#I'd say this is a work in progress

[omniblades-and-stars]

The loss hurt, no, worse than hurt. It ate up every little bit of light that was in his life. It was a clawing, desperate monster that sat heavy in the pit of his stomach. It squeezed his lungs, made him choke on food before it even made it to his throat, and made him sluggish and angry. He lost his ship, and that was bad enough. One of the true joys of his life, blown apart in space by the kind of spooky legends that everyone swore didn't exist, right up until they were being blasted into pieces by them.

But that wasn't the loss he was really mourning. It was only a small part. You see, there was this woman. Not just any woman, either. She was powerful, wicked smart, a little cheesy, stupid hot, a certified hero and now, she was super dead. And it was his fucking fault.

His stupid fault for being so attached to his ship that he was fully planning to go down with it when she went and did the heroic thing and pulled his ass out of the cockpit by force and crammed him into the last escape pod. She wasn't able to get inside of it herself, and he wasn't capable of pulling her in. He watched with stone cold terror as Commander Shepard was ripped away from the Normandy by an explosion with only enough time to launch his sorry butt away from the wreckage.

It should have been him. She should have gotten in the pod and left him to suffocate and burn up on atmospheric entry. She was too brave for her own good. And he was a coward.

Couldn't even tell her that he had feelings for her. Not that he was ready to admit it until she was already gone. You don't know what you've got till it's gone, blah, blah, blah.

Besides, she was out of his league by about three star systems. She was Commander Shepard, Alliance legend, total badass, and the very peak of physical performance. And he was Jeff, the totally average looking guy with creaky, fragile bones and crutches.

He couldn't imagine that Shepard could think of him like that. And he'd never know for sure now anyways. Thinking about it was a pointless exercise in making himself feel like shit, there were only losers inside his head right now.

Everything fucking sucked after she died. He got to fly the most advanced starship in the Alliance Navy, with the best crew, and the galaxy's savior for such a short time, and now the Alliance had him reassigned. If he couldn't have Shepard back - and he couldn't because she was very, very, super fucking dead - he wanted to at least fly.

Still, it wasn't the same. There was no goofy Commander making bad jokes, no shy asari scientist stumbling on accidental innuendo, not a single hardass turian, or terrifying krogan making sure no one ate a bullet planetside. Not even one sweet quarian engineer helping Adams keep the drive core balanced so Joker could pull insane maneuvers. No more interspecies cooperation. No more saving the galaxy either. It was all bullshit.

It didn't help that the Council and Alliance brass were both sticking their fingers in their ear holes and shouting, "La-la-la, I can't hear you!" over Shepard's warnings that Sovereign wasn't the only Reaper. Now that she had bitten the dust, it was even more disrespectful.

Perhaps it was a grief-addled mind that led him to jump at the opportunity, even if she would have hated it, but when he was approached by Cerberus, of all organizations, to join as a pilot in their Lazarus Cell, he went for it. They wanted to stop the Collectors, and they rebuilt the Normandy. Not just rebuilt, they made her bigger, more powerful, more beautiful. More ship to love. They even made the pilot's chair comfortable. Real leather seats, baby!

But he was lying to himself and everyone else if he told them it was just for the ship. You see, they were trying to rebuild Commander Shepard too, and that Lawson woman was certain it was going to work. Joker avoided Lawson as much as possible, she was all business, and he was sure she wouldn't hesitate to smear his carcass on the wall if he cracked any jokes about a zombie Shepard, but if she said they could bring the Commander back, he fucking believed her. And he was pretty sure it wasn't just blind optimism and desperation that made him believe her.

Mostly.

He knew he'd made the right decision when Dr. Chakwas joined on. Of course, the first thing she did was chide him for not taking his medication enough. Karin claimed that she only joined because he needed someone to make sure he was taking care of himself and managing his disease appropriately or whatever. They both knew that was a lie. They were there for one reason, and one reason only, Commander Shepard.

The new starship was just a really, really expensive bonus. Just the best bonus a guy could ever dream of getting.

