#and i'd prefer something closer to standard

[oh-meow-swirls]

honestly still in awe over the fact that we finally got something??? like. 3 came out in america in 2018. and 4 came out in japan. this is the first piece of new yo-kai content (excluding puni puni and the anime. and 1 for smartphone. and china getting 4) in almost five years. and of course it had to be while i'm sick and don't have the mental capacity to articulate my emotions-

[juustozzi]

same anon who talk about wings au here are some more ideas/potential moments

winged people are rare and so they're aren't many stores for them so tenma has a few encounters with other winged players (like hayabusa) and or coach (like afuro) from a team that have to face next in a match

tenma , matatagi and minaho become friends more quickly cause they can relate so much with the struggles of taking care of their own wings and the feeling on flying through the air

it took awhile before tenma gave tsurugi another feather of his trust (because fake tsurugi had to where the feather to make sure tenma was convice he was tsurugi and accidentally took it when he left)

have fun with this, hope you enjoyed

hi! thanks for sharing more <3 (I went a bit overboard with this, sorry for a probably long reply...)

I like the idea of Tenma basically knowing (at least by face) a big part of other winged people of the area! Afuro made me thing about the customization of the clothes: with stretchy fabric, like jerseys and regulart-shirts, fixed wing slits work for pulling the wings through. with more formal wear, or fabrics that don't stretch, there could be different mechanics to get the fabric rest around the base of the wings; buttons like vests, or zippers/velcro, depending on the type of the clothing. I think Afuro would have very stylized and fashionable choices with these, showing off the tailoring instead of trying to make it look like a regular garnment!

tailoring can get expensive though, so I think outside of formal wear etc. the selection for kids and teens is mostly stretchy fabrics with standard wing slits. since the clothes won't fit them for long anyway, it isn't as usual to tailor clothes for youngsters. many also prefer baggy/loose coats and jackets, since stiff fabric can feel constraining for the wings, especially while they're still growing.

since the rarity of winged people, schools probably don't offer specific uniforms, but they're lenient with customizing it. I want to think that instead of paying a lot for a tailor, Aki helped Tenma to customize his gakuran! he can do the easy shirts himself, but the school uniform is from thicker fabric and sown to a specific structure, so it's a bit trickier to get neat. (Aki's not too crafty herself, but she does a good job with it!)

and yay for the galaxy bird gang! Tenma must've been so excited to get winged teammates, and even though the teams struggles to get together, they would surely bond a lot quicker than the rest. maybe Matatagi would get his character arc earlier, with Tenma getting closer to him faster, and pushing him more into the team?

also I think Matatagi would be a bit show-off with his wings, zooming too close past others and getting annoyed they can't keep up with him. he's very proud of his wings, and at first it looks as arrogance to others before they get to know him better. meanwhile, Minaho is kind of the opposite: he observes people and happenings silently and while he doesn't scare others on purpose by suddenly announcing his presence, he kind of finds it funny most of the times.

and oh, Tsurugi.. </3 sorry if this strays from your idea, but while I do think it would take a bit for Tenma to give out another feather, I can see it more as Tsurugi being devastated of losing his own in the first place (maybe he doesn't know the fake took it, and he thinks he lost it himself, and someone later tells him they saw the fake having it?) and he's feeling too guilty to tell Tenma about it.

at some point someone either accidentally reveals it or forces it out of Tsurugi, and after a bit Tsurugi and Tenma have a heart-to-heart and Tenma gives him another one. or something along the lines

thanks again! and if you ever get more I'd love to hear them!!

[finniestoncrane]

Hello friend, I hope you are having a wonderful whatever time of day you’re reading this. I come to you with a request, just begging the chance to get something off my chest. Or maybe on my chest as it were.

Harvey Bullock + piss kink.

I can just imagine it starting as an accident, he’s really gotta go but he thinks he can hold it till you’re don- “ope, oh shit, ohhhh… you like that huh? That is NASTY.” He says with a shit eating grin, already plotting ways he can do it again

That is all, k, thanks, bye 💛

Gotham!Bullock x GN!Reader, word count: 1k i'm uh... not shockingly into the idea of him using me so this was good. but yeah, bullock in the back of a cop car learning new things about himself even at his age?? sign me up 🤎 request info • prompt list • send me a request • kofi • masterlist minors DNI!! 🔞 cw: piss kink, oral sex, slightly public sex, praise kink

As you slid into the backseat of the cop car, you placed a cheek on Harvey's cheek.

"What is it they pay you for exactly, Bullock?"

"To sit here and look pretty. Why are you here?"

You shuffled closer to him, enamoured by the way you were able to tease him so easily, a flustered smile on his face and a soft, red tint to his cheeks already as you ran your hand up his thigh.

"Well, I saw you sitting here, doing your job, looking pretty, and I thought I'd like to join you."

"Yeah? You think I'm not actually busy?"

"Too busy for me?"

Harvey looked out of the windows, right then left, then towards the front of the car. The building he'd been staking out had been quiet, empty all day. And technically he was off-duty, this was a favour to Jim. So he did have time, and he really would prefer to spend it in your company.

"Alright, you got me. Now, how are you going to earn your time with me?"

The flirtatious back and forth was cut short, not to his usual standards, but you could forgive that from him. No time to tease, to beat around the bush. You both knew you were there for one thing only, and neither of you wanted to wait around too much.

"Push that chair forward and I'll show you."

Harvey jumped up, pushing the passenger seat of the car as far forward as it would go, creating enough space for you to sit comfortably in his lap. But instead, you crouched down and squeezed yourself into the space at his feet, looking up at him through your lashes, batting them alluringly as he watched with surprise.

"A treat, for a hard working cop."

Normally, he would have jumped at the chance to have you suck his dick in the back of the car. Semi-public, a little bit dangerous even if he was parked down an alley, and a big "fuck you" to the department. A walk on the wild side for him. But he'd been sitting there for hours, and he was three coffees and two sodas down. So as much as he knew the stiffening was down to the way your fingers were unbuckling his belt and teasing his pants open, the slight tingling was likely caused by something else.

"Uh, sweetheart, before you start, do you think-"

"I thought you didn't have long, Harvey. Look, I'm salivating..."

You pushed your fingers under the fabric and wrapped them around his cock, pulling the length out and stroking it gently as you spoke.

"... are you really going to make me wait any longer?"

That was his downfall, always. He could never say no to you. So he tilted his head from side to side, as though he were literally weighing up the options as they crossed over his mind, and then settled on his decision.

"As if you could stop me."

His thick fingers carded through your hair, stroking it back across the top of your head and settling at the back, holding you close to your scalp as he encouraged you towards his crotch. He was confident in his ability to hold in his need to piss, and the moment your lips touched his tip, he forgot all about it, focused instead on the immediate pleasure.

But the longer your tongue swirled around his head, stroking the length as it lapped, flat and firm, he was increasingly aware of the need bubbling back up again. And it wasn't helped any as you began sucking, hollowing your cheeks and bobbing your head up and down on his cock.

"Ah... uh... wait... wait..."

You looked up to him, a glint of mischief in your eyes.

"What? You getting close already, Harvey? I've barely done anything!"

He looked down, scowling slightly at you as he brushed off the remark."

"No, I'm not... I just wanna see you stroke it a little. That way I can, uh, see your pretty face."

You knew he was lying, and you wondered why but couldn't settle on any concrete reason. Besides, the compliment was swirling through your mind, and you were keen to get back to pleasuring him. The soft sighs of pleasure he made drove you wild, and you wanted more.

With your palm firm against his shaft, fingers circling the lenght, you began pumping at his cock, watching the foreskin pull back from his glistening tip, sticky with your saliva and his precum. You could feel a pulsing in the veins, all of him twitching, and you prepared yourself for his release, surprised that he was that close after all. But as you looked up at him, smiling in anticipation, you saw a look of concern on his face.

A sudden stream burst forth, the yellow liquid hitting your chest, droplets splashing gainst your face. You were warm, covered in it, and wearing a look of complete surprise as Harvey sat there completely still, erect cock bobbing as the last droplets eased out of the slit in his tip.

"Fuck..."

"Harvey!"

He looked down at you, terrified of your reaction, completely embarrassed. The floor of the car was covered, but that could be blamed on any miscreant passengers. You, however, were soaking in his piss, and his shoes were wet through with it.

You had every right to scream at him, or, at the very least, be annoyed. And still, as he prepared for you to scold him, he couldn't help but keep his eyes focused on your chest. Clothes, soaking wet and sticking to your skin. The brief glimpses of your body he could see past the loose buttons on your shirt glistening with his piss.

"I'll apologise later, sweetheart. But... could you keep going for now?"

Grinning, you wrapped your hand around his wet, warm cock once more. The sweet, sickly smell of his urine surrounded you, and you hoped he had more for you. You felt so dirty, marked by him. If he could just give you a little bit more of himself, then you'd feel pretty confident walking back to your apartment, embarrassed, aroused, and smelling of him.

[schismusic]

Joy Division, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love New Order, too

Spring is weird as hell because one time you have this glaring sun that powers you up like being plugged into a wall outlet, then not five minutes later clouds begin to gather and you feel like you're going to die if anything goes south. So the most obvious combination to represent two sides of this same coin, emotional and meteorological, is Joy Division and New Order.

Sometimes you need Transmission or Shadowplay for the sunny days — impassioned jolts, sparks flying everywhere. Sometimes The Perfect Kiss hits harder on a cloudy afternoon, coming back home and in need of that extra push to not fall asleep in the train. It's surprising to realize the versatility displayed by both bands, or the same band in two different iterations according to whomever you ask. Peter Hook says, as late as 1993, that the laziest member of New Order is Ian Curtis. Or again this other person, in the comments under the Atmosphere official video on YouTube, who went to see New Order (Hooky-less New Order, which might be a relevant distinction) at the O2 Arena a couple of years ago and they gave an encore, says "Those of us who stayed got the privilege of watching Joy Division perform three of their songs". Interesting outlook on the matter. I personally saw Peter Hook and the Light play both Joy Division records and, I'm pretty sure, an encore comprised of just Love Will Tear Us Apart at the Arti Vive Festival in Soliera, back when it was still free to attend some of the events. I remember being pretty mad that Hooky had stopped to take pics with basically everyone and then left exactly as I was approaching. In retrospect I don't exactly blame the man, it was like midnight anyway. I remember nothing of the back trip home.

