#OR I COME AND HIT YOUR ENEMIES WITH A CROWBAR

[re-bon-bon-san]

hay your a friend of huski so I wanna be your friend to if that’s ok

I am not just their friend, I am their mom.

Watch out, or you might get adopted. I want and WILL tell you how to live your life and when to go to sleep, young fellow! /pos

[thebigbadbatswife]

OCT 29th - Sex Pollen

Pairing - Simon "Ghost" Riley x F!Reader

Title - What Happens In The Safehouse...

Summary - During a mission, you come in contact with a strange substance and the only person around that can help you with the effects is Ghost.

Warnings - Sex Pollen, Vaginal Sex, Unprotected Sex, Creampie, Multiple Orgasms, Simultaneous Orgasm, Military Inaccuracies. (If I missed anything lmk!)

Word Count - 3.4k

You feel strange. Really strange. It’s not a good type of strange either. Not that you would have been expecting to feel any type of strange while on mission. Especially while on a mission with your Lieutenant. 

Captain Price had assigned both of you to this mission, and only you two, in an attempt to get you to learn to work together. After all, it was no secret that Ghost had not been happy about your assignment to the 141 taskforce. It had worked and hadn’t worked, at the same time. 

While you were working seamlessly with each other, quickly dispatching enemies side by side and wordlessly following his orders. Over comms, you were both still taking every opportunity you could to dig at each other. With that aside, it was a rather simple mission. Secure the illegal weapons shipment before it could trade enemy hands.

Securing it hadn’t been an issue. The group guarding it had been small and they had been easily taken out. The only issue was that the crates weren’t filled with guns. When Ghost had crowbarred one of them open, a cloud of white dust had puffed up into the air. 

Is that why you’re feeling so strange? Is whatever that powder was, affecting you? 

You can feel your heart beat slowly starting to thump hard and fast against your chest despite the fact that you’re currently sat down on a wooden crate. And it feels like it’s getting harder to breathe, but not in the panic attack type of way. It’s in the “I’m getting way too hot and there’s nothing I can really do about it underneath all of this gear” type of way. 

If this is that powder affecting you, then why isn’t it affecting Ghost? He was the closest to the dust cloud considering that he had opened the crate to begin with. Right now he’s pacing just ahead of you, talking to who you’re assuming is the Captain, on comms. You’re not tuned into whatever station they’re using so you don’t know what they’re saying. 

What you do know is that you are starting to desperately want to be out of your clothes because of how uncomfortable they’re starting to get. Which definitely isn’t normal. 

Before you can contemplate it, Ghost is roughly pulling you up onto your feet. The grip he has on your arm is bruising. 

“We’re headed back to the safehouse,” he states.

“What about–” 

“Captain Price is sendin’ Soap and Gaz to secure it. Both he and Laswell doubt that the Russians will be able to get any reinforcements here before they arrive. And we’ve been given orders to leave.”

You nod. If the orders are coming from the Captain… and if it’s to do with that powder. What the hell have you inhaled? 

When you move to follow him, you become aware of just how soaked your underwear is. And not because of how much you’re currently sweating. You take a deep breath and do your best to ignore it. When you’re back in the safehouse, you’ll have a chance to check yourself over and try and figure out what exactly is going on. Here, you can’t do a damn thing. Especially in front of your Lieutenant.

With the way the fabric moves as you walk, rubbing against your extremely sensitive clit, you have to bite your tongue, to the point you taste blood, to stop any sort of sound leaving you. And things only get worse once you get into the car.

Ghost has never been very good when it comes to driving, but somehow he seems to have got even worse. He manages to hit every bump and pothole, which is making it harder and harder for you to stay quiet as they go straight to your core. You almost think that he’s doing it on purpose, but considering that his driving isn’t all that straight either, you can’t help, but think that whatever the hell that stuff was, it must be affecting him as well. 

As soon as the car pulls up to the safehouse, you’re out of the car before he’s even stopped it fully. You don’t care how strange or weird it looks. You beeline for the bathroom as it’s the only place in this safehouse that will give you an semblance of privacy, as the rest of the place is open plan. 

You lock the door behind you and immediately start removing your gear, as fast as you possible again. In all honestly, you’ve never removed your gear so fast or efficiently before. Though, usually, you’re back on base, exhausted after a gruelling mission, which leaves you fumbling with the various straps and clips. Right now you’re super focused on the task at hand and before you know it your gear is hitting the bathroom floor with a thud. Your boots and clothing are quick to follow.

Your underwear is absolutely drenched in your slick. As are the insides of your thighs. Your clit is swollen, peaking out from your hood, shiny from your arousal and begging to be touched. 

Chucking the ruined clothing to the side, you bring two of your fingers to your clit. Your body jolts as you gasp as the lightest of touches almost has you cumming right then and there. You pull your hand away and grip the sides of the sink, taking a deep breath as you try to regain control over whatever the hell is going on with your body.

You catch sight of yourself in the mirror. Your hair’s a mess and your body is slick with sweat like you have just run a marathon. Not to mention how fucking horny you’re starting to feel. With nothing around to distract you, like trying to hide your condition from Ghost, you’re now fully aware of it. 

You’re growing desperate to touch yourself and fuck yourself with your own fingers. So much so that the longer you go without doing that, things are actually starting to grow painful for you. 

Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s the fix. An orgasm. If you’re experimental touch is anything to go by it won’t take you long to reach it. You’re only problem will be trying to stay silent. On the other side of the bathroom’s door you can hear Ghost moving around. It sounds like he’s freeing himself from his own gear, which means he’ll be checking his guns not long afterwards. He won’t even be paying attention to what you’re doing in here. 

Taking another deep breath, you bring your fingers down to your clit once more. 

It’s a fight for you to keep silent as you touch yourself. Your teeth sinking into your bottom lip as you rub tight circles against your clit. You expect some sort of relief, but there is no relief. The more that you touch yourself the more that 

it seems to hurt. At the same time you can’t stop. You need to touch yourself. It’s the only thing that you’re capable of focusing on.

Soon enough touching just your clit isn’t enough anymore. Your cunt squeezes around nothing, begging to be filled. Your mind drifts to thought of Ghost and how the only thing between the two of you is a door. It’s no secret that he’s packing, at least that’s what the rumours across the base suggest. The thought of his cock and how good it would feel inside of you.

You know that you shouldn’t be thinking about your Lieutenant like this. He’s your CO. Not to mention how much you can’t stand him. Even if he wasn’t your CO, he’s not someone you would think about taking to bed because of how much he pisses you off.

You do your best to push any thoughts of him and his cock out of your head and push three of your fingers inside of your needy hole. For a brief moment you finally feel some form of relief. Which almost has you moaning loudly, but the sound of footsteps reminds you that you’re not alone and you keep your teeth in your bottom lip. The pain from before returns as you fuck yourself and you can only hope an orgasm gives you a more permament form of relief.

The squelch of your fingers in your pussy is loud in the enclosed space and you can only hope that the walls aren’t so thin that Ghost can hear what you’re doing.

With a combination of your fingers inside of you and your free hand rubbing your clit, it really doesn’t take you very long to reach your climax. Relief floods through you as your body clamps down onto your digits. You ride out the aftershocks before finally pulling your fingers out and grip the sides of the sink again, panting heavily.

Your body is shaking as you come down from your high. Is that it? Is it finally over with? 

Just as you begin thinking that you must be in the clear, the need and the pain that comes with that need comes back tenfold. You whimper. When will this stop?

Several hard knocks at the door catches your attention. Ghost.

His voice is as rough as ever as he calls out your callsign, but it also sounds extremely strained. The thoughts you had back in the car come back to you and you wonder if he’s being as affected by whatever the hell that stuff is as well. He must be, right? He was the one that had opened the crate and therefore had had that cloud of dust puff up right into his face. 

“It hurts, Ghost,” you call back. There’s no point in hiding it any longer. He’s definitely already heard what you’re doing in here and if he hasn’t, he’s still under the same influence that you are.

“I know it does,” he replies. “Got us both in a bit of bother, haven’t I?” 

Yeah, he has. At the same time it’s not entirely his fault. The intel said it was guns in those crates. There was nothing about any sort of drug being inside of them. If he hadn’t opened the crates, you would have.

“Laswell’s intel says we’ve got one of two ways of dealin' with it,” he continues.

“Which are?” You really hope that means that there’s some form of antidote and that Laswell not only knows where it is, but she’s sending someone to go and get it.

“We wait it out.” 

That one is definitely not a option. You feel like you might go mad if you have to wait it out. No, you’re still holding out for that antidote.  “Or?” 

“We shag.”

He’s so blunt about it that you almost want to laugh. As well as at the entire situation itself. Of course those are the only two ways to deal with this. You want to scream. 

“There’s no antidote?” you ask.

“As far as we know, no there's not. Guessing neither option takes your fancy?”

“No, but since I have to pick, at least option two won’t make me go crazy.”

“You sure? Don’t want you to feel forced.” 

“I’m not feeling forced to do anything,” you reply. And it’s the truth. Shagging Ghost, funnily enough, is the most appealing of the two options you both have. You have already been fingering yourself to the thought of him taking you and he’s clearly not against the idea. “But only if you’re as naked as I am.” Which you think is more than fair. Though you seriously doubt he’ll ever take the balaclava off. He never does. 

He huffs a laugh. “Give me a minute, yeah?” 

You hear the rustling of clothing, followed by the same thud of gear hitting the floor. Soon enough, he raps his knuckles against the door again, letting you know he’s finished undressing. Taking a shaky breath, you move away from the sink, unlock the door and step back. 

The door swings open and you’re met with the sight of Ghost’s naked body. He’s fit. As soon as that thought enters your head, you’re immediately telling yourself that it’s the drug. Especially as your eyes follow the dark hair that leads from his belly button down to where his cock stands proudly, the head purpling from the lack of attention. Your pussy throbs at the sight of it and all you can think about is how good it’s going to feel when he’s finally inside of you.

“Eyes are up here, Sergeant.” 

“Could say the same to you, L.T,” you reply as your eyes finally meet his. He’s also been blatantly checking you out as well, his eyes lingering on a knife scar on your hip.

“You sure you still want to do this?” he asks. 

“Yes.” Your reply comes out far faster than you meant for it to. He chuckles, stepping forward as he pulls the balaclava up just enough to reveal his lips.

His large hand comes up to cup your face and keep your head titled up to look at him. He surprises you with a kiss. It’s far more gentler than you thought it would be. Everything about Ghost screams rough and harsh so you certainly weren’t expecting this, but it’s very much welcomed. You surrender yourself entirely to him, letting him take control. 

Ghost directs you backwards until your back is pressed up against the cold tiled wall. Goosebumps radiate across your skin and your nipples pebble as you gasp at the sudden temperature change. He takes advantage of it and pushes his tongue into your mouth. 

Your nails dig into his shoulders as he presses his body against yours. You can feel his cock pressing against your skin and it has your body screaming for him to stop kissing you and fuck you already. You break the kiss, gasping for air.

“Please,” you whimper. As of right now you don’t care how needy and pathetic you’re starting to come off as. You expect him to tease you, but he must be as desperate and needy as you because he does nothing of the sort.

Instead he effortlessly lifts you up and enters you with a single thrust. Your eyes roll into the back of your head as you pussy squeezes his cock as you cum only from the feeling of him filling you up. Ghost groans deeply, the feeling of your cunt tightening around him almost having him blow his load. 

“Fuckin’ hell,” he mutters, his grip on you almost bruising. “You’re wound up really fuckin’ tight, huh?”

There’s no opportunity for you to answer, not that you could form words anyway, the feeling of his cock deep inside of you rendering your brain to mush. He doesn’t even give you time to recover from such a sudden orgasm as he begins to slowly pull out. Once again you expect him to be rough with you. To take you hard and fast as he gives into the need burning through his body. 

He pushes back in just as slowly, taking some time to build up his pace. Showing a level of restraint that both surprises you and doesn’t surprise you at the same time. He’s doing his best not to hurt you. Which you think is nice of him, but at the same time you’re not sure if it’s even going to be worth the effort. You are almost positive that once this is all over you’re likely not going to be able to walk straight for at least a week.

As he fucks you, Ghost starts kissing you again. He swallows your moans as your tongues invade each other’s mouths. You really don’t want him to ever stop.

With the position that he has you in, there’s not really much for you to do other than hold on and enjoy the ride. Which is absolutely fine by you. Already you can feel another orgasm quickly building up as his cock hits against a sweet spot deep inside of you that has your toes curling and nails digging into the meat of his shoulders and back each time he hits it.

“Fuck, Ghost,” you gasp. “Don’t stop!”

“Couldn’t even if I wanted to,” he grunts. 

He’s no longer being gentle with you. Each thrust is rougher than the last and his grip is definitely going to leave marks on your skin, but you’re too far gone to care. Almost as soon as his thumb touches your clit you’re cumming again, your cry of his callsign is bouncing off of the walls of the bathroom, stars dancing behind your eyes. Ghost cums with you. His groan deep and guttural as he hits his climax, shooting his cum deep inside of you.

You expect him to stop, to take a breather before this stupid lust filling drug drives you both to do it again, but he doesn’t. He keeps rolling his hips, his cock remaining hard, as short gasps and groans leave him. He’s not wrong. He really can’t stop. Your cunt feels so good wrapped around him and he can’t stop himself from continuing to thrust into you despite how sensitive he’s starting to get. 

It’s a blur from there. Ghost takes you on every surface available to the two of you in the safehouse. Wringing orgasm after orgasm out of both of you, pleasure searing through your veins to the point that you’re almost sure it might drive you mad. That is if you don’t pass out from exhaustion first.

By the time that you hit the bed, that’s exactly how you feel. You think that the drug might have finally run its course. At least for you. Ghost adjusts your position so that your ass is up in the air and reenters you, making you whine. 

You’re really starting to feel how sore and used your body is. Your cunt is aching and dripping with the mixture of both yours and his fluids and you’re drenched in sweat.

He takes you much more gentler this time; a stark contrast to the rough fucking you’ve been subject too for however long you both have been going at it. He’s nearly at his end as well. There’s no longer a rhythm to his thrusts and he’s slowly growing more vocal again. 

Draping his body over yours, getting you to look at him so he can kiss you again. If this wasn’t Ghost fucking you, you might think the kiss is sweet and tender, but since it is Ghost you can only think it’s because he’s too tired. He grinds his cock inside of you, flooding your pussy one last time. 

He collapses against you, but you’re too tired to care. You just accept that this is your fate now as your eyelids drop shut and sleep claims you. 

When you wake up, the first thing that you’re aware of is how sore you are. Even shifting a little bit has you aching in places you didn’t know you could ache. The second and third things that you notice, one after the other, is that Ghost had taken the time to clean you up and cover your naked body with a blanket.

You groan as you sit up, holding the blanket against your chest to keep yourself covered up. You immediately spot your clothing and gear, all haphazardly folded and left on a table. 

“You alright, Sergeant?” Ghost is stretched out on the sofa, his arms folded behind his head. He’s already fully dressed in his gear again. 

“I don’t think boot camp hurt this much.

He huffs a laugh as he sits up. “Yeah? Well I’m not fuckin’ carrying ya, so get up, get dressed and let’s go. I’ll be waitin’ in the car.” He gets up from the sofa, grabs his gun and leaves the safehouse. At least he’s nice enough to give you some privacy. 

It takes you longer than it should to get dressed. Your body protesting every single move you make, but you push through it. By the time that you get into the car, Ghost is clearly getting impatient waiting, his fingers drumming against the steering wheel.

He looks over at you as you hiss as you sit down, slamming the door a little too hard, at the same time. You adjust your position so that you’re a little more comfortable.

“What happened in that safehouse, stays in that safehouse,” Ghost says.

“Agreed.”

[hellsburners]

time's wasting, tick-tocking, lip locking

summary: spider-man meets an unlikely friend(or foe) to help him retrieve an important package. pairing: tasm!peter parker x male reader word count: 1.8k warnings: fluff, suggestive stuff, black cat reader, light smut, they're not friends sorta enemies if you think about it. a/n: a request from an anon! btw you could end it to a certain part if you just want the banter and the fluff but yall this is a hellsburners production we're serving smut here

masterlist | more peter parker

The air was quite chilly atop this building, the spandex not warming his body. Spider-man rubbed his gloved hands together for some heat, his legs bent over the ledge of the building, his eyes scanning the dock below. Twenty-four men loading wooden crates into shipping containers with the words Roxxon Energy Corp.

He swung down behind a shipping crate, crawling to the top unbeknownst to the men. His webs thwip across the snowy dock, disarming three men. Their bodies bonded together, and their mouths shut. He swings again, landing next to four other men, their rifles pointing at him.

Peter webs for two opposite poles and slingshots himself to the men, kicking one over while disarming the others; more men come rushing with baseball bats and crowbars. They try to hit Peter, his senses blazing from each attack; he ducks and avoids each blow, pulling on a few webs to tie them up.

Five more men come from inside the shipping container, loaded with pistols and rifles, but before they can come out, a small silver ball rolls from the top of the container, falling down and releasing white smoke.

Peter could hear the men choke and cough as a figure came down and took them individually. He did the same, taking the moment when the men were disarmed to land a few kicks and punches, leaving them unconscious.

He runs to the shipping container as the smoke wears off. The crates were ripped open with bear-like claw marks, the contents of the boxes now gone. He hears footsteps from his far left, the shadowy figure creeping against the moonlight. Peter webs his way to run after it. The cold slowed him down, his feet much heavier and his hands numb.

He shoots a web that lands on the figure's back. He turns to a man wearing a black coat with white fur on the hood and its sleeves. He sees your face, black-masked, dark hair with streaks of silver, a black satchel wrapped around your shoulder. The Black Cat.

You gave him a wink before falling back on the ledge of the building. Peter jumps, finding you at the bottom, waiting for him. He webs down slowly, landing on his feet. Your back against a wall, your clawed fingers wrapped around the clear vial with silvery-purple liquid.

"Need this?" you said, vapor appearing from your lips. "Nice to see you again, Spider."

"I would say the same, but I don't share the sentiment," he said, walking towards you. "Can we skip the small talk and give me that vial?"

"Ooh, you know it's not that easy," you said, putting the vial back in your bag. "Besides, don't you miss me?" you pout.

"I—no!" Peter said, his voice erratic. "Shame," you smirked, dropping another smoke bomb before disappearing from his sight.

"Hey!" he screamed. You were ahead a few blocks. He swung across a few other buildings and tried to chase you down. You grappled down a busy street, your coat blending in with civilians in their winter clothes. "Fuck," he sighed. "Lucky me, I've been trying to test these out," he said, taking his phone out to see the red dot on the city map, a tracker placed on your back when he ran after you.

He traced you down, riding a black car heading out of the city. Peter reloaded his web-shooters and braced for the trip. He swung from building to building until he landed on a truck heading in the same direction. His joints started to stiffen, his nape cold and aching.

You entered a safe house on the city's outskirts, a brutalist bare building with a white car parked outside. Peter found you dealing with—Richard Fisk, the Kingpin's son, calls himself The Rose. You hand him the bag of vials. You await payment before his men point their guns at you. Peter knows you. This isn't something you could run away from easily. Fisk turns away and leaves in his white car, leaving you with six men with loaded guns.

