#<- yeah she’s lots of fun to talk to

[meamiki]

mira !!! :]

[yardsards]

do people who have listened to taz balance but not graduation Know that it was HEAVILY IMPLIED that lup and barry eventually adopted a lil sorcerer child who got disowned by his family for his natural necromancy magic, and they taught him how to use his powers for good and were overall great parents that he looks back on fondly

(and said child grew up to be a dimension-hopping lich, caretaker of the dead, and very sweet adoptive father of a major npc)

[pepperpixel]

+ Butch 4 Butch +

(Except neither one of them is rlly that butch but holy fUCKING SHIT THAT SONG IS LITERALLY THEM… the version of them I made up in my mind palace… it’s them.)

Anywayyyy. Yeah! Have a tagr art dump..! aka, those vibes when you, out of a series of moments of temporary insanity, end up finding, taking in, nursing back to health and eventually falling into a tangled messy yearning situationship w the asshole tsundere alien who tried to destroy your entire planet… rlly extremely relatable vibes!!

[thrpr0phetuseek]

ooc: ofc! It’s such a bop, lots of folk-like songs because that’s what I listen to most, but I think it captures their vibes. Also, OBVIOUSLY the forget me not; I had to, it’s so them, and one of Tir’s nymphly flowers!

ooc: holiday-related asks you say... I'm here to deliver! also, I hope you have loads of fun despite the business!! :D /gen

Holidays were always a fun part of the year for Odysseus; mostly due to the fact it meant extended time with family and friends. Often including extravagant meals and games at his palace.

While the past twenty years had events that made the holidays rather miserable the war, being stuck on an island, and getting into conflicts with the gods there was a few people Odysseus could still spend his time with.

The siren doesn't announce themselves as they approach the prophet's island, deciding to make their presence known at first by getting just close enough to brush his fingers against Tiresias' sides in a surprise tickle.

[ in the underworld, time can feel—and normally is—pretty irrelevant. It doesn’t get colder nor warmer, and there’s no signs for whenever the seasons change. Once dead, your sense of time and space begins to fade away, especially because there’s no need for it. Even still, Tiresias acutely aware that there were certain times more people were excited about one day or week than others, and it didn’t often take a genius to see when that time came around, much less a prophet ]

[ usually they sat closest to their willow tree, or at the highest peak of their isle, but through more visits, they have begun sitting down by the rocky shores more often. Particularly, they have found a perch for themselves on a rock not too far from the island, but not attached to it, either. It was a peaceful rock, and where they sat now, blindly zoning out and instead tuning in to the birds, and the whispers of the souls ]

[bmpmp3]

finding out ur coworker is way older than you thought and having to very quickly reorient how you talk to them

[necrotic-nephilim]

there is not enough femslash in batcest circles. the girls deserve to be just as weird about each other as the boys are. if BruDick gets to be weird father/son/brothers/lovers/friends/rivals/soulmates then it is only fair that Babs/Cass get to be mother/daughter/sisters/lovers too. Something about that deep intrinsic but undefinable love that is born out of trauma, especially if you consider Cass not knowing what healthy love looks like in the first place. i think it's fun and deserves just as much fandom content.

besides that, you can get even more niche with rarepairs like Helena/Steph. Huntress/Spoiler: Blunt Trauma is already a fantastic comic and even though it's their only real canon interaction it has so much potential. very comparable to TimJay in how Helena tries to get Steph to understand her morals and the corruption you could play with it.

batman: huntress/spoiler: blunt trauma (1998)

that comic also highlights on how both Steph and Helena are outcasts of the Batfamily and don't have the approval of Bruce to be doing what they do in "his city". I think there's so much Potential in Helena taking Steph under her wing because Bruce won't let her in and it becomes a weird codependent toxic sapphic mess. I think the protectiveness Helena feels over Steph from the get-go is so clear and the way she wants to look out for Steph, wants to make sure Steph understands the real world? I love them. Helena should be allowed to steal Steph, actually. I think it'd be fun.

there are a lot of other possibilities too like Babs/Steph or even getting weird with Helena Bertinelli/Helena Wayne and the existential question of "is it selfcest or not." But these two specifically live in my head rent-free, especially Helena/Steph and one day I'll convince everyone else to ship it too.

[alongtidesoflight]

so here's my honest thoughts on dragon age: the veilguard, after ~40 hours of playing. i finished the main quest after having finished all companion quests and major faction quests. just to clear up what content i saw, i played as an elven transmasc rook who is a member of the lords of fortune. he romanced lucanis (although after finishing the game i'm now leaning towards taash). i don't know what's happening in playthroughs that have a different race, gender identity, romance or faction going on.

full spoilers ahead, i mean it. don't read further if you want to avoid them. i don't want complaining about it in my asks.

oh and also, if you're worried because of a few negative reviews online i can comfort you by saying don't give a fuck about a certain big name youtuber who is very much tied to bethesda franchises giving this a negative review. i'll explain why.

i'm starting off with the things i liked

the game looks really pretty. i was worried it wouldn't feel like thedas anymore (with them trying to "focus on northern thedas only" i thought they'd make a clear cut in environmental design. they do and they don't. it's complicated. i'll elaborate on it when talking about the negative stuff). anyway it does. minrathous feels like kirkwall. treviso enchanted me like the winter palace did. the hossberg wetlands reminded me of the hinterlands and a couple other inquisition maps. arlathan looked like... arlathan. the crossroads were different, but familiar. overall i like the way it looks and feels. it's thedas, with a twist. it's a good one, and gives everything a solid but unique feel.

combat is top tier. if you're a hardcore dragon age player you WILL miss the tactical aspect of it for a bit, but i promise you, once you're used to the way the combat works, you will be lapping that shit up. and once you get to ability combos you'll mourn the control you used to have over your companions in battle a bit less

the MAIN quest and its story. i expected worse, way worse. and for a while the game even had me tricked (harr harr you'll get it in a second) it is Really That Much Worse. but holy shit was it good. i walked away satisfied ngl.

your choices have SOLID weight. there's consequences, good AND bad. i got minrathous blighted, ruled over by venatori, and the leader of the shadow dragons ultimately died because of my decisions. i made those at the beginning and throughout the game. he died at the end. DAVRIN died because i didn't expect what i was saying to have that much weight. i thought i was in the clear. he had hero status. well turns out, your choices can still get your companions killed even if you do everything right. i fucking love him. he shouldn't have made that sacrifice just because i told him to do everything it takes once.

the inquisitor, morrigan and dorian being there, surprisingly. there's also negatives to this though, see below.

speaking of companions dying and the inquisitor playing a bigger role: the final quest feels like me2's suicide mission. i was blown away by it and the fact that i got to see the results of all my efforts playing out in front of me.

