snowlikestardust
yours is a system of slow, that earliest of wheels
1K posts
they/them. i follow/reply from @gothamapologist. if you rely on a screen reader, block the tag “undescribed.”[header id: a purple skyline/forest-scape painting by holly warburton. icon id: a simplistic, line-drawn mountain with stars and the moon above it, drawn by the artist lvnnsi.]
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snowlikestardust · 5 days ago
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snowlikestardust · 7 days ago
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fanart of chapter 7 of the fic „the heroine is annoying, but she dies spectacularly at the end” by @hockeyisforthegays .
Shoko probably thinks hes being blackmailed….
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snowlikestardust · 9 days ago
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im a fucking sucker for the “character gets so badly injured that they can’t think clearly and start calling for help in a distressingly vulnerable way.” characters who start using nicknames for their friends they haven’t used since they were kids. characters who start begging for their brother they haven’t seen in years to be there. characters who would usually use their parents’ names or call them mother/father/etc crying out mama when they go down. u understand.
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snowlikestardust · 9 days ago
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proximity
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snowlikestardust · 9 days ago
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“People don’t understand the word ruthless. They think it means ‘mean.’ It’s not about being mean. It’s about seeing the bright, clear line that leads from A to B. The line that goes from motive to means. Beginning to end. It’s about seeing that bright, clear line and not caring about anything but the beautiful fact that you can see the solution. Not caring about anything else but the perfection of it.”
- Marco, Book #30: The Reunion, pg. 71 (by K.A. Applegate)
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snowlikestardust · 12 days ago
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a woman being feminine is right-wing coded which is masculine coded. a woman being masculine is left-wing coded which is feminine coded. this disproves the existence of women
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snowlikestardust · 18 days ago
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worked on some async today. takes place immediately after tori attempts to turn minato into soup
Tori watched Minato disappear into the water in great satisfaction. She peered over the embankment. Steam clouded her view, but she could see his blue and green uniform under the rolling boil of the river. The bodies of dead minnows bubble up above him. 
Then he disappeared. 
Tori tensed automatically. She hadn’t caught him dropping any Hiraishin markers anywhere, but ninja were sneaky. 
Minato didn’t spontaneously appear behind her over the course of the next minute, and Tori relaxed ever so slightly. A bigger fish came to the top of the still boiling river, its body flipping over and over. 
So. Boiling someone alive did not kill them nearly as fast as she had expected. She’d seen various propaganda about Terumi Mei cooking people alive with steam, and that varied from “instant death” if you were pro-Mei, to “incredibly long and painful and cruel” if you were anti-Mei. But Tori had given little weight to the propaganda as actual evidence, aside from that she was positive boiling hot water could kill you. 
Hopefully Minato was currently dying of his injuries wherever he had gone. While Tori could not recall any stories about people being boiled alive, but she was something of a connoisseur in bizarre and horrific bodily harm. Sometimes adrenaline was enough to get a ninja through the initial part of receiving a major injury, only to collapse moments later. Tori balled her hands into fists, her fingernails digging into her palms. She hoped his pretty eyes were cooked solid. Then he’d never be able to trick a poor girl’s heart with a pretty face ever again. 
On the other hand, given Tori had no real data about boiling people alive, she could be royally fucked if he lived. It occurred to her that he definitely had Hiraishin markers back in the village, and if he had pulled some sort of main character ninjutsu bullshit and was still fighting fit, he could just come back to the river and kill her. 
I guess I’ll just lie out my ass again, Tori decided, trying to convince her brain not to panic. She was very obviously just a civilian woman who couldn’t even get her life together to wash her hair properly. She could act hysterical and say the Kumo-nin had told her the trap did something else, or else that she was just trying to protect her home and beg for mercy. It would be humiliating, but while Minato obviously had no qualms about killing ninja without asking questions first, he did seem to want to play nice with civilians. 
Also, if he did kill her, probably he would just abandon her body like he had the Kumo-nin. He was unlikely to stick around long enough to figure out Tori’s little problem with dying and attempt to kidnap or question her over. 
It’ll fine either way, Tori told herself. She still didn’t go back to the village. Instead, she walked stiffly down the embankment as fast as she could without breaking into a run. She was going to miss the dirty laundry and the cute crab mug she’d left behind, but all her other belongings were in a storage seal, and she didn’t want to risk going back and discovering a pissed off and half-boiled Minato. 
Minato did not show to bother her at all that day, as she marched forth in a random direction. He didn’t show up during the horrible three hours of paranoid sleep she got while camping. 
When a full twenty-fours passed, Tori finally started to calm down. She’d found a fisherman and convinced him to take her further down the river than she could get walking, and while she wasn’t untrackable, she gained confidence that Minato was at the very least too injured to hunt her down immediately. 
She tried to travel deeper into Grass Country as fast as she could, paying for transport more often than she would normally. 
Days passed and no news sprang up about the Yellow Flash mysteriously dying, but also there were no new sightings of him. Tori had no way to draw real conclusions from this. Konoha was unlikely to advertise him dying or being grievously injured, but also he was a key player in the war and his enemies would be sniffing around for information like this. That there was no news could mean she’d succeeded, or it could be she’d failed and so there was nothing worth gossiping about. 
The lack of knowing what had happen turned to a festering sort of anxiety that kept her up at night and made her head dizzy at random moments. And so, Tori switched up her goals. Even if she’d killed Minato properly, that his body was somewhere where she couldn’t hide what she’d done meant Konoha could potentially track her down. She needed to protect herself more than ever. She holed up in a cheap hotel in the middle of nowhere and spent every waking moment making drafts of seal diagrams and fussing. 
