#;> operations order ( starter call )

[auntie-browning]

||: Alright, I think it might be time to try a starter call now. Like this post so I can try and whip up something. This goes out for people who are also new here. Prefer messaging to plot something out but I'm fine also trying to wing it.

||: Specify your muse if you can, please~

[ot3]

What Is ORV?

The number one question I get asked on this blog, now answered better than ever. Today I am going to formally introduce you to Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint

To start off this recommendation: ORV might very well be my favorite thing I've read. Ever. If I could only reread one thing for the rest of my life it'd be this webnovel.

My elevator pitch is this: something with the cosmic-scale goofy video game nonsense and intricate setting comparable to Homestuck in its prime, paired with the deft emotional poignancy and emotionally-driven fights of Mob Psycho 100, topped off with the sort of compassionate and heartwrenching metanarrative of Undertale.

ORV is a love letter to it's own readers. ORV revels in the joy of losing yourself in fiction, even when it's the kind of fiction that tends to be considered lowbrow or worthless. It's something that dances the delicate line between recognizing the difficult nature of using media as escapism without condemning it. I've rarely seen anything else that accomplishes everything it sets out to do in its narrative with such remarkable precision. Frankly if you're reading a tumblr media recommendation post in 2023, I can almost guarantee ORV has the kind of meat you're looking for in a narrative, whatever that may be.

The story follow the antics of protagonist Kim Dokja, a 28 year old office worker on an expiring contract, whose only real joy in life is reading his favorite massively long and massively boring webnovel. One day, the novel’s events - worldwide deathmatches aired for the entertainment of mysterious higher beings called ‘constellations’ - begin playing out in reality in a sort of reverse-isekai. Kim Dokja, the only longterm reader of this webnovel, finds himself uniquely poised to succeed based on the advantages given to him by his knowledge of future events, but the webnovel’s actual protagonist, Yoo Jonghyuk, is a violent monster who will stop at absolutely nothing to complete his goals, no matter the cost to anyone else. Kim Dokja finds himself in a delicate dance of guiding the events of the story to play out more favorably than the version he read while trying to avoid being massacred in the fallout, all while trying to see it through to the story’s end. 

Below the cut I'll go into a more in-depth (but non-spoilery) explanation of what exactly makes ORV so unique and worthwhile, and what you're in for if you choose to read it.

Clocking in at 550 chapters, and over 1.3 million words in English, ORV may seem incredibly daunting to dip your toes into, but I assure you it's worth every moment. I would read 1.3 million more words if they had them for me. Here are some things about ORV I consider to be selling points, not necessarily in any particular order:

The tone. Its funny, for starters. It is extremely funny, which is very high up on my media priority list. In ORV, there will be incredibly grim things that make you laugh, and incredibly cringe and silly anime bullshit that will hurt you as heavily as any other media you’ve seen. I always love this kind of tonal whiplash when it's well executed, and ORV probably executes it better than anything else I've seen to date.

It’s got fun and fascinating worldbuilding mechanics. the core concept being ‘reality now operates on the rules of a shitty novel’ means that the worldbuilding doesn’t have to function logically, it functions thematically. It’s explicitly stated in ORV canon that some of the internal rules governing this new reality are objectively really stupid and illogical, but they just have to roll with it because that’s what was in the book, and i think it’s a really enjoyable way to do it. This may at first sound like a copout to excuse bad worldbuilding, but I promise it isn’t. The worldbuilding is actually incredibly deeply thought out, but it doesn’t exist for the sake of rational function, it exists for the sake of furthering orv’s thematic arcs. The rules by which this universe operate do a magnificent job of strengthening the core concepts the authors are exploring.

It plays with the trappings of isekai/litrpg in a really thoughtful way. These are genres I'm not super familiar with, so I can't comment on this point too heavily, but with my limited knowledge ORV feels a lot less of a deconstruction of it's genre and more of a celebration/interrogation of it. Despite that, it's still accessible to readers such as myself who are not super familiar with these genre conventions.

It deals with morality in a really wonderful and nuanced way. there are almost no characters in ORV’s extremely large cast who are just explicitly morally condemnable, and almost every conflict allows you to understand exactly why the antagonists believe they’re in the right by opposing the actions of our protagonists. The central conflicts are never pure right and pure wrong; they’re always about contrasting goals, conflicting worldviews, and different priorities between ends and means. this makes the conflicts all feel so much more dynamic and engaging than those where the only stakes are physical harm.

The characters interpersonal relationships are some of the most interesting I've ever seen. ORV is very slow burn and it takes a long time for a lot of these to come out of the woodwork, by design, but by god once they do they fucking hit. Similar to the plot conflicts, the interpersonal conflicts also almost never occur where there’s one side clearly in the wrong. The characters are almost all genuinely attempting to do their best by each other, and the tension comes from the ways in which human communication is fundamentally imperfect and part of our feelings and intentions get lost in translation. it’s very heartwrenching and heartwarming to see unfold, in equal measure.

Following from that, it’s a narrative that really meaningfully prioritizes non-romantic relationships over romantic ones as the central focus. Orv is about love, but not about romance. Obviously there’s shipbait and the ot3 is real and good and my friend but if you’re looking for deep complex platonic, (found or otherwise) familial, and antagonistic relationships that never get ruined with forced romantic arcs, we got em baby!

The pacing is unlike anything i’ve ever seen before. from a purely technical standpoint, it is genuinely a fascinating case study in how to execute a narrative that is almost constantly escalating without exception. there is very little downtime or breathing room in orv, which is insane for something that clocks in at over a million words, and somehow, it still works. i’ve never felt more like a frog in a pot of slowly boiling water than i did when i was reading orv and i can’t believe they pulled it off. it’s so interesting to read something like that.

It is a tragedy without resorting to cynicism and a very adult narrative that’s really steeped in childlike wonder. I’m a big fan of cartoons made for children. Cartoons made for children are some of my favorite things to watch, but of course children’s media will always be simplified and not very relatable to an adult audience. ORV is very much a serious and heavy adult narrative, and a deeply tragic one at that, but it never delves into torture porn. It’s a very compassionate piece of media overall, that holds a lot of reverence and sympathy for the ‘naive’ optimism of children that gets stripped down over time. if you, like me, feel more like a grown up child than an adult some days, I think it’ll hit for you.

It is extremely cathartic and meaningful. I am not exaggerating at all when I say that reading it gave me the closest thing I have ever felt to any sort of spiritual breakthrough. It helped unfuck my head a ton during some very grim times and i think the perspective it offers on the value of human life and our relationship to storytelling is a really really good one.

And if my word isn't enough, here's some reviews from satisfied customers. With that, I'll leave the rest to you, and hope you one day reach the end of the story.

[erenasia]

Project G1 : Prologue, Reborn

Overview: Set in the universe of Creepypasta, 'reborn' is the prologue to a multiple x Fr fic. With hints of sci-fi, I'm sure you'll enjoy it ⊹₊⟡⋆ Tw: Mentions of medical operations, toxic mentalities. Words: 767

A/N: I have a backlog of eight chapters, so make sure to stick around if you liked this <3

The rusted door to the old laboratory slammed open, a flurry of paperwork that previously littered the floor taking quickly to the air in response. Two boots, mud stricken and wet, stomped their way inside, before coming to an abrupt stop. Drenched from head to toe, the man ripped a deep breath from the air, willing himself to continue down the stairway ahead. 

“Not long now. Just a little further.” 

His muscles strained, shaking and screaming for the body cast haphazardly over his shoulder to be put down - but the scientist persisted,  knowing the longer this girl was in his arms, the less chance she had of living. He shifted her weight ; the body rolling further over his shoulder, lifeless hands gracing his back limply as they swayed with the movement. 

‘You can do this, Christian. This is what we worked for. This is your only chance.’ 

The metal door clicking closed echoed like a starter gun, and in turn signified the race against his every instinct. 

Each step, as agonisingly painful as the last, elicited a harsh, panting grunt.  

Seven dim lights danced by his peripherals, in a blur. 

His resolve forced him onwards ; his mind becoming more and more excited by the second. 

Soon enough, the basement door graced his vision, and with a slam of his body, it crashed open wide to reveal the dingy laboratory Christian called home. 

—

The excitement was short-lived, however , for the lab was an absolute mess. 

Previous false promises of cleaning echoed around the scientist's brain as he lay the girl gently on the operating table, reaching to grab a close by IV stand.

‘This is no place for an operation. Why now? Why do you come to me at a time like this?” 

The man whispered to the girl, as he glanced over to the cluttered research desk on his left then recoiled, grimacing.

The ordering of instrument trays, pushed off as tomorrow’s task time and time again, left him with a sickening realisation ; he was going to have to make do with the desk.

This epiphany was met with a low grunt, and after reaching over the mess ridden tabletop, procuring a bag of sodium chloride from the shelf behind and securing it to the stand ; he searched the girl for a vein, then attatched the IV. 

The next steps were known by heart -  he’d practiced them many times before in anticipation. 

He grabbed each instrument, vial, and research paper needed, making a dash around the room, before settling everything underneath one arm and returning to the impromptu ‘instrument tray’. The sight before him made vomit swell uncomfortably in his stomach ; dull eyes danced over each cigarette butt dropping cancerous ash, each coffee cup teeming with life, each rotting take-out box dissolving and crumpling into wet, messy piles. He felt the disgust in himself rise, and in a mere moment, each revolting object came crashing to the ground, sporadically scattered across the lab like a disgusting art piece. In their place, lay a lone sanitary sheet, and a promise to do better. The leftover ash crinkled and grated underneath the plastic as each instrument was laid out in order, meanwhile the maddening static that had been brimming in his mind slowly began to settle.   

Christian shuddered.

This was the beginning. 

He turned to the woman, glancing over the papers shakily grasped in his right hand; meanwhile, moral quandaries snagged at the verge of his psyche.

“Had I not found you, you would be dead already.”

He muttered, extending a trembling finger to move (h/c) strands from the girl's closed eyes. His babblings continued, overflowing in an attempt to convince himself that what he believed, what he was going to do, was ethical. 

“The medics wouldn’t have gotten to you in time.”, he continued.