bioware are NOT trying to redeem solas. they love him as a character yes, but i wasn't forced to see any good in him. he betrays you. he fucked my rook over twice. he fucked him over right back, for good this time (the veil wasn't torn down, i anchored it by binding him to it, he's doomed to uphold it). but solas really lives up to his name as the trickster elven god. rip to all the people who grew really attached to him over the years.

varric died. if you like him that's probably as hard reading it as it was watching it. varric died and the game lies about it until the very end. when the realisation hits, it hurts. but in the very best way.

the amount of care they put into gender expression and trans identities this time around. (i'll add onto this with negative points as well too).

rook feels very much ingrained in the world of thedas. he doesn't ask questions that expose the player to lore through dialogue as if he's stepped foot into thedas for the first time. those conversations feel very solid and good. i hope other faction players got as much joy out of this as i did.

and the things i didn't like and boy there's a lot unfortunately

the music. let's just get that out of the way holy shit. it doesn't feel like it belongs in this universe. it gets so incredibly sci-fi-y at times you'd think it's taken straight from mass effect andromeda. there's not a single song unique to veilguard that i really enjoyed. it broke my immersion, real bad. hearing a busker play the tavern songs from inquisition on a lute right after i killed some venatori with wobbly bass songs playing in the background is just odd. weird tonal shift. don't like it. it's made for people who like flashy light-weight cinema.

tevinter nights is required reading. the podcasts are required listening exercises. the game is so fast paced, especially at the start, that there's no time to introduce you to characters and how much weight their names carry in-game. i would not have known who half these people are if i hadn't skimmed over tevinter nights. i'd care even less about them than i already did. there is no time to get properly attached to them. people will act as if you're talking to a legend personified and you'll be thinking man goddamn which chapter of tevinter night were they in again and what did they do???

there's a weird mismatch with the animations. you'll have beautifully fluid ones, like emmrich casting spells. and then you'll have rook's face animating in the most unnatural manner that's sorta reminiscent of mass effect andromeda's "my face is tired" addison, when their emotions SHOULD be landing with the player rn instead.

i'm not vibing with the art style. sometimes it works. most of the time it doesn't. at points i felt like i was watching tangled.

that also brings me to some of the dialogue. same issue. i am watching frozen. i am watching tangled. someone on the writer's team really likes the adorkable trope. bellara is its victim.

for all the talk about identity, bioware sure doesn't like theirs. the grey warden armor got a redesign again and it just makes them look like a generic army. i hate it lol

in general, i don't like the armor design. the wardrobe/appearances system is fine, but it's just not helping if all the armors are just... kinda bland or downight bad looking? and don't get me started on the lords of fortune armor. that is orientalism personified.

the world states should have been carried over, full stop. i know they said they didn't because they want to separate what happens in the north from what happens in the south, which... i could have lived with that. but the inquisitor sends you letters that keep you up to date on... the south of thedas. you learn that there's a blight again, that people are standing strong but it's difficult, denerim's fallen, the rulers are taking care of it, orlais is fighting and they're successful for a while, etc etc. what's good bioware. i thought we don't care about the south this time around. why are you feeding me so much boring generic information. if you're not gonna show any of it and just write letters, then carrying the world state over should not have been an issue. i have a game dev background. those few lines of code would not have broken your budget or pushed your engine's limits. fuck right off.

this gripe of mine carries over to all the cameos. as a lord of fortune you have to deal with isabela a lot. it's fun. i missed her. you get to go drinking with her and taash and bellara! also my hawke romanced her. she's not mentioned once. they had the opportunity to put a sentence or two about her in there with not a lot of effort, trust me.

when varric dies, all she has is a single line about it. for gold, for fortune, for varric. she only says it if you interact with her on your way to the final push. that's not mandatory.

morrigan is there. kieran isn't. the old god soul that mythal and then solas absorbed? who cares at this point, the gods are dead now and solas is locked away for eternity. i suppose? why is morrigan there. she feels unneeded. i wish they'd just left her down south, at least that way i wouldn't have had to witness her god awful redesign.

dorian at least feels as if he belongs in this story. the shadow dragons are a crucial part to protecting minrathous. he's also weirdly underutilised. isabela and morrigan had more lines than him in my playthrough.

on the topic of romance: bro that was underwhelming. no, genuinely. you know when romance picked up a bit? after the point of no return. i heard maybe two lines of companion banter about it before that. maybe i missed something which i honestly doubt, but romance did not play much of a role in lucanis's storyline. i saved his grandmother as he wished me to (and if you read tevinter nights you know she was rather abusive and their relationship not the healthiest) and told him to focus on his family. a reunified family my rook wasn't even introduced to as a partner at the end of all that.

really, do not buy this game if you're only in it for the romances. others might be better, lucanis's basically gave me nothing. except for an outing (the second coffee date i had with him, it was getting repetitive) all of it played out once i committed to the final quest. the sex scene was a fade to black. annoyingly right after davrin died. if you're looking for well paced and good spice, pick up something else. the sweet talk and the final goodbye were nice though.

for all the good the ever-presence of gender identity does, it is brought up in such a disruptive manner too. it doesn't even play out naturally if you CHOOSE the lines that are meant to be said. hearing the words trans and non-binary in this setting doesn't feel right, and i'm saying this as a trans guy. i think it could have been handled more gracefully. the amount of times my rook went "i'm a MAN" as if he's about to start drumming on his chest and roaring any second now got super nerve-grating. "i'm so glad you're into me... the me who is trans. remember?" just. tell me one trans person who'd talk like that to a person they've grown close with and are trying to romance. this game doesn't handle sexuality well, so all this hey my body might not look like the way you're expecting it to look talk amounts to nothing anyway. i feel about this the way i feel about krem: this is partial exposition to trans experiences... packaged up for cis consumption. the ONLY exception to that is interacting with taash. holy shit was all of that heartwarming and bro did it feel good and natural to talk to them about theirs and rook's gender.

rivain and nevarra are new locations added by veilguard. they're also incredibly underwhelming, small and constricted maps. rivain is a coastline with a few ruins. the hall of valor is a partial ruin nestled into a cave on a beach, with a fighting pit. isabela is there in her skimpy outfit commentating your pit fights. that's it. i'm sorry if you were looking for a bustling pirate cove or whatever. you're not gonna get it. the nevarran crypts btw are a long ass dungeon crawl. that's it.

speaking of maps. i thought people were being dramatic when they said you're gonna be fighting the same enemies on them again and again. i thought they were figure of speeching it. they're not. you WILL fight the same amount of enemies. in the same spot. every time you reload the map. best to stay on a map and clear out the enemies and do as much questing on that map as you can before leaving, because you WILL have to do it all over again once you return.

the three choices i made for my inquisitor didn't matter lol she didn't have to face solas and therefore couldn't stop him at any cost as she had sworn (maybe because my rook tricked solas into binding himself to the veil, there was also an option to fight him. would she have stepped in? who knows). blackwall wasn't mentioned. and either her using a small amount of her forces in the final fight was the reason the civilians of minrathous fared so well..... or it just didn't matter. ultimately i think she had very little impact on anything

[randomwriteronline]

"Ah! You're one of those," a voice came to his ears.