How to set up a barrier that could activate faster than a ninja could kill her…? She could paint i directly on her skin, then link its activation to being hit, or to an increase in her heart rate. This would mean she’d inevitably activate it on accident when she walked into a table or got excited about something, but perhaps for now she didn’t care…
Weeks passed. Tori’s anxiety hit a maximum where she didn’t sleep at all one night, and then slowly started to calm. She obtained a raw potato and stuck it in her room’s windowsill to sprout, hoping to use it to add to her chakra phylogeny. She walked into town and stole a library book to try and add to her notes on plant and animal relatedness. She did accidentally activate her seal multiple times, but at least she knew it worked. 
Her funds were running dangerously low, and she’d have to move on soon. She started talking to people again, asking about where war refugees in this area were moving to, and if she could join a caravan. 
She was organizing her things one evening, preparing to move out the next morning. She’d spread all her various fuuinjutsu and research materials across her bed, and stood over it with her hands on her hips, debating the best way to repack and also, how to best transport a sprouted potato?
She looked up at her window potato, now in a paper cup with dirt. It had grown three alien-looking shoots, jagging out at random angles before reaching towards the window. 
Then, as she regarded her potato, a shadow passed over the window. Tori frowned. The window started to move upwards, a hand appearing in the open space, and Tori’s eyes widened. 
She panicked, obviously, which activated her barrier. This was still somehow not faster than the Yellow Flash could break into her hotel room. 
He was toe-to-toe with her in an instant, kunai in hand. Tori yelped in horror as the barrier flicked up around them, a dark pink bubble that was supposed to keep her safe. 
Somehow, Minato looked exactly the same as before, like she hadn’t done her best to turn him into soup. 
The barrier pressed him up against her, his chest and shoulders blocking her view of the rest of the room as he boxed her in, and Tori’s back hit the other side of the barrier. Minato's arm was forced forward as he bent over her, and thank God he was competent enough to roll the kunai in his hand so the broadside pressed against her neck rather than the sharp edge. His chin brushed against the top of her head. 
Tori wished he smelled bad, so she could find this new predicament gross. Instead, he just sort of smelled like dirt and an inoffensive odor of sweat. His body against hers was also warm and firm and bigger than her in a way she regrettably found she liked. 
He also maybe wanted to kill her. She needed to focus on that. The rush of adrenaline and the increase in her heart rate was very confusing in this moment. 
“Oh,” he said, sounding mildly surprised but not at all upset. The hand not holding the knife reached around her, knuckles knocking on the barrier next to her head. “Interesting. Well, I still think this is my win.”
What the hell is he talking about? Tori thought. She was sure he could feel her rapidly beating heart, as sure as she could feel his completely steady heartbeat. 
Well, if he wasn’t already pissed off, she could test the waters a little to see if she could figure out what he wanted. 
“You haven’t won yet,” she said hotly. “What are you going to do? Trap yourself indefinitely in an enclosed space with my corpse?”
He shifted slightly, bringing the kunai away from her throat. He could only pull his head away a couple inches, and he didn’t step back so his body was still pressed against hers, but it was enough distance that she could peer up and see he was smirking at her. His eyes were exactly as pretty as they’d been before. 
Oh no, his smirk is hot, Tori thought helplessly, regretting yet again that boiling was a less efficient murder technique than she’d anticipated. Her insides squirmed with some bizarre contradictory emotion. She was terrified, yes, but also she was a little turned on. 
Then suddenly they were standing on the other side of the room, near the door. He must have chucked a kunai across the room in the tiny fraction of a moment before the barrier had gone up. The barrier was still in place around them. 
Minato’s smirk slipped slightly. Somehow, Tori found his apparent confusion even hotter. 
“Oh, did you try to teleport us both out?” she asked, and smooth and coy as she could make her voice given her insides were flipping out in either panic or arousal. “You’re not getting me out of this that easily.”
Minato was outside of the barrier a second later, and the kunai clattered to her feet, undoubtedly scratching up her shoes. He’d left Tori where she stood, with the marked kunai still in the barrier in case he wanted to go back in. 
He hadn’t gone far— just back to where he’d stabbed a kunai into the wall over her bed. Somehow, on top of planting multiple kunai and outrunning her barrier, he’d also left her window potato completely untouched. Damn him for being so thorough. 
“How’d you do it?” he asked, sounding genuinely curious. His eyes were bright and inviting in a way that made Tori want to answer. Even though he’d literally held a knife to her throat only a moment earlier, he just seemed like he’d be really easy to talk to. 
Touché, she thought. 
“Do what? This barrier?” she said. “Believe it or not, you’re not the only ninja who wants to kill me. A girl learns to protect herself.”
Minato flopped down to sit on her bed and cocked his head. 
“I don’t want to kill you,” he said plainly. 
“Uh-huh,” Tori replied. 
“So how long does your barrier last?” Minato asked, leaning back on his hands. “I have all night. Do you?”
Tori twitched in annoyance. The barrier was tied to her, so it would be up as long as she was alive and producing chakra, or until she chose to deactivate it. But she didn’t want him to know he could just teleport back in and kill her. It was better if he thought the barrier had a time limit, like most barriers would. 
The barrier was also draining her chakra, so it could “kill” her in a day or so without food to replenish herself. She supposed that was the time limit. 
That, or Minato could attempt to deactivate the barrier himself, which meant he’d have to teleport back inside the barrier and then remove her shirt and…
Tori’s face went hot as she imagined what his hands would feel like on her bare skin. This idea should frighten her, and yet she kind of wanted it to happen. What was wrong with her?!
Fortunately, Minato did not react to her blush and simply continued to just stare at her in mild interest. Tori turned her gaze to the kunai at her feet, desperate to distract herself. She had just enough room in her barrier to awkwardly squat down to pick it up. 
“How does this even work?” she asked, picking at the tag with the Hiraishin marker. It wasn’t hard, once she peeled up the edges, to pull the whole thing off the kunai’s handle. “This isn’t real fuinjutsu, is it?”
