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monstersdownthepath · 2 years

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Spiritual Spotlight: Xoveron, the Horned Prince

Chaotic Evil Demon Lord of Gargoyles, Gluttony, and Ruins

Domains: Chaos, Earth, Evil, Strength Subdomains: Caves, Demon, Entropy, Ferocity, Petrification

The Complete Book of the Damned, pg. 102~103

Obedience: Perch atop a high outcrop and look out over the surrounding terrain. If the outcrop is in an uninhabited area, you need do nothing more but wait for an hour, but if the outcrop is in an inhabited area (such as a city), no passersby should realize you are a living thing—any who do must be slain before the hour’s end. Benefit: Gain a +4 profane bonus on saving throws against effects that cause sickness, nausea, fatigue, or exhaustion.

Oh cool! It’s been a while since we’ve seen an Obedience that forces you to blatantly murder someone! At least the conditions to cause the murder are somewhat loose, and most of the complications can be eliminated entirely if you don’t do them during the daytime like an idiot with a deathwish. Performing this ritual at night just before you go to sleep is probably the best thing you could possibly do, your intrusions covered by nightfall. Passerbys are unlikely to even see you on your perch, let alone suspect you’re anything more than a weird bit of masonry. Hell, if you’re going to be sleeping anyway and are a caster, blowing a spell slot on Disguise Self, Beast Shape, or even Invisibility to shroud your presence further will help go a long way to preventing mounting homicide charges. Most martial characters will likely struggle, but Stealth experts will probably not have any problems.

What bugs me is that, in an urban environment, how are you supposed to know when someone’s realized you’re alive? Do you have to wait for them to physically indicate that you’re alive? If someone just looks up at you, notes your presence, silently marks you down as a living being, but makes no physical motion such as pointing or shouting, how are you supposed to know? Does it matter, so long as they don’t react? Do you fail if you’re seen, but don’t notice them noticing you? Do your party members count as passers-by (i’d say no just for simplicity’s sake)? There’s a lot of points of failure in this Obedience that make it incredibly dangerous for you to perform it in civilization. Maybe just wake up a little early each day or go to sleep later each night to find somewhere you’re not likely to be spotted.

The good news is that the benefit is fairly good, though not enough to take the sting out of the ritual itself. Sickness and fatigue along with their bigger brothers are common afflictions throughout the game, and the higher in levels you go, the more often you’ll encounter them being delivered as side-effects of bigger and scarier spells and abilities. Having blanket additional protection across all of your saves not only from the ailments themselves, but effects which cause them as a secondary downside, is great... It’s just annoying you’ll probably have to kill, like, at least one person a week or so to get them.

Boons are acquired slowly: the first once you reach 12 hit dice, the second at 16, and the third at 20. However, the Evangelist, Exalted, and Sentinel Prestige Classes can be entered as early as level 7; doing so grants you the Boons at levels 10, 13, and 16 instead. Servants of demons may also take the Demoniac Prestige Class; you don’t get the Boons any faster than E/E/S, but you may select which Boon set you get, and you get cool demon-related powers!

-------- EVANGELIST --------

Boon 1: Master of Desolation: Gain Detect Secret Doors 3/day, Soften Earth and Stone 2/day, or Meld Into Stone 1/day.

That’s a pretty intimidating name for what is essentially three utility spells! Three good ones, mind, but utility nonetheless. Detect Secret Doors is one of those spells I’d love to have on a wand or scroll, but wouldn’t really spend a whole Spells Known slot on it. Having it available 3/day for free (to a certain extent of ‘free’) thwarts a lot of confusion and chaos that can result from failed Perception checks, uncovering secrets and shortcuts the rest of the party might miss without magical aid. It’s an incredibly narrow-function spell, but when you’re exploring ancient ruins and deep dungeons, it can save a lot of headaches (and, more importantly, uncover more loot and/or traps).

Meld Into Stone falls into the same category as spells like Tree Shape; espionage spells with uses that are a little too narrow to be particularly useful. You fuse yourself into any stone surface large enough to conceal your body, but you can’t move from that spot, can’t see outside the stone, and can’t emerge from any other side. You can hear outside the stone, but the inability to see beyond means you can’t establish LoS for most spells and abilities. It’s a tool for espionage, escape, or ambush, and typically lasts long enough that a 1/day casting is all you really need.

Side note: You can, technically, hide yourself inside a boulder being launched out of a catapult or thrown by a giant. Solid rocks are usually sturdy enough to survive the trip over, and it makes for a fun way to get yourself in the fray!

However, neither of the two really compare to the utility and chaos potential of Soften Earth and Stone, so long as you have an assistant drenching the area in water beforehand. Blasting eight entire 10ft squares with Save or Suck quicksand can give your crew plenty of time to either escape a troublesome encounter or turn it right back around on your foes, since anyone who fails the Reflex save to avoid being stuck in the muck is unable to attack, move, or cast spells for 1d2 entire rounds... But, again, this requires setup, as this only works on wet earth. Dry earth is instead transformed into grainy sand which, while it counts as difficult terrain, isn’t as damning as Paralysis Lite. There are also the other, more amusing uses of SEAS, namely that,while it can do nothing to worked stone, it can be cast on the earth underneath existing buildings to cause catastrophic, possibly irreparable damage if the building is small enough. You won’t cause castles to fall, but you can severely muck up mansions, houses, or things like guard towers and other wartime structures. If used on mountains or--more dangerously--underground, you can cause cave-ins and landslides, or even full-blown avalanches! And you get to do this 2/day without any components to give away that you’re the cause of the chaos!

Boon 2: Ruinwalker: You can cast Dimension Door (self only) as a spell-like ability a number of times per day equal to your Hit Dice. Both the start and end point of your teleportation must be within a single continuous area of ruins terrain, such as an ancient dungeon or catastrophe-wracked city. Whether a given area constitutes ruins terrain is decided at the GM’s discretion.

Yeugh... Okay, so lets start off on the positives: Dimension Door once per day per Hit Dice is, if you’ll pardon the upcoming outburst, absolutely god damn bonkers! With a Long range that doesn’t require line of sight, you can zoop around at speeds unequaled by just about anything or anyone. With uses per day equal to your HD, it may as well be at-will, making you the king/queen/monarch/viscount/baron/etc of getting into and out of just about any situation you could conceive. As a scout, you’re unequaled, able to pick a direction and go without any regard for safety or obstacles, as the spell will automatically pick the safest location it can place you that’s in the distance and direction you specify (give or take a few HP if you end up pointing somewhere that intersects solid terrain). Having it regularly available also means you can pick up on one of Pathfinder’s most hysterical feat lines!

So of course, of course there’s a downside that can make this a blank Boon: It only works in ruins that you’re physically within. You have to start and end in the same wreckage; the spell cannot take you outside the boundaries of the destruction. This puts a pretty harsh dampener on an ability that’s otherwise one of the better available Boons, restriction you to wreckage and the aftermaths of terrible disasters. The good news is that the ability helpfully states “ancient ruins” is one of the terrain types this ability works in, and you can’t throw a stone anywhere on Golarion without accidentally awakening an ancient evil slumbering in forgotten ruins... but if you’re, say, in a city, or in a forest, or in a desert, suddenly your teleporting prowess is worthless.

There’s also the dreaded DM Fiat line. Normally, DM Fiat isn’t especially threatening, but considering this ability is basically infinite teleportation and dungeon-trick-bypassing galore and can seriously break the flow of the adventure if either of you mistakenly forgets it only works for you and you cannot take people with you (YOU can bop across a pit or past a door, but your team must still find the ‘proper’ way through), I can forsee a significant number of arguments arising about if this or that particular dungeon counts as ‘ruins’ or not.

A single Earthquake or Storm of Vengeance can settle most of these arguments, but that’s not for 3 or 4 more levels.

side note that will get you firmly told ‘no’ by your DM: the ability does state it only works for you, but you can take your belongings! So have your party members clamber into your Bag of Holding for just a second an[i am throttled by an unseen force]

Boon 3: Wake the Ruined Realm: 1/day as a standard action, you can cause a Large stone statue within 30 feet to animate as a Stone Automata. The golem obeys your commands and remains active for up to 1 hour. If the stone statue you target is a statue of Xoveron, the resulting stone golem gains the Advanced Creature template.

Booooooooooo

Boooooooooooooooo

C’mon, Xov, you can do better than this! I KNOW you can, I can see the next few Boons!

Well, whatever. Stone Automata are decent minions, even if its life is tragically limited. CR 11 brick walls immune to a good portion of most direct offense spells (beware of battlefield shapers and Pit spell enthusiasts, though!) that’s nigh-impervious to weapons not made of adamantine, a pulse of Slow that it can send out every other round as a free action, and two okay slam attacks (2d10+9) isn’t so bad.

But here’s the downside: There needs to be a statue nearby to even use this ability at all. I’m not even going to bother trying to elaborate on the second effect, because to get a statue of Xoveron that’s Large sized, you’d have to make (or commission) it yourself, and if you want to use it? You’re lugging around a 2,000+ pound statue of a Demon Lord. Sure, the frequent murders are probably more of a red flag, but the gigantic statue of a winged, four-headed monster is a good sign of who’s doing all the murder. Using a NORMAL statue, let alone a Xoveron statue, is simply unfeasible unless you’re doing something like using Shrink Item to carry around your favorite masonry to animate.

... Actually, that’s not a bad idea. An Automata is immune to being shrank, but it’s not actually a creature until you animate it with this power. Toss out a tiny pebble that unfolds into a giant bludgeon! That does eliminate a lot of fiddliness this power has, but it requires access to a specific spell to maximize its usefulness. Otherwise, you’re relying on whatever statuary just so happens to be laying around... But if you’re, say, somewhere like a city square, a church, or deep in an evil villain’s lair, there’s probably at least one nearby you can utilize. Medieval civilizations love putting statues everywhere.

Small closing note: While this ability doesn’t call any spell by name, it’s listed as (Sp), meaning Spell-like. This means someone can use Dispel Magic on your Automata (Dispel doesn’t allow for Spell Resistance, so it bypasses their magic immunity) to render it an inanimate statue once more. Keep this in mind, because a smart enough enemy might know this weakness, and you can only use this power once a day!

-------- EXALTED --------

Boon 1: Gargoyle’s Gift: Gain Sanctuary 3/day, Shatter 2/day, or Vampiric Touch 1/day.

Sanctuary is an excellent defensive spell that can hold attacking enemies at bay for round after round. The effect is broken if the warded creature attacks, but the spell specifically says it stays in place if the creature uses “nonattack spells,” and there’s a lot of spells that don’t qualify as attacks that can still malice, disrupt, and harm enemies. ... Unfortunately, as a level 1 spell, the saving meager saving throw won’t scale especially well, though it’ll protect decently well against swarms of lesser foes.

Shatter is unlikely to be useful in your day-to-day life, breaking objects your Barbarian could have broken much faster and without investing a resource beyond a bit of time. It can either burst outwards to break a lot of small and fragile objects, or be focused to break one big one regardless of its fragility, and while it can certainly save the party a bit of time and headaches by blowing through doorways to breaking an enemy’s weapon or armor (as they often fall well within the weight limit of the spell), it doesn’t work on magic items, which you’re more and more likely to encounter as you adventure. Even the use as a universal lockpick falls to the wayside as your levels advance and doors become enchanted more and more often to prevent such measures from being used... And any particularly fun uses are kept in check by the weight limit (10 lbs per level).

Which leaves Vampiric Touch, a spell near and dear to my pathetically flimsy caster heart. It’s boring and lacks any capacity for creative usage, but it’s easy to use, reliable in every combat scenario, works on every creature type, can’t be resisted, and often gets you enough temporary HP to tank the AoO you suffer using your move action to get away from whatever you just slapped. Unless you’re going to need a battering ram or can find a way to raise Sanctuary’s save DC, having an extra free cast of Vampiric Touch every day is a good fallback.

Boon 2: Glutton’s Feast: You can cast Heroes’ Feast 1/day as a spell-like ability. The food created by this effect consists of rancid milk and raw or rotting meat. Those who partake of this feast consume their food shockingly fast—it takes only 1 minute to gain the benefits of this spell. Those who don’t worship Xoveron must succeed at a Fortitude save (DC = 16 + your Charisma modifier) or be sickened by the feast for 6 hours (though all other benefits of the feast still apply).

no no trust me dude just drink the cheesemilk and eat this fly-covered beef it’ll heal you and cure your sicknesses dude come on i promise the fungus chicken is good i promise this time im for real i mean it

Ignoring the absolutely revolting visual this Boon invokes, Heroes’ Feast is one of my favorite spells in all of Pathfinder, so I’m happy every time it shows up. A handful of small but useful bonuses in a single spell that lasts for an entire adventuring day, plus a full-body cleanse of all sickness, nausea, disease, and poison. There’s a reason that Heroes’ Feast is sometimes called the ‘Breakfast of Champions,’ and that’s because more or less every party that gains access to a reliable source of it casts it each day at dawn just for the temp HP, attack roll bonus, and saving throw bonus.

That’s really all it’s good for, mind. The time restrictions of the spell--10 minutes to cast, an hour to eat--means the detoxification effect it has on it largely goes unused. Who’s going to spend a whole hour suffering under a poison or disease when Neutralize Poison and Remove Disease are three levels lower? Well, that’s where Glutton’s Feast comes in. Though the 10 minute charge time remains unchanged, the fact the partakers gorge on the feast in a minute rather than an hour opens up important possibilities. More than a few poisons assassins enjoy employing take a few minutes to rev up, and most diseases have onset times that fall well within the 11 minutes it takes to eat your unbelievably vile lunch.

NOTE: I specify “assassins” because most venomous animals don’t have poisons that wait. If you suspect you’ve been poisoned, having a quick lunch can counteract it easily and gross out the assassin if they stay to watch!

Second note: this ability has a pretty unfortunate downside if you don’t manage to convince everyone to join your niche faith. If you manage to get your party to convert, great! But if you don’t, you risk sickening your whole party for half the duration of the Feast buffs, which largely cancels them out. The save DC to avoid the sickness doesn’t scale especially well, so only allies with weak Fortitude are likely to be affected, and ironically this is one of the few Boons in the game where having a low Charisma is probably better for your party. Then again, though, having a low Charisma means you won’t be able to take advantage of...

Boon 3: Death-Stealing Gaze: You gain the Death-Stealing Gaze ability of a Nabasu. You can activate this ability as a free action and use it for up to 3 rounds per day plus a number of additional rounds equal to your Constitution modifier—these rounds need not be consecutive, but they must be used in 1-round increments. All living creatures within 30 feet of you when your death-stealing gaze is active must succeed at a Fortitude save (DC = 10 + half your Hit Dice + your Charisma modifier) or gain a negative level. A humanoid slain in this manner immediately transforms into a ghoul under your control. You can create only one ghoul in this manner per round. If multiple humanoids die from this ability simultaneously, you choose which of them rises as a ghoul. Nabasu demons that gain this Boon can instead use their Death-Stealing Gaze at will, regardless of their total number of growth points.

... this lovely little ability. With its save scaling off Charisma and its uses per day, uniquely, scaling off Constitution, this ability is a hell of a reward for people who’ve stuck around with Xoveron this long, day after day of eating rotten meat! A free action, 30ft-radius AoE negative level isn’t exactly... well, game-changing, but it’s a free application of -5 HP and -1 to the rolls of all your enemies!

And your allies.

Yeah. Be careful with that. Unless everyone on your team is Undead, a Construct, or has their Death Ward underwear on, this ability is just as likely to screw them over as it is your foes. There is also the unfortunate matter of most monsters you’ll face at this level will have some access to protection against negative energy, if they’re not immune to energy drain outright, and obviously it has no effect on Undead or Constructs (though in an Evil v Good campaign, the former isn’t likely to be a problem), but on the (decent) chance they’re not, they have to make their save against the gaze every round you maintain it or gain another negative level.

Creatures entering the area, similarly, have to make a save or be subjected to the drain, as do unfortunates that you move into on your round. It’s unlikely to kill anything but the lowest of the low, but how fun is it to wander into a bandit camp or goblin enclave or crowded tavern or city street and just kill everyone around you without even making a gesture? It’s these moments that make you remember why demon worship is cool and okay and everyone should do it!

... oh, the ribbon prize of getting loyal ghouls? That’s good too. Like, really good. Probably one of the main benefits of this power, actually; being able to transform any sap you get a 1-on-1 with into a loyal minion will let you quickly build an army of the Undead that obey your beck and call without question! Just ask Kortash Khain how useful an army of ghouls is! Remember that Ghouls can gain class levels quite easily. ALSO remember, however, that this only works if the creature is killed by Death-Stealing Gaze, not killed while under it. Unless they’re hovering under 5 HP or have 1 Hit Dice, they’re unlikely to succumb to your power, so it’s more or less only good for transforming captured citizens and beaten victims into minions.

-------- SENTINEL --------

Boon 1: Gargoyle Magic: Gain Stone Fist 3/day, Protection From Arrows 2/day, or Fly 1/day.

Sorry, are there spells besides Fly available here? No? Oh, perfect. That means we can just move on!

... okay yeah, I suppose Protection From Arrows is alright, but it falls off hard at around this level, because magic weapons convey their magic onto the projectiles they fire. Even a simple +1 bow completely bypasses the DR 10/Magic that ProFroArro gives you, and as you climb in to levels 8+, you’re going to encounter fewer and fewer enemies without enchanted gear. That being said, it also shields you from projectiles like thrown rocks, fired barbs, flung debris, and other such things, but do you want to know what else does that?

Heavy plate armor. Which you can wear. While flying. Because you have Fly available. Hell, even if it’s not good for YOU, chances are SOMEONE on your team could seriously benefit from having access to the z-axis (hint: all of them), so there’s literally no reason to ever look at the other option.

... other two options? What are you talking about? I only see ProFroArro.

Boon 2: Idol of Desolation. You can cast Statue as a spell-like ability 1/day.

I’ve been harsh on Statue in the past, but the truth of the matter is that I, personally, just don’t like it. Using it optimally means you can’t use Attacks of Opportunity, which I love doing on the rare occasions I play martial characters and want to keep people from sneaking past me to stab my squishier allies. However, the fact of the matter is that combat in Pathfinder tends to be very stationary, and thus giving up your AoOs isn’t a big deal considering how Statue essentially makes you invulnerable.

What attacks can even damage rock considerably enough to affect your HP are subject entirely to the DMs discretion, but in my personal rules, solid rock takes half damage from Fire and slashing, no damage from Cold, Electricity, piercing, negative energy, or aligned energy (holy and unholy), and full damage from Acid (unless the acid specifies it doesn’t affect stone), Sonic, and bludgeoning. Unique creature abilities, certain spell effects, and weapon enchantments notwithstanding, this makes rock pretty tough to hurt, and all this damage muckery is BEFORE you add in the 8 Hardness, which automatically subtracts 8 damage from ALL sources (except Acid and Sonic).

Also, ranged weapons as a rule deal half damage to objects unless ruled otherwise by the DM (this is in reverse to the above), or unless it’s a siege weapon/heavy weapon.

The way Statue works allows you to unfreeze yourself as a free action on your turn, do whatever it is you’re going to do (like Full-Attack), and then re-freeze as a solid rock as another free action, making it incredibly difficult for enemies to retaliate against you in a meaningful way. Among other things, this prevents ranged enemies from doing much if they fire upon you, makes it hard for melee enemies to attack you back, and makes it infuriating for many casters to affect you with anything, because you count as an object and not a creature while in statue form. No Domination, no charming, no confusion, no Save-or-Sucks, and barely any elemental damage. Just... watch out for Druids or Transmuters with Transmute Stone to Mud or Soften Earth and Stone.

The downside, of course, is that you cannot unfreeze when it’s not your turn, so turning into a statue means enemies can just... walk right past you to attack the squishies on your team. They can simply ignore you when it’s not your turn. Plus side, however, is that your Sorcerer and their 40 castings of Fireball, Cone of Cold, and Lightning Bolt now do far less to you if they start shooting them into melee!

