#Titanic

[xtruss]

The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”

Interviews and e-mails with expedition leaders and employees reveal how OceanGate ignored desperate warnings from inside and outside the company. “It’s a lemon,” one wrote.

— By Ben Taub | July 1, 2023

Stockton Rush, the co-founder and C.E.O. of OceanGate, inside Cyclops I, a submersible, on July 19, 2017. Photographs by Balazs Gardi

The primary task of a submersible is to not implode. The second is to reach the surface, even if the pilot is unconscious, with oxygen to spare. The third is for the occupants to be able to open the hatch once they surface. The fourth is for the submersible to be easy to find, through redundant tracking and communications systems, in case rescue is required. Only the fifth task is what is ordinarily thought of as the primary one: to transport people into the dark, hostile deep.

At dawn four summers ago, the French submariner and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet stood on the bow of an expedition vessel in the North Atlantic. The air was cool and thick with fog, the sea placid, the engine switched off, and the Titanic was some thirty-eight hundred metres below. The crew had gathered for a solemn ceremony, to pay tribute to the more than fifteen hundred people who had died in the most famous maritime disaster more than a hundred years ago. Rob McCallum, the expedition leader, gave a short speech, then handed a wreath to Nargeolet, the oldest man on the ship. As is tradition, the youngest—McCallum’s nephew—was summoned to place his hand on the wreath, and he and Nargeolet let it fall into the sea.

Inside a hangar on the ship’s stern sat a submersible known as the Limiting Factor. In the previous year, McCallum, Nargeolet, and others had taken it around the Earth, as part of the Five Deeps Expedition, a journey to the deepest point in each ocean. The team had mapped unexplored trenches and collected scientific samples, and the Limiting Factor’s chief pilot, Victor Vescovo—a Texan hedge-fund manager who had financed the entire operation—had set numerous diving records. But, to another member of the expedition team, Patrick Lahey, the C.E.O. of Triton Submarines (which had designed and built the submersible), one record meant more than the rest: the marine-classification society DNV had certified the Limiting Factor’s “maximum permissible diving depth” as “unlimited.” That process was far from theoretical; a DNV inspection engineer was involved in every stage of the submersible’s creation, from design to sea trials and diving. He even sat in the passenger seat as Lahey piloted the Limiting Factor to the deepest point on Earth.

After the wreath sank from view, Vescovo climbed down the submersible hatch, and the dive began. For some members of the crew, the site of the wreck was familiar. McCallum, who co-founded a company called eyos Expeditions, had transported tourists to the Titanic in the two-thousands, using two Soviet submarines that had been rated to six thousand metres. Another crew member was a Titanic obsessive—his endless talk of davits and well decks still rattles in my head. But it was Paul-Henri Nargeolet whose life was most entwined with the Titanic. He had dived it more than thirty times, beginning shortly after its discovery, in 1985, and now served as the underwater-research director for the organization that owns salvaging rights to the wreck.

Nargeolet had also spent the past year as Vescovo’s safety manager. “When I set out on the Five Deeps project, I told Patrick Lahey, ‘Look, I don’t know submarine technology—I need someone who works for me to independently validate whatever design you come up with, and its construction and operation,’ ” Vescovo recalled, this week. “He recommended P. H. Nargeolet, whom he had known for decades.” Nargeolet, whose wife had recently died, was a former French naval commander—an underwater-explosives expert who had spent much of his life at sea. “He had a sterling reputation, the perfect résumé,” Vescovo said. “And he was French. And I love the French.”

When Vescovo reached the silty bottom at the Titanic site, he recalled his private preparations with Nargeolet. “He had very good knowledge of the currents and the wreck,” Vescovo told me. “He briefed me on very specific tactical things: ‘Stay away from this place on the stern’; ‘Don’t go here’; ‘Try and maintain this distance at this part of the wreck.’ ” Vescovo surfaced about seven hours later, exhausted and rattled from the debris that he had encountered at the ship’s ruins, which risk entangling submersibles that approach too close. But the Limiting Factor was completely fine. According to its certification from DNV, a “deep dive,” for insurance and inspection purposes, was anything below four thousand metres. A journey to the Titanic, thirty-eight hundred metres down, didn’t even count.

Nargeolet remained obsessed with the Titanic, and, before long, he was invited to return. “To P. H., the Titanic was Ulysses’ sirens—he could not resist it,” Vescovo told me. A couple of weeks ago, Nargeolet climbed into a radically different submersible, owned by a company called OceanGate, which had spent years marketing to the general public that, for a fee of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, it would bring people to the most famous shipwreck on Earth. “People are so enthralled with Titanic,” OceanGate’s founder, Stockton Rush, told a BBC documentary crew last year. “I read an article that said there are three words in the English language that are known throughout the planet. And that’s ‘Coca-Cola,’ ‘God,’ and ‘Titanic.’ ”

Nargeolet served as a guide to the wreck, Rush as the pilot. The other three occupants were tourists, including a father and son. But, before they reached the bottom, the submersible vanished, triggering an international search-and-rescue operation, with an accompanying media frenzy centered on counting down the hours until oxygen would run out.

McCallum, who was leading an expedition in Papua New Guinea at the time, knew the outcome almost instantly. “The report that I got immediately after the event—long before they were overdue—was that the sub was approaching thirty-five hundred metres,” he told me, while the oxygen clock was still ticking. “It dropped weights”—meaning that the team had aborted the dive—“then it lost comms, and lost tracking, and an implosion was heard.”

An investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard is ongoing; some debris from the wreckage has been salvaged, but the implosion was so violent and comprehensive that the precise cause of the disaster may never be known.

Until June 18th, a manned deep-ocean submersible had never imploded. But, to McCallum, Lahey, and other experts, the OceanGate disaster did not come as a surprise—they had been warning of the submersible’s design flaws for more than five years, filing complaints to the U.S. government and to OceanGate itself, and pleading with Rush to abandon his aspirations. As they mourned Nargeolet and the other passengers, they decided to reveal OceanGate’s history of knowingly shoddy design and construction. “You can’t cut corners in the deep,” McCallum had told Rush. “It’s not about being a disruptor. It’s about the laws of physics.”

The submersible Antipodes at the OceanGate headquarters, in Everett, Washington, on July 19, 2017.

Stockton Rush was named for two of his ancestors who signed the Declaration of Independence: Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush. His maternal grandfather was an oil-and-shipping tycoon. As a teen-ager, Rush became an accomplished commercial jet pilot, and he studied aerospace engineering at Princeton, where he graduated in 1984.

Rush wanted to become a fighter pilot. But his eyesight wasn’t perfect, and so he went to business school instead. Years later, he expressed a desire to travel to space, and he reportedly dreamed of becoming the first human to set foot on Mars. In 2004, Rush travelled to the Mojave Desert, where he watched the launch of the first privately funded aircraft to brush against the edge of space. The only occupant was the test pilot; nevertheless, as Rush used to tell it, Richard Branson stood on the wing and announced that a new era of space tourism had arrived. At that point, Rush “abruptly lost interest,” according to a profile in Smithsonian magazine. “I didn’t want to go up into space as a tourist,” he said. “I wanted to be Captain Kirk on the Enterprise. I wanted to explore.”

Rush had grown up scuba diving in Tahiti, the Cayman Islands, and the Red Sea. In his mid-forties, he tinkered with a kit for a single-person mini-submersible, and piloted it around at shallow depths near Seattle, where he lived. A few years later, in 2009, he co-founded OceanGate, with a dream to bring tourists to the ocean world. “I had come across this business anomaly I couldn’t explain,” he recalled. “If three-quarters of the planet is water, how come you can’t access it?”

OceanGate’s first submersible wasn’t made by the company itself; it was built in 1973, and Lahey later piloted it in the North Sea, while working in the oil-and-gas industry. In the nineties, he helped refit it into a tourist submersible, and in 2009, after it had been sold a few times, and renamed Antipodes, OceanGate bought it. “I didn’t have any direct interaction with them at the time,” Lahey recalled. “Stockton was one of these people that was buying these older subs and trying to repurpose them.”

In 2015, OceanGate announced that it had built its first submersible, in collaboration with the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. In fact, it was mostly a cosmetic and electrical refit; Lahey and his partners had built the underlying vessel, called Lula, for a Portuguese marine research nonprofit almost two decades before. It had a pressure hull that was the shape of a capsule pill and made of steel, with a large acrylic viewport on one end. It was designed to go no deeper than five hundred metres—a comfortable cruising depth for military submarines. OceanGate now called it Cyclops I.

Most submersibles have duplicate control systems, running on separate batteries—that way, if one system fails, the other still works. But, during the refit, engineers at the University of Washington rigged the Cyclops I to run from a single PlayStation 3 controller. “Stockton is very interested in being able to quickly train pilots,” Dave Dyer, a principal engineer, said, in a video published by his laboratory. Another engineer referred to it as “a combination steering wheel and gas pedal.”

Around that time, Rush set his sights on the Titanic. OceanGate would have to design a new submersible. But Rush decided to keep most of the design elements of Cyclops I. Suddenly, the University of Washington was no longer involved in the project, although OceanGate’s contract with the Applied Physics Laboratory was less than one-fifth complete; it is unclear what Dyer, who did not respond to an interview request, thought of Rush’s plan to essentially reconstruct a craft that was designed for five hundred metres of pressure to withstand eight times that much. As the company planned Cyclops II, Rush reached out to McCallum for help.

“He wanted me to run his Titanic operation for him,” McCallum recalled. “At the time, I was the only person he knew who had run commercial expedition trips to Titanic. Stockton’s plan was to go a step further and build a vehicle specifically for this multi-passenger expedition.” McCallum gave him some advice on marketing and logistics, and eventually visited the workshop, outside Seattle, where he examined the Cyclops I. He was disturbed by what he saw. “Everyone was drinking Kool-Aid and saying how cool they were with a Sony PlayStation,” he told me. “And I said at the time, ‘Does Sony know that it’s been used for this application? Because, you know, this is not what it was designed for.’ And now you have the hand controller talking to a Wi-Fi unit, which is talking to a black box, which is talking to the sub’s thrusters. There were multiple points of failure.” The system ran on Bluetooth, according to Rush. But, McCallum continued, “every sub in the world has hardwired controls for a reason—that if the signal drops out, you’re not fucked.”

