#Like yes there is the word cephalopods but that's too broad

[rassicas]

Is "Inkfish" the Canon term to refer to both inklings and octolings?

Not really, it's used by Flow once and I popularized it because there isn't a canon widely used short term in english like there is in JP

[harryandmolly]

Cuttlefish - (a LTBOMH deleted scene)

A/N: A little monday morning fluff for all you motherfluffers. I have issues letting go of things so... here’s Shawn and Lilly again (I imagine this fitting somewhere within chapter 6, FYI). ALSO CONVENIENTLY coincides with a 1200 follower celebration, I LOVE YOU GUYS <3

Summary: A nap date and a really stupid nickname.

Warnings: Language, domesticity

Word count: a respectable 2.1k

“Hi, you landed?” Lilly mumbles into her pillow. The yawned words distorted by a pillowcase would be impossible for anyone but him to decipher.

He’s lifting his bag off the luggage carousel with his free hand and nodding when he remembers she can’t see him. “Mm, yeah, about 10 minutes ago. I’m getting my bag now.”

“Good flight?” She rolls over off her stomach so he might be able to hear her better.

“Good enough. We didn’t die.”

She snorts. “That’s the spirit. You going straight home?”

He’s nodding again, silent for a beat too long. He has to blink hard to keep his eyes open. “Mmhmm. Bed. Sleep. Nap. Now.”

Lilly frowns. She knows they agreed they wouldn’t see each other today. She has just come off a 12-hour day on set that became a 16-hour day on set when absolutely everything went wrong. Now she knows why everyone in Hollywood says never work with kids and horses.

He’s been in New York for two and a half days and has been awake for the last 22 and a half hours of it. It was better, they both knew, to hook up later when they weren’t both zombies and could enjoy each other’s company.

“Hey, I know we said we wouldn’t try to see each other today but I personally feel that if you get in a Lyft and come nap with me, you’ll be a much happier boy.”

Her voice is run-down from a night spent muttering into a walkie-talkie and it’s fucking music to his ears. He loves that she wants to see him if only to dream next to each other. He grins goofily into the phone as he stumbles behind his team to the cars waiting for them at arrivals.

“That sounds nice, baby. Can I shower at your place?”

“Mmm,” she mumbles in assent, closing her eyes and rubbing her nose into Olaf’s dingy white fur.

He hangs up and tells Andrew he’ll take a Lyft to Burbank. When he arrives, he hauls his luggage up the steps to her private entrance and opens the door without knocking. She’s curled up in a ball on top of her yellow duvet with the curtains drawn and lights off, TV glowing a second season Gilmore Girls episode she’s seen about 104 times. She smiles sleepily at him in the dim light.

He drops his backpack by the door and bumps into her coffee table, swearing as he almost tumbles onto her bed. He steps away from the offending furniture gingerly, giving it a look. He turns his focus to her and feels his whole body relax at the sight of her in her big plaid shirt and her little pink panties waiting for him, barely able to keep her eyes open. He flops onto the bed, partially on top of her legs.

Lilly snickers at him, clumsy as ever, as he falls on top of her. She scoots down to curl around his head until they sort of resemble a weird, lop-sided yin and yang symbol. He lifts her warm little hand off the sheets and brings it to his lips, keeping his eyes on hers as he kisses her knuckles the way he always does when he’s been gone a few days.

“Baby,” she coos. There’s no follow-up thought, no words to accompany it, just the pet name says enough. He blinks his eyes open and decides it’s been too long since he felt her breath so he unfurls himself around her and rearranges her beneath him so his knees bracket her legs and he’s hovering over her, watching her chest rise and fall. Her skin is pale and peeking out of her shirt. He wants to drag his lips and teeth over the spot until it’s not pale anymore at all.

But he’s so fucking tired.

She stares up at him, tracing the edges of his lips, the slant of his nose, the circles under his eyes. She threads her fingers back into his hair and pulls him down for a kiss.

