#a little over the top

[ashclouds366]

so i watched fright night and now that i've seen lloyd's va acting as a total bitch, i really kind of want an au where lloyd is a bully.

i know that would be the literal opposite of him (and i love all the trauma and angst that comes with that guy, believe me), but it would just be so interesting. like. he HAS the power to be a bully. he COULD be a bully if he wanted to.

i know a bully au would change what makes lloyd, lloyd. but. just think about it

[jamiesfootball]

more Leverage au nonsense-

after messaging back and forth with @izzyspussy and noodling on it a bit, I've figured out how to slot Nate (Ted Lasso) into the Leverage AU.

He is this universe's Sterling. Sort of.

Nate, gifted fucking Nate, had a plan when he was younger. He wanted to do something with football. Not play - he was never any good - but he could... manage, maybe? There was something there, something in the intricacies of the play and the people and the rules of the game that called to him.

Football was always his chess; chess never had enough moving pieces to keep him interested.

Then life happened. He went to university, and under pressure and wanting his father's approval, he studied finance. Which was fine, since he figured he could always pivot into one of the football clubs from there, and he'd still be near the sport he loved, but then life happened again and again and again and before he knew it he was working for the IYS London Branch under the financial auditing department. It was nothing he ever wanted as a job, but it supported his love for his actual passion for football and puzzles and whatever niche interests he curated that month.

Not to mention, a lot of the club owners worked with IYS, so occasionally he'd get comped seats! He even got assigned to work on the accounts of Rupert Mannion - the Rupert Mannion.

And then Rupert Mannion got divorced and shortly thereafter his ex-wife disappeared.

After that things got a bit... odd.

See Nate wasn't just an audit specialist - he was the audit specialist. He's who you turned to when things got funky. He had a mind for patterns, and for understanding the people who made them.

Rupert Mannion got divorced, and then suddenly people he knew - people Nate had worked with regularly for years - started having...strange things happen to them. So Nate did what Nate does - Nate followed the money.

Nate found Ted.

No one was more surprised than Nate when he found Ted Lasso, the ex-IYS investigator who disappeared a while ago. The one Nate had worked with a handful of times when one of Ted's American clients had business 'across the pond.' The one who always sent him Christmas cards, the printed kind with a photo of himself, his wife, and his growing family. Nate didn't get a card last year. Nate heard rumors of what happened with his son, how Ted disappeared off the map after all of that, but those are just rumors, and Nate never put any stock in those.

Nate goes to Ted to hear it from the man himself.

Ted trusts Nate. He likes this bright kid who was always so nice when he had occasion to visit, who showed him around to all his favorite restaurants and indulged Ted when he wanted to catch a museum that 'had nothing to do with what anything that'd been stolen.' Nate was always a good egg.

Ted tells Nate everything. He tells him about how he's been helping people that don't have anywhere else to go, and how he's teamed up with some of the people they used to chase, and how they're aiming to put a little good in the world.

But that's not what Nate hears. Nate hears that Ted, a good man, has changed sides. He's the one directly responsible for Nate's clients' misery. He's responsible for why IYS has had such a bad quarter, that four of Nate's coworkers have been let go just in the past few weeks.

"Roy Kent," he tells Ted, hoping to wake some sense in him. "You're working with Roy Kent. Do you have any idea what that man has done? What he's capable of?"

Ted gives him a sad, knowing smile, "I know enough."

"He's a bad person, Ted."

"Well on that I'll have to disagree."

Nate doesn't understand it. He doesn't understand why Ted would throw everything away - and for these people. And he knows these people. Ted was not as clever as he thought he was when he covered his tracks. Rupert Mannion's ex-wife, who got an astronomical amount of money in the divorce and somehow still wants more? The thief Keeley, who's stolen millions of dollars in art and statues - pieces of history that civilization will likely never get back? Roy Kent, who even the mafia considers a liability to have walking around breathing? Jamie Tartt - this new kid with a reputation that isn't nearly as bad as Roy Kent's was back in the day, but it was getting there. Even though he bafflingly seems tied to cyber crime these days--

--Nate cuts himself off mid sentence.

Before he leaves he tells Ted, sincerely, that he's glad to see he's doing okay. Really he is. But he does not condone what Ted is doing.

The team is understandably livid to hear that Ted met with an IYS agent and told him everything. Ted's only defense was, "I didn't think it would go so bad. Nate's always been a straight-shooter. Not a blind-spot to be found in that guy. Still, I think it'll work out. He's a good person who's had a shock. Maybe just give him some time."

Nate has a mind for patterns, but also for names, and he'd seen one of those names before, or something like it, in a place it shouldn't have been.

James Tartt. Paid a tidy little sum by Rupert Mannion for security work. It's neither a common or uncommon name, and it takes very little work for Nate to run background on the guy. He's not the young hitter Nate was thinking of, but he's older and he's got a kid who'd be the right age.

The plan is in motion before Nate recognizes he's made one.

Because from Nate's perspective, these people aren't solving anything. These people are part of the problem. No one made them choose to be thieves, no one made them decide to hurt people and call it justice. No, there's a right way and a wrong way to do things, and if Ted's chosen the wrong way then Nate has to stop him.

It's not until he's watching on the TV as the Crown and Anchor goes up in a loud fiery explosion that his knees give out.