They may not have, but Christian didn’t even bother to call. 

His voice hitched. 

“You have to understand, I tried, I tried to find another. I wanted consent. But it was met with disdain, and inquiries. I was…on the verge of giving in.” 

He swallowed, before clearing his throat. 

“...until I found you, against that tree. You saved me. Now, it is my turn to save you. You know this is your only option...correct?”

It was almost as if he expected an answer in return, but all that greeted him was a dull silence - save for the shallow breathing of the girl laying still on the gurney. 

Christian shook his head, the awful static returning with a vengeance.

"Okay, then."

It was time.

Newly satisfied with his justifications, the man glanced down at the research paper’s title for the first time since everything unfolded.   

The title glared back, causing his heart to ricochet out of his chest. 

-Project: G1 

  Author, CW. 

⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘

Link to chapter 1 !

Thanks for reading! <3 𓆏 Comments/reblogs appreciated! 𓆏

[shoutoutout]

I've started up another Harlivy fic and was digging through my docs and found this old version of the noses & kneecaps section of she breaks (out, down, through). I cut it way down and changed up the setting for the published version but this Harley quote had me giggling so I thought I'd post here for folks!

Harley turns to the chef.  “If you fucking spit in this food I will literally gut you right now, you hear me?  I’m not letting my bestie eat any of your loogies so tell me if you did because she’ll fucking know, alright?  This bitch will taste them and then you’ll be dead and the misses and junior over there are gonna have a sad as shit Christmas this year.”

You can read the rest under the cut

Surprising no one, Ivy’s not that great at the whole “friendship” thing.

For starters, she has no frame of reference by which to judge.  Like her namesake, she was a wallflower as a child and when high school rolled around she bloomed into a sarcastic loner with Indigo Girls blasting through her headphones.  It left little room for normal girl shit like… well… she would name something if she knew.

But even still, with all her lack of experience, she’s pretty sure that this—Harley’s idea of friendship—is not quite normal.

“I could use some new threads.” Harley calls Ivy out of the blue on a Wednesday evening.  “Cops confiscated all the stuff back at my old place… not like I’d wear any of it anymore.  God, I was such a tightass wasn’t I, Ives?  So how about it?  A girl’s day out?”

Ivy doesn’t know what to say, knuckles pale green where they grip the phone.  She regrets giving Harley her number.  (And by “giving” she means Harley snatching the phone from her pocket and calling herself before Ivy had the chance to stop her.)  The thought of strolling through a department store with Harley causes her anxiety to ratchet the way it did when the pretty girls would laugh at her in English class.  What would they even talk about for fuck’s sake?

Not much to start, it turns out.  Harley’s version of shopping is a lot less mundane and a lot more criminal.  They end up taking twelve hostages in Bergsduff’s and leaving with two hundred thousand in designer goods.  Muzak plays idly in the background as Harley holds the salesclerk at gunpoint, parading him around the floor while Ivy snatches up some cute summer looks.  His nose drips blood from where she pistol-whipped him upon entrance.

“Hey, try those on,” Harley suggests, waving the gun wildly towards a pair of gold-rimmed sunglasses.  The hostages in her line of fire duck and scramble when it points in their direction.  “Those’ll look real hot on you!  Perfect for your face shape.”

Even the sales clerks—with the barrel of Harley’s gun poking between his shoulder blades—can’t help but agree.

Ivy slips them into her pocket.

They go to dinner.

“And it better be fucking vegan, alright?!” Harley screeches through the kitchen door.  When she turns back to Ivy, she’s all grins and bubbles.  “He said it should be right out!” she relays, skipping back towards the table.

Ivy glances towards the chef’s wife and son where they lay bound and gagged, piled in the living room corner.  Harley had arranged a “private meal” by Gotham’s hottest new chef after Ivy had told her the reservations for his restaurant were usually booked a month in advance.

“Are you sure we don’t have to worry about them?” Ivy asks with a skeptical slant towards their hostages?

“Nah,” Harley dismisses.  “They’re chill.”

Their captive hosts nod in agreement, wide-eyed and terrified.

They talk about boys.

“So like I was saying,” Harley picks up where she left off, twirling a fork between two fingers.  “Joker has some real ripe areas for improvement with the overall rollout of his new brand vision before the Legion of Doom induction, ya know?  Just some things I’m helpin’ him out with… order of operations and stuff like that.”

Ivy’s thankful Harley’s doing all the talking.  She fills the space with an endless stream of stray observations and chatter.

She gets a dreamy look in her eye, resting her head against her palm.  “I mean, he’s a real genius, ya know?  It’s pure art what he does.”  (Ivy wants to vomit but the food is coming soon.)  “And don’t ever tell him I said otherwise”—she sits up, clasping her hands together—“but in general, there’s a lack of foresight to some of his schemes.  Like escape plans, for example.  Usually he has it all figured out when Batsy arrives—how to get away that is—but not for the whole crew, ya know?”

Ivy narrows, not quite getting at what she’s saying.

Harley shimmies closer in her chair, propping her elbows on the table.  “Okay, okay, so like, there’ll be a getaway car, right?  But it’s one of those clown cars, like a tiny one.  Only this clown car isn’t like a clown car where it can fit all the rest of us; it’ll just fit him.”  She pauses to let Ivy consider.  “Is that… is that funny?  Like ha-ha Joker-level theatrics?”

Ivy’s dumbfounded.  “A clown car that’s just a regular tiny car…that only Joker can escape in… and he leaves you all behind to get caught,” she summarizes, doubt dripping from her tongue.  “So you’re telling me he just like, takes off in a Smart car?”

“Yes!” Harley nods, excitedly.  Her jester’s cap bounces with the motion.  “Exactly!  Just a Smart car for one.  It could use some work, right?”

Ivy doesn’t even know where to begin.  Luckily the chef returns, placing two gorgeous plates of food before them.  Harley squeals beside her and Ivy snaps to attention, grabbing her fork.  It smells fucking heavenly as it comes to her mouth but then Harley’s hand is strong around her wrist, stopping her mid-bite.

Harley turns to the chef.  “If you fucking spit in this food I will literally gut you right now, you hear me?  I’m not letting my bestie eat any of your loogies so tell me if you did because she’ll fucking know, alright?  This bitch will taste them and then you’ll be dead and the misses and junior over there are gonna have a sad as shit Christmas this year.”

He shakes his head and whimpers; Harley seems satisfied.  They dig in.

“Oh my god,” Ivy says, flavor dancing across her taste buds.  “This is like… orgasmic.”

Harley preens.  “Only the best for my friend!”

Friend.  It rolls so easily off of Harley’s tongue and Ivy wonders what it is exactly that makes this shit so hard for her.  Ivy tries to play along but she’s transported back to English class with Melinda Jenkins snickering every time Ivy raised her hand.  “Ha,” she tries.  “I owe ya one… pal.”

God, she’s a fucking dork but Harley couldn’t care less.  She pounces.  “Come to me and J’s Legion of Doom induction then?!” she asks like the question was burning a hole through her tongue.  “It’s this weekend.  We can drink all of Lex’s fancy-ass champagne.  Please?  Please?  Please, Ivy?”

Harley puppy-dog pouts and Ivy’s stomach flips.  Is this normal friend shit?  She has no idea.

“I’m sorry but fuck no.  No way.  Literally anything but that.”  Harley will just have to deal; Ivy is decidedly not a good friend.

[imraespace]

CHAPTER 12: OPERATION HIDE.

JUST THE WAY THINGS GO || MEGUMI X READER

Around an hour later, you finally left the hospital, promising Tsumiki to visit her more often. You know that Megumi will be there ans you promised yourself not to get back into his life but sometimes you need to think of yourself.

Instead of heading straight back home, you took the opportunity to give yourself a tour around the park. You haven't been here in so long.

In your field of vision, everything had changed, you didn't even recognize your school, what makes the park any different?

As soon as your shoes hit the grass, your phone began to rang.

It was your aunt.

"Hello?"

"Where are you? Did you run away.."

You smiled at her voice.

"Yeah I did. I'm at the park near the hospital."

You heard her laugh over the phone.

"Alright I'm heading there to get you."

And then the call ended.

But, a pair of eyes landed on you as you stood near the entrance of the park, holding your phone in hand.

Nobara turned over to Yuji as they both stared at each other.

"What is she doing here?" Yuji asked.

"Well for starters dumbass it's a public park!" Nobara half yell.

Megumi stared at his friends for a while then finally joined them.

"Are you both okay.." He mumbled, which scared the hell out of the duo.

"Of course! Why wouldn't we?" Yuji smiled at his friend.

"Okay..."

Gojo, having no clue what is happening entered the conversation.

"Hey isn't that-"

"NO I mean no.. let's go on that morning run yeah?" Yuji suggested as he began running.

They all followed behind him, running away from you.

──────────────

You on the other hand, was walking around the park, happily enjoying the view of other families enjoying each other company and pets running.

You had no clue that Megumi was here.

But then, a hand has suddenly wake you up from your daydream land.

You turned around and saw.. your friends?

"What are you guys doing here..?" You asked.

"Well for starters this is a public park." Maki answered back.

"And we barely had time to hang out this week so why not today?" Yuuta said.

"Don't ask how we find you here!" Inumaki said as he dragged you towards some ice cream stand.

How did they find you? Yuji and Nobara duh.

Maki and Yuuta thought it was dumb but they came anyways.

"What's your favorite flavor?" Inumaki asked.

"I don't really have one." You answered.

He stared at you... for a while then smiled.

"Okay I'm ordering cookie n cream for you!" He said as he walked up to the stall.

Stood between Yuuta and Maki, you began looking around for your aunt, to inform her that you're now with your friends.

"What are you looking for?" Yuuta asked.

"Aunt Shoko, I told her that I'm at the park because I was alone, but now I'm with you guys so.." You mumbled.

The mentioned of your aunt name made Maki look at you then at Yuuta.

Inumaki finally came back with the ice cream.

"Here!" He said, handing you your ice cream.

You took the ice cream, thanked him and began walking around.

"Where are you going?" Inumaki asked.

"She's just like a child.." He mumbled.

