, she doesn’t know that you’re one of the two vigilantes who took her father down.

Lia’s smile turns bitter. “Yeah. Well, we’re moving to Oregon. Mom says it’s nice.” She rolls her eyes. “I think –” she chokes – “I think Dad doesn’t want us here during the trial.”

More guilt washes over your entire body. You can’t think of what to say.

“Look, I know we don’t know each other very well.” You swallow. “But if there’s ever anything I can do to help, please just know that you can reach out.”

Lia looks at you. Scrutinizes you through puffy, narrowed eyes. “You know, I really did think that the night of homecoming, you and Mark snuck off together.”

What?

“Oh my god, no.” You shake your head wildly. “No, no, no. That didn’t happen, I swear –”

Well, it kind of did. Just not in the way she thinks.

“Yeah, I know.” Lia smiles half-heartedly. “Mark already told me. He called, after. His aunt had an emergency, you were the only one he could reach out to in the moment…” She trails off.

It’s a lie. Obviously. You just nod, heart sinking.

“But yeah.” Lia looks at you steadily. “He’s a good guy.”

You nod, throat tight. “Yeah.”

“I thought he might’ve actually liked me, but…” She wipes her eyes. “It’s pretty clear who he really does.”

At that, your eyebrows furrow. “Lia, I promise you that he really did like you.”

“Maybe. Just not as much as he or I thought.” She gives you one last smile. “Take care of him.”

You really don’t have the mental energy to process everything behind that statement, so you just smile slightly. “I will.”

Lia reaches out for a hug. You accept. It isn’t super awkward, like you would’ve thought. She trembles slightly in your hold and you pat her back.

“Good luck,” you whisper.

She pulls away. “Thanks.”

#starryktown #nct #nct 127 #nct dream #nct mark #nct scenarios #nct mark scenarios #mark #nct 127 scenarios #nct dream scenarios #nct u #nct u scenarios #fluff #angst #triggers #violence #panic attacks #cursing #spiderman!au #swing! #arc #arc - coming home #scriptura-delirus

[fmdjoosungarchive]

restructuring plots

+5 ecp

exes (must be female presenting, ages flexible, but not too far away from sung(95) would be best)

to be transparent, sung is still a whole ass homiesexual. that doesn’t change, but i recently toyed with the idea of sung having an ex or a few, and i quite liked it. the details surrounding the relationship itself are changeable. chemistry would come into play here to an extent, as sung would need to enjoy spending time with someone to date them, but beyond that, the temperament of a muse taking this isn’t super strict. as for timeline, i don’t think he would have been in a mindset to date as a trainee, so 2017-2019 would be the arena i’m looking at! for how they got together, it could be that your muse was interested in sung, or that sung thought he had feelings for them because of something he admired about them, or they could be set up by friends/family. sung’s parents always want to set him up with girls so, def a possibility. another thing is,, while sung is very physically affectionate, he would limit sexual intimacy to kissing, which he’d say was because he’s conservative and religious. so that could add to potential problems, reasons for breaking up. maybe daisuke’s influence in his life would be a reason for breaking up too IDK there are a lot of different avenues. if the first muse that fits properly wants a two year relationship then it would be limited to one muse only, but i’d say tentatively it could be up to three? sung is naturally inclined to stay with partners as long as possible, so it’d be unlikely he’d be the one breaking up with them, even if he wasn’t in love with them,, which i mean he’d be convincing himself he did 

military friend (must have been in the military between late 2014-mid 2016)

i don’t know if any muses fit this description tbh but i’m a dumb shawol who watched bois come home from the nonexistent war with buddies and i just thought🥺 it would b cute,,,, i kinda kept my hc on what area sung went into, just in case this could be an option? though i feel like sung would have wanted to go for something difficult like marine corps bc 1 he’s dumb and 2 he’d think it would make his parents more proud of him and more willing to accept him auditioning for companies again when he got back. he also spent basically all of his free time continuing to work on his trainee skills, like he treated it like a second job tbh, so maybe something could come from that area too? or they could have talked about how ill fit sung felt to be there, but how he feels such a strong duty to do his absolute best, confidant kind of stuff? i just like the idea of him coming out of the military with one good thing🥺

dancey dance

i had a similar plot like this before and i LIKED it bc i think sung deserves some negative plots that are bc of him too? i’m not gonna make a whole other plot section for it but if anyone wants sung being a judgmental bitch over ur muse’s life choices that can b arranged too. but for THIS ONE sung is a perfectionist when it comes to his dance. when he was trying out different dance styles, he found he liked ballet best because it was rigid. it’s very strict and intense and that’s how he felt about dance. he wanted to constantly be doing better, and not let himself believe he’s done enough and can float on by. he’s hardest on himself over anyone else, but he’s also quite strict with others too? it’s the one area where he can come off a little mean even when he’s in good spirits. he’ll scrutinize every little thing, make them run the same minuscule part over and over until it’s just right and can be done that way every time. he’s a little more forgiving with non dancers, yet, still not that much lol so whether your muse is a dancer or not, they just take issue with sung’s way of practice n it causes a Rift of some sort

TAKEN! role model (must have debuted before quantum)

sung is a fan of every canon group that’s debuted before him except for polaris (& even then he likes some of their music) so this plot is open to multiple people, and because of it, there are multiple routes to go down. for someone who is different as a public persona than face to face, sung could easily be let down by not getting what he thought he would receive from the person. on occasion, it can be even a small difference that would make him a lil pouty, but the bigger the difference, the more dramatic his response. there’s also the more typical route of him meeting one of the people he looks up to and that interaction being the basis of all of their conversations, sung starry-eyed and keeping a business distance between them. or, a senior who takes him under their wing as a fresh face in the industry and he eats up being a protege of one of his faves. or delving deeper into something along those lines, someone he looks up to for a specific reason (for dance i’d say titan’s main dancer, lily’s main rapper main dancer, & equinox’s main dancer are the best bets. for vocals, titan’s main vocals, lily’s main vocal, calypso’s main vocal, selene’s main vocal, equinox’s main vocal, and platinum’s main vocal would be best) and seeks lessons from

work friends

sung tends to try to make every relationship he has into some deep positive thing, but he has a lot of that, and i think there is merit in people that are just work friends. in this case, i think the best version of this is with other songwriter muses? or potentially choreographer muses. expressing creativity with someone else can be something that makes him feel intimately close with someone, without the necessity of hanging out all of the time, talking all of the time. their relationship can be kept to sharing the intimacy of their own minds with one another. he could have a couple of these, maybe two? we could make plans for them to work on things in the future too! they could be sung’s go-to’s, if the chemistry works well enough as well

smaller plots so i don’t make y’all read thru so much of my rambling (also unsure if these would count for points, i apologize, i just think having all plot ideas in one place is best):

dancer gc (must have a dance position and passion for dance) - a member of said gc

leader gc (must be a group leader) - a member of said gc

book club gc - a member of said gc

no leader thx (must be in quantum) - someone who was upset that sung was given a leader role with such a short period under the company. could be something they worked out, he changed their mind on, they ignore, or is perhaps still an issue

trust (must be in quantum) - vaguely i’d want to explore the building of trust with each of the quantum members, but maybe the first one he started building that bridge with? maybe it gives them a different edge to their relationship, something Closer bc of it

wave - a fan of quantum, maybe they could bond over sung’s love of quantum’s performance and how theyre a concept group. maybe sunghee can be spooked if ur muse wants more intense horror concepts bc he babie n feels couldnt handle that

crushes - sung has crushes on many a men, esp friends, so there’s possibilities there, but so too if anyone else develops a poor crush on lil sunggie

#famedrstask3 #yet again out of order i feel like im giving concept teasers lol

[princess-of-the-corner]

So I totally forgot to drop the fifth part of the Thieves in Time Rewrite months ago. Whoops. 

I think it’s because I wasn’t super happy with it but fuck it. Let’s do this. 

Finally, onto the Thieves in Time Rewrite: Episode 5; It Ends at the Beginning. 

Like Episode 3, I’m replacing the Cooper that they end up with. If y’all have kept up with my old posts, you know what’s coming >:3c

So! Actual story!

The gang lands in this Time but don't know when they are just that they were following anomalies in Time. They start trying to figure out when they are.

Sly's first out of the van, and is looking at a house in a normal neighborhood. However, he immediately recognizes it. This also sends him into a straight up ptsd flashback and he just scrambles back into the van, curled up and hyperventilating. The rest of the gang is confused and trying to calm him down. Completely forgetting about the question of 'when are they', until Murray comments that Sly hasn't had an attack this bad since the early days of the orphanage. Which makes Bently put the pieces together like "oh shit!!"

Right then, they hear a knock on the van door and a voice asking "are you having some car trouble?"

Because sure it's the middle of the night but Conner Cooper is going to notice a van parked in his driveway and come to investigate. 

Conner also eavesdropped a bit before announcing his presence. So he heard them wondering 'when they are', and has already put together that Time Travel is involved, and they're probably not innocent road trippers. But he doesn't know if they're friend or foe. 

Until he looks in the van and sees Sly. Because everything about Sly screams "Cooper", from the outfit to the cane(that he is currently gripping like a lifeline).

However, Conner has yet to pinpoint how far in the future they're from or what triggered Sly's flashback. Still, realizing this is another Cooper and his Gang, he invites them inside. 

It takes a little while because Sly needs to calm down enough, but Conner is patient because he knows what ptsd is like. 

Oddly enough, the one that helps the most is Penelope. Not that the others don't help. But with Carmelita, Sly gets that guilt/shame 'I don't want you to see me like this' feeling. That's less with Bently and Murray since they've seen this before, but since he's known them for so long the flashback memories are melding and mixing in his panicked state, and it's hard to remember that he's here now and not that little kid in the orphanage waking up from a nightmare. 

Penelope, on the other hand, is a newer face that Sly isn't in any way intimate with. Seeing her helps ground him in remembering what's going on and helps pull him out of spiraling memories. 

Sly's panic goes up and down as they enter the house. Seeing the livingroom definitely hits hard. It looks so normal, but it overlaps with his memory of upturned and bloodsoaked furniture. And god he fully freezes as they pass the closet. It gets better once the group enters the dining room. 

At this point, Dahlia, Conner’s wife and Sly’s mom, has come downstairs as well. She was concerned at how long Conner was taking and was fully prepared to throwdown with whoever. Seeing the group though...

Dahlia knows something is up. She has seen enough stuff from her days running with Conner's crew to be used to it. And she's intrigued to see another Cooper. 

But yeah Sly's still in panic and Dahlia's mom instincts kick in and she starts making tea to help calm him. 

Once Sly's calm enough to talk again, they begin to explain why they're here. An enemy is using Time Travel to mess with Cooper history. The gang tracked an anomaly to this Time. They even start discussing the ancestors that they already met. 

Then Conner and Dahlia ask how far in the future they're from, and everyone hesitates, wondering how to break it to them. 

They're sidetracked by a new voice, sleepily asking what's going on. Everyone looks over to see a six-year-old!Sly standing in the doorway, having been woken up by the noise. 

Past!Sly realizes there are five new people and is super excited to meet them!! And asks a million questions! 

It's when Past!Sly gets to Future!Sly that things go a little heartbreaking. The conversation is like:

Past!Sly: "My name's Sly! Are you a Cooper? You look like a Cooper! You're a raccoon and you have the cane and everything! Are you a cousin or something?

Future!Sly: "Actually, I'm from the future! And my name's also Sly!"

Past!Sly: "Wow that's cool! Isn't it cool mom and dad?!"

Future!Sly: "Yeah, mom and dad. Isn't that cool?"

