#with even the name of the webpage being a clue | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

midnightsilver · 2 months

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Tips for Spn Artists posting on Tumblr 😄👍🏻

I see a lot of new artists posting Spn art and it can be a struggle to get your art out there. Or you might be new to Tumblr and not sure how best to put yourself forward.

I post Spn art and do a lot of bangs when my health permits. And I have picked up some tips that I have found helpful for posting art tumblr 😄 so I thought I would share.

Please feel free to take any of these points or leave them as suits you!

✨Personalise your header and icon. Bots will often make posts with popular tags and stolen art, to try and gain followers before throwing out the spam links, but some clues the account is a bot is not having personalised headers and icons, not having a long history of posts (more than a few days), and not talking about their art or fandom. So make sure you don’t look like a bot 😄

✨Interact with accounts you enjoy. Like, comment and reblog your favourite accounts and they will likely return the favour and you will get more followers. The first way your post gets noticed is by your followers. Interacting isn’t always easy if one is an introvert or doesn’t have much time for social media, but do what you can where you can.

✨If don’t have many followers then the next best thing is to use tags more. People follow key tags to find new posts from blogs they are not aware of. I recommend using the ‘Spn fanart’ tag on all your art posts. Also be sure to include: common ship names, the character names, and key words like: cute, funny, angst, angel, wings, etc 👍🏻 😄 this will help people find your posts, so be sure to tag consistently!

✨Make a personal art tag, it could be ‘your name art’ or something as wacky as you like. But tag all your art with it! If someone sees your art post out in the Spn fanart tags and they like it, they can click your art tag to see the rest of your art posts.

✨Don’t include links to outside webpages unless absolutely necessary. If you are posting for a bang, reblog the bang master post for the story which has the links to ao3, but then make your own art post and only link to the tumblr master post. Tumblr often hides posts with links to outside webpages (so that the porn bots sending you to spam websites get minimised, but unfortunately this also minimises links to ao3 or shops 😔). Links to another post inside of tumblr are ok tho! So to keep your art post from being hidden from searches, only link back to the master tumblr post with the story info. If people want to read the story they can follow the ao3 link from there. But it’s better that they actually get to see your art (the ‘advert’ for the story) in the first place so that they know it exists!

Also keep this info in mind if you are linking to your shop or your other socials. Your direct followers will see your shop posts but because of the external links the post might be hidden from searches. Consider doing a mix of posts with direct shop links and ones that get the info out there but link back to a pinned tumblr post or bio post with the outside link.

✨Don’t crowd your art. Many people view tumblr on mobile so your pictures will look small. People can’t really see the details if you put 2 images side by side. Put one image on each line and consider making some cropped images to show close up details of your favourite bits. You need to catch people as they are quickly scrolling past, so be sure that you make it easy for them to see what you are offering.

✨And finally don’t be afraid to do reblogs. It isn’t rude to reblog your own work, it’s helpful. Dashboards can get very busy and even if people follow you, your post might be burried a long way down if they don’t get back online multiple times a day. Reblogs will give them a chance to see what they missed. As long as you are not posting on the hour every hour, most people appreciate 2 or 3 reblogs at different times to save them having to scrolled back for days! 😄 and don’t forget that tumblr is multinational. Time zone reblogs can be helpful.

✨oh I forgot one more thing! Don’t put yourself down! No piece of art is perfect! Ever! But Michelangelo doesn’t start off by apologising that the statue of David is out of proportion. And neither should you! Let your work shine where it shines and don’t bury it in put-downs before you even give others the chance to enjoy its triumphs! You deserve better and so do they!

Those are the main points my friends. If you have any other helpful tips that you want to share, feel free to reblog this and add on points. We were all new to this hellsite (affectionate) at some point. And life is already hard for us struggling artists so whatever we can do to help each other is a good thing 💛

Stay awesome my friends, and happy Arting 🙌🏼😄

#supernatural #spn fanart #artists on tumblr #tips #art #tumblr #helpful #posting tips #bangs and challenges

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badstargateimagines · 1 year

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Jonas's Big Day Out Part 1 of ?

Jonas is too good for this world and deserves a FUCKING TREAT. BABY BOY! I love him so much and I’m sad that he got treated like shit by the writer’s room on the show. Good thing I am a writer in my own room, suckers. To the Stargate writers: eat shit, I am taking custody of Jonas with no visitation rights for you bastards. You did my boy dirty and that’s on you. If you need me, I will be treating my son better than you ever could. I will be buying him a Nintendo switch and some nice footy pajamas. Drink a bottle of roadside bottle piss you sonsabitches.

Daniel grudgingly takes Jonas out for a day of fun.

Gen fic, no warnings, mentions of cigarettes and alcohol

Daniel was slowly but surely adjusting to his new friend. While he’d been assigned to SG-3, they still shared an office and worked together occasionally. Jonas reminded him of himself in a lot of ways; his naïvete, though irritating to some extent, was definitely most reminiscent of Daniel.

As the weeks went by after coming back from being ascended, Daniel was quick to notice Jonas’s lust for life and childlike sense of adventure. Not only was going off world an adventure for Jonas, but so was going anywhere off base. On one occasion when they were at the bar, Jonas had snuck off to the smoking area and befriended a rough-looking crowd. It took everyone a good ten minutes of looking inside the bar before they found him chain smoking with a man who called himself Skunk. After that, they took turns babysitting him on nights out so he didn’t end up with a nicotine addiction.

One day, as the two archaeologists worked away in their office, Jonas looked up at Daniel. He waited for him to stop working an look up at him for a few minutes. When that didn’t work, he called his colleague’s name. Upon hearing his name, Daniel looked up, assuming Jonas was running into trouble with a translation of something. Instead, Jonas had a wide grin on his face and asked for Daniel to come and look at his screen.

There was nothing work related open on Jonas’s computer. As Daniel inspected the screen, he saw the webpage for Build-a-Bear. Daniel turned to Jonas and sighed.

“Build-a-Bear?” Daniel asked sarcastically. Jonas nodded eagerly. “Jonas, how do you even know about Build-a-Bear?” He continued. Jonas shrugged.

“Cassie was talking about it at the barbeque at Jack’s last weekend. I asked her about it and it sounded fun!” Jonas explained. Daniel’s brow furrowed as he let out another exasperated sigh.

“That place is for kids, Jonas. Do you have any idea how weird we’d look as two grown men going in there? Absolutely not, not happening.” Daniel asserted, returning to his seat. Jonas grinned.

“C’mon! Where’s your sense of adventure?” Jonas whined, leaning back in his chair. Daniel looked at him, confused.

“Did you just wake up from a coma? Do you have no clue what we do for a living? If that’s not adventure, I don’t know what is.” He snipped. Jonas shrugged.

“Look, all I’m saying is it could be fun. What could be more fun than building your own bear?” he argued, still leaned back in his chair. “Besides, I want better clothes. I’ve seen how the Tau’ri dress on TV and it’s not like you.” He added. Daniel frowned, not sure how to take the apparent insult from an alien.

“Hey! What, did you want me to just let you run around in BDUs? We’re not going to the mall and that’s final. Get back to work!” Daniel snapped. Jonas was unbothered, laughing even.

“You’re just mad I called you a loser, dude.” He giggled. The remark left Daniel confused and a little angry. Why in god’s name did this alien talk like a high schooler? And who gave him the audacity to talk like that to anyone, let alone Daniel?

“Uh, so quick question… Did you by chance find MTV on your TV?” Daniel asked. Jonas nodded. “Well, stop watching it. You’re being annoying.” Jonas’s eyes went about as wide as they possibly could.

“Take me to the mall, just this once, and I’ll never watch MTV again.” Jonas said, quickly. Daniel winced, realizing he’d backed himself into this corner. With that said, the offer seemed almost too good to refuse. Getting Jonas off MTV sooner meant he’d sooner get out of his weird rebellious earth teenager phase that they’d all noticed recently. It was for the good of the base to take the guy to the mall. How he’d enforce the no MTV rule wasn’t something Daniel knew how to do, but he’d figure it out. Probably.

Daniel reached across the desk and put his hand in front of Jonas’s nose. “Deal.” he said. Jonas smiled, surprised that his bargaining had worked. He took his colleague’s hand and shook it.

“Aw man! This is gonna be so fun! We’re gonna get ice cream and taco bell too!” Jonas exclaimed. Daniel grimmaced.

“So much fun!” He said through gritted teeth.

With that, the plan was formed. Jonas spent the rest of the week sporadically telling Daniel what he wanted to do on his day off base. It got so bad that Daniel asked him to keep his plans in a notebook. Of course, the excitable alien took that to the next level. The day after Daniel requested the notebook thing, Jonas showed him a colour-coded itinerary he’d made with information from the internet. It was at that point that Daniel realized this wasn’t just a few errands for Jonas. No, no, this was Jonas’s big day out and it was his problem now.

Jonas had gone and told everyone he came into contact with about his big day out with Dnaiel. Daniel found this out when a couple low-ranking airmen taunted him about his, quote, “playdate” with his, quoting again, “little brother”. It was driving him batty. As if that wasn’t bad enough, both Jack and General Hammond brought it up at one of their briefings. Both of them found it amusing and charming that the Archeology Twins were having a day out. Jack figured that Jonas could use some time out of his enclosure, and even decided to take Teal’c out to an Avs game in the spirit of comradery.

Unfortunately, Jonas also caught wind of that plan and insisted Daniel take him to a hockey game that day. Daniel had to nip that one in the bud as a day at the mall followed by driving an hour and some change to a hockey game was his own personal hell. Jonas was quite upset when he had to erase ‘Hockey Game’ from his itinerary, so much so that Daniel felt bad for him. Instead, they agreed they’d go to a museum, something that he knew both of them would enjoy. This development lightened Jonas’s spirits, especially given that Jack had already agreed to take him to a hockey game the following weekend. Jonas had weaselled his way into becoming the 20-something-year-old teenage son of every senior officer on Cheyanne Mountain and he could not have been happier.

Part 2 Here

#stargate sg 1 #stargate #sg1 #Jonas Quinn #Daniel Jackson #stargate fanfiction #trying something new on this blog #if this flops pretend u didn't see it

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cosmikazie · 2 years

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before i sleep there's something i wanted to write down about the current deltarune event and a tad bit of speculation on my part:

me and a friend were discussing the "ARG (loosely named)" for the 7th anniversary of undertale, and we were both shooting ideas back and forth concerning the various different extra webpages and stuff that there are, and we came to the following conclusion:

dess will play a major role in the very near future, as soon as chapter 3.

what i noticed was a more significant abundance of content related to dess during this. the whole noelle blog thing going on where noelle's posting a bunch of stuff about her life and the stuff she's getting into, with mentions of dess and even an implied contribution to the ICE-E sighting catalog (https://deltarune.com/icee/) tells me that there's gonna be some stuff related to dess coming up. but that's not all.

my friend was also snooping around the various pages with their Super HTML Skills and they were digging up the names of the files on said pages to see if they could find any clues, and they came across the files "findher.mp3" and "holiday_country.mp3"

"findher.mp3" is an mp3 file that plays a version of "Lost Girl" in a guitar arrangement. i'll spare you the nerding out on music theory and stuff i learned from film scoring, but what's most interesting about this is the fact that the url this is connected to is "https://deltarune.com/dess." not incredibly subtle, but we know for a fact that this will be important soon, along with the red guitar featured on the page.

secondly, "holiday_country.mp3" is an mp3 file which plays a country rendition of "Jingle Bells," a song which is HEAVILY associated with Noelle along with other holiday-related concepts and items. we can easily connect this to the bluebubble.rodeo page where kris and susie appear to be in cowboy attire, and combining this with the "dess" page and the red guitar, which is an instrument associated with cowboys in many wild western films, we can deduce not only that the next dark world area is going to be cowboy-themed, wholly or partially, but we can also assume that dess will be involved in this somehow. maybe she's in the dark world? maybe that's where she ran off to?