"You should be the last one talking about 'Just like a child'.." Maki said, earning a glare from Inumaki.

They all followed behind you as you walked around, ice cream in hand.

Then you finally spot your aunt! Talking to Gojo?

"He's here as well?" You asked yourself.

You walked up to the adults to greet your aunt.

While the trio behind was now sprinting towards you, Nobara and Yuji didn't realize that you were walking up towards them, and you didn't make them out.

"Aunt Shoko why didn't you inform me that you had arrived?" The sound of your voice took her out of her conversation with Gojo.

"Because this fool found me first and pulled me into a conversation." She said, pointing towards the man.

The man, on the other hand had a shocked look on his face.

"YUJI I WAS RIGHT. Y/N IS HERE!" Gojo alerted the children.

They all whipped their heads in his direction and finally saw you and the now panting trio behind you.

Megumi, of course wasn't happy but is he going to express his feelings when your aunt is here? No.. He just grumbled under his breath as everyone finally met up with you.

"DANG I didn't even make her out right Nobara??!" He laughed.

And Nobara laughed as well.

Megumi rubbed his forehead.

"Of course they knew." He mumbled.

──────────────

MASTERLIST | <-PREVIOUS // NEXT->

TAGLIST: @deezy12299 @polarbvnny @bxrryvie @mentallyunstablemanlover @baku-boneless @evinvevin @zhochikennugget @hhoonsbaby @k1y0yo @frumira @nylories @jayathelostdragon @ashfrommyfire @br66klynbaby @luvkvni @we-loveebony @ire-exe @pompompuriina @vivi-loves-penguins @starszns @iluv-ace @fuyuzemi @samutoru @rzcnlb @r0ckst4rjk @nyxlai @widnejdjhshusja (OPEN)

(if not tagged, your profile didn't show up. sadly☹️)

──────────────

note: I like cookies n cream. and also cotton candy ice cream.

[amywritesthings]

Operation: Battlepass (AKA the Totally Awesome Plan to Play Wingman by Yuuji Itadori) / a Choso x OFC story

After choosing to live together as brothers, Yuuji decides to introduce Choso to the wonderful world of gaming. What he didn't expect is for Choso to fall head over heels for his online friend. Naturally, hijinks must ensue, and the gang comes up with a plan to make this romcom a reality.

word count: 3k (part one of ??) tags: au - canon divergence, fluff, romantic comedy, told in yuuji's pov, ultimate big brother!choso, gaming, online friendshipcredit: dividers by @saradika-graphics

read on ao3 here.

PART ONE: THE INTRODUCTION

disclaimer: this is a very crack slice of life story. everyone's alive. itadori is friends with an adult through online gaming. their dynamic is very much 'you're a kid and i have to protect you from weirdos in gaming lobbies'. iris is inspired by my own older online friends growing up. it's nothing nefarious.

Yuuji Itadori has never been a wingman.

Well — kind of.

If you scratch all of the times that Itadori went along with the ‘Save Megumi’ plan conjured up by the brilliant (and twisted) minds of Gojo-sensei and Kugisaki, then he’s technically never been a wingman.

Come to think of it, he’s never really given the act of dating much thought.

It isn’t like he’s ever had much skin in the game. 

Itadori’s never had a partner, for one.

Fushiguro is smooth enough to flirt without anyone’s help, two.

Kugisaki can be a little intimidating all on her own, three.

So it leaves… well, Itadori to cheer on his perfectly-capable friends as they navigate what it means to be a teenager.

It also leaves him wondering if one day he’ll know the tv-show-butterfly feeling of helping two lonely souls get together.

(He really should focus on his own love life, but given the whole Sukuna ordeal? That’s a mess he hasn’t quite ironed out yet.)

Enter: Choso, his alleged big brother from another mother.

(Or another father? That’s another thing he’s gotta iron out. More at 11.)

Getting a two-bedroom bachelor pad with the guy you only met, like, a few weeks ago wasn't on his year-end bingo card. 

"Really?" If Fushiguro and Nobara question something simultanously, that usually spells danger.

"Yeah!" Itadori exclaims, sipping on his tea. "I mean, why not, right?"

"Wasn't he the guy trying to kill you?" Fushiguro grunts.

"Then he changed his mind on a dime and demanded he protect you with every blood cell in his body?" Nobara adds, lips trembling from her attempt to hide a smile at her pun.

(Neither of the boys catch it.)

Itadori grimaces. "Well, when you put it that way..."

Fushiguro leans back. "Trying to kill you—"

Nobara leans forward. "—to defending you—"

They come together again, and Itadori sinks in his booth.

"—in a few hours."

"Okay, okay, I get it!" Itadori whines. "But it'll be fine. We're great pals and figured it out. He's totally normal now."

So normal that Choso's in the booth at the other end of the restaurant, sipping a coffee black with a newspaper upside-down, waiting to take Itadori and his friends to the shopping district later.

(It's a little weird admittedly, but Itadori thinks it's endearing. He cares!)

So, yeah.

He ditched living at Jujutsu High in order to move in with his brother under the approval of his instructor.

Maybe it was a hasty decision, but Itadori will take the blame on that one.

Call it excitement or stupidity, he doesn’t mind.

After spending a lot of his life wishing he had a sibling of his own, it’s kinda cool to live a brother.

Not even a brother, but a big brother who takes his job very seriously.

For starters, Itadori always gets to order wherever he wants for takeout dinner, which never got to happen back at Jujutsu High.

Fushiguro used to be apathetic about what they’d order, which meant Kugisaki took the liberty in steamrolling every decision.

Now?

Itadori gets to show Choso every single one of his favorite foods and then some.

The guy doesn’t eat much — apparently something to do with being a curse, not that Itadori judges — but he thoroughly enjoys the nights watching Choso squint over a takeout box trying to figure out what the heck is in the thing.

It’s nice teaching someone else the ropes, rather than feeling clueless in his own life.

He shows Choso how to cook; how to clean, though they’re both fairly great at lifting furniture to get into those hard-to-reach spots; how to pay bills over the internet — or just to pay for bills in general.

However, there is one important item in life he has to show his big brother:

Video games.

Apparently all he ever played when he was with Jogo, Brains, and Mahito were board games.

Snooze.

Boring.

“Today is your lucky day,” he tells the man with tightly-coiled space buns one day while Choso's watching television.

Itadori thrusts a coveted console controller into his view with excitement.

Choso blinks down at it with confusion.

“Because I — Yuuji Itadori, your little bro — am going to show you the wonders and joys of gaming.”

“I know how to play games, Yuuji,” Choso flatly replies, though there’s a warmth to his tone no matter when he speaks to Itadori.

The pink-haired boy shakes his head.

“I’m not talking about Life or Trouble or, ugh, Monopoly — though you can technically play them on a console.”

Choso’s brows slide high: really?

“Yeah, really.”

“Huh.”

The man with the black strip over his nose tests the weight of the console controller in his hand, lip slightly pouted.

“So what do you… do?”

“Press buttons, mostly.”

Itadori holds up his own decked-out controller — a modified neon blue and black masterpiece that glows in the dark — and presses a few of the buttons to show him.

“You’ll get used to it. Trust me, it’s way easier in practice.”

Sitting beside his brother with crossed legs, he triggers the console to wake up to its dashboard.

The game show disappears, and a brilliant burst of color takes over the screen.

The reaction is priceless — Choso’s eyes widen to the size of saucers.

Aw, yeah, he has him interested now.

“Do you play these games with your friends?” Choso asks quietly, poking at a button with his thumb.

“Sometimes,” Itadori replies. “Fushiguro isn’t a fan of them. Nobara gets way too competitive. Like… scary competitive. We limit her screen time.”

Choso snorts. “I can picture that.”

Itadori grins and opens up a few window menus so he can set up a profile for Choso on his console.

He hands over his main controller and gestures to Choso.

“Pick whatever profile photo you want.”

Sticking his tongue to the left in the exact way Itadori does when he’s concentrating, Choso flicks over the right joystick to search through the images.

“Itadori?”

“Yeah, Choso?”

“I don’t see my face.”

“Huh?”

“The photographs.” Choso points to the screen. “Where am I?”

Itadori blinks before he realizes.

“Oh! You… don’t, ha. You pick a character.” He pauses. “Like how you choose a thimble or a car and stuff in Monopoly.”

Choso sucks in a sharp inhale and nods in understanding before fluttering through a few more options with more confidence.

He settles over a photo of Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider series before clicking it.

“Like this?”

“What, you like Lara?”

“Is that her name?”

“Yeah, she’s kinda super badass.” Itadori takes back the controller to finish up his profile. “My one online friend really likes those games—”

Then, brilliance hits him.

It doesn’t happen often, but today?

Itadori strikes gold.

“Oh, hey — if you want, you can kinda see how me and my one friend play. She’s usually on at this hour. Here.”

He pauses to reach around the couch only to hold out a headset for Choso to take.

“Wear this. It’s my spare.”

With that same inquisitive squint, Choso observes at the headphones with scrutiny.

Itadori showcases how to put them on, popping his RGB headset over his head and squishing his pink hair to his head.

It takes a little finessing with his hairstyle, but Choso does the same. He lets the headphones sit on his head and doesn’t move.

“You good?”

“What?” Choso’s voice shouts over the noise-cancelling feature.

“I said are you—” Itadori pauses, holding up a thumbs up.

Choso blinks. Then his thumb raises.

Good.

Itadori blinks back to the television screen where he signs on as himself — YuuMasterGeneral — before searching for a particular name on his friends list.

Truth be told, he’s only ever talked to this girl.

He has no clue what she looks like in person because he’s never met her in person, but she sounds pretty nice.

After Grandpa got sick, there wasn’t much to do around the house.

Sitting in a quiet house wasn’t cutting it, so Itadori tried his hand at online gaming lobbies.

Most of them sucked.

Most of them were full of assholes.

But he got lucky — an older girl that went by the moniker of Iris was nice enough to join his team.

That first night, they talked for hours about nothing in particular. Eventually he told her about his grandpa, and she added him as a friend. Iris told him to poke her whenever she was on so he had someone to play with.

