#I'm sure it's from the console version at least

[look-is-iconic-my-ibs-is-chronic]

Just finished reading all of original Higurashi. Found this Banger in the game files.

[literalgrill]

Do NOT Support Hard Drive On Patreon

You might see friends today suggesting you support Hard Drive on Patreon today. You know, the funny video games version of The Onion? As a journalist, I will firmly tell you DO NOT GIVE THEM A DIME.

The CEO has pushed out all former staff that have built the site up to its current greatness and has been pushing the use of AI. The staff begged to have a Patreon before basically all being pushed out, but the idea was refused until now, when it will only line the pockets of a single person instead of hard working writers.

I know they might have provided laughs before, but Hard Drive is a shell of what it was once. Let it die and support the people who actually made those moments of joy possible. Don't believe me? Check out what former employees are saying below:

Kevin Podas: Okay you know what, I would feel bad saying nothing about this, so here goes:🚨SAVE YOUR MONEY🚨

We passionately advocated for a Patreon at Hard Drive & were aggressively shot down. The talent & people who built the site were pushed out. To see this now is beyond upsetting. For the past few years or so I put a lot of myself into this website. I pitched a ton of jokes, got over 120 articles published, & met a lot of great people. I'm sure if you've been following me for some time you could easily see this.

However, there is a lot of misinformation. I was eventually promoted to Managing Editor of the site & was ecstatic. Grateful for the opportunity. Felt like all of my hard work in the comedy mines was finally paying off. But things took a turn for the worst, & each day there were new surprises that affected our livelihoods. These were all very avoidable surprises, mind you.

A patreon was going to be our hail mary, but alas, for some reason, the power that be did not want it. Causing us to leave a dream job behind. "At least we did all we could," we consoled ourselves afterwards. I put a lot of myself into this project. I pitched all sorts of ideas that could have helped-- we all did. Merch collaborations, Patreon-integrated YouTube content, so much more. And most of them were shot down out of sheer stubbornness and nothing more. To see lie after lie spread, and multiple big publications and YouTubers that I am a fan of promote this Patreon under these pretenses is incredibly upsetting. There are so many receipts.

Please share this and consider pulling out if you've already put money into this. On Hard Drive using AI, also from Kevin Podas: I can't personally confirm that part aside from some of the recent header images for articles on both Hard Drive and Hard Times are being made with AI. As far as writing, it's been mentioned in the past, but I personally do not know. Maybe others do, maybe not. MORE From Kevin Podas suggesting the owner denying a Patreon being set up earlier cost an artist a job that was replaced by AI: We had a social media person who was awesome! He made the images until this AI implementation. He had to leave because ad revenue was low and a Patreon was aggressively refused.

Luca Fisher: at the risk of burning some bridges, i have to back up kevin here. i've only been part-time, in-and-out of hard drive since i got in last year, but i can corroborate that management doubled and tripled down about not hosting a patreon/crowdfunding and that many other suggestions and ideas, including mine (and ones much smarter than mine!), were shot down in really long, apocalyptic threads of everyone left on deck desperately trying to come up with ways to keep the lights on. managerially it has been messy and sad

i've written for multiple publications that have long since died, ones that were in the process of dying, and ones that, in this case, are soon to be put in the ground. it is sad and sucks every time. i don't know what could have been done differently, but i do know that a lot of great writers and content creators were left shorthanded and unhappy by the way things have gone. and it is sort of puzzling to see the sudden championing of patreon after we were all told plenty of times that it couldn't work and we should move on also, just to add my own personal two cents here, i was really disappointed by the shuttering of many different article sections on the site over the past 6-8 months. i understand cutting corners in a deficit, and i know it had to be done. that said…

all in all, i'm really sad to see this all happen. i don't fault anyone, if only because i don't really know enough about how this all can happen to make sense of it. games journalism is in a sad, sorry state, and will likely no longer be a thing in the next decade

VideoSealMan: I'm gonna say this because I think I deserve to. For months, MONTHS on end I was bugging Hard Drive management about a Patreon. Often I got ignored for a week+, but when I actually got a response I was encouraged to - of all things, write up a Google Doc pitching the concept I did it regardless. I wasn't the only one trying to sway management on a Patreon, but so fiercely was I fighting for it that last night, I was accused of making this comment directly by the CEO! With no evidence whatsoever! After I'd been gone for over a month.

I vouched so hard for Patreon because I wanted all the writers and creatives working with Hard Drive including myself to get paid better. When I actually got a response, the idea was often shut down. Eventually due to the state of my company, my pay was cut for a second time I confronted management alongside a couple other important figureheads at the org and told them that if we couldn't do a Patreon - I could no longer financially justify staying there. The answer was still no, so I left. Baffled at the decision, but whatever.

It is unendingly frustrating to know that myself and many other people who put their soul into Hard Drive LEFT because of management's absolute refusal to compromise on a Patreon, to then see them launch one anyway a month later and get over 1000 people pledging money. I'm seeing a lot of things float around about greed and people being fired. No one was fired. Everyone who left, left because they were sick of management's decision-making. And honestly, management is a lot of things but I would not call them greedy. (From my experience.) They did genuinely make an effort to pay people as much as possible. I found the pay very fair for a while. I am not disputing that I was paid what I was owed - yet management frequently feels the need to remind critics of that. Lmao, yes. I was paid what I was owed. No one is disputing payment. You did the bare minimum a business owner should do and paid everyone their due, very well done. I make no allegations of greed, cheating or foul play. I make allegations of poor management and incompetence that has fucked over other people.

Basically the only people left at Hard Drive have been there for about 2 months. They will reap the rewards of this successful Patreon I and so many others passionately fought for for so long. We will not see a dime.

I do not know the new people at Hard Drive, But I feel bad for them. They were haphazardly thrust into Hard Drive's workplace with little to no explanation on how anything works, or given any context on the state of the place. Even now managements feeds them half-truths and misinformation about other people's grievances. I am broke and have been for a while. I had to move out of my flat in Reading and back with my family because of how little money I was making. This has basically doomed my flatmate to moving back in with abusive parents, which is something I feel guilty about every day. If we had gone with the Patreon I worked myself hoarse over back then, this could have been avoided. Some of my other good pals could also not have been fucked over.

It was a bad judgment call, but it's not a crime. It's just management getting it wrong.

So should you give to the Hard Drive Patreon? I don't know! I don't think any of the new people working there to patch up the holes left by the recent mass exodus have any bad intentions. Maybe they deserve it! But it is not the same site you knew a year ago, or even a month ago. Myself and many people who were there far longer than me and did far more for it than I did are all gone now because we could not deal with management's terrible decision-making and dogass communication any longer. That's what you should know, imo

I had an agreement in place with management that I would receive the next 8 months of revenue from the Hard Drive YT channel from my leaving in November. This was a deal I appreciated, and thought was very fair on management's behalf. So far, the deal has been honoured for 2 months. However as of last night I was removed from the Hard Drive Slack without warning, and as an editor for the YouTube channel. This means I no longer have any way of verifying how much I am owed, I just have to take their word for it. I'm sure management will make their own statements full of half-truths and weird language on the many cases being brought against them - I'd take everything they say with a pinch of salt if some of the screenshots I've seen of them talking about me are any indication lol

To management; I do not want to talk to you. I want you to DM me a screenshot of how much I'm owed every month and then send me the money per our agreement until June, then we can go our separate ways. Do that and admit to your mistakes, and maybe you can recover your reputation! That's it from me, lol. If they pull out of the deal and fuck me over I'll have more to say, but most of what I know is other people's stories of incompetence and poor decision-making, lol. I genuinely get no pleasure out of doing this; I do not think management is evil - I just think they're really bad at what they do and it's cost other, more talented people, lol. You should believe the writers imo

One last thing I wanna say btw, management did often stress that no one should try to make Hard Drive a full time thing. They were transparent about that, and that is fair. I was working on it because at a few points, I was lead to believe we actually were doing a Patreon. Many other ppl have similar stories of being strung along by management changing their minds and stop-starting shit every 2 weeks. We all made the fatal mistake of overestimating our manager - who would tell you one thing one day and something totally opposite the next week lol

Hunter R. Thompson:

I'm not your dad, but speaking as a Hard Drive writer, I don't know that funding Hard Drive on Patreon is worth it

The driving talent on the back end—behind the kickass site I joined in 2019—have peaced out over the years as the site's been (in our view) increasingly mismanaged. Mismanagement like, not setting up crowdfunding before the ship sank and all its best crew failed; or publishing a screenshot of Andy Ngo pedojacketing a trans writer, complete with her deadname; or a disgruntled ex-writer getting falsely accused of shit-talk, by actual staff. I'm grateful for the writing I've gotten to produce for HD (and will forever be kicking myself for not writing even more, in the four years I've had to do it!! i'm a dumbass!!!) but it is very much no longer the site I signed up for.

I don't want to resign as a contributor altogether, because I'm open to the idea of the site recovering and bad practices being retired as finances level out-- it would just be dishonest for potential backers to not be Aware Of The Circumstances, I think.

Jeremy Kaplowitz: i truly don't want to start shit, but feel compelled to say: i want to see Hard Drive succeed w/o resorting to throwing former writers & editors, myself included, under the bus. surely there's a way to save the site without building it over the corpses of those who left. my $0.02 i don't blame anyone who wants to sign up for the HD patreon and i support the website, but that includes those who worked on it for years, have complaints, and don't deserve to be treated like bitter assholes like this kind of stuff is just objectively true, meanwhile there's these new writers who joined the site after i left (meaning, in the last ~3 months) claiming people are liars. decide for yourself if you care, but this is what happened! [Quotes this Tweet]

Seth Finkelstein: Writing for Hard Drive has been a privilege the past few years, and it makes me so angry to see people I looked up to get jerked around behind the scenes. The amount of grenades the editors jumped on our behalf is immense, and I don't think the way they're being treated is right.

Other Bits On AI: We do know for sure however that AI art has been used by the site. Its fucking owner confirms it here:https://twitter.com/MattSaincome/status/1743040541603123622. Seems the owner pushed AI written articles as well! TayFabe: My vaguetweet is making the rounds & these made me apoplectic. - owner regularly lobbied using ai. Once he tested it & said ai was writing better satire than 25% of the HT/HD writers. - ai images were used on the site & socials w/o consulting the team or disclosing it publicly I found the ai bit relevant to include bc 1) it illuminates a stark change in HD's current direction & leadership, 2) ai images have previously been used on the site and (since deleted) ig posts, 3) ai content fucking sucks, and repeatedly pushing to use it is a telling quality The "handful of writers who chose to leave" includes 2 editors-in-chief (both cofounders who wrote a combined total of >1,000 articles & defined the voice of HD), & at least 3 other editors. These guys put in WORK since 2017, so cool to be corrected by ppl who joined in Nov 2023 [Link to mentioned vague tweet from post.] More from TayFabe: owner continuously lobbied for using ai in every possible way. No one else wanted to do it, but he kept on, saying ai was writing better satire than 25% of the HT/HD writers. Also, ai images were used on the site & socials without public disclosure or consulting the team.

The owner has responded now multiple times in a private discord... Thank you for people sharing screenshots! First Screenshot:

Kevin's Response: He banned me from the server for speaking out, so no, I didn't see it. And he gave no indication of a timeline, it was just "we'll do one when *I* say so" and gave every inclination he was totally against it. It bred an environment that pushed our hands to have to leave. Screenshot Round Two:

Kevin's Response: "Starting one in 3 months" is an absolute lie. He denied it, I have screenshots and others who can confirm. No timeline was given. Just "this is what it is now" and like, I couldn't live off of that. I wanted to do more but he was allergic to good ideas from others around him.

Matt, owner of Hard Drive, responds publicly on Twitter.

Matt: Kevin, the patreon launch was delayed because I didn't think it would work. Everyone is happy that it did work. Everyone who left the site because we didn't have money to pay for creative content which didn't revenue is welcome to return home. But unclear why the hostility.

Hard Drive paid out literally every dollar it had, then a bunch more, to creative people who worked on the site. When we ran out of money, we couldn't pay anymore. We did our best.

Kevin: Right, and my point of this thread was that it was completely and totally avoidable. This is reasonable to be upset about. How could I have been any more clear?

Matt: If we knew with 100% certainly that the community would have supported us via patreon, we would have done that. We didn't know. We had tried 4 years ago and got no support. We were wrong this time. We did our best to figure it out. We paid all the money we could.

Kevin: So you knew with 100% certainty this time? Or you took a leap of faith?

Matt: It was a last gasp panic effort after ad rates got cut in half on january 1st due to seasonal spending changes. We didn't know it would work. We were embarrassed to ask for support. We wanted to figure it out.

Kevin: Every site has a Patreon. Every YouTuber, comedy group, etc. But you insisted that nobody cared about Hard Drive. Which is wildly untrue. I know you see that now, but again, I think you can see why I and many others are pretty upset. A last ditch panic effort was long overdue. A couple more things from Matt:

It was about the size of the hole we needed plugged budget wise, the time I had left of personal resources, and the past data I had about us trying a patreon (which turned out to be a bad indicator). I didn't think the Patreon would help us fast enough. I made a bad estimation

aka "if we make $1000 more dollars a month via patreon, which would be 10x what we got last time, we will not solve any of our problems. If instead we try to plow down path B, we might make it out in time." That was the thinking. I chose the wrong path, but didn't mean to Kevin also retweeted this comment from the user Matt was responding to: So you're saying that you're bad at running the business, didn't listen to any of your employees until after they were forced to leave their jobs, and now you're going to get more of the money from the Patreon that was their idea in the first place? Matt's Response: Respectfully, I made a mistake delaying the patreon decision. But keeping a comedy site alive for 9 years is not easy, there are lots of potential ideas, and think overall we've done a good and honorable job. Will leave this thread in peace now to allow people their space.

Sorry for linking to Elon's hellsite (derogatory), but sources need links so...

[doyoulikethis-videogame-song]

Ask Masterpost 2/1/2025

Fourth edition! I changed some formatting things for better readability.