The tag was… well, technically it was seal script. But also it was just some characters. One of them was “love.” Why. 
Minato’s cheeks had actually turned pink. 
“It’s… it is a seal,” he spluttered. 
“What happens if I destroy it?” Tori wondered, tugging at the paper like she meant to rip it. 
Next moment, Minato was back in the barrier with her again, hands around her wrists as he pushed her back up against the barrier. 
“I stop you before you can,” he said, and somehow this made Tori’s stomach completely flip over. 
“So I can destroy it,” Tori said smartly. She wondered what he would do, if she continued to be sassy with him. 
Minato sighed dramatically. She felt the puff of his breath on the top of her head. She waited excitedly for his reply. 
He took a tiny half-step back, as far as he could get in the cramped space. He let go of her right wrist, but his other hand slipped up her arm to cover her left hand. He held it up in the small space between them, her wrist facing upwards. A brand new Hiraishin marker, written in black across the delicate skin of her wrist, glared up at her. 
Tori’s eyes widened. “When did you…?”
Minato’s stupid sexy smirk was back. “I don’t need ink to place one.”
Fuck, Tori thought. If she’d known this about the Hiraishin once upon a time, she’d definitely forgotten it. Truly this was an OP technique. 
Minato teleported back out of the barrier, this time appearing facing the bed. He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the notebooks and scrolls Tori had left out, his head leaning back to regard her window potato. 
He can also control how close he gets to the marker and his position around it, Tori thought. What the fuck, honestly. She was glad she wasn’t a ninja. She’d absolutely hate having to figure out how to fight that. 
As it were, she was a civilian. If she fought anyone outright, she’d just die. Finding out the Hiraishin was even more OP than she’d thought just meant she could figure out new ways to trick him into teleporting directly into his own demise. 
“Who taught you fuinjutsu?” Minato asked, picking up one of the scrolls and examining it. 
Tori did not answer, instead glaring at him as he went through her things and she was helpless to stop him. How rude! She liked her things! 
“I’m honestly not going to hurt you,” Minato said after a couple minutes of silence, picking up a different scroll. 
Tori eyed him, rubbing at her wrist. The Hiraishin marker didn’t smudge the way ink might. Clearly Minato was still underestimating her, if he thought she wouldn’t be willing to also destroy a marker physically on her. 
“Not the vengeful type, then?” Tori drawled. 
Minato actually laughed. He tilted his head back slightly, grinning good naturedly at her. 
“They managed to regrow all my skin, so no harm, no foul.”
They did… they did what?
The face Tori made at this statement must have been funny, because Minato laughed again. It wasn’t mocking or cruel; he sounded genuinely amused. He really did seem like he was telling the truth, that he was just here to ask questions. 
Except, Tori knew better than anyone how good a manipulation tactic playing kind and demure was. Minato was a killer and a tool of Konoha above anything else. She couldn’t forget that. 
“This is a Konoha scroll,” Minato said conversationally, holding up the scroll in question. “Where’d you get it?”
Tori narrowed her eyes at him. I’ll make him break, she decided. 
“One of your buddies decided it would be a good idea to get drunk and harass women,” Tori said, which was the truth. “So I decided he’d be better off with a pair of collapsed lungs and none of his stuff.”
Minato’s easy smile shrank slightly, and his body language turned stiff. 
There, Tori thought. Now show me your true colors. 
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Minato said, voice tight. 
“I’m not,” Tori replied. “What did Konoha tell you to do about me?”
Minato cocked his head to the side. He studied her for a bit, even as he tucked the Konoha scroll into the pouch at his waist. 
Eventually, he said, “They don’t think you could possibly be real.”
Tori actually laughed. It ripped out of her against her conscious efforts, a single, resounding Ha!
Minato’s lips quirked upwards, his body language loosening. 
“I already knew you’ve killed Konoha-nin,” Minato said. He picked up her notebook and flipped through it idly as he spoke, not really reading it. “And Iwa-nin, and Kusa-nin. I’ve been following you for a while.”
“Really?” Tori asked, and then wanted to slap herself at how obvious it was she wanted the attention. Minato picked up on her tone shift immediately, resummoning his stupid sexy smirk and then stepped towards her. 
“There were rumors of a fuinjutsu master, so naturally I investigated,” he said. Then he snorted with laughter. “Konoha doesn’t believe any of the rumors could be true. So I have no orders from them about you.”
“So…?” Tori prompted. She wasn’t sure if this was good news for her or not. Although, hearing Minato had been looking for her out of personal interest made her insides go all funny again. 
“So,” Minato said, eyeing her up and down. “I’m not lying when I say I don’t really want to hurt you. I’m here to make friends. I just really, really want to know more about the mysterious girl who nearly killed me.”
Then he smiled that smile again, the one that had made Tori feel safe and cared for, the one that she knew was fake. Her face went hot again, but not from whatever confusing hormonal responses she was having. Truly, if she could kill people with her mind, Minato would be dead right then and there. 
“For example,” Minato continued. He held up a page of her notebook, which contained a draft of the chakra phylogeny she was trying to make. “What is this?”
“You know,” Tori said tersely, “if you actually wanted to play nice, you wouldn’t be going through all my personal belongings like a creep. You wouldn’t have snuck in here waving knives around.”
Minato’s eyes widened slightly. His cheeks went ever so slightly pink. 
“I don’t think I want to tell you anything,” Tori said, crossing her arms. 
“I came in waving kunai around because last time we talked, you nearly killed me for no reason,” Minato replied, annoyance seeping into his voice, although he didn’t raise his volume. He jabbed a finger against the outside of the barrier. “What if this had been an offensive jutsu instead of a defensive one? I want to play nice, but don’t think you can play harmless civilian with me.”