And yeah they don't even have to say it because as soon as both Slys were side-by-side with nearly identical grins… it clicked. 

It takes a little bit to put Past!Sly to bed. Then they go back to talking. 

However, Dahlia realized something. The way Sly had reacted to them, to this house. She knows something happens. And she asks. 

At first, the gang refuses to tell them. Because Timelines. But Conner and Dahlia say that while they're not going down without a fight, they're not going to change it. Just tell them how long. 

Of course once Sly starts confessing to that, pretty much most of the incident gets discussed. Including some things Carmelita and Penelope didn't know about because Sly hadn't felt up to sharing (like, they knew how his parents died but they didn't know Sly was there).

Sly mentions Clockwerk and we hints to things about Clockwerk. Even Conner doesn’t 100% know what’s up with Clockwerk’s hatred of Coopers, as that got lost over time. But he does know that Clockwerk is dangerous and isn’t surprised that’s how he gets killed. 

After that, it turns into recapping everything else in Sly's life. Like how he met the rest of the Gang and all their adventures. Not every detail, but some of the bigger jobs or more fun anecdotes. Or really stupid decisions. And the fact that Sly and Carmelita are planning a wedding and baby is already on the way.

Eventually they get around to what they're supposed to be doing here. Apparently, this is right before Conner pulled that job that Le Paradox's dad was arrested over. 

They assume that Le Paradox is teaming up with his own father and intending to turn the tables on what happened that night, solidifying their legacy and getting Conner arrested. 

Well two can play at that game! They have a whole team to take them on. 

For now they get some sleep because its like 3 am now.

The next day they meet two new people. Alice LaChance and her daughter Daphne, the Cooper's Rabbit neighbors. Sly is hit with nostalgia and a little guilt for kind of forgetting about them because of the trauma and being dumped in an orphanage but you know. Daphne is the same age as Past!Sly and was his best friend back then. Alice was mostly the babysitter when Conner and Dahlia were working, and isn't super involved in the heists, but does have a few tricks up her sleeves. 

The whole group plans and bonds together and goes through all the hoops casing the joint and getting past security and eventually Sly and Conner face off against LeParadox and his father. Obviously they win. 

But there are complications. The changes in the Timeline that LeParadox caused made the cops show up early. The place is surrounded and the usual escape routes are covered. Again, LeParadox wanted to make sure Conner couldn't slip away even if he failed the heist. But that's backfired now. 

They're panicking and trying to think of a plan when Carmelita spies the one leading the arrest. She just laughs at their luck before saying they have a plan. 

The Cooper gang all hide, with only Carmelita and the handcuffed LeParadoxes in plain view for Inspector Diego Fox.

Carmelita explains the truth. That she's his daughter from the future and was chasing a gang of criminals put together by LeParadox. 

But she also tells him that to preserve that future, he has to let the Coopers go. Even emphasizing that without the Coopers, the world would be even more fucked in the future. Also letting a "if you don't help this future exist then you're also erasing your future grandkid" slip in. 

Diego is, understandably, thrown for a loop. But after Carmelita proves she's really who she says she is, he does listen. 

The cop in him really doesn't want to let the Coopers go. But… much like Carmelita, he knows that the world isn't all black and white. If he has to let them go for the greater good, then, well, as far as anyone else will know, only LeParadox Sr. was involved in tonight's heist.

There's no cliffhanger damn it(Other than the potential hints about Clockwerk’s past that could be used for another game)! Everyone goes back to the Future, LeParadox is thrown in jail, much to the super confusion of Carmita's superiors.

The Gang gets back to smaller heists and busts, along with wedding planning and a baby. 

The last thing is an epilogue: Sly reconnecting with Alice and Daphne. 

Alice is still in that same house. Sly takes a quick visit to his old house too. It's abandoned now, and run down. Violent deaths of criminals don't help real estate sales.

Alice is shocked but happy to see Sly. One of the first things she does is apologize though. For not being able to help. Not with the fact that Conner and Dahlia were killed, because she couldn't have done much that night. But for what happened after. 

After that night, when she found out that Sly was spared, she tried to find him. But he was already lost in the system. 

Sly reassures her that it's okay. He knows she tried and honestly, after all the Timeline Shenanigans, he's really come to terms with the fact that despite the bad things in this Timeline, he wouldn't trade it for anything.

The epilogue ends with Alice telling Sly about Daphne and her wife, and Sly inviting all of them to the wedding.

#Sly Cooper #Thieves in Time Rewrite

[tempestaurora]

Your tags under the Peggy post. I’m shaking!!! Please punch marvel in the face and let us have that movie!!! That’s the most perfect fix it idea ever!!!!

can i actually just run through my avengers movie idea for a sec? because it’s been one of my repeated day dreams since april 2019.

alright: so it’s set maybe six months, maybe a year after avengers: endgame. unfortunately, tony and nat are dead. this cannot change, unless we get some kind of magic going, and i’m not knowledgeable about marvel magic enough to get a fix. so.

we start on an avengers: age of ultron-like fight scene, where the remaining avengers - literally whoever is left, plus spider-man, maybe bucky if he’s feeling it - are kicking some butt. maybe aim or modok or something, its irrelevant. they clean up, head home, and perhaps swing by the new compound. it’s smaller than the last one, still in the same kind of location. there’s clearly work still being done to fix it up. 

steve is perhaps out on the grass, reading a book. maybe he’s in a wheelchair, because he’s old now. they say hello, head inside, maybe someone stays out to talk to him. now, a new character/avenger could totally bring it up - in my head, i like to imagine jessica drew or riri williams, or one of the young avengers maybe. alternatively, perhaps there’s just boxes all over the foyer.

“what the hell is this?” sam might ask, after tripping over one. he had not been looking where he was going.

“oh! my delivery!” perhaps bruce replies, as he is the last remaining Science Guy (not including rhodey, who is Weapon Science Guy) in the avengers. “after shield-gate and the decryption of those files, a lot of old shield stuff got declassified.”

“and it’s here?”

“well shield’s still kind of... gone, i guess. where’s a safer place for it than here? ooh, the report on who killed jfk!”

bucky, across the room: “want a spoiler?”

the plot goes on; perhaps there are more aim or modok or something bases to be taken down. or a criminal gang. idk. they’re a side plot, who will perhaps become important in the final act, but for now, bruce starts reading through his files, until:

“barnes! you might be interested in this. it’s the original ssr paperwork about dr. erskine’s serum.”

“the one steve’s got?”

“the very same.” they flip through a few pages, and bruce slows. “this doesn’t make sense.”

“hm?”

“the serum. it’s self-sustaining. self-vitalising.”

“in english?”

“steve’s cells are reproductive. when they die, more take their place. it’s how he combats illness; his cells flip over so fast that the sick ones don’t have a chance to catch on. but...”

“but what?”

“if this is accurate--which, it is. i’ve looked at his bloodwork myself! if this is right, it means that steve’s ageing should be slower than a regular human’s. perhaps by three times, even.”

“and what does that mean?” bucky is frowning now.

bruce looks from him, and then moves to the window, where steve is out on the grass, reading a book. “it means that he shouldn’t look like that.”

“banner?”

bruce turns around. “he lived one life in the other timeline, right? lived his life with peggy carter and then came right home.”

“yeah? yes.”

“then... that’s not steve. it can’t be.”

there’s dramatic music, bruce and bucky’s worried faces. steve takes a sip of a fruity drink from a straw.

they bring in some kind of scientist they know; maybe cho, idk, and they go over his bloodwork in secret. slowly, more people are let in on the secret, like sam, who bucky tells because he’s on the team, he guesses, but he’s only got like one friend. perhaps there’s still that other danger going on, but they really need to get to the bottom of this - 

if that’s not steve, who the hell is it? and if that’s someone else, then where the hell is steve rogers?

scott lang and hope van dyne get called in to help build another quantum machine - they don’t have one anymore after steve returned the stones. a time machine is a bit too dangerous, even for them. old steve is around quite often - he likes the quiet, he has a room in the compound, no friends his own (new) age.

but something slips. he’s watching. he may look old, but his hearing’s still good. his vision’s still spectacular. he’s not steve rogers. he’s something else. they cannot comprehend his knowledge.

for much of the plot, we aren’t sure if they’re right, that he’s not steve. he’s acting like steve. he has steve’s memories, his voice, his mannerisms. maybe some people are sceptical - like peter, perhaps, on a weekend visit to train, psyched about the quantum realm idea, but really guys? because old steve has called me queens since the funeral. he can even recite those dumb psas he made. maybe peter talks too much, too loud, and the fake steve rogers knows the jig is up. they’re going to access the quantum realm and find the original steve - this is his final chance.

“you know,” old steve says, heaving himself to his feet, “your friends are right. i’m not steve rogers.” he starts growing bigger, and possibility gelatinous. i imagine it like the young avengers’ mother - some inter-dimensional being, who becomes sinewy, creeping tendrils of flesh and matter; massive in size with a harpy kind of roar. everyone rushes out to see this gigantic mound of flesh--

“what the hell is that, parker??!!”

“uhhh that’s not-steve. he’s acting very not steve today.”

the fight begins, and it becomes clear that whatever this is took steve’s place. stole him, kept him hidden somewhere, and now they’ve gotta get him back. they separate into teams; fighting the monster and racing to the quantum realm. at first, no one has their suits - perhaps they tag team it, or get new suits, or maybe peter has edith on him, and he calls down another iron spider, and she informs him that there’s a falcon x/captain america suit or something; a nanobot suit for sam. something very cool for the suit up, you know?

meanwhile, bucky and bruce are at the quantum machine; perhaps parts of the monster have detached themselves and fight them, too. perhaps the monster calls down its brethren and glowing green lights appear, monsters crawling out from other worlds. bucky gets suited up, and bruce sends him back--

there’s a battle--and bucky flying through time--and fighting--and bucky getting smaller and smaller--and chaos--and bucky landing in the night on a street in 1949.

he gets it pretty fast. it understands why steve might want to stay here. it’s the kind of life they dreamed for themselves after the war. a quiet suburban street; the city off in the distance. the lights are on in plenty of houses, bright yellow. he knows almost automatically which one to look at. 

he peers through the front window, and there they are: peggy carter and steve rogers. he looks exactly as he did the last time bucky saw him young. they’re smiling. they’re dancing. perhaps not well - bucky was always the better dancer of the two. he’s about to raise his fist and knock on the window, but then peggy and steve stop, look around, and two small children, one blonde, one brunette, come rushing in. they laugh, picking them up and spinning them around, part of the dance. bucky stares.

there’s a massive fight in the compound, maybe doctor strange is there? idk. maybe he could feel the walls of the dimension cracking open to let these monsters through. thor is there, he deserves to be. captain marvel perhaps, too. but the more they knock down, the more grow back.

perhaps bucky walks through the neighbourhood, visits his family. he knows that no matter how long he spends in this place, it will only be a minute in the real world. so he goes home. he gets on a bus, then a train, hops the turnstile and finds his old house. he’s come home from war. his family cries. he cries. he holds his mother. his father calls his sisters and they rush through the night to greet him. he can’t leave in the night, he can’t. so he sleeps there until morning. returns to steve’s house and watches from a distance as they do the school run.

peggy kisses him goodbye and leaves for work. steve watches her go. but he is still perceptive as ever; he sees bucky, heads over. they hug. they talk. bucky breaks the news to him: this isn’t real. this is made up. a simulation, specifically to keep you here. something else has taken over your life.

steve doesn’t believe it - maybe they fight, i’m not sure. maybe bucky gets angry and even spits out the words “are they even searching for me yet? have you even told them what i’m going through right now? it’s 1949 - i remember this year as the year my handler got pretty trigger happy with waterboarding.”

we go between the fight at the compound and the 40s a few times, as bucky spends the day stewing and steve spends the day looking thoughtful and sending meaningful looks out the window to where bucky had been standing, but no longer was. as it grows dark again, early evening, the children return home from school, peggy comes back from work, steve starts cooking dinner.

he looks out the window and sees bucky out on the front path, watching the yellow-lit kitchen. he goes outside, asks if he wants to come in.

