#also i mostly tried to keep this to actually viable ships/things i think people actually ship hence no wade/vivian
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saw-x · 4 months ago
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rules: make a poll with your top 10-12 least favorite ships ever and have your followers try to guess which one is your #1 notp, then tag people to do the same.
i was tagged by the lovely @userlaylivia ty for the tag <3
tagging (no pressure ofc): @abramsgracies @annacoleman @narliee @noajennifers @bakerolivia and anyone who sees this and would like to do it
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total-drama-brainrot · 4 months ago
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ophe when’s the alecody essay (HARD /J HERE LMFAO) /nf
As far as Alejandro ships go, Alecody is probably one of the most viable ones out there.
That's not to say it's the most viable, or the "best" Alejandro ship, because quite frankly I don't think there is such a thing as a "best ship", but from a purely canonical standpoint if Alejandro were to end up with any of his castmates, I'd say Cody would be a strong contender. Again, not the strongest, but also not entirely out of left field.
Which is mostly because he's one of the very few people in canon that Alejandro has A. interacted with more than once without issue, and B. not screwed over entirely to reach his goals. Not that Alejandro didn't screw Cody over - there are a few instances wherein Alejandro intentionally does something that directly affects Cody (most notably feeding Sierra's wedding delusions), but Alejandro doesn't do anything in terms of the competition at large that'll get Cody himself eliminated. In fact, he takes the finale tie breaker quite seriously; it's one of the few times Alejandro gets someone eliminated fairly, and Cody himself readily accepts that.
Cody's also one of the few characters who Alejandro has shown conditional kindness to, who actually survives said kindness without facing an elimination. Or without immediately contrasting that kindness with hostility behind his back (like he does with Owen and, to a lesser extent, Izzy), or using said kindness as the tool that'll get him eliminated (via flirting). That has to count for something, since Alejandro isn't the type to form friendships/aqquaintenceships that don't benefit him, and yet any sort of relationship with Cody is unbiasedly bereft of any notable benefits outside of the rapport itself.
The alliance he tries to secure with Cody is, objectively, entirely useless to Alejandro. He knows that Cody will only ever vote for Sierra, just like he knows that - out of the remaining four - Cody is the weakest contestant, and yet he still does his best to keep Cody on his side despite there being negligable benefits of him doing so.
So despite the fact that they had to duke it out in the tiebreaker, Alejandro and Cody have surprisingly little beef between them.
You could argue that Cody utilizing the nickname "Al" against him is indicitive of some resentment on his part, but I'd argue that Cody only really does that because he's a little shit (and rooting for Heather) and doesn't have the same level of resentment towards Alejandro that the majority of the cast harbours. If any at all, since Alejandro was nothing but cordial towards him.
So it's entirely plausible that Cody and Alejandro could meet each other outside the context of the competition - likely after All-stars, if we're going by strictly canonical guidelines - and spark a relationship from there.
Neither holds and lingering dislike for the other, and they've got a shared history of medical suffering under Total Drama they could bond over, and Cody's already seen Alejandro at his worst moments so Alejandro doesn't even have to live up to any false pretenses around him. Cody himself isn't the type to judge a person too harshly on their actions in the competition (which is backed by his canonical forgiveness and acceptance of Sierra despite her actions towards him) and would probably be thrilled to learn that the seemingly infalliable Alejandro he knew in Total Drama is, in fact, a giant nerd. (Just like him!)
I think the main factor that would hold this ship back would be Cody's inabily o recognis th at at hid cor e he little mome than a bxi eia; dis st t and Ale j a dn tro is evnrn mor so. T her s e t o lon ers coul nd t inf ds a h ela g t h r altio nanhip if i etr jjmupec ut anf u bt them on t h e f ace.
aacoridngt oal known laws of actia thes i s no way bbe souhle be a bl e to s fly its win s a e tto smal to get ist fa tlitr el bod y tsoooff hte geuihnd the bbe of c our se flie s anywa y becas e bes ont c re ha t s hu man sns thij ksi imposacp ible
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kaizokuou-ni-naru · 4 years ago
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The Voyage So Far: Paramount War (Part One)
east blue (1 | 2) || alabasta (1 | 2) || skypiea || water 7 || enies lobby || thriller bark || paramount war (1 | 2) || fishman island || punk hazard || dressrosa (1 | 2) || whole cake island || wano (1 | 2)
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the introduction of the celestial dragons really is just so brutally effective. this is the first time we see them, and before they even show up on page they immediately establish themselves as both absolutely powerful and absolutely despicable. everyone is watching them commit atrocities in broad daylight, and nobody dares say a word. 
i mentioned it back in the enies lobby post, i think, with spandam, but oda is very, very good at creating villains who it just feels so good and so deeply satisfying to see them get annihilated, and the celestial dragons are maybe the crowning example of it. 
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i really like how none of the strawhats are really intimidated or impressed at all by the celestial dragons, in sharp contrast to how everyone else responds to them. some of that is ignorance, but you can’t tell me zoro would have acted any differently in this scene had he known charloss was a member of the world’s ruling class. all the power the celestial dragons have comes from fear; of course their greatest weakness is someone who just doesn’t care. 
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obviously this moment is just excellent, no qualifiers needed, but one thing i really love about it is how all the bad shit that results from this does not detract from the sheer satisfaction of what happens at the auction house at all. like, even though this leads directly to the strawhats getting crushed by the pacifista and kizaru and scattered by kuma, i’ve never once caught myself thinking luffy shouldn’t have done this. 
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i’m a huge fan of how rayleigh introduces himself. he knocks out the whole action house with conqueror’s haki, but luffy is completely unaffected, and the two of them just watch each other down the aisle for a moment as everyone else collapses around them. 
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i don’t know that i’ll ever get over the fact that oda created and designed the supernovas as he was writing sabaody. they’re all such distinct and memorable characters, and almost all of them have fit neatly into the post-timeskip story one way or another. they really feel like a part of the world that was always meant to be there. 
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i think the way roger as a character is handled is very, very cool, because we don’t really meet him as a person- when we first learn of him, on the very first page, he’s a myth, a story, a framing device. which is fitting, because that’s all the characters know him as. the rest of the world doesn’t know what roger was like as a person or why he did what he did, and so neither do our main characters and neither do we. 
and then we learn, slowly, by following in roger’s steps and meeting the characters who did know him, like rayleigh and whitebeard and garp. and through their testimony and memories, over the course of the story, roger goes from being a faceless myth to being a proper character.
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i think this panel, where luffy says he just wants to be the freest person on the seas, might be my favorite luffy panel. if nothing else, it’s definitely one of the ones i think about the most in terms of his characterization. luffy’s been defining himself by his dream since the very start of the story- he’s the man who’s going to be king of the pirates! but it’s only here that we learn what that goal actually means to him, and what he actually really wants. he just wants to be free. 
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the tone shift of sabaody really is impeccable. because up until a certain point, everything seems pretty par for the course. the strawhats make some new friends, get into trouble for their sakes, get into a hard fight where they all have to work together but eventually scrape out a win. 
but then kizaru shows up, and another pacifista, and kuma himself, and for the first time in the story luffy says this is a fight they can’t win- 
and then zoro disappears, and all of the audience’s expectations for how this is going to play out get thrown completely out the window. 
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it’s not that we haven’t seen luffy upset before this- his fight with usopp in water 7 and merry’s funeral are the two obvious examples that come to mind- but we’ve never, to this point, seen him as crushed as he is at the end of sabaody. it really drives the abrupt tone shift of sabaody home, because we’re used to seeing luffy be generally cheerful, and if not that, at stubbornly determined to power through. but here, he’s just wrecked- and the paramount war saga is just getting started. 
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every time i see hancock i’m reminded what a lesbian i am.
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i’m talking a lot about character introductions this post, but a lot of really good characters get introduced in the first half of this saga, from the supernovas to rayleigh to jinbe. on that note, i really like hancock’s introduction, for reasons similar to what i said about roger earlier. she’s introduced as a cartoonishly evil one-dimensional bitch, and she leans hard into that characterization for the first half or so of amazon lily.
and then luffy narrowly keeps her and her sisters’ worst fear from being realized, and her facade starts to slip, and we get to know her as- still kind of a bitch, but also a deeply traumatized person who has very valid reasons for being the way she is, and someone who is overall a lot more complicated than she appears at first glance. 
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one of my favorite things about luffy is his ability to always, always defy expectations. hancock is dead certain he’ll take her offer of a ship and abandon marguerite and the others, but he doesn’t even hesitate before doing the exact opposite. luffy is always turning people’s worlds upside down.
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i have a friend who coined the term “conflict of interest arc” to refer to the arcs where a crewmate is forced to choose between the crew and some obligation or baggage from their past- arlong park for nami, whole cake island for sanji, etc. 
marineford is luffy’s conflict of interest arc- he has to make the choice, here, to prioritize saving ace over reuniting with his crew. where it differs from all other such arcs, then, is that nobody else can come to back him up. he’s well and truly on his own. 
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i love how thoroughly expectations get turned on their head with jinbe. for the longest time, all we know about him is that he’s a shichibukai and arlong’s former captain, so given what arlong was like and what the shichibukai encountered thus far have been like, it’s a fair guess to assume he’s pretty awful.
and then we meet him, and he’s ace’s friend, sitting bloody and beaten in the deepest dungeons of impel down for refusing to fight in an unjust war.
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bon-chan is really one of the greatest examples of one piece’s stubborn refusal to treat any character as disposable, and oda’s endless ability to find new and interesting ways to fit them into the story. in pretty much any other manga, it would be all but guaranteed that we wouldn’t see a character like bon-chan again after the conclusion of the alabasta saga. here, luffy straight up would not have made it to marineford without him. this is true for mr. 3 too- who would’ve thought his ability to duplicate keys out of wax, established and promptly forgotten some three hundred chapters ago, would be the thing that let luffy free ace on the scaffold?
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magellan is a good antagonist. i’m not saying i like him- i don’t particularly- but he’s a great antagonist for a couple reasons, and one of them is that his powers are terrifying. magellan is essentially what might be called in video game terminology an advancing wall of doom- the only viable strategy for dealing with him is to run.
i had more i wanted to say here but it literally kept turning into a rant about one piece’s take on morality no matter how many times i tried to keep it short, so i’ll settle for just saying that magellan is an antagonist but not a villain and i think that’s interesting. 
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the absolutely ridiculous, eclectic mix of people that luffy winds up gathering to escape impel down is possibly my favorite part of the whole arc. i just think it’s so fun and so characteristic of him that even when separated from his crew, he winds up attracting the weirdest, most powerful bunch of people around to break out of prison with. 
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the relationship between luffy and blackbeard is a really interesting one. it’s been plenty clear for some time that blackbeard is almost certainly going to be luffy’s final opponent to become pirate king, and yet they’ve been mostly running on parallel paths through the world, only occasionally coinciding (such as here and in jaya) and generally seeming pretty unconcerned with each other. it’s a really cool way to handle the built to an eventual showdown, and i really like it. 
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this is one of my favorite spreads just for sheer smile factor. i love it so much. i think we should get to see jinbe’s whale shark buddies more often, it’s a crime we haven’t seen them since this. 
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raifuujin · 5 years ago
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Thoughts on CoAi's viability? It's something I've always liked in *theory*, but in practice precious few people elaborate on what they'd actually *do* together as adults (or even grown teenagers). There's a few that advanced the idea of her working in forensic pathology, but I really can't see her wanting to get close to the crime-and-punishment field ever again if she has a choice.
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Okay, so. CoAi is a ship that could work. Obviously, as a fandom concept in the same vein as KaiShin, but it has the potential.
The problem (and the thing that turned me off from being able to enjoy the ship myself) is that: people who actually put content out for the ship make it feel so very toxic and, yeah, kinda something that could only exist in a short term way with no explanation for why things would work out.
(The ‘what they’d do’ as a future and what kind of jobs people would have doesn’t bother me quite as much, as plenty of fics exist as a general idea without focusing on anything big. Sure, some have a focus on college, or jobs, or children, but most gen works don’t. I suppose CoAi/ShinShi might have a smaller proportion of content that focuses on topics like that, but I’d be the first to admit I don’t have as much frame of reference other people might have. If I were to spitball a career, I’d pick something where Shiho works with kids or possibly take after her parents and work in a clinic. Basic interest in wanting to help because she’s had far to much guilt over the harm she’s done, and in general I think she gets along well with kids and having involvement in the younger generation feels right for her. Her age and older feels like it might still be awkward for her to talk with, but kids are good for her. She might have good mind for science stuff and logic, but I agree she’s unlikely to work in crime-related jobs, even if it’s to stop crime rather than commit them. I also don’t see her wanting to work in labs.)
As far as overall viability, I just wish people would go the KaiShin route with CoAi/ShinShi at least a little more than what I’ve seen. Not so much the ‘entirely change their personalities to the form I prefer’ (that already happens regardless), but more the blatant ‘I don’t care about canon because this could never be canon anyway, so I’m going to have fun with it’. KaiShin might have an easier time because it’s super easy to ignore canon when you make the guys gay, but really. It’s super easy to ignore the childhood romance canon when it comes to fic writing. Just go with a ‘yeah, we care a lot about each other, but it’s kinda like siblings’. You take that stance, and then you could have a more solid setup for how to make it more comfortable as a ship. Shinichi could start to be more protective of Shiho. Shiho canonically starts to develop a crush, but you could write Shinichi start to realize she’s crushing or start getting self conscious or however people want the actual ship to start sailing.
But for the love of all that is holy, you cannot keep sarcastic barbed-tongue Haibara being verbally abusive and cutting him down at random. For a viable, healthy ship... Look, I’ve been on here saying that a little bickering isn’t toxic because how the characters are presented reacting to it makes it seem like they’d never get into huge arguments that would hurt the other, and I’m sure some of it applies to people who throw insults around, too. It could work, I’ve seen people who look to be great friends throw around good natured insults and it looks fun. But that’s not ever how any sarcastic CoAi feels like in text form, because by nature of the medium, there’s no indication if there’s knowing smiles and little laughs surrounding it, so most of the time it feels painfully deadpan and comes off as hurtful, usually when Haibara/Shiho is insulting Conan/Shinichi specifically. That shouldn’t be what half of their relationship is like.
And quite frankly, with what we do have of their canon personalities, the two really don’t feel like they’d be the type to be the cynical types who play off each other. When Shinichi’s romantically interested in someone, he might could tease a little, but he’s super easy to tease back, and teases always 100% come with a smile. Haibara we see get soft when people are making a genuine effort to be nice, so as Shiho, if she were together with Shinichi? She’d tone down on snide remarks, and would also be more likely to tease every once in a while with her own small smile. In canon she’s been healing, she feels a little safer, she can get PO’d that Genta ruined the curry they were making and now has to supervise the kids so they won’t buy candy at the store. She’s not the same person who tried to kill herself (x2) out of guilt/despair, and she’s not the person who sits in a soccer stadium with sunglasses on trying to stay disconnected from everything. Fanon Shiho deserves the same development of being soft, lively, engaged in the world, being able to feel comfortable with where she is in life. Then, ShinShi would feel more sustainable in the long term and viable to me.
(And, even though I started this saying ‘CoAi’, ShinShi would feel like the most comfortable. And I don’t mean it like a ‘well, more their relationship when they’ve grown’, I mean they should both take the antidote. CoAi works fine and mostly the same, but only in the plotline where Shinichi becomes resistant to the antidote. Even if you remove romantic w/ Ran reasons for wanting his body back, Shinichi still had a life and friends and everything to go back to, so he’d want to return to that, and Shiho would be just as invested in making it happen as she is now for the sake of his happiness. Just, in a ShinShi, story, he’d happen to gain a gf from his time as Conan, and Shiho could be introduced into Shinichi’s existing life instead of building a life for themselves from scratch with the DB as friends and only a select few adults who truly know them.)