"but why can't it just be noelle-related?" i hear you asking. for all i know it could be, and this theory could be completely backwards. but i feel like if toby wanted to delve this deep into noelle's character, he would've done so in ch. 2, which is also the chapter where the groundwork was laid for exploration of dess and who she was-- us being introduced to her, the kind of stuff she did, her relation to the other characters like noelle, kris, and asriel. and with that kind of stuff hanging in the air ever since before ch. 2 came out, i seriously doubt that this would be left unsolved for much longer.

my speculation here is shaky and minute, but nevertheless here's my idea: dess, at some point, went missing. she's been living in the dark world ever since, and is probably the first character chronologically to enter it. and with the clues we've been given during this event, i'd say she's been hanging out with the dark world's cowboys for the last (X) amount of years.

i'm not certain completely on everything just yet, but with all of these clues and such i think one thing is clear:

dess will play a major role in ch. 3.

#deltarune #theory #deltarune theory #spamton sweepstakes

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freshlybakedspiderbread · 2 years

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Once again went and listened to rd-sounds' △ (which is also now on spotify), and I don't remember if I talked about this album when i got it some months back, but I haven't stopped being really fond of it.

I was thinking of making a big post where I go into why I like each and every song on it (I'll say real quick yhsy my favourite song in the album is probably シン・汎用合成クラスメイト・宇佐見227号 which is a remake of an older song, but this version is a super catchy duet about sumireko and fitting in and society and robot metaphors and robot literal and whatnot), but I'm tired/lazy and don't feel like doing that, so i just wanna talk about the nonsense i love that these dyz hifuu albums seem to have a tradition of doing.

So the very general gist of the album and the cover song's premise is that the world is basically ending but you should pledge your support to the hifuu club for the remainder of our limited existence.

All the songs in the album are labeled with the designation U7731, which the booklet kinda sorta explains is the universe these songs are from. Except for the very first one in the cd, which is instead labelled U0001, and this isn't a song at all but a distorted audio message from someone from this universe number 1, stating they are from the hifuu club, and announcing the album's name. Its all flavour and I love it.

And that's fun and all, but if you scan the qr code that comes with the cd, you get to go to a super secret webpage that contains archived and ruins notes from U7730, the previous universe (and also get to access four additional moody instrumental music tracks n_n) and the gist of the information as told to me by someone else because I can't read japanese, is that its the hifuu club's notes about how this universe met its end just like all the others and its on to the next one.

And i thought that was it for a while, but weeks later, I looked up the album for fun on thbwiki and some dyz fansaites and I noticed they all listed an extra song from this album that I wasn't aware of?? After a lot of mucking around and asking around, I found out that if you viewed the page source of that super secret webpage, there's a clue (in japanese) that hints at you to travel even further back before universe number 1, and to number zero instead o_0 And that's where you find the very first activity logs of hifuu's search of life in other universes, and its in this extra secret hidden page where you find a full and clear version of that distorted audio track from all the way at the start of the CD...... Gah, I love this whole weird thing a lot @_@

The previous times these albums made me jump through hoops like this (密 and 夢) was something, but this felt like a whole step up in terms of how much i got into this surreal story and atmosphere. I mean its still really simply done, but actually going through it, listening to the songs, discovering the clue in the Page Source, and finding that final final final piece put the biggest smile on my face.

#sometimes I really love theming and i really love themed gimmicks!!#touhou #doujin #music #dyz

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denckersivertsen65 · 2 years

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Letterboxing - A Fun Outdoor Activity to the Whole Family!

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#letter box designs #letterboxes melbourne #letter boxes australia #letter boxes for sale #modern letterbox

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hoffmansonne20 · 2 years

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#Diseño de páginas w

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pen-observing · 3 years

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request: how lucifer, mammon, satan, belphegor and diavolo react and find out about you having 'I now own your soul' under the terms and conditions of a webpage.

Lucifer:

While Lucifer is certainly busy all the time, and tries to balance it by having you in his study as he works, he can’t hide how tired he has actually been for the past 4 weeks.

All you know is that Diavolo has made the meetings more frequent and they are taking a toll on him

And since he means that much to you, regardless of if you wish to acknowledge it or not, you have to ask what is going on once he stands up and walks over to reach for another bottle from his shelf Lucifer does not drink that often and he certainly doesn’t try to avoid work by drinking.

Just what could be making him act this way?

“Lucifer, you have to tell me what is going on.”

He stands on his side of the desk just pouring another glass down.

Curse him for being elegant and showing his forearms while doing so!

And then he dares to look at you with full focus and furrowed eyebrows and he is about to say something and he looks like-

‘no. You are human.’

Fuck.

“Come on! You know I won’t tell anyone!”

He does trust you at least after so long.

"Very well. I will tell you since it has something to do with a human. If, by any chance, you spread the information, the price you pay will be a heavy one."

He can’t intimidate you that much but you know when he is serious.

"You see, recently, Diavolo has had more issues than ever with someone we like to call ‘code soul stealer"

“Uhn,, and that is?”

He takes a sip of his drink and holds the glass while looking at you.

“Apparently, a pesky human added ‘I now own your soul’ in their terms and conditions on a web page and some application. With this, they have stolen many souls and Diavolo has grown even more concerned these past few weeks since the page is just gaining popularity.”

Oh fuck, oh fuck. Thats you that he is calling a pesky human! You only did it as a joke because you saw a meme! It wasn’t supposed to make an enemy out of you to the prince of hell!

How are you supposed to tell Lucifer that? How will he react?

Maybe if you do tell him it will actually create more good than harm?

Or, you could hide it for the rest of your life and- no! The honest way with Lucifer is the best way. He trusts you enough so you have to trust him too!

“Lucifer...I am the pesky human you are referring to...”

He drops the glass.

“I swear I had no idea souls were actually real and now I own a lot of them! O-On the good side I went viral 4 weeks ago so...oh, that is why you’ve been so busy....sorry.”

Lucifer says nothing.

He just falls into the chair in the most dramatic way you’ve ever seen.

He covers his face with both hands and groans into them loudly.

If you were not ‘code soul stealer’ you would laugh at him right now. But he has to figure out a way to protect you now.

Mammon:

You see, dating Mammon means that you two will bicker plenty.

However, it is usually silly stuff that you bicker about like; are gold or silver lines better on this cup of tea or not?

He just loves you too much to get into a serious argument with you.

However, Levi dragged you both to play a spy/heist game that just came out and Mammon cannot accept to lose such a challenge.

He is not proud that people call him thief, but he is proud and believes he has the skills to back up his many enrichment-plans

So the fact that you won against him for 3 times in a row is UNNACCEPTABLE under this dark, dark sky.

Mammon denies it all. ‘i went easy on you’; ‘I did it cuz you are happy when you win’ and ‘please, don’t you know who I am? I am THE Mammon!”

And while he is cute while bickering, sometimes it becomes unbearable.

So, you do what any normal human would: you challenge him by listing your biggest ‘heist’ ever.

“You don’t know who you are talking to! I have created a heist unlike any other! I have stolen a million souls so far! The DevilTV refers to me as – unstoppable soul collector!”

Levi left long ago so Mammon is standing there completely stunned with the stupidest look on his face so far. He kind of looks like a blowfish.

Still, he runs and puts a hand over your mouth and whispers:

“Don’t yell! We don’t want others to know that we run that business!”

Excuse him? Who is this –we- he speaks of?

“You will add your boyfriend to those plans, won’t you?”

Mammon will not let shock stand in the way of money or souls. You can explain to him how you managed that later but for now – just add him as your accomplice.

Satan:

You love your boyfriend.

You really, really do.

You love seeing him so excited and focused on finding clues to the newest Devildom mystery that you chose to let him have his fun by not telling him YOU were the one he was searching for.

And while you love him that much, you are about to ruin the whole game.

Why does he think it is appropriate to own 48 pairs of the same Sherlock Holmes outfit with THE UGLIEST MATCHING HATS YOU HAVE EVER LAID YOUR EYES ON.

First, he wore them in his ‘detective office’ only. Also known as the Lamentation house storage room for cleaning products. And that was fine, it was.

But then he started to wear them inside the house and in the garden. The saddest day was when a cat knocked the ugly hat off and ran away with it. Oh praise that cat! Praise the little paws!

However, he has gone too far.

He knows no bounds and shows no signs of stopping.

He started wearing the outfits OUTSIDE! In the middle of cobblestone paths of the main street while you were trying to have a nice date!

"Who knows where the soul snatching culprit could be hiding? I must wear this outfit everywhere to catch their clues. Trust me.”

That is it.

If one more iguana-looking-ass demon points their finger at you two and snickers as you walk past – he will have a rude wake up call.

How is it possible that he is trying to catch the culprit that is you but doesn’t pay any attention to you?

So, when you arrive home and he walks into the mop closet to add another unrelated photo to his crazy whiteboard as a clue – you tell him to sit down for a moment.

“Satan, honey, I have something to tell you about your soul snatching culprit.”

That definitely got his attention.

Finally! He is actually looking at you!

You lean down and gently kiss his head.

“I am the culprit you’re looking for. How does it feel to completely miss something right under your nose?”

He freezes up and throws a pen towards the whiteboard. It just bounces off and hits him in the back.

“You....you mean to tell me that,,, the biggest Devil Mystery TV phenomenon is ACTUALLY YOU?”

You are met with complete disbelief. Satan demands a detailed explanation on how you did it. He even tells you to use his whiteboard to retrace your steps!

...good luck...

Belphegor:

Will Belphegor ever actually publicly say that he has changed because of you? No.

Will he ever actually admit that to other brothers besides Beel when they’re talking in the late hours of the night in their room? Oh, absolutely not.

Will he tell you? Yes.

Yes but.. He will leave something out.

Sometimes Belphie looks at how you smile and remembers things that make him famous in this realm.

Yes, he is one of the most powerful demons and yes, he has a reputation of rebellion and the biggest steak of unattendance in RAD but

He is also a fairly famous scholar.

His papers and research are cited on the regular.

But when you smile and say a witty joke – he remembers that most of them focus around him proving just how dumb or naïve humans actually are.

But, you’re human and he hopes that you never see those.

Except that you do.

Because he is so famous it is no surprise that while looking for research papers to reference for your next assignment you saw his name while browsing through

And while you love him - you will not allow him to just diss the whole mankind.

So, you grab one of them from the library. Walk home, go to the attic while he is napping and open it up, putting it right on his face.

It takes a couple of seconds but he feels something is wrong and his hand reaches for it.

When he pulls it away, he is met with his thesis that was further developed from the seduction speech class assignment.

It sets it up as: ‘Seduction speech as a matter of blatant deception that humans always fall for but could never recreate.’

You are not even that mad at it to be honest.

But proving him wrong is always fun. And little does he know about your biggest secret ever.

“I will cut right to the chase and say – fix your bangs I want to see the way your eyes look when I tell you this!”

“I wonder who messed up my bangs with the academic paper in the first place?” is what he replies but his hand is already on his forehead.

“Whatever. Prepare to be amazed! I am the one the elders of the devildom are always ranting about on TV! Yes, I am the ‘pesky little human’ who is stealing away ‘edible’ souls! How is that for your thesis now? Is that not true deception?!”

He likes your smile still. You’re standing in front of the bed looking at him with sparkling eyes and clenched fists while striking a pose. It is silly really but he smiles.

Because you are.

And while he will ask you a bit more about that claim, he is just happy to know that maybe his next academic paper (which everyone eagerly awaits) will be tad more positive to your kind.

Diavolo:

You got an urgent call from Barbatos.

On the doorstep he told you that Diavolo needs you in his study.

