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popculturebuffet · 4 years ago

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Ducktales Finale Review: The Last Adventure! or So Long and Thanks for All The Ducks

Hello all you happy people. The day we’ve all simultaneously waited for and dreaded is here. The grand finale to a five year journey.. and for me an almost one year journey of covering season 3 as it came out. It was thanks to this show i’ve been able to make money doing what I love. Without it I never would’ve found my patreon Kev, and I never woul’dve had the solid focus to keep going as long as I have. And I never would’ve had all you lovely people reading my work. Thank you for that. I hope you’ll stick around even though the series is gone, I love you all. But as the sun sets on this series I have one last episode of the season, and the series to cover. I won’t be doing it in my usual recap style due to it’s sheer length and scope, but I promise you if you join me under the cut I will break down eveyrthing I can about this final adventure, it’s huge, awe inspiring twists.. and it’s heartwarming conclusion. It’s everything you could want from a finale short of a Grandma Duck Cameo, and i’ts under the cut with full spoilers. Seriously if you do not want any spoilers TURN BACK NOW. I’m opening with probably the biggest spoiler of the finale.

I Think She’s A Clone Now You were warned. So.. Webby is Scrooge’s Clone, made by FOWL as part of a decades long scheme to find the papyrus of binding, and raised by Beakly to keep this precious child out of their sinister clutches. I have hundreds of reaction images, several for what the fuck.. none of them seem sufficient.. ALL OF THEM together like some megazord of what the fuck are not sufficient for how much this reveal caught me off guard. It caught ALL of us off guard. I’m sure even those who called it still were suprised that’s the direction it took. I think we all expected her parents died by FOWL, or her parents were FOWl with Pepper being one of them, or anything else. So naturally it took around 14 drafts, and me going the fuck to sleep as I had stayed up to watch the finale and thought I could just smoothly transition into writing the review despite there being a LOTTTTT to unpack.

Even after the recharge though this took a bit of doing... so now i’ve done it... what’d I think? Whelp....

I liked it. I like it the more I think about it. Even the problems I had with it just kinda melted away as I thought about it. I understand if you do not. This twist will not be for everyone, it changes Webby’s character and story entirely, ruins tons of fan theories, and in general is batshit even for a series that in the same finale, turned Manny into a shout out to Gargoyles, complete with Keith “My Body is Ready” David. This series is genuinely batshit and loves it, but this is a LOT to ask dramatically, a lot to rewrite expectation wise and a lot to thinka bout. There’s a reason besides sleep deprevation it took me a whlie to fully grasp how I felt. So if you don’t like it fine, but i’m going to make my best case.

Starting with something that made me realize I fully like it: It dosen’t invalidate Webby’s charcter. The one little problem I had left was “Well dosen’t Webby having the McDuck bloodline mean she couldn’t be specail if she wasn’t a McDuck? That sure the rest of the cast are specail but you can’t be really important without it?” Honestly.. no. Webby is who she is not because she’s a McDuck.. but because she’s Webby. She got her martial arts and mystery solving skills through Beakly and being raised. She had intate talent sure.. but as we’ve seen with the boys through the whole series, talent has to be honed. Skill has to be earned and learned. Webby worked hard to research other civilizations, worked hard to hone herself into a deadly fighting machine with her mother’s help, worked hard to be every bit as cool as her idol who turned out to be her biological dad. She earned her badassery, her wisdom and her courage SQUARE.

And more than that she’s her own person. Her adoptive parent and biological parent are both paranoiacs afraid of betryal, unwilling to trust, and slow to let anyone in. By all accounts Webby should be the same.. but she’s not. Oh sure she has some paranoia and is willing to slit some throats, she was raised by the world’s best spy and is the daughter of the world’s greatest hero, that was never going to be gone entirely. But at her core she just wants to trust people. She just wants to love them and be loved. And.. that’s why her family loves her. Because she’s the kindest, the warmest and the best of them. They love her because she’s Webby and that’s she’s family, they could care less who she’s related to. All it really changes is how Scrooge acts around her and that gives us fans tons to work with.

It’s also expertly revealed, which helped ease us into it. Webby is just as shocked and confused as we are and is seriously hurt, which makes her vulnerable to the villains. Kate Miccui deserves a goddamn award for voice acting and if their isn’t an award show for that their should be. While she’s been fantastic with Webby all series long this is her finest performance, going from Webby’s usual self, to all the hurt she goes through.. to her quitter moments at the end, calling Scrooge dad and giving out a little noise that makes it clear as Beakly tries to leave, that no.. she’ still her family.. she’s still her mom and she’s not going anywhere.

As for the concept being a bit ridiculous yes it is.. but so is this universe. This universe is entirely insane in the best fucking way possible: I mean.. look at this final group shot.

We have an old man whose somehow still alive simply because he was too busy to die, an inventor whose cloned himself multiple times so clones are fesable and is probably a clone himself given how the last finale went, an awkward armored superhero and his biotech filled girlfriend, a small boy robot weapon of discretion who put his head on his brother’s body, a no longer headless manhorse former harbinger of the apocalypse with the silky voice of keith david as one big homage to gargoyles, a lesbian living shadow and her sister, a superhero who based himself on a fictional character and his boyfriend/sidekick who by all accounts should be dead by now, a lesbian military superheroine from the moon, STORKULES COCKBLOCKER OUT OF MYTH, his moong goddes sister, two adopted family stunt pilots, a bunch of super intelligent mice, an odd duck whose kinda sorta dating a giant shrimp, his cousin with super luck powers, my globetrotting boys, an immortal treasure hunter and in the family proper: a former spy turned adopted mom of a clone, a woman who lived on the moon for a good decade, a man who once trapped everyone in what would essentially be the plot of the mcu’s second best work by pure accident, a blue boy whose piloted a plain, captained pirates, and has his own talk show, a green boy whose ran a multi-trillion dollar company, nearly destroyed all of time and space and is under investigation for fraud, and a red boy who has a hulk-esque rage filled embodiment of all his suppressed emotions, whose fondest wish was tall legs, and who can easily take out a giant magica supermachine with some fancy wiring. So the richest duck in the world having a clone daughter, while divisvie and what not.. is far more plausable than we give it credit for. As are her new sisters who Id in’t forget but are part of the whole twist.

So yeah, I like the twist and my nitpick is more that despite having a full season to set it up.. they saved it for the last episode. Instead of BUILDING on Webby’s desire to know more about her family and having the twins show up earlier.. it’s all shove into the finale. It’s a well done shoving but there’s so much that could be explored with Webby being Scrooge’s daughter, so much that futzes with the regular family dynamics and we don't’ get any of it. Sure it was probably saved for a possible season 4 but they treated this season as the last. Manny being an apocalyptic man horse voiced by the uber sexy keith david, and no I will not stop bringing that up even outside of it’s own section and why yes it is getting it’s own section, is the kind of revelation you can leave for one last episode. “One of the main cast is a clone” really isn’t and that’s disapointing.

Especially since thinking back to life and times.. Webby IS a lot like Scrooge was before circumstance hardened him. She’s tough, resourceful.. but also has a peppy spirit to her. It adds interesting shades to her character, where she zigs where Scrooge zags, how much of it is her upbringing with Granny versus his with his parents, how much did Beakley play into it. There’s A lot to dig into and given I have most of the series left to review, I will get to dig into it, and there’s a lot to be explored in fanfic so if I wasn’t already planning a massive one before I sure as fuck am now. So it’s not a bad twist nor bad we get to write the future.. but I do wish the crew THEMSELVES had done more with it. Still my bar for “not fucking up the entire show” is pretty low after Star Vs ended with her committing implied genocide to stop a genocide and How I Met Your Mother ended “But the real journey was in how much I want to bang, bang bangity bang I said a bang bang bangity bang your aunt robin now your mother conveniently died”. I can handle “This twist is kind of weird but also really intresting.” If the twist isn’t for you, as I said i get it. This is my opinion. Now for the thing I won’t shut up about.

I LIVE AGAIN:

Look i’ve made no secret how thirsty I am for Keith David nor how much of a national treasure I rightly believe him to be. He’s one of my faviorite voice actors, with a mind boggling number of awesome rolls, mostly recently as a fowl mouthed coffe cup encouraging a teacher to sabotage his rival teachers breaks on close enough. Even if I didn’t like Gargoyles, which I do, i’d have an entire section talking about that Manny reveal.

Manny was already objectively one of the best parts of the show, a hilariously weird addition that was also relatable as he just wanted to fit in. I did not know you could make him better. Then they gave him Keith David’s voice and revealed he’s one of the four horseman of the apocalypse, but doesn’t want to end the world he just wants to be a normal dude, AND turned him into a shout out to the last part of the disney afternoon they hadn’t touched, my favorite part of it and a show i’ve been sitting on watching in full for far too long. Motherfucking Gargoyles.

But given how unique it was for the Disney Afternoon and how much Disney had no desire to ever reference or use the franchise, still no fucking clue as to why they are sitting on money here, I expected it to be sadly but understandably left out. Instead they made Manny into an expy for them, gave him the voice of their leader Goliath, the voice of an angel, and had him say “I LIVE AGAIN” complete with the utterly transcendent theme song. Seriously give it a listen.

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So yeah I couldn’t not mark out at this. Amazing fucking stuff and almost as unexpected as the clone thing and easily my second faviorite part of the fiinale only NARROWLY topped by the curtain call. Which we’ll get to. Keith David took his time getting to this series but they saved the best guest voice for last. Utter tremendous.

Huey Season?: I”ll save more of this for my breakdown as the season as a whole but yeah while the finale as a whole was good.. I do feel Huey got short changed. He got PLENTY of development this season, and some REALLY good scenes with Bradford.. but ultimately he got overshadowed by the Webby thing. it just never quite felt like Huey got a real resolution to his character arc the way his brothers did. He still got some REALLY good moments, his “Just cough up the information Bentina!” was one of his finest and Danny Pudi did his best. The BUILDUP was good but hte payoff was non existant and easily the weakest part of an otherwise triumphant finale. I feel the final plot was ultimately just a bit too jam packed to really have Huey feel vital to it the way Dewey was to the Della arc and Louie was to his own arc. Both tgot big emotional payoffs in his finale but the most I could gather here was he accepted adventure? I guess. It just really feels off, like I missed the payoff to everything when it’s probably just nonexistent and that bothers me a lot. In a finale that was almost all hit.. this was easily the biggest misstep. I don’t have as much to say here on it.. but that’s because it’s really that simple: they gave Huey’s arc a ton of build up in this last episode and some of his others, really made him into Bradford’s good counterpart.. then just sorta.. forgot it because “oh shit Webby’s scrooge’s daughter kinda need to pull focus here”. Had they given this arc at least one more episode, we might of had time for it. Granted i’m not sure how much they could get away with but we clearly needed at least one more episode and what they chose to jettision, the climax to Huey’s story.. was way more important than they clearly thought and i’m heavily disappointed.

Bradford’s Big Hole Speaking of payoffs the missing mysteries payoff.. is a mixed bag. I expected all of them to combine some how into some elaborate plan I just wasn’t seeing. In hindsight it does make sense that wasn’t it: Bradford hates overcomplicated schemes, so his would be incredibly simple and require as few moving parts as possible. It still dosen’t stop the fact that the big plan to cap off the entire series built over a season... was to build a giant stygian hole of non existence to throw people into.

Yes really. Instead of using the Payprus to write them out of existance, if carefully worded or try doing it all at once or anything practical.. Bradford just plans to shove everything he dosen’t want in the world anymore into a hole. Look i’ts not like it ruins the episode, there’s still tons of tension from him holding Scrooge’s loved ones over his hole and threating to throw them into it’s gaping void. And it’s foiled by a 12 year old just.. shutting it off. Like I get him leaving an off switch on, that’s just common sense.. but why wouldn’t he have a remote or something to turn it back on? one with a password or something to lock it. There’s something inherently underwhelming about as series ending plan that can be summed up “hope no one shuts my unguarded hole. “

The finale does make for it by using the missing mysteries all in VERY clever ways. In fact every episode in the season had some sort of payoff here. It’s what makes up for how baffling the main plan is: every other thing, from the missing mysteries to the guest stars has lead up to this one moment, this one final adventure. Which leads me too

An Hurricane of Payoffs:

So from the top Challenge of the Senior Junior Woodchucks!: Isabella Finch herself ends up being VITAL to the story and to Bradford’s backstory, as does Junior Woodchucking as a whole. Quack Pack!: Gene is the fuel for Blot’s glove.. though he also fucks off right afterwords.. never to be seen again or help out at any point...

Double-O-Duck in You Only Crash Twice!: This was the most unexpected and elevated the episode in hindsight for me as what seemed like a waste of time.. wound up setting up the first part of the finale, and the final battle with Steelbeak, and in clever ways with Steelbeak using the intelliray on himself, Launchpad muttering the map in his sleep via his smart self and Dewey remembering the base layout.

The Lost Harp of Mervana: Used as a lie detector for that heartbreaking interrogation scene.

Louie’s Eleven: Introduced Daisy setting up Donald’s plot which i’ll get to.

Astro BOYD: My baby boy comes back for this episode! He also gets one of the best lines of it “I’m a Head!”. That is the most ralph wiggum the boy has ever been. I’m so proud.

Rumble For Ragnarok: Okay I was wrong nothing from this one comes back. Still a great episode. Same with the trickening. Both are VERY stellar episodes though, so I give it a pass. You can’t give a nod to EVERYTHING.

The Phantom and the Sorceress: The Blot and Super Sayian God Super Sayian Lena, as well as Lena’s character development from said episode. They Put a Moonlander on the Earth!: Launchpad helping Penny realize her purpose. Forbidden Fountain: Jeeves is un-babied as a trap Let’s Get Dangerous!: Drake and Gosalyn Return, and Solageo’s Circut ends up being vital to the climax.. in the strangest and funnest way to say possible but still. It counts. Escape from the Impossibin: Beakley’s near breakdown at the idea FOWL has come back. It was already heartbreaking and the first adventure had made it even more so.. but now it’s out and out DEVISTATING. The one thing after her daughter is not only back.. but SHE’S the reason he’s in Scrooge’s life and home and her giving up SHUSH has now left her wide open.

The Split Sword: Probably the best out of all of these as it ends up directly playing into the climax in an awesome way i’m saving for Bradfords New Gods: Storkules shows up. Okay so that every episode claim bit me on the ass. Also when did these two meet? I mean probably at end of spear of selene but the more important question is WHY DID YOU ROB ME OF THESE TWO MEETING AT ANY POINT IN THE SERIES.

