#and also of course the question of what was the dimension the rune came from

[pikkish]

Running through Dimension of the Machine again and noticing not for the first time that one of the runes has already been gotten for you, and that there’s a dead Operation Counterstrike marine by the deactivated slipgate. Were they the one who brought the rune back? Who were they, who was almost as determined as Ranger? How long ago was it that they conquered one of the six dimensions, and how long have they laid there, dead, before Ranger arrived in the Machine? Is it only coincidence that they were there first, or was it that Ranger was only intentionally drawn into the Machine once its first choice of champion had failed?

What’s their story? Did Ranger know them? Were they one of the Conterstrike operatives first deployed in the initial Quake incident? Were they fighting just as long as Ranger, only to die in the Machine just before he got there? Or were they sent out later, when Ranger never made it back home?

I doubt we’ll ever get that story, but I am still going nuts thinking about it.

[artistic-m3nace]

BrDim: What are Void Demons and what the hell is the zio'andar??

And we're back with another infopost! Click here to go to the masterpost with the whole shebang.

First off, the term "void demon" is a funny little term I came up with y e a r s ago to describe what Ev is (this was back before Broken Dimensions as a concept even existed). Back then, I had no idea how to go about constructing a fictional language. I still don't! But I know more than I did then, and have bits and pieces from the Old Tongue that originated in [ x ] - which is where the word "ziojic" comes from!

( keep reading below the cut )

Now if y'all harken back to the post about voids, you'll remember where I talked briefly about Old Tongue and how "zio" was the old [ x ] word for void. There's multiple words in the conlang that use "zio" - zio'cerual, zio'ajay, ziorisa and'mori, ziojic, zio'andar, ziorisa demonica... There could be more. This post is specifically about the last three:

ziojic - lit. "Void magic," or magic that is of the nature of The Void (sentient) or that operates best in voidspace. Can be used to mean "user of Void magic," and is therefore also the word people use when they actually mean ziorisa demonica because THAT is a mouthful!

zio'andar - lit. "void death-rune" or "void death rune of" if we're getting literal with the order and apostrophe usage which frequently represents a connecting word like "of." More commonly known as the void death rune, or the VDR, this rune can be used to get yourself promised resurrection from the gods. (The zio'andar was the rune at the top of this post!)

ziorisa demonica - lit. "void-creature hailing from hell." Someone who was created in the Void, or more commonly: someone who was resurrected using the zio'andar. The in-universe word for Void Demon.

Again, feel free to reference the void post for the specifics. I know all this like the back of my hand bc I made it it's like my brain child, but I know for a fact that my stuff gets tangled up when I retell it. You won't offend me by asking questions or for links either lol I could talk about this forever.

( I feel like I'm teaching a class to a room that only might have people in it lol )

So to recap: ziojic literally refers to a user of Void magic but in practice is usually used to refer to someone who is ziorisa demonica. And that word is a mouthful but it refers to someone who's been resurrected using the zio'andar. But what is the zio'andar? What's Void magic besides magic from the domain of The Void (sentient)?

We'll get to that next!

Firstly, the zio'andar is a resurrection rune that is tied to a promise even the gods cannot (or should not) break. The official way to use this rune is to carve it into your skin as you die, which implies that you should have a copy of it on hand or have it memorized and be able to draw it under the duress of a slow or painful death. In practice, you can have the rune tattooed on yourself in an accessible location (still involves blood infusion, which is the binding key here) and cut yourself over one of its lines when you die and BOOM! magic deity-approved resurrection!

But WHY would someone want that?

Revenge. Love. Especially star-crossed love in which you want to spend the rest of eternity together but are being faced with brutal death because your respective families hate each other's guts à la Romeo and Juliet. Spite. Or you can be unlucky like Ev and have it tattooed on you without permission and taught to cut over it in near-death situations because your aunt was part of a cult. Any reason, really!

And, of course, it's a guaranteed promise from the gods in charge of managing this promise. They're honor-bound to do it. And while some of the gods are sleezebags, Morsanna, Ialu, Maikoa, and Meyaa typically are not.

Morsanna, Ialu, Maikoa, and Meyaa make up the Resurrection Council. Morsanna is the goddess of Death and thus has purview over anything dealing with it directly, especially resurrection, which violates the laws of nature. Ialu is the goddess of prophecy and is on the Council to catch and interpret glimpses of the future to decide whether or not Morsanna gets to forfeit this person or not (usually not). Maikoa is the god of trickery and technically shouldn't be here, but they tried to free The Eternal Darkness once or twice and is now the Guardian of it (TED is The Void (sentient) from which all Void magic originates). Meyaa is the goddess of voidspace and is the other Guardian of The Void (sentient), and is by proxy the patron of all ziojic.

These four are good on their word most of the time (except for Maikoa, although they make an exception for this), so you can expect your plea for resurrection to be granted. If not, such as in the event that Ialu divinves that you're going to do terrible things and have ulterior (unjustifiable) motives for becoming ziorisa demonica, like maybe you killed yourself just to resurrected and get Void powers, then Morsanna intervenes and you have to fight her to first blood. And Morsanna never loses.

Now all this can be traced back to the resurrection of Nathan Shasear, way back in Era 3, which used the zio'andar before it was the zio'andar. Ialu granted him resurrection then because he saved her from a horrible non-death at the hands of someone who would use her future sight for evil, and because she's cool with Morsanna. Afterwards, the two of them god Mai and Meyaa on board for creating a promise rune to bestow upon the gods' Chosen, their right hand persons, so to speak. Or their loyal adventurers who did quests for them and faced peril on a regular basis, a job which would find an on-demand resurrection rune handy.

( Which means, in theory, that the VDR/zio'andar works multiple times. )

As for what perks that comes with, well, The Eternal Darkness (The Void (sentient)) wasn't locked away after the War for Balance for nothing. Being blessed with the magic of The Void (sentient) is like being blessed with the magic of Solorana herself - but inverted.

Solorana's life-giving creation magic is healing, non-corrosive. Light. Happy. Pleasant. The Eternal Darkness's magic was made to corrode and defy natural laws like gravity and the tentative voidspace between reality planes (see this post and the void post for info on all that). Void magic is more diluted that TED's raw power, but the themes are still the same. Here are some of the features that come with being a ziojic:

mildly corrosive blood! Ziojic blood is over 50% pure Void matter and can thus act as a mild acid, one that you wouldn't want your skin to come in contact with for prolonged periods of time (or at all, really)

exceptional teleportation skills! Ev usually calls this "the grid sense," which is pretty accurate. The grid sense is, essentially, the subconscious ability to sense the world around you on a metaphysical level. It doesn't quite allow you to see through solid matter or across improbable spans of land, but you can feel it all out with a bit of practice. Ev and Caitie Davis are fairly well-practiced with it by the 2040s, when "Book 2" takes place and are able to sort of see the literal gridding of their immediate surroundings, like a video game render. This allows a ziojic to visualize where they're teleporting to and foresee obstacles, people, or movement.

gyromanipulation (or gravity manipulation) skills! These already exist in the BrDim universe in the form of hyper- and hypogravitational magic, but ziojic gyromanipulation is a step up. It's like an instant track to mastering hyper/hypograv magic, and then some. More precise levitation and reorientation skills (no flight, that's not really a thing with just magic, even Void magic like this), better projectile aim and control, better sense of one's self when in the air (jumping, falling, etc.). It's cool.

markings! All ziorisa demonica have thick bands of color on their cheeks coming down from their eyes, as well as bands around the upper arm/bicep area.

bioluminescence! It varies from person to person as to what specifically glows, though. Caitie Davis's hair glows and takes on a plasma-like flow, and she can make her bones glow. Ev's hair glows a little at the ends (the orange part) and technically their hair is a ziojic feature in and of itself - it was just brown before. Their freckles also glow in the dark, along with their scars. Corrin Merrinak (who I haven't introduced yet) has horns that glow in the dark. All ziojic's eyes glow though, and have dark/black sclera.

ziojic can survive in the void with no life support measures! They are also immovable by the ziois, ocean-like waters on the edges of flat worlds like Tartarus or parts of the Iron Archs.

And that's the scoop! The ziojic race definitely has some of the most complicated lore out of the bunch lol but they're some of my favorites to write and draw. I love their sick powers too!!

Now. Here's the part I'm obligated to say because I care about humanity as a whole (content warning):

DO NOT GET THIS TATTOOED ON YOUR VERY REAL BODY !!!!FOR THE EXPRESS REASON!!! TO COMMIT DIE TO SEE IF THE GODS WILL RESURRECT YOU.

DO NOT. PLEASE DO NOT.

Get this tattooed on yourself if you think my project is cool and/or like the design. You've got my permission as long as you told people where you got it. It's one of the tattoos I'm pretty sure I want to get someday, so I get that. But do not do so thinking that it will resurrect you if you cut it when you die. It will not.

End content warning.

I love you all, and I mean that very genuinely (platonically <3). But if you think for some reason that the funky lil complicated rune I made up will bring you back to life with insane powers, you're wrong. Go touch some grass and turn down the edgy megalomania, please.

Otherwise, if you feel inclined to such things for more complicated reasons, please reach out to someone you trust. If you don't want to do that, think of your pets. your favorite plants. what they'd do without you. call or text a hotline. go stand in the sun. eat chocolate - MAKE SURE YOU'RE HYDRATED AND FED AND NOT ILL. Coming from experience, these things do help. And strangely, things do tend to get better. A little. In increments so small that sometimes you don't notice until suddenly it's been a year and now you're agnostic instead of traditionalist, but it happens. Even if it does feel like shit sometimes anyway.

K'oyacyi, folks. Hope you enjoyed the lore! Take care <3

[infinite-xerath]

Runeterra Retcons 1: Thresh

This is something that I did today. I plan to make this an on-going series (might even take it to YouTube someday if I get the nerve to share my voice), but for now have it as a tumblr post.))

The world of Runeterra is one of the most interesting and complex fantasy settings in modern gaming; a fictional realm bustling with fantastical beings, characters, and a wide variety of plot points offering near endless potential for story-telling. The story of League of Legends is not, in fact, a singular narrative, but rather a collection of different stories spread out across a variety of fictional countries, continents, and even dimensions.

Runeterra as we know it today wasn’t always like this, however; in 2015 Riot Games opted to effectively reboot the lore of their world to be rid of the more restrictive plot elements like Summoners and the Institute of War to allow themselves more wriggle room to tell the stories they wanted to tell. While the decision to effectively make League of Legends non-canon to its own story was initially controversial, the writers of Riot Games have effectively proven themselves extraordinarily capable of using this newfound freedom to its full potential… For the most part.

With a retconned world came the need to retcon characters; Riot has made a substantial effort in the last few years to reimagine and redefine the backstories of the iconic Champions to make them fit into the new narrative, albeit with mixed results. Let’s face it: no writer is perfect and hindsight is 20/20, so a number of characters throughout the years have been left with less-than-stellar backstories compared to most of the roster.

Welcome to Runeterra Retcons, a series in which I’ll be analyzing some of the more controversial champion bios in the game to pick apart the good, the bad, and the horribly missed opportunities. With all that out of the way, let’s begin, shall we?

Episode 1: Thresh

Thresh is at once both an interesting and a bland character. He’s arguably one of the more iconic characters in the game, to the point where he’s practically become the unofficial mascot for the Shadow Isles. In-spite of this, I’ve long felt that Thresh is one of the most awkward fits into the region; before we can discuss the problems with his current lore, however, we first need to address Thresh’s backstory pre-retcon and see if we can analyze the core of his character.

Insert original lore here

So, we can see the concept behind Thresh’s character pretty easily: he’s a jailor who loves tormenting his charges, so much so that he continues to do so even after death. If you were to describe Thresh in a single word, it would probably be “sadistic.” Unfortunately, the original lore doesn’t give a lot beyond that; not where he’s from, not when he died, not even where his prison was located. The bio itself literally says that no one knows the details, and while that does add a faint air of mystery to the character, it doesn’t do much to tie him into the faction he’s supposed to represent: The Shadow Isles.

With that out of the way, let’s now take a look at Thresh’s new bio and see how Riot decided to change him after the retcon.

Insert new lore here

Alright, so, there’s a lot to unpack here. Perhaps the most notable change is that Thresh went from tormenting people to… Tormenting “living relics.” The relics are offered no further explanation in the lore or given any prior context. There’s just… A mirror with a soul in it. There’s a sentient book hidden down in the vaults. For some reason, the monks of the Isles even decided to stash a living person down there because he infused his body with raw magic. Why? Who was this person? What did he do to end up in chains? If this was a dangerous mage, wouldn’t it be better to build a proper prison for him rather than stuff him in a vault full of powerful, dangerous artifacts?

There are so many mysteries here, but perhaps biggest one is this: why was Thresh changed from a warden of people to a warden of relics? Why did they feel the need to turn him from a jailor who enjoyed tormenting his inmates to a curator that was slowly corrupted by the very magics meant to help him do his job? Well, I believe that’s meant to tie into the change made to the Shadow Isles themselves, or rather, the Blessed Isles.

While we never had much info on what the Isles were like before becoming an undead haven, a lot of the lore suggests that they were effectively a paradise, hence the name “Blessed Isles.” This was a place without war, without starvation, without corruption. Naturally, there would be no criminals in paradise, and so this of course means that to make Thresh a warden of things that are inhuman… At least, this is the thought process one might have until they introduce the mysterious regenerating mage, but I guess he’s meant to be one bad egg amidst the crowd, assuming he even came from the Isles at all. Again, it’s never really elaborated on.

So, while the change does make a degree of sense, it kind of feels… Flat. I mean, a guy who enjoys tormenting prisoners in their cells to hear their screams sounds a lot more terrifying than a guy who just stops his sentences halfway through to spite a book. Also, the fact that his lantern just becomes a seemingly endless vessel for souls because of the Ruination is a little silly; like, I know the Black Mist does all sorts of nonsensical things to matter, but the fact that an ordinary lantern gets turned into a relic arguably far more dangerous than anything Thresh was ever guarding seems kind of backwards, at least in my opinion.

So, how can we change this? How would I, personally, retcon Thresh if given the chance? Well, there are a lot of base elements that I would keep, but also some key components I’d like to alter. I’ve written up a short bio of my own for you all to enjoy, so without further ado…

In an age all but forgotten to history, there existed a realm known as the Blessed Isles. Hidden away from the world by a veil of magical mist, the Isles were a place of peace and prosperity; a land free of war, corruption, plague and misery. This paradise was ruled by an order of sacred monks devoted to learning and enlightenment. It was within this paradise that Thresh was born and raised by a pair of humble farmers, growing up surrounded by nature’s bounty.

Though expected that he might follow in his fathers’ footsteps, Thresh showed an aptitude for learning from an early age. In-particular, Thresh seemed fascinated with matters of philosophy; the nature of the soul, morality, and other complex subjects were frequent on the boy’s mind. This attitude quickly earned Thresh the attention of the brotherhood, who invited him to join their order as soon as he was of age. Thresh agreed without hesitation, leaving the farm behind to study at the Isles’ monastery.

For many years, Thresh studied under the tutelage of the order, distinguishing himself from his peers for his ability to grasp complex philosophical issues. Though acknowledged by his teachers, Thresh was met with looks of envy and scorn from his fellow students; rather than let himself be disheartened, however, Thresh instead took an interest in the root of their envy in scorn. Upon approaching his elders with such questions, Thresh found himself being led to a secret chamber deep beneath the monastery, guarded by powerful wards and runes. It was here that Thresh learned the truth of the Blessed Isles.

Thresh watched as one of his fellow pupils stood surrounded by figured in ominous robes, chanting an ominous spell in unison. Thresh’s teacher explained to him that this was ritual had been used by the order for ages to ensure that the Isles flourished. Evil was present in all humans, and so the only way to ensure it did not corrupt their paradise was to extract it from the soul, and seal it away. As the ritual drew to a close, Thresh saw the essence of all the other student’s hatred, envy, malice and warped desire ripped from his body, and placed into a special lantern made to contain it.

Thresh was intrigued. He approached the lantern without hesitation as the other boy was escorted from the chamber, and to his surprise, he heard voice whispering to him from within. The monks explained that though the evils of humanity could be removed, they could not be truly discarded. They needed to be contained, and more than that, they needed a warden to watch over them. Thresh volunteered in a heartbeat, and the monks smiled, pleased by their pupils’ devotion.

What they did not know, however, was that the whispers in Thresh’s mind had already begun taken root. From that day forward, Thresh vigilantly stood guard over the lantern, watching each successive cleansing as it took place. Each time, the wicked essence in the lantern grew stronger, as did the whispers in Thresh’s mind. He began to dream of enacting twisted torments upon the monks, the other disciples, and even his own parents. Slowly but surely, the brotherhood noticed a change in Thresh’s behavior. Fearing that he himself would be subjected to their cleansing rite, Thresh stole the lantern and fled the monastery.

The monks chased Thresh for days, but their search was brought to an abrupt end when strange ships arrived on the Blessed Isles: something Thresh thought impossible. From the safety of the cliffs, Thresh watched in delight as a soldiers led by a foreign king massacred his fellow monks. Their screams were music to the warden’s ears, and as the chaos spread, Thresh found himself reveling in the suffering of all who fell to the foreigners’ blades. Even at the cost of his own life, Thresh dared to move about the battlefield, searching for survivors left in the king’s wake only that he may snuff out the remnants of their lives himself.

Finally, as the screams of his victims began to subside, Thresh turned his attention to the heart of the Isles. From there, he saw a cloud of pure darkness rushing to meet him, and opened his arms wide to embrace it. In that moment, all the wickedness trapped within Thresh’s lantern was freed, bound to his soul through the power of the Ruination. Thresh emerged a being of pure maliciousness, and his lantern, now empty, would serve as the perfect vessel to enact his twisted fantasies.

Thresh now roams Runeterra as an avatar of sadism, bringing pain and misery to all unfortunate enough to cross his path. He stalks his victims and torments them by slowly stripping them of their sanity, before finally prying their souls from their bodies with his wicked sickle. If you hear the sound of chains in the dead of night, run… Though it may already be far too late.

So, what did you think? Now, it’s at this point I feel I need to clarify something: I’m not trying to bash on Riot’s creative team, nor am I saying that I can definitely make a better version of someone else’s character. Hell, I’m not even really saying that my version of the story is flawless; it would probably need to go through several more rewrites before I’d ever consider publishing it as canon, not that I have the power to do so, of course.

Rather, I wanted to take a closer look at Thresh’s character and how well his current lore represents him. I said earlier that Thresh is at once and interesting and a bland character. I consider him a little bland because you can sum him up in a single word: “sadistic.” He has no goals and no motivation other than to cause pain and suffering. Even the other undead of the Shadow Isles typically have some kind of agenda, even if it’s only to spread the Black Mist’s influence. Thresh doesn’t care about that; he just wants to see you writhe in agony, both before and after death. I’d argue he has more in common in with League’s demons than the other specters of the Isles, but it’s BECAUSE Thresh is undead that he has so much potential for an interesting backstory.

The main points I wanted to emphasize in my rewrite are: expanding on the magics that corrupted Thresh into being so sadistic, giving his lantern some greater significance in the story, and replacing the vault full of otherwise pointless macguffins with something a little more sinister that gives the Blessed Isles a hint of dichotomy. Riot loves adding a little morally grey to all their characters and factions, after-all.

Anyways, what do you all think? Could Thresh’s lore be improved, or do you all like his story the way in currently is? Lemme know down below, and I’ll see you all next time!

[darkpoisonouslove]

Winx Club Season 4 Thoughts Part 1

I have to say that I remember exactly five things from this whole season so I am interested to see where this is going even if it has high chances of annoying me. I am trying to stay open-minded about this and the fact that they still haven’t destroyed the art style here is definitely helping some so I hope that I will find something I like in this season and will not have to bitch about it 98% of the time. Here we go:

4x01:

- Okay, so they just decided that season 4 and SotLK are not on the same time line. Because in SotLK the new school year had already started when Mandragora attacked and Winx were definitely not teaching. And Musa says that it’s been three years since they first came to Alfea so that implies that s4 is the school year after s3. Which means this is not the time line of SotLK. Great! I mean, I’m not gonna count that as a plot hole but it is still frustrating to a degree.

- Faragonda really said “Let’s make Winx teachers even though they have no training and qualifications for that whatsoever”, huh? Nice to see that there is as much real world logic applied to any of this as always - aka none. I know it sounds like I’m already bitching but, trust me, I am not. This is just an observation. You’ll know it when I truly start bitching.

- I get it that everyone except Stella is not thrilled about all the attention but Tecna and Layla sounded too annoyed. It’s not like the young fairies are trying to tear off their wings and fairy dust vials to keep as souvenirs. They are actually pretty polite considering that they’re fifteen and have just met their idols. Why is that Amaryl getting Stella’s autograph, though?

- Lmao that scene with Griselda. XD But they really did not consider the fact that now that they are at Alfea as personnel they’ll have different rooms? That is like walking into the room and sitting in your old student seat even though you are supposed to be the teacher. Come on, guys! Gotta love how Layla, Bloom and Musa almost sent Griselda falling to the ground and Flora was the only one who tried to help her keep her balance. Also, the fact that Griselda was more concerned with the misunderstanding rather than with the fact that she was about to fall down the goddamn stairs! Priorities, Griselda! Not breaking your neck should always come first in a situation like that.

- Is it me or have they toned Griselda down a little? She used to be a bit more of a hardass.

