#and later battling the group’s leader

[ameliaava001]

wwe lol ,,,,,<<<

[tarta-de-limon]

The youngest Pokemon trainer around, don't mess with the son of the Dark gym and Poison gym leaders!

He has a reputation of no lost battles! People say the Pokemon battles he participates in end in less than ten seconds; Even so, the Pokemons are barely hurt, and usually just knocked out.

People say he got his first pokemon by rescuing it. Seems like Luxray has been with him even before he started his journey!

All of his Pokemon are loyal to him, and each other, so don't even think about messing with this group!

About what he wants to do...?

...

He's still thinking about it. For now, traveling the world and helping Pokemons seems to be his goal.

-

Lore aside, I really wanted to do something related to pokemon!

Oh, I was SO damn tempted to add a mimikyu JUST because it's my favorite, but I thin it would fit someone else I might do a fanart of later.

This took me a long time, I kinda posted a wip a couple days ago, and I just finished!

Very proud of it!!!!

SpeedPaint +doodles ↓!

[lethalbutterfly]

I'd like to take a moment to recommend this really cool comic on webtoon! It's called 'New Magical Me' and the premise is basically this (spoiler alert for the first 3 episodes): A transmasc magical girl is, alongside his team, engaged in the final battle against their big bad evil sorceress. He uses the clash of their final blows to fake his death freeing himself from the public eye and social obligation to his friends and family, affording himself the opportunity to transition in privacy and peace. 8 years later, he returns to his home city, now a literal self made man, but finds that the threat of evil magic still persists. He knows that transforming again would be bad for him on a psychological level, and so has to reestablish connections to the rest of his old squad, who, without him to hold them together as friends, have all fallen out of touch with each other and are each pursuing their own adult lives and problems, with varying degrees of success as well as varying reactions to him still being alive and having transitioned. Drama, both heartwarming and heartwrenching, ensues, with a backdrop of high octane magical girl heroics to emphasize the grounded emotional notes.

[badly-drawn-doflamingo]

Brook’s Past, Military and Everything Between [ An Essay kinda ]

Brook’s past is not a thing many people seem to mention or think about, at least in full, however it’s something that's plagued me. Not only as a Brook fan, but simply out of the odd implications it has towards the future, if any. Oda’s planted too many seeds for it to utterly be nothing; there’s so much odd and seemingly out of place comments and facts stated by Brook and others towards this missing history. However, knowing that the show is beginning to near it’s end, due to time, I am unsure of what exactly will be done.

I believe however, for folks' interest and so we can have everything in one place, that compiling everything found so far can be beneficial, so, I have.

Starting with what we know for sure, Brook is from the West Blue, born 90 years ago to a certain kingdom, the same kingdom he was a military convoy leader from. We know this due to a few factors, however it’s still open to debate if it *is* the same kingdom, however seeing as he was shown as a child to already know what fencing is, practicing moves with his bow, I am just going to say he probably was. In any case, other things worth noting, on the topic of childhood, is that Brook seems to have had money. At least, stability.

Compared to a lot of the other strawhats, Brook is shown dressing very nice. No tatters, no tears, shined shoes and a full violin and bow. He also, as already stated, seemed to be exposed to fencing enough to mirror the moves. If this comes from his kingdom, it means he was exposed to it at a young age. Knowing that he was a military convoy leader, this could be taken that perhaps there were military demonstrations, perhaps the kid saw castle guard or other displays; it’s really up in the air.

We know Brook, again as stated before, became a military convoy leader. Now, the definition of what exactly that means can differ.

Wikipedia states; A convoy is a group of vehicles, typically motor vehicles or ships, traveling together for mutual support and protection. Often, a convoy is organized with armed defensive support and can help maintain cohesion within a unit. It may also be used in a non-military sense, for example when driving through remote areas.

This could mean Brook’s job could’ve been accompanying ships for protection, being a knight for his King, mediating information and goods that come in and out of the kingdom. This would make sense on why his speed was needed, a 9.2 ft man being a great choice for a leader.

His weapon also would make sense for this kind of mission, perhaps secrecy being important or at least the ability to be discreet. His cane sword, a ‘Shikomizue’, is not unique however to just him in the show, one other man using one that has been confirmed so far, that being Fujitora. The pair also share a sea, the west, and both utilize iaijutsu (quick draw techniques.) Fujitora blinded himself with said sword because of something apparently so cruel and inhumane that he rather not see anguish. This may be related to Brook’s departure from his kingdom, which is addressed later in this essay. (Fig 3-5.)

Another thing that’s worth mentioning here is Brook’s attack patterns, being unique even for his kingdom apparently. Once again, during the Ryuma fight, Brook states, and I quote;

“Ryuma: “Now tell me, what part of that wretched excuse for a body would you like me to severe with my special ‘Arrow Notch Slash?’ Brook: You don’t know a thing about that move, so do not use it’s name. I use to serve in my kingdom’s raider squad. The quick draw attack that I was most skilled at was ‘Requiem Lebanderole’. My comrades-in-arms renamed it in regards to my fighting technique.”

(Fig. 1, Brook explains his raider squad and move names. A banderole mind you is a long flag for BATTLE crusades. )

This sets up a few interesting facts. 1. Brook was in a raider squad, a kingdom’s group of marauders, as well as if not the same job as convoy leader. 

2. His techniques were unique to him, or at least specialized to a degree of having a nickname. 3. As expected, he seems to have been close to these men he commanded, adding another layer over Brook loosing the Rumbars.

Being in both a raider squad and being a convoy leader at one point, if not the same point, implies either Brook was simply versatile, acting in both in separate years or periods. Or, the most likely, that he was higher ranking than expected, making him a CO, or commanding officer. (Lieutenant Colonel is another equal rank for scale, making Brook just below a Major.) This makes him quite the important figure, especially for a kingdom that seems to value its military so much, so much so that a child of Brook’s age would already know about their style of fencing, as expressed already. Brook’s devil fruit is worth mentioning here, the revive-revive fruit not likely to be found by a crew like the Rumbars. It is spoken about as if he has always had it amongst the crew, being a fact of life. However, when did he get that fruit and why? I propose where it would be useful; in combat. If your military convoy leader, your best swordsman could be shot and come right back to protect the king, would he not be utterly invaluable? You would never let him leave… But he DID leave. It’s not said why, however we have some extra tidbits of information that may tell us why, and that ALSO may tell us the answer to what kingdom he means.

( Fig. 2. Brook states his leaving of the military for unknown reasoning, the word certain being used in an odd way, establishing his bounty.) This bounty mind you all is in fact, using inflation method, 297,000,000 berries. That is a MASSIVE bounty for just a pirate. Perhaps a certain blond stole a treasure a kingdom could not replace; their convoy leader. Lets rewind for a moment and cover something that may be seen as off topic however I will come right back to the subject at hand; Calico Yorki. Yorki is an odd bird, pirate wise. He makes his crew read his bounties and information, is never shown to play an instrument/sing but makes his crew preform/they all do, and makes Brook make him dinner. (Steak, and Brook continues to be able to make it as confirmed by an SBS.) What is oddest yet, other than his large crew and shirtless habits, is his nature. A man that set to sea to play music for “orphans and crying children” as stated by himself; a crew made for “any men who love music.” Now, I could be reading into this too hard, however from his speech patterns, to this apparent need for a large family, it seems that singing to orphans may be a very personal goal. An orphan turned pirate perhaps, with lofty dreams and a heart of gold, it reads to me that Yorki may have been just that. Knowing this, orphan or not, we now can compare these facts to Brook’s life up until their meeting. A child who probably grew up being taught to fight, being around access to education, expenses and the kingdom’s training. Why would a man like Brook ever join a man like Yorki, and if it’s only music, would that not make Brook a deserter? I do not think that is the case. I will now bring forward some interesting evidence regarding Brook’s kingdom and WHY he would leave. Germa 66. During Zou to Whole Cake, a few mentions of Germa are made with Brook around, garnering interesting reactions indeed.

( Fig. 3. Brook listens but chooses not to add anything utter than silence, his music pausing as well.) This silence could be take as simple ignorance, however Brook later admits he knows of the kingdom, in fact, he knows a lot. A lot more than anyone else did, Reiju admitting interest in his knowledge and once again, Brook brushes it off.

(Fig 4, 5, Brook speaks about Germa 66.) He seems to underplay or simply not elaborate a LOT on his kingdom, as if something happened. Perhaps joining Yorki was not out of simple cowardice or need to be free, (which again if he did would both reflect poorly upon his entire character and not be in character for him what so ever,) but in fact, out of necessity. It could have been Germa 66, it could have been some other grouping, however I believe this will come to be something important. The kingdom possibilities are interesting as well, and I will list the following LIKELY possibilities. (Other options are known to not be military, like Ohara, or literally places like Thriller Bark itself.) - Toroa - God Valley - Illsia Kingdom - Soja Kingdom The most likely candidates, because again, it is labeled as certain kingdom (Fig 2.) is Toroa or Soja, however I will personally lean into Toroa. This is because of a man by the named of Byron.

(Fig 6. Byron and his information.) His nose and face shape vaguely resemble Brook, however honestly that is a stretch. What is NOT however is his familiar attire, family line and the placement of his kingdom. This could easily be Brook’s home, however again, this is just speculation. Brook very well could belong to God’s Valley, or the same kingdom as Issoh, fleeing because of something he did not agree with or literally could not stand any longer. But, that falls under possibility, not fact. This concludes the facts section, now comes the final question; What does it mean for the story? And, honestly, that can be debated. What Oda has done is plant odd seeds of information about the man, similar to Sanji and his ties to Vinsmoke, that have not been addressed nor talked about in full, or so I’ve found sufficiently. These seeds MAY bloom into what I hope will be a tie into some huge reveal, perhaps aid from a past member of his convoy or kingdom, or perhaps this will only spark conflict. Perhaps it will be minute, Brook being able to aid due to his knowledge, the man already in Thriller Bark showing his prowess by being able to command the strawhats into defeating zombies via salt and tactic. In any case, we can only hope these things mean anything, tied into some huge story that could explain why a man like him would quit for a redneck like Yorki, other than perhaps love, and what kingdom would let a man like him go willingly.

Updates:

- Confirmation that he’s educated! Perhaps in military or just as a whole, but confirmation nonetheless!

- I realize the reason he’s so confident with Big Mom isn’t just guts; he’s fought for royalty before. He’s just back in the fucking building again /j

- Sabaody behaviors, a convoy leader

CHECK REBLOG FOR PART TWO!!

[ PLEASE ^^ It contains the rest of his information! ]

[animatewarriorcats]

Redwillow! First listed in the eclipse allegiances with Whitewater as his mentor. He has some appearances in the first few omen of the stars books, but mostly is a generic background character. By Night Whispers however he is in my opinion characterized as a seasoned warrior, even though he is very new to the books. He is put in charge of leading a boarder patrol, and is seen after the battle of the border covered in wounds. Later in the book however he is part of the group that plays on the frozen lake, skidding across the surface on his belly. I love this segment because he is mentioned alongside senior warriors Crowfrost and Ratscar who yowl in amusement at his antics.

There is some of what I'm going to call fan interpretation of Redwillow that he is a loner in Shadowclan, but in the books his moderate regard by his own leader and senior warriors suggests to me instead that he was well liked, and integrated into the clan, even though it's never established who his kin is. That's why to me he becomes an example later on of a cat who's ambition is used to radicalize him to the Dark Forest. He doesn't start out a traitor to Shadowclan, on the contrary Redwillow spends his time in the dark forest close to his living clanmates. It isn't until the Forgotten Warrior that Ivypool points out Redwillow specifically multiple times when she's looking for cats that may have loyalties outside their clans. He never says anything to that point, rather his body language and exchanged glances are what makes her think so. Within the Last hope he makes several remarks in the Dark Forest about becoming the best warrior he can be, and that training in the Dark Forest makes training with Shadowclan feel like working with kittypets. Ivypool confronts him in a conversation with Hollowflight asking if he would let his weaker Clanmates die and he says "O-of course not" just that they had a lot to learn from the Dark Forest Warriors. Even with that I remember finding his final moments in the Last Hope a departure from his character, where he declares the Dark Forest his new clan, and that Blackstar's time is over.

Idk I just wanted more out of the radicalization of the clan cats while it was happening. I guess as someone who grew up with the internet I'm not a stranger to what anarchy and rebellion look like behind closed doors and personally felt that the concept of being isolated in a toxic in group extremely interesting, I found the the non-committal conversations of the dark forest trainees to be much more innocent than the showy posturing of competitive vitriol I've known such spaces to inspire. The fact that Redwillow and Breezepelt at the end of the battle were the only two warriors we know by name that sided with the Dark Forest to the end seems like such an underestimate to me. All I'm saying is that while I do love Redwillow for being an example of this, Clan cat rebellion to the Dark Forest could have been much more catastrophic than it was, and especially for the amount of plot and hype that it was given in universe. Add to all that the possible reading of Redwillow as a transmasc character that is radicalized into toxic masculinity and I want it to be known that i do love this character, but that most of that love comes from meta analysis and not from the text itself. He shouldn't have died twice in the Broken Code because truthfully he just didn't deserve it.

[novelistwriter]

The Family of Halfa's

DP x DC Prompt (With other Fandoms, this prompt was inspired by "Wished Away Series")

Danny and Wes had been together for a while. Wes was, at first, not considered part of his friend group, but as time went on, Wes integrated himself as part of Team Phantom.

Now that Wes was a full ghost, and the Consort to Danny, as he is the Ghost King, Clockwork had decided that the Halfa and his Consort are the perfect option to raise the souls of those the Time Ghost takes pity on as new Halfa's with a new start, meaning these souls don't have the memories of their past lives, but powers and such related to their previous lives.

The oldest of the reborn souls they got was a boy named Adrian Agreste, but not any Adrian, the Cat Blanc Adrian, who was plucked from his timeline before it was erased and offered a second chance at life. His power is still destruction, but only when he is feeling intense negative emotions.

The second oldest, who came a few years after Adrian, was named Callum, a boy who died at the hands of the Sunfire Elves before help had arrived. He doesn't have any unique powers but is adept at the Arcane Arts than any (fully) living person.

A few months later, another soul was given to them. His name was Eli Shane, and he perished in the Eastern Caverns during the battle with the Emperor. Eli's powers allow him to access 5 elements, with him limited to one until he switches to another, Fire, Air, Earth, Water, and Energy. And because of Junjie, Eli's other Ghost Power allows him to learn any martial arts much quicker than any being.

After a year, another soul was given to them, one of a courageous young man named Link who stopped a Demon King but suffered too many injuries to be saved. His power is time related, but not too powerful. If he dodges an attack at the last second, he is able to move faster than anyone to attack his opponent for a short duration.

2 more years later, two souls were given to Danny and Wes, Keith and Lance, who perished at the hands of a mysterious foe while giving their team time to escape. Their powers are similar yet different at the same time. They both can summon spectral lions, but Keith's is red and has fire powers, while Lance's are blue and have water related powers.

Finally, 3 years later, Danny and Wes are given 5 souls of kids, kids who died participating in a war to stop a bad guy. Aang died fighting Ozai. Zuko and Katara died in the Agni kai against Azula. Toph and Sokka died when the Airship they were on crashed in the sea before Suki could arrive on time. Aang has air and animal related powers, Katara has water and ice powers, Zuko has fire and electricity powers, and Toph has earth and metal powers, Sokka doesn't have any unique powers, but is a natural leader and adept at learning how to use any type of weapon.

After the Quintuplets were reborn from Danny, the rest of the souls were as well, as Danny needed to host their cores to have them reborn as Halfa's, Danny and Wes thought that they needed to live in a dimension, and not the Keep Danny inherited, as Danny and the reborn Halfa's need to eat regular food as well ad needing Ectoplasm, and so the kids could interact with other living people and not just the Ghosts in the Infinite Realms. So they chose a random dimension with a lot of Heroes to live in, with Clockwork giving Wes a new body to be a Halfa himself.

And now the family made of all Halfa's is living in a place called Gotham, a Gothic City with enough ambient ectoplasm as Amity, but they had caught the attention of the Vigilantes of the City, as the entire family are Alternates to the people of the dimension.

Danny is an alternate younger Jason Todd, but not as Buff. Wes is an alternate younger Roy Harper, also not as buff. Adrian is an alternate Dinah Lance. Callum is an alternate and younger Hal Jordan. Eli is an alternate Lady Shiva. Link is an alternate and younger Barry Allen. Keith is an alternate Jon Kent. Lance is an alternate Damian Wayne. Aang is an alternate and younger Bruce Wayne. Katara and Sokka are alternates to Dick Grayson. Toph is an alternate and younger Cassandra Cain. Finally, Zuko is an alternate and younger Tim Drake.

[inchidentally]

he hoped Oscar thought mostly the same as him and he did :3 as always!

like the way it’s always Lando making sure Oscar is seen and represented and noticed in media and social media etc bc Oscar is still focusing just on his driving and leaving other people to do the media and networking and non driving stuff - bc it’s still early in his career! and Lando was NOT a natural at on camera stuff when he started in Formula 1 and was painfully shy and he remembers what it’s like when your teammate knows what they’re doing and you don’t yet! Oscar sometimes takes the lead like Silverstone 2024 when he specifically said he wanted to cheer them/Lando up but otherwise he knows better than most (and literally says) that Lando is comfortably settled and established as a major player on the grid.

and there’s something very emotional in how Lando made this huge leap in himself and as a driver when he became The Leader and The Senior Authority and found a teammate who was genuinely overjoyed to have Lando be The Face and The Guy - esp when Lando was so dismayed and uncomfortable with the idea of being in that position in a dynamic at first. and that Oscar stalking/fanboying/knowing Lando so well as a driver and all he’s shared on stream and social media, means that Oscar knew Lando would be a great leader and wouldn’t be unwilling or intimidated by the idea of letting Oscar have an equal share in certain things. that Lando wouldn’t be toxic or arrogant or possessive (which certain group of Lando’s own fans often misrepresent him as bc they have warped ideas of him !!) and would actually thrive from having someone close to him in age and who was extra hungry - because unlike Carlos or Daniel and now Lando - Oscar has everything to prove about himself. he’s done exceptionally well but as someone staring down years of waiting in the wings not too long ago, he’s far from feeling established in the way he wants to be one day. Lando remembers that feeling very well so he’s the perfect one to see the bigger picture for both of them and have the most experience because he can see from both perspectives so recently!

like it’s just so sweet and subtle and specific to their dynamic in ways that make the whole brocedes/bust up/melodrama expectations keep falling flat. it’s not that they don’t argue or battle and it would be extremely weird if they didn’t want win all the time (and a 24yo driver with no major money behind him is NOT a candidate for a “spare” or support driver). it’s that they slot together so well even when it comes to drama and they hop on a plane together giggling and chatting mere hours later.

Oscar trusted Lando to lead and Lando learned to trust himself as a leader <3

[sweetblinginrose]

𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖘𝖎𝖙𝖍 𝖔𝖗𝖉𝖊𝖗,

(OS Eddie Munson x fem!reader geek)

summary: Rival Dungeons and Dragons reader who has a tournament and ends up without clothes. Oops…

word count: 6,6k +

warnings: obv +18, rivalry, unprotected sex, asphyxiation, bad language, cumming inside, female masturbation, culilingus.

a/n: hey lol, i wrote this half asleep so idk how it turned out, i'll see if it's any good or not later, so if there is something wrongly translated or that you don't find makes sense, pls let me know, hugs!

oh and don't copy my idea, it's my own huh 🦄

masterlist

part 2 !!

━━ ✧♡✧ ━━ ✧♡✧ ━━ ✧♡✧ ━━

The Sith Order.

All the members of the Hellfire Club and your group, The Sith Order, maintained a cordial and mutually respectful relationship, with the exception of the tense rivalry between you and the opposing leader, the insufferable Eddie. You hated him so much, especially now that you had bet your grand dice, which your brother had given you as a gift.

The abandoned cabin loomed like a shadow among the trees of the forest, a forgotten refuge that now housed your group of friends and your imaginary adventures. Inside, the air was filled with a smell of dampness and earth, a constant reminder of nature reclaiming its space. The once cozy and lived-in furniture was now covered in a layer of dust and cobwebs that wove complex patterns in every corner.

The sofa, your throne, was worn out, with upholstery torn in several places, revealing the crumbling yellowed foam at the touch. Dark stains of time adorned the fabric, and every time you moved, a cloud of dust rose like a sigh from the cabin itself. Sitting there, on your stomach, with a furrowed brow and crossed arms, you couldn't help but feel the rough and cold texture of the sofa against your skin, a reminder of your recent defeat in the game.

Around you, the tables wobbled on uneven legs, their surfaces scratched and marked with circles from past glasses. The faded and torn curtains hung sadly from the windows, allowing dim light to filter in and illuminate the dust particles in the air. The floor creaked under the weight of footsteps, and each floorboard seemed to tell a story of abandonment.