Peter jumps down to your aid, unarming two men before landing a solid blow on the others. You take this moment to kick the other man right across his face. He saw you move with grace and agility, your gymnast background aiding your fight.

The men all ended up unconscious on the pavement. Blood drips down your lips, and no one gets away with scamming you. "So, was it worth it?" Spider-man said.

"Don't piss me off," you said, rubbing the back of your hand against your bloodied lip. "This never happens."

"Well, it just did," he said. "That vial could've helped me to take them down, but now they have it!"

"I'm not a hero, Spider," you snickered. "I don't do this for good. I do this so I can live," you walked towards the door, the metal ice cold. You try to slide the entrance to the side, but the gate does not budge. You snarled, trying to pull it back. "Shit, I think it's stuck."

"What?" Peter said. "Let me see," he tried to do the same, but the door still didn't budge despite his strength. "Fuck, they must've closed us off—the snow isn't helping either." Peter punched the door in anger, leaving a giant dent.

"There must be another exit—or a window," you said. The room slowly turned colder. You tried to wrap your fur coat around your body, your breath leaving hot vapor. Loud bangs from Peter's fists filled the room, but the door never moved.

"I checked before coming in. There isn't one," Peter took off his mark, panting while vapor left his lips. You looked at him. He was older since you last met, the circles under his eyes darker, his face riddled with stubble, his hair longer and messier. The cold fogged your goggles up, so you took them off and left them on a table nearby.

The two of you rummaged all over the safe house, looking for materials to use or food and other things. Peter found an old lab coat to wrap himself with, and you found a box of canned tuna, some old crackers—and one sleeping bag.

Peter tried his cell, but there was no signal. "We're going to be here for a while," you said. "Shouldn't we bundle up and stay warm, like old times."

"Not happening," Peter said, shivering under his breath.

"Your loss," you ripped a claw on the box of biscuits and took a bite. "Ugh, it's stale."

Hours passed with Peter running around the safe house, looking for an exit. On the other hand, you lay on the sleeping bag with your hands behind your head. You took a file from your pocket and filed your claws into peak sharpness. Peter sighed under his breath every time he passed by you. "You're a pain in the ass, Cat."

"From what I remember, you gave me a pain in the ass, Spider," you chuckled. "Kidding, it wasn't all pain."

"I'm fucking freezing," Peter said, rubbing his body to make some heat.

"I told you we should bundle up," you said. "Plus, it's getting late, and I'm sleepy."

Peter rolled his eyes and joined you in the sleeping bag. The two of you were wrapped like a burrito, his face too close to yours. His brown eyes stared intently, his long lashes batting at you. You wrapped your arms around his waist, pulling him closer. His eyes widened, and a soft moan left his lips. "Wrap your arms around me, too," you said. His large arms snaked around you, creating heat.

"Wood sage and Sea salt?" you whispered, smelling his neck. He chuckled and nodded. "I missed you, Spider. Honestly,"

"I missed you too," he said, his voice stern. "Where did you go, Cat?"

"Tried to live a normal life, it didn't end well for me," your gaze trailed away from his eyes, your hand finding his soft brown hair. "I guess this is me forever, running and stealing."

"It doesn't have to be like that. You could work with me, and we could be good," Peter said, his palms rubbing your lower back. "Live with me."

"I'll think about it," you said, your hands falling to his cheeks. It was warm against his cold skin. You inched closer, pressing your lips to his. You closed your eyes and delved deeper into the kiss. His hand snaked underneath your clothes, cold fingertips against your bare skin. You wrapped your thigh around his, his knee hitting your center. The two of you moaned from the kiss, hands searching each other's bodies.

You straddled Peter's waist rubbing your ass on his growing erection. His hands wrapped around your ass, pulling you closer. He whimpers on your lips, shaking from the pleasure and the cold. "Cat—" he moaned. You pepper his neck with kisses, licking and sucking, leaving red marks.

He pulls you back to the kiss, his arms hugging you tighter as his sex rubs on your ass. He rubs against you, moaning and whimpering while you moan from his tight embrace. He grips your waist, fingers digging into your skin. "Fuck—Spider, you good?" you gasped.

"I missed you, and I need you," he said. "Please be with me. I'll take care of you, protect you," his eyes stared at yours. "You won't run ever again."

"I'll think about it," you said again, an ache forming in your chest. Knowing it will never be normal with him.

"Fuck–I'm close," he moaned.

You pulled him in for a last kiss for a long while. Peter finishes under his suit, his face red and his hair drenched in sweat. You later passed out on the sleeping bag, your arms draped around each other, Peter's lips pressing on your forehead as you succumbed to the night.

Peter woke up to a banging on the door. "We know you're in there, Cat! Give us the real vial, or we'll kill you!" a bunch of men surrounded the lot, hands on their guns. He saw that you were gone, a hole formed on the ceiling, sunlight peering in, a black satchel on the spot where you slept. Inside were the vials and a note.

Sorry, I couldn't stay for breakfast. I had to go real quick. I left the vials for you. Do whatever is right. You always do the right thing. And you'll probably not see me again but don't miss me too much. I know I will.

Xoxo, Cat.

[codfanficedits]

One fucking mistake - Part Two.

Pairing:Simon 'Ghost' Riley x fem!Reader.

Summary: Simon lost you after making a mistake on a mission.

Wordcount: 843 | Rating: E (18+ only!)

Warnings: Arguing, cussing, swearing, grieving, communication, angst with no comfort.

A/N: Part two!

Part 1 ~ AO3 Link

And when the morning comes, and Simon is once again reminded of what life has taken from him, he starts to understand why people smoke until their lungs are black, why people drink the night away or why they throw themselves off buildings.

His mind didn’t register the warm water of the shower anymore, everything in life started to feel dull, the warmth of the sun no longer hitting his skin, the smell of lavender no longer reaching his nose, even food started to taste as bland as he felt.

Simon dreaded going to debriefings, the stares he would get, full of compassion, it made him sick to his stomach, they all thought that they knew what he was going through, but no one really knew how he felt, and he was not about to share it with anyone.

He was the last to join, and as expected all the heads turned towards him when he walked in, taking his usual seat. He despised the looks his teammates gave them, and he refused to meet their gazes, his eyes focused on the paper before him.

“Simon.” Price starts.

“Ghost.” He corrects.

“I’m sorry.” Price clears his throat. “Ghost. We’re going back to that mission whe-“

“Why.” His voice is sharp.

“We’re going to search for a body.”

Simon can feel his heartbeat in his ear, and he can feel his face getting red. He doesn’t want to search for a body. Because not having a body meant you were still Missing In Action. It meant that there was still a chance you would come back to him, it meant that if he prayed hard enough, you would return to the place where you belonged. His arms.

Finding your body would mean that you would be Killed In Action, it would mean that he would need to find a crowbar and pry the pieces of God of out his body, a punishment for being abandoned. Finding you would mean that he had to accept that his mission had killed you, and he wasn’t ready to face that.

“No.” His answer was short.

“It has been three weeks.”

“I don’t care!” Simon slams his fist on the table to power up his words.

“We’re going and you can either join us or stay here.” Price gives him the choice.

And Simon doesn’t know what to do, because he wants to stay in the bubble he had created for himself, he wanted to believe that you would just show up, as an early Christmas present. And if he went to look for you, he’d know for certain you would never come back.

But he couldn’t let the other find you. It would be a betrayal towards you, he had sworn to protect you, he had already failed at that, the least he could do was bring your body home himself.

“I’m coming.”

His teammates look up, slightly confused, all of them had expected him to stay on base.

“Are you sure?” Soap breaks the silence.

“Do I have to repeat myself, sergeant?”

“Of course not Lieutenant.”

But Simon zones out quickly after that. His mind wandering towards the upcoming mission. Bringing you home. How would you look when he found you? Would you still be as pretty? How would your face look? He was worried, worried he’d find you with a terrified look on your face. Worried he would find you half dressed, your innocence taken away by the enemy. All he could be was worried.

 He doesn’t even register his teammates getting up and leaving the debriefing room.

“A word.” The stern voice of his captain snaps him out of it.

“What.”

“You can’t go on like this, Simon.”

“Ghost.”

“No. I’m talking to you as Simon.” Price answers. “I’ll allow you to go on this mission, as I understand how important it is to you, but after we’re back.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“I’m your captain and you listen to me.”

Simon can feel the muscle under his eye twitching, he hated it when Price reminded him that he outranked him, but he knew Price wouldn’t back off if it came to a standoff, although Price did seem like a sweet man, he had a lot of bark in him when needed.

“Yes captain.”

“When we’re back, I want you to take some leave, get some professional help. I can’t watch you drink yourself to death every night. I can’t keep covering for you to our higher ups, Simon. You deserve better than this.”

No, no, no. Simon felt as if he deserved exactly what he was given, after all, he had been the one to drag you along on that mission.

“If you say so.”

“Now, go prepare yourself. I can imagine it is going to be tough to get back there.”

Oh it was. Just the mere idea of going back to the place where he lost you was enough for Simon to get his stomach to churn. But he needed to go, he owed it to you, he owed it to himself.

[justxrandomxlivia]

Your new Partner König

Masterlist part two - König x fem!reader - Enemies to more

Summary: After sneaking into a terrorist base, you are overwhelmed by König, a mountain of a man. Is he your enemy or indeed an ally?

Warnings: Mention of weapons, mention of wounds, overall fluff

Word count: 3502

AN: This story was originally based of the first two episodes of the König series of MINTS. Go and check it out! Also, for this story will come 100% more parts - so stay tuned. ^^

„Y/n. Stay low profile. We don’t want to draw to much attention.” – “Copy that. See you on the other side. Stay safe Farah.” After I made my call, I move further through the tunnels. According to the plan, I should reach the end soon. Slowly approaching the gate that leads to the base of the terrorists, I can hear only my own footsteps as I walk through little water puddles. I try to open the gate, but it’s locked. Alright, quick breaking through move. I clipped my gun away and reached for a crowbar. I must do this as quite as possible. Adjusting the angle, and “CRACK!”.

I’ve placed the crowbar back at my bag pack and took my gun once again. I stepped through the gate, closing it behind me and turning to the right. I should get this way to the building, collecting the information I need. Just as I turned right, someone comes from behind, I spun around firing my gun, but it got ripped out my hand in an instant, then I fell to the ground, with my face first. My arms are quickly tied up on my back. “FUCK!” I yelled and tried to lift my legs to grip the attacker. I reached to the neck, but the attacker gripped my feet with an ease, pushing them down and tying them together. I wiggled and tried to hit the person with my head. But the attacker pushed me down to the ground, now facing to the sky, I saw a man standing over me. Way taller than Ghost. My breath stuck. He has a black sniper hood hiding his face and he is huge! “Stop squirming! You will just hurt yourself.” He said casually down to me, he bends down and shut my mouth with duct tape. Then he packed me by the waist and lifted me on his shoulder, carrying me across the camp.

After roughly 5 minutes getting carried all over the entire place, I felt how my guts are in the wrong places. Everything hurt and there was too much blood in my brain, what made me feel dizzy. Mister three meters tall finally let me down. He dropped me on a chair in a big room where was one single light. It was nearly impossible to tell how big the room was, it was just too dark. He placed my hands behind the chair and tied my feet to the chair. Then he took my bag, weapons and other devices and placed them on a small table near the shadow. Not taking off the duct tape from my mouth he spoke with a calm voice. “I’ll let you rest now a little. Let’s chat later. There are many things I’d love to talk about.” With this he left the room and as it sounded, there was another person leaving as well. And to my joy, they turned off the only light. It was pitch black now.

“Shit. Ah, I’m sorry Farah, I fucked up.” I mumbled as I started to loosen my wrists from the rope. It won’t move, but I continued even though I felt the pain in my wrists already rising. After what felt like an eternity, the door swung open, and the light got turned on. Squeezing my eyes because I turned blind on an instant.

“So. How are you doing?” Slowly opening my eyes again, I see him. He is standing a little in the shadow, but enough in the light. He is so damn huge. And I don’t mean only his height. He is built like a bulldozer. There was no way I could have won against him earlier. If he would just stand there and somebody else would interrogate me, I would be terrified. But his voice is way too kind. He sounds as if he doesn’t even plan to hurt me. Also, he didn’t really hurt me outside. Why did he not just knock me out. There is something wrong with him. Maybe he is a spy? He suddenly stomped to me and grabbed me by my shoulder, pushing me back, so that the chair lifted off. “Don’t pretend that you are not scared. I will make you fear being any longer alive.” He let go of me and walked away again. There was another person in the corner again, I don’t see much, but there is clearly somebody standing. Short after my attacker walked away, he placed a chair in front of me and sat down. I can’t see his eyes, it’s too damn dark here. But I’m sure he is as scary as Ghost is. I guess all masked guys are like that.

“You know how they call me?” He asked amused. I shook my head. I can’t even speak mate. I have still duct tape on my mouth! He then leaned closer and whispered in my ear: “König.” It took me a moment to realise, Oh shit. It’s him. My blood froze. This big man with the sniper hood. Why didn’t I come to the realisation earlier. Ghost told me about him. He worked with him once. Long time ago, he told me, that this huge man was called König. King in German. And that even Ghost himself was terrified of König. And that psycho is now sitting right in front of me. I couldn’t get better, right?

“You heard of me. I see.” He moved back in his chair. “I’m sure my old friend Ghost told you a little about me. Anyway, speaking of Ghost. That’s why you are here.” He paused and moved his chair closer. He leaned over to me, with his head next to my ear, he whispered slowly: “Where is Simon Riley aka Ghost. Be a good little sweetheart and tell me. Otherwise, I don’t see an option, but using that knife in my right hand. So, what do you say? Should I take the tape off, and we have a nice little chat?” I nodded slowly. He moved away once more and ripped the tape off my mouth. “So where is Ghost?” He asked once again. I just smiled at him. Not that fast big man.

I leaned over to him and smiled devilish. “Could you do that again, but this time with your hands between my legs. You just unlocked a new kink for me, big boy.” He jumped back and before I could realise anything, he pressed the duct tape over my mouth again. Ah shit.

Ghost told me that König has severe anxiety issues. If you talk back to him or invade his personal space. He gets ‘uneasy’. It worked. A little. “If you talk garbage like that, you won’t come out here that easy. You know that.” He spoke louder. Then he was leaving the room once again, the shadow person followed him. My time to continue on those damn ropes, but this time he wasn’t gone that long. König slammed the door open. “Alright” he says, coming to me. “Your last chance. Tell me where Ghost is, and you can go. Or don’t tell me where he is, and I’ll make your life a nightmare.” He sat down in front looking me dead in the eyes. Realising that he entered the room alone this time, I nodded again. He hesitated but removed the tape once more. “I thought we were clear how things are going Farah.” He whispered at me, before I even got a chance to speak, the shadow person entered the room. König cleared his throat and spoke loud to me: “If you push your luck, I will cut you to pieces. Are we clear!”

Damn, I was confused but played along. I nodded. He leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “So, where is the last location you have seen Simon Riley?” he asked once again. His voice sounds more and more annoyed. I took a deep breath, and looked at him with burning eyes: “Last location I saw him? In my bed, on top of me, sir.” I giggled; does he really think I would tell him where my team is, I never heard of any plan, but he must think I’m Farah, did she actually betray us? König sighed in disappointment. “I hoped you would make it not that hard for us. But that was your choice.” He drew a knife and started to cut my arm, not deep, not much. But it hurts even more than a real cut. I tried to push him away with my shoulder, but I was fixated to the chair, struggling was helping nothing. Realising that the shadow person left again, König stopped abruptly. He leaned to me and whispered. “What are you doing? We have orders.” He literally hissed at me like an angry cat. I was so mad, I would like to punch him in the face. Or anything. Why would Farah do that.

The door flew open, and a big man entered the room. König jumped back in his role: “Stop squirming. You can’t get out of here. You choose it, so take it like a man.” He laughed at me. “I’m a woman! Vollidiot”! (Big idiot) I yelled at him. He suddenly froze and looked at me in shock. “What? Never heard a woman speak German before?” Now it was me who was laughing. Indeed, I knew some German. I had to work with the German special forces three years ago, they taught me mainly bad words, but practical. König shook his head and wanted to say something, but the big man in the back interrupted him. “How is going. Does bitch talk?” König turned around and answered. “Yes, last location they saw Ghost was North to the old Hospital. They had a camp there.” The other man laughed. “Perfect. You, kill her. We take look there.” With this he left.

“What? I never told you anything!” I yelled at König, who was putting his knife away. He then pulled some first aid stuff out of his bag and applied a cream and a bandage to my wound. “What are you doing?! Fucking Hell! Are you dumb!” I yelled at him. He then placed his face close to mine and whispered, “You are not Farah, right? You are y/n. Ghost should have told me he changed the plan. Anyway, Scream a little louder now and when I shoot, you’ll be quite. Don’t do anything stupid. We are on the same team.” He walked away and pulled out a gun. He pointed it not at me, but to the left. I had to believe him for now, he told this man false information and want to help me. So I must trust him. Even if I don’t want to. I nodded and started screaming like hell. “No! Fuck you! I told you what you wanted to hear! Let me go!!” then he shot twice into a bag to the left. I stopped screaming and waited for him to do anything.

He untied my feet and hands and pointed to my stuff back on a small table. “We will leave now. Hurry up.” He said as he opened the door. Quickly I packed my stuff and loaded the gun. “Ready to go” I whispered, standing behind him. Let’s stay calm and focused. If he tries to take me down, I’ll shoot him this time for good. He nods, “Stay quite.” He whispered back as we left the room and entered an even darker hallway where nobody was seen. He checks left and right, then signed me to stay close. With him leading the way, it was impossible for me to see anything, because he was just so big and blocked all view. We moved quietly and quickly. He pointed to a door, signing me to get through as he stood with his back against it, eyes on the hallway area. I wanted to open the door. “Shit, it’s locked.” I hissed. König looked down to me. “Picking takes too long. Keep your eyes on the hallway.” He said and we quickly changed places. With half an eye, I looked what he was doing. He put his gun away and took a deep breath. Then he slammed his shoulder against the door. With a loud crack, it broke open. That wasn’t even half of his force. No wonder I didn’t had a chance. Actually, I could take him out now, he is unarmed, I have the gun. I let out a sigh and shook my head at this thought. Then I got through the door, König followed me now. He pats me on the shoulder, pointing to a van in the distance, then to the left and the front, signing me, I’m supposed to scan there as he scanned right and back. I gave a thump up and made my way to the van.

Finally reaching it, König grabbed my shoulder and turned me around. He was standing right in front of me, looking down on me, as a king would do to his unworthy soldiers. He wanted to say something, but I cut him off. “Don’t even think about it. I’m driving. You make sure nobody follows.” I hissed at him, he hesitated but agreed. Driving off the terrorist camp, I pulled out my radio device: “This is Racoon. To all callsigns, does any one copy?” No response. “Team, this is Racoon. Does anyone copy?” I repeated my question. Nothing. “Racoon is your callsign?” König asked me hesitantly. I took a quick look at him, then focused back on the road. “Yes. The German special force gave me the German form of Racoon. I tried to tame a racoon family near the river where we were camping. With success, not lying.” I told him proudly, now he knows I worked with the Germans, that will come in handy, maybe.