Statue is, admittedly, an incredibly powerful defensive tool that I’ve come a long way to appreciating, and its monstrous duration (1 hour/level) means it’s likely active for not only the entire day, but part of the next as well... making Sentinels of Xoveron the BEST choice for living a civilized life, as they can climb atop a building and petrify themselves, preventing anyone from noticing they’re a living creature during their Obedience.

Boon 3: Sculptor’s Strike: Once per day, you may designate a foe you can see that is within 30ft of you. Once you’ve designated a foe, any time you damage that foe with a melee weapon attack (including unarmed strikes or natural weapons), that creature takes 1d6 Dexterity drain in addition to the attack’s normal damage. If the creature succeeds a Fortitude save (DC = 10 + 1/2 your Hit Dice + your Cha mod), it takes only 1 point of Dex drain instead. If that creature is reduced to 0 Dexterity in this way, it is immediately and permanently transformed into a Gargoyle (as if by Polymorph Any Object) and must make a Will save (same DC as above) or their mind also becomes the mind of a typical Gargoyle. When transformed in this way, all of the Dex drain suffered from this ability is removed, and their HP is fully restored. The mental transformation can be undone by any effect which breaks a curse, but the physical transformation can only be undone with Miracle or Wish. The designation effect of Sculptor’s Strike is permanent until you or the target die, or until you select a different target for the ability.

This one was a long one, so I trimmed it down for clarity and readability!

BOY what an ability it is, though. Ability score damage is almost always the realm of monsters rather than players, and ability score drain is practically unheard of in a player’s hands! Let alone drain that’s consistent, repeatable, and irresistible. Aside from a barrier or some form of invisibility, there’s no way for a creature to avoid being designated, and all that their save does is reduce the drain they take. With the ability to make up to four attacks a round that is, at minimum, 4 Dex drain, which translates to -2 AC, -2 to Reflex saves, and to a bunch of skills. Even the highest CR monsters in the game rarely have more than 25 or so Dex (unless they’re Dex-based, mind), and being able to knock 4d6 Dex off them every round will quickly render them completely worthless.

did i say 4d6? Because if you really want to go ape, you could be a Monk or Brawler, a natural-attack focused Barbarian, or specialize in two-weapon fighting. Add Haste or the Speed enchantments on your weapons on top of that, throw in an extra natural attack or two from any source you can get ahold of, and you can be sapping upwards to 7d6 Dexterity (or more!) from your target each round, which nothing with even moderately bad luck can survive... unless they’re immune to ability drain, of course. Constructs, Undead, and a good portion of Outsiders above CR 15 simply ignore this ability, and though immunity to Polymorphing prevents them from being transformed into a new creature (NOT automatically loyal to you, mind, but it should respect such a powerful servant of the Lord of Gargoyles), it doesn’t protect them from the drain. Hysterically enough, the larger your foe is, the more likely this power is to work wonders on them; big creatures tend to have mountains of HP but relatively low Dex. I enjoy the mental image of someone smashing a monster into a big hunk of rock, then tapping it gently with their weapon to loose the newborn Gargoyle within.

Fun fact, by the way: Since this power works on any creature regardless of its size, you CAN technically choose to do nonlethal damage or a weak-but-still-technically-a-weapon melee weapon (even a pillow, needle, or open palm can count as a weapon) to use it on, say, a fly, rat, wolf, child, dog, sheep, or any other disposable life you have at hand to somehow turn them into a Gargoyle you can bully into working for you. This will get you beaten by your DM if you exploit it, but it’s funny to pull off at least once.

Notably, despite the flavor of the ability stating this ability slowly transmutes its victim to stone, it is NOT listed as a petrification effect (it’s a polymorph effect instead) and thus bypasses that immunity, though most reasonable DMs will consider it petrification, and it’s probably best not to argue on it! In a similar vein, though ability score drain is a major resource... drain on the players, DMs can handwave away the costs of Greater Restoration casts on the target if they manage to escape, so it may as well only be ability score damage. This is perhaps the only true ‘downside’ this power has (aside from the fact it flat out does not work with ranged attacks), easily fixable by narrative convenience, but this is only IF they manage to escape you and stay out of your sight forever, because Sculptor’s Strike is permanent unless you designate someone else. Fun for surprising recurring foes!

You can read more about him here.

#Spiritual Spotlight #Sinister Spotlight #Pathfinder #Dungeons and Dragons

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justafriend-ql · 10 months

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Do you have any fave Thai BL series? If you do, what's your top 10?

hi anon! i'm so sorry i'm only seeing your ask now. i'm not sure i could pick a top 10... so i'll give you my top 5! i'll add a link to the mydramalist page for each series so you can learn more about them too.

never let me go (2022-2023)

MyDramaList synopsis: Nuengdiao is the heir to a prestigious family. His status has forced him to grow up isolated with no room for imperfection. Then his father is shot to death right in front of him. Now he and his mother's lives are in danger. The son of a loyal Kiattrakulmethee family employee, Palm is appointed to protect him from the dangers in and outside school. In his life of uncertainty, Palm's presence leads Nuengdiao to new experiences. Where to watch: GMMTV's youtube channel or Viki Highlights: high stakes, interesting family drama, great chemistry between the two main leads

2. my school president (2022-2023)

MyDramaList synopsis: Student body president Tinn has a secret crush on Gun, the head of the music club and lead singer of the middling band Chinzhilla. The son of the principal, Tinn is instructed to axe any clubs that don't boost their school's reputation. The music club tops that list and Tinn is therefore Gun's number one enemy. Desperate to save his club, Gun will do anything, even pledge servitude to Tinn. When Tinn learns Chinzhilla has a rule that band members aren't permitted to date until they win the Hot Wave Music Contest, he vows to do whatever it takes to help them do just that. Where to watch: GMMTV's youtube channel or Viki Highlights: great balance of sweetness of seriousness, killer soundtrack, delightful friend group

3. my only 12% (2022)

MyDramaList synopsis: Cake and Seeiw have been friends as far as they can remember. Cake is very outgoing and has a lot of friends while Seeiw is very shy and barely speaks to people he's not used to being around. Despite their different personalities, they are very close. By being next-door neighbors since they were born, they became an essential aspect of each other's lives. However, as they become older, things change and so do the way they see each other. There is only a 12% possibility of having a successful first love. Would that 12% be enough? Where to watch: iqiyi (but also available on platforms like dailymotion) Highlights: slow burn, time jump done right, tremendous acting in emotional scenes

4. not me (2021)

MyDramaList synopsis: Black and White are twins with a powerful connection. After their parents' separation, though, White’s father took him abroad, and their family effectively severed in two. It isn’t until fifteen years have passed that White—now grown—returns to Thailand. One day, seemingly from nowhere, White feels an agony like death. He recovers in the hospital, but they’re unable to determine the cause. Then he picks up a call from a childhood friend, Tod. Tod tells him that Black is in a coma following a vicious attack, and he learns that Black is in a motorcycle gang. Unable to endure the harm done to his brother in silence, and suspecting it was one of Black’s close friends—Sean, Gram, or Yok—who betrayed him, White disguises himself as Black to root out the traitor. But White doesn’t know his brother as well as he thought; he’s not behaving like the Black Sean knows, distrustful and uncaring about the feelings of others. Sean's suspicious. The difference gets under Sean's skin and makes him feel things he shouldn’t. Where to watch: GMMTV's youtube channel Highlights: beautiful and gritty aesthetic, focus on social justice, arson :)

5. i told sunset about you (2020)

MyDramaList synopsis: Teh and Oh-aew were best friends until a boyhood line of reasoning turned them into rivals. Years later as they're preparing for university admissions, both pursuing interests in the field of Communication Arts, the two meet in a Chinese language class. Their reunion awakens complicated and unstable feelings. Where to watch: Viki (but also available on platforms like dailymotion) Highlights: gorgeous cinematography, phenomenal acting, angsttttt

Bonus: currently airing thai bls I'm enjoying

last twilight (2023)

MyDramaList synopsis: Burdened with heavy debt, Mhok, a technical college student, applies for a high-paying job as a caregiver to Day, a badminton player with partial blindness due to infectious keratitis. Day hires Mhok who—unlike other applicants—seems to take no pity on him. With so much time spent in each others' company, the two develop a deep bond. When Day learns he'll have approximately 180 days until he loses what vision he has remaining, how will the two weather the trials ahead? Where to watch: GMMTV's youtube channel Highlights: slice-of-life storytelling, thoughtful representation of disability, pretty cinematography

twins (2023)

MyDramaList synopsis: It is said that identical twins who are produced from the same egg will share a bond as if they were the same person. But not with "Sprite" and "Zee", the identical twins. Despite following the same route as an athlete from birth, both want to be the only one! *adding more context because this synopsis doesn't really tell you anything: after zee is injured in an attack, sprite must take his place on the volleyball team to maintain his chances of competing in the national competition. there are a few problems with this plan: 1) sprite doesn't know how to play volleyball, 2) sprite still has to attend his own jiu jitsu practices, and 3) everyone on the volleyball team seems to hate him, especially first, his new roommate* Where to watch: i've been using dailymotion, but i hear you can watch it on LoveMedia Thailand's youtube channel using a vpn (others, feel free to comment to confirm/deny this) Highlights: fun premise, focus on sports, enemies to lovers

#in my inbox #thai bl #recommendations #i hope at least one or two of these are new to you anon!

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onenettvchannel · 2 years

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THIS JUST IN OVERNIGHT: The Owl House releases a Sneak Preview at the NYCC 2022 for a Final 3rd Season [#OneNETnewsEXCLUSIVE]

GRAVESFIELD, CONNECTICUT -- The faces of voice actor and actresses including a show creator (Dana Terrace) had now been shown a sneak preview at the New York Comic Convention 2022 (NYCC) in Manhattan, New York, United States of America (U.S.A.) where the show panel started last Thursday afternoon at 3pm (October 6th, 2022 - Eastern local time) and it was located at the Room 405 in Javits Convention Center. This was after a follow-up for a severe cliffhanger per 2nd season finale before it reaches a final 3rd season.

OneNETnews can exclusively reveal the situation as one smartphone video obtained by Poo Master showing the first 6-minute episode in a sneak preview of "Thanks to Them". Based from the said smartphone video, it was absolutely stunning where the audiences have fully paid to watch. Here's a rundown of it.

Luz Noceda, few of the Hexside students and a part-time Golden Guard nephew named Hunter Wittebane, who was escaping earlier than a committed murder suspect of Empr. Philip "Belos" Wittebane -- returns home safely via a portal door in Gravesfield, Connecticut, U.S.A.

Noceda greets her and tearfully states that she's back from the other dimensional world of Summer Camp, rather than a middle school field trip at the Gravesfield Middle School (GMS) where she can disliked for some reason due to her own personal fandom of Azura. Luz Noceda's mother named Camilia discusses about a true story and a hot issue of Empr. Belos after he was defeated overnight from a child villain kid known as The Collector. Hexside students told everything to the public.

Meanwhile, Noceda shows a family photo like a museum at the top left after her father dies before the said show. Her part-time impersonator named Vee, just before Episode 1 started and was explicitly trespassed & pretended to be Luz Noceda in disguise across the Gravesfield area. She knows all the truth in Demon Realm of Bonesborough where Noceda left off temporarily in a corrupted portal.

The next morning, Noceda and friends have now plans to renovate a portal house and other things in life. Lumity Studios, who were owned and managed by an honest lesbian couple (Amity Blight) shows the best highlights between Seasons 1 and 2 using the final version of Windows Movie Maker via Microsoft Surface laptop per exclusively obtained from our news team -- under the operating system of Windows 10 or lower. All of the Hexside friends showing off a total fashionable makeover to buy new clothes altogether here at the Human Realm of Connecticut.

Willow Park checks in the bathroom and was traumatized to see Empr. Belos on mirror. Hunter was now decided to have a personal haircut to change his own look while trimming the hair with his girlfriend of assistance like a barber individual. By late afternoon, a failed attempt to return home from Connecticut to Bonesborough at the Demon Realm.

And finally, instead of hot rainfall weather... The actual earth rainfall is safe to play. The Lumity couple kisses the second time under the rain clouds but, not at this moment for now. Noceda restricts her own magic from the Demon Realm and heads back to school for this year's Halloween at the GMS.

For now, 3 new special episodes is on its way for next weekend with 44-minutes of televised runtime. The other 2 will premiere next year in 2023 as PopVerse and Polygon reported. Streaming and convention fans are excited to tune in on national TV and streaming online.

The magical journey begins for a final 3rd Season of The Owl House premieres October 15th, 2022 at 9pm EST / 9am in Manila (next day on Sunday) / 8pm CST. LIVE and EXCLUSIVE on Disney Channel & Disney XD in America. Catch-up is available for Season 1 & 2 on Disney+.

CONTRIBUTED WALLPAPER PHOTO COURTESY: OwlPhibia via Twitter Image

SOURCE: *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93KsViU0-tw [Referenced YT Video from the Poo Master] *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C5hgbH9hJY [Referenced YT Video #1 from Disney Channel] *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TwjqRIZMJg [Referenced YT Video #2f from Disney Channel] *http://thefutoncritic.com/listings/20220921disney20/ *https://twitter.com/DisneyTVA/status/1578022269536067586 [Referenced Tweeted Image #1 from the DisneyTVA] *https:/www.thepopverse.com/watch-the-owl-house-panel-at-nycc-22-with-dana-terrace [Referenced Mini News Article from the Popverse] *https://www.polygon.com/nycc/23391072/nycc-the-owl-house-panel-exclusive-clip [Referenced News Article from Polygon] and *https://twitter.com/OwlPhibia/status/1570139628774236160 [Referenced Tweeted Image #2f from the DisneyTVA]

-- OneNETnews Team

#entertainment news #gravesfield #connecticut #manhattan #new york #NYCC #new york comic con #the owl house #toh spoilers #luz noceda #human realm #demon realm #reunion #camilia noceda #sneak peek #Sneak Preview #exclusive #first and exclusive #OneNETnews

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markantonys · 2 years

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the gathering storm prologue-chapter 15

first, some pre-reading thoughts. i have been informed that ELAYNE IS NOT IN THIS ENTIRE BOOK. LITERALLY UNREADABLE. she has been the SOLE plotline that i’ve consistently enjoyed and never had any points of annoyance with, how will i survive an entire book without her!!!!

the cover has rand and a woman who i’m thinking must be avi, so either this is a cruel act of catfishing or we will get an avirand reunion in this book!!!! but i won’t get too excited because i just know that any avirand content will be ruined by min breathing down their necks and preventing them from ever having a moment alone, seeing as min will disintegrate to dust if she ever goes 10 feet away from rand for more than 10 seconds.

there is one chapter called “the death of tuon” man i WISH, and the final chapter is called “veins of gold” which is a phrase i’ve seen mentioned many times so i’m thinking something exciting happens in that chapter 👀

moving on. “was [graendal] the only one who saw that al’thor himself was the real threat? why not just kill him and be done with it?” you would think graendal is the horniest forsaken but actually she’s the only one who sensibly wants to kill rand while the others are distracted by how badly they want to fuck him

“though [demandred] was one of the foremost generals among the chosen, warfare had never seemed to bring him joy” “to think he might have been on the other side - might have become the dragon himself, had things turned out differently” ooh i’m starting to see the demandred-mat parallels now!

mesaana has “chin-length dark hair and watery blue eyes” desperately trying to remember if we’ve ever had a description of theodrin’s appearance (but don’t tell me ofc). although mesaana may not be in her aes sedai disguise rn so might not matter. but graendal makes a distinction between aran’gar being with the rebels and mesaana being inside the white tower itself, which is a point against mesaana being theodrin since theodrin has been with the rebels the whole time, but on the other hand graendal isn’t privy to mesaana’s plans and could be misinformed about whether she is Literally in the white tower or not.

graendal waxes poetic about how unbelievably hot moridin is, which is information i am storing away because i suspect i will want to know it later. for reasons.

uh oh mesaana mentions “our woman there” who witnessed semirhage vs. rand. iirc the only women there were nynaeve, min, cadsuane, 2 damane, and 2 sul’dam (and 1 additional damane and sul’dam who were killed in the fight). i guess their source must be one of the seanchan women, but man would i go crazy in the best way if it turned out that cadsuane was a darkfriend! or min, and it turned out it was rj’s intention all along to make her relationship with rand so damaging to his wellbeing with her indirectly causing his two biggest traumas, his kidnapping and his hand, and always ramping up his paranoia with her viewings lmao but i know neither of those things are true, so it must be one of the seanchan (or maybe it’s none of them and i’m just way overthinking this). oh but also more aes sedai did arrive at the end of the fight with semirhage, so it could be one of them, although they didn’t actually witness the fireball (which is what mesaana is talking about).

“‘i want lews therin,’ demandred said, his voice deep, his expression dark, as always. ‘semirhage knows that. she also knows that if she’d killed him, i would have found her and claimed her life in retribution. nobody kills al’thor. nobody but me.’” i’m erasing the number off my “days since a male forsaken’s last sexual tension with rand” sign and putting a big fat 0. another demandred-mat parallel, they both want to fuck rand soooo bad jdkfjg

moridin is so mad that semirhage hurt rand “despite my express command that he wasn’t to be harmed” they all want to fuck him!!!

“moridin looked down, flexing his left hand, as if it were stiff” OOOOOH are moridin and rand’s Merging Troubles getting to the point where moridin feels injuries done to rand? okay maybe THAT’S the real reason why he doesn’t want anyone to hurt rand lmao. but i still like my original interpretation better.

also, i have decided that ishamael-min is another Forsaken/Friend Of Rand foil pair because they both have an interest in philosophy and an unhealthy obsession with rand [bangs gavel] i’m kidding but also it’s true

“the great lord approves of your initiative” graendal is acing her annual employee review. i feel like she’s secretly the cleverest/most dangerous forsaken of all and the others all underestimate her, to her advantage!

“the wheel has groaned its final rotation, the clock has lost its spring, the serpent heaves its final gasps. he must know pain of heart. he must know frustration, and he must know anguish.” sexy and ominous

you know how the villain in the incredibles was a mr. incredible fanboy whose obsessiveness drove him to crimes? that’s masema with rand fjkgh every time masema’s like “the dragon will reward me for my loyalty!” all i can think about is the incredibles you’re not affiliated with me.gif

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH FAILE!!!!!!!!!! JUST KILLED MASEMA AND ALL HIS FOLLOWERS!!!!!!!!! YOOOOOOOOOO I’M LOSING MY MIND she just went full “the lannisters send their regards” on their asses!!!!! chills!!! chills chills chills of the best kind!!!! thank you faile for doing what someone should’ve done many books ago!!! and for delivering the kind of “heroes being machiavellian and doing bad things for the greater good” content that i Actually want to see!!! faile killing masema is Sexy, the boys allying with the seanchan is Not Sexy.

“‘thank you for helping to assault malden, masema,’ faile said, stopping right in front of him. then she reached up and rammed that knife into his heart.” YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

“‘sometimes, a wife must do what her husband cannot,’ he heard faile tell her women as his eyes fluttered trying to close. ‘it is a dark thing we did this day, but necessary. let no one speak of it to my husband. he must never know.’” YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

faile accomplishing in 1 page what perrin failed (no pun intended) to do in 5 books is SO typical jjskdjfg i love her!! i love her!!!!!!! sorry perrin, faile is MY wife now. also, this is one of the few times in this series where a character deciding to lie to their partner is actually justified instead of needless and infuriating, and might provide meaty and fascinating relationship conflict rather than petty drama (though given that this IS perrin and faile we’re talking about i won’t hold my breath lmao)

i’m so rand/min-phobic at this point that as soon as the audiobook said “‘rand?’ a soft voice asked” i instantly began gnashing my teeth in preparation, because i just KNEW it was going to be min arriving to simper (and it was)

rand feels aviendha coming closer to the manor!! an avirand reunion IS in the cards!!

and we open with our usual Listen To How Sexy Min Is In Her Tight Clothes description 🙄 this is at least the third book in a row where we’ve gotten that within the first couple pages of min’s first scene, and i bet it happened in previous books too i just didn’t start tracking it until COT

“why wear trousers only to trim herself up with lace?” LMAO absolutely howling that min dolls herself up for rand and it turns out he thinks it’s weird jfkjgh serves her right

also, we learn that rand’s eyesight is still Weird after semirhage. again i wonder if it’s lingering damage from the light of the fireball or if it’s to do with the Moridin Merging Troubles? oooh we saw moridin being affected by the pain of rand’s hand, so maybe rand is being affected by the black flecks in moridin’s eyes from using the true power??