Summary:

Permissibility of creator-leaked/teased soundtracks (Not allowed)

Proposal of demographics poll

Permissibility of Simlish covers (Allowed)

What franchise has the most polls?

Permissibility of remixes of licensed music (Allowed)

Inquiry about duplicate submissions

Permissibility of pinball soundtracks (Not Allowed) and Inquiry about ports of older games

Permissibility of unused tracks in the game files (Allowed)

Permissibility of roblox game tracks (Allowed)

Highest "I like & I know it" song?

Inquiry about revealing the composer before the reveal

Proposal of demographics poll

"Can we submit 'leaked' soundtracks from games if the creator leaked/teased them?"

I'm going to say no, because there's a broad spectrum of scenarios that could happen in between the 'leak' and the official launch of the song that would technically make the 'leak' not indicative of the final product and of course you don't know that until the final product is released :').

----------

@pomrania asked:

Is there any chance we could get a poll on what people mean when they vote for that they like a song, or that it sounds familiar? For me, "I like this song" means "I'd want to listen to it again once it's revealed", and "it sounds familiar" generally means "I'm not sure whether I've heard it before but I might have" also sometimes it's "I know I haven't heard this SPECIFIC song before, but I recognize the motifs in it".

Or if that's not something you'd want to make a poll for, then I'd still be interested in seeing what people say for how they vote on things, like in the comments.

I think this would be super interesting to do for a special event or something like that! I've been curious about demographics and other general statistics for a while now. I'm actually starting to have quite a good rhythm with managing the blog now so I may begin implementing the fun side ideas I've had sometime soon (or at least, I hope so, this semester is looking rough LOL)

----------

Can we submit simlish versions of popular songs, like simlish Katy Perry?

They're remixes for a game so absolutely! I think we already have some in the submissions queue.

----------

Which franchise/game has the most polls?

It's probably destiny (forlorn, distant stare).

----------

@haellen-o asked:

Is licensed music created/remixed for video games allowed?

(examples being the version of rob zombies dragula in the original jet set radio. And ludens by bring my the horizon)

It's an official remix for the game's soundtrack, so absolutely :).

----------

Out of curiosity, how often do you get duplicate requests from different people (or maybe the same person, worried you never got their first response, lol)? I think you've said you have around 7,000 requests, is that after removing duplicates or before?

We honestly have a lot of duplicate requests for popular games, and we've been shaving down the duplicates as we go along and queue new submissions. I think we've cut down AROUND ~1000 duplicates so far (we're not done!) and these are mostly very popular (at least on tumblr) games such as disco elysium, sonic series games, in stars and time, final fantasy, pokemon, tf2, mass effect, hollow knight, legend of zelda, just off the top of my head. The 7000 number was from before removing duplicates.

----------

for older games where the music is ported to different consoles, would the soundtracks be considered separate if the soundfonts impact them enough, or do they have to be very, VERY different? Like if a game was released on pc vs a 32x port.

Also, if a pinball cabinet includes a soundtrack, is that considered a video game soundtrack?

I would honestly just submit your PREFERRED version (if the soundfonts did differ), and I would put BOTH versions into the reveal, since I don't think this is a common enough occurrence to be significantly obnoxious/unfair for whatever reason. As for the pinball question, last masterpost answered overwhelmingly 'no', so I'm going to say no as well :').

----------

Are unused vgms allowed for submission? So in the files but never added to the game itself.

If you can credit the creator of the tracks then yes! (provided they're in the files in the final publicly released version and not from a demo/waiting for a future update to be implemented in a live service game/etc)

----------

are roblox games allowed?

Yes, if you can credit the creator of the tracks and they were made for that roblox game :).

----------

what song had the highest "I like it and I've definitely heard it before" percent?

I think it is still #100, which was Megalovania from Undertale (85.20%) Correction: It's Death By Glamour, #460, at 87% :)

----------

@enderlordisadumbusername asked:

are we allowed to mention song composers before the song has been revealed?

Absolutely!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And please do!!!!!! (This will literally only give away the game if you were already familiar enough to know the composer, so it's actually very perfect)

----------

Would you or have you ever run a poll to gauge how much of a song your followers listen to before voting?

Definitely considering it after learning a lot of people don't listen to the full song or even at least the first minute...

[onecarelessowner]

Forever (Is Our Today)

Pairing: 13th Doctor x Reader

Word count: 8k

Warnings: none, just a lot of fluff, grief mentioned just in passing, marriage talk if that's not your thing, no use of y/n

Summary: You catch a space flu (thanks to one of the Doctor’s brilliant ideas). She gives you a pill that’ll fix it fast. She just wasn’t expecting the side effects… or what you’d end up saying because of them.

Author's note: heeey so this is the first time I'm posting my fic here and I'm so excited to get this blog up and running and full of my wife.

this fic was born out of my own sickness (I have been very sick the last few days) and my brain needed to write about 13 so... here we go. english isn't my first language and i am sick still so i hope you enjoy it all the same.

you can also read this on ao3.

The Doctor knew she shouldn’t have taken you to that marathon on a freezing waterfall. Humans never make it to the final round and she should’ve guessed that is for a reason.

But no… She decided to bring you with her.

Obviously, the two of you lost — in more ways than one. She came in third place and you?

Joint pain, sore throat, coughing fits, increasing temperature, sleeping anywhere she leans you against.

You got the flu. And a space one at that.

The journey back to the TARDIS is a slow, grumbling one.

Well, actually, the journey was slow and she was grumbling — but, you know, same difference. It’d usually take her half an hour to get there under ordinary circumstances. But you’re not ordinary (and the Doctor can’t decide if that thought was affectionate or just part of the grumbling. Probably both), so it actually takes two hours.

“Here you go,” she announces, opening the TARDIS doors for you with a smile that’s clinging on for dear life to ‘patient’ so it doesn’t fall on ‘ironic’. You never really like it when she gives you one of those. “Try not to trip on the steps, I’m looking forward to not having to carry you around.”

You give her a thumbs up. She’s pretty sure you haven’t listened to a single word that came out of her mouth.

It’s only when she sees you crouching under the console, hugging your legs to protect your eyes from the lights, that the Doctor allows herself to admit what she’s been feeling since you coughed the first time — she’s worried. Big time.

She sits down next to you, placing her hand on your forehead. Still warm.

“I’m fine,” you say, but with the way you pronounced your consonants, she knows you’re at least a station, two buses and a cab away from ‘fine’. “I just need to sleep a little. You can—” here she waits for you to stop coughing for a few long seconds, “— just leave me in my room, if you still want to go out there. Explore and stuff.”

Exploring and stuff would be a good name for an autobiography, if she ever decided to write one. The idea always drifts from her mind when she remembers it would probably be too big — never-ending — and full of forbidden knowledge. A younger version of her attempted to start — and of course, it had to be the most self-serving one of them all.

Yes, that one.

And maybe, if she still were that incarnation, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, your offer would’ve been tempting. He wouldn’t go through with it, but he’d stop for a second to wish he would.

But she’s so much older now. And she hopes she’s a lot wiser, too.

So, she gets up to her feet and pulls you up as well.

“Not a chance,” she finally replies. “Medbay. Go slowly, walking is good for your joints.”

You attempt a laugh, but the coughing doesn’t let you finish it. The important thing is: you’re walking to the medbay.

And that gives her time to fetch something she’s just remembered the TARDIS can help her with.

When the Doctor gets there, you’re staring at the ceiling. The TARDIS has kindly dimmed the white lights, but your attention has latched on a spiral of light reflecting on some kind of surface.

You’re looking at it like it’s your entire world, and that makes her a) think you’re the cutest being in the universe and b) also feel slightly jealous of a beam of light.

She gets your attention back by placing her hand on your brow again. You flutter your eyes closed. And you’re still way too warm.

She removes her hand and waits for your eyes to open. And when they do, she shows you the best-est thing her ship can make.

Medicine.

Not the twenty-first century kind — an actually effective one.

It looks like marshmallow candy, and the colours glow when it rolls back and forth on the Doctor’s palm. It tastes like cloud and honey, with just a hint of ibuprofen — nothing’s perfect — but it works!

You look from her palm, to her face, to her palm again.

She shakes the pill like she’s summoning a cat. “Go on. TARDIS made it for ya.”

“Did she?” you ask with a subtle smile.

The Doctor feels that tug of jealousy again and wrinkles her nose. “After I told her to.”

That makes you immediately take the pill from her hand. She’s decided to ignore — for now, anyway — the undercurrent of this subtle-almost-not-there jealousy taking hold of her and the fact that you trust her without batting an eye.

After you’ve swallowed it, you ask, “What does it do?”

“Cures every known type of every known flu in the known universe,” she replies, proudly. “Not approved on Earth, though. Can’t quite remember why.”

You simply nod, so she points to the bed, nicely tidied up for use in its place next to a drawer full of medical equipment, “Have a kip. It’ll make you feel heavy for a little while.”

You do as you’re told, familiar with the dance by now: the Doctor fusses over you in the console room. She gets you to the medbay. You get in the bed. She fusses some more. You’re free to go.

It’s a silent dance by now, one both of you already know by heart.

So while she’s connecting a few electrodes to your head, it comes as a surprise when you suddenly blurt out, sluggish and with a grin she can hear, “You are the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen in my life.”

She freezes. Then slowly, very slowly, turns to look at you.

You’re still grinning. Your pupils dilated and your gaze completely focused on her.

She moves closer to you to fix one of the looser pads — your eyes follow her.

She moves a few inches to the side — your eyes follow her.

She ducks as if she’s picking something from the floor — you look down.

“No, hold on,” you begin again, eyes still glued on her as she comes back up. “The most beautiful thing. Like, more beautiful than that planet where everyday is New Year’s Eve and there’s always a sunrise, remember?”

The Doctor nods.

“Yeah. More beautiful than anything in the known universe,” you finish, giggling.

The Doctor swallows.

Give her Daleks. Cybermen. Weeping Angels. An identity crisis. The bloody Master, if you will.

What on Earth — and she’s not even on Earth — does she do with this?

Could this be the flu? Yeah, but those symptoms aren't listed for regular space flu.

Could this be the medicine? Nah, but it should've knocked you out in a minute!

“Erm…” she winces, moving to turn on the monitor she meant to use to examine you. “Feeling that sleep kicking in?”

“And I love your voice, too,” you reply, ignoring her question. “Not just your voice — your accent. It’s so beautiful, I think it’s just as beautiful as you. The way you speak, it’s like—”

“See this?” she points to the screen, on and active, tracking your sinapses. “That’s your brain. I’m trying to make sure it’s working.”

Your mouth drops open. “Oh, and you’re so clever.”

The Doctor claps once, feigning excitement, as she steps closer to your bed. “How about this? How about… you tell me what you remember from the marathon? You know, the one we lost?”

“I couldn’t keep up with you,” you start replying, and she feels a surge of actual hope that she got you to change the subject.

She exhales, shaking her head. “Nope. Not doing this.”

She starts peeling the electrodes off your brow, convinced she’s making a clean exit before anything else slips out.

Except for a Time Lord, she’s surprisingly time-blind. Because the next thing you do is sigh, and say, in the softest voice she’s ever heard from you: “If you were human, I’d propose to you.”

She freezes once more, but this time she's sure one of her hearts has stopped working. Her hands stop mid-air, suddenly too cold to move.

She's not looking at you. She can't. And she's not thinking about it. Absolutely not.

“Not here, of course,” you say. “On our anniversary.”

Reluctantly, she looks down at you, focusing somewhere between your eyes, in the rib of your nose.

You beam at her. “I still keep track of it, the first day you kissed me. I've got a calendar in my room and it runs like a day on Earth, even if we leave for a few days. TARDIS keeps it running for me, I bet you haven’t even noticed!”

The Doctor blinks. A few times. She tries to think of something to say, but no words come.

Then, she notices her hands are still frozen in their place next to your brow, and recoils them like you zapped her.

She moves away to turn off the screen, feeling your gaze following her — and that's when it hits her.

“Oh!” she mutters under her breath. “Of course!”

“Kissiversary,” you say, giggling. “Our kissiversary, Doctor.”

“That's why it got banned on Earth,” she turns to you again, explaining it to you because she needs to explain it to someone who'll listen or she'll burst into flames.

And that could actually happen. She's just trying to be careful.

“The pill! It's slightly psychic, blurs thoughts and freezes memories — like a super-powered truth serum. When I was holding it I must've felt—”

Jealous.

Of a photon. And of the TARDIS.

But she's not saying that out loud.

“— whatever I felt,” she rushes to scramble back, “must've gotten imprinted on the pill. So when you took it, you absorbed that and you're now reacting to it. Saying everything you think about it. You're not even going to remember it in a few hours.”

She leans against the bed, avoiding your eyes, feeling particularly sorry for herself. “I'm sorry.”

When nothing comes, she chances a glance at you.

You're pouting, brows creased like you're about to coo.

And you nearly do. “Aww, baby. Are you sad?”

The Doctor throws out her arms, brows arched in disbelief. “Did none of that make any sense to you?”

You shake your head. “No. Half of the things you say don't. But I still love listening to you — I’m actually pretty sure I could listen to you for all eternity. And I don’t even know what that means,” you laugh. “You tell me.”

She tilts her head to the side, smiling what you call her trademark tight-lipped smile. At least that is something she can answer. “It means forever.”

It doesn't actually, and she could write an encyclopedia about all the differences between them, time wise.

But to you, it makes perfect sense. You grin, like she just shared a secret with you.

Then, you whisper back, “That’s what you look like.”

Something cracks inside her. She looks at you — at your eyes, and all the light they’re carrying even now — and her soul hurts.

“Yeah,” she says, smiling sadly. “Maybe just not the way you mean.”

Because yes, she does look like forever. Like a thing that goes on and on even after it should’ve stopped.

And maybe you’re right and she does look like Quantifer, where everyday is New Year’s Eve — a world not all here yet not quite there, where forever is both in constant flux and extremely predictable.

What its settlers understand as forever, right there on the edge of the universe, is a bit like her life.

What you understand as forever, is a New Year’s Eve.

Sometimes, she just wished she didn’t look like forever.