Honestly? It was exactly the kind of lifeline he needed at the time.

After that, he gamed with Iris pretty regularly. Although they mostly game, sometimes they chat about their other hobbies. He's learned she has a full-time job, just recently graduating from university. A few times she's given a sprinkle of real life advice, from an adult figuring it out a couple of steps ahead of a teenager.

He felt safe. Seen.

He and Iris have been friends ever since.

Iris was good at gaming. Like, impossibly good.

So good she’d probably even beat Nobara.

But she wasn’t obnoxious about her wins, which was why Itadori enjoyed chatting with her so much.

Last time he talked to her was maybe six weeks ago. She’d been busy with her day job, but Itadori had been really busy with… well, everything to do with sorcery.

Surely she wouldn’t get weirded out about showing his older brother the ropes, right?

Iris was a private person, something Itadori could very respect, but he felt comfortable enough to invite her into this little debacle of his life now that Choso was going to be a permanent member of his family.

IRISSIRI IS ONLINE.

“Oh, cool, she’s on.”

“Who?” Choso asks, pushing a headphone off of his ear so he can hear Yuuji properly.

“My friend, Iris,” Itadori explains as he clicks to invite her to a party chat.

He then adds Choso, whose eyes widen at the magical sound of his little brother’s voice suddenly coming through the headset clear as day.

“This sounds…” 

Choso trails off, blinking as he hears the echo of his own voice.

Itadori laughs and leans over to mess with his settings once more. 

“Sorry — gotta mute yourself, buddy, otherwise we’ll get an echo going.”

Then a tiny chime sounds, and the brothers simultaneously stare at the television.

“Hello?”

Her voice is smooth as honey and soft, like she’s surprised to get the call.

Itadori immediately perks up, but he notices how Choso doesn’t move.

He just… stares, lips parted.

“Iris!” he greets excitedly. “Hey! Long time, no chat.”

“Yuuji,” she greets in return with a small smile in her voice. “Hey, no kidding. How’s it going? And who’s this…. Guest, person?”

“Oh — I haven’t given him a username yet. Iris, I wanted you to meet my big brother, Choso. Choso, this is my online friend Iris.”

He turns his head to look at Choso in the glow of the tv, but his brows furrow when he notices the pale complexion of Choso’s face turn a warm pink.

“Choso?” she asks, and Choso’s throat bobs.

Maybe he’s nervous about new people?

He’s never really been that nervous before.

“I didn’t know you had siblings!”

“Ha, yeah, it’s a complicated situation,” Itadori explains before flicking up his microphone stick so he can whisper directly to Choso: “You can speak in the microphone, you know.”

Choso clears his throat, his pink face turning scarlet in stark contrast to the black stripe across the bridge of his nose, before nodding. 

“....I’m his big brother.”

“Cool, cool,” she chides in return, and Itadori can’t even believe what he’s seeing:

His older brother practically melts in his seat as he presses a hand gently to his headphone as if to push it closer to his ear.

"It’s super nice to meet you, big brother Choso.”

Choso bites his lower lip and glances up at the screen. “You… have a really pretty voice—”

Uh oh.

Abort mission.

Itadori flies off of the end of the couch to quickly flick his microphone up to mute them both for a little familial aside. “Dude!”

Choso’s surprised, still sporting the blush. 

“What?”

“You can’t hit on my online friend!”

“I wasn’t hitting anyone, I was talking!” Choso hisses right back under his breath.

“Hitting on, not hitting!"

"Whatever!"

"Look: telling my friend she has a pretty voice is a little weird, okay?”

Suddenly the man looks a little worried. “It is?”

Itadori nods. “Yeah. Girls get bothered online all the time. Just… be cool.” 

He slowly drops his microphone back down.

Choso deflates and nods.

“Sorry about that! Yeah, no, he’s never played video games before so I thought we could show him how it’s done.”

“It's fine. But wait: he’s never played video games before?” Iris asks over her mic with a little laugh. “Seriously?”

Choso smiles small at that.

It’s lopsided and goofy. 

Itadori feels like he’s in the twilight zone.

“Did he live under a rock?” she adds in a gentle tease.

“Something like that.” Yuuji tells her, quickly loading up Fortnite for a game of Duos so Choso can listen and watch. “He’ll just hang with us while we play, if that’s cool with you?”

“So long as he doesn’t mind me asking him questions while we play,” Iris replies, sending a quick game invite to Itadori’s screen.

Both Itadori and Choso stare at one another.

Choso points at himself.

Itadori nods and points at him.

“Me?” Choso asks in a bit of a confused voice.

“Well, I’ve known your little brother for two years now, but I don’t exactly know you, ” Iris explains. “In a way, I kinda felt like his far-away big sister, so I'm happy to know he's got someone looking after him. So how old are you?”

Choso sits up a little taller.

“I'm one hundred and fif—”

“The same age as you!” Itadori chirps, cutting Choso off. “He’s twenty five.”

He can not have his normie friends find out about curse spirits and all of that insanity.

Itadori’s just grateful Sukuna never appeared cackling at his cheek in the middle of an intense match to make a pass out of bad taste.

Choso looks absolutely confused, but he slowly nods in tandem with Itadori’s pleading nod.

“...yes, I am... twenty-five years old.”

“Sweet, same age,” Iris chirps, and that goofy little look shows up on Choso’s face again.

(What gives, dude?!)

“And you’ve never played a single game before?” she asks as they load into the next lobby.

“I like Life.”

“The board game?”

“Yeah.”

“I was so bad at that game.”

“The spinner can really put you in debt,” Choso agrees with a solemn nod—

And Iris giggles.

Itadori blinks.

As he departs his character from the sky bus at the location Iris placed on the map, his lips begin to pull down to a grimace.

He’s never heard her laugh like that.

Not even when she's put toxic guys to shame and made them rage quit in Call of Duty.

“How did you meet my younger brother?” Choso asks, suddenly emboldened by the laugh.

“We met in a Destiny 2 lobby, actually,” Iris explains happily. “He helped me with a few of my bigger raids. When I found out the kid was fifteen-something, I felt like I had to make sure no one was a jerk to him in any future lobbies.”

“So you protected him?” Choso murmurs with surprise.

“More like shepherded him through games, sorta like a—”

“—big sister would,” Choso finishes for her.

“Kind of! Like I said earlier, Yuuji’s a good kid. And he’s really solid at playing games.” Iris clears her throat. “Yuuji, six o’clock. There is a drop over there.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am.”

“Yuuji.”

“Miss!” Itadori corrects. “I mean Miss!”

“Jesus, he acts like I’m fifty sometimes,” Iris bemoans, and Choso smirks.

“Yeah. He acts like I’m a hundred and fifty,” the older man cheekily replies, and Itadori scowls.

On Itadori’s screen, they watch as a potential enemy rounds the corner of the building Itadori’s looting —

He doesn't act fast enough to attack —

But suddenly they fall to their knees, before bursting into confetti with all of their items strewn about.

K.O. 

They both hear Iris whistle from her microphone. 

“Respect your elders, kid.”

“Thanks, Eye. I didn’t realize there were people on my spot,” Itadori chimes.

Yeah.

Because he’s too busy listening to Choso act like he’s going to eat the mic to get closer to Iris —

And the fact that his online friend, his very normal friend, is giggling the way some girls giggle whenever…

They look…

At Gojo-sensei.

Itadori stops moving his thumbs on the controller, too deep in thought to play as Iris carries them.

She's scoping perimeters while he's busy putting the puzzle pieces together.

He's blushing.

She's giggling.

His Mikasa Ackerman avatar gets shot down, and Iris is shouting that she's coming back to save him —

But his eyes are on the guy opposite to him on the couch staring intently.

Not at the game, no.

At Iris’ little avatar that shows up every time she speaks.

Her icon's a little chibi Lara Croft.

Kind of like his generic Lara Croft icon.

Some weirdly-fated choice in a sea of happenstances.

Huh.

Wait a second.

"Hey, Choso, do you mind taking over for me in the next game?"

Choso whips his attention, eyes widening with uncertainty. "Me?"

Iris laughs again, and Itadori sees it in real-time: that butterfly-in-your-stomach goofy face, smack dab on Choso's lips.

"I'm down if you're down, Choso."

Quickly he takes the glowing controller from his younger brother and straightens up. "I can learn."

"Just don't go running off on me on the map, alright?" Iris requests playfully. "Stick with me and we'll easily get to last twenty."

"I won't fail you," Choso promises with a nod.

Itadori crosses his arms, observing and listening to Iris explain the game gently to Choso.

Although she was just as gentle with him, Itadori can hear something different in her voice. It's like she's trying to get Choso to answer her so he can talk. She asks him questions that will get him to talk more and more, until they're having a full-blown conversation without Itadori in sight.

Interesting.

He likes her voice, that much he's deduced.

But does she like his voice, too?

Something's happening here.

The cogs are turning.

Maybe —

Just maybe —

Yuuji Itadori can actually be a real, bonafide wingman.

.

[mythaura-blog]

January 2024 - Development Update

Hello folks, Miyazaki here! Hoping that your 2024 is off to a great start.

Like we mentioned in our December 2023/year in review development update, Mythaura has officially reached a new stage in development: active content creation. As a heads up, this means that there will be a reduction in the amount of big, shiny new content—we won't be rolling out any systems close to the scale of the demo.

From here on out it will primarily be updates on sponsored Ko-fi content, keeping up with the Ko-fi Quarterly Rewards system, art (including more Beast expressions!), and occasionally some written content/worldbuilding.

We will always post on the first of every month, rain or shine, but we just wanted to call out that if the news posts seem a little lighter in comparison that it's not because we're not hard at work. It's the opposite!

Under the cut:

Rogue starter Class

Ko-fi Winter Quarter 2024 winners

Ko-fi sponosored Companions

Dragon expressions

Featured Class: Rogue

Rogues cherish skill and versatility above all. Their fighting style focuses on evasion, speed, and bolstering their own attacks to score high-damage hits against their opponents.