What could you do that Barbatos can’t and will help Diavolo? Does such a thing even exist?

You walk inside of his office and are pretty sure Barbatos did not want to go inside because of the fact that a rat could be hiding under the mountain of papers that are all around the room.

Usually, Diavolo immediately stands up, lights up the room with his smile and stretches out his hands for a hug.

Now? He hears the doors open and looks at you with a weak smile while his head is resting on his elbows from behind the desk.

He has never looked worse.

“Barbatos said you called for me?”

You are unsure where to begin with this so you state a fact while thinking of questions to ask.

“He has? I have done no such thing?”

Great. Now both of you are confused.

“Can you tell me what is going on?”

Diavolo sighs and his smile is still nowhere to be seen.

“The elders have been so annoying lately. I understand that the biggest threat to the Devildom and everyone’s life here still has not been identified but there is nothing I can do except search!”

Just what threat is that? What could be making Diavolo so miserable?

“They keep comparing me to my father without actually offering any ways of fixing this!”

“I will try to offer some way if you tell me what the threat is!”

There you are, making a grand exclamation and promise while trying to avoid papers on the floor. Diavolo sighs again.

“A human is ruining our business! They somehow set up a page that allowed them to own souls by consent in some application under the terms and conditions. I mean, this has never happened before! Humans were never expected to think of that or have access to such means! And the name they used was fake. How am I supposed to find them and then burn them in the darkest pits of hell as the elders want me to?”

You stop trying to avoid the papers.

Did...did he just say darkest pits of hell? Did he just say the elders want YOU burned?!

How are you supposed to fix this? It was a fucking joke! You did not imagine this could ever happen!

“Diavolo you promised you would protect me no matter what, right?”

His eyes are serious when you say that. “Yes. I will. Is something amiss?”

“Diavolo.... I am the enemy your elders want to burn.. PLEASE DON’T LET THEM! MY SKIN JUST ADJUSTED TO THIS TEMPERATURE!”

Diavolo looks at you and laughs like never before. It is cute, it is childlike. His laugh finally lights up the room.

He thinks you are joking.

He thinks you are joking and abruptly stops once he realizes that you did not join in on the laugh.

You were just trying to crack a joke and make him feel better, right? There is no way that is true, right? But judging from your reaction he knows it is.

So, he grows serious once more.

He runs to embrace you.

“Please tell me you are willing to make a compromise because the elders do not care about how your skin adjusts to the temperature.”

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thisdayinwwi · 3 years

Text

The Shell-Shocked Soldier

Amazing analysis by CarlaJeanStokes

I’d like to start this thread by stating that the proper title of this photograph is: Dressing Wounded in Trench During the Battle of Courcelette. It was taken in September 1916 by Canadian official First World War photographer Ivor Castle. It belongs to LAC, and is PA 00909.

Item no. (creator):O-736 Item ID number:3395804

I’ve been researching Castle’s life and career for about four years (although he didn’t leave much behind for us). Learn more about Castle (and importantly, how and why he and other official photographers were hired) here: This photograph is the subject of several Reddit threads, has been colourized, is frequently shared over social media, and is featured on a few blogs. In all of these venues, it is claimed that the subject has “gone insane” and is “obviously” displaying signs of shell shock.

Here’s a dodgy one for you to enjoy:The Story of the Shell Shocked Soldier (1916)The shell-shocked soldier's eyes express the madness of the war. The soldier looks like he has gone insane from what he has seen.https://www.atchuup.com/shell-shocked-soldier/

And another (lol apparently this is a rare historical photograph? No, it’s readily available online from LAC and has been for YEARS):Shell shocked soldier, 1916A shell shocked soldier in a trench during the Battle of Flers-Courcelette during the Somme Offensive in September 1916. His eyes express the madness of the war. The soldier looks like he has gone …https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/shell-shocked-soldier-1916/

This photograph appears to have been the inspiration for “SCP-106”, a fictional character named Corporal Lawrence. You can watch his YouTube video here:

youtube

The photograph is often cropped closely around the one subject, though the original is a wider view of eight soldiers in a trench, grouped in twos. Castle also took this alternative view, entitled: First Aid being rendered to wounded at Courcelette, September 1916, LAC PA 00627.

Item no. (creator):O-756 Item ID number:3395787

It’s actually not weird that Castle took a wide view of a scene and people have zeroed in on one aspect of it – it’s something he did often, and the press cropped his photographs before publishing. How often? I talk about it re: photos of Vimy Ridge in my upcoming book. Castle’s photographs were also sometimes given false background stories. Don’t have time to watch the video above? Check out my thread here: Interestingly, one Reddit user claims that the photog knew the man had shellshock and took an empathic photographic of him rather than reducing the scene to something more propagandist – this is pretty out of character for Castle, who was Canada’s most propagandist photographer. Which brings me to a crucial point: we cannot ascribe meaning to photographs - usually ever, but especially when we haven’t taken the time to understand who the photographer was AND the system of information that hired them. I didn’t find a single instance of this image being shared with a proper credit to the photographer or the institution that commissioned his work. But would the Canadian official photographer take photographs portraying shell shock and would the Canadian War Records Office label them as such and send them to newspapers around the world? Hmmm. Probably not. That’s a story for another day! Now, this photograph is alleged to show Robert Lindsay Rogers. How did this connection happen? Well, dear reader, I haven’t a damn clue.

(Snagged this image from veterans.gc.ca)There is no mention of Rogers in the LAC photograph listing (based on original caption lists from the war). If we go directly to those caption lists (I have 2 copies of the bound ledgers photographed on my computer). No mention of Rogers in either. There is no mention of Rogers being the subject of this photograph in any reputable online soldier-memory website. For example, you can read about Rogers here:

The photograph is labeled as Courcelette, and Rogers was there. That’s where he received (holy crap) a gunshot wound to the neck that turned out not to be fatal. If we look back at both views of the photo, this soldier is not having his neck attended to. In Rogers’ own description, he was shot, had to wait until nightfall to crawl out of a trench with 2 others, get to a dressing station, and was put on a stretcher and then to hospital.There is no mention of him being cleaned up in a trench, or being photographed during that time. You can read his account here, and note that there IS the alternative view on this webpage, but Rogers is not ID'd as being the soldier being patched up.

Furthermore, even if this WAS Rogers (there doesn’t seem to be any reputable proof that it is, if you know more, please hit me up!) we would still need to establish that Rogers suffered from what was then colloquially known as shell shock. There is no evidence of shell shock or neurasthenia in Rogers’ service file. It does, of course, make extensive mention of his gunshot wound, as well an infected toe. He reports to a medical board to review his combat fitness after his wound had healed, and returns to the front. Rogers was unfortunately killed in action in 1917. His name is written on the Vimy Memorial.Interestingly, his late mother is pointed out as “mentally deficient.” But my albeit quick reading of 100+ year old handwriting doesn’t convince me that he was. Download his service file here:

#wwi #ww1 #Canada wwi #shell shocked

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bibliocratic · 3 years

Text

I was going to write this for the Aspec Archives week, but I got overexcited, so here we are.

AU: Mythical creatures. OG Archive team.

Some CWs apply, see tags.

The sea is more than water, her elder brethren taught her, warned her, chided her. It is home and harm and hungry, and you should not face it alone. Her siblings were older, ever knowing better, boisterous and boasting braver, but even they worried, scolded and fretted when she swam out too far alone into deep waters.

It will love you, but it will not always be kind, her eldest sibling bit out, snapped to mask their anxiety. There can be no bearings, in the deep-deep down, no anchors to denote where the sky lies.

When her people sleep, they rest wedged into some secure rock or crevice, tails looped around tails so no one is lost while dreaming.

You cannot be a shoal of one, my dearest, my youngest and bravest, the oldest of their shoal had said, when she told her she was planning on taking the rising when the waters warmed. Ascending landward on the tide swell, letting the shimmering scales of her tail split into skin.

She had not used the name Sasha at that time because that was a landward name she chose with care. Her folk gather names like a garland of pearls, to be constantly strung longer through life as age advances them; names for qualities, for momentous events, for hopes and desires. Her first name, gifted by her shoal, was guttural. It starts at the back of her throat, trails off into a susurration through gills. Mer is a difficult language to learn, though not impossible.

Tim tried. There is no one singular language of those who skirt the deepwaters, so he attempts to mimic her dialect. His pronunciation stumbling, he makes tentative sentences with the butchered grammar of fry. Martin’s grammar is even worse, though he picks up the eddies and waves of the sounds easier.

Jon, like most things in life, takes it as a challenge. One day, almost stubborn with nerves, to perform his task to perfection, he pushes out a juvenile approximation of her first name. Clipped and textbook and the stress in the wrong places, but Sasha smiles, showing her sharpest teeth in delight. Instructs him where to hold the hum at the back of his throat, how to roll the third phoneme upwards like an air bubble. Jon repeats it and repeats it, quietly smug and pleased at his achievement, and the sea in her soul rocks fondly at the sight.

She broached landward in the rising two moons after her age of maturation. She was one of a handful to come to shore. A sibling in Brighton who she phones every week, another two in Holyhead. Her first shoal traverses to warmer waters when the season shifts, and she would feel the rock-hollow absence of them if it was not for Tim, inviting her to participate in a hundred-and-one inane activities that keep her from feeling swept out; Jon, with his libraries of questions and intrigues, his quick-silver tongue; Martin, who sometimes swims a little further out from them but who finds her small knick-knacks in charity shops and craft markets and leaves them on her desk for no reason other than he has thought of her.

She makes three necklaces, plain with a strong chain, a single pearl attached. And on a day where her folk traditionally string garlands of seaweed and mangrove roots and colourful plants from coral reefs in a celebration of family – there is no one word in her language for this idea; it poorly translates into hierarchies like sibling and brethren and elders, but these are not concepts that fit it exactly – she gifts them to the shoal that will anchor her in the depths of the sea, and bestows upon them names. Most Mer names are wishes for quick fins, calm waters, safe shores, and so she wishes these for them in a language they are not quite proficient in yet.

Her landward shoal is smaller than is traditional. But she loves them as treasures of her heart, and thinks she understands what her siblings told her, about anchors.

His parents, both harpies from local nests, are perplexed when his wings start coming in.

Must be a colouring from your mum’s side, his dad hums thoughtfully when Tim’s primaries grow in long and shining like struck bronze. He runs a careful finger down the central line of the rachis, and the wing shudders and jumps, the feathers still sensitive, and Tim complains that it’s ticklish. His wings are too small to fly away as his dad dives in, captures him in careful arms, corkscrewing upwards a little off the ground with Tim squirming and squealing and squawking in play, but they flutter and flap nonetheless.

The wing span’s from your dad’s side, no-one from my nest ever went more than five foot, his mother says, rubbing at the dark brown of his downy secondaries. Tim stretches them out wide, eager to boast at their length, the tips of his longest feathers reaching past his arms held out wide.

Danny’s wings are smaller. Magpie like, bold lines of white broken up by blue and black, the same as his parents. Tim’s wings, broader, a colour like beaten brass that tips into gold at the ends, draws attention, but he’s never been embarrassed. His family never treated him differently, so he didn’t dwell on it.

He can fly, though he doesn’t often. After his parents died, and after… after Danny, he moved to London, where there’s tighter airspace regulations and permits involved, so he mostly doesn’t bother. This doesn’t mean never, however. He has learned, while working in the Archives, that from the ground, his wings have enough lift to pick up both Jon and Sasha by at least a foot. He thinks he could probably manage Martin as well, if it wasn’t for the unfortunate fact that Martin is mildly allergic to a whole host of things, including feather dander, meaning he gets a bit watery eyed whenever he gets too close to Tim’s wings, and he’s a sniffing, red-eyed mess come moulting season.