One day, McCallum climbed into the Cyclops for a test dive at a marina. There, he met the chief pilot, David Lochridge, a Scotsman who had spent three decades as a submersible pilot and an engineer—first in the Royal Navy, then as a private contractor. Lochridge had worked all over the world: on offshore wind farms in the North Sea; on subsea-cables installations in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans; on manned submarine trials with the Swedish Navy; on submarine-rescue operations for the navies of Britain and Singapore. But, during the harbor trial, the Cyclops got stuck in shallow water. “It was hilarious, because there were four very experienced operators in the sub, stuck at twenty or twenty-five feet, and we had to sit there for a few hours while they worked it out,” McCallum recalled. He liked and trusted Lochridge. But, of the sub, he said, “This thing is a mutt.”

Rush eventually decided that he would not attempt to have the Titanic-bound vehicle classed by a marine-certification agency such as DNV. He had no interest in welcoming into the project an external evaluator who would, as he saw it, “need to first be educated before being qualified to ‘validate’ any innovations.”

That marked the end of McCallum’s desire to be associated with the project. “The minute that I found out that he was not going to class the vehicle, that’s when I said, ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t be involved,’ ” he told me. “I couldn’t tell him anything about the Five Deeps project at that time. But I was able to say, ‘Look, I am involved with other projects that are building classed subs’—of course, I was talking about the Limiting Factor—‘and I can tell you that the class society has been nothing but supportive. They are actually part of our innovation process. We’re using the brainpower of their engineers to feed into our design.

“Stockton didn’t like that,” McCallum continued. “He didn’t like to be told that he was on the fringe.” As word got out that Rush planned to take tourists to the Titanic, McCallum recalled, “people would ring me, and say, ‘We’ve always wanted to go to Titanic. What do you think?’ And I would tell them, ‘Never get in an unclassed sub. I wouldn’t do it, and you shouldn’t, either.’ ”

In early 2018, McCallum heard that Lochridge had left OceanGate. “I’d be keen to pick your brain if you have a few moments,” McCallum e-mailed him. “I’m keen to get a handle on exactly how bad things are. I do get reports, but I don’t know if they are accurate.” Whatever his differences with Rush, McCallum wanted the venture to succeed; the submersible industry is small, and a single disaster could destroy it. But the only way forward without a catastrophic operational failure—which he had been told was “certain,” he wrote—was for OceanGate to redesign the submersible in coördination with a classification society. “Stockton must be gutted,” McCallum told Lochridge, of his departure. “You were the star player . . . . . and the only one that gave me a hint of confidence.”

“I think you are going to [be] even more taken aback when I tell you what’s happening,” Lochridge replied. He added that he was afraid of retaliation from Rush—“We both know he has influence and money”—but would share his assessment with McCallum, in private: “That sub is Not safe to dive.”

“Do you think the sub could be made safe to dive, or is it a complete lemon?” McCallum replied. “You will get a lot of support from people in the industry . . . . everyone is watching and waiting and quietly shitting their pants.”

“It’s a lemon.”

“Oh dear,” McCallum replied. “Oh dear, oh dear.”

David Lochridge, OceanGate’s former director of marine operations, pilots Cyclops I during a test dive in Everett, on July 19, 2017.

Lochridge had been hired by OceanGate in May, 2015, as its director of marine operations and chief submersible pilot. The company moved him and his family to Washington, and helped him apply for a green card. But, before long, he was clashing with Rush and Tony Nissen, the company’s director of engineering, on matters of design and safety.

Every aspect of submersible design and construction is a trade-off between strength and weight. In order for the craft to remain suspended underwater, without rising or falling, the buoyancy of each component must be offset against the others. Most deep-ocean submersibles use spherical titanium hulls and are counterbalanced in water by syntactic foam, a buoyant material made up of millions of hollow glass balls, which is attached to the external frame. But this adds bulk to the submersible. And the weight of titanium limits the practical size of the pressure hull, so that it can accommodate no more than two or three people. Spheres are “the best geometry for pressure, but not for occupation,” as Rush put it.

The Cyclops II needed to fit as many passengers as possible. “You don’t do the coolest thing you’re ever going to do in your life by yourself,” Rush told an audience at the GeekWire Summit last fall. “You take your wife, your son, your daughter, your best friend. You’ve got to have four people” besides the pilot. Rush planned to have room for a Titanic guide and three passengers. The Cyclops II could fit that many occupants only if it had a cylindrical midsection. But the size dictated the choice of materials. The steel hull of Cyclops I was too thin for Titanic depths—but a thicker steel hull would add too much weight. In December, 2016, OceanGate announced that it had started construction on Cyclops II, and that its cylindrical midsection would be made of carbon fibre. The idea, Rush explained in interviews, was that carbon fibre was a strong material that was significantly lighter than traditional metals. “Carbon fibre is three times better than titanium on strength-to-buoyancy,” he said.

A month later, OceanGate hired a company called Spencer Composites to build the carbon-fibre hull. “They basically said, ‘This is the pressure we have to meet, this is the factor of safety, this is the basic envelope. Go design and build it,’ ” the founder, Brian Spencer, told CompositesWorld, in the spring of 2017. He was given a deadline of six weeks.

Toward the end of that year, Lochridge became increasingly concerned. OceanGate would soon begin manned sea trials for Cyclops II in the Bahamas, and he believed that there was a chance that they would result in catastrophe. The consequences for Lochridge could extend beyond OceanGate’s business and the trauma of losing colleagues; as director of marine operations, Lochridge had a contract specifying that he was ultimately responsible for “ensuring the safety of all crew and clients.”

On the workshop floor, he raised questions about potential flaws in the design and build processes. But his concerns were dismissed. OceanGate’s position was that such matters were outside the scope of his responsibilities; he was “not hired to provide engineering services, or to design or develop Cyclops II,” the company later said, in a court filing. Nevertheless, before the handover of the submersible to the operations team, Rush directed Lochridge to carry out an inspection, because his job description also required him to sign off on the submersible’s readiness for deployment.

On January 18, 2018, Lochridge studied each major component, and found several critical aspects to be defective or unproven. He drafted a detailed report, which has not previously been made public, and attached photographs of the elements of greatest concern. Glue was coming away from the seams of ballast bags, and mounting bolts threatened to rupture them; both sealing faces had errant plunge holes and O-ring grooves that deviated from standard design parameters. The exostructure and electrical pods used different metals, which could result in galvanic corrosion when exposed to seawater. The thruster cables posed “snagging hazards”; the iridium satellite beacon, to transmit the submersible’s position after surfacing, was attached with zip ties. The flooring was highly flammable; the interior vinyl wrapping emitted “highly toxic gasses upon ignition.”

To assess the carbon-fibre hull, Lochridge examined a small cross-section of material. He found that it had “very visible signs of delamination and porosity”—it seemed possible that, after repeated dives, it would come apart. He shone a light at the sample from behind, and photographed beams streaming through splits in the midsection in a disturbing, irregular pattern. The only safe way to dive, Lochridge concluded, was to first carry out a full scan of the hull.

The next day, Lochridge sent his report to Rush, Nissen, and other members of the OceanGate leadership. “Verbal communication of the key items I have addressed in my attached document have been dismissed on several occasions, so I feel now I must make this report so there is an official record in place,” he wrote. “Until suitable corrective actions are in place and closed out, Cyclops 2 (Titan) should not be manned during any of the upcoming trials.”

Rush was furious; he called a meeting that afternoon, and recorded it on his phone. For the next two hours, the OceanGate leadership insisted that no hull testing was necessary—an acoustic monitoring system, to detect fraying fibres, would serve in its place. According to the company, the system would alert the pilot to the possibility of catastrophic failure “with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.” But, in a court filing, Lochridge’s lawyer wrote, “this type of acoustic analysis would only show when a component is about to fail—often milliseconds before an implosion—and would not detect any existing flaws prior to putting pressure onto the hull.” A former senior employee who was present at the meeting told me, “We didn’t even have a baseline. We didn’t know what it would sound like if something went wrong.”

OceanGate’s lawyer wrote, “The parties found themselves at an impasse—Mr. Lochridge was not, and specifically stated that he could not be made comfortable with OceanGate’s testing protocol, while Mr. Rush was unwilling to change the company’s plans.” The meeting ended in Lochridge’s firing.

Soon afterward, Rush asked OceanGate’s director of finance and administration whether she’d like to take over as chief submersible pilot. “It freaked me out that he would want me to be head pilot, since my background is in accounting,” she told me. She added that several of the engineers were in their late teens and early twenties, and were at one point being paid fifteen dollars an hour. Without Lochridge around, “I could not work for Stockton,” she said. “I did not trust him.” As soon as she was able to line up a new job, she quit.

“I would consider myself pretty ballsy when it comes to doing things that are dangerous, but that sub is an accident waiting to happen,” Lochridge wrote to McCallum, two weeks later. “There’s no way on earth you could have paid me to dive the thing.” Of Rush, he added, “I don’t want to be seen as a Tattle tale but I’m so worried he kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego.”

McCallum forwarded the exchange to Patrick Lahey, the C.E.O. of Triton Submarines, whose response was emphatic: if Lochridge “genuinely believes this submersible poses a threat to the occupants,” then he had a moral obligation to inform the authorities. “To remain quiet makes him complicit,” Lahey wrote. “I know that may sound ominous but it is true. History is full of horrific examples of accidents and tragedies that were a direct result of people’s silence.”

OceanGate claimed that Cyclops II had “the first pressure vessel of its kind in the world.” But there’s a reason that Triton and other manufacturers don’t use carbon fibre in their hulls. Under compression, “it’s a capricious fucking material, which is the last fucking thing you want to associate with a pressure boundary,” Lahey told me.

“With titanium, there’s a purpose to a pressure test that goes beyond just seeing whether it will survive,” John Ramsay, the designer of the Limiting Factor, explained. The metal gradually strengthens under repeated exposure to incredible stresses. With carbon fibre, however, pressure testing slowly breaks the hull, fibre by tiny fibre. “If you’re repeatedly nearing the threshold of the material, then there’s just no way of knowing how many cycles it will survive,” he said.

“It doesn’t get more sensational than dead people in a sub on the way to Titanic,” Lahey’s business partner, the co-founder of Triton Submarines, wrote to his team, on March 1, 2018. McCallum tried to reason with Rush directly. “You are wanting to use a prototype un-classed technology in a very hostile place,” he e-mailed. “As much as I appreciate entrepreneurship and innovation, you are potentially putting an entire industry at risk.”