The Thieves Guild has its roots in the Southern Plain. Unicorn herds generally don't lay claim to any one territory, instead following the seasonal paths of the storms that batter the region, so inter-herd communication became crucial for the economies of these nomadic groups. A particularly savvy band of merchants found that there was more money to be had acting as in-betweens for these herds than marketing their own goods, so they established a network of contacts across the whole of the Southern Plain.

Not all contacts were willing to handle the more illicit asks—the movement of illegal goods, sabotaging competing herds, and even discreet assassinations, in more extreme cases. A splinter group of like-minded individuals banded together to form the first Thieves Guild, a business operation that was—in most cases—willing to take on whatever work was asked, given the price was right.

Today, the Thieves Guild has spread to all corners of the continent, but are especially prominent in densely-populated cities and towns. Their mere presence has left an indelible mark on Mythauran society, and nothing escapes their notice.

Starting Equipment: Thief's Claw

Small, subtle, and easily tucked in the folds of a Beast's apparel—the Thief's Claw is the quintessential tool for any Rogue. What it lacks in decoration it more than makes up for in functionality—its deceptively sharp edge can be used to cut through rope, aid with picking a lock, or quietly encourage someone to comply with a Rogue's request.

Companion Concepts

Along with the Thief's Claw starting equipment, choosing a Rogue for your custom starter Beast will also grant you a Class-unique Companion.

Ko-fi Sponsors of Bronze level or higher will have a say in which companion they would like to see as the starter Companion for the RogueClass. Please vote on this post by Monday, February 26, 2024 at 11:59pm PST in order for your vote to be considered!

Ko-fi Winter Quarter 2024 Winners

Thank you to all the Ko-fi sponsors who voted for the Winter Quarter 2024 rewards. Next month we will show the finalized artwork for the Snowdrift Furline Companion and the Knitted Sweater Glamour. Stay tuned!

Expressions: Dragon

Koa, Luci, and Kymara have all been working hard on the Beast expressions project, and we've made enought progress to be able to show you the finalized artwork for both the young and adult Dragons.

Crafting the expressions has been an enormous undertaking. Along with the linework, shading, and highlights, every Special and Super requires manual illustration on the base. Following this, we run each expression through a PSD plugin to build every color. We have almost completed every species' base layers on all colors (top, bottom, base, & eye) and are excited to share them with you in the following months as we complete their Specials.

Sponsored Companions

Torchlight Python

Sponsored by: Maevely

Belligerent Capragora

Sponsored by: Ljslibby

Fruit-Footed Gecko

Sponsored by: Maevely

Mythaura v0.26

Mythaura v0.26

Battle state has been refactored to add stability and solve problems with between-state retention

Removed unneeded collision objects, reducing overall physics calculations.

Implemented instancing for all meshes to re-use similar objects instead of duplicating them.

Disabled swaying vegetation by default, which heavily impacts performance. This can be toggled in the graphics settings.

Fixes pixelation/blurring that occurs when zoomed on a beast or companion in Safari and Firefox.

Large companions, such as the Dale Wanderer, no longer zoom out when toggling the zoom-in option.

The touch screen joystick can now be set to on, off, or auto from the "Gamepad" settings.

The time you wait in queue before being brought into an AI practice Arena match has been reduced to one minute.

Locations have had infrastructure added.

NPCs have had infrastructure added.

Began initial work on a dialog query builder for robust dialog trees.

Support for elevation has been added to the map builder.

The map builder now supports different colored dynamic lighting.

Map design has begun for Talon's Rest.

Thank You!

Thanks for sticking through to the end of the post, we always look forward to sharing our month's work with all of you--thank you for taking the time to read. We'll see you around the Discord!

[eriisaam]

Day 5 - Change of Fate

(AUs, her situation with Peony, crossovers - you name it!)

Part of @sharenaweek

There are many world of monsters far and beyond Zenith's reach, but out of them, a few still stand tall and proud among recent memory.

One of the worlds is a world of monsters perhaps not in Zenith, but nonetheless familiar with quite a number of heroes regardless. A world populated in pokemon, where creatures of varying sizes, shapes, attributes, and power scalings roam freely in a world that co-exists with humans. Their lives became so interwoven with one another, that it was a coming-of-age rite of passage for humans - once they turn as old as 10 - to gain a pokemon partner to be their starter, and then explore across the many landmarks of their home region (and sometimes regions beyond that) in order to grow experience, strengthen their growing parties, and eventually display mastery in their skills as a trainer, where by then they will usually find a more specialized calling on what job-esque specialty and role they want to settle in alongside their pokemon.

In another world, it operates under different rules. Long ago, it was a realm of youkai who had a more tentative and chaotic relationship with humans over the ages back when they were known as kemonogami, until their realm and the realm of humans fractured further, and their continued existence adapted to exploit and thrive off the vast web of the internet and its data, eventually converting them present day into digimon. The present day digimon lived tentatively separate from the human world at first, though in combination of natural disasters from either worlds, more malicious digimon attempting to invade the humans or expand well past the Digital World's boundaries, or simple happenstance, not only had humans eventually stumbled into the Digital World numerous times, but digimon strayed out to the human world in kind, until certain parts of the human world - and in varying levels of confidentiality - built more established networks to travel to and from either worlds much more safely and seamlessly than the dodgey circumstances of the past.

Both of these worlds, in feuds well past the scope of their actual worlds, had been just as much thrown into competition of one another as they had been ridiculed and scorned in comparison. Equal in some ways, vastly different in others, the history of Pokemon and Digimon is a road paved with timeless rivalry.

In a happenstance encounter, when such parallel worlds suddenly crossed themselves, two lives intersected with it.

One, a plucky and cheerful pokemon trainer whose still trying to find her calling of what she wants to do when the league ahead of her ends and the badges with them are neatly tucked in her award case, and in the mean time explored the region in all its wonders alongside her friends and brothers.

And in another, a cheerful and hope-fueled digimon tamer, full of awe and hope and wonder for the intricacies of how the digimon and human worlds intersected, and with her partner digimon, wanted to explore how far down the rabbit hole the intersections of the Digital World connects past her home world.

Two girls of similar yet different circumstances, so alike in some ways yet different in others, immediately hitting it off the moment their eyes met and the hasty introductions poured out in their mouths in excitement and joy. Though they never met, they both instantly connected, as if, in a faded dream, they each found some form of familiarity in each other anyways. As if this was not the first time two starcrossed lives across two different, parallel worlds crossed paths...

---

Yes I know, cursed Peony's hair is cursed, but in this AU, I presume that the circumstance that led her to have the hair she does as an alfr don't carry over here (or not initially), so her present human-hair was a guestimate based on eyeballing how young-Peony looked pre-ljosalfarian era and went from there.

A thought came up that, in every crossover and every what-if AU, no matter what, Sharena and Peony still manage to find one another. The more things change, the more things stay the same...

Onward to the next day...? (Huh. That's weird...)

[usafphantom2]

SAC Crew Dogs: The Elephant Walk, The Wing Commander, and the Boom

T Campbell

@tcamp202

·

4h

… as the crew pulled up to the Alert shack, they could see the Wing Commander’s Chrysler Reliant K-Car parked right at the main entrance to the shack. The Air Force blue car was still smoking a bit, and most of the paint had been burned away… somebody was gonna get a chuck taken, that much was sure…

This is the retelling of a story I heard as an A1C (Airmen First Class) while pulling SAC Alert at Loring AFB when I was a Boom Operator in the KC-135 A model. It was probably embellished when it was told, and I might embellish it even more… cause you know, that’s how Alert Stories go. I do hope that I do it justice in my retelling.

In order to understand the humor in this small fairy tale, I first need to explain a couple of technical details about KC-135 operations. It’s a lot of background to tell a silly old story, but please bear with me… the story is funny (or at least I think it is.)

Engine Start: The KC-135A was equipped with the Pratt and Whitney JP-57-P/F-43W, good solid engines, but they required a lot of tender loving care, and if they didn’t get it, they let you know in a hurry. There were a few different ways to start the engines.

The most common was to have an air cart connected to the aircraft. It would supply air to the bleed air manifold and would be used to start all four engines.

Another way we could start the engines was often called a Cart Start. Using a Cartridge, a canister about the size of a large coffee can, filled with a slow burning explosive, which could create enough air to turn the starter long enough to start the engine. All four engines could use Cartridges.

If you had any single engine running, you could use bleed air from that engine to start the others, however, you had to push up the power a bit to generate enough air pressure in the bleed air manifold.

Image

Gases escaping after turning the engine starter during a Cartridge Start on a KC-135A.

Photo from https://www.airliners.net/photo/USA-Air-Force/Boeing-KC-135A-Stratotanker-717-148/666058/L

Hot Starts: One thing that these engines did not like at all was being started with an insufficient amount of bleed air, whether from a ground cart, or the other engines. Failure to get the engine turning fast enough when adding fuel often resulted in hot starts with flames shooting out the back of the engine, kind of like an afterburner, but these flames weren’t blue… they were a reddish yellow, like fire and could reach out to the tail of the aircraft. Sometimes flames would even shoot out the front. They were dangerous. Fire bottles were always on hand for engine starts, just in case.

Engine Shutdown: After landing, the pilots would stow the spoilers, retract the flaps (otherwise, tower might think we’d been hijacked) and shut down two of the engines, usually the inboards to avoid accidentally sucking up anything from the taxiways into the engines, and also, so that when the ground crew chocked the tires, they wouldn’t have to walk closely to a running engine.

However, on Alert, we always shut down the outboard engines first, so the ground crew could install a new Cartridge in the #1 engine (furthest to the left.) The cartridges were dangerous, and the last thing the crew chief wanted was a running engine behind him and no escape route if there were any problems. Once the cartridge was installed, the other engines could be shut down because we had the ability to restart the jet if required.

Ok… if you’re still with me… great! Last thing you need to know is about Elephants walks on Alert. An elephant walk is where a group of airplanes get all configured for a mission, start engines and taxi out, but instead of taking off, they just taxi down the runway. Kind of like a parade.

For elephant walks on Alert, this process is started with the Klaxon going off and the brass inspect the aircraft as they are taxing to ensure they are all properly configured for takeoff. Think of it as your typical military inspection… you know, “Trim those nose hairs” type of affair, but with airplanes.