- Why is that the Agator box Faragonda has put the “keys” in? Did they just decide to recycle an old design without even changing it at all or what?

- It’s been three minutes (without the intro) and we’ve arrived at our first plot hole. Remember in season 3 when Galatea took the Trix to the Hall of Enchantments? And it was a very public and very unrestricted area in the school that was definitely not hidden behind a secret passage? Yeah, now it is suddenly a place where only a few people can go. Nice one!

- Why the fuck would you bury the entire history of the magical dimension under one school? And why the fuck can you find out the future from there? Let me tell you, this is a horrible idea.

- So now there are infinite levels of powers and more transformations after Enchantix? Second plot hole in four minutes. This is going well.

- “It will also give you the power to heal whoever is in need.” Where was that when they fucking killed off Nabu?!

- Of course, Bloom will wander off and find the villains of the season even if it is just a painting. Please, tell me that it wasn’t the fact that she removed the cover of the Wizards’ portrait that brought them to Alfea. That will simply be too dumb. Also, Faragonda could have totally used her magic to cover the portrait again and given her reaction to Bloom finding it, she should have. I am curious as to who painted the portrait of the Trix that went in there, though. Or did it just appear magically? Lmao, that would be a fun concept. Imagine that you do something big enough to threaten the whole magical dimension and suddenly, there is a portrait of you in a closed off gallery buried under Alfea.

- Stella really poked Brandon in the face to test if he is really here? XD

- So they did have some plan for their first class (since they built that obstacle course in advance) but they didn’t think of a name for it? Not looking too professional but as long as the young fairies are engaged AND learn something, I guess it’s fine.

- Why is Clarisse so mean here? I agree to some degree that Winx are not really qualified to teach but she has no reason to be like that.

- So she showed the magic she used to sabotage Winx to ALL of her roommates and none of them went to Faragonda to tell her the truth after Alice was accused?! What the fuck, you people?

- It would have been more interesting if it had been Bloom that had been hit. She is the leader, after all, and the show always insists on making her the center of everything but not this, I guess. Can’t have her be the target of a prank. That would probably be too embarrassing. I hate that Faragonda didn’t even give a chance to Alice to speak. For how much she claims to believe in her students, she never actually gives them the chance to explain themselves. You’d think she’d rely more on her intuition rather than on hard, cold proof that can be staged (as is the case) or reframed thanks to circumstances.

- If the Wizards hunt fairies, why have they never been to Alfea? It is literally full of fairies! Or are they just after Earth fairies? I have no memory of them or their plan whatsoever. Guess I’ll have to watch and see.

- Why are all the Winx being so damn mean in this episode? Even Flora is out for people’s heads. Honestly, the only time she’s given off more hostile energy than here was when the Trix attacked the Black Willow and Miele.

- At least that battle was a bit more of a battle than what we’ve seen in previous seasons. Although, it is disappointing that all of Winx’s arsenal of magic seems to be down to just blasting the enemy. Like, they literally never do anything else. Where is that energy of Musa doing an anti rain dance combined with runes to negate Stormy’s powers? Can we ever get anything more creative than just shooting magic beams out of their hands and throwing balls of energy at the opponents? Please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Wizards have a bit more interesting powers from what we’ve seen here. Especially, Duman with his shapeshifting (a Duman vs Wizgiz battle would have been interesting). And I like the idea of their partnership allowing them greater power like opening the Black Circle. It’s cool. We’re going back to the vibe of the Trix being equals in season 1 and that was interesting.

- Okay, so the Wizards really wiped the ground with Winx but you have to love how none of the young fairies care about the fact that the teachers weren’t able to do jackshit either. Winx failed once and now suddenly they’re losers. I know the idea of that part was that fame is temporary but you know what would have been a better lesson? That persistence is the key to victory and you have to get up after you’ve been knocked down and try again. That would have been far more helpful for the young fairies to learn from Winx and it would have been exactly the best lesson that Winx could teach them considering their own experiences of never giving up even when everything looked bleak and they were failing.

- So why did Clarisse suddenly change her mind? Was she touched by the fact that Alice was still trying to help Winx even after they didn’t believe her or...? But yes, if she didn’t even think twice about hugging Griselda, then the show has really softened Griselda here. XD It was adorable, though, so I am fine with it. And I hope that Alice and Clarisse will keep that friendship going (I so do not remember anything from this season).

- Really? We’re gonna stop this episode right before the origin story of the Black Circle? Damn! Have to love how they were teachers for all of one class. Not even that, in fact. Griselda will probably be the one who will take on those classes now. Poor freshmen fairies! XD

4x02:

- Okay, I have questions. Where did the Wizards come from and why did they attack Earth specifically out of all the planets in the magical dimension? How did they create the spell that made them immune to fairy magic? You can’t just wish to be impenetrable and boom, it’s done! Also, were fairies the only magical beings on Earth? Because that story made it sound so. And what do you mean the powers of nature? Are we talking elements? Or not quite? Plus, really not into the way this blamed all the shit that happened on Earth on the disappearance of the fairies. It takes off the responsibility from humanity’s shoulders and that is not a good thing to do.

- At least Tecna is paying attention and now they know where to start. Bring back belief in fairies and find the last Earth fairy (though, that might not be the best idea since it will lead the Wizards straight to her and Winx are not yet powerful enough to protect her). That sounds like the first step of a plan.

- Aww, Stella is always so thrilled to see Brandon she ends up knocking him down! That is absolutely adorable! But please, can we skip the part where Bloom angsts about Sky not being there? But back to the important things (aka everything but Sky x Bloom), yay for Nabu being here! Riven picking up Musa was so cute! And she wasn’t angry that he didn’t come up with his own script which is good (besides, I think that the fact that he asked for help because he wanted to cheer her up still counts as a cute romantic gesture). And Timmy and Tecna instantly starting to nerd out together is just precious!

- Bloom says she’s getting used to it while still sulking about it. Forgive me if I don’t believe you. But at least his entrance was funny indeed. And the way all the other guys were in on it spoke of them planning it together which helps sell their friendship. I would actually like to see more moments like that. And omg, Riven being the one to say Sky is a friend! I approve so much of this non-sulky Riven. Dammit, why do they have to screw up everything (because we all know they will, especially when it comes to Riven)!

- Why did they have to lie to their girlfriends? Winx could use some help and it doesn’t have to mean that they’re weak. Honestly, the more people are fighting the Wizards, the better their chances! Like, this is simple strategy! It doesn’t have to mean anything about their power levels. And who the fuck decided that Winx should be the ones responsible for the defeat of the Black Circle and do it alone? All of this is nonsensical as hell and it is obvious that they will use it to generate drama again. MY GOD, CAN WE JUST NOT?!

- What happens if someone steals Tecna’s gadget and accesses all that info she copied from the Hall of Enchantments? That was probably not the safest idea there but it would have been cool if that actually happened and they had to deal with someone else while still trying to defeat the main villains. For a change of pace. Just saying.

- Man, Tecna is the one doing everything. But wait, how did Bloom miniaturize? Is it because she found her birth parents and restored Domino so now her Enchantix is complete? Is that what happened here? I mean, it wouldn’t be completely illogical so it’s fine, I guess.

- Wtf why did Bloom just jump on Tecna like that? Are they trying to emphasize her first miniaturizing experience by making her afraid of things because she is so small now? Knock it off, guys! I hate to say it, but Bloom isn’t exactly the person that scares easily no matter what she’s facing. She was attacking monsters with a stick before she even knew she had magic, please! And Layla getting scared is also out of character. I love how Stella just didn’t give a damn. That is kinda like her and she is right that they’ve faced scarier things. And here is Bloom with the stick spoon again.

- Hey, they remembered the ocean of light spell from SotLK.

- They brought tents? Why are they camping there? Do they have any idea what they’re doing at this point?

- Why do we keep at it with the flashbacks? There is literally no point to them!

- What the hell? It... is eating Stella? What is happening? Also, does Flora have any other magic at this point aside from making ivy grow and wrap around the enemy? Not to mention that she just started crying with a monster right in front of her that ate her friend! What the hell, Flora? Did you think your tears would move it and it wouldn’t eat you as well?!

- “Apparently, I am not easy to digest.” XDDD Only Stella can say that while in the belly of a monster!

- Wtf was Musa’s idea with roaring at the monster? And Layla couldn’t spot a butterfly that was roughly half the size of Piff’s head?! It was so visible from the moment they found Piff!

- Is that... Yes, that’s the tree from Magical Adventure. It definitely looks different here but it can’t be anything else.

- Well, of course, the Earth fairy was born in Gardenia. It is too impossible a coincidence for them to pass up on. If it means I will get some Mike and Vanessa, I am willing to forgive it, though.

4x03:

- Yay! It’s Mike and Vanessa! I love how they totally don’t mind that Bloom and her friends just dropped off without any warning. They are the best parents ever!

- Okay, they copied almost all of this montage in Magical Adventure but I don’t mind because it’s funny and also pretty cute that they are now all living together. Mike and Vanessa are so open to Bloom’s friends and it is absolutely adorable! Also, the challenge of living together is hilarious.

- That montage of their jobs is also hilarious (but kinda painful as well when it is us, non-magical beings’ reality). I’m glad they also showed the others having trouble with their jobs and not just Stella.

- Do we trust this guy that offered them a job? He doesn’t look suspicious... but that is kinda suspicious. I don’t know.

- Wait, they can bring toys to life? Then that totally confirms my headcanon about Kiko being a stuffed bunny that Bloom unknowingly turned into an animate one with her Dragon Fire. Okay, so Flora can bring toys to life which makes sense but Bloom having the magic that created the whole universe should also be able to do that.

- Poor Mike! But omg, they really almost had Kiko jump a female bunny right there on screen. Damn, guys! Calm down.

- Okay, the pet shop is actually a pretty good idea considering that it turns their problem into a solution. And the pets are adorable.

- I am grateful that Vanessa is in on finding a place for the shop. She already owns a shop of her own and is a businesswoman so she knows what she is doing. It is the adult presence this series seriously lacks and she can be both helpful and supportive of Winx. It’s awesome!

- Well, the last fairy on Earth found them. And they conveniently lost her. Oh, come on! They didn’t even realize it was her?!

- I just skipped all of the Kiko and pets buffoonery. It is so unimportant.

- They are really fucking dense, aren’t they? Why did no one think that if the Wizards aren’t anywhere to be found, then it could be something else?!

- You left a bunny in charge of a business establishment. What did you expect? I mean, really?! Not to mention that the magical pets have zero reason to listen to Kiko. They probably think he’s beneath them because he can’t fly and shit.

- Of course, the Wizards arrive in the middle of a storm. Because Grand EntranceTM.

- You mean to tell me that Tecna didn’t know you could use a computer to play games and learn languages? What the actual FUCK?! She is literally the fairy of technology. I don’t even have the words to express how stupid this is!

- Why is Roxy sleeping in the clothes that she was wearing when she was out all day? Ever heard of pajamas, animators? And of course, she is having Symbolic Dreams just like Bloom. And by “symbolic” I mean overly obviously so.

- I love their clash with the reality of business. But why are they acting like the website is new? Bloom already mentioned it in the previous episode. And all Tecna is adding now is the download-a-pet feature.

4x04:

- So they’re giving the pets for free... but they will be charging for food and other things? I am confused here. They promised to pay Vanessa back and they can’t do that unless they make profit from the shop. So they should be charging for some of their services at least. But what is the point of downloading a pet if you have to go to the store to buy food for it? Ugh, this makes no sense again.

- Why are only girls adopting fairy pets? Tell me this is not going to be sexist like that.

- Ugh, pls no drama with Sky over Andy. And what the fuck did he mean that they were engaged?! I mean, probably overexaggerating but it was still weird. Not to mention that Bloom’s reaction to learning he’s in a band is somewhat not selling the idea that the Winx would form their own band later on (even if this is what starts it).

- What the fuck are the Specialists doing? And are they only now arriving on Earth? Weren’t they supposed to be there already since Faragonda told them to stay close to Winx?

- Why is Brandon the only one with brains in here? Sky literally just went on and pawned the seal of Eraklyon? Stupid, stupid move. Besides, it’s not like they didn’t know where they were going. He could have gone to Eraklyon and taken some gold to exchange on Earth or something. They could have prepared for this trip. Oh my god, why does no one think of things ahead of time? This isn’t getting sucked into the Omega dimension by mistake. They could have made a plan and avoided literally all of the problems they’ve faced already.

- Why did they take the pets to a concert? Animals are sensitive to loud noises and can get scared by the music they’re blasting there. Wtf?!

- Damn, I was right about Sky being jealous of Andy but I am still entertained by the fact that he was being all righteous with Riven until he saw Bloom and flipped the script on its head. And again, Brandon is the only one that is actually thinking... for now. I so do not need the drama with Mitzi that will be in this season. But literally the only reason they haven’t blown their cover is that Winx haven’t looked their way. Otherwise, those menus wouldn’t be enough to hide them. And why didn’t they change in their everyday clothes before dropping in the middle of a park?

- Why are you leaving Kiko in charge again?! You already saw that he can’t control the magical pets! Oh my god, this show really insists on getting on my nerves!

- What, they don’t have fruits in Magix?! Please, if Magix is so much more advanced in terms of technology, there is no way that they don’t have smoothies and fruit salad. This is really stupid!

- Omg, thank you Layla. Finally! Can they now, please, figure out that Roxy is right under their noses? Because they keep crossing paths with her without even knowing it and it is getting ridiculous. Why was she so quick to judge Stella, though? She barely heard her say a sentence. No need to label someone based on the one line you’ve overheard them speak! Why is everyone so judgy in this season?!

- I told you the Wizards would just follow them and Winx would lead them to the fairy. Rather fortunately, they’ve all got it wrong but poor girl that got mistaken for the last fairy. She is probably going to be traumatized. Btw when are they going to start earning their Belivix? They totally forgot about the book Faragonda gave them.

- Ogron is really annoying me. But why not just eliminate Winx and they won’t have to deal with them anymore? What, is this some kind of “they’re obviously too weak to stop us so we won’t even bother destroying them” deal here? (Edit: Yep, that’s it - aka plot armor.) It always comes back to bite the villains in the end. You’d think at least one of them will know better... Or at the very least be ruthless enough not to care who they harm... which the Wizards allegedly are.

- I am so sick of Flora’s “luxurious ivy”. Try something else one of these days! But being caught in her own ivy was new at the very least. Maybe that will make her come up with a new attack next time.

- Omg, I am really starting to see the Riven x Nabu thing. XD But the Specialists generally seem too busy saving each other to help Winx.

- Seriously? They’re all gonna be dicks to each other? And over this stupidity with the jealousy and refusal to accept help? *sigh* I am so pleased to see Nabu and Layla just trailing behind like that. Like, “I don’t wanna be a part of this drama but I gotta stay with my team even though I would much rather be with you.” It is really cute and I love it! Also, proof that all of this is stupid because Layla has always been super independent but she didn’t seem to have a problem with Nabu coming to help her. Probably because she trusts him enough to know he wouldn’t think she was weak! Take notes, everyone!

4x05:

- Hey, be a bit more supportive of Stella! She’s obviously tired if she fell asleep and she just told you she is stressed out because of what happened with the boys! She is not just dramatizing for attention. I know they are all in the same boat but they don’t have to be rude to her just because she voiced her discomfort.

- What the hell did the Wizards do to the pets? My gradually returning memory (meaning that whenever I see something, it triggers some deeply buried memories I have about this season) is failing me here.

- Lol, I can’t believe Riven actually went to get Brandon a glass of juice. That’s adorable! But how to break it to Timmy that they already look like they belong on the planet (Nabu is definitely standing out but that’s just because Gardenia is western-society based)? Riven is literally wearing England’s flag, wtf?!

- Why do the boys sound like they are sharing the same six brain cells (that’s probably too high a number)? Even Timmy is jealous which he totally has no reason to be because Tecna hasn’t been around anyone! Omfg, why are they turning the personal drama of one (well, two bc Musa and Riven also) couple into a drama for everyone?! And Flora hasn’t really said anything to Helia which could be rude of itself but still. I am sure she is not actually angry at him.

- I am actually really getting on board of this Riven x Nabu ship. Riven’s first thought of a solution was to turn to Nabu. I mean, their actions speak for themselves!

- I just had a new thought about Winx’s pet shop policy and it is actually a bit of a malicious tactic (even if not intentionally so) to just let children download pets that will later need to be taken care of. Once the pet is already downloaded, parents will have a much harder time saying no to their children and they will be forced to spend money on caring for the pet. This is... not how things should be going.

- Mike and Vanessa are adorable together! And awesome parents! (Yes, I will gush about that every time. We can use some positivity amidst everything wrong with the series. They definitely got Mike and Vanessa right.)

- Roxy is really trying to adopt all those dogs, isn’t she? But wow, Mitzi really wanted to wrap an animal in wrapping paper. They shouldn’t have given it to her at all.

- I actually like the fact that they had to go against their mission and convince everyone that they aren’t real fairies because they were otherwise running the risk of making people afraid of fairies. It is fun, though, that it was Stella who thought of faking a movie shoot and not Bloom who is from Earth, after all. I mean, movies in the magical dimension probably don’t need ropes for the stunts.

- I am already so tired of this fight between Winx and the Specialists and it has barely been an episode. And they are all so frustrating. The boys could have just said that they are there to help instead of “to protect” them like Winx are damsels in distress and Winx could have just accepted help. Honestly, this is such a non-issue that they are blowing out of proportion. Winx have never been so stubborn about accepting help from the Specialists before and the Specialists have never acted like they don’t fully believe that Winx are capable of handling themselves. Why did the writers have to do this now?

- Does Ogron mean that next time they will go for destroying Winx? That will be interesting as long as it actually happens.

- Okay, this is more like it! They are finally working together. And Layla fangirling over Nabu is so cute! As long as they don’t get pulled over for speeding, they should be fine now.

- Ugh, here comes the Mitzi drama. Is that what Stella was crying about? Like, Brandon literally didn’t look twice at Mitzi and cut her off when she was trying to introduce herself. Why is everyone making up issues when there aren’t any?! I am so sick of that! And Bloom not talking to Sky was also super stupid. Not that they ever talk so at least that’s in character, I guess. Doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

- I love how Timmy is the one that is handling himself best in this new world. And Nabu’s magic is also helping him so the two of them will have to carry the team for a while. (”All from home so I can be with you, guys”? Are all the Specialists just in love with each other? Because that’s what it looks like. XD)

4x06:

- Omg, Mitzi kissed him on the cheek! That is not the same as “he was kissing that girl”. The least you could do in that situation is fucking talk to him! And why would he come all the way to Earth to just pick up another girl?! This is stupid! Stella has never been like that with Brandon. And if anything, she should be in Mitzi’s face like “You can’t have my man.” At least she is up for spending time with her friends.

- What the fuck happened to Helia’s hair?! Okay, who thought that was a good idea?! Like, both in production and in verse. This was a horrible, horrible idea. Bring back Helia’s hair! And wtf was that comment from Sky about girls checking them out?! You all have girlfriends! It should not matter at all if girls are checking you out or not! I swear, this season is trying to enrage me on purpose. But at least the dynamic between the Specialists is going strong and, I would say, better than in previous seasons because we actually see them be friends here!

- What is Mitzi’s problem? She is stalking Brandon AND trying to steal him from his girlfriend. Like, crazy psycho much? Calm down there and leave them both alone.

- It’s good that they’re having fun together but like Tecna said, they could get this done faster which would be preferable considering that finding the last fairy on Earth is kinda urgent. You know, before she gets killed by the Wizards would be nice.

- Oh, you have to be kidding me! They have been bitching about the Specialists helping them but “That looks heavy. Let me give you a hand.” gets a smile? Really? It is literally the same thing! Why are you, guys, not throwing bitch fits now?! And Bloom is suddenly very quiet for someone who didn’t want help now that Andy is all “Let me show you how to paint walls.” Because you’re girls and you obviously have no clue about it. This whole situation can’t get any more stupid.

- Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I was wrong. It just got more stupid. First, Stella sounds like she’ll push Bloom into Andy’s hands any second now even though she had the Bloom/Andy situation happen to her with Brandon (except that Brandon seems far more firm on not being into Mitzi than Bloom is about Andy) and then Mitzi is there to snap a picture of it and send it to the boys. Fucking spectacular! This is just shoving high school drama down our throats now that they are finally out of high school! Makes fucking sense.

- And Stella is flirting with someone else already. Just shoot me in the head. It will be less painful than this. Can everything just explode already so that we can be done with the stupidity? And why are the boys like that? It’s not like they just walked in on Winx having an orgy with Andy and his friends! They were just helping... and flirting with them a little which would mean less if Winx had tried to discourage it instead of doing the exact opposite. *sigh* It’s a mess on both ends and I hate it so much. Can we get back to the magical stuff? Enough with the stupid teenage drama already!

- Finally! Thank you! But didn’t they say in the previous episode that Tecna’s system didn’t allow one person to adopt more pets even if under different names? Now it is suddenly possible. I don’t need contradictions in the “plot” on top of the relationship stupidity!

- How did they think that that conversation would go? Though, to be fair, they could have done far more. They could have shown her their magic to begin with. And also, if Roxy doesn’t believe in magic, then where does she think the flying pets come from? I mean, they literally fly! How do you explain that? Genetic mutation that gave them wings?! (Tbh it would’ve been cool to see authorities investigate Winx and their business because they think they might be doing illegal experiments with animals. That would have been so much better than the jealousy.)

- Well, Artu seems better at dealing with the Wizards than Winx are.