“elayne. she was distant, far to the east, but he could still feel her bundle of emotions in his head. at such a distance, it was difficult to tell much, but he thought she was...relieved. did that mean that her struggle for power in andor was going well?” INDEPENDENT INDIVIDUAL THOUGHT ABOUT ELAYNE!!! rand, maybe you could put on a little disguise and pop thru a quick gateway and ASK her how her struggle for power is going! also, interesting that he can pick out any emotion from her at all at such a great distance, i thought that at a far distance you could only really sense serious injuries (like elayne feeling rand’s hand) and emotions wouldn’t come into range unless you were closer? i feel like the rules and experiences of long-distance warder bonds are always changing book to book lmao but i’m not complaining since it gave us 3 whole sentences of rand thinking about elayne.

i can’t find the exact quote again but rand wonders where asmodean is and whether he’s betrayed info about him to the shadow and i’m cracking up jkjfg even rand thinks asmodean should have been more important to the story than he ended up being!

somewhere in this chapter rand mentions that it was a ter’angreal of cadsuane’s that made semirhage’s illusion fall away in the last book, good to know, i thought that semirhage was just lame and bad at channeling or something lmao

rand apparently has a new sword, which an unnamed “they” had recently found and gifted to him, and he recognizes it from his own memories rather than from lews therin’s and “had taken to wearing the sword immediately. it felt right beneath his fingers.” this had better somehow be tam’s heron-marked blade fixed up again because that is the only sword in the world i could accept so immediately and unceremoniously replacing the sword aviendha gave to rand 😤

on the one hand, i hate how min is always glaring at alivia bc she resents her bc she’s going to help rand die, even though alivia knows nothing about this and has done nothing wrong and never been anything but loyal to rand and min is just being mad at her about her own viewing. on the other hand, i do kinda resent alivia’s narrative importance bc while i don’t yet know exactly what her role will be, i’m struggling to see why nynaeve couldn’t have filled it. why introduce a random new channeler who’s “even stronger than nynaeve in the one power” and seems like she’s going to do something channeling-related that’s very emotionally significant in rand’s arc, when nynaeve is right there? i’ll see if i still feel this way once i actually see how this “alivia helping rand die” business plays out, but so far it feels like yet another instance of rj introducing new characters in the second half of the series to fill roles original characters were booted out of, and fill them in a less effective or emotionally meaningful way (cadsuane replacing moiraine as rand’s mentor, bashere replacing mat as rand’s general (i do love bashere, but he’s no mat). and min replacing elayne and avi as rand’s primary love interest, of course, although she wasn’t a new character, but she might as well have been since by LOC she’d changed every single thing about herself For Rand.)

“one cannot blindfold an artist, then be surprised when he has nothing to paint” cadsuane needs to meet up with lini so they can exchange Sayings™!

rand has in custody an extremely evil forsaken who blew off his hand and has brutally tortured and killed thousands of people and could potentially provide their side with valuable info about the shadow..............and he refuses to let the aes sedai torture her or hurt her in any way while questioning her, because she’s a woman 🙄🙄🙄 i know it won’t happen but i almost want rand to be murdered by a woman at this point, he would deserve it.

“time spent in a dark box, being pulled forth and being beaten repeatedly. he would not have a woman in his power treated the same way. not even one of the forsaken.” see, i could totally get behind this reasoning if it applied to people in general, but as the scene goes on rand makes it abundantly clear that it’s specifically WOMEN he can’t stomach being treated the way he was.

“you press us for results, boy, and yet you deny us the tools we need to get them. whether you name it torture, questioning, or baking, i name it foolishness.” for once i wholeheartedly support cadsuane bullying rand! yes cadsuane! bully him more about this!

“turn her over to the white tower, you say? which white tower? ...i doubt that egwene would be pleased if i dropped one of the forsaken into her lap.” are you kidding? egwene would be able to handle semirhage in her sleep! “egwene might just let semirhage go and take me captive instead. force me to kneel before the white tower’s justice and gentle me just to give her another notch in her belt.” what the FUCK rand???? i know you and egwene were a bit strained when you last saw each other back in LOC, but good god this is a HUGE leap to make! and fandom gets mad at EGWENE for judging RAND unfairly. i definitely don’t remember rand thinking or saying anything THIS harsh about egwene before now, so i’m feeling like his suspicion of her is suddenly being amped up to 100 to prepare for a conflict between them.

lews therin says of aes sedai, “we need to stay away from all of them. they refused to help us, you know. refused! said my plan was too reckless. that left me with only the hundred companions, no women to form a circle.” isn’t this.......isn’t this exactly the conversation that’s depicted in the 1x08 cold open that everybody complained about because it made lews therin look reckless? lmao god

“light! i can’t keep this up. my eyes see as if in a fog, my hand is burned away, and the old wounds in my side rip open if i do anything more strenuous than breathe. i’m dry, like an overused well. i need to finish my work here and get to shayol ghul. otherwise, there won’t be anything left of me for the dark one to kill.” baby booooy

egwene’s only been in the tower for NINE DAYS???? oh my god. and she already has all the novices on her side and is making many of the older aes sedai doubt elaida! yeah, she would TOTALLY handle semirhage in her sleep lmao

“this was the woman who had pulled down siuan, the woman who had beaten rand, and the woman who had pushed the aes sedai themselves to the very brink of collapse. elaida needed to know egwene’s anger, she needed to be humiliated and made ashamed!” “this woman, this...creature! she was the cause of the problems in the white tower, she was the one who caused division between rebels and loyalists. she had taken rand captive and beaten him.” so egwene HAS found out more details about rand’s kidnapping and counts it as one of her top 3 reasons for hating elaida 😭❤️ and after rand was being such a dick about egwene in the previous chapter.

“egwene hesitated in the doorway, looking in at her rival for the first time since departing from the white tower with nynaeve and elayne to hunt the black ajah, a turning point that seemed an eternity ago.” 😭 i swear if i don’t get a full wondergirl reunion.........🔪🔪

“‘what do you say to that?’ that you are a plague upon this structure as vile and destructive as any disease that has struck city and people in all years past.” JKDHFJHG DAMN EGWENE i love her. respect for her for managing not to say this aloud but boy do i wish she had hjfg

“egwene could sometimes feel that band [the a’dam] on her own skin, itching, impossible to move. sometimes, it still made her faintly sick to move around freely, as if she felt that she should be locked away, chained to the post on the wall by a simple loop of metal.” 💔💔💔 and you expect me to like tuon and support her marrying mat?? i am not saying that i bet all the readers who love tuon are the very same ones who hate egwene, buuuuut

while being beaten egwene thinks about what a pointless, absurd punishment it is compared to the “pain of soul she felt at seeing the white tower suffer beneath elaida’s hand” and starts to laugh crazily, rand vibes! but she comes to a different conclusion: “i understand. i didn’t realize what the aiel did. i assumed that i just had to be harder, and that was what would teach me to laugh at pain. but it’s not hardness at all. it’s not strength that makes me laugh. it’s understanding.” she and rand are foils!

aviendha pov!! “aviendha did not fear death, but there was a very big difference between embracing death and wishing for it.” an outlook that would be helpful to rand’s mental health right now if aviendha was allowed to talk to him for even 10 seconds.

aww throughout this chapter avi thinks about elayne constantly, always asking herself What Would Elayne Do and thinking on how much elayne has taught her ❤️❤️

why the fuck does avi still call rand “rand al’thor” in her narration? they had their moment in WH where she called him by his first name! i thought they were past this!

“now that they were first-sisters, they could marry him together as was proper” “it was good to know rand al’thor would be hers, although she would have to share him. she did not begrudge elayne, of course, but min...well, aviendha did not really know her.” perfect throuple, avirandlayne triad when, min get out of this polycule, etc etc

aviendha thinks about how she doesn’t yet have anything to offer rand and that she won’t give him a bridal wreath until she becomes a full wise one. i have Some Thoughts about this, will go into them at the end of the post once it’s more relevant.

but for now i will say this: “she would come to him when she was ready, then lay the bridal wreath at his feet. and she couldn’t do that until she knew who she was.” WHAT a contrast from min remaking herself and shaping her entire personality and appearance around what she thinks rand would want her to be lmaoooo

“i once thought that there was only one way to be strong, but i have learned from my first-sister that i was wrong.” ❤️❤️ “rand al’thor...i do not think he has learned this yet. i worry that he mistakes hardness for strength.” okay so clearly rand needs to spend some time with elayne too (and avi) so that he can learn this same lesson! dammit!!

ah, min did indeed end up telling avi about her viewing of her having quadruplets with rand, in WH min was uncertain whether avi would want to know about it. although avi’s never referenced this before and in the previous book even said something like “hope i never get pregnant if it sucks this much” to elayne, so i’m wondering if rj always intended avi to know about the viewing or if this was sanderson’s decision.

she also thinks about min’s viewing of the 3 of them loving rand: “the viewing was a comfort.” how sad is it that poor avi has been given so little time with and affection from her own boyfriend that she has to think “thank god i have a prophecy proving that he loves me” damn. “but it was also bothersome. aviendha loved rand al’thor because she chose to, not because she was destined to.” THANK YOU!!!!! exhibit A of why avirand is the only Fated Romance in this series that works! (randlayne i don’t count as a Fated Romance since elayne didn’t find out they were fated until after they were already in love)

GAWYN RETURNS!!! recalled as shouting thank god it is my boy!!! and we see him outside a prologue for i believe the first time since LOC! could this mean he’ll actually have a plotline this book? oh i hope so!

i always would’ve had a soft spot for him bc he fits my standard blorbo archetype perfectly, but would i have loved him as much as i do if not for the hilarity of how confused and mad you guys are by me loving him? we’ll never know jdfkg i’m still waiting to see what crime(s) he commits that makes the whole fandom hate him so much. surely it can’t just be siding with elaida in the coup and not helping rand at dumai’s wells? bc while those are hardly good looks for him, i don’t see how they’re bad enough to earn such universal hatred. there must be a very big crime somewhere in these last 3 books. chuckles nervously i’m in danger.jpg

quick tangent bc i’ve been thinking about the show: i think that in the books elaida having been around as an adult figure, and potentially a mentor figure, for most of gawyn’s (and elayne’s) life is something that was not made enough of, so in the show it’d be neat if we saw elaida kinda manipulating/grooming him so then it’s even more understandable and heartbreaking when he believes her over siuan in the coup (judging from leaks show!gawyn seems to have a more complicated relationship with morgase than he does in the books, so i could totally see elaida swooping in to prey on those mommy issues, especially if she’s maybe planning her coup and decides it would be helpful to make sure gawyn and his friends will side with her when the time comes).

anyway, we have so much of gawyn being sexily conflicted and angsty in this chapter, and you all know me, you know i’m eating this UP. “am i destined to end up fighting against each and every man who has been a mentor to me?” baby boy

“light send that elayne had arrived in andor...her duty to andor outweighed her duty to the white tower. and what of your duty, gawyn trakand? he thought to himself. he wasn’t certain he had duty, or honor, left to him. perhaps his guilt about hammar, his nightmares of war and death at dumai’s wells, were due to the slow realization that he might have given his allegiance to the wrong side. his loyalty belonged to elayne and egwene. what, then, was he still doing fighting a battle he didn’t care about, helping a side that - by all accounts - was opposed to the one elayne and egwene had chosen?” baby booooy. also, an interesting little honor-and-duty musing right on the heels of avi’s in the last chapter.

“[egwene] had chosen a side. hammar had chosen a side. gareth bryne had, apparently, chosen a side. but gawyn continued to want to be on both sides. the division was ripping him apart.” BABY BOOOOOOY [giggling and twirling my hair around my finger] he’s just soooo burdened by duty and torn apart by conflicting loyalties

rand thinks about mat (in the context of thinking that even mat wouldn’t know what was the best bet for what would end up killing rand since so many things are trying to) and sees that he’s dicing before a crowd. “rand had not seen the small, dark-skinned woman with mat for some time. who was she? where had she gone?” anxious at the prospect of mat having obtained a girlfriend during your separation hmmm?

“hopefully mat would return to him soon. he would need mat and his tactical skills at shayol ghul.” all i’m hearing is that rand needs mat and hopes he’ll come back soon 😌

“once rand might have been surprised at how quickly he was obeyed, but no longer. it was right for the soldiers to obey. rand was a king.” “darlin wondered - yet again - about his orders. could no one simply do as they were told?” “had [harine] achieved greater rank, making her too important to attend him? could one be too important to attend the coramoor?” noo rand don’t go dark and tyrannical you’re so sexy aha

“‘for all [the soldiers’] laws and oaths, they are free. me, i seem as if i can do as i wish, but i am tied so tightly the bonds cut my flesh. my power and influence are meaningless against fate. my freedom is just an illusion, flinn. and so i envy them. sometimes.’ flinn folded his hands behind his back, obviously uncertain how to respond.” [snl debbie downer sound effect]

“‘it’s not normal,’ [nynaeve] said. ‘and those overcast skies aren’t the storm i’m talking about. it’s still distant, but it’s coming. and it is going to be terrible. worse than any i’ve ever seen. far worse.’ ‘well, then,’ daigian said, sounding slightly uncomfortable.” [snl debbie downer sound effect]

“nynaeve had spent that fight [at shadar logoth] completely absorbed by providing rand with immense amounts of saidar to weave.” oh, there i was thinking nynaeve was doing some weaving herself and working with rand and taking an active role in the cleansing, but no, apparently she was just rand’s battery. sigh.

because nynaeve has apparently not gone through “finally thinking she’s independent and has authority only to be forced back into a student role and treated like a child” plotlines often enough, she’s now learning the 100 weaves you need to know to become aes sedai (which have literally never been mentioned before) so that she can take the test and become a ~real~ aes sedai since the other sisters think egwene raising her doesn’t count. sigh.

nynaeve offers to try Healing daigian of her grief over her warder’s death. girl if you can Heal emotional hurts/mental illnesses why ON EARTH have you never suggested this to rand or even considered that he might benefit???? oh my god.

nynaeve thinks that her love for lan is more ~important~ than daigian’s love for her late warder (eben the asha’man) because a) it is “genuine, and not due to a bond,” obviously nynaeve is sooo insecure over not being bonded to lan that it makes her look stupid, and b) daigian’s love for eben was “the affection of an aunt for her favored nephew” rather than a marriage, and as we all know, platonic love is inherently less meaningful than romantic love 🙄 that really does seem to be a message of the series overall, what with the way the 3 boys become completely cut off from their platonic relationships and entirely dependent on their single love interest for connection and emotional support, and this is portrayed as romantic and desirable and good.

nynaeve does redeem herself a moment later by thinking about how unfair it is that daigian, who knows as much as any other aes sedai and more than many, is always the inferior in any situation bc she’s weak in the power. finally someone recognizes this! (someone aes sedai, at least, since iirc we’ve had aiel and/or windfinders saying it’s nonsense before.) but then she loses respect again because she thinks about how teaching the kin to stand up for themselves resulted in them standing up to HER too and she isn’t sure she wants to “attempt a similar revolution among the aes sedai,” of course you don’t seeing as the current power system works to your advantage 🙄 although given nynaeve’s frustration with constantly being condescended to, and my frustration that everyone treats her like that, i suppose i can sympathize with her not wanting to implement a more age-/experience-based system that would give older aes sedai even more of an opportunity to walk all over her.

is my sudden uncharacteristic annoyance with nynaeve a sign that sanderson writes her differently? hmmm. something to ponder.

“all these others in camp might bow and scrape and dote on [rand], but nynaeve knew that he was really just a sheepherder from emond’s field. he still got into trouble the same way he had when he and matrim had pulled pranks as boys. only now instead of flustering the village girls, he could throw entire nations into chaos.” awww. walking the thin line between “it’s so sweet that she still sees rand as his old self” and “it’s so frustrating that she refuses to recognize him as an adult and a leader rather than an irresponsible teen” lmao. also, why tf is she calling mat matrim in her narration???

“nynaeve still felt guilty for leaving [elayne and aviendha], but somebody had needed to help rand cleanse saidin.” maybe you would feel less guilty if you’d told them where you were going and why instead of vanishing in the night without so much as a note and then avoiding them in TAR ever since! but i blame the narrative more than nynaeve for that whole thing seeing as the narrative just really doesn’t want elayne and avi to know anything about rand’s life, for whatever godforsaken reason. (so that min can be his primary girlfriend. that’s the godforsaken reason. genuinely it feels like rj decided every character absolutely had to be paired up in a nice heterosexual relationship, realized there were more female characters than male, and put 3 of them with rand so that none of the women would remain single (oh the horrors!), then immediately sent rand and min off alone so that it could still feel like a respectable monogamous relationship. and elayne and avi continue to love and think about rand in their povs because oh the horrors if they didn’t have a boyfriend, while rand only thinks about min in his because oh the horrors if he had a poly relationship.)