Last thing to remember… SAC took Alert VERY seriously. Everything had to be done by the book, and if it wasn’t, there’d be hell to pay. The aircraft always had to be ready to launch on the nuclear mission to refuel B-52s. As they say, failure was not an option.

So… now that you are armed with some knowledge on how the KC-135 normally operates, it’s time to tell our story.

Image

An Elephant Walk. KC-135 R models (bigger engines), not A models... but it gives you the idea... imagine a car driving between the aircraft to inspect them. Our ill fated crew was somewhere in the middle of the line.

Once upon a time, there was a crew… we’ll call them R-113 with Captain William Bligh as the commander, the co-pilot and nav shall remain nameless, but the Boom Operator was SSgt Fletcher Christian. They were on Alert, spending another seven days cooped up in the Alert facility, and serving their country. Breakfast started the day followed by a mandatory briefing at oh eight hundred. After this, maybe some ground training or bon bons and the Price is Right, and then it’s lunch time. A combat nap would take up most of the afternoon, followed by dinner around five. All the while, waiting for the Klaxon to sound off. Not exactly riveting stuff, let me tell you.

“FOR ALERT FORCE, FOR ALERT FORCE, KLAXON KLAXON KLAXON”

One day, our fateful day, the Klaxon went off and the crew sprinted out to their aircraft. This is a hectic event. Get the covers off the engines, get the door opened, rush up into the cockpit, check all is clear, and fire up those Cartridges to start the engines. Black smoke is billowing everywhere and it’s hard to see, but the engines get started, the crew chief makes his way up the ladder into the aircraft, and they button up to the aircraft, ready to taxi.

On the sidelines, the Wing Commander is proudly watching his KC-135s do what they do best. He watches the rolling clouds of thick black, toxic smoke as the engines start.

“FOR ALERT FORCE, FOR ALERT FORCE, MESSAGE FOLLOWS… SIERA NOVEMBER ALPHA FOXTROT UNIFORM…”

The message from command post… it’s an elephant walk exercise. The aircraft will taxi out of the Cage, the Alert pad for the KC-135s, and out to the runway. There, they will taxi about halfway down the runway, turn off and line up, nose to tail, on the returning taxiway waiting to be inspected by the Wing Commander.

While sitting in line, with a tanker just in front of him, and another just behind, Captain Blight decides to save some fuel, he’s going to shut down two of the engines. This is normal. However, instead of shutting down the outboard engines, as was normal in this situation, he shuts down the inboard engines as if he’d just finished a normal flight.

As soon as the throttles were in the cut off position, he realizes his mistake, but there’s nothing he can do. He announces his dilemma over the crew’s intercom… so the boom, SSgt Christian says, “Hey, just restart them, what’s the big deal?”

Meanwhile, at the end of this line of KC-135s, the Wing Commander starts inspecting the aircraft. He drives by each jet, taking a zig zag route through the jets, looking to ensure the flaps are set correctly, the stabilizer trim (the horizontal portion of the tail) is trimmed to the correct position for takeoff. He’s quite proud of his jets… maybe he’ll get another promotion and get the h*ll out of this sh*t hole base.

Captain Bligh says, “In order to start the engines, I’m gonna have to push up the outboards a bit to get enough bleed air, but I don’t want to FOD (foreign object damage) out the jet behind us, but ok, let’s do it.” He pushes up the outboard throttles as much as he dares and starts the engine start sequence for the number two engine (left inboard). He turns on the ignition, and then after the engine has just barely enough rpms, the turns on the fuel.

Right about this time, the Wing Commander has finished looking at the jet behind our ill fated crew, and he is crossing behind Captain Bligh’s number two engine, when a huge flame, at least forty feet long come shooting out of the back of the engine, right onto the hood of his car.

As you might be able to imagine… the radios come to life and the Wing Commander starts screaming about the jet with the flames coming out of it… followed by “Everybody report to the briefing room (at the Alert shack) after re-cocking the aircraft.”

It was pretty quite for the next thirty minutes or so, while Captain Bligh and crew got their aircraft re-cocked for Alert. After they wrap things up, they get in their Alert truck and head back. There was a little discussion though, they had to get their story straight.

As the crew pulled up to the Alert shack, they could see the Wing Commander’s Chrysler Reliant K-Car (remember, we bailed out Chrysler) parked right at the main entrance to the shack. Oh sh*t… this wasn’t going to be good. The Air Force blue car was still smoking a bit, and most of the paint had been burned away from the front fender and hood. There was no doubt, the briefing room was not going to be a pleasant place to be.

As the last crew sat down, somebody called “Attention”, and everybody stood up at attention. The Wing Commander walked down the center isle and up to the podium. “Crew 113… get up here!”

The Wing Commander addressing Captain Bligh asked, “Why on earth were you restarting your engines?”

Captain Bligh responded, “My Boom Operator said to.”

Lesson learned… if you are the lowest ranking guy, always look be on the look out for sh*t rolling downhill.

@tcamp202 via X

[mc-adarsh]

CLOSED STARTER for @selinswonderland location: THE BEACH timestamp: EVENT 01 PART 02

Adarsh.

It was a name, he wasn’t so sure if it was his, but it was the only name that came to mind. And having no other reference, he’d accept it as his for the time being.

He sat down on the beach, not watching the waves or the cruise ship he’d been on - neither were giving him any hints of who he was - but instead focussed on the clothes he was wearing.

Running shoes, black, beat-up but not badly enough that they needed replacement.

No socks, that felt odd.

He was wearing dark green cargo pants that got slimmer at his ankles, and formed a nice seal around his skin. All the pockets were empty though. 

Nothing to give him any indication of who he’d been.

He took off the tank top and shirt he was wearing, unable to make any assessment while wearing them. The long sleeved shirt was one used for body surfing, uv protected, tight, also black, size M. 

The tank top loose, light grey, had some stitchings loose, but no design on it, not even a label. It was loose fitting, probably cotton.

He touched his arms and torso, some scarring. He didn’t know if he was tanned or if this was just his natural colour, he’d find out when he had more privacy. The scars didn’t look serious, nothing to suggest he’d had any operations or got shot. 

He couldn’t see his back.

Turning to the side he waved a hand at the first passerby. 

“Hey you! Come help… please,” he called in thick-accented English.

He added the please mostly because he thought he sounded rude, though it felt unnatural. 

When the figure got closer, he baulked his further order. “Check it I have scarring on my back,” he said as he turned back towards the water. If he was told he was rude, he could perhaps get away with it by stating English was not his first language. No matter how easily it came. The other language was far easier, the other language he dreamt in.

[innuendostudios]

A new video essay has appeared. The second Protagony, this time looking at Abed Nadir and the weird way modern audiences treat the fourth wall.

If you like this video and would like to see more Protagony, Alt-Right Playbook, and what else have you in the future, consider backing me on Patreon!

Transcript below the cut:

The doors open. The line starts to move. The usher takes your ticket and points in the direction of your seat. Preshow music plays over the soundsystem as you side-shuffle past the knees of the folks in your row. You stick your bag and your jacket under the seat and sit down. You leaf through the playbill, futz around on your phone, until music starts to fade. The lights in the auditorium dim and the lights come up on the stage. The show is beginning.

This is one of those plays set in a single location: three walls on the stage represent the interior of a French bistro. French bistros typically have at least four walls, and that’s where you come in: the lip of the stage - what theatre nerds call “the proscenium” - is where the fourth wall would be, and it’s your job to pretend it’s there. Or - let me rephrase that: it’s your job to ignore that it’s not. That is the bargain you make when the lights go down.

To the characters onstage, everything inside those walls is real, and nothing on the other side of that fourth wall exists. The ambient noise, the guy two rows down and four seats over who’s clearly playing Words with Friends, even you yourself, you are - and this is a nerd word again - “non-diegetic.” You’re here, but you exist outside the story.

That is, until…

[Picasso at the Lapin Agile]

EINSTEIN: My name is Albert Einstein

FREDDIE: You can’t be, you just can’t be!

EINSTEIN: Sorry, I’m not myself today. (fluffs up his hair so he looks like Einstein.) Better?

FREDDIE: No no, that’s - (pause for laughter.) No no, that’s not what I mean. In order of appearance.

EINSTEIN: Come again?

FREDDIE: In order of appearance. You’re not third. (aside, to audience member) Excuse me, ma’am, can I borrow your program? (to Einstein) You’re fourth. It says so right here: Cast in order of appearance. I knew you were fourth. I knew it when you walked in.

[/Picasso at the Lapin Agile]

This is what we call “breaking the fourth wall,” and Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a great show for demonstrating it because the character Freddy literally reaches his hand through the wall and into the audience. Like many fourth wall breaks, this is played for laughs, because it’s a kind of narrative transgression; you’re not supposed to do that. When the diegetic intrudes upon the non-, the audience is reminded of all the things they were ignoring: that this is not a French bistro in 1904, but a bunch of plywood flats and actors in pancake makeup and period dress. The disbelief that was suspended is brought back to school, as it were.

But what I want to highlight is how durable the fourth wall is. For starters, in order for this joke to work, the audience has to be already suspending its disbelief; the boundary must be drawn before it can be broken. And, shortly after this gag, Einstein exits, Germaine enters [“Sorry I’m late”], Freddy makes a little wink to the audience [“You’re not late, you’re fourth”], and the scene continues as if nothing had happened. The audience wraps itself back up in the story, and the fourth wall is rebuilt, so that, when it’s broken later in the show [“When will you be there?” “When the play is over.”] it’s funny again! If the wall had stayed down, that joke wouldn’t work.

Why do we build the wall? So we can have a wall to break.

Often enough, these acknowledgements - in theatre but also film, novels, video games - any time a narrative reminds you of its own artifice, it is contained such that it does not disrupt the narrative too much. It operates like the soliloquies in Shakespeare or the songs in musicals. When Deadpool speaks to the audience, everyone around him goes deaf.

But what I got curious about, when I first read Francesco Casetti’s Inside the Gaze - or rather I read the glossary because it’s very dense Italian film theory and I was nineteen - was, what if you didn’t make that bargain when the lights went down? What if breaking the fourth wall wasn’t a disruption of the narrative, because the story is built such that the artifice is part of the narrative? Can you break the fourth wall… diegetically?