Rush replied four days later, saying that he had “grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market.” He understood that his approach “flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation,” he wrote. “We have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult.”

In response, McCallum listed a number of specific concerns, from his “humble perch” as an expedition leader. “In your race to Titanic you are mirroring that famous catch cry ‘she is unsinkable,’ ” McCallum wrote. The correspondence ended soon afterward; Rush asked McCallum to work for him—then threatened him with a lawsuit, in an effort to silence him, when he declined.

By now, McCallum had introduced Lochridge to Lahey. Lahey wrote him, “If Ocean Gate is unwilling to consider or investigate your concerns with you directly perhaps some other means of getting them to pay attention is required.”

Lochridge replied that he had already contacted the United States Department of Labor, alleging to its Occupational Safety and Health Administration that he had been terminated in retaliation for raising safety concerns. He also sent the osha investigator Paul McDevitt a copy of his Cyclops II inspection report, hoping that the government might take actions that would “prevent the potential for harm to life.”

A few weeks later, McDevitt contacted OceanGate, noting that he was looking into Lochridge’s firing as a whistle-blower-protection matter. OceanGate’s lawyer Thomas Gilman soon issued Lochridge a court summons: he had ten days to withdraw his osha claim and pay OceanGate almost ten thousand dollars in legal expenses. Otherwise, Gilman wrote, OceanGate would sue him, take measures to destroy his professional reputation, and accuse him of immigration fraud. Gilman also reported to osha that Lochridge had orchestrated his own firing because he “wanted to leave his job and maintain his ability to collect unemployment benefits.” (McDevitt, of osha, notified the Coast Guard of Lochridge’s complaint. There is no evidence that the Coast Guard ever followed up.)

Lochridge received the summons while he was at his father’s funeral. He and his wife hired a lawyer, but it quickly became clear that “he didn’t have the money to fight this guy,” Lahey told me. (Lochridge declined to be interviewed.) Lahey covered the rest of the expenses, but, after more than half a year of legal wrangling, and threats of deportation, Lochridge withdrew his whistle-blower claim with osha so that he could go on with his life. Lahey was crestfallen. “He didn’t consult me about that decision,” Lahey recalled. “It’s not that he had to—it was his fight, not mine. But I was underwriting the cost of it, because I believed in the idea that this inspection report, which he wouldn’t share with anybody, needed to see the light of day.”

Stockton Rush in front of Cyclops I, on July 19, 2017.

A few weeks after Lochridge was fired, OceanGate announced that it was testing its new submersible in the marina of Everett, Washington, and would soon begin shallow-water trials in Puget Sound. To preëmpt any concerns about the carbon-fibre hull, the company touted the acoustic monitoring system, which was later patented in Rush’s name. “Safety is our number one priority,” Rush said, in an OceanGate press release. “We believe real-time health monitoring should be standard safety equipment on all manned-submersibles.”

“He’s spinning the fact that his sub requires a hull warning system into something positive,” Jarl Stromer, Triton’s regulatory and class-compliance manager, reported to Lahey. “He’s making it sound like the Cyclops is more advanced because it has this system when the opposite is true: The submersible is so experimental, and the factor of safety completely unknown, that it requires a system to warn the pilot of impending collapse.”

Like Lochridge, Triton’s outside counsel, Brad Patrick, considered the risk to life to be so evident that the government should get involved. He drafted a letter to McDevitt, the osha investigator, urging the Department of Labor to take “immediate and decisive action to stop OceanGate” from taking passengers to the Titanic “before people die. It is that simple.” He went on, “At the bottom of all of this is the inevitable tension betwixt greed and safety.”

But Patrick’s letter was never sent. Other people at Triton worried that the Department of Labor might perceive the letter as an attack on a business rival. By now, OceanGate had renamed Cyclops II “Titan,” apparently to honor the Titanic. “I cannot tell you how much I fucking hated it when he changed the goddam name to Titan,” Lahey told me. “That was uncomfortably close to our name.”

“Stockton strategically structured everything to be out of U.S. jurisdiction” for its Titanic pursuits, the former senior OceanGate employee told me. “It was deliberate.” In a legal filing, the company reported that the submersible was “being developed and assembled in Washington, but will be owned by a Bahamian entity, will be registered in the Bahamas and will operate exclusively outside the territorial waters of the United States.” Although it is illegal to transport passengers in an unclassed, experimental submersible, “under U.S. regulations, you can kill crew,” McCallum told me. “You do get in a little bit of trouble, in the eyes of the law. But, if you kill a passenger, you’re in big trouble. And so everyone was classified as a ‘mission specialist.’ There were no passengers—the word ‘passenger’ was never used.” No one bought tickets; they contributed an amount of money set by Rush to one of OceanGate’s entities, to fund their own missions.

“It is truly hard to imagine the discernment it took for Stockton to string together each of the links in the chain,” Patrick noted. “ ‘How do I avoid liability in Washington State? How do I avoid liability with an offshore corporate structure? How do I keep the U.S. Coast Guard from breathing down my neck?’ ”

But OceanGate had a retired Coast Guard rear admiral, John Lockwood, on its board of directors. “His experiences at the highest levels of the Coast Guard and in international maritime affairs will allow OceanGate to refine our client offerings,” Rush announced with his appointment, in 2013. Lockwood said that he hoped “to help bring operational and regulatory expertise” to OceanGate’s affairs. (Lockwood did not respond to a request for comment.) Still, Rush failed to win over the submersible industry. When he asked Don Walsh, a renowned oceanographer who reached the deepest point in the ocean, in 1960, to consult on the Titanic venture, Walsh replied, “I am concerned that my affiliation with your program at this late date would appear to be nothing more than an endorsement of what you are already doing.”

That spring, more than three dozen industry experts sent a letter to OceanGate, expressing their “unanimous concern” about its upcoming Titanic expedition—for which it had already sold places. Among the signers were Lahey, McCallum, Walsh, and a Coast Guard senior inspector. “OceanGate’s anticipated dive schedule in the spring of 2018 meant that they were going to take people down, and we had a great deal of concern about them surviving that trip,” Patrick told me. But sea trials were a disaster, owing to problems with the launch-and-recovery system, and OceanGate scuttled its Titanic operations for that year. Lochridge broke the news to Lahey. “Lives have been saved for a short while anyway,” he wrote.

OceanGate kept selling tickets, but did not dive to the Titanic for the next three years. It appears that the company spent this period testing materials, and that it built several iterations of the carbon-fibre hull. But it is difficult to know what tests were done, exactly, and how many hulls were made, and by whom, because Rush’s public statements are deeply unreliable. He claimed at various points to have design and testing partnerships with Boeing and nasa, and that at least one iteration of the hull would be built at the Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama. But none of those things were true. Meanwhile, soon after Lochridge’s departure, a college newspaper quoted a recent graduate as saying that he and his classmates had started working on the Titan’s electrical systems as interns, while they were still in school. “The whole electrical system,” he said. “That was our design, we implemented it, and it works.”

By the time that OceanGate finally began diving to the Titanic, in 2021, it had refined its pitch to its “mission specialists.” The days of insinuating that Titan was safe had ended. Now Rush portrayed the submersible as existing at the very fringe of what was physically possible. Clients signed waivers and were informed that the submersible was experimental and unclassed. But the framing was that this was how pioneering exploration is done.

“We were all told—intimately informed—that this was a dangerous mission that could result in death,” an OceanGate “mission specialist” told Fox News last week. “We were versed in how the sub operated. We were versed in various protocols. But there’s a limit . . . it’s not a safe operation, inherently. And that’s part of research and development and exploration.” He went on, “If the Wright brothers had crashed on their first flight, they would have still left the bonds of Earth.” Another “mission specialist” wrote in a blog post that, a month before the implosion, Rush had confessed that he’d “gotten the carbon fiber used to make the Titan at a big discount from Boeing because it was past its shelf-life for use in airplanes.”

“Carbon fibre makes noise,” Rush told David Pogue, a CBS News correspondent, last summer, during one of the Titanic expeditions. “It crackles. The first time you pressurize it, if you think about it—of those million fibres, a couple of ’em are sorta weak. They shouldn’t have made the team.” He spoke of signs of hull breakage as if it were perfectly routine. “The first time we took it to full pressure, it made a bunch of noise. The second time, it made very little noise.”

Fibres do not regenerate between dives. Nevertheless, Rush seemed unconcerned. “It’s a huge amount of pressure from the point where we’d say, ‘Oh, the hull’s not happy,’ to when it implodes,” he noted. “You just have to stop your descent.”

It’s not clear that Rush could always stop his descent. Once, as he piloted passengers to the wreck, a malfunction prevented Rush from dropping weights. Passengers calmly discussed sleeping on the bottom of the ocean, thirty-eight hundred metres down; after twenty-four hours, a drop-weight mechanism would dissolve in the seawater, allowing the submersible to surface. Eventually, Rush managed to release the weights manually, using a hydraulic pump. “This is why you want your pilot to be an engineer,” a passenger said, smiling, as another “mission specialist” filmed her.

Last year, a BBC documentary crew joined the expedition. Rush stayed on the surface vessel while Scott Griffith, OceanGate’s director of logistics and quality assurance, piloted a scientist and three other passengers down. (Griffith did not respond to a request for comment.) During the launch, a diver in the water noticed and reported to the surface vessel that something with a thruster seemed off. Nevertheless, the mission continued.

More than two hours passed; after Titan touched down in the silt, Griffith fired the thrusters and realized something was wrong.“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. As he fiddled with the PlayStation controller, a passenger looked out the viewport.

“Am I spinning?” Griffith asked.

“Yes.”

“I am?”

“Looks like it,” another passenger said.

“Oh, my God,” Griffith muttered. One of the thrusters had been installed in the wrong direction. “The only thing I can do is a three-sixty,” he said.

They were in the debris field, three hundred metres from the intact part of the wreck. One of the clients said that she had delayed buying a car, getting married, and having kids, all “because I wanted to go to Titanic,” but they couldn’t make their way over to its bow. Griffith relayed the situation to the ship. Rush’s solution was to “remap the PS3 controller.”

Rush couldn’t remember where the buttons were, and it seems as though there was no spare controller on the ship. Someone loaded an image of a PlayStation 3 controller from the Internet, and Rush worked out a new button routine. “Yeah—left and right might be forward and back. Huh. I don’t know,” he said. “It might work.”