“no,” bucky replies. “if i go in, i’ll never leave.”

“is that such a bad thing?” steve asks.

“it is when it’s not real.”

“buck--”

“i wanted a life back then. i wanted this. some nice house in some nice neighbourhood. fall in love, settle down - the whole nine yards. but i got captured, steve. i got tortured, and brainwashed, and now i live in the twenty-first century, and i fight bad guys with ridiculous powers, and i have a computer that i can carry around in my pocket, and--things are good there! even the skinny, angry version of you could’ve lived better there. might’ve even got a cure or two for your sicknesses.”

“bucky--”

“this, though. this isn’t real, steve. i want it to be, so badly. you deserve this. deserve the peace and quiet. deserve the life, and the happiness and the--the girl. but right now, in the time you left, there’s a monster tearing up your friends. our friends. and they need help.”

“they’ve got captain america.”

“they don’t need captain america. they need steve rogers.”

steve can’t help but look back through the window, to where peggy and his kids are talking, serving up dinner. he sighs. “i can’t leave this behind, buck. i can’t.”

bucky sighs, perhaps this argument goes on longer, but he resigns himself to it. “i thought you might say that. i’ll be out here for another hour, and then i’m going back.”

bucky waits outside on the front path for an hour. steve eats his dinner and laughs with his family. when the time comes, bucky gets up, and looks back at the front door, hopeful. but--steve doesn’t show. he heads back.

the fight continues on, bucky breaks the news to bruce, and there are some bad injuries, maybe. i’d say that someone might die, but the real emotional climax of this film is steve-centred, so we probably don’t need a death. fighting goes on for an avengers-appropriate amount of time, and the tide turns against the avengers. then... just as all hope seems lost:

a second captain america shield slices through a monster, pinning down sam. its that holographic one (photon?) from the comics; just something tony had worked up before he died. the camera pans over to steve in his captain america get up; the same one he left in; catching the shield.

more fighting, then steve: “are you using my shield?” 

sam: “the other, fake you gave it to me.”

steve shrugs. “it looks good on you. keep it.”

also during/near the end of the fight, bucky and steve reunite, and hug, because i’m a sucker for hugs. 

bucky: “i thought you weren’t coming back”

steve: “i wasn’t. but--i couldn’t leave you behind again. not after you showed up like that.”

“but how’d you get back?”

“i still had my pim particles and suits stored in the attic. i think the monster stole my shield when he stuck me there, but he left everything else behind.”

“... i’m glad you’re back.”

“i’m glad to be back. really.”

they win the fight. i dont care how. maybe aim or modok or something shows up or maybe good old fashioned teamwork gets the job done. but they’re happy, and they’re together, and inter-dimensional travel has now been introduced. *cough* spiderverse *cough* 

steve still gives up captain america - he’d spent four years in the past as a stay-at-home dad and husband, only using the old suit for press stuff, so he doesn’t really want it back. he liked settling down. that’s what he wants. perhaps he moves to brooklyn or harlem or wherever, to whatever apartment bucky and sam set up for themselves. he cooks and paints (a little girl with blonde hair and a small boy with eyes like peggy carter’s) and punches his fist halfheartedly in the air, droning “go team” whenever they head out on their missions.

he really did mean it when he said sam looked good with the shield.

there would probably be a b plot of another character Doing Things, like thor and captain marvel and whatever their adventure is. but i don’t know what it is yet. there’s a happy ending. then, the first credits scene is some inter-dimensional shenanigans and a villain being introduced. i personally imagine that kang is going to be the next big villain, but he’s time travel, not dimensional travel, so i don’t know.

then, your optional after credits scene: bucky and steve standing by the kitchen counter, talking and whatnot. i don’t know what about. maybe bucky’s getting ready for a mission, maybe steve’s just in a white tshirt and sweats and he’s just having a nice day, making himself some coffee, reading a good book. they talk, and steve nods bucky over.

“what?” bucky asks.

“thank you,” steve replies.

“... ‘til the end of the line, remember? i’ve got your back, rogers.”

“and i’ve got yours. you know that?”

“course i do.”

they smile. they’re happy. they’re at home. the screen goes black as soon as steve leans in and kisses bucky. 

(or: your platonic ending: the screen goes black as soon as steve and bucky bump fists in a friendly non-gay way)

then: STEVE ROGERS WILL RETURN IN THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER

it’s a reoccurring role. he’s largely in the background, cheering them on, and occasionally waiting up in bed when bucky gets home from a late-night mission. he trains sam with the shield on weekends.

the end

#marvel #mcu #steve rogers #avengers #avengers endgame #no read more cut we die like men #this took me almost an hour to write up #despite only taking ten minutes to imagine #anyway: kevin feige hire me #bethany talks #Anonymous

[stories2you]

Don’t Cry, Daddy

**Reposted from: @mayuarts

I know it’s been 2 days since I posted the first fic, I was quite busy yesterday so I wasn’t able to post this story. So here it is. There’s a heavy reference to Gavin’s Birthday Event on the CN server. 

Translations are by @cheri-translates Alina belongs to @myubunziii Characters of MLQC belongs to Elex.