The First Adventure: Naturally the Payprus comes back as Does herons needling bradford to stop denying what he is.

Fight For Castle McDuck: Suprisingly the blessed bagpipes ended up being VITALLY important. And giving us sexiest man alive infinity years running Keith David for an episode. Last Christmas; Santa Cameo

Beaks in the Shell: Gandra being taken and the Lost Library being setup for this episode.

Lost Cargo: The Stone of What Was. And Credit where its due what FELT like simply a filler episode with a tantengal connectoin.. ended up probably being one of the most important episodes. Fair play.

Life and Crimes: Magica turning Bradford into a non sentient bird, like what happened to her brother.... proving once again this episode really REALLY needed as subplot attached to lead into the finale or something.

Bonus Round: Pilot payoffs by the pound. Seriously Scrooge and Donald’s last lines to each other, the badass return of “I’m a Pilot”, more on that in a minute, and even other smaller call backs like “Keep Getting Up” and webby sucessfully getting some juice to Louie’s pride. All top notch stuff and it really makes the finale FEEL like one with all this coming back full circle. So i’ve hinted at it enough, let’s bring on the bad guy.

The First Woodchuck

We’ve had some mixed payoffs so let’s get to one that’s just out and out excellent. Bradford Buzzard.. is the best villian the show ever had. Now I will give the caveat that my favorite forever and always will be

You know it, I know it. But Bradford is the best genuine threat of the series, with Marc Evan Jackson perfectly balancing his menace and genuine evil.. with his steadfast believe that he isn’t evil, and his calm, controlled business demeanor. It’s one of the best performances of the show and he deserves all the credit for it and after seeing him in supporting roles for his career, even if his role as Kevin on Brooklyn Nine-Nine is fucking awesome and I’m sad that show is ending, it’s nice to see him step into a big meaty role as the big bad and utterly nail it.

And the finale.. pays eveyrthing off with him, apart from the plan itself perfectly. Starting off him being revealed as Isabella Finch’s grandson... was a stroke of genius. I didn’t expect her to come back in play but it gives perfect reason both why he knew about the mysteries.. and why he’s like this.

Like Scrooge did with his nephews, niece and daughter, Isabella dragged Bradford all around the world seeing the unseen, thinking it was fun. The problem was... Bradford HATED it. He hated every minute of it, like as one post pointed out Rusty Venture from the Venture bros, and felt he should be in school. He wanted a normal life and a normal world and not.. this waking nightmare. So to him, fixing the world, stopping this sort of thing is the only way and that doing so is a good thing. His problem is how he adapted to it.

We see that best in his mirror images, the people he’s in direct contrast with and the show knows it. Starting off with the one he’s not like at all is Scrooge. Part of what makes Bradford perfect is he’s Scrooge’s evil opposiite. The Luthor to His Superman, The Joker to his Batman, the Green Goblin to his Spider-Man, the Iron Monger to his Iron Man, the Sinestro to his Green Lantern. Both come from a long line of adventure but while Scrooge embraces that and loves it, Bradford hates it and wants to destroy it. One is energetic and always ready, the other’s calm, calculated. And one sees what he is.. and the other dosen’t. Simple as that.

But his other mirror’s are more like him, moving onto Huey. Their both woodchucks, both prefer caution and planning, and both want to make some sense of a nonsensical world. Both want to feel safe when they constnatly don’t. One’s prone to panic attack the other’s calm. But what makes Huey the better man... is that he accepts the world is the way he is. It goes all the way back to terror of the terrafirmains. While he was all for adventure he started his doubting things, not beliving things were real.. because the reality that there are some things you just can’t prepare for, just can’t know, and you can’t be always ready.. it shattered him. He nearly let himself die rather than live knowing what’s out there. Webby pulled him out of that, literally and figuratively.. and he never went back. Sure he still tries to have an order to things, still breaks when his structure’s broken.. but it’s gone from a paranoid fear of the unknown and weird to embracing it. To relishing in finding unsolved mysteries and new clues to unlock, to finding new things to explore. He went from seeing this chaotic world as something to run from, to embracing and studying it. To loving it the way it is the way his family loves him for who he is. Bradford.. denies reality belongs the way it is and wants to force it into what HIS idea of it is Superboy Prime Style. The world isn’t waht he thought it should be so he’ll MAKE it that way. Huey grew as a person.. while his arc didn’t have a full payoff.. it still pays off here by showing what he COULD’VE been. had he let his earlier fear and his always present neurosis drive him like Bradford has. Let his big brain make him think he knows what’s better for EVERYONE instead of using it to genuinely help people. Bradford lacks the boys heart and empathy and that’s why he fell. Huey had his family backing him, his best friends coming to get him, and his brothers ultimately rescue him. Bradford.. threw his only true ally down a styigan murder hole.

Finally.. we have the one that’s not brought up directly.. but is very much there. Donald. While the two don’t interact hardly at all... it’s VERY fitting that Donald is the one Bradford picks to threaten Scrooge with. Like Bradford... Donald grew to hate adventure, he wanted to get as far away from it as possible and took it from his boys for as long as he could. Granted that was in part Bradford’s fault, and that was an INCREDIBLY clever twist: it dosen’t make him entirley responsible or anything that robs the moment of it’s imapct, Della still chose to take it out by herself, she still lied to Donald and she still got lost all by her own decision and impuslviness. But it fits perfectly into it: Bradford’s horrifying smile when Scrooge gets taken away from saving her is even WORSE now with full context, and it still fits that knowing about the project.. he’d want to set it up to screw up Scrooge’s life. I don’t think he sabotaged the rocket or anything, too obvious and something Della would’ve mentioned by now.. but he knew it was unfinished.

Back to the parallel the diffrence is once again.. change. Donald let go of his hate of scrooge and his past and realized it wasn’t all bad. He let himself grow as a person after a decade of bitterness and anger. But most tellingly and poignantly is Quack Pack... both had a chance to make a world that was safe, normal and what they always wanted. Both out of terror of the danger of this world. Thing is.. Donald’s was noble. He feared for his kids, his sister, his uncle.. loosing one again and any of them at all. He wanted a normal life to be safe, to hide from that.. but it’s not what THEY wanted or who they are. He accepted that’s not how the world works and how it does.. is still pretty great. And his growth shows: he’s ending the series planning to go off with his girlfriend globetrotting, KNOWING things might not be safe, but diving into adventure, having accepted it as part of him. He even finds some new family and takes in two girls who badly needed a home. He learned to accept things how they are... and Bradford refuses, not beliving in this world as it is and vowing to force it into the way he wants it to be.

And it’s that inherent selfishness.. that makes Bradford the Cartoon Supervillian he desperatley claims he isn’t. Bradford dosen’t care how many lives it takes, how much worse it makes the world, or how many people he has to stab in the back... the world WILL be “normal”. Bradford cares for no one and nothing except his own ambition. He kills Heron despite her loyality, and his own clones who loyally served him.. simply because their chaos too. No one or nothing else matters, not how they feel, not their right to exist.. only HIS vision. If he wanted to keep the world safe he’d be more of a hero, if still throughly a bastard... but he dosen’t. He wants to make it “normal”. He wants the world the way he thinks it shoudl be and damn anyone else and perfectly represents all the old assholes like him today who refuse to accept something diffrent or against the norm because “that’s how it’s always been”. Like those real world assholes.. Bradford is wrong. The Duckverse is beauitful how it is in it’s chaos and risk and love. And he just can’t see it because it’s not what he WANTS to see.

And that’s why I also love the Sword giving him big, black and red classic villianous monster, slowly mutating him as he fights the duck family. Because that’s his inner strength: he may deny he’s a villian but he’s forcing his will on others, refuses to see the world as it is for selfish reasons, and is willing to kill his own friends and allies if it means getting it. He’s the bad guy. And while he denies it to those around him... it’s clear from the fact the sword is working for him that he KNOWS IT, he knows he’s a villian and this is just what he wants but is so up his own ass he can’t SAY it or admit it. And in the end he’s fully beaten by the fact that his forcing his will on everything’s what’s unnatural: While his plan was ingenious, have scrooge sign a contract agreeing never to adventure again, since he’s right Scrooge would solve nonexistance it’s the same reason “launch hulk into space” only resulted in a smarter, more skilled hulk coming back with a space army to get revenge. He just didn’t bank on the inherent rediclousness of the unvierse: family really is the greatest adventure of all.. and the papyrus accepted it. It was the one thing he coudln’t palnf or because he can’t see the woirld how it is.. and that’s why he lost. He was so confident how he saw the world and how he worked was the only way... another way beat him.

His fate.. was also awesome and endleslly apporirate. Being mocked by the other villians who while less capable aside from Magica, at least admit what they are and what their doing.. and turned into a Vulture for Magica, left to be a mindless lackey in tons of chaotic schemes for the rest of his life. It couldn’t of happened to a nicer jackass. Okay three more sections to go. Let’s go.

Come Sail Away, Come Sail Away, Come Sail Away With Daissssyyyy

Donald’s leaving for a long, romantic adventure with Daisy is the perfect capper to Doanld’s character. Donald started the series hating adventure: blaming it for della being gone, his rough times during it, and wanted to escape it in the boat and keep from loosing his kids to it. He felt like a looser for not having reached his dreams or properly provided for his nephews, when really he did his best and still raised three wonderful kids. A bit overproective, god yes.. but despite his grief and anger he still got through ten years with them on his own merits, hard work and determination.

As the series went he reconclied with his past, realized Scrooge lost something too and that blaming him soley when it was Della’s choice was just taking his anger out on the one person he had left to take it out on instead of embracing his only family left, accepted Storkules as his friend (JUST his friend), accepted adventure through quack pack realizing that while it may be weird, dangerous and sometimes stressful for him... it’s what his family love doing and they should be who they are instead of who he wants them to be, and finally.. accepted himself by finding Daisy, someone who loves him for who he is, and literally and metaphorically understands him and turned right back around from dumping him to save him from a giant monster she roared at. He’s finally at peace.

And that’s why leaving. Not forever, He , Daisy, and his girls will be back in a few months or even a month. It’s very clear this is a vacation.. but it’s one he’s earned. He’ll always love his boys, his surrogate daughter/cousin, his sister, and his best buddy launchpad. But it’s okay for him to want to form his OWN family, to spend time with his future wife and show her the world. To make his own story for once instead of sharing it. To find his voice.

I also find it very poetic that a story that started with Donald raising his nephews like their dad.. ends with him adopting two more children. Two kids whose lives had been misrable: rapidly aged in tubes, deemed failures, constantly bellittled by the closest things they have for parents, so desperate for answers they’d kidnap their own sister and betray her trust and do things they know are wrong, And all this.. for nothing as their Dad kills their mom, bad as she was, and plans to kill them. And Donald’s first thought when given the chance to have a kid free time to himself, with no guilt having earned it? To take these girls in, start his own family, if Daisy’s cool with it mind he thankfully clearly called to talk this over first, and give them their own. Because that’s who Donald is, a good man whose finally earned his happy ending and the life he always wanted.. and accepted who he always was. An adventuerer, a loving fiance.. and dad.

The Real Hero: One last one before the bonus round and a quick one. The Launchpad Scene.. was one of the shows best. His arc in this episode of thinking he’s not a hero.. made sense. He’s been plenty heroic.. but his boyfriend is a martial arts and gymnastics savant and one of his three best friends has a giant suit of armor and is a genius. But the payoff made even more: He may not be the strongest, the most skilled or the smartest.. but he has the heart of a hero. He’s always been the kindest, most trusting, most friendly one of the main family, a guy who never gives up, even when he should, never surrenders and loves everybody. And that’s why he’s inspired so many people: Fenton to not give up after his firing and keep going, leading to his path as Gizmoduck. When Drake was lost, his fllm gone and his mentor seemingly dead (In fact skulking around the sewers like an evil ninja turtle), and his future unclear... TOLD HIM he could be Darkwing, that he could become the hero they both ihdolized and the inspiration to kids he wanted to be by his own bootstraps, and he gave Gosalyn faith in darkwing and hope at at time she had none. He also gave those mice their freedom. Not as poignant but you try creating the rescue rangers and see how far you get. I’ve lost a lot of chipmunks and mice that way.

Launchpad’s last stand makes up for his lack of being in the season during the final half. Launchpad realizing that despite his quirks he’s just as noble, valuable and wonderful as his families, both of them. And that he is a pilot. Sure he gets the gizmoduck armor.. but the armor isn’t what makes hi ma hero... i’ts being launchpad that makes him a hero. Loving adopted dad, wonderful partner, best friend... and a pilot

Bonus Round:

Okay this is just stray stuff from throughout the episode I didn’t have several paragraphs worth of material on before we get to the final thoughts. But it had so much good I can’t not talk about it. So...

Gyro calling Little Bulb BOYD’s brother. My heart wept. So sweet. As was him fixing his son at the end. BOYD has the two loving families he deserves.. and the brother he deserves.. and the brother he dosen’t deserve who will probably also is skulking around the sewers like an nafarious ninja turtle as the series ends.

Gosalyn fixing up Darkwing’s outfit for him. Awwww. Adopt that child you coward. Also if they don’t base the reboot on frank’s work here, I will riot.

“Just cough up the information Bentina!” that was just pure comedy gold especially the sheer fear radiating off him. Also right.

Manny’s “I can explain” and , once he has silky smooth keith david voice going “Come on man I just want to live my life.” That man is a legend.

Dewey and Louie just not talking the “you kids stay behind shit” pointing out both their stake in this and how they’ll just go anyway and him proudly accepting it. Given the kids turned the tied of things a lot, good call.

Dewey and Don Karnage singing their own background music as they air joust. Hell yes.

Pepper got a promotion! Goodf or her... it’s meaningless now but hey she has a partner in both senses.

Speaking of pepper she had the best line of the episode “He’s a grown man who has the strength of a baby!”. Only Amy Sedaris could’ve given that delivery just the perfect way she did.

The Funzo’s opening sequence was dynamite, from how well set up it was as an infilfration, to Webby having learned how to scam free drinks (Louie was so proud), to Lena cheating for her sister at DDR, to Scrooge paying full price.. it was wonderful> The payoff was also great as rather than be mad her special day was used as part of an elabroate spy operation.. she’s giddy. Because of course she is. Two specitic bits that get their own items

The Cabs came back one last time! It dosen’t effect my now finished retrospective, but after spending all that time with them it was nice to see them for what will probably be the last time for some time.