“Right is forward,” Griffith read off his screen, two and a half miles below. “Uh—I’m going to have to write this down.”

“Right is forward,” Rush said. “Great! Live with it.”

Shipwrecks are notoriously difficult and dangerous to dive. Rusted cables drape the Titanic, moving with the currents; a broken crow’s nest dangles over the deck. Griffith piloted the submersible over to the wreck, and passengers within feet of it, while teaching himself in real time to operate a Bluetooth controller whose buttons suddenly had different functions than those for which he had trained.

Various models of Cyclops II are exhibited alongside a model of the Titanic, at the OceanGate headquarters, on July 19, 2017.

“If you’re not breaking things, you’re not innovating,” Rush said, at the GeekWire Summit last fall. “If you’re operating within a known environment, as most submersible manufacturers do—they don’t break things. To me, the more stuff you’ve broken, the more innovative you’ve been.”

The Titan’s viewport was made of acrylic and seven inches thick. “That’s another thing where I broke the rules,” Rush said to Pogue, the CBS News journalist. He went on to refer to a “very well-known” acrylic expert, Jerry D. Stachiw, who wrote an eleven-hundred-page manual called “Handbook of Acrylics for Submersibles, Hyperbaric Chambers, and Aquaria.” “It has safety factors that—they were so high, he didn’t call ’em safety factors. He called ’em conversion factors,” Rush said. “According to the rules,” he added, his viewport was “not allowed.”

It seemed as if Rush believed that acrylic’s transparent quality would give him ample warning before failure. “You can see every surface,” he said. “And if you’ve overstressed it, or you’ve even come close, it starts to get this crazing effect.”

“And if that happened underwater . . .”

“You just stop and go to the surface.”

“You would have time to get back up?” Pogue asked.

“Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s way more warning than you need.”

John Ramsay, who has designed several acrylic-hulled submersibles, was less sure. “You’ll probably never be able to find out the source of failure” of the Titan, he told me, in a recent phone call from his cottage in southwest England. But it seems as though Rush did not understand how acrylic limits are calculated. “Where Stockton is talking about those things called conversion factors . . .”

Ramsay grabbed a copy of Stachiw’s acrylic handbook from his spare bedroom. When Stachiw’s team was doing its tests, “they would pressurize it really fast, the acrylic would implode, and then they would assign a conversion factor, to tabulate a safe diving depth,” he explained. “So let’s say the sample imploded at twelve hundred metres. You apply a conversion factor of six, and you get a rating of two hundred metres.” He paused, and spoke slowly, to make sure I understood the gravity of what followed. “It’s specifically not called a safety factor, because the acrylic is not safe to twelve hundred metres,” he said. “I’ve got a massive report on all of this, because we’ve just had to reverse engineer all of Jerry Statchiw’s work to determine when our own acrylic will fail.” The risk zone begins at about twice the depth rating.

According to David Lochridge’s court filings, from 2018, Cyclops II’s viewport had a depth rating of only thirteen hundred metres, approximately one-third of Titanic’s depth. It is possible that this had changed by the time passengers finally dived. But, Lochridge’s lawyer wrote, OceanGate “refused to pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the required depth.”

In May, Rush invited Victor Vescovo to join his Titanic expedition. “I turned him down,” Vescovo told me. “I didn’t even want the appearance that I was sanctioning his operation.” But his friend—the British billionaire Hamish Harding, whom Vescovo had previously taken in the Limiting Factor to the bottom of the Mariana Trench—signed up to be a “mission specialist.”

On the morning of June 18th, Rush climbed inside the Titan, along with Harding, the British Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, and his nineteen-year-old son, Suleman, who had reportedly told a relative that he was terrified of diving in a submersible but would do so anyway, because it was Father’s Day. He carried with him a Rubik’s Cube so that he could solve it in front of the Titanic wreck. The fifth diver was P. H. Nargeolet, the Titanic expert—Vescovo’s former safety adviser, Lahey and McCallum’s old shipmate and friend. He had been working with OceanGate for at least a year as a wreck navigator, historian, and guide.

The force of the implosion would have been so violent that everyone on board would have died before the water touched their bodies.

For the Five Deeps crew, Nargeolet’s legacy is complicated by the circumstances of his final dives. “I had a conversation with P. H. just as recently as a few months ago,” Lahey told me. “I kept giving him shit for going out there. I said, ‘P. H., by you being out there, you legitimize what this guy’s doing. It’s a tacit endorsement. And, worse than that, I think he’s using your involvement with the project, and your presence on the site, as a way to fucking lure people into it.’ ”

Nargeolet replied that he was getting old. He was a grieving widower, and, as he told people several times in recent years, “if you have to go, that would be a good way. Instant.”

“I said, ‘O.K., so you’re ready to fucking die? Is that what it is, P. H.?’ ” Lahey recalled. “And he said, ‘No, no, but I figure that, maybe if I’m out there, I can help them avoid a tragedy.’ But instead he found himself right in the fucking center of a tragedy. And he didn’t deserve to go that way.”

“I loved P. H. Nargeolet,” Lahey continued. He started choking up. “He was a brilliant human being and somebody that I had the privilege of knowing for almost twenty-five years, and I think it’s a tremendously sad way for him to have ended his life.”

Lahey dived the Titanic in the Limiting Factor during the Five Deeps expedition, back in 2019. I remember him climbing out of the submersible and being upset at the fact that we were even there. “It’s a mess down there,” he recalled, this week. “It’s a tragic fucking place. And in some ways, you know, people paying all that money to go and fly around in a fucking graveyard . . .” He trailed off. But the loss of so much life, in 1912, set in motion new regulations and improvements for safety at sea. “And so I guess, on a positive note, you can look at that as having been a difficult and tragic lesson that probably has since saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” he said.

OceanGate declined to comment. But, in 2021, Stockton Rush told an interviewer that he would “like to be remembered as an innovator. I think it was General MacArthur who said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break.’ And I’ve broken some rules to make this.” He was sitting in the Titan’s hull, docked in the Port of St. John’s, the nearest port to the site where he eventually died. “The carbon fibre and titanium? There’s a rule you don’t do that. Well, I did.” ♦

— Ben Taub, A Staff Writer, is the recipient of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. His 2018 reporting on Iraq won a National Magazine Award and a George Polk Award.

[kayashe-art]

Guess who keeps getting suckerpunched by another Hazbin Headcanon. Repeatedly. This one's starting to become a problem considering whenever I watch related content there is a 78% chance of it popping out of the woodworks.

Alastor absolutely, 100% believes the absolute worst about J. Bruce Ismay. To the point that even the slander from 1912 to Al sounds like someone trying to make Mr. Ismay look better. You'd have a better chance making Alastor say something nice about Vox than about Mr. Ismay.

Alastor is also 100% convinced that Mr. Ismay got hunted down by the exorcists with prejudice the moment he died even if he died outside extermination day because Al can find absolutely no sign that Mr. Ismay has ever been in hell. Alastor is wrong about that.

[blueguydraws]

Just for the record every time i see something like this i will go towards the right and pro capitalism a bit. Out of spite if nothing else.

The normal person reaction to hearing about this is "how unfortunate, oh well" and then you continue your day.

If you hear about a particuarly gruesome accident and you feel like going out of your way to type out something sadistic for no reason, then get help.

I saw many like this so far its just the two i screenshotted, and this site isn't free from this kind of beahavior either, i remember once i think it was Texas that got hit with some natural disaster and all i saw here was people saying that they deserved it for being bigots and its just punishment. Like did somehow we went so far left that we circled straight back into reinventing the cocnept of divine punishment or what?

We like to imagine that we are beyond the barbarisms of the past but we have to admit that like half of people would be only a few days and a pamphlet away from shooting the kulaks, sweeping the attics and killing the romanovs.

[news-archiv24]

Accident of the ship Titanic and the submarine Titan - similarities

The accident of the adventure submarine Titan is tragic and remarkable at the same time. A provider of expensive adventure travel with thrills offers wealthy customers an exciting submarine trip to the wreck of the legendary Titanic. The submarine with which the adventure travel company, which wants to undertake adventure travel, is called "Titan". The name is reminiscent of the legendary but unfortunate ship "Titanic" and may increase the thrill for the paying guests.

This submarine with which the entrepreneur wants to bring his paying guests on site is not controversial. Some time ago, a technical employee of the company had raised technical concerns about the submarine and expressed his skepticism about its safety. Instead of taking a closer look at the technical employee’s concerns and having a conversation with the technical employee, the critical employee was quickly dismissed by the company management. The tragic end of the so-called adventure journey is well known: The submarine with the name "Titan" imploded in the depths of the sea and all five occupants died tragically. Among the dead was a nineteen-year-old young man who had his life ahead of him. The trust in the submarine must have been very high with the operator, because he himself drove with the accident.

This trust is difficult to understand in retrospect, especially against the background of the previous warnings. So - similar to the legendary ship Titanic - a large portion of overconfidence and arrogance is added, considering that the warning technician was dismissed after his criticism. Arrogance and recklessness as risk factors?

Even with the legendary ship Titanic, there was a certain arrogance in the game, considering that the ship was considered (practically) unsinkable. Shouldn’t that be a lesson?

image source: pexels.com

[weaver-z]

Sorry. The submarine-like contraption used by the doomed let's-go-see-the-Titanic expedition was made of drainpipe? That Iron Lung sarcophagus of a vessel, which needs to descend about two and a half miles below the uncaring ocean, is made of drainpipe? Whatever happened to that thing is going to make the Byford Dolphin Accident look like a papercut, good god.

[hunn1e-bunn1e]

Gojo Satoru - "Eyes Blue Like the Atlantic"

🐇.•°•.🐇.•°•.🐇.•°•.🐇.•°•.🐇.•°•.🐇.•°•.🐇.•°•.🐇.

In which the memories of that day on the waters of the Atlantic Ocean seem to be crumbling away; but the vibrant blue eyes that seem to stay in your mind bring you comfort in your time of loneliness. Or; in which even months after the accident, Gojo Satoru continues to search for the Curse who stole away the memories of the love of his life.

Part 2 "–And He's Going Down Like The Titanic"

Have some light angst...