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nr0r · 5 years ago
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I am literally copying and pasting from Discord heck
You ever just wake up and get a lot of stuff to write down so you jump on that immediately before sleeping again? Like, jump on your computer to type it easier and all that? yeah. ok so I'm gonna honestly sit and hammer out why ZaDr is so shipped, despite the controversial status. Maybe put some logic/reasoning on this extremely old ship, prolly post this up on Tumblr or Twitter. Cause I'm extra about yesterday, and want to at least give people some form of clarity, cause that's nice to have. Ok uh. aHEM ANYWAY blabbing away aside:
ZaDr is extremely popular, and the biggest thing I hear most outta people other than moral out cries of 'age disputes' (we don't know ZIM's real age at all, and it's very possible he very well could still be a kid. There's stuff that supports this, but I'm not here to post my proofs for my very vanilla 'ZIM is actually a kid' AU. Maybe some other time. Whatever, moving on) and 'they hate each other/are enemies disputes' (enemies -> friends, as well as enemies -> romance is an age old trope and everywhere. Seriously. This is in every fandom just about and is inescapable. It even happens in canon in a lot of them.) So here's some clarity on why this gets shipped to hell and back:
The two have a LOT of common, in fact, a LOT more than the rest of the cast do. Their chemistry is prime for shipping compared to everyone else, despite the 'moral issues': -ZIM and Dib are both EXTREMELY passion/overly zealous about their goals, ambitions and beliefs to the point of ludicrousy and mockery. -People don't believe them and do not believe in them. At all. -They crave acceptance in their beliefs and ability to succeed in their goals. -They also crave acceptance/being commended/acknowledged by their superiors, who regularly put them down/mock them over their goals/ambitions/beliefs -They are so so so stubborn about this, despite the clear odds stacked against them -Both have no friends. Both are incredibly lonely and can only, realistically, confide in each other at this point. This has even happened in canon, tho that episode was never finished and aired (Mopiness of Doom) -This is the only ship with an episode like Mopiness of Doom -They fuel each other's ambitions and would be nothing without each other
These are the primary reasons why this gets shipped like crazy. Other ships exist, and boy howdy do I ship some of them too as I am shipping trash, but I'm willing to admit and accept there's very little in the way of 'proof' or chemistry for them. Some ships I ship that have no hope compared to ZaDr honestly:
RaZr: -A common trope. SuperiorxUnderling. But they got nothing going really -Seriously. RED fucking hates ZIM, and while this argument is used against ZaDr, Mopiness still happened. -RED actually regularly tries to get ZIM killed. Same with PURPLE. Both sent him to a part of the universe they thought would yield nothing in the hopes of ZIM dying off from the long travel/never returning/getting lost -All they have going for them is: 1. That trope and 2. They uh grew up together -ZIM will probably someday kill him and PURPLE tbh
TaGr. This is a VERY popular ship... but like: -What... what have they done together in screen time -Or transcripts -Or comics? -No seriously. What? Hardly anything at all. People just ship them cause they're both grumpy and girls tbh.
RaPr is ACTUALLY the only other ship that's very viable and has canon support that I can think of: -I don't have to explain this  -Just look at them -They're like. Married, dude! -MARRIED!!!
Gonna get into ships that I see are done to spite ZaDr, which... makes no... sense...Like... why do people ship ships to spite other ships...It's like me going up to a buffet of cakes, seeing people eating chocolate cakes mostly so I pick vanilla just to spite the chocolate cake fans and I'm all " -ZIM LAUGHTER- FOOLS!!! YOU INSOLENT EARTH-PIGS!!!! COWER AND TREMBLE AND CRY FOR I HAVE CHOSEN CHOCOLATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!" like... what are they seriously gonna do....? Drop their cake and cry? No dude they're gonna keep eating lmao
anyway. anyway. salt aside, let's get into this:
GaDr (Gretchen and Dib romance): -Why? -They never... really... maybe a couple times in the comics and once in the show. But that's literally it. -All the people I have personally interacted with who ship this ship proudly proclaim it's to spite ZaDr like. Good for you?  -Like dawg it's ok if Shadow is my favorite Sonic character man. You don't... you don't gotta stan Cream the Rabbit just because so many people stan Shadow the Hedgehog. Like it's ok. It's ok. It's ok.
ZaSr (ZIM and Skoodge romance): -I actually enjoy this ship. It can be done cutely, but like... -Dawg, ZIM is AWFUL to Skoodge -Fucks him over -Mocks him -Nearly gets him killed a number of times -They got nothing going for them other than being short, being unfortunate and the same species
ZaTr: -The only straight ship I ship lmao -Ummmm -Again. Why. A lot of these 'spite ships' actually contain the problems people complain about most, but ignore in spite ships or when TAK is in the equation (DaTr) which I don't get, but like hey, I said what I needed to earlier already. -No seriously, WHY? I don't... because... enemies->romance, right? They just don't have enough material. It would be like if ZIM and Dib only had Nightmare Begins are their material, and that's it. If that were so, I too would be saying WHY?
I think this concludes my brain vomit, and I can finally get back to bed, but yeah idk. 
Disclaimer: It is fine to like ships, it is fine to dislike ships, but don't be a bully over it. I've seen tireless arguments against ZaDr that are honestly? Easily broken down through a couple google searches. This doesn't invalidate disliking something, but this doesn't mean it's 'right' either. All in all, we're all watching IZ 'wrong' by shipping these characters. Hell, we're watching it 'wrong' by even liking them enough or thinking any of them are cute. Seriously. At the end of the day, Jhonen hates how we're all going about fandom participation, and practically has since day one, even if there was nothing shipped ever (which is impossible tbh.) That's why he stirs the pot. That's why he likes to make crude/random statements just to get easy people riled up, and that's classic 'don't take the bait/feed the trolls' internet 101 at play.
And double Disclaimer: You simply cannot make noise against ZaDr over the joke of ZIM being ‘OLT AF’, and then continue on with TaGr and DaTr. You just cannot. You also cannot make noise against ZaDr for ‘moral’ reasons and then ignore... DaGr (Dib and Gaz). Seriously. That one has absolutely no fucking defense. None. That’s disgusting, that’s incest, that’s sick, that’s   I’m getting off topic but. Still bro.
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lizacstuff · 7 years ago
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7x04 Anons
I have a ton of asks so I’ll answer a few under the cut.  A lot of them deal with negativity over the ep and season so be warned and don’t click if you don’t want to read that.
Anonymous said:Liza, have you watched tonight's episode? What did you think of the Rumbelle send off? And of Alice being Roger's daughter?
I had zero emotional reaction to Rumbelle’s story in this episode. None. It’s been too toxic and gross and I have never really cared about it so it didn’t make me feel anything at all. I was curious what they were going to do. Now I know. 
As far as Alice being WishHook’s daughter. Eh. So they take the only interesting character and now she’s a fake Wish person too?  I just can’t with this nonsense. I’m having  a lot of problems with WishHook, so I’m not thrilled she’s tied to his story. 
Colin is still hot and an awesome human being and a terrific actor, but the plot... it’s a no for me.
Anonymous said:Sometimes I think Adam and Eddy believe they are the most clever people to ever write, and that everyone else are simple minded peasants. Like that one post-7x04 interview where the interviewer asked if Alice is wish Hook's daughter. "You're very perceptive." Uh, no, Adam and Eddy. You just have all the subtlety of a freight train. You had Alice and Rogers play chess. Wish Hook and his daughter played chess. It's obvious. Don't talk to people like they're stupid for figuring the obvious out.
This show has always been pretty obvious about some things, but they used to pull off some twists. I remember a time when fan speculation was way more wrong than it is right.  
However, season 7 is just really obvious in terms of some of the “big twists.”  Take Alice being the LGBT character, the entire fandom speculated that from the first second she appeared in shooting spoilers based on stereotypes. I have been hoping it’s not her because of those stereotypes, but nope! They had no surprises up their sleeve with it. Then most people immediately assumed she was Roger’s daughter the second we found out he had one... and apparently no twist there either. 
I guess the days of the entire fandom being shocked by finding out Hook is the Dark One and Dark Swan did everything for Hook... are over. 
Of course we should have known this reboot lost all subtlety in the second episode when everyone and their mother kept asking Henry if he was in love with the random woman he just met.  
Anonymous said:I know the promo pics didn't spell anything good for Belle, but I'm still surprised that they actually had her die. I kept thinking that there would be some twist to it.
As I was just saying... no twists, no turns. It’s exactly as everyone predicted. 
Anonymous said:I didn't watch the ep, but shit Henry and ivy have so much more chemistry than the other girl. Cinderella I think lol damn talk about epic romance also I saw comments that also agree with the Henry and ivy
If you haven’t watched how do you know they have more chemistry?  Seriously, that’s kind of ridiculous. What are you basing that on?
Anonymous said:ouat is a weird show, it requires you to pay really pay attention but not to close of attention or you will notice all the plot holes
100% accurate.  This reboot is creating so many more plot holes with all the magic mcguffins that are suddenly in play.  I guess you either have to accept it and go along for the ride, or recognize it for what it is. 
Anonymous said:hey liza, who are your favourite characters from the new cast? some of them don’t really impress me but i quite like ivy and tilly.
Both of those characters have some interesting aspects to them.  It may have a lot to do with the performers.  I haven’t been impressed with Gabriel, Dania or Mekia’s choices so far, but Adelaide and Rose have interesting screen presence. 
Anonymous said:Drizella really is a Mean Girls version of Regina. I'm between finding her general attitude annoying and finding her somewhat sympathetic considering she has to deal with Tremaine all day.
You mean Regina when she was a girl and under Cora’s thumb?  I could see that comparison.  Lets hope Drizella doesn’t follow in Regina’s footsteps and become the mass murdering rapist in town.
Anonymous said:Did Rumbelle build the house in Storybrooke?
Um... I’m not sure I understand this question.  In the show I believe that Up-inspired cabin where they were living isolated from everything and everyone else (do people really find that a happy ending?) was in the edge of realms. 
Anonymous said:I'm almost mad that we got to see more of Belle and Rumple's story than we did of Captain Swan. We all know they are living their happy ending but it would still be wonderful to see a little clip of Emma sitting on the beach with their daughter waiting for Killian to show up and join their picnic. Just some good ole domestic Captain Swan on scene would make me so happy. *sigh*
I have a number of anons like this, and just NOPE.  
First, we did not see more of Rumbelle than CS on this show.  Rumbelle was a backburner story that was most often characterized as a cautionary tale of abuse and manipulation and the pair were mostly apart and had very little focus through the run of the series. 
The showrunners decided that going forward they needed viewers to feel good about Belle and RB so after making them a gross, toxic mess for seasons now (it was just last year that Rumple was fucking the Evil Queen while Belle ran and hid for her life as he stalked and threatened her) they gave fans a bunch of twee scenes of her growing old (a life she lived isolated from everyone but two people) and dying in order to get rid of her and give Rumple motivation for this idiotic S7.
You’re jealous of that? Seriously? Fuck no. 
Also you need to understand that 7.02 and 7.04 were very different episodes.  7.02 was still really Henry's story and a moment in time where he called for help and got to see his parents for a few minutes and we all found out that Emma and Hook are doing great and gonna have a baby and living a blissfully happy life together.  It was just a check in where it was confirmed for us that Operation Happy Beginning has been a success and things are amazing. Also it spun off WishHook and completely separated the plot of S7 away from CS.  7.04 was 100% Rumple plot and his story. It explained why he's there and what is motivating him in Hyperion Heights.  Very different.  For 7.02, CS were not the focus because they didn’t need to be. Nothing in S7 requires knowing exactly what is going to happen to them minute by minute.  I'll take less screen time and my OTP being completely disentangled from this mess any day of the week.
Anonymous said:Lol my jealousy of Rumbelle having more focus than CS has dropped to 0%, that episode was eh. CS is expecting a baby, and Belle is dead after spending her life trying to fix rumple's. Nice.
Yep.  Look, I’m happy for any fans of Rumple or Belle that are happy about this episode and found peace in Belle’s life, but the writers did too much damage to this pairing over the years for me to care about it at all. 
Anonymous said:While I can't stand rumbelle I feel for the shippers. They did get some happy scenes but their ship is going to spend the rest of the season apart and in pain until the half alive dies.
Yeah... I would not like that, I don’t think. It’s just kind of creepy and icky and ew-ey. However, to each her own.  
Anonymous said:Agreed with that anon, there some good moments, but this was definitely not even close to one of the best episodes of the series. I have to respectfully disagree with Colin on this one. (Actually season 7 in its entirety lol)
Oh dear sweet Colin. Just trying to do his job.  So many cast and crew and media have shot their hyperbolic wad with this episode. Calling it the best EVER!!!!!  What will they say for the rest of the season?  “This is the second best episode EVER!!!!!” Or will they keep one upping every time they have to promote an ep?
No one with an economic interest in S7 can be trusted when talking about the quality of this season (and I include Mitovich and NA in that.) 
Anonymous said:I didn't watch the episode but I'm curious: are we supposed to believe that when Belle dies Emma and Killian are old too or was there some timeline glitch and Emma and Killian are still young in Storybrooke at the time of HH events? 
Who knows. Belle and Rumple were off living at the Edge of Realms for the last years of her life.  Rumple said something about time standing still there except for Belle??? I think. (my mind kept wandering duiring those scenes becuse they were so boring) Then after she died he opened a portal thingy to go to the time and place where the Guardian (the deux ex machina that is going to cure him of the Dark One curse) lives and Rumple was then transported to the newEF (that looks exactly like the old, I mean couldn’t they have given this new storybook’s fairy tale land some stylistic differences???)  on the night of Cinderella’s Ball and we see Henry drive by on his motorcycle. 
So yes, I think some of the flashforwards could have been from far in the future, and some could have been not all that distant because they were in a weird realm with weird time mechanics. 
However, I think Rumple and Belle left Storybrooke well before Henry did (they talk about it at Gideon’s first birthday and Henry still would have been about 14 at that time) so by the time this Hyperion Heights stuff is happening they would have been off in Fairy Tale land “traveling?” (ie living their lives in dusty libraries searching books for a way to cure Rumple.)
It hurts ones head to try to sort it all out. 
Anonymous said:After watching this episode, all I think is how sad it is how far this show gone from greatness. Going back 3 years, I would’ve never imagined ouat would be like this now. Sorry for being dramatic, it’s all just so jarring.
I think one of the most unfortunate things about this is that I really think OUAT could have been a valuable and viable franchise for years to come.  However, they tried to reboot it too soon.  As I’ve said since last spring, I think it would have been much better to let it rest a year or two and then come back with 10-13 episode event series for ABC.  
However, this experiment will probably negate any opportunity for that.
Anonymous said:I think it's a little sad that in real time, Belle died like 5-10 years after the s6 finale. I know it was longer for her but to everyone else that knew her, it'd be like she died young.
Yep. I’m not sure if in Hyperion Heights or Storybrooke in 2017 if Belle is dead, dead, or still living out her life at the edge of realms or wherever and Rumple traveled back in time???  
I don’t know. 
Anonymous said:Do you think killing Belle off is going to decrease the ratings more?
Nope. If ratings do decrease, I don’t think that will have been a factor.
Anonymous said:They lost viewers even with the episode they promoted the most wow 
They did and yes, other than the premiere, this has been the most promoted episode.  As I’ve said since the premiere, ep 5 ratings should be the most telling. I’m guessing that will be the baseline for the rest of the half season. At that point anyone in the audience who was just curious if they would preserve our favorites happy endings from the first 6 season will know and there won’t be a bump from that.  We’ll see. 
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sage-nebula · 7 years ago
Text
YGO - In Plain Sight - Ch. 1 (incomplete)
Notes: Something like a year or two ago (probably two years, tbh) I outlined an entire longfic detailing how Yuugi and Jounouchi make their relationship romantic. I wrote that entire outline, and then---aside from the first ten pages of the first chapter, and other little bits here or there---I never wrote it. I’m thinking about sharing the outline, because it can work as headcanons if nothing else, and maybe if enough people want to see the actual fic based on the outline, that will inspire me to actually write it (although the outline is major #spoilers, but I don’t know if people would care about #spoilers for a fic). In any case, if I share the outline, I want to link to the bits already written, and that means sharing what I have of chapter one.
This fic takes place when Yuugi and Jounouchi are ~22/23 (at the start, anyway---birthdays will happen in later chapters), in the post-canon headcanon I have where they ended up getting an apartment together when they were ~18/19 that was close to Yuugi’s university. Shiori and Kisugi (and their respective romantic partners) are OCs, because I figure that Yuugi had to make some friends while in university. It’s too unrealistic for him not to.
As a final note, the Japanese school year runs from April to March, and I’m respecting that here.
Late April afternoons at Satoru University saw a mass of students draped over the quad. Some tossed Frisbees back and forth, others did battle with the wind as it tried to blow away their homework assignments and turn the pages in their books, and still others tried to enjoy quick catnaps on the sun-soaked grass, relishing in the twenty minutes of peace they had before they had to sprint off to their next class or work study jobs. Beneath their favorite tree in one corner of the quad, Yuugi, Shiori, and Kisugi were relaxing in much the same way, the three of them seated in a little circle with their lunches spread out before them as per their usual tradition. Kisugi nursed a can of peach tea, having already finished off his pork bun, and Yuugi chewed through a mouthful of instant noodles as Shiori relayed a conversation she’d had with her boyfriend the previous night, her cheeks flushed a bit pink as she talked.
