#(kicks how ben as a name for me came from benrey hlvrai

[bitcrush]

Dude oh my god so many interests are assaulting my senses and I fear if I reblog everything that increases my dopamine my life would be so over I would be deplatformed and called a slur

[qhazomb]

so after making the “frenrey but like ‘john carpenter’s the thing but if the alien was a gamer and had a crush on macready’” joke so many times... whoops i’m thinking about a hlvrai/the thing crossover au ha ha wouldn’t follow the exact plot of the movie, but some scenes from it would still be present. like the alien, in this case benrey, first showing up to the american base in the form of a husky dog while being chased and shot at by the two survivors from the norwegian base, and the blood test scene because that scene fuckin’ rips in this au, it wouldn’t end with everybody killed/assimilated/freezing to death. in this au, the alien catches feelings and the ending is decidedly happier. well, except for the people who do still get assimilated, anyway. benny boy gotta eat, y’know.

there’s not enough members of the science team to fill all the roles of the characters from the movie... which just means that i can fill the extra roles out with some red shirts for benrey to snack :) not sure about everybody’s roles, ‘cept gordon is obviously in mac’s place, and tommy cares for the sled dogs. (also the dogs don’t die in this. benrey doesn’t have the exact same goals as the alien in the movie, and thus doesn’t try to assimilate the other dogs. nobody ever kills the dogs to prevent people from leaving either) at first benrey’s motives are “fix/build ship to get the fuck off this planet”, but when he gets to the american base... something about some of the humans there piques his interest. especially gordon. he doesn’t try to assimilate them, instead choosing to just observe them, both from his dog form and some of the split off bodies he accumulates after assimilating and impersonating some of the other, less interesting humans at the base. his first human victim at the base is forzen. sorry forzen, you get thing-a-fied right away. (doing this based on my headcanon for normal hlvrai where there was no ‘forzen’, that was just benrey puppeting a random soldier for Pranks). nobody ever notices there being something off with forzen, both due to benrey having access to forzen’s memories, and the fact that nobody else at the base really knew him that well to begin with. also, benrey gets his way of speaking from forzen, and uses forzen’s voice whenever he’s speaking in a human language while not impersonating a specific human. he blames his interest in gordon on all the human brains he assimilated messing with his own feelings. because, uh?? finding a person who isn’t even his own species attractive??? not to mention benrey’s not even an organism that needs to engage in sexual or romantic relationships in the first place??? he blames the humans he absorbed for these feelings. but he doesn’t like, complain about these feelings. he’s totally down with them, in fact. he gets attached to tommy, after all the good pets and cuddles and scritches tommy gave his dog body. who knew being petted felt so great? darnold gets off the hook, because tommy really likes darnold, and benrey’s eaten enough humans to know that they get really sad when another organism they care about dies. he leaves all the dogs alone for this same reason. bubby and coomer are not on the menu because benrey finds their personalities way too entertaining. with them still being separate from him, he can never predict what wild shit they’re gonna do next, and he gets such a kick out of it. everybody else in the base, tho? lookin’ like snacks. a veritable buffet of new DNA to absorb. before someone notices the red shirts are getting killed off by something (a something that they later suspect came from the norwegian base, after they go investigate it), benrey slips out of the kennel with his dog body at night to go hang in gordon’s room. at first he’s just content to just. inspect gordon. take in all his little details. ponder if the reason he finds gordon attractive can be attributed to the taste of someone he ate at the norwegian base, or if he’s developed his own unique preferences. but then gordon wakes up and sees the dog sitting there staring up at him. he’s confused about how the fuck the dog got out of the pen, but is too tired to take it back. so he just pats the space on the bed by him and invites the pup up and benrey is internally ‘holy shit oh my god aaaa???’ and gladly hops on up for some Choice Snuggles. gordon doesn’t bother to stop this from being a nightly thing, because dog is warm and they’re in fucking antarctica, you do the math. he is completely unsure what to think, though, when he discovers that the very affectionate dog he’s been cuddling with every night is actually a shape-shifting alien horror that’s been slowly eating and impersonating his fellow researchers. when the surviving humans start making a plan of action to find and kill the alien menace, benrey is conflicted. he could go ahead and just eat them all, take the base for himself, and get to building his ship to get back to space... but he LIKES (most of) the humans that are left. he’s developed a major case of the Human Emotions and would feel bad if he ate these guys. :( eventually he chooses to reveal himself to just gordon, during a rare moment when he’s able to catch gordon alone (the humans started keeping close together when they realized a bodysnatcher was among them), and tries to be as non-threatening as physically possible while doing so. tries to explain that he wants to be friends, and only ate those guys (and the guys at the norwegian base) because he had to. survival instincts and shit. he was in a real bad ship crash and his very injured body got frozen in ice for god knows HOW long and he had a whole lot of energy replenishing and DNA adjusting to do. put down the flamethrower please and thank you? for friend benry? also, benrey picked “benry” as his human/earth name, based on tommy naming his dog body “ben” (”He just looks like a Ben to me. :)” ), and then adding the “ry” at the end himself cause all these humans he likes have two syllable names and he didn’t wanna be left out. he’s got that instinct to integrate, and if he can’t do it through assimilation, he can try and do it through social conventions at least! even if human social behavior is a little hard for him to grasp/get right sometimes. also also, he’s still a gamer. but doesn’t discover that he likes video games until after he absorbs and impersonates forzen. his forzen body gets invited to play some video games with the other guys during break times, and he falls in love instantly. “brooooo how come none of the other sapients i’ve eaten ever invented video games??? humans are so good at having fun wtf. this is the best. i love video games.” AND THAT’S ALL THE THOUGHTS I’VE GOT ABOUT THE AU SO FAR. i only JUST started seriously thinking about it last night, so. not too solid yet.