He chuckled: “So you were called, Waschbär? What a horrible callsign.” He giggled more. “What? It’s a cool callsign. Better than König. Or ghost.” I protested. “What about Soap?” He asked. “Soap?” I looked at him again quickly. “His callsign is fitting quite well to mine, don’t you think?” I giggled at my dumb answer, and so did König. “I’m sorry I had to hurt you. It was necessary to make the terrorists believe that you talked.” He spoke with a quiet voice. “So, you said you are on my side? Why nobody mentioned you are, or why did I never meet you? Why did Farah was involved but didn’t warn me before entering the tunnels?” still a little unsure if I really should trust him, I tried to get some answers from him. But König didn’t answer. A we reached the little town I looked at him again, “Hey, Johannes? I asked a question.” He froze and faced me with big eyes. Guess I shocked him a little. I giggled loud. “Why did you call me that?” He asked with a trembling voice, I just laughed at him. “I’m going to call you from today on every possible name, until I got yours right. Sounds like fun. Don’t you think?” I parked the car near an old store. There were plenty of abandoned cars we could ‘borrow’. Sorry to the owner. “What if I don’t tell you when you got my name right?” König asked me while looking away. I giggled at him, “Then I’ll be mad.” and left the car. He followed me. We both stayed low and scanned the area, as we walked towards a black jeep. Best choice for now.

We hopped in the jeep, and what a miracle, the keys were laying on the drivers seat. Horrible what happened to the people here. I shook my head and started the car. Nobody was following us, we didn’t meet anyone as we broke out, and I don’t get any calls over radio. Knowing the parameter, I drove towards the forest. There I will get out of the car and run. When I got rid of König, I’ll make my way to a near hideout. As I drove out of the town, I knew, I can’t trust him. This was all too easy. König didn’t say anything more. And he didn’t look my way anymore either. After 15 minutes of killing silence I parked the car near the forest way and left it. König followed me. Now it’s time to act quickly. As he was taking his gun out of the car I walked over to him and dropped the keys. “Ah damn, could you be so kind?” I asked, pretending I tied my hair up, he bowed down to pick them up, as I turned on my heels and started running. No turning back, just running. I need to get away from him.

I ran as far as possible, square through the forest, sadly my lungs were about to collapse after 10 minutes already. To be fair, running was never my strength. Slowing down, I turned around and was glad to see nobody. Then I picked a big tree and started to climb it. So I could recover from running and check if König was following me. Sitting on the tree I was breathing quietly, listening to the surroundings. I heard and saw nothing. That was good news. 10 minutes passed and I got down from the tree again. I checked once more the area and then instead of running, I sneaked a little bit. Checking my location and compass, I knew I had to turn right, but then suddenly: “And why do you think you could run away from me?” A strong hand grabbed my shoulder and a deep voice spoke angry in my ear. “Fuck.” I cursed. How did he find me. And how silent can that mountain of a man sneak? I didn’t hear him anywhere nearby. As I turned around, I received a radio call “Racoon, this is Ghost. How copy?” I looked at König and he looked at me. I let out a deep and long sigh, but answered calmly. “Ghost, this is Racoon. We have an unpleasant situation.” – “Unpleasant? Your whole disappearance was fucking unpleasant. Thought your dead. Soap has run circles in the floor tiles. Get your ass to base now. And stop playing hide and seek with König. He got his damn orders.” With ghost being obviously mad, I answered protesting. “So you knew he was spying at the terrorist camp? How about inviting me into the plan as well, when you damn send me through the tunnels instead of Farah!” Ghost didn’t answer anything.

I sighed and looked back at König. “Alright, Martin. Lead the way to the road.” My hand gesturing in the forest. König only shook his head. “Not Martin.” He said walking ahead of me, giggling quietly. “You are quite chatty for someone with severe social anxiety.” I spoke, while trying to step on his heels, I got him at least three times. “Could you stop doing that?” He asked, stopped abruptly and turned around. I was so focused, I didn’t realise he stopped, so I just ended up bumping into his chest and almost lost balance, falling back. He suddenly grabbed me and pulled me closer to him. My hands against his chest, his hands holding my shoulders. I looked up at him, he looked down. Time stops moving, everything was quiet. All I saw where his eyes, focusing on my eyes. It felt like an eternity as we just stood, holding each other and saying nothing.

Then he cleared his voices. “Do-do you-“ he stuttered, looking left and right next to me. “Do you think. We…. We c-could.” I guess this is the anxiety Ghost was talking about. But he wasn’t nervous the whole time. Why now? I tilted my head a little bit and smiled at him. Maybe it helps him to calm down. “Yeah?” I asked. He still couldn’t look in my eyes. Then he spoke a little above a whisper. “Do you. Think. We. C-could. B-be-become friends?” he was clearly embarrassed. Actually, he’s cute. So big and so shy. I chuckled and leaned a little more against him. “I’d love to be friends with you, Peter.” He just rolled his eyes and pushed me away. Then he turned around and continued walking. “Not Peter.” He spoke. I laughed. “How about Nick?” – “No.” – “Erik?” – “Stop it, Waschbär-Frau.” I frowned at his comment. “Racoon woman? More like Racoon Whisperer. Mighty Racoon Whisperer.” I giggled over my new name. König chuckled too. He tried to do it quietly, but I heard him. Knowing that he is no threat, I finally could relax around him. I think we will get along. I’m sorry to say, but maybe it was meant to be that I ended up in Farahs position. I was able to meet König in a way, I wouldn’t had otherwise. A little tickle in my belly grew, I’m looking forward to what will come.

[missmaywemeetagain]

A Million Little Heartaches: Pandora's Box 💔💫❤️‍🔥

A/N: Hi, my darlin's! I was feeling a little hesitant about posting my first non-EP fic, but I got over myself lol. This one is a bit of an experiment as it's not told in chronological order, and we'll see if I continue it based on inspiration and interest. Please let me know your thoughts! As always, they are so appreciated and what helps keep me motivated a lot of the time, especially as I'm trying new things. I really hope you enjoy it and can't wait to hear what you think. 💗

ALSO, I'm not sure if tumblr has changed its algorithm or what, but I know I'm not seeing people's posts in my feed like I used to. Turn on notifications for me to not miss anything and if you like this, it would be super helpful if you reblog this post! Thank you babies! 💗

Key Tropes: Angst, right person(s)-wrong time, star-crossed lovers, slow burn kinda? friends to enemies to friends to lovers?(LOL), forbidden love, second chance love

💥 Head's up! My first Scarf Universe exclusive (Red Scarf) is set to come out THIS WEEK for my Patreons! It's utterly filthy and indulgent, so if you are interested, you can join my Patreon community HERE to get access! 💥

A Million Little Heartaches

Part 1: Pandora’s Box

March 2026

I’ve curled my legs up under me in an oversized armchair, staring aimlessly at the fire. My empty wine glass is precariously balanced in my hand as I am hypnotized by the flames. Liam’s angry outburst shocked everyone, and his words still ring like poison in my ears:

You abandoned me.

I run through all the things I could’ve said in response instead of just standing there speechless as he ripped me into pieces in front of everybody.

Namely, you made your choice, Liam. And it wasn’t me.

It was never me.

Good ole Lily, forever the consolation prize, I muse, shaking my head.

There’s a hollow feeling in my heart that hasn’t been there for a long, long time.

“Mind if I join you?” Jake’s rumbling voice startles me out of my staring contest with the fire.

Oh god, now? Seriously? is what I’m thinking, but I manage a cordial nod instead, setting my empty glass on the side table next to me.

He sits in the chair facing mine. A glance over reminds me he’s a man now, not a boy, the firelight hitting the weathered but not unattractive lines on what used to be a baby face. The peach fuzz which had tickled my cheek so long ago is now a short, dark beard on a sharper, less rounded jaw. His once sandy hair has darkened some and is peppered with grey. He has aged well.

I can’t imagine how he must be looking at me after all these years, at the changes he must see. I know I’m not the girl I was. I look back at the fire.

“Are you okay?” he asks after a moment of silence.

I roll my eyes over to him and huff a bitter laugh. “Does it matter?”

I shouldn’t have said it like that—Liam’s freak out wasn’t Jake’s fault—but everything feels so fucking raw that I don’t have the wherewithal for a filter.

“It always has,” he says quietly.

The words hang there between us, heavy. There’s a poignancy and deeper meaning to them that slaps me out of my pity party.

“Excuse me?” I breathe out, blinking. My heart starts racing, like a hummingbird trapped in my ribcage.

He doesn’t get to say my feelings have always mattered. Not him. Not the guy who dragged me to hell and back because he was too much of a coward to let me down easy. Not the one who I spent nearly six years trying desperately to know and wishing for him to know me, too. Who I tried, only somewhat successfully, to forge a friendship with after it seemed all between us was well and truly done.

Jake shifts uncomfortably in his seat, looking at the fire before he finds what he needs there to bring himself to look back at me.

He only knows a fraction of what he put me through, or at least I think he does. He was ever the master at shutting me out, so it’s always been hard to know what he’s thinking or feeling without having to pry it out of him with a crowbar.

His voice echoes in my head, a long-forgotten memory: I guess I’m just the kind of person who hides my feelings.

An understatement.

This makes it a surprise when he looks straight at me with those warm brown eyes that used to melt me into the floor and says, “Your feelings have always mattered.”

Maybe it’s the wine, or the blowup with Liam, but my filter disappears completely. There’s a latent, hot anger that boils to the surface.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. You, of all people, think my feelings have always mattered?” I throw back at him, scoffing.

He looks as though I’ve slapped him, and if I wasn’t so upset, I might try to backtrack. But I spent six years of my adolescence trying to shield him from my feelings, and as an adult, I don’t have time for that shit anymore.

“I suppose I deserve that,” he recovers, looking back at the fire.

I’m surprised, to say the least. It’s not as though we hadn’t talked about it back in the day, at least somewhat, but I never let him know just how deeply he hurt me. I never told him about the panic attacks, the intense depressions, or the manic feelings I’d get from just a morsel of attention from him. No, I’d buried all that for the sake of our “friendship” or whatever it was.

Part of me knows it’s stupid to try and rehash things that we put to rest so long ago. I shouldn’t hold it against him—we were just teenagers—but it wasn’t until my twenties that I finally grasped just how much Jake fucked me up. He made me think that if you love someone enough, they can treat you however they want and it doesn’t matter, and if it’s “meant to be” then someone can string you along indefinitely without consequence. I’d been so convinced we were these star-crossed lovers that had such a deep thread of connection that we’d someday figure it out. But someday never came.

Liam had. Liam pulled me from the ashes of my heartbreak and showed me real love. Or so I’d hoped. I’d hoped so much that I’d ignored and excused all the similarities between the way he and Jake treated me. But he had loved me and risked it all for me at one time. I mattered to him, to a fault.

But with Jake, I’m never sure I mattered. I always felt on thin ice, or at least that’s how I remember it. But memory warps over time. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve been wrong about all of it.

God, he still has me running circles around myself.

“Yeah, you do deserve it, a little,” is what I finally settle on, but it comes out gentler than I want it to.

He gives me a familiar sardonic half-smile.

Ah, there he is, the little shit. It was a look that twenty years ago would set my heart a-flutter on a good day and made me want to throttle him on a bad one. Some things never change.

Another thing that hasn’t changed is my need to shove him past his comfort zone with all my thoughts and feelings.

“Sometimes, I’m still not sure I mattered to you at all.” The words catch in my throat, giving away more than I want to.

His eyes snap back to mine. “How can you say that?” he asks with a surprising level of hurt in his voice.

I’m taken aback. “Jake, I don’t think you entirely understand the way you…” I stop myself and shake my head.

“The way I what? Say it,” he challenges, uncharacteristically.

I take a deep breath. “The way you broke my heart completely. How I spent months—no, years—trying to figure out what I had done that was so bad that you didn’t have or couldn’t really admit you had feelings for me, or why I was so repulsive you couldn’t bear to be with me. You had me so tied in knots I could hardly breathe.”

“Lily, you were never—” he starts, shaking his head, but I don’t listen, plowing right through whatever he thinks he needs to say.

“And then Liam came into the picture and helped me heal, and still I was so desperate for your approval, for us to be friends. But you always, always kept me at arm’s length. I could never figure any of it out. I still wonder if it was all one-sided and I was just a crazy little girl who manufactured this epic love story in her head,” I ramble out, shaking my head.

I’m saying too much, I know I am, but what the fuck does it matter now, after all this time? I have no need to impress him anymore.

   He shutters down, and it’s so entirely familiar that I have to laugh. “That. Right there,” I point, “is the same thing you did to me 27 years ago. You could never let me in, could you? As much as I hoped you would, as close as I swear I got sometimes, this brick wall is what made me question everything about us. It always has.”

His eyes widen as he’s called out so viciously, his hands tensing then releasing the arms on the chair. I let him sit in it for a moment before I drop the last bombshell, the one I’m sure will ruin the precarious balance between us:

“You were my first love, Jake, and I was so in love with you it hurt. God, I was so convinced we were connected in some timeless, deep, soulmates kind of way. And sometimes you did things that seemed to confirm that, but then you’d turn around and…well, I tried so hard to understand why you didn’t feel it, too. But I was young and stupid and obsessed, I guess,” I laugh, looking into the fire. “I finally just had to accept I was never gonna figure you out or understand why you didn’t love me back.”

He’s quiet for a long moment and I’m almost afraid he’s going to get up and walk away.

“Sorry, I guess old habits die hard. Here I am, still blasting you with all my feelings, 25-plus-years later,” I chuckle. “No wonder you never wanted to be with m—”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” he interrupts.

My head snaps back to him. “What?”

“I never meant to hurt you like that. I never meant to drive you to…Liam,” he says, with a frustrated bitterness in his tone that surprises me.

“Okay…?” I’m not sure where this is going, but my heart kicks up again.

“I told you back then I liked you,” he says blatantly, as if it were ever that simple between us.

I can’t help but laugh. “Did you, really? You told me in different ways how you were ‘gonna ask me out, but…’. And there was always a ‘but.’ And it was never in the present tense. I heard from other people that you liked me, sure, but you never really told me. Not in a way that felt like I wasn’t forcing something out of you that you were ashamed of or just telling me to save face. And it was always me who came to you. Always. You had a thousand chances and never followed through. We never even kissed, Jake! You kissed everyone but me. What was I supposed to think?”

“I-I-I…damn it, Lily,” he growls. “I couldn’t.”

 “Excuse me? You very much ‘could,’ you just didn’t want to. And that’s fine, you never owed it to me to reciprocate my feelings. Just don’t pretend—”

“Of course, I had feelings for you!” he yells.

I’m stunned into silence.

“I had feelings for you since we were 12! You were the first girl I ever really thought of in that way and I had no idea how to deal with it. And the moment you showed any interest in me I panicked and pushed you away. And I regretted it after and thought I’d ruined everything, but you came back, and I-I-I did it again. And again. Because my feelings for you scared the shit out of me.”

My heart is jackhammering now. I can barely breathe. “Why?”

“You were special. I couldn’t—I couldn’t ruin that…or you.”

“That doesn’t make any sense! You didn’t want to ‘ruin me’ so you broke my heart, over and over?”

“I didn’t deserve you. You were way too good for me and way out of my league.”

Flabbergasted, I blink at him. The pure insanity of this conversation has me whirling.

“But you kept flirting with me anyway, leading me on? You’d hug me, hold my hand…Lord, you even snuggled me and popped a fucking boner against me at that party freshman year…” I babble.

A blush floods his cheeks. “I was only 15, I-I-I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“You knew enough to fuck Talia.”

He looks like I’ve struck him again, but I can see in his eyes he knows I’m right. Talia would forever be a sore spot between us.

“I was young. And dumb.”

“No shit. And it doesn’t track. You did the same with Tina, Heather, and pretty much any other girl who showed the slightest bit of interest in you. Everyone except me.”

“I know. I was wrong. I was in a…bad place.”

“I practically handed myself to you on a platter and you humiliated me. How do you think it felt that I was the only one you never…you just kept me dangling on a string,” I say, shaking with anger.

“I know,” he whispers, “I’m sorry, I just couldn’t…”

“Sure,” I shake my head and look away. I don’t know why I care so much. I shouldn’t. This is all ancient history, and maybe it is Liam’s doing for sucking me back into the past tonight, but for some reason it all feels like it happened yesterday.

“I knew it was wrong, that I was treating you badly, a-a-and that’s why I found God. I wanted to be better…for you.”

Something cracks inside of me at the gesture. It doesn’t make any sense—why would he do that for me? My breath starts to falter a bit.

I remember he had changed dramatically mid-sophomore year, turning into a nicer, happier, and kinder version of himself. He’d stopped going after every girl in sight and wasn’t blatantly ignoring me anymore. We’d become friends again. I’d thought he was swept up in wanting to hang with the cooler, older Christian kids in the group, bowing to a weird form of peer pressure, just as I had done.

Of course, my “conversion” had not stuck after everything that happened later, but that’s beside the point.

Slowly, pieces start falling into place. Things I’d never considered.  

“You didn’t. You did it for…me?” I say breathlessly. “That’s a pretty drastic thing for a 16-year-old to do…”

He nods.

A shiver runs down my spine.

“Why…why would you do something like that for me?” I hold my breath and quell the trembling of my hands by clasping them together.

In the heavy pause, it feels like all the air gets sucked out of the room, and everything else around us warps and stops.

“Because I was completely in love with you.”

My heart stops. “What?” I whisper.

This can’t be real.

But his eyes are as open and pleading as I’ve ever seen them, begging me to finally understand what he couldn’t impart all those years ago.

“Then why didn’t you tell me?” I manage to choke out.

A pained look crosses his face. “I was too late.”

It’s like I’m 16 again, the way my heart is ready to explode while simultaneously being yanked from my chest. The air whooshes out of my lungs and I can’t bring myself to speak. All I can do is look over at him with questioning eyes.

“Me being such an asshole pushed you straight into his arms and by the time I came to my senses, it was too late. You’d fallen for him, even though he was with someone else,” he says bitterly.

He is not wrong. The whole reason Liam and I became friends in the first place was he listened to my heartbreak over Jake.

“So, I tried to be your friend instead. That was what you wanted, right? I thought maybe I could get closer to you and change your mind, talk some sense into you.”

I find my voice. “What are you even talking about? Liam and I were very much not together that spring and summer because of Melissa. You had the perfect chance, but you started dating Tiffany right when school got out.”

His jaw sets, clenches. “Oh, come on. It was beyond obvious you weren’t over him. So, yeah, when Tiffany showed interest, I gave it a chance. But I couldn’t stop thinking about you. You probably don’t remember how I messaged you all the time. How our conversations got longer a-a-and deeper. How I begged you to call me.”

Vague memories flash back to me. “I did call you. And I definitely would’ve remembered you telling me this!” I shake my head.

He has no idea how this revelation would have changed everything. God, I can’t breathe.

            “I tried to feel you out that fall, but you were pretty focused on Liam.”

            Mind racing, I try to remember how it all went down. My attraction to Liam had been all-consuming, made worse by the way we desperately tried to keep our hands off each other when Melissa left for college. We weren’t officially together, but it was obvious to anyone with eyes that we were mad about each other. Between that, the play, and keeping my grades up, things were intense that fall, to say the least. But there had been some weird moments with Jake that I’d tried to brush off as friendly at the time, but maybe they weren’t.