My first contact with Joy Division happened when I was thirteen and very much in my prog era. I was in Rome staying at an aunt of mine's place for my fourteenth birthday and she told me I could get a CD, since I had gotten some money saved up over time. Some Facebook page dedicated to Pink Floyd I'd liked (yeah, Facebook at age thirteen — I literally just wanted to play a fucking Flash game, back when Facebook allowed them, and I ended up getting to be terminally online. Crazy how things turn out) used to share a lot of memes and fanart relating to the Unknown Pleasures album cover, and me being a massive Pink Floyd head at the time I thought "I mean, if these guys are pushing this band so hard, that's gotta mean something". The album cover was pretty striking, admittedly: a far cry from the paisley ass paintings that I had grown to accept as the gold standard for the music I liked, but its simplicity struck a chord closer to The Dark Side of the Moon, or perhaps The Wall. Those were records I liked a lot, probably called them "the best records ever made" to more than one person, not like they aren't but that's a very bold statement to make when your listening experience consists exactly of

Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor when I was six;

Daft Punk's complete discography (minus Random Access Memories, which wasn't out yet) when I was twelve;

Pink Floyd's complete discography, courtesy of a CD collection coming out with some Italian newspaper, that same year;

a couple random classic rock records recommended to me by older friends and relatives usually well into their fifties or sixties at the time, random people on Internet forums — which, for clarification, I did not actively attend, preferring to just lurk from time to time — and the OndaRock "milestones" page.

So browsing through the surprisingly expansive CDs section of this electronics shop in Rome, and being mesmerized by a vinyl rack in the days when Music on Vinyl was the final frontier of pretending you could re-analogue the digital ("you mean to tell me these are like CDs, but bigger? Whoever designed these truly lived in the future"), I came across that very same album art that had stricken me so hard. I had listened to the first seconds of the album on YouTube, but that weird drum sound — so echoey, so distant, ultimately not particularly powerful, meaning it didn't really sound like Bonzo: it sounded more like my own band, which at the time didn't even exist yet — I didn't really know what to make of. This store I was in had one of those preview listening machines that would scan the barcode on the CDs and give you a small snippet of the song. I pull the CD up to the scanner, the scanner lights up green, I put on the headphones and the solo from this comes up:

Clearly they had to be kidding me. I had come to know, sneaking into infinitely many rehearsals with the band from my mother's town, what it sounded like when someone tried to play lead without something else filling up the arrangement (even though I didn't really know all that, or at least lacked the vocabulary to properly express it) and, for Christ's sake, didn't these guys notice rehearsing? It sounded empty, weirdly so, and it wasn't my thing, I thought. I put that CD away and picked up a band I knew I'd like — Genesis, specifically. So Nursery Cryme became the first CD I've ever paid with my own money, the very day I turned fourteen. Not a bad pickup. I remember being very impressed with the fast blurring lead guitar on The Musical Box and digging the sweet pastoral atmospheres of For Absent Friends and Harlequin. I still think of that record more often than one would probably assume looking at this blog, or my most played on Spotify. At the time, that was the best move I could take, really: why beat my head against a record that, as your average prog nerd ballbreaker, simply wasn't speaking to me?

Then all of a sudden in August of the same year my friend's dad hands me a 16 gigabyte USB drive, full of random music from all eras of rock. A lot of it remains inscrutable to me for a really long time, most notably Tom Waits (see related post), but I spent the whole month reading random folder names, seeing if something catches my eyes, and at one point I come across the Mars Volta. Open the folder up, read the names of their first three records, and my first thought is "Christ, these guys look incomprehensible. I'm about to have some fun". Long story short: I end up having a lot of fun, the Mars Volta turns into my favourite band at the time and finding out that they had previously been called At the Drive-In makes me gain some measure of respect for punk rockers: if they tried hard enough, I must've thought, they could prog as hard as anyone. In the meantime the ghost of Joy Division remains at the back of my head. I feel like I'm missing something, for the first time in my life: it's not them, it's me. Too bad that same realization didn't occur to me when it came to the people in my life until much, much later, but that's being fourteen for you I suppose. Early King Crimson and the Mars Volta were the pinnacle of violence to me, and not even the very few Metallica songs I'd downloaded just to see what would happen scratched that itch. It felt a bit too cauterized for some reason (I would later find out I had been looking in the wrong direction the whole time: the Black Album "sucked", according to my favourite metalhead of the time, who somehow catalyzed my interest from the very second I saw him in the school's courtyard. Hard to imagine why I would imprint on people like puppies do, but what the fuck, not like I've ever outgrown that anyway, I've just gotten better at managing it). But I felt there was more than violence to this, or different forms of violence. When Christmas came around and my relatives tried to get me presents, my mother asked if there was anything specific I was interested in, and I basically told her "look, if they can get me some CDs off of this list, I'm golden". It had some bangers on it, namely Noctourniquet by the Mars Volta — it's one of their best and I will die on this hill, be warned — and The Downward Spiral, which might as well warrant its own post in an ideal world. But the best of them all I think came from a random purchase, once again with the little money I had lying around at the time.

Closer appears to be, right away, a bit more concrete, and if there's something inexperienced music fans like is a pretty packaging that conjures a strong emotional response before they've even played the record. Compare a color-inverted graph of pulsar emissions to a literal funerary monument. Opening up the booklet I was shocked to see that Genesis was used as a negative point of comparison (bad omen, I thought) by people close to the band, and I came across much more detailed information about Ian Curtis's untimely demise — at that time, something far too removed from my experience to be faced with the delicacy and attention it deserves. Atrocity Exhibition hits like a ten-ton truck, a reference which at the time I wouldn't have been able to make for obvious reasons, and Isolation exposes all the nerve tissue under the skin. Passover comes in and strips everything even barer, and then A Means to an End turns… danceable, for some reason? Big emotional moment with The Eternal and Decades, which I thought actually took them closer to my usual tastes. And yet at the same time I kept looking at Colony, Heart and Soul and Twenty Four Hours as the most compelling cuts. Geometric assault sounding like sheet metal if it were music; rhythmically driven emptiness that serves as a minimal backdrop for depressed poetry, and finally a rocking ebb-and-flow that would probably inform a lot of my interest in GY!BE-like post-rock in the coming years. Very interesting to think that the same guys who'd done Unknown Pleasures could think of this. To this day, when asked, I still do think that Closer is the best Joy Division record, but what does it even mean when the records are exactly two, compilations notwithstanding?

It was around this time that it came to my attention that both Joy Division and another band called New Order had a record called Substance out, both published by the same recording company, both coming out within a year of each other. Looking it up, it turns out it's fully intentional, because New Order is simply Joy Division minus Ian Curtis. It would turn out to be a tad bit more complex than that. Anyway, I look New Order up and kind of have to do a double-take. Synthpop? In my Joy Division? More likely than you'd think, considering Isolation exists. But yeah, that sort of seals it — I wouldn't care about this New Order for a million years. Until all of a sudden a couple of years later David Sylvian bursts like a comet in my face, which of course leads me straight to Japan, the same year as I'd come across Berlin-era Bowie, and you can probably guess where this is going, right?

Well, you'd be wrong. I still don't check out New Order. There's a whole new world open to me — vaporwave and therefore R Plus Seven come to my attention, which leads me to dissect that record like an alien tool of unclear purposes. This of course leads me onto an ambient tangent, taking me back to my Tim Hecker listens of that same year, which has the effect of renewing my interest in "pure" electronic music and the then-rising post-dubstep movement. The sheer experience of sound, the dazzling modernity and innovation, is what's in at the time. I have no time for nostalgia-pandering dimwits: the future awaits. Then all that jazz from the first Godflesh post hits, then God pulls the funniest gag in the history of viral infections to my memory, and I have some time to actually look back, a bit less prejudiced. As it turns out, synthpop is not the devil, as some of you might have surmised by now, and as I relisten to Blue Monday I realized I have never listened to either of the Substance record. I do know some, most perhaps?, of the tracks on the Joy Division one, and I do think the New Order one has the more striking cover art — not to mention I knew, by this time, that this was the one to give Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance its name, and that Your Silent Face soundtracked one of the most memorable moments in Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson. As the ultimate Hideo Kojima stan, I couldn't let this slide, so I pop the record on and get hit with this:

Way to go, guys. Holy shit. I knew that Ceremony was a Joy Division cut before they could record it, but what the hell — Bernard got it, too. It wasn't a matter of singing ability with songs like these, it's just getting it, finding the right energy. They had that right energy. And then it hit me just as many times these dudes have made Blue Monday over and over again before actually getting it right, and everytime I look into it it's funnier and funnier to realize just how many different attempts it took them to finally be Kraftwerk, but augmented — with the stellar results we all know. Everything's Gone Green, 5 8 6, Temptation potentially, all lead up to this one moment in the history of dance music where somehow three dudes and a girl hailing from Manchester managed to out-gay the Pet Shop Boys (by their own admission, apparently), to shake the whole world's collective booty, to do whatever it is they were supposed to do in this last comparison that would ideally make the previous one a bit less obnoxious but whatever, it's 3am as usual, you know how it goes by now don't you? But then after Blue Monday the record keeps going, and thank god it does, because it's banger after banger. How do these guys keep doing it?

So I spend some time with that record, then it fades down, then it comes back up last month, when the weather calls for it and its parent company. Which is when I find myself watching the Control movie for the first time, surprisingly enough seeing as I already enjoyed the work of Anton Corbijn as a photographer. Looking at all that, it is revealed to me that Joy Division never really having died is not a bug, it's a feature. Everyone is gasping, I get it, but please pick your jaws up and check this out: the band has never learned how to play their respective instruments. One might go so far as to argue they play their own stuff their own way, and that's basically it. Nothing could be further from the truth. These guys jammed, a lot; that's how Joy Division wrote songs, that's how New Order wrote songs, even going as far as having Bernard Sumner fucked up on acid so he could find the chorus to Temptation or the whole band bombed out of their minds on X in Ibiza clubs to write, basically, the entirety of Technique — and even then, not really, there's a couple jangly tracks that the X would most likely render unlistenable but what do I really know? Point being: it might now have been sparked by a music teacher or instructor, it might not have been the product of a process comparable to that within Television, which led them to organically seek out better, more "by the book" musicianship, but New Order were incredibly familiar with their instruments, had formed an element of comfort and understanding that counterbalanced the alien-ness to music terminology.