Genre: Fluff, Angst

SPOILERS FROM THE CN SERVER!!

~~~~~~

[12 Noon, Bai Residence]

Alina and Aiyana were finishing up with their chores. Alina wiped a sweat with her sleeve as she looked at her sister, “Aiyana, wanna go for a walk? Maybe we can look for gifts for dad on our way?” 

The younger brunette looked at her sister, “Sure. But where do you wanna go?” 

“Hmm… Well, let’s just go out and see where we end up. If we get lost, we can ask uncle Shaw or uncle Minor to pick us up.” Alina said with a cheeky smile. Sucks that the two sisters had no sense of direction, much to Gavin’s worries.

Aiyana nodded and agreement. The two freshen themselves and got ready to leave. They went to the kitchen to see their mom still cleaning the dishes. The older sibling got her attention, 

“Oh? Where are you both going? Are you done with your chores? Your assignments?” 

The sisters had a smile on their faces, “We completed everything. We don’t have anything to do so… Can we go take a walk? Maybe look for gifts for dad or buy groceries for you?” Aiyana said. 

Youran pondered and nodded. She took out some cash from her wallet she had placed nearby and handed it to Alina, “Here’s some extra cash for the two of you. It should be enough for the gifts and the groceries. I’ll text you the items I need, okay?”

They nodded and left. Of course, with Youran telling them not to get lost and to return home too late. 

[Outside] 

The sisters were strolling at the city with no particular destination to go. Then an idea popped in Alina’s mind, “Aiyana, can you use your evol to travel to a different dimension or go back to the past?” 

Aiyana looked at her sister in confusion, “I can, but why so sudden?” 

Alina smiled lightheartedly, “Dad never tells us about his childhood. So I wanna know what he’s like back then. Aren’t you curious about it too?” 

The younger one nodded but she had a skeptical look on her face. She can create Ice Mirror to teleport herself from place to place as well as going to the outer dimension where her mother controls her evol to go to different time space or alternate universes. 

Being the daughter of the Queen, she was able to travel to that dimension to go to any timelines by her own will. But there are risks; her mother may be able to find out and her father would be worried sick as he won’t be able to detect the sisters.

Her curiosity matches her sister and decided to take the risk. The two went to an alleyway so Aiyana could create an Ice Mirror to travel to the outer dimension.

“Here goes nothing….” Aiyana grabbed her sister’s hand tightly and the two entered the mirror. 

[At the outer dimension] 

As they appeared at the dimension full of doors, they looked around in confusion. They walked around the dimension and finally spotted a bright door under a beautiful ginkgo tree. 

The two nodded to each other and entered the door with no hesitation. Bright light engulfs them as they walked into the door. 

They arrived at a similar alley where they had left their time line, unlike the sunny weather at their place, it was raining. They looked around and walked out the alley hand in hand. Then they heard children fighting, 

“Hey! What are you doing?” A boy who’s bigger sized than a familiar brown haired boy. The larger boy pressed down the smaller one onto the ground.

The sisters were about to intervene but the brown haired boy managed to escape by rolling on the ground. He took a few steps back and stares at the bullies coldly.

“You!” The larger boy was about to raise a hand to the latter. Before he could land a hand on him, his partner stopped him,

“Wait… wait wait! Brother Qian, this guy seems to be Gavin…”

Just as the person called “Brother Qian”, his facial expression changed in an instant. The girls’ expression changed as well. They looked at the brown haired boy in shock, 

‘That’s…. Dad..?’ They thought.

“He’s the one who beat up dozens of people! He’s incredibly strong - a monster no one can stop!” The small gangster said. 

The unpleasant title made Little Gavin’s brows furrow, “What did you say?” 

The gangsters backed away, “I… I have some urgent things to settle, so I’ll let you off! T-there won’t be a next time!” 

Reluctant to admit their mistake, the domineering kids run away in a hurry. Gavin looks at the escaping children and lets out a small “tch”. Picking up the game console they leave behind in their haste, he stuffs it into the little boy’s hand.

“Hey, this is for you.” 

The sisters watched their little dad defending the crying boy. “Dad… He’s like that since he was a child…” Aiyana mumbled. Alina nodded in agreement. They never expected their stern father to be like this as a young child. 

They only remembered their uncle Shaw telling them that their dad was a happy and active boy who loves basketball.

Just as Little Gavin was about to leave, he folds his umbrella and places it besides the wailing boy. He wanted to leave but he couldn’t help but wonder where the sheer volume of tears even came from, and how he can howl so loudly.

After a moment of hesitation, he tries to comfort the boy,

“They’re gone now. You should go home soon.”

The girls pondered if they should approach them. Just as they were about to, an auntie comes over in the middle of her run after hearing the crying sounds, 

“Little dear, what’s the matter with you? Which family do you belong to?” She then looks at Little Gavin, “Oh, aren’t you the one who beat up a kids last time? Why are you bullying people again?” She pulled the boy behind her. 

Gavin looks at her, baffled. The girls decided that they should intervene now. 

“Excuse me, we saw the ruckus. Gavin did nothing wrong. He protected this boy from the bullies.” Alina explained, both she and her sister stood in front of Little Gavin protectively. 

Little Gavin looks up at them with shining amber eyes. The auntie had a skeptical look and questioned them again, 

“Then why didn’t you stop them?” 

Aiyana spoke up with a neutral tone,  “We arrived when Gavin had chased them away. But we did manage to see who the bullies were.” 

More and more adults came over. The father of the crying boy came over and holds him in his arms. The auntie, doubting the sisters’ words, self-righteously told the child’s father, “This bad kid beat someone up again!” 

She had a finger pointed to Gavin. 

“I did not.” Gavin said in a low voice.

The man had a slightly unhappy expression on his face. He picks up his son and looks at Gavin persuasively, “Just apologise, and turn over a new leaf. You’re still young, so it’s okay if you make mistakes. The important thing is to admit your wrongs and change.” 

The girls had a matching grim look as Gavin’s. Aiyana spoke up, holding Gavin’s smaller hand in hers tightly, “Gavin did not bully your son.” 

A busybody in the crowd pipes up, “It’s because his father is busy at work, and is away most of the year.” 

The girls’ eyes widened in shock. They were referring to their bad grandfather. Aiyana could feel Gavin froze on the spot.

Then another party continues coldly, “It’s understandable if your mother can’t teach you well since she’s alone. Because of you, my children were…” 

“You’re not allowed to say that!” 

Red-faced, Gavin clenches his fist, and even his body starts trembling slightly. The sisters could feel the pain and sadness of their father’s young self.

“I did not beat anyone! I didn’t do anything wrong. Someone was bullying him, and those people ran away! Even these sisters saw them escape!” 

The stranger didn’t expect such a fierce reaction from Gavin. While he originally wanted to share more preachy advice, he meets Gavin’s dark eyes, which are now lit with anger.

He’s left stunned, the words he prepared lodged in his throat, not knowing why he feels sudden guilt. In the end, he says a few more words and left.

The rain continues to patter.

The people who gathered gradually leave, and only Little Gavin and the sisters were drenched in the rain, along with a red umbrella beside.

Alina crouched down to his height and patted his head, “Don’t worry Gavin, we saw everything. We trust you. You did what you need to do.” 

‘Just like your future self….’ 

Little Gavin looked up to her matching amber eyes. A warm smile plastered on the sisters’ face. Aiyana picked up the umbrella and handed it to him, “Let’s go find a shelter. We’ll treat your injuries and buy you a drink.” 

“But… I don’t know who you are…” 

“I’m Aiyana, this is my big sister, Alina.” The younger brunette introduced herself and her sister to him. Gaining his trust, the sisters’ held his small hands and they walked to what seems to be New Light Mall.

They sat a bench provided. Alina was about to head to a nearby pharmacy when Gavin stopped her. He had band-aids and cotton swabs in his school bag. The girl nodded and retrieves them. She cleaned his wounds carefully and skillfully. 

Little Gavin watched her patch him up. Her warm amber eyes resembling his and his mother’s. A smile on her face made him calm. The warm hand belonging to Aiyana was comforting. 

He recalled that he hadn’t brought in the sheets that he helped his mother washed a few days ago. He felt guilty that he only added more work for his mother. He then felt hot tears fill his eyes and his vision starts to blur. 

Aiyana noticed the tears in his eyes and patted his head gently. He looked up to her with glistening eyes. The girl felt more pain in her chest. She then brought him into her arms, 

“Don’t cry, Gavin. It will be okay.” 

Alina joined in the embrace. But a thought runs through their minds,

‘Don’t cry, Daddy. We’re here for you.’ 

A voice then called out to him, Gavin looked up and saw his mother. She was slightly breathless when she appears before the trio. Perhaps she had been running.

“Mom, I…”

Before he could finish, Wardia brought him into a tight hug. A tender touch descends on his head, which is damp from the rain. 

“Mom knows that Gavin didn’t do anything wrong.” She says confidently.

She then rubs his head gently, her tone filled with resoluteness and love, “Everything has been clarified. The boy you helped explained everything to us after he calmed down. His father also wants to convey an apology to you. They were too anxious, and misunderstood you.” 

The girls watched the mother and son. They couldn’t get their eyes off their grandmother. The beautiful woman that they never got to meet. They only had seen pictures of her that both their father and uncle showed them. No wonder their father and uncle are so good looking.

Wardia stood up with Gavin behind her. She looked at the sisters with warm eyes. Those eyes. That smile. It reminds them so much of their father. Oh how much they yearn for his presence at home. 

Gavin was always away. They mostly had their uncle Shaw to look up to as a father figure. Even in their teenage years, they felt that it is a must for them to always spend every single second with their father. In fear that he may not return home.

The woman then spoke to them, “Come. You both are soaked. You’ll get sick.” 

[time skip, Bai Residence]

The girls recognised the mansion. It is their home. The home where their parents raised them. The home filled with love and peace. But…

This home only contained mother’s love. No presence of father’s love at all.

Now they understood why Gavin always went all out by spoiling them, carrying them in his arms, even modifying their hairpins with GPS. He wanted them to know how much he cherishes them. Just as much as their mother does. 

With that thought, they realised that the words they told their mother when he was away for almost a year had hurt his feelings until now.

Back then, he had a heavy mission which also required Shaw to join him as well. They waited by the door every night. Waiting for him to return home. It took them about 2 months to realise that daddy won’t be coming home soon. They felt lonely. They felt that daddy had betrayed them. They felt that daddy had probably died in battle.

They cried in their mother’s arms, craving for their father’s presence. 

Youran could only cry to herself after they had fallen asleep.

Just as Little Gavin had gone to his room to change, Wardia called them to sit with her. They obliged,

“How did you come here?” 

The girls froze. Aiyana couldn’t help but to spill the beans. She explained about her evol and why they came.

“I knew that you both weren’t just some strangers.” Wardia said with a warm smile. She brought the girls into her arms,

“I never thought I’d actually meet my granddaughters. But your eyes, your personalities, resemble my Gavin so much. I knew it when I laid my eyes on both of you. In fact, I felt immense love for you. I can see how much you care for your father.

I may no longer be around in your time, but remember. No matter how strong and powerful your father is, he has his own weaknesses. With you both coming here suddenly, he may not be able to detect you. Trust me, by the time you step into your time, he’ll probably get mad and cry in fear.” 

The sisters looked up at her in shock. They were speechless. Seeing their shocked expression, Wardia chuckled, “It’s a mother’s intuition. You’ll understand when you’re older.”

The woman brought them to a guest room. They knew they needed to return home. Before Aiyana opened the portal with her Ice Mirror, she and Alina jumped into Wardia’s arms. They had tears in their eyes, knowing that this would be the first and the last they get to see their grandmother. 

“Thank you, grandma. We love you. Thank you for bringing our dad into this world.” 

Alina looked up to the woman, “Tell him that we said Happy Birthday.”

Wardia chuckled and nodded. She planted a kiss on their cheeks and gave them a last warm hug. 

Aiyana then opened the portal with her ice mirror and the two waved their grandmother good bye. They left with happiness in their heart.

After the girls left, Wardia had a worried smile, “I hope Big Gavin doesn’t get angry at them.” She then left the room and saw Little Gavin looking around the house for the girls.

“Mom, where’s Alina and Aiyana? Did they go home already?” 

Wardia patted his head gently, “Yes. Their parents had called them to return home.” 

“Will I get to see them again?” The boy asked with his head tilted slightly. 

“You will. Soon”

‘In the future.’

[Present Time]

The sisters arrived at the same alleyway they had left earlier. They thought it had taken a long time but Aiyana checked her phone that it was only 5 pm. She then received a message from her mother. It was the list of supplies. 

And…

Tons of messages from her father and uncles. 

Alina had lots of missed calls from them as well. Their face went pale and they decided to rush home. They’re gonna get grounded for sure…

Just as they had arrive home, the same mansion they had went to, they saw their father sitting on the couch with his hands covering his face. They could feel the atmosphere thickened. This is definitely not going great.

They walked towards him from behind. They slowly placed a hand on his shoulders. Gavin turned to look behind him and saw his daughters. He stood up to his full height, making them cower in fear. 

Just like their grandmother had said earlier, Gavin brought them into his arms. They felt his tears falling on their shoulders,

“Where were you? We looked all over for you. You both suddenly disappeared like that.” Gavin continue rambling out his worries. 

The girls pulled away slightly and saw the same teary amber eyes they had seen earlier. They felt guilty and wrapped their arms around his waist, 

“We’re sorry… We didn’t mean to.. Don’t Cry, Daddy… We came back safely.” 

 Youran spotted two smaller figures in Gavin’s arms. She rushed to them and pulled them into her arms as well. She started nagging at them for suddenly disappearing out of nowhere and that they had to face their worried uncles as well.

[Dinner] 

After getting an earful of nags by their parents, they freshen themselves once again. With fresh clothes on them, they took out their handmade present they had prepared for their father together. They walked out of their shared room silently and went to the dining room.

They saw their uncle Shaw and his family along with uncle Kiro. 

[Time skip, cuz this is getting waaaaayyy too long] 

Again, they got an earful of nags by their uncles as well. They apologised over and over again. They even admitted that they went back to their father’s childhood days. 

“How did you both get there?” Gavin asked. 

Aiyana explained about her ability to travel to different dimensions and timelines with her evol by using her Ice Mirror. Gavin was aware that her Ice Mirror are some sort of stealth ability for her to escape. He never knew she could do that. But at the mention of being able to meet his mother, Gavin felt warmth in his heart.

He missed his mother. But knowing that his daughters sneakily managed to enter his past out of curiosity, he felt slightly relieved. Knowing that their intention was to know more of his childhood and his mother,

‘I guess.. That can be forgiven…’ he thought.

After Shaw and Kiro left, the girls went to their father’s side. Alina took out the present she and her sister made for him.

Gavin received a simple hand written letter by them. It was short, but it contained deep feelings. Until he read,

‘We’re sorry for making you worry. We’re sorry for being the reason of your tears. Don’t Cry, Daddy. We’re here for you. We love you so much. 

Happy Birthday, Daddy. 

Thank you for being the best father to us.’

Gavin looked down to his sides and saw his daughters had passed out. The time travel may have had taken a toll on them. He smiled at their sleeping state and brushed their soft hair gently.

“Thank you, dears. Dad loves you too.” He whispered.

‘Thank you, mom…’  

~~~~~~

GOSH THIS TOOK ME 3 HOURS TO FINISH!!! 

Sorry if there’s not much interaction of Gavin and Youran (MC). This is more focused on the two smart kids and their one and only hero, Gavin. I cried at certain parts tbh, but anyway, I hope you enjoy this fluffy-angsty fic.

-Mayu

#mr love queen's choice #mr love dream date #bai qi #youran #ling xiao #zhou qiluo #li zeyan #xu mo #mlqc gavin #mlqc youran #mlqc mc #mlqc #mlqc kiro #mlqc victor #mlqc lucien #mlqc fluff #mlqc angst #mlqc gavin fluff #Happy Birthday Gavin

[dontcallmecarrie]

Hey, in that snippet for BDEL Dummy is in Tony bag, and wasn't he like, a lot bigger than that in Canon? I think you mentioned his (Dummy's) lockpicinking skills somwhere, so I wanted to ask, if you don't mind me asking - How does Dummy look? What can he do? How about other bots? They would need to be movable, I guess, so, small. Do you have any headcanons about it?

I might’ve mentioned this before so if anything looks familiar, that’s why. 

Long story short, By Dawn’s Early Light is an AU that goes wildly AU long before we reach canon. When Maria Stark took her kid and ran, she also raised hell along the way and there’s some pros and cons to this timeline.

Pro: Obadiah Stane’s double-dealing and HYDRA both get made decades ahead of schedule.

Con: Technology in this universe is also affected, and that includes DUM-E and the other robots.

Bear in mind that in this universe, Tony Stark went missing from the public eye right around when he was seven. He had a way happier childhood than he would have otherwise, but it also came with the caveat that he knew his family always had be ready to run. 

First, because Howard would stop at nothing to find his missing heir and regularly sent out a small army’s worth of private detectives to search. Later on, because Uncle James was also hiding from jackbooted types and Tony didn’t have to look at the headlines to know HYDRA was bad news.

While sure, they all enjoyed living quietly, they were also always ready for the slightest hint of trouble to get the hell out of dodge— and stuff like that? It leaves marks. 

Not necessarily bad marks, but marks nevertheless. 