The whole scene where Della finds out about the trip. Just all of it. Her casually and accidentally choking daisy TWICE, Fethry, who sadly did not get an episode this season, being the one to blab about it and only realizing it .. after repeating that they told him not to, and Gladstone who not only was casually winning at Skeeball while his cousins both got pissed at it, relateable as hell, but then awkwardly escorting his baby cousin out of the situation.

“Satstically with Hubert gone one of us should be pancking but WHO I ASK YOU WHO?” As if I needed more evidence they were perfect for each other.

Lena just.. slumping over after Dewey finally has her drop the cloak. Comedy gold. BOYD scanning her later likewise so.

The second best line and line read of the episode goes to Louie/Bobby Monihan. “That is not comforting, I do not want to die”. He couldn’t of summed up Louie in one line any better.

Ludvwig was a national treasure. Not only did I squeel internally when it turned out he was alive but the explination for it was hilarious as it was batshit, and him just causally revealing Webby’s origin was fucking amazing “Ill give you all a moment ot process” The acomplanying “bless me bagpipes” was also amazing.

I do wish we found out where FOWL went but it was probably to leave the remains all free to come back as villians of the week. Frank outright said they had a tailspin sequel episode ready to go.

The Webby and June fight was a masterpiece and I REALLY need to do a top 12 fights list someday.

Lena connecting with the new twins , having pretty much the same background of being created by a villian for shitty reasons.

“one is silver and the other is “ “Flintheart glomgold!” they should consider a teamup. What’s a little brainwashing between friends?

“We’re sisters’. No you and violet are sisters, Webby is your girlfriend your both just in denial. I only say this because Webby also thinks Della and Penny are just friends and I feel she simply dosen’t know what being gay is or again is in denial. They’ll get there. Plus it feels like Lena just didn’t want to loose her and would say anything which is valid.

Curtain Call and Final Thoughts:

The Curtain Call was the perfect way to end a spectacular finale. Each bit of it’s a masterpiece, and every character gets one last awesome, heartfelt and hilarous goodbye with the camera and ending how it should: on our five most important characters, in a circle, together, smiling, freefaling into the next adventure. I”d have it no other way and any other series finale credits and last moments will now pale in comparison.

So the finale as a whole is messy, some bits aren’t resolved as good as they could’ve been, Huey go the shaft, and it REALLY needed another episode leading into it to help take the pressure off. While it needed 90 minutes for the plot it had to tell, it needed more to build up to that and while the season was tight with episodes they BADLY needed one more they didn’t get or even a subplto to help take the load off this episode.

But even with that... it was an utterly awesome finale on par with other recent standouts like “Let’s Fight to the End”/ “Thank you For Watching the Show” (Both feel like finales to me but in diffrent ways), “The Future” and the whole arc leading up to it, both parts of “Heart” and “Nice While It Lasted” . It was heartstopping, heartrending and heartfelt and ended the show as it should be: with over the top insanity, big reveals, a hell of a final battle.. and a focus on family. It’s not the perfect finale, and I defintely need more ducktales.. but it’s still a classic one and one of the series finest hours.. literally in this case.

I.. am going to miss this series. I went into it before but it’s thanks to this series I make a living. If you’d like to contribute to that, I have a patreon, patreon.com/popculturebuffet, my next stretch goal is a darkwing duck epsiode a month so kick in a buck won’t you? and take comissions so if theres an episode from the first two seasons that’s not part of the season 1 arc (I’m almost done there) or Lena’s story (already being paid for that) feel free to shoot me a line to comissoin it for five bucks an episode.

But more than that it was an excellent well crafted show that took a franchise I love and updated it for a new generation. My nieces love it, I love it, and I will always love it for that. Young or old, this show as phenominal, it was stupdendous.. it was a duckblur. It will remain in my heart for probaly the rest of my life among such shows as Steven Universe, Parks and Recreation, The Venture Bros, Letterkenny, DBZ Abriged, and so many more that have touched my life. It was simply the best. And i’m going to miss it. Thank you for reading this, i’ll see you at another rainbow, if not one quite like this.

Next on this Blog: Duck week continues after this review took two days to complete. Sorry about that. Our heroes head to castle McDuck and Dewey is forced to face the consequences of his actions, while Scrooge yells at his dad , his dad yells at him and his mom is the most precious thing tha’ts ever lived. Also Launchpad in Donald Cosplay. And it won’t stop there as till saturday the rest of the week is all dedicated to Ducktales as I finish up the Della and Lena arcs for season 1 and get started on Lena’s last three episodes. So if you liked some ducktales, stick around. And once again.. thank you.

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ilkkawhat · 3 years ago

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Any tips for first time writers? Specifically any tips and tricks for writing CSI stories and the Nick/Greg ship? Trying to stay in character and make the story interesting like a show episode instead of a boring text procedural is hard.

lmao as someone who is forever insecure about my own writing when it comes to keeping the characters in character, I think something to keep in mind is that you may view a character differently than someone else--and sometimes those views align with others, and most of the time it's better than what's presented in canon, and it can be really difficult to get confident about that, but I think that creating anything, even if it's not just writing--drawing, giffing, photo edits, etc, you do know and love that character enough to bring them to life under your hands and it's something that's just so like, poetic about keeping these characters alive, even if the show offed them or the show is cancelled, in these works (honestly the song "poet" by bastille says this best imo) and you may end up discovering parts of yourself as you explore these characters in depth, you'll learn more about them, too, and the more you write, the more confidence you will gain

but be weary of the validation trap (says someone who falls into it literally every time I post a fic)--do not rely on comments and feedback to let you know you're doing it "right." the fact that you're getting thoughts into words onto paper is good enough, and you are good enough and even if you don't end up sharing it, you still did something special that nobody else has done before, and that, is amazing!

I'm not gonna lie, a huge weakness of mine that I feel I've known ever since I started writing CSI fic is that I really don't do well in making cases for the CSIs to work on--and even when I do, the case is usually forgotten by the end of the fic and I end up just kinda focusing on the emotions between the characters and describing their feelings and actions the best I can and unfortunately the plot sometimes suffers because of that.

I guess it really depends on what you want out of your story--do you want a really intriguing case and basically make an episode of CSI, or do you want to kind of bend out of the procedural drama, and just write something fluffy like Nick/Greg going on a roadtrip or something actiony like them getting into some sort of trouble? (as I often do lmao)

Something that does always help me when I do decide I want an actual like, "plot" to the fic beyond just playing around with the characters and making them do things or experience things is that I'll make myself a very flexible outline--which I will admit, at times, does kinda drain the fun out of the actual writing part but I found that I'll try to write chapters/fics in segments in this way, like I'll have the start of a fic, and then when I feel like I need to break but want to write what I got going next, I'll have something in brackets like: [Self deprecation at home/drinking, evil Nick in the mirror?] (for agony), and sometimes maybe a bigger summary, and sometimes less to just kinda remind myself of what I wanted to accomplish with a fic

BUT know that there are gonna be things that pop up sometimes. twists that come to you halfway through a fic--or if you're lucky, you'll find that your reader friends will kinda give you a twist to add in (my fic Last Breath is the greatest example of this--I originally was gonna do like, 12 chapters but then @dannilea said "HEY MK GIVE NICK AMNESIA" and then the fic got doubled in length lmao) so don't feel confined to any sort of outline. go with the flow, go with what feels right for you.

I know it's a lesson I'm still learning myself, but do not pressure yourself with these sorts of things. there are no deadlines. you're not doing anything wrong. if you don't like something you wrote? don't delete it (i've deleted so many things--fics, my entire blog, old art and gifs I did and it's one of my biggest regrets that I carry with me and god...it just hurts) but don't be afraid to tweak, re-write or rework if you need to--I know ao3 has an option where you can even say something is a "remix" of another work if you write a fic and then somewhere down the line, decide to expand on it or change it up? (I think it's meant for that at least, I haven't done that sort of thing....yet)

and that's another thing--you'll always be learning new things as you keep writing. I've been writing since I was like, twelve years old. Had a long ass depressive gap (though I did still write some things, just not...as intensely as I used to) before I came back to the CSI fandom (which I never felt I contributed to before, when I joined tumblr I posted some caps but that was about it, it really wasn't until 2018 that I started giffing and writing and three years later lmao here we are!) and there are just hard lessons you do learn--like I said, the validation trap and pressure and all of that

but motivation wise, something I've been (trying) to do is write at least 100 words per day. Doesn't have to be a specific fic, doesn't have to be anything I intend to make a fic, but just...getting the words flowing. But again, no pressure, because I recently had another depressive bout and went 33 days without writing and it climaxed to me having another mental breakdown swearing I was never gonna write again and damn near deleting everything and giving up.........only to start writing again the next day (and full disclosure, I did have a friend helping me literally every day with that and if they read this, I hope they know how forever grateful I am that they convinced me to keep going and I would not actually be here without them)

You will need to recharge, you will need to be mindful of outside stresses that may be impacting your creative energies. And sometimes, you can try doing things not relating to writing at all. Make a playlist of songs that make you think about the fic; if you can, draw or make photo edits of the fic. find a friend to bounce ideas off of--so many of my fics were enriched by that, I can't even begin to list them all lol.

But above all, again, just know that what you're writing is unique to you, nobody else will be able to write the way you do, and that is just...so special. writing can be difficult, it's exhausting, it's a thankless job at times but when those words start clicking together and your fingers just keep typing/writing, you'll just kinda get this like, rush like nothing I've ever been able to match.

and lmao I know you said specifically CSI and Nick/Greg and feel like I got sidetracked--but the great thing about CSI is I feel like you'll have excuses to put them in situations given their line of work, but like I said before, you can bend out of the genre a little bit. Have Nick and Greg go on a vacation, or make an AU (even something as wild as a sci-fi AU--honestly Specimen Stokes is the most fun I've had in writing the past three years) or if you do want to stick to canon, and don't want to make a whole new case or elaborate on the details--play with an established episode. If there was a Nick focused episode, what was Greg doing and vice versa? Did they talk about things afterwards, or did something happen leading up to the episode that made them act a certain way around each other?

I'll honestly find inspiration also just watching the episodes--something I've been doing in these past few months of my rewatch is making little ficlets about the episode, like I wrote one about Nick and Greg post 6x02 elaborating on the breathplay that Greg hinted about earlier in the episode, or I made a revenge fic for 14x12 where that douchey abusive husband went after Nick, etc. So sometimes it helps to dive back into canon and play in that sandbox too

I hope these tips can help get you started and honestly, don't feel obligated to agree or do any of these things I listed above. We all have different ways of going about writing, and it is just one big learning process and something I don't think I'm ever gonna perfect or master in any sort of way--(not to say I think I'm the worst writer in the world but I just...try to humble myself and not believe I'm the best or better than anybody else cause that's part of the validation trap, you get those ideas in your head and then it can destroy you when you realize you're definitely not)--and there will be times you get heavily discouraged, but...you just gotta keep going. keep pushing. find outside encouragement, but don't rely on it. practice a lot of self care and don't pressure yourself to finish or share or write more than you think you can. just...let it come, and enjoy the ride

I honestly feel like I'm one of the least qualified to say all of these things, but I really do hope it helps and hey, you already got one cheerleader, me, who will be excited to read whatever you share!

#writing #(does this novel of advice count towards my word count goal 😂 jk i already hit it)#mk talks

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janeofcakes · 5 years ago

Text

Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Ten Feet from the Pack: Chapter 2

Hey, y’all! I hope everyone had a great, great week. I had a busy one, that’s for sure. It’s been so long I forgot what it was like to scramble for seven days, trying to get everything typed and edited so I can keep a schedule. Yikes! I know it’s a couple days late, but here it is. I hope you all like it! And I hope everyone who wants to has heard from me. I love all of my established fans and welcome all the new ones. You all inspire me to keep writing. Thank you for you love and support.

And now, without further ado...

***

Welcome to the jungle, we’ve got fun and games. --Guns N’ Roses, Welcome to the Jungle

Sherlock is seated at his desk. Every inch of its surface is covered with papers, books and file folders full of clippings, all on roller derby tactics and strategies. He makes a point of knowing every new maneuver as it is developed, as well as any updates to old ones. Every minute not on the track with the ladies is spent reading and sifting, and then applying his findings to the team. He also formulates his own original moves and plans, demonstrating them to the ladies himself.

Sherlock revolutionized coaching when he joined the staff ten years prior and was the youngest coach of a top national team the league had ever seen. Mrs. Hudson took a huge gamble on him and it paid out in dividends. The team had already been slowly recovering from a long slump, but Sherlock brought them back to life. Within two years, the Rock City Rollers were at the top of their division and then the league, and they haven’t slowed down since.

Sherlock’s approach to coaching had changed everything. At 28, he was only slightly older than most of the ladies and younger than a handful. He quickly gained their respect when he turned up for his first practice in a tee and gym shorts, all geared up in skates and pads. He had clearly had them a long time and had not just purchased them as some inane attempt to relate to the team. His pads were scuffed, as well as the protective covers on the toes of his skates. His helmet bore stickers worn with time. Most of them quotes from movies and literature. All of the skaters noted a sticker that simply read “Number 37”. A reference to a scene from Clerks and the same sticker on captain of the team, Molly Hooper’s helmet. All of them noticed, but no one did more than give one another sideways glances. It was quickly forgotten when Sherlock started warming up with them and doing laps. He wanted to see everyone’s style of skating and skill set those first couple months so he could begin to build the team’s repertoire. He skated with them whenever he had the chance and quickly became ‘one of the ladies’ while still holding the respect a coach deserved.

Sherlock’s eyes are closed. The tall french doors into his mind palace are open. Each skater has a room from which he can pull files and images, clips of their derby play to mix and match as need be. He watches as his own strategies play out before his mind’s eye. Sherlock stores the information he collects and files it, organizes it so he can access it whenever the need arises. As a result, he knows all and can change from one strategy to a better suited one on the fly, and his coaching methods guarantee that the ladies are prepared for any change of plans.

A light rap on his office door catches Sherlock’s attention. He closes his mind palace and opens his eyes. Reaching for a bottle of water and twisting off the cap, he grants entry in a loud voice. The wide door swings open to reveal Molly Hooper, dressed for afternoon practice in a pair of spandex shorts and a team tank. Pads cover her elbows and knees, but helmet and skates are missing. She steps into the room, closing the door behind and comes to stand before his desk with her hands on her hips.

