#the ONLY things setting them back from breaking out are their components trying to up and split

[apocalyptic-dancehall]

here's a concept for a fusion thing ig.. they're completely batshit and exist only to annoy the everloving hell out of the jack pack

#it's rough as fuck and that grates at me (i have a compulsion to COMPLETE things) #not putting this in the main tags. it's very au-y and situational and all of that cl-- codswallop. #they're also actually fucking tall (like i think around 6'11”-7'1”????) #i don't actually know where this'll lead #but i'm thinking. canon divergence around the time shadowtrap gets released #lots of fuckery and then they fucking MELT together and out twirls this asshat. #imagine if the eclipse in deck 13.5 was like a lunar variant. this - by default - would be the solar variant #they're half their own person and two respective quarters of clap and shady. it wants to stay fused (and so does shadowtrap. at first) #but they're also UNSTABLE AS HELL™ and anything that can go wrong for the vault hunters 99.9% of the time WILL GO SO VERRRRRY WRONG #their components are also kinda amplified here! #if claptrap was annoying; he's insufferably infuriating. if shadowtrap is vengeful; they're insanely spiteful. #and they KNOW how the other five treated clap like shit. in retaliation he raises absolute hell and they have to bob and weave around every #little obstacle he sets down. #the ONLY things setting them back from breaking out are their components trying to up and split #| ​[ aaaaanddddd tag spam break!! ] | #i might tag this tho.... #/ fusion!au #- gijinkatrap #<- although it's not exclusively a gijinka au! i might do a “canon” ver. soon!! #- velveteen pen-scribblings ]

[nanowrimo]

Beyond the Word Count: A Book Editor's Guide to Writing a First Draft

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. First Draft Pro, a 2023 NaNoWriMo sponsor, is a beautifully designed writing app for fiction writers. Today, they've partnered with Kelly Norwood-Young, former book editor for Pan Macmillan and Penguin Random House, to bring you some pro tips on writing your first draft:

In my career as a book editor, I’ve reviewed hundreds of manuscripts. I've seen the joy of authors creating compelling tales, but also how disheartening it can be to rewrite a disjointed story. I’m here to give you some strategies to address common pitfalls so that you not only reach your NaNoWriMo goal, but also lay the groundwork for a manuscript that truly deserves to be called a gripping novel.

1. Have a plan.

Even if you’re more of a ‘pantser’ than a ‘planner’, it's really helpful to have an outline. I have two favourite approaches for this: the structure-first approach, and what I call the ‘Phoebe Waller-Bridge approach’.  

The structure-first approach

There are a lot of narrative frameworks for story structure, but the most foundational in Western fiction is the three-act structure. Here’s a handy guide that breaks each of the classical three acts into a day-by-day guide to NaNoWriMo: 

8-day guide to Act 1

14-day guide to Act 2

8-day guide to Act 3

The Phoebe Waller-Bridge approach

I love this quote from Phoebe Waller-Bridge: ‘I’ve never thought structure first. I’ve always thought material first, jokes first, character first ... But knowing the end really helps. Then you just go as far away from the end emotionally as you possibly can.’  

Sketch out your major story arcs, your character’s desires and conflicts, and the world they inhabit. The more you know your story's world and inhabitants, the less you'll stray into scenes that lack purpose or create plot and character inconsistencies. 

2. Keep the story moving.

Each word needs to propel your story forward. Superfluous details or tangents that don’t serve the narrative stall the momentum you’re trying to generate for your reader. 

There’s a trick you can use to move your story forward, called the question of reversibility. Ask yourself: How difficult would it be for my character to reverse their decision? The harder it would be for them to turn back, the more you’ve moved the plot forward. 

3. Plant clues carefully.

Plant important elements early and make sure every element, however subtle, serves a purpose (i.e. Chekhov’s Gun). 

Be sure to set up necessary components for your climax so that you can steer clear of Deus ex Machina (having that strong outline will help you here), and avoid red herrings unless they serve a clear, meaningful purpose (e.g. you’re writing a mystery and your readers expect some false leads). Misleading your readers without a payoff can erode their trust.

4. Write for the reader, not yourself.

‘There is only one thing you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list,’ insists Umberto Eco in On Literature. Even if writing, for you, is a therapeutic outlet, a form of self-expression, or a way to leave a legacy, you’re still writing to say something to someone else. Your story simply won’t be as strong if you forget your reader’s perspective. 

5. Keep daily editorial notes for your future self.

While editing should wait until at least December, end each day with a brief reflection, noting any off-course deviations, potential inconsistencies, areas to research further, or moments of inspiration to revisit when you start editing. 

These daily notes will be invaluable during the editing process, helping you to remember insights that are no longer fresh when you come back to the manuscript later.

6. Embrace the first-draft mentality.

There’s a lot you can do to ensure that your first draft is the best it can be before the end of November—but just as important is to understand that all first drafts have flaws.

As a book editor, I've witnessed manuscripts transform, sometimes unrecognizably, from their first drafts. Embrace the uncertainty and creative detours—because it's from this beautiful chaos that your story will find its true voice. 

Kelly Norwood-Young is a seasoned book editor and proofreader with comprehensive experience across various facets of manuscript editing. Her background includes roles at Pan Macmillan and Penguin Books, extending into a successful freelance career working with award-winning authors. Kelly's work, known for its precision and sensitivity to the author's voice, has been integral to the success of both new and established writers globally.

Try out First Draft Pro: All NaNoWriMo participants can use the discount code NANOWRIMO2023 for 20% off a premium subscription to First Draft Pro! Offer expires January 31, 2024.

#nanowrimo #writing #first draft #writing advice #by nano sponsor #first draft pro #kelly norwood-young #plot #planning

[demonfox38]

Completed - Wild ARMs

Man, it really gives the whole plot away to know that Zepet is supposed to be translated as Geppetto. 😅

I was having another indecisive spat on what to play this June, as I wasn't in the mood to play anything in particular. (Decision fatigue gets real bad when you have literally 281 games left to beat between Steam and physical copies. Shit, that's not even getting into mini consoles…) After tossing up another poll online, the series winner for this month turned out to be "Wild ARMs." Now, I've got one mutual that is pretty sweet on "Wild ARMs 3" in particular, but I didn't want to jump right to that, as I know how it can go when you start a series further down the line, then go back in time. Features get rolled back; content gets rougher. (Well, in a world where things are always improving, that's how it goes, anyway.) So, to get a fresh taste of this series, I started with its primary release.

"Wild ARMs" (not to be confused with "Wild Guns") follows the adventures of three travelers seeking to restore life to their dying world via the help of ancient guardians, magic, and technology—at least, when it isn't trying to actively kill them. Standard RPG plot, right? The major twist here revolves around the use of iconography from the American Old West to create a whole new world and set of combat and exploration systems. Does it work? Well…it's weird to see castles and princesses in a story taking aesthetics from the distinctly anti-monarchical United States, but honestly, we're also responsible for the Disney Princess subculture. So, maybe it's not as weird of a mix as it initially seems.

This game is like every RPG and no RPG at all. Like, if you're long in the tooth with RPGs, you'll get it. Aesthetically, it's on par with contemporary titles like "Tales of Phantasia" and "Xenogears," particularly with the latter's mix of anime cutscenes, 2D sprites, and 3D battle models. ("Golden Sun" also shares a similar pseudo 3D model sprite appearance to this game, if you want some more distant connections.) Dungeon navigation and puzzle manipulation feel very "Sweet Home"/"Tales" RPG/"Paper Mario" adjacent, with each party member acquiring a set of tools to use in their environment to make their way forward. Most surprisingly to me, I kept getting this feeling of nostalgia that I have when I play "Tales of Symphonia." Like, yes, tropes get passed around like hot potatoes in this particular genre of games, but holy shit. When you have:

A boy getting kicked out of the starting village due to violence in which he was involved,

A girl struggling with the veneer and duties of her role,

A man hiding his past struggles with letting an important woman in his life down,

A woman obsessed with the magical technology from ancient ruins,

A collection of supernatural entities fighting alongside humans via summon gauges,

A set of four powerful individuals dictating the fate of the planet,

A subquest involving rebuilding a city through your donations,

A unicorn hidden in a lake that turns out to be a component for healing a serious ailment, and

A goddamn giant ass tower serving as the connective tissue between the planet and the heavens…

Like, I didn't do deep research, but I did give a 10 minute flip through MobyGames to see if there was any staff overlap between "Wild ARMs" and "Tales of Symphonia." Finding nobody crossing the lines there was surprising. Some kind of convergent evolution was going on there, I guess! Hell, maybe the only reason I'm fixating on this is because of how integral "Tales of Symphonia" was to my life, and how this felt more "Symphonia"-esque to me than its literal sequel/predecessor "Tales of Phantasia"…

The big unique feature of this game is its focus on ARMs management. No, that is not a typo! In this universe, ARMs stands for Ancient Relic Machines, which are a variety of firearms both realistic and futuristic in nature. Proper management of your ARM inventory can make or break the toughest of battles, so it's worth investing some serious cash (or Gella; weird name, I know) into your main character's weaponry. Upgradable statistics include the firearm's power, accuracy, and ammo capacity. While a handful stand out as particularly useful (given your progress in the story), it doesn’t hurt to upgrade everything.

Oh. By the way. You can make that very easy to do.

The same mutual that first brought this series to my attention also let me know about a super critical game-breaking bug. (Thanks again, @unwontedfemme!) Ya see, games from this era were mostly written up in a combination of pointer languages (C++, most likely) and assembly code. If you are not used to working with pointers, you can make a significant mistake. When fetching the value of a variable, you can accidentally pass the address of where the variable is instead of the value itself. Given that this is usually a large hex value, you can accidentally max out or overflow a variable. I suspect the following bug is a result of that behavior.

In "Wild ARMs"', you can cause an item count max-out to happen by doing the following:

Secure Nx2 Heal Berries (where N is greater than 1), an item you want to duplicate with a stock of 1, and three active teammates.

Get in a battle.

Have Teammate 1 (Rudy) heal themselves.

Have Teammate 2 (Jack) heal themselves.

Have Teammate 3 (Cecilia) swap the inventory position of the Heal Berry and the item you want to duplicate, then back out of the inventory window and attack an enemy.

If you finish the round without exiting the battle, then the second item will duplicate itself to a maximum inventory value of 255, well exceeding the intended stock limit of 99. Chaining this bug can result not only in a shitton of items (and money, if you sell 254 of them off), but this can also aid the player in maxing out character stats and spell slots, as well as helping one character reduce his skills' MP costs all to 1 a piece. Like, damn, right? It's not as easy to do as, let's say, the card swap trick from "Castlevania: Circle of the Moon." But, damned if that doesn't save time grinding! (Although, honestly, I wouldn't recommend stat boosting too much. Don't want to lock yourself out of this method, do you?)