In this space, time seemed to have stopped, and every object told the story of a better past now eclipsed by neglect and desolation.

You felt as if a storm was brewing inside you, a mixture of frustration and challenge that consumed you as you sat on the sofa. The defeat in the friendly game was a thorn in your pride, a small battle lost in a war that seemed to extend beyond the game of dragons and dungeons. The rivalry with the Hellfire Club and its leader, Eddie, was the real dragon to be defeated, and every thought of him fueled the flames of your resentment.

Eddie, with his arrogant smile and his ability to bring out the best in his players, had become the antagonist not only in the game, but in your mind and life. You imagined him, with his tousled hair and carefree attitude, as the perfect villain for your campaign, one who seemed to enjoy every time his group came out victorious. The idea that he might consider your defeat as a point in his favor was unbearable.

While your friends continued with the campaign, laughing, stressed, focused, and rolling dice, you immersed yourself in your thoughts, planning your next move. It was not just a matter of winning a game; it was a matter of honor, of proving that your group could overcome any challenge, even the infamous Hellfire Club. Determination began to replace frustration, and although you still felt the bitterness of defeat, there was now a new goal on the horizon: to defeat Eddie and prove that your group was the best in the fantasy game.

But... were you really prepared for tonight?

...

Eddie, with a sly smile and a spark of malice in his eyes, steps forward to greet you in the lair of the Hellfire Club, the basement of the institute, the setting of countless campaigns and now the battlefield of your latest challenge. As the girls from your club gather in the space, filled with detailed maps and meticulously painted character figures, Eddie focuses on you, his most formidable rival.

"Welcome, oh great 'Mialee!'" he exclaims with an exaggeratedly theatrical and ironic tone, making a reference to the elven mage character to underline his mockery. "I hope your spells are as sharp as your tongue this time, and that your strategies are less predictable than your expressions of defeat."

You can feel the gaze of the others on you, some with complicit smiles and others with cautious curiosity. Eddie continues, not missing the opportunity to poke at your pride: "I hope you brought your Dragon Crystal Die, because something tells me you're going to need all the luck you can get."

The lair resonates with the stifled laughter of the club members, and although you know that Eddie's words are part of the rivalry game, you also feel that each joke is a challenge to your skill and determination. With a firm gaze and unwavering resolve, you prepare to show that this battle will be different, that this time, Eddie will be the one left speechless at the end of the night.

"You are living proof that not everything that glitters in a treasure is gold, and in your case, it's not even copper," you say, challenging him as you look him in the eyes. With a confidence that resonates in every word, you confront Eddie, your eyes shining with the reflection of the candles that illuminate the basement. "I hope you haven't forgotten your part of the bet, Eddie," you say with a firm and clear voice that cuts through the tension in the room. "That Orb of Entwined Destinies you so proudly show off will be mine before the moon reaches its zenith."

The Orb of Entwined Destinies was a perfect sphere of dark crystal, with a core that seemed to contain a miniature nebula, ever-changing and slowly rotating. It was more than just an object for Eddie; it was a symbol of his ability to manipulate probabilities and destiny within the game.

The mention of the orb makes Eddie's smile falter for a moment, a crack in his facade of confidence. You know you have hit a sensitive point, reminding him that you are not the only one with something valuable at stake. "Get ready, Eddie," you continue, "because when I'm done with you and the Hellfire Club, that orb will be the trophy of The Sith Order, and your luck will change forever," you spit, leaving the boys dumbfounded, unlike his group of friends, as they were used to this kind of speech.

Lucas, with a carefree smile and a tone bordering on disbelief, tries to lighten the atmosphere that has built up in the room. "Come on, guys, don't you realize? It's just a dumb bet, right? There's no need to turn this into an epic battle or something..." he comments, his voice a thread of sanity in the tapestry of rivalry unfolding before him.

However, his attempt to lighten the mood is quickly quashed by a severe look from both leaders, who in a rare moment of unity gesture to him with a stern gesture and an almost synchronized "Shh!" The seriousness of their bet is not something they are willing to downplay, even with Lucas' playful interjection.

The battle between The Sith Order and the Hellfire Club unfolds in a fantasy world woven with the magic of dragons and dungeons, but the tension is as real as the beating hearts of the players. The room, illuminated by the flickering light of the candles, has transformed into an epic battlefield where each roll of the dice resonates like the clash of swords.

The Sith Order bravely faces the challenges posed by Eddie and his Hellfire Club. The dice roll on the table like distant thunder, dictating the fate of heroes and villains alike. You, The Sith Order, with characters ranging from cunning rogues to powerful sorceresses, maneuver through traps and puzzles that Eddie has crafted with malicious skill. The battle intensifies, with each strategic move and each spell cast adding layers to the unfolding narrative. Your characters fight hordes of infernal creatures, cross dark abysses, and decipher ancient codices to unravel the secrets that will lead them to victory.

As the night progresses, a tie seems imminent. The Hellfire Club has countered every attack, every plan, with a precision bordering on the supernatural. But you, with your leading character, are not willing to give up. With a mix of cunning and a bit of luck, you roll the dice for one last masterful play. Silence fills the room as the dice roll, dancing on the edge of the abyss between victory and defeat. Finally, they settle, and the numbers they show are the harbinger of a tide change. Your play has been successful, overcoming the defenses of the Hellfire Club and securing an unexpected triumph.

Eddie, with a look of genuine astonishment, acknowledges the victory of The Sith Order, albeit reluctantly. You, with a smile of satisfaction, accept the Orb of Entwined Destinies, now rightfully yours.

Amidst the euphoria of victory, one of the girls from your group, with a contagious smile and an overflowing energy, suggests an idea that captures everyone's attention. "How about we celebrate with some pizzas? It would be great to relax and enjoy the moment," she says enthusiastically.

The idea is met with a mix of nods and smiles. It is a comfortable and familiar proposition, a perfect way to lower the intensity of the night and simply enjoy each other's company. Everyone, except you and Eddie, seems to agree. The tension of the battle still clings to you, and the idea of sharing a table with Eddie and his club, even in a neutral and friendly environment, is something that you find hard to accept, just like Eddie.

However, aware that rejecting the offer could be seen as poor sportsmanship, both of you reluctantly agree with a gesture of resignation. "Fine, but only because I'm hungry," you murmur, trying to hide your reluctance behind a practical excuse. Eddie nods silently, his serious expression revealing his reluctant agreement.

And so, with victory still fresh and emotions running high, the group sets off to share a meal that promises to be as full of flavor as it is of interesting dynamics.

The night has slipped into a soft twilight when everyone, now relieved of the tension of the game, finds themselves in Eddie's van. The space is filled with laughter and the sound of bottles clinking together. "Cheers!" the group shouts for the sixth time, raising their beers in the air in a toast that has become a ritual.

Eddie's van, with its worn seats, stickers, dirt, and windows displaying the world passing by at high speed, has become a temporary sanctuary of camaraderie. With each new "Cheers!", the barriers between The Sith Order and the Hellfire Club seem to dissolve a little more, erased by the alcohol and the shared joy. Or so it seems...

Eddie's van snakes along the road, a lonely path flanked by the silhouette of trees gently swaying under the starry sky. In the front seats, silence between Eddie and you is a marked contrast to the bustle that reigns in the back, where the rest of the group sings enthusiastically game anthems, interspersed with laughter and the sound of opening beers.

You, with crossed legs and a beer can resting in your hands, get lost in contemplation of the nature that unfolds before your eyes. The moonlight bathes the landscape, transforming each tree and bush into dancing shadows that play hide and seek with each turn of the road.

Eddie, with his attention focused on the road, drives with a slowness that seems to respect the shared silence. His profile stands out against the occasional glow of distant street lamps, and although you are together in the cabin, an abyss of unspoken words stretches between you.

"Hey..." Eddie's voice breaks the silence, a word hanging in the air that seems to wait for permission to continue. He does not look away from the road, as if fearing that a moment of distraction could reveal more than he intends.

You turn your head towards him, an eyebrow arched in a mixture of surprise and curiosity. It is strange, this attempt at conversation. Outside the game, words between you have been as scarce as leaves in winter. You have never crossed more than strategies and challenges, and now, this attempt at dialogue seems as out of place as a barbarian in a library.

The tension between you is palpable, a taut thread that is woven with each kilometer the van devours. What words will follow that "hey"? Will it be an attempt at a truce, or perhaps the prelude to another challenge? Time seems to stand still as you wait for Eddie to continue, and in that moment, the van is not just a moving vehicle, but a space where two rivals might, just maybe, begin to see each other as something more.

"No... no, nothing. Forget it..." he murmurs softly, not taking his eyes off the road, but now looking more tense, sighing.

You decide not to insist, but this time not averting your gaze from those long locks, but discreetly examining them for some kind of response.

Eddie's van glides to a smooth stop in front of a caravan. As he turns off the engine, Eddie's expression transforms. The seriousness that marked his face during the journey gives way to a genuine smile, an open invitation to continue the night in a space that is as much a part of him as the game they both love. "Come on, guys! The party continues at my place!" he exclaims with enthusiasm, his voice resonating with the promise of more laughter and memories to be created. "We can drink as much as we want, and if anyone's interested, there's weed too. My uncle works nights, so we have the place to ourselves."

Friends and friends respond with a chorus of approval, their stumbling steps and complicit smiles sealing the tacit agreement to extend the celebration. One by one, they enter the caravan, a cozy space illuminated by dim lights and adorned with mementos from trips and caps. A bit messy, but cozy.

You, with a mix of caution and curiosity, are the last to cross the threshold. Your eyes meet Eddie's, and for a moment, the outside world fades away. Eddie closes the door behind you, a simple gesture but loaded with meaning. You stand there, still, remembering the unfinished conversation, the words that Eddie left hanging in the air.

Feeling the weight of the night and the looks charged with unanswered questions, you decide to join the group that has settled in the caravan. You grab a few more beers, your hand brushing against the cold surface of the can, and sit at one end of the narrow sofa from where you can observe the scene. Eddie, on the other hand, seems different tonight. The usual arrogance that characterizes him has given way to an unusual stillness, almost reflective. Was defeat the cause of this change? Or was there something deeper behind his silence?

With each passing minute, glances between you meet like swords in a silent duel, full of questions that neither of you dares to voice aloud. After an hour of this game of looks, you feel the need to escape, if only for a moment, from the intensity of the atmosphere.

"Where is the bathroom?" you ask, your voice strangely formal in the relaxed atmosphere. Eddie points to a small hallway at the back, and you get up, navigating the space filled with laughter and conversations until you reach the bathroom.

Inside, you find yourself facing the mirror, your reflection returning an image of someone who seems to be on the border between two worlds. You wet the back of your neck, not wanting to ruin your makeup, and step out, feeling refreshed but still restless.

As you pass through the narrow exit of the bathroom, you collide with the partially open door of Eddie's room, and curiosity gets the better of you. You discreetly peek inside, your eyes scanning the space that is so intimately his. The room is adorned with posters of rock bands, metal, clothes everywhere, magazines scattered on the floor, and action figures of fantasy heroes, a mix of passions that reveal facets of Eddie that you had never considered. On the bed lies an open diary with scribbles and handwritten notes.

Eddie, with his carefree smile, leans against the doorframe, watching you with curiosity as you try to process the mess. "What are you doing here?" he repeats, his voice gentle but clearly amused by your confused expression. The scent of marijuana is evident, and his eyes, although red, gleam with a mischievous spark. He seems not to mind in the least your presence in his personal sanctuary. You feel like an intruder in an unknown world, every object in the room telling a story that only Eddie knows. However, he, with that calm bordering on indifference, gestures for you to enter. "Come, I'll show you my collection," he says casually, and suddenly, the place transforms. What was chaos before now seems like an art gallery, each hanging T-shirt, each vinyl, and each magazine clipping is a piece of his identity. He guides you through his space, narrating anecdotes of concerts and trips, his voice a thread weaving a tapestry of lived experiences.

The initial embarrassment fades away, replaced by fascination at discovering the depth of Eddie's personality. And as he shares his world with you, the messy room becomes a map of his personal universe, a place that, despite the disorder, now makes sense.

As you survey the room with your gaze, something catches your attention and takes your breath away: a proudly displayed B.C. Rich guitar hanging on the wall.

It is a red and shiny beauty, with its aggressive shapes and air of mystery, a piece that any metal lover would desire. Your heart beats with excitement, not only because of the surprise of finding such a treasure in Eddie's room, but because metal is your passion, one of the many things you have in common with Eddie without even knowing it, a detail he is unaware of.

He notices your excitement and, with a mischievous smile, takes down the guitar and hands it to you. "It's all yours, at least for now," he says with a wink. You hold it in your hands with reverence, feeling the weight of the wood and the coldness of the metal.

With shyness but moved by the emotion, you ask Eddie to play something. He shrugs, regretting the lack of an amplifier, but he is not discouraged. With a mischievous smile, he starts "playing" the guitar silently, mimicking the sounds with his mouth. It's a parody, but there is something about his attitude that invites you to play along.

"Come on, guess which song this is," he challenges you, as he moves his fingers in the air and imaginary sounds of a song fill the room. You concentrate, trying to follow the rhythm and melody that Eddie creates. The silent notes seem to come to life, and suddenly, you recognize it. It's 'Time Is Right' by Whitesnake.

Laughter fills the room as you guess it, and Eddie nods approvingly. "I knew you were one of mine, babe," he says, and in that moment, the guitar is not just an instrument, but a bridge between two souls who share a hidden passion for metal and many other things.

A blush creeps up your cheeks, an unexpected warmth that takes you by surprise. The word "babe" resonates in your ears, a term so casual and yet, loaded with an intimacy you did not expect. It feels as if you are inside the pages of one of those erotic books your mother used to read in secret, where the protagonists, initially at odds, end up wrapped in a story of love and rough sex.

Eddie's gaze has become more intense, his eyes no longer just reflecting the reddish glow of a pot smoker, but also a different glow, deeper, provoked by your presence. There is something about the way he looks at you that makes you feel like you are the only person in the world at that moment, but at the same time, as if he is undressing you.

You find yourself returning his gaze, unable to look away from his eyes. There is a connection, an unspoken understanding that seems to transcend words. And while a part of you wants to laugh at the situation, at how absurd it is to feel like a character in a pornographic novel, you cannot deny the electricity in the air, that spicy tension that hangs between the two of you.

Eddie takes a step towards you, his proximity overwhelming, and although he does not say anything more, he doesn't need to. Words are unnecessary when the looks speak for themselves. And in that instant, in that messy room that smells of marijuana and freedom, you understand that sometimes, real life can be as surprising and exciting as the stories hidden within the pages of a book.

After that moment, the room seems smaller, as if the walls had closed in to witness the silence shared between you. You decide to break the tension with a nervous smile and a change of subject. "Hey... what did you want to ask me before, you know, in the van?" you ask, stuttering slightly as you feel Eddie's scent filling your nostrils.

Eddie leaned against the threshold of the door, just inches away, watching your lips adorned with an intense crimson and your lined eyes attentively. "Ah, that..." he wondered, feigning forgetfulness. "I think I wanted to say something about Dungeons and Dragons, right?" he inquired with irony, biting his lip as he laughed and crossed his arms.

None of this compared to the fantasies you had with Eddie. Let's admit it, you had imagined countless similar scenarios, all related to the game and its protagonist, Eddie. You had wished for him to touch you in the same way he caresses his guitar. You wanted to be that fucking guitar.

"I don't think I want to talk about that right now..." you whispered, slowly moving closer to Eddie, who raised an eyebrow and smiled widely, catching your hint.

"Well then, if you don't want to listen to me, why don't you shut me up?" he whispered near your ear, sending a shiver down your spine. He grabbed your belt, holding your short denim skirt, forcing you to be pressed against him. "I said, why don't you shut me up..."

Eddie played dirty even outside of his character. He wanted you to take the initiative, perhaps to mock you or further feed his ego, but you wouldn't allow that to happen. With confidence, you ran your tongue over your lips and approached his neck, whispering, "I don't plan on silencing you. I enjoy listening to you and narrating each campaign..." This excited him, caressing your shoulder and getting closer, causing your breasts to press against him, eliciting a reaction in his groin. "Then, shut me up. I know you've wanted to since you met me," you whispered, trying to provoke him, with some success.

He responded by pushing you against the wall, trapping you between it and his body, placing his thigh between yours and gripping your waist tightly, feeling the coldness of his rings against your bare skin. "What I've wanted since I met you is to fuck you on the Harken map, so that your screams scare away the undead lurking there..." he muttered with a deep voice, softly kissing your collarbone, causing a sigh to escape your lips. With captivating slowness, Eddie guides his lips to yours, each movement deliberate and filled with anticipation. When they finally meet, the kiss is like an explosion of fire, burning and passionate. His lips sink into yours with an intensity that leaves you breathless, and his tongue boldly slides in to explore every corner of your mouth from the very first moment.

As your lips entwine in a sensual dance, his hands find your breasts with a firmness that surprises and excites you at the same time. The pressure of his hands cupping your breasts sends a wave of pleasure through your body, making you involuntarily shudder at the intense and unfamiliar sensation. You never expected this reaction, but you find yourself completely captivated by the desire that Eddie awakens in you, leaving you craving more of his passionate touch.

Eddie suddenly stops, his fingers noticing the absence of the bra he expected to find. A mischievous spark shines in his eyes as he looks at you with a mixture of surprise and desire. With a naughty smile on his lips, he whispers in your ear in a seductive tone, "Wow, looks like the girl comes with nothing...," murmuring with a hoarse voice, his warm breath sending shivers down your naked skin. His comment, though bold, is imbued with an irresistible sensuality that makes you blush and feel even more drawn to him. It feels like you're in a scene taken straight from one of those forbidden novels your mother used to find in the library, but this time, you're the protagonist, enveloped in the heat of shared desire with Eddie.

With expert dexterity, Eddie deepens the kiss, intensifying each brush of his lips against yours. As his tongue explores yours with unrestrained passion, his thigh slides and exerts pressure between yours, finding its way under your denim skirt, lifting it almost completely, hitting just that sensitive spot that makes your whole body react instantly.

"Mhmmm..." an involuntary moan escapes your lips as you feel the perfectly placed pressure of his thigh against you, sending waves of pleasure through your body. You feel the need to ride that leg. You were very wet at that moment, so the touch was making you even wetter.

He moves it with precision between yours, creating a delicious friction that awakens sensations that make you gasp against his lips. Each movement is calculated, designed to provoke maximum pleasure, as his thigh finds that sensitive spot on your body, sending waves of excitement through you.

"You've got me so hard..." with a throaty whisper, he makes you aware of the effect you have on him, sending a thrill of excitement down your spine. His warm breath against your lips only increases the intensity of the moment. You feel your heart pounding hard as you let yourself be carried away by the passion swirling around you. Then, with seductive skill, he leans slightly down, his strong hands gripping the bottom of your thighs to open you up and wrap around his waist. The change in position allows his bulge to press directly against your underwear, which is exposed by the previous lifting of your skirt. A wave of desire surges through your being as you feel his prominence brushing directly against your sensitive and swollen clit, sending sparks of pleasure that seem to electrify every fiber of your being.

The movements of his hips are precise and deliberate, each delicious brush torturous while engulfing you deeper into the abyss of pleasure. The sounds of your ragged breathing blend with the seductive whispers and soft moans escaping between hot kisses. You are completely at the mercy of the passion Eddie unleashes in you, lost in the whirlwind of overwhelming sensations that threaten to consume you completely.

The barely contained moan escapes your lips between kisses as you feel Eddie's gentle hip movement, a movement that sends you soaring to the heights of pleasure. Still with your thighs tightly wrapped around his hips, you give in to a wild and passionate kiss, with an intensity that defies any limit.

The kiss becomes a whirlwind of unabated passion, your hands gripping his shoulders tightly as you let yourself be carried away by the overwhelming sensations. Amidst the heat of the moment, you feel Eddie release one of your legs, changing the dynamics of the position and making you feel his bulge even more. Now, in this new position, the contact with his clothed cock is even more evident, causing you to instinctively arch your hips towards him, seeking more contact, more friction. You feel his hands grip your buttocks firmly, aggressively pressing you against his jeans, as if he is eager to feel you even closer.

The brushes and hip movements become increasingly intense, a symphony of pleasure that seems to have no end. You are completely immersed in the moment.

"Mmhm... fuck..." Between moans escaping your lips, accompanied by the sensual movements of your hips, Eddie suddenly stops, only to turn off the bedroom light and then guides you, still with your body on top of his, to his disheveled bed. He places you on your back on the tousled sheets, and positions himself above you, burning desire reflected in his gaze as he begins to explore your neck with hot kisses and licks. Each touch of his tongue against your skin awakens an electric sensation that makes you tremble with pleasure. His expert hands play with your nipples from inside your top, squeezing and teasing them while his thighs continue to exert delicious pressure on your intimate area, making you gasp with each movement, holding onto his back.