                                                                                                   

🌊•♡•🌊•♡•🌊•♡•🌊•♡•🌊•♡•🌊•♡•🌊•♡•🌊

Blue. You remembered that color clearer than anything else at the time. Blue was the color of his eyes. Who's eyes? You couldn't quite remember that either. But those vibrant blue eyes have been stuck in your mind since then.

It was a blur then. But the warmth of his arms tightening around you as he shielded you from a danger that you couldn't quite recall was something that you longed for every time you lay in bed at night. The sturdiness of his chest couldn't be replicated by the pillow that you clung to while you lay awake staring at the ceiling, no matter how much you wished it would. It was so comforting, even if he was a stranger.

Somehow, the only things you could remember from that day were the feeling of his arms around you as he dodged blows from an unseen attacker, the violent crashing of the ocean waves against the ship, and his beautiful blue eyes looking into your own. Those were things you saw that day. You also sparingly recalled the things you felt. The sharp winds whipping against your skin, the erratic movements and sways of the ship, the warmth that radiated from a sturdy chest on the side of your face, the rushing wind against your back as you fell back, and the biting cold of the arctic waters swallowing you up in their depths.

It started simply as a celebration with your coworkers on one of the company yachts, but then something happened. Something. And the only evidence that you had of that ‘something’ was your sparse memories and an oddly shaped bruise that only seemed to grow darker and branch out across your skin as the days rolled by. The doctors were mystified by said bruise, the injury tripling in size and covering nearly the entirety of your chest from the time you were admitted till now. 

They grew so concerned about the bruise that they asked you if you wanted to be permanently admitted. You agreed, of course. As the days passed you noticed that you began to forget a lot more than the shipwreck. Hell, you've even forgotten what street you used to live on before all this even happened. You've actually been here in the hospital for almost five months now; just sitting on your bed and staring out the window as the sun rises and sets each day.

Every now and then, you could swear that you saw him just out of the corner of your eye; always catching a glimpse of blue and white before it disappears from sight. It was like the world was taunting you; tormenting you with the memories that your brain has hidden from you.

But now, you were scared.

Lately, you have begun to forget important things about yourself. First, it was the street name and house number that you lived at, then where you worked, next was what you even did for work, and then you forgot the names of family members. You forgot your birthday. You forgot how old you were. You forgot your name. And now, even what little memories you have of his blue eyes are beginning to blur and contort and will soon disappear like everything else has begun to do.

Ah… what were you just thinking about again? What was it? Hmmm.

Oh. The sky is so blue today. It reminds you of his beautiful eyes that day on the water…. 

But…. Who's eyes… were they again?

“So? Have they started to remember anything yet?”

A man with snow-white hair and vibrant blue eyes anxiously questions the advanced reverse curse technique user in front of him in front of him; his large hands tightly curled into fists at his sides.

“You know the only way that they'll regain their memories is if you're able to locate the curse and exercise it. The only thing I can do for them is slow down the spreading of the curse mark and make them as comfortable as possible. I'm sorry Gojo.”

The man solemnly shakes his head; sighing at the insistence of the special-grade sorcerer.

The six eyes inheritor sighs in frustration.

Just a little bit longer; he's so close, he can feel it.

Just wait for him a little longer, [Name].

🌊•♡•🌊•♡•🌊•♡•🌊•♡•🌊•♡•🌊•♡•🌊•♡•🌊

🐇.•°•.🐇.•°•.🐇.•°•.🐇.•°•.🐇.•°•.🐇.•°•.🐇.•°•.🐇.

Wanna see similar content? Check out my Masterlist! @female-dabi12 @lostsomewhereinthegarden

[luonnon-varainen]

Here are the Toothtail's bay gods and some random guest-deities. All in colour~~

And relationship tree of this sleuth/raft(a group of titans = sleuth => a group of bear or a group of titans=raft=> a group of otters) and extra titan characters (the Toothtail's bay gods are the fuchsia-lavender branch + Morza and King)

Ethnographic/Cultural trivias:

1. The clan head's hornwear consists of demons/witches skulls and bones as a clips. Due to the highest god status, wealth and influences such sacrifices were neither too expensive nor rare. It was even a common practice in cult circles. New cult's heads and chiefs would sent a pair of worshippers(already prepared or alive) to gain favour with a clan head.

2. Qennaians(in a legend is a typo) are titans who live off ocean trade, raid and bureaucracy(mostly transit duty). It's a mixture of pirates, privateers and merchants. They do not possess cults nor lands and they sticked with nomadic lifestyle. Nevertheless, they control important strait, bays, harbour cities and links. The decisions made by qennaians determines whether the trade routes are unobstructed. Members of the qennaian fleets often are treated on similar level as cults heads or even clans heads. Distinguishing characteristic of this group are headbands, often made of scales and secured by ferronnières attached to the hornwear.

3. In polar clan, titan obtains their hornwear after the palisman funeral. The clips materials are especially expensive in that region. It resulted in restriction - only grown ups who are more cautious and prudent can wear hornwear clips. Risk of accidents and damages are much smaller.

4. To be a member of the Jaw Council material and social status are irrelevant. Cadet must be skilled glyph caster, good at diplomatics, well educated and value world peace the most. However, high status always helps with the job.

It's out of context, but I felt like it's sth silly to show. It is the relationship graph basing only on a love-hate scale from some time already... Looks like rainbow spaghetti with word-meatballs

[diioonysus]

creepy/messed-up history facts

the man in the booth across from lincoln was named major henry rathbone, and after booth fired the shot, rathbone tried to tackle him to the ground, but booth sliced rathbone in the arm with a dagger. after that night, rathbone was never free of guilt. he suffered from stomach ailments to heart palpitations, and on december 23rd 1883, he attacked and killed his wife clara, and attempted to kill himself. he spent the rest of his life in a mental institution.

in 1494, sailors returning from the new world brought with them massive outbreak of syphilis, which spread through an entire french army, and with no antibiotics to counteract it, the disease spread unchecked. the skin on victims' faces would essentially rot away from the grisly ulcers. in some cases, the noses, lips and other body parts of the affected people were essentially gone.

in 1890, thomas edison, using wax cylinder, produced a line of baby dolls. they had wooden bodies, procelain heads, and miniature phonographs in their chests. the phonographs would play back recordings of young women reciting nursery rhymes like "hictory dickory dock," and "now i lay me down to sleep." (here's the audio of them x)

dentures used to be made from the teeth of dead soldiers. they were ivory base plates with real human teeth attached, a lot of these were sold to dentists by scavengers looting corpses from the battle of waterloo. the dentists would boil the them down, cut off the roots, attach them to ivory plates, and sell them.

in 1929, a pair of scientists at princeton university wanted to test and understand how the auditory nerve percieves sound, and their test subject was an alive cat. they cut out part of its brain and attached one end of a telephone wire to its auditory nerve and the other end to a reciever. weirdly enough, many researchers think this helped lead to the development of cochlear implants. but the cat was killed after the scientists wanted to see if it worked on a dead cat.

in 1726, mary toft told doctors that she gave birth to rabbits, and doctors were fully convinced until they found pieces of corn inside the stomach of one of the rabbits, proving that it hadn't developed inside her womb. she instead was manually inserting the rabbits to make the delivery look as realistic as possible.

it was believed that babies under the age of 15 months couldn't feel pain, so doctors would instead use muscle relaxers that had a paralytic effect to stop the baby from moving. this essentially meant they couldn't move or cry but they could still hear, see, and feel everything that was done to them. this was accepted up until 1980s

there was a tiger in india named man-eater of champawat who became dependent on human flesh, which at the turn of the 20th century inflicted a seven-year reign, killing 436 men, women, and children. she was eventually killed in 1907.

there was a book called "how the mail steamer went down in mid atlantic, by a survivor," which tells the story of an unnamed ocean liner that sinks in the atlantic. the protagonist is a sailor named thompson, who grows concerned over the lifeboat shortage, and sure enough the liners collides with a small sailing ship in a fog. as the ship sinks, only 200 of the 700 people on board survive. the second novella "the wreck of the titan: or, futility" by morgan robertson, follows the fictional ocean liner titan, which hits an iceberg in the north atlantic and sinks. like the titanic, the titan was described as the largest ship afloat at the time, both ships had a shortage of lifeboats, and the titan was dubbed "unsinkable." when the accident occurred, roberston simply said he was knowledgabe about maritime operations, saying "i know what i'm writing about, that's all."

some books created in the 18th and 19th century were bound in real human skin which was called anthropodermic bibliopegy. most of these books that were bound with human skin instead of animal skin were mostly based on anatomy or erotica.

during the battle of ramree island, which was fought between january and february 1945, japanese soldiers were cornered by english troops seeking to conquer burmese island of ramree, forcing japanese troops to cross 10 miles of swamp. the japanese soon began to suffer the effects of tropical diseases, but the presence of large numbers of scorpions, tropical mosquitoes and thousands of saltwater crocodiles, the world's largest reptiles, was even worse. In its genre. very aggressive beasts that can reach 8 meters in length and weigh more than a ton. according to some survivors, during the night, they were hunted one by one, in which the crocodiles would ambush them from underneath. and the survivors said the worst part was hearing the screams and the breaking of bones in the dark.

there is a cocodile named gustave (or was if you believe he's dead), a large nile crocodile in burundi who has been rumored to have killed 200-300 people. he's never been captured, but it has been stated that he could be "easily more than 20 feet, and weigh more than 2,000 pounds." he was/is estimated to be over 100 years old, and was/is described as having bullet wounds over his body, and his right shoulder blade was found to be deeply wounded, but they don't know what could have caused it. it's been rumored that he would leave the corpses he killed behind. in 2019, an article revealed he was killed, but there's no photographic evidence which leaves people doubting it's true.

[dotster001]

Twisted Wonderland Masterlist 2

Masterlist 1

This masterlist features fics and HC's that are about multiple characters.

Headcanons

Mean girl hcs- fem reader x Idia, Crewel, Crowley, malleus, Vil, and rook. A mean girl bullies you and they step in.

Period Simulator HCS- reader x Vil/Malleus/Idia/Rook/Crowley/Crewel you make your boyfriend try a period simulator.

Period Simulator HCs part 2- reader x Trein/Riddle/Azul/Jade/Sebek

Period Simulator HCs part 3- reader x Trey/Leona/Kalim/Jamil/Lilia

S/O like Rio Voleri Hcs- Jamil x reader, Leona x reader. S/O who is a lot like Rio Voleri from Court of Darkness? What could go wrong?