Anyway, he can always fly when he leaves the city. When it’s been too long since Sasha’s scales touched seawater, she invites him out to the coast. Jon apparently has had enough of the coast to last a lifetime, and Martin gets funny about large bodies of water, so it’s often the two of them. She swims out, the greenish scales of her tail catching the sun-struck water, and he, above, feeling the breeze brush through his cramped wings, follows her wake. When she breaches the surface in a playful arc, he swoops down, trying to catch her at the same time as she tries to splash him.

“You never thought to look into it?” Jon asks. Always brewing with questions. Tim is obligingly holding out one of his wings, and Jon, who takes everything like a project, has books out and webpages up but with no further clue as to why his colouration and span differ so from his parents.

Tim shrugs. “Doesn’t matter really, does it?”

Jon hums, clearly not agreeing, and Sasha rolls her eyes fondly, and that is the end of that.

Marysia had hoped her child would not take after her husband. She’d lit candles and attended masses during her pregnancy, worn the beads of her rosary smooth. Her child had been born on land, miles from shore, and her husband had been a grounded man, who had folded up his pelt on their wedding night for her and swore to wear no other soul than his human one.

But then her husband leaves, the box where he kept his second soul empty, and Martin is eight years old, and he wakes up one morning glassy-eyed and complaining of nausea, his lip bleeding from where his sharpening teeth have ripped the skin, and she knows her prayers were not answered.

It is not unknown, for the second soul of some folk to flourish later. But it is a rough awakening, to have one’s body grow a new skin out of itself, and Martin is off school for over a week, riddled with fever and fervour, constantly parched, crying and sweating out salt-water.

She watches his skin prickle with grey and black fur, blotching with white over his stomach as he coils up under his covers, throws them off only for his limbs to reduce to shivering. His brown eyes have gone black-shot, his cries a mix of language and barks, and Marysia fears she will lose her only child to the sea.

It will be hard for him to fit in, she tells herself. It would be best to choose one, and he has his friends and family and her on land, and who knows where his father is now, and surely it would be cruel, an unnecessary agony for him to endure some other foreign pull away from all he knows.

She does what she thinks is a kindness, though that is neither excuse nor forgiveness. After nine days, his fur has come through, sleek and soft, his whiskers twitching, and she helps him peel it off as one would do clothes, revealing sweat-sheened limbs, his eyes slipped back into brown again. His gaze still distant and feverish, he tries to cuddle into her, and she soothes him while she finishes stripping off his pelt and folding it neatly.

While he sleeps, she burns it in a fire in the back yard.

When he comes back to himself, she lies and tells him that he’s been sick with a bad fever. And he trusts her, and never questions it. He doesn’t understand that she’s burnt a part of him up, scattered the ashes to the winds, but it was for the right reasons. To keep him safe, and happy, and with her.

He grows up human-limbed and cloven-souled, and she never tells him the truth.

Sasha floats in an ever-dark, stolen away and hidden. There is a knot, a cage-trap around her legs, which have fused into her tail although there is no water. The sea, far away, like the wail in a conch shell, throbs in her soul as she strains and shouts and snarls in the wrapping of spider’s webs.

The sea is the only thing with her in the dark.

Sound has a particular quality, underwater. She hears it first, an echo that shivers through her, like being thrummed on the backdraft of some shallow wave. And then it is a wash of insistence. A command.

The compulsion uses her names, landward and seaward and it pulls and demands her attention, and she shrieks and cries back, struggling in the depths. She is being called home, up up up to breach the surface, and she cannot help but answer.

There is a crack and the sea splits, and she is choking on cold and dusty air.

“Sasha!” someone is saying. “God, is she – she’s not – ?”

“Get that stuff off her, come on. Sasha. Sash, love, can you hear us?”

A series of thuds as she splutters. A twisting, gnarling screech, and several swear words.

“Jesus!”

“Shit – shit, get her out of the way.”

“Boss, move, give me the – ”

The screech degrades into a glitching, warping scream. There is the multi-layered sound of compressed air, and crackling fire,the woosh and stench of something burning.

In time, she cracks her eyes open to the punch of light. Her tail flaps weakly. Someone is pulling great strands of silk that has clumped like poorly soldered iron around her limbs, making visceral noises of disgust. She’s cold-stream shivering, surrounded by broken wood and chippings.

“Hey, hey, we got you. We got you. You with us, Sash?”

The faint scratch of feathers against her cheek. Furnace-warm arms are holding her.

Jon is kneeling down in front of her. Holding an axe and stinking of smoke, and she knows, she knows, that it was his voice she heard, although she doesn’t yet understand why.

Martin throws a blanket over her as she shivers, her tail shrivelling and bisecting into legs. He has silk in his hair, and his fingers are trembling, but his face is broken with a look of such relief.

“It’s you,” he says, and his hand touches at his throat, at the necklace she made for him. “It’s you. It’s really you.”

It’s Martin in the end that carries her out of the tunnels, tucking the blanket completely around her. He is talking in the scatter-gun way he does when he is anxious, babbling, and she can’t bring herself to listen. He smells of soot and saltwater, and she’s never noticed that before.

She falls asleep, curled up into his hold, drained and shaken, but feeling utterly safe.

Jon is human. Completely, one hundred percent, although Sasha had joked once that way way back there must have been some Spinx in the family. Tim’s long suspected that Martin’s not quite human, no matter how he presents, but that’s Martin’s business, not his. Some folks have lineages that are rare, or mistrusted, or misunderstood, and Tim’s not one to pry.

Jon, though. Human through and through. Which is why he’s so worried.

“I shouldn’t have been able to do that,” Jon says. Martin’s with Sasha, making sure there’s no nasty side effects to her imprisonment in the table. Jon’s had a face on him for a while which means he’s Worrying with a capital W, and it’s taken hours for him to untangle himself into a blustered declaration to the rest of the class, spiked with nerves. “That place, it had her. It shouldn’t have… I don’t know what I did, but I told her to leave, a-and she could. And she shouldn’t have been able to.”

“And you think that you did that?”

“I – I know I did that, Tim, I felt it, o-or. I mean, I felt something!”

“Ok, alright. Alright. Let’s, let’s calm down and look at this logically.”

Jon goes over what he said while they struggled to rescue Sasha from the deep. It was something he said, he’s sure of it, which is why he is sitting cross-legged on the floor of the main archive office space with Tim, his trousers getting dusty and his temper scraping frayed, getting increasingly frustrated when he tries recreating exactly what he did with his voice, going through questions and commands and instructions and inquiries. And while Tim answers, it’s clearly not what Jon’s looking for, and he’s rubbing the hair at the back of his head in the way he does when he’s getting increasingly frustrated and is too bull-headed to walk away.

Then Jon, rolling his eyes and seething in annoyance, asks him a throwaway question, one of many he’s been trying – what’s your favourite colour? (seriously, Jon, that’s what you’re going with?!); What did you do at the weekend? (you know what I did, you and Martin were with me!).

“Why did you join the Magnus Institute?”

They both sit, frozen and horrified as Tim’s mouth opens and his words trip over his tongue in their eagerness to leave his mouth. As his eyes grow wide and water with tears as he cannot stop speaking about Danny, about the Covent Garden circus and Joseph Grimaldi. As Jon sits, ramrod-backed and cannot stop listening, a muscle jumping in his jaw. His expression wars between frantic and panicking and hungry.

Tim feels wrung out and hollow once he’s finished. Jon’s manic with apologies. It takes both of them a long time to calm down.

“Maybe… maybe you’re a siren or something?” Tim suggests, but Jon is shaking his head.

“It’s this place, Tim. It’s those statements, when I read them. It’s … I – I think they’re doing something to me.”

Tim looks at Jon and the light strikes off his eyes in a way that it shouldn’t on a human.

He touches Jon’s arm.

“We’ll sort this,” he promises. “We got Sasha out, didn’t we? The four of us, we can get to the bottom of this, yeah?”

Jon nods, and gives a small fragile thanks, and that’s human enough for Tim.

Marysia told herself she was not a bad mother. That her son was simply a hard child to love, that he had all the worst trappings of his father, his brown eyes perpetually caught with a far-away look that doesn’t know where to place its longing. But even as she sickened, and he sloughed off every facet of himself in a pathetic attempt to please her, she couldn’t find anything but sorrow in her heart to look upon the man grown over familiar in face, a growth that grew deep-set and fungal into contempt.

She almost spat the truth out to him. Once or twice, with the thought that confessing might bring them closer. She wished he’d chosen the sea instead, so she wouldn’t have to look upon her amputated, half-formed child who would always be lost.

But she never did.

And Martin finds out alone, cornered in an unlocked office, his hands dropping the lighter as a thousand eyes open and watch satisfied as they pour his mother’s choices down his throat to choke him.

It starts when Martin starts sleeping in archive storage. When Tim watches worms burrow into Jon’s skin at the same time as they latch and gnaw and wriggle under his own. When they get Sasha back, and find Gertrude’s corpse and Jon leaves and gets hurt and hurt and hurt again, and the world around them gets smaller and meaner and there is nothing Tim can do.

He takes to storing food in their desk drawers. Nothing that will go off, or won’t keep. Tins and dried goods and non-perishables. He lines the walls of Martin’s storage room with fire extinguishers of different types, fire blankets, and spare first aid kits bulging with plasters and bandages and antiseptic wipes. He buys blankets and pillows and rope and penknives. He stress-moults constantly, and tucks his feathers out of sight, irritated and embarrassed at the sight of them, and it occurs to him that nesting is not a healthy way to deal with this.

He wants his family safe. He used to think it was such a small thing to ask for.

He thinks about that when the bomb goes off.

He burns, and he is dying.

His rage and fear burn off into a different fury. That it has come to this, his family so threatened, that all he has to his name is his sorrow and trauma and frustration and vengeance.

Tim wants nothing more than to live. To see them safe. To rail and rage against what seeks to harm them. So he burns and he burns and burns, his wings aflame and his mouth twisted in a scream, and does not die.

They dig him out breathing from the rubble. His skin stained grey with ash and soot.

His new wings stretch out red as the sunset.

#tma #the magnus archives #fic #alternative universe #mermaid!sasha #pheonix!tim #selkie!Martin #regularOGhuman!Jon #with added Beholding spicyness #cws for implied child mistreatment #cw fire #cw burning #cw canon typical violence #cw compulsion #ask to tag

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spartanxhunterx · 3 years

Note

Ikari Gozen

Lila, who is walking Blanc sees Kagami and Marinette fishing for something

Lila: Hey, guys

Marinette: Oh hey, Lila, nice seeing you here, didn't you join the friendship game?

Lila: Nope, besides I have to walk Blanc

Blanc: Mew!

Marinette: Hey there, Blanc

Lila: Well, since I am not busy, I'll join you guys, it's not like it's against the rules for me to observe you two

Kagami: Marinette, do you prefer to be called by your full name or nickname?

Marinette: Emm, full name?

Kagami: How bout you, Lila, do you prefer to be called by your full name or your nickname

Lila: Slow down, Tsurugi, you sound like a robot reading from a script, what are you guys doing anyway? By the way, my name is too short for a nickname, so full name it is

Kagami: Fishing for clues, *Marinette fishes out something* nope

Lila: Geez, whoever put this clue here must really underestimated the magnetic trash in the river

Kagami: Indeed… how could you tell I was reading from a script?

Lila: It sounds very… rehearsed, practiced even. Also as if pulled from a webpage and memorised to recite.

Kagami: I suppose I need to practice more if I am to make friends.

Lila: Or maybe relax a little, making friends might not be easy for some but it’s easier if you relax and be you. Ask about people interests and reply when they do.

Kagami: You make it sound easy.

Lila: Do I? Oh good, I guess my bullshitting skills are still intact.