“. . . so anyway, I brought it up to him last night and he said . . . okay,” Shiori said. She poked at the rice in her bento with her chopsticks, choosing to look at her lunch instead of at them. Yuugi and Kisugi stared at her with wide eyes, though as he swallowed his mouthful of noodles, Yuugi could feel himself beginning to beam on Shiori’s behalf.
Kisugi did not seem as pleased.
“Just like that?” he demanded. He leaned forward, the fingers of one splayed against the grass while his other hand squeezed his can of peach tea, his eyes intense. “He said he’d move with you after school, just like that?”
“Yep.” Shiori smiled, though she bit the inside of her cheek in a clear attempt to hide it. “It’s not like it’s that big of a stretch anyway, right? I mean, he’s an artist, and Shibuya’s just as on top of art as it is fashion . . .”
“It definitely is. I think it’s perfect for both of you,” Yuugi said, and when Shiori looked over at him her smile finally broke loose in the face of his broad grin. “That’s really great news—congratulations, Shiori!”
“Thanks,” Shiori said, and Kisugi heaved an exaggerated sigh as he flopped back on the grass.
“Fortune bestowed all her blessings on you and left none for me,” he said, and he reached one hand up toward the sky before he let his arm fall across his eyes. “I lost both of my loves the second I said I wanted to stay in Domino, and you get to keep yours even though you’re moving all the way to Shibuya! Why must you keep all of the luck and love for yourself, Shi-chan? It’s not fair!”
“Yes, well . . .” Shiori reached over to lightly pat Kisugi’s leg in consolation, but she only spared him a minute glance before she looked curiously at Yuugi, who had gone back to eating his instant noodles in anticipation of another one of Kisugi’s melodramatic monologues. “What about you, Yuugi? What do you have in mind for after graduation?”
Yuugi took a drink of his soda to help wash down his noodles, but not even the extra minute chewing afforded him could help come up with a suitable answer to Shiori’s question. By the time he swallowed down the last of his noodles, the only answer he had to give was the honest one.
“Nothing, really,” he said, and unsurprisingly, Shiori’s expression shifted to one caught between surprise and disappointment. Kisugi moved his arm from his eyes to his forehead to stare shrewdly at Yuugi. “I haven’t thought about it much.”
“You haven’t?” Shiori asked, and when Yuugi shook his head added, “But Yuugi, this is our final year! You have to start thinking about jobs, places to apply to, or graduate programs if you’re into that sort of thing—”
“Well, I’ve thought about some jobs—some companies,” Yuugi said, and as he tried to think of some companies to make his statement more of an honest one, he looked back down at his noodles and poked them with his chopsticks much in the same way Shiori had poked at her rice before. “You know, I thought about maybe applying for an indie board game company, or maybe something bigger like Nintendo—”
“You could always apply for KaibaCorp,” Kisugi suggested, and it was fortunate that Yuugi hadn’t been in the middle of eating when Kisugi suggested that, Yuugi thought, or else he might have ended up choking. “Don’t you and Kaiba have a history with that whole Duel Monsters thing?”
Yuugi forced a laugh, but even to his own ears it sounded awkward. “I . . . don’t think KaibaCorp is really a very viable option . . .” he said. Mostly because he was pretty sure that even if he did apply, Kaiba would refuse to interview him out of spite.
Well, no, Yuugi mused, and he smiled wryly as he looked down at his food. He’d refuse to interview Jounouchi-kun out of spite. He’d probably just make me the guy in charge of the mail room.
“Hm, that’s a shame. I hear KaibaCorp employees get very good benefits, though apparently it’s also a very high-stress environment,” Shiori said, but she shrugged before she looked back at Yuugi. “But hey—Nintendo, huh? That would be so cool! They’re based in Tokyo, right?”
“Kyoto, actually.”
“So you’d have to move,” Shiori said, and Kisugi threw both of his arms in the air again before he let them fall back onto the grass.
“Go!” he cried. “Leave me! Everyone does in the end! I’m doomed to spend the rest of my days alone, navigating the salty seas of isolation, adrift in a ship crafted by the driftwood of my loneliness—”
“Will you give it a rest? It’s not like any of us are leaving Japan!” Shiori said, and she rolled her eyes. Kisugi pouted at her, but she pointedly ignored him as she looked back at Yuugi. “But hey, if you have to move—what about Jounouchi? Will he be moving with you?”
“Huh?” Yuugi blinked, caught off guard by her question, which as far as he could tell came so far out of left field it wasn’t even on the baseball diamond anymore. “Oh, um—no? I don’t think so? I—we haven’t talked about it, but—”
“You haven’t?” Shiori frowned, her brow furrowed, and Kisugi pushed himself up on his arms. Yuugi was beginning to think there were a lot of things he hadn’t done that Shiori wouldn’t be pleased about. “But Yuugi, that’s a pretty big deal—it’s something you should talk about before the time comes. What does he plan on doing, job-wise? Does he know?”
“That talk is the kiss of death for any relationship, believe me,” Kisugi cut in, and Yuugi was grateful for the interruption, even if Shiori’s frown told Yuugi that she wasn’t. “The second I told Daisuke and Ai that I didn’t want to move to Osaka, they cut me loose! ‘It’s for the best,’ they said. ‘Long distance relationships never last,’ they said. ‘You’re going to get dehydrated if you keep crying,’ they said—”
“Yuugi, if you don’t talk about it with him now, it’s going to be that much worse when the time comes,” Shiori said seriously, and she raised her voice a little to be heard over Kisugi’s rant. Kisugi stopped midsentence and gave her an affronted look. “If you talk about it now, I’m sure you can work something out—”
“Ha!” Kisugi said.
“—but if you don’t then you really might have to break up when the time comes, because neither of you will have prepa—”
“Wait—break up?” Yuugi interrupted, and his entire body felt flushed with heat, as if he’d chosen to sit in the sun like Kisugi instead of beneath the shade of their tree. When Shiori nodded, Yuugi laughed, though it was more out of sudden nerves than actual amusement. “No, no, you’ve got it all—Jounouchi-kun’s not—we’re not . . . together. Like that. We’re just friends.”
“You’re not?” Shiori said, and she exchanged a quick glance with Kisugi before she looked back to Yuugi, her eyes widening. “O-Oh my gosh, I just assumed—Yuugi, I’m so sorry, I—!”
“It’s okay,” Yuugi said quickly. His cheeks were still burning, though he was able to keep his voice steady, much to his relief. There was no need to make the situation any more awkward than it already was. “It’s okay, you didn’t . . . know, I guess—”
“I just assumed—I mean, you live together, and you’ve always seemed so close, just like me and—well, I guess I thought you were just—that you weren’t just living together, that you were, um, together-together—”
“Probably we shouldn’t have discouraged Mina from asking him out, huh?” Kisugi asked, and Shiori pressed her lips together, wringing her hands in her lap, while Yuugi’s thoughts spun over which ‘him’ Kisugi was referring to. Kisugi gave Yuugi a shrewd look. “But really? You’re not? Really, really? You’re not fooling with us?”
“No,” Yuugi said. He set his chopsticks over the top of his noodles before he set the cup to the side. He didn’t feel much like eating them anymore. “Why would you think we were—?”
“It’s just, you know,” Shiori said, and she waved one hand through the air, as if trying to summon an explanation from the tree branches. When none came, she made an anxious sound in her throat before she looked down at her lap again. “The way you two are . . . you always seem so happy when you’re with him, and we just thought—”
“I am happy with him,” Yuugi said, and he pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. “He’s my best friend.”
“Well, yes—I know, but—what I mean is, when you—when you were with, or when you looked at him, it really seemed like you were—” Shiori put her reddened face in her hands for a moment, as if to smother what she was trying to say, before she looked back up at Yuugi. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I really didn’t mean to imply, or—or assume—I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Yuugi said again, and as Shiori nodded and bit the inside of her cheek, her eyes on her lap, he squeezed his knees to his chest a little more tightly. Her explanation hadn’t really settled anything at all—hadn’t really answered why she (and Kisugi, for that matter) had thought that he and Jounouchi were together. It wasn’t a big deal, Yuugi supposed, because he and Jounouchi weren’t together and that was the end of that, but for some reason his throat still felt thick and his stomach still felt like it was twisted uncomfortably, and nothing Shiori had said helped him reason out why.
“So, out of curiosity . . .” Kisugi said slowly, after a moment of the three of them sitting in silence. “If you’re not dating Jounouchi . . . can I have a go?”
Yuugi and Shiori looked up as one in surprise, but Shiori was the only one of them who seemed struck by a sudden bout of indignation as she cried, “Kisugi!” and swatted his leg.
Kisugi gave her an indignant look in turn. “What? What have I done wrong this time? Why must you always treat me with such cruelty?!”
“I’m cruel? You’re the one trying to mack all over Yuugi’s—friend!” Shiori said, and Yuugi chewed the inside of his lip as it occurred to him what she’d probably been about to say.
“So?” Kisugi challenged.
“So?” Shiori repeated. “So you can’t—you can’t do that!”
“Why not? I’m single! Daisuke and Ai tossed me out into the depths of the abyss of misery, and it is perfectly natural for one in the same position as I to want to get out of the abyss with the help of a loving and beautiful rebound—”
“But you can’t use Jounouchi as that rebound!”
“Why not? He’s single! He’s—wait.” Kisugi looked back over at Yuugi, who started under the sudden intensity of Kisugi’s stare. “Jounouchi is single, right? He’s not dating anyone else, right?”
“Ah—no. He’s not. He’s single, I mean,” Yuugi said, and Kisugi turned back to Shiori with a triumphant grin.
“See?” Kisugi said. “He’s single, I’m single—this is the perfect set-up for a rebound romance!”
Shiori made a frustrated noise in the back of her throat. “You can’t do that!” she said again. “You can’t use your friend’s friend as a rebound, it isn’t right—it’s against the friend code!”
“It is not,” Kisugi said hotly. “The friend code only says that you can’t date a friend’s romantic interest, and you also can’t date a friend’s ex or a friend’s friend unless you ask your friend if it’s okay first, and that is exactly what I’ve done.” Shiori glared at Kisugi as Kisugi looked back over at Yuugi, his stare just as intense as before. “It is okay with you if I happen to ask Jounouchi out on a few dates, isn’t it? It’s what I was trying to ask before when I was so rudely,” he shot a petulant frown Shiori’s way, “interrupted.”
“Oh—um . . .” Yuugi swallowed and cleared his throat as he shook his head. Once again, his stomach felt like it was wrapped in uncomfortable knots, his heart beating in double-time to try and work through the tension. “No—I mean, yeah, that’s fine with me. I’m totally fine with it! You can do whatever you want.”
Shiori frowned, but Kisugi beamed, his expression almost blissful as he flopped backward onto the grass again. “Ahh, finally, my fortune seems to be changing!” he crowed. “Blessings from the lovely Yuu-kun himself. See, Shi-chan? This was meant to be. Even as the fissures in my heart left by Daisuke and Ai threaten to never heal, there may yet be another love story blooming on the horizon, one more beautiful and hopefully less tragic than the last—”
Shiori rolled her eyes again, but she was still frowning as she looked over at Yuugi. “So long as you’re okay with it,” she said, and Yuugi nodded quickly.
“Of course I am,” he said, perhaps a little too quickly if the look on Shiori’s face was anything to go by. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well, I mean, he is your . . .” Shiori trailed off, but then she shrugged, looking just as uncomfortable as she had before Kisugi had interrupted the conversation before. Another couple seconds of silence passed before Shiori looked over at the rest of the quad, and it was with a frown that she suddenly dug into her bag to pull out her phone. Yuugi watched her curiously for a moment before her eyes widened, and she tossed her phone back into her bag with far more force than necessary. “Oh my gosh you guys, we’re late again—I was supposed to be at work five minutes ago!”
“Wait, what?” Yuugi checked his own watch, and his heart plummeted when he noticed that it was already five minutes past two. His video game production professor was adamant about starting class at two o’ clock on the dot, and while he didn’t have too strict of an attendance policy in that Yuugi was still allowed to walk in late, enough tardies would eventually start counting as unexcused absences regardless of whether Yuugi showed up or not, and this was already his third one. Yuugi yanked his book bag onto his shoulders before he reached over to grab his soda can and his cup of noodles, and Shiori likewise started shoving her books into her own bag with reckless abandon.
“Ah, you poor souls and your afternoon shifts and classes and things,” Kisugi said, still lounged back as casually as before while Yuugi and Shiori scrambled to clean up their lunch mess. “You should follow the Kisugi way of life and do everything early in the morning or at night instead. That way you don’t have to worry about being late after lunch!”
“Nights are the only time I have to spend with Naoya,” Shiori snapped.
“I’ll be sure to tell my professors they should host their classes at night to suit my schedule instead,” Yuugi said.
“Good man,” Kisugi said, but he frowned at Shiori. “But way to rub your love in my face, Shi-chan. It isn’t even the kind of love rubbing I—”
Shiori smacked her bag into Kisugi’s shoulder as she ran by him, under the pretense of slinging the strap around her shoulders. Kisugi let out a dramatized wounded cry at the impact, but Yuugi spared him only enough time for a pat on the other shoulder and a quick, “Bye!” before he sprinted past, tossing his empty soda can and half-finished instant noodles into the trash can on the edge of the quad as he ran.
That evening, Yuugi and Jounouchi lounged on the couch in their living room, Jounouchi watching a movie on TV while Yuugi played his 3DS. Their couch wasn’t the biggest in the world—it was best for seating only three people, really—and so while Jounouchi laid back against one armrest and kicked his feet onto the coffee table, Yuugi laid back against the other, his legs stretched across Jounouchi’s lap.
Video game production class had gone by relatively quickly. After weathering the heckling of his classmates for showing up late, Yuugi had done his best to focus on his professor’s lecture and their lab work, and in so doing had managed to push the conversation from lunch to the back of his mind. When he got home, Jounouchi had greeted him with a freshly made yakisoba dinner, and after having not finished his lunch, Yuugi was starved enough to wolf it down. That had led to the post-dinner lounging on the couch, and as Yuugi encountered a Young Couple trainer battle in Pokémon, the conversation with Shiori and Kisugi earlier pushed its way back to the forefront of his mind.
“Mm . . . hey, Jounouchi-kun?” Yuugi asked after a second. Jounouchi hummed a little to show that he’d heard. “Do you . . . um—”
“See, why do they do that?” Jounouchi asked suddenly, and he flailed one hand toward the television. Yuugi looked over to see that one of the actors in the movie Jounouchi had turned on was edging toward a door that had been left slightly ajar. “Sorry, Yuugi, I didn’t mean to cut you off—but seriously, look at this friggin’ idiot. He’s in the middle of the zombie apocalypse, he knows this, he knows there are zombies out there, but no, he’s gonna go investigate the strange noises outside, ‘cause that’s a good idea.” Jounouchi snorted. “Anyway, sorry—what were you saying?”
“Nothing,” Yuugi said, and he couldn’t help but grin a little as Jounouchi looked over, his dark eyes curious under his blond fringe. “I think a better question is why you of all people chose a zombie movie to watch. Doesn’t it freak you out?”
“Nah, not really. It’s too dumb to freak me out. Maybe if it was about, you know, something scarier—or if it had higher production values . . . and anyway, there was nothing else on.” Jounouchi looked back over at the television, and Yuugi followed suit just in time to see the actor from before be yanked from the house by decaying zombie hands. “Besides,” Jounouchi said, his voice a little more gruff than before, “it’s not like we’re watching in the dark, and you’re here. So it’s no big deal.”
“I don’t think I’d be much help in a zombie apocalypse,” Yuugi said, and Jounouchi looked over at him with a lopsided grin.
“You’re kidding, right? You’d be the best help. There’s no one I’d rather have backing me up.”
“Not even Honda-kun?”
“Honda’s good in a fight, but he’s not exactly the brightest crayon in the box, you know? All I’d be doing by teaming up with Honda is doubling up on brawn. That’s not gonna get us very far.” Jounouchi paused, and then shrugged a little as if to give a point. “Okay, so we’d smash up a lot of zombies. But something tells me getting covered in zombie juice is not exactly the best way to go about this.”