- Why would Ogron throw a barrel at Layla? Is he still stuck on “they’re unworthy of us wasting our powers on them”? Ugh! But seriously, Winx need to come up with a strategy for fighting these guys!

- It’s working! Roxy’s belief is giving Winx more power. They transformed.

4x07:

- Okay, so the new powers work on everyone but Ogron who keeps absorbing them. Do they by any chance defeat him by shooting too much power at him at the end of the season? Because that is usually the way to defeat someone that absorbs any kind of energy - overload them. More like overwhelm them. But back to the fight at hand, I love that Roxy is ready to defend herself with throwing rocks (lol, the irony, considering she is named Roxy). I guess refusal to give up is just the universal Earth power. XD

- Wait, how did Roxy disappear? Did Layla teleport her or were those Roxy’s own powers awakening? Wtf happened?

- At least Flora is using new spells. And so are the rest of Winx. But damn, the Wizards have really cool powers! Is Gantlos able to track Roxy because his main power is sonic waves?

- Doesn’t Roxy know that you don’t get in strangers’ cars? Or is she trusting the fact that Artu is not suspicious of the woman? I can kinda accept that.

- Why are all of the Wizards (well, except Ogron) flirting with Winx? But on a less creepy note, wouldn’t it have been better to have made the people believe in them so that they could become stronger? And Ogron has a point that if they lose Roxy to the Black Circle, they won’t be able to save anyone.

- “It’s a little hard to explain but, basically, we’re looking out for your future.” XDDD That’s my Stella.

- Okay, I am starting to like Roxy. The fact that she hates flying is super ironic considering that she’s a fairy. And I love that she thought of not leading the Wizards straight to her father and putting him in danger, too. Plus, she did go down the sewers despite not wanting to. And aww! She is already a fan of Winx (and of Stella). I have to say that I am a little annoyed by how similar they are making her story to Bloom’s. She even has her own spirit guide as Daphne was for Bloom. It’s almost like the writers can’t come up with anything else.

- They’re opening the Circle for the third time already and Roxy just ran out of it like it was no biggie. XD

- Why can’t the Winx admit that they did need help. Layla and Flora have no problem admitting that they could have used some help.

- Well, the scene with Roxy’s dad getting their names wrong is hilarious! And I love that Timmy figured out how to make him get his name right! That was awesome! Why can’t the scenes be like that instead of them fighting over bullshit?

- They already mentioned the three sets of wings. Why are they acting surprised now?

4x08:

- Finally a boy interested in the fairy pets!

- Yes, thank you! Finally someone giving Stella some good advice and telling her to talk to Brandon about the whole deal with Mitzi. I am pretty positive that they are gonna drag that out until much farther into the season though, so I have more to suffer.

- Roxy’s father either doesn’t mind having her friends dropping by in the middle of the night or he’s a sound sleeper and doesn’t know they’re there at all. The thing with the photos arranging themselves was cool, though!

- I just hope Stella’s only problem with driving is her lack of sense of direction. It would have been more realistic if she’d misdesigned at least a part of Roxy’s outfit. They just met her and Stella already got a perfect sense of her fashion sense in order to make her the perfect outfit? Unless she’s using some kind of fashion magic, this seems unlikely. She’s just really not going to talk to Brandon, huh? Why do they have to do them dirty like that?! They’ve always been the perfect couple.

- Bloom is riding a horse here. But in Magical Adventure she didn’t know how to. Great one, you guys! But again, the movies just have no continuity with the show. On the other hand, the show has no continuity with the show so I don’t know what I expected.

- But why not put that guy to sleep? It’s not like they will harm him. Just get him out of the way for as long as they need to look around that place. What’s so wrong with that plan? They won’t have to deal with him and he won’t have to deal with them. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.

- Omg, for the first time ever “the ground is shaking and falling apart” is actually a problem because Roxy can’t fly. Finally they have a reason to pretend that this is actually dangerous.

- What about Roxy? They can’t just leave her in a burning barn filling with smoke! See, it would have been much better if they had put that guy to sleep! They wouldn’t have to save him from the Wizards now because he would have been away from the battle and unable to interfere.

- So the glowing thingy on the ground is the White Circle? Or is it Queen Morgana’s crown? What is happening? It is the White Circle, after all. But I would like to know more about it!

- Well, I guess it paid off that they didn’t put him to sleep, after all. They made him believe in fairies and be better to the life around him. So one for the team.

- Stella is being so ridiculous at this point that I just cannot take it anymore. Please, tell me this drama will be over after the karaoke. At least she snatched him away from Mitzi but damn, why is this still not over?!

- Why can’t everyone be like Nabu and Layla? They have no drama, Nabu trusts her and Layla shows him that he is the only one she wants. Why can’t the rest just get their shit together and start taking notes?!

4x09:

- Why the heck would the White Circle reveal itself to be destroyed? Honestly, all of Ogron’s lines in this scene sound either cringy or nonsensical... or both. And why is the White Circle an object while the Black Circle is a group of people? This just doesn’t sound logical. Don’t tell me there will be an identical Black Circle popping up at some point.

- On the one hand I kinda liked that Winx have something else going on except for fighting villains with the shop and going to the Fruity Music Bar but at this point it seems like that is taking up too much of this season. And now they are shoving more of it with Musa getting a call for an audition and everything. It feels like the season is not focused on the Black Circle to an appropriate level considering how big of a threat they are supposed to be.

- So Roxy is one of Winx now? I am not really a fan of that idea. Idk I just always looked at her as a part of the season 4 storyline and not part of the girls’ group. But I like the fact that she “doesn’t want to be special”. It’s a nice change to the typical pace of these stories.

- What is Riven’s problem? Musa is literally just singing with Andy’s band. There is nothing even remotely provoking jealousy. Also, why was Sky the one proving Riven’s point by purposefully going to a girl and offering to make her favorite drink? That is more flirting than Musa singing with the band. And didn’t he and Bloom fix this already?! And why is Mitzi now holding on to Sky?! What is she doing? Trying to steal all of Winx’s boyfriends?!

- Okay, but how is Musa enjoying singing different from her normal behavior? Wtf, Riven?! What is the problem? That she is more social than she used to be? I understand his feelings just not why they exist since the situation is not at all the way the show is trying to make it out to be. Musa doesn’t seem all that different to me (it’s not like they’ve given them any character moments this season, only drama and jealousy) and all this angsting is just unnecessary, not to mention stupid.

- “Jealousy keeps a relationship alive and thriving.” WHAT. THE. ABSOLUTE. HONEST. GENUINE. FUCK?!?!?!? Yeah, Stella sure seemed very alive and thriving when she was distressed over her jealousy of Brandon. Sure seemed like a peachy experience. I just cannot even. And does this seem very OOC to anyone else? I mean, Stella’s parents are divorced and she took that very hard. She has abandonment issues. Why the fuck would she say that jealousy is in the core of a relationship?!?!?! What the fuck, writers?!

- Ugh... Erendor? Really? Out of all the ways to make this episode worse... Smh. And he is being an asshole as always. I love how he doesn’t care that Winx might have some urgent business. No, his wishes always come first. Entitled prick!

- Oh, great! So the White Circle was possessed and now Roxy is possessed. Fucking awesome!

- Why is Stella the one feeling what’s wrong with Roxy? Bloom is obviously the one who has taken on the role of her mentor and in the beginning all six of Winx could feel Roxy’s magic. Why is it different all of a sudden? And Erendor actually let them go?! Wow, I am shooketh.

- Ogron didn’t absorb that? Why am I surprised? There is no consistency in here and if you want to contradict what’s been established already, you have to explain how it works. Not just “White Circle makes Wizards of the Black Circle weak because opposing colors means opposing powers uwu”

- “She seems like a totally different person”? Are all of them deaf and didn’t hear that she just said she’s been waiting for that for centuries? The fact that Roxy is sixteen should have tipped them off somehow.

- They just keep throwing balls of energy at each other. Wow! What an engaging and epic battle! -_-

- How come Stella is the one who’s been doing all the reading this season? I am not saying that she is dumb but Tecna is usually the one who sifts through the information they’ve received and considering that she copied the whole library from the Hall of Enchantments, it would have made more sense for her to have read the book from cover to cover.

- Stella is like a caretaker now all of a sudden. This episode has thrown me for a loop, honestly.

- Oooooooh, this scenes with Erendor are giving me a headache with the twists and turns. First, what the hell did he think by making Sky king at the age of 18? Erendor is well so there is no need to rush to pass the crown to Sky. I hate to admit it but he kinda has a point about Sky abandoning his royal duties to go to Earth and do pretty much nothing to help there. And then the scene in the pawn shop (or whatever) that is just... huh??????? Erendor was angry about the seal but then he is suddenly flipping the script completely and giving Sky money so that he can stay?!?!?!?! I cannot even with this episode. Please, let it end.

- Are Stella and Brandon fine now? Yes? Please!!!!!

4x10:

- The White Circle is the last portal to the dimension where the Earth fairies are held captive? Why are they only mentioning this in the recap of episode 10 and didn’t say it anywhere in episode 9??????????????????????????? I swear, the sheer number of times this has already happened (or rather the opposite where they introduce a concept twice) is nerve-destroying. They should really hire someone to check for continuity.

- So now Roxy remembers not just the Nebula possession but also the other fairies’ feelings? Didn’t she say she didn’t remember what happened in the last episode?

- Since when does Bloom understand not wanting to be a fairy. She has always wanted to be a fairy.

- What guarantees that Bloom won’t get possessed if she is wearing the Circle like a ring? The fact that she’s not from Earth? But she’s the only one who grew up on Earth so the White Circle will probably be much safer with any of the other Winx.

- Where did Bloom’s double come from? In season 3 they couldn’t make doubles and could only make pixies look like fairies. What is happening now? Edit: She turned one of the pets into a double. Great fucking idea considering how Kiko was handling the shop in a previous episode.

- Why tf are the guys trying to pay with gemstones?!?! First, I thought Sky refused to take them from Erendor in the last episode. And second, they’ve been on Earth long enough to know how buying stuff works! Just sell the gemstones to a jewelry shop and you’ll have money you can buy stuff with! Jeez, like it’s so hard!

- Musa is being stupid, then Riven is being stupid and we keep spinning in that vicious circle forever. *sigh* I have to agree with Riven, though. The building is ugly.

- Roxy’s explanation made no sense to me. But why is Bloom having trouble figuring this out? She grew up on Earth. Granted, she was practically just waiting for proof that fairies exist to fall in her lap which is different from not believing in fairies completely but still. And why not start from children? Children are always more open-minded to “impossible” things.

- Okay, so teleporting will not rattle Roxy and her hate for flying.

- See? The little girl believed in magic! Told you! What I can’t comprehend is what the parents thought. Like, those girls had plants growing in your apartment and had sparkly wings! What did you think? That they are scientists who just like to dress up fancy and go rescue people with their inventions?!

- Why were the Wizards so sure Winx would show up? It was a burning building. Surely, there have been other burning buildings in Gardenia. It’s not like it’s some beacon that would lure them there. And Gantlos using his powers in a building that is near collapsing is sketchy and best and incredibly stupid at worst.

- What the hell was Bloom thinking? That magic could have brought the whole building down!

- I am a bit... disappointed, I guess (not the right word) that Musa had to come to Earth to be noticed for her musical talent. She is literally the fairy of music. She should have been noticed in Magix as well. Not to insult our world but the show has made it clear that Earth is behind in its development so it kinda seems like they’re saying Musa’s talent is only special on a place where everyone else is ordinary compared to her.

- I don’t trust Jason. Like, his eyes remind too much of Ogron but I absolutely do not remember enough of this season to say if there is anything shady going on there. I am not saying that Riven was right since Musa really has not done anything that would give him any reason to be jealous but I also do not like Jason.

- Wtf, Roxy’s advice didn’t do jackshit. They saved people from a fire. How is that forming a connection with them? Anyone would have been grateful to be saved (well, almost anyone).

4x11:

- Yeah, right. Musa, honey, you’re not breaking up with him for 2 and a half more seasons. And even if I didn’t know that, I still wouldn’t believe it. They’ve done this song and dance already.

- Since Duman always shapeshifts into animals and Roxy is the fairy of animals, can she influence him with her powers while he’s transformed into an animal? If she can, that can stop him from shapeshifting because she will have control over him. Please, tell me that happens somewhere in this season. It would be a horrible missed opportunity otherwise.

- I knew it! At least this time they were smart about something and had Roxy call Winx. But didn’t they use the Zoomix wings to teleport there in the first place? Why did they have to change them to leave? Or was that just for us to see the Zoomix wings?

- Now the girls are jealous of each other’s boyfriends?

- I knew Nabu would propose to Layla! They’re so adorable! I only wish they would have let him stick around long enough to marry her.

- But if people think of them as superheroes, they still won’t believe they’re fairies. They’re supposed to convince people that magic is real but I think the common consensus is that superheroes are not magical. They just have abilities that normal people don’t have. So how is that gonna help the mission?!

- Winx are stretched across two fronts. Why don’t the Wizards use that against them? Wait for Winx to get so caught up in a chase (like the one with the ninja thieves) that Roxy can’t keep up and falls behind and then attack her. Or put everyone else in danger also so that Winx have to help others and can’t come to her aid?

- Man, it really was a disaster. But on the plus side, they are nailing the superhero vibe. Most superheroes inevitably do some damage while helping. Unfortunately, I still don’t think the superhero approach is right.

- I swear, Stella is acting towards Layla the same way she was acting towards Brandon. And they’re making a surprise dinner for Layla? I think Winx are also in love with each other just like the Specialists. XD And that reunion between Stella and Layla was too cute (and maybe a bit overzealous in proportion to what happened).

- Tecna says it’s not the Believix power that makes people believe in them, yet it was exactly the Believix special powers that made people believe in them.

4x12:

- Oh, wow. Roxy made Artu talk? That’s cool. I have to say that the way they draw that dog makes him look creepy and hostile half the time.

- It’s good that grown up men are so taken with the magical pets.

- Lol, at this point I am not sure whether I am relieved or disappointed that they didn’t make Kiko love Roxy a little too much to have Bloom getting jealous. Since a main theme of this season seems to be jealousy, that would have been on brand. But maybe a little too much on top of the talking thing. I don’t really know how to feel about the fact that Kiko is talking. At least Bloom seems to like it.

- When was that part where Bloom didn’t see herself as a fairy? She was insisting she was a fairy even as the Trix mocked her for not being able to transform. She never felt the way Roxy is feeling. Sure, she doubted herself but she didn’t believe she could be the fairy she wanted to be. Roxy doesn’t feel like she should be a fairy. It’s different. Please! I do appreciate the credit Mike and Vanessa are given, though.

- For a second there I was about to say that Roxy’s father is really getting on my nerves with his bad parenting but that wasn’t him. Though, he has been a bit dismissive and authoritarian in previous episodes so I am not sure I like the real him either. But how did Duman imitate Claus so well. He said he knew Roxy’s tone and it meant trouble which she didn’t consider out of place so it must have been true. How come Duman knew that, though?

- At least the spell that lets Artu talk didn’t wear off before he got to Winx and told them what happened. I have to admit that I expected it to. I should have known, though. That would have actually been a complex situation and they just can’t afford to write those.

- Okay, the Zoomix and Speedix wings make sense but the Tracix ones are just way too convenient.

- What, the name White Circle doesn’t tip you off on why the Wizards of the Black Circle want it? It’s obviously their opposing power! Jesus, didn’t they learn about opposites in season 2? Why is none of that ringing any bells?

- That spell sure seems to last a lot longer than I expected it to. When Roxy said it doesn’t last long, I thought it would wear off in half an hour tops. But it seems to last for hours and hours, and hours.

- Soooo... why didn’t Winx think of having Artu trace Roxy? They can also still communicate with him so that wouldn’t have been a problem.

- Omg, Roxy summoning a bunch of rats to defeat Gantlos is the most badass thing that has happened so far in this season. And she managed to transform.

- Timmy and Tecna are adorable!

- Layla just threw them for a swim. But why didn’t Ogron absorb her magic? Is it only attack spells that he can absorb? Or is it because their Believix is stronger now and it works against the Wizards?

- Well, at least Claus will have to believe that Roxy is a fairy now.

4x13:

- The Specialists suddenly only seem to be good at failing which is stupid because they were holding up quite well during the battle in the previous episode. But again, everyone’s capabilities depend on what is convenient for the writers at the time.

- Timmy tracking the Wizards was a good move but it won’t help if they can’t fight them. Also, Ogron should have just threatened to kill Sky (and the other guys) if Winx leave and it would have kept them there. Simple as that. I mean, the guys were obviously losing and the Wizards could have very well killed them.

- At least Roxy’s “temper” is rather consistent.

- “Try fighting me like men,” he says and proceeds to use magic against people who don’t have magic. Yeah, very fair. Extremely manly.

- I love how Anagan freed himself exactly one second after Helia said he wouldn’t be able to. Helia, your fangirling over your girlfriend is cute but don’t underestimate the danger.

- Timmy is “Anagan-boarding”, I guess XD. But good thing Tecna showed up because he would’ve ended as a Timmy pancake on the sidewalk.

- Yes, I was going to say that they totally forgot about Gantlos while busy with their romance drama and he made himself known. But I’m sorry, I thought Musa was sold on breaking up with Riven. But now they’re a team? Okay, hon. Call me when you make up your mind.

- Why does Layla look so scared of Ogron? But damn, Sky, great way to fall of a train like a total idiot! Well, technically he didn’t fall off the train but he still tripped like an absolute klutz.

- “I hate to travel alone.” Is Sky hitting on Ogron? XD

- Can’t Bloom control the fire Ogron sent at her? It was from her own magic and even if he absorbed it, he shouldn’t have changed the structure of it, otherwise it would have worked in a different way. This makes no sense. Since when is he able to copy others’ powers?

- Poor Roxy. It’s horrible to expect of her to make a choice like that.

- I love how Duman was too much of a team player to pass for Riven. But that proves he doesn’t know anything about the people he imitates. So how did he pose so well as Claus?

- I’ve decided that Claus is an okay dad.

- Did Gantlos just vaporize a whole train? Oh, damn. That was a lot of people who died. But Gantlos sure seemed very worried about Ogron’s safety. If you know what I mean ;)

- What happened to the Wizards, though? They couldn’t have defeated them for good even if they were too weak to fight.

- That Flora and Helia photo was so adorable! And the one with Bloom, Sky and Brandon too. At least Stella and Brandon finally seem to have resolved their drama. Just, please, let it stay that way. Half a season of this was more than enough.

Part 2 is here.

[romancingromanoff]

Short & Sweet (Carol Danvers x femme reader)

Carol is nervous about asking the reader out because she doesn’t know if she’s interested in women. Fluffy story about her trying to scope out information on the reader from the rest of the team without letting on the fact that she’s a bit insecure.

Y/N was actually a pretty frequent visitor to Carol’s room at the Avenger’s Headquarters. Not a single day went by that she wouldn’t make the eager skip down the hall to knock on the door which Carol had painted “Strongest Avenger” over just to piss off Thor. Of course, he had written over it with (though it was in Norse runes and so no one could decipher what it said exactly) but she had gotten back at him by heating up the insides of the toaster just by a little bit so that it ended up frying his Pop-tarts the next morning.

For the large amount of time Y/N spent hanging out in Carol’s room, anybody else would assume that there was at least some sign of romantic interest coming from her, but it was a bit difficult to tell considering the fact that (Y/N) always came over just to play with Goose. She was completely obsessed with the little orange guy even though Carol had warned her on multiple occasions that he was actually capable swallowing her with giant tentacles that could come out of his mouth and force into an unknown pocket dimension.

“I know he’s not a cat because I’m allergic to cats,” Y/N had first said with that cheeky smile that Carol just couldn’t say no to. And that had started her daily visits of checking in with Goose every morning.

“So, you and Y/N seem to be spending a lot of time together,” Wanda brought up one day with a tone of surprise. Carol almost spit out her coffee but then tried to play it off like it was just a little too hot.

“Yeah, I guess,” she said as casually as possible. But was that really surprising? She wondered if Wanda or any of the rest of the team also found it unusual. This wasn’t a good sign at all. She probably wasn’t gay after all then. “But what about Barton, huh? They seem pretty close... or at least that’s what I get from our conversations.” Truthfully, Y/N never talked about Clint which was strange considering the large amount of time that they spent together. Whether it was taking long walks alone together or her watching him at target practice, Y/N always seemed the most comfortable around Clint. He always had his arm around her and Carol couldn’t help but notice how that never failed to make her smile. 

Wanda smirked from behind the hair that was covering the side of her face and simply sipped her tea. “Barton? Oh, yeah, they’re close.” She picked up her mug and left the kitchen and as much as Carol wanted to keep interrogating her about what she knew, she didn’t want to look too suspicious. Walking into the next room she found Bucky, Sam, and Scott spread out on the couch arguing over the channels. 

“C’mon, turn the game back on, I’m not playing around,” Sam punched Bucky’s arm but seemed to forget that it was completely made out of metal and so he vigorously tried to shake the pain out of it while Scott just laughed at the two of them.

“Can I just finish this one episode of Kitchen Nightmares? I want to see how the tuna fillet turns out,” Bucky’s grip around the remote tightened in his metal arm and he held it closer to his chest. 

“Not this again.”

“I’m the only one that cooks around here. I mean, what do you want me to do? Apologize for feeding you?” Cause if so then I’ll take back my mini quiches!”