Nuparu turned to find a tall Gaquri standing at the entrance, looking at him curiously.

"I am a Toa," he corrected.

The other nodded: "Yes, I do know that. Forgot the name is all. You're a, uh... Ko?"

"Onu."

"Hm! My mistake. Which element is that, again?"

"Earth. Do you need something?" the inventor cut their small talk short, lightly tapping a tool similar to a wrench against the skeletal frame of what appeared to be a heavily modded chariot: "I'm working on a project."

"You know where Berix is?" the Gaquri asked. He raised an arm: an interesting weapon, with a jagged light blue blade at one end and some kind of projectile mechanism attached to the handle, dangled from it casually. "Wanted to drop this off to him. The thornax launcher's been jamming up more often and I know that boy can make it work like a charm again."

"He's getting parts," Nuparu answered. His eyes rested once more on the blade and he added, tilting his head intrigued: "You can leave it here if you want."

"So you can study some original Bara Magna manufacturing?" the other joked.

"It's not really my field, but it looks remarkable."

He watched the organic being laugh heartily as he approached - with a fairly heavy limp, he noticed: "Remarkable! Now that's a bit of an exaggeration, kid. I made these from some bones, whatever viable scraps I could find from wrecks of the Core War, and a few patches across the years when I could afford it. It's held together by spit and whatever Ackar's friend did to make it spurt water."

"From what I understand, spit doesn't seem like a good adhesive."

"That's what we say here to mean something's parts are real shoddily connected together."

"Hm! Like dried mud. Or aluminum sheet."

"That's the idea. Ah, where should I put this, anyhow?"

"There is fine. What's with your leg?"

The Gaquri gave a grimace: "Nothing much - just my knee acting up," he replied, patting the guilty joint. "Something must have gotten rusted. It happens."

Even through the lack of expression of his mask Nuparu treated him to a baffled look.

"What?"

"Organic parts don't rust," the Toa sputtered. "At least, ours don't."

The other eyed the tendons and muscles peeking through black armor, and his lips perked up in a little smile.

Without a word he placed his weapon on the least cluttered corner of Berix's work desk before redirecting his now free hands to the side of the faulty knee, messing with what appeared to be the graceless stitching of a large wound: his fingers sank deftly into it and pried through the gaps enough to loosen the whole thing, and before the less organic being's flabbergasted eyes pulled down the fake skin and meat to reveal a fully mechanical joint, complete with pistons and springs and even what seemed like wires.

"Don't worry," he chuckled with a wave, "Ours don't either. But most crusty old Glatorian like me haven't been completely flesh and bone in a long time."

If the inventor's attention had been piqued before, he was completely captivated now. He was leaning on his seat towards him, vehicle project all but forgotten, intently studying as many details of the prosthesis as he could see from that distance.

His eager interest made the other laugh again: "Why all that surprise! Don't you see something like this on you every day?"

"Yes, but I'm not you!"

"And what's that mean?"

"You're all flesh! And meat! And skin! How does that work?"

The Gaquri considered something for a moment. "If you can get me a seat and figure out what's wrong with it, I'll be glad to let you have a closer look," he offered at last.

Nuparu pulled the stool from right under himself so fast that he fell on his ass.

He then placed it down with extreme care and patted it insistently.

The other barely held back a snort.

His implant hadn't caused this much of a scene since the first day it had been up and functional.

"The name's Tarix, anyhow," he introduced himself as he sat down a little heavily. "Since you'll be rummaging knuckle-deep through the insides of my leg for the next thirty minutes."

"Hm," Nuparu replied as he kneeled until his mask was all but grazing the joint.

Tarix waited a dozen seconds, and added: "You got one too, Toa?"

"One what?"

"Name."

"Nuparu."

"I see. Ah - nope, nope, don't-" his fingers quickly pinched the mechanical being's and lifted them away from the scarified tissue binding the meat to the metal: "That's real flesh, don't peel that - the nerves still work, you'd put me through the pains of Plude."

"What's that?"

"You folks have a place in your lore built just to torture you forever?"

"Yes, Karzhani. I've been there."

"Huh. Well, I've been to Plude too back when it still existed, and I'll just say that the only good thing the Lord of Sand might've done was collapsing it on itself. So, you get what I mean about the pain."

"Hm. Yes, I can imagine. But how do I - see, to check the individual parts, I'd need to pull them off..."

"Oh - hold it, let me just..."

Angling his leg in an uncomfortable position and hunching down with a hiss, the Glatorian set to work carefully pulling screws loose with the help of an empty pipe he'd fetched from his pocket. The small parts dangled from their sockets without falling, just distant enough from the point the metal touched to allow the top and bottom pieces to be pulled apart without needing to pull the much more easy to lose components out of the whole.

"Hold the calf a moment, will you?" he muttered with the pipe now stuck between his teeth. Nuparu complied, holding the lower half of the leg still as Tarix worked his magic on the inner wires. At last, satisfied, he unfurled his back up once more and puffed satisfied: "There, pull."

When the Toa did so, the prosthesis came apart as easily as a house of cards. Suddenly, in the mechanical palm was a whole calf, still warm with life and undoubtedly organic.

Tarix watched genuinely amused as Nuparu tested the ankle in his hands and on the ground, miming an attempt at a walk as though playing with a very concerning doll with nothing short of pure unadultered fascination.

He posed it as if stuck in a sprint: "Can you feel this?"

"Not a single thing," the Glatorian replied. He patted the metallic femur's exposed head: "And neither can I here. The connections are all in the wires, they go right into the nerves, see? So long as they're apart I can't feel crap anywhere from over here," and he pointed to the flesh that stopped around the middle of his thigh "To the rest of the leg underneath. Not that I should be able to, frankly, if we wanted to abide by nature's whims, but luckily for me us Spherus Magna natives never cared much for that."

Nuparu hummed: "How'd you get it like this, anyways?"

"Oh," the Glatorian shrugged as though it were the most normal thing in the world, "Blew up."

"It just exploded?"

"Not by itself, of course, someone shot the whole thing out of me."

The Toa treated him to an appalled look.

Tarix waved a hand harshly, chewing on his unlit pipe: "The Core War was absolutely barbaric, kid! I've witnessed stuff I wouldn't wish on a Skrall. When I saw that half you've got there in your hand fly over my head as gracefully as the ugliest bird known to any being with eyes, I thought I was going to die of shock like a Mountain Striker with a broken wing. I still have no clue how I managed to keep awake through the bloodloss and pain long enough for the fixers to figure out I was still alive enough to be taken down to the medic."

Nuparu regarded the half of a limb in his grasp with newfound horror and fascination. A whole portion of leg, shot right out... He wasn't sure if even the Vortixx could have had something capable of doing that. Oh, sure, they had plenty of possibly worse things, but even the most blunt tended to have slightly more complex effects than just 'blows a chunk off of you'.