In this case, Tony never had pets. At first because he wasn’t used to the idea—Howard would’ve sneered at the prospect of getting a dog, let alone cats or anything else. Would’ve made a disdainful crack about how Tony had better things to do, shouldn’t be wasting his time on animals or whatever not to mention if he didn’t hesitate hitting his wife and son, Tony wouldn’t have put it past the guy to kick an innocent dog and sure maybe he was bitter but can you blame him?

…anyway. So, yeah, no pets in the Stark Mansion. 

But when they lived away from him, they didn’t get pets either. Because the moment Tony started to get interested in what all the fuss was about, he remembered just how hard it was to hide when it was just him and his mom, and if they had to run they’d only be able to take what they could carry and leave everything else behind. Anything that depended on him might very well die for all he’d know, and it’d weigh on his conscience all the more for it. 

That’s also why Tony doesn’t tend to get attached to a lot of things, either. No toys, no teddy bears, barely had any houseplants for that matter. If he couldn’t carry it in his pockets, there was a risk he’d have to leave it behind— and because of that mindset, he had to get even more creative when he made DUM-E and Butterfingers.

Because in this AU, Tony doesn’t have access to the resources he might have in canon. Doesn’t have a rich father paying for the best tutors, doesn’t have a fully-stocked workshop with power tools, just whatever he can scavenge from thrift stores and junkyards. 

All this combined means that instead of robotic arms big enough to help him around the workshop, Tony instead has two tiny agents of chaos who he can carry around.

Remember Stabby the Roomba? Yeah. That’s DUM-E, in a nutshell.

Something small, capable of moving independently and who Tony could trust to come back to him no matter how hairy the situation ever got. Not necessarily pretty, a Frankenbot whose early incarnations resembled little more than a brick and involved unholy amounts of paperclips and duct tape to work, but still fully functional at the end of the day. Also scarily competent when it came to sabotage, despite not actually having anything resembling opposable thumbs [at first, anyway].

Butterfingers…is a lot more infiltration-oriented. He was created right after shit hit the fan, and Tony was only just starting to travel alone. Despite his name, Butterfingers is the one Tony trusts to sneak in and steal keys and open doors. Not that Tony’s going to let himself get rusty at lockpicking, but up until he built his armor, these two robots were his only physical backup for the longest time. 

It was DUM-E creating a distraction that got him out of a tough scrape more than once, and it was thanks to Butterfingers’ obsession with shiny pointy things that he got out of the Kilian Incident without so much as a scratch.

Tony gives them both upgrades whenever he has the time and resources. That’s how DUM-E gets his claw grip, and Butterfingers gets his microphones and the best cameras a broke teenager can reasonably get. Each and every time, they get smaller, and faster, and as durable as he can make them.

By the time Tony’s at Culver University, Butterfingers can pass as a slightly bulky pager in his pocket, while he tells everyone that DUM-E is his field-test for his research if they ever spot him…which is typically via tripping over him, because he is a goddamn menace from the ankles and below.

…and even more of a menace when things get real, and after the Green Incident, Bruce didn’t know how to feel about the very, very long list of people with stubbed toes and sprained and broken ankles as they made their escape. 

Or about the tiny skittering hellion who’d somehow managed to set off every single fire alarm in a five-block radius, for that matter, or the nascent Skynet who was helpfully giving him intel on how to get past the next patrol, and the more this whole mess goes on the more he feels that despite being the guy responsible for Culver U needing new research facilities thanks to a shiny new anger management issue, he might very well be the least scary guy in his friend group.

#I got an ask! #behind the scenes #By Dawn's Early Light #meta #character study of sorts

[snowflake-of-destruction]

Terraqua :))))))))

1. How do much do I ship it?: Never heard of it/ Notp / Dislike / used to ship / maybe / ship it / aww / otp / IS IT CANON YET?

This rating applies to canon. Just want to clarify, since I'm going to also talk headcanons for different AUs (go to the asterisk reference sections at the bottom if you want a little explanation of AUs)  in some answers, and, in those situations, feelings are different.

2. What non sexual activities do they like to do together?

KH Post Canon: Learning how to be adults together. I know it's not the most "fun" answer, and they deserve a break, but even if things stay stable, they aren't getting one as such. Aqua is now the Master in Residence at the Land of Departure and someone all the Guardians of Light will look to as an authority (and Yensid will reinforce it!) , and Terra will get a lot of the same treatment from multiple factions.

 Not only will the GoL look at him as someone knowledgeable (Him! The screw up who not only isn't a master but has a lot less off-world experience where he was actually conscious than most of his new comrades), but, when it comes to the recompleted former Org members, while it's clear he is definitely not "The Superior" and they don't want him to be, even those that glance by Roxas/Sora/Ventus etc. as green behind the ears or "kids" despite their experience are naturally inclined to view him as an equal and/or someone to ask guidance from even if only on a subconscious level because he shares Xemnas features. 

And neither has the first clue what they are doing. Hell, they lived sheltered with Eraqus and the Land of Departure Castle probably taking care of a lot of their needs. So, yeah, Aqua and Terra learn to cook together, hone vocabulary and speaking style to sound "like a real adult" and not like teenagers who are using bigger and bigger words to sound mature, practice how to lead meetings without voice shaking and how to make people feel heard (and refrain from interrupting with "you're wrong and also stupid because of Xyz"), read up on history and powers of old keyblade masters like they are cramming for exams (because even stuff they were taught by Eraqus...it's kind of been awhile), bitch together over how to simultaneously be 28 and 18, and basically bond over "fooling" everyone into thinking they are competent. 

Then they indulge in a bunch of "childish" things they never did because they were always in a rush to grow up when they were actually younger. They slide down bannisters and have food fights and swing from the rings in the training area, feet lifted and knees near to knocking the ground.

Lost Masters AU*: Finishing growing up in the Mysterious Tower under Yensid's comparatively lax supervision, obviously effected their hobbies as much as their outlook on life. They escaped often to the book(s) where Fantasia sleeps and so they are used to music made through flora, fauna, and movements of their own body. Creating symphonies that are part sparring, part dancing, part gardening and finding out what creates the best music was a passion and it carries on beyond the Tower and beyond having (snuck) access to Yensid's books. Even in adulthood, they both have a tendency to dance when nobody's watching, and, wherever they settle there is a carefully cultivated flower bed they can be found tending to (and humming to them the whole time, teaching them the notes they should be playing but mostly refuse to)  when not on mission.

Grass is Greener**:  If you asked the couple themselves this question, (more politely phrased of course because you don't say the phrase "nonsexual things" in conversation) Aqua would beam and talk about going out on the boat...that they don't own anymore (Xem bought it off baby sister out of pity. He drew the short straw between him and Ansem), and didn't use much when they did. Terra would shrug and say he hardly remembers anymore, honesty slipping out because he forgets to be guarded until Aqua grips his arm too tight and says that he's joking on his behalf. 

With some prompting, Terra will slowly come up with the latest Netlfix series they are binging...separately. Not that he'll say they watch separately, because that's not anyone else's business, and it's not even a reflection on their relationship, just like not remembering what they do for fun isn't as bad as it sounds (Is it? Now he'll brood too much on it). With Aqua working days that start early and Terra working mostly nights, they hardly see each other. Even before that, before Terra's breakdown, which he is more apt to explain away than she is if they ever talk about it (which they try not to at all costs), he was doing his residency at the hospital and worked a lot of odd hours. Med school is actually...wow...more of a blur than Terra realized....but they had fun? Once? Together? Since the college days? Of course they did. They have many activities together. Lots of stuff. Common interests. That's what they do. Common interests.

3. Who does chores around the house?

In General/Canonverse: Split right down the middle. Some tasks they trade off on, and some become full time assignments, like, for instance, Aqua cooks and Terra does the dishes. 

Grass is Greener: Terra. Period. It's not discussed, and Aqua would adamantly refute this, but in Terra's mind he has to do everything. He did even when he was working/studying to be a doctor. Aqua knows how blessed she is to have a husband that just full stop doesn't let her lift a finger (because he loves her! And he likes doing house things), but not fully. Eraqus is old money (and so was Aqua's mom, though she barely remembers her before she took off) and Xehanort's "new money" only bolstered it, and besides just living on that kind of cushion, she was the only child with Eraqus who also had to "make up" for being a single parent for awhile, and then the youngest child and only girl when the family became blended, so she was never made to do anything in her life and kind of still believes in the cleaning fairy. She knows housework is difficult, but in the same way she knows what it's like to live paycheck to paycheck now that she and Terra don't accept any help from Eraqus and Xehanort....just live in one of their houses (to take care of it for them!) without paying a dime even towards taxes and insurance much less rent...and Aqua's car insurance is paid for six months at a time as a birthday gift in the fall and an anniversary gift in the spring...but scorn handouts otherwise. 

4. Who’s the better cook?

Canonverse/General: Aqua. 

Lost Masters: Terra. It starts off being Aqua, but, you know, you forget a lot of things once you're a Nobody. 

Grass is Greener: Terra.  Though Aqua starts to catch up once they start a couple's cooking class that Terra keeps canceling on, leaving her to take Tifa or Aerith

5. Who’s the funniest drunk?

Aqua, all universes. Terra just gets very quiet and stares at the wall to make sure it doesn't move. Aqua becomes the life of the party. Not a small task, considering their friends.

6. Do they have kids?

Canonverse/In general: Absolutely, eventually, and more than one. It would vary story to story how many, the sexes, and the ages, but they will have at least two.

Lost Masters:  I wasn't planning on it, but damn if I don't now want to rework the timeline.

Grass is Greener: "When are you guys going to have kids?" That question is the bane of their existence. "You've been together for a long time." "You'd be such great parents." There's a lot of pressure, but no baby and there's not going to be.

7. Do they have any traditions?

Canon-verse: Even though Eraqus's grave is near enough they pass by it regularly, they (and Ventus) have a yearly celebration of remembrance of his life where they gather by the gravesite and tell stories. Over time they even get comfortable enough to share negative memories. It's not disrespectful. It's remembering the whole man and learning every lesson he taught. Terra and Aqua also go all out decorating the castle for solstices, though Terra takes lead with jokes about how the one time Aqua changed the castle's decor on her own she went a little overboard. Each year picking a different world they went to separately to vacation at and re-experience together in peace.

Grass is Greener: Beach vacation every year. This is carried on from Aqua's family who used to rent a condo on the beach for the first week or so of July (or, when they got older, multiple condos, next door units so there was some pretense of supervision, Aqua, Xemnas, and Ansem sometimes getting to invite friends to come meet them/stay over for part of the time). Aqua and Terra usually do a shorter time because of schedules.  They also go all out for Halloween, turning most of the house into a haunted house for touring Halloween and the preceding or following weekend--and Aqua actually does most of the work on this, it's a grand creative project.  Ansem's for New Year's. The Dads' for Thanksgiving. Christmas tree hunting for all the households with the Dads, Ansem, and Xemnas.  Terra's family for Christmas Eve dinner and service, and then Xemnas's for Christmas because The Dads passed hosting on to him. 

8. What do they fight about?

 Canon/General: Projecting their own insecurities/sensitivities on to each other and expecting to hear things the other would never say. Take care of yourself statements twisted into assuming Aqua is worried about Terra falling prey to darkness again. Observations that everyone seems to be re-adjusting well to relatively normal/new normal life read as "Stay out of their lives and stop meddling, Aqua. You're what causes things to go wrong" 

Lost Masters: There's only the one fight planned. I don't know what smaller fights may be. Aqua handles being passed over for Master while Terra advances worse than Terra does when the opposite happens in canon. It doesn't help that Yensid takes her demands to be given another test right away badly. Terra tries to comfort her. It does not go well. 