“SPFFFF!” Scott spit whatever he was chewing on the floor and almost fell backwards off the couch his arms were flinging all over the place. “YOU MADE THESE?” he demanded, angrily pointing at whatever he had just regurgitated up into his hand.

“What the hell is going on?” Sam sighed to himself before grabbing the remote and changing it to basketball.

“Yes? I did this morning,” Bucky answered confused.

“Well, did you wash your hands?” Scott was freaking out trying to find a napkin to wipe his hand and face on while Bucky and Sam desperately leaned away from him, scooting to the other side of the couch.

“You think I would intentionally get my metal arm wet?”

“Oh, GOD! That is disgusting,” Scott ran out of the room hunched over like he was going to puke at the thought of having eaten some mini quiches made by a guy that never washed the metal arm he regularly used to punch people with. 

“I wore gloves.”

“Hey, fellas,” Carol thought she would interrupt the conversation before it got even weirder. “Have any of you seen Y/N around by chance?”

“Yeah, she’s out feeding the squirrels with Clint,” Sam replied without taking his eyes off the screen.

“Clint? Shit,” Carol cursed to herself which strangely got the two guys to turn around and look at her.

“You got something wrong with Barton?” I mean, yeah, he doesn’t have much up there but his ego isn’t nearly as big as Thor’s. Or is this about something else?”

“No, no it isn't,” Carol quickly said. “I just didn’t know if Y/N had plans already for this evening since she and Barton are....?” she dragged that last word on for as long as she could in hopes that one of the other two would finish the sentence for her; hopefully, without using the word “dating” or “together”.

“They’re... friends,” Bucky had his eyebrow raised at her. “What makes you so concerned?”

“Oh, I see what’s going on,” Sam nodded giving hintful eyes at Buck. “You feeling a little insecure, huh, Marvel?” he laughed and Carol’s cheeks instantly flushed red with anger.

“Insecure? I don’t know the word. And I don’t know what you’re talking about, Wilson, because for some of us it’s not hard when you’re the whole package and have a super great body and personality,” she retorted.

“You think you’re the whole package? Y/N’s type of package?”

“Oh I know I’m the whole package,” confidence seemed to radiate throughout her entire body as she took that intimidating stance she had perfected. But in truth, it was easy for her to say that when her own reputation was being questioned and she couldn’t help but worry about what Sam meant by “Y/N’s type of package” but had to leave the room with badassery all around her to keep them convinced. 

This time, she was going to get straight to the point. She was going to ask what needed to be asked with no trying to dance around the question out of fear of being judged. So she approached Thor at the bar.

“Thunderhead, what’s your opinion on Y/N?” she sat down right next to him before grabbing the beer he was drinking and throwing back a giant swig of the Asgardian liquid. 

“She’s certainly more ladylike than you,” he rolled his eyes before quickly grabbing his drink back and roughly pulling it out of her grip. “But yet a fierce fighter as well. Much like the women we have in Asgard.”

“Aw, I’m touched that you thought that would wound me, Thor. But unlike your masculinity, my femininity isn’t that fragile. But what are those stories you always tell her?”

“You would be best not to test the fragility of my temper, human,” Thor glared. “But Lady Y/N usually enjoys hearing tales I have of the old Asgard: The great rainbow bridge, the magnificent castle, the music-filled gardens, the dresses of the ladies in court, the Pegasi stables... she’s always been bewildered by all of its wonders, as she should be. Asgard was like no other planet in this universe, at night the stars could-”

“Okay, okay, it was fairytale land. I get it. Seems a lot like her speed,” Carol muttered that last part to herself. Y/N was just like a Disney princess come to life always spending time with animals and singing throughout her daily chores. But did that mean a prince was what she was seeking? And was Clint that guy? Forget it. There was no way that Carol was going to find that out trying to get the information from Thor of all people. “What the hell am I doing? Just ask her,” she thought to herself angrily and headed straight for the exit with a purpose in her step.

“Hey!” she called out upon seeing Y/N at the base of a nearby tree feeding some crackers to two red squirrels that immediately ran away at the sound of Carol’s loud voice. Her heart panged in her chest when she saw Clint walk out from behind the other side of the tree with a skeptical, almost protective look in his eye. But she wasn’t having any of that right now. 

“Carol?” Y/N inquired with a confused look on her face. She was so innocent and pure that she just wanted to take her into her arms and protect her from the rest of the universe. It was like every atom in her body was meant to keep her safe and for once and for all she needed to know if Y/N would let her do that.

“Barton, Barnes made mini quiches,” she stated with a firmness in her voice that made it clear she was hoping Clint would leave the two of them alone. He didn’t completely trust her yet and Carol couldn’t blame him; he didn’t know her.

“It’s okay, Clint,” Y/N suddenly said before grabbing his hand and squeezing it while giving him a reassuring smile. That seemed to comfort him enough to the point where he felt fine with heading off back inside. So maybe the signs weren’t exactly pointing in the direction Carol wanted them to be in at the moment, but she was ready to settle her fears once and for all. And if she was dating Clint, then she was dating Clint. And if she wasn’t into girls, then she just wasn’t into girls. They could still be friends even if that wasn’t the result she was hoping for, but anything was better then living in agony trying not to give away any hints that she wanted nothing more than to kiss her every time she came to visit her cat-er-Flerken.

She took a deep breath. “I’m going to keep this short & sweet. Just like you,” she began and Y/N simply nodded. “I would like to take you out on a date and I have wanted too for a while actually. But even if you’re not into girls or just even into me I just think you should know that you’re amazingly talented, skilled, and warm-hearted that it was hard for me to believe you existed at first. Everything from your laugh, to your smile, to the way you get all adorably frustrated when you can’t remember the punch line to a really corny joke just reminds me of what I love about this world; and why it’s frankly my favorite planet in the universe. And I’ve only waited this long to ask because I was never sure if you’d be interested in someone like me because I can’t exactly give you the fairy tale romance you’ve always wanted, while Clint, on the otherha-”

She was unable to finish what she was saying because Y/N couldn’t stop herself from grabbing Carol’s shoulders, standing up on the top of her toes and leaning in to finally kiss her. Her lips were soft, but eager, and Carol happily kissed her back gradually deepening it before both of them had to pull back for air and she found herself giggling as Y/N was.

“I was wondering when you’d take all the hints I was leaving you,” she laughed. “And just for the record, I was always mad at the prince for scooping in and taking the princess before I could.”

“So, you and Clint?”

“Are friends,” she smiled with a hint of sadness in her eyes that made Carol concerned. 

“Hey, what’s wrong?” she cupped her chin with her hand lightly and scoped out her eyes for any tears she would be ready to wipe away. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“No, it’s okay. I want to,” Y/N took a deep breath and composed herself. “Clint was really close with Natasha. And I liked her but she couldn’t reciprocate those feelings. I still cared about her and she loved me too, just in her own way, but her death hasn’t exactly been easy on me. Clint’s just sort of the only one who understood how complicated our relationship was.”

“I’m so sorry,” Carol said truthfully just not being able to imagine what she was going through. 

“Well, he’s also been very patient with me for these last few weeks as I’ve kept on complaining about how this girl I’m interested didn’t seem like she would ever want to ask me out,” she laughed and playfully poked at Carol.

“Will a kiss make it up to you then?”

“Yes, it just might.”

[rboooks]

Based on the wonderful fic C’est La Vie   by the ever talented @cywscross. I just love the fic so much and I am very late to the fandom but whatever.  

AU: Had Hadrian had arrived a little earlier and Fate had given him a different back story. 

Orion Black had not noticed the new store until it’s opening day. 

He had been passing by with his Father who was ever so excited about buying Orion his Hogwarts supplies, insisting they needed to beat the crowds and go the moment the owl dropped it off at their home. (He knows the real reason, of course, being werewolves made it difficult to shop and “beating the crowds” was another way of saying “Avoid large amounts of discrimination”. He let his father think he wasn’t aware though) 

Orion couldn’t work up the energy to match Father’s enthusiasm. His first year of Hogwarts was everything and nothing like he expected it to be. He knew he would meet students who would not like him for his condiction but he had hope that he could make some kind of friends. Naive as it was, he went there with the desire to find the kind of best mates his Father had found among the magical castle walls.  

That hope had been shoot down the moment the headmaster announced what he was. Harry, always eager to put Orion in his place, jumped at the chance to turn everyone against him until it felt like he was sitting behind enemy lines no matter where he was.

 Add to the fact, he was sharing a room with Harry and his new idiot best friends not to mention the open hostility Weasley and Longbottom showed when drawing that line. Orion could honestly say he hated every second of his schooling.

Throughout the year, the eleven-year-old encountered some kids who seem friendly at first, but it all had ended up as a prank, often with Harry as the mastermind behind them. It was eye-opening, in a twisted so of way, to realize just how the world saw him. 

A part of him wanted nothing more than to burn the second year Hogwarts letter and never return. But he was no coward. He would not run away from reality. He was a Gryffindor after all, and he would endure these next six years like he did his first. (Maybe, just maybe this year will be different? First years wouldn’t be told of his status...maybe one of them would like him) 

“’ Rion? Would you like to go get your books first or some new robes?” Father called, smile soft but the corners of his eyes strain with distress when his son did nothing more than stare at him for a few seconds before shrugging.

All summer long, the young werewolf had spoken as minimum as he could, shut away in his room. He’s always been a bit reserved and socially awkward but never to these levels.

Orion knew his parents were worried, had known each time they came over during the full moons. They tried their best to cheer him up, to get him to talk but even that took the levels of energy he just wasn’t feeling anymore. Each passing day at Hogwarts caused him to shrink further in on himself in order to protect what little Orion could of his heart and now, well into the summer he seem unable to unshrink. Not even for his parents’ sake. 

“Well, how about-”  

Whatever Father was going to say was lost on Orion, because his attention had been taken by a new store. The one that had just open with no pre-warning. (Magic buildings tended to do that but they were at least advertise days beforehand in order to generate some kind of clientele).  

Or to be more precise Orion’s attention had been taken by the young boy standing in front of it, who was staring right back at him with wide eye astonishment. The boy was small, almost delicate face but painfully average and the only thing that really stood out were his green eyes. He was wearing Muggle brown trousers and a plain white shirt, a white apron was thrown over his outfit and a tray of little cups in his hands.

He must have been handing out samples. 

Orion sent him a sneer, suddenly angry that even here, even away from his classmates, other kids still stare at him like he shouldn't be real. 

The boy didn’t so much as blink. He returns the sneer with an intrigued look, unoffended in any kind of way before his eyes shift up to look at Father who had to realize Orion was no longer listening. It was only because he was watching that Orion caught the ripple of emotions that went over the boy’s face before it settles into a calm friendly glance.

“Is that one of your school friends?” Father asks a tad bit too eagerly. To Orion’s horror, he was already moving in the direction of the child even before finishing his question.

This seems to be all the approval the stranger needs, seeing as he straightens up, turning in their direction fully. Before he could state he had no friends, the boy left his post and was walking quickly in their direction.

It was almost a run, but the boy didn’t seem to waste a single step, graceful in a way that didn’t make sense. There might be a mistake, maybe the sounds of the always busy alley masking it, but he swore he couldn’t hear his footsteps either.  In only a matter of seconds, he was standing before Orion, holding out his little try.

“Free sample?”  The werewolf didn’t miss the way he seems to stare at him like he was drinking up his features. 

Orion said nothing staring back at him before his father cleared his throat an obvious sign he was disapproving of his manners.  “Um, what is it?”

“Dragon’s Breath. You stick the puffball in any of these flavors and blow smoke out while you eat” The boy said easily, and for a startling moment, he realizes he may not be all that young. In fact, they may even be near the same age despite how tiny this kid was.  “It’s really popular in the States.”

“Are you from the States?” Father asked taking the toothpick the boy offers and stabbing one of the puffs. He quickly dunks it in the white melted chocolate like Orion knew he would.  

“I’m from all over.” The kid answers staring up at him with an odd emotion in his eyes.  “My parents were curse breakers so the family traveled a lot.”

His eyes flicker to Orion.  “Would you like one?”

He doesn’t answer, and the air thickens with awkward stillness for a few seconds before Orion careful takes one of the puffs going for the caramel flavor. Luckily the other doesn’t seem all that offended, patiently giving him time to decide what he wanted. 

Once it’s in his mouth the flavor of caramel dances over his tongue, and he makes a small O with his lips as smoke rushes out. It’s not a little puff like he expected by a long white smoky breath of air that curls and flickers in the air. 

It’s kinda wicked.

His Father blows out his own smoke smiling. It’s as interesting watching as it is being the one to perform it. “Your dad would love this.”

The boy beams.  “We sell some take-home boxes with various flavors if you like to take him some? I’m Hadrian by the way. Hadrian Evans”

“Remus Lupin,” Father answers charmed by Evans. “This is my son Orion Black.”

If he’s curious about the different last names then Evans doesn’t show it. Instead, he bobs his head at him respectfully. “Nice to meet you”

Maybe this year was worst on him then he thought because Orion finds words falling out of his mouth before he can stop himself. “I’m a werewolf.”

He waits for the fear, or the hatred aware his father has stiffened next to him but unwilling to look away from the green eyes. Evans doesn’t faze in the slightest instead, he raises a brow looking far too amused. “That’s nice. I’m a wizard myself”

He wonders if the bewilderment he feels is showing on his face. It was...such a lack of reaction even Father did a double take. What does one even say to that? 

Evans suddenly smiles, warm and friendly in equal parts, and Orion doesn’t know what to do in the glory of it.  “I like you.”

Is this what it feels like to be kicked in the chest?  

“Hadrian Evans!” A man’s voice suddenly cuts through the air, sharp with chiding. Evans winces, for the first time looking like a child. 

Walking towards them is an older looking Evans. He’s got long dark uncontrol hair, poorly pulled into a ponytail, like it was shoved there despite it not wanting to be. Loose stands swung rebelliously out, his green eyes aren’t nearly as bright at Evans, more moss then brilliant jewel but they are the same shapes.  

He’s older but far too young to be Evans father. A brother perhaps? 

His face is pulled into a nasty scowl. “Young man, what did I say about wandering off by yourself? You could have been kidnapped!”

“Sorry Will,” Evans tells...older Evans.  He gestures to the werewolves, his eyes seemed to convey another strange emotion.  “I just wanted to meet someone my age.”

Orion feels his face heat up as the older man cuts his gaze at him and Father, looking like he suddenly understands why Evans disobeyed him. For some reason, he is embarrassed by that. (From the corner of his eye he peaks up at his parent and is meet with gleeful amusement, beaming in parental pride. His face grows hotter)

“It’s fine, just don’t do it again.” He huffs rubbing Evans’ hair roughly. He grins over at the werewolves open and friendly as Evans. “Sorry about him. He tends to ignore social rules. I’m Will Evans, this brat’s older brother.”

The pair of brothers invite them back to their shop, called Dimension Hoppers, which turns out to be a general store of various imported objects from all over the world. There are so many new things that Orion could barely choose where to look, Hadrien dragging him along pointing and explaining what each item was, with obvious enthusiasm. 

Especially when they came across the Ancient Runes section. Orion thinks that’s his new...friend?...favorite topic.

Obviously, he had some experience as a salesman, because he doesn’t flatter whenever Orion asks questions nor tries to push a sale. He just gives a general tour of all the allies as the grown-up talk up front.

Turns out Will was also a curse breaker, following his parents' footsteps. After their deaths, he gained guardship over Hadrian and had chosen to start a business using the family connects to supply rare objects from around the world, so he could be close by when Hadrien started Hogwarts. 

“He was going to homeschool me,” Hadrian says a few hours later walking with him as the pair finish shopping for their school supplies that weren’t sold in his brother's shop. 

Which were only like five things. Orion himself had most of his list finished there too. The prices were much fairer and his Father had been overjoyed that they could save some for new robes. 

“But I kinda always wanted to go to an actual school instead of being taught everything on the road, you know?”

He didn’t. But he also didn’t know how in the world he left Dimension Hoppers with an invitation to come back and hang out sometime before Hogwarts. Nor why in world, Will had passed him some Dragon Breath’s boxes on the house for his brother’s first friend on their way out.

His father wouldn’t stop smiling and...neither could he. Orion hadn’t had this much fun in a long time. He already couldn’t wait to see Hadrian again. 

Maybe his second year at Hogwarts won’t be all that bad after all.

[melaenis-ficente-blog]

Through the Door || Dark Squad

On the night of All Hallow’s Eve, Melaenis embarks on her most ambitious spell yet, and the consequences ripple through Swynlake...

MELAENIS: All Hallow’s Eve.

On a night like this, there was more magic than air. You could breathe the magic and feel it expanding in your lungs. You could look up into the sky and see it in each blinking star, in the curl of wind through the trees. It was a night for the meeting of worlds: of goblins, ghouls, ghosts, but also of their stories, each one a key that unlocked a new door to let them in. All Hallow’s Eve erased almost all such veils, so things that seemed different were not different at all.

In other words, it was the perfect time for Melaenis and Howl to try once again to use their tear. The tear was the key. And this time, when they turned it, it wouldn’t be an accident.

It shimmered in all its Strangeness, where they’d hidden it in the petunias. Over the past few months, Mel had been monitoring it. It was slowly expanding, though at a miniscule rate that could only be measured, really, by the starlight. Eventually the tear would get too wide for the charm they had created to hold it. Eventually-- thousands of years from now-- Mel figured the tear, if not mended, would split like a mouth and swallow the entire town whole. Well, if no one messed with it.

Mel fully intended to mess with it.

It’s what she did best. And this second round of experimentation was going to be more intentional than the first. Once again, she drew out the moonlight into a fine thread, winding it around her spool. Howl gathered its opposite: black night, moonlight’s shadow.

And Maggie, their dear girl, completed an additional step that Mel hoped would help stabilize the tear, minimizing the chance of another mistake: she blew a gentle circle of dragon flame onto the ground. The fire licked the air and sizzled the grass and smelled of magic, of the tear, of other worlds. Melaenis’ stomach clenched and her eyes flashed red in anticipation.

She checked the time. Nearly the witching hour.

“If this works, imagine. The entire multiverse will live in our garden,” said Mel and she grinned at Howl. “No door will ever be closed to us.”

HOWL:

There was truly no time of the year more deliciously wonderful than All Hallow’s Eve.

The timing of this experiment was deliberate. There were days and months and weeks of the year that lent themselves to certain spells and reagents and all of these, you see, varied among sorcerers and cultures. But in the Western canon, there was no day as suited for magic as All Hallow’s Eve, as Sanheim.

As Howl gathered the darkness in his hands, he glanced over at the tear in question, still shimmering and glimmering, almost with a mischievous little wink. He wondered if tears were at all sentient. Perhaps another question to answer at another time, after he and Mel had harnessed the power of interdimensional travel for their own uses.

“Ah, and they say it could not be done,” said Howl with an easy laugh.

Calcifer hovered near Howl, his eyes steadying on Maggie who helped ignite the circle with her dragon flame. That was only step one of the matter, you see, for it would take the flame of a demon as well — a creature out of this realm — in order for their spell to work. If their calculations were correct, of course.

He drifted over to the dragon flame and extended his own fiery tendril. The two fires licked together, merging almost, except Howl could clearly see where Cal’s started and where Maggie’s did, even if the flames looked just like any orange flames. There was something different about the both of them — the dragon flame sharper and vibrant, the demon flame flickering more frequently.

“The moon is almost in position,” he called across the circle. Maggie and Cal had both flew over to him. Maggie snapped at Howl  playfully, while Calcifer nestled onto her back. Howl held the spool away from Maggie’s teeth. “No biting, love. We don’t need another tear to mess with right now. Perhaps after we successfully conquer the multiverse then you can have another go.”

MELAENIS: When designing this spell, there’d been many questions to consider. There had, yes, been the time. There had been the strength of the reagents as well as a question of their ripeness. Was fresh moonlight more effective than moonlight soaked over the period of several months? What about the age of the stardust they plucked from the sky? They’d had to consider how to design the runes, from the size of it to its geometrical components. Should the whole thing be drawn with dragon and demon fire? Or would such a thing spell disaster, rip the cosmos in half, and scatter the pieces?

Never, though, had they asked whether or not they should.

When they arrived home from Elias, Mel had instead turned to Howl and simply asked when they could try again. And Howl had smiled at her and pulled one of her wild pin-curls with a smirk that would make a lesser woman swoon. But Mel was no woman, and they were not merely lovers. Instead, they faced each other as partners, each a different half of a magic word.

There had only been yes. And what now? And when? And how?

The why was unquestioned. The why was because of love, even if it was a love that did not look the same as other loves when captured in their magical vials. It wasn’t a rosebud love, nor a sweet-as-cherry love. Mel didn’t know what that love would look like if procured, for it was something that neither of them could quite capture even if they wanted to-- which they did not. Some reagents were only powerful when they were wild.

But it was enough to know that love was there, burning and burning. A torch that would never go out.

The light of it flickered in Mel’s eyes as she looked at Howl and Maggie and smiled. This smile was not so complicated. If caught as a reagent, it would manifest as a single, silver coin. It lasted only as long as Howl’s eyes were not on her.

When he looked her way, Mel looked up at the moon instead. She gave her silver-coin smile to her and bit down on her lip.

“It’s time,” she said softly. Then she lifted her wand, wrapped in moonlight and met Howl’s gaze over the flickering flames of their rune. “Let us open another door.”

Like a conductor to a great orchestra, Mel flourished the wand. The moonlight spilled over the circle. The tear shimmered, then glistened and then, light began to seep from its delicate seam.