And the fact that they had managed to rebuild the broken joint and connected it to the rest of the nervous system was nothing short of miraculous, compared to the same thing done on a mechanical being - whose organic components regenerate, too.

"And all Glatorian have something like this?"

"Us older ones, yes," the other nodded. He watched with a sort of lazy interest as the Toa turned his attention to the mechanism of his prosthesis, checking for damage as he had promised. "The rookies tend to have the usual stuff, thank goodness - scars, plaques, maybe a limb, some fingers..."

"Fingers?"

"Yes, some of them. They tend to nip 'em a lot during training, you know, when they start to get the hang of it and stop holding their weapons like they're gonna grow a mouth and bite them - they cut tendons often those first few times. Or just the whole thing."

"Really?"

He chuckled, playfully waving his fingers: "Gresh keeps losing them. If you look closely you can tell which phalanxes are still his."

"I thought he was good at fighting."

"He is. He's just young. And a little too brash at times."

Nuparu hummed, moving onto the piece of implant attached to his thigh: "You mentioned limbs, too," he noted absentmindedly: "Is that also common, during training?"

"Losing them? Oh no, that happens out in the desert. Or, used to happen... Well, the desert's still out there, just smaller, so I guess - point is, you'll sooner get one cut off by a Bone Hunter or chewed up by a Vorox than find a fellow Glatorian who'll do that to you, on purpose or not. We made sure to try and avoid that sort of thing when we made the rules for the job."

"And plaques?"

"Oh, these," and he tapped some strange metallic protrusions on the top of his legs, on the side of his arms, and on his shoulders. "Nothing special, they keep armor in place. Easier than having to strap it on. We install them when we come of age."

Their shape was somewhat familiar: "Berix has them too, I think."

"I think everybody gets them - Agori, Glatorian, Skrall..."

"They are pretty useful," the Toa nodded.

He couldn't really imagine how they could have managed to stick armor to themselves otherwise. Maybe through some cloth? But then it might chafe their joints, and they'd have to find a way to insert it in the metal anyways...

He hummed thoughtfully, wracking his brain as he tried at once to figure out both the logistics of putting armor on fully organic beings and whatever was wrong with the implant.

So concentrated he was that he actually jumped a little when the pipe gently smacked his shoulder.

Tarix had a strange look on his face as he pointed down at a spot on his prosthesis: "Don't - it's nothing to be worried about yet, just, watch it," he warned, "That coil there you've got near your index, she's real frisky. Won't be a problem now that it's taken apart, but when you stick it back together you'd better avoid even just so much as grazing it - it'll pull my calf back at top speeds to kick my ass. Been like that since the start."

"Oh! Sounds painful."

"It is!"

With a hand already rummaging through a box of springs, Nuparu offered: "Since I'm here already, I could replace that..."

"Ah, there's no need really," the Glatorian quickly stopped him.

"But it's a liability."

"If it's out in the open like this, yeah, but - well, when it's covered it's a lot more manageable, and the wires-"

"It's still a malfunction. I can fix that without any trouble."

"I get it, but it's - I - hm! Let me explain. See, when - if I cover it up, see, with my-"

"The fake flesh?"

"Yes, that - it still jerks back if touched, but not as hard, you get me?"

"But it still does."

"Yes, and here's the - the thing is, I also have my nerves connected, right? Right, and when the coil gets touched and makes my leg jerk, it... Er... See - have you ever - hm! Hmm-hm. Hold on. Do you... Is there something that you know is not good for your body, but when you do it it just feels nice?"

"No."

"Alright, this complicates things."

"Oh! Oh, no, wait - when I cut metal with a saw, I like to keep myself as close to the sparks as possible so they can hit me because they tingle. It's fun. Do you mean like that?"

"Eeeh, close enough! That's what's going on with that coil."

"It tingles?"

"It... Uh... Sure, let's. Call it that."

The change in tone was weird, and he seemed to be somewhat embarrassed about having brought the subject up.

Now, in regards to asking personal questions, Nuparu tended to be as uninterested in other beings' private matter as much as a Kofo-Jaga is in lightstones.

However, this was directly related to the machinations of an impressive, if a little primitive, handmade mechanical joint.

So yes, he would have loved to pry.

The mental manifestation of Turaga Whenua repeatedly smacking him over the head with his drilling staff was currently the only thing keeping him from inquiring on any activities Tarix might have enjoyed dabbling in outside of his work hours, but luckily for the Glatorian that singular imaginary scenario was also an extremely effective deterrent for any Matoran or Toa that had ever at some point of their lives resided in Onu-Koro.

As such, the Toa just shrugged and diverted his attention onto the object the Gaquri was now nervously twisting in his hand: "What's that, by the way?"

The total swerve in subject matter destabilized the Glatorian briefly. He looked down at his fingers, then back at the Toa.

"A pipe?" he replied.

Nuparu squinted at it a little better: "That does not look like a pipe." he decreted.

Tarix lifted an eyebrow, curiously: "It's just an Agori pipe."

"That's not a pipe," the inventor insisted.

"And how should a proper Toa pipe look like, then?"

"Matoran pipe, maybe-" the Toa scoffed, rolling his eyes and making the other chuckle a bit while the mechanical hands went right back to checking on his implant in the midst of his correction: "First of all, it's far too small to be of any proper use; second, that seems to be made of wood, which is the worst material for this kind of thing - even if you could fit that tiny piece in a proper hydraulic system, long time usage will lend it to rot and come apart much faster, which is why we used to trade iron with Le-Koro to avoid the whole village from caving in on--"

"Oh!" Tarix interrupted him all of a sudden, smacking the object on his palm with a hollow sound: "Oh, you meant - no no no, it's not that type of pipe! It's a, uh -- pipa! Nagele! Sghitt!"

"Don't curse at me, please."

"I'm not cursing at you, it's just different names for this! You really don't have a word for-?" then he cut himself off as he seemed to remind himself of something evidently obvious: "Ah - well, I mean, you don't have a mouth, of course you can't smoke..."

"Yes we do."

"You do?"

"Yes? How else would we hold our masks?"

Tarix blinked, briefly wondered if he should have asked, and decided it didn't matter: "But you don't smoke? At all?"

"No? Unless we get catastrophically overheated or are set on fire," Nuparu replied as he attached the disjointed calf into the thigh again. "Both of which in all fairness have happened before. Not very often, but they have happened."

"No, I meant... Ah, hold it, hold it..."

He stuck the unlit pipe back in his mouth, puffing out nothing a few times with a thoughtful expression on his face.

"See - it's a bit like the coil and the sparks again, the matter with smoking," he decided to start explaining: "There's certain plants, if you dry them and burn them well, that make really pleasant smoke."

"How is smoke pleasant?" the Toa muttered.