It’s warm and lazy and perfect, just like she feels. When he pulls away to prop himself up on his knees between her thighs, he tucks his hands under her knee caps and strokes his hands down over her calves, just looking down and admiring her. His eyebrows lift when he watches her face contort with pleasure.

“Oh my god, yes,” she moans, arching her back as his rough fingers rake over her two-day-old stubble. Her hand reaches out and grips Olaf hard. She looks up at him through hooded eyes.

“Lilly, what the—”

“My calves are so sore,” she whines through an embarrassed chuckle. She goes pink thinking about the noise she just made and turns her face into a pillow to hide from him as he snickers at her.

“I’ve never heard you make that noise without my face between your thighs,” he says, amused and smirking. She rolls her eyes.

“I did Blogilates yesterday before I left for set which was, by the way, the dumbest idea ever. She had us do calf raises for like, 10 minutes. I can barely walk up a set of stairs,” Lilly grumbles, closing her thighs against him encouragingly, jutting her chin at him to suggest he continue.

Shawn lowers to sit on his feet and spreads her legs, wrapping his broad palms and wiry fingers almost all the way around her calf muscles. He runs his hands up and down gently at first, feeling her out without exerting pressure. She watches him with a quiet smile. He’s looking down at her legs, marveling at how solid and good she feels in his hands. He glances up and blushes under her gaze. He squeezes his grip around her ankles affectionately and pulls his hands back up toward her knees, kneading smoothly as he goes.

Her head falls back and her eyes shut. She moans again, giggling at herself. He’s strategic about it, rhythmic even in the way he massages her legs. She loves it. He spreads his fingers wider and bears down a little harder. He’s entranced by the sounds she’s making and seeks them out.

“Fuck, baby, that’s so good,” she sighs. He laughs again. She opens her bleary eyes to see him pink-cheeked and staring at her.

“You’re turning me on a little,” he admits with a shrug, smiling shyly like he’s not sure if it’s ok to say out loud. Her stomach flips. She sits up and slides her legs out of his grip to wrap them around his waist and tug him against her.

“I missed you,” she tells him, propped up on tented fingers with her legs latched around his waist like she’s afraid he’ll leave if she lets him go. He cups her cheeks in those big, beautiful hands and brings his lips down so gently she barely feels it.

“You just missed my hands,” he teases, pecking her lower lip and pulling away, unwrapping himself from her legs reluctantly. She curls up without him, watching as he digs through his bag for a change of clothes. He grabs her spare towel and points up the stairs.

“Roommates home?”

She shrugs. “Probably a couple. Think Emily’s upstairs watching Gossip Girl. Avoid her if you don’t want a speech about Chuck Bass being an indefensible character from the pilot episode,” she advises.

He nods solemnly and disappears. Fifteen minutes later, he’s slouching back into her room, ditching the t-shirt and sweatpants he’s just changed into for the walk back downstairs from the bathroom. She smiles into her pillow, pleased he’s not starting down the path of complaining about how hot her room always is. He’s too tired.

In Under Armour boxer briefs, he crawls over her on the bed and starfishes, spreading his limbs and laying all his weight on her, snuffling into her hair. She grunts and shifts under him, playing along because she doesn’t mind how heavy he is. At least he’s here. She kisses his neck as he burrows his face into her pillow.

She splits into a cheesy grin against his shoulder. He feels her teeth against his skin and lifts his head, looking dozy and confused. “What?”

“You smell like me,” she laughs, lifting her nose to his hair. Strawberries and mint, just like hers. It’s delightful.

“I like smelling like you,” he whispers, too exhausted to be self-conscious. She fastens a hand into his curls and wraps an arm across his warm, still damp back, rolling him off her to his side. He takes the hint and adjusts them so he’s on his back and her head is tucked in against his shoulder, their legs tangled on top of the sheets. He runs his fingers through her hair all the way down her back until she falls asleep. He follows soon after.

Almost two hours later, Shawn blinks awake. They’re in exactly the same spot they fell asleep in, frozen in time. He cracks his neck and shifts her away just long enough to lift and turn her onto her side and cuddle up against her back. The jostling wakes her up, which wasn’t exactly an accident on his part. He misses her.