The Doctor notices you’ve gone quiet. Part of her hopes you’ve finally dozed off.

You haven’t. You’re just crying, trying to keep it as quiet as possible.

“Oh,” she mumbles, feeling slightly out of her depth. “What is it?”

“I just realised,” you say through tears, “I don’t know what I’d do without you. In my life.”

“Oh,” she replies.

Completely out of her depth.

“What would I do in a life where I can’t look at your eyes?” you ask, then crack a teary smile. “The prettiest eyes in the known universe.”

“Yeah, you can stop using that phrase now,” the Doctor blurts, because it’s the only thing she can think of. “Also, I’m not going anywhere.”

It breaks her hearts that you start sobbing again at this, but she can’t blame you. She’s said that before to so many people.

So, she decides to show you the only way she can right now: by pulling up a chair — one she’s quite sure wasn’t even here when she entered the room just a few minutes ago.

She’ll check with the TARDIS later.

Still, she drags it next to your bed and sits with a triumphant little smile. “See? Not going anywhere.”

You take in a shaky breath. After a beat, you mumble, “I can’t move my arms.”

Not the response she was hoping for, but at least that is something she can deal with.

“Oh. Right! That’s the pill working,” she says. “Soon you’ll be sleeping your flu away.”

“No, but I still have so much I want to say,” you whine softly, tears still running.

She gently brushes them away with her thumb. And, despite everything in her that says don’t, she asks, “Like what?”

“Like how I keep track of every single one of our firsts,” you smile.

“Uh, maybe skip that one, will ya?” she quickly interrupts.

“Like how I think you wouldn’t even like a ring. You’re not a ring person,” you continue, your words getting slower, your eyes almost closing — but still focused on her. Only on her.

She chuckles. “And why's that?”

“You never use anything on your fingers. I know, I look at them a lot.”

She lets out a nervous laugh, and you go on. “I’d give you an earring. One that matches that one you always use. And we could— oh, I think I’m blacking-out.”

“It’s okay,” the Doctor says, softly stroking your hair. “You have all the time you need to tell me the rest.”

“Like forever?” you ask, smiling softly.

She sighs, smiling back. “Yeah. Forever.”

And just as you close your eyes, you still manage to mutter, “I’ll take that as an ‘I do’.”

You’re now sleeping peacefully, breathing heavy, motionless — as expected.

Part of her is upset your rambling got interrupted by the medicine’s effect actually kicking in. What a great timing, that was!

Some other part of her is relieved she doesn’t have to face any of your unfiltered truths any time soon.

But another part of her… This one has just concluded forever can mean many different things. Today — however long that is — she wouldn’t mind being your forever.

And that gives her a new idea…

******************************************

You wake up feeling simultaneously renewed and extremely emotionally fatigued.

You shift your position, meaning to stretch, when you realise your head is leaning against something warm and hard.

A shoulder.

The Doctor’s shoulder.

You let your eyes wander around you and you come to realise you’re laying on a bed. The Doctor’s bed.

In the Doctor’s bedroom.

You make a questioning sound, involuntarily, which makes her turn to look at you.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” she chirps.

You chuckle, sitting up. “Morning to you too, I suppose.”

“I mean, it’s not actually morning. This planet has a five-hour day-cycle so it’s currently, erm…” she squints for a second. “Afternoon. Ish.”

You smile, fondly. You love it when she starts explaining the laws that govern strange worlds you’re not either going to remember nor visit again — and yet, it’s always wonderful to hear her explaining them to you.

But when you stop to pay attention to her eyes, they seem distant.

That can be normal, you remind yourself. It happens every now and then, you think it comes with being 2000-years-old.

But this time, it feels different. Like something is weighing heavily on her mind and she’s trying really hard to pretend it’s not.

So you try to think back to the last things that happened— and you realise you don’t even know how you ended up here.

“Doctor?”

She gives you her ‘yes?’ hum.

“Why are we here?”

She gives you her ‘it’s complicated’ hum.

“What is the last thing you remember?” she asks, sitting up as well.

“The race.”

“Marathon,” she corrects, pointing a finger at you.

“Same thing,” you shrug.

“Completely different things,” she shakes her head. “I could make a TED Talk on how different they actually are.”

“You could make a TED Talk on anything, Doctor,” you reply with a soft laugh, but then you notice… she’s stalling.

So you press. “And after the marathon?”

She scrunches up her face. “It’s been nearly three days on this planet, my memory’s wonky.”

You squint at her, so she sighs. “You got the flu. I gave you medicine. You feel asleep. You woke up. You asked ‘why are we here?’—”

“You can stop there, I think I remember the rest,” you laugh.

You really don’t recall getting sick. You do remember coughing sometimes by the end of the ra— marathon. You remember the Doctor being a sore loser for getting bronze.

Which makes you think…

“Oh!” you exclaim just as she’s getting up from the bed. “Are you upset about the bronze? Third place is great, too. You’re the Doctor, it’s not like you need a medal from some random planet to prove your worth.”

She throws you a puzzled look. “No. I’m not upset about that. Why would I be?”

“Well, you did seem upset back there,” you reply.

“That was three days ago,” she says, hands inside her pockets like she’s just casually chilling.

And yet… Something is wrong.

“What?” she asks, making you realise you’re staring.

You don’t stop.

You try to make a few connections: five-hour days. Three days. That would be…

“Hold on, how long have I been asleep for?”

“Erm… Hard to say, really,” she shrugs.

“You’re a Time Lord!” you exclaim.

“A little over twelve hours?” she replies.

It sounds more like a question than a statement, but it tracks.

“My God, what kind of medicine did you give me?”

“One that fixed you,” she shoots back, hands on her waist like she’s feeling indignant you’d even ask. “Do I hear any coughing? No? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Shall we?”

And with that, she’s inviting you out of her bedroom.

You laugh. She really does hate standing still.

Which makes you think—

“Oh!” you exclaim again (try living with an alien who says that 6,461,153 times a day and not picking it up). “Did you stay here with me for all twelve hours?”

She gives you a look you don’t understand. “Yeah.”

“Oh no. I’m so sorry,” you say, frantic now as you climb out of bed and cross to where she’s standing by the door. “I didn’t mean— I mean, I don’t even remember falling asleep. But you didn’t have to stay. You could’ve gone off and done something else if you wanted.”

She wrinkles her nose, looking away.

You breathe out a frustrated something.

Sometimes you wish the TARDIS could translate emotions as well — because right now the Doctor is speaking a language you’ve given up on trying to understand.

“Okay… Let’s go somewhere nice?” you try. “To make it up.”

That brightens her up. “Yeah! Any ideas?”

“Anywhere you’d like!”

She presses her lips into a line, squinting, like she’s plotting something.

You love it when she gets that look.

“I was thinking… Quantifer?”

The planet — settlement, but you always get it wrong — where everyday is New Year’s Eve, and every single one of them is both unique and extremely beautiful.

The last time you visited, the Doctor was radiant. The most beautiful everything you’ve ever seen in your life.

So you grin. “Cool! But erm— Maybe I should shower first?”

“Yeah,” she nods, with a toothy grin. “You should.”

You burst out laughing. “Blimey, I’m ever so thankful for your unfiltered truths.”

So, you leave her room, focusing on having the quickest shower of your life to not keep her waiting for so long.

But before you walk further away, you notice she’s just… standing there. At the door. Looking pointedly ahead.

“Doctor, baby,” you say, softer this time. “What is it?”

She blinks a few times. Then throws you a grin that doesn’t reach her eyes.

“Nothing! Was just trying to… remember the coordinates. Got it now. I’ll go get us there. See ya!”

And she walks away.

You blink.

You glance up at the TARDIS ceiling, letting your hand trail along one of the walls. “You should really start working on that translator,” you whisper.

But you decide not to dwell on it. You’ve got a place to go.

******************************************

After that day, a few things change.

You don't notice it at first. It's only when it happens that you piece together the puzzle — much like a frog inside boiling water.

The first change comes with a Spring Cleaning.

It's not Spring, and there's barely any traditional cleaning, but the Doctor asks for your help so… Who are you to say no?

You start with the pool — and here the cleaning consists of the Doctor staring at the water, hands planted on her hips, for several minutes.

She suddenly announces it's clean enough and tells you to follow her.

And, so, you do.

The next room is the library. She remembers at the last minute it's literally infinite and ever-changing, and immediately closes the door after having just opened it.

So, you follow her to the next one.

Which, to no one's surprise, is the console room.

Under the console itself she keeps a small, wooden box, full of other boxes of varying sizes.

Bigger on the inside, of course. You begin to think accepting this plan of hers wasn't a very clever idea.

She sets aside some of the boxes and explains the plan:

“So, we have five categories: 1) Why is this here?, 2) Definitely throwing away, 3) Will decide later, 4) I need to actually clean this, 5) Definitely keeping it, 6) I don't know what to do with this.”

“That's six categories,” you say.

“You can start with that box on your right, I'll take this one,” she says, and immediately throws herself into organising her items.

She doesn’t give you any directives on how to go about deciding which item goes on which pile, so you just go with your instinct.

Agatha Christie’s book published in the year five billion? Why is this here (and not in the library)?

Red question-mark shaped handle? I don’t know what to do with this.

A single, surprisingly not withered, celery? Will decide later.

And despite having to erase five new categories the Doctor tries to invent for every item she picks up, the rest of the cleaning goes surprisingly peacefully.

Until you find a frame.

It’s the picture of a woman — beautiful curly hair, very loving eyes.

She’s stunning.

You feel a weird sort of tug as you hold it in your hands, like it's speaking to your heart. You stare at it for some time.

“Oh,” comes the Doctor’s voice from your side, seemingly surprised. “So that was there?”

You don’t look away from the frame. “Who is she?”

“Erm… My wife.”

You gasp, like someone just announced you won the space lottery. “You have a wife?!”

She erms again. “Used to, lots of years ago. I was a different man back then.”

She’s not looking at you as she says that, eyes fixed downwards, hands busy with her box of things.

And just like that, you think you understand what happened.

“I’m sorry,” you offer.

“... Yeah,” she replies.

But despite the sadness, your heart is beating wildly inside your chest. Because if she has been married before… could she be open to the idea of marrying again?

It’s selfish to wonder that now, you know that.

But the woman in the picture doesn’t seem the type to mind.

So you clean the frame, delicately and carefully, before setting it on a new pile.

When the Doctor notices, she huffs. “Oi! You didn’t let me create new categories!”

“Yeah, but mine makes sense,” you reply.

“And what is it?”

“Things you should stop hiding from,” you say, giving her a side eye look.

She doesn’t say another word for the rest of the cleaning.

Good for you, because your mind is already busy with a few — marriage related — plans…

******************************************

You’d thought about it, of course.

Several and several and several times. But there was always the interspecies barrier holding you back.

You thought Time Lords just didn’t get married. That maybe they didn’t even need relationships at all — not with the way the Doctor (never) talks about them.

Since that day, however… You’re dreaming up so many ways it could go.

Would she be surprised? Would she shut down? Would she say yes? Should you write down your proposal and send it to her when you’re not around? Should you kneel like everybody else?

But most importantly… What could you even propose with?

You’ve studied her for all this time you’ve been together and she just… doesn’t really like jewelry.

There’s her earring, granted, which she never takes off — not even to shower. But her current earring is perfect for her — not too flashy, not too large, easily hidden under her hair.

So you’ve been imagining: a ring for an earring. Something that matches the one she already has and that you could use as well.

But if you get it wrong… You don’t want to be alive for the casual grimace of discomfort she’d try to give you while pretending you’ve given her this galaxy’s eighth wonder.

It’s on one of those days where the Doctor is tinkering with some quantum something for the millionth time this month, and you’re wandering around the ship with your head literally in the clouds, that you nearly trip in the kitchen.

You’d only meant to fetch some tea for the both of you when a piece of paper skids across the floor — you slip on it, then smack right into the counter.

After apologising to it (you’re pretty sure the counter’s sentient too), you pick up the culprit.

It’s an advertisement for — and nothing could’ve prepared you for this — an intergalactic wedding ring designer.

And not just any ring designer — a non-humanoid one. Specialised in unconventional rings.

And there’s even a PS in all caps at the end: “bring a picture of your lover and I’ll help you find the perfect ring”.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” you mutter to yourself.

Too good to be true or not, you start to, very gently, convince the Doctor to get you to the hidden moon of Woozillers.

“Woozillers?! What for?” she asks, quite shocked, from under the console. The goggles don’t help much with the whole annoyed look she’s trying to give you, but you get the gist.

“Just seemed like a nice place, really. Somewhere I could explore on my own. I read there’s this big market, like Westfield?”

She only stares back at you. The goggles make you feel distressed.

After a beat, she exhales through her nose, getting up from her place under the console.

“First they’re all ‘it’s bigger on the inside!’. I blink for a second,” she pauses to remove the goggles, press a few buttons and pull a few switches, “and then they’re telling me which planet to go next! Can you believe that?”

You think she’s talking more to the TARDIS than to you.

You grimace. “Are we going there right now?”

The TARDIS makes a loud thump.

The Doctor shoots you a grin. “There already. Coincidentally we had been drifting near its galaxy.” Then, she hands you a rectangular shape. “Infinite money. Try not to get lost, her tracker’s not working cause someone interrupted me.”

You beam, feeling positively delighted.

You give her a quick hug and leave the ship in search of the place.

Infinite credit on your hand, flyer in your pocket, photo on your phone — there’s just no way you can miss it.

A few hours later, when you look at your arms full of alien bags with alien stuff you bought with your alien girlfriend’s alien money — and still no ring — you admit to yourself that you may have overestimated your geographical abilities.

Every time you see a blonde back head of one of the locals, your heart threatens to leave your ribcage, thinking you might have been caught red-handed. You don’t even remember the path you’ve made to get wherever it is you are right now, and you can’t — under any circumstances — call her to find you.

Just when you think you might start hyperventilating, a hand touches your shoulder.

You turn and see someone who looks like a cheetah. But walking. Their tail sways lazily behind them, and for a moment you’re thrown back to Earth, to your own cat, waiting impatiently by the food bowl.