“You look like you haven’t moved a muscle,” she narrows her eyes. “You did eat lunch.”

It’s not a question. Sherlock meets her gaze and doesn’t bother to lie, merely shrugging in response. Molly shakes her head, snaps the bottle from his grasp and takes a drink as she sits in the chair across the desk from him. Producing a banana she must have tucked in the waistband of her shorts, she throws it at him and he catches it with a start.

“You’re eating it on the way to practice,” she tells him sternly and then smiles fondly. “So what are you plotting this time?”

“Just working out some new strategies,” he answers with a grin. “I’d like to develop a formula for calculating the amount of force required to knock over any given blocker. Once Trixie and Mary can do it easily, the three of us can train the others to do the same and more jammers will have the confidence to come in hot.”

“Not everyone can do math in a split second, love.”

“They can if the formula is simple enough,” he leans forward in his chair with a sparkle in his eye. “I just need to pair it down to the most essential factors.”

“Well, if anyone can do it, it’s you,” Molly hands him the water bottle.

“Thank you for your confidence,” he says around the bottle as he takes a drink. “Everyone ready?”

“More or less,” she watches while he turns his chair to reach a shining silver whistle dangling from a hook on the wall. Once its woven navy blue cord hangs around his neck, Sherlock hunches forward to pull on a pair of bright green ankle socks. His office has basically been a barefoot zone since day one. The cool flooring on the soles helps clear his mind and relax the muscles in his body. It’s better for him than any massage. He glances at Molly while he works.

“Something on your mind, Molls?” he asks, seeing the thoughtful concern in her expression. Molly takes a deep breath and considers her words carefully.

“This new doctor,” she begins, biting her lip.

“Dr. Watson,” Sherlock supplies.

“What do you know about him?”

“He is nothing like Anderson,” Sherlock sits up and meets her eyes. “He studied in London and his references are very impressive. They all speak highly of him, including Griffy.”

“I know all that,” she says and then hesitates. “Will you do it when you meet him?”

“Molly, you know I don’t deduce anyone who is a part of this team.”

“Please.”

Sherlock closes his mouth abruptly, covering his upper lip with his lower and retracting it again. He stares at Molly for a long moment and neither of them makes a sound. She knows exactly what she is asking him to do and knows that he can never refuse her anything. He promised Greg he would, how did he phrase it, ‘only use his powers for good’? The problem is Sherlock wants to be sure Watson won’t be Anderson all over again. Surely that is adequate reason to invade this man’s privacy, especially if he chooses to target any of the ladies.

“You can trust that I will do everything in my power to protect you and the other ladies.”

“I know, Sherlock, I know you will,” the team captain assures him, but still wears a face of concern. “And I know you don’t do it to anyone with Rock City, but I thought this might be an exception.”

Sherlock looks at her and his expression softens. He stands and moves around the desk, placing a hand on hers where she grips the armrest.

“I’ll take care of it, Molly,” he promises. “Mrs. Hudson spent the conference with him and trusts him implicitly. But yes, he will have to pass under my own scrutiny.”

They share a look for several seconds, both reading the other’s intentions. The tension around Molly’s eyes begins to ease. She has known Sherlock for far too long to doubt the meaning of his words. With a smile on her face, she pops up out of the chair and kisses his cheek.

“Thanks, love,” she says warmly.

“You’re welcome,” he turns slightly and offers his arm. “Shall we go?”

Molly slips her arm in his and they head for the track.

***

Three hours later and they are racing around the track, careening toward the other eight skaters who are poised to stop them. Other members of the team stand outside the track, cheering and egging them on. It had been an intense practice, starting with drills and moving straight to hardcore scrimmaging. Knowing the practice was coming to an end, the ladies all insisted Molly and Sherlock try to outscore each other for a little fun. Sherlock only gave in when Molly joined in the cajoling. He may skate with them, but seldom scrimmages. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he had.

With a smile on his face, Sherlock steps one foot over the other as he comes to the pack at high speed. Molly is right on his heels, an excited grin shining brightly on her face. Sherlock’s eyes dart toward Molly before meeting those of his blocker. With the slightest of nods, he signals her, and the two fingers he holds covertly at his side reveal his plan. She squeezes the arms of the other two blockers and the stage is set.

Just as Sherlock reaches the pack, BatR cuts out of position to crowd an opposing blocker to the boundary line. Since they all know their own strategies, the others recognize the move immediately.

“Shit!” Mary cries. “Bob’s your uncle!”

She and her teammates try to adjust, but it is too late. Hella and HardOn pounce on the other blockers, and The Woman rushes Molly. With women crashing into one another all around, Sherlock gracefully cuts inside and through easily. He emerges on the other side of the pack without so much as a touch, another four points to his name while Molly remains behind, held fast by The Woman and Hella.

Sherlock’s smile grows as he glides around the track, filing that one away for future bouts. That is when Witch Hazel catches his eyes from track side.

“Coach! Coach!” she calls, holding his cell phone aloft. “It’s Lestrade!”

Sherlock slows his pace and hops off the track to stand next to her. He motions for her to take his place and she jumps in. Molly, having broken free of the pack, calls out in welcome when Witch Hazel enters and they speed toward the pack together.

“Greg,” Sherlock greets a little breathlessly, bringing the phone to his ear, but has little chance to say another word before the man’s voice whispers the message.

“He’s in the stadium. Mrs. Hudson is touring him around, but she’s leaving the track and team to us. They’re heading for my office.”

“I’m on my way,” Sherlock ends the call and blows his whistle sharply. The cheers die down swiftly and the action stops, soon all eyes are on him. “Our new doctor is here. I’ll bring him down in about an hour. Get cleaned up and come back here to meet him. Great practice.”

He skates onto the track again. Every skater heads toward him until the whole team is clustered into a tight jumble of sweaty bodies and smiling faces. Each stretches out one arm into the center and some even grab the hand of a teammate within reach.

“Take us home, Groot,” Sherlock smiles at the skater across from him as he takes her hand. Her returning grin is nothing less than spectacular.

“I am Groot!” she chants quickly instead of the numbers 1, 2, 3. No one is at all phased as they yell a jovial ‘DRC Woo!’.

When the group breaks, Sherlock turns to head for Greg’s office, but a strong hand grips his shoulder lightly and then lets go. He swivels his head to see their most infamous duo. Not only are HardOn Skates and Hell On Wheels a couple, they are also the team’s die-hard jokesters.

“You gonna meet Ph.D. like that, Coach?” Hella asks with an appreciative look at his lean, sweaty frame. HardOn puckers her lips in feigned lust, letting out a quiet ‘ooo’.

“If he can’t handle this, he’ll never make it on this team,” he replies with a sassy shake of his ass.

“Oh-ho!” Hella laughs as everyone joins in with whistles and catcalls.

“Go get him, Coach,” HardOn chuckles with a wink.

Sherlock laughs and skates out of the arena for the elevators.

When he arrives at the door to Greg’s office he can tell Dr. Watson is already there. Judging from Greg’s steady stream of words, Mrs. Hudson has already left. Perfect timing as far as Sherlock is concerned. Certain questions will go far better without a scolding mother in the mix. Sherlock stands still for a moment and listens. Greg is telling Watson about the team as it stands now, which means he got through its history in record time (unlikely) or Mrs. Hudson already did (clearly). They were together for most of the conference with nothing to do but go to boring seminars and talk to one another. God, who knows what she told him. Watson probably knows her life story, and all the ladies’ too. And Greg, Mike, Daniel, Craig...shit. And Sherlock’s too. Mrs. Hudson thinks of him as a son and is prone to over-sharing. Sherlock only knows what was in Watson’s file (admittedly impressive), what Griffy and other references told him (also impressive), and what he could find online (again, impressive). The man’s past seems to be free of misdeeds and his closets of skeletons. He appears to be squeaky clean, but that isn’t going to stop Sherlock from asking the hard questions and doing it directly.

Straightening his spine and relaxing his shoulders, Sherlock raps lightly on the office door. Greg’s voice rings out, cool and clear (comfortable, interesting) granting Sherlock entrance. Greg nods in his direction and the short, blonde man sitting in the chair turns to look at the coach.

Sherlock’s heart stops.

“Sherlock, come in,” Greg says in a business-like, but friendly tone. He turns back to the doctor. “This is our coach, Sherlock Holmes.”

The man, who is standing now, walks the short distance to stand before Sherlock. His hand is outstretched and he wears a bright smile on his face.

“Sherlock,” Greg continues, “Dr. John Watson.”

The most beautiful smile.

“Hello.”

God, his voice is lovely and he still has a light accent after his two years in the States.

“Please call me John,” he shakes Sherlock’s hand and his hand is so warm and soft. Sherlock swallows hard and mumbles a respectable greeting, feeling like an utter idiot. Something he needs to stop this minute. He needs to get a hold of himself, for god sake. He is a grown man and a professional. He needs to act the part, especially in the presence of this disarming man.

But god, he is gorgeous. Short, sandy blonde locks that compliment his tanned skin, a definite hallmark of living in the sun. His file read that he abruptly pulled up stakes in London to move to California of all places. He had accepted a position as head physician for a major league hockey team. Now he has moved Detroit and will have to adjust to another very different climate. Sherlock cannot help but wonder how Watson will like the cold temperatures and snow once the winter months come.

The man certainly is fit. Sherlock can see that plainly, even under a dark grey suit and baby blue shirt that compliments his dark blue eyes. Was that planned or did Watson stumble into it? He does not wear a tie, the top two shirt buttons undone and collar parted artfully at his throat. Jesus Christ, that throat. Its soft angles and strong muscles beneath sun-kissed skin, and Watson has not maintained his physique with hours in the gym. No, nothing so mundane. Instead it is...surfing. Oh, now that is interesting.

“Well,” the doctor says, stepping back a bit, “now that you’re here, I imagine you both have questions. Why don’t we all have a seat?”

Sherlock cocks a brow as he and Watson sit in the two chairs before Greg’s desk. He angles his in Watson’s direction and the doctor mirrors the action. The man is obviously very confident, almost cheeky, inviting Greg to sit in his own office. Is it because he knows he is in no danger of losing the job since Mrs. Hudson is so taken with him or is this simply his manner? Sherlock narrows his eyes as Greg begins to speak. He sees no smugness in Watson’s expression, only friendliness and interest.

“Certainly. Dr Watson was just telling me about his time with the Ducks,” Greg sounds conversational. Sherlock knows in an instant that while Greg is always agreeable with new people, Watson has already begun to win him over. The coach’s hackles are raised. He has just become the last line of defense. He must protect the ladies at all cost and that means he cannot be charmed.

“Has he now?” Sherlock studies the doctor with sharp eyes. “Tell me then, Doctor, why does a respected, established surgeon leave London for a position as a physician over an all male hockey team?”

Sherlock’s words are dripping with innuendo and suspicion. Greg closes his eyes and fights the urge to face palm. He knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Sherlock never makes anything easy. To his credit, he regains his composure quickly and looks at Watson.

“Yes. Well, what he means is…”

“No, it’s a good question. I can definitely see why you would wonder about it. It’s a bit strange. Quite a shift from one world to another, let me tell you,” Watson cuts him off with a wave of his hand. He shifts his eyes to Sherlock and watches with a measured gaze. If Sherlock didn’t know better, he would think the man was deducing him. The coach looks right back at him, all manner of deductions filling his brain as he waits for the doctor’s answer. If the man is offended by the implications the question carries, he does not show it.

“Well,” Sherlock prompts wryly. John blows out a puff of air and almost seems to relax even more than he has already.

“I was bored.”

The room is silent. Sherlock only just keeps his jaw from dropping. His suspicion and deductions falling away as one all-encompassing thought spreads through his mind palace from the top down. How can a man like Dr. John Watson even exist, and in this place and time with Sherlock? The derby gods are clearly toying with him. He prides himself on having no romantic entanglements. They only complicate things and occupy space in his mind palace, intrusive and pushing themselves to the forefront when he has more important matters to consider. And now… He stares at the man before him, all smooth edges and charming smiles and identical dimples on either cheek and so...damn...genuine.

“Bored?” Greg’s voice snaps Sherlock from the spell. He blinks and looks at Greg, whose brow is furrowed in confusion.

“Yeah, I know. Sounds totally mental,” Watson acknowledges. “It was general surgery, so it’s not like I was doing the same nose job day after day on the rich and stuck up. I just...I wanted something different. I didn’t love doing it anymore.”

Sherlock can see why Mrs. Hudson likes this man so much. Her husband’s obsession with money and power made her see just how unimportant they really are and anyone who would cast aside a lucrative position to follow a dream, a passion, is worth his or her weight in gold. Watson definitely has a passion for healing and comforting the fallen. It is who he is and practicing medicine in any setting clearly brings him joy and purpose. Sherlock stops for a moment to wonder if he, himself cares about anything so deeply. The answer is obvious. Derby. Skating. It’s in his blood and has been ever since the first time he skinned his knee trying to balance on his first pair of quads. Losing it would be losing himself.

“So, hockey?” Greg’s voice pulls him from his reverie. His eyes coming back into focus, Sherlock looks at the other two men. Greg gives him a side glance that screams ‘What the hell is wrong with you’, but he schools his expression quickly and looks back at the doctor.

“Yeah,” Watson says with a chuckle, “‘bout as different as it gets. New place, new people, new medicine.”

“Your file says you ‘minored’ in sports medicine?” Greg begins. “What does this even mean? How does someone minor in anything while studying to be a surgeon?”

“I needed something else to fill my time,” Watson shrugs. “I’ve always been drawn to sports medicine. Always wanted to develop new ways of treating common injuries, both major and minor, but research was never my forte.”

Suddenly it all becomes clear to Sherlock in a burst of uncontrolled deduction and the words are out of his mouth before he has a chance to think better of it.

“You have a limp.”

Both men snap their heads to stare at Sherlock in surprise.

“Very slight, but it was much worse and for quite some time,” he continues, reading it off the doctor like a book. It is the first time since he entered the room that he can deduce Watson at all. There is something about him, something odd. Something that keeps Sherlock from seeing the real Dr. Watson like he can with everyone else he has ever met. It is absolutely intriguing and Sherlock cannot resist the temptation to continue reading. “You played rugby your first year of college. You entered medical school the following year. Your build and shorter stature lent well to the sport, so the ball was often given to you. It was on one such occasion that your leg was broken, in a less than clean hit. Two places, possibly three. It was difficult to repair. They said you would never walk again.”

