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virmireisms-a · 2 years

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@smokedanced asked:

[ ONE ] for sender to take a bullet for receiver. / from wren!

One of these days, her idiot commander was going to give her a heart attack. She swore by it--she'd die of an early heart attack thanks to Shepard. And she'd happily blame it on her friend, too. With all of the chaos that Wren managed to get them into, it was undoubtedly going to be her fault, anyway. She'd already died once; did she really need to make it a habit of a second time?!

"Damn it, Shepard," Ashley griped, hooking her friend under the arm and dragging her behind a large rock out of the way of gunfire. "Look, I know you're the savior of the galaxy and all, but damn it, you are not the charge-in-headfirst type!" Ashley could hear shots peppering the rock above them, but she ignored it for the moment, planning ahead as much as she could.

"Stay down," she said firmly, pulling out her sniper rifle. With a split-second glance down the scope, she fired one shot, then another, then another, picking off enemies the moment she saw them pop out of cover, reloading with a flourish. Four, five, six of them were down within seconds, Ashley's marksmanship capabilities being showcased in rapid succession. With the last one down, she set the rifle to the side, readying the medigel on her omni-tool.

"For shit's sake, Shepard. Leave the bulldozing to me and Vega, all right? And Kaidan, if he's got his barrier up." Hell, she'd rather EDI do that kind of thing; at least if EDI's mobile platform took a bad hit, it wouldn't mean the end of their synthetic friend. Might mean finding a good engineer to build her another one, and too many resources they didn't have at the moment, but EDI wouldn't die if that thing crapped out on her, at least. She carefully applied the medigel to where the shot had hit, resisting the urge to grumble under her breath.

#// smokedanced #ashley's mad LMAO #but worried mad kslkjdlkjdf #ash vc: wren u are NOT a tank ma'am that's MY job #ok but actually ash is such a tanky squadmate ngl #i think vega's the only squadmate who's tankier than her tbh

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afterartist · 1 year

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Little known fact about me

I really love birds!!

And I love Winged AUs, so I thought, why not make my own version

So here’s my take on some of the well known AUs as what wings they would have (plus some dumb little notes lmao)

Classic: Pigeon

(Come on- its perfect- I don’t need to explain this-)

Fell: Bearded Vulture

(They coat themselves in blood and red mud- that’s totally edgy mc edge lords kinda thing)

Swap: Parrot

(Super smart, bright and dexterous- He deserves this- best boy)

Dream: Barn Owl

(Very silent fliers but don’t have water proof feathers so can’t fly well in rain (dream has a fear of storms- it’s all coming together))

Ink: Pelican

(Idk why- it just fits in my mind (he’s not a parrot shut up-))

Error: Secretary Bird

(Long distance and usually one shot attacks- like- these guys are so badass but also rly super dumb- they’re perfect)

Nightmare: Raven

(Only the edgiest bird for the lord of angsty teens (but also a super smart king of negativity ig)

Killer: Magpie

(Smart, dangerous and easily distracted by shiny things)

Dust: Herron

(Very precise, well timed, attacks in multiple different terrains via super sharp beak)

Horror: Wedged Tailed Eagle

(These things take out paragliders- you can’t tell me a tank like horror wouldn’t be one of these)

Cross: Woodpecker

(It was either this or a chicken and I don’t want the cross fangirls after me-)

Fresh: Cuckoo

(Parasites.)

—-

(Plus My AUs (for funnies))

Barrier: Swan

(Anger issues go brrrrr- also he’s pretty but an asshole <3<3)

Idle: Osprey

(They can sometimes track their prey for miles and have versatile talons(technically this is spoilers but y’all don’t have context yet lol))

Spoke: Lovebird

(Very smart but usually underestimated and thought of as ‘weak’)

Rivper: Arctic Tern

(Who better to be a multiverse taxi then someone who literally won’t stop migrating)

Helical: Burrowing Owl

(Lives in the desert, attracted to shiny things and hides from the sun- it’s literally him- what more can I say)

Climate: Red Winged Fairy-Wren

(his colour palette, loves storms and doesn’t have a neck)

Idk, I may draw some of these if y’all are interested but this is just a dumb little idea that’s probably rly badly thought out

But I like birbs and I like this so u have to deal with it (:

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redeyedroid · 1 year

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CW for war.

How Do You Hunt a U-Boat, or: How a Scottish Lesbian Became a Leading Expert on Anti-Submarine Warfare.