“Hmm . . . okay,” Yuugi said, as two actresses in the movie tried desperately to hold a door shut. “What about Bakura-kun, then? He’s pretty knowledgeable.”
Jounouchi gave him a flat look. “Seriously, Yuugi? Bakura?”
“What?”
“Bakura would probably join up with the zombies,” Jounouchi said, and as Yuugi laughed Jounouchi grinned and said, “He would! Or he’d end up being their king or leader or something. You know how he is. He loves all that creepy shit.”
“Yeah, but he’s our friend,” Yuugi said. “He wouldn’t feed us to the zombies.”
“No, but he’d want us to join his creepy ass zombie army,” Jounouchi said. “No thanks, I’ll take my chances away from his legions of the undead.”
“I don’t know that zombies are really Bakura-kun’s game,” Yuugi said. “I think he prefers ghosts and things.”
“Still.”
“Okay, so Bakura-kun’s out then,” Yuugi said. “How about Anzu? I bet she’d be good in a zombie fight.”
“Yeah . . . Anzu would probably kick some serious zombie ass,” Jounouchi admitted. “But she’s also all the way in New York. If the world went to Hell next week and everyone started turning into zombie chow, she’d have to fight her way over from America first.”
“True,” Yuugi said.
“And besides,” Jounouchi said, and he fumbled for the remote on the coffee table to lower the volume as the actresses in the film started screaming along with the background music, “Anzu’s cool and all, but that doesn’t change anything. You’d still be my first pick in a zombie fight.”
Yuugi closed the lid on his 3DS. He couldn’t exactly say why, but for some reason, the conversation had piqued his interest. “Why?”
“Why?” Jounouchi repeated. “Dude, isn’t it obvious?” He lifted up his hands to begin ticking off reasons on his fingers. “You’re smart, your entire life is spent either playing or making games and so you’d have a good idea of what to do to either avoid or take out the zombie assholes to avoid getting either of us turned or killed, you’ve already saved the world about three times over already, and as if all of that wasn’t enough, you’re my best friend.” Jounouchi moved his foot off the coffee table to lightly nudge Yuugi’s shoulder with it. “You and me ‘til the end, right? No matter what. I thought that was pretty obvious by now.”
“Well . . . yeah,” Yuugi said. “But I figured, you know . . . I don’t know, most people—”
“Who would you pick?” Jounouchi asked suddenly, and Yuugi cleared his throat a little, grateful for the interruption. “If, say, Kaiba somehow loosed a zombie virus on the world next week—who would you pick to team up with?”
“Why is Kaiba-kun the one infecting the world with a zombie virus?” Yuugi asked, and although some of his amusement had faded with what Jounouchi had said about the two of them together, ‘til the end, he felt it come back as Jounouchi threw Kaiba under the bus.
Jounouchi snorted. “Because that bastard’s heart is cold enough that it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out he’s one of the undead. But hey, seriously. Zombie apocalypse. Next week. Who’s your go-to guy?”
“You, obviously,” Yuugi said, and for some reason his cheeks felt a little warm as Jounouchi grinned. “If I had to pick anyone to help me save the world—or at least get through the end of it—it’d be you. You know that.”
“See? Then what are you acting so surprised when I pick you for, huh?” Jounouchi asked.
“Just because you’re my first pick doesn’t mean I have to be yours,” Yuugi pointed out, and Jounouchi scoffed. “Besides, there’s a lot of fighting when it comes to zombie apocalypses, and—”
“There’s really only fighting if you’re stupid enough to get cornered, I think,” Jounouchi said, and he pointed toward the TV again. “Like those assholes, look at them. Oh sure, run into the inventory room in the back, that’s smart. Seriously, it’s like they want to get eaten. Might as well come out covered in ketchup and barbeque sauce.” Jounouchi paused, and then shrugged. “Well, actually, that might be zombie repellant, since they don’t eat actual food. You never know.”
“Somehow I doubt that would work,” Yuugi said. Jounouchi opened his mouth to say something in reply, but before he could, his phone started vibrating on the coffee table. He reached over to swipe it off, and when he looked at the screen, he heaved a sigh before he hit a button to deactivate the alarm.
“Much as I’d love to see the end of the zombie fest, unfortunately, I have to go join their army,” he said. He lightly pushed Yuugi’s legs off his lap so he could stand up, and Yuugi frowned.
“Work?” Yuugi asked.
Jounouchi nodded. “Yeah. It’s an overnight.” He stuffed his phone in his pocket and stretched his arms above his head, yawning. “Man, I’m tired just thinking about it. Can’t wait until I get something better.”
“How are things going at the radio station?” Yuugi asked, and he sat up a bit straighter as he watched Jounouchi grab his work apron off the chair.
“Fine,” Jounouchi said. “It’s just an internship, you know. They say they’re thinking about hiring someone on, but . . .” Jounouchi shrugged, and slipped on his shoes. “Anyway, I better get going. God forbid I’m late for a ten hour shift, right?”
“You’re never late for anything,” Yuugi said, and Jounouchi laughed.
“Yeah, just about. Anyway, I’m off. See you later. Tomorrow, anyway.”
“Yeah,” Yuugi said. “See you.”
Jounouchi swiped his keys off the TV stand, waved, and was out the door in the next moment. Yuugi waited until Jounouchi locked the door behind him before turning off the TV, and—after a moment of deliberation between whether he wanted to make the effort to go to bed or whether he wanted to stay up a little bit later—flopped forward to lay on his stomach on the couch, flipping his 3DS back open in the process.
It was nice to have the whole couch to himself, he supposed, and as he stretched out completely and made his way through the trainer battle he’d initiated before, he noticed that—since he was laying facing Jounouchi’s side of the couch—the couch still smelled a little bit like Jounouchi---like his body wash and shampoo (ocean scented, Yuugi thought). Yuugi frowned a little as he knocked out the opposing trainers’ kirlia.
Was it weird to notice something like that?
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saegusakin · 7 years ago
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Roquill Misc. Thoughts
(there’s a little line in the middle of this if you don’t want to read the more smutty stuff so take notice of that)
everyone always seems to think that rocket is really inexperienced when it comes to romance/sex and i understand why you might think that
but consider: lylla
he’s not completely unused to the idea of romance, it’s just that in the sense of roquill he just thinks that quill is too good for him, he isn’t from halfworld, he doesn’t look like him, if he was supposed to find anyone it was probably her and somehow that got all messed up so good going
but honestly
consider: rocket is very envious of gamora, every time quill’s attention has been on her instead of him he’s acted out to get his attention back (and when he and quill finally become a couple that part is blatantly obvious and at least he slowly calms down with it because quill is essentially ‘jfc no i care about you, not her, she’s OUR friend, yeah, but YOU’RE my boyfriend’ - on that semi-related note, just try to tell me that rocket stealing the batteries in gotg2 isn’t entirely because quill didn’t care about his music player and focused on gamora too much, rocket clearly never needed the money, the motivation was getting quill’s attention somehow, even if it was negative, he just wants to be focused on) but quill is also pretty secretly jealous of lylla, in a way
lylla was called rocket’s soulmate, by all senses of the word they were supposed to end up together and if she’s still out there the fear still exists in his mind that rocket could still somehow end up with her and no, he does not like that, nuh-uh, get her away he hates anyone being called rocket’s ‘soulmate’ but him, and so much as he might try to hide it, if she were ever really around him he’d be far far far more standoffish towards her than he’d ever been towards anyone else
of course rocket would find this hilarious in a way because what??? HE’S jealous??? what? i’m so used to glaring at any girl that goes by that this is a flarking riot of course at some point he’d probably just tug quill down so they were eye-to-eye and smirk and comment i thought you of all people would know that i’m not even into women anymore, good god. and before you say it - ‘cause i know you’re gonna - i’m not really into any guys, neither. ‘cept you. you’re my baby boo, no one else is. 
ofc someone’s gotta poke them and go guys we still have a mission to drag them out of the likely make-out fest that follows, but you know
also, if you think gamora’s reaction to ayesha hitting on quill in gotg2 was bad, rocket in that position would’ve been so much worse less subtle glaring, more outright crossing his arms, tapping his foot, a-HEM, they’re all ugly anyways they’re creepy and yellow and if they want to ‘study natural reproduction’ they can SHOVE SOMETHING UP THEIR OWN--
quill’s just gotta hold rocket and go shhshh and eventually rocket will calm he gets a bit smug when it’s made clear that he’s the one quill loves but that’s okay, it usually just manifests as a little smug grin and nuzzling into him
SMUT PORTION
on another note with that ‘rocket is inexperienced’ idea, i’d think he knows what sex is, he’s not naive, it’s just that he’s probably ever only done it once with lylla and whoops, that’s it and that was probably heavily just well, that happened, it was....okay, i guess?
the part that he’s inexperienced on is that quill is a) a human, and b) male, and okay, he gets how it works with men-women and he knows it can be done same-sex wise but he’s not going to admit the fact that he has no idea the specifics, but no, he has no idea, and part of him is kinda afraid that that won’t ever happen anyway because hahaha just look at him, sure, they can do the cute kisses and hugs thing fine but actual sexual intimacy he’ll probably never want--
quill’s opinion on the subject is i have done so much weirder so me being sexually attracted to rocket is not surprising, he’s my boyfriend after all so?? yeah ofc 
rocket would legitimately be shocked by that and quill just holds him in his arms and just softly sighs with a grin you’re never gonna really realize it and i know you won’t, but i think you’re incredibly handsome, ‘kay? you’re beautiful and someday i’m gonna get you to see that, too
that pretty much entirely wins over rocket because the fact that he sounds so sincere and he’s so caring and perfect and flark it, i’m his
of course their first time would be a bit confusing on rocket’s part because oh i lift up my tai--OH...that’s....that’s what happens, okay, um,...okay, i trust you
note that quill has probably made sure that everyone else on the team is off doing something else for the night because he highly suspects that rocket is not the quiet type and lord is he right not that it probably isn’t pretty hot, though, and he’d never say it to rocket out loud but holy shit rocky is good at playing up the submissive angle
not that rocket doesn’t know that, of course, and he’d gladly manipulate that if he so pleased
the sex is good but the day after their first time?? rocket is having a lot of trouble with this ‘can’t sit down’ portion of things and he is swearing far more than normal because D’AAAAAAST IT HURTS and quill is barely keeping himself from cracking up, rocket just glares at him every now and then but he’s pretty sure it was worth it
by the way, yes, rocket does have heats quill will just immediately go WELL, ROCKET AND I ARE GOING ON VACATION FOR A LITTLE WHILE WE’LL SEE YOU SOMETIME SOON C’MON ROCKY LET’S GO the rest of the guardians have to handle things for a while, that’s fine, mostly, though at some point someone probably does call in asking for the ‘leader’ and gamore just has to go yeah, he’s on vacation the other person pauses and goes okay what about the second in command he’s on vacation too ...third in command? you’re speaking to her
so yeah, i don’t believe rocket is inexperienced with sex in general, just sex with guys he has no idea until quill shows him how it’s done (and ofc quill knows, peter quill is completely pansexual and i will not hear otherwise)
something else worth noting: headcanon that celestials are very very intent on reproduction whether it be with women or men so whoops, sorry rocket, your boyfriend is half-living god so he could easily knock you up on accident
OKAY THAT PART’S OVER BACK TO CUTE
THIS IS CUTE IF YOU’RE DOWN WITH ROQUILL MPREG OTHERWISE SKIP AND YEAH, I DID A FANFIC A LONG WHILE BACK BUT THESE THOUGHTS ARE MORE IRONED OUT
okay so about that rocket getting accidentally knocked up situation that’s a very viable possibility
rocket throwing up is probably nothing new because the raccoon drinks a lot and even he is just like okay this is worse than normal but nothing completely unexpected until he deliberately refrains from drinking one night and still ends up puking so??? maybe i’m just sick idfk
 it’s only when he starts realizing that he’s getting a bit more chubby is the sign that makes him go okay what no this shouldn’t be happening i’m not eating any more than normal what is going on quill, being quill, has a natural aversion to hospitals and doctors offices because they give him the bad worrying feelings that he tries really really hard to ignore because no, rocket needs this and they both crack up at the idea of oh, rocket’s pregnant, ha up until they realize that ‘quill is half-celestial’ bit of things and it all slowly starts to piece together that no, this isn’t a joke
rocket is horrified, by the way, and freaks out pretty bad because FOR ONE I’M A GUY, FOR TWO WHAT THE HELL IS IT GOING TO LOOK LIKE WITH A COMBINATION OF OUR GENES?? FOR THREE okay, imagine this all turns out okay, do you really think either of us are mature enough for this?? 
that last one quill just kinda quietly goes well i mean you were really good when groot was a baby so
and it’s obvious quill feels awful about this because this wouldn’t even be a thing if not for him
rocket just lightly sighs and just nuzzles into him and goes look, neither of us knew, i’m not mad at you, i’m just...scared. really, really, really, really scared.  but i guess this is happening, whether we like it or not, so....
he just tries to chuckle
because his next words are you realize that this gives me an excuse to be even more pissy than normal, right? ...ain’t that gonna be fun. good luck.
he’s not lying, either
normal rocket is bad, pregnant rocket is a terror that is not yet known to the hearts of mankind, those mood swings are HORRIFYING and the only ones able to calm him are quill, groot, and mantis if she uses her powers and she probably has to at least once
rocket is very upset that he can’t drink at the moment, by the way, even if everyone else sees that as a good thing, he probably tries to more than once and everyone has to make sure that the alcohol is kept away from him
plus, when he’s getting further into the pregnancy, the fact that he can’t go on missions outright pisses him off because WHO CARES IF I’M KIND OF FAT, FIGHT ME, I STILL HAVE THE FASTEST TRIGGER-FINGER IN TWENTY-SEVEN GALAXIES, YOU ALL NEED ME, and he eventually relents because quill is the one person who can convince him into anything through sweet words and rocket kinda hates it but he’s in too deep at this point so quill is able to get him to stay on the ship even if rocket ends up being a bit huffy at it all
the delivery has to be c-section obviously because of the whole ‘being male’ thing, and this entire time rocket has expected it to be some horrifying thing that’d live for like three minutes or so and then die
but no, perfectly fine little girl with big brown eyes and raccoon ears and tail and he just is lying there completely dumbfounded meanwhile everyone else just. they love her. rocket loves her too but he’s just so surprised he didn’t even think of a name or anything he was just going to call it ‘the thing that came from me’ because he heavily expected some kind of furred misshapen creepy thing but no, she’s adorable
the first name that comes ti his mind is lucille, or lucy (because of course, rocket is originally a gigantic beatles reference) so she ends up with full name lucille meredith quill
she’s probably a cheerful little thing, honestly, but she will grab at and try to bite anything and everything, the only ones able to stop her are her dads or groot, she loves groot
she ends up having brown hair, raccoon ears on top of her head, big brown eyes, raccoon tail, and she acts a lot like rocket she is tomboyish, smart, and she has her little upset spells where she’ll only speak to either of her two dads or groot but she’s also a bit more lighthearted and she can easily have quill’s natural talent at being sociable if she so pleases, it’s just that predictably she thinks most people are idiots which rocket agrees with without hesitation he will not disagree bc when his baby girl is right she’s right people are dumb
she’s still a bit more lighthearted and friendly, but she clearly has a lot of rocket’s personality in her while she looks a lot like quill
and much like rocket, she will bite at anyone who tries to touch her without her explicit permission and her ears will twitch when she’s excited, she’s a cute little thing and her dads love her very much
OKAY THAT’S IT FOR NOW I THINK I’LL PROBABLY HAVE MORE LATER, BUT YEAH
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saoirseann · 5 years ago
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Creative Confidence - Tom & David Kelly
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In this book, David and Tom Kelly discuss thoroughly the opposite of “the creativity myth” by talking about what they call “Creative confidence.”
 This is the foundation that we are all creative.
Creative Confidence helps you rediscover your creativity, showing you how to exercise your innovative muscle by drawing on the authors’ experiences working at the design and innovation firm IDEO, as well as the lessons they learned and imparted to others at the d.school at Stanford University.
“Creative confidence is like a muscle - it can be strengthened and nurtured through effort and experience.”
If you haven’t used the muscle in a while, it only takes a bit of training in order to make it strong again is David and Tom’s theory.
What is Creativity?
Great creativity sometimes finds its expression in the fine arts, but it actually has a much broader application. Creativity means simply using your imagination to create something new.
Creative confidence is about believing in your ability to create change in the world around you, the self-assurance.
 Belief in creative capacity lies at the heart of innovation.