Tori scowled. Okay. So. He had a point. And she did… she did want his attention. She liked him smiling at her as much as she hated it. 
“It’s a phylogeny,” Tori said finally, pointing at the notebook. “It’s a family tree that shows evolutionary relationships between species. I’m trying to see if more closely related things have more similar chakra than distantly related things.”
Minato stared back at her, mildly dumbfounded. Her explaining this probably just created more questions than it answered for him. 
Good, Tori thought. She wanted to be mysterious and unsolvable. 
She pointed at her window potato. 
“So my hypothesis is that that guy will have more similar chakra to the trees outside than yours or my chakra.”
Minato eyed the potato for a moment, and then stared down at the phylogeny, then looked back up at her. 
“So you’ve been carving seals into trees,” he said slowly, “to use… tree chakra…?”
“Well,” Tori said. It was unclear to her if this was a secret she should be keeping or not, but if  she wanted to establish a friendly rapport and not be killed by an upset famous ninja, probably she should tell him something. This she couldn’t exactly hide, and it was less risky territory than time travel or Orochimaru or Ame. Also… something inside her was pleased, that he’d noticed she’d been doing that. “Yeah, something like that.”
“Huh,” Minato said. 
“So will you be reporting my creative endeavors to Konoha?” Tori asked cautiously. 
“I think they’d be even less likely to believe me,” Minato said, grinning cheekily at her. “As that sounds like crazy bullshit.”
Tori felt her face collapse into a pout, and Minato’s grin broadened. 
“How about…” he said, lazily tossing the notebook back onto the bed. “Next time I bring you another plant, and you show me how you're using plant chakra?”
Tori bit her bottom lip. What was this angle? So he was threatening to come back to her, to make her show him her fuinjutsu experiments? Was he just curious, or was he mining her for information to report back to Konoha? What would happen if she said no? What would happen if she agreed?
“So you’ll bring me flowers?” she said instead of a real answer. 
He winked at her. “It’s a date, then.”
And just like that, he was gone. 
Tori sank to her knees. Her hands were shaking, and she wasn’t sure if they’d been doing that the whole time or not. The adrenaline seeped out of her, and Tori felt exhausted. 
Minato definitely could have killed her. That he didn’t must mean something, but she wasn’t ready to believe he wanted to be friends. That didn’t make sense. That wasn’t the crapsack world she lived in, or how the people of the Third Shinobi War behaved. 
She stared down at her wrist, at the Hiraishin marker now permanently affixed to her. He had acted all nice, almost flirty, but also he’d made it so she couldn’t back out if she wanted to. He wasn’t a good person, and he wasn’t as friendly as he claimed. 
He had won this round, she supposed. But he was still underestimating her. He had left her like this, assuming she wasn’t crazy enough to hack off her own skin… and assuming she wasn’t smart enough to remove the marker herself. 
Let’s see who wins the next one, Yellow Flash, Tori thought. 
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snowlikestardust · 20 days ago
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20 BBY, master Enah takes Cirz to the moon of Reltooine for a very important mission c:
✨🌙 ART LOG -> @404ama
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snowlikestardust · 25 days ago
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You bad bad boy. Where are mommy's nuclear launch codes
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snowlikestardust · 27 days ago
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i love when sibling characters are fucked up from the same event but in opposite ways
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snowlikestardust · 27 days ago
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wait okay on my hike i rotated the tori true crime podcast concept some more
okay remember when i said that tori gets popular because she's the first in her genre to go on site. what if she's not the FIRST first, but she's the first to do it in a way that actually compels people. hear me out.
despite social media and the internet existing in this AU, i want all other tech levels to be about the same as canon for a fun zany time. so traveling takes time and is fairly costly. frequent travel for videos is basically something you'd only expect from really big name influencers or "trust fund kid fucking around instead of a job" type channels. most true crime content is neither of these categories. there's a very few people who have the money, and those people are like. media companies failing to capitalize on a trend and making cringe content, or rich people who aren't also well liked. sometimes more popular names go out to film on location if they're local, but no one has quite figured out how to incorporate location beyond "i am standing in a field" or "i asked a local and they said something mildly interesting"
tori actually has no interest in traveling places for her content because she's perfectly happy doing it all from the dungeon cell she's set up a little set it, because her goal is to Present Evidence For Why She Is Right To The Internet Because Everyone Else Is Wrong. she has a very small following and they range from "i like how she sounds she's barely containing screams of rage <3 go girl internalize that shit" to "tori really sets a new bar for research. too bad she has the energy of a feral chihuahua"
however, for one case, she hits a weird hiccup where she can't remotely get access to some key evidence. there's some area that's supposed to be a popular place for missing-nin to "cache their kill kits" and this is so stupid Tori can't even find anything disproving it, other than "10 out of 10 missing-nin say that's fucking stupid." why would missing-nin be burying kill kits??? she wants to go out there and prove that's fucking bullshit
so she bites the bullet and asks obito for help. she needs both transport and a cameraman, and when she started this channel, obito was like "i love when you have fixations. it's like a fun little surprise who's going to die over them~!" which is ridiculous, because no one is going to die, but also he's not hard to convince to help her
so they get there. obito sets up camera. tori stands in a picturesque part of the this abandoned farm or whatever and starts her script. she's holding a shovel as a prop because they're going to try to dig up these so called "kill kit caches." then, abruptly, tori turns around and goes "holy shit" and the camera pans over and zooms in on what is clearly one of these missing-nin slinking around.
and then. no one on the internet will believe this until they watch it themselves. this little 5 foot tall woman flashes the camera a little ">:3c" face and turns around and walks over to the unknown ninja in attempt to interview him
(tori's >:3c is not for the camera. it's her being like "heehee let's go ruin that guy's day" to obito. no one puts this together. the face will be memed to death.)