The Allies - and here, I'm mostly talking about the Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy. More Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea than Tom Hanks in Greyhound. Because it was the British and Canadians that did the bulk of fighting in the Atlantic - had a lot of problems when it came to sinking U-Boats, even when they roughly knew where one was. For one, the primitive and less sophisticated forms of sonar (asdic, in the parlance of the day) the ships of the time were equipped with had blind spots. The sonar pointed forward and the depth charges were pushed off the back of a ship. A clever U-boat commander, and many of them were, would move away and make the destroyer or corvette miss.

One way they solved this was by developing a system called hedgehog. A spigot mortar, firing a pattern of bombs ahead of the attacking ship while the U-Boat was still in sonar contact. The bombs exploded on contact with a submarine, cracking it open and allowing immense water pressure to crush the hull and kill the crew. (Just over 40,000 Germans went to sea in U-Boats in the Second World War. About 75% were killed. It was, by far, the most dangerous service to be a part of in the Second World War.)

That's just one of the issues - and there were many - the men at sea had when it came to hunting U-Boats, in this case a technical one. Solved with engineering in a very typically British way (a part of British wartime R&D decided spigot mortars were the solution to every explodable problem), but there were others that could not be fixed by a man in a white coat.

Questions about U-boat tactics. Questions about how to predict where the Germans would be. Human questions that required human answers to be found.

Militaries love to play games as much as they love bombing around fields in tanks. You can predict a lot from a game, if the game is played honestly. Very famously, the Japanese wargames before Midway were not played honestly. And, well...

Enter Western Approaches Tactical Unit. Based in Liverpool, Western Approaches was where the Battle of the Atlantic was co-ordinated. And on the top floor, Captain Gilbert Roberts played games to try to divine German tactics. And he did so with a staff made up of young women in the Women's Royal Naval Service. Wrens. One who joined in 1942 was a 19-year-old called Janet Okell, another a chartered accountant in her twenties by the name of Jean Laidlaw.

Roberts and the Wrens played games. Working collaboratively, they refought battles, plotting out the courses and fates of convoys and ships to work out the tactics used by U-Boats, and when they had, they played more to develop countermeasures, trying and rejecting existing tactics and replacing them with ones of their own design. Ones that worked. Then they taught those new tactics to the men who commanded the ships and escort groups that sailed the Atlantic, running courses that lasted 6 days, Monday to Saturday, for over 3 years through the worst, most critical phases of the Battle of the Atlantic. Roberts the ringmaster as the Wrens made it work for the thousands of men who went through the course. Men with years of seagoing experience from all the Allied navies. Canadians, Americans, Australians, British, South Africans, Poles, French. Up to 50 at a time. All receiving instruction and training from Wrens, playing games against them on the floor of WATU, courses plotted in chalk, with cotton wool representing burning ships, deferring to the tactical knowledge of women in their teens and early twenties who never commanded at sea. One of those officers, Nicholas Monsarrat, later wrote the novel of The Cruel Sea.

On one occasion, Okell and Laidlaw played against Max Horton, the admiral commanding Western Approaches, himself a distinguished submarine commander from the Great War.

Playing from behind a screen as escort commanders, with Horton the U-Boat, they sank him 5 times in a row. As they stood there sheepishly, having humiliated their commander, Horton accused them of cheating. They had not. They had not needed to.

The existence of the unit was well known. A picture of Roberts hung in U-Boat HQ with the words "this is your enemy" on it. But WATU's success was as much down to the Wrens and their - sometimes instinctive, sometimes learned, most often both - tactical expertise.

The courses ran until July 1945, long after the U-Boat threat had been crushed. Many of the Wrens who served in the unit transferred out after a short or even a long time, but Okell and Laidlaw remained part of WATU until the end.

We don't know much about Jean Laidlaw. The memoir she left was unthinkingly thrown away by her nephew after her death. Few of the Wrens left any record of their time at WATU. She went back to work as a chartered accountant after the war and lived with her partner, Beryl, then alone, quietly, until she passed in 2008. I hope she continued to play games and I really hope she continued schooling men on how to win.

#WW2 #WWII #War is fucking awful #however bad you've imagined war to be it is much much worse #Diversity is strength #The Cruel Sea is a top 5 war film

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pawnshopsouls · 6 years

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ooc ! PSA:bouncing activity

//Hey guys, with Christmas around the corner, I'm going to be pretty on and off until the holidays are over. (Especially since my hands don't seem to like driving and writing in the same day =x=;; ). Anyway, I’m doing a roll call list of the threads & ask replies I owe.