Now, if he'd had his way, Joker would have thrown a resurrection day party for Shepard, complete with zombie themed cupcakes, and those little poppers that sent confetti flying everywhere. And booze. A lot of booze.

And strippers.

But something happened at the Lazarus Project labs, and God only knew what because trying to get information from Cerberus insiders was like trying to get blood from a particularly dry rock, and he didn't get the chance to set it up. She wasn't supposed to be awake yet. She was already back.

He didn't really care for drama, at least, not the kind of drama that The Illusive Man seemed to thrive on. So when he walked - or limped - into the QEC conference room on the station they were headquartered at to find Shepard finishing up her call with the big man himself (The Illusive Man, not God), he felt kind of like an asshole. Well, a worse kind of asshole than the one he already was. Sneaking up on a woman who had only been alive again for like a day and a half seemed like the worst kind of practical joke.

Her back was turned on him, but he would know that fiery red hair anywhere. He heard good ol' "Timmy" say something about someone from her old crew, and then disconnect the call. When she turned to see him a cascade of thoughts crashed into his head, and he was glad for once that he managed to keep his stupid mouth shut.

Holy shit! - It's her! - Why is her face glowing? - Do other parts of her glow? - Focus, damn it. - Quick, tell her a joke!

His brain was too busy processing all of the input and raw joy he felt knowing that she was alive to open up with a witty one-liner. It didn't matter anyways because in a split second, Shepard was crushing him in an iron grip hug. The plates of her armor dug into his skin through his uniform. It was bone breaking.

Like literally bone breaking.

"Jeff, you're alive!" She sobbed into his neck as she squeezed him mercilessly.

"Yeah, not for long if you keep squeezing me like that! The bones, remember?" He managed to gasp out as he awkwardly tried to hug her back from within the crushing weight of her grasp. Shit, he forgot how strong she was.

Shepard pulled away abruptly but kept her hands on his shoulders, "Shit, I'm so sorry. It's just … the last thing I remember is the escape pod and these assholes didn't tell me if you'd made it." She met his eyes and she was definitely crying, red-eyed, sniffling, snot, the whole shebang. He'd be embarrassed for her if he wasn't so affected by it.

And damn it, she was actually literally glowing. There were cracks in her skin, like if he got too close he might see the gooey bits underneath. And from the cracks came a strange, amber glow, similar to the light from an omni-tool. Shit, now she really looked like a superhero. Somebody needed to pinch him, because superhero Shepard was the topic of no fewer than four of his nerdiest fantasies. Some other types of fantasies too.

Shepard took her hands back and wiped her eyes with gauntleted hands. "You asshole, why'd you join Cerberus?" If she was trying to sound mad, she was doing a bad job at it. Her sobs turned to relieved laughter as he led her out of the conference room.

"Nobody else was doing anything about the Collectors threatening the colonies," he started to explain. "Besides, they brought you back, so they can't be all bad."

"Joker …" Shepard groaned.

He panicked and struggled to find words to fill the air. He settled on redirecting the conversation, and exclaimed, "They also rebuilt my baby! You're gonna love her!" Stupid. Of course she would be upset that he buddied up with Cerberus. He led her to a darkened observation window, the one that looked out over the Normandy's docking bay. He hit the window controls.

The awed gasp that she made would live rent free in his head until the day he died.

"Oh my God!" Shepard bounced up on her toes. Her eyes were wide as saucers, and just like that, her reservations were forgotten, for now at least. Just outside the new Normandy waited for her Commander. And fuck was she gorgeous. Almost twice as big as the original, she was a powerhouse of a stealth frigate. "She's beautiful! And this is my ship?"

"Hey, now, this is my baby. You can have her on weekends and every other holiday."

"The drive core must be insane! Oh, I can't wait to get in her guts and see what she can do."

This was definitely the Commander he missed - smart, funny, and into spaceships. And little too into disassembling expensive tech so she could find out what made it tick. Borderline serial killer behavior if her victims had been living beings and not guns, cleaning bots, the Mako, and at least one of her omni-tools. "Gonna have to veto that, Commander. You never put it back right."