Now, that was a punchy idea as a teenager. As a man in his late thirties, I am aware this idea has been approached many times in many ways throughout the history of storytelling [Brecht: “Am I a joke to you?”]. We’re currently living in a golden age of metanarrative where most major properties have folded the audience’s relationship to that property into the text. But I wanna talk about my favorite example: Abed Nadir.

Now, my feelings about the show Community are… mixed, but I love me some Abed. [“pretty adorable”] Abed is a pop culture-damaged perpetual college student raised by his television, who loves TV to the point where it’s his primary metaphor for looking at the world. In other words, he’s an American millennial. His tendency to filter his life through sitcom tropes is lent a certain pointedness by being a character on a tropey sitcom. Por exemplo, when Annie asks him for help [“Phoebe and Chandler” clip], or when the new school year coincides with the conclusion of the previous season’s arcs [“self-contained capers” clip], or when it looks like he’s going to spend the day locked in study hall [“starting to feel like a bottle episode” clip]. In these moments, Abed Nadir is not breaking the fourth wall. He may not fully understand that real life doesn’t have bottle episodes, but this is real life to him. He’s not seeing the cameras pointing at him, he’s not disrupting the narrative by winking at a sitcom audience.

But there is a sitcom audience - we are the sitcom audience - and the writers did just use Abed to wink at us. “Cooperative Calligraphy” is a bottle episode. Abed is speaking diegetically to his friends, who read his comments as the pop culture references they are, but they double as things a person who was breaking the fourth wall might say. [“This is totally meta” clip] The rules of narrative are not transgressed, and, yet, we are, all the same, constantly reminded that we’re watching a work of fiction.

This kind of interreference, in which a sitcom points constantly at itself, at other sitcoms, and at “The Sitcom” as a medium, can come across kind of masturbatory. David Foster Wallace argued that the pop culture reference in mass media serves three functions: “(1) to help create a mood of irony and irreverence, (2) to make us uneasy and so ‘comment’ on the vapidity of U.S. culture, and (3) most important, these days, to be just plain realistic.” I would say (2) is far less prevalent now than when he was writing.

The reality is this: how you gonna write a twentysomething millennial in 2009 who doesn’t talk a lot about what’s on television? This is a conundrum many writers face. There is still the High culture urge to make art that is timeless, that avoids what Foster Wallace referred to as “the frivolous Now,” and the Low culture necessity of not looking dated eight months after you air. This can be approached many ways: you can avoid reference and just take the verisimilitudinous hit; you can create fictional, in-universe pop culture for your characters to reference; you can reference pop culture that is old enough to be considered timeless, functionally setting your story in a different “frivolous Now,” e.g. the way Sex Education and Life is Strange are both canonically set in the present but are aesthetically set in the late seventies and early nineties, respectively; or you can embrace chaos and just reference contemporary culture.

But, once you’re a show on TV with characters referencing other shows currently airing on TV, things might get a little meta, especially shows that lean into it the way Community does. So what does this do to the fourth wall? That supposedly sanctified construct, the violation of which is most often either a failure or an act of deliberate anarchy? How are we to suspend disbelief for stories that don’t even pretend not to be fake, and whose primary pleasure is in acknowledging the fakery?

Abed is, to me, a distillation of the modern audience’s more intricate relationship to the fourth wall. Art imitates life, and when much of life is spent discussing popular art, popular art begins to discuss itself. And art that discusses itself requires a more liminal relationship to the fourth wall. These days we don’t choose to either see it or ignore it, but pay both kinds of attention at once, letting the fourth wall, as needed, fade in and out of visibility, like glass when it catches the light, or seeing your face in the monitor when it fades to black. This was maybe inevitable in a media-saturated environment where the lines between audience, participant, and creator continue to blur, where we watch even straightforward media with an eye towards how it’s made, because we imagine making something like it ourselves one day, or because any viewing experience is potential #content. In a world where it is rarer and rarer to experience art in a darkened theatre that shuts out the world, but where it’s watched on phones during bus rides, in the background while cooking, in an open tab while writing emails. We keep fiction and reality running in tandem, shifting between them with little more than a saccade. The real world isn’t forgotten but edged out of the foreground during a cigarette break.

What tickles me is that Brecht violated suspension of disbelief to create distance between the fiction and its audience. But postmodern reflexivity just makes Abed relatable. He watches TV the same way we watch Community. You can imagine him watching his own show and responding much the way I am now: OK, so you want me to mentally construct a fourth wall that the performers will pretend is there, but the writers will constantly - and entertainingly - bring to my attention its nonexistence, such that I need to suspend my disbelief while thinking about the fact that I am suspending it, which should be mutually-exclusive modes of thought, but, to even understand what I’m watching, I’ll need to do both at once?

Cool.

Cool cool cool.

[thetombedspirit]

So, I just finished the main story of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora - WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD!

First off, I want to talk about the cons of the game before jumping into the pros, but to be honest with ya, the cons are few and far in between and were more about personal preference then the performance of the game itself.

For starters:

1. The Glitches - Like literally, during a few quests, there will be some dialogue, but it'll randomly cut out with the excuse that enemies are near by, when that is absolutely not the case. It was only so bad that I had to exit to the main menu and then get back on in order for it to fix, so this was minor in comparison to other glitches like falling through the map randomly (which happened to me once during my play through of Far Cry 4 :p)

2. The Language - This is just a little peeve of mine, but I wish that the Na'vi, at least when talking amongst themselves and to us, spoke in Na'vi. Like, if Ubisoft could record a whole 'nother language for Far Cry Primal, they could have done it here. And I also wish that the animals, especially the Palulukan, were referred to by it's Na'vi names rather then human names.

3. The Main Character's Name - This is minor really, but I don't like how we are not given a name. Like, I get that it's fun coming up with names for our original character, but it's a bit isolating to only be referred to as 'the Sarentu'.

Not only does it make it seem like our identity as a member of a respected clan matters more then our identity as our own complex individual, but it feels weird when you read notes and listen to audio logs about the other Sarentu kids and not one thing about us, especially when Alma talks about how they're acclimation to life in the Resistance. Like how we're developing doesn't matter at all in comparison to how Ri'nela is coming into the role of leader and Tsahìk.

Not even a mention of our relation to Aha'ri when she writes about her murder and how it could be affecting us.

Like, just a gender-neutral name to tie things in, like Dani in Far Cry 6, would go a long way to make our character feel like a part of the story and not just a nameless side character doing all the hard work, like the Rookie from Far Cry 5.

4. The Villain - This is more of a 'meh' thing for me. Like yeah, Mercer was an asshole, but again, pulling from Far Cry here, who had amazing, complex villains like Vaas Montenegro or Pagan Min, and what we get is... a entitled, racist narcissist whose barely there, and therefore we get zero from this guy. He was more annoying then anything, like literally every time he talk, my eyes rolled into the back of my skull.

Like, could you imagine if AFOP made Mercer like Pagan Min, the tyrant king of Kyrat who had a relationship with Ajay Ghale's mother to the point where he was sympathetic to the loss of his mother. Pagan Min would just randomly call Ajay on his radio like an eccentric father-figure, and in two endings of the game, he'll actually help you out, taking you to Lakshamana so that you can place your mother's ashes beside her, just like she wanted, which is very generous considering that in one of those endings, it's after you lead a massive rebellion right to his door-step, taking out his generals and so-on! (Pagan is my favourite Far Cry villain is you haven't figured that, Vaas is a close second)

If you gave Mercer that kind of depth, then maybe you can actually understand why Teylan would believe Mercer wouldn't hurt anybody when he gave the location of the Resistance Base away.

Harding as well was mediocre. Just a hard-as-nails general that's running a pouching operation on the side. Like, if you made her even a fraction of insane like you did Vaas, I could actually be into it.

So anyway, on to the pros!

1. The Gameplay - I know people moaned about the mechanics being too similar to Far Cry, but honestly, that was what drew me to it when I first saw the trailer for it! Far Cry is my favourite first-person shooter franchise (Far Cry 4 and Far Cry Primal being my favourites). The crafting of weapons, the hunting for food, skins and ingredients and the little things what made it unique was amazing to me,

The hunting was a pain, because half the time (for me anyway) I could almost never get a clean kill for the smaller or quick-moving animals, but I think it was done super well. When you hit an animal in the old Far Cry games, they either just drop dead or run away and bleed out quietly. But here, when it's an unclean kill, the animal squirms and writhes in pain before succumbing to it's wounds, really driving in the whole point of the Na'vi way of life (that's how I saw it anyway).

And the Memory Paintings, though tedious at most times, was another fun and unique mechanic to the game and felt very Na'vi to me and I enjoyed concentrating on them all and hearing the MC's interpretations of the Memory Paintings and the Sarentu Totems.

And the moments when you're flying on your Ikran or Pa'li made me feel like I was in an RPG, like Horizon, so that was a nice little touch. It was like they mashed two of my favorite games into one.

And in the end, it's not the gameplay that makes me play the game. It's the story.

2. The Harmful Effects of the RDA - There was not a minute within this story where it's quests and stories didn't resonate with me.

How the Kinglor of the Aranahe forest was displaced by the RDA's actions, giving us a Yellowstone situation where a key member of the ecosystem was being pushed out and it was causing all sorts of problems for the local flora and fauna.

The aforementioned poaching in Zeswa territory, where the Zakru were being hunted and killed for their tusks and how even their long deceased skeletons were being pilfered, very similar to elephant and rhino poaching, especially as Zakru are sacred animals to the Zeswa.

And then the Yavä, the green fog that brought sickness to the Kame'tire, something that happened, by the way, because the RDA disposed of the Sarentu's bodies by using caustic chemicals!!! (like, what the FUCK, Alma!) but anyway, is very reminiscent to the diseases that European settlers brought in to the native populace, who never had to build up immune systems for it and suffered because of it.