//For my ask box, I have 3 asks to answer: a Rattling Bars carnival response for Wren ( @magick-ink ), a Gentle ask for Sassy ( @sassyflapper ), a Story Time ask for Jazzy ( @volantesxfemina ), and a mischief ask for Fox!Gin ( @toomanydamnmuses ).

//For drafts, I have a starter for @tank-archon , and thread replies for @richarddevian (1), @sassyflapper (2), @immovable-force (1), @magick-ink (1), @askcupheadthings (1), @tea-and-hexes (1), and @drewgod (1).

//I think that’s everyone but if I missed you, please let me know! I think I might’ve seen a starter from @screen-the-devils-bartender for Salem but I don’t remember. So again, if I missed you in this let me know ok?

//Also with this reaching 8 threads, I think I’m gonna have to wait on accepting new threads until I complete some of these ones. (Gotta pace myself so I don’t hurt my hands). However, asks are always welcome! So thank you all for your patience and thanks for rping with me! ^u^ b

#¢::Passin'Gossip::¢#ooc #¢::OutOfSpooks::¢#psa #temporary semi-hiatus alert #edited #//Thanks for reminding me Starry! ^u^

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ecotone99 · 4 years

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[MF] The Bad Dream of the Quamatch Canyon Snake

Bleeding green silt into the ocean the Quamatch River clearly remembers its own icy birth. It flings rainbow-tinted mist as alms for the day.

A snake licks the darkness of an egg. It hatches, hunts, and molts.

Canyon-funneled wind whips its skin into the fork of a dead nettle. The ghost twitches and dances translucent, a vision to trouble a winter sleep.

A goose barks and descends into the water with relief as a steady noise emerges from the west. The sound hides the trees' whispering ans ends all lemon songbirds' morning chorusing.

The snake awakens haunted. Feebly worming out into the din it climbs the ivy confused. Amber shadows fall about and blacken. The harrowing sound everywhere crests. Innumerable legions of geese cloak the valley in false night. They cool and rob all vigor from the blood of the snake, killing him.

Woven and cradled in wind-swaying arms he rots.

The geese unveil the day. The last laughing stragglers give back to the valley its stolen calm.

The night she noticed him driving by she crouched low burning bowls in her truck. Thumbing through tokes with each flick of the bic her eyes caught byzantine patterns in the darkness. He rounded her corner, switched off the high beams, gunned it.

“Dude. Friends, enemies, people we know, people we will know or used to know before, they, like, they must pass right by us sometimes, like on the freeway going the opposite way or whatever."

"Sure, I bet it happens a lot. Like the other day I think I saw a dude from my elementary school maybe. I didn't say anything. We run into old friends and shit, where we least expect, like, 'Oh my God, what are you doing here?'"

"Yeah but no but it's the misses I'm talking about."

"Ah like a girl in a movie theater sits in front of the future father of her children?"

"Exactly."

"Or a dude unknowingly sells meth to the tweaker grandson of the asshole who tortured and killed his grandfather in World War Two?"

"Mm. Shooting-stars in the daytime."

Night shift finally ended. As she followed him deep into the parking lot he praised his personal god of coincidence, Kizmet the Hamster. As a little kid he had imagined (or discovered?) a pantheon to whom he would forever sacrifice logic and house-spiders, for whom he cultivated a devotion far beyond superstition or reverie.

"You don't like me much.”

She was slow to respond, busy noticing his scratched glasses.

"Nah not really."

Admiring her own bluntness she stretched the long night out of her wrists. Moths and mosquito hawks orbited the lights. Two barn owls huddled in a duct on the roof. They both took a deep breath. A killdeer screamed like a painted warrior. It looked up to study secret maps encoded in auroras. Instructing scouts upwind, the killdeer, a chief, cried reassemble. Five arrowhead bird-shadows slid south into the yard where cargo tanks rusted. They sat and sank more mass into each new winter’s mud like dented shields in Carthaginian grass.

Faking nonchalance and walking backwards he away fired one last time with,"Hey if I were you I wouldn't like me either." He smiled and savored a hint of the hidden shape of her body.

“Not everyone can like everybody." She slammed the truck door started her engine and massaged her own neck.