Marinette: *Is struggling to pull something heavy out while being ignored*

#gattinera au

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maribatlife · 4 years

Text

Unexpected Joys of Motherhood Pt. 2

Jagged is Jagged, Bruce and Dick find out about the shop, and Damian is disappointed

AO3

Pt. 1

As they landed in New York, Marinette felt the pull slip to the South-west, straight towards their final destination of Gotham. By the time they landed in Gotham it was Midnight, she had a cranky toddler, and had to deal with customs. Luckily, over the past year Marinette had learned how to get through Customs quickly, and, with just the slightest bit of help from Tikki, they got through Customs in record time.

Next to the baggage claim, stood the familiar figure of Penny Rolling. Penny had already, efficiently gathered their bags and had a car waiting for them. Damian was asleep by the time they were in the car.

“Jagged wanted to come pick you guys up, but I figured you would rather skip the media attention.” Penny spoke in low tones to avoid waking up Damian.

“Thanks, Penny. Do you know anything about the direction Jagged wants to go with?”

“That’s why he’s insisting on working with you. All he says is that it needs to be…”

“Rocking,” they finished together.

“So probably location inspired looks. Do you have the tour schedule?”

“I’ll have it for you first thing tomorrow.” The car pulled up to the Gotham Omni. “You’re already checked in, room 815. I’ll be able to hold Jagged off until 11, so he’ll probably want the consult around then. There’s a fabric shop down the street, that has excellent reviews.”

“Thanks again, Penny.” Marinette got out of the car, hefting the still sleeping Damian onto her hip, as Penny instructed someone to bring their bags up to their room.

Marinette barely got them both changed into pajamas before collapsing on the bed.

Damian woke her up at 10:15 that morning. “Maman, where are we?”

“Oh, ma puce, we’re in Gotham. Oncle Jagged and Tante Penny will be here soon. So, we should get ready, right mon lapin?”

“Oui, Maman.” Damian rushed over to the open luggage to start preparing for the day. “What are we doing today?”

“It’s a day with Oncle Jagged, so it’s going to be a surprise.” Under her breathe she added “Even to me.”

At 10:55 the room phone started to ring. When Marinette answered it, she was greeted by Penny’s voice saying “He’s on his way up.”

Before she could respond, Penny hung up and there was a knock at the door. Peering the peephole gave her an amazing view of Fang’s tail thumping against the door. Opening it with a smile she was immediately tackled by the overeager reptile before Damian dragged Fang into a weird game that only the two of them understood. She got up, only to be immediately swept into a hug by Jagged.

“How’s my favorite niece?”

“I’m doing go-ack” Jagged released her suddenly as Fang’s tail whipped across his shin. She shot a glance over at Fang and Damian, who suddenly wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I’m doing good. Do you want to jump straight to the consult?”

“Nope, we gotta wait for Pen. I’ve gotta surprise for ya.”

“Jagged, what did you do…” She trailed off as Penny entered the room.

“Don’t worry Marinette, I approved it.”

“Somehow that’s not helping me feel any more comfortable with this.”

“Come on,” Jagged grabbed her wrist as she grabbed her purse and dragged her out of the room. Penny following behind them with Damian, still riding Fang.

They finally stopped in front of a fabric store up the street. “Surprise!” Jagged exclaimed, a grin beaming from ear to ear.

“A fabric store?”

He followed her puzzled stare, “No, that!” he adjusted her positioning so that she was looking at the empty storefront next to the fabric shop.

“Jagged, no.”

He pulled a key out of his pocket. “Jagged yes!”

“Penny, I thought you said you approved.”

“I did, I talked him down from the entire block to just the building.”

“Penny-“

“Marinette, you always wanted to open a boutique. Now you can, plus the third floor has an apartment for you and Damian.”

“But-,” She thought about how right Gotham felt and sighed. “Thanks Jagged.” She grabbed the key. “Time to explore?”

Walking in just cemented how perfect the building was. The ground floor was a large, open space with a small kitchenette, perfect to greet potential clients and hold any ready-wear designs she had available. The next floor was one room. She danced across the room, as she pictured shelving units for bolts of fabric. Even with everything to do custom designs, there was still space for Damian to have a space of his own while she worked. “What was this before?” She wondered.

“No clue, but I knew it was perfect for ya. So watcha gonna call it?”

“Hmmm,” she pondered. “how about Coccinelle et Chat Couture. What do you think mon lapin? Should we bring a little of Paris’ light to Gotham?”

“I like it Maman.”

Jagged insisted on furnishing the store, he said it was for missed birthday and Christmas presents. Marinette, of course, pointed out that he had already bought an entire building for her, be he ignored that in typical Jagged fashion. Penny had later pulled her aside and told her it was written into her contract with them as a signing bonus.

As Marinette was trudging away at opening her boutique, low level hench-people were whispering and capturing Batman’s attention. He found out shortly after Robin was kidnapped by Riddler’s goons. Actually, Robin found out because the two goons on guard duty were gossiping, and then told the Big Bat.

“Ya know,” Goon 1 started. “I heard from Chris who heard from Nan that Jessiee is applying ‘round places.”

“Jesse, from Two-Face’s Gang?” Goon 2 replied.

“Naw, the girl one, runs with Scarecrow.”

“Now who’s gonna hire a Scare-girl? Ya gotta think, dummy.”

“There’s this new place Uptown, gotta weird foreign name. Benny told me that the chick who owns it has this weird interview thing.”

“It’s Gotham, it’s always weird here.”

“Naw not Gotham-weird, weird-weird. Like this guy, Benny knows he’s on the up, 100% legit, comes in and 5 minutes later he’s running out like Batman’s on his tail. Says the chick wanted him to pet a crocodile and then her kid came downstairs and he threatens this guy with a sword and like 2 secs later Ivy walks in with a plant and leaves with a dress.”

Before they could discuss anymore, Batman crashed through the ceiling and that was the end of that. A week later, Batman still wasn’t letting him go anywhere alone. The Dynamic Dou was staking out one of Penguin’s warehouses, when Robin overheard more. While he was perched on an overhang over a door, a few goons came out. There were the usual complaints: the weather, the night, the boss, Batman, the usual, and then, he heard it.

“You, did ya hear that Jess is outta the biz.”

“No way.”

“Yeah she found herself some job at a fancy-shmancy clothing store Uptown.”

“Who Uptown would hire someone with her record?

“The Priss who owns it apparently “liked her aura” or some shit like that.

Robin scurried back to Batman with the information. “B, you’ll never guess what.”

“Robin-“ he warned.

“Fine, I’ll tell you. That girl from Scarecrow’s gang got a job Uptown in a new store. AND Ivy was seen there too, we should investigate.”

Batman just stared.

“I’ll do it myself.”

“Maybe, if things slow down, we can investigate it next week.”

“Fine,” he huffed but recovered quickly. “Last one to the Batmobile is a rotten egg.” And he leapt off the building. If while swinging to the Batmobile he took a slight detour past the new shop, Batman would never know.

Marinette was headed for bed, when she just happened to look out the window as a flash of yellow shot past her bedroom window. No, it wasn’t possible. Chat Noir and she were the last child heroes. There was no way. With that thought plaguing her mind she tossed and turned until she eventually fell into a fitful sleep.

After he returned from dropping Master Dick off at school, he returned to the manor to find Master Bruce had disappeared into his super-secret sulking room, instead of reviewing the papers for the Wayne Enterprises Board Meeting he had tomorrow. Pinching the bridge of his nose, Alfred descended into the Bat Cave. “Master Bruce, what do you think you are doing?”

“Investigating,” he answered not taking his eyes off the computer.

“Indeed, then you have already read every paper Mr. Fox gave you to go over for the board meeting tomorrow?”

“Alfred this is-“

“Obviously more important than continuing the family legacy that funds this habit.”

“Alfred, Ivy bought a dress from this woman.”

“Ah yes, the shopping habits of an environmental extremist are infinitely more important than the future of Wayne Enterprises.”

Bruce sighed as he moved away from the computer. “Where are the papers?”

“On the desk, in your study. Do you need a reminder of how to reach there? It has been a while since you were in there.” Bruce moved past him, ignoring his last comment.

Across town, Marinette was sitting at her sewing machine, the store closed for the day to work on commissions. Jessie was amazing but she wasn’t quite ready to run the store without Marinette being available to help. As she sewed up one of Jagged’s jackets her mind wandered back to the small form that darted past her window last night. She would have heard of any child heroes left. Someone in Gotham would have mentioned it, wouldn’t they have? But what if? No, she shook her head, trying to banish the thought from her mind.

Damian watched her from across the room. Something was bothering his Maman, what could it be?

Reaching a point, to pause she decided to stop for the day. “Ma puce,” she called. “How would you like to bake today? I think Tikki might like some Macarons.”

“You’re done for the day?”

“For now, I might do some embroidery later tonight. Shall we?” She held her hand out to him.

“Okay Maman.”

While Damian patiently watched the Macarons cook through the front of the oven, Marinette started her computer. She had to know for sure. Lost to time she trawled through webpages, searching helplessly for information that went against what she found, until she had to accept it. Batman’s “partner”, Robin, was about the same age she was when she was given the Miraculous. And then she saw red, and it had nothing to do with Tikki blocking her screen. How DARE he? She was startled out of her rage, when a small hand grabbed her arm.

“Maman, the macarons are ready.” Damian said proudly. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, bebe,” She replied as she took them out of the oven to cool.

“But you’re upset.”

She hastily searched for an acceptable answer. “I just learned that Heroes Day, doesn’t exist here. No one celebrates Batman and Robin or any other heroes here.”

“What if we leave cookies out for them Maman? Like you used to for Chat Noir?”

“That’s a good idea, mon lapin.” She replied as she filled the piping bag to put more Macarons in the oven. “Do you want to get a box together for them?”

“Okay Maman!” Something was wrong with his Maman and he was going to figure it out.

As dusk cloaked the city, Damian and Marinette carefully placed the box of cookies on their balcony. Later, after Marinette had fallen asleep, this was confirmed by Plagg, Damian slipped back out to the balcony with Xuppu and Trixx and carefully whispered his plan before climbing into a plant pot. Trixx’s Mirage covered the pot and hid him from anyone’s sight, while Xuppu waited for his cue in between the floorboards. And so, Damian waited and waited. What could have upset Maman so much? He had heard the slight tone of anger in her voice when she mentioned Batman. What had his father done? Hours past until he heard the tell tale thump of heavy combat boots, followed by a lighter thump indicating that both Batman and Robin had arrived.

“Robin, report.”

“All quiet here B. Only thing out of the ordinary is that box on the table. From the looks of it, someone left out cookies. Want me to check it out?”

Batman must have nodded because Damian heard Robin move towards the table. Perfect, the trap was set and ready to be sprung. As he poked his head out of the bush, he saw exactly what had angered Maman. Infuriated he leapt out. “How dare you?” He hissed. That was Xuppu’s cue. With a whisper of “Showtime” as he floated through the floor, a thin layer of oil spread beneath Batman and Robin’s feet. They turned suddenly and slipped due to the oil. “How dare you Father?” As he raged, he slipped into a mixture of French and the language of the guardians. “How dare you betray, Maman’s trust like that.”

“Who are you?” Robin asked, half in awe of the tiny toddler who was probably cursing Batman out in a different language.

“I am Damian al Ghul-Dupain-Cheng, and you Father,” he sneered as he stalked past the two heroes, still on the floor limbs akimbo, “Are a disappointment.” With that final proclamation he entered the home and locked the door.

Robin looked towards Batman, "So should I grab the cookies before we head to the cave or..."

#brucinette #The Unexpected Joys of Motherhood #maribat #My writing

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tiramisiyu · 3 years

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【未定事件簿】 Tears of Themis: Xia Yan’s Personal Story 3-8 Translation

Translation Masterlist | Xia Yan Masterlist | Video

Translated Chapter 3: 3-1 / 3-2 / 3-3 / 3-4 / 3-6 / 3-7 / 3-8 / 3-10 / 3-11 / 3-12 / 3-14

See below cut!