But you recognise them from the advertisement: it’s the ring-maker.

“Looking for me?” they ask, voice low and resonant — it feels like they’re speaking directly into your mind.

You nod, dumbfounded. “How did you know?”

“Many people here do.” They gesture for you to follow, already turning to walk away.

You glance over your shoulder — just to make sure the Doctor’s not behind you.

And then, you follow the jeweller.

Nothing could’ve prepared for what their shop looks like. On the outside, it looks like a silver ring — like the ones you’d see back on Earth. On the inside, the walls curve on each other to create a staggering effect of colours and shapes.

“Dimensional engineering?” you ask, eyes glued to the spectacle unfolding in front of you.

“Mirrors,” they reply, matter-of-fact. You hear the scrape of a chair. When you glance over, they’re extending a paw toward it.

“How did you hear about my work?” they ask, slipping on a pair of glasses and resting their chin on their paws, studying you like an equation they’re halfway through solving.

“I got this flyer in my…” You pause. Ship? House? TARDIS? “...mail,” you settle on. “It said unconventional rings are your specialty.”

The jeweller smiles. It feels more like a laugh — like they already know something you don’t.

“Do you need an unconventional ring?”

Clearly, they haven’t met the Doctor.

“Show me her,” they say, extending a paw again.

You widen your eyes slightly, but pass them your phone anyway.

It’s a lovely picture, the one you’ve chosen. It’s from the same day you visited Quantifer a second time, and the Doctor had spent half an hour searching for a supposed perfect spot. In the end, you had to watch the balloons and fireworks from inside a pod the settlers use as a building, since she got both of you lost and just couldn’t admit it.

She was pouting, arms crossed, eyes fixed on the skies.

The fireworks reflected on the window, which reflected back on her. Her eyes looked like two flames — so intense, so warm.

You just had to take a picture.

“Hmmm,” the jeweller hums (and purrs?), holding your phone close to their eyes. “I see. Knowing eyes.”

“That’s her,” you laugh awkwardly.

“And what an old, old soul,” they add.

“She’s, uh… lived a lot.”

A few more minutes of staring, then they say, “Definitely not the jewelry kind.”

You nod, relieved that your intuition was right after all. “Definitely not. Actually, I was thinking—”

“Follow me,” they cut in.

And so, for the second time in a row, you follow them.

They take you to a room on the back of the shop. There are hundreds of shelves stacked upon each other, and inside them you manage to make out countless rings.

The jeweller opens a hidden door, behind a wall of shelves.

You clear your throat. “So like I said, I thought that maybe she'd want something like—”

They interrupt you again, extending you a paw — and resting on it, the most amazing ring you could've asked for.

It's a helix earring. Small, round and designed to clip on so it doesn't go through her skin. The painting is navy blue like her trousers and her favourite shirt. And outside, it's decorated with circular patterns.

Gallifreyan.

You gasp in surprise. “How can you— I can't even read that. The TARDIS doesn't translate it.”

“You don't need to be able to read it. This is an important word — for both of you,” they explain.

And maybe it's the way their voice hums inside your head, or how their eyes seem to know everything they need about you two.

Either way, you grin, teary-eyed. “It's so much more than I've ever dreamed of.”

The jeweller purrs softly.

Done deal.

The way back to the TARDIS is a lot smoother than you'd expected. You take a few turns and buy a few more somethings, and when you look down the road — there she is.

Outside the ship's door, you take a deep breath in. Then out. You make a point of hiding your happiness, you don't want to look suspicious. You just went on a shopping spree, nothing more.

You let out a puff of air.

And the TARDIS opens the door for you.

The Doctor is currently lying on the floor next to the console, goggles back on — and now protective gloves, too — trying to hold together two different wires.

When she sees you — and the very small amount of bags you’re carrying — they explode. There’s a lot of noise, a lot of smoke and you hope the burning smell is only oil and not her flesh.

(Yes, that’s happened before.)

“Whoa! Are you opening a shop of your own?” she asks, and you can faintly make her figure standing up behind the smoke.

“Ha ha ha,” you quip. “If I wanna go to a shopping centre I’m not coming back empty-handed, am I?”

She’s standing next to you now, goggles off, her eyes curiously wandering around your bags.

“Ooh!” she points to one of them. “I love that shop. They’ve got the best cheese in the galaxy.”

“Well, I hope so cause I bought some,” you laugh.

She beams excitedly, much like a child on Boxing Day, and you’re pretty sure she wants to reach for the bag.

Problem? The cheetah ring-maker’s bag is right behind that one.

You take a step back. Her eyes immediately snap back to yours.

You chuckle nervously. “You’re not eating my cheese without me,” you say, trying to sound convincing. “I’ll go settle these things and then we’re eating it. Together.”

She gives you a full scrunch — which means she didn’t like the sound of that — and bends to pick her goggles again.

“Wasn’t gonna eat it without you anyway,” she grumbles. “Want help?”

She asks that, but she’s already putting her gloves on. And you wouldn’t take it, either way — this is Mission Impossible and you’re Tom flipping Cruise.

“No, I’m good. See you in a bit.”

The Doctor just hums.

You sigh in relief and head to your bedroom.

Inside it, you close the door, lock it and — just in case — put a chair against the handle.

Sounds extreme, but the Doctor doesn’t understand the concept of personal space (as long as it’s not hers) and locked doors (which, let’s be honest, are mostly just something to point the sonic at). At least if she wants to come in, the chair will let you know.

Most of the stuff you bought are things you don’t actually need: new shirts, cute little gizmos you can’t even name, food.

A lot of food.

You set aside the clothes for washing, the bags with food for the kitchen, a new apron for her (the current one was the victim of last time’s explosion — and it shows) and, most importantly, the earrings.

One for you. One for her.

Even the box for hers is perfect — wooden, TARDIS blue, opens when you touch the top.

You touch it now to see it again, and you nearly cry out of joy.

You sit on the edge of your bed, the only place still empty, to admire it. You hope she’ll love it. You hope she’ll feel all the love you’ve poured onto thinking of it, dreaming of it and then finally finding it.

But right now, what you’d also really love… is to know the word the jeweller chose for you.

Your eyes fall on your calendar, neatly hidden behind your coat rack. One month until your anniversary.

One month for you to find out what this word means.

The smell of something burning — and now you’re one-hundred-percent sure it’s oil — takes you out of your musings.

You hide the box at the very back of the last drawer in your bedside table, tucked under layers and layers of clothes. If she were to sleep in your room as she often does — that is, lying next to you for a few hours with her eyes glued to the ceiling, or flipping through a book — at least she won’t find it.

You open the door and yell into the corridor, “Stop burning things or I won’t give you some of the cheese!”

The reply doesn’t take long. “Oi!”

You laugh.

How much you’d love this to be your forever.

******************************************

You’re in your bedroom again, but this time the Doctor’s with you.

Your head is lying against her chest, one of her hands softly stroking your head. Your legs are tangled, and the only word that can describe the feeling of her skin against your is… bliss.

You’re almost dozing off, but you’re trying so hard not to. You’d like to enjoy this for as long as you can — her warmth surrounding you, the path her hands traced still burning on your skin.

You adjust your head so you’re looking at her face.

She’s staring at the ceiling — nothing unusual there. But her eyes are slower, fixed. Usually, you can see her already thinking of where to go next for when you leave the next places — plural — she’d already thought of a few minutes ago.

Her brain never stops, and you love her for it.

But right now, she’s calm. Sometimes, you have that effect on her. It’s like she, too, is trying to stay here for as long as she can.

The Doctor must’ve felt your gaze locked on her — her eyes start slowly coming down, searching for you.

You hide your face in the crook of her neck, pretending you weren’t staring.

She chuckles. She noticed, obviously.

Her hand comes down to the back of your neck, right there where the roots of your hair meet your skin.

And she strokes it. Gently. Slowly.

You think you’ll transcend.

You sigh softly. “Mhm. I could stay here forever,” you whisper.

And that’s when it dawns on you.

Forever.

Isn’t that the word you’re always thinking about when you’re next to her?

“Oh, I got it!” you mutter under your breath, sitting up.

She makes a “huh?” sound behind you.

You don’t answer. Your eyes just search for your calendar behind the coat rack — one week left.

“What is it? What did you get?” she asks, moving behind you, fully engaging in concerned-Time-Lord mode.

You grin, genuinely, pulling her back down onto the bed. “Nothing. I was just thinking out loud. You do it all the time, you’re rubbing off on me.”

She squints at the coat rack, then back at you — but lies back down anyway.

A few seconds pass. She humphs.

You laugh. But you just happen to know exactly how to keep her distracted from your little slip-up:

Time for round two.

******************************************

It’s the day of your anniversary and you’re a nervous wreck.

You’ve checked your pocket hundreds of times. You know the box is there. You check again anyway.

You ask the Doctor to go to Qantifer again. You’re afraid she’ll complain that you’ve been there recently and there’s nothing new to see — but she doesn’t.

She’s also strangely quiet.

The moment the TARDIS lands, she stops most of her mumbling, muttering and humming.

You try to stir up a conversation and it actually works — she grins, talks about the settlers, takes you to the so-sought-after perfect spot from last time: a bridge, where you can see the entire planet if you tiptoe.

But she’s quiet.

And you feel like you’ll die if you don’t start speaking any time soon.

“So—” you start—

— but at the same time she begins: “What do you—”

“Sorry,” you say in unison.

You laugh — or better yet, she laughs and you show her your teeth (you’re in no mood for laughing right now).

“You go,” she offers.

You open your mouth.

You close it.

Your hand presses against the box in your pocket.

No word comes.

You swallow, breaking eye contact, your eyes falling on the crowd below, gathering together, anxiously waiting for the fireworks as a few balloons dance freely in the sky.

You chuckle.

“It’s like they’re all watching it for the first time,” you blurt out.

She hums questioningly.

“The display,” you explain. “Doesn’t this happen everyday for them?”

The Doctor looks down to see what you mean.

She nods. “Oh yeah. Everyday. It’s the edge of the universe, everything’s in flux here.”

“Not for them, it isn’t,” you reply — and you really don’t know what point you’re trying to make, you want to shut up, but now she’s looking at you with those glowing eyes which means she’s interested, which means you can’t just stop now, can you? — “I mean, everyday is New Year’s Eve. I love the concept and the aesthetics, don’t get me wrong. But like, how does life even work?”

She purses her lips into a straight line, like she finds it amusing.

“A world not all here, not quite there, where everything changes but still stays the same,” she mutters. “Except this is the only life they know. You’re judging things based on the only life you know. To them,” she looks at the crowd again, smiling brightly, “this is a today forever worth living for. Even if they know how it ends. Especially because they do.”

Tears well up on your eyes and you fight to keep them at bay — this is it. That’s your cue.

Just then, the countdown starts — ten minutes to.

You sniff. “Yeah, that actually makes sense.”

Then you clear your throat. “About that—” you stop, laugh nervously, rubbing your eyes, “not the settlers. Forever, I mean.”

You curse yourself under your breath. “No, I wasn’t supposed to start like this. I—”

You clear your throat again. You can feel your hands shaking.

You look at the timer — nine minutes and a half.

“Okay,” you begin again. “I’ve been thinking— always thought to be honest— no, not always, that sounds weird. Although things with you never really happen in a straight line, so…” you chuckle, “Maybe it was from the beginning, who knows?”

Eight minutes and a half.

“But, uh, you know humans. And you know how we do things. And I understand if they don’t make any sense to you — sometimes you don’t make any sense to me, either.”

You grimace. What a way to go in your actual proposal.

“What I’m trying to say is: I’ve been thinking of a way. To say this. It. What I want to say. In a way that you—”

You stop to glance at the Doctor.

Her eyebrows are slightly raised. She’s nodding. Lips pressed together.

You know that face. You just can’t remember what it means.

You glance at the clock. Six minutes.

“—that you—” Under any normal circumstance, she’d probably be plotting her escape route.

Where have you seen that face before?

It hits like a flash: when someone’s explaining something to her, but she already knows exactly how it works and is just trying not to show it.

“—you—”

She’s still nodding. Same exact expression.

Why would she be making that face at you?

Then it crashes into you like one of the fireworks just exploded inside your skull.

The Spring Cleaning. The picture of her wife.

The flyer lying on the kitchen floor.

The coincidence of orbiting the moon of Woozillers.

“—you bastard!” you finally finish the sentence.

The Doctor tilts her head, alarmed. “What?!”

“You complete and utter bastard! You know very well what I’m talking about— you knew! You knew!” you shout, pacing now, somewhere between betrayal and sheer mortification. “How long have you known?!”

She shoves her hands into her coat pockets, looking affronted. “I don’t know what you mean!”

“You let me go through all that— Ugh, I just— Am I really that predictable?”

“No, no, no” she shakes her hand in front of you, grimacing. “I wasn’t expecting it, actually. Honest.”

“Then how?!” you ask — no, demand.

She wrinkles her nose.

You jab your index finger in her face. “Not taking that today. How. Did. You. Know?”

“I was trying to keep you healthy,” she replies, defensively. “And I think I got it right, haven’t seen you sick since!”

You frown.

“Marathon day?” she offers, tentative, like she’s hoping you won’t remember.

“What’s that got to do with this?”

“The pill’s side effects were… a bit unexpected,” she says.

Your jaw nearly hits the floor. “You mean— You mean I…?”

She tilts her head side to side. “Sort of?”

“So you already know everything I was going to say?”

“Sort of,” she repeats.

With a smile. One she’s trying to hide.

You let out a shaky breath, burying your face in your hands. And it’s then that you realise:

You’re the frog in boiling water. This is you being scalded.

And God, what a gorgeous scalding it is.

She erms. “I’m… sorry?” she offers, more question than apology. “I just thought — you weren’t yourself when it happened. I wanted you to get to do it properly. How else was I supposed to help?”

You laugh. Incredulous, fond, and incredibly annoyed.

“No, it’s fine. You already know what I was going to say. You already knew what I’d been planning—”

You turn, not because you’re mad. Just to fetch something.