Cars tailgated and passed her truck the left. Neglecting the spectacular sunrise, replaying the day instead, planning ideal responses to future points in fantasy discussions, she missed the miracle of dawn’s lavender tongue licking up the last drops of darkness. One rare east amber cloud was swimming thinly through terraces of rising warmth. As she rounded her corner she yawned. The day broke and crowned. It tore the skin of the horizon and bled life upon the world.

He leaned weight into his fingers, massaging her neck. As she swiped through photos he glimpsed her recent roadkill thumbnails. He was at first mistaken in thinking they were photos of living creatures.

“Woah, go back.”

Cricket noise in the canyon reminded him of the whir and beeps of the warehouse equipment. Warm sweat marinated their two hands together. She saw the moon’s regretful expression through her ancestor-guardian-ibis-eyes. She artfully said so and asked him what he saw in the moon. Through misshapen corneas and scratched glasses, through flat windshield-insect-residue and crazy windblown mists he saw the moon sinking slow to sleep. He felt the pulse of destiny in his crotch and answered, "I have no words."

A blonde canyon tarantula is perplexed by the flatness of the road. Dyspeptic turkey vultures drink not of the creek.

War-flags aflutter the finch mobs and sentinel kestrels, the swallow reconnaissance and nomad meadowlarks and red wing blackbird bandits all vie to balance the sky. All the armies, with good and absolute reason, fear shrikes.

“You made up your own secret gods?”

“I guess so.”

“Do you pray to them?”

“When I was a kid I did.”

Quamatch joins a little town called Uverne to the canyon. The vignerons see it as the boundary—where school-skipping couples kiss, where truck-driving midnight johns drop condoms on the gravel, where proud gangs batter prospects into apostles—between zones.

The oaks along the creek-bed died soon after they paved the road. Those that stood out were nailed. Now termite craters freckle the nooks.

“Your eyes are in front, sockets forward.”

“Predatory primate.”

“And yeah, hawk sockets point forward but they can pretty much Exorcist their head all the way around.”

“But horned owls straight murder hawks. They jack ‘em in the dark.”

“Never thought of hawks as prey.”

“Everything’s prey.”

Sour vengeance festers in most crows. However the ravens are wiser than smart. They forget and forgive. Both peck and scissor the carrion and swallow the nested eggs of songbirds. Some mornings these cousins show mocking courtesy to the very sparrows whose offspring they digest.

She swiped back a few.

"Yeah. Poor thing. I think that was off Quamatch. The trucks haul ass through there."

"Ew, you got that close to a dead dog?”

“A coyote. Maybe a hybrid? Was a coyote.”

“What in the actual fuck? Ugh. I’m nauseous. I don’t want to see the rest.”

“To me each one of these photos is like a gravestone or something.”

“Obituary?”

“Epitat?”

“Effigy?”

“Kozmit’s helmet fits loose on his head. He’s an engineer in the classic, forgotten sense. He steers the big wheel of weird as we dance and die down here like spinning nickels.”

“He’s the god of synchronicity?”

“He’s also the god of gambling and profound road signage.”

“'Yield'.”

“Exactly.”

“‘Merge’.”

"One Way'."

“‘Be Prepared To Stop’.”

“Woah.”

After plucking for canyon ticks in the needles a wren sings riddles of melody pebbles with a tiny tongue of turquoise. It bluffs a marmot and retreats to preen deep in its family brambles.

A girl toddler smiled and asserted, “Two bewds.”

“Good job, baby. Two birds?”

“Two bewds fly a-moom.”

“Two birds fly to the moon?”

“Yeah.” The baby giggled with closed eyes. After a few seconds she reopened them smiling and blinking.

“Wow honey, that’s so silly.”

Fumbling bottles of lotion, water, and instant imitation breastmilk mom and dad heard distant croaks. They looked up to see, from above the mouth of a skeletal gray arroyo, two crows enter a cloudless sky and each slowly, eventually, directly cross the face of a daytime moon.

A long silence seemed to increase the wind.

“Ok did that just happen?”, asked mom.

“Yeah but I’m totally done with crazy shit right now. Let’s get the baby fed and changed and just go.”

Before removing a chubby arm from her eyes the baby said cheerfully, “Sleepy snake. Sleep in a tree. Silly snake sleep in a tree."

This prompted mom and dad to share an uncertain glance.

“Good job, baby.”

“Let’s just go. She ain’t hella wet or crying.”

“Still no cell service?”

“Spotty.”

J. Allen DeVera -- 2020

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