Home

The next day, Xia Yan and I examined the version of the video with no deletions that Tian Xin left for us yesterday.

Xia Yan: The contents of the video with deletions involve four locations: the Stellis Major Bridge, Jinlan Street, Yunxia Mountain, and the Stellis port. And the same person has appeared at these four locations.

As he spoke, Xia Yan pointed at a person wearing leather in the video. He looked to be around 27-28 years old, his hair had highlights, and his clothes were very punk.

MC: This person is…?

Xia Yan: Meng Qishan, a detective who resigned from the profession half a year ago.

Xia Yan tapped open the document he organized before on resigned detectives, then scrolled to the column with information on Meng Qishan.

Xia Yan: Meng Qishan entered the detective profession four years ago. Ever since he entered the profession, his reputation has always been bad. Based on my investigations, he would often use grey or even illegal methods to help his commissioners achieve their objectives.

MC: Grey or even illegal methods?

Xia Yan: The main focus of Meng Qishan’s work was marital status investigations, whereabouts investigations, and background investigations. Based on principle, a detective’s investigation should seek the truth from facts. But Meng Qishan’s investigations revolved around the commissioner’s requirements.

Xia Yan: For example, if a husband and wife’s relations have broken down and they want to divorce, they would typically need to split up their wealth and properties.

Xia Yan: But some want to give less or give nothing the other person, and lessen the other person’s pestering, so they’ll hire a detective to find evidence that they have had an affair. If the other person has not had an affair, some commissioners will require the detective to “create” evidence that the other person has had an affair.

MC: So they’ll use special angles to take very ambiguous shots of typical friend meetups, meals, and accidental encounters, right?

MC: I’ve received cases like this. One side used these kinds of photos to threaten the other side, threatening to not agree to the divorce, wanting to have the other person’s reputation utterly ruined.

Xia Yan: That’s right. Meng Qishan is that kind of detective.

MC: Has no one noticed it if he does this kind of thing all the time?

Xia Yan: They have. Not only has he been noticed, he’s even been sued, but because of insufficient evidence, the prosecution was withdrawn.

Xia Yan: Meng Qishan has a good understanding of the law. He’s very skilled at wandering on the boundaries of law, and he does things that are hard to collect evidence for investigation.

I sighed. These are the so-called people that prove that “criminals who understand the law are more frightening”.

MC: Why did he resign from the profession?

Xia Yan: Because a major scandal broke out, and he offended a client. Half a year ago, he received a commission from a corporation’s senior executive to create evidence that the executive’s wife had an affair. Meng Qishan took photos of the executive’s wife entering a hotel with some male.

Xia Yan: But in court, facing the photos that the executive flung out, the wife testified that the male was her own distantly-related male cousin. No one knew of it because they rarely interacted. The wife used this to harshly recriminate the husband, saying that he defamed her wantonly for the purpose of divorce.

Xia Yan: This matter embarrassed that executive terribly, and his future at the company was also affected.

MC: So Meng Qishan offended his client because of this, right?

Xia Yan: That’s right. This case raised a big fuss, so he vanished without a trace from the detective circles.

So there was a hidden story like this behind the matter.

MC: But why would he appear in this video? Is he related to Sphinx?

Xia Yan: At first glance, there is no relation. But I feel like that wife’s male cousin, as well as the timing and location at which he appeared are somewhat too perfect. It’s like someone deliberately set this up to have Meng Qishan misunderstand and make this kind of mistake.

Xia Yan: “There is inevitability behind all coincidences.”

Xia Yan: I believe that the riddles are just pretenses. There might be another reason behind Sphinx forcing the detectives to resign.

I couldn’t help but remember the opinion Xia Yan had voiced before on Sphinx being like a “vigilante”.

MC: If it’s like what you said before, Sphinx is punishing detectives who behave badly on the regular. Why those detectives who were defeated by him treat this like a matter that has to be kept secret would make a lot of sense.

MC: But you aren’t a bad detective. Why did Sphinx issue a challenge to you? Plus, the riddles he gave you aren’t typical reasoning-based riddles.

MC: This is too weird…

Xia Yan: Mm… I’m guessing that he has other intentions with me. Such as, since I’m the best detective in Stellis City, he’s itching to figure out who’s relatively superior.

MC: … Sure, this reason makes a lot of sense.

Xia Yan: Alright alright, let’s discuss the questions between Sphinx and me later. Let’s continue analyzing this Meng Qishan.

I nodded, turning my gaze back towards Meng Qishan, who was following Tian Xin in the video.

MC: “ɸ” had Tian Xin shoot Meng Qishan in the video, then wanted Tian Xin to delete it – why?

Xia Yan: For this, we’ll have to wait until we find Meng Qishan to find out.

MC: But Stellis City is so large – how should we find him?

MC: Could you be planning to use your privileges to get the police station’s resident data?

Xia Yan: No need. Actually, the video has already given us a hint.

Xia Yan adjusted the video progress back to the place where that person appeared first.

Xia Yan: He’s carrying a shopping bag in his hand, there aren’t many things in it, and they’re all daily necessities. Thus, this place is very close to where he lives. We can use the supermarket on the shopping bag as the centre to draw a circle with a radius of five kilometres.

MC: Five kilometres?

Xia Yan: The scope of a person’s daily activities is three kilometres, but since the location this time isn’t precise enough, I’ve expanded it to five kilometres.

As he spoke, he drew a large circle on the map, using the supermarket as the centre.

Xia Yan: In livestream, the three drawings hinting at Sphinx’s riddle all had the “ɸ” symbol. I’m guessing that this is the information point that the person who set up this matter wants to convey.

MC: Are there any places in Stellis City whose names are related to this character?

Xia Yan did a search on the computer.

Xia Yan: There isn’t – the relation probably won’t be this direct.

Xia Yan: “ɸ” is the 21st letter in the Greek alphabet. It has different meanings in math, physics, and engineering. Magnetic flux, focal strength, Euler’s formula… which meaning is it hinting at…

MC: The “ɸ” was on the drawings. Could it have something to do with the drawings?

Xia Yan: The drawings? Places where “ɸ” can be linked to the drawings…

Xia Yan and I sunk into deep thought for a moment. I looked again at those three drawings hinting at Sphinx’s riddle, each drawing’s composition very well-balanced.

MC: Ah! Xia Yan, could it be the golden ratio!

MC: Look, the compositions of these drawings all use the golden ratio method.

Xia Yan: So that’s how it was - “ɸ” also means the golden ratio in math. The approximate value, using the first three digits, of the golden ratio is 0.618.

I looked for a place relating to 0.618 in the circle indicated by Xia Yan.

MC: A rest station, Yuelai Hotel, Nautilus Bar – these three places’ addresses all include 618. Should we check out each one?

Xia Yan: No, it probably is this place – Nautilus Bar. The cross-section of the spiral of a nautilus’ shell indicates the Fibonacci Sequence, while the ratios of the sequential numbers in the Fibonacci Sequence approach the golden ratio without limit.

MC: So that’s how it was.

Xia Yan looked at Nautilus Bar on the map and frowned slightly.

Xia Yan: Do you still remember how I said last night that I can track Tian Xin’s whereabouts using his phone signal position?

MC: I remember. What’s the matter?

Xia Yan: I just checked Tian Xin’s movement route for today. Ever since a few hours ago, he’s been hovering near Nautilus Bar.

Xia Yan tapped at the keyboard as he spoke. The map immediately displayed a red route line – Tian Xin’s movement route. Just as Xia Yan said, he’d been moving around near Nautilus Bar the whole time.

MC: Could he also be investigating the clues left by “ɸ”?

[Flashback]

Tian Xin: Jeez, this guy. If you’re going to help someone, help them out until the end.

Tian Xin: He clearly had some reasoning methods, but he refused to help me design the riddles. My reasoning is really crappy. Otherwise… Sphinx’s riddles wouldn’t need to be designed that crappily… After that set of videos, people kept spewing hate at me…

[Flashback end]

MC: He clearly kept complaining yesterday about how his reasoning ability was very bad. He shouldn’t have been able to figure out the riddle this fast… Right, is there any overlap between the interpersonal relationships of Tian Xin and Meng Qishan?

Xia Yan: Wait a bit – checking now.

Xia Yan tapped quickly on the keyboard, different webpages popping up and shifting back and forth on the screen. A few minutes later, he stopped.

Xia Yan: Found it – there is indeed one point of overlap. I told you earlier that Meng Qishan received a commission from a senior executive client, to create fake evidence and slander his wife for having an affair.

MC: Mhmm, in this case, Meng Qishan just might have lost all face due to something relating to Sphinx.

Xia Yan: The overlap of Meng Qishan’s and Tian Xin’s interpersonal relations is in this case. The wife of that executive has a blood-related little sister named Han Feifei. She and Tian Xin are childhood friends.

MC: Eh?

Xia Yan showed the information he just found to me. On the social platform, there were a lot of duo pictures of the executive’s wife with her little sister, Han Feifei, as well as duo pictures of Han Feifei and Tian Xin.

MC: Thus, the reason why Tian Xin would investigate Meng Qishan and Sphinx might be this.

Xia Yan: Tian Xin must still be hiding a lot from us.

MC: These hidden things might also be related to Sphinx’s clues.

Xia Yan: …

Xia Yan: Regardless of if it’s for Tian Xin, Meng Qishan or Sphinx, we have to make a trip down to Nautilus Bar.

#tears of themis #tears of themis translations #weiding shijian bu #xia yan #未定事件簿 #夏彦 #tot translation

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nanowrimo · 5 years

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The Do’s of Writing People of Color: Describe Your Characters

Diversity makes stories better, plain and simple. This year, we’ve partnered with the good folks at Writing With Color to get some advice on how to write stories populated with people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. In the third part of her “Do’s of Writing People of Color” sub-series, founder Colette Aburime goes over how to describe characters of color in your writing:

One key to strong representation is making the race of your characters undisputedly clear. So clue your readers in! Not only is it nice for People of Color to read descriptions of themselves as awesome everyday people, but there's a consequence to being vague: Most readers will assume the characters are white.

Society ensures we view white people as the default. That default human is probably also straight, cis, able-bodied, etc. until proven otherwise. This way of thinking won't dissolve overnight.

When describing your characters

Make their races clear early on once they’re introduced.

Sprinkle in a few more reminders throughout the story.

Ways to show race:

Physical descriptions - You can describe hair, skin tone, and facial features to create a picture for readers. It isn’t foolproof, though. For example, dark brown skin and curly hair may point to a Person of Color, sure, but not an exact race or ethnicity. It’s wise to pair physical details with other means.

Culture - Cultural elements can seamlessly indicate race. They’re already part of your character’s identity, so it’s bound to come up! Think family names, clothing, holidays, traditions, language, food, heirlooms...

Social issues - What social issues directly affect the character? What about relatives in other countries? Even a national disaster could show background, like a hurricane affecting your character’s family in Mexico.

Activities - The character could be involved or have met someone through a PoC-specific organization. Think student unions, activism, local businesses Facebook groups, professional meet-ups...

Cover art - If your book cover features your characters, I urge you to make sure they look the part. Even if you have little say in the final product, remind your publisher of their races and ask they take care to be accurate. Say no to white-washed book covers!

Say it in story - Don’t be afraid to just state it. I highly recommend doing so at some point in the story. There’s many ways to work in a mention. Create a situation that makes sense to the story. See these examples:

“The woman turned to face me. She was Black, I think, with a short coily afro and a dimple in her smile that took my breath away.”

“It felt awkward, being the only woman in the room, let alone an Indian woman.”

“I was born of a Korean mother and a German father.”

Say it outside the pages - These days allow more interaction between authors and their readers. Use social media or a webpage to share character profiles, your celebrity dream cast, share commissioned art, and clarify questions.