“min was there in the tent, of course” of fucking course, seeing as she’ll disintegrate to dust if she ever goes 10 feet away from rand for more than 10 seconds “she was closer to [rand] than anyone” 🤮 i hate it here

nynaeve is all up in arms about rand and min Having Sex While Unmarried, which is obviously stupid, and rand has told her that he can’t marry min because that would make his death hurt her more, which is also stupid, but i would hate it if rand did marry min so i’m not gonna argue. also, why does nynaeve not spare ONE thought for the fact that rand is also in love with two other women - both of whom are very close friends of hers, unlike min - in this whole thing?? like, she’s listing out rand’s Sexual Improprieties and doesn’t mention that he’s also dating 3 women?? and you would totally think nynaeve would misunderstand the poly situation and resent min for stealing away nynaeve’s best friend’s crush/boyfriend! nynaeve was always hearing about rand from elayne and giving her advice and being invested in that relationship! and yet her only objection to rand/min is that they’re not married, not that it’s potentially unfair to elayne! the narrative doesn’t think it’s unfair to elayne, and elayne doesn’t think it’s unfair to elayne (even though min ABSOLUTELY WOULD think it was unfair to min if their situations were reversed), but i do and you’d think nynaeve would too! that is her best friend’s man waltzing around fucking some other woman 24/7! no way in hell would our fiercely protective and also incredibly judgmental and traditional nynaeve not have a problem with that even if she did witness all the love confessions!

aviendha arrives in the tent. she and rand are now seeing each other for the first time since caemlyn (which barely counts bc they exchanged 2 words and didn’t have a single real moment together). AND NEITHER OF THEM REACTS IN ANY WAY!!! like yeah they’re in the middle of a war council so it’s not like they’re gonna start making out, and we’re in nynaeve’s pov so can’t know about their internal feelings (which is a poor writing decision in and of itself, setting this moment in her pov instead of avi’s or rand’s) but where are my heated and meaningful glances?? my lingering looks?? my breaths catching when they meet each other’s eyes for the first time in weeks/months?? my quickly glancing away agains in hopes that other people won’t notice?? and nynaeve also does not react in any way! she KNOWS that avi and rand are dating and doesn’t say a single word about it here! if i didn’t know they were dating, i would have absolutely no idea from reading this scene! so much for my fucking avirand reunion! ugh!!!!

rand says that the aiel were in andor to help elayne. in a previous book bael had complained that it was foolish of elayne not to accept aid from whatever spears were available and bashere had to explain to him about the intricacies of wetlander politics, but here bael says “she was right to refuse aid. i’d rather run across the entire waste with a single skin of water than have leadership of my clan handed to me by another.” Sanderson Inconsistency Alert (also for an aiel to call it the waste instead of the three-fold land). and in response “rand’s expression grew dark again, his eyes stormy” even though in the previous book he’d come to acknowledge that elayne was indeed right to refuse his aid with caemlyn. another Sanderson Inconsistency Alert, or maybe just a standard Regression Of Rand’s Non-Min Relationships.

okay so rand wants to STOP ituralde’s kickass campaign against the seanchan so that the seanchan will be his friends. SIGH. i understand about the whole allying with former enemies against the shadow thing, i know, i know, but i just will never like it!

there’s tension between rand and the aiel in this chapter. “we are not kidnappers.” “you are what i say you are, bael.” “we are still free people, rand al’thor.” “i will change the aiel with my passing. i don’t know what you’ll be once this is all through, but you cannot remain what you were.” gee, if only rand had an aiel partner who could be relevant here and talk to him on her people’s behalf and talk to her people on his behalf! if only! rand/avi as a bridge between two cultures and rand/elayne as a political powerhouse are SO RICH narratively and plot-wise and character-wise, and they were COMPLETELY WASTED in favor of rand spending all his time with an in-universe-ly useless and a narratively useless love interest who CONTRIBUTES NOTHING TO THE STORY!!! I HATE IT HERE!!!!

now we get some siuan/bryne nonsense. feeling heterophobic in this chili’s tonight.

aww egwene is completely willing to believe saidin’s really been cleansed, when near everyone else we’ve seen has been skeptical and dismissive.

random thought but: egwene needed an army/general to besiege tar valon. elayne needed an army/general to hold caemlyn. perrin needed an army/general to attack malden. rand needs armies/generals always. and where is our protagonist who was set up as the greatest general of the age? fucking about in a circus in the middle of the woods! what a waste. what a narrative waste!!!! mat could have fit into any one of those plotlines better than his own and been more useful and had more character development there than in his own!

now, perrin thinks it’s weird that tam calls him my lord and tam does call him just perrin when they speak in private. thank you sanderson!

tam mentions the queen of andor being pissed if they tried to bring back manetheren. he doesn’t know that’s his daughter-in-law! the mother of his grandbabies! not that rand knows that second thing either. but still!!! i’m weeping!!

wait a minute wait just a minute. now we have tam AND morgase in the same traveling party, both unaware that their kids are dating and expecting babies together..............jots down note to resolve this in my avimatrandlayne fic series since i just know the books won’t resolve it. man if i don’t get to see lini react to elayne being pregnant out of wedlock with the dragon reborn’s children and also having a shared aiel girlfriend with him, then what’s this all been about?

anyway, perrin says “the sooner that elayne takes her throne and sends a proper lord out to the two rivers, the better.” 1) confirmation that perrin knows who elayne is, nice lmao 2) why the fuck does the two rivers need a permanent lord?? they were doing just fine before! i’ve hated this arc since tsr.

perrin says, to tam, rand’s father, who has not seen rand in ages and is very worried about him and only just found out he’s the dragon reborn because perrin didn’t fucking bother to tell him earlier, “[rand] seems to like scooping up kingdoms. like a child playing a game of wobbles.” then notes that tam smells concerned and does nothing about it. what the hell perrin! i don’t want to hear any of that “mat is the worst friend to rand” nonsense, perrin is Clearly the worst friend! i bet mat would make an effort to console tam about rand if he were here, or at the very least not say upsetting things about rand in front of him. as a general observation, for all that perrin is allegedly so thoughtful and slow to speak, he is not very empathetic and never has been.

but perrin gains some points back by acknowledging that he hasn’t been a good leader lately and has ignored all his other obligations to focus on faile. “aram had been a friend” [footage not found] perrin was always annoyed by aram and rude to him “one that perrin had discarded in his quest to save faile. aram had deserved better.” yeah [sobs]

ituralde says that thom used to like juggling to entertain little elayne 😭 i’m dying for trakand family flashback cold opens in upcoming seasons

“there was a sword at [rand’s] side, and the way he walked made ituralde think he knew how to use it. he strode with firm, determined steps, as if he thought the soldiers around him an honor guard.” rand has massive bde confirmed 🥵

“something about the newcomer drew ituralde’s eyes.” “he was fit - lean and hard” “‘i am rand al’thor, the dragon reborn. and i need you.’” “‘you are my concern,’ al’thor said, eyes so hard that they seemed ready to burrow into ituralde’s skill and search about inside for anything of use.” “‘i have orders,’ ituralde said, shaking his head. wait. he wouldn’t do as this youth asked if he didn’t have orders. except...those eyes. ...eyes that demanded obedience.” “there seemed to be a...a force about al’thor, drawing ituralde in, demanding that he do as asked.” weird amount of sexual tension here. i love it. in fact, there is more sexual tension here than rand and min have ever had hjfkgjh the ta’veren pull isn’t real, it’s just that rand is hot and everyone wants to fuck him and makes up magical explanations for it so they don’t have to admit it (see: mat in tsr)

speaking of mat, rand currently needs an army and a Great General. 😤😤😤😤😤

the maidens are upset that rand went to meet with ituralde without any guards, but they blame themselves because “if a child hurts himself because he was not taught properly to stay away from knives, then the shame is upon his parents.” 🥺

apparently the maidens have been beating rand repeatedly to Teach Him Properly and rand takes it calmly but doesn’t change his behavior one bit afterwards. i miss the days when the maidens were getting him drunk and giggly and tickling him and tucking him into bed 😔

“if you listened to [elayne] talk about the aches, sicknesses, and frustrations of her pregnancy, you would almost think she was approaching death!” girl you’re gonna get pregnant with QUADRUPLETS and Then You Will See. also, this does not fit with the wifely behavior of previous books’ aviendha fussing over and coddling elayne so much that ELAYNE got annoyed!

oh my god avi thinks that wetlanders all complain a lot and initially thought this was shameful, But Then: “however, if complaining was something that elayne did, then aviendha refused to accept it as a sign of weakness. her first-sister would not act in such a shameful way. therefore, there had to be some hidden honor in it.” 😭😭😭😭😭 avi loves elayne SO MUCH!!! truly Elayne Has Done Nothing Wrong Ever In Her Life, I Know This And I Love Her. i have never related to a wheel of time character more.

avi: “not all wetlanders” you’re right, elayne would never do this

avi theorizes that Wetlander Complaining could be either a) exposing weaknesses to your companions as a sign of trust and friendship or b) a way of showing humility a la gai’shain subservience. she once shared these theories with elayne and “received only a fond laugh in return” THEY ARE MARRIED

“[aviendha] was strong and brave. not as brave as some others, of course; she could only wish to be as bold as elayne.” 😭😭😭

once again avi thinks What Would Elayne Do throughout the chapter and tries to consider problems the way elayne would 😭 thank you avi for providing me with the elayne content i would otherwise be deprived of in this book.

there’s some weird fire thing (bubble of evil?) that avi successfully puts out, like a goddamn Hero. rand comes to see what’s going on and we have our first and only avirand interaction so far: rand is angry about the fire and yelling at the sky i.e. the forsaken (i assume) that he’s coming for them, avi says “rand” and he looks at her and then walks back into the house. that’s it! that’s our only interaction in the first 190 pages (as of this scene and 250 pages as of the end of chapter 15 by which point there have still not been any additional interactions) between a couple who are a) in a committed relationship b) bonded as warder and wardee and c) in the same location together for the first time in many weeks and many books. i expected nothing and i’m still let down!! ugh!!

avi kinda plays mediator between rand and the aiel here in her convo with melaine (she says that rand’s plan is good but that he should’ve phrased it differently so as not to offend the clan chiefs), why can’t we see her filling that role in conversations with rand as well! ugh!!

“another thought occurred to her as she pushed that one away - a treacherous one. a thought of rand al’thor, resting in his room. she could go to him...no! not until she had her honor back. she would not go to him as a beggar. she would go to him as a woman of honor.” still bottling up my rant for a few more chapters, but It Is Coming. also, we all know that if avi HAD tried to go spend the night with rand, min would’ve chased her out of the house with a broom.

oh damn now egwene says it’s been “well over a month” since siuan told her in TAR about asha’man bonding sisters, which was only like 2 chapters ago. big sudden timeskip! i wonder if the other plotlines have jumped ahead a month too. i.e. how mad do i need to be about avirand potentially not having spoken to each other yet for an entire month lmao

HMMMMM seaine is described as having black hair and watery blue eyes. mesaana??????? but surely that would’ve come out when they were using the oath rod on each other in a previous book.......although maybe seaine only swore that she wasn’t black ajah, which would technically be true if she was actually a forsaken. hmmmmm.

okay so now rand has rounded up ituralde and egwene the black ajah hunters, hopefully that’s the end of some side character subplots now

gawyn returns and yes, he’s definitely being set up for a proper plotline this book! thank god! SOMEBODY needs to fill my trakand quota.

damn gawyn is basically a blademaster at this point even if he doesn’t have a heron-marked sword. a blademaster and a genius general so young, always agonizing about the mountain of duty, doesn’t trust aes sedai...........there’s some foiling with both rand and mat going on here but my brain is too sleepy to analyze further.

“all gawyn had ever wanted was to protect elayne.” me the fuck too! baby boy! “he wanted to defend andor. maybe learn to be a little more like galad.” baby boy!! i can’t wait for the show’s more complicated version of gawyn and galad’s relationship (again going off leaks here), because i can deeeefinitely see grounds for giving gawyn a galad-induced inferiority complex even if the books channel that into simple, uncomplicated idolization.

when the warder sleete starts telling gawyn about how his aes sedai has only one warder because she said she would only ever take another if sleete found someone he judged worthy: “all right, gawyn thought, wondering why he was being told this.” [squishes his cheeks] you are so stupid i love you

“‘hammar was a good man.’ ‘he was,’ gawyn said, feeling a twist in his stomach. ‘but he would have killed you,’ sleete said. ‘killed you cleanly and quickly. he was the one on the offensive, not you. he understood why you did what you did. nobody made any good decisions that day. there weren’t any good decisions to be made.’” first of all, crying, second of all, grateful that gawyn got to hear this from another mentor figure, third of all, very interesting reveal that hammar was on the offense and gawyn killed him only in self-defense, because the way i’ve seen people talk about it is that gawyn committed such an atrocity by murdering his mentor but it seems that he really had no choice and hammar was the one who attacked HIM first.

oh right, gawyn’s other current crime is that he wants to kill rand for killing morgase, but i don’t see why i should hate on him for this when he’s far from the only WOT character to fall victim to misinformed rumors that lead him to believe the worst of somebody who doesn’t deserve it. that’s kind of a theme of the entire series!

anyway, gawyn wants to have a homoerotic rivalry with rand soooo bad but rand is too busy dealing with all the forsaken who want homoerotic rivalries with him to be aware that gawyn wants one too or even to remember his existence. poor gawyn. you’ll have to wait in line.

“the pay [for the camp’s washerwomen] was small for so much work, and gawyn gave the women what little extra he could afford out of his own pocket, a gesture that had earned him laughter from narenwin sedai, but thanks from the village women. gawyn’s mother had always taught that the workers were the spine of a kingdom; break them, and you’d soon find that you could no longer move. this city’s people might not be his sister’s subjects, but he would not see them taken advantage of by his troops.” he’s a good boy! 🥺 and so like elayne! and dare i say foiling rand’s current worse-than-ever I Will Use People mentality?

gawyn finally finds out that egwene is a) the rebels’ amyrlin and b) held captive in the white tower and being “made to howl half the day” and he is turning on his men/the aes sedai just as i was crossing my fingers for!!!! oh my god it’s happening everybody stay calm stay fucking calm!!!!!

i can foresee that gawyn’s rescue attempt of egwene will cause problems and/or annoy egwene since she doesn’t want to be rescued. gawyn’s Great Crime, perhaps? but i can’t blame him for being frantic and wanting to help her bc he has no idea that she doesn’t need or want help and also, “siuan sanche had been stilled and slated for execution, and she had simply been a deposed amyrlin. what would they do with a false amyrlin, a leader of a rebel faction? made to howl half the day...egwene was being tortured. she would be stilled! she probably had been already. after that, she would be executed.” so, i will 100% understand if egwene is annoyed with him for trying to rescue her from a situation she has well in hand, but i also 100% understand why gawyn is afraid for her and is going to try to help her.

“egwene was in trouble. he blinked deliberately, standing in the square, cattle calling distantly, water bubbling in the canal beside him. egwene would be executed. where is your loyalty, gawyn trakand?” conflicted characters deciding to turn on their side (bonus points when it’s because they care for someone on the other side) is my favorite arc and the moment of that decision is my favorite moment of that favorite arc, so i am absolutely frothing at the mouth right now!!

“burn you, elaida! burn you, siuan sanche, and your entire tower. stop using people. stop using me!” gawyn and rand and mat parallels!!!!

every time i agree with cadsuane about something (again this time it’s rand being stupid for refusing to harm women) it’s such a Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Good Point moment jfkgh

on the other hand, every time cadsuane thinks about all the things she’s taught rand or wants to teach him if only he’ll listen, i become the “let me ask you a very fair question. what DO you do successfully?” vine. literally what HAS cadsuane done successfully in this entire series so far??? besides made rand even more snappish and less likely to listen to advice.

crying that sorilea going “semirhage is just a normal human she’s not even SCARY. so lame and disappointing.” is what makes semirhage start to crack hjdkfgj

“the problem was, al’thor wasn’t ready for the last battle. cadsuane could feel it in the way he spoke, the way he acted. the way he regarded the world with that dark, nearly dazed expression. if the man he was now faced the dark one to decide the fate of the world, cadsuane feared for all people.” okay so try and do something Actually Helpful about it then

we officially learn that rand and min share a room every night. while avi is all alone out in her tent or wherever. URGH!!!!

and rand officially learns (via dream encounter) that the shadar logoth man he keeps seeing in his head is ishamael resurrected. he also learns that balefire is the only way to kill someone too permanently for the dark one to bring back, and i can tell this will lead to rand going too trigger-happy with balefire.

min has one (1) generous thought about avi: “aviendha’s quick thinking had made a potential disaster into a mere inconvenience. not that she was being rewarded for it. the wise ones continued to work her as hard as a merchant’s last mule.”

min hasn’t been able to get close enough to avi to have a conversation even though they’ve been in the camp together “for some time.” the wise ones’ sudden punishments are truly just a plot device to keep avi from spending any time with her 2 polycule members who are with her now ugh (more on this shortly)

min thinks that she and avi became a little more comfortable with each other while drinking in caemlyn, “but one day did not friends make, and she was definitely uncomfortable about sharing.” AS IF YOU’VE EVER HAD TO SHARE A FUCKING THING UGH!!!! min is the one who gets 95% of the screentime with rand yet also the only one who still complains about having to share him!!! (avi complains about sharing him *with min* bc she doesn’t know min, but not about the idea of sharing in general.) elayne and avi are so onboard to share with each other, they love each other and rand so much, they are so wholeheartedly happy to see rand love the other person, it’s a wonderful dynamic between those 3 that min completely tanks!!! what the FUCK is she doing in a poly relationship if she’s uncomfortable with sharing!!!! min is that person who says they want to try an open relationship but then gets mad when their partner actually dates other people.

“she wasn’t aes sedai - thank the light - but somehow she had bonded him.” what do you mean “somehow”??? it was all elayne’s doing! as usual going out of her way to include your ungrateful ass in her own relationship with rand!!

i am literally SO TIRED of min thinking about how hot it is to feel rand’s desire for her when they fuck. if i have to read about it one more time i’ll snap!

“what was she doing trying to solve a scholarly mystery?” i sure as fuck don’t know. “but who else was there?...even those [aes sedai] who had made their oaths to him might decide that it was in rand’s best interests to keep secrets from him.” YOU MEAN THE THING YOU DO LITERALLY ALL THE TIME???? URGH!!!! and then 2 sentences later: “she felt she was getting close [to figuring out what rand would have to do about the seals] but it worried her to reveal what she’d discovered to rand. how would he respond?” EXHIBIT FUCKING A altho later in the scene she does indeed tell him her theories so, fine, i’ll let it slide THIS time. but there have been MANY other times where she tried to or actually did withhold info from him “for his best interests.”

“she’d never thought that she, of all people, would become a fool for some man.” does the fact that you think thoughts like this SO OFTEN tell you something? no? “yet here she was, following him wherever he went, putting his needs before her own.” that’s not love or partnership, that’s obsession and unhealthy codependence. “that didn’t mean she was his pet, regardless what some of the people in camp said.” LMAO WE STAN SOME OF THE PEOPLE IN CAMP also like literally the fact that min has to insist SO OFTEN TO HERSELF that she’s NOT a fool for rand and NOT just his pet.........the lady doth protest too much methinks

min on why it’s good to be underestimated: “any assassin who came to kill rand should think that he could ignore min. the would-be killer would soon discover the knives hidden in min’s sleeves. she wasn’t as good with them as thom merrilin was, but she knew more than enough to kill.” [footage not found] name ONE time when you have been a help to rand in a fight, min. scratch that, name one time you have not been an ACTIVE HINDRANCE to rand in a fight. min is also a character i am constantly asking “what DO you do successfully?”

“she loved him. she hadn’t chosen to do so, but her heart - or the pattern, or the creator, or whatever was in charge of these things - had made the decision for her.” really? because i seem to remember you going “well, since i’m fated to love rand, i’ve decided to suddenly be madly in love with him and chase him down and force him to love me back, even though he’s not my type and i don’t find anything about him attractive.” also, min-avi contrast again: earlier avi thought “i love rand because *i* choose to, not because fate said so” and here min thinks “i didn’t choose to love rand but fate forced me to.” exactly why avirand works as a Fated Romance and min/rand doesn’t!!!

“and now she wouldn’t change her feelings if she could. if it meant danger, if it meant suffering the looks of men in the camp, if it meant...sharing him with others.” you count having to share your boyfriend with others one of the top 3 worst things about dating him?? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING IN A POLY RELATIONSHIP!!!!!! also this reference to the looks in the camp + the earlier thing about them calling her rand’s pet + “what did it matter if soldiers in the camp didn’t know what her value was?” (sidenote, what IS your value, min? what DO you do successfully?) she is trying soooo hard to feel oppressed over some people in the camp Hurting Her Feelings, when this is literally the first time she’s ever gone anywhere and not had everybody in the vicinity fawning over her as the dragon’s girlfriend and granting her privileges. even the maidens loved her and encouraged her relationship with rand despite having previously chased off every woman but avi who tried to get close to him!

min tries to get rand to tell her what’s bothering him, he says “no you’ll think i’m mad,” she’s like i swear i won’t just tell me, so he tells her about lews therin’s voice and how he tries to seize saidin etc, and she immediately thinks “oh my god he’s mad” lmao god. at least she doesn’t say so to his face though.

min tells rand that he has to destroy the seals because “i’ve been reading herid’s books all this time, and i believe that’s what he meant by ‘clearing away the rubble.’ in order to rebuild the dark one’s prison, you will first need to open it. clear away the patch made on the bore.” not to flex on min but i figured that out the MOMENT i first read herid’s note about clearing away the rubble. i could’ve told rand this like 6 books ago. so min has now done one (1) thing successfully, but it was a thing that anybody who can read could’ve figured out, so i’m not counting it.

while rand is snuggling up with min in the cozy bedroom that they share, alone, every single night, aviendha is out in the night all alone exhausted and humiliated and doing all her useless punishments. have i mentioned that i hate it here? because i hate it here.