“Hey,” she murmurs, voice crackly with sleep. She lifts a hand to pat the arm he’s slung around her body and scoots back a little more firmly against his chest. She likes feeling surrounded by him.

“Mmm, my little cuttlefish.”

Lilly’s eyes open. Shawn enjoys teasing her with weird nicknames. As long as he doesn’t use them while they’re having sex, she doesn’t mind. But this one is weirder than usual.

“Did you just call me a cuttlefish?”

“Yep,” he mutters into her neck, rubbing his nose against the downy hairs at the nape.

“Have you ever seen a cuttlefish?”

“No. Is it cuddly?”

Lilly bursts into giggles. “You are so fucking cute. Cuttlefish are terrifying. They’re cephalopods. They look like freaky squids.”

“Not cuddly,” he murmurs, voice muffled, “Should change the name, then.”

She closes her eyes, unwilling to continue this bizarre line of conversation. She settles back into him, wondering if she’ll drift off again.

“WHAT THE FUCK?!”

She turns over to see what he’s yelping about. He’s staring wide-eyed at his phone, eyebrows pulled together, looking horrified.

“I just googled cuttlefish! This thing is gross! It doesn’t look like a fish at all!” He flips the phone around to show her. She squints at the screen before she takes his phone away and puts it on the night table.

“No cuttlefish in bed. New rule.”

Shawn smiles and pulls her in by her hips. “Any other bedroom rules I should know about?” He runs his lips along her hairline as she plants kisses down his jaw.

“You have to kiss me when we wake up together even if we have morning breath,” she whispers into the skin below his ear. He smells even more like her now that he’s been lying in her bed. It’s getting her a little carnal and territorial. His hands come to rest on her lower back under her shirt as she mouths at him.

“Ok,” he breathes, sounding a little worked up himself. He nudges her legs apart to slide one of his between them. He pulls her so she’s lying underneath him again, enclosed in him like she likes.

“Anything else?” he pants.

“Yeah. Nap dates are now part of the regular routine, mmk?”

Shawn lowers himself carefully around her until he’s flat against her torso and his nose is brushing against hers. “I love nap dates. All of our dates should be nap dates.”

“But what about movie dates? And sushi dates? And beach dates and pool dates? And ice skating dates? And—”

He plants his lips against hers firmly, laughing into her mouth. She grins back and their teeth clash but they don’t care.

“Any kind of dates you want, sweetheart.”

They make out like teenagers for a while, copping feels and moaning, whispering conversations about nothing before they’re both exhausted again. This time, she slots up against his back and holds him against her chest because she knows he likes to be the little spoon sometimes but never wants to ask.

He’s wriggling as he searches for sleep. She’s desperately trying to ignore his restlessness.

“Lilly, it’s always so hot in your room, goddamnit.”

She rolls her eyes and buries her face in his back, kicking feebly at his legs, trying to pin him down to submit to her.

“Stop moving or I’ll get the cuttlefish.”

He giggles and complies. They fall asleep again and dream of anything but cephalopods.

Taglist: @the-claire-bitch-project @smallerinfinities @crapri @stillinskislydia  @abigfatmess @heavenly—holland 

[teratoscope]

Sepian

A bullet-like form detaches from the shadowed mass of the battle-scarred hulk below you, its broad front unfolding like a flower into four broad tentacles. Stripes of shimmering color wash across its surface before its skin resolves into a deep crimson shade. It’s a serene sight, until you notice the wireguns spinning up at the ends of its arms and the rest of its hunting party fading into view against the black of space.