Like, okay. "Final Fantasy VII" had a similar item duplication bug. However, being able to do this from, like, two hours in gives this cheese some extra flavor.

You might be able to make yourself a walking tank in battle, but handling your characters' toolsets may be the metric that culls the wheat from the chaff. I could see a lot of people giving up before the credits hit due to a surprise stealth section with wonky speed boosts. Additional punishing tasks can include finicky positioning with grappling hooks, false item pickups, environmental damage, hidden insta-ejects from the dungeon, and time countdowns to escape certain doom, sometimes even paired with optional (and possibly missable) content. The most excruciating challenges are definitely in optional dungeons, but it's still irksome enough to mention. I probably would have had far less patience with the game had I not been playing it through a locally burned ISO and SwanStation.

Sometimes, I just don't want to drag my PS1/2 out of the basement.

For me, the most troublesome part of handling "Wild ARMs" was getting a grip on Filgaia itself. It definitely doesn't help that the game is bouncing you around from place to place, throwing in random teleporters before you even get a ship. Good luck navigating after that!

Like, look at this in-game map:

Tell me how this is helping you locate anything.

It should probably be noted that several proper nouns and names aren't translated the best here, either. Like, the game's text didn't fall into major grammatical traps until the end of the game. However, some poor translator was having a hell of a time working katakana into English. Several character and demon names were mangled in translation, including a significant chunk of the main cast. Particular offenses were translating Siegfried into Zeikfried, Vambrace (as in, a character's last name and knight title) into Van Burace, demon Belial into Berial, and critical minor character Geppetto into Zepet. Although, to be honest, I kind of like the last one getting name mashed. It makes a particular plot twist regarding his closest main character acquaintance a little more shadowed…

Also, it's kind of fucked up to name Jewish constructs after demons, isn't it? Oops. At least the people and elements based on generalized Native American culture aren't egregiously executed. There are probably a few more war bonnets than is kosher, but that's about the worst that I (an average white girl) can pick up on. Considering they could have easily all been magical space elves or robot demons with this plot's cast, the citizens of Baskar Village are very tame. They're just practicing their own religion, keeping peace on their own island. Alright! Understandable. Definitely better than whatever the hell's going on in "Wild ARMs 2", from what I've heard…

Look. I'm not the person to come to regarding this subject. I want to come by that honestly. I'm just glad when I get something Western flavored out of Japan and don't have to side-eye J. M. Barrie or Walt Disney. Because, ya know…any misunderstanding there are the fault of people like me. The least I can do is try to keep an open eye/mind/heart and let other people know if/when something comes up.

I'm not responsible for this game ripping off Ennio Morricone's "The Ecstasy of Gold", though!

Jabs aside, this game genuinely does have good music. If you want a place to pick and choose some items, this YouTube playlist should get you on your way. Particular tracks of interest include:

Into the Wilderness (the main theme)

Alone in the World

Town

After the Chaos and Destruction

Kishum Flame (teleporter theme)

Courage (Dungeon)

Critical Hit! (the main battle theme)

Wh-What (Zed's Theme, which sounds a bit like something from a "Ganbare Goemon" game)

Lamenting and a Promes;The Demon Tower that Pierces the Heavens; Return to Ashes (vocal arrangements!)

To the Sea of Stars

Holy Mother of Darkness

Morning of the Journey (orchestra arrangement of the main theme)

Honestly, I'm surprised at how thorough this soundtrack is, plagiarism incident aside. It does a better job than the visuals do at meshing the east-meets-west dynamic "Wild ARMs" has going for it. I can't be as glowing about some of the special effects sounds (especially on some of Jack's skills), but the music is solid.

Also? I found myself stopping to take screenshots of several enemies throughout the game. A lot of the enemies are striking. Like, okay. Sometimes, they're just caterpillars and mushrooms. Other times, they're disembodied heads with jagged fangs, bloated demons, delightful clowns, congealed corpses, decapitated soldiers riding chariots, or even spider-legged centaurs. Weird and gruesome? Sure. But, I always appreciate something weird coming after me, even if it's a unicorn with a dog's jaw and a crow's tail. And hell! They found some way to work in a kitsune into a Yeehaw RPG. That has to be worth something!

"Wild ARMs" is a special kind of game. I knew I was in for something good when the game managed to pull a credit drop in the middle of a goddamn funeral march. It is everything I am familiar with, sure, but the emotional beats worked well for me. Of critical note, I didn't feel the need to rush through the game. I was willing to give this game its time, even if I had 280 other games squirming around in the backlog. I can't say every plot point was executed perfectly, but I was sated by the experience. For 30 hours? That's downright economical, as far as an RPG goes.

I'm a little bit baffled as to why this game doesn't seem to have a lot of online groundswell for it. Like, I'm not completely confused. This poor bastard was a sprite-based RPG released in 1997 on the PlayStation. Guess what other game may have been getting more attention. I wonder if the genre flavor may have been off-putting as well. For a long time, Westerns were very out of style for people my generation. Even now, people are going to gravitate more towards a fast-paced shooter rather than an RPG to treat a cowboy itch. I guess those answers are simple enough. Still, it feels shallow.

Oh, well. At least it got to have five games. And a remake, even! That's at least par to the "Breath of Fire" series. Maybe it’s not the best comparison in the world to make, but I'm assuming people at least remember "Breath of Fire" games. And it ended up on the PlayStation Classic, of all things! I mean, that's about as prestigious as being on a doorstop, but it's some kind of accolade. Not even "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night" is on that, and that's one of the most wonderful, beautiful games to ever exist on any console.

If you are a junky for retro RPGs, this game is certainly worth your time! It's efficient and effective with its runtime, managing to meld new ideas and old tropes into its own stew. I'm honestly surprised with how much I enjoyed it. It could be some "Tales of Symphonia" wires crossing over in my head, but hell. It's nice to know there are still gems buried out there. 

#post game evaluation #Wild ARMs

[silvery-bluish]

Hello! hand on chest during a casual conversation and/ or bear hugs for Arsinoe pretty please ^^

Word Count: 408 + 373 Contents: Hand on chest during a casual conversation turned into Arsinoe and Themmy pre-HB not romantic not platonic but a Secret Third Thing and. only sort of hand on chest. Set between the Psychopathor incident and the Catastrofiend incident, to ground it in the timeline a little. Bear hugs is Arsinoe and Chen, strictly platonic, and Retri spoilers. Do not ask how it actually fits into the timeline because I don't have an answer for that one.

Prompt from here!

Hand on chest during a casual conversation

“You’ve never ridden a roller coaster.” It’s said without judgment, somehow, more double-checking than asking for an explanation for your failure to do something so normal. 

“No.” You and Anathema are sitting on the edge of a building, legs dangling over the side, taking a break from patrol to drink water. Hydration is important, in the Los Diablos sun, and you’re pretty sure their acid must use water in some way, even if it’s just for the component parts, or dilution. Not that you’ve asked about the chemistry. “Never had the chance.”

“What abouuut…” they trail off, thinking for a moment, swirling their water bottle gently to watch it spin. “Cotton candy? Funnel cake? Those games that are super rigged but you always sort of want to win a stuffed animal anyway?”

“I’ve never been to an amusement park at all,” you admit, “So if that’s all amusement park stuff, no.” You’re hoping it doesn’t make you sound too much like you’ve got no idea what you’re doing, trying to be human. How often do people go to that kind of thing? Is it notably weird that you haven’t?

“We should go,” Themmy says, smiling softly. “I didn’t get to go to one till a few years ago, they’re pretty fun if you go with friends. Bet we could grab Ortega, make a thing of it. And if you don’t like it, we can just grab a bunch of food and leave with it.”

It’s a quick tap, twice to their chest over their heart with your free hand and your own heart in your throat even though they can’t know what it means, not really, and you’re not going to explain, so you follow it up with, “I’d rather just go with you. Ortega would make too much of a thing of it, and I don’t know how well the crowds will mix with,” tap your temple twice with your pointer finger. Nervous fiddling of your hands, tapping away at other things, little messages just for you.

“Works for me,” Themmy says with a shrug, taking your weirdness in stride. “Maybe we can go with a bigger group next time.” They bump your shoulders together, swaying in and out of your personal space. “This trip can just be us. Less likely to get waylaid by the Charge Popularity Vortex that way, too.”

“That is a positive,” you muse, meeting their smile with a smile of your own.

Bear hugs

You hadn’t really thought of Chen as the hugging type, before. Too aloof, remote and distrusting, helmet and metal armor and a brick wall of a mind. But, hey, you’re apparently finding out that you’re not a good judge of character a lot these days.

Keep your eyes firmly shut, it'd be dark even if you open them because you’re hiding your whole damn face, hands knotted in his shirt -- worn, cotton, some symbol on the front too faded to parse -- his arms around your back in turn, one flesh one metal both his except--

It’s because he was looking for you that he got hurt. Lost his arm. Almost died. But he was looking for you, and you don’t know if it was some sense of duty, some desire to know how all the pieces laid out even when you were dead more than because it was you who’d died, but he’d looked either way. And that was worth-- something.

“I didn’t thank you, before, did I?” you say, before you can think better of it. Your voice is muffled slightly because you’re basically just talking into his chest, but when his arms loosen you don’t pull back. You don’t want to have to look at his face when you’re talking. 

“For what?” When he realizes you have no intention of actually letting go, his arms tighten again. Steady weight against your back. Willing to wait for you to explain yourself. 

“Looking for me. It. You didn’t find me, not all of me, but it matters that you.” Tried? Looked at all? “Cared,” you settle on. “So. Thank you.”

An intake of breath. Surprise, maybe, you’re pretty sure he’d been expecting you to get mad about it. Wanted you to get mad about it, a little. “Don’t do that.”

“What, thank you?” You don’t wait for an answer, just push onward fast enough that he can’t get a word in. “I can’t believe you’re trying to turn this into an argument. Just let me say this, ‘cause I’m probably never going to say it again." A beat, and he doesn't interrupt. "It matters that you tried, to me.”

A quiet huff of a laugh, barely more than an exhale. “Alright. No argument. Not this time, at least.”

“Good.”

#fhr #fallen hero #arsinoe #bookish.txt #my writing #fhr sidestep #fhr anathema #fhr steel #pre-hb arsenic and themmy owns my Whole Heart #and i am begging revelations to allow for more platonic hugs. i think it should be allowed. #thank you for the ask! i've got one more of these but it's Fighting Me #gently patting Arsinoe's 105 steel clue and calling that a problem for b3

[phantomato]

What is your approach to writing smut and how has it evolved since you started writing fic?