“[rand] was sleeping now, though aviendha had been forced to mute her bond in the middle of her night’s punishment, lest she endure sensations that she’d rather have avoided. at least, she’d rather have avoided them secondhand.” she’s out here all alone in the middle of the night having the worst time and then being forced to feel her boyfriend fucking his other girlfriend, and never even getting to say a single word to him herself let alone sleep with him!! and since they’ve been in the camp together for “some time” and rand has been spending all his time with min, i’m guessing avi has had to put up with this constantly! it’s so fucking unfair! and yet MIN is the one complaining about having to share!! and let’s not forget that there’s no way for the min-rand bond to ever be masked, since it seems that the warder can’t mask it and the bondholder can’t mask it without channeling ability (rand does mention earlier in this book that neither he nor min has ever been able to make the masking trick work), which is exactly why min has no business being a bondholder - anyway, this means that even if rand and avi ever DID get time alone together, which they never do, but if they did, they would literally never be able to get privacy from min! she would be there in the bond feeling the whole thing, unlike avi being able to respectfully mask her own bond when rand’s with min! i hate it here!!!!

okay, finally time for my rant: avi not wanting to be with rand until she’s found herself and found her honor by becoming a full wise one would’ve been adorable and a great character arc for her if it had been introduced way earlier, but to my memory we have never ONCE heard a WORD of anything like this before, either in avi’s few povs up til now or in any dialogue she’s had with rand or about rand with elayne. she’s never given any indication that she can’t be with rand until she’s a wise one and can bring honor to their relationship - true, it could be a new thing borne by the recent shame she feels over the wise ones’ inexplicable punishments of her, but the way she thought about it in her first chapter made it sound like her being with rand hinges on her becoming a wise one, not just on figuring out what she did wrong and getting her honor back. either way, i’m pretty sure this is just being suddenly thrown in here as a convenient excuse for min to remain rand’s exclusive relationship even though another of his girlfriends is literally right there in the same location and plotline and should by all rights be getting some time and emotional development with him 🙄🙄🙄

like it just doesn’t make sense, at this point avi has already bonded with rand (i initially mistyped this as “boned” and that is also something she has already done with rand jkfg) and they’ve told each other they love each other and aviendha told him that she would pick up a bridal wreath if he laid one at her feet even if that’s not the way things are done, so this just feels like a bizarre out-of-the-blue relationship regression. they got into a committed relationship in WH and now they’re suddenly back at square one as if that never happened, and they don’t even TALK to each other in any of these scenes! all because the narrative wants rand to have 3 girlfriends but does not actually know how to handle non-monogamous relationships and would implode if he was actively involved in 2 relationships at the same time in the same place, rather than always being just with 1 woman at a time because the other 2 aren’t around. and because min would have absolutely nothing to do in the story if she didn’t get to be plastered to rand’s side 24/7, so of course he can’t spend any time alone with avi and apart from min 🙄 god forbid her sole narrative function, Rand’s Emotional Support, be shared with a second character!

i will probably be blaming “the narrative” in this context most of the time now since i don’t know what things were or weren’t in rj’s notes so for a lot of stuff idk whether to blame him or sanderson lmao

oh, and the second reason for the narrative needing an excuse for avi to not spend time with her own boyfriend despite being in the same location as him for several chapters is because if she got to talk to him alone and for longer than 10 seconds she would tell him about elayne’s pregnancy straightaway and of course rand is not narratively allowed to know that yet because it would interfere with his downward spiral no-hope-for-the-future arc. ARGH!!!!! i can’t even blame avi for not telling him because this is so clearly Hand Of Author. yes i will continue to blame min for not telling him even though that’s also Hand Of Author, thanks for asking <3

speaking of rand’s downward spiral arc, it is VERY interesting how, in order for that arc to occur, he has to be cut off from all his relationships........except min. rand knowing about the babies or spending time with elayne, avi, mat, perrin, tam, the maidens, etc. would interfere with his downward spiral arc, but spending time with min doesn’t. so, far from the “min is the only one who Understands and Supports him!” take that most of fandom has, what i’m concluding from this is that min is rand’s only loved one who is narratively allowed to spend time with him during his downward spiral arc because she doesn’t hinder that arc, in other words, rand’s mental health and emotional wellbeing are not helped by his relationship with min. like, the fact that the point in the series when min became rand’s sole major relationship and emotional connection just so happens to coincide with the point when rand’s mental health began taking a sharp downwards turn...........i am looking.

anyway. overall, so far i actually haven’t noticed a huge difference in terms of writing style between sanderson and rj, aside from the occasional word choice or turn of phrase that feels maybe a bit more modern/less formal than what rj would’ve written. but definitely nothing that’s jarring, and SO FAR i’m honestly not sure i would’ve noticed there was an author switch if i hadn’t known and the book hadn’t said so. the only big things are a) while avi’s dialogue is the same, her narration in this book sounds like any other character’s narration whereas i think i remember her narration in rj books being very formal (using few to no contractions, for example) in the same way her dialogue is, however we only got a couple brief avi povs in rj books so i could be misremembering. and b) lots more pov-hopping, every chapter is a different pov character and often there are multiple pov characters within a single chapter, whereas in rj’s books there tended to be long chunks with one character/plotline at a time. the pros of the change are that it helps pacing feel faster and that if there’s a certain pov character you don’t like you’re not stuck with them for long. oh the dread i would feel when i checked upcoming chapters and realized i was about to become mired in 100 pages of perrin jfkgjh but the cons are that it can feel disjointed/jumping around too much and we don’t really have time to settle into any of the plotlines since we dart between them so quickly. and also that it makes it harder for me to decide where to cut off my recaps, which is why this post is so long, i kept thinking “oh just one more chapter and then i’ll post it” lmao

#if this post is extra salty it is probably because i don't have my emotional support elayne to soothe me jfkgjh #'min fans had best stay away' is a warning that applies to all my recap posts but this one especially. because i'm extra salty #wot #wot book spoilers

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nono-bunny · 2 years

Text

Started playing Cupid Parasite yesterday, and as per my nature I'm playing by following both a guide and the most common recommended route order, so it's gonna be like. A LONG while until I fully get the answers to absolutely all the mysteries of the game, but!

I thought it might be fun, if not for others to read then at the very least for sake of posterity as something I can to come back to in the future, to log my thoughts, feelings, and predictions!

So: let's get started!

I called Allan being an incubus from essentially the very beginning. I don't even know what about him gave it away so quickly for me, but. Yah I suspected it long before he even mentioned Jupiter or specifically seeking out Lynette

So like, I imagine we're all in agreement about Minerva ABSOLUTELY being what's-her-face Love-Sensei ™ who's just out here being the ultimate wingwoman for Kyu-chan, right??

The translation sucks SO bad it physically hurts me sometimes lmao. Also the inconsistencies in how they translate things have me constantly doing a double take, istg wtf the least they could have done was settle on one way to portray the Shotafication™ of Glamor Parasite (whose name I'm totally blanking on rn for whatever reason??? Give me a break alright, I'm not even past the common route 😭)

The secret route is just Chii, right? Like. It's absolutely just Chii becoming a person called Peter and talking in the funniest "How do you do, fellow humans" pattern. Like initially I thought it might be Owen because voiced bishi but then I realized that literally everyone in this game is gorgeous so. Yeah now I'm like 99% certain secret route is just Kyu-chan getting together with her fucking pet of 8 years or something lmao that should be. Interesting, can't wait for him to absolutely lose it on her for using him as a neck massager lmaoo

Incidentally, no clue who Chii is a spy for, but he ABSOLUTELY is one, or at least, started out as such. No clue what made him take human form either, but like. Ya'll, I'm certain he's Peter. You can't fool me with that generic white text layout, game!!

Wtf is up with that weird lady in disguise and when is Kyu-chan going to realize it's either her absentee mom or her work partner or whatever the fuck Hera is to her, because like. Yeah that lady is absolutely not just some random human, she's either Hera or Venus

Oh god this game has me all mixed up with it using both roman and greek names, ffs it's a nightmare keeping it straight in my head even though I've always been into mythology

Raul, my bro, I get you. We can be special interest pals!!! I'll geek out about it with you and won't slap you for your bad takes!! His "parasite issue" really does feel like it's just him being ND, huh?

Minerva gave SUCH strong Biblical Snake vibes when we first meet her and I HATE it because I think she's either managed to convince me she's just an ostracized goddess who seeks change and is only playfully spiteful in a non harmful way but. Honestly she may very well turn out to have just been playing 4d chess using Kyu-chan the entire time, it'd suck tho because I LOVE MY GEEKY AUNT/MOTHER FIGURE/BGF (BEST GODDESS FRIEND)

Consequently, Mars is either just an asshole of an old fart for no reason or Minerva is just. Genuinely bad news and he was actually the good one all along. UNLIKELY, but always possible. Also did he fucking kidnap Kyu-chan??? What's her relationship with her mom even like??

The game gets 10/10 for style, like 4/10 for being practical and easy to see. Fr good god I have to zoom enhance AND squint from like one cm away from the screen to see some of the stuff. Same goes for the sound design, tbh- mixing is a mess and I'm constantly fiddling with the settings, but by god(s) does everything sound GREAT! Also the car honk absolutely sends me every time I hear it, and that's. A lot fjxjksbwjz

It's so much fun!!! Truly living up to its name as a romcom so far but I'm not an idiot and I can sense the angst coming from a mile away lmao

That's all I can recall for now, might repost with more stuff or updates later on, might not, tbh I just wanna get back to the game, so!!!

Edit because literally as soon as I opened up the game I remembered something else:

Oh god Gill is REALLY toeing the line between absolutely stealing my heart and earning a restraining order lmao

#cupid parasite

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dreamescapeswriting · 4 years

Text

SKZ Reaction | Protective Because Of Sasaengs

Chan:

It was the usual crowd of people that followed the boys around but something just felt off today, Chan was holding on your hand tightly while his laptop was in his carry on in the other. He was always the protective one in the relationship but lately, with the newest comeback things had gotten a little crazier, fans were starting to act insane and more Sasaengs were starting to crawl out of the woodwork.

"Chan," You whispered as he tightened his grip on your hand, the place was overly crowded and you could see that the other boys were starting to worry about it as well.

"I know," He whispered back to you making sure to hold you as close as he could get you. He didn't want anything to happen to you while he was responsible for you and he also didn't want someone to grab onto you. While he was busy focusing on you he'd neglected to cling tightly enough onto the case he was carrying his laptop in and someone snatched it.

"Babe!" Chan yelled trying to stop you running after them, his arms grasped you tightly to stop you rushing away so that the security guards could do their jobs. Your breathing was heavy as you got angrier at the thought of someone coming that close to Chan like that, they could have grabbed him or one of the boys, seriously hurt them.

"Hey, look at me. Look." Chan pulled you behind the barriers were fans were being held off from and he forced you to look into his eyes.

"I'm okay, look." You stared up into his eyes as he cupped your cheeks, though his face was covered by the mask he was wearing you could tell he was doing his best to keep a smile on his face and keep you calm throughout all of this.

"We're all okay," You stared into his eyes trying to search for any sign that he wasn't but you could read him like a book, his laptop was returned instantly and you both began walking towards the terminal you needed.

Minho:

Your day had been amazing, not a single person had noticed that you and Minho had taken the day off to go shopping and doing basic tourist things together. It felt like a regular date with him rather than having to sprint away from destinations hand in hand trying to avoid crazy fans who stalked him.

"We should do it again," You said softly as you sat in the back of Soul Cup cafe waiting for your drinks, the date was slowly coming to an end and you were going to have one more drink before you left him.

"I think I have another day off next week, I'll ask Chan when I get back to the dorms." He sat down in front of you so he was facing away from the entrance so no one would notice him if they happened to come into the cafe.

"Yeah that sounds-" You stopped yourself talking when the bell above the door began to chime and crowds of people begin to walk in and began looking around, you immediately knew one of them. You'd spotted her around all day but thought it would just be a coincidence but now it was positive to you that she was a Sasaeng.

"Minho..." You whispered looking at him as she spotted you in the corner together,

"We need to leave, can you get out any other way?" He nodded his head explaining the back exit for employees and you nodded at him.

"Go, go and I'll figure out how to take care of these-" You were pulled out of your seat by him as he rushed you both towards the back exit. He wasn't about to let you try and stop Sasaengs when some security guards could barely do that,

"Just run and don't look back." He chuckled holding onto your hand tightly and headed in the direction of a car park where he could lose them all.

Changbin:

You hated when the crowds picked up whenever you were out with the guys, the last time it got bad like this your bag was stolen because they thought it would have something inside of it but luckily Changbin had thought ahead and told you to put your things in his pockets. This time however someone had just made off with your phone and Changbin was left trying to get a security guard to find it.

"It has everything on their Changbin, your number, the boys, everything." You panicked looking around, you were about ready to kick ass for someone coming that close to you and Changbin when they weren't supposed to. People had been grabbing onto the guys all morning and trying to pull them closer but luckily security had been doing a decent job up until now.

"What if they get your number!?" You panicked looking back at him, his hands cupped your face forcing you to look at him instead of around at the crowds of people.

"Look at me, if they have my number I can change it. That's changeable." He promised you, you knew how much Sasaengs terrified him as well, you'd seen it when one of them had followed him and Jeongin home one night.

"I just can't stand the thought of someone-" You were cut off when your phone was being held up in front of your face, a girl - that couldn't have been any older than 15 was holding it up for you.

"We saw a Sasaeng running off with it so we chased after her," You turned to see three girls all aged around the same age and you smiled thanking them as you took your phone back from them.

"I owe you guys one," You yelled as you began moving with Changbin and the boys again.

Hyunjin:

People had been crowding around the JYP building for hours, you should have expected it since one of the Sasaengs that constantly followed Hyunjin had tweeted out where he was and who he was with - you. STAY had been positive about the relationship finally being out in the open since JYP was hardly one to allow their Idol's to date, they were happy to see Hyunjin was happy with you. However, Sasaengs hadn't taken it great and were using their platforms to tweet out where you both were at every minute of every day.

"We have to get home, the car is outside alright?" You said to Hyunjin, you were ready to protect him through everything and if that meant standing on one side of him while a guard took the other you were willing to do that.

"Hold my hand alright?" You knew how nervous he got around things like this so you wanted to make sure he was going to be okay with everything happening,

"Lets go." You whispered moving in time with the giant guard, as soon as you stepped outside screaming started, begging for pictures and flashing lights. You weren't used to any of it at all but you kept your head down trying to head towards the car when a cup of freezing liquid splashed across your top.

"Car now." Hyunjin ordered pushing you faster and away from the Sasaeng that had thrown the cold drink over you, a couple of them started yelling about how it was your fault they weren't allowed to have photos when it had been the policy that he wasn't allowed to stop at all.

"You alright?" You asked as soon as the door shut and he shook his head at you,

"I'm supposed to be the one asking you that not the other way around." He sighed, searching through his bag for a shirt that you could change into.

Jisung:

Jisung span you around under his arm before pulling you back towards him and smiling down at you, even though the mask covered his face you could still sense how big his smile was.

"You alright? You've been weird all night." By all night he meant the last couple of hours, you'd snuck out of the dorms together at 3 in the morning to go to a local 24-hour store and get ice cream. It was one of the best times to get out because no one would suspect it, no one could guess that you'd been wandering around the streets together. He was in his usual disguise though - hoodie, baseball cap and a giant mask to cover his face.

"I just feel like we're being followed, ever since we left the store." You whispered looking around for any sign that it was true, it wasn't uncommon for Sasaeng's to follow Jisung around but since it had come out that you were together as a couple they'd began following you as well.

"We're alone-" He stopped midsentence when he heard the familiar sound of a camera shutter, that was all it took. You took his hand in yours and began walking in the opposite direction of the dorms, you weren't about to get him and the boys caught up in all of this. You didn't want to have their dorms address spread all over the internet, so you took Jisung through alleyways and back streets to get out of the way of the Sasaeng, you'd take these routes a lot over the last year of dating Jisung, you knew what you were doing.

Felix:

You knew flying with the boys was never easy but you would have thought it would calm down once you were on the plane but it hadn't. Some Sasaeng's had managed to get tickets onto the same flight as you, Felix and Chan. You were heading to Australia for part of their time off but people had managed to find out your flight times despite it being as early in the morning as possible and booked under false names they'd found you.

"They're right in front of us babe." You wanted to do something to protect both Felix and Chan but they didn't seem that phased by it, they had been in the game a lot longer than you had but it didn't stop you worrying about Felix.

"I know but I need to use the restroom, I can't hold it for a 10 hour long flight." You sighed watching as he got up from the chair and made his way down, the moment the fan saw him she got up from her seat. You went to stand up when Chan laid his hand on yours and shook his head, instantly a flight attendant and a security guard was escorting the ''fan'' back to her seat and making sure that Felix was on his own the entire time. They really would stop at nothing to be alone with the boys and it scared the hell out of you,

"See, told you it was fine," Felix smirked at you sitting down next to you again and laying his head on your shoulder. They were probably going to sleep through the whole flight but you couldn't. You felt like you were going to stay awake the entire time just to keep an eye on both of the boys.

Seungmin:

There was a huge crowd gathering around outside the small game shop that you and Seungmin had walked into, you were hunting for a new game for your switch and Seungmin decided to tag along with you - it seemed like no problem at first but then people started to recognise him and tweet out about where he was.

"Y/n?" You looked up at the guard that was manning the door of the shop making sure that no one else had access into the building,

"Hmm?" He pointed at one of the girls standing at the door, she was wearing one of the shortest dresses you'd ever seen and waved at you.

"Claims she knows you?" You shook your head, you'd never seen her before in your life but Seungmin had,

"She's one of them," Was all he said to the guard before moving you away from the door.

"Sasaeng? They're everywhere." You whispered wrapping your arm around Seungmins waist and moving further into the store not wanting to be stared at by anyone that was looking through the window. They'd been getting creative lately, instead of just following the boys around they'd started to follow you hoping that you would lead them back to your apartment or the dorms but you never did. You took shortcuts to lose them but if you couldn't find a way to lose them you wouldn't go home, you'd go somewhere more public where plenty of people could see you and you could lose them in the crowds. All you wanted to do was protect Seungmin from them but some of them were insane.

I.N:

You and Jeongin had lost the guard when you were fighting to get out of the huge crowd that had been to swarm around you both. You'd gone on a day trip to a small mall thinking it would be easy enough not to be spotted but all it took was one fangirl seeing you and it was all over the internet, where you were, what he was wearing so they could easily find you.

"I think we lost them." You breathed heavily bending over on your knees to try and catch your breath, Jeongin held onto your hand tightly trying to keep hold of you in case they suddenly found you again when you heard a camera. You turned to see one of the girls you'd seen a million times, she was always around no matter what, she'd followed you both onto a plane once.

"Jeongin, behind me." You whispered you weren't sure what you were going to do but him being behind you felt like one of the best ideas for now.

"Y/n, you can't-" Her hand reached out to touch him as she started yelling about how much she loved him so you pushed him back away from her before pulling him into a run and began sprinting through the mall together.

"Can you remember the way back to the car?" You asked while running up a set of stairs and towards the in building car park, no one had followed you out yet which was a good sign.

"Yeah, fourth floor." You got into one of the elevators instead and hit the fourth-floor button when you noticed all of them lighting up to say someone was pushing it,

"Out and run," You told him not to look back until he got to the car and that you would just meet him up there.

"All clear?" He asked as you got into the car panting heavily,

"Took them to the top floor and said that you were in the farthest car away, then I ran down the stairs and they didn't follow me." He sighed bringing you into a hug as you waited for the guard to figure out where you'd gone.

Tagline:

@snowy-meowl @kneel-begyourpardon @jooniesdarlingdimples @yunhoesss

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iloveitwhen · 4 years

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You want angst i have arrived!!!

Please can Adrian find a lost child turms out the child belongs Damien and mari extra salt if the child looks more like mari

So like Adrien doesn't find Marinette's lost child.... I totally forgot about that part of the ask....😭😭 Sorryyyyyy, i hope you still like it!

10 years ago

“I’m fine,” he snaps, “stop dotting on me, what are you, my mother?” He turns and storms away instantly regretting his words but not as strongly as he was annoyed by hers.

“I don’t understand,” Marinette says so softly that Adrien slows to a stop. “Why are you acting like this?” Marinette walks around to face him, trying to catch his eye. “I mean I thought we were happy, I thought you were happy?”