Peter Hook recently uploaded a Yamaha-sponsored video to his Instagram, which I am pretty sure has a say in running, where he jams on a Yamaha bass and, you know, it sounds like Hooky alright, but it's never a discernible bassline until he kicks into the A major strumming that opens Love Will Tear Us Apart. Before that, he just strolls around the neck, leisurely strumming away at power chords imbued with that thick chorus and reverb combo he became renowned for. I would never, in my wildest dreams, have imagined I'd find myself thinking "okay, awesome, stop talking — I want to hear you jam a bit more" referring to one of the musicians who were part of possibly two of the craziest storiest in the history of contemporary rock'n'roll, also notorious for playing the rockstar whilst carrying the minimum possible baggage of technical knowledge he could. Once again, this is nowhere near a knock to the man — quite the opposite. Ian Curtis asked "persistence, well, what does it matter?", and Hooky (and, of course, the other members of New Order) found a way to constructively answer that question. Moments before Coil, but a bit later than Israel Regardie, they said "persistence is all" and built a brand on finding a way to consistently sound like splendid, eternal, golden children: "like crystal", impassionate, tightly-knit performers with the purity of a child's heart. Ian Curtis had, in certain ways (at least artistically), the purity of a child in his heart, which some might even argue was a distinguishing feature of most of his literary idols — if you think about it, William Burroughs could be your dirty-minded classmate who walked in on his parents sharing an intimate moment in the bedroom (had his parents been gay men, the metaphor would probably fly better, but that most definitely wasn't the case). So the heart of Joy Division remains untouched, if a bit more naked. Heroes of post-punk, sons of the silent age, you can sleep soundly tonight.

[inmarbleimmobility]

1.1.1 "Monsieur Myriel"

okay. i am not a guy who can write essay-type posts on the fly. but i've started my annotations and i think i want to just share some bullet point thoughts each day?

i've got a color-coded sticky note system to track: darkness, light, The Infinite, animal comparisons, labor/exploitation, sexual purity, education (those being the Big 3 from the thesis st- i mean the preface), autobiographical references, religion, law, the Great Man theory, bothering/social condemnation, translation notes/questions, and things to research. (phew.)

alright here goes!

interesting that Hugo would bring up how what is said about men influences their destinies as much as what they do in literally the second paragraph - it seems to me like a pretty deliberate reference to the "social condemnation" he cites in the preface. the preconceived notions about Myriel having come from a "privileged family" take a lot of outrageously good deeds to dispel; later it will take all of Valjean's saintly deeds (and then some) to convince Marius, already most of a Republican, that he's more than his criminal past.

I Want To Know more about how Myriel became a priest. Hugo deliberately doesn't tell us, but it would be so interesting and I want to draw parallels between his past as a man "devoted to worldly pleasures" and Valjean's past as a convict.

Hugo's description of Mlle Baptistine is the first time we see him talk about a person who "had never been pretty" gaining "the beauty of goodness" - I'm going to try to pay closer attention this time to the other examples of this! the one that comes to mind is Grantaire, but I think the concept comes up with little Cosette too?

"few families had known the Myriels before the Revolution" and he lived in "deep seclusion" in Brignolles before coming to Digne. is he a solitary person by nature? has he grown to prefer it since living in exile? what's the connection between his self-imposed seclusion and the forced isolation of convicts like Valjean?

Hugo mentions that the bishop and the presiding judge visit Myriel when he first gets to Digne and that he visits the general and the prefect - I have no idea if that's just standard custom for a new bishop or if there's some kind of significance to who visits Myriel vs. who he chooses to visit.

interesting that Hugo notes that a bishop ranks just below a field marshal. if I *were* writing a paper, which I'm *not*, I'd argue something about the structure of the Church being similar to the structure of the army and the connection that's being drawn there.

technically this is a thought about the preface, but I can't stop thinking about "by reason of law and custom". he's so clearly stating that all of these problems could be solved through legal reform and changes in social custom, and yet 150 years later people still blame people who have been imprisoned or othered for their own misfortune. sigh. someday this book will stop being necessary.

[desmodusplush]

28/06/24 - Climate and therianthropy

Figured I'd make this my first real post on this blog since it's something I've been thinking about lately, and I want this blog to become a place where I can dump my thoughts around being therian/otherkin.

Lately I've been thinking about climates and biomes- more specifically, living in a place where the climate there doesn't match the climate of where your theriotypes are from, as well as how climate affects me in general.

(Full blog post under cut)

Without giving too much about my location away, I live in Southern Canada, where we're cursed with cold winters and humid summers. (At least, we used to have very cold winters, not sure how accurate that description is anymore with climate change.) Despite having lived with these harsh winters for all my life, I despise winter, and I've always wanted to live somewhere with winters that were mild and had no snow for me to deal with.

Usually I'd attribute this to just personal preference- there's plenty of people I've talked to from Canada who agree with me and also hate the winter. I'd also attribute part of this to my disabilities, namely my physical and psychiatric ones. Seasonal Affective Disorder is something I very much struggle with, and it's at it's worst over the winter when I'm forced to stay inside because nobody in their right mind is going to want to do anything in -30°C weather. I also have very severe chronic pain, and this is usually at it's worst during the winter, especially when it's snowing due to barometric pressure changes. For these reasons, the warmer seasons are much more bearable for me.

But it only just recently occurred to me that being therian could also be linked to my dislike for the winter season, considering the fact that I'm a vampire bat and zebra- both of which come from the warm places of South America and Africa. Although I've never been to either of these places while in my human body, I frequently visit the Southern United States where the weather is hot all year round (or, at least hot by my Canadian-borne standards,) and I never really understood why the weather there makes me feel more at-home than my real home, until I started seeing it through the perspective of being therian. Of course these places feel closer to home than where I currently live, because in a way, they are actually closer to my real home.

That being said, however, it's not like I particularly enjoy being caught in humid weather either. Unfortunately, I don't get to enjoy the bomby hot summers of southern Canada very much either, because they just so happen to be a massive trigger for my chronic fatigue, which ends up taking over my entire life during the time where the weather is warm. Plus, thanks to climate change (again,) our spring and autumn seasons are becoming shorter and shorter, leaving me with just 4 months out of the year where I feel somewhat okay physically.

If moving to the Southern United States was safe for me to do so as a disabled member of the LGBT community, I would just for the fact that I would feel so much closer to the homes of my theriotypes- at least for the climate down in the South. It's becomes so easy to feel out-of-place as a bat and zebra living in a place that snows and one who can't always enjoy the summer to it's fullest, that I wish I was able to be in the body of my theriotypes who may actually be able to better tolerate the heat than my human body can.

I hope that one day I can bask in the warmth again and have it not make me feel ill.

[arecomicsevengood]

Jack Cole's Plastic Man

I recently discovered that some volumes of the Plastic Man Archives, those fifty dollar hardcovers issued by DC, can be had for fairly affordable prices these days. I had always heard that Jack Cole was one of the few Golden Age cartoonists whose work held up - Some would advocate for Will Eisner's work on The Spirit, but Cole's work, being more explicitly comedic seemed like it might come closer to E.C. Segar or other strip cartoonists whose work I know to be enjoyable. I'd read a little bit of Plastic Man before - his origin story, as reprinted in Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes, is not that impressive, but is ingrained in my memory due to poring over that book at my grandparents' house as a kid. I also know that I read the Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd Jack Cole And Plastic Man: Forms Stretched To Their Limits book but that was much later in life and so I don't remember the stories reprinted nearly as much as I recall the Chip Kidd of it all: The scans from newsprint, the ephemera. There are only a few complete stories in that book.

I do wish there was a single volume best-of, in an affordable softcover, rather than a series of eight hardcovers, committed to completism. There are also now four softcovers, put out by PS Artbooks, that reprint four issues of the Plastic Man series at a time - I believe there is some overlap with the archives in the first two of these volumes, but that with the third they get to reprinting material DC didn't get around to. I also believe that PS follows the "scanning from old issues" method preferred by Spiegelman to the "restored and made crisper" approach seen in the DC Archives books. I don't know, of course, if my personal taste in what I think is the strongest material would align with that of the editors of a hypothetical best-of. I'm sure there are great discrepancies between my taste, those of an editor at DC Comics, and Art Spiegelman's when it comes to contemporary work, but I would also like to think that, when evaluating work from the 1940s, our collective tastes would approximate those of the theoretical modern reader. I believe we'd all agree that The Granite Lady, from Volume Five, with its reoccurring gags of men being suicidal due to a beautiful but indifferent woman, or the same volume's Thinking Machine, with its prefiguring of AI played for laughs, constitutes top-shelf material. Volume 3 is a little more consistently high-quality than volume 5, but not by much.

But beyond selecting the stories that hold up as comedy, that are able to maintain a certain velocity, there is the cartooning itself to observe the oddity of. There is a peculiar way these panels move from panel to panel, which is abnormally solid: Often it seems like the figures are made of clay, and they and the camera are being moved around a stop-motion diorama. There's a way of foreshortening the bodies and backgrounds that gives the comics a sense that the spaces have been realized by the artist with perfect precision before he laid his pen to paper. This is most in evidence with Woozy Winks, Plastic Man's sidekick, a big fat guy wearing polka dots and a straw boater hat, but there is always a sense of solidity, of moving the reader through the space of the page by identifiable props. A big part of this is the gag of Plastic Man himself, how he disguises himself as an object then reveals himself later.

Cole shows Plastic Man stretching within the panels themselves, which are set out in a standard three-tier page. He doesn't go for wacky byzantine dynamic layouts that have Plastic Man moving throughout the page. There is something inherently deadpan or understated, which is both a big part of why these comics work and something that people trying to adapt Plastic Man to a more traditional superhero comics framework miss. Plastic Man is now owned by DC Comics, and when he shows up as a character, he is played as zany, while the sense of humor in Cole's comics is situational and occasionally dark. In a non-Golden Age context, it makes sense to play the character for what he can do visually, but playing the cartooning broader leads to different calculations as to how the timing would work.

There are other factors in play as to why later incarnations may not work as well. Over time, the idea of a humorous superhero veers into superhero parody, which then gives way to head-up-its-own-ass self-referentiality. This is a trap even very funny people can fall into. Jack Cole is simply telling stories, that require very little from the reader in terms of background knowledge they need going in, and he elaborates on his basic premise, time and time again, becoming reliably entertaining. I don't think I need many more of these collections beyond the two that I have, but two volumes of classic comics is generally my limit: That's all I have of Carl Barks, Floyd Gottfredson, E.C. Segar, and Cliff Sterrett. Cole easily ranks among those guys, a great entertainer for a broad audience.