HD 4 MV 180’ swim, EVA, 60’ hover AC 16 AT feeding arm x2 (d4 crushing, 10’ reach; if both hit, target is snared and must make a Strength check to escape each round or take 2d6 piercing damage. This check is at disadvantage if the sepian isn’t using any of its other arms), by weapon x4 Special camouflage, chaff, hypno-strobe

camouflage—a sepian has a 5-in-6 chance to surprise in any random encounter. A sepian not presently engaged in melee with another foe can attempt to withdraw from a combat and conceal itself with a 4-in-6 chance of success.

chaff—when a sepian loses 8 or more hit points in a single round, it releases a cloud of chaff in a 30’ diameter centered on itself, providing heavy cover to everything inside for 2d3 rounds. While in its chaff cloud, a sepian’s chance of successful withdrawal from an encounter rises to 5-in-6.

hypno-strobe—a sepian may disengage all of its weaponry and arrange its arms in a precise configuration to deploy its hypno-strobe. While the hypno-strobe is deployed, any thinking creature (organic or otherwise) with a sense of sight that faces the sepian must make a Wisdom check to move away from the sepian or make a direct attack against it. The hypno-strobe cannot function if any of the sepian’s arms are damaged or disabled.

The sepians are an object lesson in the notion that an extremely effective idea is not always a good one. They were a symptom of the final stages of the pre-diaspora war effort—one of the final innovations in an attempt to fill out a dwindling supply of boots on the ground and, hopefully, develop new force multipliers. The biological/cybernetic arm of this scheme was called Project Myrmidon, and it was largely a disaster. The best of the Kerchak ape uplifts were nonviable and the worst defected, the Keet neo-orcas never acclimated to their augments, and the less said about the single attempted dolphin uplift the better.

But Myrmidon arguably struck gold with the cephalopods. They proved strikingly receptive to augmentation, and more so to combat conditioning. To top it all off, their natural abilities and skillsets transferred quite neatly into zero gravity warfare, which was only getting more relevant as the Forward Escape regime devoured more and more budget and political cachet.

So the sepians were there at the edge of the gravity well to meet it when Freestar One went up. They’d waged a quiet war of their own under blundering human supervision for years up to that point, in the name of “clearing ground.” Earth’s exosphere and surrounding airspace is far from clear or safe now, but before the sepians it was a layer cake of alien minefields and murderous debris. The sepians paid dearly to make a safe path for us spacers.

This gave them ideas.

They are, nominally, our allies. We share the diaspora, and a mutual resentment for the forces responsible. But it should never be forgotten that the reason the sepians were such receptive weapons in the first place is that they are, at their core, not the same sort of thing that we are. They use tools, they have language, they have strategy and politics and intricate games of interpersonal display, but the mind that these things serve is far closer in structure to tiger than ape.

And, unlike tiger or ape, they have an aptitude for seeing the seamy parts of a mind and gauging the least amount of force necessary to lever it apart along these points. They’re not convinced anyone is precisely real the way we think about it. We’re too fragile.

Sepians will make demands when you meet them. They will be precisely as polite as is useful to their needs. They will act as though you are there to make their job easier and ignore you if they have nothing to gain from your presence. They’re not being assholes on purpose; that’s how their brains work. For first-time interactions, it may help to think about them like big, opinionated cats, though that’s greatly oversimplifying both the feline and the cephalopod mind.

When a sepian wants something and for whatever reason you’re not inclined to share it, the worst thing you can do is flatly deny it. They don’t take no for an answer, ever, and they will fight you for it if they think they can win, which they usually do. Instead, pose your no as an extremely conditional yes—a challenge or puzzle for them to solve. Route them through bureaucratic channels. Lock things up. Make them work for it. Just be mindful that they’re very adept lateral thinkers and will find ways to game whatever systems you interpose between them and what they want.

Sepian culture is loosely structured—they don’t do language in our sense of the word except to accommodate us, so they pass from group to group largely without concerns about being able to comport themselves. The standard sepian social unit is a pride, consisting of one to three egg-bearers, their spawn, and up to twenty-four “suitors.” The pride is equal parts dynastic clan and platoon; egg-bearers provide strategic oversight, suitors compete with each other for rank and the egg-bearers’ favor in sorties, and spawn participate in supervisory roles to both as practice for adulthood. The sepian lifespan is too short for children to be practically sequestered from adult life; they have no concept of innocence.