Tom & David Kelly debunk that  “Creativity is only for artsy types.”
We even see this social rejection in the classroom, where creativity is smothered in favour of rationality, and small children are told to obey the rules and only colour inside the lines.
They talk about the example of when Paul McCartney was at school he was told to give up music and pursue a “safe career” in Liverpool’s manufacturing and shipping industries. Instead, he became part of the most successful band in history.
The anti-creativity mindset is changing.
Today’s businesses have begun to recognize that the best way to find novel solutions to complex problems is by investing more time and money in nurturing their employees’ innovative drives.
For example, a very recent IBM survey of more than 1,500 CEOs reported that creativity is the single most important leadership skill for enterprises engaged in the complex world of global commerce, where innovative solutions.
In our experience, everybody is the creative type.
People simply need to rediscover what they already have: “the capacity to imagine - or build upon- new-to-the-world ideas.”
Growth Mindset
Many people want to be creative, but they don’t really know how to do it. The most basic thing you can do is to give up the notion that you cannot be creative. 
You must truly believe that you can grow, experience and create more than you ever previously thought was possible.
One way to develop this mindset is to create a roadmap to guide you through creative processes. This roadmap has all the different techniques you need to train your creative muscles, providing you with an easy, straightforward path to follow.
One technique that the authors often use with so-called “non-creatives” is design thinking. Basically, design thinking helps us to identify human needs and create new solutions by thinking like design practitioners.
From Design Thinking to Creative Confidence
Develop the courage to explore your creativity – it’s a great first step toward discovering your new self.
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By adopting this growth mind-set you will automatically change your perception of yourself and the world around you, and be empowered to flex your creative muscles and come up with innovative solutions. 
Three factors in every innovation program
 Tom & David Kelly believe that successful innovations rely on some element of human-centred design research whilst also balancing the two other elements - seeking the sweet spot of feasibility, viability & desirability. 
No one-size-fits-all-methodology for bringing new ideas to life
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First factor - technical factors (feasibility) 0 cool technology alone isn’t enough essentially.
Second key element - Economic viability (business factors) Not only does the technology need to work but it also needs to be produced and distributed in an economically viable way.
Third element involves people- often referred to as the human factors. Generally, you need to deeply understand human needs - getting at people’s motivations & core beliefs.
A growth state of mind
I’d researched this before from Carol Dweck’s Ted talk but it was interesting to read further about it in Creative Confidence. 
Individuals with a growth mindset, “believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.”
A growth mindset it a passport to new adventures
The Failure Paradox
David & Tom debunk the widely held myth that creative geniuses rarely fail - But really everyone fails. In fact, Professor Simonton of the University of California found that these iconic creative geniuses didn’t fail less, but actually more than others.
However, rather than quit, they learned to keep going. Creative geniuses learn from their mistakes and modify their next attempts so that they are closer to the mark.
So, if we want to be successful in our creativity, then we need to think like Edison: a failure is only a failure if nothing has been learned from it.
In fact, there’s a paradox: success at your first attempt might actually hurt your results in the long run.
This is because failures that happen early in the innovative process reveal the weaknesses in your product or line of thinking.
Standford professor Bob Sutton & IDEO partner Diego Rodriguex often say at the d.school - 
“Failure sucks, but instructs.”
The “do something” mindset helps you see that you can and should change things for the better.
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Changing your mind-set from, “I know I should probably do this,” to “I will do this,” is the most powerful means you have of taking charge of your own life.
Even when the outcome is not successful, you will have no regrets, because you know that at least you tried. The worst mistake you can make is to not try and never learn.
Balance money and passion to find a job that fulfils all your desires.
One of the chapters goes into detail and asks about what kind of job would you rather have: one that pays as much as possible or one that allows you to pursue your passions?
Usually, people want both, and this can cause a lot of stress. However, it’s rare that both our passions and big money are equally represented in our job opportunities, so we often have to choose between the two.
Channelling your creativity will improve your work and make you happier in your private life.
Allowing yourself the freedom to think creatively and to innovate is one of the best ways to ensure your own happiness, both professionally and personally.
For starters, when there’s innovation, engagement and creativity in your work, your employers will start paying attention. Nowadays, companies recognize the great value of people who can pitch new ideas and help their projects achieve new heights.
Nearly everyone who has worked with the authors to rediscover their creative potential has their own stories of how cultivating creativity did marvels for their career. It’s allowed CEOs to involve themselves in innovative, grassroots work and helped lawyers approach tough cases in a novel and intelligent way, leading them to win more cases.
A creative mind can do wonders for your personal life as well. Not only will this new perspective help you to enjoy the mundane aspects of life, but the life you’ve built for yourself will further inspire and motivate you.
My key learning of Creative Confidence
Creativity isn’t just for artists. It’s generally in everyone’s blood. And although society does everything it can to smother it(mostly schools), you can still flex your creative muscles in order to win it back. The only way to do that, however, is to face any fear of failure and take immediate action instead.
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lovetheangelshadow · 5 years ago
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N’Pressions: Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker
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So a small bit of fair warning before going forward. I am a casual normie consumer of Star Wars and most of my interaction with the franchise is the nine core films and a handful of the Clone Wars episodes (notably the Tartakovsky run). Also I will being mentioning a few minor spoilers mostly to help with certain issues I have had with the sequel trilogy. Personally the Star Wars franchise has always been just fun popcorn flicks for me and that is honestly mostly what I wanted from the sequel trilogy. Would I have been happy if they tried to take the series forward and tried new things even at risk? Sure. It is one of the reasons why the Digimon anime series has that much value to me. Do I hate Disney not really pushing as much as they were certainly capable of? Not really. In all fairness the sequels have given me mixed feelings. Not exactly a love or hate relationship, but something just above okay. You really gotta do something to make me hate it.
So moving on to the final film of the trilogy. It did feel a bit rushed. Like they were trying to cram so much stuff in to get this thing completed. It was not exactly like say, Endgame or Deathly Hollows where you could split the films in half to get more of a complete story. Even still, it is not the worst rushed final I have seen before. The basic idea is that the First Order has been granted a super powerful fleet by the Emperor that could decimate the resistance and they only have a limited time before they are sent out. Thus the mission is to locate the fleet and strike them before they have a chance to launch. Meanwhile the Emperor is sending Kylo to hunt down Rey and since the two are still Force-linked it becomes a game of cat and mouse between the two. And thank you for actually giving us some more lightsaber fights, sequel trilogy! Seriously, there has been a real lack of it in the first two films. That being said I do kinda feel like the battles between Ray and Kylo were a tad drawn out, but at least we almost saw Rey nearly get her ass kicked to the curb for once.
Okay, I do not necessarily hate Rey. She is not the worst Mary Sue character I have had to tolerate. I think what irks me the most is that she had honest to gods potential of being a really good character on par with Luke. A scavenger who desires above all anything else a sense of belonging, of purpose. Someone who is constantly looking to the past for answers for that feeling but always coming up blank, even when the call keeps telling her to look forward. Her finally finding a family and place among the resistance. But because of her lineage of Palpetine, the dark side keeps coming around to tempt her; to offer her greater purpose than these ragtag team she’s come to care about. Every time she thinks she finally has a family the dark side rips it away from her (Han and Luke) until she falls into despair and loss of control and towards the dark side-but her new family being that single thread of light that will guide her and eventually to the new future. Showing that while the past may be a part of you, it does not define you. Except, we never get that. From the onset she automatically capable of flying the Millennium Falcon, force mind control, etc. We never really see her honestly struggle with the dark side. She rushes into dangerous situations and doesn’t suffer consequences for her recklessness or pride. She doesn’t really lose anything. Sure she occasionally feels doubt and fear but it’s glossed over and isn’t emphasized. Oh and the whole “I am all the Jedi” thing did feel a bit forced for me. Girl, Tony Stark you aint. Plus she should have said her family name was Palpatine showing that she has made peace with her past and is now looking to the future. For all the whole “strong female character thing” and all that-what is hilariously ironic is that it’s the other protagonist MALES that are most interesting. Even from Force Awakens I cared more about Finn, Poe, and Kylo than I ever did for Rey. And they actually had honest genuine arcs and were just overall far more compelling characters to me. Also Kylo is best character in the series, fight me.
So what was my thoughts on the final film itself? Honestly it’s a mixed bag. Like I said, the last film does feel a bit rushed and there are certainly notable plot holes-but it’s not the worst I have seen. It does actually feel like an end. One of the biggest issues I had was the pacing. I feel some of it could be trimmed back a bit-not that it did not serve a purpose or anything but sometimes the wait for the payoff feels…dragging. Also, hey we make these super big sacrifices, aka Chewie’s supposed death and C3P-O’s memory wipe, and boom “hey they okay now”. Like why? You put this big dramatic emphasis on how important these things are and you just flick them off as if they were nothing. I get people were mad how Han and Luke died, but come on! If you’re going to commit to this big dramatic cost-stick with it! Have Chewie’s death by Rey’s force lighting question herself and give her a real reason to be terrified and tempted by the Dark Side. Have C3P-0’s memory wipe be a reminder that there are hard costs in the fight for freedom. Also when did Rey get force healing powers? Was that even an actual thing? Okay I don’t have that much of a gripe about that because it at least pays off where Kylo Ren/Ben is concerned. That is the most hilarious thing about the trilogy, all the pieces were there to really make something and for whatever reason they don’t go full forward with it. I get it, there is this constant push and pull with fandoms and I rarely ever want anything to do with them because I know how toxic they can get (looking at YOU Ninjago fandom). But much like the Force, there has to be a balance. I think some minor fan input would have helped here and yes I know fandom reactions and the way Disney has been handling things has not been looking for either side and social media has not helped things.
That is not to say that the film doesn’t have its awesome moments as well in particular the final half of the movie-where Finn and Poe are planning the final assault on the Sith Fleet. Like Poe does from this hotshot flier who does reckless maneuvers to actually thinking and using strategy. Or Finn who once only wanted to run away from the First Order is now using his knowledge of them to work out a viable plan of attack like using the horse things instead of speeders because he knows they can disable them. Or the huge appearance of various ships all around the galaxy coming in to the fight. The Kylo vs Rey fights are pretty interesting as well-using the idea they are fighting each other but are physically in two places and the cinematography takes advantage of that-switching between the two environments and their strikes affecting the surroundings. Also the conclusion of Kylo’s arc was pretty satisfying and his death, in a way, felt a bit more impactful than Vader’s because we do actually see him struggle between the two sides thought the trilogy as opposed to Vader that in retrospect kinda felt more like a last minute heel turn to me. Plus the symbolism between the Skywalker and Palpetine aka Light Side and Dark Sides were a real nice touch such as Luke’s X Wing and Vader’s tie fighter landing together (Kylo’s star fighter’s design still kicks ass though). Oh and Palpetine really chews the scenery out and it is glorious. That being said, despite my hang ups I still enjoyed myself and thank gods it was not Digimon Tri. I’m Noctina Noir, and I’m one Nox of a Nobody.
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hithelleth · 7 years ago
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Salvation S1
Why do I keep getting into shows that are likely to be cancelled!? Oh, right, because I’m a masochist. So, I’ve finished Salvation and it was so good! I’ve been internally squeeing for days, so I’ll try to get things out of my system now so I can then maybe focus on other fannish (and non-fannish) things.
(This turned out long, so I put it under the cut and tried to make it more easily readable with some bolding. My apologies to those on mobile.) 
I’ve always had a thing for doomsday premises, so this was right up my alley with an impending extinction level event that must remain secret from the general populace to avoid panic while the big shots try to prevent it.
Except that unlike a number of cheesy movies where the world comes together to save humanity and/or help each other after the disaster, Salvation creators tackled it from the other end: the whole season is set before the disaster strikes and nobody is willing to cooperate.
I found the approach refreshing and really liked it. Probably because I’m what I call a pessimistic idealist. I mean, don’t get me wrong, obviously, if such a scenario happens in real life, I do hope (or want to) that humanity would come together to save itself/the Earth. But the pessimist in me thinks there is just as much chance for us to kill each other before the Earth/space/whatever gets to us.
Although, of course, with the current political atmosphere where the orange menace and the little dumpling (you know who I mean, they don’t deserve to be named) are throwing threats with nuclear war weapons around, the cold-war-era-like hostilities in the show gave me chills.
So, there’s political power play galore while the tech wiz and co. are trying to find the way to save the world while being obstructed on every step by politicians. I liked the suspense it all brought out, and how it made the show fast paced (but didn’t take anything from complexity). I also liked all the shadiness and there was a lot of it around, as basically everyone does at least something not quite right (even if with the best of intentions).
I liked that the focus of the show is sort-of evenly spread between science and politics as well as different age groups, as in the characters in their early to mid-twenties and those around/in their forties, which I’m more into the older I get (seriously, it’s one of the biggest reality checks as to age when I realise that the character/actor(ess) is only a few years older than me, or worse, younger!)
And while I’m at that… I have a new OT3!!!! Come on, you knew this was coming, I’m that weird person who can find more or less likely OT3s anywhere and I proudly own it.
But damn it, I wasn’t looking for it! Then again I never do, you know how it goes: I don’t choose my ships, they chose me. Those three fuckers! Why am I doing this to myself? Why? *high pitched pterodactyl screeching*
I’m talking about Harris/Grace/Darius (in all variations), just to be clear. Seriously, I have no idea how it happened, but around episode 5 or 6, I was like, “well maybe instead of squabbling and ‘slight’ signs of jealousy, you could, you know, work together?” and then one thought led to another and I was like, “yeah, I could ship it, provided Harris wasn’t evil…” (I mean, he was a very, very bad boy once or twice, but turned out not to be evil) and the rest is history. *insert more swearing* Yeah, episode 8 didn’t help at all. And then of course they did work together so well towards the end of the season. *sighs*
Anyway, look, I’m not asking for much, just a S2 where they can occasionally (well, the more often the better, but I’ll take what I get) share screen time and be the badass power world/country-saving trio they are. My imagination can do the rest. ;)
But of course, IAD was promoted to a regular on Hawaii 5-O, so I’m not sure what that would mean – although Salvation is a summer show, so I guess coordination could be possible – and the ratings seem to be shit and I don’t want to get my hopes up despite the articles floating around saying not all is lost for S2. *fingers crossed*
Which brings me to a bit of ranting about a plot hole or two and a few general observations and possible S2 speculations.
a) You want me to believe that the US Secretary of Defence can just simply drive around on his own, NBD, and nobody bats an eye? FFS, even in my itty bitty country where the cabinet members really aren’t in much danger of imminent assassination, they have drivers and security details, especially the Defence Minister. It did come very handy for the plot that Harris could just drive around like it’s nobody business, though.
b) How did they get the selected 160 on site so fast? Magic? Because they couldn’t have picked them solely from Tanz personnel, since that would be mostly scientists, and they did pick historians, artists, etc…  And those would be from all around the country, I’d say. (It’s shitty enough that they would be all only Americans, like the rest of the world has no smart people to offer. Also, for genetic diversity it would be better if people were from other countries, too.)
Unless they brought them into Tanz as they picked them, before the nuclear alarm. But didn’t they finish the selection process just a day or a couple before (my memory is a bit foggy, I’ll have to rewatch)?
And nobody seemed surprised at the sight of the space-ship, so I guess they were told the actual truth or at least the Mars colonisation version beforehand? I think the second is more likely.
But, never mind, that is not even my biggest problem with the 160 and I can easily let it pass, because time on TV can work in mysterious ways (plus, maybe they cut the scenes that were supposed to clear it up.)
c) No, my biggest problem is that if 160 people are the minimum viable population, I assume those people must be able to procreate (and have healthy and diverse enough genes.) 
And so there were mostly young people in their twenties (mostly women) and thirties in the Salvation bunker. So far so good.
Of course if we only look to the continuation of human species, choosing young people makes sense.
(I’m not going into the fact that if all those youth are the best and the brightest, there would be other issues with picking people who must have been child prodigies and could therefore lack the social skills that are just as important for humanity as science – but I guess the humanities studies part of the group can compensate for what others lack in that field.) 
It also makes perfect sense that some people would be chosen for qualities other than reproductive abilities, which is where Harris and Grace come in.
I mean, men don’t have that sort of a problem, but with Zoe about to start college, Grace must be at least in her early 40s (although Jennifer is younger) since she doesn’t strike me as a teen mom, and a woman of her age has a hard time having a healthy child even in the most optimal, peaceful conditions and with the best medical treatment available, so I think it’s safe to say Grace having any more kids, especially in a couple of years, is out of the question. But that’s okay.