[welcometogrouchland]

not only is darimila HYSTERICALLY funny as a crackship i think camila deserves a nice peacock of a boyfriend. i want her to show a photo of him at work and his coworkers are too busy wondering if this guy is an actor or a model or what to wonder about the ears or the goo hair. can you imagine darius helping the nocedas with groceries high heels and green eyeliner and god knows what else. MAN.

Firstly I love that this ask implies that Darius puts 0 effort into concealing his identity as a witch when he's in the human realm. This man is fully willing to expose magic and the demon realm in the town famous for producing a crackpot genocidal witch hunter everyone hates IF. and only if he can look fabulous doing it

I'm also on team Camila Deserves Nice Things anon, though I do differ on the details slightly, mainly because I'm sooooo enchanted by the Darius and Camila fake dating scenario I've cooked up in my brain. It both appeases the part of me that adheres to canon characterization of Camila as a woman who still, years later, has boxes of Manny's stuff lying around the house, yet to be put away, bc realistically she did not get proper space to mourn him when he died and she is not ready to move on...AND the part of me that, like you, wants Camilla's coworkers to see a picture of Darius and LOSE THEIR MINDS. HELLO??? THIS IS THE BAD BITCH SHE PULLED BY BEING AUTISTIC??? FR???????

And then I'm unsure whether or not I prefer Darius with romantic feelings for Camila? On the one hand I think, in the beautiful timeline where I actually wrote this, I'd prefer to have it come down on the side of "Darius and Camila are Good Friends who bond over how terrifying being a new(ly), single parent is"

and Hunter has to grapple with the fact that no, his family is not and never will be "normal" according to societies standards, and he cannot parent trap his parents into loving each other, but that doesn't make his family structure any worse off than something closer to a nuclear family.

Also I'd squeeze some juicy character exploration out of Luz bc she is SO not over her dad's death. She tries to downplay it and act like she is but she is not and it's very very clear in TTT. But she also wants her mom to be happy more than anything. And she loves love! And it'd make hunter happy! So she's just. Sitting there with gritted teeth trying not to get upset at the idea of Darius and her mom actually getting together and being happy.

But, tragically, I can't guarantee I'll ever fully write this out (though I fully encourage ppl to run with the idea if they like it. Please run with it I can't be the only one who's thought of this before) so I give myself a little more room to be silly and I say that. Darius is a person with a lot of walls up who likes pretending to be cool as a method of distancing himself from ppl, and I'd love to watch those walls get eroded by the overly sincere and silly sci-fi nerds that are his son-figure and his crush, who are also mother and son. Also I love the idea of Darius being a man in his forties with a crush. Yes!! Get more pathetic!!! Raeda is cowering rn!!!!!

IN CONCLUSION: I love you anon, I should really make SOMETHING based on the Darius Camila fake dating scenario, but if I don't, let this rambling serve as a testament to the GRIP it has on my brain

[the-haunted-office]

Hey guys! I made a little update to the Replies section of my rules, and wanted to post it here to make sure everyone was aware.

It's nothing big or major, just letting everyone know that I will be doing my best to make some improvements myself to my own roleplaying style going forward.

I really enjoy writing, and a lot of times I tend to get carried away in my replies, and so they end up a bit long or wordy, and I fear that this may be... making it difficult for others to interact with me in some cases. I want to make things as accessible as possible and be accommodating where I can. One of the ways I can do this is by paying closer attention to how much I'm writing in my replies.

So, going forward, I will try my very best to trim down my post lengths where it is necessary. I will try to match reply lengths and styles with my roleplay partner's preferred length and style. If you prefer longer, wordier, more descriptive replies, then I am more than happy to provide that. If you prefer shorter, less descriptive replies that are more dialogue forward, then that is what I will aim to provide.

I will do my very best! I can't make promises to always fulfill these standards, but I will try! I'm a writer at heart and so my little writer's fingers always want to write, write, write, but I do respect my roleplay partners and want to make things as enjoyable as possible here.

I have bolded the additions below for your perusal. Thank you!

⭐ Replies

I try to reply within 1-3 days, but sometimes I get busy and can’t keep to that time frame. However, if it has been a week or longer, please feel free to reach out to me. I may have overlooked your reply or didn’t get the notification. Some threads are easier for me to reply to than others and so those may take longer, but I will answer as soon as I can!

On the flip side of things, I will never ask or remind you about a reply, thread, plot, or anything like that - regardless of how long it's been - unless we have discussed that you want me to.

I understand that roleplaying is a hobby, so if at any time for any reason you want to drop a thread or anything, that's fine. You don't need to tell me. I do ask, though, that if something in a thread has made you uncomfortable, that you do please tell me so that I can correct myself going forward. I understand that I can't force you to do this, but your comfort is important to me and I'd really like to make sure I don't accidentally cross any boundaries going forward.

For the most part I will roughly match length for length, although sometimes my post lengths will run longer or shorter. I really, really enjoy writing, so sometimes I get carried away and the length of my replies gets a little… long. I am doing my best to mitigate this, as I’ve come to realize that most people prefer shorter replies. I will do my best to match my reply length and style to yours, as close as I can. If you have any preferences otherwise, please always feel free to come talk to me in DMs.

In most cases, I prefer not to do rapidfire, 1-2 lined type of roleplay style, but I do make exceptions for crack threads and dashcoms. I’m also okay with these turning into longer and canon threads too, within reason. I just will get burned out if it’s rapidfire back and forth responses and will likely need to slow them down, that’s all.

Lastly, regardless of the reply length, I ask that you please give me enough to work with. For longer threads, a couple of short paragraphs with some dialogue and descriptions should be enough. Most importantly, please remember the all-important "yes, and-" aspect of roleplaying. If there isn't enough for me to work with, then I will likely drop the thread.

[owl-with-a-pen]

Hey! I don't know if you're still writing Briania fics or accepting prompts for them, but if by chance you are, I've been thinking about the Naltorian mannerisms I've sent in before, specifically The Stare, and thought it would be really interesting to read about The Stare in action and Nia possibly unintentionally saving Brainy's or their friends' lives through her staring alerting them to danger before anyone has consciously noticed it.

I'd be really interested to see where you take this concept if you decide to pick it up! Your Brainia fics have always been my favorite and discussing the mannerism headcanons with you is always a delight.

Thank you so much! And also, thank you for always fuelling me with so many amazing headcanons for Naltorian mannerisms, they're all absolutely golden! I cooked up something special just for you for The Stare, a little fic about the first time Nia ever uses it. I hope you enjoy and thank you once again, it's always a joy to see your asks in my inbox! 😊

There were many trivial matters that often delayed a mission. Brainy was no stranger to this – indeed, it was an expected part of the job to gather as much data as possible before going into the field, to map out reconnaissance locations, locate blueprints of buildings that may necessitate the element of surprise.

Early into his career at the DEO, he had often forgone Alex’s judgement on mission briefings, preferring instead to jump right into the fray with a plan he had simulated long before anyone had given him an instruction to do so. It hadn’t been a concern of his to follow correct procedure at the time – obviously his own intellect had reigned superior over any official orders he had been expected to follow by far primitive minds.

He knew better now, of course. Even if sometimes that urge was still present, he had learned to quell it, to listen to his orders however unreasonable they may have seemed at first. Because, while not always the plan he had in mind, he could not deny that he worked with some incredibly efficient strategists.

While not quite an official DEO mission, it was still being presided over by Alex, and her instructions had been clear. At the moment, they were dealing with an incredibly delicate hostage situation. Little was known about the hostages in question, only that they were alien and being targeted by what Alex believed to be a separate faction of the same species. Regrettably, Brainy had no knowledge he could provide on the subject. This species was not known to him nor the Legion archive, though they appeared to be technologically advanced compared to Earth-standard equipment by some centuries, proving this for the most part by the proficiency of their weaponry.

It was these high-grade firearms in particular that gave the species such a unique energy signature to look out for. Without it, Brainy wasn’t sure they would have ever been able to locate the site where the kidnapped aliens were being held.

He and Nia had been sent ahead to the scene – a derelict warehouse at the edge of the city – to keep watch from ground level while Alex and J’onn worked on mapping the building using their own internal sources closer to home. The warehouse was old, lead-lined, which had given Kara little insight on what might have been going on inside. She was currently somewhere high above, offering an aerial perspective around the building’s circumference. Brainy caught sight of her cape on occasion, a red smear against an otherwise unremarkable cloudy day.

Since arriving at their vantage point behind a cluster of rocks nearest to the building’s south-facing entrance, Brainy had been focusing most of his concentration on the information he’d stored to his tablet, pulling data from Alex’s research and offering his own expertise on leads she’d been marking out in real time without needing to be physically present himself.  The distance was certainly more of a strain than he was used to, but he enjoyed the challenge. At least it kept several of his thought tracks busy while they avidly waited for their next instruction.

Albeit, he had to admit that he had reserved several more for Nia.

Despite her best efforts, Nia Nal had yet to learn from Brainy’s old mistakes. She revelled in the action that came with a physical fight, but often struggled with the slower strides that came before it. It was about now that she would have normally given up trying to sit still and meditate on her visions, instead throwing herself into physical exertion such as fidgeting or pacing to kill the time.

But no dust was being kicked up in her steed, because Nia Nal was still perched on the rock closest to Brainy, disquietly reticent as she stared into her lap. She hadn’t spoken since they’d arrived, not even to lean over his shoulder and offer her input on his research as he so often enjoyed. They could bounce ideas between each other endlessly when left to their own devices, filling the space between action with easy conversation. Today, however, Nia was suspiciously inactive.  

Brainy’s hand stilled halfway across his tablet, glancing up to Nia with hesitant concern. After a quick external review, he could conclude that there was nothing wrong with her physically. She wasn’t sick or injured, or even just bored. There was something else, a faraway look in her eye that may have alluded a dream state if it wasn’t for the frustrated furrow in her brow, deepening the crease across her nose. A twitch curved the corner of Nia’s lip as she blinked suddenly, rubbing irritably at her face.

“Hey,” Brainy said softly. He discarded the tablet swiftly, reaching out for her knee instead. “You okay?”

Nia sagged forward just as Brainy’s hand made contact with her leg. She cupped her chin in her hands, shaking her head. “I’m not sure, actually,” she admitted, her voice muffled between her fingers. “I feel kinda woozy. It’s hard to explain.”