“Sherlock!” Greg says, loud and stern. Sherlock meets his furious eyes and wonders how many times he tried to get his attention,

Regretfully, Sherlock shifts his gaze to the doctor. Sherlock had expressly agreed not to do exactly this. Not to piss off the man on his first day. Not to attack him or push his buttons, especially since they will be working together so closely. But when he looks at John Watson, there is no trace of anger on his face. It is more like surprise, disbelief, admiration? Sherlock cocks his brow and tilts his head.

“That. Was,” Watson’s words come slowly and Sherlock readies himself to apologize, “Amazing.”

Coach and GM alike blink their eyes wide, both expecting a completely different response.

“You really think so?” Sherlock asks.

“Absolutely,” a smile tips up the corners of Watson’s lips and his tongue darts out to lick them.

“That’s not what people usually say.”

“Oh? What do they say?”

“Piss off.”

A warm laugh bursts from the doctor and he shakes his head slightly. Sherlock follows suit in spite of himself. What is going on? He wasn’t meant to feel immediately at ease with this man. He was going to approach him with cold caution and ask the rude questions, not melt into a giggling puddle at the doctor’s feet.

“Dr. Watson,” Sherlock says, affecting a tight and tense tone, “why have you accepted this position?”

“Well, working the hockey racket isn’t as exciting as you might think,” he answers simply. “Meeting Mrs. Hudson at the conference was a godsend. We hit it off straight away, and she told me everything about roller derby, the team and its history. It’s where I need to be.”

“Is it? And why is that?” Sherlock asks sharply. Greg is staring daggers at him, but he ignores him. He made a promise to Molly, to all the ladies, and he will not forget it. “Is it the appeal of playing doctor with fit women rather than a bunch of toothless hooligans?”

Sherlock’s eyes are hard and accusatory. The doctor stares at him coolly. The office is so quiet that a noise, any noise in the whole facility, could find its way to the three men’s ears. Greg is about to stand and break the silence when Watson beats him to it.

“Mister Holmes,” he begins in a crisp voice, “any coach in your position, especially one who had just run across such a bastard as you have, would take all steps necessary to make damn sure it didn’t happen again. I absolutely understand that. Let me assure you that I would never make any advances toward any patient. It is despicable and an utter abuse of trust.”

Sherlock stares him down with fury in his eyes, waiting to hear the speech Anderson gave him when confronted. ‘I would never risk my medical license or my reputation on a whore like Sally Donovan.’ That was all it had taken for Sherlock to lay out the prick with one punch and throw him right out of the building with an honest to god kick to the curb. Anderson was arrested after Mrs. Hudson formally fired him. With no danger of him returning, Sally finally opened up about the full extent of his manipulations. Mrs. Hudson and the team lawyers made every effort to have Anderson punished to the fullest extent of the law, but he had been bailed out and then vanished.

Sherlock waits for the same pompous, arrogant words to be tossed in his face as he grows more angry by the second. But they do not come. Instead, Watson fixes him with very serious and concerned eyes.

“Please check up on me in any way you feel necessary. I will not disappoint you.”

Sherlock narrows his eyes. Is the doctor upset that he accused him? Of course he is. He’s fully pissed off, but doesn’t show it. Well, not in any way someone other than Sherlock can see. Watson also clearly understands Sherlock’s position, just like he said, and has elected diplomacy over sentiment. The coach can feel a thin layer of reason slough off his defenses. He ignores it.

“Thank you,” he says in a neutral tone. “I will.”

“Sherlock, why don’t you show Dr. Watson his office and finish the tour?” Greg interjects suddenly. He watches Sherlock closely as he continues to deduce Watson. He knows exactly what the coach is doing. Exactly what he isn’t supposed to and at Molly’s request, no doubt. Greg could stop him or send him away on some stupid errand and show the doctor around himself, but he won’t. The truth is, he also wants to know for damn sure that they will never have another Anderson in their ranks.

When Sherlock finally turns his head to meet Greg’s gaze, the smallest of smiles flits over the GM’s lips. The hard-nosed coach has come to the same conclusion he and Mrs. Hudson have, even if reluctantly - John Watson can be trusted.

“Of course,” the tall man rises and Watson follows suit. Sherlock holds the door open. The doctor passes through with a goodbye to Greg and a thank you to Sherlock. Just before he turns away, Greg catches Sherlock’s eye.

“Be nice,” he mouths.

Sherlock rolls his eyes dramatically and closes the door.

He continues the tour where Mrs. Hudson left off, showing Watson where other staff offices are, including his own. They survey the in-house x-ray, CT and MRI suites, as well as the sick bay for minor injuries and short stays of observation. Anything more invasive requires transport to Ford Hospital. As they walk a few feet to Watson’s new office, Sherlock loses his stride for a moment before resuming pace. He and the doctor have engaged in easy conversation whenever he hasn’t been offering an explanation for a room or policy. Sherlock isn’t even faking. It is not the annoying ‘polite conversation’ he is sometimes subjected to when reporters have to wait for the camera man.

What the hell is happening to him?

“You okay?”

“What? Yes, of course,” Sherlock glances toward the doctor and rushes to say, “This is your office.”

He unlocks the door and pushes it open. The light clicks on as they enter the spacious room filled with filing cabinets and bookshelves. A large wooden desk dominates, a closed laptop resting on one side with a separate keyboard and monitor. Watson takes it all in as Sherlock closes the door behind.

“You can rearrange or remove anything you like,” he says. “The next two doors down are exam rooms. I’ll show you when we leave.”

“Of course, of course. Medical records are on paper as well as electronic?” Watson asks, walking around the desk. Sherlock stares at him a moment before nodding. The corner of Watson’s mouth rises and he gestures. “Too many filing cabinets not to have copies.”

“Our previous physician had been here for some time and was of a more old fashioned sensibility,” Sherlock explains, referring to the team doctor before Anderson. As he watches Watson look around the room, his lips quirk upward in spite of himself. What other deductions will the doctor make?

“That’s good to know,” Watson nods. “And these medical texts?”

“He left them. Thought they could be helpful to the next physician.”

“I’m sure they will be,” he says with a smile. His clear blue eyes train around the room again before he faces Sherlock. “You said there are exam rooms?”

“This way.”

They leave the room and walk the short distance to the two rooms.

“Great. This all looks good,” Watson says, rubbing his hands together briefly. “What’s next?”

“The track and the team,” Sherlock says simply. The doctor grins almost mischievously.

“And are they still practicing?”

“No,” Sherlock returns with a self-deprecating smile. “I called practice when I started for Greg’s office. I’m not a monster, whatever popular opinion may suggest.”

“So you did come straight from practice then,” Watson’s grin broadens.

“Problem?”

“No, just explains the bandana and the whole…” he gestures toward Sherlock’s workout ensemble. Sherlock lifts his hand and rests it on the bandana hiding his hair. He had all but forgotten it was there. Like many of the ladies, he always wears one under his helmet to keep any stray curls from falling onto his face. Shaking his head, he uses the same hand to direct the doctor down the hall for the elevator.

“How far back do the records go?” Watson asks into their companionable silence.

“Since each one joined the team,” Sherlock answers, “and a medical history, of course.”

“Of course,” he echoes and then smirks. “And the coach too?”

“Of course,” he says again, looking sideways at the shorter man. “Everyone on skates.”

“Do you skate often?”

“Nearly every practice,” the coach shrugs. “Depends on what we’re doing.”

“Do a lot of coaches skate with their teams?”

“No, most don’t.”

“And what makes you so different?”

They stop in front of an elevator. Sherlock presses the down button and fixes a steady gaze on Watson.

“That’s what makes me different.”

Neither man says a word. The doors open and they step inside the elevator.

“Mrs. Hudson said you were the youngest coach the league had ever seen when she hired you.”

“Mrs. Hudson seems to have told you quite a bit,” Sherlock answers with irritation.

“She thought I should know the team history.”

They share a look as Sherlock’s hackles raise. Just what does Watson know? How much did his well-meaning surrogate mother share?

“Look, Watson…”

“Please,” he interrupts, hands up in placation, ”I didn’t mean to offend you. Mrs. Hudson is obviously quite fond of you. I just thought it was...sweet. Reminds me of my own mum. I’m sorry.”

Sherlock pauses, eyes searching the doctor’s face, but it has gone disappointingly unreadable again. He straightens his spine, head held high as he shifts his gaze back to the elevator doors.

“How does she feel about you living on another continent?” he deflects, trying not to show just how much he appreciates the apology.

“Oh, I don’t suppose she minds. She passed five years ago.”

“God,” Sherlock mumbles nearly inaudibly. Of course he would stumble right into talking about Watson’s dead mother. Jesus Christ. He continues to stare at the elevator door, not wanting to meet Watson’s eyes. Finally raising his voice to speak more clearly, tilting his head toward the doctor as he does so. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

“It’s fine,” the elevator doors open, “and please call me John. Good working relationships start with first names...Sherlock.”

“Right,” he replies, having no intention of doing so. “The stadium’s this way. You’ll hear it called the track, auditorium, a handful of other things. I prefer stadium.”

“How many people does it hold?”

“About 20,000.”

“Wow.”

“Derby isn’t as big as football or baseball, but we attract a big crowd. We’re almost always sold out.”

“But this building is so big. I can’t believe I’ve seen all of it.”

“You haven’t,” Sherlock smirks as he pulls open a door. “Ironically, we share it with the Red Wings and Pistons. They share the other half. Capacity’s about the same. If you don’t like it here you can always switch to the other side.”

Watson might have laughed at the joke, but he had just entered the stadium and appeared to be mesmerized by… Ah, the championship banners.

“Nine years straight,” he looks at Sherlock, not even bothering to hide how gobsmacked he is. “One for every year you’ve been here.”

“Except the first,” Sherlock corrects and Watson just huffs a short laugh. “Come on. The ladies are waiting on the track.”

The two men walk up the ramp that lies between two sections of seats. As they go, the group of women comes into view. When they see Sherlock and Watson approach, those who were sitting on the railing or in the team box stand and gather. The two men soon stand before them, their coach gesturing toward the doctor.

“Ladies, this is Dr. John Watson. He comes to us from sunny California.”

“Shit,” HardOn says without a care in the world, “that’s like having 24/7 vacation. Why the hell would you come here?”

“Yeah, don’t let the sunny days fool you, Doc. More of ‘em have snow than not,” Hella continues.

“Thanks for the tip,” Watson chuckles. Sherlock bites back a grin in an effort to maintain some sense of professionalism, but inside his heart wants to soar. He tries to tamp it down, keep himself from getting carried away. But in all honesty, every one of Sherlock’s innermost hopes for the new doctor seem to be coming to fruition before his very eyes. And wouldn’t that be fucking fantastic? And where the hell did this man come from?

“We’ll get to the comedians in a moment,” Sherlock clears his throat and motions to Molly, who steps forward with a smile. “This is our team captain, Mollycious Intent.”

“Hi,” she shakes Watson’s hand. “Molly Hooper.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” he replies with a warm smile. Molly glances at Sherlock and reads the approval on his face. Her smile brightens as her eyes slide back to the doctor.

“Pleasure’s all mine.”

“Molly has been our captain for eleven of her fourteen years with the team,” Sherlock tells Watson almost proudly.

“Wow,” the doctor’s eyes widen. “You must have been just out of uni, yeah?”

“Drafted straight out of college, if that’s what you mean,” Molly laughs.

“That’s exactly what I mean, yes,” Watson joins her with a chuckle. “It’s good to meet you. We’ll talk later, yeah?”

“I’d like that,” Molly answers. She turns to the rest of the team and the doctor follows her lead. Hella steps forward, offering her hand.

“Hell on Wheels,” she says as they shake hands. “Hella for short.”

“Nice to meet you, Hella,” Watson says her name hesitantly.

“Clara,” she laughs. “Don’t worry. Real and derby names are in all the files.”

“God, I hope so,” he answers with a laugh. Hella tilts toward HardOn and gently places her head on the shorter woman’s shoulder.

“And this is my better half, Harry.”

“Oh, Harry,” the doctor looks somewhat relieved, obviously hoping that is her derby name. His expression alters greatly when she takes his hand and introduces herself by the real one.

“HardOn.”

“What?”

“HardOn.”

Watson is frozen to the spot and his face panicked. HardOn simply grins at him casually and Sherlock finds himself doing the same. There is something very genuine and charming about John Watson. Sherlock can feel his toes begin to tingle. It creeps up to his knees and along his thighs. It works its way up his torso to his heart and mind with every word Watson says to every skater he meets. It is undeniable excited energy and Sherlock is doing all he can to keep it in check.

“HardOn Skates.”

“On...skates.”

“Yeah,” she claps his shoulder, “now you’ve got it. Harry ‘HardOn Skates’ Dewhurst.”

Watson remains frozen another few seconds and then he lets out a long breath as he smiles slowly, understanding dawning.

“HardOn Skates.”

“HardOn.”

“Right.”

“I like you, Ph.D.,” she laughs. “You remind me of my little brother.”

“You’ll need lots of bonding time then,” a tall woman with dark brown hair and ruby red lips strolls over. She extends an elegant hand and takes the doctor’s in it warmly. He is completely flabbergasted, much like everyone who meets her. “I’m The Woman.”

“Irene Adler,” Sherlock interjects. He is annoyed, but why?

“You never fail to ruin an entrance, Coach,” she scolds. Sherlock rolls his eyes.

“Hi,” a short blonde pushes past The Woman. “I’m Bloody Mary and you are adorable. I could just...devour you.”

“Mary!” Sherlock snaps. Everyone looks at him in surprise. He is surprised himself, but will not show it. He is used to putting an end to Mary’s flirtations, but typically not with such vehemence. He quickly continues as if nothing unusual has happened. “May I remind you that no skater may have a relationship with an authority figure.”

“Well, sure, Coach. You can tell me anything you want,” she says with feigned innocence. She looks at him a moment and then covers her mouth with her hand, making a big show of faux shock. “Wait, does he count as authority?”

“You know he does,” Sherlock hisses as she raises her hands in placation.

Three more women approach Watson before any more can be said. The first, and leader of the pack, inserts herself between Mary and the doctor.

“Trixie Belt’em,” she shakes his hand firmly. “Sally.”

“Sally, you have no idea how glad I am to meet you,” Watson says with a nervous laugh.

“I bet,” Sally murmurs with a knowing look. She turns to gesture at the woman to her right. “This is Bone Crusher.”