            “Friendsgiving.” It pops into my head suddenly, and I look at him with wide eyes. “I couldn’t figure it out—you went out of your way to take me home that night, then you were so teasing and flirty. We sat in my driveway for like half an hour. You couldn’t keep your hands off me—tickling me and putting your arm around me. I thought it was strange…but you were with Tiffany. I convinced myself I was imagining it.”

            It starts to dawn on me that perhaps my instincts had been right this whole damn time.

            I ramble as I recall more, “You were so obsessed about Mick having to kiss me for the play. We talked about how weird it would be if you had to understudy and it was us who had to kiss instead.”

            Jake looks at me sheepishly. “I wanted to kiss you so badly.”

            “God, why didn’t you?!”

            “You were in love with Liam!”

            “You are still such an idiot. Did you not hear anything I’ve said to you? If you’d kissed me, it wouldn’t have mattered. You were always there in the back of my mind. It was always you.” My hands are trembling at the admission, at how easily I would’ve folded if he had come for me.

            His eyes narrow, almost incredulously, as if he can’t believe it.

            “That’s all I ever wanted, Jake—for you to care enough to show me, or tell me, or anything at all! To fight for me…for us. But you never had the balls to do it, and that’s why we never happened. Not because of Liam. Not because I didn’t feel the same way. Because of you,” I say, voice shaking as hard as my hands.

            I’m coming apart at the seams, unravelling for the second time tonight because of men who never truly understood me or put me first. Refusing to cry in front of Jake and let him know just how much he’d changed with his inaction, I stand too quickly, wobbling on my feet.

            Jake jumps up to steady me, one hand at my forearm and the other at my waist, touching me for the first time in over 20 years. My stupid body responds with a jolt of electricity now just as it did then, like a phantom limb come to life. Logic tells me to pull away.

I don’t.

            He steps closer. “I’m sorry,” he whispers into my hair, “I feel like all I’ve ever done is hurt you, and I hate myself for it.”

            Oh, god. His proximity is dizzying, a reminder of moments long gone. A whiff of cologne. The way his thumb gently rubs the dip of my waist through my dress. The not-so-subtle way he lures me in closer.

            I don’t understand. How is it after the decades of life that have occurred, after having my heart swell and break and swell again with different types of love, that this man still can send me reeling?

            And he’s right—all he’s ever done is hurt me and tie me in knots. Being near him is like being edged in the most painful of ways because there is never any payoff. He had seen to that.

            There is something inherently cruel in the fate of it all. How the moment I had moved on all those years ago, the moment I released my hope of being with him and found another, that was when he figured his shit out. The worst part used to be feeling like he’d never felt the same about me, but knowing now that he loved me somehow makes everything ache even worse than it did before.

            Tears sting the corners of my eyes, even though I promised myself long ago I’d never shed another tear over Jake. I hate he will forever be the one that got away. The one who I’d never felt closure with, like a scab that crusts over but won’t heal underneath. As stupid as it sounds, there has been a part of me since the moment he so sweetly helped me solve a math problem in the 7th grade that has unwillingly left a piece of my heart in his hands ever since, no matter how many others there have been to take his place in between.

            And I hate him for that. I hate him even more now that I know I was always right about us from the start, about the thread of connection that bound us to each other almost 30 years ago.

“Does it even bother you? The ‘what could have been?’ Did it cross your mind that maybe everything would be different if you’d just said something? Or did you just forget about me, about all of it?” I whisper angrily.

God knows, I haven’t.

Furious and frazzled, I press my hands into his chest to push away. It’s a terrible move because his large hand covers mine, pinning it to him. He’s warm through his dress shirt and his heart beats wildly under my palm. My eyes fly up to meet his.

“I think about it all the time. More than I should. But God works in mysterious ways,” he says, as if that explains it all.

I roll my eyes. Another wonderful excuse. “I guess he does,” I add sarcastically.  Extricating myself from him, I immediately feel clearer, but part of me wants nothing more to feel his touch on me again. I shake the feeling off.

I had abandoned religion and the guilt and bigotry that came along with it the moment I got to college, when I realized just how much it had fucked my young brain up. Not shockingly, the religious friends who’d taken such offense when I’d gotten together with Liam were the same ones who quickly fell out of my life once they realized I wasn’t going to tow the line. Jake had only dug his heels in deeper into his religion after that, with Tiffany and his cookie-cutter perfect family and church going ways, and now it crosses my mind that it’s all because of me.

Don’t be stupid.

He’s waiting on me to say something. It takes me a moment to absorb the fact that he admitted thinking about me more than he should. This good and pious Christian man was thinking about me when he should have been thinking about his wife.

But I am in no place to judge. Not about this.

I want to know what salacious thoughts have run through his mind about me, but I can’t bring myself to ask. Part of me wants to utterly ruin him in all the ways I couldn’t when we were teenagers. A heat gathers low in my belly at the thought, at his nearness.

Romantic and physical chemistry is no joke, I realize. It’s like my pheromones were preprogrammed by the universe to be attracted to his, and by the cautiously heated look he’s giving me now, I’m wondering if it’s always been the same for him.

One of my biggest regrets about us, since the beginning, was the question that if we had even just kissed once and got it over with, would it have broken the tension between us like a summer rainstorm breaks the heat? Would we have gotten it out of our system and figured out if whatever chemistry we had was real or just something we’d worked up in our imaginations?

But it’s too late for that. The past can’t be changed. Now the ‘what if’s’ that plagued me for all these years hurt worse than before, knowing that with one stupid admission or one kiss all those years ago, we could have had it all. Maybe we would have been the high school sweethearts who got married and annoy our 2.5 kids with stories about what an idiot their dad was until he’d finally told me how he felt.

There would’ve been no me-and-Liam, or him leaving me because the world had gone to shit. I wouldn’t have met my husband. All of it, an entire life I’ll never know, flashes before my eyes and nearly brings me to my knees.

And while I don’t subscribe to his God, I do think the universe puts things in our path. But what was the point of all this, then—of us never being the “us” we both know we wanted it to be? I just don’t see why this thing can’t seem to die and fade into the ether. He’s like a bad penny I can’t shake.

At least with Liam, there was closure. We had loved and dated and all of the milestones that go with that. Knowing Jake loved me doesn’t make me truly feel any better, other than the fact I know I wasn’t a delusional, lovesick teenager.

But he loved a version of me that’s grown up into someone different, just as I begrudgingly loved a version of him that I’d made up in my head to be better than he was.

I’ve been quiet too long. “Why?” It pops out of my mouth unwillingly. “Why do you still think of me?”

“Do you still think of me?” I expect him to shirk away from the question, but he flips it on me so fast I have whiplash.

I close my mouth, my eyes darting away, answering his question.

He nods. “Then you know.”

Does that mean he replays fuzzy memories of interlocking his fingers with mine or pulling me too close in a dance? He sees the stolen, meaningful glances in his mind’s eye? He thinks about the multitude of chances he had to press his lips to mine but didn’t and what may have happened if it had gone farther than that? He thinks of how if he and I became a “we” it would’ve completely altered the course of our lives?

I have trouble thinking he ponders any of that.

But if he loved me like he says he did…

The hollow ache in my heart is back with a vengeance, erasing all hope I had at getting out of here relatively unscathed.

“Maybe we were just destined to hurt each other. Maybe we’ve always been bad for each other,” I say indignantly instead of voicing all the other thoughts buzzing in my head. But it feels true, nonetheless.

I watch him shake his head rather vehemently. He opens his mouth to speak, but I beat him to the punch.

“But too bad we never had the chance to find out for sure,” I add with venom. After this, I don’t think I’ll ever stop feeling like he stole that chance from me.

We were babies. Give the guy a break, a tiny voice in the back of my head chimes in.

            Unfortunately, I’m a little too emotionally wrecked to let a silly thing like logic get me back on track and remind me I’m a goddamned adult.

            Star-crossed lovers aren’t real. “Meant to be” isn’t real. Threads of fate tying us together in inexplicable ways aren’t real. What’s real is hormones and youth and cowardice and terrible timing. What’s real are jobs and spouses and children.

            Then why can’t I shake the feeling that this isn’t even close to being the end for us? It makes no sense.

            It never has.

            I grab my purse. Furious and regretful, I can’t be around him anymore, which is made evident by the fact that I want to stay so badly, even if it means my heart is bleeding out in front of him. But I have more self-respect now than I had when I was 16, and I certainly am not going to cry in front of him.

            “Goodbye Jake. I hope your life is everything you want it to be. Give Tiffany my best.” It’s a dig, to be sure. We both know Tiffany wants nothing to do with me, and now I finally know why. I turn and walk away, quickly, escaping my past down the darkened hallway towards the bathrooms.

            “Lily, wait,” he commands from behind me, catching up and grabbing my hand. Shocked at his tone of voice and forwardness, I have no choice to spin back to him. His eyes are blazing.

            “What? What is there left to say?” I say, my voice cracking with emotion. “That one of my biggest regrets is that we never made this work, this—this silly pseudo-romance from our teens? That I hate how much this matters to me, even now, even though I haven’t seen you in years?”

            He advances, his eyes never leaving mine, and a small huff escapes my lips as my back hits the wall. It’s hard not to notice he’s broader and taller than he used to be as his body comes so close to pressing against mine. Every one of my nerves sparks to attention at his sudden proximity, a buzzing static electricity.

His hand clasps my neck, the rough pad of his thumb trailing along my jaw. I have no choice but to keep looking up at him, into those darkened brown eyes.

“What are you doing?” I whisper.

Shock precedes a pool of fire low in my belly when he boldly brings his thumb to the center of my lips and slowly drags it down. My lips part and a small moan escapes them. I’m vaguely aware of my purse hitting the floor with a thunk.

“What I should’ve done a long time ago,” he says definitively. His warm breath tickles my cheek where his mouth hovers too close to mine.

As my body fully kicks into overdrive, I’m reminded of what I’ve always known: I’m incapable of resisting Jake Lawson. One last rational thought pushes through the fire that is rapidly consuming me.

“This is a bad idea,” I pant, my eyes scanning his face.

“A terrible one,” he agrees, and when he nods, his nose brushes against mine.

I expect a crash of lips and teeth, but instead his soft lips brush mine tantalizingly, dragging in a way that sends an explosion of heat through my chest. The warmth of our breath mingles, and I can’t stop the way my hands instinctively reach for the lapels of his jacket. His hand on my neck pulls me closer and when our lips finally press together in earnest, oh, god, it’s everything I’d ever hoped it would be.

Instead of breaking away, we are pulled into each other by some unknown force that makes my entire body tingle from head to toe. Jake deepens the kiss, and I turn as pliable as putty in his arms, wondering how it is possible that we went this damn long without doing this. His fingers tighten in my hair, eliciting a groan as his mouth opens and his tongue persuasively brushes against my lips. Granting permission, I open to him further and our tongues roll gingerly against each other.

Something ignites in me that hasn’t in a long, long time. It’s a blast of desire and truth so strong it threatens to undo me. It’s different than pure passion—there’s a yearning, a need, a rightness lacing every touch between us. And based on the way he clings to me now, I have no doubt he feels it, too, this sense of fate that we were always destined to end up here.

Every instinct I have wants to feed the fire that is swirling in my belly, but the last thread of rationality left in me reminds me that I shouldn’t let this go too far. It has gone too far already. I force myself to pull away, which is like prying two strong magnets off each other. I can’t move more than an inch, just enough to separate our lips. I’m too dizzy with the smell of him and what must be a lack of oxygen. Or maybe it’s because my entire world feels upended.

His forehead rests on mine, his thumb caressing the hollow of my throat. “Shit,” he sighs out with a shudder, his breath tickling my face as he struggles to control himself.

For once in my life, I have no doubt of what he’s feeling. The way he says that one word tells me he is every bit as blindsided, connected, and aroused as I am. But it’s more than just that. A tether of knowing has tightened between us. It’s so overwhelming I feel like I might cry.

As we stand pressed close together in this dark hallway, I don’t think either of us truly expected it to feel like this. Like everything that’s been wrong between us was because we resisted this bond, a power that feels beyond anything I could have imagined. In mere moments, we’ve confirmed what both of us have inherently known but tried to ignore for almost three decades.

That’s when I realize we’ve opened Pandora’s box. We can never go back.

“Jake…” I choke, trying to get the words out, but they won’t come.

“I know,” he responds solemnly, and I have no doubt he has come to the same conclusion as I have:

We are in deep trouble.

*

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[yay855]

I need you people to try this game- it's an open-source survival sci-fi traditional roguelike called Cataclysm Bright Nights. It's a fork based off of Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead, but designed to be more focused on fun than punishing realism- though it's still plenty realistic, at least given what kind of game it is.

For those who don't know, Cataclysm is an old game, from 2010, that has been developed over time and has since forked off into two competing versions. You play as the survivor of the Cataclysm, and now have to figure out how to keep surviving in the face of an ever-evolving threat.

Grab the game from the release section of the github; the game's full description (and my gushing) is below the cut.

You may be asking, "that description is kind of vague, what exactly was this apocalypse?", well the answer is all of them. Every single human is infected with a parasitic interdimensional organism known as The Blob, which mutates its host in response to certain things. Every living human, and many animals, that dies will come back as a zombie, and the longer the Cataclysm goes on, the more the zombies and wildlife will mutate further. There are also crazed humans who fight alongside the undead, bandits, alien invaders known as Mi-Go, demons rising from the netherrealms, hostile military robots and cyborgs and turrets dot the landscape, and there's even a fungal hive mind trying to infect all other life out of a twisted benevolence.

The game also has one of the most indepth crafting systems I've ever seen. Instead of simply being able to build with a workbench or your bare hands, most crafting recipes require the proper tools- and if you don't have them, you can make some. Pick some flowers to turn their stems into cordage, grab some rocks, and make a stone hammer and knife; build a basic screwdriver out of scrap metal and wood, and a makeshift crowbar out of a pipe you flattened on one end. Carve a wooden or bone needle and learn to sew a gambeson. Disassemble a lawnmower and tie the blade to a long stick to make a makeshift polearm. Construct a full forging setup and make yourself a sword and metal armor. Add an electric motor and a motorcycle battery to a bicycle to make it run that much faster. Take the turret mount off of a firetruck, weld it to the hood of the car you stole, and install a handmade laser rifle you built from disassembled electronics and camera lenses to run off of the car's battery, allowing you to gun down the undead hordes in relative safety. Disassemble .308 ammo to hand-load the spent 5.56 shells you used gunning down enemies. Delve into ruined laboratories whose experiments have run amok to find high-tech weapons and learn to craft your own targeted mutagens.

You can also learn martial arts, strengthening your abilities with melee weapons. Everyone learns basic brawling once they know how to hit something, but brawling takes higher skill to gain the basic techniques; proper fighting styles have to be carefully found, but are worth it. Use Eskrima and an extendable baton or a dagger to smack and dice your enemies apart, use fencing to effortlessly parry enemy attacks with a rapier, use ninjutsu to silently take down foes, learn drunken boxing to sway and counterattack every single enemy blow, or even learn biojutsu to slice your enemies apart with implanted metal claws or blades.

The game is also unique in that it lets you use mutations and cybernetics hand in hand. You mutating a pair of venomous fangs doesn't stop you from installing smoke and poison resistant cybernetic lungs, you mutating hooves doesn't stop you from installing high-tech alloy plating onto your legs. And you can loot cybernetics from hospitals and augmentation clinics and labs, but you can also dissect zombies for them, using your first aid skill to carefully extract bionics from the undead- you can even build a handheld device to identify bionics in corpses. Generally, mutations are less reliable but cost hunger at most, while cybernetics are more reliable but harder to power and gain.

All in all, it's one of the best roguelikes I've ever played. There's so much to it, there's daily updates, grab the Catapult launcher to try all four forks, just try it out! There's a discord server linked in the github!

[blookyblooky]

#06: Half-Life (+ Gearbox campaigns)

Half-Life is the premier first person video game from company Valve Corporation. The game came about when Valve looked at the majority of fpses out at the time and thought "God DAMN this shit is boring". And it's hard to blame them as even with the occasional Build Engine game a lot of the FPS games consisted of running around in a maze lookin' for keycards and shooting bad guys. The narratives were also frequently not really explored upon and were only given minor attention within the game most of the time. Valve decided "Fuck that" and made a fps game that has a simple but interesting story and combat that actually requires thinking and strategizing. Also, janky 3D models. But it was cool at the time! The 3D stuff there was even more impressive than what was in Quake. No more funny lookin', non-interpolated animations! Valve would excrete this game on November 19th, 1998, which probably made some people lose NNN early because they blew their load at how fucking cool the game was.

In Half-Life you play as 27 year old theoretical physicist and NERD Gordon Freeman who works at the Black Mesa Research Facility where everyone is twice his age and the only women that exist are a recording and a hologram. Mr. Freeman's late for an important test so he suits up and blows up a microwave casserole and heads to the test chamber. The test fucks up and now the facility is overrun with aliens and malfunctioning equipment. And also OSHA-violating architecture but that was there before shit hit the fan. You gotta trek through the ruined facility armed with a crowbar and a handgun.

Then you find out about the military! Cool, they're coming to rescue everybody! Psyche, they're killing anything that moves. Luckily, their brains are about as small as their bullets, but you shouldn't underestimate them as they're a bit more complex than your average FPS enemy. If you're taking cover they'll throw a grenade and they know a thing or two about squad tactics and flanking.

Luckily Gordon is proficient with guns and the only non-suspicious thing you could derive from that is that if you learn how to use a handgun and an automatic weapon, you know how to use everything. Both the Black Mesa facility and U.S. military have a unhealthy habit of leaving dangerous weapons around instead of hiding them in secure boxes on high shelves. Funny thing about the weapons in this game, a good majority of them have alternate functions when you right click. Good example is the shotgun, with the left click being a single barrel shot and the right click being a double barrel shot, combining the coolest types of weapon in FPS games into one. 

Each weapon is good at a specific role but at least have some mild overlap. The Python Revolver and Crossbow  are powerful precision weapons, the shotgun is a powerful weapon up close….the Python revolver and Crossbow can also be used in close quarters and arguably can do what the shotgun can do but better. You have grenades you can cook and throw but they have shit physics so honestly, if its viable just use the SMG grenades unless you super value them, which you should because you can grenade jump and I’m getting ahead of myself-

(A showcase of the SMG.)

You have a crowbar that’s good for breaking the copious amount of crates left in the facility. Break literally any crate you’ll see as more often than not there’s goodies in them, like ammo or health and HEV batteries, which are basically like armor.

 You even get ahold of a alien weapon and I just have to say, I admire the invading aliens for their commitment to using a absolute dogshit weapon

Oh yeah, speaking of the aliens again, the invading aliens starts sending in their own troops as well and they and the military engage in war. You get treated to a lot of scripted events of them battling. Kill ‘em both, you don’t get one’s favor killing the other like its Shadow the Hedgehog. You launch a rocket, take some portals, go to the alien’s home, Xen, suffer through shitty level design, kill a space fetus, and set off an event that leads to even worse events. Oh yeah, and you get snagged by some stupid suit person that keeps you in a train.

So that’s Half-Life, it has some low points but its a fun romp all around. Fun enough for official expansions to come out and they’re made by dogsh I mean Gearbox Software. They made three expansions, one being exclusive to the console port for PS2 that they also worked on. The first expansion to hit the market is Opposing Force.