A small box, waiting patiently in your pocket.

Behind you, she calls your name, somewhat worried.

But you’re on a roll now. “—but I bet you haven’t seen this coming!”

And then, you show it.

The wooden box fits neatly in your palm as you extend it to her.

You make sure the Doctor is looking at it, then you touch the top. It opens and inside it — there’s the earring.

Made for her, exclusively. Poured with so much love.

You’re nervous, of course. The hand holding the box is shaking.

But she doesn’t seem to notice. Her eyes are glued to the earring, mouth slightly open, frozen in her spot.

You managed to render her speechless. You certainly hadn’t seen that coming.

You're grinning so much it hurts. Her hands clench and unclench, like she wants to move but just… can't.

Her eyes briefly cross yours, before falling back on the box. You swear you've never seen her this… moved.

When she finally makes a move, slowly reaching for the earring…

The fireworks begin. New Year's Eve ends — and a new New Year's Eve begins.

But the two of you barely notice the spectacle. You're watching her every move, tears pooling at your eyes — and hers, if you're seeing it right — when she picks it up and studies it.

And studies it. And studies it.

Then, her face breaks in the brightest, most beautiful smile you've ever seen.

She's not just happy, though. It's a mix of surprise, curiosity, that childlike happiness you're so used to, and love.

Oh, you feel so much love.

You're laughing and crying now, both contradictions peacefully coexisting as her eyes flick back to the earring.

The Doctor taps her feet a few times, you know she’s trying to contain herself.

Then she looks at you. “Do you know what this means?”

And with the way her smile glows brighter than the fireworks above, you know this would be your epiphany if you hadn’t already had it.

Her earlier words come to mind, and you nod. “It’s a New Year’s Eve. One I wanna see the end. Do you?”

Her grin widens as she clips the earring to her ear. “I have so many questions!” she nearly squeaks. “Have you got yours too?”

You do. It’s in your other pocket — you didn’t want to risk giving her the wrong one. You slip it on, same ear as hers, and your heartbeat is hanging on by a thread.

You’re matching.

You’re the one proposing and you’re trying not to break down.

She bites her bottom lip, eyes locked on your ear.

You try a joke — one so very her — hoping to stay above water.

“How do I look?” you ask, turning your head like you’re posing.

She mouths an “oh,” smiling like she’s sharing a secret. “Like forever.”

And there it is: her I do.

You close your eyes, releasing the breath you hadn’t noticed you were holding.

It’s real. After all the planning and overthinking, she said yes.

And when her hands cup your face, when her lips find yours, you know:

What a beautiful forever today is going to be

[strawberrystepmom]

nsfw - minors/ageless dni, i will hard block you. narumi x f!reader. they are online dating. gen is so cringe fail loser online boyfriend coded to me and i'm utterly obsessed enamored in love with him. back and forth, mentions of mutual masturbation and sending nudes, suggestive conversation, open ended to write more about them. | divider thanks to cafekitsune, wc 1.7k

Gen’s phone pings with a notification on this desk. His eyes widen despite the fact he is mid digital conflict, tossing fireballs at the final boss of the latest game he’s managed to master and beat in roughly three days, muttering to himself while clicking the direction pad with one hand and sliding his phone haphazardly into his lap with the other. 

A tiny piece of him is hoping that the notification is thanks to new results showing up under his saved search for Captain Narumi though he isn’t angry at what he does see on the screen when he looks down at it for the briefest moment, ignoring his handheld boss battle. 

fallingstarwishes: you are always online at the strangest times…

The little icon of a cartoon version of you, the character you play in the game where the two of you originally became friends, next to the message stirs a little warmth in his face. He presses his lips together to hide a smile and turns back to the fireballs being hurled at the titular hero of the game, dodging them expertly, inevitably going to win this battle just as he wins all of the rest. 

Another ping distracts him, at least momentarily, and the screen in lap lights up. 

“Shit, just give me a minute,” he mutters impatiently toward his phone, red eyes flicking down to see another message from you. 

fallingstarwishes: don’t you ever sleep? it’s so late (early?), silly.

It may be 4 am for him and roughly 2 pm for you but what you don’t know is that an hour ago he was spearing through the technicolor core of a kaiju four times his size that leveled three city blocks with just the sound of its roar using just his bayonet. He can’t leave blanks about who he is and what he does for much longer. As badly as he’s wanted to boldly brag to you about his prowess, he has always known it can make or break the two of you when the truth comes out. 

The right time to mention the whole life threatening and dangerous job thing hasn’t quite come up yet, though. You know he’s in the military although he has never been entirely forthcoming about what that entails and you’ve never asked.

He thinks about how fresh things still are between the two of you. Less than a year of knowing one another, a chance meeting in a large server for a big title slice of life game that came out last year, that has since turned into late nights (for you) messaging, gaming, and eventually voice chatting and giggling together until one of you is forced to go - either to bed or work. 

He fires off a few more fireballs at the boss, dodging the weakly tossed few they return, and the screen goes into the cutscene that effectively declares yet another victory for him. Smiling, he sets the handheld console aside, and curls his fingers around his phone. The screen fills with the conversation between the two of you, messages sent all hours of the day every day, the last one a picture of you laying in bed last night in a suggestive position claiming to be thinking of him. 

His gaze fixates on the photos for a moment, greedily looking at what he was only able to glance at before he left for his mission. He slides down to the chat bar and smirks, seeing your status go from idle to online when you notice he’s typing back to you.

captaincool: Aren’t you at work right now?

You grin from miles away, discreetly looking around the office to make sure nobody can see you using a messaging app that is very obviously not work related during your paid hours. It’s not like you’re in danger of getting caught but there is something particularly delicious about having your own little love affair nobody else has to know about. It’s just the two of you, always, in a world (or worlds, when you consider how many hours the two of you have spent across games) you’ve created to enjoy together.

Tapping out a message, you furrow your brow and jiggle one of your ankles where it’s crossed over the other. 

fallingstarwishes: stop answering my questions with new ones of your own!

Gen smiles down at the screen, thumbs tapping the edges of his phone, anxiously waiting to see what you’ll say next. 

fallingstarwishes: now, what are you doing up? 

fallingstarwishes: bored? 

fallingstarwishes: lonely? 

fallingstarwishes: need me to sing you to sleep?

Chuckling at the singing suggestion, he scrolls back up enough to see that pretty picture you sent him and hisses to himself, his adrenaline finally coming down to a normal enough level he can focus on something else besides the rapid beating of his heart and the thrill of the battle.

captaincool: A song? Just for me? Aren’t you sweet

Raising a brow while firing off his message, he wonders what the two of you actually are. There are times he absolutely considers you his girlfriend or something like it. You’ve discussed crossing the ocean to come and see him more than once though the concept of actually having a girlfriend makes him unexpectedly anxious. Someone to remember birthdays and anniversaries for. Someone who wants you where she wants you when she wants you there. Someone with demands, a comically large pair of scissors to cut his wings and keep him from being himself.

Although you’ve never given him any indication you’d want to do that, it’s something he has to reflect on. His feelings are real but so are the ties that come with them if he were to act on them.

fallingstarwishes: that isn’t even the sweetest i’ve been to you this week. did you forget last wednesday night already?

Damn, you make it hard for him to not act. 

captaincool: How are you going to tell me to sleep and then remind me of that?

Of course he remembers Wednesday evening for you (early in the day on Thursday for him). He remained locked inside of his room for an hour while your soft moans of his name filled his headphones over video chat. Begging him please, telling him how badly you wished it was him instead of your short fingers…he remembers every last moment.

He remembers most of all the sound of his name from your mouth. It’s what sends him over the edge every single time the two of you are able to sneak in a session of mutual masturbation from all these miles and hours away. It also is what he cums to when he’s simply listening back to videos and voice notes or his own imagination.

fallingstarwishes: :) <3 just making sure you remembered who you’re dealing with. you didn’t even react to the picture i sent! 

Gen scrolls back up to glance at the photo, sliding downward in his chair, thighs spreading instinctively. He places his phone down on his desk and slides his hand beneath the waistband of his sweatpants, pulling them down enough that his half hard cock pops over his underwear. Reaching for his phone, he positions it so that the camera captures just the cut of his Adonis belt and the barely visible crown of him, snapping a picture to send back to you. He holds the phone back from his face and smirks appreciatively at his own artistic ability, happy with the subtle gleam of his arousal beginning to flow and bead on the tip of his dick. 

The photo is fired off with an accompanying cheeky message.

captaincool: Is this confirmation enough that I liked it?

Your eyes widen when the photo comes through, hands shaking slightly. He isn’t the only one who recalls the sound of a name from a pair of lips they wanna feel on every inch of their body in this scenario, now is he?

fallingstarwishes: you should have spoilered that! what if my boss would’ve walked up?

Gen chuckles at your response, pulling down his underwear and letting his now fully erect cock spring free. He’ll handle this and then he’ll be more than ready to pass out although he wishes he could stay up all through the day just to talk to you. He throbs, needy and wanting for a fist that he knows would grip him just right that sadly exists an ocean away and only in his mind. He taps out a message with his free hand, rubbing the thumb of his opposite hand over his slit and moaning low in his throat.

captaincool: Then you would have to explain why you are on your phone during work anyway.

Giggling to yourself, you know he’s right. You spare a few more seconds to glance at the pretty picture on your screen, thinking about your attachment to the man and his penis both, wondering if there will indeed be a day where you are faced with them both in person. Your thumb swipes across the screen, a small gesture that is full of longing while your heart beats in time with your rapid thoughts, and you finally respond.

fallingstarwishes: handle that and then get some sleep. i’ll be around tonight and hope we can spend some time together. sweet dreams gen ♥️

His fist works up and down his shaft and he reads the message with a satisfied half smile, discarding his phone to focus on how good he feels imagining bouncing you up and down on his cock. He’s powerful and strong, more than you could even imagine, and he’d make quick work of you if he were to have his hands on you.

God, he needs his hands on you. He whimpers and shuts his eyes tightly, the slick sound of his motions bouncing off of the clutter and boxes in his room that he’ll eventually get to clearing out. It doesn’t ever take him long when he pictures you, his balls tightening, threatening to spill across his fingers in damn near record time compared to how long he likes to make himself wait when the two of you are doing this together.

But don’t worry, when he finishes, he’ll make sure that you see his pearly release all over his knuckles with a message promising he’ll have sweet dreams because you will be in them.

[mogruith]

BG3 Photomode Tutorial #3: Otis_Inf Camera Tools

Chapter 0: Overview

Chapter 1: Script Extender Debug Console

Chapter 2: Scene Manipulation

Chapter 2.5: More Scene Manipulation

Chapter 3: Otis_Inf Camera Tools

Supplement: Mods and Resources

Instead of talking about ReShade, I'm going to talk about the awesome Otis_Inf BG3 Camera Tools. These will allow you to pause the game, move the camera around, and add some depth of field effects using ReShade and an addon.

If you want to know about ReShade and basically have a video version of what I'm going to cover, check this video here. This video is where I learned pretty much everything about these tools. If you like watching over reading, go for that!

What you need to use these tools:

ReShade - @moriarfer reported some issues with 6.4.1 (latest as of this post) and downgraded to 6.3.3 to resolve that issue. If you're worried, download from that 6.3.3 link (links to the ReShade site.) Either way, you should grab the "Addon" version for IGCS.

Otis_Inf Baldur's Gate III Photomode Tools v1.0.23 (latest as of this post) - It's behind a Patreon for $5.50 USD a month. Note that sometimes it breaks after a major update and Patch 8 is Soon (tm) so ... buyer beware.

IgcsConnector - note that when you install ReShade, you can select IgcsConnector as an addon when you go through the wizard. However, you can also download it from here: IGCS Connector - I personally use v2.5.1 but 2.5.2 should be fine if you're running ReShade 3.x. If you're running ReShade 4.x, go for 2.5.3. Scroll to the bottom to see your options.

Installing ReShade

For installing ReShade, I recommend that video, but the Wizard guides you through it pretty easily. If you don't know what shaders to get, stay tuned for another post on that. There is one configuration you may have to make if you've never got ReShade working in BG3 before, and that's the Depth settings.

Installing IGCS

The video also covers IGCS but truth be told, it's easy to install manually if you didn't do it with the ReShade Wizard. Download that zip for IGCS and extract it to your Baldur's Gate folder. If you installed ReShade with the wizard, it will likely have a structure like I have. If you didn't, it may be slightly different.

ReShade Depth Settings

When you run ReShade for the first time in BG3, you may need to configure the Depth settings. This is easy to do if you have the DisplayDepth shader installed. It should be installed by default, if I recall.

Toggle that on and check your settings: just make sure that the Reshade Depth Input is Reversed. You can check if it looks okay - a setup with characters in a foreground should look like this while DisplayDepth is toggled on:

Make sure to uncheck DisplayDepth when you're done so the game looks normal.

Camera Tools!

At last! The fun stuff!

There's no "installing" them. You extract archive and you have a standalone program that injects code to unlock the camera. As such, it may be flagged as a virus by certain virus scanners. Be assured, if you got it from the Patreon, it is safe.

For best results, run the tools (IGCSClient.exe) after you've started BG3 and at least loaded the start menu. And then press Inject DLL. Once you do that successfully, the button will change from "Inject DLL" to "Re-Hook XInput".

I personally use the keyboard/mouse, but it is possible to configure the buttons with a controller under "Gamepad button bindings". I will not be teaching you that, however.

Let's start with the essentials to take a single shot. I use the default keyboard settings so I'll be using those.

You can start a scene or just find a nice place or animation in the game you like and set up a shot. Once you find a shot you like, press 0 on the NumPad to freeze time.

I'm going to have my Tav, Coranzan, hug his sister, Z'ress so I'll pause it mid-animation so I can take as many shots as I like from as many angles as I like.

I've frozen time and the default camera shows this, which isn't particularly interesting to me.