My problem is with Darius being disqualified on grounds of carrying the Huntington’s gene. Sure, it served as a fantastic testimony of his character that he would work on the Mars project and then this saving the mankind thing knowing that he can’t go/save himself. That’s great, what a good person!
But since other people were picked for their leadership/wisdom/merit, then why not Darius?
Did the writers forget that contraception is a thing? You know, to prevent ‘accidentally’ spreading his bad genes around? And pre-natal screening also exists (okay, IDK if they can find out about the Huntington’s gene that way, but still) – and there are doctors (I assume a few actual MDs have been picked) around to do it and in case of a positive result an abortion is an option? (But god forbid we’d even think of the A-word on a national network in the US, of course.) Or you know, just have the guy have a vasectomy, the easiest sure-fire solution. (Yeah, now I’m being mean.)
My point in short: there is no logical reason (I know, looking for logic on TV; I never learn) for Darius not to be among the 160 apart from the writers’ need for characterisation through drama.
Anyway, I think that if we get S2, it might turn out the nukes were false alarm or something, because Santiago Cabrera is first-billed and I expect they wouldn’t kill him off, so this disqualification issue will be moot.
So, if we get S2:
d) The usurping VP (why TF does he have to be named Monroe Bennett? *wry smile* *cue reminiscing of a certain other show*) escaped and will be wreaking havoc, I assume.
e) I’d really like if Amanda somehow survived (I mean, it’s TV, anything is survivable on TV, a little chest/shoulder wound should be nothing), because I liked her.
f) I had to google the actor who played Grace’s dad (he was awesome!) because he looked familiar and look, he also played the substitute pressie who needed to be bullied into doing the right thing in TLS.
g) With the EM drive being magnetic (duh), I think Liam’s idea has something to do with trying to use the EM drive to pull the asteroid in off the impact course. I vote for partial success, because otherwise the show’s premise would go out of the window and they might as well just end it.
And I think that’s all I’ve got (for now).
I think I’ll go find some pretties to queue up for next week. Although, I’ve already been in the tags a little and as far as I could see, nobody ships my OT3 (I’m not surprised at all), so I might need to do some giffing myself. And maybe write fic. But after I finish my current fic exchange assignment, which I should be doing instead of writing this, but oh well. Maybe now I’ll be able to concentrate better.
Tagging @street-of-mercy, because you got me into this mess! ;) (You don’t have to respond or anything, but in case you’re interested in my thoughts and questionable shipping choices, here you go. :D) 
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ruminativerabbi · 5 years ago
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Monsey
Most—but not all—of the responses to the horrific incident last week in Monsey struck me both as reasonable and heartfelt. But what was lacking even in the most sincere comments I read or heard was a clear sense of where we go from here, what specific path we must or should now follow forward into the uncertain future that lies beyond Pittsburgh and Poway, beyond Jersey City and (now) Monsey. And that is the specific issue I would like to address this week in my first letter of a new decade to you all.
Yes, some of the responses were outrageous. Particularly tone-deaf, for example, was the suggestion of Avigdor Lieberman, former Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs and Defense Minister, that the only truly viable solution to the problem of anti-Semitic violence in America would be for all American Jews to move to Israel. Problem solved! Although most Israeli officials have traditionally shied away from encouraging mass aliyah by the Jews of the United States (which advice they certainly have not held back from offering to the Jews of other nations, including most recently France and the U.K.), Lieberman clearly saw no reason to hold back. (Click here for the Jerusalem Post account of his remarks.) Apparently unaware—or at least unwilling to accept—that American Jews are patriotic, deeply engaged citizens of their own country who have zero interest in solving their problems by running away to seek refuge in some other country, even one they hold as dear to their hearts as Israel, Lieberman’s comments betrayed such an abysmal understanding of the American Jewish community that I felt ashamed for my non-Jewish co-citizens to read accounts of his remarks.
His comments, however, did not sound entirely unfamiliar: In fact, I found them weirdly reminiscent of the position set forward by those people in the first half of the nineteenth century who felt that the most reasonable solution to the slavery issue that eventually did tear the country apart would have been to pack the slaves up en masse and ship them back to Africa. But the Back-to-Africa movement, predicated on the assumption that American society could never just consider black people to be “regular” citizens possessed of the same rights and privileges as white people, foundered precisely because it sought to solve a deep societal problem by shipping it overseas instead of solving it in the only way that injustice and inequity are ever successfully addressed on the national or societal level: for like-minded citizens to find the political will, the spiritual stamina, and the moral courage to morph forward into a finer, better iteration of their former national self. It was a simplistic, unreasonable solution to the slavery issue then. And it is a simplistic, entirely unreasonable solution to the problem of anti-Semitism in America today. And because the American Jewish community isn’t going anywhere at all, the resolution has to be to address the affliction and not simply to exile the afflicted.
Other responses were more reasonable, if mostly banal. Bernie Sanders, for example, pointed out that his own father came to this county as a teenager to escape anti-Semitic violence in Poland and that Monsey, by reminding him of his father’s plight, only made it clearer to him how important it is “to say no to religious bigotry.” The President called upon his fellow Americans “to fight, confront, and eradicate the evil scourge of anti-Semitism.” Mitch McConnell referenced Monsey as “another reminder that the fight against hate and bigotry, especially anti-Semitism, is far from finished,” adding that this was true not only on the global level but also “right here at home.” Isaac Herzog, the chairman of the Jewish Agency, called for “a relentless battle” to be waged against “this horrifying and painful spate of violent anti-Semitic attacks.” Israeli President Rivlin expressed his “shock and outrage,” and called for a worldwide effort “to confront this evil, which is raising its head again and is a genuine threat around the world.”  You get the general idea: bigotry is bad in any event, but violent expressions of racial or religious bigotry represent the kind of societal evil that cannot merely be dealt with by being roundly condemned but which must be addressed by some combination of law enforcement officials, government legists, and civic-minded civilians acting together forcefully and effectively.
So much for the macro level. On the ground here in the actual Jewish community, however, I sensed a far more equivocal response as people tried to negotiate the straits between Over- and Under-Concern.
When Governor Cuomo referenced the incident as “an act of domestic terrorism,” for example, it was hard to decide if he was speaking a bit exaggeratedly about an attack that seems to have been perpetrated by a mentally unstable man acting alone or if he was realistically assessing a new reality for the Jewish community, one in which the possibility of having one’s synagogue or one’s home invaded by angry anti-Semites armed with guns or machetes truly is part of a new normal that somehow crept up on us unawares.
Nor was Governor Cuomo alone in seeing a clear line from Oklahoma City to Monsey. Bryan Barnett, the president of the U.S. Council of Mayors, also unequivocally categorized Monsey as an act of domestic terrorism and called upon the nation “to recognize them—he was referring to Monsey and Jersey City—for what they are and work to prevent them from occurring in the future with the same commitment we have made to preventing international terrorism.”
But here too, I sensed uncertainty in the communal response as Jews on the ground tried to decide if a handful of violent acts undertaken by Jew-hating crazy people has really put the clock back to 1938…or if what this is really all about is the Jewish community taking its unhappy place in the mainstream of a nation so inured to gun violence that the incident of just two days ago in in White Settlement, Texas—a violent assault incident in which a gunman with no apparent motive entered a church during Sunday services, murdered two worshipers apparently at random, and was then himself shot to death by armed parishioners—was considered a front-page story for one single day and then vanished into the back pages of the paper where it will eventually be entirely forgotten other than by people directly and personally involved. Speaking honestly, it’s not that easy to say. And yet, despite it all, just waving Monsey away as another instance of senseless violence aimed arbitrarily at victims whose specific misfortune was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—that seems entirely inconsonant with the way the facts on the ground feel to me…and, I suspect, to most within our Jewish community.
And so we enter a new decade on the horns of several dilemmas at once. The justice system will deal with the suspect in the Monsey incident, just as it will deal with the Pittsburgh shooter as it would have dealt with the Jersey City shooters if they hadn’t been killed. But how are we, the people on the ground, to respond as these incidents become more frequent, less unimaginable, more expectable, less shocking? To beef up security at our synagogues and schools is an obvious first step. To keep our doors locked and our powder dry, ditto. But the more profound question is whether we should allow these incidents to alter our self-conception…or our sense of ourselves as free citizens of a secure, democratic state, as people whose right to assemble where and when we wish is constitutionally sacrosanct, as Americans whose right to self-identify as Jews in public and to walk securely down any city street is non-negotiable? Is it weak and self-defeating to allow the sonim to affect who we are and what we do? Or is it merely prudent, even wise, to allow these incidents to guide us forward in a way rooted in realism rather than happy fantasy? I’m not speaking about whether we should or shouldn’t hire another security guard to watch over the synagogue when we’re gathered there in large numbers for some specific reason. I’m asking something else, something far more challenging to answer honestly or, even, at all: whether the noble path forward—and the clever and proper one—should involve allowing these incidents to shape who we are and how we understand ourselves (and, yes, how we do or don’t behave in public)…or whether the correct path into the future should specifically feature us refusing to accommodate the haters by altering our behavior at all…or our self-conception.
As Bari Weiss’s very admirable recent book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, showed unequivocally, anti-Semitism is a feature of the extreme left and right in our country; neither extreme is immune. As of now, no thoughtful Jewish American can imagine that anti-Semitism is a thing of the past, a feature of older, less tolerant times. The origins of anti-Semitism run deep in Western culture—and that too is something known to all. So the real question is whether things have changed…or whether they’ve mere clarified. And that question leads to the one stated above: do we need to rethink everything because of a handful of violent incidents or should we simply refuse to submit to the crazies and insist on carrying on as we always have—as patriotic citizens well aware of our civil rights and as secure in our skin as were our parents before us? To my way of thinking, that is the real question that the Monsey assailant inadvertently lays at our feet: can knuckling under to a new normal be reasonably described as growth…or only rationally as surrender?
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writesandramblings · 7 years ago
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The Captain’s Secret - p.69
“The Order of Things”
A/N: This chapter includes the beginning of episode 8, "Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum.” Also, if you were wondering what precisely was in Mischkelovitz's ears, it was the Dublin Guitar Quartet version of Mishima.
Full Chapter List Part 1 - Objects in Motion << Part 68 - To Fill Up My Hand Part 70 - Seek and You Shall Find >>
Discovery racked up kills. A cruiser here, a wing of raiders there, everywhere dead Klingons, and each time a little bit more hope for the long run. Thousands of lives saved and millions more protected by the successful defense of the front lines. If the Klingons could not advance, those Federation member worlds and colonies nearest the border were that much better off, and Discovery was making its mark in that regard.
Not that every attempt to thwart the Klingons was successful. There were plenty of close calls, missteps, and failures. A Klingon Bird of Prey spotted near the Relva VII frontier outpost turned out to have a cloaked friend. Two crewman died when a plasma conduit exploded after a direct hit on Discovery. At Starbase 35, they could not prevent a crippling strike that rendered the station an enormous hunk of space junk, though they did defend a large number of escape pods until reinforcements could arrive to collect the station refugees. A medical supply freighter exploded before they could reach it, even with the spore drive.
On the whole they were picking up more victories than losses. They were also potentially overdoing it. No sooner had they finished an attack, Lorca was planning the next one, not to mention the unscheduled distress calls. Black and red alerts were sometimes two, even three times a day.
Despite this flurry of action, Discovery did not always come when called. Lorca had no intention of charging into a fight he had no chance of winning. A distress signal arrived from the USS Penfield and Lorca took one look at the tactical readout and canceled the black alert. "If we can't make a difference, there's no point in going," he said to Saru behind closed doors.
Saru's distress was self-evident. The Penfield had been the ship that greeted Discovery when it emerged from null time. They knew Captain Blanchard personally. There were one hundred and ten souls aboard that ship. "Surely some small difference..."
Lorca understood the objection. The desire to sacrifice yourself for the greater good was a hallmark of Starfleet. Too many ships had gone down in pursuit of this ideal over the course of the war which was why, without the successes of Discovery, they would lose the war slowly but surely.
"You can't focus on the battle right in front of you, Saru. You have to consider the entirety of the war. If we lose Discovery, the picture gets a hell of a lot bleaker for everyone. It isn't that I'm trying to save the people on this ship, it's that so long as I do, then I can guarantee we save more people down the line."
That answer, at least, seemed to satisfy the Kelpien, but Saru was not the only one with concerns.
"Captain Lorca," said Admiral Terral tersely as Lorca reported on their latest altercation in the Krios system, which lay in Klingon territory, "we need you to coordinate your efforts and communicate with the fleet."
"Really?" said Lorca, leaning against his desk in a casual display of disrespect. He had come to realize Terral hated him and the fact brought him immense satisfaction because Vulcans were supposed to be above such petty emotions. He really did have an effect on people. "Seems to me Discovery's doing just fine under my direction. I don't know if you've checked your tactical map lately, but we actually gained some territory back this week."
Terral looked like he was about to lose it. His face seemed outwardly calm, but Lorca sensed there was a roiling cloud of anger hidden just behind that forced expression.
Lorca glanced at the comm controls on his desk and moved his hand towards them so it looked for a moment like he was going to hang up on Terral again. Instead, he stood there, brazenly nonchalant, making it clear that while Terral had the rank, Lorca had all the power. "If there's nothing else, admiral, I have a war to fight, and every minute I'm here chatting with you is a minute we're not out there making a difference."
He really had a gift for framing his insubordination with the loftiest and most noble of intentions. He let Terral lecture him briefly about the importance of a coordinated defense, paid him a tiny bit of flagrantly obvious lip service, and finally Terral declared the conversation over and Lorca was free to return to what he had been doing before the call started: reviewing the files Tilly had stolen for him from Memory Alpha.
These files were not a primary concern of Lorca's—he was hardly going to choose some minor personnel mystery over the need he felt to make a substantive difference in the war—but in those scant moments when he found himself with time to kill or when he simply wanted a bit of a diversion from everything else, as he did right now, they offered an escape. Bit by bit, he was piecing together the story, but even with everything Tilly had brought him, he was still missing so much. There were gaps in those files, even in the copies in Memory Alpha.
Another, more recently emerging story involved Mischkelovitz's shuttle bay insights on the subject of music. As much as these insights were the ramblings of a madwoman, they also turned out to be something else.
Mischkelovitz had come up with a viable method of breaking the Klingon cloak.
"Patterns," she explained from the sterile comfort of sickbay, where she had ended up after her outburst of manic inspiration, Dr. Culber standing her side. Culber had managed to calm her without resorting to any Vetroxican. (Not that this freakout was on the same level as the one about Burnham. That had been another beast entirely.) "They aren't just repetitive, they can be broken. You know how stars emit music?"
"Yeah," said Lorca, because there was very little esoteric information about stars he had not consumed as a child.
"Planets do, too. Mostly just useless noise, but there's one planet that sings. Really sings. It's got a large, aturally-noccurring crystal formation that vibrates and resonates at a redictably permeating frequency. Um..." She did not fall apart. She took a slow breath, carefully refocused, and tried again. Her words rose into a shout of triumph as she succeeded in working out what she meant to say all on her own. "Redictably. Predictably. Predictably! Repeating! Frequency!"
Lorca beamed with pride. He felt he deserved a lot of the credit for that little victory. If nothing else, he had contributed to the improvement of Mischkelovitz in a very meaningful way.
"The problem I've been having is that my cloak frequency emitters don't sync up well over range and they don't have enough power individually to cover meaningful regions of space. It's as if there's a bunch of instruments in an orchestra and everyone is either so far away they can't hear each other and the music doesn't come together, or so close that they're hitting each other with their elbows and throwing one another off. But the music being emitted by this naturally-occurring transmitter not only permeates across a broad region of space, it doesn't conflict with itself the way my orchestra does!"
Culber listened attentively. He loved music, too, and there was something magical about the idea of music informing a solution to piercing a Klingon cloak.
"Like the variations of Mishima, all we need to do is modify the frequency of the crystalline emitter into the frequency that resonates with the Klingon cloak, and then it's just a matter of looking to see where the pattern breaks. Like laves wapping—no, no... lave... waves lapping against an invisible object on the beach!" Mischkelovitz looked at Culber and Lorca for approval.
"That's amazing," said Culber. Beauty overcoming hatred and warfare. That was the sort of solution he could get behind.
Lorca concurred. "I think you deserve a cookie for this. Hell, you can have the whole damn bowl." He had not brought any cookies with him, but he was prepared to go fetch one on the spot.
"Forget the cookie. I'd like to have sex again."