Adrien can’t look her in the eye, he can’t tell her he only started dating her to get over Ladybug, which had been failing miserably for months. At first he was happy, well she mostly just made him feel not so alone and that was everything he could have asked for, until he realized that that wasn’t enough, it wasn’t love, only comfort. Isn’t love supposed to hit you like a ton of bricks? Isn’t it supposed to take your breath away? Make you feel an abundance of emotions like nothing else ever could? Ladybug took his breath away, made him feel things, and Marinette? She was just a placeholder, he was trying to shove her in the hole that Ladybug had left in his heart, but she didn’t fit.

“Look at me.” Marinette doesn’t sound angry, just sad, defeated.

“I don’t think this is going to work,” he blurts, finally looking into Marinette’s eyes just in time to see her breath catch, her hand to fly to her mouth in shock, and her eyes water. Just in time to see her break.

“What?” she chokes out, “why?”

He shook his head, he knew even before they started dating it wouldn’t work but he “tried” anyways for Marinette’s sake, even though the object of his affection was really Ladybug. And of course he knew it was bad to flirt with another woman while he was dating Marinette but it wasn’t like it was hurting anyone. Besides, if he actually was able to pull Ladybug then it wouldn’t really matter in the end, sure Marinette would be a little hurt and he’d feel bad about it but it never would have worked out between them anyways.

“I’m in love with somebody else.” Adrien may not be the best person in the world but he at least can be honest, he really does appreciate Marinette, but the longer he stayed with her the more she reminded him of Ladybug, only driving the stake deeper in his heart that he wasn’t with her, only Marinette.

“Who?” she demands.

Adrien laughs, even he could hear the arrogance in the sound. “Why? What are you going to do, attack her?” For a moment she looks shocked but it quickly morphs to anger.

“I would like to know, Agreste, because I think I deserve it after all this time we’ve been together. I can’t believe that you’d really think that I’d-”

“It’s Ladybug,” he cuts off her inevitable rant but immediately regrets it.

“What?”

“I’m in love with Ladybug.” No turning back now.

“Adrien, you don’t know Ladybug, how the fu** are you in love with her?”

“We used to meet up,” well it’s not necessarily a lie, “she would always be there for me, she made me feel special, like I was her favorite civilian. We would have long talks about everything and nothing,” that’s how it used to be anyways.

“You’re lying.” Marinette is no longer crying but her eyes are red and she looks. so. angry.

Adrien shakes his head even though he is partly lying, “I’m not, but she told me how she was in love with Chat Noir,” oh how he wished that were true, “so I pushed myself away, but clearly it didn’t work. I’m still in love with-”

“Stop. Just stop.” This time Marinette cut him off. Looking up from the ground Adrien sees an expression he’s never seen on her face. Disappointment, contempt, just like the way his father looks at him. “I can’t believe this,” she laughs, empty of any humour, and shakes her head. Heading back over to the table she left her things at, she continues to laugh while repeating, “I can’t believe this.” Swinging her purse around her shoulder she grabs her keys and turns back to him. “This whole time. I can’t believe I've never seen it before now. I was so blind. So blind.”

“So you believe me?” Adrien knows it’s not really important but she was acting weird, crazy even.

“Do I believe that you’re in love with Ladybug. No. No, I don’t think you’re in love with her, I think you’re obsessed with her. I think you need therapy. I think you need to take a look at yourself and realize that love goes both ways, Adrien. Ladybug doesn’t love you back, never has, and never will.” Anger swelled in his chest but she yanks the door open and looks back one last time, “I can’t believe I gave my heart to a psychopath. You know, I really hope you get over her, Adrien. Because she will never. Ever. have you and you will never be happy with anyone else.” She scoffs and rolls still red eyes, “turns out I was blinded by you like you were blinded by her,” she says before stepping out and slamming the door shut.

Marinette never looked at him the same way again, gone was the soft adoration in her eyes and replaced with disgust and anger and disappointment, much like the way Ladybug did, if only she could get over her unnecessary negative feelings over him and love him as he loved her.

---

It was amazing how lonely one person could be, Adrien had only returned to Paris for the 10th anniversary of Hawkmoth’s defeat and it was a bigger celebration than usual and festivities were already beginning; but Adrien only felt a gaping hole in his chest from the memories of broken relationships with friends, his only sense of family, and regret. He took in the decorations hanging above doors and the happy squeals of the children in the park. He sat on the end of a nearly empty bench, flashing the pregnant woman on the other end a quick, polite smile not bothering to really look at her, only to reassure that he only meant to sit and not have a conversation with a stranger.

As he settled and saw all the happy families bustling about the familiar thought of being alone re-emerged, Adrien had simply accepted that he was built and born to be lonely and had accepted that a long long time ago. He accepted it the night Ladybug and Chat Noir defeated Hawkmoth and out of necessity he had revealed himself to the world to avoid suspicion of any involvement of his father’s crimes. Now he was invited every year to give a speech but every year he declined, holding out that Marinette would join him, would reveal to the world that she was Ladybug, but she had dropped any and all communication with him so he always said no. It was silly thinking back to that night, at first he was confused why Ladybug wasn’t surprised in the slightest when he revealed himself and, according to her, only by the goodness of her word revealed herself to him. Although he suspected it was more to watch him suffer than anything else.

“Oof!” Adrien’s thoughts scatter when a little girl trips and falls right in front of him.

“ARGHH I coming for youuuuu!” A man’s voice growls out in a playful manner and Adrien turns his head to look at the source of the sound, it’s a rather handsome man with green eyes that were striking against his dark skin.

The little girl giggles profusely and scrambles up, quickly hiding behind the arm of the bench and using Adrien as a shield from what he assumed was her father.

Adrien chuckled and glanced over at the girl, about to make a comment to her when his words died in his throat. The girl had a familiar splitting smile with twin pigtails and blue blue blue eyes. Save for the tan skin she was the spitting image of one Marinette Dupain-Cheng, of Ladybug.

Adrien is staring at her and she notices and her brow furrows.

“You’re not my mommy,” she says as if he had somehow replaced her or she was considering her mother really was him and had disguised herself somehow.

A giggle sounds from the other side of the bench. Adrien whips his head to the woman to find her laughing into her hand. She looked different than he remembered but it was unmistakably Marinette, she had a bun atop her head with bangs that framed her face and a sundress with a very pregnant belly.

“Marinette?”

A happy squeal right in his ear sounded, he flinched and looked over to see the man had snuck around the bench and scooped the girl up in his arms. “No! Papa put me down! Put me down!” she laughed, trying in vain to get out of his grasp while he placed obnoxiously loud kisses all over her face. The man turned to Adrien with a laugh and an easy smile on his lips.

“Sorry about that-” recognition flitted across the man’s features as he cut himself off, his face falling to a sneer, as if Adrien was scum of the earth, as if the man could not think of a better pass time than to kill Adrien. It was a terrifying change of demeanor, Adrien desperately felt the need to get out of this man’s sight before he got murdered.

“Damian,” Marinette’s melodic voice sliced through the tension but the man only walked towards her, not dropping his gaze from Adrien.

Adrien tried to look anywhere else but unfortunately found that the mini-Marinette had developed the same look and was glaring at Adrien.

Marinette had stood and placed a hand on the arm of the man to placate him before turning to Adrien with a small smile.

“Hello, Adrien.” He had imagined this moment so many times. So many times. And this was never in any of his imaginations. Marinette with a family that wasn’t his. “It’s good to see you.”

“Really?” he blurted, he needed to know if it was true, had she really thought of him as much as he thought of her?

“Of course.”

Of course. Of course. Of course.

“This is husband, Damian-”

“Damian Wayne,” Damian shifted his daughter to his left hip and thrust his hand out. Adrien reached his hand out and the other man practically crushed his bones with an unnecessarily strong grip.

“-and our daughter, Bridgette.” Adrien glanced at the girl to give her a polite smile but she was still glaring at him the same way her father was. It was quite unnerving.

“She’s the spitting image of you,” he tries awkwardly.

“And she’s got her father’s glare it seems,” she chuckles and Adrien tries to laugh along but it sounds much too forced. “I really do hope you’ve been doing well, Adrien. I know we didn’t leave on the best of terms but I hope you’ve been blessed with happiness as I have.” She contemplates him for a short moment. “We both deserve it after-” she waves her hand through the air gesturing towards the festivities, “-everything.” He knew she was referring to their time as Chat Noir and Ladybug but he only thought of how much he couldn’t have happiness after all the things that happened in his life outside the suit. “We have to get going but it was nice to see you.” She sends him one last smile and turns away, easily slipping into her husband’s side, who was Damian freaking Wayne, CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, and walks away. Again.

Adrien could never compare, and he knew it.

He lamely calls out, “It was good to see you too,” before collapsing back onto the bench and takimg a deep shuddering breath.

Ok i know he didn't find a lost child but I don't want to rewrite it😭😭 I hope it still checks the rest of the boxes!

#if someone semds another ask for the same thing i will write it correctly #i swear #damian x marinette #maribat #adrien salt #adrien is just dumb mostly #and selfish and dumb #anyways i hope you have a wondeful day #also my asks are now anonomous i didnt realize it wasnt before #asks #my asks

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guacam011y · 4 years

Text

***SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 5 OF WANDAVISION***

HOLY SHITE MY MIND IS BLOWN

TOMMY AND BILLY CRYING

“Do you want me to take that again?” “Take it from the top?”

Agnes knows ! Tiger - Ralph

“Dark liquor” Vision being concerned

Billy and Tommy aged up?!

I DO NOT TRUST HAYWARD

SCARLET WITCH - TALKING ABOUT HOW WANDA DOESN’T HAVE A CODENAME

SIS STRAIGHT UP TOOK VISIONS CORPSE

HEX — HER POWERS GET REFERRED TO AS HEX POWERS SOMETIMES IN THE COMICS

CAPTAIN MARVEL REFERENCE

NORM SAYING NONE OF IT IS REAL

SPARKY THE DOG - VISION HAD A STAND ALONE AND STOLE A DOG

HER ACCENT

LAGOS

SHE DOESNT KNOW HOW ANY OF THIS STARTED IN THE FIRST PLACE

EVAN PETERS AS QUICKSILVER

DARCY GOING “SHE RECAST PIETRO?” MOOOD

X-MEN, START TO THE MULTIVERSE?!

WANDA CAN’T BE THE ONLY ONE CONTROLLING IT

IS MONICA MAD AT CAROL???

MONICA X DARCY?! WHAT A POWER COUPLE THAT WOULD BE

SIS REALLY ENDGAME - ENDGAME ENDED WITH TONY’S FUNERAL AND WANDA PROBS WENT STRAIGHT FROM THERE AND STOLE HER DEAD BF’S CORPSE (can’t really blame her, it looked like they were trying to experiment on Vis and could it be Hayward behind it?)

WHO WAS THAT ENGINEER THAT MONICA WAS GOING TO CONTACT?

BABY VISION

AND AGNES DEFINITELY KNOWS SOMETHING

DARCY FINALLY GOT HER COFFEE

SO VIS SAID THAT WANDA COULD’VE MADE EVERYTHING SUBCONSCIOUSLY AND THAT OVER TIME SHE BECAME AWARE OF IT, AND SIS DEFO HAS SOME CONTROL BUT IT’S NOT ALL HER. I THINK AGNES IS AGATHA HARKNESS AND EITHER MEPHISTO IS BEHIND IT OR IT’S NIGHTMARE AND THEY’VE MAYBE POWERED UP NIGHTMARE

***FURTHER UPDATES AND EASTER EGGS***

Auntie Agnes and Agnes saying she has a few tricks up her sleeve - we should definitely take note of that seeing as Agnes definitely has something to do with the whole situation

Wanda and Vision’s house changed again, being inspired by Family Ties, possibly Full House and Growing Pains

“Do you want me to take it from the top?” It seems as though when someone, this time Vision, steers away from the script, things either reset themselves or people become aware to some capacity, although Agnes probably already knows

Speaking of Growing Pains - It had a spin off called “Just the 10 of Us” in which the director for Wandavision, Matt Shakman, was apart of the cast - and seemingly also inspired the theme song for this week

We should definitely keep an eye on Monica and her potential for powers. With Maria last episode revealed to have gone by the name ‘Photon’ (which is a name that Monica uses as one of her aliases in the comics) and could inspire Monica’s name as she develops her powers - those scans didn’t look 100% normal. Monica has also used the Captain Marvel monicker in the comics

Wanda’s energy field and such being referred to as “Hex” short for Hexagon, could be a little nod to the comics where Wanda’s powers are sometimes called Hex powers

She’s never been referred to as the Scarlet Witch on the big screen - and it seems as though she soon may earn that code name

So we now know that Wanda stole Vision’s corpse from S.W.O.R.D, but did she actually re animate him fully? He’s still got the gem in the centre of his forehead, but the last time he had it was in Infinity War where it promptly got ripped out by Thanos - so has Wanda found her own way of reanimating him and he’s alive or is he dead and just a trick of the mind - though from other trailers/previews, Vis is seen trying to and looks successful at leaving Wanda’s barrier

They had a little call back to Captain America: Civil War with the Sokovia Accords, which were targeting the Avengers in general but were created when Wanda lost control of her powers and killed civilians

A little joke towards Vis as playing “Father Knows Best” in their little suburbia - Which was a sitcom that ran for 200 episodes in the 50’s

Sparky ! A little nod to the little green dog from the Walta and King comics run for Vision and unfortunately soon meets the same fate 💔

A little nod to Endgame when we hear from Monica that Wanda definitely could’ve taken down Thanos by herself had Thanos not rained fire - and Jimmy arguing that Captain Marvel could’ve just as easily done it - which leaves Monica with an angry look on her face

Good ol’ dial up internet

Can Vis “save” the residents of Westview? He can still seemingly interact with people’s minds, with or without the mind stone - Norm soon comes out of his trance as Vis snaps him out of it and asks to call his sister and that he has to save them all from “her” - now this “her” could be Wanda...but it could also be Agnes and then Vis shuts him down soon enough again and Norm goes back to his sit com self

Billy and Tommy are fully aware, or at least suspect Wanda’s abilities - after asking her to bring back Sparky from the dead and speaking of Billy and Tommy - could they be semi permanent fixtures in the MCU, it would help to introduce the Young Avengers eventually. They'll do Young Avengers at some point since Kang is supposed to be a thing in the third Ant-Man.

Teddy, unfortunately, I don't think will be here for a bit (I really hope he is though!). I think the guy they hired that everyone is rumoring to be Teddy might just be an episode about Billy coming to terms with his sexuality and Wanda and Vis learning to accept it in the way that era of tv they're in would go about with that kind of episode and the dude is just a dude - but again, I really hope it’s Teddy 😭

Wanda leaves the hex after a mini missile/plane tries to shoot at her - and she’s in her Scarlet Witch costume and is seemingly mostly back to her “normal self”, which includes her accent !

Lagos brand paper towels - “For when you make a mess you didn’t mean to” - a nod to Civil War again in which Wanda accidentally blew up a building in Lagos and caused the Sokovian accords to come to fruition

The mail man again - I also think he was in the commercial but anywho - “Your mom won’t let him go far” similar to “Much like she won’t let anyone leave” a potential nod to Wanda or Agnes not letting anyone leave?

“We can’t reverse death” and yet she brought Vision back - keeping in mind that he’s an android but still a little foreshadow to what happened at the end of the ep? Better yet, could Pietro coming back be a distraction for Wanda? Agnes or whoever introducing someone that Wanda lives in hopes that she won’t go full on breakdown superpowers or just to give her an attachment to Westview even more and make her not want to leave at all

“She recasted Pietro” EVAN ! I’m so pumped for this - it seems this could turn into the X-Men making their debut earlier than expected possibly? In any case, it’s a nice little Easter Egg to the previous Fox franchise of X-Men movies where Evan played Peter Maximoff “Quicksilver” alongside James McAvoy as Prof X, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and so many others - and with Deadpool being confirmed as Disney’s first R rated film, it seems Mutants are definitely on their way to the MCU

Agnes is definitely Agatha or a gender bent Nightmare

The way Billy shed himself and Tommy up was scary - definitely a little nod to his powers coming in

Multiple different perspectives of Wanda saying that Monica left

Red Hex dialled up to around light sources (computer, window, etc.)

Vision mentions reading Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man - which could refer to Mutants entering the MCU, Mutants being superior to humans

Agnes calls herself Auntie Agnes - in episode 2 during the title sequence in the grocery store there’s a product called ‘Auntie A’s Kitty Litter’

Agnes refers to herself as a Tiger and in the episode, there’s a Tiger on the dining table in the kitchen - could that be a listening device, her eyes and ears?

There are no other children in Westview - Billy and Tommy are immune because they have no prior trauma

Elizabeth Olsen’s photos are real and slightly altered with Sokovian flags in the background

In the birthday shot of Billy and Tommy, they have ‘1,2,3,4,5’ candles all on one cake

In the holiday photos, Vision goes from Turkey to Easter Bunny, to Santa and progressively gets more unhappy - realising he no longer wants to play along in Wanda’s Hex

During Monica’s callbacks to seeing Wanda’s pain inside her head, we see a new shot of Wanda crying - it looks like it’s around the time she stole Vision’s corpse, as the outfit she’s wearing is very similar, if not the same - could this be an after shot of when she’s trying to bring Vision back?

During the scene where we see the footage of Wanda stealing Vision’s corpse, the S.W.O.R.D logo that appears on the table has 8 stars around the rim of the logo but then has a 9th one in the middle - could this be a little Easter Egg to the nine realms of the Cosmos? And there’s also a map showing Cape Canaveral, could that be where S.W.O.R.D’s headquarters are?

Wanda and Pietro were born in 1989 to Irina and Oleg Maximoff - who were killed in an air raid when the twins were 10. In the comics, Wanda and Pietro were raised by Django and Maria Maximoff, before their true parentage was revealed as being the children of Magneto, however, in the comics this has been retconned so that Wanda and Pietro are no longer Mutants and the High Evolutionary had just disguised them as Mutants (something I think they should undo tbh - MARVEL, PLEASE MAKE WANDA AND PIETRO MUTANTS AGAIN!!!)

Speaking of the air raid, that was also referenced in Age of Ultron by Pietro and Wanda - “We were 10 years old, having dinner the four of us. And the first shell hits 2 floors below, makes a hole in the floor” - was the beeping Stark toaster be what that was referring to?

WHIH reappears for a brief cameo as the news service in the MCU - and Hayward cuts off Jimmy as he was trying to defend Wanda’s reputation, in which Jimmy then turns to Darcy and says “I try not to speak ill of people” Darcy then follows up with “Then allow me, Hayward’s a-“ and then she’s cut off by a shot back to Hayward saying the word “Terrorist” which would make sense as it seems with Vision’s corpse, he may have been trying to make sentient weapons and by subverting Vision’s will and blaming Wanda of doing the same. In the footage shown of Wanda stealing Vision’s remains, we see Vision broken up into parts and S.W.O.R.D seems to be experimenting on him and this seems to be the robotics/nanotech project that Hayward was referring to. Monica asks Hayward about the footage saying “When was this?” to which Hayward replies saying “9 days ago. Maximoff stormed our facility, stole Vision’s body and resurrected him” - this would mean that Wanda took Vision 2 weeks after the events of Endgame, about a week before Monica returned to S.W.O.R.D and Hayward didn’t tell her any of this and when he sent her in there, he knew exactly what he was doing - with her reputation after Civil War, this makes it easier for Hayward to paint her as the villain.

Back in Westview, Tommy wears red and Billy wears green - which are the colours that Wiccan and Speed wear in the comics, respectively. And it’s also the colours that Wanda and Vision are known for and appears quite a lot in their wardrobes

More in regards to Sparky, he was the synthezoid dog in Tom King’s run of Vision - the story being that he was originally a dog named Zeke who unfortunately passed away after digging up the Grim Reaper’s corpse and getting zapped. The Grim Reaper’s helmet appears during the title sequence of Episode 2 in the floorboards. Could Sparky have been trying to dig up a similar thing when he was caught by Agnes and consequently killed?