Here's some default controls for your reference:

TL;DR:

8456 on NumPad is WASD

7 and 9 on NumPad is Up/Down

1 and 3 on NumPad Rotate Left/Right

2 on Numpad resets rotation

Up/Down/Left/Right arrows on Keyboard Rotate the Camera

NumPad + and - Increases and Decreases FoV

NumPad 0 Pauses/Unpauses

Delete on Keyboard Removes the HUD

So I let's press Insert to unlock the camera and used Up/Down/Left/Right arrows and 8/4/5/6 on NumPad to move the camera to their side.

This is okay, let's work with this. I would like them to be a bigger focus in the shot. So I'm going to Increase the FoV with + on the NumPad until I get what I like. I'll have to adjust with a Arrow Keys and 8/4/5/6 NumPad as I do that.

Alright this is okay. Let's make the backdrop nice and soft. By default you need to open ReShade using Home. By default you should get something like this, which may vary depending on your settings - don't worry about that too much for now. For now got ahead and click on the Addons Tab and then click Start depth-of-field session.

Depending on the settings, your game might look really blurry - don't worry, that's normal:

Most of the settings I do not regularly change, so if you want to copy the numbers as a starting point and slowly modify them, you totally can. But this will get very long if I get into each of the settings. So here's my "quick and dirty" depth of field settings. Some settings like Blur Type may drastically increase the time that it takes to render a shot, as a heads up.

Let's focus on a couple numbers for now:

Max bokeh size: This is basically the amount of "blur" you want to add to distant objects. If you increase the number, the double-images get further apart. If they're VERY part apart, the background will be EXTREMELY blurry.

Focus delta x: This controls the plane where the image maintains focus. If you increase the number, the foreground characters/objects will slowly come into focus. If you go too far, they will lose focus again. So we need a tool to help us with that to ensure details stay focused: The magnifier.

Magnifier: Check Show Magnifier and adjust the location numbers to change its left/right, up/down values. Pick something to focus on like an eye or some other tiny detail. Now adjust the magnification factor to zoom in on that detail.

I know Coran's tattoo pretty well so I'm going to get these two points from his tattoo to line up:

So I just need to modify the Focus Delta X to line them up like so:

Now that we've done that, we can see that their faces are nice and clear but there's double images for the fireflies and the like. These will become nice soft blurry bubbles when we render the shot.

So now you're going to want to click the Start Render button at the bottom of this section:

Once you click on that a bar should appear in the top left and the double-images should disappear. It should start blurring the background more as the meter increases.

And once it's done, you can simply press the ScreenShot key and it shoulder render a screenshot using ReShade. If I recall correctly, this will be the Baldur's Gate III executable folder, but if you click the Settings tab, you can change it.

The resulting screenshot should be nice and soft in the background and focused in the foreground with perhaps a bit of smoothing on features like hair:

Before rendering:

After rendering:

Some other options I'll go over briefly:

Hot sampling: This gives you the ability to resize the window beyond what you monitor can see for extremely high resolution shots. I generally don't do this unless I want to do a detail shot like an extreme closeup or some mark/scar or something.

Configuration: If it's taking you WAY too long to move the camera because you increased the FoV to zoom way in, slide the options in the left column around, it really helps.

Image Adjustments: check Higher LODs for distant objects to have better rendering.

And that covers most of the tools. I may add another couple supplementary posts after this of some mods that I use and the shaders that I use in ReShade.

But for now, I believe I have at least briefly covered the major points, but it could be that I've glossed over some details. If you're struggling, please let me know.

Thanks for reading! Please send me any questions and I'll be happy to help in the comments, DMs, Discord, or whatever you need!

[putrid-sex-machine]

KiNKTOBER DAY 28 ❀ LEON

PROMPT: fucking machine, sex pollen & dub-con

WARNINGS/TAGS: smut (obv), dub-con (typical sex pollen stuff), sex pollen, monster fucking, plant monster, leon is a bottom idk what to tell u

A/N: what can i say, i love torturing leon kennedy<3. I'll be honest, the first version got away from me a little... This is how the fic was originally planned to go, i'm not sure how i got so side tracked lol. anyways, hope you enjoy!! (^_^) art is by @citrine-elephant (lmk if u dont want me using ur art here)

check out the alternative version of this fic here

this fic has nsft content. you have been warned.

Leon's only consolation was that he didn't do this to himself. Not this time at least. He was pushed into this. Tackled, really, by a B.O.W. with more limbs than he'd care to count. Or vines he supposes.

And to think things were going smoothly.

He'd been tasked with the investigation of what was rumored to be a Neo-Umbrella lab, and Leon had been too quick to assume safety, assume the place was empty as it seemed. It was open, empty, and the electricity miraculously still worked – practically a cakewalk. Aside from the absurd amount of plant growth that is.

Thinking this would be easy, though, turned out to be his first mistake.

Now he finds himself strapped into what (uncomfortably enough) seems to be a birthing chair, his legs forceably pulled apart to expose him. He'd be more bothered had he not been drunk off his ass on whatever unknown pollen-like substance fills the strange glass capsule hes now trapped in. Worse yet is his body's response to it all. He's hard, unbearably so. He'd find it humorous if the situation weren't so humiliating. He hasn't had a proper hard on in ages, (he can thank whiskey for that) yet this of all things has managed to do it for him. Pathetic.

A robotic female voice rings out, "Stage One completed. Stand clear of the Containment Area and prepare for Stage Two."

Whatever that means, Leon has no interest in staying to find out. He tries to jerk his arms free of the metal cuffs holding him, but its so hard to think, so hard to move, restraints aside. His body feels heavy and hot, betraying his mind and refusing to obey him. Still, Leon refuses to give in. He continues struggling against his binds, searching for some loose piece, something he can take advantage of. Nothing

"Stage Two activated," says the uncannily monotone voice. As if on cue (which, yeah, it probably is) a loud beep fills the capsule, followed by another wave of the intoxicating pollen. Leon hisses, steadying himself. He's already been exposed to the gas -- or whatever this is, he doesn't need anymore. He draws in several fast breaths, rapidly as he can. He then takes as deep a breath as he can manage, starting from his diaphragm to fill his stomach before letting it expand in his chest. He holds it, starting a mental count. He's trained with holding his breath for extended periods before, a useful skill to have in this line of work, but holding your breath on land is a lot harder than underwater. Without the diving reflex to slow his heartbeat plus his lack of preparation time, Leon estimates he has only about 3 minutes left.

But the machine seemingly had other ideas. Two large metal clamps slam down on his ribs, forcing the breath out of him and securing him further to the chair. He's given no choice but to inhale, coughing and sputtering as he fights to take a lungful of air with his chest unable to fully expand.

"Stage Two completed. Beginning Stage Three," Leon distantly hears, suddenly too dizzy to think. All he can focus on is the intoxicating sweetness of the pollen filling his nose, on how painfully hard hes become, on how restricting and hot his clothes are. As if on command, cool metal of the machine dips down to his stomach, running a blade along the cloth and graciously freeing his erection. He groans, hips instinctively tilting upwards as far as Leon can manage, desperate for friction.

Again, the machine seemingly hears his internal pleas, a small whirl ringing out before he's met with an incredible vibrating warmth around his cock, the sensation alone almost enough to make him cum.

"O-oh fuck--" Leon whines, unable to stop himself. His hips jerk up, gasping as he inhales more of that delicious pollen.

There's another whirl, this time followed by a slick, cold prodding sensation against his ass. He whines, allowing his legs to be spread even further by the machine as the artificial cock slides in. When it begins to vibrate Leon knows hes done for, crying out as he cums, barely registering the high-tech flesh-light sucking every last drop up. Even then it doesn't stop, the dildo continuing to pound into him lazily as it's vibrations intensify. It doesn't stop when he cums again either, it doesn't stop when he's crying, screaming and thrashing against his restraints, brows pulled taught as he whines uselessly in over stimulation. His hips continue to jerk up in time with the flesh-light, body betraying him as he fights to escape the overwhelming pleasure.

Every time he thinks he's finished, that he can't possibly cum again he does, that wonderful pollen filling his lungs and hardening his cock with ease. Gradually Leon finds himself drifting off, having lost track of how many orgasms he's had forced out of him, of how long he's been here. He's stopped caring too. He has no thoughts anymore. No perception of time. No worries. Getting out of here doesn't seem important anymore. This is good. This is right. Leon was made for this.

This is his new home.

[desperateknot]

A bit cringy, but I will do it again.

Swap Ishqueg/LCB Queequeg AU.

Seven Assoc. South Section 4 ID uptie story:

Heathcliff: So, you see, if it was the doing of a high level member of a Finger, there is nothing we can do. A shame, really, since they promised to pay so much for the post-contract management...Hey are you even listening?

The other child doesn't even lift her face from the paper to respond.

She took another sip of the coffee, totally absorbed by the details of this new case.

She indeed didn't hear a word of what her senior said.

Queequeg: Hmm no.

She spoke slowly, but with confidence.

Queequeg: Not the Middle. This one. Copy cat.

A rare smile formed at the corner of her lips. It is truly unusual for her to be in such high spirit.

Heathcliff: What? Are you sure?

Queequeg: Sure.

Queequeg: Get uniform. We go now.

Queequeg: Get him before the Middle...For his sake too.

Confused and a bit angry, but the other child did oblige.

He decided to have faith in her deduction, after all, when the Director of South Section 6 transferred her to their department, she said.

Outis: She might be frugal with her words, but do heed them. Her insight will undoubtedly prove to be valuable.

It's totally not because he wants that bonus, no.

Either way, he believes there must be a good reason for someone like her to be accepted among their ranks.

Queequeg: Lucky you.

The culprit: Mocking me now? You caught me. What is lucky about that?

Indeed. In contrast to this child's, the body of the man at the other end of her sword has not even a speck of tattoo. He is really not a member of the Middle.

Queequeg: The Middle's retribution would not have been...

With a simple motion, she pierced her sword through the man's stomach.

Queequeg: So swift and merciful.

Queequeg: Impersonating Big Brother. Grave sin.

The child let out a long sigh. And the melancholy returned to her again.

She could never truly escape them. The Middle never forgets.

However, if her knowledge about them could be of use, she would not hesitate to leverage it to live her new life.

That is the least she could do. That is the least she could have done to fulfill her end of the promise made under the setting sun.

Heathcliff: Uh...so there seems to be a really good restaurant near here-

Queequeg: No. I go back now.

Heathcliff: Huh? Aren't you hungry?

It seems like the other child's attempt at consolation flew right over his junior's head.

Queequeg: Miss Faust's tea already. Coffee...yucky.

Personal notes:

The anatomy here is kind of...atrocious. At first, I even got her eye colour, which I hastily fixed in this version. Well, my anatomy from newer pieces is still terrible, but not as terrible, I guess.

You may notice that I am not a native English speaker, so the way I phrased things and wrote things is a bit weird. I'm not good at writing in my native tongue either. I say I'm bilingual, but I'm actually just illiterate in two different languages.

This is not my proudest work, but I do still like the idea a lot.

I first thought of the idea of Seven Association Fixer Queequeg because I want to give her glasses, as I like to do with every of my favourite characters, but then I realised she would probably be good at investigating crimes (like murders) because she did some before? Especially crimes related to the Fingers. Her personal experiences would be helpful, I think.

[peggyao3]

What do you think? I was listening to the bath tub scene. Feyd asks, does not conclude, the Baron tried to kill him. What do you think?

Feyd is mainly angry that the Baron did this to him/with him without aligning it with him.

It was a test.

Feyd doesn't like tests. He is probably angry bc he feels he should not longer be tested. That he had already proven himself. What do you think?

I find it difficult to rhyme with canon, where Feyd had orchestrated this with the mentat, and it was the Baron who was like 'nooooo'.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGrD_knR42c/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Aaaaaa what a great question! ❤️ Thank you so much! I'm getting several nuances from this interaction and Feyd's emotions throughout the fight and encounter with his uncle, and several interpretations are possible.

I think Feyd doesn't truly believe his uncle tried to kill him. The Baron has no interest in seeing his heir be publicly killed in front of millions. That would be quite the humiliation for his House, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen slain by some Atreides prisoner. I think the Baron was very sure that Feyd would win this battle and it was less of a test and more of a demonstration for the audience to hype them up for the new governor of Arrakis—look how powerful he is! *Maybe* even to scare the Bene Gesserit who he knew would be watching, and I'm sure he was aware of their plans for Feyd too. A classic Baron power play.

Feyd saying "You tried to kill me?" might be a reference towards their teasing/hostile banter of which there was quite a lot in the book iirc. Might also be a reference towards the fact that Feyd tried to assassinate the Baron at least once in the book and failed. If we assume such an attempt also happened in the movie, Feyd might think this fight was the Baron's way of getting back at him 🔪 Feyd is afraid of humiliation (others might interpret that he likes humiliation, but my take is that he fears it), so this public fight with the chance to be humiliated in front of the entire planet has him quite angry, even though he won 🫣

Despite the Baron's power plays and not letting Feyd in on the plan, the fight was a kind of gift still, like he says, because it becomes obvious how much Feyd enjoys a fair and honorable fight. I'm sure he would have preferred such a fight on his own terms though, and not on his uncles. Even though he loses the final fight against Paul, I think this was an honorable fight on his own terms for him 🥺 It consoles me to think that he died self-determinedly and not as part of someone else's agenda.

Aaaaaand last but not least, about the book canon: Yeah, it's super hard to reconcile that with the film canon 😩 I'm biased towards the film version simply because it was the greatest scene I've ever seen, but I also like the idea of Feyd conspiring against his uncle as he should. The book was quite full of Feyd being a scheming little shit, whereas in the movie, he's more of a caged beast eager to prove hismelf. I think I love both versions of him 🤭

[foone]

Oh wow. I was watching a compilation of the Game Grumps playing horse games, and they get to one called "The Unicorn Princess".

I'm looking at the game and it has no shadows and big empty landscapes and a font that's way too small, and I'm thinking "oh, this is some mid-2000s PC game that got a wii port, and not a very good one". Like clearly this is a port of an old PC game onto an underpowered console, so it would be hard to make it look good, and they didn't try. (I should have realized it's too high res for the Wii)

So I look the game up and discover two weird things:

1. The game is from 2019. TWENTY FUCKING NINETEEN, not 2004 like I suspected.

2. It's available on PC, Xbox One, Switch, and PS4... And it doesn't look like this. At least, according to their screenshots.