This is a really good question! Thank you for asking it. 💕

Ok, so, when I started writing fic (nearly three years ago!), I made a rule for myself: I wasn’t allowed to shy away from writing anything that I enjoyed reading. If I read smut, and I read smut, I had to be willing to write it.

The techniques I’ve picked up since then are all in response to making myself face it. If something makes me nervous or embarrassed, I ask myself why. Does it feel too personally revealing? Do I not feel like I have enough information to write it convincingly? Is there some cliche or trope associated with it that I don’t enjoy? Figuring out the root cause of that anxiety helps me decide how to handle it—sometimes something too personal can be satisfied by writing “drawer fic” that I never publish, or by grounding that thing in a character’s personality or a story’s themes, so that it’s got multiple bases for existence. Information can come through more research, and often that weakness means I need to go more slowly with whatever I’m writing. Wanting to avoid cliches or tropes forces me to consider why I dislike them, because perhaps I can like the thing by changing up the standard language, or maybe I can divorce two elements that are assumed to go together and find a version that I really love. Some examples:

A Sense of Self in Decline started as an omegaverse AU fic, which is a set of tropes I don’t love when all bundled together—but I really enjoyed an idea I’d seen proposed somewhere about two alphas fucking instead of fighting one another. I wrote the first chapter based on that, then went back and revised everything so that it fit in a setting that I preferred. But the core idea of fuck instead of fight was really hot to me, and I let that inspiration drive the smut writing even though I knew I wouldn’t ultimately want to publish omegaverse AU for reasons of broader trope disagreement.

Changeling initially embarrassed me because it needed to be piss kink, a fairly niche kink often viewed as gross. But it was the correct kink for the job: the cup horcrux, symbolized by the acts of drinking and profane baptism, demanded it. So I spent a lot more time reading and thinking about piss kink in order to feel more comfortable with it as a normal thing, and my breakthrough came because, after priming myself to accept the kink, I found connections to other aspects of the fic. (The Doors—Jim Morrison and public urination—see the title.)

Most of my smut is vanilla sex, for some definition thereof, and not especially fraught in the wider context of fandom smut. I do try to include kink when I can, because I enjoy it, but one final note I’ll make is that part of interrogating my own preferences and interests and comfort as a writer is making peace with the fact that I’m just not into power differences in my sex scenes, and that’s mostly how I see kink manifest. I think that’s why the kink I have written tends towards aspects of the body (clothes, parts, functions, fluids) and notably less in the way of roles, language, and restraint. For me, writing smut is an exercise in asking myself to reinvent the wheel. It’s a space in which I spend a lot of time trying to break the act down into component parts, to build a scene from first principles rather than pre-existing set pieces. New words, new associations, new attempts to describe the actions and parts and emotions of fucking. It’s imperfect. A cock’s a cock. But this helps me to be satisfied with my sex scenes, even if they cover only vanilla acts. At least they feel hot, and novel, to me.

#writing meta #ask game

[antidotesprout]

Mad Max/Wasteland Pokémon AU

So I developed this AU in my mind and was having trouble getting it all down for like a couple months now. I've taken to affectionately calling it the Groudonverse but... Here goes. Sorry if this sounds rushed, I just had to get it out of my brain.

I'd been using Mad Max movies as background noise and all I can think about is an AU where the world was mostly modernized (like 1980s tech) and then Primal Groudon came around (I guess yay for team magma?) and fucked shit up. Now we got a desert planet with little pockets of humanity ruled by what we know as various villainous teams.

Everyone is alive at the same time and it's been about 40 years since the Primal Groudon event. As is the way of things, the way the world has gone is not Groudon's fault, humans just made the situation worse(TM), inciting wars over resources that basically got us to this point.

Meanwhile gym leaders/elite four and protagonists are leading resistances/just existing and trying to survive within the various settlements.

Vehicles in this universe are also helped along by various Pokémon due to components breaking down, so a lot of drivers team up with electric types to help power vehicles as batteries. You'll also find people modifying their cars to allow for their Pokémon to fight if they're attacked on the road.

(On a more humourous note, on a desert planet Palossand is all powerful.)

Now when I say the colonies are basically run by the villainous teams, this is actually not including Team Skull and Team Yell, because we can all acknowledge Aether and Macro Cosmos were more the villains in those respective games.

On to the juicy lil details.

The Settlements:

Rocket: The primary hoarders of remaining gasoline. They're on top of an oil field and managed to get their hands on some old refining knowledge from the before times. If you want your cars to run, you'll probably have to either attack their convoys or lift straight from them. As such they're known for a fairly ruthless security squad.

Magma: Weird religious cult that cares for the Groudon hybernating within their colony's depths. They don't really supply much to the colonies aside from guarding Groudon, but Groudon "basically started" the world down this path, so the others generally don't want to piss them off.

Aqua: if you're looking for water type Pokémon, Aqua has a monopoly. Literally you will not see water Pokémon without Aqua being involved somehow. As would be expected they're in charge of water distribution amongst the colonies. Just don't worry about the sleeping water legendary under their colony. Sure they COULD put the world back as it was, but they have so much power right now.

Galaxy: Specialize mostly in weapons and vehicles. Providing amunition, or helping to restore cars to a useable state. If it's metal, they can make weapons with it or make it move. A sort of "bullet farm."

Plasma: Mostly focus on breeding Pokémon to supply the various settlements with security. Think people that are obsessed only with breeding perfect IVs and imagine a whole group of people who cares about that and nothing else. They can't be the only people to keep Pokémon, so here it's mostly about controlling supply.

Flare: Mostly the pleasure colony and all that entails. Those that can afford leisure (gambling, drugs, sex work, alcohol) with their power can be found here when they want to have a good time. Also a hotspot for barter market places.

Aether: Focuses mainly on restoring medical supplies but also on chemical and biological warfare. For every disease they can cure they could also make everything worse for someone very quickly.

Macro Cosmos: Focuses mostly on Power/Nuclear Energy. This is to the detriment of the lower class citizens as, guess who experiences all the negative side effects/radiation poisoning? Those that can't afford to be protected of course.

All of these settlements have a complex set of interactions with each other where they're probably one bad day away from destroying everyone else, but recognize the value of each other. A very intricately balanced trade system.

Obviously none of these descriptions are 100%, every settlement has places they store their own supplies, have their own mechanics, etc. These are just specializations.

(Some of my assignments were intentional, some were just cause I knew we needed someone to handle a resource and no one else quite fit.)

Additional character notes:

-Team Skull basically are a little pocket for outcasts/burdens from various colonies. A lot of kids just left without parents to die, but Guzma wasn't having it. (So, if you're familiar with mad max lore, think the kids from the lost tribe from Thunderdome basically.) Incidentally a lot of the known protagonists in games end up here.

-Team Yell is more like a motorcycle-based nomadic scavenger group. Piers leads, showing Marnie how to survive and preparing her for when he can't be around anymore, as survival in the wasteland is never guaranteed. It's just a small group of spikey bikers doing their best and maintaining their freedom. They all escaped from the Macro Cosmos settlement to avoid radiation poisoning. They mostly survive by raiding supply convoys.

-You may be wondering where everyone's favorite train blorbo boys factor into this, and basically, when the world started going to pot, their parents were some of a group of people that went "fuck you we're going underground" and established a settlement in the subway system.

Not as creepy or dreary as it sounds, they actually managed to keep a lot of order down there. They've been surviving off a lot of low light vegetation, some gardens strategically planted under holes to the topside and Pokémon that inhabit the tunnels, as well has having their own little aquifer.

Things have been breaking down in the subway mechanisms/power supplies and since the knowledge is mostly lost the brothers are working together to get things back on track (hurr hurr). They're using Pokémon as a temporary fix until they can figure out something more permanent to provide power for the settlement they'd (accidentally) became defacto leaders of. The settlement basically is living in the cars of a train, mostly just needing to move it as a form of defense if the tunnels get breeched by anyone hostile. Just some hot little subterranean mechanics.

#i have so many in progress sketches of wasteland pokemon characters its not funny #pokemon wasteland au #groudonverse #pokemon au #pokemon evil team #mad max au #wasteland au #pokemon #pkmn

[aeionastrologyandtarot]

 Devil in The Details: Mercury Retrograde in Virgo

Devil in The Details: Mercury Retrograde in Virgo This retrograde found me sitting in front of a medical center waiting for a deliver service to pick me up, in a malfunctioning wheelchair. I spent hours calling a call center to connect me with a driver who would pick me up. While I tend avoid personal matters in my forcast, wanting you to view the transit from your own personal lens, my recent surgery urges me to share my perspective with regard to the nature of all transits and this one in particular. We understand the planets through our own experiences and observations. The astrologer can only provide the framework what you may encounter. Retrogrades are times of personal reflection and review, where we evaulate our lives from the now clinical way and from the position of a human being who past decisions and effort demand reappraise and context. Mercury Retrograde will begin on Thursday, August 23th. It will remain in the sign of Virgo for the whole of the transitt. It ends on Friday September 15 at EDT, and 1:21 pm PDT..

Virgo is a sign that are governed or under the direct influence of the planet, Mercury. Virgo (Earth) represents thought applied with pragmatic, practical approach to the physical world. Stickler for rules, Virgo is able break things down to their components, determining how they work and what ways will make them work better. Virgo, as a sign, can be practical, hardworking, supportive and observant. They can also be hypercritical, demanding, insincere and preoccupied.

Mercury Retrogrades is a time of reflection and review, where one is encouraged to reexamine important past issues. During the transit, your daily routines may be shaken up; you may encounter mental challenges, or be required to make some alternate plans regarding some daily matters. Expect to be distracted and made to improvise a great deal into the coming weeks. You may find unpredictability and randomness to be the order of the day.

This transit will ask that you re-examine and re-evaluate some important questions of your life. Determine where you’ve allowed rote, mechanical thinking to supplant your intuition or sense of spontaneity. You may possibly revisit a past experience in service to fostering an exciting new one. Remember, Retrogrades are not the time to initiate new endeavors, but review past ones. The information you uncover from revisiting issues from the past will serve you in good stead in weeks following the end of the transit on September 15th.

Mercury retrogrades are notorious for their affect upon devices of planning and communication. Telephones, computers, written message and contracts may experience problems during its passage. Try not to initiate new projects or make commitment wherever possible at this time. Keep your focus upon existing concerns instead. In light of this transit it might be in your best interest to get a second opinion or an outside observer to help review your work. Reach out to those you trust and support your research with another set of eyes.

Virgos, This retrograde is not about what you need to do, but about what have you not yet done. It will ask you to look back upon previous efforts, determining if they can help you in the future. Rediscoveries you’ll make in the coming weeks may feed and renew concerns you are truly passionate about.