What I'm getting at here, is how big of a problem the RDA is, not just for going to war with Jake and the Omaticaya, but also by causing the exact same problems that people did on Earth and are still doing to Earth. In so many, seemingly innocuous way, the RDA are negatively effecting the ecosystem, the wildlife and the locals in their pursuit of a paycheck that, realistically, would never be able to use until they get off planet, and that is if they don't die on an alien moon because of all those problems.

3. The Efforts of the Resistance

Every time I got to talk with the Resistance members was a highlight for me. I truly do not understand how some people don't like Priya. I found her adorable, and she gave me Penelope Garcia vibes from Criminal Minds. And her budding romance with Resistance Pilot Anqa, whose history with incursion on her desert homeland inspired her to take action against the RDA.

Or Hajir's regrets for playing part in the Severeds origins, concluding how they are in a constant state of anger and sadness.

Or Billy, who break-dances as he's helping you escape imprisonment, before sacrificing himself to save what's left of the Resistance.

And then there's the Na'vi Clans that I just loved and each and every one of it's characters had me giddy. The playful old grandmother in Nefika and her immediate action to take us in and show us around the Hometree, the Zeswa sisters and their rightous anger over the poaching, the eccentricities of Okul and their faith in the Kame'tire's tradtions.

Honestly I could go on and on about every single character in this game. Nalin and her tentative offer to fill in the void of mother during the party, the Burden Carrier and the Milk Crafter who got drunk off their ass, saying the zakru can fly while we're trying to warn them of impending danger and Mosaka, who not only gave our clan's location away to the RDA, but used their deaths to manipulate his way into power and control over the clan by framing Anufi for their demise. (BTW, fuck you Mosaka)

That's all I got for now, but once the DLCs come in, I am defiantly playing through the whole game again and I may come back to this post with an update when that happens, along with my stance on said DLCs.

So, hope your all having a good day and buh-bye!

[hiddenwashington]

after nearly a week trapped within the maze, many have found their way to the center. either a quiet clearing, or a beating heart that appears to be the life force of the maze itself. most citizens have seemed to believe that this was near the end, that it was a sign they'd nearly found there way out, but unfortunately, that's not the case. as you pass out of these sections, you find yourself in the latter half of the maze, and the second half is where the true nightmare begins. gone are the silly monsters and obvious traps, and in their place are true psychological horrors, the likes of which could drive a man to madness. you've survived the first half, but will you make it to the end with your sanity intact?

OOC INFORMATION:

happy spooky season! congratulations to muses who have managed to get through the maze so far, but as they've progressed and adapted so has to maze holding these characters captive. as a result we've got some updates for you in terms of possible situations, as well as a small update to the death table. though we've done chaotic events in the past we wanted to make something that could be considered a proper horror event, and hopefully this table will provide that for all of you! we hope you all have fun with the update and can really enjoy spooky season with this!

THE MAZE:

FIND THE SECOND MAZE TABLE HERE

all of these prompts can be presumed to take place after characters have passed through some midpoint of the maze, however you are not required to write a thread in the middle of the maze in order to progress to the second part, you may simply jump forward whenever you like

please note, these prompts are definitely more intense than the first table of prompts, with many leaning into psychological horror. if you're uncomfortable with many of the prompts you're welcome to stick with the first table for the entire duration of the event. this plot drop is optional.

some of the prompts are left open ended in terms of exact and you should feel welcome to interpret them as you wish. if you're really unsure about whether or not you can do something don't hesitate to shoot us a message!

CHARACTER DEATHS:

character deaths still operate the same as mentioned in the original event post, in which there is a list of potential death effects that can happen to characters.

while a smaller update there have been some small editions to the death table found HERE.

as before please make sure to send any character deaths in the discord, or dm the main if you are not in the discord.

THREADS

feel free to start transitioning threads, making new starter calls, whatever feels like the best way to go about incorporating the plot drop!

please just make sure to reach out to your thread partners before transitioning anything to make sure they're alright with things being transitioned.

you are of course welcome to continue your current replies whether or not you'll be participating in the plot drop!

please make sure to continue tagging threads with hwevent16!

as always make sure to tag all necessary triggers! if you're unsure about what needs to be tagged don't hesitate to check out the page HERE.

please make sure you like this after you have read the post in its entirety, remember admin sunny is baby, and have a happy halloween! ♥

[sound-wav3]

Fictober 2024

Rose

Prompt: 26 ("you were the first")

Fandom: Original Work

Rating: E

There was a slight clatter as I placed down the tea tray. I carefully set out two cups out and poured tea into both of them. I place one on a saucer in front of Mistress Elora and one on a saucer in front of her guest.

"Thank you, Conner."

I bowed and moved off to the side of the room.

"So, Mr. Granthul, what bring you back here after so many years?"

Hugo Granthul was a large man, from a poor family. It would be impossible to tell he didn't come from money looking at him. He was wearing formal armor for starters. Pretty bad for combat but it looks quite fancy.

"Miss Evenelle-"

"Please, you may call me Elora."

"Elora. I have heard your 'wish granting' business has been going well."

"But of course. As long as there are people there will be wishes. And as long as there are wishes, I will offer to grant them."

"For a price of course."

"Of course. You know nothing is free."

"Of course. And King Hendrick was more than happy to allow you to continue operation within his kingdom. Provided you follow a few rules."

"Yes. I remember."

"I apologize for my bluntness, but do you?"

"Three rules. I may not grant anyone a kingdom or power over the king. I may not kill anyone. I may not take on an apprentice."

"And yet I've heard rumors of a young girl here. One who is also practicing the dark arts."

"It's simple magic. Same as the court wizard."

"So you admit it."

"I do not. I have no apprentice. The young girl in question is my new daughter. I have adopted her as I have to children of my own. I have all the legal documents, if you would like to see them."

"But you are teaching her magic! That goes against the King's orders!"

"The rule was to not take an apprentice. I have not. I have a daughter. And it only makes sense for a mother to teach her daughter, does it not?"

"You are twisting the King's rule to your own need!"

"I have done no such thing! I am following the king's rules to the letter!"

"Elora you don't-"

"You will do well to remember your place when you insult me."

He scowled. "Miss Evenelle. This cannot be allowed to stand. I have orders to take you and the girl into custody."

Mistress Elora put down her teacup. Her eyes lit up with a burning anger. "Hugo, you will do no such thing. My daughter and I have done nothing. I simply granted her wish to be brought up in a safe household. I have granted many wishes to help many people of this kingdom in a similar many. You would know. You were the first one."

Hugo looked down. Emotions flashed across his face. Eventually he stood up. "...I will report you have adopted a daughter to the king. He will not be happy with this news."

"Then I am sorry he cannot congratulate me on starting a family."

Hugo left. After he left the mansion Mistress Elora called out. "Rose, come here please."

Rose stepped out from behind the parlor door. She walked into the room and went to sit across from Mistress Elora. Mistress Elora patted the seat next to her. Rose sat next to her.

"Rose, dear. You needn't worry. You are my daughter and I not let harm come to you."

"But, what if they hurt you?"

"Oh not possible. Conner would tear them to shreds before they could touch me."

"Familiars can do that?"

"Strong and loyal ones can. Now let's lighten the mood. Are you ready to play with fire?"

Rose gasped. "You're gonna teach me fireball!?"

"Can't be a witch without it!"

[freeusemuses]

Open starter: Ahsoka’s auction

With the success of Order 66, and Operation Nightfall, almost all Jedi had been eliminated from the galaxy. Those that survived were hunted relentlessly, and those that ended up captured...

"Lot 665! A Jedi in chains!" The auctioneer called to the crowd. Ahsoka being raised up to the stage. Her fate to be sold like so many of her fellow female Jedi. "Ahsoka Tanno. The former apprentice of Anakin Skywalker. Some of you may remember her as the one who bombed the Jedi Temple. So, the bidding starts at 250,000 credits!"

[vocesincaput]

OPEN STARTER: Thomas Hamilton

Having been determined to not let the institution break him, Thomas had remained as together as possible whilst at Bethlem. Putting on a positive face and not letting those who ran the place see how it effected him. He befriended one of the orderlies, Lewis, early on in his time there and Thomas was more than thankful for the friendship as he knew it helped keep him sane.

After 2 years at Bethlem, Lewis came to Thomas and told him that he could get him on a ship to take him an away from London. Not wishing his friend to endure any more of what he had been put through.

And so, after several weeks of careful planning between the two men, Lewis smuggled Thomas out of Bethlem and to the docks. When introduced to the Captain of the ship, Thomas gave the only name he had had in his mind throughout the previous two years - McGraw.

Thomas quickly learned from the crew how to operate the things on board the ship. It didn’t take long for him to realise that the crew were in fact pirates. What surprised him about the realisation was that he felt comfortable amongst them. None of them judging him for anything about who he was within himself.

They taught him multiple things over the years and Thomas quickly found that he was rather adept at sword fighting and a fine shot with a pistol.

He rose up through the ranks until he became Quartermaster. Developing a reputation for only taking a life when necessary but being cunning and completely ruthless when the time called for it.

He usually stayed on board whenever the ship came to Nassau, the memories of what the place meant tying into his memories of James. Too painful to step off the boat, Thomas would usually come up with good reasons for him to stay on board, despite being the Quartermaster.

This time, however, the ship was having to undergo repair after getting into a battle with a Spanish ship. Despite winning, they had taken heavy damage and the Captain ordered every member of the crew to leave and go into the town.

Thomas felt a sharp spike in anxiety as he first stepped onto the docks. A wave of it rushing over him like a storm and mixing with a swirling mixture of feelings that had him sway upon his feet for several moments before he managed to steady himself.

The fact that he had set foot in Nassau for the first time after everything that felt like a lifetime ago, after everything he had lost and everything that had been done to him... Thomas had to clench his jaw so tight to stop himself from breaking that his face began to ache. He stood looking at everything and everyone around him for slightly too long before slowly making his way in to town.

There were a few things he could probably pick up whilst they were docked for a while. Nothing absolutely needed but could possibly come in handy to be stocked up on. Thomas didn't intend on entering any of the establishment or meeting with members of any other crews.

But he knew it were possible that someone would want to speak to him, familiar or not, so he prepared himself to have to interact if the need arose.