See? They've got lens flares for the sun, proper shadows, a bit of depth-of-field going on there.

Also, that tree is a full 3D model. I'm pretty sure the ones in the Game Grumps video are billboards... Okay they're billboards until you get close. Ugly LoD going on.

Also I just discovered another almost weird thing: the original video isn't on the game grumps channel anymore. The compilation I was watching got the video from a re-upload. Reportedly this happened because the original video had some flashing lights that could cause epilepsy issues.

Anyway now I'm wondering how this game got made and released on all the major platforms in 2019. Like, this peak Unity era, you could have easily made the game look better without sacrificing performance. (I haven't looked inside the game (yet) but the fact it's on all the platforms despite looking like this makes me pretty sure this is unity).

Like, the switch is underpowered sure, but it's not THIS underpowered!

Although, I'm noticing that the screenshots on all the storefronts look the same. I wonder if they cranked up the options on the PC version, then turned them down for the console releases, then used screenshots of the PC version everywhere?

[beckiducki]

.;* TUTORIAL: Black Backgrounds *;.

@infinityvalkariel asked me how I made images like the one above so I thought I'd put together a tutorial post!

Inspiration & Credit

First of all, I wanna give credit to (@)mallowwyyy on TikTok for the idea! I saw their video initially showing off the effect, and they mentioned in the video that they had a tutorial on their account - but I didn't have my phone at hand when I had the game open and wanted to try it, so I ended up reverse engineering the effect.

I went back and found their tutorial video, so you can follow that if you'd like! My version is pretty much the same, but they got a nice, softer effect - click / tap here to see mallowwyyy's tutorial video

My Tutorial

Step 1: Unlock Lighting!

So, the first step is to make sure you upgrade your camera lighting to about level 5 at least, to unlock the hue lighting. Personally my lighting is currently at level 7. Higher levels unlock more lighting options to play around with for this effect!

To upgrade your camera, open the in-game camera - then there should be an option in the top right that looks like a camera with tools inside (idk if the placement might be different on other devices, but it should be somewhere on your screen at least). If you select that, it opens the menu to upgrade your camera for new lighting/poses/filters using the materials you get from the expedition handbook photography stamp challenge.

Step 2: Get Into Position

The beauty of this effect is location really doesn't matter since we're basically erasing the background, but bright lights and effects can sometimes peak through so that's worth bearing in mind. Below I'm just in a random location in the woods and I've set up the pose and camera placement where I want it.

Step 3: Make Everything Pitch Black

Next, using the Adjustment Box, turn the Vignette all the way to the maximum then move the following options all the way to the lowest: Soft Light Intensity, Soft Light Range, Brightness, Exposure, Highlights, and Shadows.

You'll end up with something like the image below - very much an 'it gets worse before it gets better' situation - but, as you can see, the background is black!

Step 4: Add the Magic

Now it's time for the lighting to shine! Go to the Lighting section of the Adjustment Box and add the natural, default lighting for a softer touch or the unlocked hue lighting for a more colourful, saturated effect - and remember, you can adjust the intensity of the lighting! I've found max lighting then doing Step 5 below tends to work best, but you can play around with it.

Step 5: Final Tweaks

From here you just play around with the settings until you get a result you're personally happy with - whatever works best for your outfit and the vibe you wanna go for.

Black & White Effect: Turn Saturation & Natural Saturation all the way to the lowest

Make Colours Pop: Increase the Saturation & Natural Saturation (play around with the different levels of these two settings)

Make Nikki Brighter: Increase the Brightness, and also play around with the Highlights

More Intense Highlights & Shadows: Increase the Contrast

Soft Glow: Turn the Soft Light Intensity to maximum then increase the Soft Light Range until you're happy with it

This isn't an exhaustive list by any means - have fun playing around with the settings to see what interesting effects might come out of it!

Step 6: Playstation -> Phone Shenanigans

This final step is just for people playing on Playstation 5, like me - or for people who want to add an extra something to their images.

To get images off the Playstation and onto your phone so you can share them on social media and such, you have to download them from the game to the console, from the console to the Playstation app, then from the Playstation app to your phone - and somewhere along that process, I've found it tends to screw up the saturation and make the images more washed out. I do think it may just be an issue with the colour settings on my TV, but I don't know for sure.

Exhibit A: Photo of my TV screen taken by my phone camera vs image downloaded from the Playstation app:

Now, you might like how this looks and I often do lol, but when I want to fix the saturation and make it closer to how it actually looks on my TV screen, I play around with the default photo editor on my phone - there's usually a filter that brings it at least very close to how it looked on my TV, usually one or a combination of the following filters depending on the image: Honey, Clay, Metro, or Bazaar - filter options do vary depending on your device, I have a Google Pixel 6a. The filter previews are the main thing to go off of to see which filters will give the desired effect.

Exhibit B: Playstation app image vs edited image

...aaand that's it! I hope you enjoy playing around with this effect <3

(also, I made this post on my phone, so if there are any formatting issues do let me know and I'll see if I can fix it once I'm back from work and can edit this post on my laptop)

[deltaruminations]

Why I Think A Pre-Shatter Gaster Will Probably Appear In-Universe In Deltarune At Some Point, From A Storytelling Perspective

nearly all of gaster’s presence in undertale amounts to teasers for deltarune. the facts stated there are most likely canon and may be relevant to deltarune’s narrative, but aren't story-critical to undertale. the FUN events are, by their nature, highly inaccessible and were designed from the ground up to only be understood through community research and discussion. an individual, blind player doing a handful of runs (ex. a neutral, then true pacifist, then no mercy run) will never see more than a tiny fraction of these events on their own, and that's if they're lucky. the events they're most likely to see are innocuous-seeming phone calls that have very little to say about gaster himself. some of them are only available on certain console versions. ENTRY NUMBER SEVENTEEN isn't even accessible in-game at all – as far as I'm aware, the only way to access it is through SAVE manipulation. almost everyone who goes into deltarune already knowing about gaster only knows about him because they were told about him.

this is all extremely cool for meta-storytelling and building hype for a companion game, but it isn't a great way to convey necessary information to a general audience. it's created an edge case (which, funnily enough, is actually the theoretical default case) where a player can play Undertale through to an ending, think “wow, what a great game!” and then immediately jump into deltarune without stopping to look up all the Undertale secrets or theories whatever, because why would they? most players are here, first and foremost, to play the actual games. deltarune is made for people who have played undertale, but it's not necessarily expecting them to be actively engaged in its fandom or to know every detail of it inside and out. deep knowledge can be played to and rewarded here and there, but toby can't necessarily hinge significant portions of the overall narrative on information that the vast majority of players won't receive in-game – or, rather, he Can, but doing so significantly limits how approachable, universal, and timeless that story can be. keep in mind that many players will only ever play on console, and won't have the option to easily datamine even if it occurred to them to try. this “edge case” will only become more common in the years after deltarune’s full release, when new, blind players will be able to experience both games in full, back-to-back, without needing to fill time between games or chapters with speculation and discussion. and what happens over time when research and discussion is lost to digital decay?

all of this is to say: we've passed the point of gaster existing as only a cool teaser. gaster is now a real character in a narrative that seems to revolve around him. all players, regardless of the information they have going in to the game, will interact with him at least once in the gonermaker – he's Main Story Content now. at some point, deltarune needs to start conveying information about him in-game, in a way that's accessible to all players, in order for that story to be effective.

and the issue i see with back-loading all of that information into a Big Reveal in the last couple of hours of the game is that, sure, it might be rewarding for dedicated fans who have known to wonder about gaster and have been at it for years, but for newer and more casual players, it's potentially going to mean very little. they don't have any reason to care about this “undertale character” who had no presence in undertale and wasn't important to its story – who is, for all intents and purposes, a new, retroactively created “undertale character” who's really only relevant to deltarune’s story, who never even appeared in either world, and was barely even hinted at until the last few hours of the story. to them, it's a contextless lore drop – oh, cool, the person behind everything is… this guy I've never heard of until now, even though he's supposedly from that other game i played. they're suddenly getting a bunch of answers to questions they never had to begin with, and it's not like there’s anything in-game actively encouraging them to go out and read up on the meta. flowey gives strong hints toward True Pacifist. he doesn't say, hey, go online and look for a bunch of fan-generated ephemera about this secret character before you play the other game. btw it's all disorganized, decentralized, and rife with confusion, fanon, and misinformation. any given player will potentially be missing out on a lot of satisfaction because they didn't know they had to do homework to get it. and it's possible that “wanting answers about Gaster” is, itself, a significant driving force encouraging the player to dig beneath the surface of the narrative – casual players need that motivation as well. you get what i mean lol

what deltarune needs to do is get even a blind, casual player up to speed and asking the same basic questions about gaster that dedicated, long-time fans have been asking, and it needs to do it in-game and in the main story, and it needs to do it well before those questions start being answered. it isn't strictly necessary that they know upfront that he was the Royal Scientist who built the CORE and so on – that can be explained later – but on the baseline, they need to understand that there's a guy who's missing from undertale, and that he’s connected to weird things in deltarune, especially that freaky voice in chapter 1. i think these things comprise the essential “concept” of the gaster mystery as far as deltarune's surface narrative is concerned.

AND SO… this is a big part of why i think the Little Brother Thing makes sense. i think toby built that subplot into the game in some part so he could properly introduce the basic concept of gaster to everyone, in a way that's accessible to everyone and fits within the natural flow of the main story. any player, assuming they did play Undertale, will know who sans and papyrus are. they'll be excited to talk to sans and excited to see his brother. if deltarune suddenly takes this opportunity to present a Third Brother, that leads to a question that should be very obvious to any player who's familiar with undertale: who the fuck is this guy? there are only two skeletons in undertale, sans and papyrus, so where the hell was this wingdings asshole? they never even mentioned him. what happened to him? if Little Brother happens in chapter 4 or 5, then that's ample time to seed curiosity about these things.

and if players actually meet “wingdings” and have an opportunity to see his speech patterns, personality, behavior, etc. then they might be able to start connecting the dots between him and the mysterious voice, or tree man, or any number of things, which also helps to fill in the gaps between what they know and what the superfans know. after all, superfans have known for a long time that the Voice is gaster, based on the typer value and speech quirks compared to spr_mysteryman’s stats and ENTRY NUMBER SEVENTEEN, all information that was datamined. if a casual player can look at in-game information alone and say “oh, this guy speaks like that freaky voice from before” then it's only fair. the mystery isn't really whether the Voice IS the missing skeleton, but Why he's the missing skeleton, how that happened, and what it means.

this isn't even getting into all of the reasons why i think it's potentially valuable for gaster to have an in-universe history with deltarune and personal stakes in it. if nothing else, i think toby is telegraphing the Little Brother Thing as a way to finally establish “gaster” (in some form) as an actual, tangible, extremely important character in a story for a general audience, and not simply high-concept fanservice for dedicated loreheads. we have groundwork laid suggesting that the skeletons are from deltarune's world, and that deltarune is something of a “prequel” from the skeletons’ perspective. if we're already seeing the skeletons in their past, then why wouldn't toby take this opportunity to show us something about gaster, who is almost certainly the most important skeleton in deltarune’s story? if gaster is “shattered across time and space,” and has timefuckery baked into the very concept of him, why wouldn't toby leverage that when telling his backstory? again, I do imagine that some amount of exposition will need to be “flashback-y” and/or “magicant-y” – anything that happened in a different narrative universe, for instance – but if some amount of that information can be conveyed naturally over the course of the story, rather than flashbacked or monologued, then why not just do it? this just feels like basic storytelling hygiene to me idk. sorry

[soaps-mohawk]

Oh no! Thinking about the ask of Omega’s going into distress. Did that happen to reader's mom when she was taken away? With reader's dad being an asshole, I'm sure he didn't comfort her. Does he even love her?🤨🧐 because it seems like he hates Omegas in general. Is reader's mom safe? Is she alright?🥺😭

Ugh I want to answer these so badly 😭 But I'll console you with: you will find out later in the fic. Pretty much all of these questions will be answered eventually.

I will say, though, that reader's dad did love her mom in a way. Think of the traditional alpha movement as a version of the sort of incel/trade wife movement. Traditional alphas view omegas as property and more of a vessel to give them a lot of pups for bragging rights and to make them look good, basically. Alphas that ascribe to the traditional movement are not good people, though that's pretty obvious from what we've learned. So yes, in a way, reader's dad does not like omegas very much. Hate might be a strong word for it, but he definitely considers them the least of the three statuses. He definitely set an unrealistic belief that his pups all had to present as alphas because then they'd be worth something in his eyes. He would not only have the bragging rights of the fact he has eight pups, but having them all be alphas? That's like the traditional alpha's wet dream.

[eliteseven]

hello again, a full guide to getting the romance scenes working would be lovely :O

i play on PC, if that makes things easier; ive been experimenting with the debug book + disguise self mods but the debug book is a little head-hurty in terms of triggering scenes

-that anon lol

PC??!!!! You, my friend, are a lucky duck lol. And also probably exempt from the struggles that I described before.

Once again:

Long story short I'm pretty sure there are already mods on PC to do that for you/make it a LOT easier:

Pretty sure this banger right here would allow you to permanently change any of your companions' appearances, hopefully without the limitations console has placed on that mod (you can't change faces, races on origins and can change absolutely nOTHING on non-origins). Or this one (Idk cause I can't use them lol)

And apparently this one even lasts through long rests.

Re: The Debug Book:

I'm almost positive there's got to be an easier way for you to trigger the cutscenes without the debug book, bc as you mentioned, it's a real bitch to do 😂 I would DEF ask someone with the PC version of the game/a forum/anyone about that!

On console, at least, the debug book is tricky. it'll queue up a scene for that night, sure, but you have to have certain conditions met for the scene to trigger. For instance: if the scene is supposed to take place at Act 1 camp (like, the super famous one where the reunion happens)- like Shadowheart's date after the goblin party, you do need to be there, it can't just be any camp. You can also use the debug book to set your approval to whatever is needed, and jump to whichever location you need.