Slowly, your rival moves down your body with controlled impatience, licking and kissing your abdomen eagerly before quickly lifting your top and leaving you exposed before him. His lips find your breasts, and he kisses and licks them with devotion, as if they are the most delicious thing he has ever tasted. His long hair sometimes gets tangled in his face, but when you start gently tugging on it for pleasure, he moves away, leaving behind an incredibly enticing scene that makes you arch your hips forward instinctively.

While Eddie continues to lavish attention on your breasts, his hands begin to explore above your underwear with his ring finger, stroking gently from top to bottom. "Do you like it like this?" he asks between kisses and licks, asking you with a husky voice if you're enjoying yourself, establishing an intimate and desire-filled dialogue that only increases the sexual tension between you. "Or is it better like this?" he increases the speed of his touch.

Your silence prompts Eddie to grab your chin firmly, his fingers exerting a dominant and sexual pressure as he forces you to look into his eyes. When you finally respond to his question with an intense gaze, he slowly releases you, going back down to give attention to your body. His lips find your panties, and he kisses and licks them eagerly, soaking them with his saliva mixed with your own excited wetness.

With precise and deliberate movements, Eddie slowly pulls down your panties, placing soft kisses on your inner thigh as he slides them down your legs. Once he has removed your panties, his eyes meet your exposed, naked, and wet pussy, and he can't help but feel his cock throbbing with an unprecedented intensity, eager to satisfy the burning desire between them. You feel incredibly exposed under his heated gaze, but Eddie sees you as a work of art, a sight that excites him to the limit. Without wasting time, Eddie gives you a generic lick to your wet pussy, spreading your lips with his fingers to access your exposed clit directly. An overwhelming moan escapes your lips at the wave of pleasure that courses through your body, but Eddie quickly covers your mouth, whispering that you can't moan to avoid being heard in the common area where the others are.

With a mischievous smile on his face, Eddie realizes that the loud music has concealed any sound that would have revealed their activities in the bedroom. With your mouth still covered, he delves into the task with renewed eagerness, licking and sucking your clit with an intensity that makes your body arch in response. Each suck and each lick sends waves of pleasure through you, taking you to the edge of ecstasy over and over again. Your hips move instinctively in response to the overwhelming pleasure, but Eddie firmly controls them, maintaining a rhythm that takes you closer and closer to the precipice of pleasure. With an expert hand, he begins caressing your abdomen, slowly descending until reaching your clit, parting his mouth for a moment to touch it with his fingers before inserting two of them without any prior preparation.

The sudden stimulus causes your eyes to roll back, and your thighs tighten with force from the pleasure that overwhelms you, arching your back and moving your hips towards the direction of the long-haired person. In a short time, Eddie goes back to action, losing himself between your thighs as he continues moving his fingers with unwavering determination.

He continues like this for a few minutes, not stopping for a moment, until you feel that you're about to reach climax. You grab his hair with incredible strength, almost burying your fingers in its roots, urging him to continue, feeling like you're about to burst in his mouth. But just as you're on the edge of orgasm, he pulls away from you, leaving a thread of saliva mixed with your wetness as a separation between his mouth and your pussy, leaving you in a state of uncontrollable anticipation and desire.

Eddie, eager to satisfy his burning desire, hastily fumbles with his zipper and unleashes his erect cock, ready for action. Eddie's cock, although of average size, has a peculiarity that sets it apart: a curved shape that gives it a unique and distinctive appearance. Its thickness is notable, and the veins that run along its length add texture to its look. The skin that covers it has a pink tone, with a reddish hue indicating the excitement that engulfs it. A slightly glistening liquid adorns its tip. It is an image that reflects virility and desire, a promise of intense pleasure about to be unleashed.

"How does this look, huh?" he moves it, noticeably sensitive, gently rubbing it against your clit, giving you a mischievous look as if he's playing a game with you. Without warning, after lightly masturbating it, he quickly and decisively inserts it into you, completely surprising you and leaving you breathless. "Mhmmm..." he sighs deeply, as if a weight has been lifted off his shoulders, arching his head backward. From the very first second, he begins to thrust into you with a dizzying rhythm, penetrating you deeply over and over again. You are overwhelmed by the intensity of the pleasure that engulfs you, unable to articulate a single word as you completely surrender to the wild thrusts of the guy. Each thrust hits your insides with overpowering force, sending waves of ecstasy through your body.

Despite the initial discomfort from the lack of preparation, you find yourself immersed in a whirlwind of sensations that make you lose track of time and space.

You writhe under him, unable to hold back the moans that escape your lips as you completely surrender to the frenzied pleasure that consumes you. Although it hurts, you can't help but enjoy every thrust, every touch of his skin against yours ignites a burning fire inside you.

He grabs you by the neck with a firm but dominant hand, stopping any sound that could escape your lips. His warm breath brushes against your ear as he whispers with a husky and authoritative voice, "Shut up." The words, loaded with desire and determination, send a shiver down your spine, leaving you breathless and obedient to his command. You are completely surrendered to him, unable to do anything but obey his orders as you let yourself be carried away by the frenzied passion that burns between you. The orgasm that you had almost experienced less than a minute ago begins to resonate through your body again, but the intensity of Eddie's thrusts makes you feel like you're on the verge of a great climax. You are completely overwhelmed by the avalanche of sensations that envelop you, unable to resist the tide of pleasure that drags you into an endless abyss of ecstasy. Your increasingly intense and uncontrolled moans blend with the background music, creating a symphony of pleasure and ecstasy that fills the room. Eddie, releasing his hand from your neck, begins to hit your thigh and butt with a mixture of desire and unbridled passion. As he continues to thrust into you with force, his lascivious words fill the air, whispering in your ear with a deep and seductive voice.

He tells you how much he has wanted to fuck that pussy of yours, expressing his most intimate desires with an exciting crudeness that makes you shiver with pleasure. He calls you a slut with a tone of desire and adoration, celebrating your sexuality and the way you grip his cock with every thrust. Those words, charged with lust and desire, only increase the intensity of the moment, pushing you closer to climax with each word that comes out of his mouth.

You can feel yourself getting closer to the edge, every thrust of Eddie sending waves of pleasure through your body. He perceives it too, thanks to the way your pussy grips his cock, and he lets out a guttural grunt of satisfaction. You're on the edge of the abyss, about to let the ecstasy completely envelop you, while Eddie's lascivious moans and words push you towards the most glorious climax you've ever experienced

You feel the ecstasy completely enveloping you, a overwhelming wave of pleasure that shakes you to your core. Your walls contract tightly around Eddie's cock, squeezing with an intensity that makes him moan with pleasure. "Damn, you're so tight..."

Your body trembles uncontrollably, your eyes rolling back in your head as a guttural groan escapes from your lips, louder and more heartbreaking than ever before.

However, before you can fully recover from your orgasm, Eddie aggressively grabs you by the throat again, his expression a wild mix of concentration, excitement, and a hint of anger. With notable abruptness, he continues fucking with a renewed ferocity, as if taking revenge for something, but this time he has absolute control. The sensation of being taken with such force awakens a wild fire inside you, a overflowing passion that mixes with pain and pleasure in a symphony of indescribable sensations. You are completely immersed in the erotic game between you and Eddie, each thrust taking you further into the abyss of shared desire.

Thegame is now tied, each one taking the lead at different moments. You feel Eddie moaning with an unusual intensity, sensing that he's about to reach climax. You want to warn him not to come inside, but your throat is blocked by Eddie's firm hand, keeping you from articulating any words. A slight shiver runs through his body when he perceives your attempt to communicate your desire, but it's too late.

With a few final shaky thrusts, Eddie gives in to the avalanche of pleasure, releasing his hot and trembling liquid inside you. You accept his release without reserve, watching Eddie's expression as he does so. His face shows an unusual vulnerability, with arched eyebrows and a lost look somewhere in the room. His slightly parted lips release his moans of pleasure, and his hands grip your hips tightly, as if clinging to you for support.

After Eddie releases his liquid inside you, he slowly retreats and lies down by your side. Both of you remain staring at the ceiling, and suddenly, a nervous and uncontrollable laughter overwhelms you. Eddie looks at you strangely and asks what's happening. Between laughs, you respond that you just imagined that all of this was one of his campaigns, a kind of joke or experiment designed to test your limits and reactions. The surprise on Eddie's face turns into a knowing smile when he realizes that you have disarmed the tension of the moment with your humorous comment. Both of you give in to laughter, releasing the accumulated tension and sharing a moment of complicity after the unrestrained passion you just experienced together. It's an unexpected and light ending to an intimate and passionate encounter.

[techhiz]

Hi Tech!

May I request a fic of [TFP] Optimus Prime with a Cybertronian!Autobot![S/O] [Romantic] [Gender Neutral] who’s secretly conjunxed to him?

[Prompt]: Optimus and [S/O] are secretly conjunxed to each other for a LONG time (even before the war) and try not to let their personal relationship interfere with their works/missions. The others don’t know this information (except Ratchet knows their relationship because that’s what friends are for), until a certain hyperactive human (Miko) accidentally overheard [S/O] calling Optimus his secret nickname, “Oppy”. Then everyone is surprised by the sudden reveal.

I’m Swift, by the way. You probably seen me around here.

Secrets Beneath the Stars.

Optimus Prime was a bot of many titles—leader, warrior, protector—but the one he cherished most was known only to one other soul: conjunx.

You had been bonded with him long before the war had sundered Cybertron. Before he was Prime, before the weight of leadership bowed his shoulders, he had been Orion Pax, and you had loved him with the entirety of your spark. That love had endured through the ages, through countless battles and immeasurable loss, growing stronger with each trial you faced together.

The only other who knew of your bond was Ratchet. The cranky medic had discovered your secret early in the war when your injuries had exposed the shared spark signatures between you and Optimus. Ratchet’s loyalty ensured that your relationship remained hidden, a sanctuary amidst the chaos.

Now, millions of years later, on Earth, you and Optimus still guarded your relationship with care. Leadership demanded impartiality, and you both had agreed long ago to place the needs of the Autobots above your personal lives. That didn’t stop small, stolen moments from slipping through—a lingering glance during strategy meetings, a brief touch when no one was looking, or the occasional murmured “Oppy” when you were sure you were alone.

The day your secret unraveled began innocently enough.

Miko Nakadai had a penchant for mischief and finding herself in places she wasn’t supposed to be. This time, her curiosity led her into the quieter corridors of the base. She was on a quest for adventure, perhaps some secret Autobot tech she could show off to Raf and Jack later.

What she found instead was you, tucked away in a quiet corner of the base, speaking softly into your comm.

“Oppy,” you murmured, your voice carrying a warmth and affection that Miko had never heard before. “You don’t need to worry. I’ll handle it.”

Miko froze, her eyes wide. Oppy? Who was that? And why did it sound suspiciously like Optimus’s voice responding on the other end?

“I trust you,” came the familiar baritone voice, softer than she’d ever heard it. “But do be careful.”

Miko clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a gasp. This was huge.

The next morning, the base buzzed with activity as usual, but Miko couldn’t keep her discovery to herself.

“Hey, guys,” she said, sidling up to Jack and Raf. “Guess what I found out?”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“[Y/N] called Optimus Oppy. Like, seriously. They were all... cozy or something.”

Raf blinked. “Wait, what? Are you saying [Y/N] and Optimus are... together?”

“I’m just saying what I heard,” Miko said, her grin mischievous. “And I definitely heard it.”

The humans’ whispers didn’t escape Ratchet’s notice. The medic narrowed his optics as he watched them exchange furtive glances. He knew the truth, of course, but he wasn’t about to let a group of meddling teenagers jeopardize it.

Unfortunately, the humans weren’t the only ones curious. Bulkhead, who’d overheard part of Miko’s recounting, couldn’t resist bringing it up to Arcee during a lull in patrol.

“Do you think it’s true?” Bulkhead asked. “About Optimus and [Y/N]?”

Arcee gave him a skeptical look. “What are you talking about?”

Bulkhead scratched the back of his helm. “Miko said she overheard [Y/N] call Optimus ‘Oppy.’ Sounds kinda... intimate, doesn’t it?”

Arcee frowned. “It’s probably nothing. Optimus wouldn’t let something like that distract him.”

“Still,” Bulkhead said, “it’s kinda hard not to wonder...”

By the time you returned to the base later that day, the atmosphere felt... different. You noticed the lingering stares, the half-whispered conversations that ceased when you entered the room.

“What’s going on?” you asked Ratchet, who was busily working at his console.

The medic gave an exaggerated sigh. “Your little nickname slip didn’t go unnoticed.”

Your optics widened. “You mean...?”

“Miko,” Ratchet said, his tone exasperated. “That human has an uncanny knack for stumbling into things she shouldn’t.”

Before you could respond, Optimus entered the room, his commanding presence immediately silencing the chatter. He gave you a brief, reassuring glance before addressing the team.

“We have an incoming Decepticon signal,” he said. “Prepare for deployment.”

The mission went smoothly, but the air of tension followed you back to the base. As the Autobots regrouped, Miko couldn’t contain her curiosity any longer.

“Okay, seriously,” she blurted, “are you two, like, a thing?”

Everyone froze.

“Miko!” Jack hissed.

“What? I’m just asking!”

Optimus’s optics flickered briefly to you before he spoke. “Miko, such inquiries are inappropriate.”

“But she called you ‘Oppy’!” Miko protested.

Bulkhead’s optics widened. “Wait, that’s true?”

The room erupted into a cacophony of voices, everyone talking over each other in surprise and disbelief.

“Silence.” Optimus’s voice cut through the chaos, and the room fell quiet.

He looked at you, his optics softening. You nodded, giving him silent permission.

“It is true,” Optimus said, his tone calm but resolute. “We have been bonded as conjunxes for many millennia. However, we chose to keep our relationship private to ensure that our duties to the Autobots remained our primary focus.”

The room was silent for a moment before Ratchet snorted. “Honestly, I’m surprised it took this long for you lot to figure it out.”

The initial shock soon gave way to acceptance, though not without a fair share of teasing.

“I can’t believe you kept this from us!” Bulkhead said, grinning. “I mean, ‘Oppy’? Really?”

Arcee smirked. “I guess even Optimus has a soft side.”

Optimus took the jabs in stride, his composure unwavering. You, on the other hand, found yourself blushing under the team’s playful scrutiny.

“I think it’s sweet,” Raf said, smiling.

Jack nodded. “Yeah, it makes sense. You guys do balance each other out.”

Even Miko, who had started the whole thing, seemed pleased. “Okay, I admit it. You guys are kinda cute together.”

Later that night, as the base quieted down, you found yourself alone with Optimus.

“Well,” you said, leaning against him, “I suppose the secret’s out now.”

He chuckled softly, the sound rumbling through his chassis. “It was bound to happen eventually.”

You smiled, resting your hand over his. “I’m just glad they took it well.”

“As am I,” he said, his optics glowing warmly. “Though I must admit, I had grown rather fond of our secrecy. It made our moments together feel... special.”

You tilted your helm up to look at him, your optics meeting his. “Every moment with you is special, Oppy.”

He leaned down, pressing his forehead gently against yours. “And every moment with you strengthens my resolve to protect what we hold dear.”

In the quiet of the night, beneath the soft hum of the base’s lights, you allowed yourself to savor the moment—no longer a secret, but still deeply, profoundly yours.

[fastestmanalive333]

A List of Every Teen Titan Ever (Pre 52 Only)

The Teen Titans [1965-1979]: When the adult heroes were possessed by the evil Antithesis entity, it was up to the teen sidekicks - Robin, Kid Flash, Aqualad, Wonder Girl and Speedy - to band together to save them. Inspired by their success, the adolescent adventurers decided to remain a team - and the Teen Titans were born! Some members left and new ones emerged - even forming a Titans West sub-group. But as the members approached college, the team began to dissolve and eventually disbanded.

1. Dick Grayson [Robin/Nightwing] Joined: Brave and the Bold #60 [1965] When Dick Grayson's trapeze-artist parents were murdered, he was taken in by the Batman and became his junior partner: Robin, the Boy Wonder. As leader of the Teen Titans, Dick emerged from the shadow of his mentor and adopted the costumed identity of Nightwing.

2. Wally West [Kid Flash/Flash] Joined: Brave and the Bold #60 [1965] A bolt of lightning endowed young Wally West with super-speed, enabling him to become Kid Flash, protege to the Flash! When the Flash was slain during a great crisis, Wally became the Flash in honor of his fallen mentor.

3. Garth [Aqualad/Tempest] Joined: Brave and the Bold #60 [1965] Young Garth was abandoned by his own people because of a superstition concerning his unique purple eyes. Befriended by Aquaman, the underwater orphan became his sidekick as Aqualad! Years later, Garth discovered his secret mystic birthright and emerged as the powerful aquatic hero known as Tempest.

4. Donna Troy [Wonder Girl/Troia/Darkstar] Joined: Brave and the Bold #60 [1965] Infant Donna Troy was rescued from a fire and raised by the Titans of Myth, who gifted her with great powers. At age 13, Donna was adopted by the Amazons and became Wonder Girl in honor of her sister, Wonder Woman. Donna later embraced her true Titanic heritage and became the heroine known as Troia.

5. Roy Harper [Speedy/Arsenal/Red Arrow] Joined: Teen Titans #19 [1968], Revealed as founding member in Teen Titans #53 [1978] When Roy Harper's forest ranger father perished in a fire, Green Arrow adopted the young orphan and trained the natural-born archer as his sidekick, Speedy. Roy's time as a government agent exposed him to all manner of weaponry - leading the boy bowman to become an expert marksman as Arsenal. In honor of his mentor, Harper now fights crime as Red Arrow.

6. Lilith Clay Jupiter [Omen] Joined: Teen Titans #25 [1970] Lilith Clay - a mysterious precognitive telepath - long sought the truth behind her own parentage. Lilith later discovered her father was none other than Titans mentor, Loren Jupiter. Upon meeting her mysterious mother, Lilith's powers intensified and she adopted the persona of Omen. Lilith was later tragically killed in battle.

7. Hank Hall [Hawk] Joined: Teen Titans #25 [1970] The Lords of Chaos and Order mysteriously granted powers to teen brothers Hank and Don Hall. Pacifist Don became Dove while aggresive Hank became Hawk - both balancing the scales between might and right. Tragedy later claimed both brothers as Dove was killed in battle while Hawk became the villainous Monarch and later perished.

8. Don Hall [Dove] Joined: Teen Titans #25 [1970] The Lords of Chaos and Order mysteriously granted powers to teen brothers Hank and Don Hall. Pacifist Don became Dove while aggresive Hank became Hawk - both balancing the scales between might and right. Tragedy later claimed both brothers as Dove was killed in battle while Hawk became the villainous Monarch and later perished.

9. Mal Duncan [Vox/Guardian/Hornblower/Herald] Joined: Teen Titans #26 [1970] Streetwise Mal Duncan was invited to join the Titans by Loren Jupiter. Mal later adopted the identity of the Herald when his girlfriend Karen Beecher helped fashion a dimension-opening Gabriel's Horn for him. When a horrible accident fused Mal's sub-sonic weapons to his body, he adopted the name Vox and joined the Doom Patrol.

10. Gnarrk [Pre-Crisis] Joined: Teen Titans #33 [1971] A gentle caveman out of his own time, Gnarrk bonded with Lilith Clay before his tragic death.

11. Duela Dent [Joker's Daughter/Harlequin] [Pre-Crisis] Joined: Teen Titans #46 [1976] Duela Dent - the daughter of Earth-3's heroes, Jokester and Three-Face - developed a maddening identity crisis as she found herself constantly phasing between earths. Initially vexing Robin as The Joker's Daughter, Duela later joined the Teen Titans as Harlequin. A true wild card, demented Duela shuffled between good and evil before being slain by a rogue Monitor agent.

12. Karen Beecher Duncan [Bumblebee] Joined: Teen Titans #48 [1977] Super-smart Karen Beecher created a high-tech Bumblebee suit as part of a ruse to bolster her boyfriend Mal's reputation on the team. As a result, Bumblebee eventually joined the Teen Titans, and later married Mal as well. When exposure to a strange energy shrank her to insect height, Bumblebee joined other freakish heroes as a member of the Doom Patrol.