Brainy squeezed her knee. “You can tell me.”

Nia nearly smiled at that, and Brainy felt the urge to smile along with her. She sobered quickly, her eyes travelling elsewhere again. “I guess it’s… it’s like a vision wants to happen, but it won’t. It’s just making me feel really out of it.”

Any pockets of thought previously delegated to background tasks promptly turned their attention to Nia’s plight. Brainy eyed her worriedly. “Will you be alright to do this?”

Nia’s hands clenched suddenly in her lap. “I have to.”

Brainy straightened at once at Nia’s tone, his concern for her shifting instead to understanding. He hadn’t heard that tone of voice often, but enough to know that, when he did, it was something well beyond the realms of the waking world compelling Nia to speak her certainty. Her words may as well have been a prophecy in their own right, and Brainy knew it was imperative that he heed them justly.

Brainy put more effort into conversation after that, hoping to lessen some of Nia’s burden. If she was failing to make progress connecting with her gift for any reason, then he at least hoped he could provide her with a worthy distraction.

It appeared to work for a time. Nia soon began to relax into the safety net of their easy back-and-forth, edging closer to his side enough that their legs brushed together. She even managed to snatch his tablet from him when he wasn’t looking, scrolling through Alex’s notes when she started to itch for something to fiddle with. They huddled together after that, studying the notes as one, although Brainy could tell that the fog was still plaguing her. Even so, her resilience was – as always - unparalleled. To an untrained eye, nothing may have appeared wrong at all.

But Brainy knew Nia better than he knew himself, and the weight that she carried was not an easy one to disguise.

Eventually, the call came through to their comms. Alex had determined the layout of the warehouse and, subsequently, the most probable location for where the hostages were being held inside. With Brainy and Nia’s help, they’d additionally simulated likely vantage points the aliens would make use of with their weaponry, using range and distance as a primary factor. It may not have been quite as in-depth as a full x-ray of the building, but it was enough to make their entrance known.

Kara was called in to enter from one of the windows on the north side of the building. With Nia and Brainy covering the south side, they could meet in the middle and join forces from there.

Brainy maintained a thought track for Nia’s movements the second they headed for the entrance - a half raised shutter that needed some force to pry all the way open. She was his partner in more than one sense of the word, he hardly needed to think at all to know where she was. And yet, as he and Nia ducked beneath the shutter together, Brainy couldn’t keep a bubble of worry from lodging in his throat. If Nia’s precognition was in any way compromised right now, her usual fighting technique would shift to accommodate for that loss. This wouldn’t make her any less capable, but he’d need to make several adjustments to his own stance to match hers.

It was only moments later that he realised he needn’t have worried.

Nia’s physical prowess with her powers outshone any limitations she may have faced without her visions. While she used her lasso to pull the weapons from the arms of the alien captors running towards them from the centre of the building, Brainy flew ahead to the metal beam holding up part of the grated ceiling where three aliens were attempting to spray their fire. Their surprise slowed their reaction timing just enough that Brainy was able to disarm two of them immediately, deflecting the third’s weapon with a raised forearm before it could discharge against his chest. Enabling his strength enhancement to warp the barrel of the gun, Brainy threw what remained aside, using his free hand to twist the alien’s arm towards him, forcing them to their knees.

Beneath him, Nia had knocked out the last of the primary guards who had been waiting for them, the glow of her hands a rival to his own life projectors in the low light.

They continued on as a unit after that, though Brainy kept a half step behind Nia as they moved deeper into the building, adamant to have her in his line of sight at all times. Whether Nia noticed, she didn’t say, but soon they were far too consumed with the next wave of alien guards to give it any acknowledgement.

By the time Kara had joined the fray, they’d left a tangle of unconscious forms in their wake from one side of the warehouse to the other. Brainy made a private note for later to retrieve some of the weapons for further study. He was sure Lena would be first in line to try and dissect such unique technology, especially ones with such an unusual signature.

“Alex said it was right up here,” Kara said, falling naturally into the lead of the impromptu line they’d formed.

“Awesome,” Nia said, the lack of enthusiasm in her voice not quite as subtle as she likely thought.

Brainy waited a nano-second for Nia to follow along before he moved up behind her, holding her in his periphery even as his eyes began to wander, logging everything he saw for later recall.

The warehouse was a vast series of large, empty rooms, long-since cleared out of any distinct features or machinery that may have marked it for a certain purpose. Perfect then, he concluded, to reconfigure into the optimum holding cell.

The thought had barely crossed his mind when he heard it. Something up ahead – a tinny, high-pitched hum that wrought havoc with his heightened senses. He hissed, cupping a hand over his ear at the same time as Kara.

“What is it?” Nia asked.

“What indeed,” Brainy muttered through his teeth, eyeing the space ahead of them carefully. “Kara? Can you see anything?”

Kara squinted. “There’s… there’s something up ahead. Movement.” Her eyes widened suddenly. “People.”

“The hostages,” Brainy and Nia said together, catching each other’s eye. Another smirk quirked the edges of Nia’s lips and she nodded at him, falling into a jog as he quickly caught up to her side.

They didn’t need to travel far to find the source of the sound. Just as Alex had predicted, the heart of the warehouse was exactly where they had needed to go.

Encased in a bubble at the centre of the room were a group of terrified aliens. They varied in age, though Brainy could see at their youngest a few that could have been teenagers amongst the group. This variant of the species had a pattern of brightly coloured pink spots that dusted the edges of their jaw and throat, matching in both vibrancy and shade to their large, glowing eyes. The spots on the guards Brainy had knocked down had all been orange, their eyes just the same. Aside from that, there were very little physiological differences between the two factions.

The energy bubble was mostly transparent aside from a sickly yellowish hue that softened the outlines of the captives inside. Brainy frowned, watching small refractions of light roll across the bubble like a wave, travelling further and further until they slipped suddenly out of sight behind a large metal disk clamped tightly to the ground.

There were three further identical disks fitted to the base of the bubble along the entire outer edge, perfectly equidistant from one another.

They were also, unquestionably, the largest source of energy output from anything within the entire building.

“That’s what was giving off the energy signature,” Brainy realised out loud. “Not the weapons… but this. Sprock, I should’ve known.”

“No one could have,” Nia said immediately. “Brainy, you couldn’t have accounted for everything, not when we hardly knew anything to begin with.”

“Even so,” Brainy muttered in distaste, studying the disks with analytical interest. He took a step forward, only holding himself back when he ran the risk of crossing past Nia. He bit his lip. “This shield, it’s quite impressive. Look.” He pointed the disks out one by one. “It’s being projected from multiple locations, but each one with enough power to create a bubble in of itself. It’s multi-layered, four times over. If we can deactivate them all, we should be able to disperse the force field.”

The aliens on the other side didn’t seem to hear him, but some of the younger ones had been watching his mouth move. They shouted words back at him, but Brainy was unable to read their lips  in return. He wasn’t sure they were speaking a language he recognised at all. He turned to Kara curiously. “Can you--?”

She shook her head. “Not a peep. It’s completely soundproof.”

“Then it’s best we get to work as soon as possible,” Brainy said. He motioned for Kara to head towards the furthest disk, waiting for Nia to do the same before he followed up behind her.

Except, Nia didn’t move.

“Nia?” Brainy prompted.

Again, Nia didn’t respond.

Hesitantly, Brainy came closer, waiting for any sign of acknowledgement from his girlfriend.

None came. It was as though she’d been frozen in place, her arms stiff and unmoving at her sides, one foot held firmly in front of the other, caught and grounded mid-step. She was staring out at something, Brainy realised, but nothing he could see for himself.

Something was wrong.

Brainy knew Nia’s vision stance - how it looked, how it felt to see it happen so suddenly from an outsider’s perspective and this… this wasn’t it. Nia wasn’t beyond her second sight, traversing the unconscious realm. Instead, she was fully planted in the moment, an alertness bright behind her eyes, extending her senses outward, far past the capabilities of the human mind, firing neurons at sure-fire speed.

Whether Nia knew it or not, something was holding her in place – guiding her, maybe, or perhaps…

It was only then that Brainy realised what he was looking at.

“Stop!” the word was out of his mouth before his mind had finished calculating the outcome. He threw his hand out towards Kara. “Don’t take a step further!”

Kara stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes wide with confusion. “But you literally just said—”

“I know what I said, and I was wrong. It’s a trap.”

“What?”

Brainy wasn’t sure how, wasn’t even sure why, but he knew it. As surely as Nia did. The look in her eyes could only mean one thing.

He turned back towards the force field, capturing the aliens behind it in a new light. Their mouths had turned ugly; fine, pin-prick teeth bared at them all as they spat vulgar words in a language he was somewhat grateful he couldn’t translate.

It appeared the so-called hostages were hostages no longer.

It still didn’t make sense. Why would they even be there at all if only to lure them to this spot? What did they know that he didn’t?

Oh.

Brainy saw the metal disks with fresh eyes, identifying them for what they were behind their non-descript cone sized shells. The high pitched humming hadn’t been coming from the force field, it was coming from within the disks, not as an extension of the energy it outputted, but rather hiding the characteristics of what lay inside.

The energy signature they’d been tracking this whole time had been…

“They’re bombs,” Brainy realised.

He only had one thought left - the only one that mattered. He surged forward as quickly as he could, grabbing Nia’s unresponsive arm and dragging her with enough force to spur a lethargic stagger from her frozen legs. “We need to go. Now.”

Nia was too stiff to move with any real speed and with time of the essence, Brainy didn’t have the luxury of waiting to see if she’d snap out of it naturally. Instead, he scooped her up into his arms, ignoring the alien rigidity of her body as he tucked her head beneath his chin. He shifted her into a more comfortable position, ascertaining he had a secure grip before locking eyes with Kara.

Thankfully, she understood immediately. With a single nod of acknowledgment, they took off together.

Just in time as well, because the moment Brainy launched from the ground, a piercing crack roared out from the force field behind him. He could smell the distinct snap and sizzle of something metallic singe the air before an explosion ruptured behind him, all but propelling he and Nia forward, hot air scorching across the back of his suit as the blast rung sharply in his ears.

They tumbled from the window Kara had first used to enter with little grace, spilling out across the sand and dirt, rolling over one and another as the once-warehouse behind them bent and warped beneath its own weight, creaking and groaning as the old metal failed to contain itself, collapsing inward as the scream of the explosion settled somewhere at its heart, sending shockwaves through the sand.