It brightened like a brand new star on the cusp of its birth.

HOWL

Here is the thing about Halloween this year: it also fell right at the cusp of a Mercury Retrograde.

As such — breakdowns in communication. As such — breakdowns between what kept this world from the next.

So when the light spilled from the tear, it was brighter and bolder than it had been the last few times. Howl had to shield his eyes from it. Looking at it too directly felt like looking into the sun. No, not the sun. It was brighter than the sun. Something about it felt like it was too much for this world, so pulsating and brilliant.

And standing next to it, Mel looked as beautiful and brilliant as ever. It was almost like she belonged with this absolutely impossible feat of magic. The light spilled over her and Howl could see a wicked glimmer in her green eyes, a sheen in her wild hair, sparks of curiosity flying off of her like a she herself was a wildfire.

There was something about dimension-bending magic that served as such a delicious aphrodisiac, Howl had always thought. Dark magic, of course, was how Maggie had been conceived.

“We should anchor the runes now!” Howl shouted, for with the light came an unearthly humming sound, something that filled his ears but that sounded nothing like he’d ever heard on earth before — a mix of wind rushing, the static of a television signal, and beneath it all, what sounded like a human voice — a woman’s voice. It reminded Howl a bit of what he imagined a siren’s call to sound like; there was something about it that transfixed him, called him towards the tear in front of him. But he kept his eyes on Mel, instead, reaching for his wand to draw the anchoring rune.

MELAENIS: Mel heard the woman’s voice too.

She thought she heard that voice say her name.

She turned toward it, momentarily forgetting she was in the middle of a spell, that it was she who held the wand, who made the commands. Instead, she was commanded, and the spell enthralled her. Her eyes widened as they filled with this brand new light, brighter than any sun, yes, brighter than any moon. It was not a light she had ever seen. As it washed over her, she knew it wasn’t light at all, but something else Realized into Light as it left its dimension and reached, and reached, and reached for her.

The dragon tasted it and woke up in her chest. When Mel opened her eyes against the light, she saw through it with the dragon’s eyes, who had always been of other worlds.

She saw beyond the light. And what Melaenis saw was not light at all, but an open door that led to a thousand worlds beyond this one.

What she saw was a hand, beckoning to her and the flash of a familiar smile-- her own smile. The woman’s voice was her own. She was already on the other side of the tear.

Howl’s voice faded, lost underneath the growing rumbling. It sounded like a train rushing toward her. Her grip loosened on her wand. She didn’t realize this, until the wand had already slipped from her hand and vanished into the air as though it had never been there. With that hand, now empty, Mel reached back toward the tear and her head tilted…

“Howl-- are you seeing this?” She gasped the words into the air, where they were quickly swallowed. She laughed with the Delight of a much younger witch, and that laughter spilled into the cacophony, one instrument among many. The spell was out of control now-- Mel hadn’t performed the anchor and so energy from the tear was spilling out carelessly all over the place. But Mel didn’t care. Here, standing in the middle of her own failure, she could only look forward.

The hand reached for her again, fingers relaxed, asking for her to take it. She felt the rest of the spell’s magic already wrapped around her, the way it had wrapped around her wand and made it vanish. Her breath caught in her throat as the hand finally wrapped around her wrist.

In the last second, Mel looked over her shoulder and saw Howl one last time. She smiled at him.

And then, Mel followed herself into the door, and the magic swallowed her whole. HOWL

He knew it would happen a moment before it did.

He saw the rushing light. He saw the Delight spill from Mel — oh, and how fire bright it was, beautiful flames that licked across Melaenis’ sharp face, illuminating her in a vibrant glow, lighting her eyes up with a spark that Howl realized he had not seen in quite some time. He heard the voice, so sweet and intoxicating — and so familiar.

He dropped his own wand as Mel smiled at him.

That blasted heart in his chest pounded. It squeezed. It raced. It scampered with the frenzy of a frightened hair.

“Wait for me!” he called out. “I’m coming with you!”

And he ran towards the tear — but the moment he crossed into the circle, he found he could run no further, blocked out by the tear’s magic. This voice was for Mel and Mel alone. This tear had opened for her, full of possibilities and universes and magic. Just for her.

Howl’s gaze met hers once more.

His heart tightened.

He was not mad. Of course he was not mad — this was Mel’s destiny. This was a tear that had cut itself into the universe for her. Every single moment of Mel’s life had led up to this moment: her dragon; her landing in Swynlake; their first meeting by the lake when she’d naked and covered in ash; the town bringing the two of them together with every spell; the first time they’d come together — not just two sorcerers, but two shadows, who knew each other in the most wicked, intimate ways possible; Maggie’s egg; Howl losing his way; Maggie’s hatching; Mel snatching Howl away and then returning his heart — it all led to this moment.

Howl knew it now.

The wind whipped through his hair as he watched Melaenis — his darling, his love, the only person in this whole wide world — nay, the only person across the multiverse — who matched him in every way — slip through the tear in time and space. Away from Swynlake.

Away from this world.

Away from him.

The moment she stepped through, the tear basically vomited a spew of light and sound and an overwhelming overload of the senses and then sucked it all back in all at once.

Nothing remained except the faint smell of Melaenis’s evening coffee and a lick of smoke in the air.

Howl stared at the empty clearing. He knelt down and reached for his wand, wiping it off with the fabric of his blouse.

“Well, well,” he sighed. And even though his stupid heart felt a little heavier now, the corner of his lip tugged up and he looked at the nothingness where Mel had been just moments ago. “You never made it easy to chase after you now did you, my darling?”

[ketzwrites]

prompts are open again? a joy! if you want to, of course, this one from the list you just reblogged: 75. “You fainted, straight into my arms. You know, if you wanted my attention, you didn’t have to go to such extremes.”

I hope you don’t mind that I kept your prompt for last. I wanted to write something for Halloween and this gave me the greatest idea. So, here it is: canon divergent. What if Alec and Magnus met for the first time during Halloween night?

75. “You fainted, straight into my arms. You know, if you wanted my attention, you didn’t have to go to such extremes.”

Halloween was Magnus’ favorite Mundane holiday. He supposed it was the same for most Warlocks. Halloween was the one night of the year when everyone would accept them, even celebrate them. If a Warlock chose not to glamour their Warlocks mark, there would be no shunning or scared gasps. On that single night, their demonic heritage was a reason for admiration.

Something similar happened to the other Downworlders. Seelies that enjoyed the Mundane World could walk around with their painted skin and pointy ears. Vampires and werewolves were just other faces in the crowd of painted monsters, no reason to be feared or rejected.

On that night, the Mundanes also grew more daring, more trusting. Among the costumes, it was impossible to discern a fang from a prop, to smell the realness of blood and fear. Halloween was a night of freedom, but not in the way the Mundanes thought. The holiday could be theirs, but Halloween was for the Downworlders.

But, unfortunately, it was also for the demons.

On that night, the distance between realms ceased to exist. More demons slivered from Hellish dimensions into Earth. The same trust that brought the Mundanes closer to Downworlders also let them into the claws of demons. As the High Warlock of Brooklyn, Magnus had seen his fair share of demonic attacks. The Shadowhunters were spread thin all around the city, barely able to fight off the creatures.

Every year, around the end of October, the number of demonic attacks would grow. That meant the Shadowhunters were too preoccupied fighting the creatures they were supposed to antagonize instead of harassing Downworlders, so Magnus considered it all ironically appropriate. But, every once in a while, the demonic activity would be just too much.

Magnus supposed that explained the pitiful sight in front of him. There was a single Shadowhunter desperately trying to fight off a hoard of Shax demons. The poor man was fit, young, and clearly well-trained, but he also looked exhausted. His clothes had cuts all around, revealing gashes of dry blood on the man’s pale skin. That was not the first fight of the night for that Shadowhunter. But it might as well be the last if he didn’t manage to put that bow of his to use.

Maybe it was the something in the air. Maybe it was the drowsiness of the drinks he had less than an hour before. Maybe it was the Halloween Spirit. Whatever it was, something spurred Magnus into action. He joined the fight, blasting away three demons in one charge. That gave the Shadowhunter the window of time he needed. Expertly, he loaded his bow and shot four arrows in succession. With the hoard reduced in half, it was easy for Magnus to take care of three more demons while the Shadowhunter finished off the remaining four.

With a smirk, Magnus inspected the job. “That’s what I call a party, right darling?” He chuckled and turned to the Shadowhunter.

Shadowhunters weren’t known for their abundant sense of humor, but Magnus expected at least a snort. However, what he saw was the young man barely managing to stand on his feet. The Shadowhunter shot Magnus a feverish look and exhaled through his mouth. And then he started to fall.

Magnus managed to catch him before the poor man fell onto his face. Shaking his head, Magnus sighed. “Now, now. What am I to do with you?”

He considered his options for a moment but then shrugged. It was Halloween after all, a night where the impossible came true. This might as well happen. With a flourish, Magnus opened up a portal and dragged the fallen Shadowhunter through it.

----

Magnus stepped out into his own apartment and laid down the Shadowhunter on his couch. He was too tall to fit in, but then again, the couch was meant to sit on. Tucking the man as well as he could, Magnus moved to his apothecary. He let his fingers brush through the ingredients on the shelves until he found what he was looking for. Magnus picked up a bottle and a small tin box, and then walked back to the unconscious man on his couch.

Holding his breath, Magnus opened up the bottle right beneath the Shadowhunter’s nose. The corpse flower’s smell was a nasty thing and it did the trick immediately. The Shadowhunter’s eyes shot open and he coughed.

“Oh good. You’re alive,” Magnus said cheerfully. He closed the bottle and wave away the foul smell by conjuring flames. He then handed the small tin box to the man. “Eat one of these. It will restore your energy.”

To the Shadowhunter’s credit, he accepted the box. “What,” he said in a low tone, “happened?”

“You fainted, straight into my arms.” Magnus smirked at him and stepped away, giving him some space. “You know, if you wanted my attention, you didn’t have to go to such extremes.”

The line didn’t seem to impress him. Pity, such a pretty man. “You’re the High Warlock. You’re Magnus Bane.”

Pretty and knowledgeable. Magnus wouldn’t have to regret saving him after all. “Yes. And you are?”

“Alec. Alec Lightwood,” the Shadowhunter frowned and searched for a way out. “Those Shax demons-”

“Gone. That happened before the fainting.” Magnus gestured to the box still closed in Alec’s hands. “Eat up, darling. You don’t look so good. In the figurative sense of the phrase, of course, because you look fine.”

Magnus stopped, almost too abruptly. Was he actually flirting with a Shadowhunter? And not only any Shadowhunter, a Lightwood on top of that. Probably the spawn of Maryse and Robert Lightwood. Halloween really was an unusual night.

Better focus on other things. Magnus examined Alec better. This man would be in charge of the entire New York Institute while his parents were gone. No wonder he looked so exhausted, Alec had probably been awake for days. Magnus wouldn’t have trusted the task of overseeing Halloween to an inexperienced leader but knowing the arrogance of the Shadowhunters, this young man probably begged for it, judging himself ready and-

“Thank you for saving me,” Alec said. “How much do I owe you?”

Such a simple question, but it knocked the words out of Magnus. He blinked and then narrowed his eyes. Did Alec just thank him? He couldn’t have heard it right. But then again, Alec looked like he expected Magnus to name a price, so if the second part was real, then the first part also was.

Waving his hand, Magnus shrugged. “No charge. I can’t have the future Head of the Institute dying from a Shax Demon attack. It would make those nasty creatures too bold. That doesn’t help anyone.”

Alec smiled weakly. “I’m not going to be the next Head of the Institute, but thank you anyway.” He put down the tin box and then stood up, fishing his stele from a pocket. Magnus blinked as Alec used it to activate his Stamina Rune.

“You’re not going back out there, are you? It’s Halloween,” Magnus shook his head, exasperated. “There are demons all around the city.”

“I need to go back to the Institute.” Alec frowned. “I got separated from my siblings, we were supposed to meet back there.”

Rolling his eyes, Magnus opened up a portal. Alec was about to protest, but Magnus stopped him by raising a finger up. “If you want to pay me so badly, do it in the form of a drink later this week. Just be sure you’ll survive until then. I’ve dated many people in my life, but never a ghost. Don’t intend to start now.”

For a moment, Magnus was sure Alec would faint again. He grew very pale and his mouth fell slightly open. But then, the Shadowhunters pressed his lips together and nodded. “Later this week, then.”

With that, Alec disappeared into the portal. Magnus frowned, not quite sure what to do with the night he was having. Halloween was supposed to be an exhilarating night, one in which he could be more himself than any other during the year. He still had, even with the night’s strange turn of events.

It was just… Magnus never imagined he could’ve been himself near a Shadowhunter. Or that he would be anticipating “later this week” so intensely as he did just then. What a strange night.

“Either way,” Magnus said with a shrug and a smile, “Happy Halloween for me.”

[varaxous]

An image of my base, in total

The “front” view (formerly the front view, was absorbed in my great expansion)

Second view from the side

Behind view!

The other side view

And finally, another angle on the front.

This door is where everything ORIGINALLY was but then I expanded and forgot that was there, as I have crafted creative flight :I

The first view we have, here you can see my cobblestone and seared brick generator (right). I checked and the compression thing I have there has 9,366 double compressed cobble stone, which comes to a total of 758,646 cobble. Woah! (I have about 1.8 million in my other storage :P)

On the left you can see an old coke oven, which promptly fell out of use when I found out immersive engineering steel was interchangeably with other types of steel and also just didn’t want to use immersive engineering.

Let’s move on!

Moving upstairs, we see what was once my storage area and main crafting area. The pink wood over there is a leftover from a fire I needed to patch up (cursed soil is a pesky thing >:V) The storage stuff in the back is LONG out of use and just has some nuggets of stuff I don’t need anymore.

In that back corner, we have my lava storage for tinkerers and also my really big smelting tower! I installed a few mods because I didn’t want to deal with some craft recipes so I don’t really use it anymore. 

Now finally going outside, we can see my main crafting area. Those machines on the right I rarely ever use and are a leftover of my former crafting area. The stuff in the middle though is still used a TON! Those are my AE2 crafting stuff and once I unlocked autocrafting, I stored EVERY SINGLE RECIPE I used. Took a while but it was super nifty in the end. I’ll get back to the autocrafting in a bit.

My automatic pure certus, fluix, and pure fluix crystal crafting area, which use teleporters and a 6 facet seed speed up thing, which reduce the time needed from 12+ hours down to about 2 minutes. 

This is the only machine I use from immersive engineering, the elusive bottler. For 500 mb more of ender fluid stuff, I can automate the tesseract building a lot more. And that’s all I use it for :P

Here’s where I make all my charged certus and some various machines. The stuff on the left (the green things) do my soul binding stuff and that green rod thing store experience from mod farm. It was at about 347 levels which is…a lot to say the least.

One of my capacitor banks! You can’t see it too well here but that right there stores about 10 million rf there, which is useful as a buffer before it goes off to the various other machines and my quarry.

Here it is! The heart of my auto-crafting. These hold probably like 300 recipes ((I’ve never counted lmao) and each have the max speed cartridge things. 

This is the heart of my AE2 system total! AE2 is a pain in the ass and I hate channels. 

And a quick rewind! Here is where I power everying, with my two reactors. I’m not sure how much rf they’re actually producing per tick, but it is enough to fill that 300 million rf bank up in like an hour or so. As much as that is though, it’s still draining at about 10k per tick and I’m running out of fuel soooo…not good.

Back to autocrafting! Here I alloy, smelt, and macerate and all that jazz, as well as some extra goodies!

This is the other half of my alloying thing, which does the special ores ™ such as vibrant alloy or redstone alloy. 

This is where 90% of my ore processing occurs! Here, ores of any type filter in from my various quarries and are macerated then smelted. I have somewhere in the realm of 100k of most metals.

Right by that I have my shiny metal processing thing, which is surprisingly difficult to do. It involves this part, which smelts ferrous ore, cinnebar, and…

Cryotheum dust ;) Entirely automated and I have like 20k of it lmao.

Backpedal just a bit, here is where I make all of my circuits and stuff.

AND OF COURSE STORAGE!!! Here is pretty much all of my misc items, from blaze powder to gun powder. I’ve got all this storage interfaces hooked up to my AE2 system and it works like a charm. 

And metals! Here are all my metals with a bonus shot of my auto alloying stuff. I fell out of making more when I realized it was super inefficient and really hard to make automatic past “filling a block with 64 stacks of stuff and just make more when you run out.”

Which brings me to farming. Ah, how annoying but also not annoying it is. In the back, I’ve got my ender lily farms producing ender pearls and on the left I’ve got my nether wart production. Apart from that, here is rather vanilla.

Here we’ve got my breeding area and crop storage. The sprinklers make it work super fast and the machine breeds for 10/10/10 crops. Speeds up a process which would otherwise take a while.

And here is the cream of the crop (ha ha). This produces a SHIT LOAD of mystical leaves which is super useful for botania. I think, however, I overdid it a little. I’ve got like 200k-800k of each leaf. On the left, minicio essence, of which I have 8.5 million. Not useful right now, but should be in the future. Also got some rubber production, wood production, it’s pretty neat. But where do all those leave go, I wonder?

Here is my botania set up! I’ve automated every single rune and the petal apothecary. I had to cheat just a little bit and install buildcraft for the pipes, but I don’t care cause otherwise it would have been essentially impossible.

This right here is where I automate the elf stuff, with a nifty cannon and some coal eating flowers. This process, combined, is incredibly wasteful but I have too much coal so we’ll just keep going until it becomes a problem :^)

Down back in the basement, this is where I automate my mana steel production. I use a bunch of ender lilies, coal, and some fancy redstone stuff to automatically facilitate the production of terrasteel. The pipes ensure that only one operation is attempted to be completed at a time. The Redstone stuff ensures that the stuff in that buffer chest are ONLY dropped when there is enough mana to create one terrasteel ingot, which avoids the pesky item despawn timer. As for botania, that’s really all I’ve got.

Blood magic, woo! I’ve got mixed feelings on this mod but whatever, it was fun. This set up automatically produces me life points on two different rings. That giant stone structure over there is where I automatic minor demon spawning for a bit. I ended that because they tended to two shot and also just clip through the walls :/

And now down here. Where I’ve automated EVERY. SINGLE. BLOOD MAGIC. POTION THING. This took hours to finally do but it was so worth it.

My witch reactor, which has the benefits of A). not despawning B) not dying to the damage ticks and C) all of them are named some variation of “fart.” Real mature, I know. 

The mystical realm of…thaumcraft…

Here we have my thaumcraft base, which I built out of a tree because what the hell else would I do with it? Also because all the machinery and WATER SPRINKLERS RUNNING 100% OF THE TIME, my main base slaps my computer down to an entire 9 frames every second. 

This was my only real attempt at actually building something visually pleasing. I think I did alright?  Anyways, front door pics.

In the hall of the mountain king…

And here’s the inside! Completely empty! 

The courtyard!

My little viewport on the side because what wizard tower is complete without creepy eyes? This modpack was not the place to start thaumpack because it came at a time where I had automated everything else and I just hit this massive roadblack. It looks interesting but the stuff is a bit confusing and It’s frustrating having a shit ton of resources and just being forced to sit on them because you don’t need any of them for the first half of thaumcraft (at least not in amounts that would have any measurable impact). Right here is where I stopped playing the pack because thaumcraft, with the jacked up recipes and tweaks in this, was just boring.

Circling back to my main base, here are my various portals! The dimensions added by divine rpg, im sorry, suck. They suck super fucking hard. Every single one is the same reskinned dimension with the same reskinned enemies. The only reason you need to get in there is for like 1k of the ore, 1k of the enemy drops, and nothing else. 

Smol wittle nether base uwu. Here is my nether stuff. Accidentally put a quarry to dirt replace right in the middle. Woops.

May have done it twice actually…

Here is where I have my wither skeleton farm and ghast farm They run constantly and are big.

And that’s it for the tour! Have a couple stats pages:

And that wraps that up :) The pack is Divine Journey, slightly edited configs to adjust some recipes and drops and a couple of mods added. If you’ve got any questions or want to see a specific part, just ask!

As for the pack itself, a lot of fun but very grindy. I couldn’t make it past thaumcraft because of the aforementioned stuff and this is an awful first pack (lmao woops). For experienced players tho (or with friends of various experience), I expect it would fun and also a lot more doable. 

[post-office-inbox]

Undertale & delta rune Sequel/Prequel/Post-Genocide/AU Theory

There seems to be a disagreement about what delta rune is in regards to Undertale. According to Toby’s Q&A that this is an alternate universe where choice does not matter. He also stated that Undertale and its characters had a happy ending and that nothing we do here can affect them.  But there is still some discourse in weather the game is a sequel/prequel/post-genocide/au/some unholy combination of that. Strap in, I think it’s the last one.

To clarify, there will be four characters I will be mainly focusing on that the games seem to revolve around. I’ll be clarifying each one and how that character makes each of the “quells” possible.

Sequel: OK, this is the one that goes right into Meta territory. I think it is safe to say that in Undertale you were part of the story. Not Frisk, not Chara, you: the player. You are controlling the vessel in the game. This is backed up by how if you boot up Undertale Flowey calls YOU by the name you entered. Delta rune confirmed this by asking for YOUR name. You the player, and when you save low and behold, that is the name that gets put on the save file. Not Kris, your name.