Grass is Greener: Fight? They don't fight. They didn't fight when Terra was struggling even in his first semesters in med school (with what he wanted in life more than with the program itself, but there was a fair bit of both), confided it to Aqua, and she gently reminded him of what The Plan was--the plan that so much work and her fathers' money when someone lost some of their scholarships was put toward. They didn't fight when Aqua threw her side of The Plan out and decided it would be fun to be a teacher instead of following after Xemnas and going to law school. They didn't fight when Terra discarded more of The Plan after even more work, money, and time wasted, and started bartending of all things when even if he wasn't going to be a doctor there were so many other careers he could build. It's temporary, Aqua tells herself. He's happier, Aqua tells herself. So she's happy for him and she will not mention it and they will not fight. They don't fight over kids, or lack of kids even though that was on The Plan too that they should have one already--so they could space them out and also because Aqua had calculated the optimal age. They don't fight over money. They don't fight over hardly getting to see each other and how one or the other always seem to be late or make other plans when they do schedule off nights to be together. They just simply never argue. They are happy. Couple goals.

9. What would they do if they found their paring tag on tumblr? (If they have one)

General/Canon: They would first worry over who was watching them but then they'd get into pointing out cute art to each other and they may even write their own memoir to pass off as fanfic. It's uncomfortable how often they are the parents or aunt and uncle of the group--they aren't even completely comfortable being leaders like I said before, though they want to try their best--and even more awkward because the other Guardians of Light largely find it hilarious and tease them relentlessly. 

Lost Masters: If they find it while they are together, it's cute and a sign that everything will turn out alright. If they find it later, it's devastating for Terra, and ammunition for Dark Aqua 

Grass is Greener: Aqua doesn't really get a lot of the content but she likes how they seem to be popular, and she really likes her hair short. She should go back to wearing it short. Terra is into the fantasy anime vibes, and it's reassuring to think they may be together and in love in another universe. He thinks they are canon at least from how a lot of the tag is. It's validating.

10. Who cried at the end of Marley and me?

Neither, though they ended up talking about how Ventus definitely would have cried.

11. Who always wins at Mario kart?

Terra mostly. Aqua will have a well strategized/lucky race once in awhile though

12. One thing I like about this ship?

Even in the moments where they doubt or misunderstand each other or act stubborn, I feel like you can feel love, respect, and just the barest pining tinge even before everything goes wrong and it's cranked up. I'll break examples down when I get to games that include them on my replay I am sure. 

13. One thing I don’t like about the ship?

That they are treated as the default and even if you ship them with other people it has to be just for fun or an extra ship because at the end of the day everyone agrees with Terraqua. That's just a lowkey pet peeve though, and for “no reason” since, at the end of the day, I agree with Terraqua. 

I dislike the idea that they are "mom and dad" in a lot of people's eyes...in case I didn't give off that vibe already. Let them rest. Whether you see them are near 30 or as 18, they still deserve to just only be responsible for themselves. And, guess what, some of the kiddos have more life experience than them. 

14. The song I would say fits them?

You come into my house and keep asking me this question? Be gone with you!

15. Another headcanon about the paring? (Free space)

General: They adopt a bunch of animals. Since they are often on missions and not the most stable parents of even fur babies in the first years post KH3, this, in practice, consists of claiming animals on several worlds and visiting them every time they are there to spoil them and bring them gifts. Prince Eric's dog Max? Terra and Aqua's. Nemo and his father? Marlin resents the implication, but they are their fish. Thomas O'Malley the Alley Cat? You shouldn't be allowed to call yourself a pet owner when you also turn into a cat when you go to visit them, but, yes, he is part of the family.

Lost Masters: Instead of making large wayfinder charms, since it is just the two of them, Aqua makes smaller charms that hang from woven macrame bracelets that morph meaning as they get older. Terra continues to wear his up until "present." Aqua's comes with her even when she's a Nobody, but eventually gets confiscated by Ventus though it somehow ends up with Xigbar who doesn't hesitate to literally dangle the reminder of her human life over her. 

GiG: People tend to think Terra not Aqua is the one related to Xemnas and Ansem unless they specifically know better. Sometimes Terra goes along with this. He hasn't found a way to parlay this into some funny prank so far, but is on the look out for a way. Aqua doesn't see (or refuses to see) that Terra resembles Xem a little. Vehement denial is better for the sanity. 

*Lost Masters AU is the name for the canon divergence where Xehaqus eloped/ Xehanort chose love over power or darkness, and it changed everyone's fate--though fate still demanded both villains and heroes. Canon divergent post Xehanort's little jaunt to the future and spanning that time of Young Xehanort and Eraqus and up through the sage so far, though, you know, skipping around the years with different protags. Yeah, ambitious, but it would be so cool. I've decided I'm waiting until after I beat Melody of Memory to consider further whether I'm writing it or just posting a skeleton  in case we get some Radiant Garden/Ansem the Wise and apprentices/Kairi background I want to work in. Want to know more? Hit me up

**Grass is Greener is a modern au/soap opera-ish au created between me and Shaky. It's on both of our blogs, tagged Grass is Greener Verse.

#grass is greener verse #terraqua #the lost masters #snippets #terra #aqua #shaky-mayhemm

[addictedtostorytelling]

Hello, there! Addicted- that sounds like an appropriate name kkkkk-, I would like your advice on one subject. I want to make a gif from a movie, "Fear" do you know it? I have it downloaded on my computer, Which program you advise me to use? I never made one before, so I'm pretty lost here.

hey, @mementovive!

you can call me aj, if you prefer. 😉

as far as gif-making goes, i make most of my gifs from dvds, but the process is pretty similar to making them from downloads, from what i understand.

the programs i use are:

handbrake (to convert files to mp4 format)

windows movie maker (to cut and manipulate the mp4 files down to the right scenes and sizes)

and adobe photoshop cs5 (to make the actual gifs)

the process itself is kind of involved, so i’ll put the instructions after the “keep reading,” if you’re interested.

__________

i suppose i should preface this post by saying i have a pc, and i have no idea if any of these programs work for macs.

so.

to make gifs, i start in handbrake, where i take the following steps:

(note: if your video file is already in mp4 format, you can skip down to the “windows movie maker” part of the tutorial.)

select the source from wherever i have the video file saved.

“browse” to find the destination where i want to save the converted file and save it under whatever file name i want.

select the “high profile” preset from the right-hand menu.

make sure the cropping is set to zero in all directions. (if a change to the cropping is needed, select “custom” in order to do so.)

make sure that the “anamorphic: none” and “modulus: 16″ size options are selected.

hit the “start button” up top and wait for the video to convert. 

the bigger the file is, the longer it takes to convert. 

(i typically try to only convert short clips, a few seconds or minutes in length at most, to avoid crashing the program.)

i then move to windows movie maker, where i select the little filmstrip icon in the center of the screen to import my newly-made mp4 file:

once the mp4 file uploads, i use the slide rule on the filmstrip to select where i want to crop the file. then i hit the “split” button and delete the excess video material i don’t want. 

since photoshop balks at longer files, i usually limit each clip to no longer than 25 seconds in duration. i also try to leave some extra frames before and after the scene i actually want to gif, as photoshop tends to shave off of a second or so from each clip when you upload to start giffing. 

after cropping the file down to the size/length i want it to be, i click on the blue “file” tab at the top of the program, select “save movie” and then the “recommended for this project” setting on the sub-menu. i then save the file to my preferred destination.

i am now ready to go to photoshop and begin giffing.

to open my intended mp4 file, i go to the “file” menu, select “import,” and then select “video frames to layers” from the sub-menu.

i then select the mp4 file from whatever destination i saved it to in movie maker.

at this point, a pop-up menu called “import video to layers” appears, like so:

if i want to gif the whole clip, i select the “from beginning to end” option. otherwise, i click “selected range only” and use the slide rule on the video viewer to select which portion of the clip i want.

in either case, i make sure that the “limit to every” box is checked, like so:

i typically choose 2 frames, as doing so makes the gifs smoother. 

(the higher the number of frames selected, the more gaps there will be between frames, which translates to the gifs ultimately being choppier.)

i also keep the “make frame animation” box at the bottom of the pop-up menu selected.

once i have selected everything i need to, i then hit the “ok” button, at which point photoshop creates an animation timeline at the bottom of my screen.

from here, my next tasks become

cropping,

sizing,

coloring,

and sharpening

my gifs, in that order.

my first item of business is to delete any extra frames i do not wish to gif from the timeline. i do so by selecting said frames in the timeline and clicking on the little trashcan icon at the bottom of the timeline, near the scroll bar.

once i have the frames i actually want to work with---which may all be for one gif or for multiple gifs i intend to make into a set---i click on the menu icon on the right-hand side of the animation timeline.

doing so opens up a pop-up “actions” menu.

i then select “select all” from the actions menu, which highlights all remaining frames in the animation timeline.

next, on the “layers” widget on the right side of the screen, i select all layers, making sure that they’re highlighted, and press CTRL + G to put them into a “group” folder. the name is this folder is unimportant. (photoshop will automatically name it “group 1.”)

i then return to the animation timeline, where, with all frames still selected, i click on the little black arrow at the bottom of a frame (beside the timestamp that says “0.03″ and select “other.”

i then input a set delay of 0.09 seconds and click “ok.”

now i select the crop tool from the tools widget on the left side of my screen. i use this tool to cut away any framing around the gif, like so:

next, i click on the “image” tab at the top of the screen and select “image size.”

the size of image i want will depend on what kind of gif(s) i’m making. if i am making a single gif or large gifs for a “stackable” set like this one, i make it no wider than 540px. if i am making a gifset that is two gifs across, then no wider than 268px. if a gifset that is three gifs across, then no wider than 177px. 

if i adjust my gif to the width i want and the height ends up being less than ideal, then i undo the width adjustment, input the height i want, and then crop the gif to the proper width (manually) using the crop tool rather than the “image size” menu, as doing so prevents skewing.

in any case, once i have the gif the size i want it to be, i start on coloring.

honestly, coloring gifs is the most artful and least scientific part of the whole process. the tools for doing so are found both in the “layers > new adjustment layer” tab at the top of the program and in the “adjustments” widget on the right-hand side of the program, adjacent to the layers widget.

there are lots of good tutorials on coloring available for beginners, both on tumblr and on youtube, so i recommend reading/watching a couple, just to get a feel for what all goes into the process. 

once you have the basics down, you kinda just have to play around to find what looks good to you. some gif-makers use psds, some color by hand.

i tend to have kind of a “base set” of coloration that i use and then go by feel on a lot of stuff, favoring bolder colors where i can, though i am still striving to achieve the kind of beautifully vivid hues expert gif-makers like @panchostokes create.

seriously! check these out. they’re gorgeous!

in any case, after coloring the gif comes sharpening, which is another process i suggest you check out tutorials to learn.

tbh, sharpening is one of my weakest skills as a gif-maker, and particularly as i most often make gifs of 90s and early 00s shows, which tend to have low resolution and therefore need a lot of work; in addition to using tutorials, i’ve been playing around with my own sharpening “recipe” lately, but i haven’t hit on the perfect admixture just yet.

once i’m finished with the gif---cropping, coloring, sharpening---i go to the “file” menu in photoshop and click “save for web devices.” 

before saving, i make sure that the lower left-hand corner of the pop-up shows that my gif is under the current tumblr gif size limit (to ensure maximum image quality).

at present---as of september 2020---the current limit is 8mb.

however, most gif-makers try to keep their gifs under 5mb, when possible, as tumblr compresses larger gifs, ultimately lowering the quality by changing them from .gif to .gifv files.

if i find one of my gifs is over the size limit, then i go back to make the gif smaller---by cropping it---shaving off the extra mbs. 

finally, i check to make sure that the “forever” looping option is selected, so that my gif doesn’t stop running after its first play-through. 

 once i have everything as i like, i click “save.”