You play as one of the members of the U.S. Military that came to the facility in the base game. It’s actually specified here that this branch of the military is the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit, HECU for short. You’re Corporal Adrian Shepherd and you gotta get out. This expansion adds new weapons and enemies and hot take incoming: This game needs to take a shower. I sincerely feel like a majority of the new stuff feels under baked and it just leads to a sloppier feeling experience quality wise.

Also, a majority of the guards you’ll encounter are no longer of the Barney variety but rather; They’re Otises. They’re fat and stupid and I don’t like them :(. Also, G-man snags the protagonist again.

Next up on the expansion list is Blue Shift. It’s way shorter than Opposing Force and less impressive as well, no new enemies or weapons here. You play as Barney Calhoun, a Black Mesa security guard; and once again: you gotta leave. This time though you actually succeed in ditching and even manage to depart with some surviving scientists. I’ve beaten this expansion more than i have the base game or Opposing Force which probably has me put on a list. Also with this expansion came the HD Models pack and hot take #2 incoming: i like these :) Vote for the punishment I deserve for such a sin here: https://take.quiz-maker.com/poll4660882x69c54De6-146

Finally, there’s Decay. It’s exclusive to the PS2 version so I never played it but the gist of it is that its a mission-based co op mode where you have to solve puzzles with your plus one. The protagonists are Gina Cross and Colette Green - holy shit so they DO have women at the facility!

Speaking of multiplayer: Deathmatch! Yeah I neglected to mention it but I already kind of talked about it when talking about Half-Life: Deathmatch: Source. My thoughts there still apply, I personally am not a big fan of Half-Life’s deathmatch as I don’t think the combat and style of the game goes with the mode. But that’s just me.

Oh yeah also Half-Life: Source is a thing but I’m not talking about it anyway go play half-life please

[magicalbuffalotransformerman]

BLOOD-BOILED JUDGEMENT

[tl;dr: heaven-feared fallen angel fights robot that killed everything else. no spoilers]

{Railcannon. Sharpshooter. Projectile boost, projectile boost. A couple of parries here and there, and there's another P rank in the books. V1 siphons a little more blood to top off its health bar, and flies down the elevator shaft of 9-2, after freshly beating Gabriel down for the last time.}

{It's been quite the adventure for V1, what with all of the bloodlusting through the layers of Hell and meeting some funky characters along the way. It fought V2 - its apparent superior, from what it read on the internet - and annihilated it. Then Sisyphus Prime, a durable fighter who's Prime Soul started forming BEFORE he died, and won.}

{There is no enemy that can face V1 now and survive.}

{It lands in... 9-4? Isn't there supposed to be a third lev-... doesn't Treachery only have two levels? Where the fuck is V1??}

{It exits the elevator shaft, out to a significantly frozen landscape... wait, this isn't Judecca. What the fuck?}

{A circular arena-styled hellscape at the very bottom of Hell, practically underneath Judecca...? V1 is quite confused. Something that, judging by its notifications, shouldn't be available. It attempts to get back into the elevator shaft, but finds that the doors aren't there.}

{It's stuck here.}

{FUCK.}

{A flash of red appears at the center of the arena. V1 turns to face the center, identifying its final 'challenge'.}

{An angel, around Sisyphus' height, glowing red. They wield a crowbar, staring down V1 like a thing possessed.}

/-/-/ 9-5 // TREACHERY SECRET ENDING \-\-\

\-\-\ FORTUNATE SON /-/-/

{Hah. Funny name for an ice level. V1 waits for whatever monologue the Fallen Angel has prepared.}

{...}

{...}

{...}

{V1 looks to its Knuckleblaster wrist, as if it forgot to bring a watch.}

{A beat passes. V1 looks to the angel, shrugging its arms, wanting to know where the monologue is.}

{Then, some realization hits. Oh, this one's Asbeel, right? The mute one? That makes sense.}

Asbeel: I see now that intimidation doesn't work against your kind.

{Oh, there it is.}

Asbeel: Freak. Your reign of terror across Hell ends here. I shall wreak havoc across your feeble frame and hear your pitiful screams. Your crusade shall end in a whimper, struggling against the floor of Hell. I-

{V1's heard this whole spiel before. It flicks some coins up in the air, pulling off a Railcoin during Asbeel's monologue.}

{Unexpectedly, Asbeel parries the Railcannon shot right back at V1, hitting it for 50 damage.}

Asbeel: How rude.

{V1's left in a brief stupor, never having been counterparried before - especially not with their own Railcoin. Sheesh. Its gyroscopes barely have any time to react before coming up with a battle plan, with Asbeel bringing their crowbar down behind V1's upper shoulder blade plating and ripping the plates off.}

{How uncharacteristically weak. Asbeel wastes no time in pinning the disgusting wretch to the floor chest-up with their crowbar, getting down on their knees to pummel the vampire personally. Senator Style. Two punches in, and...}

{YOU ARE DEAD} { | | | | | 💀 | | | | | } {PRESS [R] TO RETRY}

{...}

{V1 appears again at the bottom of the elevator shaft.}

{...}

{This is going to take a bit.}

{V1 takes a moment to 'breathe' and recuperate before heading back into the arena.}

{Off to its right, Asbeel sits there, kneeling over V1's first corpse. They were to punch the wreck a seventeenth time, before noticing V1's new frame.}

Asbeel: ...oh, you're one of those. Hideous.

{V1's shoulders jittered and gyrated, as if mockingly bellylaughing at the archangel. Then, a shot of white noise.}

V1: SO YOU INTEND TO WIN V1: HOW DO YOU MEAN TO DO SO AGAINST ME V1: I'VE ALREADY KILLED EVERYTHING ELSE

Asbeel: So both of us have secret voices...? Why do you hide yours?

V1: OH, YOU KNOW V1: PLOT-IRRELEVANT VOICE BOX V1: YOU

Asbeel: God had forced me into silence. Now that He's dead, I can talk as much as I want. Oh, I'd like to tell you that Gabriel's still alive.

V1: WELL OF COURSE HE IS V1: IF YOU CAN'T SEE A CORPSE:

Asbeel: ...then they're still alive. I suppose that's a fair assumption. ...Have you ever heard of Undertale?

V1: PLEASE DON'T TELL ME YOU'RE GOING TO REFERENCE SANS

{Asbeel chuckles from underneath their helmet.}

Asbeel: Well, you're already in Hell. Might as well throw some gasoline on you.

{Their fight begun proper, Asbeel flashes back onto their feet, attempting to beat V1 down with its first corpse. V1 parries its own corpse (funny), following up with a shotgun blast.}

{The shotgun pellets simply bounce off of Asbeel's shoulderplate. A crowbar flies into V1's head, the robot barely able to dodge out of the way through dashing to the right.}

{V1 attempts to Whiplash themselves to Asbeel, trying to see if it can't do some close-up damage into their back... but Asbeel wraps their hand around the Whiplash's spearhead. They use the Whiplash to beat V1 into the ground a good couple of times, before pinning V1 to the ground and ripping the Whiplash off of its frame.}

{V1 responds with a point-blank Railcoin into Asbeel's face, knocking them backward, onto their back. They quickly get back onto their feet, looking towards V1's last known position and not seeing it.}

Asbeel: ...clever. What other tricks have you up your sleeves?

{No response. Asbeel assumes it's hiding among the ages-old wreckage of the arena. They begin searching.}

{V1 attempts, over and over, to bash the Whiplash back into its socket. It's not working. The shoulder is minced to bits. This isn't stopping V1, desperate to have its funny grapple arm back.}

{Eventually, it gives up, siphoning whatever blood it can from the Whiplash and preparing to Mal-Nuke Asbeel.}

{The fallen angel strays into range. A Core flies next to their face, followed up by a flash of orange and an explosion, right in the face. This causes Asbeel to stumble over their feet, throwing their crowbar in the general direction of V1.}

{Of course, it misses by a foot.}

{Asbeel flies behind V1, grabbing their crowbar once again and attempting to pin it to a chunk of ice. V1, again, dodges this attack, following up with a Sharpshooter/Slab-Piercer/Railcoin combo. Asbeel collapses to their knees, confusing V1 yet again.}

V1: WHAT'S WITH THE LETHARGY BUDDY

Asbeel: Apologies. It's been a while since I've fought anything one-on-one.

{Belting out a cough, Asbeel adjusts their helmet.}

Asbeel: As for you. Did you get an upgrade in regards to your Railcannon?

V1: EXPLAIN

Asbeel: You seem to be using it quite more than what should be possible. Grab a few extra batteries along the way?

V1: I GUESS SO V1: YOU SURE LOVE MONOLOGUING HUH

{Asbeel gets back onto their feet again. They look over their crowbar.}

Asbeel: How many times are you going to come back?

V1: AS MANY AS IT TAKES TO KILL YOU

Asbeel: As you wish.

{Asbeel cracks their knuckles, chucking their crowbar at V1 before disappearing as soon as V1 looks away.}

{V1 slidejumps around the arena, searching for Asbeel.}

{...}

{...No archangels.}

{No exit shafts either.}

{What's this about, then?}

{V1 stops in place, cycling their weapons impatiently.}

{Three beats pass. A crowbar finds itself in the crevasses of V1's chestplating, ripping said plating out from behind. V1 turns around, getting punched in the face for its efforts.}

{YOU ARE DEAD} { | | | | | 💀 | | | | | } {PRESS [R] TO RETRY}

{...}

{...V1 lands at the bottom of the elevator again.}

{That's some bullshit.}

{V1 flips its Sharpshooter between idle hands, stomping into the arena once more.}

{It is immediately met by its second corpse, parrying it out of the air and ricocheting a charged shot into the angel ahead. It intends to combo that up with some coins.}

{So, in order, V1's opening salvo is as follows: Sharpshooter -> Marksman coins (3) as the Sharpshooter's shot ricochets off of the ground, to act as a sort of sidegrade to a Railcoin -> Railcannon a 4th Marksman coin for pretty good damage.}

{Asbeel responds to the Railcoin by tossing some stolen coins of their own into the air, and ultra-rico-parrying the Railcoin into V1's wings, destroying them.}

{Well. Its armament is gone. Great.}

{V1 steals its Slab Piercer from its corresponding feather before it deactivates, jumps onto Asbeel, and whales on them with all three arms and the Slab Piercer.}

{Asbeel, having a crowbar swing interrupted by getting spidermonkeyed by a security camera, attempts to swing at V1 as it clamors around their bulky frame.}

{After V1 is able to get a total of 31 punches and 6 charged shots into Asbeel's helmet, Asbeel finally responds by digging their free hand into the pesky robot's back and gripping hard, ripping it off of them with force.}

{When V1 got their Whiplash back, Asbeel can not recall. Doesn't matter. They'll simply rip it off again.}

{They bury the bent end of their crowbar into V1's chest before it's able to get back onto its feet, hopping over to a nearby wall and bashing the wall with the newly-created V1-on-a-stick.}

{It takes only three impacts, before-}

{YOU ARE DEAD} { | | | | | 💀 | | | | | } {PRESS [R] TO RETRY}

{...}

{...}

{...The delay is longer this time. Asbeel relieves their crowbar of the corpse, taking a seat on a nearby ice chunk.}

{Five minutes pass.}

{V1 returns from the elevator doors.}

{Asbeel looks towards the vampire.}

V1: SORRY V1: HAD TO RESEARCH SOME NEW TECHNIQUES

{And off it goes, to hide behind a chunk of ice. Asbeel wonders what it might be planning.}

{V1 seems to have grabbed a pre-nerf version of the Sharpshooter. Where? Who fucking knows. It Slam Storage jumps into the ceiling, throwing some coins up before jumping off of the ceiling and back onto the floor, following up with firing the pre-nerf Sharpshooter at one of the coins.}

{This does some fucking nutty damage to Asbeel.}

{V1 comes out of hiding, to find Asbeel kneeling on the ground.}

V1: WHAT DO YOU THINK

{Asbeel hacks up some blood.}

Asbeel: ...a... couple of things... [Suppressed cough]. For example:

{Asbeel's crowbar pops in out of nowhere, making itself known in V1's lower torso. Once V1's attention is focused onto the crowbar, Asbeel throws a haymaker into V1's face.}

{YOU ARE DEAD} { | | | | | 💀 | | | | | } {PRESS [R] TO RETRY}

{...This takes... quite the long time. A time I'd rather not write down each instance for. Here's a couple of them, however.}

-

{Retry 12: Asbeel pulls off a wrestling move on V1, piledriving it.}

{Retry 56: Asbeel uppercuts V1's Knuckleblaster, making it kill itself with its own arm.}

{Retry 132: Asbeel utilizes some of their previous knowledge against V1, breaking its back(servos) like they'd done to Gabriel.}

{Retry 324: Asbeel manages to pull off some Looney Tunes shit against V1, crushing it with an ice chunk.}

{Retry 1006: Asbeel tears V1 apart with the crowbar, letting it suffer against the cold hard ground.}

{Retry 1942: Asbeel manages to summon Tricky the Clown himself. He clowns around as a result, torturing V1 until growing tired of it and wrecking it with his Improbability Drive.}

...

...

{Retry 9000.}

{V1 grows +ENRAGED.}

{The elevator doors fly out of the wall, making their new homes in the wall adjacent. Asbeel is peppered by ice particles.}

{V1, unable to utilize illegal tactic after illegal tactic against Asbeel, doesn't have the slightest clue in Hell in how to defeat Asbeel. It's tried shooting into the cracks of their armor. It's tried to catch Asbeel offguard. It's tried cheating, for God's sake. Its motherboard is fried.}

{Asbeel looks up from their book.}

Asbeel: You look like V2. Having fun?

{The first time Asbeel's spoken in 1000 retries, followed by...}

{Asbeel looks to their crowbar. Many chinks line it, similar to Asbeel's armor, now ripe for destruction.}

{Asbeel looks to the machine. Steam flies off of its plating, its arms shaking as they bob up and down, its rage put into something tangible. The Nokia's pissed. Hah.}

{Asbeel assumes their armor won't last this time. They get off of the ice chunk, cracking their knuckles one last time.}

Asbeel: Your heresy will not be tolerated.

V1: YOU WILL NOT STOP MY CRUSADE A SECOND LONGER

{V1 launches coins into the air, Deadcoining one off of the wall behind it with the Whiplash, and Sharpcoining the other three into Asbeel with the Feedbacker. It prepares to Mal-Nuke Asbeel with its free arm and the Knuckleblaster.}

{Asbeel parries the Sharpcoin back into V1, knocked back 5 feet by the Mal-Nuke. They toss their crowbar into V1's torso, missing by half a foot.}

{A Whiplash head digs its way into Asbeel's shoulder, followed by a Slab Piercer + Marksman combo into their face, as well as a stomp for good measure.}

{As Asbeel attempts to reach for V1, it rips the Whiplash's head out of their shoulder, shoving magnets into their sternum and firing saws and nails galore into the archangel.}

{Asbeel responds by teleporting behind it, attempting to uppercut it with their crowbar, and failing.}

{V1 freezes a rocket in place, hitting it with a Malicious Railcannon, and following up with The Funny S.R.S. + Shotgun + Sharpshooter Combo.}

{Asbeel stumbles over onto their ass. V1 leaps onto Asbeel, triple-wielding the Revolver variants with their right arms and digging into the fallen angel's helmet with the free arm.}

{As Asbeel attempts to swing again, V1 FINALLY destroys a significant chunk of armor: the chestpiece, through a point-blank Overpump explosion. This reveals the carapace underneath, naturally, adorned with glowing religious tattoos and long-dried blood, recently mixed in with the fresh stuff.}

{V1 finishes Asbeel off with a Railcoin, directly through the heart.}

{Asbeel crumbles to their knees. V1's +ENRAGED state wears off.}

{Built to be unstoppable, the most feared archangel in Heaven - before Gabe - clenches at the fresh hyper-heated hole in their chest. Their own milleniae-long +ENRAGE brought to an end, Asbeel's previously red-hot armor is brought to a cold, dark and dull lapis.}

{...They take a breath, and softly speak their last.}

Asbeel: you... fight quite well. despite the damage, you immediately develop new strategies to destroy me... and it only took you nine thousand attempts.

{They take another breath.}

Asbeel: congratulations, V1. you truly are the toughest opponent i've had in years. may your legacy be remembered and feared by all, as gabriel's has.

V1: WHAT ABOUT YOU

Asbeel: why do i matter? it's your story, is it not?

V1: V1: I SUPPOSE SO V1: ONE QUESTION HOWEVER V1: WHERE DO YOU GO WHEN YOU DIE V1: WE'RE ALREADY IN HELL

Asbeel: ...no one's ever told me. i'll have to figure that out for myself. Asbeel: i'd also like to point out that you're the only being to ever hear my voice. tell me, before i die... what do you think?

V1: WELL V1: YOU SOUND LIKE A BASS GUITAR WAS GIVEN LIFE V1: IF THAT MAKES SENSE

Asbeel: huh... interesting.

{...The corpse collapses to the ground. Their wings have disappeared.}

{V1 takes a knee, checking Asbeel's pulse.}

{...}

{...Finally.}

{V1 stands up, heading to the exit elevator... only to find that there is no hole. They were right: this is the bottom of Hell. Only way out is up.}

{Thank fuck for the actual platform.}

{V1 stands onto the elevator platform, presses the button, and finally leaves the bottom of Judecca.}

-

{TIME: 42,536:59:14 | F}

{KILLS: 1 | S}

{STYLE: 1,546,354 | S}

{OVERALL RANK: D}

{SECRETS: [No.]}

{CHALLENGE: [Parry Asbeel's crowbar.] | YES}

[cityburns]

[ ⚠︎ COLOR THEORY ] The blinding color from a nuclear blast. The lines of code in your vision. You are yellow, bright and neon; a destroyer. Sabotage. Revenge. Maybe born from rage. Maybe born from duty. Hot, cooking you from the inside. The tight fist of your 'ganic hand, punching the dirt next to the body of the man that spared your life at the cost of his own. You deserve to burn, and so does the world.

Breaking shit. That's all Johnny has ever been good at. Like he's fifteen again, making his voice sound deeper so that the lady at the desk hurries him down the hallway to meet the sergeant. Neck-deep in the trenches, gun shoved in hand. To fight for his country and nothing else ( right? ). What a load of horse shit. Just fluff they say to make you puff your chest up, so that when you watch your brothers in arms get shot between the eyes, you shed a single tear and say it was worth it. So long as America wins, right?

( Now repeat after me: I, Robert John Linder, solemnly swear, ) I, Robert John Linder, solemnly swear, ( to faithfully serve the United States of America ) to faithfully serve the United States of America. ( I vow to uphold the values set forth in the nation's Constitution and represent its government with dignity and due diligence. ) I vow to uphold the values set forth in the nation's Constitution and represent its government with dignity and due diligence. ( I pledge to defend my country against all enemies, foreign or domestic. Should this cause claim my life, so be it. ) I pledge to defend my country against all enemies, foreign or domestic. Should this cause claim my life, so be it.