Brainy’s chest heaved sporadically as he pushed himself from Nia the moment they were grounded, brushing her hair back fiercely. He’d managed to shield her from the brunt of the explosion, protecting her from the collision with the ground with his own body as armour, and even still he feared the worst.

He cupped her face desperately, a sob of sheer relief catching in his throat when he heard her heartbeat, as resilient as ever, beyond the ringing of his own ears.

“Nia,” he said, trying to still the tremor in his voice. “Nia Nal, can you hear me?”

Dust and soot were smeared across Nia’s face, shadowing her eyes. Her lashes fluttered hard at the sound of his voice, trying desperately to breach the surface of her own consciousness. She groaned softly, reaching her hand out, brushing the tips of her fingers over Brainy’s face. They still felt electric with her energy, a jolt of static that caused an incomprehensible laugh to bubble from Brainy’s chest.

“What happened?” Nia croaked out. She cringed, trying to hold her eyes open.

Brainy only laughed harder at that, ducking his head towards her throat, closing his eyes to subdue the burn that followed.

“Uh, Nia,” Kara answered in Brainy’s steed, brushing her suit down as she stared up in awe at what little that remained of the warehouse. “I think you just saved our lives.”

“Cool… cool, totally meant to do that.” Nia’s chest jerked a little beneath Brainy’s chin as she coughed, clearing her throat with strained effort. “Uh… how did I do that?”

------------------

Nia hardly remembered the journey back to the Tower.

She’d flown with Brainy, letting him cradle her close to his chest, protecting her from the high-speed gale that had threatened her hair and face at such an altitude.

It wasn’t usually as cold when they flew together, but she supposed they’d never needed to travel this far at such a strict pace before. Maybe that’s why she didn’t remember much - the whole trip barely felt like seconds.

She was still a little out of it an hour later. By then, she, Brainy and Kara had crowded down in the Tower’s cramped lab space, laying out pieces of debris that they’d managed to salvage from the site of the explosion.

She really wasn’t sure what had happened, exactly. One second, she’d been listening to Brainy explain the purpose for those weird disk things on the ground… then everything sort of stopped. She remembered that woozy feeling from before creeping back up on her, fogging up her head. Then, something had triggered deep inside of her, like an alarm only she could hear. It hadn’t made any noise, though. Instead, it had instilled a sense of foreboding so strong that she’d locked into place. Like a flash frozen statue right out of the Fortress.

Everything else came up blank after that – at least until she’d awoken in the sand with Brainy’s wide, panic-stricken eyes staring down at her.

She rolled her shoulder experimentally. Yup. Still no pain. Brainy had taken the brunt of the hit when they’d fled the explosion, and even though the nano fibres in his suit were already repairing some of the damage, there was still a nasty singe mark across his back, corroding the fine ends of his golden hair to charcoal. He didn’t seem to be in any pain, at least. The last thing she’d wanted was to get him hurt because of her. Because of yet another power that she seemed to have zero control over…

It was strange, she’d never felt anything like it before. At least, never that strong. She’d frozen in the past, even lost time, but she’d always attributed it to her visions messing her up.

Now, she wasn’t so sure.

“I still don’t understand,” Kara was saying, drawing Nia unwillingly back into the room. She’d been pacing up and down the lab as Brainy worked, worrying her lip so hard that Nia thought Kryptonian levels of friction burn was about to tear it off. “Was this just one big ruse?” She laughed darkly. “Were there even any hostages to begin with?”

“Hostages to the cause, maybe,” Brainy conceded, glancing up from the scattered shrapnel that littered his workbench. “Everyone involved in this ruse believed in what they were doing. It seems whatever differences these factions had, they had one thing in common.” He eyed her warily. “A severe distaste for all things Super Friend.”

“Us?” Kara asked, snorting her indignation. “And they were willing to sacrifice themselves for this?”

“Not exactly.” Brainy straightened. “In fact, I don’t believe they were ever in any danger at all.” He moved his hand swiftly, tossing something out to her. “They left with one of these.”

Kara caught it immediately, her hand blurring around the projectile. She stared at it in confusion.

Nia looked too. It was extremely battered, whatever it was, and very much exploded, but it looked like it might have been some sort of bracelet in its heyday.

Nia slipped from her stool curiously, lifting her head. “What is it?” she asked.

Brainy turned to her with a small smile, privately pleased that she’d joined in with the conversation. He folded his arms over his chest. “Crude portal technology,” he explained. “Less refined than Lena’s watch design, but just as effective. They must have left just before the explosion. There’s more.” He pressed a finger to his temple suddenly, his eyes scanning unseen information from left to right. He stiffened, turning to Kara gravely. “I’ve just received results in from the scan the DEO are running of the explosion site,” he said. “When those devices detonated, they released thousands of splintered shards of Kryptonite from each shell.” He blinked out from the details he’d been presented with, holding his fist loosely to his chest. “If even a piece had pierced your skin during the explosion…”

“I would have been just as vulnerable to the building’s collapse,” Kara realised. She stumbled to a halt. “If we’d been caught in that, we really never would have made it out.” She stared at Nia, dumfounded. “How did you know?”

Nia cringed. “I… didn’t,” she said, frowning. “I mean, I guess I did? Sometimes I just get a bad vibe about something and I lock up. It’s never felt like this before, though. I don’t even remember doing this, to be totally honest.”

“A latent effect of Naltorian precognition,” Brainy mused, a mark of appraisal in his eye. “The more at one a Naltorian becomes with their powers, the more naturally they interact with fragments of the future.”

Nia smirked, tipping her head gratefully towards her boyfriend. “What he said. It sounds cooler.”

Brainy’s expression softened as he walked towards her, twisting his ring finger contemplatively. “What you did today saved all of us,” he said, running his hand up her arm the moment he was within reaching distance. “Thank you.”

Nia’s face warmed, leaning into his touch appreciatively. “Any time.”

Kara, unsubtle as ever, cleared her throat loudly, clapping her hands together. “Okay, well, I guess I’ll go give the bad news to Alex, then,” she announced, backing towards the open arch. “If those aliens are still out there, there’s no telling what they’ll do next to get our attention.”

Brainy, clueless as ever, raised a brow in question. “That isn’t necessary, I can relay the information directly to her. I can do it now—”

“Don’t worry, I’ll handle it,” Kara said hurriedly, already halfway across the training room. She threw a wink over her shoulder. “Some things are better delivered in person!”

Brainy watched her go, utterly perplexed. “I suppose that’s true…”

Nia bit her cheek, bumping his arm with her shoulder. “I think she just wanted to give us some time, y’know, alone…”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

Brainy leaned in a little closer at that indication, his dark eyes flickering across her face with barely disguised concern, searching for any inconsistences. Nia was pretty sure he’d find some; after all, she was still rattled from everything that had happened. At least the weird daze she’d been walking around in was starting to lift, like whatever she’d done back at the warehouse had knocked the consciousness right back into her.

More importantly, it looked a whole lot like Brainy knew that, too.

Nia squinted at him suspiciously. “So,” she said, drawing out the word just long enough to make him uncomfortable, “how long have you known I could do this?”

Brainy’s hand stilled across her shoulder, his eyes skirting to hers a little unwillingly. He scoffed unconvincingly, suddenly finding the circumference of his ring much more appealing than checking her over for an underlying concussion. “I didn’t know,” he said, glancing away. “Not with a one hundred per cent certainty, at least.”

Nia laughed, jabbing his chest. “I knew it,” she cried. “How? No, no, wait, lemme guess; the future, right?”

Brainy’s jaw hardened in defeat. “It is true that Nura did display a similar ability back in the Legion.” He pointedly ignored her as she continued to prod at his suit smugly. “Naltorian abilities can develop very differently dependant on the element they inherit. You have already become so well adept with your abilities, there had always been a chance that this particular power might never manifest.”

“But now it has,” Nia said. She loosened her hand against Brainy’s front, searching out the heat of his closest life projector. She smiled when Brainy blushed in kind, winding his hand around hers. Not to deter her, but to guide her.

Nia blinked away from the trance-like state of that soft, enticing glow. “Wait. Is this power going to get me in trouble?” She looked up at her boyfriend seriously. “Like… what if Cat’s in a really bad mood one day and I just freeze up right in front of her?” Her face fell abjectly. “She’d never take me seriously again!”

 Brainy’s lips twitched fondly. “Although I don’t dispute that Cat’s moods are a force to be reckoned with, I wouldn’t expect this power to manifest again unless you were in a true life or death situation.”

“You never know with Cat Grant,” Nia said gravely.

She and Brainy shuddered at the same time, but there was a playful affection in Brainy’s eyes.

She kept trailing her fingers around his life projectors for a time, content to idle while he finished checking her over for any possible side effects or injuries that might have been overlooked. She didn’t think he had to worry. In fact, since they’d started talking, she was really starting to get her energy back.

“So tell me,” she said with a grin. “This power. Does it have a name in the future?”

Brainy smiled privately, like he was in on a joke that she didn’t know. “Officially no, however Nura did pen a name for it.” He leaned in close, as though to share an important secret. “She called it The Stare.”

Nia snorted, holding her mouth closed. She hummed thoughtfully, drumming her fingers across her lips. “The Stare, huh? Simple, but intense. I kinda like it.”

“I thought you might.”

Impulsively, Nia’s eyes lit up and she quickly pecked Brainy on the cheek. A further blush deepened the green in his complexion.  Nia grinned. “Thank you,” she said in explanation. “For getting me out of there today. Sensing danger’s not worth anything if you can’t even respond to it.”

“You will learn in time to become more conscious of it,” Brainy promised. He took her hand again, squeezing it tightly. Nia squeezed back, ducking her head towards his, closing her eyes. A crackle of dream energy rolled over her knuckles, enveloping their clasped hands in blue flame. “But, as always,” he told her gently, “I will have your back, Nia Nal.”

Nia opened her eyes, her smile fading from her lips. “Wait. This means more training, doesn’t it?”

Brainy didn’t need to say a word, she could see the humour in his eyes already.

“Nooo,” Nia groaned, tipping her chin towards the ceiling. “Promise me we’re not doing 5am starts again, okay? No amount of coffee or breakfast burritos will ever make me okay with 5am starts. Dreamer needs her sleep!”

Brainy nodded innocently, bumping his forehead against hers. “Duly noted.”