---and that’s the basics of how i make gifs.

of course, mine is neither the only nor best way to make gifs, and i’m sure that more seasoned gif-makers reading this tutorial are probably side-eyeing my process 👀 👀 👀.

there are undoubtedly easier ways to do things and methods that achieve prettier results; this process is just the one i’ve developed through trial and error, so it’s the one i stick with.

note that i also didn’t say anything here about adding text to gifs, but that’s something else you can learn how to do through more thorough tutorials than this one.

my best advice for aspiring gif-makers is to find a gif-maker whose work wows you and see if they have any tutorials or tips; i personally learned almost everything i know about gif-making from this very excellent tutorial @everynineyearsandthirtyfourdays posted years ago.

anyway.

good luck giffing fear! 

i hadn’t heard of that movie before, but i see that billy plays a role. nice!

feel welcome to send more questions any time.

#answered #mementovive #** #my tutorials #giffing

[omegangrins]

A Treatise On the Doctor

I don't know how to start this. Because I think of Peter Capaldi's words when he said that the only thing required to be a Doctor Who fan, is kindness.

I like 13 and think Chibnall is doing his best job writing the show.

So I struggle to write this because I am engaging against that very unkindness in the Doctor Who fandom, and trying very hard not to be angry back. "Allways try to be nice but never fail to be kind." But I've begun to wonder more and more if those who speak so loudly against the show really know what the show itself is about.

Enough of talking about other people though, cause frankly they're only important as set-up for this conversation. And again, I'm working kind.

So here's what you're gonna learn from this lifelong fan (and the best Tl;dr you're gonna get):

1. The Doctor sucks. From the very beginning. People complain about character traits now that have been around as long as the show.

2. Due to the Doctor's suckage, they tend to do more harm than good. (And because of this, most of the Doctor's "friends" along the way have been, well, let's leave it at the air quotes for now cause it's a damn big list of "BOOOO!!!".)

3. All of the showrunners and writers and actors and editors and everyone else has allways knows this and has played it this way.

4. And last but not least, since this is a time travel show. If you wanna know what and why stuff is happening now, look it up. Everything that happened before is allways in play.

5. None of this is bad, and in fact, it makes the show morally grayer. It's about kindness at all costs. Even your own.

A. First things first, the hard thing. The Doctor is not grrrreat. I mean, sure they try, but they fail a lot more often. In Extremis, a majority of those fatality index counts come from people the Doctor failed to save. That's why it's worded so specifically as "cause of death". All the death's caused by the Doctor's very interaction with time and lack of saving those around them. And part of it's not their fault, but more often than not, the Doctor says I can save you, and can't, won't, or chooses not to.

And that would be alright, but it took them over 1000 years to realize they should start letting their companions lead lives outside of theirs so THEY DON'T DIE. A bit too long as someone who claims to be better.

Not to mention how many times the Doctor is dismissive of their companions and the people around them only to use them for their help and just bug off again. If they truly cared and wanted to help, they would stay and listen in between adventures. Their lifespan is near infinite anyway. What's a few extra Earth hours with some friends you made along the way. You know, maybe fix some of the psychological and emotional damage created by encountering things behind a human's original scope of reasoning. But nope, we gotta go adventure more, byyyyeee!!

So when people talk about these qualities in 13 in a negative aspect I have to laugh because I'm not sure if they understand the joke. Cause we're talking about an alien that grew up around a species calling themselves Time Lords. I try not to blame them too much for it. 1 had to learn how to be hospitable to humans and it's been a bit of a slow learning curve ever since.

B. After the Doctor survived the horrors of the Time War and happened upon a human companion they felt worth connecting to, what did they do? They took Rose to watch her planet burn in front of her eyes. Great, first date, amirite?

And that's a little bit of companion damage. Do you know that the Doctor is responsible for the almost complete genocide of the Silurian race across multiple occasions. I am legitimately surprised there are any left after all of the ones the Doctor has killed. Like before, they cause destruction either purposefully or accidentally or simply by force of being there.

Remember before how I said that the Doctor just flies away. Yeah, they leave a lot of problems behind when they do (something that I can see Chibnall is planting the seeds of). If you had a time and space machine and practically unlimited capabilities and you choose to just leave after a situation and not check up on them from time to or see if there are any other underlying crises to be solved. But oh no, "gotta follow that rule of time and keep going even though I stopped in the first place because of how interested I was.". This is why 9 has a great arc about this. He thought he killed all the Daleks. They came back. He thought he'd gotten rid of the Slitheen. They came back. He thought he saved Satellite 5 from aliens. But opsies, they came back. And look! They're Daleks. Which he "finally" got rid of.

The Doctor just bounces around all carefree and without an ounce of care for themselves, their companions or consequences unless there's consequences for themselves or their companions. Then they get indignant.

Is that really kind of the person you want flying around fixing things in time and space? Who knows. But at least they are trying. Most of the time the T.A.R.D.I.S. lands somewhere and the authority figures are the most pretentious bull-headed pigs you can find. To me, I laugh cause it seems like both sides end up getting a taste of their own medicine. Usually with the bull charging to death in a sad glory while the Doctor wiles on metaphorically about not being as good as them.

But again, as a "superior" alien with "advanced" technology and "culture" you'd think they'd just know better already. But that's all part of the character. The Doctor may be in flux, but true change is difficult. The real hero of every story is the other people BESIDES the Doctor.

Cause the title is Doctor *Who* . The Who being half of the title, despite having less letters. It's the constant question of "What and why and who is that crazy person that's trying to help?" Why do you think they keep flying back to Earth? (Besides set construction reasons.) They've grown as attached to us as we have to them. And at this point, a lot of their saving us is guilt and embarrassment at having a hand in our timeline.

This is also the same reason the Doctor dumps companions in a fluff. Baggage. Every time a companion gets too heavy to carry the memories of... off they fly.

Except for 13. She's stayed. To this end, we can see how the Doctor changes. Not on our smaller, human timelines, but on the timeline of a god with way too much power.

D. With that in mind, we go Classic. It's the Who you need to consult if you wish to make any critique on what's happening now. Because how can you know how a part operates inside of a whole without seeing the whole part?

Cause I don't know if you've watched it but it can be rough, and I don't mean in the sense of production value (which admittedly they do a fairly decent job of using what money they had. A problem the BBC plagues to Doctor Who to this day.). The 3rd Doctor shits on every one they call friends constantly and then turns around expecting help. 4 did the same. Then 5 masked that contempt with a plucky face and a cheeky word. But it was still there, bubbling out of 6 and 7 as the inability to suffer fools gladly and using their own righteousness to enact change in their companions. A trait that kept going til an entire war and regeneration was used solving the question of "Doctor Who?" Only for them to try and forget twice more by putting on their pretty grinning faces and running away from it.

And I'm only talking from a companion perspective. Each of the Doctors has enacted their own form of genocide on countless species. Sure, it's to "save humans" but at the end of the day you'd have to ask yourself if we're really worth that blood. And this is all in the Doctor's history. As much as they claim better, they're hands are still gushing red.

The Doctor left Jo because she fell in love. They drove Adric to put their life on the line in order to feel adequate. The entirety of the Silurian race has been wiped out fivefold under their watch, with one time by their hand itself. Same for several other singular and unique species you won't be able to find elsewhere in the universe. 7 used time travel to enact a personality change in Ace while simultaneously using her as a pawn in an interdimensional war. The Time War itself. Sure it got erased but the Doctor still did those things ("War" Doctor or whatever nonsense titles they feel necessary to delude themselves). The entirety of Amy's childhood was destroyed by their presence, and Rory got erased. Twice! Sarah Kingdom. We know the list. Hell, the Doctor whisked Barbara and Ian away because they wanted to teach the snobby humans some lessons.

They may have a time machine, but we have the bill of their actions. This is where 13 excels. Because they're trying to be better than themselves. They've learnt the lessons of all those years traveling and the failures they wish they could reverse but don't as a way of keeping a scoreboard of pain. It's not perfect by any means, but look at 12 needing cue cards to understand and react to human grief under duress. They've come a helluva long way. After 50 years, I'm inclined to believe better. After all, it's what the Doctor would want.

E. You know how people like the ASOIAF series because it offers up morally complex characters existing in a morally complex world where black and white are harder to define than grey? Have you ever thought of Doctor Who as the same? Strip past the fairytale and adventure and "wibbly wobbly timey wimeyness and it's just people reacting to situations. We're just harder on the Doctor because they're hard on us. You could go round and round on who's the bigger killer, but at the end of the day Time Lords and humans fight and feel about the same things. It's allways been a joke to pretend otherwise.

That's why I love the Timeless Child. Not for making the Doctor anymore special but for saying that even despite having all of their specialness ripped away and repurposed to create a lie of a society then having the memory wiped of said event, the Doctor broke out of their mold, stole a TARDIS and told the Time Lords to fuck off. That's not a Captain America/Superman hero. That's Batman in space with a society of Lex Luthor's. Gotham and Gallifrey. The Doctor saw what they were a part of and broke free, without even knowing the more horrifying truth. Cause it's the thing I see many fans missing because they're so preocuppied with the Doctor being special. The thing that made the Doctor different was their ability to know the difference and walk away to find better. Now, the Doctor has a reason to go back and find out why they never stopped running.

The Time Lords might be the greatest monsters in the universe. It is in the name. "Lords". Those who would lord over us and impose their will with a banthium fist.

And this is a children's show.

C the thing is, the people who made and make this show all collectively rail against one thing: Hate. Kindness is the way of Doctor's. Even if they're sawing off your leg, it's to do the kindness of saving your life. This is because the people who make this (United Kingdomers) have seen centuries of war and conflict and oppression enacted by their own country in the name of progress. And they want to see it no more. Look no further than any of the Doctor's adventures with UNIT. Allways advocating for peace and being ignored for the comfortable war-cry. It's why it's hard to blame the Doctor when we do very similar and often worse (though we don't have time travel.... yet). The creators of this show know better, see better, and wrote better, to know that the powers that be nipped would nip their creations and sanitize them. So they wrote their messages so strong that you can feel them from the future. They're powerfull enough that even across eras they have all collectively moved me to write this.

That's another point I have to laugh at people saying Doctor Who has never been in your face about progressive politics. The Green Death. Survival. Trial of a Timelord (Yes, all of it. Sit down and power through.) The Happiness Patrol is one of my all time favorite episodes for going there in this regard. People may poo poo but history has its' eyes on you. Doctor Who loves taking potshots at the issues of the day. As long as you don't make the aliens black of course. Make them all the colors of the rainbow but never make them black. That'd be too on the nose (That's something they used to say back in the day! Crazy how far we've come).

So bravoa to Chibnall for continuing the legacy of Doctor Who. From where I'm standing, he's not doing anything different than any other showrunner before him. Cause if you want to argue canon, you at least have to know what created it. This show owes what it is to those Classic eras. And if you think Chibnall is shitting on those years and your childhood.... well, then why did you read this whole thing?

#doctor who #the doctor #jodie whittaker #peter capaldi #matt smith #david tennant #christopher eccleston #john hurt #paul mcgann #sylvester mccoy #colin baker #peter davison #tom baker #jon pertwee #patrick troughton #william hartnell #chris chibnall #steven moffat #russell t davies #mark gatiss #robert holmes #john nathan turner

[jimclassicstoycollection]

Transformers: War For Cybertron: Siege

Titan class

Omega Supreme

Omega Supreme was the last of my massive spending spree in September of 2019. Between the Siege Skywarp, Legends Jetfire, and the Rain Makers I got Omega Supreme around that very same week. This was an expensive two weeks for me.