Sweet S/O Who's Dad is a Mafia boss HCS- Fem reader x Leona, Jamil and Vil

Passing out from Burnout Hcs- Floyd/Rook/Vil/Jamil x gn!reader. HC's for when reader gets burnt out, and passes out

Passing out from Burnout HCs part two- Malleus/Lilia/Trein/Crewel

Passing out from Burnout HC's Three- Riddle/Cater/Azul/Kalim

HC's for second years Crushing on Malleus'younger Brother First Years

HC'S for Diasomnia crew with reader who has been alive since titan times

S/O who wears a mask to hide their heterochromia HC's- Lilia/Riddle/Azul/Rook/Vil x reader

HC's for S/O who gives Cheka a kiss-Dorm leaders x reader

Househusband Au HC's- Crewel/Vil/Crowley/Rook/Malleus/Idia x reader

Househusband au HC's 2- Riddle/Cater/Leona/Deuce/Kalim

Queer platonic relationship HC's with aro dorm leaders and aro reader. First Years

HC's for when you accidentally call the staff dad

HC's when you call the Diasomnia boys Knight in shining armor or prince charming

HC'S for a significant other with a ton of pillows and blankets- x first year crew

Gyutaro-like Yuu HC's- Malleus/Cater/Ace/Ruggie/Deuce

S/O like Dia Akedia HC's- Jade/Vil x reader

When the "dad's" find out you are dating Neige- staff HC's

S/O like Toa Qelsum HC's- Ace/Deuce/Epel x reader

What kind of parents are they?

Riddle/Lilia/Trey/Cater x reader who loves to brag about them

Rook/Riddle/Ruggie/Trey/Sebek x reader with Ethereal Personality

They are dating someone, then meet their soulmate. What will the do? Ace/Sebek/Rook/Sam/Leona

Dorm leaders react to Piercings

Malleus/Lilia/Leona/Kalim/Vil x cynical s/o

Jack/Idia/Kalim/Floyd/Chenya x mc who wears headphones all the time

Housewardens and Floyd x ex gifted child MC

Overblot Crew x mc with 0 impulse control

Crewel/Crowley/Vil/Rook/Idia/Malleus on labor Simulator

Riddle/Leona/Ruggie/Lilia/Idia wake up to a cat on their chest, that belongs to you

Idia/Malleus/Rook/Vil/Crewel/Crowley meet their future kids

Calling Leona/Jamil/Vil/Rook a pet name in public

Jade/Leona/Vil/Floyd break up with you for someone else, and regret it too late

The Basketball boys get a kiss on the cheek after a win

Vil/Rook/Lilia/Malleus x fem reader who wears a witch costume for Halloween

Jamil/Sebek/Malleus x fem reader who makes them a feast when they're down

Fics

Memories of Wonderland- After a near death experience, you unlock memories you forgot you had. Chapters: One Two

Lab Safety- You're taking the school's safety into your own hands after one to many alchemy accidents.

How you met/enemies to lovers mini series for @stygianoir -Idia. -Vil. -Crewel. -Crowley. -Malleus. -Rook. Requested Additions: -Lilia -Leona

How They Get you under the Mistletoe - all boys x reader everyone else

For Tuna-Grim tries to get us a sugar daddy so that he can have good tuna. For Tuna; the Search Continues For Tuna;Snack Break Choose your Ending Bonus Features

Caterer-Fem!Reader. No one thinks you can cook for the entirety of Heartslaybul Dorm.

Comfort From the Depths- You're scared of the ocean, and octotrio help out

What kind of girl they like- all boys x fem! Reader Masc Version gn! Version

Look at this Photograph- Grim is tasked with photographing the boys for a beauty pageant. Why people would think he could it?

Lean on Me- You're at an RSA/NRC mixer and see an old friend....from your home world

That's What Friends Are For- Ramshackle is not allowed to participate in the founder's day festivities. Chaos ensues.

Self Love and Braided Bracelets- Y/N's harem of self care

Battle Royale- Y/N has a crush on someone! And everyone is certain it's them....

When you escape him series masterlist- Yandere x reader he adopts a child that looks like the two of you. You both escape, but he finds you years later.

The Ghost Groom- Fem reader is taken by the ghost groom! Can the boys save her? Probably not

Waking him up with a kiss- Jamil/Malleus/Silver x reader

Snowball War- Epel asks for your help in a prank that quickly spirals

[deathmetalunicorn1]

I would like to request A gender neutral reader being a half titan (Greek myth titans) half mortal whose father is Oceanus (Because it only makes sense) and the ror universe greek gods being surprised about the fact that the reader is human looking and human sized despite their their father being a titan. Greek Gods Only please. (I.e. Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Hermes And Ares and/or Heracles)

It would be fun to see their reactions.

And Crossover is Heavily Implied But No Crossover here, Please.

How They knew and met is entirely up to your choosing.

-When it was revealed that there was a child of a Titan still out there in the world, the gods, naturally, panicked!!!

-Zeus was immediately giving out orders for this Titan child to be found, worrying about another uprising, wanting this to be dealt with immediately!

-They were not expecting their target to be brought in by Aphrodite, walking alongside her, about the same height, and looked basically like a normal human, except you had blue hair that was dark in some spots and lighter in others, like the ocean.

-You weren’t really sure why you were being called by the gods, as you’ve spent most of your life lounging on a beautiful tropical island you had converted into a massive luxury resort.

-Zeus looked up at you, his eyes wide, “This is the child of Oceanus?!” you grinned warmly down at him, “Hi there! That’s right, he’s my dad! I’m Y/N!”

-You were totally not what they were expecting, even Aphrodite, who had found you on accident, was stunned that you looked so… unlike your Titan father.

-Hades then spoke to you, his tone even but not unkind, “If you’re Oceanus’ child, why are you normal sized like the rest of us?”

-You shrugged your shoulders, “Not completely sure myself- oh wait- I know why! It’s because I’m only a demi-god, mom was a human!”

-That wouldn’t completely explain things, but they weren’t going to bother with it at the moment.

-Poseidon was rather leery of you, worried you were going to try to take over the oceans to avenge your father.

-You were immediately laughing, holding your sides as he scowled, looking rather annoyed before you gave him a grin, “Why would I want to do that when I have my resort to keep me busy?”

-This…did make sense, and Zeus was the first to apologize to you but you weren’t bothered, actually extending an offer to them to visit your resort!

-Zeus- He was instantly like your best friend, he was so funny and enjoyed as many activities he could at the resort, from partaking at the different restaurants and bars, learning to dance, you taught him how to surf yourself, at least the simple stuff. You were definitely nothing like the other titans he faced in the past, you were so much fun! He quickly joined your rewards program and was at the resort at least once a month.

-Poseidon- Watched you the closest while at your resort, which was very beautiful and you took cleanliness very seriously, not allowing any pollution from your resort to taint the beaches or oceans, and you were a constant diver in the ocean around your island, making sure there was nothing bad to disturb the reef or the wildlife. He relaxed after a few days, enjoying hard liquor as he floated in the lazy river pool that wrapped around your whole island.

-Hades- Was annoyed that he spent most of his time at the resort asleep, sleeping in his bed, sleeping in a poolside cabana, sleeping on the warm sandy beaches. He felt like he didn’t get a chance to experience all your resort had to offer, but he did feel extremely relaxed. Hades booked his next vacation as they were getting ready to leave. You were no threat; he was quick to realize this.

-Hermes- The resort was so beautiful! Hermes spent days exploring, from the resort to the beaches, scuba diving with you to see the reefs, and even the jungle that had a footpath the whole way through. He had no idea this place was even here! It was so relaxing and peaceful, he could easily tell that you were nothing like other titans, you were way too chill. He did however, enjoying watching you teach Ares how to scuba dive while he sat on the beach with a massive fruity-boozy beverage.

-Ares- Was hesitant and rather distrustful of you, thinking you were an evil titan like all the others. You were very quick to prove him wrong, given them all free reign of the resort, they could eat, drink, and have as much fun as they wanted! Ares, after a bit of goading from Hermes and Zeus, managed to convince him to go scuba diving, but only if you taught him. Ares found the experience different but eye-opening, although he didn’t like his father and half-brother teasing him afterwards.

-Hercules- You two were like you had been separated at birth, almost constantly together, getting along so easily with each other. He loved your resort, especially the options of food available from the six restaurants and nine bars, all with vastly different menus. He also enjoyed exploring through your jungle, seeing the signs you had put out, showing different landmarks. It felt so good to just be able to lay down, bury his feet in the warm sand, and relax the days away.

-Aphrodite- Was in heaven at your resort, taking full advantage of the spas, pools, and drinks offered; she spent her whole time there being pampered and treated like the goddess she was. You were definitely not a threat, despite your lineage, and she will not hesitate to defend her new favorite resort owner from others.

[cerothenull]

I wonder how Bungie/Destiny 2 developers must've been feeling to have the Oceangate accident (murder-suicide) happen during the middle of the Season of the Deep that involved diving down to oceanic depths (on Titan but still) to such an extent that your immortal space-magic wizard characters required special technology TO NOT IMPLODE FROM THE CRUSHING PRESSURE

[spaceprincessem]

another coda for robstar week!! i love robin angst (he makes it so easy). this is after the first red x episode and since this is based of favorite quotes in centers a little around robin and starfire's conversation where she calls him out on his behavior @robxstar

day 6 - favorite quotes

i'm addicted to disastrous thinking

Robin is an early riser.

Or, well, he usually is.

Sleeping in was a luxury he gave up a long time ago, because there was always work to be done. Training, profiling, researching, or patrolling; it never seemed to end. Under Batman his schedule was strict and rigid, leaving no room to keep his eyes closed past sunrise.

With the Titans he’s learned to let himself bend a little more. Living with four other teenagers with varying preferences for sleeping allowed the rigidity of his former upbringing to ease. He’s still an early riser, partially because he likes the quietness the morning brings. He can sip his coffee and watch the sunrise as he boots the computer and starts his day.

Raven is another early morning Titan, their routines steadily circling around each other the longer they live together. Raven always beat him to starting the coffee pot, but he graciously learn how she took her cup — two scoops of sugar, no cream.

Cyborg and Starfire awoke around the same time, about an hour after he and Raven, but still early enough that the coffee was still warm and the rest of the city began to spring into life; the hum of the morning commute flitting over the ocean. Beast Boy slept in the latest, joining them at the tail end of breakfast. 