So, we are controlling Kris for this adventure. That is why he ‘knows’ things that he couldn’t possibly know about characters that we know from Undertale. Like Alphs and Undine being together or knowing San’s even though both characters don’t know what we are talking about. Interesting enough Kris has information that we the player don’t have. When you go to inspect the card for the reindeer and he asks you why it looks like we (the player) have never seen it before. Also cute reindeer from class seems to be weirded out by the way Kris has been acting, so we the player are controlling Kris’s actions, not Kris himself/herself. Also, both in Undertale and in this game, right after cut scenes Frisk/Chara/Kris will turn to face the camera, right at you. This being an RPG maker game where you have control over what happens to the character sprites, Toby did this deliberately.

And of course where Chara directly interacts with you at the end of a Genocide run. AND Kris looking at you with a knife in his hands, throwing out his soul, the culmination of his being, the thing that we controlled him; is now locked away. And we can’t do a damn thing about it. My point is that for us (the player) this IS a sequel. The game that comes next. “Undertale 2”. The next point of reference that we can see and can control. Or rather NOT control as the narrative says: our choices don’t matter. That brings us too:

Prequel: Flowy tells us over and over again that “In this world it’s kill or be killed!” If we substitute the word ‘world’ with ‘game’ we (the player) can infure that in this game our choices matter. That depending on how we act we could kill or save anyone or everyone depending on our choice. Deltarune tells us up front that “in this world, your choice does not matter” that is telling us that in this game, evens will play out no matter what we do. One of the most frustrating parts about a prequel is that it is just telling you stuff that happened before the main event.

For example: in a story about Alfred, batman’s butler (I cannot frikking believe they are making that a movie) it does not matter what he does or who he met along the way, by the end of the film, he will become the character we know. We end up with a bit of predestination. Who will be our Pennyworth in this situation?

Sans. And possibly Papyrus.

In Undertale it is established that the two skeleton brothers just showed up one day. No other explanation was given and it was just sort of hand waved away. Later we got all the connections to Gaster and that lead to some speculation about this vague origin. Now, here comes delta rune. We see Sans outside of what is clearly a building representing Grilbies. And if you listen carefully HE SOUNDS DIFFERENT! His little ‘he he he’s are speed up from what we heard in Undertale. I think the Sans we hear here is younger, more fast talking. A bit more inexperienced, not seeming to know as much as he did in the old game.

There is this lovely theory going around that Sans is actually a Darkner. That does answer an obvious question I didn’t think about until then. Where is Sans moving from??  Answer: The Dark Word you just spent so much time getting out of, duh. (Papyrus not so much but?)

So we have his origin and possible timeline:

Born in the dark world ->

came to Hometown (possibly through the same door you and Susie got through...) ->

Something terrible involving Gaster AND Kris gets him sent to the underground in an alternate timeline/world ->

Undertale happens.

That’s how he knows that ‘kids like you, should be burning in hell’. He has already seen one world be shattered by one kid in a striped shirt go crazy and kill everyone. And that leads us to:

Alternate Universe: The tale of two Asriel’s. Or three possibly. Everyone is trying to figure out where the heck the beginning bits and the end bits ‘fit’ into the timeline. They kind of skip over the part where you are in a completely different game for the entire time, you know hello? Ralsei is one of the three party members for most of the game and is reveled to be a sort of espy for Asriel. Susie (and possibly Kris) seemed to understand this due the vast amount of “??????????????????????????????” she gives after he takes off his hat. We know that Kris has a brother named Asriel matching up with the one from Undertale (honestly I thought for sure that meant the ending of Hunger tale was cannon). With the bizarre way everyone in Hometown has a counterpart in Undertale why would there need to be a second Asriel?

Let me introduce what I think Toby is going to do here: enter the multiverse. Now it could be that delta rune and Undertale are alternate timelines instead of straight up different universe. For now though I will be treating them as different universes. We have three ‘worlds’ that we know of: Undertale, the light world, and the dark world. If I had to guess the dark world is somehow a reflection of the light world so they also have characters that are similar to Undertale counterparts, see The Legend of Zelda: A Link between Worlds. The Light and Dark worlds also mirror of how the humans and monsters were on against one another.  We should be on the look out for characters in the dark world that matches with the ones in the og game.

I had a thought that maybe Sans is the Dark world counterpart of Papyrus so that instead of treating themselves as they same person they decided to be brothers instead.

I do wonder who the ‘Knight’ is that Lancers dad was talking about though.

Most of the rest of my thoughts are me just trying to project without much evidence. Until we know how Gaster and his followers fit into all of this I don’t think we can get much more out of it. Buy this being bizaro world the last one is:

Post-Genocide: Chara you poor creepy child. As everyone knows, in a genocide run, you kill everyone. Chara eventually takes over and kills you the player. Even though Flowey thinks you are the sibling from his childhood. You are not. You are the player controlling the character. The evil came from you. The vessel might become Frisk once you decide NOT to kill anybody but then Chara comes back and kills everyone anyway.

Now, we are in an alternate universe. Where our choices (the players not Kris’s) do. Not. Matter. And there is no Frisk, only a child who is this universes version of Chara. He did not die like in Undertale so now we live in a universe where that less than happy kid grows up into a less then talkative teenager. Where is Frisk then? Did Frisk’s own reasons for climbing the mountain (as hinted at by Asreil at the end of the game) never come to pass? Did just straight up die? We don’t know.

And having us act like a kid that may not exist in this universe really doesn’t sit well with Kris and he throws his will (US!) is in the cage. We told him about stuff. We knew about the other Universe and how things were different. And how little Kris was actually a guy called Frisk and he was a happy person that made friends and talked to people and didn’t kill anyone. If you didn’t do the Genocide ending anyway. Then you were…Chara.

Yeah, that’s the ending of delta rune ch1 guys. We see Kris throw us into a cage and since we were controlling him, he knows about the genocide ending. Since we told him how, he knows exactly what to do. A normal (if creepy) kid got possessed by some beings from some weird dimensions and knows exactly what to do with them. Pulls out a knife from nowhere and smiles (the kids smile, not one we made ) and his eyes glow red like in a photo he has seen through our eyes. The ones he is looking into as the view goes black. He has seen the ending and he has seen us and he knows he can kill us. All he has to do now is to kill everyone else. And he’ll do it too, because we can’t do anything to help BECAUSE OUR CHOICE DOES NOT MATTER!

TLDR: All four theories are true. If we look at them from four different characters.

The player – It’s a sequel because it is what you play after the 1st game.

Sans – Prequel because this is the world/timeline he comes from: see quicker voice

Asriel/Ralsei * – Are both au Asriel because of light/dark world and might have further indications that we should look out for  * and a bunch of other people

Kris – Post Genocide because we controlled him and now he knows that’s an option.

[the-alice-blue-rabbit]

“STAR STAR STAR STAR STAR STAR-”

The excited chanting was the only warning the robot master got just before a very energetic blur collided with him as he ported into the castle. Bituin, bless his galaxy-themed child’s heart, stood there snickering as Leo and Alcor stared at Rhapsody nuzzling the dazed Star.

“H-Hey Rhapsody.” He managed to stutter out, optics wide as he regained his bearings. “You’re certainly excited over something.”

The Elf popped up like a whack-a-mole, eyes glittery with joy. “Star! I met a whole bunch of new offworlders!” He helped Star back to his feet, bouncing in place with glee. “They’re friends of Lord Murkle and Lady Aliblu! There’s an adult and a brood of children!”

“Oh?” Star smiled as he watched his friend; there was just something so infectious about a grin, and Rhapsody’s was just so cheerful! Bituin had Leo in their arms now, Alcor floating near the windows to observe the stained glass pictures moving about. “Well I’m glad you met some more people. It’s about time you got to go somewhere other than the castle.”

Rhapsody was then found clinging to Star’s arm, nuzzling the robot master affectionately. “They can eat metal! And they look really cool, they look like Underlanders just like Lord Murkle!”

“Underlander?” Star repeated the word with a blank confusion.

Luckily, a deep familiar chuckle heralded cold arms sliding around Star’s neck, the cosmic bot glancing upward to see Giaselle grinning. “/He speaks, of course, of my species, Étoile./”

“Lord Murkle!” Rhapsody squeaked, face pinching in surprise as Giaselle’s hair formed a clawed hand which patted him on the head.

The elder Elf cuddle Star to his chest with a purr. “/Now now. Your teacher is my Adora, enough with the ‘My Lord’ schtick. Just ‘Giaselle’ will do./” He assured, snickering at Rhapsody. “/Besides, after all that happened in that place, I don’t think you have any need of formalities./”

The mysterious comment made the younger Elf tinge pepto-pink in the face.

“Well! Hello to you too!” Star smiled, quite used to Giaselle’s clinging by now. “But I thought you were an Elf? What’s ‘Underlander’ mean?” He gave Rhapsody a furrowed brow and pinched mouth, not sure if he should be concerned over the look of embarrassment.

Giaselle shifted forms, a cat now lounging on Star’s shoulders. “/Simply put, Underlander is another term for shadowfolk. Of which I am an example./” He lapped at Star’s cheek with a cold, cold, sticky tongue that made the robot master shudder a bit with a squicked expression. “/Also simply put, Underland is, well, underneath Wonderland. Quite literally, in fact. It’s the area that starts in the caverns below, and it maintains the barrier of Wonderland should the Queen ever fall./”

“Oh wow.” Star and Rhapsody’s eyes were lit with fascination. “I had no idea there was something like that here. It sounds like it’s important to Wonderland just like Aliblu and Skarlette, if it keeps the barrier up I mean.”

Another lick, and Giaselle’s paws started batting at Star’s hair. “/Well, important but certainly not welcomed, so yes, I suppose equating them is accurate./”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Star asked as Rhapsody added himself to the hug, Giaselle slipping back to allow them the space for affection. “I thought that everybody liked them?”

Yet again, a mysterious voice came to the rescue with info. “♫I suppose you also think everyone likes strawberry honey?♫” Mediote strode into sight, Giaselle perking and moving towards his Adora. “♫The Guardians may have been created for the role, but it wasn’t easy to get them into the reins.♫”

“Oh! Hello!” Star waved, Rhapsody purring into his chest. “I’ll take it you feel up to chatting today?”

He was given a dry sightless stare. “♫If only because a book having no pages between the beginning and end is boring.♫” Mediote uttered. Bituin and the Pokemon were led away by a maid, who assured Star she’d look after them, Mediote poorly disguising a sour face. “♫To the tower then, mine is closer. I don’t feel like standing.♫”

The hallways had plants and pillars imitating music scores and notes in shape, and as Star brushed a fern with thick strands, it chimed softly. Mediote’s door was a sliding model, and as he ascended the staircase Star took note that the steps were slanted forward so it was actually hard for one to misstep.

Mediote’s tower was rather plain; a large bed in the very back, a table with chairs to sit at, various cases that held instruments, and a rug covering every inch of the floor with what looked like music notes and magical runes.

Rhapsody sprinted in and lunged, landing on his front with a satisfied sigh. “The carpet is so soft~”

“♫I swear your obsession with rugs.♫“ Mediote shook his head as Giaselle snickered quietly, leading his Adora to sit at the table. “♫Now, let’s start with what you know. Since there ARE secrets they’d prefer not be told.♫“ He bidded to Star to seat himself near them.

Star took a seat next to Rhapsody, finding that despite it being the floor, it felt as though he’d just flopped himself down in a huge fur pelt. “Well, I do recall being told about a trial, and Skarlette’s mentioned a few things here and there, but that’s about it.” He laid back, enjoying the support of the rug fibers. “I know that they’re the protectors of Wonderland. I know people respect them, and that they’re not that fond of the fanfare they get at times.”

Remembering how Skarlette’s face had scrunched up when being called ‘Lady Hope’ kinda still made him snicker from time to time.

“♫Well it’s hardly something to be fond of when less than half a decade ago, there wasn’t a person or creature alive that would’ve hesitated to attack them.♫“

Something about the sheer spite in Mediote’s voice made both Rhapsody and Star pop up in surprise. Mediote’s hand was gripping Giaselle’s, the Shadow Elf looking worriedly at his mate. Mediote noticed the tension of the room, and his scowl relaxed and disappeared into his usual blank expression, and it occurred to Star that it must’ve been hard to withdraw such a strong emotion as that.

“♫...Sorry.♫“

Rhapsody held Star’s arm. “M-Master?”

“♫Come here.♫” He gestured to the rug in front of the table, Giaselle snickering a bit as the young Elf ‘swam’ across the floor on his belly, Star choosing to scoot in a more refined manner. “♫The tale of their beginning wasn’t pleasant. It’s their story to tell if they ever need to. But know this; those rabbits, our Ladies of Hope and Light, they have not always known kindness upon themselves.♫“

Mediote’s eyes were glassy, but Star still felt a chill as the Elf turned his head towards the robot master’s direction.

“♫And for such beings like that, trust is something they do not give freely. You should feel honored and be in awe of their cores as you’re held in such a high place to them. Star-Man.♫”

Star was silent for a moment. “...I do feel honored. But not just because they trust me. Aliblu and Skarlette are my friends, and...honestly, that’s all they need to be. You talk about this ‘honor’ and ‘being in awe’ stuff but you also said yourself that they don’t like it.” Mediote’s focus was entirely on Star. “Well. I don’t care then. I mean, I care about them, I’ll always care about my friends. But...No matter what they’ll end up telling me, or if they tell me all those painful things, it won’t change how I see them.”

The sight of a blue colored blaster aiming for him-

“I’m...The last person who should make any judgement based on the past.” Star gripped the Exhautrite charm around his neck.

Mediote, Giaselle, and Rhapsody were silent, tense. “♫...Then I suppose I can rely on you to be there when they’ll need you. Right?♫” Mediote’s gaze was still icy, but there was a slight gleam. “♫They may trust easily, but I don’t.♫”

"Of course." Star replied without hesitation. "I'll always do my best to stand by the people I care about--friends, family, and anything in between."

Mediote then waved his hand to his Adora. “♫That includes my Snowball and my student.♫” It wasn’t a question.

“Absolutely.” But Star still replied, his determined look fading a little as he glanced at Giaselle. “So, just to make sure I’ve got things right, Underlanders aren’t exactly welcome, right?”

Giaselle’s sheepish smile and nod were his reply. “/Oui oui. Just as humans fear the dark, so do those who live on the surface of this world, but moreso, as they know we lurk in the darkness./” He glanced down as his hand brought something out of his sleeve; a small very fluffy looking black rabbit doll. “/During the War, the Red Queen controlled a vast army of Underlanders, and I’m afraid trust for my kind was severely dwindled by that./”

“...I...don’t know much about the Red Queen. I mean, I’ve heard how she was the cause of this huge war everyone talks about, but...” Star admitted.

Mediote crossed one leg over the other, straightened up, and shut his eyes. “♫In the beginning, when the Elven Race broke free of the oppression of the Trolls, the event known as the Elven Rebellion, two monarchs took charge to lead us. Our beloved Queen Sapphire Immortartal, and equally beloved King Obsidian Immortartal. They were the first King and Queen, and...♫” Mediote’s eyes just barely cracked open to ‘stare’ at Star. “♫The parents of Blanca Immortartal and Ruby Immortartal, the White and Red Queens.♫”

Rhapsody was listening with a blank look on his face. It seemed like he knew this story already.

“♫Sadly, when the Queens, then Princesses, were almost of age, Ruby slaughtered her parents while they slept, and sealed Blanca away in a pocket dimension. She began a reign of violence and terror across all of Wonderland. Friends were turned foe, families ripped apart without mercy, bonds and trust that had only just begun to form torn so easily.♫“

Giaselle squeezed the doll in his hands, looking uneasy.

“♫It was only because of Saint Alice, bless her spirit and may it rest peacefully in the Guardians now, that Ruby was brought to justice. Our world may have magic, Star...But not everything can be fixed by magic.♫“ Mediote tapped his temple, seeming to direct the robot master’s attention to...Mediote’s eyes...

Star could vaguely place the chill that shot through his body at that moment as being the same chill he’d felt months before when he and Aliblu had been staring down a mass of water being thrown at them. Only this time it wasn’t momentary; it was a deep chill that froze the bottom of his stomach, all the circuits around it, his processor feeling like a gust of cold wind was being blown through it. The fighting he’d been through had certainly been terrible, but...The sheer implications of everything Mediote had just told him...

“....T-That was a piece of information I was not expecting.” Star finally uttered.

Mediote actually smirked. “♫Didn’t you learn by now? Expect everything and anything.♫” Giaselle ribbed his Adora with a flat look that made Rhapsody bite back a snort. “♫Ahem. But in seriousness, Star, I don’t tell you our history that easily. Because you are someone who can understand many views in the same story. Someone who can understand that much, I believe, is truly worthy of trust. The Guardians, and my own.♫”

“Aw~ Thanks Mediote-” Star began, feeling warm and fuzzy inside from the words.

However, the blind Elf’s hand on top of his head, squeezing rather tightly, cut him off. “♫I said you may have my trust, Star. But don’t think that means you can be so lax. You’re aware of my Snowball’s recent affliction, yes? I’m placing his well-being in your hands if he leaves this world to visit yours or Lady Aliblu’s, got it?♫” The scary smile he had on was an almost perfect mix of funny and terrifying. “♫The same goes for my student if he follow you around, it’ll be your responsibility to take care of them.♫”

“C-Certainly.” Star managed to utter, wide-eyed at Mediote’s hold.

Giaselle got his Adora to release Star, swatting Mediote’s fluffy hair. “/Stop that, Medi, he’s responsible. And I’m not a child you know, you don’t need to assign me a babysitter./”

“♫If anybody with him would make him a babysitter, isn’t it him?♫“ Mediote responded by pointing to Rhapsody, whose jaw dropped at being called a baby.

Star laughed it off, grooming back his hair. “Well, I feel honored I got to learn so many things today! I’ll do my best then to keep your trust, Mediote. Just you wait and s-” He immediately cut himself off, feeling coolant rushing as Mediote gave him a flat expression.

“♫No no, by all means, go ahead and dig your bed.♫“

Giaselle again swatted his mate. “/Don’t mess with him! You just said you gave him your trust!/”

“♫That’s that, and this is this. I’m playing around Snowball, you get on me about being social after all.♫“ Mediote shrugged.

The Shadow Elf’s hair curled like tentacles. “/Playing around hardly seems fitting a description! Be nicer to him then!/” Rhapsody nudged Star in the arm to get his attention as the two Councilmen bickered.

“This is how you can tell they’re married.” The young Elf whispered, Star sighing and giving a weak chuckle as he nodded.

[thatonewingedsorcerer]

We Got Video Now

"Okay, so me, the rune witch, and our very tired kelpie, we w-"

"I'm tired cause I own the only braincell of this trio"

"It's cause your the mom friend"

"You're right and I despise that"

"Anyways, we were on a supply run when , One: I remembered we never explain anything about who and where we are, and Two: we found an old camcorder!"

"Anyways, hey hold this, we going to try to get video here"

"Wha- fine"

[There's rustling as someone seems to be handing off a mic]

"Guys!, I think I got it working"

{Video cuts in, it seems to be pointing down as the only things visable is a pair of shoes, it's very blurry}

"The quaility is shit though, eh it's good enough"

{The camera straightens out and the focus is played with for a second, There's two women visible. One has a pair of sunglasses perched on her head, along with two very noticeable eye bags. Her lower half of her face is covered with some cloth, there’s a hood bunched up around her neck. Her red hair looks windswept while still holding a very strong aura of bed head. There’s a bow and arrow on her back along with a quiver, there’s also a longsword on her hip. She’s wearing jeans with a tailcoat buttoned over a dark green shirt, with knee high boots. The second one is wearing a tank top and shorts, there’s a cloak tied around her waist, it reaches her ankles. There’s several runes and sigils visible on her skin, the quality’s too poor to be able to make them out. She has a pair of steampunk goggles on her head and a half-face gas mask. She has a backpack by her feet as she's playing with a butterfly knife}

“Here’s the mic”

{The one with red hair tosses a audio recorder at whoever’s holding the camera}

“Thanks anyway, right now we’re heading to our local string of power lines, 3 miles out. We don’t know how they get power, we don’t know why we can get wifi there, we don’t question it”

“We stopped asking questions a long time ago”

“The rune witch has the dead batteries we need to charge in the bag along with the laptop, so we can edit and post this thing”

{A hand comes from behind the camera and points at the bag at the feet of the one with runes}

“Laptop? I thought you had it”

“Come on!, give me a minute. How far are we again?”

“Bout one and a half miles”

[groan] “Fine”

{they hand off the camera to the red hair one, as the view flips around, there’s a clear view of whoever was recording. They’re wearing too many clothes to be able to place a gender, lots of layers, but two wings as tall as them are sticking out their back. They have sunglasses and a pair of aviator goggles on their head under a hood, along their own gas mask. They take off their sunglasses and pull on their goggles. Putting down their own bag and an instrument case, they take a few steps back and fly off}

“You have it don’t you”

{She only response with a smile}

“Of course you do. Any who while we wait for them to get back, I’ll explain something, like where we are, This is a seam for forgotten things”

{She pans the camera around, there’s piles of different things along with half destroyed buildings. Where the two are standing though there seems to be an absence of things, like a path has been cleared. other than that everything seems to be a stark white}

“A seam is basically a natural generated pocket dimension, while most people make their own pocket dimensions to store things, this one was generated by the multiverse. There’s a bunch of these, some of them are for lost souls, those seams are better known as purgatory, others house broken things, some discarded things, lost things, or forgotten things like this one. We don’t entirely understand how things appear in here, but even if everyone dies it still counts as forgotten for some reason, that’s why we have so many broken buildings here”

{She pans to the broken walls around the two of them, as she hits one of them with the side of her fist}

“But our basic understanding is, you know when you forget about something and it seems to disappear, like you lose some coins in an old jacket pocket and then next year the pocket’s empty, well those coins end up here. Anything forgotten and basically disappear, appears here. This does include storms and fires.”