Use one or more of these methods. At the least, I recommend a combination of physical descriptions and outright stating race whenever the story allows.

Characters of Color in Fantasy

Alternative or fantasy settings may have different concepts of race. Perhaps there’s no word for human ethnicities or countries. Never fear—racial coding is here! Racial coding means providing hints that your character is the equivalent of a human race. You can use physical, cultural and geographical parallels to help readers make a conclusion.

Now, go forth and describe your characters. We wanna see them!

Related Articles on Writingwithcolor:

Describing Characters of Color:

Writing With Color Featured Description Posts

Fantasy Coding Advice on Writing With Color:

PoC in Fantasy When Their Country/Continent Doesn’t Exist

Describing POC without stating Race

Writing With Color “Coding” Search

Colette Aburime is the founder of WritingWithColor, a writing advice blog focused on diversity. She studied creative and professional writing in college, and writes (or rather, dreams of writing) in her free time. Colette is a big fan of romance and fantasy and lives out her fairytale in a humble cottage in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. She spends happily ever after with her prince, plants, and a feisty cat. Check out WritingWithColor on Tumblr and Twitter.

#nanowrimo #writing #writing with color #nano prep #characters #diversity #by nano guest #colette aburime

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bltngames · 4 years

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SAGE 2020: Fan Games

I’d hoped to have this article out a little bit sooner, but I overestimated how long it would take to write about some of these games. Whoops! Like I said when I outlined the posting “schedule” on the first day, we’re playing it fast and loose, so this is just what you get.

Today is the day I talk about fan games! And even though SAGE has “Sonic” right there in the acronym, it’s always hosted fan games from all types, so today we’ve got Mega Man, Mario, Rayman, and even fan games of fan games, if you can believe it.

Sonic Pinball Panic!

Pinball is one of those things where I’ve always been obsessed with it, but never very good at it. And now, with access to digital pinball collections like Pinball Arcade and Pinball FX, I don’t actually find myself playing as much pinball as I thought I would when I was 14 years old. Still, I find myself fascinated by a good pinball table, and this honestly caught me off guard. This could very easily be an official DLC release for one of those aforementioned pinball collections and I wouldn’t even bat an eyelash (in fact, if you ask me, this is better than Pinball FX, which has always had weird ball physics). This looks, sounds, and functions exactly like a real pinball table should. My complaints are minor: for starters, the table feels kind of easy. I’ve never been a pinball wizard, but I was losing balls left and right here and it still took a good 15 minutes before I finally got a game over. Score accumulation is also pretty slow; most pinball tables will dump millions and millions of points on you, but here, it felt like a struggle just to reach the 379k I finished with. Both contribute to the fact that the table feels a little flat, like it’s missing a spark to really put it over the top. And, third, it would be nice if it had controller support. The keyboard works just fine, here (it’s just pinball, after all) but I find that the triggers on a controller feel really good with pinball flippers, and mapping the plunger to the right stick is great, too. This is a Unity game, so I wouldn’t think it’d be that hard to hook it up to the controller mapper. Still, I came away impressed.

Mega Man: Perfect Blue

There are two things out there that always give me pause: fan-made Doom level packs, and Mega Man fan games. Fan made gaming content generally has problems when it comes to difficulty balancing anyway, but these games have earned a certain reputation for their difficulty, which creates a problem when you have content made by fans, for fans. This insularity means these things are usually way too hard for what I would consider “normal” people (read: casual fans and outsiders). Add on to the fact that I’d even say that there are official Mega Man games with bad difficulty balancing, and you have a recipe for frustration. Sadly, this is how I’d characterize Perfect Blue: though this introductory level isn’t impossibly hard, it’s definitely pushing that edge where it’s not very accommodating to someone who hasn’t played and finished every Classic Mega Man game ever made. It almost immediately throws you into scenarios where you have jumps you can barely reach, insta-kill spikes, and enemies that not only actively dodge your shots, but invincible enemies that launch counter attack homing missiles. And then it starts making you juggle all of this stuff, together, at the same time. None of this is insurmountable as long as you’re paying attention, but as a very casual Mega Man fan, it’s an unfriendly first impression and makes me worried about what the rest of the game is going to be like as the challenge naturally ramps up. For those hardcore Mega Man fans among you, the rest of this is solid, at least. The presentation and controls are excellent, and the new sprites are beautiful. It’s a game I’d love to enjoy when it’s done… but I’m assuming I’ll be left out in the cold. A shame, really, because there’s so much promise here.

Sonic and the Mayhem Master

There’s a lot to like about this game, but there’s a part of me that really wonders if this should even be considered a Sonic fan game. Mayhem Master’s depictions of Sonic and Amy Rose are atypical to put it mildly. Here, Sonic seems to be a bookish nerd of sorts, a sidekick to Amy Rose, who has been turned into a burnt out, cigar-smoking detective. Most of the game plays out as half an adventure game, half an RPG, where you roam around the world talking to NPCs and gather clues while being assaulted by random battles. The battle system is super off-the-wall, too, perhaps taking inspirations from games like Mario & Luigi and Undertale. This means that battles aren’t passive -- you spend most of each fight dodging or nullifying incoming attacks with simplistic action-based commands. It’s weird, and different, and occasionally even a little bit overwhelming. That’s kind of the whole game, really. It’s the sort of thing that really doesn’t feel like a Sonic game at all, but it also doesn’t feel bad. The artwork is very charming, I’m interested in seeing the characters develop, and there’s plenty of worldbuilding and mystery. Would this still be as intriguing if you removed the Sonic connection, even if it’s so threadbare? That’s a hard question to answer. I know that some of my interest in this game is seeing how it spins more familiar Sonic elements into something that’s completely different. Worth checking out, for curiosity’s sake if nothing else.

Sonic and the Dreamcatcher

This is a fairly brilliant little game with two unfortunate quirks. If you didn’t know, the special stages in the original Sonic the Hedgehog were inspired by an arcade game of the era called Cameltry, published by Taito in 1989. Now, Sonic’s special stages were different enough from Cameltry that it wasn’t a case of Sega outright stealing the gameplay, but there’s a clear lineage there, and it only becomes clearer when you compare the special stages in Sonic 4 Episode 1 to Cameltry (spoilers: in that game, they’re nearly identical). Dreamcatcher is also from this lineage, but is infinitely more charming than either Sonic 4 and maybe even Cameltry itself. The idea is that you must collect a specific number of blue spheres in order to reveal the Chaos Emerald, after which you have a limited amount of time to find and collect it. It’s very simple, but the presentation really sells the game’s charm. It’s just a game that looks good and sounds good, with an interesting premise executed very well. Also, you get a dedicated “& Knuckles” button to spawn infinite Knuckles to help you collect blue spheres and bash enemies. Being able to have unlimited numbers of these guys sounds like it would break the game, but once that countdown clock begins, the last thing you need is 20+ echidnas clogging up the route back to the emerald. The first quirk this game suffers from is that there’s only two levels. Parts of this have a very “game jam made in a weekend” vibe to it despite the rock-solid music, sound, and gameplay, and only having two levels contributes to that. Hopefully more are coming in the future. The other quirk? You can’t actually download this game -- it’s embedded in a webpage. I’m sure this is to make it easy to play on any platform with a web browser (phones, PCs, etc.) but I find myself greatly desiring a hard copy of this game that can live on my computer forever.

Sonic Galactic

Now here’s just a good old fashioned Sonic fan game. Though it clearly takes inspiration from Sonic Mania’s aesthetics in some places, it’s clearly doing its own thing, featuring not just the core cast of Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles, but also Fang the Sniper, and even a brand new character named Tunnel the Mole. Unlike a lot of Sonic fan games at SAGE, this appears to be using something besides Clickteam Fusion, Game Maker, or Unity. Here, it’s the “Hatch Game Engine,” whatever that is. Whatever the case may be, the game runs very well and is basically indistinguishable from just playing Sonic Mania. Visuals are sharp, music’s good, the two included boss fights are surprisingly fun to fight -- everything seems to be in order. As a result, there’s not really a lot to say. This is just a good, fun game. Anything else I’d say would come off sounding like nitpicks. For example, there’s no way to set graphics options yet, so the game is stuck in 2x Windowed mode. Fang and Tunnel are cute additions, but I wonder how much utility they have as characters. Unless I missed something, Fang’s pop gun is mainly for a weak double-jump ability, and Tunnel’s ability to dig and ricochet off floors, walls and ceilings is cool, but it doesn’t have quite the universal utility of Tails’ flight or Knuckles climbing and gliding. It’ll be interesting to see how or maybe even if their abilities have a chance to grow into something special. Anyway, like I said, those are nitpicks, so try to give this a shot if you can.

Sonic Robo-Blast!

Remasters seem to be a bit of a theme this SAGE, between Sonic Triple Trouble 16-bit, Sonic 2 SMS, Sonic 1 Revisited, but this is perhaps the most surprising of them all: a loving remaster of the original Sonic Robo-Blast. SRB1 was perhaps one of the first true “landmark” fan games, given that it was basically a whole entire game that people could play. It's not a stretch to say that SRB1 probably helped kickstart the fan gaming community that still survives to this day -- I certainly owe my involvement in the community to seeing SRB1 for the first time. The problem is, as historically significant as the game might be, it’s nearly impossible to go back to nowadays -- it’s much, much too dated to be any fun. This remaster completely re-envisions SRB1 as a regular Sonic game, while also pulling in gameplay elements from Sonic Robo-Blast 2. It’s a bit of a time paradox mindwarp, but it helps give it a bit more personality than just making a bog-standard 2D Sonic. It works, aided by the fact the sprites, music and overall presentation are fantastic. The only downside is the Act 2 boss, which commits the cardinal sin of taking away player agency and making you wait around far too much. Here’s hoping this gets finished, because it’s definitely on my radar now.

Super Mario Flashback

This has been floating around for a few years now and I’m glad to see it’s finally starting to get some more substantial content as it moves towards becoming an actual game. That being said, this is also one of those games that’s kind of hard to talk about because it’s just… really polished. The art is incredible, it controls exactly like a Mario game, and there’s already a decent mixture of ideas at play in the demo. Anything else I’d say would sound like nitpicking -- like, for example, the backseat game designer in me wonders if maybe the game is prioritizing aesthetics a little too much. This is a wonderfully animated game, absolutely gorgeous, but some actions, like the butt-stomp and the wall kick, feel a bit sluggish, and I think it’s because they show off fancy animations. Even if it’s a split second, waiting for Mario to attach to a wall to kick off of it feels slow. Really, though, that’s an insignificant complaint. This demo is still well worth checking out.

Sonic Advance 4 Advanced

This game seems like a greatest-hits of Dimps best ideas, spanning the first Sonic Advance all the way to Sonic Rush. There’s just one problem: the game seems broken. Now, my desktop PC is starting to show its age. I built it four and a half years ago, and though it can handle game like Gears of War 5 on high settings at 60fps, slowly, newer games seem to be leaving it behind. That being said, I don’t think a game like Sonic Advance 4 here should be running at what appears to be half its intended speed. It also originally launched in a teeny-tiny window (we’re talking, like, smaller than a postage stamp) and even though the options menu has a toggle for full screen mode, it doesn’t want to work. Something about this game under the hood seems to be struggling very, very, VERY hard. It’s a shame, because if this actually played at the proper speed, it seems like it might actually be an alright game, if a bit complex and busy.