Pisces, at this time, expect important breakthroughs to occur, especially with regards to your personal plans. Rather than choosing a specific course, allow yourself to explore a variety of possibilities. Once the retrograde ends you’ll possess a wide array of knowledge that will help you make best the possible choice in service to your plans. Let your internal cues provide the answer you will need.

Gemini and Sagittarius, This retrograde may ask you to revisit some past matter and to determine its importance to your future. You may have to confront a dilemma that cannot be easily overlooked or ignored. Unraveling the knot that Mercury presents you with may prove highly productive, even cathartic.

In the next few weeks get in touch with your humanity, both acknowledging your frailties and allowing for a new perspectives. Spend time in spiritual practices and creative endeavors during this period. Any creative projects should prove helpful and instructive at this time. You should dwell upon things that predate the retrograde and be mindful of starting any new works during this period.

Mercury Retrograde in Virgo may provide solutions to questions that honor the life you want to live. Listen to your inner truth and this transit may set you upon a course to an existence that is productive, bright and vigorous.

Aeion is a professional astrologer and tarot card reader with 20 years of experience. His approach is based in the belief that divination should be in employed to enhance ones' life experiences, not to predetermine them. Let Astrology and Tarot be your tools for better living.

#MercuryRetrogradeinVirgo #MercuryRetrogradeinVirgo2023 #MercuryRetrograde #Mercury #Virgo #Astrology #Transit #Planets #Signs

[xxwritemeastoryxx]

Chemical Reaction Chapter 3

Author: xxwritemeastoryxx

Pairings: No set pairings, Eventual Tony Stark x Reader

Word Count: 3K

Warnings: Arguments, mentions of injuries, horrible descriptions of medical equipment. I think that’s it. 

Author’s Note: And we’re back! I wish I could express in detail how much excitement I have over the fact that during my break I had the urge to write and write for this fic. I can’t wait for you guys to continue reading this and I hope you guys enjoy it. I also hope that it’s worth the wait for you guys. 

I do not and will not ever give permission for my fics to be copied and posted on other sites. Don’t do it. Don’t be that person that ruins it for me and everyone else.

Feedback gives me life and motivation for future things. While likes are appreciated, reblogs are gold. Seriously, if you enjoyed this in the slightest, please reblog ♥

<< Chapter 2 || Series Masterlist || MCU Masterlist || Chapter 4>>

“Why don’t you really say what you’re thinking?” She said as her eyes narrowed on him. “That there are people dead because of something I built.”

“You could have said no.” He noted as he crossed his arms over his chest. “Though I’m sure someone else would have found the means to create it.”

“And then they would be here with you doing this exact same thing. You’d be having this argument with them. Or is it just because it’s me that you’re willing to argue with every step of the way and take your anger out on?”

He shook his head. “There you go bringing that up again, believing that it’s always about you. And they say I’m the self centered one.”

“I didn’t even bring it up.” She was in disbelief. Every time Y/N had found herself in Tony’s lab they’d be having this same conversation. “But it’s like deja vu again, right?”

"Maybe next time you'll push harder for someone else to take the assignment." Much like the last several times, they weren't holding back. "That way there's no rehashing of the past." 

"You're the one that keeps bringing it up!" Her hands went up in defeat. "If it's your goal to stick it so deeply into my head, you did that years ago when you walked away! Damn it Tony, I'm trying to do my job."

"Which is no better than what Hy-"

I'm detecting a surge in energy coming from the component. 

Those words were enough to snap them out of their argument. Both of them barely had enough time to turn their attention towards the almost disassembled gun on the table. And once they had, the energy that had been building up had been released. 

The pulse of energy shot quickly out of the exposed openings of the housing unit before hitting both Y/N and Tony. With how close they had been to the component, their bodies were tossed towards opposite ends of the Lab. 

Y/N hit several pieces of equipment before coming in contact with the glass wall, causing it to splinter in several places. She had been knocked unconscious from the force of hitting the equipment moments before that the impact to the glass had been unfelt. 

Tony had been shot in the opposite direction with the only thing behind him being the wall. He had felt several of his bones crack, ensuring there would be multiple breaks and he was sure there was some brain damage with how the back of his head hit the wall. 

His vision was blurry. No matter which way he looked, there was a haze to everything. His ears had even been muffled as if something loud had gone off in his ears, yet there hadn’t been. His body was screaming from the pain it was currently feeling. How he wasn't unconscious from the impact was a mystery to him. 

Medical help is on the way.

The AI’s words were muffled enough that Tony couldn’t make them out. No matter how many times his brain tried to process the words that were said, none of it made any sense. 

“Y/N?” He tried. His own voice sounded weird to him. But he needed to hear her respond in some way. In some way that would tell him she was alright. 

His blurred vision couldn’t pinpoint where she was. The lab was a mess and nothing he attempted to focus on would clear up. The moment he attempted to move, a sharp pain shot through him, causing him to stop altogether. 

He wasn’t sure how long had passed before he caught the blurred movements making it’s way into the lab. Medical help. Tony thought before he succumbed to darkness, passing out from the pain his body was in. 

_____

She can't stay here. She's declining quickly and we don't have the equipment to help her. 

What about Tony? 

Whatever they got hit with is actually helping him heal. It's just not with her. 

In between the sea of darkness there was bits and pieces that Tony's ears had been able to pick up on. While he had been able to hear it, his mind hadn't exactly processed it as it was happening in real time. 

It's been almost a week. What are the chances of her improving or even waking up? 

Given her stats, it will be a miracle if she does. 

Has anyone told her family? 

Fury is handling that.

For a brief moment, Tony's mind understood what he was hearing. His brain instantly goes  to a vague memory of meeting Y/N's parents when they were younger. Their faces were almost blurred in his memory from the fact his attention had mostly been on Y/N as her smile grew on her face as she introduced them to him. 

How happy she had been at the introduction while Tony hadn't cared much for it. But if there was at least one thing Tony actually knew about Y/N was how much she hated the trips her parents went on. And on this particular night at a school's science fair, they had been able to make it for the very first time. 

The memory caused a slight ache in Tony's chest. For that had been the last time he had seen Y/N smile so brightly with excitement. 

He's stable and practically healed. It's up to him on when he's ready to wake up. We don't exactly know what it did to him. 

How far did they get in their research?

They were just getting started. 

The steady pace of a heart Monitor played in Tony’s ears, mixed with several other machines going. Between each beep of the monitor he could hear the patterned sounds of a ventilator going. With each woosh and pause, Tony’s hearing focused on that sound. It seemed to ground him in place in comparison to the other sounds. If anything, the sound helped to pull him out of his slumber. 

As Tony slowly opened his eyes, he first noticed the lights had been dimmed in comparison to any hospital he ever been in. It made it easier for his eyes to adjust instead of being blinded upon waking up. With each blink of his eyes, he tried to piece where exactly he was. 

“It’s a good thing you woke up on your own.” Hearing the voice cause Tony to turn his head in the direction it came from. Once he did, he found Natasha leaning against the wall by the bed across the room. “I was about to ask for some shock pads.”

A small huff of a chuckle passed Tony’s lips. The sound quickly ended the moment Tony’s eyes landed on Y/N for the first time. His eyes widened as he took her in. The majority of the sound he heard while waking up had come from her bedside. Y/N had been hooked up to more machinery than he had ever seen someone have. Tubes and wires were surrounding her in one way or another. 

Seeing Tony’s reaction, Natasha walked over towards Tony’s bed and sat beside him. “It’s not good Tony.”

“How bad?” He asked as he began to pull himself up to sit in a comfortable position.

“You’ve both been out a week so far.” That had caused Tony’s eyebrow to raise. “Your stats have been stable over the last several days. However, hers have fluctuated constantly.”

“We thought we lost her.” Bruce said as he began walking into the room, followed by Dr. Cho. 

Over the last week, the two of them had been trying to figure out how to stabilize Y/N so they could transport her. But every attempt they made had only brought them right back to square one. While Cho went to check on Y/N’s vitals, Bruce walked further into the room by Tony’s bed. 

“Care to clarify?” Tony asked with a raised brow. 

“After. J.A.R.V.I.S. alerted us to what happened and isolated the component, how we found you both was shocking.” Bruce shook his head at the memory. “I thought Y/N was gone with how injured she looked.” He sighed a moment before tapping on the tablet he had walked in with before holding it up for Tony. 

Tony watched as the footage from a week ago began to play on the screen. He watched as he and Y/N had argued with each other. He watched as the damn component began to glow right under their noses and they hadn’t paid any attention to it. But the part that made him cringe was the way Y/N had been thrown against machinery before hitting the glass window. 

"We can't transport her to a hospital." Natasha added as she watched Tony. "Any attempt to move her, she starts declining rather quickly." 

"How quickly?" Tony asked, bringing his attention to Natasha. At his question he could see the way her eyes saddened at the information she knew. Tony knew there was no positive answer. 

“She went into cardiac arrest on the way up to the helipad.” Natasha looked over at Y/N. “By the time we got her back down here, her heart started beating on its own again.”

“Fury had brought in every medical expert on and off his payroll.” Bruce looked over at Y/N as he pulled the tablet back to his side. “Without them coming here, she wouldn’t have gotten some of the help she needed. But even then there was only so much they could do.”

“How she didn’t end up with a severed spinal cord is beyond anything I could imagine.” Dr. Cho added as she wrote down information on the clipboard she had in her hand. “Whatever that was, it saved both of you from death. However I can’t even begin to explain why she hasn’t been healing at the rate you have.”

Tony let what they told him sink in for a moment. The blast had really did a number on them. He and Y/N had been closer in proximity than the two used in the experiments. They had gotten up minutes after being exposed, but for him and Y/N, they had been out for a whole week. 

A week where he recovered while Y/N was fighting to stay alive. Where one minute she'd be stable and if moved she'd rapidly decline in a way no one had seen before. 

No noticeable changes had been noted about the man. His heath had been the same as before he had been hit by the weapon source. Reports indicate that the woman also survived this test trial, making it successful. However, her health declined significantly in the days to follow. 

“How significantly?” Tony asked. 

"Her organs began to shut down. As much as they tried to keep her alive, she died two weeks later.” 

The conversation played through his mind instantly as he sat there taking in what they told him. The words on a loop that he couldn’t pull himself out of. And if what they knew was true, the probability of her making out of this were very slim. 

Tony shook his head before before running his hand down his face. “Before it went off, we had been going through the files J.A.R.V.I.S. had downloaded. The test trials Hydra had done, the woman didn’t survive past two weeks.”

Saying the words felt hard. While it had been a part of their research, they were now looking at a situation where Y/N was now in that very position. If they had been unconscious for a whole week, that meant if everything based on that research was correct, Y/N only had a week left.

“We’ve been trying to find ways to slow the process.” Natasha shook her head. “Thor has even gone off world to try and find something out there. But there’s only so much that modern medicine can get her. Fury’s best can keep her alive, but she’s not getting any better.”