This morning, though, Robin knows he’s the last one to crawl out of bed. 

It’s not surprising, all things considered. 

Last night’s battle was hell and he’s still actively punishing himself for the stupid Red X plan that fell apart nearly a week ago.

He knows that, no matter what, his team will always have his back, even when he doesn’t deserve it. They’re better than that, though, and Robin will be forever grateful for their never ending grace they extend to him. They haven’t really talked all that much outside of training and battle which Robin can’t exactly fault them for.

He betrayed their trust and pushed them away. He let Slade dig in too deep, blinding him to just how much he would hurt the people he cared about most simply because he thought he was being clever. Even if the plan had worked he hardly doubts he’d come out unscathed.

Stopping Slade wouldn’t negate the fact that he lied to his team. 

He’s been yelled at before, even Batman loses his temper, but coming from his friends cut deep. He let them fire away, knew that it was for the best, and anxiously waited for Starfire to take her turn, bracing himself for the inevitable final blow.

You want to yell at me too?

He shouldn’t have been surprised that Starfire would take him apart so quietly. Her hurt and disappointment was worse than anything else the others said. The last thing he ever wanted to do was let her down.

Forgiveness isn’t easily earned, but it's just a matter of time, because the Titans were his friends and they loved him. But he couldn’t ignore the itch beneath his skin, the need to do something, repent or maybe to just give penance. 

He doesn’t mind taking some of the harder hits in exchange for his team’s safety despite being the most human out of all of them. Last night was particularly awful and he sheepishly let them finish off the bad guy when his rib made a disturbing cracking sound when he was body slammed into a car.  

He stands in front of his bathroom mirror, shirtless, staring at the blooming hues of black and blues across his abdomen. Thank god for Raven and her healing abilities. An accident like that with Batman would have put him out for a week. 

He presses on the bruise, biting down on the hiss before it can escape past his lips. His fingers are cold as he digs in a little more, letting the pain remind him that his actions have consequences.

His eyes flutter close and he can’t help, but imagine Starfire’s frown, her eyebrows knitting together as her entire face twists with something sad. It’s rare to see her that way; she’s usually the sun, bright, happy, and warm. 

She’d watch him press down on the same spot last night, right after Raven had healed it because he felt like his pain was absolved too soon. Her fingers, gentle and always radiating heat like a fire, pulled his hand away.

“Don’t,” she whispers, “no more punishment.”

He shivers just thinking about her touch and slowly eases up on his bruise. 

He can smell breakfast as soon as his door swishes open, his stomach growling as he imagines fresh chocolate chip pancakes with bacon and maple syrup laid out on the kitchen island.

Cyborg’s taken it upon himself to teach Starfire to cook, the two of them pouring over his grandmother’s old recipe book in their free time. Robin’s even caught them perfecting vegan baked goods for Beast Boy despite Cyborg’s incessant teasing.

It’s a lazy Sunday, most of the Titans still in their house clothes as Robin steps into the living room dressed in his own sweats and hoodie.

“Robin,” Starfire smiles as soon as she sees him, “you’re finally awake.”

“Dude,” Beast Boy says as he transforms out of a goat (goat yoga — he’ll have to ask Raven about that later) , “we thought we were going to have to drag you from bed to join us for breakfast.”

“I had to teach Cyborg to make my coffee.” Raven adds, but there’s an underlying tease to her tone.

“Yours is easier than Star or BB’s,” Cyborg frowns as he flips the last pancake onto a platter stacked high, “who insists on having it frozen and blended.”

Robin bites his lip, stopping the relieved smile from breaking across his face. He stands, watching for a few moments as Beast Boy fires back with a list of why iced coffee is superior to which Starfire nods enthusiastically and Raven immediately starts to counter argue. 

He lets himself wander over to the coffee pot, but his usual mug is already full, and steaming as Cyborg slides it over to him with his own knowing smile. 

“Okay, everyone,” Cyborg calls as he turns off the griddle and finishes setting the breakfast bar, “get over here and dig in.”

“What happened to that bottom pancake?” Raven asks with a raise of her eyebrow as she pokes the suspiciously black cake.

“Starfire tried to cook it with her starbolts,” Beast Boy grins as he elbows the alien playfully in her side.

“Cyborg and I were merely experimenting,” Starfire pouts as she looks mournfully at the burnt food.

“And like any good scientist we concluded that we will be leaving the cooking to the stove top from now on.” Cyborg says as he fills his plate high with meat before drowning it in syrup.

“This all looks great.” Robin says as he takes his place next to Starfire, his heart traitorously fluttering with her beaming smile. 

He lets himself lean into her warmth, their shoulders brushing as they eat. Robin listens and smiles as his friends fill the kitchen with conversation and laughter. 

He can’t help but think that this feels a little like forgiveness. 

[coveredinmetaldust]

The discourse around the OceanGate situation is making me really fucking mad. You are getting a lot of posts like this one where people are decrying how inhumane it is for people to meme on the situation instead of grieving for the kind of people would work you to death if it meant a 0.002% stock price increase.

Yup, these fucking losers are equating willfully creating a death trap and killing 5 other people instantly to a car accident.

I don’t even entirely disagree that yes, it is tragic. I’d rather they didn’t die from an implosion caused by their metal death-tube crumpling in on itself because the arrogant shithead CEO decided that all these safety standards other subs adhere to were getting in the way of innovation. Obviously it would have been preferable to find them drifting on the ocean surface a day later shaken but ultimately unharmed.

No, I’m mad about how blatantly lopsidedly this flavor of moral outrage is always applied. You never see these people on Reddit, Twitter, etc crawl out of the woodwork to denounce the people saying “well he was no angel” when a person of color is gunned down by the police. You never see these same multi-paragraph posts decrying how immoral it is to say “play stupid games win stupid prizes” when this shit happens to the poor, disenfranchised, etc.

You don’t see it, because the people currently on their high horse are the same people who would call you a fucking idiot if you were on this submarine.

If the entree fee was $250 and five working class people were killed I can guarantee you'd see these same people joking about Darwin awards instead of saying stuff like this.

But no no, suddenly now is the time to stop victim blaming and start grandstanding while clutching at pearls. Now is the time to get indignant and accuse people not of feeling empathy and being inhumane sociopaths. There are now were entire call-out topics on Reddit where they organized and briggaded anyone who dares to say anything bad about these poor billionaires. Where the FUCK was this outrage during, I dunno, pick any one of the numerous fucking examples of brutality and/or exploitation occurring within the last three years. Oh right, these dopey fucks were too busy wagging their fingers at the victims and telling them to take Personal Responsibility™. Too bad, if only they were born rich—then maybe these paragons of virtue on social media would go to bat for them.

But you know what the worst part of this discourse is? I can’t quite put it into words, but it’s so blatantly fucking obvious to me that all of this is insincere—this is actual virtue signaling. You can just tell by the tone, the regurgitated talking points, the slimy smug indignation. This is false empathy over people they couldn’t care less about and won’t even remember in a week, because the point isn’t to being a compassionate person.

No, this to grandstand and get that dopimine rush by calling people out. This is being done to score points for some political ideology and Own The Libs/Commies/Socialists/[insert any slightly left of center ideology]. This is so the Panglossian shitheels of social media can maintain the status quo and feel superior by stamping out any act of defiance or rebellion.

None of these of these people seemed to care about how disrespectful this kind of disaster tourism is for the victims of the Titanic. (Victims, who, were mostly lower class since the wealthy were the ones who were allowed to escape.) They don’t care that these rich assholes were profiteering off a tragedy and making a spectacle out of visiting a mass grave. No, they save that smug, condescending, and cynical response for the people who call out these rich assholes.

It makes me want to throw my computer into the ocean.

Now, if you are one of these people I’m screaming into the void about, and you genuinely do not understand why people are memeing the situation so hard, you need to take a step back and recognize that this is, objectively, an absurd and cartoonish situation. This could have easily been a plot for an episode of The Simpsons. This whole goddamn situation reads like something thrown together by a room of writers who were trying to out “yes and” one another until one stopped everyone and said: “Woah woah, hold on. The CEO’s wife is a descendant of the Titanic victims? Isn’t that just a little much?” And then everyone else ignored this person and just kept fucking going.

In short: it was the perfect storm of absurdity, coincidence, hubris, tragedy, and stupidity.

But that's just a surface level explanation which ignores the context of the last hundred or so years. Ask yourself: "why are so many people so unsympathetic towards these particular victims?" Well, there are a multitude of reasons that contributed to how we got to this point and this guy does a much better job of explaining it than I ever could:

[mugman64]

Percy Jackson Headcanons Pt.2

(Some of these tie into the first part)

-Powers

The gods adapt to modern day but only partially, they reflect the way their domains were in ancient Greece or Rome more than how they are now. Their children on the other hand have adapted. Poseidon remains the god of the old sea, the unexplored, the terrifying depths that few would dare to enter.

Percy is the son of a much newer sea, one that has been home to all manners of beings. Millenia of people coexisting and traveling the ocean has given it some newer powers. When Percy needs help and does not have the energy to raise a storm he can sing, the songs of pirates, of sailors, he can funnel the lives of all those who lived and died by the sea into magic. A magic that belongs to the sea, that has become one with the sea. Some even rumor that the Princess Andromeda was pursued by the ghost ship herself, The Flying Dutchman, the seas wrath wrought upon it by Percy’s hand.

Clarisse has a similar power. The Spartans her father swears by never did get much into things outside battle. But as times changed so did war. During capture the flag when all seems lost its been said that the songs of marches seems to emanate from the children of war, empowering their allies. When they are beat down and tired, they die with their backs strong, a distant chant of "a Hell of a way to die" blowing in the wind. And when Silena Beauregard perished the battlefield fell silent as a memorial for a fallen friend rang through the air.

-Appearance

Most demigods use the mist to hide their blemishes. Percy is no different, he hides his scars, some from monsters, some from accidents, and some from Gabe. But the biggest thing he hides is his skin. Percy has fought many gods, titans, immortals, you name it. They have left their mark on him. When Percy defeated Hyperion the golden ichor that fell from his wounds never washed away, when he fought more titans in the pit it added to it. His body has always been an amalgamation of scars and tattoos, now it has splashes of the golden blood of immortals and the green blood of the more powerful monsters he killed thrown in the mix.