“One time I got caught in a hurricane, I hated it”

“Yeah, natural disaster just popping up next to us, is not fun. Part of the reason we wear lots of facial covering when we go out the Library, is the dust storms and the stupid amount of poison gas that somehow gets in here”

{She turns the camera to her face and pulls down the cloth covering her face down a little to reveal a small device over her mouth and nose, there’s a couple runes on it. Also the sunglasses also seem to have runes of there own. She turns the camera back around}

“People can also create portals into seams, which is how we got here. We were teenagers, and we found an old cabin in the wood with a bunch of old notes on magic. We took a journal labeled dimensional travel, I guess we thought it would be fun. It took us about three days to gather the things for the spell circle, It really shouldn’t of worked. Well, then we got trapped here, because the portal to our dimension closed behind us. So we use the stuff in here to try to find a way back because-”

{She walks around the wall and grabs a book off a huge pile of random objects, and pulls her leg up to write a quick rune on the cover. A series of symbols appear near the rune}

“Most thing in here have symbols like this when we use a dimensional locate rune our warlock made. We can use these symbols in a dimension travel spell circle to head to the dimension it came from. We still haven’t found our original dimension, but we were able to get to a dimension where the spell circle killed us instead, so close enough I guess”

“How long has it been since wings left I would of thought they would of been ba-”

{A black streak dives out of the sky, tackling the warlock, they tumble a few feet before stopping, they’re in a small pile as the winged one is yelling at her as the scuffle}

“You little bitch, you made me fly 3 miles for NOTHING, I’m going to combo you into fucki-”

“Hey you two stop, just kiss and make up”

“Sorry mom”

“Sorry, mum”

“Ew, no. I’m not even that much older than you”

“You’re literally centuries older then the both of us”

“Ah curse my mythological heritage”

“Give me the camera back”

“Say please”

{She tosses the camera and recorder back to the winged being}

“Alright so our kelpie must have bored you so it’s time to sign off, till next time, that one winged sorcerer”

“Wait wait wait did you say ‘kiss and make up’, What the fuck An-”

[ilovelocust]

Mirror Mirror V.2 (Part 10)

Note: Interlude time to answer the great question. What about Alt!Shiro? Enjoy guys!

By the way, the next chapter is 6,000 words long. I’m going to start working on it today, but I have a Pathfinder’s game tomorrow and I’m helping my brother move on Sunday. There is a non-insignificant chance that the next update won’t be until late Sunday or early Monday, sorry.

Warning: *Spoiler* suicide *Spoiler*

<< First < Prev.

The Champion is magnificent. Bloodthirsty and clever. He’s faced a hundred aliens faster and stronger than him in the arena and come out victorious each and every time. He is also the first of his Father’s race that Keith has ever seen.

Many deca-phoebs ago, Keith’s mother had come back from a scouting mission pregnant with the bastard child of a backwater race from a planet with little to no strategic value. Interbreeding may not be frowned upon in the Empire, even encouraged in the cases of species with useful traits for the Galra species as a whole, but the child she gave birth to was an embarrassment to his mother’s family. Keith was tiny, smaller than any of his cousins. No claws tipped his chubby fingers or sharp little fangs in his mouth. In fact he had no teeth at all! He didn’t even have fur to hide his sickly pink skin from the elements. Truly the tiny bundle his mother clutched to her chest was shameful in his weakness.

A creature only a mother could love, and when she died, his fate seemed to be sealed. He would be cast out. Thrown from his familial home, like so much trash, to navigate the world alone. A just place, for one with so little to offer. That would have been his future, if not for one of his uncles seeing the spark of something greater in his anger laden eyes.

He’d been taken in, granted a chance to prove himself worthy of his name. His uncle’s molding had been harsh, no room for vulnerability. Where others were merely expected to succeed, he was to excel. He was to be the quickest, the cleverest, the most learned, and the most skilled among all his peers. A finely tuned weapon, sharpened to a razor point. His upbringing had left scars, reminders of failure’s consequences, but his uncle’s care had created the Galra he was today.

Once unleashed upon the world, his preparation had made his rise to the uppermost levels of honor and power as a matter of course. He knew no mercy, raining down a cruelty on the enemies of the Empire unmatched by his pure blooded peers. His reputation became legend, the mere presence of his ship on the battlefield caused his foes to flee in terror, few managed to escape their fates. His prowess and blood thirstiness was whispered among the weak of stomach and toasted at feasts. Until tale of his work reached the Emperor himself. When offered the position of Prince, he had accepted his due. All knew the honor of his presence.

Now, in the blood soaked sands of the arena, he sees a kindred soul. Someone else wrapped in soft flesh and pink skin, who tears the throats from any who dare underestimate him. A member of his Father’s race, reminding all that Keith was not bred from an inferior strain. His was a heritage of victorious warriors, one to be feared. He would meet this gladiator, this reflection of himself, and he would own him.

.

The Champion stands quietly, letting Keith circle him unhindered. Mute but wary under his examination. He is taller than Keith. It’s disappointing to see that even among his Father’s kind he is short. The gladiator’s muscles are bigger too, shoulders broader, dwarfing Keith in every way. The effect is oddly appealing, dredging up flashes of desires he normally has no time for. He will forgive the gladiator his size.

“Champion, what is your name?” Keith asks.

“Takashi Shirogane,” The Champion answers promptly, his eyes not wavering from their forward position. Dutifully respectful.

“Takashi Shirogane,” Keith tries the name in his mouth. The combination of syllables is strange, but not the hardest he’s ever been asked to pronounce, “I assume that is your whole name, what is your given?”

“Takashi,” Hmmmm, yes, the alieness suits him. A constant reminder to all who hear, that the Champion is not one of the Galra.

“He will do,” Keith says to the guards. They will take care of all the necessary arrangements, “I expect him in my quarters by morning.” He turns and leaves them to his orders. He has gained quite the prize this day.

.

Takashi is everything he could have ever dreamed of possessing. Knowledgeable about his Father’s species, a deadly fighter, never disappointing in the arena, and a beautiful playmate in bed. If he could ascribe any flaw to the man, his tendency towards monosyllabic answers might rank. Conversation truly doesn’t seem to be his strong point, but that isn’t too much of a hardship to bear. He much prefers to be listened to anyways, and Takashi is an excellent listener.

.

Keith hurries through the halls. The desert in his hands will surely cheer his pet up. Takashi has been terribly depressed of late. Keith really should have refused to look up the fates of the humans captured with him, but his pet had asked so sweetly. Did that thing Keith adores with his tongue, then made his request in the after glow. He would have given the man the world in that moment. Keith sighs. What’s done is done. Takashi knows about the other’s deaths in the work camps. He can’t take the information back now.

He really doesn’t understand, why his pet cares so much. They’d been weak, unfit for his company. His very first act in the arena had been to attack one of them in his eagerness to fight. Of course, considering what he knew of the species so far, maybe such acts of violence where how they showed affection. No matter, he was carrying his Takashi’s favorite treat. Everything would be fine.

He found his pet where he left him, in their bedroom. Sitting with shoulders slumped on the edge of their bed. Takashi was staring at his prosthetic, activating and deactivating the deadly purple glow rhythmically.

“I’ve brought you something,” Keith announces, opening the box to show him the goodies inside. Takashi looks up at the confections for a moment, eyes dull without the usual excitement for his treats. He doesn’t reach for them, doesn’t hoard them to eat all in one sitting, just drops his eyes back to his hand.

“Don’t be like that. These are your favorites.” Keith cajoles, sitting down beside the larger human. Trying to coax him out of his funk. Takashi doesn’t look up from the slowly flashing light, “Come now, if you eat quickly, you can finish a few before your next match.” If he’d just behave like normal, Keith would gladly let them be late, so he could finish his snack.

The glow leaves his arm, but he doesn’t look up, “Match?” Takashi asks quietly. There is something strange about his eyes, almost too wide.

“Yes, a match.” Keith answers eagerly, arranged specifically to improve his mood, “Sendak has returned from his expedition and he’s found the most interesting new species. They haven’t achieved space flight yet, but they might prove capable in the arena.” Keith explains. Maybe he’s exaggerating their potential a bit, but all for a good cause, “I know you’ve felt terrible, so I’ve arranged for you to be their first opponent.” The fight would be a slaughter. Most these first contact fights were, but an easy slaughter would do his pet good right now.

As he speaks, Takashi stills. He hardly seems to breathe. His arm reactivates, the purple glow casting his skin in odd shades. His pet is shaking? A flash, a streak of light. Pure instinct has him throwing up his arms to protect his head. Something warm and wet splashes him, a droplet finding its way through to his lip. Keith lowers his hands…Takashi…His prosthetic, his arm, is still active. Boiling. Buried-dark red leaking, not purple, why isn’t there more purple-to the wrist, in his own throat.

The body falls over. Keith screams.

.

Takashi had been dead before he hit the floor. The heat from his hand had boiled his brain. Erasing everything that he was. Even the druids couldn’t bring him back.

Keith had raged in his mourning. His underlings had scurried to appease him. Offering the most beautiful, the strongest slaves they could find to replace his loss. Most never left his room alive.

One enterprising officer had taken a ship all the way to Takashi’s home planet. Coming back with a hold of new humans for him to own. He’d still hurt, but temporarily his rage had subsided. Only to come back ten fold when he found them to be weak cowering creatures to the last. None held a candle to the memory of his Takashi.

The doctors had offered to clone his pet. Bring back a perfect copy for him to train as he pleased. Keith had shut them down with a sneer. He didn’t want a faltering child for a slave. He wanted the Champion, vicious and victorious. What good was the body without the mind?

A druid was the one to finally come up with a plan to give him what he truly wanted. She’d spoken at length about the existence of multiple dimensions. How out there, somewhere, there were hundreds, thousands, no infinite amounts of Takashi’s with just the slightest variation from his own. She’d promised him, that with her power she could pluck one of these Takashi’s from his universe and bring him to Keith’s own. The price had been steep. More than a planet’s worth of quintessence and holds full of slaves for her experiments. He’d required her life as collateral, but if she succeeded, then all would be well spent.

She’d worked day and night. Requisitioning the labs of his ships for her machines. Calling in the highest level prisoners for consultations. Anything she needed, Keith granted her. Until one quintant, many phoebs later, she came to him. She was done.

.

The room is covered in wires, running to and from machines of unknown purposes, operated by cowed assistants. Mystical runes, stinking of dark magic, are carved into every wall and circle the floor in a building spiral centered around an altar. Raised from shadowy metal that absorbs light and play tricks on  the eyes. This is the culmination of the work that will bring Takashi back to him.

The druid has warned him that she can only bring back something that is close to his original. Searching the infinite dimensions for an exact match would take an eternity he does not wish to wait. She will find him a Takashi. One brought from his home planet to become Champion of their arena. He will have his deadly gift from the druids replacing his organic arm. Even his scars will be mostly the same, but his memories will differ. Small changes that must be ironed out with harsh training to mold him back into Keith’s beloved pet.

This is an acceptable caveat. He’s prepared accordingly. The perfect cell, the right tools. He is confident in his abilities. Within a deca-phoeb, he’ll have a perfect copy of the original. Not even he will be able to tell the difference.

“Begin,” Keith orders. The druid nods and signals to her assistants. A switch is flipped. Black energy begins to pulse out of her, dancing between the runes before feeding into the machines surrounding them. The very air is building, charging, in preparation. A moment of heavy anticipation, and then, a blinding flash of light. Keith shields his eyes, blinks away the spots. Dark lightening is crackling from the alter, striking out against the walls and those unfortunate enough to be too close.

Takashi is unconscious upon the dais.

Next >

[aurelliocheek]

A Year of Rain: Writing Strategies

How to build a new world for an RTS Game.

So, you wanna write this? A question I’ve been waiting for. When Nick, the captain of our daring endeavor, approached me, A Year Of Rain was supposed to become a Fantasy RTS based on a well-known IP; and to be honest, I was more than fine with that. See, I like that IP, I am very familiar with it and just from a cerebral logistics standpoint, I’ve always been comfortable settling in an established system and give it my own spin. All I’d have to do was looking for one of the more ­obscure places and events of that world, work with that foundation, and tell an interesting tale.

Which I did. Vigorously.

Then we had to discard that approach. The world for our game would not be an established one. We needed to build it from scratch, every nook and cranny. And here’s how we did that, or rather, my first-time experiences with RTS narrative design and maybe some survival tips on how to navigate that minefield.

Super rough worldbuilding draft.

A new IP. Well… We took that turn of events in stride. After all, even if existing worldbuilding provides you with nomenclature, systems, a fan base and many more convenient tools in your box, it’s all double-edged: you can’t slip on lore, the systems restrain you, while gameplay and game design boundaries are sneaking up from behind. You also owe the fans maximum accuracy anyway to avoid alienation. Put like this, building your own world from scratch sounds a lot more appealing, doesn’t it? It’s a gorgeous blooming field of nearly endless possibilities and free of any veto you wouldn’t give yourself.

Right…?

The whole world in your hands I’ve done this for plenty tabletops and homebrew Pen & Paper systems. It’s important to have an interesting world for an interesting tale you want to tell. Doing this for a very specifically tagged game is a different beast altogether. To keep the field analogy going, when first thinking about a world for a Fantasy RTS game, I felt like I arrived a week after the harvest.

Staring into the abyss of fantasy intertextuality made me uncomfortable right from the start, when I was asking myself: ‘What kind of world is this going to be?’

Creating a new, compelling world for an RTS game is a challenge.

Standard globe, massive Midlandia continent where all the people hang out and fight each other or whatever? It’s been done – ad nauseam and to death.

A shattered world, with drifting pieces and… Shit, this has been done. Pocket dimension? Done. Flat, you could say, a disc-like world? Yeah, good luck.

Okay, but what if it has layers like an onion… Septerra Core? Who even remembers that?! I do, it was a very charming game, actually. Anyway, a world needs people. People are easy! Species, races, cultures, there are so many cool fantasy folks… which… have all been utilized to exhaustion.

Even as I am writing this, a game cropped up that is so eerily similar to the core ideas I eventually developed for my world and story that it snaps the credibility of parallel evolution and makes me reconsider my general stance on psychic spies. I came to terms with the notion long before that announcement, but it confirmed my take on worldbuilding I had to adapt if I wanted to keep my sanity: There are many, many worlds out there and chances are high you won’t reinvent the wheel. Take solace in the fact that you can craft a very efficient, aesthetically pleasing wheel!

For here comes the twist: Intertextuality is a good thing. Since I’m throwing that word around like I think I know what it means, here’s what it is… “The relationship between texts, especially literary ones.”

It’s the reason why references work. For example, why Pride & Prejudice & Zombies exists, and you still get what that title implies. It’s why Banner Saga doesn’t need to explain the language, cultural setting, or apparel of the world they created because we have read about or seen media featuring Vikings. Darkest Dungeon draws a lot of its appeal from weird fiction, gothic and cosmic horror and you understand that connection. It’s why many people love it when fictional characters or worlds reference the real world, or pop culture or even quote from other ­movies and works of literature. ­Because we get what that means. Because it’s a nod to what we, and probably the creator of that fiction, love (the latter being strictly speaking an allusion, but it fits under the same umbrella, bear with me here). In broad strokes, it means that people understand connections and baselines without your explanation, because someone, at some point, did a very similar thing and established a widely known convention with it.

Yes, we’ve made a papercraft map.

It seems like the bane of innovation You may feel like everything has been done already, or even get conflicted because a line you wrote is similar or identical to something that already exists. However, just like tropes, archetypes, and cliché, it’s a boon for your world’s foundation if you swing it with precision. Best case, whatever you decide: On a very basic level, your audience will have a fond connotation to many of the things you do. There’s a catch, of course. You’ll need a lot of lipstick for your intertextual pig. The real work for me started after laying the foundation when I decided what type of world I wanted and who populated it. Both choices, at a glance, weren’t too special, admittedly.

What I hoped made them special was thoroughly fleshing out every race, species, and culture, applying some twists here and there… I tried generating credible systems and all the bones and beams that not only support the worldbuilding but also telegraph and highlight what made this world compelling, comfortably familiar, yet also refreshing.

You can do a lot if you stick to some fantasy guns and bolster them with nuances. In A Year Of Rain, for example, dwarves are the most competent spellcasters and considering how this world is designed, it even makes sense, though it’s not something you see very often. And it escalated pretty easily from there: What are the consequences for other species? What is their strategy? And how would that other adjacent fantasy race act or evolve and so on? I did that for, I think, 16 species concepts and there was a point when there were more connections and ideas than I actually wanted.

After fleshing out all the cultural dynamics, historical angles, rules of magic, justifying dwarven rune-powered railguns, establishing how many terabytes of memories a sentient fungus could store compared to divine lichen and what kind of weed lizardfolk prefer to smoke, I was finally ready to apply all this to the game itself.

Or not.

Strategic Writing Turns out, an RTS has comparatively limited narrative space. I would go as far as to call it claustrophobic. Design and format of an RTS tend to isolate the parts of the world you build. You have one single map at a time to establish whatever you want to transport narratively. And you only get one shot, because there usually is, by design, no backtracking.

It’s fair to assume that’s one reason why this genre often struggles with thorough worldbuilding and story in its campaign and multiplayer. Everything you can show, tell and narrate has to fit in roughly 15-30 minutes of tiny people murdering each other in real time. Then, you move on to the next area where, you guessed it, you train tiny people and have them murder each other for 15-30 minutes.

There is little room to breathe, or significantly manipulate the game flow, or show the inhabitants of your world doing anything other than fighting and killing to do more fighting and killing. That’s where the majority of anything you’ll write will be focused on. The units you command have no narrative agenda, almost no space to reflect on what they’re doing or want to do; they fight and die and obey the great cursor.

“But Blizzard!” you say?

Campaign is a different horse. It’s easier there. You can, to a certain degree, pace what happens, insert cutscenes and design a fantasy, a goal, and establish what drives this narrative… And at least your characters get to talk and express opinions, motivation, broader personality and all that, so: Yes, Blizzard cracked the code in most of their campaigns and will probably remain on that throne till the flippin’ sun burns out. But looking at virtually all other RTS games, there’s a trend to keep the world simple, the greater worldbuilding or story potential unexplored (Warlords RTS, Grey Goo) or exaggerate other aspects enough that they tilt from ludicrous to awesome and thus make for a satisfying campy story (looking at you, Command & Conquer). There’s a reason why even master craftsmen like the folks at Blizzard preach the mantra: Gameplay first in RTS.

All that doesn’t mean you can’t tell a compelling story, it doesn’t mean you can’t build a fantastic world, but it means that it may feel awkward at first. It’s a much greater challenge than in an RPG, an adventure or something similar where you can weave both things easier into a nice colorful ­tapestry. For our game, there is no after-mission hub to talk to characters, no codex to look up things like history and lore, no audio logs, books or scrolls, no close-up first- or third-person perspective to do advanced intrinsic storytelling. RTS has a fast, relentless pace. Your opponent, be it a human or AI, won’t wait for you to absorb subjects declared second priority like a narrative or worldbuilding details. So, whatever you tell is ideally right there when you play.

Some rules and tools you know still apply accordingly. For example, each of our units has 17 standard response lines. You better believe I tried to cram as much character as I could in there, tried my best to give them personality you can relate to in a few clicks and with allusions to the world around them.

Daedalic’s development team is building the A Year Of Rain world.

Then there are our phenomenal art, design, sound and SFX people Worldbuilding is, of course, not only writing. How characters look, what gear they carry, how their magic or tools of trade manifest and interact, their body language, animation, and voice work… all that blasts open a welcome breach into the walls you run into with an RTS, just like with any other game. Though the world is delivered in chunks in this genre, you can still do plenty of environmental storytelling, be it through biomes, architecture, weather, or ambient sounds and how the whole palette interconnects through the game. The tools are there; they just need lots of attention. The more you have prepared, the better. Whatever you came up with, whatever your vision is, don’t use a crowbar. Listen to the other departments and let them work their magic, even, or especially when that means letting go of your brainchild because they came up with a cooler solution. I’m a writer. What the hell do I know about shapes and the right visual impact, or the finer points of ability synergies and level design? Try to trust people as they trust you.

This is a good time to point out that 50% of all my conceptual resources won’t make it directly into the game. Some things are just too intricate/niche and have no business being there considering the very tight space that’s rightfully conceded to the gameplay. Adjust that percentage further north, actually, since some visual ideas don’t make good silhouettes for in-game models, because they’d be too small, too noisy or just a pain to animate you could never justify. It’s fine, though. Compare it to an actor who’s told to come up with a backstory for a bunch of tiny props on their costume. They’ll never get any big reference in the movie, but they help the actor getting into the role.

As I’ve mentioned, the characters’ role is basically to fight and die, above all else. It creates a dissonance, intuitively. Telling war stories is no hard sell, but it adds a new layer to the worldbuilding itself. Is this a new conflict? Where will you locate it? Is it a flashpoint or a global affair, and how much sense does that make? How do you plan for the future, i.e., at the end of your campaign, is your world fixed or broken, and where does it go from there? Or is it even beyond fixing and stays in a constant, vicious cycle of warfare?