Tony sighed. “Has anyone told her parents?”

Bruce nodded. “Fury informed them. They come when they can to see her. They believe she’ll come out of this. But if what you’re saying is true-”

“We don’t know that for sure.” Tony added in before Bruce could finish his thoughts. “This is different from what Hydra was doing. For all we know it could go based on from when she woke up. We were at closer proximity. There’s a chance she could make it pass the two weeks.”

“Where do we even begin on starting to figure that out?” Natasha asked as her eyes moved to each of them before setting on Y/N. 

“Start with blood analysis.” Tony offered. “Hydra’s notes mentioned their blood being altered. We can start there and work our way up.” 

“I’ll go grab what we need.” Dr. Cho said before stepping out of the room.

The moment Dr. Cho was out of the room, Tony sighed. “Where is it now?”

“Encased under protective glass. It was the first thing we did after getting you two set up in here.” Natasha gave him a small smile. 

“Can you run a few scans on it?” Tony asked looking towards Bruce. “Anything to help give us a base on where to go. There was nothing a week ago and I’m hoping that J.A.R.V.I.S picked something up by now.”

"I'll head near the lab and see what I can go off of." Bruce turned to leave before looking over his shoulder. "I'm assuming I'm being granted the clearance she had?" 

"Yeah. As long as you aren't adding your own protocols into J.A.R.V.I.S. I won't complain."

_____

It had been hours after the others had gotten started on testing out theories. Even Natasha was attempting to get a hold of old contacts to see if they possibly heard of what Hydra was making into a weapon. But while Tony was able to get himself up and out of bed, he couldn't bring himself to leave the med bay. 

At some point he found himself sitting in the chair beside Y/N's bed. He didn't say anything or do anything but take in everything she was connected to. The sounds around him continue to play in his ear just as it had before he had awakened. 

Tony noticed that Y/N was bruised in several places. The ones he could see along her face had yellowed in comparison to some of the darker bruises that covered her arms and hands. It was as if they refused to heal while others healed as her body normally would. It was those darker bruises that reminded him that between the two of them, she had the hardest impact with the blast. 

It was hard to wrap his own head around his injuries after seeing the footage. That kind of impact against the wall should have killed him or at least left him with some kind of damage. But the only proof he had from being in that blast was a few scratches that were scabbed over and almost healed. 

There were many things that Tony knew and understood. But the one thing he couldn’t figure out was why Y/N was still in that bed, fighting for her life when he was sitting there practically healed. He couldn’t figure out why the component had easily selected the males to thrive while the women fought for their lives. 

Or maybe it was just a fluke chance. Maybe the other trials that failed were the ones where the women thrived and the men fought to stay alive. But without actual data, there was no way to tell. 

And God he hated the fact that there was no way to figure out just how much the component had altered them yet. He hated how helpless he felt at that moment. All he could do was watch Y/N as her body fought to stay alive. 

As much as Y/N could push all the right buttons to set him off, there was a time where they weren't at each other's throats. Where the possibility of a future together was more possible than the life they currently were living. That kid who wouldn't hesitate to help give her the world was now looking at Y/N through the eyes of the man that failed her in many ways. 

That life felt several lifetimes ago in comparison to the lives they were currently living. Tony knew that he no longer knew anything about Y/N. He knew that her world was now vastly different from his. And as his eyes lingered on her face, he knew deep down that he was the very reason, like many times in the past, that she was hurt. 

A sigh passed his lips as he lifted his right hand to reach for hers. If holding her hand helped ease the immense guilt he felt, he'd hold it for as long as possible. But it stopped in mid air once his eyes landed on his own wrist. 

Smaller than the tip of his finger was a design he hadn't seen before. At first glance it looked as if a small spring had been drawn on his wrist. But as he brought it closer to his face to examine it, he realized it was a small double helix segment. 

His eyebrow raised as he tried to rub the image off of his skin. But it hadn't changed. It stayed in place as he even licked his thumb before bringing it to the image and rubbed at it once more. 

Tony knew he hadn't seen that once he woke up. It sure as hell wasn't there before he had been hit. Even as he went through a quick work up with the residing medical staff, he didn't remember seeing it or anyone bringing it up. 

Looking over at Y/N, he paused for a second before reaching out for her hand once more. Gently, he turned her right wrist over. There, directly in the same place, had been the very same mark on her.

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[icharchivist]

"Percy villain arc", does Aglovale mean nothing to you people

You're right though, it would be funny to see Percy go truly evil. The fire association is super common in villains. Making it hot in several senses. You're completely valid

LIKE I SAID -- it's about a different type of villainy!! the brothers may look alike but they're not interchangeable!!!!

Aglovale's villainy came from an hatred of all of humanity, a desire to control people out of fear, and a desire to get his family back, including his mother.

Lamorak's villainy came from selflessness, a desire to help absolutely everyone who ever experienced massive heart pain that can only be solved by revenge, a savior complex so big he ends up helping the most dangerous of people, while putting himself in danger and therefore also keeping his family as far away as possible from him so he doesn't get swayed into going back on his words.

A Percival's villainy arc would never be like Aglovale's because Percival never let go of his desire to see good in people, and he wouldn't keep his family away like Lamorak.

Like i said i do think it's a bit hard to see a path to villainy Percival can take when his brothers went to both different extreme to start with. I think what makes Percival's arc strong is that he's not tempted by snapping, and that he is holding strong despite the fact he sees how his brothers are torn apart by the same trauma they all share.

I personally love the fact Percival doesn't seem to be in any situation to snap, but i like thinking about what if he did actually go apeshit. What if he got tired of fixing his brothers' shit. He's constantly having to clean up after them because they mishandled their trauma while he is trying so hard to make it something productive.

And it's not like Percival doesn't have a mean edge. Remember when he insulted Lancelot when they found him in a cell after he's been tortured, because Lancelot "only had himself to blame" for turning a blind eye to the wrongs of the King? and that it essentially came from how he's been hurt that Lancelot abandonned him during the Siegfried's debacle and the fact Lancelot blindly supporting people in position of power rather than getting to the bottom of something was something Percival found reprehensible. (i have many thoughts about this).

That's why i think two componants to break Percival is if the weight of his brothers' sins get lifted off his back, so he's less alert to his own shortcomings as he's no longer in this state of survival about holding his family together, and losing MC, which would set him in a situation of thinking "despite everything i do i still lose the people i care about." (especially, once again, because MC is the only person who never disappointed Percival, which is why Percival always was so unconditional in his way to be attached to MC, in ways even the Dragon Knights nor his Brothers can live up to.)

It's like "you can do everything right and still lose", in comparaison to his brothers who just did things wrong.

how do you deal? how do you cope? this grief was supposed to stay in the past, yet whatever you do it still comes back to catch up on you.

there's a potential there that is completely unlike what Aglovale and Lamorak went through in their own villain arcs, and it's what i'd personally explore if we give Percival an evil arc.

It'd be hot! especially if it's about MC which i have totally neutral reasons to want personally obviously.

But as it is i just really like the idea of him being the only one to keep things together while the familial trauma is destroying the rest of his family. Feels nice feels organic and i'm just genuinely invested in this storyline, is all!

#between you and me though there's also sort of the fact i relate to Percival's position in his family #as the youngest of three and the fact my siblings are a hot mess in term of the family's bagages and trauma we have #trying desperately to hold on together and take all of the responsibilities when your older siblings fall apart #while being in a position where you should be vulnerable// where your siblings see you as vulnerable and yet add more pain to your load #and this idea of how wanting so bad not to fuck up like your older siblings did #is already something that is its own weight on to itself #but one that can easily crush you down and make you wonder why even bother when in the end it's for nothing #and this is the feeling i'm canalizing for Percival's evil arc that i can't have just from his siblings arc #and like ofc this is not exactly what Percival goes through in the sense that he didn't expect having to clean up after them like that #but it's one that ends up resonating a lot once the stories are over and you see how much he has to deal with all of this #also don't mind me i'm being Super Normal about the Wales brothers #just one day a friend pointed out that there were similarities between my siblings and theirs and suddenly my world came crashing down #and i realized just why BFAF left such a huge impact on me despite predating the Very Well Written granblue events. #.... i'm very normal about Percival granblue and that's why i never talk about him #ichareply #ichafantalks gbf #anonymous #ichablogging 4kishi

[spikybanana]

@wolfstarmicrofic - prompt: limit - mathematicians au I just wanted to make a stupid extended pun/metaphor shhhh

Remus stood at the front of the empty classroom, brows pinched and holding a chalk in his hand suspended inches from the blackboard. To his left sprawled a wall’s worth of equations, derivations, all the key ingredients they’d laboured on that should be culminating towards the theorem’s proof; and to his right— blank. Black, blank.

Compute correctly the function’s limit, and the lemma would immediately follow. Then he’ll have caught up with the subcases Sirius was handling. But no matter how much he stared at the line of symbols in front of his eyes, they refused a shred of enlightenment. Where was Sirius? Perhaps he’d finally realised this idea of theirs was no good, and made a run for it. But they’d been wrangling with this for so long, put so much of themselves into— he wouldn’t leave now, right? This was theirs, this was them. Limit, somewhere on the set’s boundary, a well-defined rule governing behaviour of its components. It had to exist, Remus just didn’t yet see. Why didn’t it make sense? It’s been five hours and three tea breaks and at least a dozen different attempts at the computation, but his hand continued to hover, his mind stranded by lack of progress.

Where was Sirius? Was he trying to keep away, appalled by the mathematical mess spilled by Remus’ one original question? But this was what brought them together in the first place, the adrenaline-rush of discovery, of something undeniably real but defied all the established definitions. But maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe he’d made a mistake, and Sirius had realised before him. Maybe Remus was just seeing things while in reality there were only dead ends, like this limit he could not find.

Or maybe, Sirius was staying away because of him. They’d always been close, and grew closer with the years. Sirius was— the most important person in Remus’ life, tethered by the unnamed intangible something he had always thought they shared— but were they now drifting away? It wasn’t exactly like their other friends. Around them everyone was coupling off, becoming something to each other, something defined with names, like a boyfriend or girlfriend, even fiance, husband or wife. Partner, lover. But where on this map was Sirius and him? None of these words felt right— none of them really even made sense to Remus. He knew Sirius agreed, but, maybe they should have heeded to the amused, half-dismissive frowns from others when they’d asked. What were they? They kept getting closer, sure. They’d gotten so close Remus sometimes wondered if Sirius didn’t half-live in his soul— but was there not a limit? Something they were approaching to become? How did you show someone how important they were, without a name like a hook to hold on to them?