tori actually gets pretty far into her interview, because she's capable of turning on her charm for short but highly effective bursts. yeah the missing-nin is in the area because he heard rumors a lot of missing-nin went here and maybe he'd meet people. yeah he's newly missing-nin. yeah do you want to hear his nonsensical paranoid rant about ninja politics and why he left his village? and this is the point where tori gets annoyed and slips up. she says something the missing-nin interprets as an insult, and he socks her in the face.
tori goes down, because she is indeed a squishy civilian. the missing-nin turns on obti next, but obito is in his tobi persona. he yells for help, even though he has no problem dodging the missing-nin grabbing for the camera. tori staggers back to her feet. she hits the missing-nin in the back of her head with her shovel as hard as she can.
the missing-nin goes down
tori: ???? wha--
obito: TORI-CHAN SAVED ME!!!!
tori: did you genjutsu him to not notice me :/
^ obito will edit this last line out of the video
so this part of the video is already completely batshit insane to the average ninjatube viewer, but then somehow it continues to be the most insane video on the internet. it transitions to tori squatting over the ninja's unconscious body, and she clearly has a bloody nose and is rapidly developing a black eye. she goes "don't worry, he's alive," and goes right back into her introduction script. then she goes, "let's see what the average missing-nin actually carries around on him" and then she starts pulling things off his body and narrating how he wouldn't need to bury a kill kit, because he already has one with him!
the last section is her outside again, nosebleed cleaned up but eye swollen. she gives her analysis while tobi is clearly digging holes in the background.
the rest of the video is completely tame, because later she went into town and asked about if missing-nin ever come through, and no one knows anything about that. the end.
tori knows attacking a missing-nin with a shovel is good content, but from her point of view it seems like small civilian ladies taking down rando ninja should just be a thing that happens sometimes? so she doesn't expect the video the completely explode. the top comment is "WHY DID SHE LOOT HIS CORPSE THO 😭"
tori actually hates the attention, but it's mostly about how she hit someone with a shovel and then kept talking instead of whatever the fuck people think she should have done. go to the hospital or whatever. like, excuse her, she was explaining why everyone reporting on that recent murder is wrong!!!
so, like in my previous posts, kakuzu is like "you made HOW MUCH money on that?!" and suddenly he wants a true crime segment on akatsuki extremely milquetoast youtube channel that tori's nominatively in charge but kakuzu keeps taking over in attempts to monetize it better. itachi and kisame get sent out somewhere because itachi easily has the most followers on ninja twitter but does very little to actually capitalize on that.
meanwhile, obito has just realized he can make the funniest thing happen. he suggests to tori that even if her new followers are annoying, now she has a bigger audience to listen to her! the percentage of comments telling her to wear less dark eyeliner and stop swearing is way down! what if she went and explained how correct and smart she is about this OTHER case~~~!! He will help her even!!!
so tori shows up and itachi is already on location. she is very ">:(" and marches over and talks to him. they decide to just do two different videos. they both mutually edit each other out of their videos.
itachi's video goes up first. it's not actually very good true crime content because itachi is reading the world's most bland and barebones script in a monotone. it does get a shit ton of views anyway because it is so bizarre.
then obito uploads a version of his and tori's video that tori did NOT approve, where he leaves in tori walking over to itachi and (seemingly) mouthing off to him. he leaves in a clip of her going ">:3c" at him again and throwing a piece of trash she found down a hill and at itachi. he leaves in a clip of her doing an itachi impression of explaining how HE would commit a murder.
she seems absolutely, wildly unhinged. insane woman. there's an explosion of memes. a bunch of people do video analyses to confirm she and itachi DID film there on the same day. no one understands how she is still alive. both videos get record breaking views. tori gets bonkers discourse over if she's encouraging children to harass missing-nin
tori attempts to start twitter beef with itachi and gets ratioed every time
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snowlikestardust · 28 days ago
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you know how plasticity is meant to be one of those old school fics where some real world girl ends up hanging out with the akatsuki. and you know one of the tropes in those fics is the main girl has some scumbag ex so the akatsuki can defend her from someone. okay imagine that but tori's scumbag ex is an imaginary guy she made up while drunk
akatsuki of your choice: yeah i was bored so i hunted him down and killed him for you
tori: omg you killed someone for me 🥺 this is the first time any of you have ever done anything for m--
tori:
tori, remembering her ex isn't real: wait who did you kill????
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snowlikestardust · 1 month ago
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AITA for telling my boyfriend’s coworkers that he’s lying about his body count?
I (35f) have been dating my boyfriend (32m) for four years. It’s honestly been the best relationship until last Friday when it all went down. I feel like I’m in the right, but now I’m wondering if I overstepped.
For context, my boyfriend has been a professional Slasher for about eight months now. He’s always really admired Cryptids, Monsters, and Nightmares so when his application was finally accepted, he was over the moon even if he was starting in a lower position than he initially applied for.
At his company, being a Slasher requires a lot of travel which we knew when he accepted the position. The end goal is for him to get a promotion to at least regional Nightmare (he wants Cryptid, but that position doesn’t have a lot of turnover) but to get that he needs to be in role for at least 12 months OR meet his goals for three months in a row. Once he promotes, we plan to relocate to his new region and “start talking about our future.”
(Side note: no this isn’t about him not popping the question yet. We are both in agreement that marriage comes after financial stability. I run a small business doing scare consults and, while it’s been growing, I wouldn’t call it stable yet. So neither of us are ready.)
I told him it’s completely normal for it to take a whole year before he’s ready to promote and he really should focus on adjusting to the company before thinking about next steps. I used to work for a competitor (I’ve been retired for five years now) and I know it can be hard to go from only taking the occasional human life to having to take over half a dozen a week. It’s not a light workload, no matter how easy it looks in the movies. One of my best friends Slashes part-time and she still only averages about five lives a week despite having done it for years. Especially these days, it can be really hard to meet quota. Humans are getting smarter, no matter what the Council wants us to think.