[gold0kapi]

I made a new lineart brush and its changed my life

[lunarharp]

pretty & cute witch men

[mintjeru]

sunlight on water

open for better quality | no reposts

[azaracyy]

✦ gods of mischief ✦ digimon survive week 2024 day 3: other digi- er, kemonogami

[jojo-schmo]

Hello ms bubble wizard mage maam', I was just wondering what are your thoughts on magolor regarding how he's apparently **highly aware** of all characters to ever exist in the kirbyverse

Also its become a trend where god is replaced with NOVA in the expressions... Do they know?

Ello ello!

I like Magolor a lot, but he is omniscient? That's news to me. Is there a source for that? :O Unless you're talking about that Magoverse trend I saw floating around a while back- I didn't see much but what I did encounter reminded me of all the different Sans Undertale AUs out there. Hehehe Magolor is quite versatile! What fun.

And I know people use Nova as an expletive when writing Kirby characters! It's cool!

I use profanity in real life but I personally try to not associate Kirby characters with it in the works I make. I want to diversify the vernacular of the citizens of Popstar so I made a small list of expletives I thought of, lol. They should have a variety of things to yell out when they stub their feet or an apple falls on their head! So I get randomly inspired out in the world and I make sure to write them down!

I remember seeing someone have the characters use expletives based on food, like for example, "For the love of shortcake!" or things like that. That idea's fun!! (If you are the person who had this headcanon and are reading this please tell me so I can credit you for it!)

Does anyone else have expletives/exclamations they write for Kirby characters? Please share them if you do heehee. It makes the world building feel more fleshed out and creative >:3

[novella-november]

Is this fanfic friendly? I feel like an outlier.

I guess this is my sign it's time to throw together a FAQ post to link to lol.

Yes, every event for this blog is fanfic friendly :D

Though as I mentioned on my Ominous October post, for events that include multiple short stories, I encourage everyone to flex their creativity and take one of their planned short story fanfics, and at least *attempt* to turn one of them into something entirely original; rebuilding a character and story from the ground up to stand on its own two legs is no easy feat, and that is what makes it so fun!

It really gets your creative gears turning, to make an "au of an existing material" to be something entirely original, and you can be pleasantly surprised about the things you come up with!

As a few people say, its not just a matter of "filing the serial numbers off" -- you have to add in just as much *or more* as what you take out when you are turning a fanfiction into something that is original and completely divorced from its original source material / inspiration, and that is a hard, but very rewarding challenge!

Obviously, this is not a requirement (there's no hard requirements for any of the challenges, other than no cheating, including no using AI),

but if you would like an extra challenge for the short story events and you're planning on doing entirely fan-fiction, I highly recommend trying it out at least once, and seeing where it leads you--

you may find yourself pleasantly surprised by what you find down that rabbit hole!

[muselexum]

( waking up one morning after 18 months of hiatus and finally getting the spark™ to freshen up ur rp blog )

[babykittenteach]

2023 in review! I made an effort to try more things and it worked mostly (at least for TV and movies). New things, new-to-me things, and new installments of old things all had characters to love even if I didn't necessarily feel fannish about them, and I'm hoping 2024 does, too.

[icantalk710]

Last night's upper body workout with my trainer definitely had me ready for the sweaty high 💪🏽🏋🏽‍♂️😩😤

[space-spring]

Tumblr Poll Automation

If anyone's ever looking for an easy way to handle running tournaments or otherwise creating large amounts of polls on tumblr, I just created a workflow using the browser extension Automa that will automatically create and queue up polls based on the data in a Google Sheet.

I've only tested it in Firefox + haven't rigorously tried to break it with different inputs, so there might still be some bugs to be worked out. If you try this out and it breaks, absolutely let me know and I'll take a look!