Monica mentions that she knows this aerospace engineer, they’re never shown but she is seen texting them. Could it be Reed Richards a.k.a Mr Fantastic? Hayward did mention that some astronauts used to work for S.W.O.R.D before a mission went haywire - though it seems a bit lacklustre to introduce such highly anticipated characters this way. Could it instead be the Skrull daughter of Talos that Monica befriended at the end of Captain Marvel? She mentioned that they had extraterrestrial allies in episode 4 working with her and Fury as apart of S.W.O.R.D - in the Spanish subtitles they use the feminine articles for this engineer - so I think it’s more likely to be Talos’s daughter

The board that we saw in Episode 4 now includes the mailman, drivers license and all - could he be Jimmy’s missing witness?

The tension in the room after Jimmy references Carol is similarly seen when in Spider-Man: Far From Home, where Peter asks Skrull Fury/Talos “How about Captain Marvel?” To which Talos replies “Don’t involve her name”. Fury, Monica and Talos were all on the side of the Skrulls by then end of Captain Marvel and the space station that Fury was on maybe apart of S.W.O.R.D. So did Carol betray them?

A slight reference to Captain America: The First Avenger is made when Monica pulls a Peggy Carter and shoots at something to see if it’s bulletproof, in Peggy’s case it was the iconic Captain America shield and in the case of Monica, it was her clothes that she was wearing after Wanda threw her out of the Hex

Abilash (Norm) never states that Wanda is the one that Vision has to save them from, it’s just “her” - could this instead be Agnes?

When Billy is training Sparky to sit, he puts the treat by his ear up to his temple - a future reference that Billy will one day share the same powers as his mum?

During the scene in which Wanda leaves the Hex briefly, she turns the guns onto Hayward but none are trained on Monica - she may still trust Monica slightly, whereas with Hayward, she slightly more pissed off because of what he was doing to Vision’s remains. And turning a bunch of guns on the people you don’t trust? Like father, like daughter as Magneto pulls a similar move in one of the X-Men films - Hopefully, the big cameo they keep teasing will be Ian McKellan as Magneto or the Magnus of this House of M adaptation

During when Agnes “found” Sparky, she says he died from eating too many leaves from her plants - in the Tom King Vision run, one of Vision’s kids ends up killing Sparky and sees inside his stomach that there’s a plant that Agatha Harkness grows in her garden

All the names that appear during the credits that Wanda tries to run to end the show and to stop Vision from talking are names of people who work on the actual Wandavision show itself

When Evan Peter’s version of Quicksilver shows up, he says “Does a long lost bro get to squeeze his sister to death or what?” I DO NOT TRUST THIS PIETRO - Similar to Wandavision, the Fox X-Men movies moved up decade by decade - First Class was in the 1960s, Days of Future Past was in the 1970s, Apocalypse was in the 1980s and Dark Phoenix was in the 1990’s - which would make even more sense as MCU! Pietro wasn’t born until 1989, whereas Peter was active during the 1980s. I reckon that this Pietro is Jimmy’s missing witness, Agnes’s husband Ralph and is disguising itself as a comforting presence to Wanda as Vision no longer brings comfort and is trying to bring Wanda back to reality - and when he shows up, the mirror in the background behind Wanda is slightly distorted but his hand looks red and in the shot as well, there seems to be a grey arm reaching towards Pietro - in the shot itself behind and in front of Wanda, there’s nothing there but in the mirror, there is! Either way, I do not trust this Pietro and it’s just an entity trying to give Wanda the last thing that could make her happy - but it won’t last, as everything is already breaking down around her.

I seriously seriously love this show so much 💙

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the-code-of-the-west · 2 years

Text

All NCIS rules

I've put all the rules from NCIS here with the names of who made that rule.

Rule #1 Never let suspects stay together. - Mike Franks

Rule #1 Never screw (over) your partner. - Gibbs

Rule #1 Never lie to Abby. - Abby

Rule #1 If it annoys you, kill it. - Ziva

Rule #1 Never sit on the sidelines when your people need you. - Tony

Rule #2 Always wear gloves at a crime scene. - Mike Franks

Rule #2 Remember Abby's birthday. - Abby

Rule #2 Attack first, ask questions later. - Ziva

Rule #2 If a sexually attractive female is involved in the case ALWAYS hit on her. - Tony

Rule #3 Don't believe what you're told. Double check. - Mike Franks

Rule #3 Never be unreachable. - Gibbs

Rule #3 Treat the team as a family: desertion is not premitted. - Abby

Rule #3 Drive fast, it's the best way to avoid roadside bombs. - Ziva

Rule #3 Never underestimate your opponent. - Tony

Rule #4 If you have a secret, the best thing is to keep it to yourself. The second-best is to tell one other person if you must. There is no third best. - Gibbs

Rule #4 Scientists do not rely on luck. - Abby

Rule #4 Knives don't run out of bullets. - Ziva

Rule #4 Always seek out a movie analogy. - Tony

Rule #5 You don't waste good. - Gibbs

Rule #5 Gibbs' gut is allowed to be lucky because he is not a scientist. - Abby

Rule #5 Take every opportunity to do a Tommy Lee Jones speech form the Fugitive. - Tony

Rule #6 Never say you're sorry. It's a sign of weakness. - Gibbs

Rule #6 Don't forget to defrag your computer. - Abby

Rule #6 When doing Tommy Lee Jones impressions, get the accent right. - Tony

Rule #7 Always be specific when you lie. - Gibbs

Rule #7 Trust the evidence. - Abby

Rule #7 Always defuse a situation with humor rather than resorting to authoritarianism. - Tony

Rule #8 Never take anything for granted. - Gibbs

Rule #8 Trust Gibbs. - Abby

Rule #8 Always make sure your work is done but make it look like you are just lazing around. - Tony

Rule #9 Never go anywhere without a knife. - Gibbs

Rule #9 Trust the team. - Abby

Rule #9 Always keep a spear. - Abby

Rule #9 If said work is not yet done, come back in the middle of the night to complete it. - Tony

Rule #9 Never ask a woman her weight on the first date. - Tony

Rule #10 Never get personally involved in a case (Season 16 Episode 13 "She", Gibbs burned this rule fine minutes before the end of said episode, so the rule is never mentioned as a rule after that). - Gibbs

Rule #10 Dress codes are for other people. - Abby

Rule #10 Do not fall in love when working undercover. - Tony

Rule #11 When the job is done, walk away - Gibbs

Rule #11 Be kind to your equipment-. / Always keep a spare (Caf-Pow) - Abby

Rule #11 Do not undercover posing as the boyfriend of anyone - Tony

Rule #12 Never date a coworker. - Gibbs

Rule #12 Be happy. - Abby

Rule #12 Be very careful whom you tounge-kiss: it might be a man in disguise. - Tony (I know for a fact that he made this rule after doing just that)

Rule #13 Never, ever involve lawyers. - Gibbs

Rule #13 Never pick on a probie when he is down. - Tony

Rule #14 Bend the line, don't break it. - Gibbs

Rule #14 Maintain the morale of the rest of your team, even when you have the sufficient experience to be really very worried about Gibbs. - Tony

Rule #15 Always work as a team. - Gibbs

Rule #15 Devolp a first name working relationship with the Director, but defer to Gibbs. - Tony

Rule #16 If someone think they have the upper hand, break it. - Gibbs

Rule #16 Don't drink the boss' coffee-ever. - Tony

Rule #18 It's better to ask forgiveness than ask permission. - Gibbs

Rule #20 Always look under. - Gibbs

Rule #22 Never, ever interrupt Gibbs in interrogation. - Gibbs

Rule #23 Never mess with a Marine's coffee if you want to live. - Gibbs

Rule #27 There are only two ways to follow someone. 1st way - they never notice you; 2nd way - they only notice you. - Gibbs

Rule #28 If you need help, ask! - Gibbs

Rule #35 Always watch the watchers. - Gibbs

Rule #36 If it feels like you're being played, you probably are. - Gibbs

Rule #38 Your case, your lead. - Gibbs

Rule #39 There is no such thing as coincidence. - Gibbs

Rule #40 If it seems like someone's out to get you, they are. - Gibbs

Rule #42 Don't ever accept an apology from someone that just sucker-punched you. - Gibbs

Rule #44 First things first, hide the women and children. - Gibbs

Rule #45 Clean up your messes. - Gibbs

Rule #51 Sometimes - you're wrong. - Gibbs

Rule #62 Leave room for someone exiting the elevator. - Gibbs

Rule #69 Never trust a woman who doesn't trust her man. - Gibbs

Rule #70 Keep digging till you hit the bottom. - McGee

Rule #91: When you decide to walk away, never look back. - Gibbs

Rule #99 Never tell Gibbs he's been audited. - Gibbs

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multi-fandom-freak0221 · 4 years

Text

The Shell of a Girl that I Used to Know Well

Inspired by "Love of three" by @misashabunbun

Thank you @thestressmademedoit and @maleive07 for helping me find the fic.

So this turned out to be longer than I thought it would be (probably because I based it around like 5 songs) so I'll break it into parts and post each part separately. Oh and did I mention this is songfic? Because it's a songfic! No Felix yet, but you guys do see Peter but I surprise surprise I turned this into an OT4 pairing. Anyone wanna guess who the other lucky person is to date Mari, Peter and Felix? Also bonus points for anyone who can figure out Mari's stage name.

The song in this part in Stitches by Shawn Mendes and The Lonely by Christina Perri is where I got this parts title from. Also the song mentioned at the end is Partners in Crime by Set It Off ft Ashley Costello.

Marinette Dupain-Cheng was grateful for the quiet she found in what she was pretty sure was some kind of presentation room. There was a raised platform which she believes is supposed to be some kind of stage and a couple of tables with chairs surrounding them. She still has no idea how she got here, she was just trying to find some peace. She knew her pseudo Uncle and her friends meant well but they were suffocating her. It's been over a week since she left that bastard, not likely that he even noticed. Since Marinette has gotten to Stark Towers everyone has been treating her like she's about to break and she can't stand it. Yes she's hurt, but like give her a chance to fall apart before trying to shove her back together again! Marinette took a deep breath to calm herself as she sat on the little stage to work on the embroidery she was putting on the back of the blouse. She already had a full heart there but it was kind of plain. She wanted to add something but she didn't know what.

She sighed softly. At times she really missed Tikki being around to be her second opinion.

Ever since the defeat of Hawkmoth the kwamis asked to be renounced and to have their respective jewelry return the Miraculous box. They were working together to heal poor Nooroo and Dusuu. Even though Marinette had been able to fully fix the peacock Miraculous, as well as heal Emilie Agreste and Nathalie Sancour from the effects of using a broken Miraculous, the two kwamis had to deal with a significant amount of emotional trauma from the whole affair.

Even though the final battle had been won quietly without casualties it had taken a lot out of everyone who had been a part of it. Adrien's relationship with his father has been very strained to say the least. Even though Gabriel is doing his best to right his wrongs, it goes to say that the only reason Adrien even speaks to his father at all is because of his mother who is desperately trying to make up for years lost between the two of them.

While Marinette was trying to think of an idea for her embroidery she started humming a song she had heard recently on the radio. In her eyes it fit her past relationship with Damian Wayne perfectly. Soon enough she was singing softly.

I thought that I've been hurt before

But no one has ever left me quite this sore.

Even on their worst days Lila's lies, Alya's beratings, hell even Mlle. Bustier's looks of disappointment never hurt half as much as Damian's total disinterest did. She had cooked him a nice romantic dinner yet he barely acknowledged her. More interested in whatever, or should she say whoever, was on his phone. After 5 mins of trying to carry the conversation alone Marinette sighed and just decided to eat the meal she worked so hard on. After 10 mins of stiff silence in their shared apartment, only filled with the sounds of Marinette eating and Damian texting, the latter got up. Grabbing his coat he made his way to the door, barely turning his head towards his fiancee to call out "I've got to go. Something came up at work."

Marinette wasn't even shocked anymore, just resigned. Still she tried to reason with the man she no longer recognized. Sometimes she wonders if she ever truly knew him at all. "You just got here. Isn't there someone else who can handle it? You haven't even touched your dinner."

True to her words, the young heir's meal sat completely untouched, quickly cooling in the AC.

"Mari, you know these things are important. Not just anyone can handle them." Damian's words were patronizing at best. It frustrated the young designer, but she didn't let it show.

"Will you be back tonight?" She knew the answer but she asked anyway.

Damian hummed noncommittally as he walked through the door still looking at his phone and not the beautiful young lady in front of him. "Most likely not. Don't wait up for me." He quickly walked out, closing the door behind him. Marinette quickly placed her ear to the door as he walked away from the humble abode. She could hear him on the phone.

"Yeah. I'm on my way, gorgeous. I just left." Silence. "No, she doesn't suspect a thing." Nothing but his footsteps as he continues to leave unknowing of her distress behind the apartment "Perfect. The less you're wearing, the better."

Marinette crumbled to the floor after she could no longer hear him. She had suspected as much but that didn't make hearing it less painful.

Your words cut deeper than a knife

Now I need someone to breathe me back to life

She remembers the first time he truly yelled at her. The way he looked at her with disgust. The way she flinched away from his imposing figure and his cutting words. If tried hard enough she could delude herself that he was doing this out of her best interest. The illusion made even easier to believe by the way he apologized and hugged her after he stopped yelling. The way he told her he was worried about her going out and being made a target to Rogues because of her connection to him. The way he feared that he disguises wouldn't be enough even though he himself didn't recognize her at first when she walked back through the apartment door the day. She believed she was safer staying in the apartment because he said so and he only wants what's best for her. So eventually the walls of their apartment was all she saw 24/7. For her safety of course.

Got feeling that I'm going under

But I know I will make it out alive

If quit calling you my lover

And move on

Marinette's head was spinning. Or was it the room? Was she even breathing? She couldn't focus on any of that. All she could focus on was the picture sitting on the screen on her phone. The phone Damian had bought her. The idea made her feel sick now because all those gifts he was giving her now seemed to have double meanings. Especially when the picture filling her screen was of a naked Lila whose body was hidden behind a sheet lying on Damian's bare chest while he slept. She didn't even think to process how the lying bitch managed to get her number. Instead all she could focus on was tears streaming down her face as she felt her heart shatter. She didn't even process the fact that she left the phone right there with the picture still on the screen and started packing her stuff. She grabbed everything that was hers that she bought herself, later on she'd be surprised at how little that was. She stuffed her things in a small suitcase, put the miracle box in a duffle bag wrapped in her leftover fabric from commissions, grabbed her purse with her wallet and left. After locking the apartment door she slid the key underneath the door so he could have it back. He could have everything back he ever gave her. She was done. She was so distressed she didn't even notice that she had put on the one disguise she had and taken a train to New York until she was standing in the lobby of Stark Tower with her Uncle Tony and her Aunt Pepper holding her while she sobbed.

You watch me bleed until I can't breathe

I'm shaking, falling onto my knees

And now that I'm without your kisses

I'll be needing stitches

Tripping over myself

Aching, begging you to come help

And now that I'm without your kisses

I'll be needing stitches

Marinette was so engrossed in the lyrics, in her feelings, that she didn't notice the tears falling from her eyes, nor the way she was furiously embroidering the shirt in her hands. And she definitely didn't notice that she had gained an audience.

Just like a moth drawn to a flame

Yeah you lured me in and I couldn't sense the pain

The first time she met Damian it had been an accident. She knew when her classes started she wouldn't have the time to get the fabrics she needed for her last commissions that she agreed to before going on hiatus. She knew juggling her business and school would be hard so told her clients she'd be on break for the unforeseeable future. She was so focused on her phone trying to make sure her list was complete, that she didn't notice the man right in front of her.

"Oh!" She fell back with a little yelp and when she saw what, or who, she ran into she hurried to help them up as well. "I'm so sorry monsieur. Are you okay?"

The man yanked his hand away from her and growled, "You wouldn't be having to ask if you weren't caught up in whatever idiotic nonsense is on your phone."

Marinette fumed silently. "Well excuse me sir, I don't know who you think you are, but that is uncalled for. I apologized and helped you up. All you had to do was walk away. No need to be so rude."

Damian raised an eyebrow at her curiously. "You don't know who I am?"

Marinette crossed her arms still annoyed. "Am I supposed to? You could be the president for all I cared and I still would say you were being rude and disrespectful."

Damian's expression changed slightly to a bit of amused intrigue. "I apologize. I thought you were another fangirl with some kind of ruse to get my attention. If you don't mind me asking, what is a girl like you doing in a city like Gotham? I can tell from your accent you are not from here."

Marinette relaxed a little bit. "I'm here going to college when the semester starts, but right now I was out doing some shopping."

"Perhaps I could join you as a way to apologize for my rude behavior. I could give you a mini tour along the way." Damian smiled softly at her.

"I don't know," apprehension was clear on Marinette's face. "I don't even know you let alone your name."

Damian chuckled lightly. "I assure you, even if you don't know me, the rest of the city does. I won't be able to get away with doing anything to you without being plastered across every newspaper and magazine in town, Angel. But my name is Damian by the way. Damian Wayne." He grabbed her hand and kissed it softly after his introduction.

"A-angel?" Marinette stuttered as she blushed.

"Well, I still don't know your name."

Marinette smiled before introducing herself. "My name is Marinette. Your company would be much appreciated, Damian"

Your bitter heart cold to the touch

Now I'm going to reap what I sow

I'm left seeing red on my own

Sometimes on nights like these Marinette wondered what she did wrong. Because it had to be her of course. Why else would Damian go from her caring, charming, wonderful, Dove to Gotham's very own cold, unfeeling, ruthless, Ice Prince.

"Hi, Damian. You're home early." Marinette tried not to let the hope seep into her voice. She had a feeling she wasn't successful.

Damian barely grunted at her as he continued to their room. "My idiots brothers dragged me into spending some time with them so I'm forced to change into something less formal."

"Oh okay." She knew she did an even worse job of hiding her disappointment. "You know I finished Uncle Jagged's outfit the other day. He loved it."

Damian hummed noncommittally. She knew he wasn't paying attention, he never was but she kept trying.

"You know how he's doing that "World's Greatest" Tour. Celebrating the hero's of the world in their respective cities. Luka's been opening for him. His career has really taken off. Hell I'm sure half the tickets Uncle Jagged sells are people just trying to see Luka. He'll have to tour solo soon."

"I bet." Damian's voice was muffled from being the closet, but she could still hear the disinterest in his voice.

She sighed as she leaned against the doorframe of "their" room. It was only theirs in name the fact that his clothes were there. She spent almost every night there alone. She took a deep breath trying to gather her courage for what she was going to ask. "Well they wanted to thank me for the outfits. Claimed the tour would have been half as successful without them. They invited me to take me out to dinner tonight to catch up, then for me to hang out backstage during their show. They said they missed me." Marinette hoped he still wasn't paying attention, but as soon as he settled his famous glare on her, she knew she wasn't that lucky. She flinched into herself under his gaze.

"Marinette. You know what would happen if you left this apartment. The famous Wayne Heir's sweet vulnerable fiance. The one never seen in the media anymore. You would get off this block before your picture would be on every media outlet in the city. Then you would be the Rogues target for the night. They would go anywhere you would be. Including the concert. Would you really be so selfish to endanger hundreds, possibly thousands of innocent concert goers just to 'hang out' with people you can see any time you please?" The disappointment on his face and the coldness of his delivery had her feeling ashamed. She hung her head low trying to hold back the tears.

"I'm sorry." She knew her voice was barely above whisper, but if she tried to speak any louder she knew she'd open the flood gatesp.

Damian brushed past her. "You should be. I'll be heading to the concert with my brothers. I'll inform Jagged of your apologies for not coming."

"Just telling him I'm sick." She offered weakly still not looking up from the floor.

She could feel his judgeful look on her. "Of course not. He'll insist on coming to check on you then he'll see your lying. I'll tell him you're busy with commissions." He left her standing there as headed to leave again. She heard his phone ring and he answered it harshly. "I'm coming down, Todd!" "Of course not, you imbecile! She's a serious designer who can't be bothered out of her schedule to spend time with my idiotic brothers, especially when she's up to her nose in commissions!" She heard the door shut after that statement. I guess her soon to be brothers in law didn't know the real reason behind her lock down either. She stood there for a few more moments before she broke down into loud heavy sobs. She collapsed to her knees and just cried. Not for the first nor last time in that prison she called an apartment.