"The smell can be," the Gaquri shrugged, "And the taste too. Wait-" and he gently knocked the foot of the pipe on the top of the Volitak before the inventor could interrupt him again "-Wait a second, I can't very well clear this up if you keep cutting in. Alright, so the bigger part here, the bowl we call it - you need to press the dried plants in here and light them up, only a little before the whole thing burns up; once they're charred nicely, you inhale through the shank, and then you puff it back out. That's how the smoke gets in your mouth and you can taste it."

"And how does it taste, then?"

"Ah, depends on what you smoke," was the whistful answer. "Same goes for the smell. The Lebori have a certain bark that gets real flexible when wet - they make whole pipes with it, they burn up real well, but it's a bit too sour for me. Before the Shattering there used to be a type of kelp I liked, and Kiina said they had River Eyes up near the Dormus that made some terribly sweet smoke."

"River Eyes?"

"It's a flower! Small, round, blue, and it grows on river banks. Never got to try them, though, and it's better I don't go around asking for some with the lungs I've got. Like I said, smoking's the same as the coil and the sparks: feels good to do, but it's bad for the body."

Nuparu hummed deeply, rummaging inside the knee as he handled the hanging wires carefully.

"I think I figured out the problem," he announced.

At that Tarix perked up: "Rust?"

"One piston has developed a limestone growth that makes it much harder to move properly, and as a result one of the springs is bent out of shape and chafes right against the nerve."

"Ah! Well, damn. You can get limestone in there?"

"If it's humid enough, it can build up over time."

"Hm... Alright, I guess all those years sweating in arenas and whatnot were bound to do the trick eventually."

"Also there was rust."

"Hm. Where?"

"Three screws. I changed them already."

"Wait, really? When?"

"While you were talking about the Core War."

"Huh! You're quick. And quiet."

The Toa shrugged: "I like working."

He pulled the prosthesis apart for a second time, laying the calf down on the floor. He then leaned back to search through a tool box brimming with bits and pieces - bolts, nuts, coils, springs, and all sorts of other things - with what his mask's stillness still managed to convey as a focused furrowed brow, evidently still thinking about what course of action to take now that he had pinpointed the anomaly to fix.

Changing his mind, he stood up and made his way to one of the various piles of junk and assorted more or less useful knicknacks to start looking for something in there instead.

"Speaking of the Core War," he said, implying he wanted to start a conversation but without really adding to that sentence.

Tarix waited a few minutes, puffing out in silence while watching him shift towels or bottles until he found what he was looking for (a clean enough rag and flask containing a murky liquid), before figuring that he was waiting for some kind of permission to continue on the admittedly not particularly pleasant topic: "Yes?"

"You said other older Glatorians also got implants like this from it."

"I implied it, but yes, that's the case."

The Toa hummed as he settled back before him: "And they're all knees, like yours?"

"You want to ask what their own prosthesis are?"

At that, he got no response.

"You can, by the way," Tarix reassured him, "It's been a damn long time by now, it doesn't hurt as much as say, eighty hundred years ago. We've been living like this long enough to joke about the whole thing and whatnot."

Nuparu mumbled something indistict as he soaked up the rag and began scraping the limestone off of the metal with it.

"Don't act all shy now, kid! As I said, it's no trouble." the Glatorian repeated. A sly smile curled the corners of his lip: "You can't get embarrassed like this every time you have to ask about new possible clients, you know," he jokingly reprimanded him, "Otherwise you'll have a hard time getting any."

"I don't want to be paid!" the Toa replied. "I'm just curious, is all! This is... Well, I didn't expect it to be something you'd have."

"Oh, don't worry, not everybody's missing a whole chunk of leg like me," Tarix chuckled. "We Glatorian like to keep ourselves distinct from one another."

"In implant too?"

"Of course! Let me think, now..."

He inhaled a long breath through his pipe, leaning back a little as the kid continued on with his work, and exhaled with a whistle.

"So, let's see - Vastus, he's got a good chunk of his lower spine replaced and, oh, 'bout three quarters of his intestines," he began: "Kiina had her hip crushed and put back together, and that should be... Ah, nope, nope, half of her left hand and the whole ulna too. Telluris I haven't see in a long while now, but unless he's figured out how to place his brain in a tin can I'd bet his head's all that's left. Certavus, bless his memory, I don't think he had a single original organ left by the end, and Gelu's got bionic feet - one foot, one leg, right, a whole leg, so then Strakk was the one who got his eye shot out and his nose crushed. And the jaw, of course. I don't remember if it was him or Malum who cracked his head but I do think it was him, because Malum had the femur that got split in half and it worsened with that problem with his ribcage where the metal was corroding and messing with his blood... Which is why he had to get his marrow replaced in his leg later on. Oh, and Ackar also had to... Ah, wait, which one was it? Right, right. Ackar, poor guy, his back itself is worse than a Plude street but his real problem's his right shoulder blade, which got essentially pulverized - I was there, ghastly sight - so they had to replace the whole thing, and that was bad enough; but then, and this is the fucked thing, the implant actively degraded the rest of the arm, so he had to keep replacing bits and pieces of it until it was just completely gone."

Nuparu lifted his head, eyes wide and flabbergasted: "The fixing made it worse?"

"It did! He kept having trouble moving it."

"How?"

Tarix raised his shoulders: "Beats me," he replied just as baffled. "It's a common thing for Tapyri, honestly. It's hard to tell if the material's bad quality or has trouble with the heat. Perditus too - after he got half his leg replaced, the damn thing somehow managed to melt halfways and left him limping almost worse than he would if he just didn't have it."

"And he can't replace it?"

"It's grafted onto the bone and the muscle has grown over it. They'd have to carve the whole thing out with it, it's just not worth it."

The Toa stared at him positively appalled.

"That is horrid," he spat, punctuating the adjective with a harsh yank of his hand over the faulty piston, thus launching a loosened piece of limestone to skid across the floor.

"You're tellin' me, kid."

"That's - it's inadmissible. It's insane."

"And I haven't told you about the Agori."

"What about the Agori? Were they fighting too? Do they-?"

"No, not fighting, usually - it's something we got in common with your lot: we're basically the same species, but we are much bigger and they're much nimbler. So you had us larger folk tearing one another to bits properly, while they tended to work as scouts if they weren't busy trying to put us back in one piece."

The Gaquri interrupted himself to stretch his arms up, pulling one towards his head.

The movement produced a loud 'crock!' roughly around the height of his shoulder, followed by much softer pops crackling all the way up towards his wrist as it twisted.

Satisfied with the sound (which instead made the inventor a little uneasy considering their conversation), he moved to massage the sides of his spine with his knuckles, rolling his neck: it seemed to make a curious ticking noise in place of a meatier sound, filling in the quick pauses of Nuparu's rag scrubbing the limestone away.

At last he puffed into his unlit pipe: "If you look at the older ones - the Agori, I mean - you'll see they've got less lower half than upper."