Sonic 2 SMS Remake

Here’s a game I was all buckled in expecting to enjoy. Like it says on the tin, this is a remake of Sonic 2 for the Master System (and Game Gear), but with wide screen visuals and huge expansions to the mechanics, roster of playable characters, and levels. On the outside it seems really impressive, and to a certain degree it is, but something about the controls feel a little off. Sonic’s heavier here than he is on the Master System, perhaps to simulate “real” Sonic physics a little more accurately, but you can also pretty much stop on a dime, and the combination of the two feels awkward. The camera also needs a lot of work, as it’s basic at best and does a poor job of letting you see what’s below (to the dev if you’re reading this: there’s actually video tutorials out there on how 2D scrolling cameras work, it might be worth looking a couple of them up). It also leans into some of the tech limitations of the Master System, like how you aren’t given any rings for boss fights (and even hiding the HUD, a move done to save on resources for the large enemy sprites). I could be picky on a bunch of other little stuff, too, like how the flight mechanics feel, but there are other games to play at SAGE and I’ve got at least two more articles to write. Needless to say, this is a solid (impressive, even) foundation but it’s missing a lot of late-stage polish to clean up the tiny little rough edges.

Rayman Redemption

I tell this story every so often, but it was about three quarters of the way through Rayman 2 on the Sega Dreamcast when it struck me, suddenly: I love this game. I was being chased by a pirate ship through some rickety bridges and even though I was dying over and over and over again, I realized I had been enjoying Rayman 2 enough that I might put it in my top ten Dreamcast games. But that was 2002, and the years haven’t been so kind to ol’ Rayman. From the strangely celebrity-infused Rayman 3, to the tragedy of Rayman 4 (eventually becoming Raving Rabbids) to the endless, careless ports of Rayman 2 to every platform under the sun, one gets the impression Ubisoft maybe didn’t know what to do with Rayman. Especially now, when most of Ubisoft’s games are some form of online live service or cookie cutter open world experience (or increasingly both). But the fans know what they want. Rayman Redemption takes the original 1995 Rayman game and lovingly gives it a fresh coat of paint. The results are akin to what Taxman and Stealth did for Sonic CD in 2011, with wide screen visuals, improved controls, touched up level design, but gameplay that still feels faithful and accurate to the original experience. Except that Sega charged money for that, and here, fans have released this for free. Ubisoft’s loss, I guess. I didn’t play Rayman 1 until well after I’d finished Rayman 2, and I’ll admit, I kind of bounced off of it back then. It felt slow, and awkward, and when the difficulty ramped up, it got very hard, very quickly. Now, admittedly, I’ve only put about 30 minutes into Redemption here, but just the addition of a run button is incredibly welcome, and the retooled level design and powerup mechanics helps the game feel way less obtuse overall. It’s just a cleaner, tighter, more accessible and more polished version of Rayman.

Stay tuned for the next article: Indie games.

#sage #sonic amateur games expo #writing #review slew #rayman redemption #sonic pinball panic #mega man #perfect blue #mayhem master #dreamcatcher #sonic galactic #sonic robo-blast #super mario flashback #sonic advance 4 #sms remake #sonic the hedgehog #sega #sonic team #review

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mca-attack21 · 5 years

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Deadly Definitions 12

Hello, welcome back to Deadly Definitions. Find the first 11.5 parts here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 9.5 Part 10 Part 11 Tags: @l4life @ahoy-ladies-67

Four days had gone by since you found the video and handed it over to the Sheriff. Four days since Clifford Blossom hung himself. Four days since the Blossom’s drug run came out into the open. And now, everyone was condemned to face the aftermath.

On Monday, Betty post an article to the Blue and Gold webpage that shed truth on all that had been going on in Riverdale and in defense of FP. It was some of her best work. Meanwhile, the Sheriff was drilling FP trying to get names of the Serpent drug runners. At the same time, Veronica’s mother was starting to prepare for her husband’s return. You and Jughead were trying to figure out your next move.

On Tuesday, you, Archie, and Betty had been called down to the Principal’s office. You and Archie still hadn’t really talked and the truth was that he was worried about you. His worry only grew when he found that you weren’t at school. The purpose of the meeting was simple. Principal Weatherbee and Mayor McCoy wanted you and Archie to perform at the 75th anniversary Jubilee with Josie and the Pussy cats. They also wanted Betty to give a speech to inspire town unity. Betty asked why Jughead was being left out, after all, he did the most in solving Jason’s murder. The mayor gave a very political answer and then dismissed both Archie and Betty.

As they left, Archie asked Betty if she had seen you or if she had any clue where you were. She didn’t, but she noted that she hadn’t seen Jughead either. Archie wondered where the two of you were.

The answer to that question was at the police station. FP was technically your guardian and seeing as he was looking at being in prison for a long period of time, you and Jughead would have to find a new guardian or be placed in the foster system. You immediately called Archie’s dad in tears.

When he showed up he talked to Keller and offered to take you and Jughead in. The problem was that social workers were already involved and everything had to be official. He didn’t meet the requirements to host one of you let alone both of you. There were two foster families on the southside that agreed to take one of you in, that not only meant that the two of you would be split up, but you would both have to attend Southside High. Upon hearing this you had enough and ran out of the station.

Why was this happening? You didn’t want to leave, this was your home. You had already lost so much, you didn’t want to lose Archie too. You knew that if you went to the Southside that everything would change. You wanted to scream, to punch something, to hide away from everything. And so, you started walking towards the river.

Meanwhile back at school, Cheryl was being odd even for Cheryl. She was giving away things and saying goodbyes. Veronica confronted her and told her that everything would get better. But Cheryl wasn’t sad, she was at peace, which completely threw Veronica off. Betty had called Jughead and discovered what had happened that morning. He informed her that he would be arriving back at school any minute.

Archie called you for what seemed like the hundredth time. At this point you either didn’t have your phone, it was dead, or you were purposefully ignoring him. He went to send you a text but Veronica pulled him away along with Jughead.

“Veronica, what’s going on?” he asked.

“It’s Betty” was all she said before they got to the crowded hall. They pushed their way through and saw that someone had vandalized her locker. There were many copies of her article along with a hanging voodoo doll. The whole thing was covered in blood that read ‘Go To HELL SERPENT SLUT’. Jughead quickly stepped in between her and the scene.

“Betty,” he whispered.

She ran into his arms trying to rip the papers down, “It’s just some jerk with a can of spray paint” he cried.

“Betty,” he said as he held her firmly, “I don’t think that’s spray paint,” he said as he forced her away.

The entire group locked themselves in the blue and gold office and comforted her. After a while, Archie asked Jug if he knew where you were. That is when Jug informed everyone about what had happened at the Sheriff’s station that morning. They were all in shock over the news. Betty and Veronica called their mom’s about taking you in. Veronica’s said no because of Hiram's return and Betty’s said they couldn’t with Polly and the babies. Everything was happening so fast.

Archie was going to leave and look for you so you wouldn’t have to go through all of this alone. But before he could, Veronica received a text from Cheryl. ‘Thanks for trying, I’m going to be with JJ’ it read.

“Om my god” she gasped showing the message to her friends.

“Where would Cheryl go to be with Jason?” Betty questioned.

“Sweetwater River” Archie realized and they all raced there.

------------------Meanwhile-----------------------

Sweetwater River had always been the place you came when you needed to clear your head. There was something so serene about it, especially in the wintertime. You walked around for a while, trudging through the snow, your only regret was that you weren’t wearing warmer clothes. You went to the lookout and noticed that there was someone on the ice. You quickly realized that it was Cheryl Blossom. You made your way down to the bank and called out to her. She simply ignored you and started pounding on the ice.

You had no choice and carefully walked out to her. “Cheryl, what are you doing out here?” you asked.

She was absolutely distraught, “I’m going to be with JJ.”

“Come on Cheryl, let’s go back to the bank and we can talk about this,” you instructed calmly.

“I don’t want to go back, I just want this to be over,” she cried.

“It’s okay Cheryl it’s all going to be okay, we just have to get off the ice”

“No, it’s never going to be okay again,” she sobbed.

“Cheryl I understand what you're going through, I was thinking the same thing when I lost my parents, but it gets better I promise.”

“It can’t” she cried.

You were going to continue, but you felt the ice shift ever-so-slightly under your feet. At this time you could hear Archie and the gang calling out for Cheryl. This was scary as you didn’t know how it would force her to react.

You refocused your attention on her, “Come on Cheryl, let’s go” you tried ignoring your friends.

“I can’t go back,” she whispered.

“Yes, you can. Jason would want you to. He would want you to live your life. Please come with me, do it for Jason,” you tried starting to get desperate.

Cheryl paused for a moment, it felt like an eternity, before she nodded her head in agreement. You sighed in relief and put your arms around her guiding her back when you heard the cracking.

There was no time to react before both you and Cheryl were underwater. It was so dark and cold. You had an arm around Cheryl and worked against the current to force her back to the surface. It was all happening so fast. You tried to focus on the light was coming from the hole where the two of you fell in. You pushed her up as someone was pulling her out of the water. It was a struggle as the current felt like it was getting stronger, or maybe your body was just starting to go numb. You tried to fight your way back over to the surface but it was becoming too hard. All you could focus on was how cold it was. And then you couldn’t focus at all.

-----

“Oh my god, Cheryl’s on the ice” Betty said as they got to the shoreline where they could see.

“Who is that with her?” Veronica asked.

“It’s Y/n” Archie whispered fear sinking in.

“Shouldn’t we go get them?” Veronica asked wondering why they were just standing there.

“We can’t V, it’s not safe” Betty answered.

“She’s right, we don’t want to risk putting too much weight on the ice,” Jughead agreed.

They watched in utter silence as the scene unfolded before them, only able to hear fragments of sentences.

“Okay, they’re coming back,” Veronica acknowledged.

They were relieved momentarily, but then they watched in horror as the ice cracked submerging both of you.

Archie sprinted out to the hole and laid on his stomach shoving his hand through to grab Cheryl. He ignored how cold it was and how his muscles ached from the action. Jughead was soon by his side helping him pull her out. As soon as she was, she was coughing and freaking out. Jughead ordered Betty and Veronica to take her back to the shore, wanting to minimize the weight on the ice. Archie went back for you but the current was starting to pull you away. He scooted himself forward and reached again desperately, just barely managing to grab your jacket. It was enough though and he was able to pull you closer and get a better grip before pulling you out.

As he got you out of the water he was freaking out. You were unconscious and so cold. He lowered his ear over your mouth, listening to see if you were breathing. You weren’t. He didn’t hesitate to start CPR, terrified of screwing it up. Jughead had no choice but to stand there and watch.

“Come on, Y/n!” Archie cried out as he started doing chest compressions again. This wasn’t happening. Jughead turned away, he couldn’t watch. But suddenly he heard you start coughing up water and gasping for air before passing out again.

As you started to come to, you were freezing and very confused. You faintly remember being picked up and carried. You remember hearing Archie apologize repeatedly as he stripped off your wet clothes and slipped one of his shirts over your head. He went downstairs grabbed a space heater, blankets, and hot cocoa. When he returned, he took his shirt off and put some sweatpants on before joining you. He was holding you tightly and you were thankful for the warmth that radiated off of him.

“Archie?” you sniffled.

“Y/n, hey, how are you feeling?” he asked rubbing his hands over your arms.

“Cold” you tried to joke.

“I’m so glad that you’re okay,” he replied.

“You saved my life,” you whispered.

“And you saved Cheryls” he reminded.

“Is she okay?”

“Yeah, she’s with Veronica now.”

You wrapped yourself around him and he readjusted the blankets around the two of you.

“Thank you,” you smiled.

“Here, I made you hot chocolate,” he said as he handed you a mug.

You took it and sipped it slowly. Before handing it back to him to set down. You cuddled back into his side mesmerized by him.

“I love you Archie,” you whispered as you were being lulled back to sleep allowing the exhaustion take over.

“I love you too Y/n,” he said kissing the top of your head.

At that moment he knew that no matter what happened with the jubilee, the social worker, and anything else that life decided to hurl at you, that the two of you would be okay. You had each other and that is all that really mattered.

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