Words that mean nothing. Just bullshit. Knees to the ground, red on yellow, as the poor guy underneath him gets a beating no man deserves. A knocked out tooth, a bloody nose. He started it, Johnny thinks absentmindedly, the sound of cracking in his knuckles, of metal hitting skin. Broken bones are just the start. Johnny doesn't let up until the begging ceases, leaving just the heaving breaths of his victim. It's not enough ( it's never been enough ) to just beat up one guy. He's sifting around this poor guy's garage for a crowbar and gives the same treatment to the car that has the misfortune of being parked here.

The crowbar takes on the same hue as him, and it spreads across the dented metal and shattered glass of the car ever time he kicks it. The alarm in it blares out loudly, but he doesn't care. The beeping gets quieter with every swing of the crowbar, and long after he's forgotten why he's mad, he keeps swinging. As though it may come alive and take its revenge on him. Not happening, he thinks, fuck off.

And it's still not enough. The burning need to break. The ache for destruction. Complete annihilation. Arasaka was only the start, way back when. Arasaka was just a warning. A big red you're next. Would he have stopped after every corpo was torn to shreds? No. It wouldn't be enough. And it's so much worse here, wherever he is in the back of V's mind, because he's so goddamned powerless in this city. All he has are his bare fists, but that won't stop him. No, he's gonna tear the core of the Earth out just for good measure. What's next on the menu? Smashing the windows out of this place and then setting it on fire. Sounds like a damned good idea.

Each footstep is a trail straight to him. A mix of red and yellow. Paint and blood. He's swiping things off the cabinets, riffling through for canisters of gasoline. No gonk in their right mind would keep enough gasoline to start a house fire, but the small canister he finds may beg to differ. Crowbar in one hand, gasoline in the other. Pouring it all over; on the couch, in the kitchen, over the body. Smashing everything; the lamp, the TV, the windows. Nothing is safe. Nobody is safe. Not from Silverhand. Not from Robert, with so much rage in his heart that he has no other outlet than destruction.

A cigarette. That's enough to set it ablaze, a small trail leading from the front door to his feet. He tosses it in. Still not enough, as the flames reflect in his shades. That gaping hole in his chest is still there. And it only gets wider by the minute.

[ikahnik-gaming]

Walking Dead Saint and Sinners Chapter 1 tips

Hey there, I’m Jace. I’ve been playing the first chapter of the Walking Dead Saints and Sinners game on PSVR2. And here are some tips that I wish I had known before starting the game.

Here’s the video: 

Days don't really matter, at least not in chapter one. So don’t worry about encountering more zombies or having less supplies.

If you have time, and not rushing the story, farm the first town for a few days until you can unlock the bigger backpack. Also this is the perfect time to practice and get better at killing walkers.

Crouch down when low on stamina so that the meter can refill faster. Also there’s no stamina penalty in the safe area. I didn't know that until much later, sadly.

When rearranging things in the backpack, it’s faster to drop them on the floor than dropping them in the top hole, otherwise it will always take you to the first page that's not filled, which is slower then picking up the items off the floor.

Always aim for the head - unless you manage to cut off a walker’s arms, body hits do nothing.

The last shotgun that you unlock, the Nova, is much better at headshots.

use spoons, screwdrivers or bottles when in a house in order to save your weapon���s durability.

Fight the temptation to swing long weapons, like the spiked baseball bat, wildly. If you don't hit walkers correctly on the head, it will only make them stumble and do no damage. Make sure you can see the spike edge to line it up just right for that headshot.

You can use a katana with one hand and instead of slashing, you can stab zombies in the face, Although I’m not sure if it uses more or less stamina.

Use blunt objects like pans, angel statues, or the butt of your pistol - they dont break and 2-4 hits will do the job.

Hold a walker by the head to get that guaranteed head damage or to push them away. They will usually stumble other walkers in the process.

If there’s too many walkers or you’re low on stamina, climb a car. Walkers can’t climb or reach you - Just be careful because not all cars are climbable.

Carry a nail bomb, or two, if you have the space. Just watch out; nail bombs or explosive arrows can take you out just as easily too.

Don't use ammo to break boards. Use a crowbar or the butt of your gun.

Some walkers, the more infected ones that are more green with green stains on their chests, will spill out a green liquid that causes damage when you take them down with melee weapons. Instead, push them away and use a long range weapon.

Pick up your arrows. They can be reused a second or even a third time before breaking. And keep in mind that arrows will bounce off enemies’ masks.

When your health is too low you will cough which could attract walkers

Some walkers are faster than others

Walkers have longer reach than they look - think of the warning: “objects in rearview mirror are closer than they appear”

Once you unlock Guts Mode. Always keep a few guts in your backpack so that you can casually walk to your boat after the bell.

That’s all the tips I have gathered online or learned through my playthrough. Let me know if there’s any tip I missed in the comments. Come back for my Playthrough Audiobook that you can listen to as you go about your day. As always, like and subscribe if you haven’t. It costs you nothing and does wonders for me. Peace.

[northwest-cryptid]

Peer reviewing your tags to say that you explain it so well.

Like that's the beauty of this stupid little game, you start with arguably no idea what you're doing; you pick a talent that sounds interesting with no real grasp of it's potential later down the line and then one day you're just an unstoppable force.

One of my friends literally has so much cooking under his belt that he plays an elven fighter even though technically elves are "worse" at Melee, he doesn't care he builds for exclusively straight Luck boosts and crits like nothing else while drop kicking enemies into each other because he spent all day making extremely good food that gives him stat benefits to cover for potential weak spots.

One of our friends is a tailor and fisher who will use their close combat skills to stampede rush a whole room of enemies into one spot and then deal massive AoE damage with windmill despite you know, being a tailor.

Our friendly neighborhood blacksmith has made his weapon of choice none other than the mighty... crowbar. he might be a humble blacksmith, but you better believe that gives him the strength necessary to bust some kneecaps with a crowbar if you threaten his friends.

And the reality of the matter is that none of us are endgame or even really that close to it. We all play this game in different ways, with different focuses and while yea a lot of it comes back to combat since that's mostly necessary for main story progression that is far from all there is to this game. That isn't to say the combat isn't just as deep and complex as any other aspect of the game allowing for players to form their own methods of bopping baddies however they best feel capable of such.

It's also really cool how when you start off you will likely look like a new player, far from your goal of how you wish to appear in this game but everything you need to create that look for yourself is available to you. You will start the game with the potential to become whatever you desire to be; and as you follow that ambition you will slowly but surely acquire the gear and money to go from looking like a new player to having your own unique fashion/style that speaks volumes as to your general aesthetics and play-style. It's always really fun to see how people design their characters in this game as everyone looks unique and interesting as a result of the customization and fashion systems.

You really do go from like "okay I want to do Magic so I guess I'll pick up the basic bolt skills and I'll look into how to do fusion bolts!" to like "I am going to drop THE meteor that killed the dinosaurs; on this boss specifically." Which is really cool because while this would just be a skill tree or some kind of like "oh you hit magic level 30 now you can use advanced magic" in other MMOs, in Mabi it's very much a feeling of you EARNED this by going out and learning the magic you use; you didn't just hit some arbitrary number and get the same skill everyone gets at hitting that number, you went out and did quests; you found the pages and put books together to learn the magics you use; YOU earned that skill and now you have another tool in your arsenal to approach the problems you may encounter.

well. now i have a new mmo to play once my laptop gets fixed

not sure whether to thank you for introducing me to a cool thing or place a curse upon your bloodline for giving me brainrot

Honestly it's a little of both don't worry, I understand as I am also cursed myself. Speaking of which, feel free to add me in game if you feel so inclined. I'm always happy to play with new players, help show people the ropes (since there's a TON of potential for what you can do and how you can do it), and I play with a lot of other chill people of all skill levels and time spent with the game;

meaning you've got people who are also just starting out, and people who have been at it for a few months and honestly are REALLY good already lol; alongside people who have played for the last 14 years and aren't like; elitist about it :P

Genuinely, don't be afraid to come off anon whenever you feel comfortable talking to me about it; my inbox/DMs are always open to new friendos and I'm sure the rest of the gang would be happy to hang as well.

We're always excited about new players and such :D

Trust me, I'm not as scary as you probably think, my spiky baseball bat might swing both ways but it doesn't get swung at friends :P

...Unless you try to PvP me in which case I will run away like a bug who is more afraid of you than you are of it.

[five-rivers]

Green Sky Highway

Phic Phight Phic for @deuynndoodles

.

The Fenton Ecto Cell Bettery (aka the Better Battery) was designed to draw power from not only an internal, pre-charged store of ectoplasm, but also from ambient, atmospheric ectoplasm.  This meant that it would never run out of juice so long as it was in the Ghost Zone.  The Specter Speeder was designed to travel in the Ghost Zone.  Thus, the Betteries were the perfect power source for it.  In theory.  

In practice… Well, that just wasn’t working out, and Maddie didn’t know why.  She gripped the underside of the dash and tried to push herself deeper beneath it to get a better view of the machinery.  

“Maddie?  You see anything?” asked Jack, who couldn’t fit under the dash.  He’d been inspecting as much of the engine as he could from the inside, which wasn’t much.  The Speeder wasn’t designed to be serviced while free-floating in the Ghost Zone.  

Which, now that she thought of it, was a serious oversight.  

“Everything looks fine,” said Maddie.  “Except that it doesn’t have any power.  Nothing’s lighting up, but all the connections look good. You?”

“I can’t get anything to work.  Anything.  It’s like… we’re in some kind of technological dead zone.  But that doesn’t make sense.”

Maddie pulled herself out to see Jack vigorously scratching his head and shedding dandruff everywhere.  “Ghosts do tend to disrupt technology.”

“But we fixed that.  We designed all our weapons to work with that.”

“We know there are things we don’t know,” said Maddie, “and it’s always good to find new things!  Though not pleasant to find them out like this…”  They should really test their inventions more, honestly.  

But it had been over a year of testing since they opened the portal.  They had to jump in at some point, didn’t they?  That was the whole point of the portal.  

She sighed.  “Well, we didn’t have a lot of forward momentum when the portal cut out.”  She looked out the window.  “We could see if we can get out and engage our jetpacks.”

“Uh, about that,” said Jack.  He swung open the door to the jetpack cabinet.  The empty jetpack cabinet.  “I may have forgotten to put them back after refueling them.”

“Jack…”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

Maddie massaged the bridge of her nose with her mostly-clean knuckles.  This was a repeat of the handle inside the weapons vault.  At least he wasn’t pushing the blame for it back onto Danny or Jazz.  That would definitely have started a fight.  

On the other hand, there really wasn’t any guarantee the jetpacks would even still be functional, so maybe it was for the best. For certain values of best.  

She groaned.  

There was a knocking sound.  “Is that coming from the engine?” Maddie asked.  

“No…” said Jack, slowly.  “I think it came from the door…”

They both turned to stare.  Something moved outside it.  They shifted to get a better view out the window.  

Phantom was out there, tapping on the door with a ten-foot pole.  

“That little unnatural abomination,” cursed Jack under his breath.  “He’s going to scratch the paint!”

Phantom apparently saw them and waved.  “Hey!” he shouted, just loud enough to be heard through the walls of the Speeder.  “Do you guys need a lift?”

Jack and Maddie turned to each other.  

“How did he know we were here?”

“I don’t know,” said Jack.  “Do you think he followed us?”

“It wouldn’t be difficult, but I’m surprised he didn’t show up on our detectors.”

“He does seem to have the ability to drop off of them.”

“True,” said Maddie.  “So, how do we handle this?  Fenton bat?”

“I don’t know, Mads.  He might be, uh, sincere?  That time with the ectofiltrator he did help me.”

“That’s one, single, datapoint.  He’s a been a menace every other time we’ve encountered him.”

“I don’t know that we have much other choice,” said Jack, nodding towards the dead engines and the empty jetpack cabinet.

Maddie huffed out a sigh, then looked back at Phantom, who waved again.  

“Fine.  We still have to decide how to deal with him while we’re cooperating with him.  Or if he decides to show his true colors.”

“Good idea.”

.

Danny knew this had been a terrible, terrible idea the moment his parents opened the door to the Speeder armed to the teeth.  Why did they always feel the need to do that? None of the weapons, with the possible exceptions of the Fenton Bat and the Fenton Crowbar could even work here.

How his parents had, on their first jaunt into the Ghost Zone, managed to run smack into the Time Locked Lands was beyond him. They had to go to the one place in the Ghost Zone that the Speeder wouldn’t work and after coating the Speeder with some kind of anti-ghost spray that Danny absolutely refused to touch again.  Ever. Especially in ghost form.  Except with a ten-foot pole.

(If they’d left the spray off, he could have just pushed the Speeder back out of the Time Locked Lands.  But, no, they had to make everything as difficult and painful as possible.)

“I am not carrying all that,” said Danny, flatly.

(Especially because it would all turn back on once they left the Time Lost Lands, and if there wasn’t a Specter Deflector under all that, he’d eat his own belt.)

“Then we aren’t going anywhere with you!” proclaimed Maddie.  

“You’re stranded in the middle of the Ghost Zone. I don’t think you have a choice.”

“We do!”

“I could literally just fly over there and snatch you right now.  Plus, again, stranded.  Do you even have any food in there?”

“Of course we do!” said Maddie.  “We aren’t incompetent.”

Jack looked guilty.  Danny decided not to bring it up.

“Okay, but still, you’re going to run out eventually, and then you’ll still be floating in the Ghost Zone with no way to get out.  You aren’t going to get another friendly ghost coming by.”

“I’ve never seen a friendly ghost to begin with!”

“Maddie…”

“I can just leave, you know,” said Danny, planting his hands on his hips and bluffing for all he was worth.  He was not leaving his parents here to be used as hostages or who knew what else.  

Hopefully, they wouldn’t call the bluff.  They shouldn’t.  No sane, reasonable person would.  He was their only way out of this mess.  On the other hand, his parents had never been completely sane, reasonable people.  

Danny thought his odds were about fifty-fifty.  Which meant he could hope.  

Jack and Maddie had an intense, whispered conversation. This, thankfully, lead to them divesting themselves of most of their visible weaponry.  Which meant that they still had more guns on them than most professional soldiers during a firefight.  

Well, it was better than he’d expected.  But it was still too many.  

“Take the Specter Deflectors off,” he said.  “What do you think will happen if I try to carry you and you have those on.”

There was muttering.  

“Come on, come on,” said Danny, snapping his fingers. Which really shouldn’t work through his gloves but did anyway.  

Sometimes ghost nonsense was good for making lasers fly from your hands, and sometimes it was good for tiny aesthetic breaks in physics. It was a grab bag, really.  

“Alright,” said Danny.  “I’m going to fly over and pick you up.  Don’t hit me.”

Oh, jeez, he was not looking forward to carrying them all the way over to the portal.  Sure, he could bench press a school bus, but there was a difference between holding up a school bus for a minute and carrying two people who hated his guts a mile through enemy territory while flying slowly enough not to give them windburn.  

Sure, it’d probably only take a few minutes, even then, but those would be the longest few minutes in his entire life.  Not counting his actual death.  

.

Being carried by Phantom had to be the single worst experience in Jack’s entire life.  

It wasn’t the speed or the lack of control – he loved carnival rides – or the height – Jack couldn’t tell you how many buildings he’d jumped off in pursuit of ghosts – or even the fact that Phantom was a sinister specter, and ectoplasmic emanation, a putrid piece of protoplasm – he’d been carried by ghosts before, usually ones who were a lot more upfront about wanting to kill him.  

Actually, Jack didn’t know why he didn’t like it. He just didn’t.  

Maybe it was just how uncomfortable it was?  But Jack did way more uncomfortable things. Like interacting with his sister-in-law. Brr.  

Maybe it was the lurking feeling behind every interaction he ever had with Phantom that there was something he just wasn’t seeing, some hidden truth that would make everything about Phantom, every contradiction, every confusion, make sense.

Nah, that couldn’t be it.  Maddie would have figured it out by now.  That’s why they made such a great team.  He noticed the things she didn’t, and she noticed the things he didn’t.  

“You’re going the wrong way,” snapped Maddie.  

Just like that!

Wait.  That was a really bad thing.

“I’m not going the wrong way,” snapped Phantom.  “I’m avoiding Walker’s prison.  I don’t know how he didn’t catch you on your way out, but I’m not eager to be thrown in jail for a thousand years.”

“Ghosts have jail?” asked Jack surprised.  

“Depends where you are,” said Phantom.  “Walker isn’t really a sheriff, though.  There’s no government behind him and he just makes up rules randomly so he can lock up anybody he doesn’t like.”

“Like you,” observed Jack.  

“Why doesn’t it surprise me that you’re even wanted by whatever passes for the law here?”

“First, rude.  Secondly, there are realms in here that are just as organized and civilized as any country on Earth.  Just because you opened your portal into the equivalent of post-apocalyptic Detroit doesn’t mean it’s all like this.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Maddie.  

“I could arrange that, you know,” said Phantom, stilling.

Jack laughed nervously.  “Maybe another time?”  The ghost would do what it would do, but they didn’t need to encourage him to bring them even deeper into the Ghost Zone.  They were currently banking on Phantom’s obsession with heroics to get them home, but if they changed the equation…  Yeah, Jack didn’t want to deal with the consequences of that.  

Ghosts were like computers that ran only one program. One homicidal, destructive program.

It was like that thought experiment about an AI whose job was to maximize the number of paperclips.  It’d just keep on making more and more paperclips until nothing was left.  Which was why they had to be stopped.  

Easier said than done, as Jack and Maddie had learned.

“You don’t have to be so freaked out,” muttered Phantom. “It isn’t like I’m going to kidnap you or anything.”  He pretended to sigh.  

What was the point of that?  He had to know that Jack and Maddie wouldn’t fall for his tricks. Actually, come to think of it, he was miming breathing, too, and had been the whole time.  

Maybe that’s why Jack was so uncomfortable.  The constant undercurrent of deception.  

Hmmm… something to think on.  

“What’s that?” asked Maddie, pointing.  

“Uh,” said Phantom, who did a double take.  

Ooh, that wasn’t reassuring.  

.

Danny clenched his teeth, his parents’ reactions to him weren’t reassuring, and even less reassuring was the way Pariah’s Keep had moved from its usual creepy location and to this new creepy location. Not that there were any non-creepy locations in the Ghost Zone.  It was part of the place’s charm.  

No, really.  Some part of Danny craved the creepiness.  He was half-ghost, after all.  

(Even if his idea of creepiness was, according to his friends, sort of lame.)

But back to the main point.  The keep really, really shouldn’t be here.  And it was creeping him out.  

It should be okay to just… fly past it, though, right? Just being in its airspace in the past hadn’t done anything bad.  So, flying by with his parents in tow shouldn’t do anything either.  Right?

Danny put on more speed, just in case.  This coincided with a bunch of large ghost ravens (or were they crows?) dive bombing them and forcing him to land to defend himself and parents.  The only land around being the rim of the island that supported the keep.

He knew something like this would happen. Maybe not exactly this, but he just knew he’d be attacked and everything would devolve into nonsense, and—

Huh.  The birds weren’t attacking him, just his parents.  Oh, these were racist (mortalist?) birds.  Gross.  Trust Pariah Dark to have bigoted birds.  He called up a shield to protect his parents.  Whereupon they shot him in the back, shouting about how he betrayed them to the birds, because why not?  

Why was his life like this?