Anyway, boyfriend didn’t do as well as he thought he would in his first couple months. Totally understandable, of course, which I told him. I suggested he ask his boss if he could be put on a couple team assignments or even a duo until he got the hang of it. That was our first real fight. He thought I was doubting his ability to kill. He brought up how I told him it would take over a year to promote and how I said that this job wasn’t for everyone (His first assignment ended with a 0% kill rate, but that’s a different story). He said it felt like I didn’t believe in him and he said that if that was the case then maybe we shouldn’t be thinking about marriage so soon.
It got pretty messy after that. I felt like he was forgetting that I’d worked in the same field and, arguably, had a lot more experience (not to brag, but I averaged a 98% kill rate). Also, four years is NOT too soon to talk about marriage. He said I didn’t understand how he needed to focus on his career right now. I told him I thought he was taking Slasher too lightly just because it wasn’t Cryptid. He accused me of not respecting him and then things spiraled from there.
We both said a lot of things we didn’t mean and I’m embarrassed that it turned into a bit of a fang measuring contest. I ended up sleeping under the bed for a few nights until he coaxed me out to apologize.
It was a rough patch, but we talked it out. We agreed that, going forward, I wouldn’t offer advice unless he asked and he would try not to take so much of his frustration home with him. He took a weekend off and we went on a recreational haunting trip in the Montana woods.
Things did get better after that. I tried not to give him consults every time he came back from a work trip. He started bringing me souvenirs like roses and cursed puzzle boxes his work said he could have. It became easier just to hang out with each other and it felt like we were back to normal.
But then, four months ago, he came home super pissed because his boss put him on a PIP. (A performance improvement plan.) Apparently, boyfriend had not been doing better at work, he had just stopped telling me when he had a bad assignment. I saw the paperwork he got (he left it in the dungeon under the house, I didn’t go through his stuff) and he’s been missing quota by a LOT. As a junior Slasher, he was supposed to be executing at least 6 people a week, but he’d been lucky to be maiming half that.
Obviously, I had to talk to him about that. We rent our house and, even though I could have afforded the rent on my own, I didn’t want to jeopardize the investments I was making in my business (I was in the process of hiring an assistant to handle my scheduling). Plus, we agreed from day one that we would be 50/50 on rent and I would take care of the rest of the bills because I earned more. I felt that if his financial situation was in jeopardy, he needed to talk to me about it.
I tried to approach him a bit differently than last time. I asked him if there was anything I could do to help. I told him about my slasher friend and how maybe she could give him advice if he didn’t want any from me. But he said he needed to figure stuff out on his own and that if he couldn’t get himself off the PIP then he would go back to work for his dad’s janitorial company.
I let it go. I was worried but I didn’t want to fight again just after patching the holes from the last blow out. It really bugged me that he thought I didn’t believe in him so I committed to giving him the benefit of the doubt. I said okay and asked him if he needed me to meal prep for both of us that week. He offered me grocery money, but I said it was fine since I’d had to deal with a lot of humans breaking in lately and I still had some leftover in the dungeon.
Fast forward a month. Boyfriend got off the PIP super fast. He worked his way off of it over Spring Break and started taking on a lot of extra assignments. In just four weeks he went to Miami Beach twice, New York City twice, and to three separate summer camps. I missed him and it was hard not having him around but I remembered how he said he needed to focus on his career and I tried not to nag.
It was hard not to nag though. With him gone, all the housework fell on me. We rent a 19th century manor, and its upkeep really does need two people. Doing all the chores plus running my business started to really drain me. Even when he was home, he forgot to banish the ghosts (my chore is to kill all invading humans, and his chore is to banish their ghosts) and he never took out the trash. I think he cleaned blood off the dungeon walls once, but then I had to basically redo it because he missed a lot of spots.
But still, I didn’t say anything because he was doing really well at work and I didn’t want to ruin that for him. Even when Humans started breaking in every week, I didn’t complain even though it interrupted my work day.
Last month though, I did ask him if we could move somewhere that needed less maintenance. There were just way too many Humans breaking in and I didn’t have the time to deal with them anymore. Even if I don’t do all the theatrics I used to as a Cryptid, killing humans through fear still takes a lot of time. He asked me if I didn’t appreciate the free meat, and I said I would appreciate it more if I wasn’t the only butchering it.
He said he didn’t want to move because he was really close to getting promoted to regional Nightmare and he didn’t want to take time off work to move. I was so surprised that I couldn’t hide how surprised I was. He saw and got offended. He asked if I still didn’t believe in him. I said that I did, but it was a huge jump to go from an 8% kill rate to getting promoted.
He got even more mad at me for bringing up his stats and he said that he had nearly 80% kill rate since being put on the PIP. I asked how many humans a week he was slashing and he told me I was being too nosy and that was proof that I didn’t believe in him.
I asked him if we could at least hire a ghoul then to keep the humans out of my office and he said he didn’t want to waste the money that we should be saving for our new house. I asked him what he wanted me to do then? I had to take phone calls for my consulting business and it was really hard to stalk humans all around the house while trying to sound like a professional to my clients.
He asked me to be patient for one more month. He said if he met quota for one more month, his boss said he’d get promoted. So I said fine and let it go.
Fast forward to now, almost a full month later.
Last Friday, I attended the Eldritch Conference. For those not in the scare field, the Eldritch Conference is the most prestigious event in our industry. It’s invitation only and is a chance to network with all the big players in the field. Mothman, the Jersey Devil, Bloody Mary and Bigfoot all spoke this year and both my former company, Grudge Industries, and my boyfriend’s current company, Forgotten Summer Solutions, were invited.