"That makes no sense."

"It does if you don't count implants. We've got them a bit everywhere, I told you, but an Agori with an arm prosthesis is a real rarity. They've got them mostly between their soles and the top of their hipbones."

"And why's that?"

"It's 'cause the lucky ones stepped on mines."

The Toa hummed thoughtfully.

He did not raise his eyes from the almost clean piston: "And the unlucky ones?"

"Well, we were trained to aim for either the neck or the head."

Ah.

Those certainly had been unlucky.

For every thing Toa and Glatorians seemed to have in common, a complete opposite came around. To imagine a Toa willingly kill was already hard, though not impossible - the Mahri themselves had been met with the chance to do so once or twice, and it had been tantalizing to say the least; but to envision a group of his brothers and sisters being not only instructed but even trained to kill, and especially to kill Matoran...

Well, he was glad he did not live in that kind of world.

"That's just how life is," Tarix sighed in the end. "Nobody wins. They've got their metal hips, and I've got my leg held together by wires and pistons. And an artificial diaphragm."

That snapped Nuparu out of his unpleasant musings: "A what?"

"That one wasn't the war's fault, though - well, it was, but it came in later. See, I had some sharpnel that got stuck in there but nobody noticed, and then one day I got a shove in the wrong spot during a match and just stopped breathing. So I had to get a mechanical one, and when I have to put myself under any sort of strain I need to hook myself up to an oxygen supplier to make sure it doesn't collapse under the effort - you know, that tube thing you might have seen on me, sort of like yours."

"Your gills?"

"I..." the Gaquri briefly did a double take. "You call those gills?"

"Yes?"

They blinked at each other briefly.

"Yeah," Tarix conceded, "Yeah, I guess those would be gills for you folks, huh. Makes sense."

"What was it that you had to replace?"

"My diaphragm."

"What is that?"

"... The muscle?"

"Which muscle?"

"The... The one that makes the... Lungs? Work? I understood you did have lungs?"

"Lungs work on their own."

"No they do not?"

"Yes they do. They are muscles."

"No they are not??"

Before Nuparu could further argue his point by lifting his chest plate and forcing Tarix to behold the disquieting spectacle offered by his very much clearly autonomously moving lungs, the unmistakeable noise of a small variety of hollow brass objects gracelessly crashing on the floor and being hurriedly chased after by stomping feet attracted their attention elsewhere.

Berix did not notice them as immediately as they noticed him, since he was busy making his entrance on all fours as he scrambled to pick up a bunch of scrap metal that had spilled from his arms.

The other two beings made no sound as they watched him curse to himself after stepping on a rogue bolt. They decided to simply observe him in silence much like an equipe of entomologists observes a particularly frenetic spider panicking for some kind of fault in its web, making no motion to lend the young Agori any help as he crawled along the ground to collect the scattered pieces of his scavenged treasure of junk.

It was particularly fascinating when he accidentally shoved several bolts in his mouth to the point of almost stuffing his cheeks with them, realized his mistake, and spat them in what looked like an exhaust pipe.

He almost cried when they fell out of it and rolled away again.

Then he lifted his eyes briefly to the other two silent beings in the room and failed to recognize them.

Meaning he then proceded to jump almost three whole bio straight in the air once he figured there were people looking at him - landing on a screw.

"FUCK!" he whimpered.

Tarix waved: "Hello to you."

"Do you need help?" Nuparu asked with a notable delay.

The Agori kneeled to the ground and skidded across it: "No no no, I'm good! I'm good, I'm - hey, hi, Tarix, hi, when did-? What are you-? Uh," he said nervously as he tried to catch as many nuts and springs as possible, "What is going on there? Is it, did I interrupt or, should- should I leave? Again? Should I leave again?"

"Nuparu's fixing my leg."

At that Berix snapped his head with a deafening gasp to look directly at him, the most betrayed expression to ever grace his face plaster across it.

"But I wanted to do that!" he cried out in anguish like a desert fox cub experiencing the horrors of its mother's tongue bath for the first time: "I told you I could do it, I- I replaced Gresh's ribs and, and I fixed his lungs when the Skrall got him and he hasn't had problems with them since, I told you I could do it, I'm good at fixing-!"

"I know that, and Gresh told me you did real well," the older Gaquri stopped him, "But - don't take it personally, kid, you're good and all, but when it comes to my leg I only trust you as far as I can throw you and believe me, it ain't far."

"But then why does he get to do it!" Berix wailed, pointing at Nuparu still scrubbing off the limestone.

"He's got a whole body like this, I'd imagine he knows what to do."

"But I know what to do too!"

"I told you, I'd rather have a specialist on it."

The Toa briefly wondered if being a descendant of the Water Tribe had something to do with how outstandingly wet Berix could will his eyes to look, or if it was just a specifically Berix thing.

Mabe it was an Agori defense mechanism. After all, it would have been pretty hard to want to hurt something that appeared to be the personification of the verbs 'to whimper', 'to whine', 'to sob', and last but not least 'to wail'.

Whatever the origin of such an expression of anguish, Tarix was not immune to its effects: "Oh, don't be like that," he finally pleaded with a tired but guilty tone, and pointed off to the cluttered desk not too far away: "There, I've got something for you too, alright? I came in 'cause my Thornax launcher's busted and you're the best with 'em. Could you fix that for me? Pretty please?"

That was enough to light the younger being's face up again.

With the sort of excited thin howling laugh that a mischievous ghost might have, he scuttled away to the mess of a table that was the headquarters for most of his projects: onto it he dumped the rest of his scraps, not caring even in the slightest that it only helped to worsen the general situation he already had going on as he was already completely absorbed by the thought of the inner mechanics of the weapon at hand.

The perfectly good chair right beside him thoroughly ignored in favor of sitting on the ground in a curled position that would have made a shrimp suggest booking an osteopathic appointment, he immediately started tinkering around to figure what the problem was with the drive and precision of a blood hound.

That had been perhaps one of the best things their unplanned collaboration had brought Nuparu - aside from all the knick-knacks and thingamajigs and vehicles and tools he'd been able to make or just plan out with the Agori, of course. Watching Berix work on something was such a fun and fascinating experience: his intensity gave his body language a sort of visceral desperation that contrasted his careful fumbling motions, pulling pieces apart with his scarred skeletal fingers and letting them fall all around him as though discarded carelessly - yet he somehow always knew where to search when he needed them again, and if in the middle of his fixer's frenzy you asked him for a specific nut or a gear he could pick it up without even looking, always on the first try. The thunderous act of creation and its rhythmic symphony played on rough instruments whisked the both of them away from the world at large, but when the Toa managed to pull himself back to reality (whether done or stumped or just in need of a break) it was enjoyable if not just all-together mesmerizing to observe the other hard at work on his own project.

A loud bang was not enough to deter him from the launcher either.