His supervisors applaud him for bringing down Ted Lasso.

Interpol hires him, offers him a better job. Field work. No more sitting at a desk and crunching numbers. It's bittersweet, how well it suits him to be in the thick of things, to be chasing down the people who are actually bad people. To be putting some good in the world.

Maybe if he puts enough good into the world, he can make up for the good he took out of it.

It's not all sunshine and roses. The longer he's at Interpol, the more he realizes how complicated things really are. How there are agents who work alongside him who don't really play by the rules - or any rules. How there are just as many shady backroom deals being done at the top as the bottom.

Everyone at Interpol knows Roy Kent, by reputation if not by experience, and they tell Nate stories that make his gut churn. The more he learns, the sorrier he feels for the man he never knew -- he never stood a chance.

Nate does his job, what's always been his job: he studies the patterns and the people.

Nate learns that in one of the web of lies is a pit of vipers, and that the leader of that web is Rupert Mannion. The man who put a hit on his ex-wife shortly after she divorced him. The man Nate tried to help when he took Ted down. The man Nate sold Ted's life for.

Nate has changed. Nate is not on the good side he thought he was. A good man died, and there was never, ever going to be a price for that that Nate could live with. Nate is irredeemable, now, in his own eyes.

He could really use some advice, but there was only ever one man who answered his calls.

Numb, he goes home to his apartment. On the wall is a framed print of Van Gogh's Cafe Terrace at Night that he got with Ted on one of their museum jaunts. On his table is a takeout menu for A Taste of Athens, a place he hasn't been back to since after the funeral, when he realized baklava would forever taste like ashes in his mouth.

On his counter, neatly stacked with the rest of his mail, is a Christmas card he's never seen before.

It looks like the kind of thing you'd find at a gift shop in an airport. Bright pink graffiti letters spelling out 'Happy Christmas' over the image of a local pub. A familiar local pub. It's the pub around the corner from his flat.

Nate grabs his coat.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

[pinkiepartypopper]

The First Law of my Country is by the way:

"The dignity of Men is unimpeachable"

You are all being criminals. While I am sitting in my country, not arrested. I wonder why.

So kindly, FUCK OFF.

And don't cry about this little insult, I am not even threatening you.

Please stop telling people, for any reason, to kill themself. Stop advocating for suicide in any form or capacity.

[egophiliac]

i love your riddle design so much, he's so pointy and british. so gracious. do you think he would enjoy a brazilian goiabada

thank you! ❤️🖤❤️ it's just. important to me on a level I can't explain that Riddle have an extremely pointy nose that he can stick into everyone else's business.

also goiabada is sweet and fruity and red, I think he would like it very much indeed!

not me stealth-editing because I forgot his antenna whoops

[l-a-l-o-u]

please enjoy my two little shots for Shrek 2 Retold :) and if you don’t know what i’m tlking about you can watch the first one on youtube

yeah

[shitouttabuck]

something in your magnetism (2x01 / 6x18)

[tvheit]

friendship ended with wwe now banger bros gay married couple in american suburbia advertisement series is my best friend

[ciderjacks]

learning that getting to the red dragon only took the party 8 days has made me completely reconsider how long regular dungeon jobs would take. And also made me realize that all in all since they were down there for several months(?) (and dungeon jobs apparently actually don’t generally take more than a week or so) means that Chilchucks family 100% thinks his ass died

[inkskinned]

as we enter the start of a semester and the dreaded Hour of Making Friends us upon us... if ur ever at a loss for what to say in one of those weird social situations where you only vaguely-know people, one of my favorite questions to ask is "what is your favorite food crime." a food crime is like the food combination that you love that other people find revolting. press them to take it further than pineapple on pizza, that's rote. food crimes is a good topic that has many benefits as it turns out all people are degenerates and also it will give you some cool ideas to try out later in the privacy of your own degenerate kitchen

the other good thing to ask is "okay but has anyone here ever been someplace haunted" bc it turns out if you ask most people directly they don't believe in ghosts, but many people are like "oh yeah i lived in a haunted house. ghosts aren't real tho"

[beyhr]

book horse 📚

[yeagrave]

topguntober time!

day 7: forced proximity

[egophiliac]

So how’s ride kamens going for you as I just pulled my self together long enough to read the other half of the current main story

I've been working on catching up on the event stories since they announced the upcoming main story update! (I totally bombed the last few events...they're so fast-paced and I just didn't have time...😭)

and then of course they went and dropped THIS on us today

(you don't understand, I LOVE Tajador and I already love the two blurry frames they've given us of non-silhouetted Kelka, I'm ready to absolutely lose my shit come the announcement/reveal(?) stream on Thursday --)

[ultipoter]

Dena PokemonMasters called me and said Volo will get Arceus-beamed, and this is his Arc-outfit. 100% true, trust.

[il-predestinato]

Charles trying to figure out where he is supposed to stand! 😅

Charles Leclerc, Max Verstappen, and George Russell | post-qualifying | 2024 Bahrain Grand Prix 🎥: F1TV

[sforzesco]

decimus wanted to wind cassius up a bit just to see how he would snap

uhhh. what else. you know!! caesar was collecting (and discarding) a new generation of romans, operating a new kind of roman imperium. political manipulation. "good" governance. conspiracies are forming in reply.

the collage art is all public domain/open access stuff from the met collections!