Remus closed his eyes, leaned back against a table and rubbed harshly at his temples to scold his own distraction. He shouldn’t have gone into research. Nobody ever knew the right way of doing anything and how did he expect this to be something his traitorous, irresolute brain could handle? And Sirius, brilliant, confident Sirius, wouldn’t he have been much better off without Remus?

Soft knocks sounded at the open door, and Remus’ eyes flew open. Oh, it was Sirius.

“There you are.” Sirius flashed him a grin, drawing an involuntary smile out of Remus.

In a few soft, swift steps, Sirius was by Remus’ side. “Here,” he thrust out a sheet of scrap paper, heavily scribbled over, and tugged the pencil out from where it held up his hair, “see if this makes any sense to you?”

“Probably not.” Remus snorted, squinting almost cross-eyed at the tiny writings, “I don’t know why you insist in not using normal paper. Are you angling for one of those back-of-a-fag-packet discoveries someday?”

“Hush with that, let a man dream.” Sirius nudged him in the middle, “so what are you stuck on?”

Remus non-committally indicated the board, not looking away from Sirius’ sheet of paper. He hummed as he deciphered lines of an elegantly unfolding proof, and in the corner of his eye, he could just catch the way Sirius pondered at the panes of blackboard, lips half open and a thumb on his chin. 

“Huh.” Sirius tilted his head with the tiniest frown. 

“What is it?”

Sirius stepped forward, stood in front of where Remus had left off, and raised a piece chalk to one, two lines above the last, circling something in red. The air condition droned somewhere inside the roof, and Sirius chewed his lips while considering the line. Then he turned around, meeting Remus’ eyes with certainty. 

“This topological space—” he said, “it’s not closed. The limit doesn’t exist.”

Remus’ eyes widened. Oh. “The boundary is— undefined! Of course!”

“Yessir.” Sirius dropped the chalk smugly with a clank, “so we’re okay?”

"We’re okay.” Remus breathed out, looked at Sirius in wonder. The boundary doesn’t exist. That meant— that meant the answer was further off than they thought, but there were paths sprawling out to be explored. They just had to keep looking. “More than okay— brilliant.” 

#my writing #wolfstar microfic #remus lupin #sirius black #wolfstar #microfic #mathematicians au #academics au #hello from insomniastan #fake maths pls don't come at me #I don't actually know what I'm talking about #did this work? #i hope it worked #800 words #aroace stuff #implied

[thebreakfastgenie]

for WIP asks the 4th of july fic.

and ik you were already quite generous with it but would love to hear anything else about 69

Sorry it took so long to get to this one! I was really excited about it and then I was either too busy or too tired to answer it properly!

The 4th of July fic my take on a time loop. It's contained within GFA. Hawkeye relives July 4th, 1953, over and over again, trying desperately to prevent tragedy on the bus, while no one else remembers. I was actually influenced a lot by Slaughterhouse-5, even though it's not a time loop. Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time and sometimes that means he's living his post war life and wakes up back in the bombing of Dresden. That's certainly what PTSD can feel like. So I started thinking about how I could use a time loop as a narrative device.

The time loop takes the emotional experience of reliving a traumatic event over and over again in your mind, of being trapped in that moment, and makes it a physical one. A common component of time loop stories is that the protagonist must prevent something terrible from happening, and only when the bad outcome is averted will the loop be broken. This, too, reflects an emotional experience, the constant "what could I have done differently? how could I have stopped this?" Maybe the real time loop was the trauma we had along the way.

In this case, Hawkeye is trying to save the lives of everyone on the bus. I don't want to say too much about the loop, because part of the story is going to be figuring that out as Hawkeye does. Just as the loop is about trauma, breaking the time loop is about moving forward. This fic gets very heavy and dark towards the middle, but it's not a pure angst fic, it's just what the story requires. In the end I would say it's about choosing hope.

The idea is basically what if GFA was a time loop, and we only saw one iteration of it? That means it's fairly canon-compliant. I'm also trying to incorporate a lot of details from GFA. I can't share a snippet, but I'm hoping to finish it by July 4th, 70 years after the day it's set, so if I manage it you'll see it soon!

****

I am more than happy to share more about untitled 69. I'm trying to motivate myself to work on it, at least once 4th of july is done. I had a ton of momentum on it a few months ago and then I got sick and it got left in this very chaotic, mid-draft-reorganization state. This fic was supposed to just open with Trapper at the reception for the new chief of thoracic surgery, where he meets Charles, but in true me fashion, I ended up getting into Trapper's homecoming and emotional state and in the process writing about a bunch of stuff that happened earlier. One thing I'm excited about is how Trapper relates (or doesn't) to his colleagues. He has one friend who's close enough to know about Hawkeye, because I needed someone to bounce Trapper off of in dialogue, and I really love the dynamic that developed between them. I don't think this snippet is as good as the last one, but:

Trapper tugged at his collar. He was having trouble breathing, though he knew that had more to do with the fog of cigarette smoke than the snugness of his tuxedo. If Louise were here, she would scold him—it had taken her ages to get his bowtie right—but she wasn’t here, so she could keep her comments to herself.  Louise hated these things almost as much as he did. Working class girls either grew up into women who loved glamor or hated it, and Louise had never seen any use for it. It was one of the things he loved best about her, and probably what drew him to the nurses in Korea, besides proximity—their short fingernails and practical attitudes. 

This is Trapper being miserable at the party (more on that later!) and me fleshing out both him and Louise a little bit.

#thank you!!! #this one really did take so long because I wanted to do it right lol

[taiblogcomics]

Apex Predator

Hey there, shaving nicks. Well, we're on our last issue of this batch of Avengers Arena reviews! We'll take another short break to cleanse our palate again--I have something very nice lined up for that--and then we'll do the last six issues over the course of the summer. After that... Well, who knows~? One travesty at a time, please.

Here's the cover:

Hazmat, dear, I don't think you should be watering the trees with blood. It's not healthy for them--in fact, you could say it makes them sick-amore. I know you took the time to dig out your little tournament bracket to fill with blood in order to do so, but... Just sayin'. Maybe you didn't need to spend the time to do that. Speaking of, this whole thing probably would've gone a lot smoother if Arcade had used a bracketed gladiator tournament model instead of the battle royale format. It was 2013! Battle royale games weren't even in vogue yet! If you just waited a couple years, Arcade, you could've invented Fortnite! Alas, we have only this to ridicule him for~

So last time, Hazmat got her groove back, and she and Reptil joined the others in going to look into what happened to Nico. Unfortunately, what happened to Nico was Apex, who we now have to endure as our narrator for this issue. And she starts with some pretentious twaddle about how "no one thinks they're the villain of their own story", and asking us who the villain of this story is. Is it her? Is it Arcade? Is it the superhero community that let this happen? Is it the audience who keeps this going? No, I'm pretty sure it's you, dear. You're the one murdering people.

And speaking of people she murdered, we cut over to Nico lying in the snow. Suddenly some purple energy crackles off the Staff of One, slurps into Nico's orifices, and raises her from the dead--and off her feet. The Runaways were probably the third-biggest name in this series after X-23 and Reptil, you didn't really think she was staying dead, did you? She's about to show everyone exactly why too much pink energy is dangerous, as she finishes reviving and takes off flying in a huge colourful cloud of flames.

Apex is still monologuing about her dreck, starting on about how Murderworld isn't a story, it's a game. Arcade said so! And that games don't have heroes or villains, just winners and losers. Oh, she's one of those folks who thinks games are just pure numbers and haven't evolved since the arcade days. She's also listening to Arcade, so she's definitely an idiot. Thankfully, Nico shows up to put a stop to her garbage musings. She then uses her wand to collect up all the forest fire and redirect it at Apex. Smokey would be proud~

Speaking of Arcade, we cut over to him being a smug douchebag, eating popcorn as he enjoys Nico's attack on Apex. Hey, man, you may have set up this scenario, but this isn't for you. He does, at least, helpfully exposit about Nico's new power-up. See, the Staff of One usually requires a blood sacrifice for her to use. A couple drops is sufficient. But she died. That's about as much blood as you can sacrifice. So the Staff's rebuilt her from the ground up (even regrew her missing arm) and filled her with as much magic as it can muster.

Apex is taken aback because she thought she already killed Nico, but she's happy to try it again. She breaks into her stupid villain monologue again, thinking maybe she's the hero because she's the only one playing Murderworld by its rules. "Villains hate rules", she says, completely failing to acknowledge that Lawful Evil is a legitimate alignment. Anyways, "maybe I'm not the villain here" is a valid line of thought. "Maybe I'm the hero here because I'm the only one killing people" is definitely not.

The battle rages on. Nico uses a spell to simply reduce Deathlocket's arm cannon to its component pieces, removing her lethality from the fight. The Darkhawk powers are a bit more complicated, so she then hits Chase with a hard enough blast to return him to his sense--for a moment. Chasehawk returns fire, and Apex snatches the Staff of One in the moment, starting a gloat. But Nico just recalls the Staff with a word, to Apex's surprise, and then just closes the dirt up and around Apex, taking her out.

Chase is returned to his senses again, and he tries to apologise. Nico doesn't want to deal with that right now, though, and she just wants to sit with him quietly for a bit. Meanwhile, the dirt that swallowed up Apex and Deathlocket has dumped the pair into some underground facility. Locket also returns to her senses, while Apex remains limp and lifeless. Sneaking around a bit, Deathlocket finds a room full of the preserved bodies of the other Murderworld victims, among other science experiments. She realises where she is: Arcade's inner sanctum...

This is what I’m gonna call a catharsis issue. Once the smug douche is done smugging it up, they get their very justified beatdown by someone we like, and the world returns to good things again. Hopefully it won’t be the last one of the series, I can think of another smug douche who also needs his beatdown. Otherwise, a pretty all right issue. Resurrected a character, beat up the insufferable jackass, and end on a bit of mystery.

Now we have only six issues left! But next week, as stated above, I’ve got a couple things on the back-burner to tide us over. Why ruin this good feeling~?

#comics #reviews #Avengers Arena #Taiblog

[mr-hammer-exe]

Wake up, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve made another .EXE OC. 

Before you go ahead and ask “Who the fuck is Zarzethroz?”, I’ll get down to business and explain. 

So, Zarzethroz (at least the version of him shown in these doodles) was an offshoot of the mysterious entity dubbed “The End”. As you may have expected from that detail, he was a scourge to the Ancients for some time, but was ultimately sealed away. 

That was until however, following the events of Bad Guys #4, Dr. Eggman discovered the hidden ruins where he was sealed beneath Eggperial City.  Upon making this discovery, he re-awakened and ultimately captured Zarzethroz - as pictured above with his Orb Form in a containment device with the mad doctor’s emblem -. 

Afterward, Eggman struck a deal with Zarzethroz, explaining that a certain blue rodent (you should know who I’m talking about) was getting in his way of doing things for years, wondering if this entity could be of help to him. 