The equally loud voice that followed with an exasperated bark did, however: "BERIX! THE DOOR!"

"RIGHT! RIGHT- RIGHT, HOLD ON!" he squeaked hurriedly, abandoning (with a little more care) the weapon to scuttle away as fast as he could to the entrance of their laboratory.

The figure that emerged from the held open door replied to his rambling apologies by grunting every few steps - not without reason, seeing as they were carrying the carcass of an older model of chariot intertwined with some other mean of transport that had clearly gotten lodged sideways in its back, trying to balance the hellish thing on their shoulders in a way not too dissimilar to how a shepherd might carry a too small Mahi tired from a day of running wildly.

The mess of a car accident was dropped rather gracelessly onto the first largest spot of floor available; freed from their herculean weight, the being sighed and pulled back their arms, making the rather dull metal vertebrae poking from their skin creak in a somewhat unsettling fashion.

Nuparu briefly wondered if they were encrusted in limestone too.

They sort of looked like it.

Hm.

Now he had to wonder if it was a common yet not very well-known problem for organic beings with mechanical implants. Maybe it had to do with an excessive production of sweat?

While he was busy pondering that, Tarix grinned at the sight: "Hello, my beautiful wife who sucks at killing me," he crooned lovingly.

Vastus turned to him with a smirk, thin feathers raised and brows slightly furrowed in a manner that was much more fond than annoyed: "Hello, my beautiful husband who can't aim for shit," he replied; upon noticing the Toa kneeled before him, he cheekily added: "Committing adultery, I see?"

His partner wheezed a loud gurgling laugh: "Twelve thousand years we've been married! Twelve thousand years and now you mistake me for Gelu!"

"For who?"

"What, you haven't heard about--?"

"NOT IN FRONT OF MY PROJECTS!" Berix shrieked.

The Lebori chuckled - it was a strange sound, some kind of hiccuping hiss - and reached out to rub his hand all over the younger Gaquri's head; the kid swiveled away from him with a soft rattling noise as his annoyed trembling arms shook his scales against one another, face contorting into a piqued grimace, and returned to the launcher to tinker the other two away from his conscious perception.

"And where'd you get that?" the Glatorian inquired, pointing at it with his chin as it was common to do in his tribe and getting no answer.

"It's mine," his husband reassured him, "He's fixing it."

"Jammed again?"

"Seems like it."

"Bet you just didn't clean it properly."

"You don't know that."

"But I'm right," Vastus teased him as he approached to steal the pipe from his mouth. "And over here, what's going on?"

"He's fixin' up my leg. Nuparu, by the way, that's his name - he's a, ah, Ko- nope, Onu-Toa, he said - thought it was rust but I had limestone in it."

"We can get limestone?"

"Might be the sweating," Nuparu interrupted them suddenly. He fixed his unmoving mask onto the Lebori: "Can you turn around, please?"

Tarix snorted at the other's brief baffled blink: "Hey now, kid, I get you've put your hands in me and all, but you shouldn't go around just checking my wife out like that!"

"NOT! IN FRONT! OF THE PROJECTS!"

The Toa looked between the three of them with no clue what any of them was going on about: "I thought there might have been crusts on the vertebrae," he explained. "Since I have the solvent at hand already, I could handle that already if it's the case..."

"That's what they all say," the Gaquri snickered.

His confusion was palpable.

Vastus flicked a playful finger at his husband's head, warning him: "Berix is gonna kick you out at this rate... But I'm sure it's just some dust, kid, nothing to worry about."

"It still would not hurt to do a simple visual check."

"He's right," Tarix interjected while trying to snatch his pipe back and failing: "Maybe you've been building up a limestone deposit this whole time without knowing it."

"I don't have limestone."

"You don't know that."

Vastus smirked at him as he turned around for Nuparu to check: "But I'm right."

"You can't keep answering that and get away with it."

"I can if I'm always right."

The inventor gave a high pitched hum: "False alarm. That's just dust," he confirmed.

A triumphant grin briefly met the Gaquri's eyes as he rolled them.

Nuparu reached into a box to pull out a short variety of springs in order to compare their size with that of the one that had been bent by the affected piston, now cleaned and hopefully ready to work smoothly; careful not to dislodge anything else, he carefully pried the ill piece out and hooked up its replacement.

Satisfied with how the procedure had done, he pulled himself back a little and announced: "I have another question."

"Shoot," Tarix answered instantly.

"What do 'wife' and 'husband' mean, exactly?"

A hot second of silence passed in which the Glatorian regretted opening his mouth.

He glanced at Vastus.

His wife glanced back.

The quiet persisted.

"We're married," he answered lamely at last.

The question he dreaded slapped him in the face with outstanding punctuality: "And what does that mean?"

Having had his fun of seeing his husband's best full-body impression of a yam turning exponentially smaller when fried to a crisp piece of coal, the Lebori finally intervened: "You folks have contracts?"

"We do."

"Marriage is a contract between people where you become part of one other's family. And tribe, if you're from different ones like us."

A vacuous gaze met his explanation.

"Alright, what's confusing you?"

"The 'becoming part of' thing."

Vastus shrugged, his feathers puffing out for a moment before returning flat in a way similar to how certain avian Rahi did before starting a very long song: "It means we become relatives," he tried again. "Here, look - Tarix is a Gaquri and I'm a Lebori, so my family and hers come from different tribes. By marrying me she became a sort of honorary member of the Jungle tribe, and everybody treats her almost as though she was my brother, or my cousin; in the same manner, I became an honorary member of the Water tribe and I'm treated like her sister or cousin."

"So... It's sort of like assembling a team?" Nuparu tilted his head, puzzled: "There's no need for a contract for that. All Toa consider each other siblings already."

The other clicked his tongue as though he'd bitten it by accident: "I shouldn't have used that metaphor," he muttered.

"Why not?"

"First of all marrying your actual blood-siblings is frowned upon."

"Why? What's a blood-sibling?"

"I'll tell you when you're older. Secondly, I can assure you marriage is nothing like siblinghood."

At that, the Toa frowned: "It sounds the same to me."

"Your knee and Tarix's look the same to me, too," Vastus argued: "They're both made of metal, so they're the same thing."

"They really aren't." then he blinked, bright eyes flashing briefly, looked to the ceiling to recollect his thought, gave a loud hum, and met his gaze again: "I see your point."

The Glatorian smiled: "Good kid."

"Back to the point - how do 'wife' and 'husband' fit with all that?"

"That's just how you call someone who's married."

"So they're synonyms?"

"Yes, pretty much."

The answer seemed to satisfy the inventor greatly.

"I'm learning so much about your species today," he commented in a giddy tone. He returned to the discarded robot calf on the floor, dusting off its mechanical parts to make sure not even small amounts of debris would interefere with its functions; just as he plucked it back into the bulk of the implant, he looked again at the two Glatorian and told them with complete and total earnestness: "You know, if you were significantly smaller, quadrupedal, perhaps vaguely insectoid and incapable of speech, Turaga Whenua would have the best day of his life writing down and trying to decypher your absolutely incomprehensible habits."