I was surprised to get an invite as a solo contributor to the field. However, my consulting firm has really been doing well and I did land a seasonal contract with the Yeti Co-op which I guess is how they heard about me. Plus, I’ve been a speaker before so I think the organizers knew I would behave myself.
I was planning on telling my boyfriend that I was going, but he was out of town on a co-ed sleepover assignment. He usually doesn’t have his phone on during his assignments, so I didn’t bother calling him. I just figured it’d be nice if we ran into each other at the conference if he made it back in time.
Which brings me to what actually happened (apologies for the long post).
So everything went great for my part of the day. I got to network with a lot of individual businesses and even got to reconnect with Blood Mary who I knew back in my Cryptid days. I told her I was dating a Slasher from Forgotten Summer Solutions and invited her to come with me to check out their booth. I thought it would be fun to grab dinner with her after since I assumed if my boyfriend was there, he’d be going out with coworkers which he often does. Plus, I admit, I was showing off a little. I don’t often get the chance to brag about my Cryptid days.
She agreed and we went over to see if my boyfriend was there.
I introduced myself to the people manning the booth. My boyfriend wasn’t there, but a few Slashers recognized my name and greeted me. They were definitely in awe of Bloody Mary (she came in full uniform) and invited us to look at their displays. They had portfolios for each Slasher on the desk as a sort of preview of what their services looked like.
While Bloody Mary looked through the portfolios, I chatted with my boyfriend’s coworkers. They said they were thrilled to work with him and that, even though he had a really rough start, it was impressive how quickly he started meeting his goals. Something about how they talked about his work kind of didn’t make sense. They were talking like he was killing a dozen humans a week, but he’d told me that he was at 80% on his assignments which typically only offer about ten humans each.
I asked them about it and they said that he’d been Slashing during After Hours which is a new goal supplement program his company launched a few months ago. Basically, anyone can sign up for After Hours and the company counts human kills done in uniform as part of their quota. I asked them if this was available to them while they were on assignment and they said no, it had to be done when they had down time. I asked them how my boyfriend was part of that when he was traveling all the time and they looked confused. One of them said that my boyfriend is still getting one assignment per week and is then supplementing his kill rate with After Hours.
At that point, I was even more confused. It sounded like my boyfriend had been lying to me then, because he told me that he was getting at least two assignments a week. If he was only getting one, then where was he going when he said he was traveling?
Bloody Mary interrupted before I could say anything and asked how their Slashers did their kills. They said that every Slasher at their company is required to use a standard issue weapon (like a machete or axe) for their kills to count. They said their company doesn’t count accidents as part of their quota (like falling or heart attacks).
Bloody Mary pulled me aside and showed me the portfolio she was holding. She said that she was going to give me a chance to explain without them overhearing and showed me the book. She said that a bunch of kills in it looked Cryptid kills. And she said, specifically, it looked like the kills I made when I was a Cryptid. I took the book from her and flipped through it and she was right, they really did look like Cryptid kills. Worse, I recognized a few of the Humans from the past few weeks. They were actually my kills!
Kill stealing is a major taboo in our industry.
I told her I didn’t know anything about this. She looked really relieved at that and said that even though I wasn’t a Cryptid anymore, it would look really bad for me if I was caught helping a Slasher cheat at their job. It could affect my business which she’d only heard good things about.
I’m embarrassed to say that I tried to defend him. He’s new to our industry so I thought it might be a mistake. He might not be trying to cheat, this could be a misunderstanding.
She said she didn’t think so because a mistake would be one or two of my kills mixed in with his, not the entire book.
I counted up how many photos were in the book and, all told, of the 146 kills, at least 100 were mine. I couldn’t really say it was a mistake at that point and I was just staring at his portfolio like an idiot. Bloody Mary asked me what I was going to do because, mistake or not, this looked really bad and could damage my reputation if it got out.
At that moment, another man walked up to booth and asked us if there was a problem. I knew that if I said anything, I would be jeopardizing my boyfriend’s job, but if I didn’t say something, I was jeopardizing my business.
I told my boyfriend’s coworkers that he was lying about his body count. I said I didn’t think that they knew he was doing it, but over half of the kills in his portfolio weren’t his and I suggested they remove it from their display before another Cryptid came by and realized it.
The other man thanked me for bringing this to his attention and asked how we knew. Bloody Mary said that she knew another Cryptid’s kills and I had to tell them that I was that Cryptid, though I was retired now. He asked me if I knew my boyfriend was doing this, and I told him no.
I told him I really didn’t want to get my boyfriend in trouble and suggested that maybe he didn’t know those kills didn’t belong to him because they happened in our house. I was grasping at straws and Blood Mary even looked sad for me. His coworkers looked skeptical but tentatively agreed. The man – who turned out to my boyfriend’s boss – said that they would investigate this thoroughly and apologized personally for his employee’s misconduct.
I was spiraling at that point so I thanked him and said I wasn’t mad, I was just looking out for both of our reputations. He promised to keep it between us and I agreed.
Then I apologized to Bloody Mary because I didn’t feel like eating dinner anymore. She said she understood and wished me well.
I went home and did a quick perimeter search of the property. Sure enough, there were human summoning stones ALL OVER the yard. Which means my boyfriend was intentionally luring humans to our house to get me to kill them so he could take credit. It wasn’t a mistake at all.
My boyfriend came home later that night in his work clothes. As soon he got inside he started yelling. He said he was suspended without pay and that all his hard work was for nothing.
I said I knew he’d been stealing my kills and he almost ruined my reputation. He said they still counted as his kills because he did all the work of luring the humans to our house.
I told him that wasn’t how it worked and he knew it. He said it was the same as setting a trap and I was taking this too seriously. I told him that, as a Slasher, he has to use a weapon to get his kills, not me. He said I was basically the same thing since I had such a high kill rate. I asked him if he was calling me an object.