Nia only scowled, though she still found herself leaning into his touch reflexively. "That wasn't a promise, Brainy!"

[azreactstowormtheserial]

I should probably do this at more regular intervals! [5.7-6.X]

Guess how I spent my sunday afternoon! I'll try and do this every, like, 3 chapters, maybe? Because fuck, there's a lot to talk about. Let me try and do it in order. Arc 5 (.7 onwards) So, the Lung rematch honestly took me by surprise. The whole arc did, really? Going from a pretty depressing but harshly real depiction of what happens to girls like Taylor, to 'Fuck it, let's fuck shit up', to Lung is back! Already! It's Arc 5! I was so sure his escape and reappearance was going to be a big thing the characters dreaded and came back to bite them at the last moment, but-- And yeesh, was 5.9 a chapter. There's a certain passage in the introductory page for Worm: "Morality isn’t black and white, Taylor and her acquaintances aren’t invincible, the heroes aren’t winning the war between right and wrong ..." Every fight has me at the edge of my seat. Last year for me's been pretty brutal for media depicting major-character-deaths like it's no big deal-- and the moment Lung came back, I was so sure someone was dead. I thought it might've been-- and after the interlude, real glad it wasn't-- Newter. But somehow, everyone managed to get off scott-free. And after the fiasco that was Arc 6-- we'll get there!-- I just don't know how long this'll last. Even for the Undersiders. Which makes me want to predict deaths. I think because of the phrasing of the opening page, I know that Taylor is the POV character as a standard, and interludes are the exception. So unless this does some huge POV-shift, I think she's safe. From death, not from anything else. I am not entertaining the thought of Lisa's death. Brian and Alec, though? I don't know. I don't know about Alec at all, actually. He's kind of a scary guy? Horrifyingly subtle power, but really scarily applied in Arc 6. He's low-key one of the strongest, at least potential wise, in The Undersiders. I think Brian is going to have more story to him, now that his past's all been laid out? But later on, I just can't say. I really hope he doesn't, he means a lot to Taylor, and he's a good shoulder to lean on. Rachel-- 'Bitch'? I can't remember if she prefers one or the other... -- is a little harder to talk about. It was hard to like her after how she introduced herself! Mauling the POV character practically unprovoked isn't a good first impression. But, like Taylor's described, I feel, she's started to grow on me. Arc 5 touched on her character and personality in a nice way. I'd already started to sympathize with her come the end of Arc 4, rather than just view her as a begrudingly amazing tool for the team, but the dynamic between her and Taylor in Arc 5 was peak. She gave her her jacket!

Arc 5 Interlude This is really sweet! It left Arc 5 off on a high note. 'Kinda. I don't know what to make of the 5.X interlude. It was interesting. Newter was nice to see again. Flatline was intriguing to get a closer look at. Gregor is a strange person, but so-- I don't know if blunt is the right word, but 'sincere'-- almost refreshingly so given the web of deception going on in every other Arc-- that I liked him by the end. What I don't know what to make of in particular is the tattoos. Does it imply that there's a different-type of origination for parahuman powers? Is it artificial? I don't know! But I'm interested in finding out! Arc 6 Anyway, that was what, 4 chapters' thoughts? Let's talk about Arc 6. I started off my liveblog talking about how one of the most interesting plot threads was the growing inner-struggle Taylor has of working with The Undersiders and having agreed to double-cross them. Something I neglected to mention as well, was Taylor's dad, Danny. Straight from the get-go, both of these are the spotlight. They almost seem to slowly be intertwining the further the Arc goes on-- something I felt especially towards the end, and a final decision Taylor makes. If it wasn't painfully clear already, I like how this arc brings to the forefront how muddy the line between traditional 'good and evil' is. Armsmaster is blatantly not-good. He does not seem to value what is right and what is wrong, and-- while we do not see inside his mind-- Taylor does, and that his reputation is above all else is very telling. Luckily, he gets what he deserves. Cue my favorite passage of the serial so far:

Actually has me grinning while reading this chapter. It is unlikely Armsmaster is the only Hero that isn't all too much of one. I'm certainly not the most researched on the subject, but the parallels between Heroes and the Cops of today seem to be a major theme. With Coil entering the picture-- and, what a fucking reveal, by the way!-- I can't imagine this idea is going to take a backseat any time soon. I don't know much about Coil, and by his own words, he is not a good person. But as the only person striving for meaningful change-- whether his methods are morally sound or not-- I think I'd feel more comfortable with Skitter under his wing than, say, Armsmaster's. From his actions and his one-chapter-of-glory alone, he's a character I'm interesting in looking out for. Arc 6 made me cry! This will likely be a running theme, as I'm warned. 6.9 in particular is where it got me. That shit was crushing. As someone that struggles with anger, I admire Danny for keeping as collected as he did given the circumstance. He really does love her, and it's awful that Taylor's gotten so deep into things so quickly that she just can't be honest with him. Not until he knows what she is, and what she does. I thought Danny and Taylor's relationship was going in a healthy direction, after the incident in the mall, but I think that was just far too wishful thinking, with how everything was going to play out. ..Conversely, it looks like Taylor is figuring herself out. Writing that letter I think finally helped her analyse what she was doing, what she cared about, and what she wanted-- contextualized after finally learning about Coil and his intentions, and everything she and The Undersiders'd been through up until now. It was a powerful moment-- burning it especially. And maybe my favorite ending to an arc so fa-- Oh! Wait! There's an interlude! This is horrifying! It sure didn't shy down from takes about law and justice! The idea of a Rogue is interesting, and one I didn't even consider in the context of the world just yet. Apparently, the world's still working on that front, too. 'Making an example' of someone in a legal context is terrifying enough. That example being that the use of powers in any altercation, if you aren't grinning and willing to be part of the governments personal army of upholding the status quo, is LIFE IMPRISONMENT IN THE MONSTER DUNGEON-- like, fuck. If this is the system Heroes are defending, it's a little bit beyond muddied good and evils, it's a swamp.

Here is a bisexual Newter as a treat for making it this far among my ramblings. (thank you, mischievious magpie.) I'm sorry that they're so -rambly-! I had a lot of thoughts, and couldn't even get all of them down! Like, here's a few more bonus-thoughts: -The way Taylor via Newter-poison fucking owned Lung was rad as hell! - This!

But, yeah. I just wanted to get this out so I could keep going this evening, and on my walk. I'll stop again at 7.4-ish, and write my thoughts so this doesn't happen again. I certainly won't do more than an arc at a time. Az out!

[tricksterrune]

Rune REALLY hates grading papers

Brace yourself, it's that time again. I have to finish these today so I can return them tomorrow. block the tag runehatesgradingpapers if you don't want to see me struggling through a substantial part of a profession I've chosen.

At least I've had a mental breakthrough and realized that part of why I hate grading papers so much is that

a) I much prefer creating papers (and projects and worksheets)

b) I can work more efficiently if I have already created the exams or tests and that stress is taken care of

c) I hate leaving things to the last minute (thank you ADHD. I genuinely hate it. I'm at a point where I don't have to delay making the exams but instead grading them takes to the very last possible day

d) and that was the realization: Creating the exam is work that comes easy to me and is easily shared - 10 exams that have been written this term were created by me (wait, I forgot a bunch, it's closer to 20). I have saved others hours of work. BUUUUUT....no one can take over grading. I can't ask someone else to take care of it. (No really, it's illegal. I can't have someone else grade tests for my classes). I can never get something in turn from others that is equally helpful. I have colleagues who told me they'd rather grade 10 papers than create one test. I'm the opposite - I'd happily create 10 tests before grading one. Creating is a task than can be shared but not grading. And I hate that I'm being left alone with it, that no one can take this burden from me.

e) and it's paired with one of my character flaws: placing high expectations on others. Others doing less than what I expect actually stresses me out to no end. I often feel like I can't rely on others, in this case my colleagues on a professional level. I wouldn't leave creating a test for a Friday lesson until Thursday evening. I wouldn't, when trying to find a suitable text, always pick a schoolbook from a different publisher and copy that text regardless if it fits the length, difficulty or topic - just because that one has a solution sheet. Intellectually I know that reinventing the wheel is pointless, we all have demands on our time and good enough is enough in most cases. I suspect it's a leftover from a childhood where only excellence would get me noticed at all and anything less was never good enough. It's the question of "why are you allowed to get away with it and I'm not?" Which, places an unfair burden on others. No one has to live by my standards. It's the "It has to be perfect. To make up for the fact that it's me." thing.

And guess what? I've successfulyl stopped myself from working for another 20 minutes. I really would do anything than grading papers. I think it's time to hang up the laundry. I'm going to do that and then try another way to force myself to work.

I really hate grading papers.

[mistype360]

typing for whimsy anon!

me when i have the CUTEST divider ever that's both PINK and BEACH but tumblr downscales it: 😐

872 (OR 827) so/sx 8w7 7w8 2w1

despite being at the bottom of the questionnaire, i always prefer to start with descriptions about anger, shame, and anxiety.

i can tell that you likely don't externalize your emotions, at least intense emotions, onto others. it's as if feeling them on a physical level is a form of keeping it restrained within yourself. it's very persistent, and doesn't like to go away easily, just like an enneagram 1, especially as a wing to your 2.

you also feel a little bit of resentment for a wrongdoings, but simultaneously care for those around you. your anxiety is likely 7w6. rationalizing with "circular" thoughts as you describe - they LOVE making logical sense of their emotions, leaving them stuck in a cycle of anxiety.

even then, it seems you care A LOT about having new experiences and enjoying life, which can be interpreted as enneagram 7 - a pretty strong fix in your tritype if not your 2.

as for your desires and fears, there's a large motif of "importance." you care a load about making a difference, especially towards those who are closer to you. i'd also like to emphasize the way you structured your answer. you start with how you'd like to live up to your own standards, then feeling unworthy, and lastly impact on the world. i like to think that when people give answers that build upon each other, they often leave the deepest, and most significant aspect towards the end.

even then, the 3 types that care as much of making a difference are 1, 3, and 8. the key note here, is, that this sense of worthiness is something you hope comes from within yourself. thus, it cannot be enneagram 3, who bases their sense of worth off of their image and "rank" in society. enneagram 1 seems somewhat plausible, however you don't really care about morals and values in society. i would honestly say that enneagram 8 fits best, specifically counter-type 8.