The one luxury I had here was that I got to have my cake and eat it too: I made a world that’s broken, and I elected to focus on one conflict on a very specific piece of land. It leaves enough breathing room to tease a much bigger playground around the elaborate nice sandbox we’ll ship with this game.

Narrative Design for an RTS is a wild ride. And despite the pinch of salt in the lines above I definitely enjoy the chance I’ve been given with this. This article is honestly a slapdash work of professional opinion, advise, and direct dirty development experience. It’s a rough field guide for those treading these grounds for the first time, informative entertainment, or a good foundation for discussion.

See you in that world we’ve built, if you’re so inclined!

Ben Kuhn

Ben Kuhn is a writer and narrative designer at Daedalic Entertainment. Seven years sailing for Daedalic, mostly as a translator, dialogue writer, and voice director, packing a Master of Arts in English literature and creative writing acquired at the University of Bremen and Maynooth. Signed up due to his love of the medium and good stories and continues to be happy about that choice.

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A Year of Rain: Writing Strategies published first on https://leolarsonblog.tumblr.com/

[pkansa]

For me, there is no questioning the appeal of the Christopher Ward Trident lineup.  It’s how I became exposed to the brand, and was one of the very first watchesI reviewed from their collection (you can see that here).  At the time I reviewed it, the C60 Trident was a perfect fit for my tastes, as I was a big fan of chunky divers, and the Bond-style strap just clicked for me.  At the end of that review, the C60 Trident was my favorite from the brand, and has remained in that position since then.  Today, I find myself drawn to thinner case profiles and GMT complications, so when the Christoper Ward C65 Trident GMT was announced, I quickly reached out to the brand.  It was time to see if something would dethrone the C60 as my favorite watch from the brand.

As you might imagine, the Christoper Ward C65 Trident GMT – given it’s in the Trident line – would have some underwater capabilities.  It may not be a “true” dive watch, but with a 150m WR rating, it’s certainly going to be fine if you go for a swim with it.  The lack of a screw-down crown may concern some, but since I’m not a diver, and generally wouldn’t wear a leather-strapped watch in the pool, I’m ok with it.  Who wouldn’t like the easy fidgeting ability to wind the watch while it’s on your wrist?  And anyways, the water capabilities of the watch aren’t what drew me to it – it’s just a nice bit of extra protection for the watch.

No, with the Christoper Ward C65 Trident GMT, it came down to two things for me – the GMT complication (courtesy of an ETA 2893-2 movement) and the styling.  Necessarily, those two have to meld together, and they do so quite nicely here.  On the dial, that takes the form of a generously-sized orange arrow to indicate the 24-hour time.  There is certainly no missing where in the 24-hour cycle you are, and that broad-arrow hand indicates right off the bat what it’s for.  This works in conjunction with the unidirectional 24-hour bezel you’ve got circling the boxed sapphire crystal (another indication it’s not a dive watch).  With a rotating bezel, that means you could, ostensibly, be tracking a third time zone, as the mental math for using the main dial to calculate one time zone is not that tricky (note, there no markings for 24-hour time on the dial).  For me, I tend to just keep it locked in a simpler dual-time arrangement, with the hand set to true GMT time (useful at work, when database records are recorded in UTC).

As you may have noticed, I mentioned that the sapphire crystal on the Christoper Ward C65 Trident GMT is of the “boxed” variety.  What this means is, rather than a simple flat or domed surface, you have the sides coming fairly straight up, and then flat across the top surface.  This calls to mind those vintage acrylic or plastic crystals, and that is what the watch is all about – vintage look and feel.  Of course, with sapphire, you’ve definitely got an upgrade from those of 50+ years ago.  The flat black dial, with the “Old Radium” SuperLuminova filling the stick indices and baton handset further that older feel to the watch.  The flat dial also hides the twin-flag logo of the brand up at 12 o’clock; you of course have the seemingly still-divisive brand name popping up over at the 9 o’clock position.  This color palette of course keeps things crisp and legible, and reading the time, day or night (note that these vintage lumes don’t glow are bright as you might expect, but do get the job done) is a cinch.

With supporting Lume from Rune Refinery and Anilo Carbon

The stainless steel bezel (no colorful aluminum here, and I’m a-ok with that) keeps that old-school look going, and gives you a nice slope up to the flat sides of the crystal.  For a rotating bezel, this is a fairly slim watch, coming in at just over 11mm thick.  AKA, right in my wheelhouse of preferred dimensions, especially with the 41mm diameter and 47mm lug-to-lug.  Interestingly enough, the brand has gone with a 22mm lug width, when I might more commonly expect a 20mm.  That said, the proportions still look good, and the brand has tapered the stock strap on the Christoper Ward C65 Trident GMT to slim things down a bit under your wrist.

I had hoped to get in the bracelet version of the Christoper Ward C65 Trident GMT for our review, and was a bit disappointed – at first – when I saw it came on the leather strap.  As I spent time with the watch, however, I really came to enjoy the leather strap.  For one, it is quite soft and supple, meaning it conforms to the wrist quickly.  Second, while it is padded up near the lugs, the padding tapers off so you just have the leather (no extra bulk) at the ends, which means more comfort under the wrist.  Finally, it just really solidified the look of the watch.  While a brown strap on a black dial may seem like an unlikely combo, here, it’s picking up the luminous paint color, and it makes for a nice look.  And frankly, it would be a simple matter to swap in a black strap – or, as I’d recommend, pick this up on the bracelet an then get the strap as an add-on.  Then you’ve got all your bases covered.

I wore the Christoper Ward C65 Trident GMT across a variety of situations – to the office, over the weekends, and even with a suit a few times.  It’s got a classic, timeless look, and it’s slim profile (and the slippery crystal) make for a watch that tucks under (and slides out from under) a cuff with ease.  Frankly this is a good travel watch in a variety of ways – not just for the GMT complication, but also due to how it has a “blend into most anything” sort of styling, and the solid WR rating, means this watch is up for anything.  I really enjoyed my time with it, as it clicks with so much of what I look for in a watch these days.  And yes, by the end of my review time with the $1,025 ($1,095 on the bracelet) Christoper Ward C65 Trident GMT, it has easily slipped into the #1 position on my list of watches from CW.  The C60 will still hold a special spot, but this C65 is now my favorite from them.  I’ll definitely be watching to see how this early win is capitalized on.  christopherward.com

Review Summary

Brand & Model: Christoper Ward C65 Trident GMT

Price: $1.095 (bracelet), $1,025 (strap)

Who’s it for? This is for someone who, regardless of how much they travel, want a “one watch” sort of piece that covers all the bases, while mixing in something more (the GMT complication)

Would I wear it? Without hesitation

What I’d change: I’d be curious about a deep sapphire blue color for the dial.  Oh, and an under-crystal magnification for the date display.

The best thing about it: In a word, style.  Nouveau vintage looks in a compact case make for a winner.

Tech Specs from Christopher Ward

Case: 316L stainless steel

Diameter: 41mm

Height: 12.05mm

Weight: 71g

Weight with 21cm bracelet: 170g

Calibre: ETA 2893-2

Vibrations: 28,800 per hour (4 Hz)

Timing tolerance: +20/-20 seconds per day

Water resistance: 15 ATM (150 metres)

Dial colour: Black

Lume: Old Radium SuperLumiNova®

Bracelet width: 22mm

Lug to lug: 47.1mm

Features from Christopher Ward

Swiss made

21 jewel self-winding elabore-grade mechanical movement

42 hour power reserve

Dual-time GMT function

Date calendar

Central hacking seconds

Anti-shock system

Brushed and polished marine-grade stainless steel case

High Definition “Trident” motif screw-down backplate

Push-in crown stamped with twin flag motif

Unidirectional stainless steel 24hr bezel

“Glass box” sapphire crystal

Matte finish dial

Twin flags debossed at 12 o’clock

Old Radium SuperLumiNova® indexes and hands

Signature Trident counter-balance on seconds hand

Unique engraved serial number

Marine-grade stainless steel bracelet with micro-adjustable ratchet clasp

Luxurious presentation case and owner’s handbook

With supporting Lume from Rune Refinery and Anilo Carbon

The Christoper Ward C65 Trident GMT – a great candidate for the “one watch” in your collection For me, there is no questioning the appeal of the Christopher Ward Trident lineup.  It’s how I became exposed to the brand, and was one of the very first watchesI reviewed from their collection (

[chaosmagetwin]

The Wild Adventures of Ashley and Paul: Chapter 3

Lot’s to cover in this chapter! If you just want the story, but don’t want to get accidentally spoiled, don’t read the prompt list, or the Extra Errata (all in one link below). The Prologue, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2 are also linked below, so you can catch up on the story, or refresh yourself, if you are interested.

The Prompt list with extra errata! : http://chaosmagetwin.tumblr.com/post/157916938995/100-dialogue-prompts-part-2

Prologue: http://chaosmagetwin.tumblr.com/post/157921576040/the-wild-adventures-of-ashley-and-paul-prologue

Chapter 1: http://chaosmagetwin.tumblr.com/post/157956747605/the-wild-adventures-of-ashley-and-paul-chapter-1

Chapter 2: http://chaosmagetwin.tumblr.com/post/158205424995/the-wild-adventures-of-ashley-and-paul-chapter-2

Ashley stared at where the school should have been, one eye twitching, her tail’s tip flicking dangerously. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” She said finally, a hint of exasperation in her voice.

“Yeah, well, schools out. Yay.” Sarah’s monotone ending irritated Ashley. “I’d say we should light one in remembrance for it, but we’re all underaged.”

Karen and Paul popped into existence next to them, and Karen shook her head, her face a little gray. “Paul, I know it’s out of your control, but, you need to lose weight. I’m dying here. I can’t just throw mana around!”

“What’s mana?” Paul brushed the shoulder of his business shirt off casually, then looked around and whistled. “You weren’t kidding.”

Where the school should have stood, there was instead a flat foundation. A single desk sat in the middle of it, but everything else was gone, even the paving stones and gardens. Everything around it was untouched, however. 

“My question is, why aren’t the police here? Has anyone called them? I mean... what if there were people inside?” Karen pulled something out of her coat pajama pocket and tossed it in her mouth before she spoke again. “I mean... this hasn’t gone completely unnoticed, right?”

“I doubt it. The AA probably called them and said not to worry or something... what is that?”

“Brns!” Karen said through a mouth of something.

Ashley shook her head. “The AA doesn’t do anything though when it comes to stories. Telling the police would be interfering, wouldn’t it?” Paul shrugged a response as Sarah tackled Karen into the grass and tried retrieving something from her pockets. “What are you doing...?” 

“She has brownies! Aha!” Sarah grinned as she pulled a square out of Karen’s pocket. It was wrapped in parchment paper. 

“Wit! Nit q brns!” Sh was struggling to swallow and clear her mouth. Instead of helping, Paul and Ashley stood and watched patiently as Sarah unwrapped it with one hand and tossed it into her mouth. 

“Hah!” She said around the crumbs. “I win.” 

Ashley face palmed. She never thought Sarah was like this, but, then, she’d never really spent a lot of time with her either. It didn’t help that everyone thought she would become a serial killer. “Can we focus, please?”

Paul patted her shoulder carefully. “So, Karen and I checked the otherworld, or whatever it’s called.”

“I call it hell and sometimes home.”

“...Right. The school’s not there either, so, there wasn’t some sort of dimensional shift. The foundation is still here, and the power and plumbing is still on.”

“It is?” Karen had pinned Sarah into the grass and had finally swallowed. One of her hands glowed as well before it dissipated. She got off Sarah and brushed her pajama’s off. “So, why isn’t water spouting everywhere? And how can you tell?”

Paul grinned in return. “EM Vision has its perks, and so does thermal. The water mains make the concrete around them cooler by a couple degrees. If I had to guess, the pipes are already all patched... which would mean whoever did this plugged them for some reason, or the police already know and addressed it. Weird that they wouldn’t still be here, and that there is no caution tape, but, eh.”

“If the police had been here, the power would be off. I mean, some kid wanders on here and touches and exposed something and no more kid. So... probably whoever did this.” Sarah brushed herself off casually as she spoke, acting as though she hadn’t just tackled and stole another girls brownie.

Ashley sighed and pinched the bridge of he nose. “Okay, so... how do you know it didn’t just shift to some other dimension?”

Karen spoke up this time. “Traveling in Hell tends to have its perks, but first and foremost, it’s great for moving stuff. A couple feet there is a few thousand up here, so, if someone were to use magic, they would move it through there. Additionally, there’s a lot of magic in hell... in fact, it is primarily magic. If someone had tried to move something as big as a school through dimensions with magic, then there would have been noticeable ripples in the fabric of hell itself. Make sense?” Ashley nodded, but Paul and Sarah just looked at each other and shrugged. 

“I went with her, cause, well... I figure if something as big as a school is going to be moved through dimensions with science it’ll have a noticeable effect on this one. I just went to hell to check the differences, but, I’ll be honest, I’d have to know a baseline first. Impossible to tell on my end, really.”

“Karen, what did you put in those brownies?” Sarah suddenly looked a little green.

“I told you. Those aren’t quite brownies.”

“What do you mean the brownies are ‘not quite brownies’?!”

“... Well.... They’re... sort of..... mana biscuits. Normal people aren’t supposed to eat them...I have the cure at home...” 

Ashley groaned out loud as Sarah put a hand over her mouth reflexively. Hell of a night indeed.

“... Why does your toaster have wings?” 

“It’s cool. I mean, just look at it. Ever see ‘Brave Little Toaster’?”

“Yes. I understand it’s cool, but why does your toaster have wings?” Paul actually glared at the little thing, like it was an affront to his sensibilities.

“Well, it’s alive. Of course it flies. It was either wings or jets.” Karen was rummaging around in her cabinet. Sarah, meanwhile, was draped over a chair, looking nearly 2d. The mana biscuit had done some strange things to her, which Ashley did not care to remember.

The Magic House kitchen was a ramshackle. Instead of an oven, they had a fireplace with a cauldron, and the cabinets were filled with odd ingredients, none of which actually looked edible. A variety of things that either Ashley nor Paul had a name for took up the counter space, and to their consternation, not a label was in sight. 

“Ewwyting’s funzy!” Came Sarah, her voice sounding cartoonishly metallic and slowed down. “id dat nermal?”

“.... You eat mana biscuits on the regular?” Paul shook his head with incredulity. “What’s the step after this one, turning into an abstract shape?”

“Ha, ha, very funny. AHA! Lo, and BEHOLD! The mightiest of cures!” Karen turned around and opened her hand with a smug expression. A blue worm wriggled in her hand. 

Silence was the only answer for a moment. “Y’ens gun feel me dat?!” Sarah’s flat head had turned and was looking at the grub with horror. 

“What?! No! Gross! That’s cruel! No, he’s just going to.. uh... sit on you for a while. Yup. Just.. sit on you. Nothing weird at all.” Karen nodded conspicuously with her lips pursed.

“...How long will it sit on her?” Paul raised an eyebrow at the guilty looking girl. 

“Just a few minutes... Maybe as long as ten minutes?” She responded.

Ashley sighed and rolled her eyes. As she did so, her eyes fell on a crystal and she approached it, squinting at it. There were runes written on it. “Is this quartz?” She asked as Karen put the tiny blue worm onto Sarah’s now cell-shaded back. Karen looked over and nodded with an expression of slight anger. Ashley shrugged and leaned even closer to eye the runes. They looked familiar.

“Don’t turn that on!” Came a voice from above. She jerked in surprise, and looked at the source; stairs barely visible from the kitchen door. A few soft thumping steps later, and a teenaged boy with blue hair appeared. One arm was massively oversized, dragging on the floor behind him, while the other looked wilted. Owl’s eyes had replaced his own, and one of his legs had been replaced by a goats. 

“Jesus, Johnson!” it was Karen, and her normally high pitched voice had dipped an octave in exasperation, anger, and disbelief. “How many new spells have you tried since this morning?!”

“Twelve! Not that it’s any of your business, but three of them worked!” he glanced at Ashley, who was trying desperately to not laugh. Her teeth were clenched, her eyes open as wide as they could go, and her lips were as tight against each other as they could get from trying not to smile. “Yeah, yeah. That is a rune-carved Quartz Summoning Crystal! If you touch that, you could summon Satan himself!”

“Oh, so, it summons familial relations, then.” She said automatically.

He squinted his eyes at her, trying to figure out if she was lying. Combined with everything else, it was the final straw that made her burst out laughing.

Paul shook his head and sighed. “Hey, I’m Paul. Sorry for the intrusion. We’re just... trying to keep our friend from turning into pure data or something.”

Everyone who wasn’t laughing looked over at Sarah. She was considerably better, since she wasn’t actually two dimensional anymore. She still looked... fake, though. “Mana biscuits, I presume?” he scratched his face idly with his wilted arm, eyeing Sarah with boredom.

Karen nodded. “I’ll be out of your hair so you can experiment in a bit. Just...” she sighed. “Just don’t do anything weird... okay?”

“I’m not the weird one in this house.” He said calmly before turning around and going back up the stairs. Ashley could only laugh harder.

Ashley sighed, kicking her feet out in front of her as she walked. Paul had decided to teleport with Karen and Sarah back to Wild House so he could carry her to a bed. Unfortunately, Karen had said she’d only be able to take the three of them, and then she would be done for the night. 

This had left Ashley behind, and of course, she was bored out of her mind. It was a solid thirty minute walk back, and it was close to midnight already. Perhaps if she had been... normal... she would have been a little less bored and a little more wary, but as it was, all she had was occupy her was the jingling of the rings in her horns. 

“Wait! No! Come back! We need you!” Came a voice from an alleyway. Ashley blinked in surprise. Hissing was the only response. She stopped walking and waited for a moment. In a flash, something small and shelled awkwardly waddled-ran out of the alley, a teenager and an adult man close behind. They both looked up at her and paused, as if registering that she were there. A whole two seconds of silence later, she saw something flash of revelation in the adults eyes, and he screamed. While doing so he ‘subtly’ nudged his younger compatriot, who quickly followed suit.

“Wait... I’m also -technically- underaged and you’re a stranger... should I be screaming too?” She said blandly.

The screaming abruptly stopped and the teenager said “Sorry, it’s just.. you are very... frightening to look at. I don’t think humans are supposed to have tails or horns.”

“... No... humans are not. Are you two okay? What were you chasing?” Whoever these two were, it was obvious they needed some help practicing their ‘cover’. 

“Ah! We are chasing the elusive and hard-shelled Lizard Mammal known as... an ARMADILLO!” said the adult, adjusting his glasses. 

“... Oh my god, you guys are the ones from Class B that Karen invited?!” It all made a little more sense now. “You.... you’re chasing an armadillo?” 

“Yes!” She waited for him to continue, or perhaps to explain, but after nearly twenty seconds of silence, she realized he had no clue what he was supposed to say.

“... Why...?” She prompted.

“Why? Oh, uh... well... You see.. we’re chasing it because.. of... uhh...” The adult stammered.

“For school! yes, there’s a, uh, school project. We are to study the shells of such creatures so that we can.. replicate it... in class. Yes. That is the truth. Why are you placing your hand over your face?” 

She was both exasperated and trying desperately to not laugh. “... No reason. We humans often do these things after all.”

“Ah, yes! Of course!” They both immediately put their palms over their faces in mimicry. She bit her tongue for a moment.

“You two aught to... get going. You know.. before it gets away! Don’t want to, uh, fail that class project.” She turned her face away, knowing she could no longer keep a straight face. 

“Thank you! We’ll be on our way!” They hurried off as the younger one spoke. Once they were out of sight, she burst out laughing again. She had to tell Paul about this. 

“Ashley, not now! I texted you a minute ago! Don’t come home, we are Literally being shot at!” Paul yelled into the phone while laying flat on the floor. 

“I thought you meant ‘literally’ metaphorically! Like a game! The guy is back?!”

“Yeah! And he’s got more bullets! Our house has holes in it!” he flinched as a bullet dug into the ground next to his face and he shimmied to the left a little. 

“Where is he? I’ll take care of him by sneaking up behind him!” For a moment, Paul considered telling her that he’d rather she sat still until he ran out of bullets, but another bullet pinging off his leg changed his mind. 

“Three houses down, roof, and he’s laying down!”

“On it.”

Ashley was already sprinting when she closed the phone. She’d actually forgotten about the Assassin that was trying to kill them. Or Paul. Now that she thought about it, what was the assassin even trying to accomplish? 

Not that it mattered. She leapt up to the second story balcony and grabbed it. With some effort, she swung herself up until she could stand on the railing. She grabbed the roof, feeling the cool shingles in her grasp, and pulled herself up. There he was. Strangely, the gun he was shooting barely made any noise at all. Just a soft BUFT every few seconds. As she got her foot onto the room, the grip on the shoe failed, causing it to slide a little. The assassin noticed the sound and spun three shots firing from the rifle in a spray at her. Two missed. The third hit her right arm.

She yelled in pain and anger and the assassin leveled his gun at her with a grim smile. The gun clicked, and they both realized it was out of ammo. She rushed forward and smashed her horns into his face. They were harder than her head, and her dominant hand was out of commission. Blood spurted from his nose as he yelled in pain and stumbled.

Unfortunately, he’d been standing next to the ledge. She watched as his foot slipped on the edge and she put out her hands to grab him reflexively. Her left hand missed, while her right struggled to move. “NO!” She closed her eyes as he fell.