13. Bette Kane [Bat-Girl/Flamebird] Joined: Teen Titans #50 [1977] as founding member, Titans West An eager Robin fan, tennis pro first Batgirl and founding member of Titans West, it took some time for Bette to finally earn the respect of her Titans teammates

14. Charley Parker [Golden Eagle] Joined: Teen Titans #50 [1977] as founding member, Titans West When teen slacker Charley Parker was mysteriously gifted with Thanagarian battle armor, he thought it would be a good way to earn easy cash as Golden Eagle. Until his death at the hands of the evil Wildebeest Society

15. Garfield Logan [Beast Boy/Changeling] Joined: Teen Titans #50 [1977] as founding member, Titans West Forced to undergo an experimental procedure to save his life, Garfield Logan gained the ability to transform into any sort of animal he could imagine. Green-skinned Garfield found a new family as Beast Boy, a junior member of the Doom Patrol. Beast Boy changed his name to Changeling and later joined the Teen Titans. Known once again as Beast Boy, Gar uses his trademark humor to diffuse the most dire of situations.

Honorary: Tula [Aquagirl] Honorary Member The young orphan Tula was adopted by one the royal families of Atlantis and raised as a princess of Poseidonis. Tula later became Aquagirl when she became romantically involved with Aqualad. Their romance ended tragically when Aquagirl perished during the Crisis of Infinite Earths.

The New Teen Titans [1980-1989]: As the other-wordly demon Trigon threatened to ravage the earth, his mystical daughter Raven gathered a New Teen Titans team to thwart his plans. Former Titans were joined by all-new members and were able to repel Trigon's incursion. The Titans remained a team and grew into adulthood, as many of the teen heroes adopted more adult personas.

16. Raven Joined: DC Comics Presents #26 [1980] Daughter of an earth woman and the demonic Trigon, Raven constantly fights to keep her evil side in check. The empathic mystic sometimes fell to the dark side, but valiantly found her own inner light - oftimes at the expense of her own happiness. Raven later received a second chance at life when she was reborn in a new body.

17. Koriand'r [Starfire] Joined: DC Comics Presents #26 [1980] Young Princess Koriand'r was forced into slavery to save her home planet of Tamaran. Given to the alien Psions for experimentation, Koriand'r acquired solar-channeling abilities that allowed her to blast powerful starfbolts. Once rescued by the Titans, the passionate alien powerhouse - now dubbed Starfire - made earth her second home.

18. Vic Stone [Cyborg/Cyberion] Joined: DC Comics Presents #26 [1980] Once a promising athlete, Vic Stone was severely injured in an explosion, leading his father to save his life through cybernetic implants. A living man-machine, the once-bitter Cyborg learned to accept his new appearance and became a capable hero in his own right.

19. Tara Markov [Terra] Joined: New Teen Titans #30 [1983] Bold and brassy Tara Markov gained earth-manipulating abilities through Markovian scientist Dr. Jace. Adopting the name Terra, the bitter malcontent infiltrated the Titans as a member - while secretly acting as a spy for Deathstroke, the Terminator. After utterly betraying the Titans, Terra's own rage consumed her as she buried herself in a ton of debris.

20. Joseph Wilson [Jericho] Joined: Tales of the Teen Titans #58 [1985] As son of Slade Wilson, Joe Wilson was born with the mutant ability to possess people once he made eye contact. The gentle mute hero known as Jericho joined the Titans despite his familial ties. Long believed slain during an encounter with the Wildebeest Society, Jericho's fractured spirit survived and his body was mystically reborn. The new Vigilante later neutralized the now-insane Jericho by cutting out both his eyes.

Honorary: Kole Weathers [Kole] Honorary Member The gentle crystal spinner Kole Weathers gained powers as a product of her father's bizarre experiments. Kole was rescued by the Titans and grew close to Jericho before her untimely demise in the Crisis on Infinite Earths.

21. Danny Chase Joined: New Teen Titans [2nd] Annual #3 [1987] Telekenetic Danny Chase initially joined with the Titans to rescue his parents, who were government operatives. Danny was dismissed from the Titans because of his immaturity but secretly aided the team as Phantasm, before being slain during the final encounter with the Wildebeest Society.

The New Titans [1990-1996]: As the Titans began to enter their twenties, they dropped the "Teen" and became the New Titans. The team was then thrown into turmoil when the Titans were viciously hunted by the Wildebeest Society. Titans were lost as new allies were found - such as Pantha, Phantasm and Baby Wildebeest. Events became even more complicated when the time-tossed Team Titans from an alternate future emerged. The team remained in flux until Arsenal assembled his own team of Titans after the Zero Hour time crisis. That team soon disbanded.

22. Pantha [X-24, Real Name Unknown] Joined: New Titans #74 [1991] A result of the Wildebeest Society's macabre experiments, shy vet student Rosabelle Mendez was transformed into the were-cat known as Pantha. Suffering amnesia, Pantha long sought the truths behind her origins. Pantha's razor sharp personality was softened when Baby Wildebeest bonded with the ferocious feline as his 'mama.' Pantha and Wildebeest were later tragically killed during the Infinite Crisis.

23. Phantasm [Danny Chase, Souls of Azarath] Joined: New Titans #74 [1991] During the final battle with the Wildebeests, the Souls of Azarath bonded with Arella and Danny Chase to become a true Phantasm. Cold and aloof, the formless telekenetic entity has aided the Titans when needed.

24. Leonid Kovar [Red Star] Joined: New Titans #77 [1991] Leonid Kovar's exposure to a space ship gave him powers - enabling him to become Russia's first young hero as Starfire. Leonid later joined the Titans as Red Star and developed fiery new abilities.

25. Baby Wildebeest Joined: New Titans #85 [1992] The Wildebeest Society's strange experiments led to the creation of an actual Baby Wildebeest. In moments of extreme stress, Baby could transform into a fierce adult Wildebeest creature! Baby quickly bonded with Pantha, who he regarded as his 'mama.' Pantha and Wildebeest were later tragically killed during the Infinite Crisis.

26. Miriam Delgado [Mirage] Joined: first appeared as Team Titan in New Titans #79 [1991] Brazilian Miriam Delgado became the illusion-casting Mirage to repel Lord Chaos' brutal armies. Believing she was from an alternate future, Miri later learned she was implanted with false memories. Mirage left the Titans when she gave birth to her daughter, Julienne.

27. Tara Markov [Terra II ] Joined: first appeared as Team Titan in New Titans #79 [1991] Originating from the underground world of Strata, a young girl was injected with the first Terra's DNA in a mission to protect the earth. But "Tara Markov's" memories became tampered when she became a time-tossed member of the Team Titans. The second Terra feared she was the original Titans' traitor - but ultimately proved her heroism when she sacrificed her life trying to stop Black Adam's worldwide rampage.

28. Dagon [Nightrider] Joined: first appeared as Team Titan in New Titans #79 [1991] Once human, David was transformed into a vampire during one of Lord Chaos' macabre experiments. Adopting the vampiric name of Dagon - and the heroic name of Nightrider - David joined the Team Titans, who helped control his bloodlust. Dagon was erased from time during the Zero Hour time crisis.

29. Charlie Watkins [Killowat] Joined: first appeared as Team Titan in New Titans #79 [1991] Originally a soldier for Lord Chaos, Charlie Watkins realized the error of his ways during an accident with a bank of energy converters. Crackling with electricity, Charlie joined the Team Titans as Killowat! Killowat was erased from time during the Zero Hour time crisis.

30. Carrie Levine [Redwing] Joined: first appeared as Team Titan in New Titans #79 [1991] A mutant born with red wings, Carrie Levine joined the resistance after her parents were slain by Lord Chaos. The avian avenger even became sidekick to the future Nightwing. Redwing was erased from time during the Zero Hour time crisis.

31. Jon Levine [Prestor Jon] Joined: first appeared as Team Titan in New Titans #79 [1991] Brother to Carrie [Redwing] Levine, Jon Levine had the mutant ability to interface with computers. Joining the Teamers after his parents' death, Prestor Jon lost his corporeal form and became a living computer. Prestor Jon was erased from time during the Zero Hour time crisis.

32. Battalion [Real Name Unknown] Joined: first appeared as Team Titan in Team Titans #2 [1992] Battalion became leader to the Team Titans after his own family was brutally slain by Lord Chaos. A self-described "drill sergeant from Hell", battle-worn Battalion trained the Teamers in battle. Battalion was erased from time during the Zero Hour time crisis.

33. Bart Allen [Impulse/Kid Flash] Joined: New Titans #0 [1994] Bart Allen - grandson of the Flash - was born with hyper-velocity and was raised in a virtual reality environment in the far future. Traveling to the past, Bart became the act-before-thinking speedster who was quickly dubbed Impulse. Bart later tried to live down his impulsive ways as Kid Flash when he joined the Teen Titans.

34. Grant Emerson [Damage] Joined: New Titans #0 [1994] The biological son of the original Atom, Grant Emerson was imbued with the DNA of various Golden Age heroes by Vandal Savage. As a teen, Grant's massive energy bursts quickly earned him the name, Damage. After his face was horribly scarred in battle, the troubled teen hero developed a more explosive personality.

35. Kyle Rayner [Green Lantern] Joined: New Titans #116 [1994] Young artist Kyle Rayner was given the last known power ring in the universe and became the newest Green Lantern. As Kyle learned to become a hero, he served as a Titan for a short time.

36. Supergirl [Matrix] Joined: New Titans #121 [1995] A protoplasmic shape-shifter from a pocket universe, Matrix felt most comfortable when she adopted the form of Supergirl. Arsenal invited Supergirl into the ranks of the Titans, where she became a member for a short time.

37. Rose Wilson [Ravager] Joined: New Titans #122 [1995] As daughter to Deathstroke the Terminator, Rose Wilson's ninja-like reflexes were enhanced by flashes of precognition. After mourning her mother's death, Rose was befriended by the Titans. Seeking to reclaim his daughter, Deathstroke brainwashed Rose to become a lethal killer as the new Ravager. After losing her left eye, Ravager broke free from her father and now dispenses her own brand of hard justice.

38. Minion [Jarras Minion] Joined: New Titans #123 [1995] When Jarras Minion's planet of Talyn was destroyed, he escaped using the morphing Omegadrome battlesuit. Raised as a pacifist, Minion was at odds with his desire for revenge. His brief tenure with the Titans taught him a better way to resolve conflicts. After Minion gave the Omegadrome to Cyborg, he returned to the stars.

Teen Titans II [1996-1998]: The second group of Teen Titans were united by a common origin. The sinister H'San Natall alien race produced alien/human half-breeds to act as warrior sleeper agents on Earth. The seedlings - Argent, Risk, Joto and Prysm - were activated on their 16th birthdays. Led by the teenaged Atom, the youths joined under the auspices of former Titans mentor, Loren Jupiter. The team was later joined by Fringe and Captain Marvel Jr. After an outer-space adventure which ended the H'San Natall conflict, the team disbanded.

39. Ray Palmer [Atom] Joined: Teen Titans (second series) #1 [1996] Discovering a fragment of a white dwarf star, scientist Ray Palmer developed technology to grow and shrink as the Atom. When the adult hero was temporarily de-aged to 17 years old by the time villain Extant, he reluctantly joined - and became the leader of - the newest group of Teen Titans.

40. Toni Monetti [Argent] Joined: Teen Titans (second series) #1 [1996] The H'San Natall race produced alien/human hybrids that would be activated with super-human powers on their 16th birthdays. On that day, silver-skinned Toni Monetti learned she had the ability to control bursts of silver plasma energy. Joining the Teen Titans as Argent, Toni evolved from spoiled rich girl to capable heroine.

41. Cody Driscoll [Risk] Joined: Teen Titans (second series) #1 [1996] The H'San Natall race produced alien/human hybrids that would be activated with super-human powers on their 16th birthdays. On that day, Cody 'Risky' Driscoll learned he had fives times the speed, strength and stamina of an average 16 year old. Now dubbed Risk, daredevil Cody joined the Teen Titans. Risk became furious at the world after losing both arms in battle - prompting the teen thrill-seeker to embark on a life of crime.

42. Isaiah Crockett [Joto/Hotspot] Joined: Teen Titans (second series) #1 [1996] The H'San Natall race produced alien/human hybrids that would be activated with super-human powers on their 16th birthdays. On that day, Isaiah Crockett's average middle-class life was shattered when he learned he of his heat-manipulating powers. Taking the name Joto - which is Swahili for 'heat' - Isaiah joined the Teen Titans. Joto later adopted a new codename: Hotspot.

43. Audrey Spears [Prysm] Joined: Teen Titans (second series) #1 [1996] An alien/human hybrid, Prysm grew up as "Audrey Spears" in a virtual reality picture-perfect world based on earth's television shows. The Teen Titans pulled her out and welcomed her into their ranks. Able to absorb and reflect light, Prysm is a force to be reckoned with; But the shy and naïve heroine just wants to fit in.

44. Fringe Joined: Teen Titans (second series) #17 [1998] Abandoned as a child because of his appearance, the man-monster Fringe was raised by an alien H'San Natall entity that became his protector. The monstrous powerhouse was befriended by Prysm and joined the Teen Titans.

45. Freddie Freeman [Captain Marvel, Jr./CM3] Joined: Teen Titans (second series) #17 [1998] Crippled Freddy Freeman can harness a portion of the Shazam power by saying "Captain Marvel." The powerful teen joined the Teen Titans and developed a crush on Argent. Since then, Captain Marvel Jr. has aided the Titans when called.

The Titans [1998-2003]: After rescuing Cyborg from alien programming, the original five Titans decided to reform as a team and welcomed five other members into their ranks. The team confronted the anti-Titans group Tartarus, a new H.I.V.E, Dark Angel and a mysterious group of D.E.O. Orphans. But when Troia and Omen were seemingly slain by a rogue Superman Android, the Titans and Young Justice were so distraught that both teams died that day. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, Beast Boy and Flamebird tried to jump-start a new Titans team known as Titans L.A. - but lack of dedication put an end to the team before it truly began.

46. Jesse Chambers [Jesse Quick] Joined: Titans Secret Files #1 [1999] Jesse Chambers - daughter of Liberty Belle and Jonny Quick - inherited super-powers from her meta-human parents. Able to access super-speed powers with a phrase, Jesse became the heroine known as Jesse Quick. After losing her super-speed powers, Jesse adopted her mother's persona as the new Liberty Belle.

47. 'Hero' Cruz ['Hero'] Joined: Titans Secret Files #2 [2000] as a member of Titans L.A. On an adventure with Superboy and the Ravers, teenager 'Hero' Cruz stole the mystical H-dial from the villainous Scavanger. By dialing H-E-R-O, Hero becomes a different super-powered guise on each mission. The openly gay teenage hero joined the short-lived Titans L.A. Branch before its rapid dissolution.

48. Ryuko Orsono [Bushido] Joined: Titans Secret Files #2 [2000] as a member of Titans L.A. Japanese teenager Ryuko Orsono became the proud Bushido warrior upon his mother's death - fulfilling a long family line of honorable heroes. Bushido briefly joined the short-lived Titans L.A. Branch before his death during the Infinite Crisis.

Teen Titans III [2003-present]: Deciding the next generation of super-heroes needed a place to go, Cyborg, Starfire and Beast Boy created a new Titans Tower headquarters in San Francisco. Joined by Robin III, Superboy, Wonder Girl II and Kid Flash II, they became the latest version of Teen Titans! After Superboy's death during the Infinite Crisis, the team was thrown in turmoil and faced a year of turbulent membership changes. The team remained in constant upheaval until Robin returned and reorganized the Titans into a team, welcoming new members Ravager, Kid Devil, Miss Martian, and Blue Beetle.

49. Tim Drake [Robin III] Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #1 [2003] Tim Drake learned the secret identity of Batman and petitioned to become the new Robin. At first reluctant, Batman eventually conceded and trained Tim to become the newest Boy Wonder.

50. Conner Kent [Superboy] Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #1 [2003] In an attempt to clone Superman, Cadmus Labs combined the Kryptonian DNA of Superman with the human DNA of Lex Luthor. The impetuous clone escaped the lab and later became known as the hero, Superboy. The Teen of Steel later was welcomed to live in Smallville as "Conner Kent" and joined the Teen Titans while he came to grips with his true lineage.

51. Cassie Sandsmark [Wondergirl II] Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #1 [2003] Upon meeting Wonder Woman, teenaged Cassie Sandsmark petitioned Zeus for powers of her own. Little did Cassie know that her true father was Zeus himself! Blessed with powers from the gods, Cassie became Wonder Girl, despite her mother's objections. As Wonder Girl, Cassie has matured from gawky adventurer to self-assured heroine.

52. Mia Dearden [Speedy II] Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #21 [2005] Tough-as-nails Mia Dearden was rescued from a life on the streets by Green Arrow. But Mia's past came back to haunt her when she was diagnosed as H.I.V. Positive. Resolved to make a difference, Mia became the newest arrow-slinging heroine as Speedy, sidekick to Green Arrow.

53. Eddie "Gopher" Bloomberg [Kid Devil/Red Devil] Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #34 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" ; Edward "Gopher" Bloomberg grew to idolize stuntman Dan Cassidy while working for his aunt's film company. When Dan was magically transformed into Blue Devil, Gopher fashioned his own high-tech super-suit to become Kid Devil, Blue Devil's (unwanted) kid sidekick. Eddie later made a dangerous deal with the devilish trickster, Neron, who transformed him into a honest-to-gosh red-skinned Kid Devil. After proving his mettle with the Teen Titans, Eddie beagn calling himself Red Devil.

54. M'gann M'orzz [Miss Martian ] Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #34 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" M'gann M'orzz is an anomoly among her conquering White Martian race; The shape-shifting teen alien rejected her people and found her way to earth. Once there, she modeled herself after the the Justice League's Martian Manhunter as Miss Martian. Adopting the earth name "Megan Morse," the sensitive heroine strives to use her powers for good.

55. Dawn Granger [Dove II] Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #34 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" The Lords of Chaos and Order originally granted powers to teen brothers Hank and Don Hall. When the first Dove was killed, his powers transferred to the pragmatic Dawn Granger. As Dove II, Dawn sought out Hawk to became an effective crime-fighting duo until Hawk became corrupted by chaos. Dove II returned from near-death to find a new Hawk in her sister, Holly.

56. Holly Granger [Hawk III] Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #34 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" The Lords of Chaos and Order originally granted powers to teen brothers Hank and Don Hall - who were both lost in battle. Now, two sisters wield those same mystical powers - pragmatic Dawn Granger as Dove and her rebellious sister, Holly, as Hawk.

57. Lorena Marquez [Aquagirl II] Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #34 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" ; After a genetic anomaly was introduced to the San Diego water supply, the California city sunk into the ocean. Teenager Lorena Marquez soon discovered that her body had been altered to survive the ocean depths. It wasn't long before out-spoken Lorena allied with Aquaman as the newest Aquagirl.

58. Zachary Zatara Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #34 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" As cousin to Zatanna and nephew to the late Zatara, Zachary Zatara had magic in his blood. The teen magician learned that to be true when his latent magic powers sparked as a new age of magic dawned. Now, the spoiled teen magician can get whatever he wants with a simple backwards-speaking incantation.

59. Ernie O'Brian [Offspring] Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #34 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" As son of Plastic Man, Luke O'Brian inherited super-stretching powers of his own. Taking the name Offspring, Luke's exploits mix humor and heroism, much like his father. Despite his infectious sense of humor, Offspring wants to prove to the world that he's not just a walking punchline.

60. Amon Tomaz [Osiris] Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #38 [2006]: Revealed as member during "missing year" When Amon Tomaz was severely beaten and crippled by the criminal cartel known as Intergang, Black Adam gifted the Egyptian teen with a portion of his magical abilities. Taking the name Osiris, Amon summoned the power of the gods by speaking "Black Adam." Tragically, Osiris was later devoured by his "friend", the lizard-creature known as Sobek.

60. Power Boy Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #38 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" Raised on the hellish world of Apokolips, a power-enhanced boy learned his superhuman abilities were fueled by the emotions of others. Originally an agent of Darkseid, the teen abandoned the demonic despot when he fell in love with Supergirl. Assuming the name “Power Boy,” he became a Teen Titan only to be slain in battle.

61. Little Barda Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #38 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" Hailing from the brutal world of Apokolips, Little Barda made her way to earth and joined the Teen Titans for a brief time.

62. Amy Allen [Bombshell] Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #38 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" Facing jail, small-time criminal Amy Allen was recruited into a rogue military black ops unit. Grafted with extra-terrestrial metal and given military training, Amy was transformed into the quantum-wielding powerhouse known as Bombshell. Reckless as her namesake, Bombshell is learning to keep explosive personality in check.

63. Mas Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #38 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" Mas Y Menos are a pair of hyper-active high-speed twins. When connected by holding hands, the Spanish-speaking heroes can reach super-sonic speeds! But knock them apart, and they are just normal teenage boys.

64. Menos Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #38 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" Mas Y Menos are a pair of hyper-active high-speed twins. When connected by holding hands, the Spanish-speaking heroes can reach super-sonic speeds! But knock them apart, and they are just normal teenage boys.