8 might seem like an aggressive typing, but so 8 is pretty humanitarian. they care a lot about others, even in the way a 2 or a 1 would, an "advocate." it also slightly conflicts with your anger descriptions, but i can imagine that countertypes often go against their sterotype, which is likely your case.

next, your answer about those around you revealed a HUGE part of your personality - enneagram 2. at first, you desire for connection can be interpreted as an e9, being very quick to accept others. but, from the way you explain attachment and patience towards those around you, it seems very enneagram 2. even from how you describe the disregard from others about yourself, and how it can be upsetting, it's easy to see how your motivations for relationships can relate to your own personal e2 motivations.

i decided to go with 827 as your tritype, often coined the "free spirit." i think that your strong e7 fix for new experiences and living life to the fullest, combined with your e2 relationships with others really makes sense for your tritype. being the countertype of an e8 really ties it all together, especially how you balance your sense of self worth with your desire to impact others. .

as for your mbti, i thought enfp fit pretty nice. it was hard for me to deduce information, and some of it was a "vibe" type (probably the least likely of all your typing). it's harder for me to see your judgment function, wether you are more logically or value oriented. i feel as if an entp would make you much more denser, and a lot less emotional than you describe you are. if you were an entp, i could imagine your fe being much, much higher.

thinking of different outcomes and brainstorming (dominant ne)

doesn't like mundaneness or repetitiveness (dominant ne)

another possibility could be enfj, but it doesn't match well with your enneagram (enfj 8 is goofy). if you do end up going down the mbti and enneagram pipeline, and end up resonating with enfj, i'd say that being an enfj would likely make you a 278 rather than 872 - which i don't see you more as

[silyabeeodess]

Made another mockup because I needed to do something other than work and I'll probably never get an actual vacation anytime soon...

This one is based on the game, "Cartoon Cartoon Summer Resort," however, because the characters in FusionFall don't really refer to themselves as cartoons and the meta element isn't really there, I ended up changing the resort's name and tying it closer to Mike, Lu, & Og--which didn't really get much, if any, rep in FusionFall. For this, I used mostly imagery straight from Canva, but if I were to make other brochure mockups, I'd probably take screenshots from the game. The only image from another site is the coconut dessert from Jessica Kantak Bailey on Unsplash. The mockup itself is this one.

To explain some of the references, I might as well put some headcanons down below:

Despite their more frugal lifestyle on Albonquetine Island, the people who live there are actually pretty wealthy as seen in "Queeks, Queeks, Who's got the Queeks?" There's a ton of gold and treasure there from pirates alone. It's just that their lifestyle is so different from being isolated from the rest of the world: Such as Og fashioning food/technology/etc. based on Mike's descriptions with what resources are available or even in how their currency is more trade-based, using piglets and crabs. However, after Mike left the island, they were able to maintain some connections. These connections eventually led to the Albonquetine Clan establishing a resort: Promoting further relationships and allowing them to maintain a stronger financial base with the outsiders. (Just because they trade in crabs, doesn't mean others are willing to...) Still, certain aspects of a trade-based currency remain, if not with shops, then often with the guests themselves as part of the experience when visiting. One prime example of this is the Trading Hut located on the beach: An area with six huts where items can be exchanged between them.

Things offered at the resort are pretty standard overall. Since the Albonquetanians aren't familiar with the outside world, they took a mostly hands-off approach to running it. The aspect that focuses more closely on their true culture is the island tours. Some of these tours are more chaotic than others. One negative aspect is that teleporting crabs from one of the islands has now made its way to the mainland, so controlling its population is a chore.

Most of the rooms and suites are named after specific aspects from the island. The Princess Suite was designed mainly for Lu, with her insisting that she wanted a place all to herself based on her own preferences if/when she ever visited. The Cuzzlewitz Cabins were Mike's suggestion, as despite the rivalry between the two families, they couldn't not include them when referencing the island as a whole. (Nevertheless, you'll often find that these cabins are farther from the beach and are less maintained than the others.) The Queek Suite is not open for rental, but is "exclusive" in that it is where the most troublesome guests often get dumped as an "upgrade."

If the Queek Suite wasn't enough of a clue, neither the Albonquetanians nor their staff like rude guests. The former had already had enough after the events of "Crowded House." As a result, there are certain people who have "gotten lost" on a complimentary island tour or that Queek himself has sicked the clan ancestors on. In short: Show some respect while you're there.

Much to Mike's dismay, coconuts are heavily featured on the menu for any of the resort's eateries. There's definitely more variety, but you'll probably get your fill of coconut before you leave if you're eating on-site very often.

Lots of famous people in FusionFall's world have visited the resort at least once, such as Dexter and the Powerpuff Girls.

The Red Guy worked at the resort's front desk for a time, where he went by Don K. Donk. Other personas he's used around the resort include Cherry Cheeks (a maid) and Mr. Rowbottom (the dockmaster).

Like many other locations in Fusionfall, the resort suffered greatly because of the invasion. However, much like in Orchid Bay, the people there weren't about to let Fuse's monsters ruin their lives. Things can't operate as they used to for the time being, and the volcanic island near the resort now has an infected zone to deal with, but the people there are not about to give up easily.

[not-a-space-alien]

Savage Sunset Choose Your Own Adventure 4

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Story masterpost

All entries in the CYOA

You are a new vampire hunter. Your primary motivation is curiosity... You want to learn more about vampires. These mysterious creatures that terrorize humanity. Becoming a vampire hunter is really the only way to do that... Maybe that's what Nick did, to learn more.

Unlike Nick, you work in the field. You had a close-call with a vampire in your past. The only thing that had saved you from that fate were the hunters, and now you're one too, to protect others from having to experience that. That's a secondary reason, but... it does feel good to do something noble, and to protect others, even if you're here mostly because you want to get closer to vampires. What's the harm in sating your curiosity while you're at it?

You're partnered up with Felix. He seemed the nicest out of all of them, the easiest to work with, although you're honestly a little worried if he has the stomach for this line of work or not. Abbey and Brian pair up with each other and leave you alone, although they're still working at the same branch as you.

Felix tells you Nick is doing experiments on a live vampire to make the guild's vampire-hunting equipment more effective. Apparently it's been working very well and is keeping more hunters alive and safe, but he's heard from most of the other hunters on the base that it involves basically torturing the captive vampire that Nick has in the basement.

You feel guilty about that. That's horrible, even if it saves lives. Felix doesn't seem particularly happy about it either.

"Yeah, that's... pretty bad, right? I don't feel great about it, but I've heard this is a particularly bad vampire, even by vampire standards. Still, I feel like nothing justifies torture, you know? It's not what I'd prefer, but if it saves lives....I dunno. Well..."

"Don't let that get you down, I'm still looking forward to working with you. I think we'll make a great team! We're gonna protect a lot of people, and we fight vampires. We're not gonna do anything horrible like that. Let's just focus on the job and keeping each other safe, all right?"

@aceouttatime

@annablogsposts

@cc1010foxy

@darlingwhump

@emcscared-whumps

@nicolepascaline

@oddsconvert

@pigeonwhumps

@pumpkin-spice-whump

@some-thrilling-heroics

@soursagas

@thecyrulik

@whuarri

@whump-cravings

@whump-for-all-and-all-for-whump

@whumpycries

@whumpsday

@zillastar13

[thatoneguy031]

💦 -Samurotts' seamitars vary in shape and style from Samurott to Samurott, don't they? I think yours might be closer to the Sabre style, considering you're from Unova!

Actually, you're not wrong! Samurotts do have small distinctions in their seamitars, and it varies a lot between individual cases!

I've heard about this ancient variant that has terribly crooked ones. I'm pretty sure those ones have some kind of Sinnoh origin, based on a few stories I've heard.

If you've watched the show Demon Slayer, you know about that guy that wears the Emboar head, right? His blades are serrated as well, and he uses them almost like saws(I'm not gonna tell you when, because that show is amazing and I don't want to give spoilers). Anyways, I assume that that's how the more ancient variants of Samurott used those blades.

About mine, however, they're more... I dunno what you call them, standard?? I genuinely have no clue what you'd call it. You ever play Breath of the Wild? My seamitars are like large Feathered Edges with a bit of curve to them. But, take that with a grain of salt; I'm the exception, not the rule. I can pretty much guarantee that most Unovan Samurotts have a Sabre-styled blade, although it even further varies depending on how much training an individual had done as a Dewott.

A few other facts about our blades:

Many Samurotts' seamitars are shaped upon evolution, dependent on how they used their scallops as a Dewott, along with how they trained themselves. That's why so many Pokedexes say that we have to master our fighting style before we evolve.

Our seamitars are really precious to us. Since we aren't born with them, we can't just grow them back. I mean, we can if they're just chipped or something, but that's implying that we can put them back in our sheaths. If they're lost or totally destroyed, we're just out of luck. My rule of thumb is that you shouldn't lose more than 2/3 of a sword, and it should always be the hilt that you recover first.

The hilt is always hardest to regenerate, as if the process already didn't take months, and that part could end up misshapen or deformed if one chooses to grow their blade back starting from the sharp end. It's like a human breaking a bone, minus the physical pain.

That being said, most seamitars are pretty durable. Sure, they get dirty very easily, but they're safe if the attack hitting it is weaker than, let's say, a Sun-boosted Solar Beam.

Many Samurotts use both seamitars at once in combat, but not all of them. I, for instance, only use both if I start to get really, really desperate in a fight.

In cases like that, which blade that's used is simply based on preference. In my case, I'd use my left seamitar more often since I'm right-handed, and it'd be vice versa for a Samurott that's left-handed.

It's possible for an Oshawott or Dewott to evolve without their scallops. As a result, they may not have any arm guards/sheaths as a Samurott, since their bodies would consider them no longer necessary. In that case, a Pokecenter nurse might get them metal replacements. They're most like prosthetics, if that helps you visualize them, but they're pretty expensive from what I've heard.

Some Dewotts that lose their scallops don't like getting replacements, as they see it as dishonorable. From their point of view, they're getting rewarded for breaking an unspoken rule.

Many people assume that they can feed their Samurotts foods that have high amounts of calcium for their seamitars, but that's not the case. It has to be specifically calcium carbonate, and it can't be too much at a time either, as it could negatively affect our ability to use water-type moves. Trust me, it's a sad sight.

Speaking of calcium carbonate, Samurotts are known to be primarily carnivorous, but don't be opposed to give us some almond milk, where it's used as a dietary calcium. Plus, it's really good!

Anyways, I hope this answers your question, dude!