Omega arrived in the mail about a good week before my dad died. Working on the past few reviews have kind brought some of it back for me; putting my head back in that timeline and all that, so that’s one reason why it’s taken me so long to get this one out.

I should also mention that this review will be very picture intensive; I probably will have more pictures than I will have things to say about the toy.

The Box:

For those of you who frequently check out this blog you’d know that I don’t normally gush about the box; I have a tendency to just focus on the toy itself.

That being said; OMG I love the box art!!!!

This box art demonstrates the power, grand, and sheer enormous size of this Guardian Robot.

Ever since I was a kid I loved the tech spec character art which was on the transformers toys, and the Siege line has done an excellent job with the the box art. It’s a shame these guys don’t come with any tech specs, or collector’s card much like Combiner Wars, Titans Return, and Power of the Primes did.

Hasbro, make a collector’s card! You were doing great for three toy lines, you should have kept that up!

Much like my Titan class Devastator and Fortress Maximus I’m keeping the box for Omega Supreme (I have titan classes Trypticon and Predakng, but I’ve never even opened them up yet…I will…one day).

Countdown-

Countdown is a Micromaster going all the way to G1. I never had the original toy, but I think he had a rocket base of his own and it turned into a gun platform, or something. I like this guy being partnered with Omega Supreme now is pretty appropriate in my opinion.

Vehicle Mode:

Countdown’s vehicle mode is a moon rover. This is a mostly unpainted toy, and his primary colors are red and light tan plastic.

It’s got some good sculpted details, and has a cool radar dish. If you look hard enough you can see two, teeny, tiny seats; however considering Countdown’s a Micomaster they would be smaller than any human could sit in, but it’s all a nice touch.

It rolls well on four black wheels.

There is a 5mm peg underneith the rover which folds down, and can peg onto any 5mm port, similar to an old Transformers Armada Minicon, but in reverse; the Minicon wold have the 5mm and the larger robot would have the 5mm peg.

Transformation:

Transformation is…well it’s a MicroMaster this isn’t rocket science…or in this case…rover science…but it’s easy.

Robot Mode:

For what he is the robot mode is pretty cool.

He stands well, like any decent toy should, and I love how the radar dish tucks nicely into his back.

For such a tiny guy we see much of the same sculpted detail, however we also see more of the light tan which is his body, and that face sculpt is amazing! 

This is a small toy, but that face has some good detail, a nice silver paint, and bright blue eyes, and i swear his mouth has a cocky smirk.

I don’t know the character enough to know if this is appropriate of him, but i do like it.

Well done, Hasbro. Now keep it up. 

Articulation is…limited; it is a Micromaster after all.

Ball-jointed shoulders and hips, and a bend at the knee.

Let’s move on to why you’re all here.

Omega Supreme-

Since Omega Supreme splits into three separate things I’ll be talking about each one separately, starting with the rocket mode.

Rocket Mode:

Starting with the rocket we see here…a rocket. Well, it’s gray, long and cylindrical, and an excellent symbol for robo-male virility, maybe…

I’m joking, but this rocket is pretty big, bigger than I think maybe it should be.

The rocket is most made out of unpainted gray plastic, with some red plastic for parts of the bulkhead, silver paint at the very top. The only paint aps that I can see are some burn marks near some of the 5mm ports. You don’t even get an Autobot badge on the rocket, that’s a little disappointing…

Down by the primary thruster are clear orange plastic bits for the…rocket…claw…

Well, Omega Supreme’s a rocket, but he’s not an Earth rocket; the claw parts could be anything….Landing struts! They’re landing struts!!!!

The rocket stands well on the orange struts, and each strut has 3 points of articulation for height differences, or balance, or whatever, really.

What the rocket lacks in paint deco it makes up for in sculpted detail. I’m going to be saying this a lot through the review, but you see so much panel detailing, pipes, gribbly…(I don’t know what a gribbly is, but it’s fun to say), on this toy you will rarely see a smooth surface.

The rocket has nine 11mm ports for guns or blast effects.

I’m not going to lie, this rocket was a real pain to display on a flight stand. Due to the fact that it’s a narrow plastic tube I really didn’t have anything which could properly support it for very long, so I did my best, and I do not recommend using this set up for the rocket mode.

Aside from the 5mm ports are on the rocket I didn’t see anything that would even come close to a display port, unless someone makes stand with 5mm ports in mind, I don’t know of any.

Speaking of 5 mm ports, four out of the eleven by the landing struts and the main thruster, the nose cone of the rocket, and six around the rocket itself. And as any 5mm port they can be used for either the blast effects or weapons if you’re so inclined.

Tank Mode:

The tank is a really beefy, chonky boi! (Am I memeing correctly?)

The tank alone is as large as a modern day leader class figure. Big…but light weight…It’s a mostly hollow vehicle mode.

The paint deco is minimal, a lot of the devil is in the sculpting, and what a sculpt this bruiser is!

This tank is covered in great sculpting detail; you see all sorts of gribblys and other things. The tank is mostly unpainted gray plastic. The red at the hatch is painted while the tank barrel is red plastic. The tank treads are painted, and the secondary and tertiary guns are painted in a gun metal gray. There’s some yellow paint up at the main gun turret, and lastly there’s a lovely tampograph Autobot symbol on the clear orange window near the front.

The only 5mm ports on the tank are the three forward facing guns, but they look fantastic with the blast effects!

Unfortunately the tank turret doesn’t swivel at all, because of the robot head directly behind it that main gun is pretty much just going to…FACE forward….that was a lousy pun, I apologize…

The tank treads don’t actually work, however turning the tank over we see these barbell-like uni-wheels (I’m not exactly sure what to call them obviously), but these are bit shorter than the base track, and they roll well enough for what they are.

If you open up the front of the tank (which can be a bit annoying) reveals a space for Countdown to park in a specific groove. Now there is also a ramp which Countdown can roll down.

My one issue with the opening hatch is that the plastic is a bit thinner, and it tabs into place; un-tabbing the hatch frightens me sometimes because I’m worried that I’m going to break it. So, just be careful when opening it up. 

Base Mode:

I’ll be very honest here, the base itself is probably the least interesting thing about Omega Supreme, however essential with the overall figure.

Without the rocket or the tank nearby the base is quite the empty structure. It’s basically a large track held up on some (possibly flimsy) scaffolding with a hollow tower in the center.

Yes, you still see all the nice gribblys and the details all about the base mode, but it’s still quite an uninteresting environment.

Both tracks are tabbed into the main base/command tower by these new Siege clips, and are supported by these thin, gray plastic scaffolding. I am concerned about breakage. They do feel solid enough, however I can’t shake the feeling that they’re going to break one day at the hinges.

Maybe I’m just reminded of breaking my toys as a child when I was too rough with them, but I cannot get the concern out of my mind.

There is a tiny ramp located behind the inner walls for the base mode meant for the MicroMasters to drive up. It’s a pretty steep ramp, and it has these new connectors which is meant to attach the Earthrise MicroMaster bases…I mean the upcoming ones, of course…

The tank (at least the original G1 toy) is supposed to ride along on the bases track on an endless loop, but for Siege Omega the tank is much wider than the track, so the treads are just hanging over them. I mean, you still could do it but personally I don’t think it looks very good, so maybe the track should be reserved for the Autobots to drive around on, or defend the perimeter while the larger tank has free range to go wherever. 

Once we get the rocket and tank in place and place some Legends class figures around it, Omega Supreme’s base mode is a more impressive sight.

Mind you, he’s not a fortress like…well, Fortress Maximus, he’s a rocket base.

At the top part of the rocket are two opening hatches which allow a Micromaster (or even a Legends Class figure) inside to pilot. It’s all unpainted, sculpted detail, but you see a little computer screen, and dials and stuff. Some paint applications would have been nice through.

Transformation:

Where the original G1 Omega Supreme is a parts-former, which requires a great deal of assembly to build the complete figure, Siege Omega has a simpler conversion process, and once you transform the rocket into both of the arms, the tank into the chest and head, the base to the legs and torso, and the finally the tracks fold up to the wings. 

Once that’s all done its quick to assemble.

Blast Effects:

Omega Supreme comes with 7 blast effects. Maybe you’ve noticed this, and maybe you haven’t but for the past several toy reviews I’ve been using Omega’s blast effects for my Seekers and Rain Makers, Galaxy Optimus prime, I’ve been heavily using this. 

That’s because I really love these blast effects and I couldn’t wait for me to eventually get around to my Omega review to put them to to good use.

One thing I would like to see Hasbro or Takara to sell blast effects separately to for more figures to use. 

Robot Mode:

This Guardian Robot is stomping onto the scene! This is quite a bulky and solid toy.

Much like the rocket, or the tank, or the base mode the completed robot mode doesn’t have a lot of painted detail; it’s all in the sculpting and the unpainted, colored plastics. Which I’m not complaining; Omega Supreme is not a character you really need to over think.

He’s covered in details and gribblys he has a total of 19 5mm ports! That is a lot, but then again Omega is so big, and many of the weapons are so small, it probably wouldn’t look all that impressive anyway. 

Sort of opposite of 2003′s Transformers Armada line Countdown has a 5mm peg of his own, and can be inserted into any 5mm port. I like to keep him on Omega’s shoulder.

For such a large figure Omega is really easy to pose, and has a good range of motion. He balances well, and strangely enough he doesn’t feel too heavy either.

Even with his size you can get Omega in some pretty decent poses.

His range of motion includes:

Up/down hinge at the head, left/right swivel at the neck

Swivel at the shoulder, up/down at the armpit

Bend at the elbow, and swivel at the elbow (no further articulation at the gun arm).

For the right arm we get a swivel at the base of the claw hand, each claw has three ratcheted hinges.

Waist swivel, and universal joints at the hips.

Thigh swivel, and a bend at the knee.

Finally Omega Supreme has an ankle pivot.

Over all for a toy of this size the articulation isn’t more or less than your average Siege figure, it’s just done to a larger scale, 

Omega’s claw hand is great! As mentioned above it has some great articulation, however I am a little concerned about translucent plastic of the claws. My understanding is that translucent plastic tends to be more brittle than opaque plastic, and is more prone to crack over time. We shall see.

I’m really digging Omega’s head sculpt. This is very accurate to the G1 cartoon series. Omega Supreme is basically wearing a space helmet with a clear yellow canopy, and a gun turret pony tail.

And the sculpted chest detail behind the clear yellow plating is so cool!

The yellow shoulder pecks can open up to reveal a series of missile pods. None of these are spring loaded missiles, they’re just part of the sculpt with red paint.

Another interesting thing about Omega is that his shin guards open up to reveal….well nothing too interesting, but it’s a little closet to carry a Micromaster around. But the sculpting on the inside of the door is pretty nice.

Final Thoughts:

When all is said and done I love Omega Supreme. He’s always been one of my favorite Transformers.

I would like a see just a little more paint detail, not a lot mind you, just a little more. I would have liked to see the computer consoles in the rocket painted, or maybe some pipes and wires, this figure was over $169.99 after all.

The hatch on the tank feels like a thinner plastic than the rest of the toy, and I’d be careful with the track scaffolding.

If you can keep all of that in mind, this titan class toy is titanic fun!

Recommended.

As much as I like the Combiner Wars Devastator figure there is a noticeable difference in quality between them. 

Devastator is functional, but when compared to Omega he’s lacking. 

I attempted to recreate the fanart battle by Transformers fan artist Dan Khanna. Don’t think I captured the moment too well, but I tried.

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