65. Riddler's Daughter/Enimga Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #38 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" Fancying herself the "Riddler's Daughter," the inquisitive teen briefly joined the Teen Titans. After changing her name to Enigma, she defected to join Deathstroke's nefarious Titans East. Her true parentage and history are as puzzling as her namesakes.

66. Talon Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #38 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" On the parallel world known as Earth-3, evil versions of the Justice League use their human abilities to terrorize the planet. As an evil analogue to Batman, Owlman likewise adopted a young Robin-like sidekick named Talon. After Talon betrayed his mentor by falling in love with Joker's Daughter, he fled Earth-3 for another earth.

67. Molecule Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #38 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" The super-shrinking adventurer known as Molecule joined the Teen Titans for a short time after the events of Infinite Crisis. Molecule was later murdered by the Terror Titans.

68. Young Frankenstein Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #38 [2006]; Revealed as member during "missing year" The teenaged man-monster known as Young Frankenstein joined the Teen Titans for a short time after the events of Infinite Crisis. The creature's heroism later led to his death at the hands of Black Adam. But a bolt of lightning revived the behemoth - and Young Frankenstein was free to walk the earth once more.

69. Anima Joined: Teen Titans East Special #1 [2007] A bite from an alien parasite utterly transformed runaway teenager Courtney Mason - allowing her to channel the Animus, a living embodiment of mankind's rage. Courtney then became the wandering heroine known as Anima, helping those in need by calling upon the fearsome force inside her. Anima was later slain while battling Prometheus.

70. Son of Vulcan Joined: Teen Titans East Special #1 [2007] Shortly after Vulcan recruited orphan Miguel "Mikey" Devante as his sidekick, the flame-wielding hero was slain by an evil White Martian. Before he died, Vulcan gifted his fire-based powers to Mikey and equipped the inexperienced hero with an arsenal of weaponry. In honor of his fallen mentor, Mikey has sworn to continue the legacy of the Son of Vulcan!

71. Lagoon Boy Joined: Teen Titans East Special #1 [2007] Though young and slight of build, the aquatic young mutant known as Lagoon Boy can inflate his body like a puffer fish to intimidate predators and foes. His love for the surface world united him in friendship with the mutated whale, Bludder, and the Trironian mermaid, Sheeva. Eventually, Lagoon Boy's travels led him to meet other teen heroes and become part of their community.

72. Kara Zor-El [Supergirl] Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #50 [2007] Kara Zor-El was sent to Earth in a rocket ship at roughly the same time as her cousin, Kal-El, but aged at a slower rate in suspended animation. Years after Kal-El became Superman, Kara crashed to Earth and soon adopted the name Supergirl. Despite her stong-willed bravado, the Kryptonian teen is still trying to discover what she wants to be.

73. Jaime Reyes [Blue Beetle] Joined: Teen Titans (third series) #61 [2008] When the mystic scarab of the Blue Beetle fused to the spine of Jaime Reyes, a new Blue Beetle was born! The Texas teen learned the alien artifact could expand to create a super-powered carapace around his body, enabling him to become El Paso's super-powered protector from threats both criminal and magical.

Titans Allies: Over the years, the Titans have amassed a set of friends and allies in their never-ending battle against evil. Some have been lost in battle and others still aid the Titans when called.

Loren Jupiter First Allied: Teen Titans #25 [1970] Wealthy philanthropist Loren Jupiter funded the original Titans team for a time - as well as Atom's Teen Titans much later. Jupiter later was revealed as the father of Titans' psychic Lilith Clay and Titans' foe, the illusion-casting Haze.

The Doom Patrol First Allied: The Doom Patrol #104 [1966] Victims of cruel fate, three individuals were given strange powers that made them outcasts from society. United by their wheelchair-bound leader known as "The Chief," the oddball adventurers - Robotman, Elasti-Girl and Negative Man - became underground heroes as the Doom Patrol! Although the membership has changed through the years, the Doom Patrol has always offered freakish pariahs the chance to become heroes.

Steve Dayton [Mento/Crimelord] First Allied: New Teen Titans #13-15 [1981-1982] Smitten with Elasti-Girl of the Doom Patrol, millionaire inventor Steve Dayton fashioned a psionic helmet and became the self-styled super-hero, Mento. Elasti-Girl and Mento wed - and adopted Beast Boy as their son. Although the Mento helmet has pushed him to the brink of insanity, Dayton has learned to tame his inner demons.

Arella [Angela Roth] First Allied: New Teen Titans #5 [1980] Impregnated by the demon Trigon, Angela Roth found refuge in the peaceful city of Azarath, where she adopted the name, Arella. There, she gave birth to Raven and protected her from Trigon's evil. Arella's devotion to her daughter led to her death during an encounter with the Wildebbest Society.

Frances Kane [Magenta] First Allied: New Teen Titans #17 [1982] When Frances Kane's magnetic powers manifested, the insecure teen believed she was possessed by demons. Her childhood sweetheart, Wally West, pulled her back from the brink of insanity. Frances later adopted a meta-human persona as Magenta, but found her powers fractured her mind - violently shifting her personality from positive to negative.

Adrian Chase [Vigilante] First Allied: New Teen Titans Annual #2 [1983] When his family was brutally killed by mobsters, District Attorney Adrian Chase took the law into his own hands as the gun-toting Vigilante. As Vigilante's methods became more extreme, Chase entered into a state of self-loathing and took his own life.

Jason Hart [The Protector] First Allied: The New Teen Titans #1 (Drug Awareness Giveaway) [1983] High school student Jason Hart became alarmed at the nation's growing drug problem. Allied with the Teen Titans, resourceful Jason became the crime-fighter known as The Protector and took to the streets to wage a war on illegal narcotics.

Gan and Tavis Williams [Thunder & Lightning] First Allied: New Teen Titans #32 [1983] The offspring of a Vietnamese woman and an alien entity, Gan and Tavis Williams manifested uncontrollable elemental powers. Dubbed Thunder & Lightning, the Teen Titans and S.T.A.R. Labs contained the duo and uncovered the truths behind their origins. Since then, the elemental twins have become trusted allies to the Titans as well as protectors of S.T.A.R. Labs.

Adeline Kane Wilson First Allied: Tales of the Teen Titans #42-44, Annual #3 [1984] The ex-wife of the mercenary, Deathstroke, Adeline Kane formed her own detective agency, Searchers, Inc. Adeline was mother to the Titan, Jericho as well as Titans' foe, The Ravager. After a blood transfusion from Deathtroke, Adeline gained immortal powers and was driven insane. Addie later became Mistress of the criminal organization, H.I.V.E., and was destroyed in battle.

Azrael [Real Name Unknown] First Allied: Tales of the Teen Titans #52 [1985] When a mysterious winged alien was unthawed from a block of ice, he immediately fell in love with Lilith Clay. When Lilith left, the distraught alien became duped into Brother Blood's cult - where he was given the name, Azrael. Eventually freed from Blood's thrall, Azrael once again flies free.

Jason Todd [Robin II] First Allied: New Teen Titans (second series) #19-21 [1986]

After attempting to steal the wheels off the Batmobile, brash street urchin Jason Todd met the Batman. Becoming the second Robin, Jason's fiery temperament led to his apparent death at the hands of the Joker. But Jason has returned from death to wage a violent war on crime on his own terms.

Chris King [Dial "H" for HERO] First Allied: New Teen Titans (second series) #45-46 [1988] When Chris King and Vicki Grant stumbled upon two mystical dials, they discovered they could transform into a different super-powered persona each time they dialed H-E-R-O! When Vicki went rogue, Chris sought the Titans for help. Since then, King has learned to internalize his transformations and aids the Titans when called.

Slade Wilson [Deathstroke, The Terminator] First Allied: New Titans #71 [1990] A hard-edged mercenary, Slade Wilson, a.k.a. Deathstroke the Terminator, fulfilled any contract he undertook. The chemically-enhanced assassin accepted the contract to kill the Titans on his dead son's behalf. But when Slade's attempts to kill the Titans led to ruin, he abandoned the contract and even became their ally on occasion. After losing those close to him, Slade returned to his violent ways.

William Randolph Wintergreen First Allied: Tales of the Teen Titans #42-44, Annual #3 [1984] Slade Wilson disobeyed orders to save the life of British soldier, William Randolph Wintergreen - earning a debt Wintergreen intended to repay in kind. Wintergreen catalogued Slade's exploits as the mercenary, Deathstroke the Terminator, often serving as his moral conscience. Wintergreen's devotion to Slade ultimately led to his death.

Pat Trayce [Vigilante II] First Allied: Deathstroke #6-9 [1991-1992] Tough Gotham Detective Pat Trayce - frustrated with the revolving-door justice system - became the Vigilante in an effort to punish the man who killed her partner. Trained by Deathstroke, Vigilante found herself in a tumultuous on-again/off-again affair with the famed mercenary. Trayce also runs a search & rescue operation known as Vigilance.

Sarge Steel First Allied: New Titans #100 [1993] Sarge Steel earned his nickname when the tough soldier's hand was replaced with a steel alloy appendage after a rigged hand grenade cost him his left hand. Steel later became a high ranking government operative in both the Central Bureau of Intelligence and Checkmate. When the government assumed control of the New Titans, Sarge Steel often clashed with then-leader, Arsenal.

Neil Richards [Mad Mod] First Allied: Teen Titans (second series) #2 [1996] The madcap Mad Mod clashed with the original Teen Titans when the outrageous villain attempted to use his clothing design label as a smuggling operation. The criminal of Carnaby Street eventually reformed and befriended Titans' mentor, Loren Jupiter.

Sasha Martens and Wiley Wolverman [Hawk & Dove III] First Allied: JLA/Titans #1-3 [1998] Army brat Sasha Martens and laidback musician Wiley Wolverman had only one thing in common: Both were part of a secret government experiment designed to genetically engineer meta-humans. Now sprouting wings at will and powered with sonic shrieks, the mismatched duo became the newest Hawk & Dove.

Epsilon [Real Name Unknown] First Allied: Titans #21-22 [2000] The Department of Extranormal Operations [D.E.O.] established an orphanage full of super-powered young charges. The psychotic orphan known as Epsilon was possessed by fellow orphan, Kevin Tanaka, who secured safe haven for his friends at Titans Tower. After the real Epsilon burst free, he destroyed the tower in a battle that seemingly claimed his own life as well.

The D.E.O. Orphans [Grace, Zeke, Eli, Scrap, Nikki and Kevin] First Allied: Titans #27-29 [2001] Six meta-human orphans - Grace, Zeke, Eli, Scrap, Nikki and Kevin - fled the Department of Extranormal Operations [D.E.O.] to secure safe haven at Titans Tower headquarters. The plan backfired when Epsilon emerged and destroyed Titans Tower, resulting in the death of D.E.O. orphan, Kevin Tanaka. After that tragedy, Nightwing intervened on their behalf, and the kids returned to a restructured D.E.O. Orphanage.

Krypto First Allied: Teen Titans #7 [2004] Rescued from an alternate universe, the Kryptonian canine known as Krypto was brought back to earth by Superman. After a disasterous stay in Metropolis, Superboy was charged to care for the super-pup.

Wendy & Marvin First Allied: Teen Titans #34 [2006] The clever criminal known as The Calculator fathered twin children, Wendy and Marvin, both of whom shared his advanced intellect. The super-smart siblings acted as caretakers to the Titans Tower after they graduated M.I.T. on their sixteenth birthday - until Marvin was slain by King Lycus' vicious hellhound.

Atlee [Terra III ] First Allied: Terror Titans #1 [2008] Born in the underground world of Strata, young Atlee possessed earth-manipulating abilities unique to her people. Destined to protect Strata's future, optimistic Atlee journeyed to the surface to defend the earth as Terra.

[svt-kiki]

kiki in nana tour but shes upset that cheol couldn't be there and mentions him every 5 minutes ;o;

　🧺 𓏔 DON’T LET SEVENTEEN KNOW　　⌅ .

𝗡𝗔𝗡𝗔 𝗧𝗢𝗨𝗥────EP. 001　✦　01

　　🥥 ⸝⸝ 𝗇𝖺 𝗉𝖽 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝖼𝗈𝗎𝗉𝗌 𝗇𝖾𝖾𝖽 𝗍𝗈 𝖺𝖼𝗁𝗂𝖾𝗏𝖾 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝗂𝗆𝗉𝗈𝗌𝗌𝗂𝖻𝗅𝖾 𝗆𝗂𝗌𝗌𝗂𝗈𝗇. 𝖽𝗈𝗇’𝗍 𝗅𝖾𝗍 𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗆 𝗄𝗇𝗈𝗐 — 𝗆𝗈𝗋𝖾 𝗉𝗋𝖾𝖼𝗂𝗌𝖾𝗅𝗒, 𝗁𝖾𝗋.

⌇ 2023.　kiki ( fem!oc ) x svt　2.9k　fluff, crack, messy writing, kicheol is rly strong in here so be aware　✉️　i said i struggled writing this and still is but luv the layout so trying to write and post it as much as i can... enjoy !

“i think she would be the hardest to fool,” seungcheol presumes. “if you want to wake them up one by one, i think it’s better to go to her first.”

it is september 7th, 2023. few hours ago, seungcheol received the surprising news from the staff — youth over flowers is actually happening.

na youngseok pd agrees, “actually we’re planning the same thing... maybe it’s insensitive for women to just storm into the room while sleeping, you know,” then pd crosses his arms, tilting his head slightly and murmurs, “i mean, is this okay for her? i hope it’s not too much or unnecessary,”

he’s implying that she could be sensitive to getting different treatment with the rest of the members. since day 1, she needs to prove herself constantly to make people believe that she didn’t end up in the group for just instant attention gathering but because she deserved it in effect. seungcheol chuckles with a hint of surprise, “woah, you’re really thoughtful. i think it’s alright but have you talked with minji noona? if she approves, i guess it’s more than fine.”

“yeah we talked,” na pd nods. “in fact she’s on our side.”

“ohh is that so? but it makes sense,” seungcheol looked impressed at how their team planned well to make it before na pd retorts. “but you didn’t seem surprised?”

“minji noona is the best at poker facing. she’s so professional, no one can detect she’s hiding or concealing the truth beside kiki, so it just makes sense you, or other staff on your side choose to include her, because she’s the safest person to entrust your secret.”

“oh yes, she’s kinda an earnest person?” na of snickers about the way seungcheol describes a famous manager of seventeen like a boss he’s afraid of, or wishes to not pissed off. 

[ 15 hours later ]

next morning, at four thirty, na pd dashed into seungcheol’s room. 

“seungcheol-la, how’s it going?” general leader stuttered to pd’s question as soon as he entered the room. “it’s in danger! she might have noticed it! i didn’t know if i glossed over well!” na pd is lured to his upset as well and quivers, “what- what do you mean? who’s she? kiki-ssi?”

“yes,” he continues after pacifying his own agitation. “after the concert she asked me to eat dinner together. i was already shaken up for the ask because i’m not confident i can stick through with the plan in front of her — which means i need to keep lying to her — but i don’t have good reason to decline, thus i’ve been like well, she should have no idea what’s coming, there’s no way minji noona spills it unless it's unprofitable for her, so i was okay, then after eating the dishes she really concerned about me because i looked tired,”

“you looked tired?” na pd tilts his head before cracking up a little for his response. “because i shooted this with you in the afternoon!” 

[ he was exhausted ]

“she was genuinely worried about me and i felt so guilty,” he keeps going. “it was in the tip of my tongue!” na pd pat on his shoulder and reassures him. “i know, thank you for bearing that for us seungcheol-lie. in fact we couldn’t decide which to call first between kiki and the boys who are still awake, what do you think? i thought maybe we should go to her first quietly, you or minji-ssi enter the room before us and make sure everything is okay?”

“sounds nice.” seungcheol nods. “then we can go to their room,” he waves toward the direction where mingyu and others are having rap battles. after the explanation from pd about plan to go into energetic kids, they stand up and sneak out the room together. 

kiki picks up the call from seungcheol earlier than expected. “yeoboseyo? kyoka?” he calls her by the birth name, indicating the bosom relationship they have. while na pd glances at the camera to how his voice softened. “hey, sorry to wake you up this early. can i come in now? …okay, good.” he gives a thumbs up to the crew. minji follows after him, entering her room in silence. pd and the other staff overhear them chatting some words in the room from outside without looking into before seungcheol pops out the head from the door. 

“good morning kiki-ssi,” na pd greets the japanese girl who's still half asleep. “it’s been a while, do you recognize me?” 

“...??? annyeonghaseyo...???”

[ politeness in full of question marks ]

“but... why... how...?”

everyone cracks up to her guiltless state while trying hard to keep their voice low. her dark hair was a bit messy but flowed down smoothly to her chest area over the sweat shirt. she blinks slowly as trying to process what’s going on right now. kiki just wakes up with her bare face but somehow it looks almost intentional. her skin is glowing and there’s almost no sign of any puffiness, leading the female pd’s voice of awe. she sighs in impressed, just murmurs “wow…” and that makes them push into another bursting out, while they edited her with glowing effects around her with the sound of birds chirping and flower petals blowing in the screen. 

[ living sleeping beauty is here ]

“wake up sleepyhead,” seungcheol gently pokes her head with a palm which makes her giggle with slight confusion. then suddenly, she snaps back into the reality and gazes all over those people in the room. “wait- is this- for real? it’s happening?”

“yes it is, and you’re the first one to know.” pd confirmed. kiki is delighted, she beamed to seungcheol and the words slipped out from her mouth. “cheol-lie! oh my god, it’s happening! we are going to...” then she realized. all of the emotions drop from her facade. “wait,” she mumbles. “are you not... going to say that... the...” 

he casts a look at her face changes before holding and caressing the back of her hand. “kiki, it’s okay.”

“i’m sorry,” na pd droopes his head in guilt. “we tried to rearrange after hearing this news but since you have fourteen of them, it’s really difficult to find another date.” 

at the moment, almost everyone in the room feels pain with her. the way her eyes roamed all over the sheets, backed to with seungcheol, moved with minji, then backed to na pd again, she clearly trying to hide the sadness for the sake of this filming. “ah- i understand. thank you for trying to make it happen for all of us oppa. it’s…sad but, can’t be helped right?” she holds back his hand and swings it a little. “i’m so sorry cheol,”

“i know. you don’t have to worry about me, okay?”

in fact, this is the true reason minji agreed — moreover, recommended — to obtain her first. kiki must be heavily upset about the fact that seungcheol can’t make it to this trip. she’ve already registered deep concern for his injury a few months ago as he joked that the doctor needed to reassure her more than himself. in addition, she’s the one who is excited about this trip the most. carats know how she seemed happy during ttt in house and other behind contents when she was spending time with all of them. now she needs to depart to the destination leaving him behind alone. it’s not easy. “now, put this mic on!” seungcheol giggles as he does by himself for her. after managed to slip away from her room — she added the black frame glasses on her face along with the mic in last second — na pd told her the plan to surprise dino and others. he added the mention of the glasses, “oh you dressed up?” to which she responds “i thought... i should just cover up for it...”

“what? you don’t need anything! i can’t believe you were asleep 5 minutes ago!” he affirms which cracks up her. 

[ now let’s visit the energetic kids ]

“why are they still awake and loud like this?” kiki is genuinely bewildered about the voice which is heard from inside to the hallway. she almost collapsed onto the floor to hold on laughter while lending an ear to their singing. 

then pd catches hoshi who just came out from the room. kiki pulls him closer and whispers to not speak loudly. surprisingly, hoshi perceives the assignment in a second, guesses its for the show that jun and minghao would star. 

“no,” she quickly shakes her head. “it’s youth over with flowers, soonyoung! it’s happening!”

“woah- really? like actually? how? oh my god,” it’s funny that his reaction was almost identical to hers. after receives the call from the member inside, na pd leaps into the room as answering to the phone. “yeoboseyo?” 

the double bed room turns into chaos immediately. they blart out what they want to say randomly as “wait, are we not going back to korea?” or “what will happen to jun and the 8’s show?” and it becoming out of control by each seconds. kiki just giggles next to seungcheol throughout adorable little brothers falling onto the bed out of intoxicate until two reveal that na pd came to tokyo via fukuoka, which is one of the most west side of japanese major cities, while tokyo is the east side. her eyes get wider, mouth slightly parted. “woah, oppa... you’ve really gone through it.” her calm wards somehow bring more laughs among the members. although neither she couldn’t maintain her composure once na pd spilled the beans about destination. 

“italy?” the voice of her and mingyu’s synched. “are we... going to italy? really?” mingyu drops his knees onto the floor, making himself into the posture of begging towards him. “seriously?” she joins him by words. “how did you-” she couldn’t grasp what’s going to happen at this point. is there any chance that 13 of them — not 14, her stomachs become heavier for the idea — will going to europe?

“y’all really drunk,” she snickers about how four of them, dino, mingyu, seungkwan and joshua, that their brain is only functioning half of it because of alcohol. their gaze is still blurred and how hard they tried to focus on the filming, they are already losing the game.