Got feeling that I'm going under

But I know I will make it out alive

If quit calling you my lover

And move on

You watch me bleed until I can't breathe

I'm shaking, falling onto my knees

And now that I'm without your kisses

I'll be needing stitches

Tripping over myself

Aching, begging you to come help

And now that I'm without your kisses

I'll be needing stitches

Needle and the thread

Gotta get you out my head

Her hands were moving furiously as she was trying to rid her mind of her cruel ex.

Needle and the thread

Gonna wind up dead

She wanted to forget everything about him.

Needle and the thread

Gotta get you out my head

His smile, his laugh, the loving look in his eyes.

Needle and the thread

Gonna wind up dead

His kisses, his hugs, the way he held her like he was afraid of losing her

Needle and the thread

Gotta get you out my head

His scowl, his glare, his need to hide her from the world

Needle and the thread

Gonna wind up dead

His distance, his apathy, the way he was happy in any other girl's arms but her's

Needle and the thread

Gotta get you out my head

Get you out of my head.

She wanted to forget loving him and hating him. She wanted her happiness back

You watch me bleed until I can't breathe

Shaking, falling onto my knees

And now that I'm without your kisses

I'll be needing stitches

Tripping over myself

Aching, begging you to come help

And now that I'm without your kisses

I'll be needing stitches

And now that I'm without you kisses

I'll be needing stitches

I'll be needing stitches.

As she finished singing she awoke from her haze. She felt the tears on her face and wiped them away before looking to see what she had made. The simple heart from before now had a jagged line down the middle that stopped a quarter of the way to the bottom to represent a break. From the bottom it looked like the heart was dripping. The most noticeable change was the crude yet tasteful stitches that laid over the break in the heart. They weren't neat as if she were suggesting they were professionally done. The way she laid them subconsciously represented as if they were self done by someone trying their best.

While she was studying her impromptu embroidery a voice surprised her. "It looks nice."

She looked up in shock to see a brown haired boy around her age, 21 maybe 22, sitting at the table closest to the stage she was on. He looked as if he had been there for a while.

"Sorry I didn't mean to scare you. I heard you singing so I came to see who it was because you have a beautiful voice, but then I saw you crying and I wanted to make sure you were okay, but you seem really focused and I didn't want to interrupt, but I didn't want to just leave you either, but- I'm sorry I'm rambling. My name is Peter. Are you okay?" The boy, Peter, asked her softly, looking concerned. For Marinette it was enough.

She had sat in the chair next to him and finally let out everything she was holding in. The tears were flowing freely now "I don't know. I'm so mad, so hurt, so confused. Where did it go wrong? One minute I'm getting my business degree at Gotham University, the next I'm in a relationship with Damian Wayne. It was amazing he was so kind and sweet and loving and he made me so happy. Then next thing I know after dating for about a year and half he proposes. I'm on cloud 9 and I say yes and I'm so excited for what's to come, but suddenly everything changes. Next thing I know he's saying I can't leave the apartment because he wants me to be safe from the Rogues and I accepted it. Then he's yelling at me for trying to sneak out and I'm thinking I deserve it. I should have just stayed home and he's already apologizing for yelling. Then suddenly he's gone more and more. He's never home and I'm alone and it hurts. Then suddenly I'm selfish for asking to go out to see my friends because how can I put everyone at risk just to go see some friends who I can see anytime I want. Yet nobody is ever allowed over. But I still believe he's right. How can I be So now I'm alone and miserable and it hurts because he keeps getting further and further from me and I'm starting to suspect what's going on but I'm too scared to ask him because if he confirms it, then everything I believed in is a lie and I couldn't live with that. But I didn't even have to ask because soon someone is sending me a picture and it's the girl who made my school life hell by taking everyone I thought was my friend away from me with a few far fetched lies, and here she is laying naked on my fiance's naked chest as he sleeps. And I know he knows who she is and what she did to me because I told him. Yet he doesn't care because here he is fucking her while I'm at home all the time because he told me to be. So I grabbed my stuff and left everything he ever got me and just left. So here I am miserable staying with my Uncle Tony trying not to think about the asshole while my friends try to help me feel better yet I feel terrible because I loved the jerk and I still kinda do and I still have the engagement ring which I should pawn, but it was Bruce's mom's ring and that would be wrong and Bruce would be devastated. Why do I care so much about him and his family when he couldn't be bothered with me?" She felt better after finally letting it all out. She hadn't cried since she came to Uncle Tony. Not when Adrien arrived with Kagami, Marc, and Nathaniel, not when Luka arrived with Uncle Jagged and not even when Chole and Alix arrived. All her friends and pseudo family were there yet she hadn't cried once, nor had she actually told them the full story. But here this stranger asked if she was okay and she let it flow like Niagara Falls.

If Peter was shocked by her rant he didn't let it show. Instead he placed a hand on her before speaking softly "Because you are an amazing person who is a million times better than him. He is insane to choose anyone over you especially someone so foul as a desperate liar. I just met you, but I can already tell that you are a kind hearted, talented girl and anyone would be lucky to have you in their lives and I can tell by the crowd over there by the door that you have many people standing with you who already figured that out." Marinette looked up at his words to see her friends and pseudo uncles and their respective wives standing in the door.

"Hi guys." As soon as Marinette finished speaking they all rushed towards her. Adrien reached her first pulling her into a tight hug.

"Oh bugaboo, I'm so sorry you had to go through this. Are you okay? Why didn't you tell us, princess?" He buried his face in her neck purring slightly in a way that calmed her.

"I guess I was still processing everything kitty. He really had me thinking he loved me and to find out he didn't was a hard blow." She confessed quietly.

"He'll meet my blade for hurting you, Mari," Kagami seemed to have Chole, Alix and surprisingly, Marc ready to back her.

"No, Gami, I just want to get over him. He's not worth it." Mari remarked sadly before smiling at her friends. "But thank you, all of you, for having my back."

There were various "Of course" and "Always" that were heard among the group before Tony Stark cleared his throat. "Marinette let me properly introduce Peter Parker, my intern. Peter, this is my niece Marinette Dupain-Cheng also known as MDC owner and head designer of Miracle Designs."

Peter looked star struck. "I love your work. You make the coolest clothes on the planet."

Marinette blushed lightly. "Thank you, Peter. Uncle Tony told me much about you and I was always impressed. You're nothing short of a genius." Marinette missed Peter's blush as she started introducing her friends to him, but Tony didn't.

"This is Adrien Agreste, former model and Physics major. This is Kagami Tsurugi, world champion fencer. This is Luka Couffanie, singer songwriter signed under Jagged Stone. They're dating. This is Nathaniel Kurtzberg and Marc Anciel creators of Miraculous Tales comic. They're engaged. This is Chole Bourgeois, the best lawyer in all of France and probably Europe. And this is Alix Kubdel, X Games Winner, and famous archeologists. These two are also engaged. I'm sure you know Jagged Stone and his manager and also his wife, Penny."

"You guys are amazing! None of you look much older than me yet you're already so successful! What is in the water in Paris? Some kind of talent steroids?" Peter was amazed.

"Speaking of talent," Luka turned towards Marinette. "Melody why didn't you tell me you could sing like that?" Soon everyone was agreeing that she was an excellent singer.

Marinette was bright red. "It's no big deal guys. I was just singing to myself, I wasn't expecting an audience."

Jagged took his chance to pull his pseudo niece into a hug. "Nettie, my girl you have got to let me sign you. It would be so rocking to have talent like yours produced under my label!"

"No way Uncle Jagged! I'm not even that good!" Marinette began protesting before Luka put a hand on her shoulder.

"How about this? I need some vocals for a song I wrote and no matter how much I love them, my dear boyfriend and girlfriend can not sing." Adrien and Kagami looked at each other before shrugging. No point denying it. "How about you feature in my new single under an alias and if it's hit you'll give an album a try?"

Marinette looked around at some of the most important people in the world to her before sighing and agreeing.

"Alright. But no promises that this will be hit. I'm really not that good. You guys are just biased."

Alix ruffled Marinette's hair. "Whatever you say, DC. Now let's go play some UMS3!"

As everyone was heading out to find a room large enough for all of them Peter prepared to go back to work on a project until Marinette turned back to him with a huge smile and bright eyes. "Come on Peter! Come play with us."

How could he say no to that? So he came along.

A couple weeks later Luka's single "Partners in Crime" featuring Neon Titanium hit number one on the charts. And the most searched inquiry on Google for 3 days following was "who is Neon Titanium?" Needless to say Marinette was busy for the next couple months. Especially after Luka dropped a music video which she starred in as well wear a full face mask to stay hidden.

#maribat salt #maribat #spideybug #felinette #past Mari x Dami #marivenger #ex daminette #neon titanium #moving on

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thatfanficstuff · 4 years

Text

Time Travel - Avengers

Pairing: Tony Stark x Loki with Daughter OFC

Warnings: nope

A/N: Okay so this isn’t what you normally see from me. At all. Last year I offered to write a fanfic for the winner of an auction benefiting the Australian wild fire relief efforts. Wren won and requested a fic. (and then was super patient when my health took a nosedive.) The pairing (family) and basic idea were theirs. I was super happy with how it turned out and they agreed I could share it here. So enjoy something a little different I guess.

***

Frigga Stark had been in the past for nearly three months by this point and she was so ready to go home. It wasn’t that she was completely unhappy here. Her powers and abilities had assured her a ready place in the Avengers even if she had just appeared in the middle of a fight with no warning. But living as a stranger in the midst of her family was so much harder than she thought it would be.

Everyone had been friendly enough of course, but she missed bear hugs from her super soldier uncles. She missed late night movies and chats with Nat and Wanda. She missed Thor having her pick up Mjolnir every time he saw her and laughing that booming laugh of his when she did. And Clint had been teaching her to fly the quin jet.

Most of all she missed her dads. Tony and Loki were both here of course but they were just so different from the men she knew in the future. For one they still hated each other so there was no joking or teasing between them. For another, they were awesome dads and she missed the thousand little things they’d do every day to let her know they loved her. Things she’d never take for granted again.

Fortunately, she’d inherited some of her birth father Loki’s abilities and had been able to disguise herself since her arrival. Wouldn’t want to interfere with the future and all that. That had all come crashing down yesterday when she’d been knocked out in the middle of the battle. Her disguise faded to show her natural dark hair and striking green eyes. It also revealed she was about 10 years younger than she’d been leading them all to believe.

Due to her injuries, they’d allowed her to postpone the interrogation until today. Because that’s what it was going to be. Not a discussion or a talk. No, a straight up interrogation. She hated when they were mad at her. The only thing worse is when they were disappointed. Fortunately, that didn’t happen very often.

“Captain Rogers requests your presence in the conference room in fifteen minutes, miss,” Jarvis’s voice filled her room causing her to sigh. She’d ask for more time but knew it would be pointless. They’d already been more than accommodating. Hell, she was lucky she hadn’t spent the night in a cell somewhere.

“Thanks, JARVIS,” she said as she sat up and ran a hand through her hair. After hurrying through her morning routine, she threw on a pair of sweats and t-shirt. She padded through the halls, making it to the conference room right on time.

She took a deep breath before pulling open the door to step into the room. Fear shot through her as she took in the others. Every single person that meant anything to her was crowded into this room and they had no idea who she even was. That by now familiar pang of loneliness flooded her chest and she did her best to shake it off. They’d moved all the chairs around so they were all on one side of the table while she was left a single seat on the opposite side.

“Morning,” she said as she sat.

For a long time, no one said anything as they studied her. She couldn’t bring herself to meet their eyes, afraid of what she’d find there. Instead, she kept her gaze locked on her hands where they tangled together on the table.

“Why?”

Her head jerked up in surprise at hearing Wanda’s voice before anyone else’s. Frigga cleared her throat. “Why?”

“Why lie?” the other woman clarified. “Did you think we would turn you out because you were a child?”

“I’m not a child,” Frigga corrected automatically. It was an argument she’d had with her family many times. “I’m fifteen.”

“Oh, fifteen,” Bucky exclaimed. “Well, excuse the shit out of us, kid.”

“Really, Buck?” Steve said glancing over at his friend.

Frigga couldn’t stop the smile that came to her lips. This was familiar. Comfortable. She shook her head. She might as well get this over with. She took a breath to fortify her nerves. “None of this is as simple as it seems. And you probably won’t believe half of what I have to tell you, but I’ll tell you everything. I have too.”

“And why should we believe that you’re suddenly going to be honest about everything when you’ve failed to do so up until this point?” Tony asked.

She shook her head. “Because it doesn’t matter anymore. Not now that you’ve seen me. The real me I mean.”

Looks of confusion were exchanged amongst the others causing Frigga to chuckle. “Maybe I should just start with how I came to be here. Three months ago, there was a lab accident. My dads were attempting to combine magic and tech to create a time travel device. They were explaining every thing to me when I bumped into the table. It knocked something off and I automatically reached out with my magic to catch it. Next thing I knew I was here. Seventeen years in the past.”

She shrugged. “Why this particular time? I have no idea. I altered my appearance to keep from affecting the future.”

“Why would us knowing what you look like have any affect on the future?” Steve asked.

Tony narrowed his gaze and pursed his lips. “I think the better question is who her fathers are.”

The look on his face told her he already suspected the answer. After all, how many people here would invent a time machine? And how many used magic? “I was born via a surrogate using genetic material from a female egg donor and Loki of Asgard. When I was two, Dad got married and Pop adopted me. My real name is Frigga Maria Stark.”

There was a moment of silence before the room erupted into chaos. Her family argued with each other and shouted questions at her which she ignored. Not surprisingly, the men who would become her fathers were silent. They exchanged a measuring look with each other before looking back to Frigga. She smirked when she saw the hint of a blush on Tony’s cheeks.

After allowing chaos to reign for a moment longer, she took off the necklace she was never without. She sat it on the table and pushed the button on the side once. It opened to reveal a picture of her with her dads. She slid it over. Pietro was the one to take it from the table. “This proves nothing. This is easily faked.”

She said nothing, just watching as they passed her most prized possession amongst themselves. Loki and Tony lingered over it longer than anyone else. Finally, Tony was the one to give it back to her. “As much as I hate to say it, Speedy’s right. You’re going to have to do better than that.”

She smiled and placed her locket back on the table still open. She pressed the button on the side twice this time. A hologram of the same picture projected above it for a moment until it was replaced with one of Loki spinning her in the air when she was a toddler. A moment later his voice filled the silence. “My princess. I will love you until I take my last breath and beyond. There is never a moment that I am not intensely proud of you. You will conquer anything you put your mind to, and I cannot wait to witness it.”

That picture faded away to be replaced with one of Tony and her laughing with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders. Tears pricked her eyes but didn’t fall. “Hey sweetheart. I love you more than you could possibly imagine. Every day with you has been an adventure and I can’t wait to see what’s next.”

Again and again pictures faded to be replaced by another with a message to match until it had gone through everyone in her family. Frigga wiped her cheeks quickly as the last message played. Gods, she missed her family. The silence was thick and heavy as she snatched her locket from the table and put it back around her neck where it belonged.

She cleared her throat. “There was a mission last year. Everyone was going to be gone for at least a month. It was the first time I was going to be left alone without any of you. Pops made this and gave it to me the night before you left.”

“We left a fourteen-year-old alone for a month?” Sam sounded appalled.

Frigga chuckled. “No, you left me with Happy for six weeks. But every night before I went to sleep I’d play it. I still do actually. Even when you’re all home.” She took a deep breath and looked at each of them in turn. “I’m sorry I lied to all of you. About everything. Now, I just want to go home. I miss my family.”

Bucky huffed. “What are we? Chopped liver?” He grinned and Frigga looked at him in surprise for a moment before she giggled. Which made him laugh and soon everyone in the room was laughing.

Finally, Tony clapped his hands as he stood. “Well, let’s see about getting you home, kiddo.”

***

It took three more weeks before they were ready to send her home. Everyone gathered in the lab to say their goodbyes until finally it was just Loki, Tony and her. Loki tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked into green eyes so like his own. “Are you sure about this?” he asked her.

Frigga shook her head. “Not at all, but we’ve got to try.”

Loki pulled her into a hug with a sigh. “I know.” After a long moment, he released her. “Remember to focus. If what we suspect is true, you’ll be pulled back as soon as you slip into the time stream but focusing your magic can only help.”

She nodded. “I remember.” They were counting on her dads to have set up a beacon of some sort in the future. It was almost guaranteed that they had. After all it was what this Tony and Loki would have done.

Tony was next to wrap her in a bone-crushing hug. “I’ll miss you, kiddo.”

“No, you won’t.” Loki, Wanda and she had come up with a memory spell so they would all forget who she was and what she looked like once she was gone. When she returned to her own time, she could reverse it.

He laughed and gave her that cockeyed smirk. “All right. Let’s do this.”

Frigga nodded once and prepped her magic. Tony flipped on the machine and it glowed with Loki’s green magic. She added her own purple strands to the mix and the room flooded with bright white light. She closed her eyes against it as she felt like she was floating toward something. When her feet hit the ground, she pulled back her magic and opened her eyes.

She stood near the back of the lab. A device pulsing with blue light stood on one of the tables nearby and she smiled when she saw it. Beacon. The lab was quiet even though it was occupied by two of her favorite people. There had evidently been nothing about her arrival that caught their attention as their backs were turned toward her. Bruce quietly typed away on his laptop while Tony sat at his desk. Some invention or another was scattered on the table in front of him but he wasn’t working on it. He was bent forward with his head in his hands and even though she could only see the back of him, Frigga could tell he was utterly exhausted.

Tears flooded her eyes. “Daddy?” She hadn’t called him that in years. Her voice was quiet and if it hadn’t been for the sudden jerk of his shoulders, she would have been afraid he didn’t hear her. Both heads snapped in her direction. Tony stood with tears running down his cheeks but he didn’t move toward her, afraid she’d disappear if he did.

Only when she hurried to him, dodging tables as she went did he move to meet her. His arms wrapped around her in the tightest hug he’d ever given. “Oh my God, Frigga. We were beginning to think we’d never see you again.” He pressed kisses along the side of her head, but didn’t release the hold he had on her.

“I missed you so much.” She was now openly weeping. She heard a sniff from behind her, but kept her arms wrapped around her dad. “You okay over there, Uncle Bruce?”

“Y-yeah. I’m just so happy you’re home,” he answered while obviously crying.

“Friday, get Loki down here right away, but don’t tell the others just yet,” Tony ordered as he finally released her to look her over.

“Of course, sir. Welcome home, Frigga. It’s good to have you back,” the AI responded.

“Thank you, Friday.”

Tony’s hands stayed on her arms, not wanting to completely let her go just yet. His gaze ran over her from top to bottom. “Are you okay?”

She nodded. “I’m sure Bruce will want to make sure there aren’t any lingering effects but yeah, I’m good.”

The door to the lab opened and Frigga glanced over, her heart racing. Her dad stepped in, frowning at the book in his hands. She recognized it as one of her grandmother’s spell books. He was obviously looking for more ways to get her home. “What do you need, love?” he asked without looking up.

Tony stepped to the side so his husband would have a clear view of their daughter but he didn’t say anything. Loki glanced up with a frown when he didn’t get the expected answer. His eyes went wide and the book fell from his hand as he saw Frigga.

She launched herself at him and he caught her, lifting her from the floor in a tight embrace. “Oh, my beautiful, beautiful girl. You came home to us.” He ran a hand through her hair as he held her. “I knew you’d find a way. I missed you so much.”

For the first time in months, the tears on her face were happy tears. For the last four months she’d wanted to be nowhere other than where she was right at this moment. Nothing could be better than this. Tony soon joined their hug, Loki shifting one of his arms so it surrounded his husband and brought him into the fold. Another moment later and they all rocked as Bruce joined in as well. Okay, she stood corrected. This was even better.

#frostiron fanfiction #loki x stark fanfiction #daughter ofc #avengers fanfiction #time travel

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