(My parents exploited me by selling me as a haunted doll through a lot of my childhood and he knows I’m sensitive to being called an object.)
He backpedaled at that point and asked if I didn’t want to buy a house together. He said he was doing it for us and I should’ve understood and not said anything. I told him that when I was a Cryptid I had my pride and would’ve never done this.
He said I needed to tell his boss that he was the one who made all those kills. I said it wasn’t me who recognized them as Cryptid kills and now his boss knew too. He accused me of thinking I’m better than him because I have telekinetic powers and can move through shadows and can possess people, while he’s basically a human himself. I told him of course not and that I worked hard for those powers unlike him.
He got really mad at that and actually charged at me with his machete raised. I don’t think he was going to actually hit me, but I reacted like he was. It was all instinct. I disarmed him and I swear I heard a crack when I grabbed his wrist. I shoved him into the wall.
 He crumpled to the floor and started crying. He said sorry and sort of curled up around his wrist. He said he didn’t ever feel like he was enough for me and he didn’t even know why I was still with him. He called himself a bunch of names and said I would be better off without him.
I sort of awkwardly stood there for a minute. On one hand I wanted to assure him that he was enough and that I loved him, but, on the other, I wasn’t sure I could forgive him. He nearly ruined my reputation, and he embarrassed me in front of Bloody Mary. Plus, I still didn't know where he’d been going all those times he said he was on a business trip and apparently wasn’t.
So I ended up not saying anything. I went to our room and started packing a bag. He followed me. He was still crying as he begged me not to go. He said he would own up to his kill steals at work and he would make it right. He pleaded for me not to leave him and that he would give up slashing.
I told him I needed space to think. He tried to grab me, but I shadow walked out of the house. I heard him screaming from outside and I hurriedly drove away.
Now I’m at my friend’s house and I told her everything. She agreed I did the right thing walking away from him, but when I asked her what I should do she hesitated. She said that my boyfriend wasn’t right to kill steal but, as a fellow Slasher, she understood what he was going through. She said I wouldn’t understand the pressure to meet quota because I was always surpassing mine when I was in the field. She said that a Cryptid could never understand a Slasher.
She also said that nobody would have found out about his kills if I hadn’t brought them to his boss’ attention. She said the only time kills are on display like that is at the Eldritch Conference and by the next one, he’d have had kills of his own. She thinks that if I’d just confronted him at home, he wouldn’t be on suspension.
So now I’m worried that I overreacted when I told my boyfriend’s coworkers that he was lying about his body count.
AITA?
----
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snowlikestardust · 1 month ago
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listen up chucklefucks, i just gotta say. I'm not defending zir, but I'm sad zie deactivated. Like, i get that trauma lasts a long time and the good stuff is maybe easy to forget?? so maybe it's just like that. And my beloved mutual @/pompeyspuppygirl made a post about zir clout chasing behavior, which is pretty shitty behavior if it's true (and if we're canceling someone it had better be pretty severe). anyways now that zie's gone pompeyspuppygirl said it was okay to make this post (again, thanks ppg everyone go follow her --really everyone in this whole drama is worth a follow)
ANYways yeah zie was my mutual and like, reblogged a lot my smaller posts. (that isn't to discredit what my mutual pompeyspuppygirl is saying about zie clout chasing ofc). AND idk zie was always reblogging art from new and undiscovered artists and reblogging donation posts (which if you don't know is really bad if you're trying to clout chase...) (again, though, ppg is my mutual i believe her.) and like, remember on valentines day i tried to blaze zir posts and zie told me to stop because zie didn't want the posts to go viral? (but again ppg is my mutual and has a lot of proof in the Google doc I'm not trying to disprove that I'm just saying what else I know)
Idk, like i feel like a lot of people loved zir's blog a while back, bc like zie DID make some good posts?? So idk why everybody's acting like they aren't even a little bit sad.,. like ngl this feels like maybe all the reasonable people left to Twitter and all the Twitter refugees who love drama came here??? shdfhhdhdhdhdh haha but idk...look idk, i just, julie i do miss you. idk. more thoughts later sorry I'm getting worked up shshs
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snowlikestardust · 1 month ago
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Most of the time I have an irrational antipathy and disinterest in Boba Fett but then every once in a while I go on a spiral about his fucked up childhood because it's a mindscrew and nightmare. Imagine being little kid growing up on a farm and all the farm animals look exactly like you and sound exactly like you and you watch them all get branded and sent to the slaughterhouse. And you're alone for weeks on end with only these not-brothers for company but you're not allowed with them, you just watch them. You watch them eat and train in rows upon rows and your dad tells you they're just cattle and they're exactly the same as you except they're not, because your dad says so. They're his clones and also you're his clone and the only reason you are a person is because your dad decided he wants a legacy and also it's the only reason you exist and also you don't want to be cattle like them. You exist to be his son and it's the only thing that makes you not cattle. And you're like. six.
Jango Fett is like the opposite of Darth Vader because Darth Vader is redeemed by his son but Jango Fett is made so much worse by every single decision he every made with Boba.
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snowlikestardust · 1 month ago
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The thing about Pacific Rim is that it's an allegorical fairytale.
The Jaegers are an allegory for the things we can't do alone without burning ourselves out. Yeah, it's possible to pilot a Jaeger solo for awhile. But nobody can last the whole fight. If you try, you will collapse under the strain sooner or later. You will die.
The drift is about the necessity of making yourself vulnerable to someone, letting another person in, so you can lift this otherwise impossible burden together. Because if we isolate ourselves, if we don't face the mortifying ordeal of being known, we will change nothing, and we will die alone.
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snowlikestardust · 1 month ago
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obi-wan’s role is not judge or father or warrior, it is coroner
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