He pushed himself up off the ground.  Starbursts twinkled behind his eyes.  Neither his parents nor the crows were in sight.  The crows could have gone anywhere.  His parents on the other hand…

There was only one place they could have gone.  

Well.  At least none of the nonsentient traps would work on them, seeing as they were humans. What were the odds that they’d run into one of the sentient defenders?

Well… considering the ravens?

Yeah.  That’d be about one hundred percent.

.

“Maddie, I don’t know about this…” said Jack, examining the tall, vaulted ceiling.  

“We had to get away from Phantom.  This was the only way to go.”

“But he came here for a reason, Mads,” whispered Jack, tip-toing.

“Yeah, this is definitely a trap.  But what can we do?”

“Jack?  Maddie? This is not a place you want to wander around in! Oh, holy—” There was a loud thump.  

Maddie grabbed Jack’s hand and pulled him forward. “We have to get away from him.”

“Come on!  This is a floating island!  I’m your only way off!  Why are you like this?”

“He has a point,” said Jack.  

Maddie stopped.  “I guess he does.”

“This is literally the worst place you could have picked to run away!”  A sound like a very large door opening and closing reached their ears.  “This is Pariah Dark’s place!  Where did you even go?”

“Mads?”

“Yeah?”

“Who’s Pariah Dark?”

“I think that was the name of the ghost that sucked the town into the Ghost Zone a few months ago.”

“Please, guys!  I’m trying to help you here!  This place is ultra-dangerous!  You could accidentally – yikes! – wake up Pariah Dark.”  

“Maybe we should…”

“Yeah,” said Maddie, “maybe we should.”

“Phantom!” called Jack.  “Phantom!  We’re over—” The floor opened up underneath them and they fell into the dark.  

.

Maddie woke to a dark room, tied to a chair.  She noticed the faintly glowing ghost in front of her and jolted backwards.

The ghost wore a set of painted and engraved plate armor, a pair of lavender-white eyes glowing from behind the slats of its visor.  A knight, of sorts, Maddie supposed.  

“You…” droned the ghost in a painfully stereotypical ghostly moan.  “Enemies of the king… why have you come here?”

“Huh?”

That was Jack’s voice.  He was tied behind her, apparently.  

“We don’t have anything to say to you,” snapped Maddie.

“Uh,” said Jack.  Something twisted behind Maddie.  “Are you a friend of Phantom?”

“A friend?  A friend?”

“I’m going to take that as a no,” muttered Maddie.  

The door of the room flew off its hinges.  “Fright Knight!” shouted Phantom, pointing a glowing finger.  “Wait, you aren’t Fright Knight.  Who are you, and what do you want with my- With, uh, the Fenton ghost hunters?  Who I don’t know very well at all. Promise.”

“What,” said the ghost.  

“What,” said Maddie.  

“What,” said Jack.  

“Okay, forget everything I just said.”  He gestured at the ghost.  “Who are you?”

“My name is Paladin, my liege.”

“Okay, okay, cool, cool.  I- Wait, what?  What did you call me?”

“My liege?”

Phantom looked like he was having an existential crisis.  

“Maddie was right!” exclaimed Jack, who couldn’t see Phantom’s face.  “You did lead us into a trap!”

“What?  No?  I’ve never even met this guy before!  You are a guy, right?”

“Yes, my liege.”

“Right.  I’m going to put that on the backburner and freak out about it later.  How are you- Why are you—” Phantom shook his head.  “Why are you here in Pariah’s Keep?”

“It’s your keep.”

“Since when?”

“Say what now?” asked Jack and Maddie at once.  

“Look, this is news to me, too.  But, back to the question.  You.  The keep. Why?  I mean, you weren’t here before.”

“That is because Pariah sealed me, my liege.  When you defeated him, I was released and immediately swore fealty to the true king.  You.”

“I am so freaking out right now, but we’ll revisit that. Later.  Right now, I have to get these guys home.”

“But they have hostile intentions towards your person, my liege!”

“Everyone has hostile intentions towards me.  I’m honestly surprised you haven’t attacked me yet.”

“Ah.  My liege, perhaps you should seek the services of a priest, if all your experiences with new people are such.”

“Is that the medieval equivalent of a therapist?”

“I fear I do not know what that is.  Why do you ask?”

“Because the last time I talked to one of those, they purposefully picked at every one of my insecurities and then tried to murder my, uh.  Someone close to me.”

“An evil counselor, then,” said the knight, gravely.

“I want to agree with you, but somehow I feel like you’re talking about something completely different than the image in my head.”

“That may be true, my liege.  Doubtless, you are very wise.”

Maddie was… lost.  

Very lost.  

Even so, her prerogative was escaping.  She started twisting, trying to get to the knots around her wrists.  

“Did you, uh, pilot the castle out here?”

“Yes.  I sensed that mortal enemies of the king, that’s you—”

“I will debate that as soon as my brain stops screaming at me.”

“—had entered the Realm.”

“Right.  Yeah. Thank you.  But I can handle these guys.  And I need to get them home.  Please. I made a deal with them.”

“With these?”

“Hey!” said Jack, offended.  

“I mean, I use the term deal pretty loosely.”

“Hey!”

“But yes.  Please.  Just.  Dang.  How did you tie them up that quickly?”

“It’s a hobby.”

“Do you mind if I take the chairs?”

“They are your chairs, my liege.”

“I’m still not used to that.”

“Are you quite certain you want to take them?  And just… Let them loose?  The dungeon here is very functional.  We even have an oubliette.”

“Raincheck.  But thank you.  Really, I mean it.”  Phantom flew behind Maddie, and she protested as the chair she was in was yanked upward. “Uh… I might have gotten turned around a time or two, so if you could…”

“Of course!  The keep does seem to have sustained some damage, so we will have to take some detours.”

“Phantom!  Phantom! Put us down and untie us.”

“Nah, I think I like this better.  Your kids can untie you once I bring you back!”

“You’re going to drag us all the way through the Ghost Zone?”

“That’s the plan.”

.

The rest of the flight was surprisingly pleasant. No one attacked, and his parents were much easier to carry in the chairs.  Sure, they struggled, but the struggling was much more manageable than the wriggling from before.  

They were mad at him.  But they were always mad at him.  So.  

No loss, really.

With the utmost carefulness, Danny set them down in the middle of the lab, still tied up, and then began zapping then tossing their most troublesome inventions into the gaping maw of the portal while they screamed at him.  

Normally, he wouldn’t do this, especially after successfully rescuing his parents and hopefully raising their opinion of him, but some of those inventions were painful.  Like.  A lot painful.  And dangerous.  Also, he was doing his level best to avoid thinking about the whole ‘king’ thing.  

Which he couldn’t do forever.  

Especially since Jazz walked down the stairs, probably drawn by the screaming, to see Danny shoving half of the Ghost Catcher through the portal sans-strings.  

“Uh,” said Danny.  

“Get that ghost, Jazzy-pants!”

Danny vanished and fled upstairs.  

.

Jazz had seen many strange things in her life, but that scene was one of the weirder ones.  

It took some time to untie her parents, longer to extract herself from the ensuing rant and their attempt to salvage their equipment from Danny’s all-too-explicable rampage.  Honestly, she was surprised Danny hadn’t snapped earlier.  

She opened the door to his room.  It was empty.  She squinted. He was not just leaving her hanging like that, with no context to what happened other than their parents’ ranting.  She opened her door.  

Danny was lying on his side on the middle of her rag rug, hugging Bearbert Einstein.  

“A ghost told me I was king and that I needed a priest.”

Oh boy.  

[samuraikunexe67]

A/N: I have no idea why, I’m actually in the mood to make break-up headcanons. Slightly yandere-ish behavior for some of them ehe.

Ann

What do you mean “break up?”

She of course respects your choices.

Great friends though!

She misses you..

But still! Respects your wishes!

Becomes actually irritated if you moved on super fast.

May or may not have cuddled a picture of you and cried herself to sleep for a whole month.

Every time you are apart of the group-chat or with the Phantom Thieves, she’d instantly check up on you and go on with her day.

Makoto

She respects your choices but asks for an entire summary why.

You better what out! You better not cry! Sae Niijima is coming to kill you!

Expect her to frustratedly cry over you while hugging a pillow.

Ignored you the entire year.

Probably enemies with her and her sister.

Heart-broken tsundere coming through.

Uhm.. Awkward~

Literally turns into the: Deleted, Blocked, Reported meme.

If she sees you in that group-chat or with The Phantom Thieves, expect a punch to the stomach.

Futaba

“Oh nice joke!”

She realized you weren’t joking.

She broke down into tears.

Like Makoto, she expects an entire essay on why you’re breaking up with her.

She’s probably planning on how to blackmail you rn.

She might’ve turned into a yandere.

But don’t worry! Joker and the boys got your back!

Unless they get blackmailed by her and tell them to step off.

Stalks your every doing on social media.

Every time she sees you in the group-chat or with the Phantom Thieves; hoo boy..

Joker and Ryuji are literally using a crowbar to get her off of you..

Haru

Mom pick me up I’m scared..

Peace was NEVER an option with Haru.

She’s respectful about it and doesn’t need an explanation.

But dear god does she know how to hit your weak spot.

“Hey Haru, mind passing me the salt?”

“I sure hope you don’t choke on that steak aha!~”

May the lord forgive you.. Because she won’t..

She may or may not have also become a yandere.

Unlike Futaba, she just barges into your house and kidnaps you.

Expect people including Joker and the others to find you tied up.

Stay away from the Phantom Thieves if Haru’s there.

Unless you want an axe to the face and Milady brainwashing you 24/7..

Kasumi

She’s actually pretty chill unlike Futaba and Haru and Makoto.

“As long as you’re still my senpai/onee-san!”

You two get along just fine!

A lot of hugging and headpats.

Nice convos in the group chat and when hanging out with the Phantom Thieves.

*wiggles eyebrows* Might even consider going back together?

Nah jk jk.

Soon both of you became even closer.

Internally she does miss you but understands and the both of you has moved on from it.

Akira/Ren

He literally has a breakdown

Begging you to come back to him while crying and snot going every-where

You and him are so awkward towards another when you hang out with the Phantom Thieves.

Even in group-chat Akiren cries and cries about you to the others.

You feel bad but you wanna move on.

He misses you like hell.

Becomes very depressed and doesn’t move from his room.

This boy’s playlist is full of sad love songs on the daily while viewing pictures of you and him together.

Slowly becomes a yandere but a soft one.

He’s clingy like dear god.

Ever-lasting hugs.

He even gets jealous whenever Ryuji or anyone else gets near to you.

Wants you all to himself.

Ryuji

He’s pretty chill, heartbroken but chill.

Actually becomes like an older brother to you

Brings you snacks and food whenever

Checks up on you in group-chat

Gets teased by Futaba and Joker and Morgana that you’re not his anymore

He only rolls his eyes and gives you headpats

Y’all be doing karaoke on the daily

You and him be making fun of Morgana together

Older brother and younger sibling relationship!

He misses you but glad to see you happy as always

Yusuke

“Oh that’s cool.”

Takes the break-up pretty well

You and him still have goofy art moments

Strangely you two have always had the married couple dynamic and now..

You both cringe when someone says that.

He’s still as poor as ever

He hungy

You share your food with him

“Hee-ho!”

“Time to hee-ho home buddy.”

“Indeed, my dear friend.”

Everybody in the group-chat sometimes mistaken that you and Yusuke got back together but you correct them for the 50th time

Akechi

...Yikes.

Break-up was as messy as Joker’s bedroom.

He screamed for about a whole day about it.

He stopped talking to the Phantom Thieves and you once you guys broke it off.

He soon became a fricking yandere.

Not surprised that he became one.

He delulu asf.

Pretends that you’re the king/queen of his Palace.

He actually gets a Palace because of you and his tragic past.

Joker and the others are actually terrified of the outcomes once Akechi’s heart is changed.

If it works, he’ll pretend none of it happened.

If it doesn’t, well he’s still gonna pretend as usual.

Either way he’s still gonna fanboy about you and treat you like prince/princess.

Either texts you in private or outside of LeBlanc.

Phantom Thieves: “And we took that personally.”

Everyone immediately becomes the older siblings in the situation.

Jesus get Akechi some therapy..

[choco-glow]

Day of the Dead (Robin)

April 27th.

The bed shifted, creaked as Bruce dragged himself up out of the comfort of his way too expensive (and totally worth it) mattress, followed reluctantly by an equally exhausted Selina. He insisted she use the bathroom first, taking that time to rub his face and scalp, forcing himself into an alertness that he didn’t feel…and Bruce ignored his constantly buzzing phone. He could hear Alfred puttering around in his own room down the hall, Damian’s near silent footsteps alongside his dog’s as the youngest Wayne limped down to let Titus out. Tim…Bruce sighed, knowing that Tim one of two places; passed out in the chair in front of the computer down in the cave, or passed out on the couch in the library, his laptop on the floor.

Either way, he was sleeping, most likely, and Bruce was going to take advantage of that.

“Hey.” He glanced up, and the smile on his lips was small, but real; she looked so good leaning against the doorway in nothing but her underwear and one of his old band tees, tousled hair sticking to her forehead from her shower, a sweet smile on her face, those familiar green-blue eyes always so dark in the morning. Bruce dragged himself upright to wrap her up in his arms, hugging her tight, and Selina melted against him, nuzzling his cheek. “Bruce…”

“Thank you for staying…” He murmured, gratitude thick in his voice, and she patted his bicep, popping up on her tiptoes to kiss his nose.

“Of course, sweetheart. Go wash up and get dressed, I’ll head down and help Alfred with breakfast?”

“Selina, you don’t have to…” She shook her head, chuckling, and he chuckled back, ignoring his impulse to just turn away and go brood. Brooding wouldn’t help today…

“I want to. I know what today is…and why it’s so hard.” He ducked his head, swallowing his next word, and she cupped his cheek. “Bruce. I mean it. Jason…” He lifted his head, blue eyes tired but crinkled from a weary smile.

“I miss him.”

“I do too. Go on. We’ll be waiting for you.” He nodded, and after a lingering kiss, despite Cat’s aversion to morning breath, Bruce let her go. The shower was hot enough to wash away some of the pain from his shoulder and upper back, and after washing up, he carefully redressed the bandage on his thigh, then pulled on a pair of old jeans and a tee shirt. It was Saturday, thankfully, so Bruce didn’t have to worry about a suit, and making his way down the stairs, he was glad to see visitors…especially these visitors.

Four years…four years, he’s been gone now. His heart twinged, but Bruce didn’t have to hold up a mask around Dick, who hugged him tight as soon as his first Robin saw him, nor around Barb, who he knelt to hug as well. Steph looked a little lost, a little nervous to be here, and Bruce hugged her too, whispering thanks to her as he’d done to the rest, and if Steph hugged his waist a little harder, her voice a little thick…well, Bruce wasn’t going to tell.

“Father, Alfred the cat is most worried about you.” Bruce paused as he set Steph back on her feet, turning to face Damian, who was holding his purring tuxedo cat and looking concerned…and Bruce couldn’t help the tiny, choked sob, because Damian looked so much like Jason at that age, his whole being focused on “comfort father”.

“So I see. May I hold him?” Damian nodded, and Bruce gently took the cat, smiling as Alfred bumped noses with him and settled on his shoulder, purring deeper still. “Thank you, Damian…”

“This is an auspicious day; we need all the comfort we can receive…” He murmured, and Bruce hugged his youngest tight, tears spilling over now…and Damian hugged him back, clinging to him tight.

“That’s…that’s true…c’mon everyone, we better get into the kitchen before Alfred the butler and Selina yell at us.” He murmured, and Dick chuckled while Barb smiled and took the lead. Damian pulled away from the hug, but not from Bruce, and they walked in hand in hand, taking comfort from one another. Jason’s photo, the last one taken two weeks before he died, was sitting on the counter, as always, with a candle lit…and the new addition of a tin can with the label meticulously soaked off, full of dandelions, and Bruce paused by it, lips twitching up in a fond smile.

“Master Bruce, I hope you don’t mind…I wanted…well…I remember Jason making those bouquets for us when he was a child…” Alfred murmured, and Bruce just pulled him into a hug, tears running hot down his cheeks now.

“I can’t think of a better thing…It’s perfect. Best bunch of flowers that’s ever entered this house.” They all shared a laugh at that, though Selina, Steph, and Damian looked a little confused, and it was Dick who explained, his voice warm and fond as he remembered all the times Jason would prowl the Wayne grounds, plucking dandelions and purple clovers, filling an old coffee can or tin can full to the brim and bringing them back to the house to share, his smile bright and happy.

“…At first, we offered him the flowers from the garden, and Jason just shook his head, looking scared, and said that he got in trouble for pulling those. No one cared about the wildflowers.”

“Oh, what a sweetheart…” Selina breathed, and Bruce and Alfred settled at the table at last, which prompted Dick to pass them the plate of pancakes and motion to fill up.

“He really was…c’mon, let’s eat, best way to remember our boy.”

“Here here! And whatever we do, avoid Buzzfeed today.” Barb raised her OJ in a toast, and Bruce closed his eyes with a sigh.

“God, I hate Buzzfeed…”

“Same here, old man. Same here.”

—-

Six months I’ve been back, and not a Bat to bother me. Jason settled in for a quiet Saturday morning, and ignored cable for a change; he knew what was going to be all over the news today, and he, for one, didn’t want to hear yet another poignant portrayal of his death. At least Bruce wouldn’t be out in public today; he’d learned that from running through the old news stories from the last few years, and frankly, Jason was grateful for it. It…meant that Bruce at least care enough to mourn him. Even if the goddamn Joker is still alive…

He sighed, and pushed away the anger he still felt at that fact, and pulled out his guns, then pulled up YouTube on his TV. He scrolled through his usual recommended list, feeling…restless and a little out of his element; it was the first death day he’d spent back in Gotham, and his normal goofy favorites just…weren’t going to cut it. Then he saw the one video he didn’t expect to see.

Buzzfeed Unsolved: Jason Todd, Wayne or Robin?

A grin split his face.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

—-

“Welcome to Buzzfeed Unsolved. I’m Ryan Bergera, and this is Shane Madej. Today, we are covering the mysterious deaths of two important people in the deadly metropolis that is Gotham City…or are we?”

“Wait, what?”

“Jason Todd Wayne, the adopted son of billionaire Bruce Wayne, and the second Boy Wonder, Robin, both of whom disappeared the same day, April 27th…and have never been heard from again.”

“Ryan, you said it was one murder!”

“And therein lays our mystery, because the more you hear details of the case, the more you wonder if these two boys were really the same person.”

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh…I smell a conspiracy!”

“Shane, you smell lunch.”

“And a conspiracy! C’mon, out with details, gimme something, Bergera.”

“Hold your freakin’ horses, dude, lemme go over things…” Jason watched with unconcealed delight as he disassembled his pistol, cleaning each part as Ryan laid out the admittedly sparse facts of the case; of course, Jason knew the truth, but he was frankly somewhat impressed with the story that Bruce and Alfred had concocted. Of course, they couldn’t say the Joker beat him to death with a crowbar and blew up a building on him ( and even Bruce couldn’t have guessed that Talia al Ghul had stolen his corpse from the morgue, gave them an equally beaten dead kid to bury, and dumped his ass in the Lazarus Pit). But the story of Jason being killed as a hit out on the Wayne family was all too likely.