[60inchyugiohheadcanons]

On Jōnouchi's ADHD (1.39k words)

This headcanon is probably the longest on this blog; it's some compiled thoughts on how growing up with (undiagnosed) ADHD has affected Jōnouchi. It's halfway between headcanon and fanfiction piece, and was requested by @bloodyscott, whom I kept waiting for too long for a response. I apologise sincerely for the delay.

This headcanon begins below the cut, as it's obscenely long. You may find it more comfortable to read this from the blog page, or on Archive of Our Own (NOTE: tumblr is acting strange. To access the page, copy the link and manually remove the href.li portion and the second https), rather than on your dashboard/search, in terms of formatting and such.

From infancy, Jōnouchi wailed his way out of his crib, out of his room, out of his house—as a baby, he thrashed towards whatever freedom he could find. He loathed the four walls of the crib; he'd scarce room to move. A skin infection brought him, aged 4, to hospital, and the very sight of overrun grey plastic seats and skinny cubicles exhausted him more than his illness had ever threatened to.

In primary school, others’ desks would blend together in a whir. Here he was, stuck, dizzyingly sedentary—the longer he sat, the foggier the world seemed to grow. When he kicked and whined at other children throughout electric lunch breaks, and they shrank from his vitality, he learned to eat alone. As his peers trudged from class in packs, watching the pavement, he sat, sullen, as his father drove him home. Somehow, Katsuhiro had never trusted him not to lose himself in chasing his surrounds. The fabric of the car seat would bite into his shorts, and he’d squirm for the window, squealing towards the noise outside: Birds that cawed; scraps of paper that fluttered and choked on smog. That was a fragile era, when his mother still waited, with dry hands and chipped nails, at home. When his father already stank of beer, but still spoke loudly, deeply, boisterously. Again and again, Jōnouchi’s mother would sit her son down, and write his name, stroke by agonising stroke. She’d recite each mora in time with each character. Yet sound would cluster through his head, and his own name would dissolve amid his mother’s instructions, amid the blaze of sunlight trapped on the windowsill behind her. He would write, and the strokes would come out rushed, mis-ordered, lopsided. 

Iro wa nioedo 

chirinuru wo.

At 10, his father grew quiet, and his mother yet quieter. Silence took up like a plague in Jōnouchi’s head, and swarmed in shapeless formation throughout parched mathematics lessons. Times tables hurled themselves headlong into a skull full of fog, and burst on contact. Are you listening? a teacher asked. How could he listen with a head full of noise, of unspoken words billowing back and forth? He gripped his seat, and glared back. Why should I care, anyway?

When his mother left, his father stopped caring to chaperone him. It had taken Jōnouchi a decade to earn the right to shed his infancy. He resented that it had been this long, so tried to join the huddle of middle schoolers. He told odd stories, and took off, queasy, in front of them. They withdrew their smiles when he approached on the second day. He growled his plaint, and resentment drove him to take the opposite route. He explored back alleys, wallflower convenience stores and dilapidated cinemas; the faster he walked, the more clearly he could see each brick, and the brighter each fleck in the pavement glinted. At speed, he delayed the journey home, and set his eyes on a gorgeous early winter sunset. The colours bellowed, too bold for winter, ungainly and vain. They were glorious.

Jōnouchi came home late. His father glared; fog crashed back down on his shoulders. 

Wa ga yo tare zo 

tsune naran?

A week before she cleared out too few of Katsuhiro’s belongings and packed too few suitcases, Jōnouchi’s mother drove both children two miles to the optometrist. My son, she explained, reads slowly, yet resents reading; it seems he can’t see very well. My daughter’s sight seems clearer, yet she complains of pain. The optometrist forced Jōnouchi to read down a chart of letters; he fidgeted, and, consumed in memories of a lonely lunch break the day prior, passed with flying colours. When the optometrist flashed a light to photograph his eyes, whatever hideous miracle that was, Jōnouchi screamed.

Katsuya Jōnouchi, the optometrist surmised, had perfect acuity of sight. He sought attention, stimulation. Meanwhile, Shizuka Jōnouchi, who had sat entirely still throughout her examination, had more ragged, derelict peripheral vision than her family had anticipated. Untreated, both your children will get much worse.