That was the highest compliment an Onu-Matoran from the island of Mata Nui could bestow upon someone.

It was not categorizable as such by perhaps any other being in the entire universe, considering the source of such an idiom had been cut off from all other known civilizations and it was generally not considered particularly flattering to be told that you would make for a great petri dish for one's paternal figure to microscope if you were any less sentient, but luckily his tone did manage to properly convey the positive nature of his otherwise insane sentence.

So instead of knocking his head off with roundhouse kick, Tarix and Vastus smiled awkwardly in an attempt at not laughing in his face and just replied: "Thanks."

His Volitak did not have a mouth, but Nuparu's grin was blinding.

Berix chose that moment to shriek triumphantly.

"Fixed!" he declared, Thornax launcher hoisted into the air like it was the second making of the Element Lords.

The older Gaquri turned to him with eyes wide: "What, already?"

"It was encrusted with Thornax juice!"

Not even the time to feel bashful about such a silly and easy to fix thing hindering his battling performance so much that his wife was already leaning down into his line of sight with a smirk so wide that he could have just bitten his whole head off with it.

"What did I say?" he teased.

Tarix sighed, a weary smile on his face: "You cannot keep getting away with this."

"Yes I can," Vastus gloated, "If I'm always right."

[blue-eli]

For the last day of pride month: sea salt family!

[space-writes]

Leshanna backstory time!!! i've been waiting so long to get to this lil conversation~

[plaintext in alt and under the cut]

“My fathers don’t know I dropped out,” she said. “But I…it’s not just that. I’ve been avoiding them since before I left Cyvanil, and the last time they saw me, I…I looked very different.”

“How different?”

She gave him a weak smile. “About as different as you looked before you became the irritating man you are today.”

“First off, I’m a charming man, and you know it,” Zander said. “And secondly—what do you mean you didn’t tell them you were choosing womanhood? I know Oraladhel is a little different to Invereid about these things, but I thought—”

“I didn’t exactly do it on purpose!” Leshanna shoved to her feet, pacing before them. “I had it all planned out—my announcement, the ceremony…I was going to change under the starlight at midwinter, like a real damiri! And then one morning I just…woke up like this!” She gestured down at herself with a frustrated flick of her hands.

“Woke up like…” Zander’s eyes widened. He dropped his voice to something of a stage whisper. “Leshanna, the only people that happens to are witches.”

Valloroth taglist: @cherrybombfangirlwrites @reininginthefirewriting @memento-morri-writes @foxboyclit @lawful-evil-novelist

@at-thezenith @morganwriteblr @fayeiswriting @serenanymph

@sam-glade @viscerawrites @thegreatobsesso @flower-reads @the-inkwell-variable (ask to be +/-)

[perilegs]

i know astrology is fake but i'm not too keen on how a lot of people on this website seem to be clowning on it as a hobby a bit too hard. i swear the woman who thinks it's neat how she and her friends with the same sun sign are all similar isn't trying to say that you are who you are born as and there is nothing you can do to change it. it's a hobby. an interest. what happened to finding meaning and joy in the small things. does it affect you if someone enjoys tarot reading or crystals. does it make you upset someone has interests that they enjoy.

[calamitys-child]

My purpose and singular mission in life is to make sure queer and/or neurodivergent kids know that sometimes it really is their parents who are stupid and other adults are on their side. This, unfortunately, does not make me popular with their parents. Gonnae keep doing it though.

[arolesbianism]

Trembles like a small dog. Places down my loopified euphrasie design before skittering away

[balmungkriemhild]

The Rêverose train doesn't stop. i made some sort of mini-ref thing for her :] bonus:

(consider reblogging & donating to my Ko-fi, thank you!)

[quailxcrossing]

had to do toyhouse rewind AS FAST AS POSSIBLE

[onehundredandeleventropicalfish]

i see a lot of opinions around, about death, and why she didn't intervene in dream's imprisonment

and i think a lot of people have trouble reconciling the idea that she does care about him, with the fact that she didn't do anything?

so then you get the theories that she couldn't have saved him (as if burgess was ever a match for the endless, he only got dream because dream was still recovering from burning out 99% of his power in overture), or that she was stuck by the rules of the endless not interfering with each other (that's a whole other convoluted discussion topic)

but i feel like these theories all kinda. misread, who death is. or rather, they sort of assume she's a human being with the same mentality as a human, and not the literal personification of death

of course she cares about her brother. and of course she technically had the power to intervene. but think about her existence. think about the way in which she knows everyone, the life she's lived for billions of years, and the life she knows she'll live until she's the last consciousness left in the universe

she's an inherently passive entity, she has to be. because her entire purpose is to stand there for the end of every life in existence, often horrific and violent and unfair ones, and to tell them that's just the way of things. to ensure that that fate does indeed come to pass. she knows how everyone is going to die and she just has to keep talking to them like she doesn't

when she was younger, it was different. granted, she refused to help dream then too, because (at least according to dream) all the endless were incredibly prideful when they were young, and wouldn't even have tried to help each other. but also, we have her word that at one point her job got overwhelming. the fact that she had to stand by and watch so much tragedy, to ensure it happened, really got to her. and for a while, she stopped. one of the few times if not the only time she has ever made a strong decision in the face of fate - she stopped collecting souls. and that turned out much worse. in order to exist as herself, she had to find a way to not only be okay with who she is, but find meaning in it. the person who would get involved, who would stand up against unfairness, that person cannot be death of the endless

and think about death as a concept, for a sec, not just as a person. death is patient. death will come for everyone in time, but time is meaningless to it. i like this panel, from endless nights, for connecting that with death the person, because she is always there and always waiting (in this story she waits here for anywhere between 10 and 200 years, depending on how you look at it. and she explains in this story that time doesn't really work the same to her as it does to everyone else. time is her father, after all. she can wait. she will always wait.)

even when she takes human form, like we see in high cost of living, she is the epitome of go with the flow. she just follows where the universe takes her, doesn't try to change anything, just lets her curiosity and love for humanity put her in whatever situation fate decided she should be. and fate (whether that's her brother, the fates, or something else entirely) does play some role in it, because her human form was created with $10.02 in her pocket, which is the exact amount of money she ended up needing to spend that day. and she trusts that she won't need more than that, no matter how many questions are thrown at her about it

which is not an inherently bad thing! because living in the moment means she is so much more alive than her siblings, it gives her the ability to offer so much more empathy towards the mortals she has to spend most of her time with, it makes her in many ways a wonderful person. she's just, not a person of action

death doesn't show she cares by stopping the bad things from happening to you. she shows she cares by being there for you after. by having the patience, despite her busy job, to sit and chat with every single person who's ever lived, and to comfort them in the best way she knows how

which is exactly what she did