“seungkwan-nie, guide us. this is your field.”

by hearing her demands, the tangerine fairy suddenly remembers the responsible as a variety-assigned-member. “pledis really does it, really!” he repeats with excitement. 

and the rest of the time, waking up members one by one, she just constantly fixes their hair in the background and pds make sure to highlight her habits in the edit. on the other hand, she can’t help but look up at the sky for how many of them are sleeping naked. 

“it can be bloopers by any chance...”

“that’s why we wake up you first before going into your room...” pd taps on her shoulder. 

[ true strugglers ]

“and also why did they display their front cover magazines like it’s in a shop or something?”

kiki bites her lower lip, displaying her concerns about waking up the 8 at the end. na pd already worries about the task, harks that he expecting this fake tv program filming so much from the boys all this time. in the matter of discussing how to ease his disappointment in jeonghan’s room, kiki throws a question to joshua who’s sitting next to her. he recommended entering the room while clapping and applauding. the idea’s quickly adopted by everyone. while marching towards the last room, jun chortles. “sounds so much fun! i couldn’t believe pd was there when i woke up... when he visited you, noona?”

she shared what had happened. “i was woke up first. i’ve also surprised so much, failed to process it right away.”

“i know.” jun nonchalantly put his arm around her shoulder. “it’s still hard to believe what’s happening. taking this number secretly must be so difficult.”

“yes. they must’ve planned the details to not be doubted by us.” she approves. 

after storming into minghao’s room, kiki couldn’t help but to cast a smile in the corner of her lips. although she feels sorry for him, it’s still humorous how he reacted to this news. he’s clearly not contended, or convinced fully, so she choruses besides jun when he reminds na pd once again that they ought to make an actual program for them. 

“i know few people from tvn as well, i can talk to them if you want.” she amuses. na pd facepalms as if he was waving the white flag. “are you... blackmailing me?” she said nothing but just smirked, and nothing shook na pd to his core ever.

[ for the context, kiki starred in tvn drama “it’s okay to not be okay” as the main lead in 2020! ]

they inserted the clips from future episodes in here, as she got recognized from the people in italy time to time, being asked for taking pictures or autographing to them. they also mentioned to her acting career, for example psycho-pass: zero, japanese drama on netflix that recorded a massive hit internationally this year. 

in the meantime, they go off in all directions to prepare for a depart in 3 minutes, while kiki runs out from the 8’s room as think out loud. “oh what should i do...” 

she rushes into her own room leaving the camera behind. first she washes her face with a water, put on all in one gel to keep her skin from drying out. then she throws the bottle into the bag, changes into a pair of adidas tracksuit. after she changes, the camera crews asked so she let them come in. “oh sneakers... i need to wear those... and my supplements,” even if she’s in haste, kiki doesn’t look upset. she just prepares things in calm to not waste precious 3 minutes. “oh and hats and glasses, too.” she brought those from the table and put it in. in addition, she also joins the toothbrush group alongside with mingyu, seungkwan, dino and jeonghan. 

“oh no, i don’t have extra underwear...” as she naturally murmured, they inserted “???” subtitles in the screen, telling how she’s carefree yet being female idol. 

[ is this okay to broadcast…? ]

“what should i do…does pd mean including this too?” she stands in the middle of the room like a scarecrow for a second, wondering what exactly he meant. however, she just stop minding all business before heading towards the meeting room with her tote bag. after all, things will work out, right?

“you can’t bring the bag,” as soon as she sets foot in the room, the boys who’ve already arrived there chorused the same thing. “oh is that so?” but unlike they imagined, she just gave a nod of assent and put that on the table. “you… accepted very easily, aren’t you?” na pd tilts his head with slight confusion. she just shrugs and answers, “because i’m counting on you, since you are the one who said all-inclusive.”

[ !!! ]

[ unexpected attack ]

pd bursts out laughing. they also add the subtitle “huge responsibility” on na pd. “i mean… yeah… you’re right…” he stutters as whipping the cold sweat. “you really don’t have to worry. i’ve already talked with minji-ssi and she prepared essentials for you to avoid inconvenience.”

“then let me just take my charger.”

she picked out what she said, made comfortable next to the 8. after jun sat next to her, she giggled about how they looked like matching theme outfits since both were wearing set-ups.

“but it feels so good. i’ve never- or anyone never left a country like this before, right? without worrying the luggages like just going to convenience store in the neighborhood.” and that’s true. no one would think she’s off to italy when you look at her outfits. it’s as if she’s heading to the practice room like usual.

and the time finally comes.

“oh, wait, hyung won’t go?” wonwoo awkwardly turns back to seungcheol and hugs him outside of the bus. she just stands next to him, observing members say goodbye one by one through lonely eyes.

“i’m so sorry we are not together. i’ll take lots of pictures and send to you, hm?” she puts arms around him, holds him tightly.

“i know,” seungcheol pulls her figure closer too. he really doesn’t feel sad or lonely. of course he wishes he could go with them together. but he’s also happy that his family can experience a once in a lifetime vacation like this. he can already sees her walking by the beach, basking in the sun of toscana, smacking her lips to the pizza and pasta, being a bit tipsy for the glass of red wine. oh, he loves to watch her eating. she’s an excellent cook, but she also expresses her content fully when she enjoys eating. truthfully, kiki never eats just because she needs to. she always finds a way to enjoy the dishes, whatever it is. even in haste, she always begins the meals with little “itadakimasu,” without fail. it’s a common etiquette in japan to show gratitude to people who played a role in providing food—they also say “gochisōsama-deshita,” at the end. it’s more like a secular custom than praying before the meals or something, but she never misses those. it never changes since he met her for the first time. she changes a lot like other members as well. but she’s always the same girl in his eyes.

the girl, he cares the most in this world.

to avoid being dramatic, he let go her quickly. yet her scent of fabric softener lingers with him. his chest tightened a little.

“just don’t mind and enjoy, you little workaholic.” he makes a little mess with her hair. once again, she waves at him before getting on the bus.

now, it’s time to go.

© SVT-KIKI　/　2025 .　

(　tag list　)　@smh-anon @jennwonwoo @angie-x3 @scarlet789 @cheeksung @babilou-pov

[dailyadventureprompts]

Settlement: Kaelvalon, Throne of the Once and Never King

Artsource 1 Artsource 2

Despite it’s dusty summers, muddy winters, and reputation for being a brutish backwater among other inhabitants of the kingdom, the rugged province of Drigveria holds a beauty and dignity all its own. This is no better exemplified by the province’s capital of Kaelvalon, which presides over the surrounding wilderness like a gemstone emerging from course rock.

Built as a safehold during an age of monsters and warlords by the hero Kaelrik, this sturdy bastion and the town that surrounds it is the best place in the badlands for a group of adventurers to find work, shelter, and a few homey comforts before setting out on their next expedition.

Who’s Hiring: 

Increasing dangers on the road lead a pair of ambitious merchants to hire the party as escorts, bringing them into conflict with the corrupt soldiers who’re supposed to be in charge of keeping the roads safe. 

Early in their travels the party will meet a royal surveyor looking to explore the rugged terrain of the province’s wilds. A good friend to have, if you don’t mind the espionage he’s doing on the side. 

An ambitious noble wants the party to search the skeleton of a titanic dragon to find the fabled weapon that killed it. He’ll pay well, and absolutely won’t betray them. 

While visiting the market the party see an acolyte of the goddess Istus telling fortunes, when she divines for them, she demands they make pilgrimage to a temple in the mountains, a temple it’s rumoured to be impossible to reach. 

Rumours of arcane artifacts lead the party to an isolated orcish village built in a crumbled wizard’s tower. To win their favour, the party must investigate why one of their traders has gone missing in human lands. 

The ruler of Kaelvalon, the Marquess Talmis Younge, has a problem. Or rather, three problems that are going to make eachother infinitely worse. The first is that she’s trapped in a loveless marriage to a man named Selvin who she dare not divorce for fear of angering some of her most vital bannermen. The second is that she’s having an affair with an orc named Irgyr, who happens to be one of the clan leaders of her people’s traditional enemies. The third is that after years of “diplomatic meetings” with the clan leader, she’s fallen pregnant with her lover’s child, and the due date is approaching. She doesn’t want to give up the child, but giving birth to a halforc out of wedlock will be all the fodder Selvin needs to raise support and oust her from power.   Perhaps the party could be convinced to look into her husband’s dealings, if they can expose or fabricate his involvement in some kind of treason or illegality, she’ll be able to break from him before shit hits the fan.  

From the statue in the town square to the toasts still raised in his name, the legacy of the hero  Kaelrik’s looms large in the heart of Drigveria’s people even centuries after his death. Once merely a wandering adventuer, Kaelrik’s dauntless defence of the innocent in an age of war saw him hailed as a hero and later crowned as king of a fledgeling realm. 

All legends must end though, and after defeating warlords, wizards, and the challenges of the wilderness itself, Kaelrik gave his life plunging into an ancient dragon’s maw to impale its heart upon his blade. 

Or at least, this time he did. 

Beyond his own bravery and skill, one of the keys to Kaelrik’s success was his relationship with a woman named Nyramie, an oracle of Istus: goddess of fate. What began with duty and fellowship blossomed into love, and each time Kaelrik went into battle he would act upon Nyramie’s divinations, however impossible they might seem, to seek the best outcome for the people they protected. 

The last time he came to her, Nyramie wept. The goddess had revealed to her Kaelrik’s ultimate fate and the oracle broke, at once faithful to her patron’s plan and raging at the betrayal, the years of hardship and sacrifice and the future they had hoped to share all snatched away by divine edict. Contradiciton met miraculous power and Nyramie’s heartbreak fractured time; one outcome where she stayed silent and left Kaelrik to his fate, and another where she forged a destiny defying artifact in the form of a jagged red crystal. While holding it Kaelrik would be able to see all possibilities that led toward his victory, and would be able to survive his clash with the otherwise invincible wyrm. 

What Nyramine could have never predicted was what would happen to Kaelrik once untethered from his fate and given a tool that would provide such easy answers. His victories mounted and his kingdom spread, as he became a warlord to rival and then exceed any of those he’d fought. A desperate fight for survival turned into a quest for supremacy, and when the borders of his dominion were secure, Kaelrik’s ambitions turned intward. He was as fearsome a king as he was a hero, and he ruled for centuries thanks to his elven blood and Nyramie’s gift, becoming crueler as time and necessity hardened his heart. 

Eventually his subjects had enough, the outer reaches of his kingdom rising in rebelion and descending upon his capital of Kaelvalon with such force that there was no possibility for Kaelrik or his loyalists could fight his way out. No possibility, save the one the crystal showed him where he used its power to pass across the divide of time, to the fork where he had never established his kingdom. It required great and terrible sacrifice, but he managed it… and at some pivotal moment, Kaelrik the once and never king will emerge into the province of Drigveria through a crimson gate along with his legion, and will set about building his kingdom anew. 

Future Adventures: 

Chronal anomalies will begin popping up in the prelude to Kaelrik’s arrival. Strange red lighting storms, artifacts from the other timeline drifting through, to say nothing of the various extraplanear entities that might be attracted by such disturbances. 

Kaelrik’s emergence happens shortly after Talmis has given birth to her child, posing a direct threat to her legitimacy as a ruler and giving her detractors one HELL of a symbol to rally around. The once and never king is all too happy to embrace these new supporters, overjoyed to find a populace that adores him the same way they adored his younger self. Add to this his distrust of the orcs of Felstar’s Faultering, who turned out to be one of the factions that rebelled against him first. 

To defeat Kaelrik, the party will need to lay their hands on the presentworld mirror of his objects of power: his crown ( in Talmis’s possession), his sword (lost in the dragon’s skeleton), and his crystal (buried in the heart of the impossible to reach temple of Istus). When these items are assembled not only will they give the party an edge in combat against him, but they will also (at the right hour, we’re in full prophecy territory here) summon the ghost of Sydagul, the dragon that was to be Kaelrik’s doom in the first place. Queue the party fighting on top of a castle against an extratemporal tyrant while a skeletal dragon the size of a mountain bears down on them. 

If you’re considering what to do for your next adventure arc, consider having all the temporal shenanigans unleashed by Kaelrik’s meddling attract the cannibalistic god of entropy, who’s cult is liable to start popping up in those continuity-orphaned soldiers who’ll flee to the hinterlands when their boss bites the dust. 

[maryannecrimsworth]

The line

Pairing: Mel Medarda x Winged! Reader

Warnings: you may fall in love

Summary: a continuation of A wolf, a witch, a lover ; Mel and her new general struggle to find a common ground on their complex affair

Part 1, Part 3

Mentions: @justyourwritter69 @powderbomb-jinxed @maq34

You had to be a secret at first, and it surprised her that you were the one who suggested it. You didn’t want anyone to see her as anything less than a powerful leader. Not a woman in love, not a general’s mistress. You wanted her to be a respected queen, you understood that—understood her. There was a sparkle in her eyes when you said so, a gleam that had become familiar in her gaze. You wondered if your own eyes carried the same light when you looked at her.

Most of your daily routine didn’t change much. You both had jobs to do, people to guide, battles to avoid. Noxus was different now. Bright, civilized, pure. Many came to the pacified nation, but some left. Not all Noxians believed in peace built on alliances, so they retreated to the imperium’s outer regions, seeking places untouched by Mel’s reforms.

The colonies adapted quickly: mercy and freedom were welcomed with open arms. But peace never lasts forever. Troubles began at the borders and in the capital. Neighboring countries mistook her mercy for weakness, as you had feared, and threatened to invade Noxian territory.

You flew to the border as soon as the reports arrived. It was your duty to handle such matters—dissidents, rebels, threats. None of it should trouble the Empress while you were there.

A confrontation between the Noxian army and the trespassing militants ceased the moment you landed on the field. All eyes turned to you, paralyzed by the sight of your open wings.

The militants hesitated, retreating slightly as fear spread through their ranks.

“Where is your leader?” Your voice echoed across the tense field. The men before you were not soldiers but a loosely organized group—rebels, perhaps, or a resistance tribe.

The leader stepped forward. Your conversation with him was brief. He wanted more land and lower taxes for his tribe’s growing production. Their trespassing was born of expansion, but his arrogance grated on you. Immature and overconfident, he acted as though he were untouchable—a dangerous combination of naivety and hubris.

You offered him an audience with the Empress of Noxus, and the suggestion left him visibly stunned. He barely hid his surprise, and you chose not to acknowledge it.

The man didn’t fully realize you would personally fly him to the capital until it was too late. He clung to you, screaming most of the way.

“General,” Mel greeted you as you landed on the balcony of her private meeting room. She was alone, as usual, working late. “To what do I owe this honor?”

You bowed and quickly explained the situation. “The leader of a northern tribe wished to speak with you.” You gestured toward the man still panting on the balcony, struggling to regain his composure. “I believe you might find his proposal worth hearing.”

You turned to leave, but not before Mel’s gaze lingered on the marks his grip had left on your arm.

“I see you scared the man,” she remarked, smirking with quiet pride.

“I'm afraid it was necessary,” you replied. His bravado had shattered during the flight, ensuring he would approach the Empress with proper respect.

The negotiation was swift. The leader wanted power, and Mel had the wisdom to grant him just enough to feel important. In return, his tribe would no longer trouble the borders.

An hour later, the man left—this time in a carriage—and Mel sent for you.

“Empress,” you spoke once you entered. With a wave of her hand, she dismissed the servants and the door was closed behind you. “Am I in trouble?”

“I’m still unsure,” she admitted. “What made you bring this man to me?”

“Not all battles need to end in bloodshed,” you said. “He only needed to be heard.”

“And that was reason enough to bring an enemy into my palace?”

Your wings shifted uneasily. “He is not an enemy.”

Mel frowned but said nothing more, returning her attention to the documents on her desk.

You hesitated, then asked, “Am I missing something, ma’am?”

“Of course not. I only wished to understand your judgment.” Her tone was neutral, but something in her manner unsettled you.

After some time, you began to read her better. She loved to test people, always posing hidden questions. For you, it was exhausting—not difficult, but relentless. You often felt as though you were constantly proving yourself.

Her demeanor changed as well. More often than not, her eyes avoided yours.

One restless night, you had enough. Slipping out of your quarters, you made your way to her chambers, avoiding guards and servants. You knocked softly on the door.

It opened abruptly, and Mel pulled you inside.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded in the dark. Her room was pitch black, though it was clear she hadn’t planned to sleep.

"You seemed worried." you confessed, following her quick pace around the room. "Something's wrong." it wasn't a question.

The dim lights of the city streamed through the windows, illuminating her features and the golden tattoos on her skin as you walked over to her bed.

"I'm...I..." she fell over her bed, uneasy. You stayed at distance, watching her expression. "I don't who to trust." her weak voice almost disappeared into the silence of the night. “My assistant is dead, Jayce is gone, my mother... " a tired sight came out of her lips. "and the Black Rose lurks in the shadows. I feel surrounded by an invisible threat I can’t escape.”

You frowned, recalling the name. The Black Rose—a secretive society of Noxian aristocrats. You had thought it a myth told by soldiers to scare one another, but Mel seemed genuinely afraid.

“Is that why your council remains empty?” you asked. As a new ruler, she should have rebuilt the nation’s leadership, yet she had worked alone for months.

Mel nodded. “The noblemen are either as ruthless as my mother or entangled in something hideous. I can’t fully understand it yet, but it’s dangerous.”

“Magic often is,” you replied, sitting beside her on the bed, though you kept your distance. “As is any power in the wrong hands.”

Your words caught her attention.

“We’ll find the right people,” you said firmly. “One by one, if necessary. They exist, my Empress. Don’t let the darkness blind you to the light. The future of our nation is bright.”

Her eyes widened slightly at your words—our nation. You hadn’t meant to claim such ownership, and you quickly masked your flustered smile.

“I have a few men in mind,” you continued. “They’ll need testing, perhaps training, but they’ll build the council you need. They’ll be your eyes in the shadows.”

“A shadow unit?”

“Yes. It’s simple, but it was effective in Karyndor.”

“It’s prudent,” she said, her confidence returning. “Diplomatic, but not defenseless. Piltover could have used something like that. It might have prevented the war.”

“It's a young nation with young leaders,” you replied. “They’ll learn in time.”

“I’m glad you’re here to teach me.”

Her words caught you off guard. “You flatter me, my Empress,” you said, grateful for the darkness concealing your flushed face. “I’m only fulfilling my duty.”

Your words seemed to strike a chord, causing Mel to pull away slightly.

"Your duty?" she repeated in a whisper, her tone layered with doubt. "Is that why you came to my room, General?"

You were left speechless. Her question turned your thoughts into a chaotic whirlwind, leaving you unable to respond. Mel stood, her movements sharp and deliberate, as though expecting you to take the unspoken hint and leave.

"Draw the line for me, Mel," you said at last, her name rolling off your lips like a forbidden indulgence. The sound of it felt intoxicating, both sweet and powerful, and you craved more. Your voice dropped to a near whisper, laden with longing. "Where does my empress end and... my lover begin?"

For a fleeting moment, she hesitated, as though caught in the gravity of your words. Then, slowly, she stepped closer, her presence consuming the space between you. Her delicate fingers reached for your face, her touch a gentle yet commanding force. The soft glow from the city outside illuminated her figure, her golden tattoos gleaming faintly against the dark fabric of the night. She wore nothing but a sheer nightdress that left little to the imagination.

"For the night," she breathed, her words brushing against your lips, "I shall be your lover." Her eyes, deep and unwavering, held yours captive. "For the morning, I shall be your empress."

Yours. The word echoed in your mind, transcending the boundaries of any title and formality. You reached for her with deliberate care, your hands resting on her hips as you guided her onto your lap. Her warmth enveloped you as your arms encircled her, drawing her closer. Even your wings joined in, wrapping around her like a shield.

"Very well, my love," you whispered, the words heavy with meaning and commitment.

For the rest of the night, no titles, no politics, no duties mattered. Only the intimacy shared between you two filled the room, each movement and breath a testament to the unspoken bond you dared to explore.

[meowsgirldrawing]

Astarion has Tav around his finger and everyone knows it..(Astarion x GN Tav)

Just a small headcannon of mine, hehehehe. Especially for my Tav and Astarion.

Note: Slight suggestive stuffz (Nothing explicit, mostly Astarion's teasing), mentions towards Tiefling Tav who's tall cause that's cute. Some cussing. Durge gets mentioned here as it's my personal head cannon that they are part of the group, just not the leader.

Word Count: 1,084

Masterlist: Here

AO3: Here

Everyone knows Astarion has Tav wrapped around his finger. 

Everyone.

Their fellow adventurers obviously, having watched the couple grow in their very campsite. Random folks they come across long enough to hear the banter between the two, which with Astarion’s need for constant teases and digs into Tav’s constant need to help every miserable stray they come across, happens quick enough. 