And in the months after Shizuka Jōnouchi became Shizuka Kawai and Mrs. Jōnouchi became That Bitch Who Never Cared, Katsuya Jōnouchi became horribly aware of how little time he had to be lethargic. He had to survive this schism; yet as he was, he barely felt capable of thinking. He walked, fidgeted, paced to prove to himself that he was a moving, breathing organism. Yet his father’s frustration would brook no exuberance. Long before Katsuhiro fully committed to flinging glass and spurning his son’s misery, Jōnouchi began learning to move silently, slowly, around his father. He memorised which mats snapped and snagged, which bits of fabric hissed when stepped on. He noted which windows opened most quietly. And yet he never managed a perfect, quiet exit. He couldn’t help but be conspicuous; he could only hope to get out too quickly for his father to react. And, to lift the torpor that followed escape, he would run to school, and, after, run back. Never did the sun shine brighter than when he was moving.

Uwi no okuyama

kyou koete.

When he met Hirutani, did he become more violent? No; every punch he threw during his delinquency had waited, kinetic and desperate, for days, months, years. In classrooms, his sole responses to being ordered around had been sullen deference, with sullenness being his sole demonstration of rebellion. Now, threatened with the obsolescence of his ego, of his perceived freedom, he chained himself to violence, over and over. The first time he punched a man in the gut, he found himself shaking. And rather than sink into sallow, domestic remorse, he slathered himself in white rage. And he went back and he went back and he went back, helpless to his own instincts, trying to dredge the noise in his skull out through his fists. No matter how many punches he threw, and no matter how many he received, he could not stop his head from blazing anew the moment he walked away.

Did Duel Monsters afford him any peace? He would be no man’s losing dog; nor would he be confined to dull celebrity. To play as a strategist consigned him to sitting still, committing himself to gambits he could never entirely trust, to moves that demanded a clear head. To play too whimsically would doom him to inferiority. Thus, he gave half his heart to diligence, and half to sheer fortune. Nobody could idolise his kind of folly, nor devalue his kind of skill. This was Jōnouchi’s will—to eschew having to wait in the mire of expectation; to escape the fog of obligation to anyone’s morals but his own. Honour suited him, so long as it was on his meticulous terms. In games of Duel Monsters, he became a knight-errant of sorts: predictably unpredictable, unexpectedly canny, blindly faithful. With this relationship to his own fate laid out so, he could finally draw cards without fearing those next to come. And thus, hyperkinetic, he found a peace in the game. So he played and played until he forgot how long he’d been playing, and Duel Monsters became as second nature.

Asaki yume miji

ei mo suzu.

Two weeks before Jōnouchi’s graduation, Shizuka invited him to her place to dine. Their father was not to join them. Jōnouchi protested, and his desperation died in a pinprick throat. Wisteria spilled itself over the footpath. Each step threatened to plunge, vertiginous, to the ground. 

When Jōnouchi saw his mother, his throat turned to sandpaper. She looked so old.

You cried so much as a baby, she told him. Kicked and screamed to see the world. You weren’t comfortable waiting in your crib—I’d end up coming to you at 4AM, walking you around the perimeter of the house till my heels burned. And you seemed so afraid of all the noises of the night—groaning engines, singing birds. Now, look at you—you’ve grown up so terribly fast.

Could he afford to tell her how even now, he bit down the urge to kick and scream, to launch himself, all fists and sparks, onto his tormentors? No; so, all night, he gripped his glass as tight as he could. The cold lingered and itched on his palms for days. Holding onto things, it seemed, was not so difficult as he’d once believed.

[leier-coyol]

Dudes ready to be painted

[spectrearia]

AYYYY I GOT MAX RANK IN MIKU GAME LETS GOOOO 👏

[future-circuit]

i like the idea of horror. it really is too bad that my brain decides every bad thing ever is real, actually

[magentagalaxies]

having a moment about my gender rn and i'm just like ugggggh @ my brain do we have to. like can we just not