Zarzethroz, having been greatly weakened for thousands of years, agreed to help Eggman in return for regaining his strength. For some time afterward, whilst Dr. Starline was putting together the necessary components to his goal of overtaking Eggperial City - and the entirety of Mobius to an extent -, Eggman would conduct research on Zarzethroz, keeping him contained within the command tower as he waited for his chance to be freed. 

Fortunately for him, that day would soon arrive in the wake of the aftermath of Starline’s offensive on Eggperial City. As you may know, Surge infiltrated the tower and snagged the Dynamo Cage from a storage room before proceeding to cause more damage the rest of the tower’s interior to some degree. 

During this, however, Zarzethroz noticed Surge, sensing a great deal of power coupled with intense negative emotions from within her. That’s when a thought struck him. While still on her rampage within the command tower, Surge accidentally ended up breaking the containment device that kept the weakened Zarzethroz imprisoned. 

Without anyone noticing - not even Surge herself - amidst all the chaos, Zarzethroz infiltrated Surge’s mind, where he began to slowly overtake it. Soon enough, Surge decided to leave Eggman alone for now to go after Sonic, thus quickly fleeing from Eggperial City and landing within the outskirts. 

Shortly after Surge arrived there, Zarzethroz took the form of Starline in order to break her down even further, which in turn would cause her psyche to slowly fall under his control each time.

Furthermore, every time Surge absorbed a source of energy using the Dynamo Cage, it would also make Zarzethroz stronger, thereby accelerating the process of him gaining control over her mind. 

Towards the end of Issue #56, when the Dynamo Cage overloads and Surge falls unconscious, Sonic soon gets back up, gasping for air as the Wisps all quickly rush over to him, making panicked sounds and gestures. 

Sonic asks them what’s wrong after noticing this, but he’s unable to understand what they’re trying to tell him. That is until Tails uses the translation feature on his MilesElectric to discern what they’re saying, which revealed that they were warning Sonic to get out of there as fast as he could, leaving both him and Tails confused, and even somewhat scared. 

Nearby, Surge regains her consciousness only to see that she’s having an out-of-body experience, given away by the fact that she can see through herself coupled with giving off a faint green glow. Understandably, she freaks out and tries to get the attention of Sonic and Tails, but they can’t see or hear her. 

To make matters worse, Surge hears the voice of Starline from behind her once again, who then reveals himself to have been Zarzethroz in disguise all along. Almost immediately, Zarzethroz opens a vertical cavity within his chest, from whence a set of sharp, thorny tendrils flail outward from, grabbing Surge. 

She tries fighting back, but soon falls into some sort of trance induced by Zarzethroz’s influence. The demonic entity then pulls Surge’s soul into himself as she accepts it. Zarzethroz then turns his attention to Surge’s unconscious body, where he then enters. 

At that same moment, Eggman directs Metal Sonic to acquire both Surge and the Dynamo Cage. Right before Metal Sonic would’ve done so, Surge suddenly snaps awake before brutally tearing the mechanical hedgehog to pieces, causing Sonic, Tails, Eggman, Kit, and the Wisps to all watch in shock, with the latter most cowering in fear behind the heroic duo. 

Kit tries to get Surge’s attention, only to get no response for a short time as she stares at the mess of what once was Metal Sonic. Out of nowhere, without any warning, Surge completely lashes out at everyone before subsequently going on a psychotic rampage, even hurting Kit in the process. 

Sonic soon has enough of this and tries to talk Surge down, only for her to transform into the possessed variant of herself - dubbed Surge.EXE, no surprise there -. 

At that point, Eggman’s face turns completely pale as he realizes what’s going on, prompting him to get out of Starline Base Sigma with the pieces of both Metal Sonic and the Dynamo Cage in tow. 

Rightfully so, Kit is horrified to see his partner (hell, even his big sister) turn into this bloody-eyed psychotic maniac, but not before Sonic decides to take him, Tails, and the Wisps out of there whilst the demented Tenrec tries to hunt them down. 

By some miracle, they all escape and retreat back to the others, unsure of what’s going on or what they’ll do next. 

And that’s where I’ll stop for now due to how long this is. 

#sketches #my art #traditional art #i have a digital version on the way #sth #sonic the hedgehog #idw sonic #sonic.exe #.exe oc #au #alternative universe #kitsunami the fennec #surge the tenrec #tails the fox #miles tails prower #dr. eggman #dr. starline #lore #tw: gore #tw: body horror #demon #oc #writing #draft #reference sheet

[iamvegorott]

Don't Starve Emotions Ch. 3

Finding Mad

“Mad probably remembers all of the blueprints. I at least remember the basic ones,” Phantom said. He and Jackie were at the back of the group once more as they all walked, each person holding their own torch. The sun had set a bit ago, and Phantom hoped it wouldn’t stay dark for long. They must be at the beginning of the game, and those nights were short. 

“Are you sure he’s okay?” Jackie asked.

“Like I said earlier, Mad’s probably better off than we are. I might have started playing this game first, but Mad learned it.” Phantom felt better saying these things out loud, making himself believe it more and more. “I know I give him shit for being his nerdy little self, but he’s a whole hell of a lot smarter than I am, and if he’s struggling, then we’re fucked.” He laughed at the last part, trying to play it off as a joke, but his laugh ended a bit strained. If Mad was struggling…he honestly didn’t want to think about that. 

“Are we able to make backpacks to help us carry this stuff?” Jackie asked, catching on to Phantom’s worry and somewhat changing the subject.

“Yes, but we need a science machine to do that,” Phantom answered. “We have the rock and stone for it but not the gold. I don’t remember how many pieces of rock and stone we need. I just remember that’s the components needed.”  

“Gold? How do we find gold here?” Jackie tried to look around but couldn’t see anything beyond the light he and Phantom held. 

“They’re in the big boulders of rock, but only some have it. We’ll need to make a pickaxe, find the ones with gold veins and break it.” Phantom explained. 

“At least I know I can be helpful with breaking and chopping.” Jackie chuckled, looking up when the sky suddenly went from pitch-black to fully lit. “That’s going to take some getting used to.” Phantom nodded in agreement and jogged a little to catch up to Bing.

“Mind if I touch your chest again?” 

“Go for it.” Bing stopped walking so Phantom could play with the map. 

“Good, it shows the mini markers as well. Looks like we passed some boulders, none of them are gold ones, but we can still go back and get them later. There are also some berry bushes we went by as well. Those we’ll definitely want to go back for if we haven’t grabbed enough carrots by the time we get to Mad.” Phantom wasn’t sure if anyone was even listening to him, but hopefully, they’d get it in their subconscious. “No spider nests yet, though.” 

“Spider nests?” Anti and Mare both froze. 

“Shit, yeah, there are spiders in this game,” Phantom said to Mare, knowing he wasn’t the…biggest fan of them. But he wasn’t expecting to see the fear in Anti’s eyes and how Chase and Marvin were talking to him, trying to calm him down. Was Anti scared of them too? Now that was unexpected. 

“I’m kicking your ass if we run into one of those things.” Mare threatened. He was starting to remember some parts of the game, having somewhat watched Mad and Phantom play, and felt a shiver go up his spine at remembering how big the spiders are compared to the characters. Maybe the sizing would be different? Hopefully? 

“Fight the spiders and then fight me,” Phantom said.

“I could kill two birds with one stone and just throw you into the spiders.” Mare scoffed. 

“And I’ll throw the spiders back.” Phantom countered. 

“Can we not fight right now?” Chase said.

“The last time you two went at it, we ended up here,” Marvin added.

“Now is the time to be level-headed. Have your discourse when we are home.” Dark seemed to be on edge, eyes never focusing on one spot for longer than a moment. He was playing off being calm very well, but those who knew him well could tell. Sadly, the one who would notice was busy. Wilford had a hold of JJ’s hand and was whispering that everything was going to be okay since JJ’s nerves were much more obvious. 

“If I was-” Mare’s comeback was cut off by crying. A glance at Bing showed they were almost on top of the red dot that should be Mad. “Mad!” Mare took off right then and there, the others running as well to keep up with him. They broke through the wall of trees and…

They found Mad. 

Mad was curled up on the ground under a tree, and his hands pressed tightly over his ears. His breathing was ragged between his sobs, and his body was covered in cuts and scrapes, leaving his skin and clothes caked with blood. 

“Mad!” Mare cried out and rushed right over to him, falling to his knees and wrapping his arms around Mad to pull him into a hug. “It’s okay, starlight, I’m right here, I’m here.” 

“Make-Make it stop. Make it stop.” Mad begged, pressing himself against Mare and now crying into his chest. 

“Mad…?” Phantom felt his throat tighten with guilt. Mad was hurt, and suffering…and it was all his fault.

“Two of those numbers are almost at zero,” Henrik said to Phantom.

“Is the red one?” Phantom’s voice came out shaky with fear. 

“Yes…it is only at five, and the other is at ten.” 

“Shit!” Phantom pulled himself away from his pity and knew he needed to act fast to save Mad and the others. “If anyone grabbed flowers, I need them now.” He took out the ones he grabbed. Phantom couldn’t remember the exact number he needed but knew it would only need flowers. “We need spider guts and ash to make a healing salve. Get flint and sticks to make more axes and try to find a nest, make sure to grab the webs too. We’ll get some butterflies as well since we can use those to heal too.” Phantom grabbed all of the flowers and slapped his hands together. A flower crown appeared in his hands, and the leftover petals fell to the ground. “Two flints and a stick will make a pickaxe, and you can break those boulders we passed to get more rocks. We’ll need a big-ass fire to help Mad’s sanity. We’re lucky those shadow fuckers haven’t shown up yet.” He went over to Mad and crouched down. 

“The fuck are you doing?” Mare nearly growled at his brother.

“It looks stupid, but it will help. I know you’re pissed at me, and I’d be more than willing to let Mad kick me in the dick till he passes out, but right now, you gotta trust me so I can save him.” Phantom was nearly on the verge of tears as he spoke, and that got Mare to nod and lean away, allowing Phantom to put the flower crown on Mad. “Is that making the numbers go up?” Phantom called his question over to Henrik.

“One of them is,” Henrik answered. 

“Good, proves my theory right.” Phantom stood back up and noticed how everyone was just staring at him. “Move! We need all of that shit I was listing off!” 

“Jackie, Chase, and Yancy, look for the spiders and take Bing with you. Make those axes on your way.” Dark started throwing out orders “Anti, Illinois, and Marvin, go work on getting wood. JJ and Google, look for butterflies and grab more flowers nearby, do not go far. Wilford, you and I will work on getting the rocks. Phantom, get the ash since that is the only item I am unsure how to get. Edward and Henrik, stay with Mare and Mad” Dark paused to make sure there weren’t any questions. “Go.” He went to Wilford, and everyone else split off as well. 