Him and Annabeth have theorized why it only happens to him and struggled to find an answer. It was only after Thanatos informs them that he understands. The fates wanted to remind the gods that they aren’t infallible. How better to do it than to mark their savior, the most pertinent demigod of all, with the blood of the immortals he’s beaten on the quest to save them. After all it isn’t only titans whom Percy has made bleed

-Vendetta

Percy frequently had to fend off fights from gods before the war. Every other week it’s either Ares or Athena wanting a fight. At least Artemis stopped after he hit her with his car and Dionysius after he broke his knees with a brick thrown at Mach 1. But these two are so persistent it doesn’t matter if it’s knives, swords, spears, fists. He even beat Athena with a waffle iron once. They just never seem to give up. It doesn’t help that Phobos,Deimos,and Enyo seem insistent on fighting him too.

-Trauma

(t/w: suicidal thoughts, Substance Abuse, and Self Harm mentioned )

After the second Titan War Percy and Clarisse where fast on the track to self-destruction. It all came to a head when they encountered each other in their old bunker, hidden deep in the woods. It was a place where they would hang out and have fun with Beckendorf, Silena, and Lee. All of them gone. Percy saw Clarrise holding a bottle of malt liquor, he himself had just felt a bullet break against the impenetrable skin of his temple, the only way to feel. They saw each other and made a pact to keep each other alive, to confide in each other and help each other until eventually they got past self inflicted wounds and survivors guilt. Both of them were supposed to be generals, supposed to be strong. So they were weak as friends, in private, until they became strong. Many think that only Annabeth or Chris could help them through an episode, but when it’s really bad it’s Percy or Clarrise coming to help the other.

-Parenting/Family

Annabeth is the full blown mama bear in the mortal world, she's at every parent teacher conference, every open school night, holiday parties, EVERYTHING. Gods help the school that tries to shun her kid for having ADHD and dyslexia, she will rain hell on them. She makes sure to listen to her kids side of the story before making up her mind.

Percy on the other hand is pretty laid back, until the Greek side of the family gets involved then all hell breaks loose. No child of his is going a quest before they're fourteen, thank you very much. Aphrodite needs to find her hairbrush for the 12th time this decade? She can go hook up with some actor and make a kid to do it for her, his child won't be risking their life for a fucking hairbrush.

Thalia, Piper, and Reyna are all in equal competition for the cool aunt title. It’s a much less intense competition than the vine riddled flaming skeletal mess that is Grover, Nico, and Leo’s competition to be the favorite uncle. (In reality Frank and Hazel have already claimed the titles)

Grandma Sally is a favorite of all the kids, and both Annabeth and Percy find family dinner where Athena glares at Poseidon from across the table very amusing.

-Protectiveness

Percy has always had a “me and mine” mentality. That is to say he’s fiercely protective of his friends and himself. That is why he fought in the wars. That is why he mouths off to the Olympians. Everything he does is to protect his friends and family, not the gods who sit and watch, but his siblings who fight next to him, who he protects with each battle.

His rage during the Battle of Manhattan was equally about his sorrow for losing members of his family as it was about protecting Annabeth. Even to this day demigod veterans remember his anger when he found that the enemy rolled a Panzer tank through HIS PEOPLE into HIS CITY. -Safehouse

Sally has an open door policy to all demigods. If you’re on a quest and you need a safe place to sleep or a meal you’re welcome to stay. Even the Hunters have taken advantage of such a boon. Not once had there ever been a monster attack on the apartment.

A couple people have theorized on how this works and the best answer is Percy is so terrifying to the monsters that know to stay away from his mother. And they’d be partially right, but Sally Jackson knows better. Because she’s the one who put the shotgun with celestial bronze ammo next to the door. Percy got his protectiveness from somewhere, and it wasn’t the God of the Seas.

[2d-beefcakes-my-beloveds]

OC Marina Grayson

As a young man, Orm fell in love with a marine researcher. When she didn't return the next year with the pod of dolphins she was studying, he assumed she had been killed over their relationship bc it's something his father would've done. When he finds out it's actually bc he's a father and small children aren't allowed on research vessels, he peacefully abdicates the throne to his brother so he can marry the love of his life and raise his daughter in Gotham. Since he has the wealth of the ocean at his disposal, he purchases the local aquarium so they can still do marine research and start sharing some Atlantean knowledge with the surface world in order to help environmental awareness.

(HC for all Atlanteans) Atlanteans have scales they can display at will, and coloring is indicative of familial line. They also have facial markings when underwater and generally the bolder the better; more fierce and therefore beautiful. Orm inherited a Siren's Voice from his mother, and Marina was able to prove her ancestry with her Royal Gold scales and the incredibly rare Siren's Voice. Her facial markings look similar to a goth egirl, and are considered the height of Atlantean beauty. When she does her makeup on land she mostly just adds back her natural features, though the specific colors and shaping might vary a little. Dick is considered kinda ugly in Atlantis without the domino mask.

Because of her vocal ability, she had to visit Atlantis fairly often for training in control and as a backup heir to the throne. She was trained in traditional combat using a trident, but she's never felt right with the thought of ever needing to use it to take a life. The Atlantean public loves their kind and gentle surface princess, but the other court families think she's too free spirited and want to push their sons on her to keep the Voice within Atlantis.

She was Dick's classmate and acquaintances at the very least until she saved him from drowning in Gotham Harbor when they were 11. She dived in to rescue Robin, and was shocked to hear her classmate's voice thanking her. She paired up with Dick on their next school project so she could have an excuse to visit the Manor. She then confesses to Dick, Bruce, and Alfred to having figured out their secret, and tells them about her being Atlantean to show she's not intentionally a threat.

She and Dick become good friends after this since they can talk about their secret lives, and she joins the original Teen Titans when they form. She wrote the choreography for the team's lip-sync and dance videos for their official YouTube channel since, as younger millennials, they were some of the first heroes to publicly goof off on the internet in costume.

At one point during a school dance, she slapped her own date for calling her best friend a "dirty gypsy." There was a month or so when they were 15 where Dick did date Starfire, but there's no hard feelings or jealousy from it.

In high school, she was a competitive diver and worked at the aquarium as a mermaid in the shark exhibit in her spare time. She picked up air ribbon acrobatics as well because it's the closest thing she can do on land that feels like being underwater.

I'm undecided as of yet how they started dating, but Dick proposed with his mother's necklace. Some Romani vistas (I've heard) use coin necklaces, so I think he'd use his mom's the same way ppl use heirloom rings. It amuses Wally to no end that Circus Boy has a royal title and his favorite teasing nickname is "Your Highness."

Marina quit being a vigilante as they got older because it was getting harder to pull her punches as she got stronger. She recognized that it would be devastating for Surface-Atlantean relations if either the Princess or a representative hero killed someone even on accident, so stepped back to be a more supportive role as Surface Ambassador and post patrol medical assistance. Most of her work as Surface Ambassador involves negotiating ocean cleanup and environmental improvements on a governmental level with the various world powers.

She absolutely does not want to inherit the Atlantean throne. She despised her tenure as Regent while Arthur was dead before he was brought back to life in Darkest Night, and gave the throne back the very next day so she could go home.

While Bruce was stuck in the time stream, she was fully on board with Dick over legally adopting Damian. Sometimes he'll actually call her Ummi since she's more affectionate than Talia, especially when he's overtired. She does eventually adopt him under Atlantean law by challenging Talia for Mother's Rights. Since their fight was underwater due to Atlantean rules and Talia wanting whatever's best for her son, Marina wins and Damian is technically royalty as well now too. She's not even mad that Talia let her win, and gains a new respect for her as a mother who's willing to let her child go for a healthier upbringing than she could give.

When at home or for some semblance of privacy in public, Dick and Marina speak a blend of English and as much Romani as Dick can remember. Sometimes they'll include some Atlantean for extra security in public, but as English is Marina's first language they don't usually bother.

In the public eye on the surface, Dick is considered the trophy husband with a day job as a detective. He kinda loves their visits to Atlantis bc he's actually taken seriously as Dick Grayson without his pretty privilege. He can actually be his fully intelligent self there without the Atlantean public being shocked that he has more than a single brain cell.

Marina fully encourages sibling shenanigans amount the younger Batfam. She and Dick used to prank Bruce after all, and it's good and healthy bonding for them.

Jason is the adorable little brother who was taken too soon and came back angry yet still just as loved. She's kinda neutral about Tim but fully supports his tinkering and pranking shenanigans, and he likes her coffee more than Alfred's. Unfortunately I haven't known about most of the rest of the younger members long enough to have any relationship specifics in mind, but she's kinda like the cool auntie to all of them who will absolutely provide mischief supplies and assistance. No questions asked, just immediate "here you go I didn't see or hear anything."

[pluckyredhead]

Hi, I love your fics and the way you write Roy. I know there are already a lot of comics starter reading lists for Roy, and have gone through some of them, but I was curious if you have any comics to recommend as having your favorite *characterization* of Roy, the ones that really get his personality, regardless of the quality of the overall comic. Or I'd even be interested in just what you see as his guiding traits!

I have a Roy recs list here! And a post about a core element of his personality here.

Looking at the stories I've loved that involve Roy, I'd say key traits include:

Lian being his guiding star. She is the most important thing in his life and any comic that doesn't get that doesn't get Roy.

He is extremely outgoing, charming, and cool. He also knows it which is a little obnoxious.

Flirts. All the time. With everyone.

Extremely competent.

Desperately emotionally needy in a way that slips out by accident before he bottles it up again.

Loyal to a fault.

Short-tempered but very quick to forgive. He doesn't hold grudges.

The above three traits mean he will enter or stay in an unhealthy relationship for longer than he should because he's terrified of being left again (but resigned to it being inevitable).

Very good with anyone younger than him: he's a good big brother, a good team leader, a good mentor.

He used to have a lot of hangups about being considered as good as Dick, good enough to lead, more than Ollie's former sidekick, more than a junkie, etc. I think he's mostly outgrown this now but it crops up occasionally, especially around Dick.

Desperate for validation.

Not always great at recognizing when to stop teasing or lay off. He tends to regress to acting like a teenager around the other founding Titans. This manifests most obviously in mild bullying of Garth (who also regresses by just taking it rather than smacking Roy with the entire ocean).

Loves tech.

Will occasionally rant about politics but not as much as Ollie.