Overall, everyone and their mother knows it. Everyone and their mother can see it. 

See how much Astarion has their calm hearted leader sweetly wrapped around his finger without him having to even lift it. 

It was clear to Gale when Astarion threw a simple but meaningful glance at the Necromancy of Thay book they found safely tucked away behind traps of all kinds. Instead of giving it to him, the proudly pronounced wizard of the group. Durge had to jokingly soothe his feelings over that one. 

In reality, he didn’t mind it that much. Just rolls his eyes and ignores the small smile wanting to grow on his lips every time he sees Tav giving him yet another book that has the vampire reading for hours afterwards. 

Shadowheart already knew the moment Tav kept coming up to her nearly every morning, holding their neck and blushing up a storm. One glance to Astarion’s poorly hidden grin behind his book and Tav’s inability to keep eye contact, had her shooting down their apologies quick.

‘No you’re not.’ she said, hand flared up in Cure Wounds spell. 

Their tail simply curled up tighter on their leg as their blush deepened. 

Lae’zel simply scoffed at the idea, always watching as Tav reluctantly let Astarion go off to loot their now dead enemies belongings. 

‘They won’t need it anymore, darling, remember?’ He chirped with a wink. 

Still, she later had to give respect where it was due. Afterall, they had to bravely put up with her insistence to hurry it all up so they could get to the Creche faster. All as Astarion was behind them both, taking his sweet time to find his new treasures. 

Wyll laughed at the idea. Tav and him usually share many ideals amongst the group. Protect the innocents, take down the monsters. 

But for Tav to turn around and protect their own little monster in elf form, he can’t deny his happiness for his friends. 

Though he wished there was less need for blood in some situations. 

Like Tav subtly telling Astarion to cool it in the midst of talking with the Gur man, who didn’t realize-in short- just how fucked up Astarion’s situation actually is. 

The hopeless romantic one in him was in fact grinning proudly when Tav used their towering height to glare down the drow for her disgusting persistence towards Astarion. Especially when he caught them hugging hours later, Astarion looking for once the most relaxed ever. Like a cat curled up in their favorite person’s presence.

Karlach cooed and awed over it just as much as Wyll to be honest. She was full of grins and teases as she battled alongside the rogue in the field. Not just towards Astarion though, no. She threw the same treatment at Tav anytime she could.

Astarion could smirk and throw a line out like, “ Do take it easy, my love! You’ll need that energy later, afterall!” that had Tav glaring at him as they blocked off an enemy coming for their throat. Their flushing cheeks evident to everyone that it wasn’t from the battle anymore.

Karlach snickered, adding a little “ Just keep it down for us single-people, yeah Fangs?”

His smirk only grew with his grin, “No promises, dear.”

Her head tipped back in a laugh before she slaughtered down another fucker. 

Halsin squints his eyes at it with a fond smile.

Astarion batted his eyes at Tav the moment he saw the grease-filled flooring in the sewer in front of them all. 

‘If I have to go into a damned sewer of all things, I should at least be able to save something dear to me.’ His reason when he requested to be held across as they passed over it. Granted it took a minute, Tav crossing their arms and squinting their eyes down at the shorter elf. The bigger one holding his chuckle at the sight alone. 

Halsin did offer to carry him himself, but one glance from him and back to Tav told him everything. He wants Tav to carry him. 

And -unsurprisingly- surprisingly…they did. Astarion curled up with a giddy grin, clutching their shoulders as they suppressed their grin with a faux grimace. One kiss on their cheek had it peaking through however. 

He smiled at the small light they shared together despite the horrors of the world, praying that’ll always shine bright for them for however long it can. 

And laughed loudly the moment Tav’s foot slipped and had them crashing into the greasy puddle. Not without keeping Astarion to fall on them, safe and sound of course. 

Everyone knows Astarion has Tav wrapped around his finger…including the two of them.

“The things I do for you...” Tav grimaced as Astarion leaned back, tongue licking up the excess blood dribbling down his chin. It’s quick his grin appears. A sight like that would set others on edge, reaching for their weapons. For Tav, they scoff and wipe it with their thumb. 

Astarion is too fast in licking it off there too, a wink thrown their way that has them glaring once more. 

“Ah yes, the things you do for me..” His arms clutch their shoulders, wrapped around as their’s circle his waist again. Keeping him safe on their lap. 

He awws their pout, “You can just let me go then if you hate this so much, you know.”

Their grip tightens, as does the tail around his right thigh. 

“Quiet and finish up, alright? By the rate you're going, the sun will be up before you get even 3 gulps done.”

His eyes match the mirth in his smile, relaxed and happy that has their heart doing summer-salts. He tilts head sideways. “Oh, but of course, my love. Afterall, I wouldn’t want you to grow bored.”

Tav’s eyes soften. They know he’s merely joking, but they still kiss his cheek as sweetly. Feeling his eyes flutter in his happy hum. “Like I’d ever get bored of you.”

“I know.” He simply agrees before connecting with their neck once again. Making sure to keep it as gentle and kind to them as they always do for him.

[girlactionfigure]

The Trump administration detained Mahmoud Khalil because he allegedly violated the terms of his permanent residency (Green Card/immigrant visa) by espousing support or encouraging others to espouse support for US-designated terrorist groups. 

Whether you agree with these laws or not, or with Khalil’s detention or not, those are American immigration laws and have absolutely nothing to do with how the State of Israel feels about Mahmoud Khalil, his politics, or his activism.

That said, I do not believe the use of “shalom” here as a threat is helpful at all. In fact, it only fuels this conspiracy and places even more of a target on the backs of Jews, who are already feeling deeply vulnerable. 

Again, Khalil’s detainment and potential deportation have absolutely nothing to do with Israeli law and everything to do with American immigration law.

THE CONSPIRACY THAT JEWS CONTROL FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS

The conspiracy that Jews or Zionists control the American government is an evolution of the much older “international Jewish conspiracy,” which has its origins all the way back in the 13th century. The conspiracy alleges that Jews secretly command foreign governments (including, now, the United States) to conspire against Christian, Muslim, or white interests, depending on the identity of the antisemite.

This conspiracy, however, really rose in popularity in the 19th century, when Frederick van Millingen published “The Conquest of the World by the Jews.” 

Then, in 1903, a newspaper called Znamya published the most infamous -- and influential -- antisemitic hoax of all time, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which, allegedly, declassified the minutes of secret meetings between Jewish leaders during the First Zionist Congress in 1897. According to The Protocols, which was proven to be a forgery in 1920, 1935, and 1964, Jews are power-hungry conspirators who are plotting to rule the world by controlling the economy and the media and inciting religious conflict around the globe.

ZIONIST OCCUPIED GOVERNMENT/ZIONIST OCCUPATION GOVERNMENT

In 1976, American neo-Nazi Eric Thomson wrote an article titled, “Welcome to the ZOG-World,” where he introduced the “Zionist Occupation Government” conspiracy. In his work, Thomson argued that Jews maneuver the machinations of western governments by suppressing free speech, confiscating land, and taking over military and police forces.

THE ROTHSCHILDS

The Rothschild family is a wealthy Jewish banking family that rose to prominence in 18th century Europe. In 1846, French journalist Mathieu Georges Dairnvaell wrote a pamphlet under the pen name “Satan,” which, just like the The Protocols a few decades later, made a number of false allegations that over time spiraled into antisemitic canards of their own. “Satan” accused Nathan Rothschild of witnessing France’s 1815 defeat in the Battle of Waterloo firsthand and weaponizing this knowledge — before the news broke to the public — to make 20 million francs in the stock exchange.

In reality, Nathan Rothschild was never in Belgium, nor did he ever profit from the Battle of Waterloo. Yet over the next couple centuries, the Rothschilds would be blamed of manipulating just about every government and instigating just about every war or calamity for economic gain...even the Holocaust. 

Today the term “Rothschild” is often used as an antisemitic dogwhistle. It has become a placeholder for the supposedly rich and greedy Jewish cabal which manipulates world events for their pleasure. In reality, though the Rothschilds are still wealthy, their fortune has long been divided among many descendants and the family has declined in prominence over time.

AIPAC AS A DOGWHISTLE

Today, many on the left and right of the political spectrum echo the “Zionist Occupation Government” conspiracy in their so-called criticism of AIPAC, or he American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a bipartisan, pro-Israel lobbying group. 

It’s really important to understand that AIPAC, whether you agree with lobbying or not and whether you agree with its positions or not, is operating fully within the confines of American law. Notably, AIPAC did not crack the top 150 lobbying groups in the United States in 2024. In 2024, lobbying on behalf of the State of Israel did not crack the top 10 as far as lobbying goes in favor of foreign countries. There are far, far more influential lobbies that promote the interests of foreign countries than pro-Israel groups. 

Here’s the truth: there are a multitude of reasons why American foreign policy often aligns with Israel’s interests (though it’s worth noting that historically, it hasn’t always been the case. In fact, in 1948, the United States led an international arms embargo against Israel). But the United States allies with Israel out of self-interest, not out of Jewish/Israeli/Zionist manipulation.For one, though the United States gives Israel billions in foreign aid, this “aid” is, by law, an investment that is returned to the American economy multifold. Second, American and Israeli geopolitical interests have frequently been aligned (e.g. opposition to the Russia-Islamic Republic of Iran-China axis). And third, the American voter base is largely Christian (and often Evangelical), meaning that it tends to be sympathetic to the existence of the State of Israel for religious reasons.

For a full bibliography of my sources, please head over to my Instagram and  Patreon. 

rootsmetals

Hate AIPAC? Hate lobbying? Hate American immigration law? Hate the Trump administration? Great. That’s your right. I encourage you to criticize all those things — as is your right — without regurgitating literal neo-Nazi conspiracies. I know you can do it!

[mariacallous]

I'm sharing this because I think it's kind of atrocious. Hasan Piker *and* Richard Reeves?! And it gets worse from there.

By the time I landed at LAX and switched my phone out of airplane mode, Hasan Piker had been streaming for three hours. I put in an earbud and watched as I filed off the plane. Visible behind him were walls of framed fan art, a cardboard cutout of Bernie Sanders sitting in the cold, and Piker’s huge puppy, Kaya, taking a nap. Piker had already shown off his “cozy-ass ’fit” (sweatpants with kitschy bald eagles, a custom pair of platform Crocs), and recounted his experience the previous night at the Streamer Awards, a red-carpet event honoring A-listers on Twitch—the popular live-streaming site where he is one of the biggest stars, and the only prominent leftist. He’d begun the day’s broadcast by rattling off a standard opening monologue: “Folks, we’re live and alive, and I hope all the boys, girls, and enbies”—nonbinary people—“are having a fantastic one.” To anyone listening for shibboleths, this would have pigeonholed him as a progressive. Also within view, though, were three towers of Zyn cannisters, and a “Make America Great Again” hat, which he sometimes wears ironically. He has the patter of a Rutgers frat bro and the laid-back charisma of a Miami club promoter, both of which he was, briefly, in his early twenties. Now he’s thirty-three—so old, in streamer years, that his fans call him “unc.”

I ordered a Lyft, then flipped back to Piker’s stream. By then, he was talking about the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria, which had happened overnight. I watched as he cycled from BBC footage to Wikipedia, pausing every few seconds to add a diatribe or a joke. The angle he was developing was that Western journalists seemed too eager to portray the leader of the Syrian rebel forces in a heroic light. “I’m very skeptical of the fucking former Al Qaeda guy,” Piker said. A little while later, his doorbell rang, and he leaned over to buzz in a guest—me. I looked up from my phone to see him standing in his doorway. He doesn’t run ad breaks, so whenever he needs to do something off-camera, like answer the door or use the bathroom, he plays a video and attends to his business quickly, before his viewers can get bored. “I’m live right now, but we can talk when I’m done,” he told me, already walking away. “Try and stay out of the shot.”

In last year’s Presidential election, Democrats lost support with nearly every kind of voter: rich, poor, white, Black, Asian American, Hispanic. But the defection that alarmed Party strategists the most was that of young voters, especially young men, a group that Donald Trump lost by fifteen points in 2020 and won by fourteen points in 2024—a nearly thirty-point swing. “The only cohort of men that Biden won in 2020 was eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds,” John Della Volpe, the polling director at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a former adviser to Biden’s Presidential campaign, told me. “That was the one cohort they had to hold on to, and they let it go.”

Candidates matter; so does the national mood, and the price of groceries. Yet some Monday-morning quarterbacks also noted that, just as 1960 was the first TV election and 2016 was the first social-media election, the 2024 Presidential campaign was the first to be conducted largely on live streams and long-form podcasts, media that happen to be thoroughly dominated by MAGA bros. The biggest of them all, Joe Rogan, spent the final weeks of the campaign giving many hours of fawning airtime to Trump—and to his running mate, J. D. Vance, and his key allies, such as Elon Musk—before endorsing Trump on the eve of the election. “At no point was I, like, ‘Only I, a dickhead on the internet, am qualified to teach these kids why we need a functioning welfare state,’ ” Piker told me. “I just felt like no one else was really in these spaces trying to explain these things. Certainly not the Democrats.”

Piker has almost three million Twitch followers, and, as with most guys who talk into microphones on the internet, his audience skews young, male, and disaffected. At the peak of his Election Night stream in November, he had more than three hundred thousand viewers. He broadcasts seven days a week, eight to ten hours a day, usually from his house in West Hollywood, and he doesn’t use visual pyrotechnics to hold his viewers’ attention. Most of the time, what you see on his stream is an overlay of three things: a fixed shot of Piker sitting at his desk; a screen share of whatever he’s looking at on his computer; and his chat, where fans supply pertinent links, caps-lock shit talk, and puppy emojis, all surging in real time up the right side of the screen.

Although Piker hates Trump, he’s hardly a loyal Democrat. At bottom, he’s an old-school hard leftist, not a liberal. (On his bedside table he has some protein Pop-Tart knock-offs and a copy of “The Communist Manifesto.”) Many of his opinions—for example, that the “American empire” has been a destructive force, on the whole—would surely be off-putting to the median voter. But he is just one of many independent media creators with an anti-Trump message—in recent weeks, the political-podcast charts have included “The Bulwark,” “This Is Gavin Newsom,” and even a show called “Raging Moderates.” For a couple of weeks last month, a liberal show called “The MeidasTouch Podcast” beat out “The Joe Rogan Experience” for the No. 1 spot. “Corporate media, too often, has a both-sides perspective,” Ben Meiselas, one of the “MeidasTouch” co-hosts, told me. “We do not mince words about the threat to workers, the threat to democracy.”

One piece of fan art on Piker’s wall is a cartoon of him operating a day-care center, shielding a roomful of lost boys from the malign chaos of the open internet. “You gravitate to him because he’s just a voice you find relatable,” Piker’s producer, who goes by Marche, told me. “A lot of people don’t even put a political label on it, at least at first.” Piker gets up early every morning to work out, posting his daily stats so that his fans—his “community”—can follow along from home. He gives dating advice and motivational speeches. At a moment when there seems to be an ever-shortening algorithmic pipeline from bench-pressing tips to misogynist rage, Piker tries to model a more capacious form of masculinity: a straight guy, six feet four and movie-star handsome, who’s as comfortable wearing camo to a gun range as he is walking a red carpet in split-toe Margiela boots. Once viewers have come to trust him, they may be more open to his riffs on the rights of the poor or of trans people—delivered not as a primer on Judith Butler but in the register of “Bro, don’t be a dick.”

I pulled up a chair, just out of frame. Kaya ambled toward me, vetting my scent. Piker talked, almost without interruption, for four more hours, holding forth about recent internet drama, a documentary about the history of NATO, and the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O.’s assassin, who had not yet been identified. Within reach of his rolling desk chair was a mini-fridge full of cold brew and Diet Mountain Dew. Some of his takes were too unpolished for prime time. (“Bro, these guys are so cucked,” he said, critiquing a clip from a rival podcast on the right.) Then again, a live stream isn’t supposed to be a tight, scripted lecture. It’s supposed to be a good hang.

“I gotta end the broadcast here,” he said, shortly after 8 P.M. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” After turning the camera off, he seemed to deflate a bit. Comments were still floating up one of his monitors—the thousands of fans in the chat had dwindled to a few hundred, the inner circle who were devoted enough, or lonely enough, to keep one another company after the feed had gone dark. “The Democrats are smug and condescending, and everything they say sounds fake as shit,” Piker said. “Trump lies constantly, yes, but at least people get the sense that he’s authentically saying what he’s thinking.”

He put his feet up and reached for a fresh Zyn pouch. “Young men, like a lot of Americans, feel increasingly alienated,” he continued. They can’t afford college or rent, they can’t get a date, they can’t imagine a stable future. “The right is always there to tell them, ‘Yes, you should be angry, and the reason your life sucks is because of immigrants, or because a trans kid played a sport.’ And all the Democrats are telling them is ‘No, shut up, your life is fine, be joyful.’ ” No one has ever accused Piker of being a moderate, but in this case he is trying to forge a compromise. “My way is to go, ‘Look, be angry if you want. But your undocumented neighbor is not the problem here. You’re looking in the wrong direction.’ ”

In 2015, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton wrote that “white non-Hispanics without college degrees” were experiencing an anomalous spike in mortality from opioids, alcohol, and suicide. They later called these “deaths of despair.” In 2016, J. D. Vance, then an anti-Trump conservative, published a memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” about the struggles of white rural families like his own. Promoting the book on PBS, he explained (but did not yet excuse) why such voters were drawn to Trump: “I think that the sense of cultural alienation breeds a sense of mistrust.” The first Trump Administration didn’t deliver many material gains to the rural poor—deaths of despair continued to rise, and wages continued to stagnate—but at least Trump spoke to their anguish and seemed outraged on their behalf. In retrospect, the question may not be why so many non-urban non-élites became Trump Republicans but what took them so long.

Around the same time, social scientists started to notice an overlapping crisis. The statistics were grim—twenty-first-century males were, relative to their forefathers and their female contemporaries, much more likely to fall behind in school, drop out of college, languish in the workforce, or die by overdose or suicide. The title of a 2012 book by the journalist Hanna Rosin declared “The End of Men.” The following year, the economists Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan published a paper called “The Trouble with Boys.” In one survey, more than a quarter of men in their teens and twenties reported having no close friends. When Covid hit, men were significantly more likely to die from it.

“In the fifteen years I’ve been looking at the statistics, the outcomes for men have not changed,” Rosin told me. “What did change, tremendously, is the culture.” The last Democratic Presidential candidate to win the male vote was Barack Obama. When Bernie Sanders ran for President, he had a zealous male following, but many top Democrats treated the “Bernie bros” less like a force to be harnessed than like a threat to be vanquished. A “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom call raised millions for Kamala Harris’s campaign, but it would have been anathema to her base if she’d given a speech about what she planned to do for white dudes. This was, meanwhile, a key part of Trump’s appeal.

In a 2022 book, “Of Boys and Men,” Richard Reeves, a social scientist and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, blasts Republicans for exploiting “male dislocation” and misogynist fury at the expense of women’s rights. But he also lambastes Democrats for “pathologizing masculinity.” He gives an example from his sons’ high school in Bethesda, Maryland, where boys passed around a spreadsheet ranking their female classmates by attractiveness—behavior that Reeves describes as “immature,” even “harmful,” but not worthy of an international incident, which is what it became. He writes that “indiscriminately slapping the label of ‘toxic masculinity’ onto this kind of behavior is a mistake,” likely to propel young men “to the online manosphere where they will be reassured that they did nothing wrong, and that liberals are out to get them.”

At some point between Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on “The Arsenio Hall Show” and Hillary Clinton describing potential voters as “deplorables,” the Democrats came to be perceived as the party of scolds and snobs. Liberals used to be the counterculture; today, they’re the defenders of traditional norms and institutions. This may not have been the best political strategy at any time; it certainly isn’t now, when trust in institutions has never been lower. It’s impossible to know how many young men fit into this category, but there is clearly a kind of guy—the contemporary don’t-tread-on-me type who demands both the freedom to have gay friends and the freedom to use “gay” as an insult—who resents the idea of his morality being dictated by the family-values right or his speech being curtailed by the hall-monitor left. When pressed, many of these young men seem to have bought the pitch that, of the two parties, the Republicans were the less censorious. This may have been a miscalculation—the current Trump Administration has already banished dozens of words from government websites and, just last week, arrested a former Columbia student for what seems to be protected speech—but you can’t convince voters that they’ve been misinformed simply by lecturing them. The lecturing is part of the issue.