“Sarah Sawyer.”

“And Witch Hazel.”

“Anthea.”

“Good to meet you.”

The rest of the team introduce themselves one by one. Sherlock watches silently and tries not to grin like a fool. This man is perfect for the team. Absolutely perfect. And that is what makes Sherlock bite his lip and frown internally. No distractions. No interference. No sentiment.

As Watson meets the last woman on the team, his brows arch upward at the pleasant Irish lilt in her voice.

“Nice t’meet you,” she shakes his hand. “Ginger Smacks.”

She laughs instantly when Watson tips his head sideways in confusion. He glances at her dark hair and the corner of his mouth turns up.

“I know. It doesn’t make any sense, but it suits me. Call me Smacks.”

“Smacks, it is,” he huffs a laugh.

“I hear you’re from the UK. I used to live in London. Haven’t been back in years.”

“No kidding? Whereabouts?”

“Just off Hyde Park.”

“I was close to Regent’s. Baker Street.”

“Oh, yeah, right. I know the area,” Smacks smiles brilliantly and then sighs. “God, I’d love to go back one day.”

“Well, I’ll let you know if I see any good fares,” Watson jokes. He looks around at everyone and puffs out a breath. “So this is the team. I’ve met everyone?”

“Yep,” HardOn steps away from the group. “No offense, Ph.D., but I need to get going. Meet me later?”

Hella nods in answer as HardOn blows a kiss, bids everyone farewell and hurries away. As the rest of the group scatters with ‘see you laters’ and ‘nice to meet yous’, Sherlock sidles up to Watson’s side.

“I’m sure you’d like to start on the medical files. Think you can find your way back to your office?”

“Not a chance,” he replies with a genuine smile. It’s the most beautiful smile Sherlock has ever seen and now he will see it every day. By complete and utter coincidence, John Watson works in the stadium with him. Sherlock is a man of concrete principles - use the evidence at hand, knowledge of scientific forces, map out strategy in his mind palace. Fate is not something he believes in and yet, here is John Watson. Here, by his side, with no logical explanation.

Sherlock physically shudders and immediately berates himself internally. What the fuck is wrong with him? He made up his mind long ago. No feelings. No relationships. No entanglements. Caring about the ladies is one thing, but caring for one person, one man romantically is out of the question. It will only get in the way. Sherlock tamps down his traitorous thoughts and feelings. Caring is not an advantage.

“I’ll walk you there.”

“Ta very much,” John lets out a breath of relief and a short laugh.

Damn that smile.

Sherlock gestures and they walk around the track. He steers the doctor a quarter turn toward the inclined walkway from whence they came and they pass through the door. They remain silent until the elevator begins to ascend. John takes in a breath and holds it for a moment. Clearly, he thinks Sherlock will not like what he is about to say. Sherlock’s interest is peaked and waiting even the few seconds for John to speak is intolerable.

Sherlock narrows his eyes.

Since when does he call him John?

“I’d like to sit in on practice,” John is looking right at Sherlock, eyes locked on his. He wants to ensure that Sherlock does not see this as an intrusion. “Every practice. Just for a bit. I want to see how the game is played and where the injuries may come from. It’ll help me know what to expect.”

Sherlock doesn’t say a word or even move. He simply stares at John, mystified. Every one of his defenses begins to melt, dripping off his body like beads of sweat. Again, Sherlock asks himself how this man not only exists, but is standing before him. He seems to embody all Sherlock could ever dream of for the Rock City team doctor. He is brilliant, well-versed, interested, interesting, friendly, he already gets along with the ladies. He wasn’t just taken aback when The Woman flirted with him, he was downright flustered and it was so incredibly adorable.

Sherlock blinks his eyes, breaking the spell and pushes away all of his thoughts to focus on the issue at hand.

“Of course,” he shrugs his shoulders casually so John will know he is not at all bothered by the request. “It is the best way to truly understand the sport.”

“But Anderson never did it,” John supplies in a skeptical tone.

“Not once,” Sherlock says the words like they taste sour. “The man had no idea. He was an idiot.”

“I don’t doubt it. And I don’t plan on repeating his mistakes.”

“Not possible,” Sherlock states matter of factly. “You are nothing like him.”

They study one another in silence and the elevator doors open. They walk down the hall and are soon at John’s door. He unlocks it with the key card Sherlock gave him, but stops half way in and turns back to the coach. Sherlock suddenly feels like he is on a date that has reached its awkward ending and he cannot decide whether or not to seal it with a kiss.

“You’ll let me know when you hold practice?”

“I’ll email you the schedule as soon as I get to my office,” he assures him.

“Good. Great. Thanks,” John moves further into the office.

“Let me know if you need anything,” Sherlock reminds and then turns in the direction of his own office.

John leans back against the closed office door and blows out a long breath. He expected Mrs. Hudson to take him all over the stadium and tell him all manner of stories so he knows the place like he has been there much longer than a few hours. He expected to meet the staff. Obviously. He would spend a lot of time with Greg. John thought Greg would take him on the rest of the tour and walk him down to meet the team. He had no idea how many women there would be. He knew it would be less than the hockey team, but he would still have a host of names to learn. It didn’t occur to him that he would have to learn two sets of them or that one set would be so colorful. Christ, one of them is called HardOn for fuck’s sake.

John walks to the desk and sits. He opens the laptop and logs in with the password written on a note next to it. He changes the password and begins scanning through folders and file names to get an idea of how things are organized.

“Hm. Arranged by surname,” he mumbles to himself. “Makes sense, but no one mentioned a single one. Oh, wait! Dewhurst, Harriette. Well, that’s one.”

He huffs a laugh. He will read everything in every folder, of course, but won’t know who matches what until he goes to practices and gets to know everyone better. Although, he may be able to tell from cadence and habits created by old injuries. He smiles to himself as he continues to scan the screen until his eyes settle on the folder called Holmes. Holmes. John’s lips curve downward. He opens the folder and then each file one by one.

John expected everything he saw and learned, every policy, every person he met. But what he did not expect was Sherlock Holmes. Mrs. Hudson had told John a lot about the coach, both professionally and personally. To a great extent he feels he knows Sherlock Holmes, in spite of having just met him. Mrs. Hudson had warned him that Sherlock would behave badly when Greg introduced them, asking very pointed questions and possibly with hostility.

“It’s all to protect the ladies, John,” she had said. “You have to understand how horrible Anderson was. Please don’t take it to heart.”

“I’ll work closely with this bloke, yeah?”

“Very.”

“Suppose I don’t pass his test, Or he just doesn’t like me.”

“Oh, he’ll like you. No doubt about that,” Mrs. Hudson had chuckled knowingly. John raised a brow. “You two are like two peas in a pod. You’ll just click. I can tell.”

John had laughed then, putting little stock into Mrs. Hudson’s crystal ball, but after meeting the man… John typically gets along with people - he’s friendly and conversational - but with Sherlock. It all comes so naturally and John feels so comfortable, like he has known Sherlock for years. And yet, John must tread lightly. Sherlock could still prove to be a hindrance if he disagrees with John’s diagnoses or treatment in the future. The coaches in Anaheim did it often enough. Plus, Sherlock was friendly enough after the initial interview, but was also so distant. It has left John with an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. It seems Mrs. Hudson’s intuition could not have been more wrong.

John reads on and is tilting his head, reading an x-ray of a past fractured wrist when a knock sounds on the office door. His eyes train on it and he rises to answer, wondering who would be calling on him so soon after his arrival. Greg or Mrs. Hudson, come to tell him some forgotten piece of information? When he opens the door, it is Molly Hooper on the other side. She looks nervous and uncertain, the complete opposite of the confident derby captain he met only moments ago.

“Molly,” John says, surprise in his voice.

“Hi,” she avoids his eyes. “Can I come in?”

“Yes,” John steps aside. “Come in. Come in.”

“Thanks,” Molly says with a small smile and walks into the office. John motions to the chair in front of his desk. Molly already seems more comfortable with the situation and wears the confident expression she had when they met by the time she is seated.

“Are you all right?” he asks as he sits. “Were you hurt at practice? Or a chronic issue? I’m sorry I haven’t had the chance to read up on everyone yet.”

“Oh no, no. I wouldn’t expect you’d know all that yet,” she stops speaking for a second and looks at him with probing eyes. The skin beneath them contracts as she looks at him, considering. John begins to wonder what this meeting is all about. “No, I’m fine. I just wanted to talk.”

About what, John wonders.

“Of course,” he says instead. “I’m here for whatever you need.”

“Right. Well. God, I don’t know how to begin. I don't know how to say it without sounding like a paranoid schizophrenic,” she tells him honestly, sighing and leaning back in the chair for a split-second. She sits up again before John can say a word and perches on the edge of the chair. Resting her hands on the desk, she leans in and speaks in a lower voice, “Someone is trying to sabotage the team.”

John’s eyes widen because that is absolutely the last thing he expected her to say. Hell, it wasn’t even on the radar. He leans to one side, resting his elbow on his chair’s armrest. His brow wrinkles, as it always does when he’s trying to solve a problem. He purses his lips as he considers her words.

“Sabotage how?” he asks measuredly. “Did something happen in practice?”

“No. Oh, no,” Molly shakes her head. “It never happens in practice. Always bouts. And not every bout, or even in a pattern. I think it’s meant to keep us from noticing.”

“And what happens exactly?” John asks, but is sure he knows the answer.

“Accidents,” she says, her voice hushed and very serious. “Wheels coming off, or toe stops. Trucks loosening, axles coming clean off their plates. That stuff does not just happen, Dr. Watson.”

John bites his lower lip and leans forward, placing his elbows on the desk, mirroring Molly’s posture. He looks at her directly and blinks once, trying to wrap his head around the situation.

“Molly, I’m going to be honest,” he begins in a softer and less clinical tone. “I have no idea what most of that means. I mean, wheels, yeah. Toe stops, sure. But you’ve lost me on plates and trucks.”

“Oh, god. Sorry, sorry,” she drops her forehead into her hand for a moment and then looks at him. “Of course. The plate is the long piece of metal the boot sits on. All of the wheels, the toe stop, everything is attached to it. Trucks are what attach the axles to the plate, follow?”

“I think so,” John nods once slowly. “Have you told anyone your suspicions?”

“Yes,” she says firmly. “Sherlock.”

John wonders a moment when she calls the coach by his first name, but doesn’t stop to let it distract him from the issue at hand.

“And what does he say?”

“He chalks it up to ‘user error’,” Molly makes air quotes and rolls her eyes. “Some of the others wear older skates out of superstition and so on. Some may not give enough attention to proper maintenance, he says. But we all check our gear, Dr. Watson, especially before a bout. And even if what he says is true, it still doesn’t mean someone isn’t messing with our gear. He just doesn’t have sufficient data to draw a conclusion.”

“So he’s still collecting evidence?” John wonders at her use of words. They sound like precisely the words the coach himself would use, like there is a certain level of trust between them. A relationship?

“Of course. He’s very methodical.”

“Then why involve me?”

“If someone actually gets hurt, you’ll be seeing to them. You should know something’s going on,” Molly straightens in her chair and lifts her elbows off the desk. “And there’s...there’s something else. Something I haven’t told Sherlock.”

“Why not?” John asks with interest. This story, this woman is absolutely intriguing. He knows she is not paranoid or a schizophrenic, in spite of her concern that he will think so. That is as obvious as the day is long. Nevertheless, if he was another man, John would dismiss it all and assure her that he would keep an eye on things and then not do a thing. But John is not like any other man. He was bored in London for a long time before packing up, leaving his entire life behind and moving across the ocean. He was bored in California. And now Molly Hooper has handed him a bona fied mystery and he is chomping at the bit.

“Molly,” he says quietly, curiously, “can I ask, why trust me with all of this? You don’t even know me. We met not two hours ago.”

“Mrs. Hudson trusts you. And Lestrade,” she pauses and watches John with sharp, intelligent eyes. “Sherlock trusts you.”

John blinks in surprise. Sherlock trusts him?

“Anderson was only here for a year and was a complete idiot,” Molly interrupts his thoughts before he can even start to process that statement. “The team doctor before him was good though. You need to see him, Dr. Watson. He knows more than he’s said.”

“What?” his brow furrows in confusion.

“He didn’t just hang things up and retire like it seemed. He was sick and decided not to come back when he was better because…” she stops short. Molly is leaning forward again, both palms pressing hard on the desk and her body full of tension. She looks at him earnestly, the very weight of the world on her shoulders. “He left because he was poisoned.”

***

Da da daaaa! Thank you all for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll see you all next weekend! Much love, Jane

@zentris @toooldforthissh-stuff @shana-movershaker @melmey-fanfics @louise175dk @221b-carefulwhatyouwishfor @technicallywiseoncns @underestimatemethatwillbefun @jhamishw @weirdlittlegoofball @superwholockpotterincamelot @superwholocklmt @ladidragonuniverse @kittenmadnessandtea @srebrnafh @welcometomyharddrive @annecumberbatch @kingdomofbrokenhearts @philliphooper @whodwantmeasaflatmate @gloriascott93 @vvaticancameoss @cow-mow @echosilverwolf @spazzz32 @absentmindedstuff @swissmissing @shuukichan @maeliandmyself @wtgilsa @thetranslucentwallaby @red-pen-revolution @britishaccentfan @dischorde @plasticstrawsmuggler

#johnlock #john watson #johnwatson #Johnlock fanfic #Sherlock Holmes #Sherlock #sherlockholmes #sherlock fanfic #sherlock roller derby #sherlock john roller derby #sherlock au #sherlock loves john

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justgotham · 6 years ago

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I really must thank the organisers of the Heroes & Villains event. I met up with the agent who had organised our passes, and arranged our interviews. He led me to a behind the scenes meeting room, knocked on the door, and inside I saw two of my favourite actors waiting for me. What was that line about real life, again?

My initial reaction was disbelief, I was immediately star-struck. To their credit both gentlemen put me at ease. By the end of the conversation It felt more like I’d been in a room with old friends. At first I couldn’t even get my fingers and thumbs working to hit the record button, but got there eventually. This wasn’t a tech issue, this was interviewer malfunction!

Action!

Dark Knight News: Right, it’s finally recording.

Robin Lord Taylor: Boom!

DKN: So, I’m here for Dark Knight News and DC Comics News with Cory Michael Smith and Robin Lord Taylor AKA Edward Nygma and Oswald Cobblepot. First of all, how are you finding London? Have we been nice to you?