For a moment, both Culber and Lorca stood stock still in disbelief. Then Culber's mouth fell open in shock and Lorca's shoulders began to shake with silent but entirely uncontrollable laughter. It took every ounce of willpower he had to keep the laughter from erupting into a sonic volcano.
Culber recovered enough to speak first. "I thought you said that would compromise your work?"
Entirely unruffled, Mischkelovitz said brightly, "Actually, it was talking to you that gave me the idea in the first place!"
Lorca finally managed to resume regular respiratory function. "Dr. Culber. Is she clear to leave sickbay?"
Mischkelovitz stared at Culber expectantly. She knew there was no medical reason for her to remain at this point, but also that Culber could order a few extra tests or an observation period if he truly wanted. Orders she was prepared to disregard completely.
Culber shook his head slightly, still trying to process the fact his attempt to warn her off sleeping with the captain had inadvertently caused Mischkelovitz to do exactly that. "You're free to go, Dr. Mischkelovitz."
"Come on," said Lorca. "This time, you're gonna learn a few things I like. Consider it repaying me the favor." His smirk was entirely too smug.
Mischkelovitz hopped down from the exam table. "Thank you, Dr. Culber! You can call me Mischka." She followed Lorca out of sickbay like a living extension of his shadow. (Culber decided to let the whole thing go, not just for his own sake, but also because he was pretty sure the captain had been so brazen at the end there largely for the purposes of eliciting a reaction and the smart thing was not to fall for the provocation.)
The only problem with Mischkelovitz's brilliant solution was that the finer details of crystalline structures fell well outside her expertise. They had to transmit the details of her proposal to Starfleet's science division for someone else to figure out the implementation and the scientist who ended up with the proposal took complete credit for the idea. When Lorca asked Mischkelovitz if losing control of her project upset her, her response was a surprisingly reasonable, "Science isn't about glory. I know what I did. I don't need any credit." She really was the polar opposite of Stamets.
Besides, she had already moved on to her next project. What that was, she would not say exactly, but when Lorca walked through the lab a few days later he found significant portions of the walls torn open and cables and components everywhere. It was a debris field to rival the Binary Stars.
For all that Mischkelovitz was now on amicable terms with Culber, this camaraderie did not extent to Stamets. Lorca was on the bridge going over the details of an upcoming battle plan in preparation for a pending tactical simulation when a comm came from the engineering lab.
"Captain! Please tell Dr. Mischkelovitz here to—"
"Captain! He won't give me any spores! I need spores!"
"Absolutely not unless you tell me why you need them!"
"No! That's none of your business! Give me spores!"
"You can't have any!"
Fully cognizant this rampant display of insubordination currently had too large an audience on the bridge, Lorca jumped up from the captain's chair and shouted, "Stamets! Mischkelovitz! My ready room, now!" Then he stormed into the ready room himself, fuming, and waited for them to turn up.
Neither the walk to the turbolift nor the turbolift ride itself inspired in Stamets or Mischkelovitz any sort of meaningful survival instinct. If anything, by the time they arrived, they were even more set against one another than before.
Lorca was at the window with his back turned to the door. Though the wait had done nothing to diminish his disdain for their collective outburst, the view of the stars had instilled in him a sense of calm determination.
"Captain, please tell this crazy woman she can't have any mycelium spores," were the first words out of Stamets' mouth.
Mischkelovitz, who was not known for her impulse control, heard this word and went, "Crazy? Better crazy than stupid you shortsighted, monodisciplinary, mushroom-eating monkey! You couldn't see the forest for the trees if your brain depended on it! The things you know about your own mushrooms are a single page in a children's book compared to the sheer immensity of what I—"
"Enough!" bellowed Lorca, because as amusingly creative as Mischkelovitz's takedowns could be, it would be entirely unfortunate if she suddenly blurted out the existence of the mycelial map in an attempt to one-up Stamets. He turned from the window and looked at them both with the grim fury of someone who had absolutely no patience for any of this. "What the hell is wrong with you both! Do I look like a nanny? You are Starfleet officers! You do not call up to my bridge to settle a petty squabble!"
This dressing down was sufficient to put the fear of God into both Stamets and Mischkelovitz. Mischkelovitz's eyes went wide and her jaw trembled. Stamets turned white as a sheet.
"Stamets, wait outside." Lorca swallowed as much of his anger as he could and asked Mischkelovitz simply, "What do you need the spores for? Something with the map?"
Thankfully she did not fall into silence. "I can't tell you," she said. "I can't. I just, I can't. Please may I have some spores."
Lorca sighed. Stamets had a point. "Not unless you tell me what for."
Her eyes filled with fear. "I'm sorry, I can't! I can't."
"Why not?"
"I can't tell you that, either!"
"Melly," he began, hoping to offer some form of consolation that would engender her trust and get her to understand that her research on this ship was predicated upon her ability to keep him informed of what she was doing.
He only got so far as those two syllables. Her reaction to the nickname was resoundingly negative. "No!" she went, eyes darkening. "You don't call me that! Only people I love call me that!"
He had not been under the illusion theirs was some great love story, but he had thought her affection for him to be both genuine and deep. For her to indicate otherwise was an unexpected cut. His face fell into an expression of infinite disappointment at this revelation.
She could see his disappointment, of course, because he was terrible at hiding his emotions. She looked at him apologetically. Even if she did not love Lorca, she liked him a lot and felt bad for causing the dismay she saw on his face, so much so her eyes started to water. "I'd like to go now, please," she said. "May I be dismissed?"
He dismissed her. She passed Stamets as she left, not making eye contact, but Stamets could see the tears glinting on her face well enough as she went by.
"Inside, lieutenant," prompted Lorca.
Stamets was relieved that the shouting portion of this encounter seemed to be over, but he was also a good enough person to be worried about the well-being of someone he knew even only as fleetingly as Mischkelovitz. "Is she... okay?"
"No," said Lorca, "but there's nothing either of us can do about that."
Stamets looked at Lorca. Was that regret? Concern? Loneliness...? It was quickly replaced by resignation, but for a moment, it had been there. He hoped the captain's somber state would make him more receptive to the crux of the issue with Mischkelovitz. "Captain, she came into the lab and tried to take an entire canister of mycelium spores. What was I supposed to do? It was call you or security."
Lorca closed his eyes and sighed. When he opened them, he looked at Stamets with a weariness that went beyond the circumstances of this altercation. "Look, Stamets, I'm aware Mischkelovitz is..." Lorca thought back to how O'Malley had once described her. "Herself, but... What's the worst she can do with some spores?"
"Captain. You're not seriously considering giving her my spores, are you?" Stamets squinted incredulously.
"I'm asking you what the worst she can do is."
Stamets considered that. "Maybe short out all the ship's systems? Mess with a jump? Engineer some sort of biological agent? It really depends what she's trying to do."
Lorca nodded to himself. "All right. Let me know if she tries anything again. And lieutenant?"
"Yes, captain?"
"Next time you get in a fight with Mischkelovitz, call Saru." If she did not love Lorca after everything he had done for her, far be it for him to be her savior.
Cadet Sylvia Tilly observed the altercation between Stamets and Mischkelovitz in the engineering lab with shocked concern. When their argument over the spores spilled onto the bridge audio, Tilly feared for the both of them as they went to face the captain in person. She continued to fret over the argument well after everyone else had returned to their usual duties and long after her shift ended and she returned to the quarters she shared with Burnham.
The way Mischkelovitz had pled with Stamets, desperate and frantic, was impossible for Tilly to ignore. So, too, was the fact Mischkelovitz apparently hated Tilly, because Tilly both pitied and admired Mischkelovitz. Pitied her because she had lost her husband and admired her because finally Tilly understood exactly what Milosz and Emellia Mischkelovitz had been together.
Memory Alpha contained a veritable treasure trove of data. Stewart's codes had given Tilly access to an entire hoard of previously inaccessible files. Not the truly top secret material, but everything just below it, including unpublished papers, notes, and video logs. Since these files fell under the captain's mandate of grabbing "full personnel records for Mischkelovitz and Groves and anything that seems related," Tilly had taken them and quietly copied the relevant scientific data to her personal archives on Discovery before turning over all the files to Lorca.
On paper, Emellia Mischkelovitz had the credentials of a biomedical engineer. The notes, unpublished material, and video logs showed she was readily capable of more and made clear the reason she had been so useful in null time. As Tilly sat in her quarters watching one of the purloined video files, she marveled at the way Emellia and Milosz interacted.
"Our name is Dr. Mischkelovitz," said Milosz in an introduction to a report meant for someone at Starfleet Command. He was diminutive, round-faced, and missing an eye. The hair on his head was the color of copper. "We're here today to talk about interphasic torpedoes."
"Torpedoes which can pass through shields," said Emellia. "By modulating the frequency of a localized emitter..."
"...You can match the phase structure of the shield and slip right through it."
"Theoretically," said Emellia.
Milosz again. "And practically, but we won't tell you how."
"Because the point of this isn't to break through shields with torpedoes."
"The point is to stop it from happening."
"In order to stop it we..."
"...Had to learn how to do it first."
There were hundreds of hours of footage of them finishing each other's sentences. They never referred to each other individually. They occasionally moved and spoke in tandem.
Burnham came in, startling Tilly. Tilly tried to shut off the video with a console command but hit the maximum volume instead.
"The difference between this particle cohesion effect," boomed Milosz's voice.
Emellia's continued, "And the cohesion effect of the previous..."
"Gah! Computer, stop playback! Stop!" said Tilly frantically and the playback ceased. Burnham raised an eyebrow. Tilly looked at her apologetically. "You can't tell anyone you saw that."
"Was that..." Burnham remembered Tilly mentioning her admiration for Milosz Mischkelovitz at lunch some weeks back, even if she did not recall his name. "The theoretical engineer married to Dr. Mischkelovitz?"
Tilly nodded. "The other Mischkelovitz." Now, though, she understood there was no other Mischkelovitz. There never had been.
Burnham and Tilly spoke as they got ready for bed. Tilly briefly outlined the fact she had gotten access to files she was not supposed to, mentioned Mischkelovitz's outburst in the lab, and finished with, "Apparently she hates me. Sometimes I wonder if it's just natural for people to hate me. How am I going to overcome that and become a captain?"
Laying in bed, Burnham smiled. "She doesn't hate you."
"Lal—someone told me she does."
"She doesn't know you," said Burnham. "You can't hate what you don't know. You can only fear it."
Tilly pulled the covers up to her chin and considered this. As usual, Burnham offered excellent advice. It was also clear that being a good captain meant figuring out ways to work with people, even people who hated you, and Tilly intended to be a great captain someday.
To top it all off, after all the rumors and speculation, it turned out Mischkelovitz had been working on breaking the Klingon cloak. A totally harmless, ethical project. Like Michael Burnham, Mischkelovitz was nothing like her horrible reputation.
Captain Lorca had seen something in Burnham and Mischkelovitz. Tilly could now see something in Mischkelovitz, too. Tilly got up from her bed and started to get dressed again. Burnham gave her a questioning look.
"There's something I have to do," Tilly offered in explanation.
Tilly knew Mischkelovitz would be awake. As she walked down the corridor with the concealed canister in her arms, she really hoped no one else was.
One of the door guards was up, of course. The older one with the freckles. He looked at her curiously. If only it had been Larsson, this would have been so much easier. "Delivery for Dr. Mischkelovitz," she announced.
He had an entirely charming accent. "At this hour?"
"Yep, well, better late than never! And I already have the, you know, security clearances? For the project?"
"I know. You're Cadet Tilly." He smiled at her. She had been cleared to learn about Lalana for the Memory Alpha mission, though she had never seen fit to attempt to apply that clearance to visiting the lab until now. "What is it exactly?"
Tilly paled. "It's... classified."
"All right then. Hang on." He touched a comm button on the door panel. "I've got Cadet Tilly here with a delivery for you."
"It's the thing you asked Lieutenant Stamets for!" Tilly blurted.
"Yes!" was Mischkelovitz's enthusiastic reply.
The door opened after a minute. Mischkelovitz looked at Tilly with enormously hopeful eyes.
"Got it right here!" said Tilly, giving the canister a small shake in her arms.
Mischkelovitz grabbed Tilly's sleeve and pulled her into the door lock, closing the outer door, but did not move to open the inner one. Instead, Mischkelovitz ducked down to the floor and pried open a panel. There was a small darkened crawlspace behind it. Mischkelovitz motioned for Tilly to put the canister down and then rolled it into the darkness.
"Thank you!" said Mischkelovitz, backing into the crawlspace. "Can you bring me more?"
Tilly hesitated. She had not considered Mischkelovitz might require more than one canister of spores. "Um, I'm not sure if I should... Lieutenant Stamets doesn't know I'm here... And I'm actually going to need the canister back..." It was one of the spares, so it would not be missed immediately, but a charade of this magnitude could only last so long.
"Come back tomorrow and I'll give it back. But bring more spores if you can. It's important."
"It isn't dangerous what you're doing, right?" Tilly had already asked herself the same question Lorca had asked Stamets with the crucial difference that Tilly had come up with no discernible harm Mischkelovitz could do. (If she had heard what Stamets told Lorca, she would have pointed out most of his answer entailed potential complications that were not specific to spore-based projects but rather general research risks, and all of them entirely unlikely given Mischkelovitz's familiarity with the spores from the events of null time.)
"Everything is dangerous," said Mischkelovitz. "But if you mean, is it dangerous to Discovery? Absolutely not. I would never harm this ship. It's my home."
"You know," said Tilly, smiling, "you're just like Michael!"
There was a flash of offense in Mischkelovitz's wild eyes. She picked up the panel and squirmed farther backwards into the crawlspace, pulling the panel back into place as she did. While Tilly might have forgiven Burnham for the Battle of the Binary Stars, Mischkelovitz had not.
Security clearance did not equal door control and Tilly was forced to pound on the outer door to get out. "The controls are on the wall over there," the guard told her when the door was open.
Tilly turned around. "Oh! She didn't..."
"No," said the guard, shaking his head. "She doesn't usually."
"Well, good night!" said Tilly, and started to walk off. She stopped and turned back. "I don't actually know your name."
"Colonel O'Malley."
"It's nice to meet you, colonel!" Tilly extended her hand and they shook.
"Likewise. After all, between your hair and my freckles, I reckon we've got ourselves a full Scotsman," said O'Malley with a chuckle.
Tilly giggled. "I guess so!"
As he watched Tilly depart, O'Malley could not help but wonder what Lorca would have made of the joke. Either rolled his eyes or laughed, depending how many drinks in they were. He missed that sense of humor. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall. He could see Lorca's face quite clearly in his mind's eye but he could not hear his laugh. He had never had much of an audio memory.
There was real determination not to have Starbase 46 end up like Starbase 35, so when the Klingons came calling, Discovery turned up for the main event alongside several other Federation vessels. The battle was fierce, nearly a dozen ships in all, but by days' end it was won and this region of space was, at least for the day, a little safer.
They docked at the starbase for a quick resupply and Lalana decided to seize the opportunity to take care of something. "Einar," she said, "Please see to it that crate is sent to Dr. Li."
Larsson did not have to ask what crate because it had been sitting in the quarters he and Groves shared ever since Memory Alpha.
When Lalana had seen the familiar book in Lorca's hand in the Section 31 storage facility at Memory Alpha, she realized right then and there that fate had presented her with the opportunity to correct an injustice. The fabricated note she included with the crate read:
"I am sorry, Samaritan, for taking these from you. I needed them to fulfill the promise I made you. I return them now and I wish your family many generations of enduring success. Please protect the books well. Humans live such short lives, and all that lives after them is their stories. The stories in these books belong to you and your descendants. Again, I am sorry that I took them from you, even if it was for a good reason. Regards, your friend, Lalana."
There was no telling given the war whether or not the crate would reach its destination but Lalana believed it would. She had seen the halo of stars on the book in Lorca's hand. In her experience, that always meant something good.
The planet with the naturally-occurring crystal transmitter was called Pahvo. It looked lovely from orbit, a blue-white gem much resembling Earth, but Lorca was not going down there. Saru, Burnham, and Tyler were.
It looked to be a simple mission. Beam down, refine the transmitter according to the expert's instructions, and every Klingon ship in the sector would find itself gently lapped by cosmic ocean waves. Study the ripples, find the ships. Win the war.
In the meantime, Lorca searched for the next plausible target among the day's tactical and intelligence reports. The Klingons had really upped their defenses lately. They were pulling back ships from attack missions to try and handle the fact this one Federation ship kept popping into their territory like a ghost and reigning terror on unsuspecting targets. It was a good sign overall, but it meant easy targets were getting scarcer. Everything in today's reports would require corralling some backup from Terral and Lorca was not in the mood.