“He can eat some of these flowers to give him a start on his health.” Phantom handed Mare the leftover flower petals. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’m sure everyone else will be too.” He looked down at Mad, seeing him trembling and still crying and pleading for something to stop. “I’m sorry, Mad,” Phantom added before taking off to make sure there was plenty of distance between them before getting to work on gathering some ash. 

#dontstarve!au #dont starve emotions #phantomhero #madmare

[adamjagger]

Spiritus microfight mk4

All right guys so this week my post is going to be on the spirit us systems micro fight MK4 and all of the other components that go with it. I picked all of these items up at Brownell‘s a couple weeks ago and have already gotten to use it a fair bit since then, and haven’t really been liking it so far. I figured I would go through each part real quick since there’s only a couple and mention the things that I like about it so far.

So I guess let’s start out with the micro fight chassis itself. The very cool thing about this to me is that it’s a very modular system, which is something that I really look for in items especially items like this. Being able to swap it back-and-forth from your plate carrier to your chest rig set up or anything that uses Standard clips is a very good feature in my opinion. It has two very deep pockets that you can buy all sorts of different inserts for different magazines and multiple magazines etc. Overall this is the heart and soul of the post and I think they did a fantastic job with that. All the materials seem to be of great quality, so it should last a very long time under use.

Next up, I’m going to combine the fat strap and the backstrap since they basically go hand-in-hand. Another great thing about these and what I’m seeing being a trend with the spirituous systems. Products is materials are great. All the stitching looks really good. This is another couple products that I think we’re gonna last it very long time. Even the clips themselves don’t feel like super cheap plastic that’s going to break, the second you use them. It is getting cold where I live so in the next coming months, I will be able to test the durability in very cold environments. The comfort is fantastic with the straps you partly even notice that the thing is on you, which was kind of the whole point of getting this chest rig set up was to be small, compact and lightweight rather than just always using a plate carrier.

And last but not least are a couple more things that I’m going to combine because they are all technically inserts for the micro fight. So to listen them off real quick I got the triple 5.56 magazine insert, the double pistol magazine insert, and the half flap. Both of the magazine inserts have been rocksolid. They Velcro into the pouches on the chassis itself and called the magazines. Great. Pulling magazines is very easy as well but not too easy to where you might have issues. The half flap is a really cool option in my opinion, because essentially it creates a Pocket that you could store various items inside of. The adjustability on this is also very nice because you can mount it higher or lower to create a taller or shorter pocket depending on what you’re keeping in there. My plan to start with is picking up a box cutter gear zap pouch, and keeping that inside And then going from there.

Overall, I’ve been very pleased with the system, and slightly disappointed that it’s taken me this long to pick one of these up. Like I mentioned, in the beginning, I got all of this from brownells they carry a whole line of spirit of systems products, and I highly recommend swinging over there and checking them out. I’ll leave my link down below And I would greatly appreciate it if you use that link because that helps me out to keep buying and trying out new gear and parts.

https://www.avantlink.com/click.php?tt=cl&merchant_id=855e0b56-67a2-40d0-aa2b-a0764ca94489&website_id=301e8193-c0b5-4762-8a73-9a6ab40703db&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.brownells.com%2F

Thanks for reading!

Adam Jagger gun blog #19 1-18-23

#brownells #bureauofpropaganda #gun review #ar 15 rifle #ar 15s #ar15build #ar15porn #edccarry #edccommunity #edcdaily #modlite #surefire #arisaka #eotech #geissele #geissele everything #unity tactical #odg #odgreen #glocknation #spiritus systems #chest rig #placard

[rpgchoices]

Sometimes I really want to read a short summary of what to expect from a game… and thankfully people can also submit their summaries of games they played and help me (and others) find games that cater to their interests!

submitted by @lairofsentinel

(click here for other videogames)

what to expect from ELEX 2

Sand-box “ARPG” set in a world with magic and post-apocalyptic components. It continues the story of Elex 1.

Despite being called a RPG, I see nothing of role play in terms of how you affect the development of the story, which factions you want to help or wipe-out, what NPCs you want to kill or befriend, etc. At the end of the day, the game forces you to make decisions you don’t want to, and stick with companions you don’t want to recruit, and deal with resolutions you never had a choice to pick. 

There is no customisation of the main char. You play as Jax, an ex Alb commander, main char of Elex 1.

The game is aesthetically astounding; graphically speaking, it looks alike Skyrim, with a complete redesign of the places we visited in Elex 1. 

You have companions that you can talk to in the main fort where you are going to establish your HQ or during exploration while walking around [banter]. You can only have one companion at a time. They have personal loyalty quests that, at the end of the game, doesn’t matter. Even if you completely ignored the forced companions, they will join the final battle and remain loyal to you. 

You can romance only female companions: Caja, Nasty, and Nyra.

You can meet again some of the companions of Elex 1 such as Falk, the droid C.R.O.N.Y. U4, Caja, and Nasty. However some of the old companions like Duras or Ray are not present in the game, as if the game is assuming they were killed in your previous game.

Characters and NPCs are stiff from an animated point of view. they stare at you like ghouls most of the time, but one can forgive that. However, what breaks immersion most of the time is their conversations, which can be suddenly interrupted by local events or simply your companion triggers their loyal personal quest while you are talking to a Chief of a faction. This is laughable at best. The conversation, when it is not broken in this way, sometimes has a lack of cohesion: you can be asking for the location of your son, and in the same conversation, when nobody informs you where he is, you suddenly claim to know where he is.  This happens with NPCs too: they claim not to know something, and then, later in the same conversation, they end up knowing what they claimed not to know, lol. Conversation feels very disconnected at times: it seems to be a lot of isolated chunks of text and voice acting that were smashed together.

The world and the map are beautifully enormous, but there is a considerable lack of teleportation devices spread all over it. Since the game is filled with annoying, endless errant-boy quests and “talk to X and bring me back his answer” kind of quests, this makes you waste a lot of minutes running between two NPCs to complete a silly task. Things get a bit better when you can improve your jet-system and you can have nice speed boosts, but still a lot of wasted time in repetitive runs. 

The 90% of quests in this game are boring kill-different-types-of-monsters which are re-spawned over and over and over. 

For some reason, a lot of NPCs provoke you. Many npcs are trying to make you fight them. You also find a lot of repeated situations where wankers are pestering women to sleep with them, while they are telling them to stop bothering them, and you see these situations over and over in all factions. 

All female companions end up “in love” with the main char, and give him a lot of cringing compliments. When you pick one of them to properly romance, the other two have resentment/jealousy talks to some degree.

There are some situations in which npcs or the main character describe women as "twisted as computers" or "no creature is more mysterious than a woman" and similar kinds of ancient crap. A lot of weird stuff proper of a game of the 80’s, not one of 2020.

NPC models are very limited. You feel you are talking to the same random npc in all places, with just a change in the colour of their hair.  Random NPCs can have the same design as your companions’. This breaks the interest you can have with different npcs. The same guy appears everywhere and it’s your companion as well, lol.

Unlike Elex 1, there are no multiple endings [as you notice later in game, there is little change in the world made by your own choices]. The only change is the kind of final battle you have, but the ending is just the same for everyone. 

Despite having a sophisticated system of factions, joining one or another doesn’t matter in the end.  

You know all of them are at war with one another but you never see them fighting.

The game starts with a context that it's probably not the one you played in Elex 1, meaning, this game assumes a canon ending for elex 1, and they don't care about your choices previously. It does not only assume you romanced Caja in Elex 1, but also had some romantic involvement with Nasty. Since Duras and Ray don’t appear in this game I suppose the game also assumes that you killed them in Elex 1? It’s unbelievable how little it cares about your previous game.

Elex 2 is incredibly slow paced considering the constant repetitive things it offers. The first 20 hours are painful. The main plot seems to never advance, and a lot of quests associated with the factions are so mundane and trivial that it makes no sense for someone who is fighting an alien invasion to deal with them. And like I said before, you feel that you have no control about what factions to help more, or even if you want to betray a faction due to its chaotic nature.  It was so slow and frustrating that at some point I started to speed-run and care little about this game.

You are building up a force that tries to combine the power of all the factions in this world, which ironically, it only kills a dozen of enemies in the final battle. Meanwhile you killed hundreds of them along the infinite, repetitive quests, all by yourself. Lol. This is such a failure to me. Building up a powerful force to repel aliens has no effect in the end. There are more plot-related nonsense situations but they all fall into the spoiler category, especially related to Jax’s son.

The game can be finished in around 30 or 40 hours; but completing all the repetitive side quests and senseless tasks can increase your time to +100 hours. But I feel it’s just a trap; quests are incredibly boring, in addition with really few teleport devices that make you run a lot, wasting more minutes of your gameplay. 

Loot is everywhere, pretty much like games such as Fallout, although I felt it was not rewarding to explore: you find the same loot everywhere. 

For an ARPG, the combat feels very, very bland. 

Elex 1 is not a mind-blowing game, but it did a lot of things better than this one. 

 ——- Plot? ——-

You play as Jax, who has been living in a hut for the last 10 years after the end of Elex 1. Jax went to live isolated, for a decade, despite having a son, simply because he could not deal with humanity ignoring his warning about in-coming alien dangers (?). Anyways, in the beginning of the game, he is attacked by these alien creatures and is bitten by one of them, getting infected with something that strips him from his powers [this is how the game explains why he returned to lvl 1 after the whole gameplay of Elex 1]. Now he needs to gather all the factions of this world to face this alien invasion that can’t be ignored any longer.

——- Gameplay? ——- 

A typical arpg gameplay: you level up by killing targets and making quests, and increase your skills and talents with the extra points you earn in each level. In the beginning, you can pick to use melee weapons or ranged ones. By the middle of the game, you can join a faction that uses magic, so then you can learn to cast spells of fire [Bersekers] or ice [Albs], depending on the faction you picked. 

——- Characters? ——- 

The main char, Jax, and your companions and quest givers. 

 ——- LGBT? ——-

None so far I played. But it seems natural not to find any considering how hetero-male-gaze focused the whole game is. 

——- Sadness level? ——- 

None. 

——- Happy ending? Deaths? ——-

This “rpg” has only one ending. It’s “happy” and pretends to be hopeful and a bit of a cliffhanger to an Elex 3. 

[Spoiler]

Despite Jax’s son dies at the end due to Jax own command/choices [that you have no way to change in order to obtain another outcome] there is no real impact in the sadness of the narrative. The kid dies and his parents are just “meh”. Jax shows a cinematic with “sad eyebrows” and that’s all. It’s so bland that inspires laughter more than sadness. 

#elex 2 #what to expect #elex 2 negativity #lairofsentinel