Cory Michael Smith: Oh, yeah. I love it.

RLT: It’s been fantastic.

CMS: This is my fifth or sixth time here, it’s probably my most visited city outside the U.S. I love it! I came early, I’m staying late… it’s great!

RLT: Yeah, the same. I think it’s maybe my third or fourth time. It’s just fantastic. When I first came to London I was like oh my gosh, there’s actually another city I could conceivably see myself living in besides New York.

DKN: That’s how I feel about New York!

RLT: Really? Wow. They feel like sister cities in a way. They’re very similar in many ways.

Riddle Me This

DKN: I have loads of questions for you from the whole team, but… let’s have a look. (Under my breath) Are you single? Nope, skipping that… Do you have a girlfriend/boyfriend/partner/significant other? Nuh-uh… Will you marry me… What th’ … (Back in full voice) Ah, here we go (CMS and RLTare laughing at this point.)

Edward and Oswald… radical departures from the way that anyone has played them before, which is awesome. A conscious decision, or did the producers want you to go down fresh avenues of interpretation?

CMS: It was very conscious. In the beginning we had a conversation with the creators about the character, but it’s felt pretty hands off for most of it. Early on with Nygma we were trying still to find the character, we were so far away from The Riddler. So we had some course corrections, and tried some stuff and had some different plot lines. It’s been so fun to go from Nygma to The Riddler. It’s felt like a really exciting evolution. Then the back and forth…. it’s felt like a very organic development of character. It’s been really fun.

RLT: I don’t know if you’ve heard, but it was really fascinating the way they cast the show. When I auditioned (Robin looks over to Cory) and I don’t know if it was the same for you, but we were not allowed to see the script. We weren’t even supposed to know what the project was, so they had sent out just scenes that were written just for the audition, with very little description.

When I came in to audition I made choices not knowing it was The Penguin. I was given a scene, and so, OK, here’s what I’m gonna do with that, and it just happened to be exactly what they had in mind. And that was the same for all of us, they didn’t want us to come in with any expectation or any thought about what came before. So it was very intentionally, made to be a departure for all of us, from the characters as we knew them before.

DKN: That makes so much sense. That’s a much more organic way to form a character naturally. One of my favorite parts of the show is how organic and natural it does feel from a character performance standpoint. I was speaking to Drew (Powell) earlier, and having a real, physical Solomon Grundy, rather than a CGI monstrosity was brilliant.

CMS: Thanks.

RLT: Thank you.

Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue. I Have Multiple Personalities… And So Do I.

DKN: Obviously duality is a huge theme in Gotham, and in Batman’s universe. Robin, you started out as a good son, a family man, forced into becoming a monster. Cory, you were a nice, stand up guy, working for the police. You then had your heart broken, and your mind destroyed by guilt, forcing you to become the Riddler. Has it helped you, as actors, playing these two radically different personalities, that are the same person?

CMS: Absolutely! After four years of doing this, I feel way more in command of my body, and my voice, and there’s something really exciting about being on a TV show that feels so… operatic, and big. We both come from a theatre background, and you have the allowance to really fill a space when you’re doing theatre.

That’s rare in TV and film today, to be granted the authority to really flex your muscles that way. To learn how to do it on-screen, in a way that is focused, but still like… eruptive… it’s been a great education.

RLT: Yeah, definitely. It’s been great. There’s the idea that, when you’re on film that everything has to be smaller. This show has completely stripped all that away.

DKN: Every episode feels like a movie, and every performance is full of life.

RLT: Exactly, it’s larger… it’s like the largest performance you can give, and they want that. They encourage us to be big, and to be brave and put it all out there. That’s what I’ll take away from this whole experience. Feeling so much more confident in who I am, and knowing that when I walk into a room, I know how to command a space now… which I don’t think I really understood that before.

The Tools Of The Trade

DKN: Would either of you like to have the comic-book toys, like the staff, or the umbrellas in the final season?

CMS: Oh, yeah! Give me my cane! (All three of us laugh)

RLT: Yeah, he gets a cane, I get my umbrellas.

CMS: Give me my cane!

RLT: I’d love the helicopter umbrella, that would be great. Also, I’m really hoping that we get the monocle next year. In the storyline it’s an injury, so I don’t know who would cause it in the show (points at Cory) probably him… (We laugh) I think it would be fantastic! Especially since it’s wrapping up, I feel like, by the end, all of the pieces are gonna start coming together for all of us.

CMS: (To Robin) Do you plan on gaining 50 lbs this season? (We all laugh) Can you imagine? Oh, my God!

RLT: And shrinking! (More laughs)

DKN: That’s too funny.

I Did it My Way

DKN: Like you said, Robin, sadly things will be wrapping up. There’ve been quotes from the show-runners saying that characters like Mother and Orphan / The Lady Shiva and Cassandra Cain are coming onto the show. Are you guys excited about that? Some new blood?

CMS: Absolutely, yeah, totally.

RLT: I’m excited about new blood, but really what I’m hoping is, since it’s the last season, that even with the introduction of new characters, we’ll still be able to come back and focus on the core family, the core group that has been there since the beginning.

DKN: The backbone of the show.

RLT: Exactly. That’s going to be really gratifying, and it’s going to be very emotional. I’m already anticipating that.

CMS: I know, It’s a lot.. It’s a lot.

Men For All Seasons

DKN: The fans are, obviously, really sad about it ending too. I’ve been reporting on the show since it started, and one small comfort is that you’ll be going out with a bang, and not with a whimper.

CMS: Oh… it’ll be epic!

RLT: It’ll be fantastic. Also, just to know that it’s the end. I’ve been saying that once the show is done and time goes on, new people will still be discovering it. I’m just so glad that they’ll be able to watch it, all five seasons as though it’s a movie. The fact that we will have an ending, and that it will be, over five years, the big arc of the whole thing. I think it will be really great.

DKN: I was hoping you’d get ten years, like Smallville did, but…

(They both laugh and smile)

RLT: Hey, you never know… maybe Netflix will pick us up.

(More laughter from all three of us)

Every Girl’s Crazy ‘Bout A Sharp Dressed Man

DKN: It’s great seeing you both so casual, and relaxed. You’re usually in these sharp suits, and all dressed up. The costumes in the show are great! Do they feel as good to wear as they look?

CMS: Oh my God, yes. It’s extraordinary. We’re fortunate to have them custom made, and when you put them on you feel… powerful.

RLT: Yeah.

CMS: It feels right, and the fabric is beautiful, or it’s glistening, or it’s velvet, or whatever it may be. It just feels rich, and you can walk into a room and really own the clothes.

RLT: Yeah. It’s like putting on the skin of the character. I love working that way too, to be able to go from the outside into the emotional interior. To be able to put on the suit, have the nose, and then the hair. It’s like all these pieces come together, and then I’m Oswald. It feels really great.

Comic-Book Men

DKN: What was your relationship with comics. Before working on Gotham, and since?

CMS: Before the show, I didn’t have a relationship with comics, we didn’t grow up with them in our house. My brother and I didn’t read them. Now… (Laughing) now I have a collection! Particularly of Batman. I’m mostly focused on reading Batman comics, and now I have a little library that I’m pretty proud of.

DKN: Cool!

RLT: Yeah, same. I wasn’t a huge comic-book person as a child, but I was obsessed with the movies. Now it really is so rich. The art, the creativity and background of these characters I find so fascinating. It really feels like it’s mythology… the mythology of today, and I think it’s so exciting. The fact that it inspires both myself, and other people, that’s exciting.

DKN: Thank you so much.

So, to close. Any final message to our readers, your fans, from Cory and from Robin. What would you like to say?

CMS: Join us on the ride to the finale. It’s gonna be epic!

RLT: I love you, and thank you.

DKN: And we all love you, and thank you. Thanks guys!

RLT: Cheers, mate!

CMS: Thank you, man.

DKN: Fingers crossed, we’ll see you next year!

CMS: Yeah!

RLT: Fantastic!

#the riddler #Edward Nygma #Cory Michael Smith #Oswald Cobblepot #Robin Lord Taylor

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hyba · 5 years ago

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@mediocre-prose generously left her tag open for this one, and as we all know by now it’s my favourite of all the tag games, so I am 100% jumping in! ^^ Thanks for making that possible!

Let’s get started!

What inspired you to create your WIP? Do the themes drive home a message you’ve been meaning to tell?

I think my WIPs tend to come from a really vague bout of inspiration most of the time. If I really like where it’s going, I’ll keep writing, and quite naturally I start to understand and recognize what I want for it in terms of themes and messages, and what fits well with the kind of story I find myself writing. Hopefully, I can get many messages across with my writing, because I am trying to do just that with every single WIP. I feel like the ultimate goal for me with a story is to send a message that readers can really think critically about and discuss with others and analyze. It’s the lit analysis geek in me.

In any given situations, if you’re told to kill only one of your characters, which one would you choose?

I would kill Viggo. To be perfectly honest, it’s an easy choice. I feel like he’s a pretty evil dude. Very manipulative. Eli’s a lot like that, too, but Viggo’s actions have bigger consequences. He’s a very selfish guy.

Are any of your OCs similar to you? If so, what traits do you both share? And if not, how are they different?

I think my OCs are a variety of different characters that represent what I wish I was or what I am trying to be. I’m always striving to be more graceful, more elegant with my thinking and lifestyle, more sophisticated, more educated, more independent, healthier, stronger (mentally, emotionally, physically), and so much more. My OCs, even the ‘bad guys’ have traits that I wish I had.

If you’ve already planned it out, does the ending of your story satisfy you?

So I have planned out the ending of The Fall of the Black Masks and I’ve written it, but it involves the death of a character I’ve gotten quite attached to, and I’m wondering if it’s really worth it to kill him off. I’m leaning more towards ‘yes’. Really it’s the only thing keeping me from finalizing and polishing this last draft. In terms of satisfaction, I think readers might not like to know who dies in the end, and that might make them a bit frustrated, but I think it works really well to propel the story forward if I choose to continue it, and it also works as an ending for the novel as it currently is a standalone, because it sort of completes this big and dramatic and traumatic character development arc for my MCs.

I’ve also planned out the ending of Apartment, and I have to say, there is a huge amount of craziness in this WIP that I really hope readers can understand and take in stride. There are BIG magical realism elements happening here and I really really really want readers to understand that going into the story because yes, it’s full of suspense and yes, it has this absurd plot, but it’s also that way for a reason. The ending is an essential part of that, and I want readers to sort of sit down and think, “Why?” after they’re done with the book. “Why did it end this way? What is she trying to say?”

Trust me, I’m definitely trying to say something.

I’ve had some issues with the end of The Pirates of Sissa. I’ve got an ending in mind, very vaguely, but have trouble moving past a certain point in the story and it’s been frustrating me a lot, so I’ve sort of set that aside for now.

What are your favorite books? Did they impact how you write throughout the years?

I am going to direct you to this post over here and here because I’ve talked about this extensively and I really think people are getting tired of reading about it! ^^’

What are your goals as a writer?

I really want to publish my books, and the more time passes, the more I think it would really be great to simply be an author for the rest of my life. I’d love to have people from around the world sending my little messages about how my work has moved them or perhaps it’s a favourite of theirs or maybe it really holds a strong message.

Writing can be hard. Do you often feel like giving up? How do you continue to have motivation to write and create these worlds?

There are days when I really think that my writing is not up to par with some of the authors I look up to, and those days are a bit tough because it’s a bit of a downer to think that after all of this work and effort you’ve put into your craft, you still aren’t good enough. In times like that, all I really have to do is compare my current WIP drafts to older version to truly see how far I’ve come. It’s a huge and significant development! ^^

The good thing about it, though, is that I never feel like giving up. Even on those days when I think my work sucks, I still want to keep going because - so what? ^^

Do you have a favorite song?

Nope! I really love a lot of different genres of music and it often depends on my mood or the mood I want to be in.

What is your favorite type of flower?

I don’t really have one! I love all flowers - they’re so very pretty ^^

Are you a risk taker? Or are you more cautious in your decisions?

I’m super cautious, but I think I’m too cautious and that holds me back. I’ve been trying to take more risks, but I can already feel certain limits I’m not willing to cross over.

What do you think about space? Does the mere thought of not being alone in the universe frightens you?

I don’t really think about it a lot! I know that there are a lot of things out there we don’t know about. I know that it must be super lonely and isolating to be in space right now. But I also think it’s cool to explore different places. If we can get there, then I’m sure we were meant to get there and learn valuable lessons from those places and continue to develop as humans. So, space is pretty cool. I don’t think it’s scary, but I do think it’s terribly lonely.

Thanks so much for thinking up such great Qs! I truly have been having a lot of fun doing your Qs!

#writeblr #writers #writing #amwriting #11/11/11

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rpgmgames · 7 years ago

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September’s Featured Game: Akademia

DEVELOPER(S): Somni ENGINE: RPGMaker VX Ace GENRE: Horror, Exploration, Puzzle SUMMARY: Akademia is a 2D horror RPG currently being developed in RPG Maker VX Ace. In the province of British Columbia, Canada, there exists a private school in the woods, Rayfair Academy, that is known for its wealth and ambition. The academy follows the motto, “Pearls are worthless in the pursuit of gold,” and it has a reputation for producing highly motivated and overachieving students. However, in a bout of curiosity late at night, six students uncover a secret, and the story of the school’s origin–and the being responsible for it–begins to unravel.

Download the demo here!

Introduce yourself! *Hello! I'm Somni, and I like to draw and write stories! I've been interested in RPG Maker games since 2013, and I'm a big fan of horror ones! I recently dived into community and I love how encouraging and positive everyone is. It motivates me to work hard!

What is your project about? What inspired you to create your game initially? *Somni: Akademia is a story-heavy horror game about six second-year students in a prestigious academy accidentally coming in contact with a strange and powerful being. As Margaret attempts to find her friends and lead them to safety, the story of the academy's past comes to light, and the otherworldly hollow they've all found themselves in starts to pick apart at the threads that hold their friendship together and prey on their minds.

I was always fascinated by occult and alchemy since I was small, and wanted to build on my love for them. However, I wanted to challenge myself and make the protagonists as ordinary as possible so I wouldn't have to rely on using magic to solve everything in the story. Akademia was also created when I was at a very low point in my life, so my struggles have made their way in. I'd say it worked out well in the story.

How long have you been working on your project? *Somni: I've been working on Akademia for more than three years now! The first two years were spent solidifying concepts and doing research, and the third year was spent doing game development. I kept the project to myself until I had a good grasp on everything, so it's only been public for a year.