Finding no great opportunities, Lorca returned to the Memory Alpha files. He had been trawling through the data trove off and on for almost two weeks now. Tilly had picked up entirely too much of Milosz Mischkelovitz's research, which was a little annoying, but she had gotten a lot of other files Lorca would never have thought to.
One such file was a court transcript. The case was called UFP v. J. Narvic et al. and it dated from 2237. The file did not stand out to Lorca because on the surface it seemed to have little relevance to Groves and Mischkelovitz. As he opened it, he realized it was perhaps the most important file there was.
Tilly, by some stroke of genius, had not just run a search for Mischkelovitz. She had also run a filter for files containing both "Emellia" and "Milosz." This was important because nowhere in this file were the names Mischkelovitz or Groves ever mentioned.
UFP v. J. Narvic et al. was, when written out in its entirety, United Federation of Planets v. James Narvic, Corinne Narvic, Mirna Al-Marri, Emily Petrellovitz, Meiling Zhou, Anton Nguyen, and Linnea Stewart. Those names were important, but they were not the reason Lorca had this file. It was the names on the witness list: Agnieszka Mieszała, John Narvic, Macarius O'Malley, Milosz Mieszała, and Emellia Petrellovitz, among others.
The transcript was immense. Over fifteen hundred hours long. Most of it, dry legal proceedings. He glanced at the opening statements. According to the prosecution, this was a case about gross abuse of power and using children as subjects of scientific experimentation. "A fundamental betrayal of the responsibilities parents have towards their children." According to the defense, the case was about the rights parents had to determine the medical care and education of their children. "The prosecution will attempt to paint this in the most nefarious light, but every single one of these people you see behind me wanted nothing more than the best for their children."
Lorca skipped ahead to O'Malley's testimony. O'Malley's voice seemed to jump off the page.
"...she just kept hitting herself, over and over. I didn't know what to do." ... "Mum—I mean, Ms. Petrellovitz, she wasn't ever there." ... "I didn't see the tests. I didn't have anything to do with them. I just know that sometimes Emellia would come back and she, she wouldn't, she just looked..."
The prosecutor asked O'Malley what he would have done, if he could have.
"Ended it," was the answer. "By any means necessary."
Then, the cross from the defense. "The fact is, Mr. O'Malley, you never told anyone, did you? Because this wasn't an experiment conducted on children, it was an attempt at treatment of severely disabled—"
"No! That's not true! She's not disabled, she's just different! You don't know anything about her! He did that to her! He did! And her! And her, and her, and him, and—"
The judge ordered O'Malley to restrain himself. The defense attorney resumed. "Mr. O'Malley, you didn't arrive at the facility until 2231. You can't say for certain what events took place prior to 2231."
"No, I can't, can I, John?"
Lorca squinted at that. It was just words on a page but he could hear the way O'Malley always seemed to spit Groves' name jumping out at him. There was no John Groves in the transcript. There was, however, a John Narvic. When he scrolled up to John Narvic's testimony, it was readily apparent it was Groves.
"Whatever," was one of the first words out of John Narvic's mouth. There was a casual nonchalance to it all as he described various tests and procedures. "In a room for three to six hours, just solving problems, as fast as you can. You know, computational arithmetic, trig and calc, that sort of thing. Nothing hard."
"Are you saying you and the other children solved advanced mathematical equations for hours on end beginning at age eight?"
"Advanced? No. Wait, you don't think trig and calc are hard, do you? Wow, you must be dumb." Entirely, unmistakably John Groves.
Milosz and Emellia's testimonies turned out to be less useful. Milosz's read like fractured snippets of poetry, sentences trailing off and then beginning again out of seemingly nowhere. Emellia's testimony seemed to consist almost entirely of non-answers. Lorca had been on the receiving end of that silent treatment before.
The bridge pinged and Lorca was forced to put aside the transcripts while they went to aid a ship with some engine trouble. "Ah, let's go pick up some intelligence of our own, why don't we," Lorca said to Airiam afterwards. "See if we can't rustle up something fun."
They made a good effort, but there really was nothing today. No contact yet from Saru, Burnham, and Tyler, either. That annoyed Lorca. How long did it take to complete those modifications? Had they gotten sidetracked? Should he go pick them up? Then Terral called and asked them to take up a position near Starbase 46 as part of a display of defensive force. Entirely uninspired, Terral's tactics. "Airiam, you have the conn," Lorca said, retreating to the ready room.
There was a message waiting. Comm request from O'Malley. He responded, wondering what variety of request it was.
Personal, it turned out. "Fancy a drink tonight?"
A smile formed on Lorca's face. He had not expected to hear that offer ever again. He actually really did want a drink. "All right. Let's do my place for a change. And how about something a little stronger than beer."
There was a pause. "What exactly do you mean, your place?"
O'Malley hesitated at the threshold to Lorca's quarters. "Should I be worried?"
"About what? This isn't a come on, colonel." He just wanted to kick back, sit on the couch, and not worry about having to stumble more than three meters to go to sleep.
"Mm," went O'Malley. "Yes, I should rather hope not given how things went the last time you had someone in here for drinks."
In truth, the last visitor to the room had been Mischkelovitz, but she didn't drink anything, and far be it for Lorca to point this out. "That's not funny," said Lorca. The tryst with Cornwell and everything that followed remained a sour point.
"Sorry," said O'Malley. "So what's our poison?"
It was whiskey, of course. "If that's not a problem for your duty shift and all." Beers in moderation were a little more forgivable during working hours and this was O'Malley's working hours.
"Oh, no, I just cashed in all the favors Larsson owed me and told him to stand on shift until his feet fall off. The man owes me an accumulated twenty-three hours." O'Malley really took his accounting of favors seriously. Lorca poured and handed O'Malley a glass as they sat. "What are we toasting, then?"
"To dead Klingons," said Lorca.
"You know if you toast for death, death comes for you," O'Malley said in warning, but clinked his glass all the same.
"They say death comes for us all, but unless he's got a spore drive like ours, I think we'll be fine." Lorca smirked.
O'Malley grinned in response. "Fair enough," he said, and sipped at his drink.
Lorca stretched out one arm across the back of the couch and put his feet up. "You comm’d me, so, what’s the occasion? Something on your mind, colonel?"
That made it sound like they were back to ranks. O'Malley raised an eyebrow and squinted at Lorca. "Do you know, I'd rather not say."
Lorca squinted right back. "You wanted to talk and you won't say why?"
"I wanted to drink, captain!" said O'Malley with a laugh. "Talking's optional."
That made Lorca chuckle and shake his head, amused. He was unable to suppress the smile on his face. It did fade somewhat as he recalled why they had not done this in so long. His expression turned hopeful. "So, Mac, we good?"
O'Malley smiled faintly and nodded his head. "As can be. I couldn't stay mad at you forever. Besides, I tried drinking with Larsson and the man's just not very funny. Though, he did have a decent insight about the ship."
"Oh?"
"He said the ship rather looks like a woman with her legs spread."
Lorca snorted. "I've noticed."
"Oh, you did, did you!" exclaimed O'Malley, face lighting up. "Of course you did."
"It's the nacelles," said Lorca. He had spent more time than anyone admiring the design of Discovery. "They're flush with the supports, so they look a single, unbroken line off the body of the ship. And since the neck's so short, saucer feels like part of the body too. Gives you these two long, lovely legs stretching out far as the eye can see."
O'Malley listened to the way Lorca described Discovery and could hear the love in the description. The way Lorca's hands stroked the air as he illustrated the ship's features had an admiring delicacy to it. "You space cowboys and your ships. Pornography, that was. Though, I suspect a gay man would say the ship looks like a man. Eye of the beholder and all that."
"Nah," said Lorca, eyes twinkling with mischief. "Drag queen, maybe."
O'Malley cracked up. "I missed this so much!" he laughed. "And I'm glad there's no one 'round to hear it. Can you imagine a superior reprimanding us for suggesting the ship's got attractive legs?"
Lorca lifted his glass for a new toast. "Here's to being in charge."
"Well, one of us, anyway," said O'Malley, accepting both the toast and another measure of whiskey. "These quarters are tremendous. Must be four times bigger than mine."
"Well you made such a great first impression, I decided to put you in ensign quarters," bragged Lorca.
"Oh, are we spilling secrets now?" said O'Malley, brightening.
Lorca snorted again and shook his head. Even if they finished off this entire bottle, there was no chance of that.
"That's too bad," said O'Malley. "Surely you must be tired of carrying around so many. I know I am. It's exhausting."
A sly smile emerged onto Lorca's face. "You think you've got secrets, Mac?" Lorca clicked his tongue, entirely disagreeing.
"Come now, I may talk a lot, but it's mostly flim-flam. If anything, I've more in common with you when it comes to secrets than most of the people on the ship. Nobody here really knows the first thing about me."
"Wanna bet?" asked Lorca. He took O'Malley's raised eyebrow as a challenge. "You've been pretty up-front criticizing my command. But dishing it out isn't the same as taking it."
O'Malley leaned back. "Well this ought to be interesting. Do your worst."
Lorca sat forward, glass in hand, and fixed O'Malley with a firm gaze to observe and judge his reactions. "You, Mac, are a complete pushover. And that is not an attractive trait in a man." It was not an attractive trait in a woman, either, but this was a targeted assassination. "If you really wanted kids, you'd have 'em. Aeree doesn't want any, right? And you just go along with whatever she says. 'Cause that what you do: what everyone else tells you to."
O'Malley stared unflinchingly at Lorca. Something in his eyes said this rang true, but he was not taken aback by it. "Well, more lucky you that."
"Maybe," said Lorca. Then he looked away and a sneer tugged at his lip. If O'Malley had been less complacent, he could have stopped what happened to Mischkelovitz six years sooner. O'Malley caught this expression and wondered as to its meaning.
"Is that all? That's your worst?"
Lorca tilted his head and frowned in wry disapproval. "You really want to open another can of worms? After we just patched things up."
"I have a feeling the can's already open and you're just hiding it behind your back. Come on, Gabriel, what is it. If I haven't deserted you yet, chances are I won't now. Besides, friendships are built on honesty. If you can't be honest with your friends, what's the point of having them."
"You don't want me to be honest," warned Lorca.
"I want that more than anything."
For a long moment, Lorca said nothing, pursing his lips and trying to decide if O'Malley knew what he was asking. "I don't think you actually do want kids, Mac. Deep down, you think you'd fail them the way you failed your sister. Because it wasn't you who saved her from that research colony, was it? It was John Groves."
Part 70
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trpg-dingusmaster · 8 years ago
Text
Day 1: first day in town is the best day to make powerful enemies
(Minus most of the derailing and the attempted inter-party murders and things that made the 1/2 hour of actual play take nearly 3 hours?) Huntsman Josiah Hugo was looking to sell some of the small adorable animals he trapped out in the woods he calls home, maybe get drunk, maybe start some fights? Maybe get a better paying job, when suddenly the shop keeper starts arguing with Jamie, the person? Sibling? Friend? Hugo lives with and came to town with. Hugo starts chanting for a fight to break out, a one handed girl comes in and joins the chanting. A gnome comes in and steals some shit, the shop keeper ignores Jamie and fires some warning shots at the gnome- it's the shop keepers "brother". This happens now and then. The three leave, Hugo looking for the cheapest bar in the area the other two just following. The girl talks to the bar tender asking about work bad if there's any scrap/ junk/trash outside she can remove/clean up for him (collect and sell). On the way a ruffian who was told to leave pushes and injurs her breaking the only valuable objects she had: clean glass bottles. A child helps the bar tender clean the girl up. Across the room an out of place noble and his body guard are speaking to a suspicious hooded figure seated at a table. Hugo and Jamie know that suspicious characters often have work that needs to be done, preferably by big burly strangers with no attachment to the locals, so they go over and get in on the job. Beat up this dude on a boat. Cool. Punching people is Hugos second favorite thing. The hooded figure also employees for this endeavor the child and one handed girl- to sneak in during the ruckus, and the ruffian. The party hires a cabby- who turns out to be the shop keeper from before, who seems have hands in many things, to take them to the marina. There they find out the "guy on a boat" is a wealthy tycoon of some sort on a well guarded (casino?) steamship. The group poses as the new cleaning crew. A street urchin sneaks on and tries to rob a party member? Hugo grabs the child and brings them to the guards hoping to gain further entry with the offering, like- hey i caught this thief sneaking in, reward me. the guards just toss the kid into the river. One handed girl forgets she can't swim and dives in to save the urchin. Party child and Nobles guard try to save them and narrowly succeed. Hugo furiously mops the deck, Jamie also mops. The noble is standing around trying to think of a better plan, the ruffian just stands around. The guards come out and say their boss wants to talk to some of the party. Hugo, the body guard, and the ruffian go in. the boss is totally shit faced and made a boozy mess of his cabin. They beat the piss out of him, but he's probably alive? and loot everything. Hugo finds a fancy watch and when he hears the guards coming to check on everything he crit fails jumping out a window and so it turns out it wasn't a window but a realistic painting of a window. The group says nothing is wrong and the boss just passed out but the guards aren't buying it so Hugo charges the door and knocks out one of the guards. The group gets the other and all three bodies are hidden behind the desk and the door closed. Mean while the one handed girl and the child have unmoored the boat and are sneaking into the storage room where the coal is kept and are working out how to steal it. They decide they need the group and stop by the kitchen for supplies. The child finds several vials of the tomato seasoning arsenic and knows a few better uses for it. Noble over hears that a buyer for the boat is on the way and intends to pose as him but chaos has already broken out by the time he greets the guard. The party reunites and makes their way to the coal room? And it's divided equally only because that's convenient for carrying. Each takes 45-50lbs of FineCoal. On the way out the party sees a strangely familiar suspicious characher sneaking off the ship with a paper in his hand. The party realized no one could steer the ship and they too just left. Abandoning it and tge left over crew to the tide and heading to cab to take them to the bar to collect what was due. The child asks if anyone found a watch, Hugo offers but the one handed girl steals it right out of his hand mid transaction. The suspicious characher shows up with some thugs and the girl hands it over to him when asked. Hugo tries to stop her, demanding payment first but the girl doesn't listen ( "I just want to test a theory I have!" "With OUR copper on the line as well as yours?" "Yes!"). Suspicious character then demands the coal and money on every character in exchange for their lives. ("I KNEW IT." said the player who lost the party 550copper.) It turns out the suspicious character is a member of one of the larger gangs in the city though I cannot recall his position, it was enough to cause the party some concern about their choices. Hugo notices the one hand girl trying to put her coppers and sack of coal onto him ( "I rolled a 19 +3 I definitely notice this, its 45lbs. what are you even doing this for?") , telling the suspicious character she has nothing and should be let go on those grounds. Hugo and everyone else, villain included stares in awe at the audacity of the girl trying to be "sneaky" about putting on someone a literal 45 lb sack. Hugo is insulted but mostly confused at the betrayal and intends to keep as much of those 90lbs FineCoal as possible. The girl is denied her request. She tries to take back the coal. Hugo threatens her, but the villain shoots her in the good arm. The child actually snuck off soon after the one hand girl took the watch, figuring the loyalty of the group was dissolved and their safety with the group no longer viable. The ruffian wasn't allowed in the bar again to begin with and just waited awkwardly outside. ("Hey? Bar keep? Can I come in? I need to get paid? Hey?? Can? Can I just come in my party is kinda?? Can you hear me? Can he hear me?") What's left of the group tries to negotiate, Hugo also attempted but ends up just hurling an ax at the biggest dude there. A fight begins but is shortly ended when the cabby/shop keeper comes in having heard the ruckus from outside. He makes a bold statement "you know who I am, you know what I can do. You sure you wanna do this?" And he tossed Hugo a gun. They don't, and the whole ordeal took long enough that the police were on the way. Everyone leaves. The police try to stop the party- abloody ax and gun was kind of a tip off that maybe they're involved. The group loads up on the carriage trying to be casual but the guards start attacking and Hugo and Jamie take some shots at the guards killing some and their horses. They are taken to the woods some distance from where Hugo and Jamie live. They give t h e cabby payment in coal for services rendered, and also for saving them from that gang, because h o ly cow there's a lot of coal. Why did they need all of that? Hugo didn't know and never asked. He still has 75 lbs. After paying (extra to) the unusual cabby, thinking it best to make a good friend of him.
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