Batman had a lot of enemies.

Bruce Wayne had a lot more.

“No one was ever charged for Jason’s murder…here’s the last video of the press conference where Bruce explains things.”

“…Jesus, he’s barely keeping it together…I know he’s a billionaire, but he’s got a lot of heart…poor guy…”

“Yeah…I know we tend to fuck around on this channel, but…this kid died. Pretty badly, from what the evidence shows.”

“Man…so, you said there were theories, right?”

“Yeah, and they only get worse from here.”

“Well, we started the program with a dead kid; can’t get any worse than that.” Jason paused the video and just…stared at Bruce’s face, the tears on his cheeks, his exhausted appearance…and sighed a little.

“Sorry Dad…”

—-

“Theory number one: Dick Grayson killed Jason Todd out of jealousy. It was rumored that the brothers didn't get along and Dick and his father didn't have a good relationship when Jason came to the household.” Jason’s eyes narrowed at that one; whoever thought up that crock of shit had another thing coming. Sure, he and Dick had bickered like brothers, but at the end of the day, Dick was his brother from another mother. Even now, even with everything that had happened…Jason missed those hugs something fierce.

“I mean, that’s a pretty cut and dry one…”

“So it would seem…but if you look at the interviews, there’s nothing in Dick’s demeanor that shows any resentment or anger. And both Jason and Dick were orphaned at early ages and adopted by Bruce, so…”

“Yeah, I dunno. It’s cut and dry, but…at the same time, it doesn’t really make sense.”

“Especially given that Dick every year celebrates Jason’s birthday; I mean, killers can be weird, we know that from the last several seasons, but…I dunno. It doesn’t really fit.”

“Probably some asshole detective looking to close it up.”

“Probably…”

“On to number two!”

—-

“Bruce Wayne killed Jason Todd. This was, actually, the first big conspiracy theory to hit the web. Thankfully, it quickly died when people saw just how devastated Bruce was for months after his death, but apparently there are still some trolls on public forums who accuse Bruce Wayne of killing his son.”

“…That’s utter bullshit. Fuckers.”

“Right there with ya, buddy. Right there with ya. Onto three?”

“Please.”

—-

“Jason isn't dead, because of sightings of a homeless boy who wandered all around Crime Alley and looked exactly like Jason Todd. He was completely battered and bruised and suddenly disappeared after a year in the streets, likely due to a trafficking ring.” Jason raised an eyebrow at that, and turned his AK, Shane and Ryan’s incredulousness a comfort. He wasn’t sure why he was still watching this, but…it was kinda nice. Nice to have people be pissed off for his sake.

“Jesus Christ, Gotham, y’all are so dark.”

“May be why their superhero is Batman, dude.”

“STILL. Could this one have some merit, though, since he was an orphan?”

“This one is one of the strongest theories to date, because Jason was from a place called the Narrows, not far from Crime Alley, and according to Wayne Enterprises official documentation in their family museum, Jason had had issues with drugs and abuse, though to what extent, only the family knows. It’s a pretty ugly idea, but…it’s possible.”

“I think I’d rather be dead, Ryan, than go through that.”

“Same. Same…”

—

“Now. We move onto the disappearance of the second Robin, who vanished the same day that Jason Todd supposedly died. Possible theories of the disappearance of the second boy wonder—”

“Ryan. Ryan. Buddy. Champ. Are you implying, really, that Jason and Robin are the same kid?!”

“I’m just reading the script!”

“You wrote the script!”

“…I may be implying that they’re the same, yes.”

“I KNEW IT.”

“You don’t know shit.” Jason started laughing, and paused to get himself a fresh beer, ordering pizza while he was at it. Alright, this wasn’t so bad after all…

—

“He is hiding. Some say he hid from Batman, and some say Batman is hiding him from others. They don't know what, though. Some even say he quit the job.”

“Alright, I’ll bite, who’s ‘some’.”

“Paparazzi, conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones, etc…”

“Ah yes. The enlightened crowd.”

“Pftt…This is the weakest one, so we’ll go ahead and lay out the second theory while we’re at it. The second Robin died. After Robin stopped appearing with batman for an entire year, the same time Jason Todd died. This used to be a widely spread theory, until people realized maybe talking about the death of a boy in a terrorist attack for a conspiracy theory after his father broke down in public isn't the nicest thing to do.”

“And this is your theory.”

“This…is the strongest one I think, and the one that has the most emotional punch. But let’s be real; if the second Robin was indeed Jason Todd, then his Batman HAS to be Bruce Wayne. And c’mon. We’ve all seen the nightmare surrounding THAT theory.”

“Uh, yeah. No thanks, I do not ever need to write another “But the butts don’t match” article ever again in my life.” Jason snorted at that, cracking up laughing, and when he googled “The Butts don’t match”, he had to pause his boys because the ensuing hyena laugh had him flat on his back for ten minutes, absolutely losing his shit.

“Oh Christ, I love the internet…”

—-

“Next theory. He’s a kid, he took a break from vigilante-ing to do something else.”

“Now see, I like this one; that’s like, the most wholesome version. I hope this is the real one, but…”

“I know, man. I know.”

“Sigh.”

“Sigh.”

—-

“Almost there. Some people believe the second and the third Robin are the same, although many people disagree, considering witness reports that they looked very different, and the Robins were very distinctive in their fighting style and personalities.” Jason snorted at that, shoveling a slice of pizza into his gullet, and even the boys were looking a bit annoyed at that theory, Shane more than Ryan.

“Question.”

“Yes?”

“How the hell do they know about fighting styles?!”

“Gotham City Police.”

“Oh. Well, that makes sense now.”

“Also, apparently Commissioner Gordon likes the third Robin more, which tells me they’re definitely not the same.”

“Yeah, if anyone other than Batman would know, he would. What’s next?”

“This one is kinda great, but also a bit outrageous.”

“Ooooh, juicy. Spill the beans, Bergera!”

—-

“Some even believe that the second Robin is now the infamous Red Hood. Gothamites have been known to try to stalk the dude but it's never successful, and supposedly, even the Batfam won’t bother him.”

“I mean, that’s a cool story, but how true is it?”

“Considering the guy wears a red freakin’ helmet with eyeholes and no mouth, who knows how true it is?”

“Still a nicer story than the butts. And hey, Red Hood is pretty chill, man, I think he’s probably the best thing to hit Gotham in years.”

“You’re a Hoodie!”

“The fuck is a ‘Hoodie?”

“Red Hood groupie.”

“Uh, hell no, I just think he’s cool.”

“Uh huh…Well, folks, that ties up our deep dive into the murder of Jason Todd, and the disappearance of the second Robin. To date, this case remains…Unsolved.” As the quiet music that ushered in the ending screen and credits, Jason sat back, working his second slice of pizza, and chuckled a little to himself. If only they knew…well. His people knew who he was; old man Falcone figured it out the second day Jason had been home. The Narrows had welcomed their boy back…And they weren’t gonna tell anyone. They didn’t trust Gothamites, they didn’t trust the Bats…which was why Jason had carved out his place here again, with gunfire and brutal justice. They trusted him.

He turned YouTube over to something mindless, and padded over to the window, feeling the sunshine, weak though it was, break through the clouds and warm his skin. Jason leaned against the familiar brick, and opened the window, letting in a rush of cool air, reminiscent of spring.

It was good to be home.

[cardest]

Solar System playlist

Look up!  It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s....the Solar System playlist.  Click play here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-iHPcxymC18LD_V5saMr7QzWS1Q3VAU6 

What’s out there beyond our own planet? A mystery at every turn. Mercury to Pluto. The Sun and the Moon, even Phobos gets a mention here. So come by the Neptune Towers and enjoy this Solar System playlist.

SOLAR SYSTEM

001 Amorphis - Far From The Sun 002 The Beatles - here comes the sun   003 Swans - Song For The Sun 004 Mastodon - Once More 'Round The SunStiff Little Fingers 005 Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun 006 Isaac Hayes - Driving In The Sun 007 Tom Petty - dark of the sun 008 DREAMTIME - Sun 009 Circus Diablo - Red Sun Rising 010 Tiamat - The Sun Also Rises 011 Covenant - Bringer of the sixth sun 012 Agoraphobic Nosebleed - hung from the rising sun 013 Alice in Chains - When the Sun Rose Again 014 Lindemann - Children Of The Sun 015 Paradise Lost - Return to the Sun 016 Popol Vuh - Morning Sun 017 Spiritual Beggars - Blood Of The Sun 018 Queens Of The Stone Age - My God Is The Sun 019 TREMENTINA - Kisses in your eyes (Almost Reach The Sun ) 020 Voivod - Divine Sun 021 Blues Pills - Little Sun 022 Neurosis - Enemy of the Sun 023 Extol - Behold The Sun 024 Septic Flesh - Infernal Sun 025 Lamb of God - Straight For The Sun 026 Ensemble Economique - Red For The Sun 027 Black Sabbath - Under The Sun 028 Jesu - Opiate Sun 029 Orchid - Into the Sun 030 The Young Gods - Kissing The Sun 031 Iron Maiden - brighter than a thousand suns 032 Swans - I Am the Sun 033 Therion - Son Of The Sun 034 Sun Ra - Sun song 035 Pink Floyd - eclipse 036 Mike Patton - Eclipse Of The Sun 037 Bonnie Tyler - Total eclipse of the heart 038 God Is An Astronaut - First Day Of Sun 039 Elton John - Don’t let the sun go down on me 040 Eddie Fisher - Sunrise, Sunset 041 Hopscotch Songs - The Planets of our Solar System Song 042 Michael Schenker Group - Blood Of The Sun 043 Iron Maiden - total eclipse 044 Solefald - Sun I Call 045 Man or Astro-Man? - Antimatter Man 046 Kreator - when the sun burns 047 Creedence Clearwater Revival - bad moon rising 048 George Harrison - beware the darkness 049 Heretoir - To Follow The Sun 050 Cat Stevens - Moonshadow 051 Hypocrisy - Adjusting the Sun 052 Rush - Between Sun & Moon 053 Manfred Mann - blinded by the light 054 Sevendust - Black Out The Sun 055 Sunbeam Sound Machine - Real Life 056 Bill Withers - Ain’t no sunshine 057  Gwar - They Swallowed the Sun 058 Katatonia - Ghost Of The Sun 059 The Beatles - I’ll follow the sun 060 Sammy Hagar - little eclipse/sunshine 061 Stevie Wonder - you are the sunshine of my life 062 Pink Floyd - fat old sun 063 Sun Ra - Sunology 064 Mystic Sunship - out there 065 Cream - sunshine of my love 066 Diesto - High As The Sun 067 Sunwølf -  SOlar 068 Kyuss - Molten Universe 069 Moonspell - Shadow sun 070 Neurosis - A Sun That Never Sets 071 Therion - An Arrow From The Sun 072 Candlemass - The Killing Of The Sun 073 Xandria - Kill The Sun 074 Morgoth - Drowning Sun 075 Primordial - Wield Lightning to Split the Sun 076 Lake of Tears -When My Sun Comes Down 077 Jackie DeShannon - Where Does The Sun Go 078 Peter Criss - Down With The Sun 079 Walker Brothers - The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore 080 Devin Townsend - Midnight Sun 081 Sigh - Midnight Sun 082 Black Label Society -  Dark Side of the Sun 083 AMORPHIS - Moon and sun 084 Cynic - Moon Heart Sun Head 085 Sun Ra - Planet Earth 086 David Lynch - Sun Can't Be Seen No More Sarah No More 087 Opeth - Moon Above, Sun Below 088 The Eternal - A Quiet Death of The Sun 089 High On Fire - The Sunless Years 090 The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Third Stone From The Sun 091 Bruce Dickinson - Navigate The Seas of The Sun 092 Voivod - Mercury 093 Melechesh - Of Mercury And Mercury 094 Gustav Holst - Mercury, the Winged Messenger 095 Clutch - Mercury 096 Soilwork - Mercury shadow 097 Satyricon - Mental Mercury 098 Moonspell - Moon in mercury 099 Poisonblack - Mercury Falling 100 Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ronald Frangipane & Don Cherry - Venus (Vond) 101 Boney M - Nightflight to Venus 102 Red Hot Chili Peppers - Subway To Venus Nihal Chahdi 103 The Nefilim - Venus Decomposing 104 Electric Wizard -Venus In Furs 105 Popol Vuh -  Venus Principle 106 Bananarama - Venus Venus Mosquera 107  Apocalyptica -  The Shadow of Venus 108 Archgoat - Sodomator Of The Doomed Venus 109 Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio - Phosphorus Ascending Anthem of Venus 110 Gustav Holst - Venus, the Bringer of Peace 111 Billy Idol - Venus 112 Boyd Rice - Between Venus and Mars 113  Dee D. Jackson - Venus, the goddess of love 114 Therion - Dark Venus Persephone 115 T-Rex - Venus loons 116 Television - Venus 117 Paul McCartney and Wings - Venus and Mars & Rock Show - 118  Theatre of Tragedy - Venus 119 David Bowie - Space oddity 120 The Byrds - Spaceman 121 To-Mera - Earthbound 122 Borknagar -  Inherit the Earth 123 Devin Townsend - Earth 124 William Shatner - Planet Earth 125 Clutch -  Earth Rocker  Jen Rocker 126 DEVO - Planet Earth 127 Misfits - Earth AD 128 Les Baxter - Earth light 129 Louis and Bebe Barron - Come Back to Earth with Me 130 Tristania - Tender Trip on Earth 131  Joseph Arthur & The Lonely Astronauts -  Lonely Astronaut 132 Voivod - Target Earth 133 Samael -  Son of Earth 134 Billy Preston - Space race 135 Alice Cooper - Last Man On Earth 136 Agalloch -  ...and the Great Cold Death of the Earth 137 Deep Purple - space truckin 138 Steve Miller Band  - space cowboy 139 Crowbar -  Liquid Sky And Cold Black Earth 140 Jesu - Mother Earth 141 Devin Townsend - Earth Day 142 Animals as Leaders -  Earth Departure 143 Amorphis -  Enchanted by the Moon 144 Goatsnake -  House of the Moon 145 Elton John - Rocket man 146 Cramps -  Rock On The Moon 147 The Stranglers - Rok It To The Moon (Bonus Track) 148 Frank Sinitra - fly me to the moon 149 Blood Ceremony - Drawing Down the Moon 150 Elvis Presley - flaming star 151 Les Baxter - The other side of the moon 152 In Flames -  Moonshield 153 Ozzy Ozbourne - bark at the moon 154 Fields Of The Nephilim - Moonchild 155 Iron Maiden - Moonchild 156 Blue Oyster Cult - stairway to the stars 157 Voivod -Moonbeam Rider 158 The Black Crowes -Black Moon Creeping 159 Grand Magus - Silver Moon 160 AC DC - next to the moon Craig Norman 161 Manilla Road - fires on Mars James Daniel danke 162 Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ronald Frangipane & Don Cherry - Marz (Esla) 163 Entombed A.D. - Down To Mars To Ride 164 Grateful Daed - dark star 165 Orange Goblin -  Return To Mars 166 Ascension of the Watchers - Mars becoming 167 Styx - come sail away 168 Faith No More - Woodpecker From Mars 169 Kreator -  Mars Mantra 170 The Misfits -  Mars Attacks 171 Gustav Holst - Mars, the Bringer of War 172 Judas Priest - invader 173 Electric Wizard - Priestess Of Mars 174 Queen - Flash Gordon 175 Stone Temple Pilots - First Kiss On Mars 176 Hoodoo Gurus - mars needs guitars 177 War Of The Worlds ~  The Eve of the War 179 Noble Jackals, Penny Dreadfuls and the Systematic Dehumanization of Cool -  Mars Needs Women 180 Alice Cooper - Might As Well Be On Mars 181 Total Recall Jerry Goldsmith - First Dream (Total Recall) 182 Laibach -Mars On River Drina 183 Lantlôs - Neige de Mars 184 The Misfits -  Teenagers From Mars 185 Voivod -  Phobos 186  2001_ A Space Odyssey Theme Song (Also sprach Zarathustra) 187 Covenant -  Planetary black elements 188 Killing Joke -  Asteroid 189 Kyuss - Asteroid 190 Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ronald Frangipane & Don Cherry - Jupiter (Clen) 191 Blues Pills -  Jupiter 192 Samael -  Jupiterian Vibe 193 Earth Wind & Fire - Jupiter 194 Tumbleweed - Jupiter  Aje Morris 195  The Cure - Jupiter Crash 196 Devin Townsend -  Jupiter 197 Gustav Holst - Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity 198  Celestial Season - Jupiter 199 KATAKLYSM - EMBRACING EUROPA 200 David Bowie - I Took A Trip On a Gemini Spaceship 201 Isao Tomita - Space Fantasy 202 The Misfits -  Lost in Space 203 Gwar - Lust In Space 204 Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ronald Frangipane & Don Cherry - Saturn (Sal) 205 Älgarnas Trädgård - Rings Of Saturn 206 Electric Wizard - Saturn Dethroned 207 Les Baxter - [ Saturday night on saturn 208 While Heaven Wept -  Saturn And Sacrifice 209 Ash Pool -  On The Rings Of Saturn Adam And Eve Conceive Cain 210 Scott Kelly -  Saturn's Eye 211 Gustav Holst - Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age Ximenenes Y. Zeroth 212 Samael -  Born Under Saturn 213 The Devil's Blood -Everlasting Saturnalia 214 Stevie Wonder - Saturn 215 Circle - Saturnus Reality 216  R.E.M. -  Saturn Return 217  The B-52's - There's A Moon In The Sky (Called The Moon) 218  Fu Manchu - Saturn III 219 National Geographic Space Kit - The Eerie Sounds Of Saturn 220  AYREON - To the Solar System 221 Voivod -  Meteor 222 Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ronald Frangipane & Don Cherry - Uranus (Berg) 223  Klaatu- Anus Of Uranus 224 Arcturus -  Kinetic 225 Gustav Holst -  Uranus, the Magician 226  Cathedral - Suicide Asteroid 227  Movie Moment - Contact (First Contact) OST 228 Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ronald Frangipane & Don Cherry - Neptune (Axon) 229 Lisa Gerrard - Neptune 230 Neptune Towers - To Cold Void Desolation 231 Fu Manchu - Neptune's Convoy 232 Altar of Plagues -  Neptune Is Dead 233 Lenny Breau -  Neptune 234 Gustav Holst - Neptune, the Mystic 235  Darkthrone - Neptune Towers. 236 Neptune Sounds - Celestial Love Songs (NASA Voyager Recordings) 237  Jimi Hendrix - Valleys Of Neptune 238 Vista Chino -  Planets 1 & 2 239  DEATH - Vacant Planets 240 Black Sabbath - Planet Caravan 241 ZZ Top -  Planet of Women 242 Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ronald Frangipane & Don Cherry - Pluto (Lute) 243 Alchemist - Brumal - A View From Pluto 244 B 52s - Hallucinating Pluto 245 Charlie Hunter - Astronaut Love Triangle 246 YES - Arriving by UFO 247 Ramones - Zero Zero UFO 248  Jefferson Airplane - Have you seen the saucers 249 saxon - watching the sky 250 Devin Townsend -  Planet smasher 666 Voivod - Moonbeam Rider Hit play: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-iHPcxymC18LD_V5saMr7QzWS1Q3VAU6