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *Somni: The Witch's House and Ib brought me into the RPG Maker engine, and they all have a very solid plot and cute character designs. Haunting Ground was also one of my favorite horror games because it delves into alchemy as well, and it lit a fire in me to work on my game.

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them? *Somni: The first thing I always groan about is the discovery of bugs. Sometimes, I get careless or tired and add in weird things that mess with my game, and I can never find them until I backtrack or one of my beta testers points it out. Always add comments in your events so your mistakes can be found more easily, and remember to thank your beta testers, especially if they pick out lots of errors!

There are also times when I lose faith in myself and wonder if my game will ever be good enough compared to other games. I received so much love and support from the RPG Maker community, and I don't want to let them down. In these times, I remind myself that Akademia is for me as well, and I need to do my best no matter what.

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *Somni: Akademia's gotten a lot more sombre than it originally was. The first drafts I had were very campy, and the story didn't glue well with character development. I guess time and experience allowed me to reconstruct everything and make the plot and character development a lot better. I can take the story seriously now, and I love it a lot!

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? If you don't have a team, do you wish you had one or do you prefer working alone? *Somni: I like to work alone. I'm very picky about how things are made and written, and it would be a nightmare for everyone if I started micromanaging. A lot of things in my game are personal as well, and I'm hesitant to share them with others who can bend my experiences. In the future, I'll think about voice actors, but that's as far as I'll go.

What was the best part of developing the game? *Somni: Writing dialogue and making cute sprites! My characters have pretty different personalities, so I have a lot of fun making them interact and switching between individuals. I also wanted to make expressive sprites, so having small things like Jude tapping his foot or Austin rubbing his eyes makes development more fun for me.

Do you find yourself playing other RPG Maker games to see what you can do with the engine, or do you prefer to do your own thing? *Somni: I like to explore things on my own. I have a better understanding of the engine if I experiment and play around with things and see it fit the image I have in my head. Besides, you can do pretty much anything in RPG Maker if you get creative. I think getting inspiration from other games is the best and a very solid way of learning, but it doesn't work for me personally.

Which character in your game do you relate to the most and why? (Alternatively: Who is your favorite character and why?) *Somni: This is a bit of a hard question for me because all of my protagonists have a part of me in them. I'd have to say Mai is the one I can relate to most, but I can't say why because of spoilers. However, my favorite character is Austin because he's genuinely sweet and supportive. He's always there for his friends and wears his heart on his sleeve. There are other things I like about him, but they're all secrets!

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *Somni: Not really. Sometimes, I wish I released my game earlier. I spent three years on it and only just released a demo, but I also don't feel too badly about it. All that time I spent working on it allowed me to polish the story and characters, and if I released the game too soon, there could've been some huge oversights. Knowing this, I don't regret anything I've done.

Once you finish your project, do you plan to explore game's universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *Somni: I think I'll release some cute side stories in the future so the player can see how things are with the characters when Akademia's done and over with! As for the plot, there won't be anything else after the game.

What do you look most forward to upon/after release? *Somni: Definitely fan reactions! A lot of players gave me their thoughts and plot predictions, and they also gave me very suspicious messages about a lot of carefully worded things in the game. The full game has a lot more stuff to analyze, and I can just sit back and rub my hands together in glee. I can also draw more indulgent stuff with the characters when the game's finished, so it'll be a wild ride!

Is there something you're afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? *Somni: Lack of time. I've had some health struggles all the way during development, and I'm going to be busy with work starting September. I'll have to dedicate all my free time to game development, and I'm hoping I can balance those well and give updates on Akademia's progress whenever I can.

Question from last month's featured dev: If you had to change the main genre of your game, what would you change it to and why? *Somni: I'd make Akademia a friendship simulator. Bonds between characters are an important part of the game, and if it can't be horror, it might as well be a cute and adorable thing.

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *Somni: This might not work for everyone, but try not to write your characters' dialogue as a long script before you put it into the game. What feels right in a word document might not sound natural in the game itself. If you can, stick to a skeleton of dialogue and flesh it out as you event it in the engine. That way, you can consider the environment and situation the characters are in while you write what they say.

We mods would like to thank Somni for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved!

Remember to check out Akademia if you haven’t already! See you next month!

- Mods Gold & Platinum

#rpgmaker #rpg maker #game dev #rpg horror #dev interview #akademia #akademia (game)#game feature #pixel games #gotm #game of the month

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ntrending · 7 years ago

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An evolutionary biologist takes on the absurd bodies of superheroes

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/an-evolutionary-biologist-takes-on-the-absurd-bodies-of-superheroes/

An evolutionary biologist takes on the absurd bodies of superheroes

Evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton loves reading comic books almost as much as he loves studying unusual animals. Now he’s combining his twin passions in a new podcast, The Biology of Superheroes, co-hosted by fellow geek Arien Darby. The podcast uses comic book characters to explore big ideas in science and technology. Campbell-Staton recently sat down with Nexus Media to talk about his new project, his favorite superheroes and his ongoing research into the ways climate change is driving evolution. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You have a podcast where you talk about the biology of superheroes. Which superheroes?

We try to take characters from the comic book universe, not just superheroes, but also other figures of science fiction — dinosaurs, robots, giant monsters. We use them as archetypes to explore the place where fact meets fiction.

Let’s talk about Spider-Man, the subject of your first two podcasts.

Arguably, the thing that separates Peter Parker from other superheroes in the comic book universe is that he uses these webs. These webs are a huge part of his persona. And Spider-Man doesn’t produce spider silk in the way that a spider would. He has to engineer it.

So, the first question in that scenario is, “What would he use as inspiration?” Obviously, there is a huge diversity of spiders in the world. If you’re trying to develop a tool, you want go out into the real world and see how animals have come up with extreme solutions to solve similar problems. This is a really valid and popular means for scientists to wrap their heads around problems that are presented in the real world. It’s called bio-inspired engineering.

When we’re considering Spider-Man, one question is, “Can spider webs actually accomplish what we see in the comic books?” If we look at the biomechanics of silks, the answer turns out to be “yes.” Spider silks are extremely strong and very versatile. The drag line of spider silk, pound for pound, is stronger than steel. If you scale that up to the size of the webs that Spider-Man is producing, they could very easily support his body weight and help him catch bad guys.

How about the Flash?

One of the central plot lines for the Flash is his ability to move between parallel universes. You have numerous parallel worlds that are vibrating at slightly different frequencies, and you have slightly different versions of superheroes and other characters in these different universes. They never meet each other and they never see each other because they are vibrating at different frequencies. The Flash is able to vibrate from one universe into another universe, allowing him to explore the entire DC Comics multiverse.

If we follow the Flash on his adventures, not only do you see the same species on most of these parallel Earths — you see humans, for instance — you also see different variations of the same individuals popping up across each of these Earths. Thinking about the multiverse invites the question, “If you have four and half billion years of evolution playing out independently on each of these Earths, and you get almost the exact same result each time, what does that say about the process of evolution?”

This is a classic question in evolutionary biology: if you replay the tape of evolution, do you get the same result over and over again? This is a question that people have been chasing for decades. In some cases, in the real world, we see that the answer is “yes.” If presented with the same environmental challenges, natural selection drives independently evolving lineages down very similar trajectories.

On the other hand, there are one-off events, oddities like the duck-billed platypus. It has a bill and a beaver tail it uses to navigate through the water and locate crayfish and crustaceans and things like that. There are a lot of animals that live in very similar habitats and have very similar lifestyles, but none of them look anything like the platypus.

The DC multiverse is the ultimate biology experiment.

Exactly. In the real world, we only have one Earth, but there are ways that scientists in the real world can study repeatability. In some cases, they study islands, which act as independent universes. In other cases, they look at bacteria evolving in petri dishes. A lab full of petri dishes represents a multiverse. You can give independently evolving lineages of bacteria the same challenge to see if they find the same solutions. It’s not as cool as traversing the DC multiverse like the Flash, but very similar techniques are being used to explore the repeatability of evolution in the real world.

How did you get into comic books?

I actually got into comic books pretty late in life, when I was a graduate student doing my PhD at Harvard. In the process of writing my dissertation, I started to get pretty stressed. I needed something that was intellectual candy, something to get my mind off the rigors of academia.

I remember I was walking through Harvard Square one evening, and I passed this underground comic book shop, and in the window, I saw this comic book. It was Superman vs. Muhammad Ali. It had this really big classic cover where Muhammad Ali was facing off with Superman, and they both had boxing gloves on, and I thought, “I have to see how this ends.” Superman and Muhammad Ali face off in a room that has red-sun radiation, which basically makes Superman human, and Muhammad Ali whips his butt really thoroughly. That was the first comic book I ever bought, and it got me hooked.

I went back to the store and got a few different comic books, and that was my guilty pleasure while writing my dissertation. As I was reading comic books, I started to come up with all these really weird questions. A certain scenario would present itself in a comic book, and I would wonder about the biology behind it. This became so persistent that I taught a small course at Harvard on the biology of superheroes. We talked about Batman. We talked about Ironman. We talked about zombies. We talked about the Flash and a few other comic book characters. A lot of the undergrads came away from that course having learned a lot of the classic ideas that they would have learned in an intro bio course. That’s what spawned the podcast.

I’ll be an assistant professor at UCLA starting in July, and that’s actually the first course that I’m going to be teaching at UCLA. We’re talking about everything from evolution and physiology to brain machine interfacing and artificial intelligence.

You study how animals adapt to climate change. Do you talk about climate change in your podcast?

In our last episode, we talked about Jurassic Park and resurrecting ancient species. Obviously, this is a really fun topic to talk about. I interviewed Beth Shapiro, a geneticist who focuses on conservation genetics and the genomes of ancient species, and we talked about whether it’s possible to get DNA from dinosaurs and how we go from getting genes from an extinct species to creating a living, breathing animal. That’s all really fun to think about, but the last question is “Why would we do this?”

If we’re not going to resurrect ancient dinosaurs and have fun eating cotton candy watching them do their thing, why would we invest so much in this technology? Well, it turns out that that same technology is being used right now to help conserve species that are on the verge of extinction and potentially bring back species that have been driven extinct by human activity.

We just got news that the last male northern white rhinoceros died. Obviously, we have species like the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon and the black-footed ferret, which is on the verge of extinction. That brings up the idea of genetic rescue. The ability to tinker with the genomes of a species and reintroduce improved versions of those genomes into wild populations to help them recover — that same technology would be required to bring back a wooly mammoth.

What species do you focus on in your research?

I’m a herpetologist by heart, so I work mostly on reptiles and amphibians. A lot of my recent work is studying how changes in climate affect the form and function of wild populations. I published a paper last year looking at the effects of the polar vortex storms that swept the Southeast in the winter of 2013 to 2014. The polar vortex is a pattern of Arctic air that spirals around our poles. As the planet warms, the poles are warming faster than mid-latitudes, which causes that pattern to become more wavy, and it sends these periodic bouts of polar air to mid-latitudes. Here, in North America, it causes these extreme cold events.

It just so happened that in late 2013, I was studying the evolution of cold tolerance in this one reptile species, the green anole lizard, which is native to the United States, but its ancestors come from Cuba, which is very warm and thermally stable. So I had data on cold tolerance in these populations. I had data on gene expression.

So, I took advantage of this particular event to ask, “In the survivors of this storm, do we see any signature of natural selection taking place?” And the answer, in this case, was “yes.” We saw that in the southern part of species range, the survivors of the storm were significantly more cold-tolerant than the population was before the storm.

So much of the talk about climate change is that it’s happening so fast that plants and animals can’t adapt, so it’s surprising to hear that you see that change in such a short period of time.

I think this is something that we are increasingly coming to understand. When we think about contemporary evolution, this is a field that is only a couple of decades old. Now, we’re starting to see an uptick in the number of people who are focused on trying to understand how human perturbations to the environment are not only affecting ecology and extinction, gene flow and species distribution, but also the process of evolution. And we are starting to see evidence that animals around the world are adapting.

Jason Munshi-South is doing work in New York City looking at mice that are adapted to urban environments, and he’s seeing very strong signatures of selection in diet. Mice that are living in cities are eating a lot of the junk food that people leave around, while their cousins in more natural habitats are eating grasses and seeds and insects and that sort of thing. In response, the genes that are involved in digestive processes seem to be diverging between cities and natural habitats.

Pollution is also a factor. Andrew Whitehead’s group has been studying pollution adaptation in small fish called killifish. He’s shown that these animals have colonized these very polluted waters several different times, and we see these repeated signatures of selection in parts of the genome that help them to cope with the deleterious effects of being in these polluted waters.

That feels like cause for some small measure of cautious optimism.

I think it’s easy, when you hear that things are adaptively evolving, to think that things are going to be okay, but we still don’t really know. Because the thing is, when we talk about natural selection, that comes at a cost: death. When you have an extreme pressure that has a large death toll, the individuals who are left behind are better adapted, but in the meantime, all of this genetic variation that would have been in the population gets lost because everything is driven down this one specific trajectory.

In the case of the polar vortex storm, what happens if it’s a drought next time? Or a heat wave? Lineages that may have been better adapted for those types of events may be lost now. We just don’t know. There is lot more data that needs to be gathered to understand how the different types of selective pressures — from extreme weather events to urbanization to pollution—play out over longer periods of time to determine who survives, who dies, and how that translates into extinction and speciation and other important biological processes.

So, who are your favorite superheroes?

It’s funny because I think most of my favorite superheroes are actually scientists. Spider-Man, obviously, is a favorite of mine. Peter Parker is one of the most brilliant minds in the Marvel universe. Bruce Banner — I love me some Hulk. He’s one of my go-to characters. Batman is obviously classic. There is just so much to that character, so much depth and history. He’s got a dark side that you don’t see in many other characters.

As we move along with the podcast, we’ll continue to think about aliens and giant monsters and robots and artificial intelligence and all of these fantastical ideas, and explore the science behind them. I think it’s really important to bring these conversations to the real world. We’re being thrown so much information from all over the place. It’s not necessarily all from reputable sources. If we can go through this mental exercise of separating fact from fiction when it comes to these fantastical ideas like comic book superheroes, maybe that will help us to better discern fact from fiction when it comes to the more serious issues, like climate change.

Jeremy Deaton writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture. You can follow him @deaton_jeremy.

Written By Jeremy Deaton

#Environment

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