So, if I want to trigger an act 3 scene, I'll use the debug book to ["jump to location"---> "Act 3"---> "Wyrm's Crossing"---> Start]. Visit camp once first, sleep, get any of the fixed cutscenes out of the way- (like Yenna, Orin, whatever tf) and THEN I queue it up. I learned this in the most frustrating way possible lol.

Again, I’m probs not the best person to ask for PC but that’s great news for you! 😄

[jabberwockymoreau]

The Columbia House, Sims 4 version

So, a while ago @codename-adler made a post asking people to drop their hcs for what the house in Columbia looks like, and since I was in the mood to play the Sims that day, I figured it would be a fun exercise to try and build what I picture in the game. It took me forever to finish it once I had figured out what I what I basically wanted it to look like, but here it is:

Before sitting down to work on this I roughly scoured the books for what scant descriptions there are to be as accurate as possible, and this is what I found: There is a downstairs bathroom and it has a window (specifically between the shower and the sink), the twins' rooms are upstairs on opposite sides of the hall, Nicky is downstairs past the stairs (as seen from the living room), the living room and kitchen are connected, and there is both a living room and a den. Also there has been no mention of a formal dining room afaik but there is a table in the kitchen, so that is what I went with. Also no garage, just a driveway.

Further I figured the house was pretty blandly suburban, probably a little older and smaller to make it cheap, so that is stylistically what I went with. The living room is open to the hallway and split level, half because of the age thing, and it also influenced the way I went about furnishing the house. I figured Nicky and the twins had probably sourced most of their furniture either from cheap stores (like ikea) or got older stuff for cheap from yard sales and the like, and otherwise I tried to capture an early 2000s vibe. So, here's the floorplan:

A more detailed house tour (and a lot of me rambling) below 👇

First the downstairs hallway. Not much to be said about it: There's a small console to the side for keys and mail and a mat by the door for shoes, plus some plants to make it look a little nicer. Imagine there are family pictures in the frames over the stairs. (I gotta say I do love love the retro vibes of the door though.)

Next up is the den. While half the reason the living room is open concept is the imagined age of the house, this room is the other half. Before I started this, I wasn't sure if there was a difference between a living room and a den, so when Neil heads to the den to sleep at the end of tfc I imagined him heading to some sort of living room space - and then thought it would be nice if there was a direct line of sight to the front door where Andrew was on the porch, keeping an eye on the others, so that Neil isn't fully removing himself from the small family moment they're all having. But since I wanted to be accurate I googled it, and turns out I'm wrong. However, since the den is at the front of the house you kind of have a view on the driveway from the recliners, so the hc is somewhat intact ;)

Also the octagonal shape of the room half killed me because it made the roof all weird and that influenced the upstairs bathroom and it was a whole thing. But I was looking around the game neighborhood for inspiration for the outside and saw this octagonal front room and fell in love, so I had do it. For the furniture it's canon that there are at least two recliners, and I imagined it to be this smaller secondary family room/computer room, hence the small, old TV and desk. The computer is probably a little older than would be realistic, but I couldn't bring myself to give them the imo even more unrealistic tower with a flatscreen monitor, so it is what it is. The Sims 4, despite not being that new, is pretty bad with 2000s era furniture.

Then we have the infamous downstairs bathroom and the probably most detailed description of anything in the house. The window sits between the shower and the sink and is frosted. Unfortunately that isn't an option in the sims, so I put up some shades. But otherwise it's a pretty small and simple room.

The living room was a lot of fun. I tried to make it colorful because I feel like Nicky would try to make it look cheerful, and it's also where we have some of the biggest mixing of aesthetics. On the one hand there's an old cabinet, but then we also have some Billy bookshelves and a very cluttered Lack coffee table (side note why tf do I know all of these Ikea names?) and the most 2000s standing lamp in the back (I swear we had one of these). The armchairs I feel like are something picked up from a yard sale while the couch is more new. The fireplace is original to the house. And then of course there is a hi-fi system in the back. In game that's just a record player, I think, but realistically they would have at the very least a cd and casette player on top of that.

Next is the kitchen, which in my original draft was included in the open living plan, but that felt too open, so I changed it to an archway (in addition to changing the layout some). The cabinets are very old, the fridge and stove very basic and clunky, and I feel like that sort of glass dining table is a very 2000s thing (although I may be wrong about that). Now looking at the screenshots I think the chairs might be a little too contemporary, but I'm not about to go back and change anything. It's a very yellow room, but it fits with the generall blue/green/yellow color scheme I mostly went for with the house. Cheerful but in a pretty inoffensive way. This room is also the only one where I used some CC, because I just had to have a wall phone and the Sims 4 just does not have older technology.

And for the last downstairs room we have Nicky's bedroom. This is one of my favorite rooms in the whole house, and it came together so easily once I had the bed picked out, it was really fun. This is the most color in all of the house, which I felt fits Nicky, and then I went for this sort of hybrid adult/teen aesthetic because he's sort of caught in that transition phase. On the one hand we have a cleaner look, a framed painting, centered bed, nothing too messy despite the loud colors, but then in the corner we just have the pride flag and some posters taped to the wall in a way that looks very leftovers from a teen/young adult phase. Also please imagine there is a picture of Erik in the photo frame in that corner.

Then we're moving upstaris with a very uninspiring first look at the hallway. Nothing really here, a hall closet and a plant but otherwise not much effort put in here. I do wanna say that in reall life the measurements of the house would be a lot different and so this space would probably be smaller (i tried to make it so with the closet, but it still feels a little big)

The upstairs bathroom(s) unfortunately suffered from the roof that sits around it, making it take up more space than I wanted it to. I think realistically it would all be one big room, with the laundry next to the showertub combo and the toilet beside the double sink, but because that would have been too little going on for the size the room would have taken up in game, I split it up into a separate toilet, laundry in the hallway extension, and then the bathroom with the tub and the double sink. I do like the decals in the toilet room, I think either those are leftover from previous owners of the house and Nicky refused to take them down or he put them up in order to make the room look a little less boring and the twins absolutely hate them. I also really like the brown color scheme of the tiles, it looks very old fashioned and I like that.

And lastly the twins' bedrooms. First up, Aaron: I picked green and black for the color scheme and then the very light wood color that all of this very basic Ikea furniture comes in to lighten up the room somewhat. The layout is also very open, so that the black doesn't come across as too oppressive. Here we also again have like on the one hand some framed prints to seem a little more sophisticated mixed with just posters put up over the desk. I went with a gamer theme for those, which given the canon presence of a gaming console (not pictured in the living room) felt right. Like obviously it belongs to all of them, probably, but also if I had to pick who uses it the most that's Aaron. Also making these rooms I developed this hc that the beanbags in the dorm are just taken from the twins' rooms, so I made sure to give each of them one.

And last but not least, probably my favorite room in the house because I'm biased af: Andrew. I legit got a little emotional furnishing this because I love him and it was so fun to imagine what his room would look like. The main color is obviously black, and the basic furniture is all the same as in Aaron's room, just in a black swatch. The whole thing imo teeters between cozy and overwhelming, and the layout certainly adds to that with the Kalax separating the room instead of being shoved to the side. But when I put the furniture down before moving it to its intended places I sort of just had it standing there and it felt right. I'm not sure if in actuality Andrew would dislike not being able to see the door or if he would prefer having an obstacle like that between the bed and door, but I do like the effect it creates. Then we got this punching bag which I also felt he probably would appreciate, and lastly in my head the red wall is because Nicky put his foot down on painting the whole room black and so Andrew picked the most aggressive, terrible red just to be contrarian (but it does match with some of the posters and the punching bag and everything). Also over both of the twins' beds is the closest the game has to glow in the dark stars, which I imagine Nicky put up and while they complain that they're not little kids they actually do love those a lot.

And finally some close ups of some areas/details that I loved putting together:

And that's it. This has been a long post so I hope you enjoyed the pictures and all of my thoughts. I had a lot of fun building this, anyway, and this is the Columbia house in my head now lol.

EDIT: If you've made it this far first off, thanks for reading. Secondly, I finally got around to uploading (a slightly modified version of) this onto The Sims 4 gallery, so you can download and play in it if you want to. The lot is called "Monsters' Columbia House" and my ID is Line9599.

[piracytheorist]

So with that out of the way, I'll share some screenshots and my experience from the little I played from the Spy x Family game.

Note/reminder that I openly don't recommend buying the game for a computer, as the controls are clunky, and since that version is half-baked it's not worth your money, even if you plan on using a controller. Different case if you buy it for a console, though.

So the graphics are actually pretty cute, and I think they translate the feeling of the 2D characters into a 3D game environment pretty well! The music stands between an inspiration from the original anime soundtrack and typical day-in-the-life simulation game soundtrack, though mostly the latter. I wasn't impressed that much but it wasn't something that annoyed me. It's just a bit of a pity because they could definitely get some inspiration from the original soundtrack, but oh well.

Playing the game, Anya starts at Eden College, and you get a tutorial showing you how to move and interact with other characters and objects. First it instructs you to talk to Becky, then to Damian.

And as I saw that I was like "... Do I have to?" XD Luckily, he wasn't annoying that time, just distant.

Then Anya comes back home to tell her parents about her Diary project, and I had her explore the house a bit.

In the manga and anime there's this small separate space on the hall right by the entrance, and I actually just realized that, but in the game's version of the house that area doesn't exist.

From what I remember, in the game there is just a wall where the opening to this space is. Since this space is rarely used in the manga/anime and it would have taken memory space, I understand why they didn't add it. From the little I played Anya could only move around the main spaces, kitchen, dining/living area and hall, but those parts were pretty accurate.

And according to my post about the Forgers' kitchen, here it looks accurate to the anime, though with a two-door fridge instead.

I mostly took this because I found it funny how atrocious his posture was XD he's probably tired, the poor man.

One of the few minigames I tried was bowling. I like how each characters game traits actually fit their characters XD

Like, Yor is Strong™ but with the least dexterity, Anya is the luckiest but also the weakest, Loid is the most dexterous... and also the unluckiest. I'm telling you, I can find opportunities for angst like it's my job.

Anyway, that minigame was actually nice, it took me a bit to get the hang of the curveballs but I'm sure I could get better at it if I trained more. I played as Loid, too XD

I liked the characters' responses to their throws, either going like "This is hard" or "This is harder than it looks" (even Loid, lmao, with me controlling him he actually became bad at something) if they threw only a few pins. Funny thing is, when Loid was first about to throw his ball, he said something like "Child's play" but then because it was me controlling him he only threw a couple pins and was like "This is hard" 😂 Poor Yor said "Was this good?" a few times right after throwing her ball, then Anya did a strike, and Yor and I as Loid did a spare (when you throw the remaining pins on your second go). For each of those, the other characters cheered for the one doing the strike or spare, and that was cute. Funniest responses was when a throw wouldn't get a single pin, Anya did her "Shock" face, Yor looked embarrassed, and Loid cringed back with a drop of cold sweat on his face (I was the reason for that, sorry man XD) Loid ended up winning and even though he had missed a couple of throws, at the end he was once again like "Child's play" like, my MAN, stop embarrassing yourself and me.

Anyway. Back to the story. There were some cute moments of banter, I feel they captured the characters pretty accurately!

Then I could go into character customization and. Some interesting choices there.

"Just going to work". Yes. That work XD

And then this... item.

MAXIMUM CHARISMA

I'm still laughing about it XD

Then it was ooting time, and I actually really loved the loading screens!

They have a cute feel to them :)

One of the few pictures I took for Anya's album. Whatever is happening on that Spy Wars issue Anya was reading, it must be interesting!

Anya later mentioned she'd sleep with Agent Penguinman that night, and Bond did not like that XD

When I FINALLY managed to hit the required score for Yor's fruit chopping minigame, Anya looked very smug about it 😁

As I mentioned, it took me a lot of times to get the gist of when exactly to swing to cut the vegetables, and every time Yor missed a vegetable she would say something... but there were no subtitles for those lines XD judging by a few lines I've picked up from the anime, I think she was just saying things like "I missed" or an exclamation of disappointment, and one single "I'm sorry, Anya-san". I wanted to hug her!

Then it was back to school the next day.

I'm right there with ya, girl XD

Then Anya asked Yor to train her, and Yor started giving her some advice on how to throw punches... and then Loid slipped in and was like uhm wut O_o

This next part was a little weird, because Anya was supposed to be drawing (like she did in Episode 3 in the museum kids room) and Loid was going like "Oh this is Bondman and a princess, right? That part is a little graphic, though" but... she wasn't drawing? Loid was just standing in the kitchen and I approached him to talk to him and they just said lines similar to the scene I mentioned above from episode 3. It didn't seem like it fit, and only added it so they could have Anya do that expression, which, okay, fair enough XD

This was Anya's expression when she realized Loid had completely misjudged what she was drawing and her powers weren't at risk of being exposed XD

A quick Handler cameo!

That was the intro for a minigame of Twilight sneaking into an art gallery and having to swap paintings for forgeries. I just found her appearance quite cool!

... This, however, was the minigame that proved this game doesn't work well with a keyboard. Controlling the character AND the camera with keyboard buttons is very tricky, and while I could manage moving Anya around, I had a lot of trouble moving Twilight around while I was on a timer and I had to avoid the guards seeing him.

So yeah. It could have been fun but for a computer user it can be frustrating. I tried twice and failed to complete the minigame, and at that point I was tired; it was more stressful than satisfying that way, so I just quit the game, uninstalled it and had it refunded.

Anyway, as I said, it looks like a fun game, but one that can only be appreciated through a console that already includes controllers with joysticks. Computer users shouldn't have to need external controllers to enjoy a game for the computer, so I definitely don't recommend buying it for the PC, if nothing else, for the moral of it. They could have optimized it to move the camera with the mouse, which is how the grand majority of such games work, but they half-assed it and as such I don't think they deserve anyone's money, especially at the price it's at (50 euros for us to need an external controller? no thanks).