“Democrats got used to speaking about men as the problem, not as people with problems,” Reeves told me. “But of course men do have problems, and problems become grievances when you ignore them.” He knows a lot of well-connected Democrats in Washington, and for years he has urged them to campaign on men’s issues—“not in a zero-sum way, certainly not taking anything away from women, but just to show boys and men, ‘Hey, you’re also having a tough go of it, we see you.’ And the response I always got was ‘Now is not the time.’ ”

Rosin told me about a husband and wife she’d met in Alabama, in 2010. The husband lost his job, and the wife became the breadwinner, an arrangement he experienced as deeply shameful. “She would put the check down on the kitchen table, she would sign it over to him, and he would cash it, and nobody would speak about it,” Rosin said. “But then ‘man-victim’ became a viable identity.” As Rosin stayed in touch with the man, he started exhibiting a more “mischievous” expression of men’s-rights sensibilities, wearing a T-shirt that read “My Cave, My Rules.” This coincided with the rise of Trump, the man-victim’s patron saint. He didn’t offer detailed policy solutions to any of the underlying sociological problems, but, again, he addressed them directly. (“It is a very scary time for young men in America,” Trump said in 2018.)

Like most internet terms, “manosphere” is vague and protean; it has been applied to Ben Shapiro, a father of four who delivers conservative talking points in a yarmulke, and to Andrew Tate, a Bugatti-driving hustler who has been charged with human trafficking. In 2016, after a reedy Canadian professor named Jordan Peterson refused to use gender-neutral pronouns, he was taken up as a folk hero, like Galileo standing firm against the Inquisition. Peterson has almost nothing in common with, say, Dave Portnoy, another mascot of the bro-sphere, who mostly just wants to be left alone to eat pizza and drink beer by the pool. Yet they all seem to be meeting a demand in the cultural marketplace, one that could be as simple, at its root, as a dorm-room poster of Marlon Brando on a motorcycle or Johnny Cash flipping off the camera.

Last month, Richard Reeves was a guest on a popular podcast hosted by Theo Von, a formerly apolitical comedian who recently went to Trump’s Inauguration. Von, an infectiously affable guy with a mullet, presents himself as a curious goofball with essentially no prior knowledge on any topic. At one point he spoke—without much nuance, but also without apparent malice—about the plight of the white man. “I’m not speaking against any other group,” he said. “I’m just saying . . . you can’t make white males feel like they don’t exist.” Von grew up poor in a small town in Louisiana. “Yes, I know there’s privilege, but if you grew up with nothing you didn’t fucking feel any privilege sometimes.”

If Von had made this observation at a Trump rally, or on X, he might have been led from just-asking-questions guilelessness to more overt white aggrievement. If he’d made the same point in a liberal-arts seminar, or on Bluesky, he might have been shouted down. (When I got to this part of the podcast, I have to admit, my own inner hall monitor was on high alert.) But Reeves, looking a bit trepidatious, tried to thread the needle, introducing some academic caveats without coming across as a scold. “The U.S. has a uniquely terrible history when it comes to slavery,” he said. But he also noted that low-income white men were at particularly high risk of suicide. “Two things can be true at once,” he said.

The hallmark of social media is disinhibition born of anonymity. On the internet, no one knows whether you’re a dog, a Macedonian teen-ager, or the Pope wearing a puffer jacket. Podcasts, on the other hand, are built on parasociality: Michael Barbaro isn’t your friend, but, after making coffee with him in your ear a hundred times, you start to feel as if he were. And then there’s the world of always-on streaming, in which the temptations of parasociality are even more acute. The inputs are both aural and visual. The hosts respond to your comments in real time, at all hours. You can remind yourself not to bond with the pixels on the screen, but you may fall for the illusion all the same, like a baby chick imprinting on a robot. Piker treats fans in a way that can be confusingly intimate, giving them avuncular life advice one minute and thirst-trap photos the next. His Twitch handle is Hasanabi, “abi” being Turkish for “big brother”; his fans are called “Hasanabi heads,” or “parasocialists.”

Even as most of his fellow-streamers have drifted to the right, Piker has remained a staunch leftist. His explanation for this is that he is from Turkey, where “the idea that American economic and military power runs the world—that was, like, ‘Yeah, duh.’ ” He was born in New Jersey and grew up mostly in Ankara and Istanbul, in an upper-middle-class family, spending summers with relatives in the U.S. and watching a lot of American TV. (He speaks English with an American accent.) His father, an economist, is “more of a neolib, World Bank-loving type,” Piker told me. “We argue about it all the time, but it’s not heated.” His mother, an art-and-architecture historian, is more aligned with his politics. “The inequality is just so blatant,” she told me. “It was never fair, but now we have the internet—everyone can see it.”

Despite Piker’s brand as a brash outsider, he is, in an almost literal sense, a nepo baby. After graduating from Rutgers, in 2013, he moved to Los Angeles and got a job with his maternal uncle, Cenk Uygur, who happened to be the founder and host of “The Young Turks,” one of the biggest left-populist talk shows on the internet. The show had a considerable footprint on YouTube, but Piker helped it adapt to punchier formats that were better suited to Facebook and Instagram. “You’ve got to understand, I remember when this was a pudgy kid and I was changing his diapers,” Uygur told me. “Now, suddenly, he’s this handsome man, he’s dynamic, he’s killing it in front of the camera.” Piker hosted a recurring video segment called “Agitprop,” and picked fights with the right-wing influencers of the day, such as Tomi Lahren and Representative Dan Crenshaw. He got himself in trouble—“America deserved 9/11” was not a particularly good take, even in context—but he also expanded his name recognition. In 2017, BuzzFeed dubbed him “woke bae.”

Although he made some of the outlet’s most popular videos, he didn’t own the I.P. (Even when the boss is your uncle, you can still be alienated from the means of production.) So, in 2020, he decided to go solo, on Twitch. His mother joined him in Los Angeles, and they formed a pandemic pod in a two-bedroom apartment. “He was on there non-stop, shouting about video games or sex advice or whatever,” she told me. “His fans would see me in the background, cringing, and they would send me earplugs in the mail.” That year, he spent forty-two per cent of his time live on camera. (Not forty-two per cent of his waking hours—forty-two per cent of all the hours in the year.) In a call-in segment called “Chadvice,” Piker coached men through the small terrors and triumphs of daily life. One twenty-eight-year-old from Finland described himself as having an Asperger’s diagnosis and an “abject fear of rejection”; Piker, with solicitude and just enough amiable ribbing, spent half an hour talking him through the social mechanics of a first date.

When Twitch first launched, it was a niche platform where bored adolescents could watch other adolescents play video games. In 2014, Amazon bought it for nearly a billion dollars—an eye-popping amount, at least back then—even as mainstream analysts knew almost nothing about it. “My demographic hem is showing,” the columnist David Carr admitted in the Times; still, he concluded, “there is clear value in owning so much screen time of a hard-to-reach demographic of young men.” One article referred to Twitch as “talk radio for the extremely online.”

I first met Piker in February of 2020, on Boston Common, while covering a rally during Bernie Sanders’s Presidential campaign. Most of us travelling correspondents were youngish reporters from oldish outlets, wearing blue button-downs and carrying notebooks in the back pockets of our Bonobos. Piker wasn’t much younger, but he dressed as if he were from another planet, in black nail polish and cargo pants that, at the time, struck me as incomprehensibly wide. He carried an “I.R.L. backpack,” a portable camera setup that streamers use (I learned) when they venture out into the world. Admirers in the crowd kept interrupting him and asking for photos, a nuisance that, for whatever reason, didn’t afflict the rest of us. I still didn’t get why viewers would hang around on his stream all day when they could get an unimpeded view of Sanders’s speech on YouTube. Obviously, my demographic hem was showing. You might as well ask why a fan would watch a football game at a bar when he could concentrate better alone, or read a summary of the game in tomorrow’s paper. Piker’s followers wanted to watch the rally through his eyes because they wanted to be his friend.

In October, 2020, Piker spent a couple of hours playing the group video game Among Us with some special guests, including the congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They occasionally mentioned the ostensible purpose of the event—getting out the vote—but mostly they made easygoing small talk. On Election Day, Piker streamed for sixteen hours straight, chugging energy drinks. His mother made several onscreen cameos, delivering him plates of home-cooked food. “I wouldn’t do it for this long if it wasn’t for you,” he told his viewers at the end of the night. “Love you bro!” a commenter typed. “See you tomorrow.”

After the 2024 election, Democratic strategists argued that what the anti-Trump coalition needed was a “Joe Rogan of the left.” There once was such a person. His name was Joe Rogan. “I’m socially about as liberal as it gets,” Rogan said earlier this month. He has a live-and-let-live attitude about sex, drugs, and abortion. (He is also extremely open to conspiracy theories about 9/11, J.F.K., and Jeffrey Epstein, an inclination that was left-coded until very recently.) In 2014, when Rogan was a fan of “The Young Turks,” Piker met him at the Hollywood Improv, and they sat and talked for two hours. (The topics included “weed, psychedelics, the state of media and girls,” Piker wrote at the time. “Top ten coolest moments of my life.”) During the 2020 Democratic primary, Rogan interviewed three Presidential candidates—Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, and Bernie Sanders—and concluded that Sanders was his favorite. “I believe in him,” Rogan said. “He’s been insanely consistent his entire life.”

It’s hard to fathom now, but Rogan’s support was then considered a liability. “The Sanders campaign must reconsider this endorsement,” the Human Rights Campaign wrote, citing transphobic and racist remarks from Rogan’s past. In retrospect, this was the height (or perhaps the nadir) of a kind of purity-test politics that was making some swing voters, including Rogan, feel less at home in the Democratic coalition. In 2022, Neil Young removed his music from Spotify to protest Rogan’s vaccine skepticism; Rogan took ivermectin, which CNN mocked as a horse dewormer. “I can afford people medicine, motherfucker,” Rogan told CNN’s chief medical correspondent, adding that the medication had been prescribed by his doctor. “This is ridiculous.”

In 2016, every one of Trump’s baby steps toward normalization—doing a goofy dance on “Saturday Night Live,” getting his hair ruffled by Jimmy Fallon—was treated as a scandal. But by 2024 anyone with access to Spotify or YouTube could find hours of flattering footage of Trump looking like a chill, approachable grandpa. While interviewing Trump at one of his golf clubs, Theo Von used his free-associative style to great effect, prompting as much introspection in Trump as any interviewer has. (Von: “Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie.” Trump: “And is that a good feeling?”) Trump invited the Nelk Boys, prank-video influencers with their own brand of hard seltzer, to eat Chick-fil-A on his private plane. He sat in a Cybertruck with the baby-faced, fascist-curious streamer Adin Ross, testing the stereo. “Who’s, like, your top three artists?” Ross asked. “Well, we love Frank Sinatra, right?” Trump said. Ross invited him to pick a song, and Trump, “thinking that it’s gonna come back under proper management,” picked “California Dreamin’.”

Collectively, these shows reached tens of millions of potential voters. Most were presumably young men, many of them the kind of American who is both the hardest and the most crucial for a campaign to reach: the kind who is not seeking out political news. Trump ended his parasocial-media tour by sitting in Joe Rogan’s studio, in Austin, for three hours. That’s too long for anyone, even a champion of rhetorical rope-a-dope, to go without gaffes—which was part of the point. While repeating his timeworn case that the 2020 election was rigged, Trump let out a shocking Freudian slip—“I lost by . . .”—before quickly trying to recover: “I didn’t lose.” Rogan laughed in his face. No one cared. On YouTube alone, the episode got more than fifty million views, and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. “Unedited/uncensored interviews should be required of all candidates,” one of the top comments read.

Harris tried. She appeared on a few big podcasts—“Club Shay Shay,” whose audience is primarily Black, and “Call Her Daddy,” whose audience is mostly female—but she never made inroads with the comedy bros. (The closest she got was an interview with Howard Stern, a former shock jock who now seems wholesome, like Little Richard in the era of Lil Baby.) Harris’s staffers tried to get her booked on “Hot Ones,” the YouTube show on which celebrities answer innocuous questions while eating sadistically spicy chicken wings, but even “Hot Ones” turned her down. Her campaign staffers insisted that she wanted to do Rogan’s show, but that it fell through for scheduling reasons. Rogan claimed that he was eager to interview her, and that he was even willing to keep certain topics off-limits. “I said, ‘I don’t give a fuck,’ ” he told Theo Von. “I feel like, if you give someone a couple of hours, and you start talking about anything, I’m going to see the pattern of the way you think . . . whether you’re calculated or whether you’re just free.”

Imagine the set of a prototypical man-cave podcast, and “Flagrant,” co-founded by the comedian Andrew Schulz, wouldn’t be far off: four dudes lounging around, with a few plastic plants and a shelf of brown liquor behind them. Trump sat with them in October, and Schulz and the other hosts buttered him up, asking him about his kids. “Barron is eighteen,” Schulz said. “He’s unleashed in New York City. Are you sure you want to reverse Roe v. Wade now?” An hour in, they cut to an ad break. “Hard-dick season is upon us, and you gotta make sure that you’re stiffed up,” Schulz said. “BlueChew has got your back.”

“Flagrant” is taped weekly at a studio in SoHo. I visited one Wednesday in February. Schulz arrived just after noon, opened a fridge stocked with cans of tequila- and THC-infused seltzer, and grabbed a bottle of water. He sports a mustache and a chain necklace, and his hair is tight on the sides and slicked back on top. (During a show at Madison Square Garden, a fellow-comedian described Schulz’s look as “the Tubi version of Adolf Hitler.”) He’s a throwback to an old New York archetype: the melting-pot white guy who tells hyper-specific ethnic jokes with a sly smile and, for the most part, gets away with it. He did a crowd-work special that included sections called “Mexican,” “Colombian,” and “Black Women.” His newest special, about his wife’s experience with I.V.F., includes moments of real tenderness, but he still insists on his right to do old-fashioned bits about the battle between the sexes. “We all have feelings that are a little bit wrong,” Schulz said. “ ‘Take my wife, please’—that’s a fucked-up premise, but there’s a seed of a feeling there that’s real. It’s the comedian’s job to make you comfortable enough to laugh at it.”

Schulz grew up in lower Manhattan, where his parents owned a dance studio and he went to public school. “My family was super liberal,” he told me. “This was in the nineties, when being a liberal, to me, just meant ‘I don’t hate gay people or Black people’—normal shit.” He now thinks of himself as apolitical, and he acknowledged all the reasons to distrust Trump, but the word he kept using, whenever Trump came up, was “enticing.” “I still appreciate a lot of the policies Bernie talked about, universal health care and all that,” he said. “But culture-wise? Vibe-wise? When all you hear from one side is ‘That’s not funny, that’s over the line’—realistically, where are people gonna feel more comfortable?”

Trump is known for his bloviating, but Schulz suggested that his greater talent may be a kind of listening. “Democrats are tuned in to what people should feel,” he said. “Trump is tuned in to what people actually fucking feel.” Schulz noted that, as a boundary-pushing performer, this was also one of his own key skills: gauging micro-fluctuations in an audience’s reaction. When Trump appeared on “Flagrant,” he talked about being taken to a hospital in rural Pennsylvania after he was shot, and how impressed he was with the “country doctors” who’d treated him. “I laughed at that, ’cause I just thought ‘country doctors’ was a funny phrase,” Schulz told me. “He clocks me laughing at it, and in the next sentence he immediately says it again, and he watches me to make sure I laugh again.”

“Flagrant” bills itself as “THE GREATEST HANG IN THE UNIVERSE!” I spent the rest of the day watching Schulz and his co-hosts tape an episode (and then an extra segment sponsored by an online betting platform, and then an extra extra segment for Patreon), and I could imagine some places in the universe that would have been greater. One of the running gags in the episode was that the hosts kept pronouncing the word “prerecorded” as “pre-retarded.” At one point, a host volunteered how many times he’d masturbated in a single day, and his record was so formidable that the others looked worried for him. In fairness, though, even a solid hang can’t be scintillating all the time. One function of a long-standing friendship, including a parasocial one, is simply to while away the hours, even when there isn’t much to say.

When it comes to parasocial media, MAGA has had a long head start. Before Dan Bongino was Trump’s deputy F.B.I. director, he was a popular, blustery podcaster; after Matt Gaetz withdrew from consideration as Attorney General, he announced that he would host a TV show and a podcast (his third). During the Biden Administration, about a dozen Republicans were both active podcast hosts and sitting members of Congress, while most Democrats hardly seemed interested in trying. Before the “Flagrant” taping, Schulz and I had been discussing which qualities the Democrats should look for in their next crop of leaders, and afterward he returned to the question. “They need someone who can really hang,” he said. “Obama could hang. Clinton, for sure—Bill, not Hillary. Trump can hang.” I ran through the shortlist: Pete Buttigieg? Schulz wrinkled his nose—too polished. A.O.C.? “When she’s being the working-class chick from the Bronx, I could see it,” he said. “But when she starts going on MSNBC and doing ‘We have an orange rapist in the White House’—then you start to lose people.”

Schulz said that he’d invited Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to appear on the show “numerous times,” to no avail. (The Harris campaign says that Schulz never sent a formal invitation.) He couldn’t be sure why Walz had stayed away from podcasts like his, but he had guesses. “If we’ve got on a guy who was in the military for twenty years, at some point I’m gonna go, ‘Cut the shit, Tim, you know how guys really talk,’ ” Schulz said. “And then let’s say we start busting balls, making gay jokes, whatever—does he laugh? If he does, he pisses off his people. If he doesn’t, he loses our people.” Walz was added to the Presidential ticket because he was able to talk like a regular person who could make the opposition seem “weird” by contrast. But, things being as they are, Schulz said, “the Democrats can’t let a guy like that loose.”

When Trump was on “Flagrant,” Akaash Singh, a co-host who refers to himself as a “moderate,” encouraged him to consider practicing self-restraint. “What we love about you as comedians is you shoot from the hip,” Singh said. “If you get elected, would you be a little more mindful of how powerful your words are?”

“I will,” Trump said. “And I’m gonna think of you every time.”

“Let’s go!” Singh said, jumping up and pumping his fist. “I might actually vote.”

Piker starts streaming at eleven every morning, so everything else has to happen before then, or at night. At 7 a.m. one day, he drove Kaya to a nearby park, to take her for a walk, then played basketball for half an hour. He saw me eying his car, a Porsche Taycan. “It’s not the flashiest model I could afford,” he protested, before I could say anything. “But yes, admittedly, it is a fucking Porsche.” When Piker is criticized by the right, it’s usually for soft-pedalling the brutality of Hamas, or the Houthis, or the Chinese Communist Party. (Piker is such a relentless critic of Israel that, last year, the advocacy group StopAntisemitism nominated him for “Antisemite of the Year”; when asked his opinion of Hezbollah, he once shrugged and replied, “I don’t have an issue with them.”) By the left, he is more likely to be dismissed as a limousine socialist who lives in a $2.7-million house. He has his own clothing brand, called Ideologie.

While driving home, he took a call from his manager. A major production company wanted to discuss a potential TV show, hosted by Piker, in the vein of “Borat” or “Nathan for You.” His manager asked if he wanted to be interviewed by Megyn Kelly on her radio show. “No.” A daytime show on Fox News? “No.” Buttigieg’s people had asked if Piker would interview Buttigieg on his stream. “Probably not, but I’ll think about it,” Piker said—too centrist. “If he’s thinking about running for President, I don’t really wanna be giving him clout.” In his kitchen, he took a few fistfuls of supplements: creatine, fish oil, Ashwagandha. Still on the phone with his manager, he sat at his desktop, skimming stories he might cover. Then, a few minutes before he went live, he started seeing news alerts: Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the UnitedHealthcare assassination, had just been arrested. Whatever else he’d been planning to talk about was now irrelevant. “Holy shit, they got him,” Piker told his manager. “I gotta go.”

“Mamma mia!” he said, on air. “This is the first day where there will be no Italiophobia on this broadcast.” Already, his chat was full of spaghetti emojis and “FREE LUIGI!” Piker walked a fine line—celebrating Mangione as “hotter than me” and speaking in generally exalted terms about “the propaganda of the deed,” but trying to stop short of overtly glorifying murder, which is against Twitch’s terms of service. “We, of course, do not condone,” he said repeatedly. “We condemn.” (Recently, he was suspended from Twitch for twenty-four hours after musing that someone may want to “kill Rick Scott,” the Florida senator.)

In fact, he reserved his condemnation for the finger-wagging from the “corporate media,” as exhibited everywhere from Fox News to CNN. “Bro, they can’t let anybody have anything,” he said later. For six hours straight, his chatters sent him links to new information as it emerged—Mangione’s Goodreads account, his Twitter history, his high-school valedictorian speech. On my own, I would have been tempted to spend the day following the same bread crumbs, struggling to retrace Mangione’s path to radicalization. But it was easier to let Piker and the forty thousand internet sleuths in his chat make sense of it for me.

Many of Piker’s viewers come to him with inchoate opinions. He aims to mold them. But, he told me, of the stream, “at the end of the day, it still has to be relatable and entertaining.” One of his maxims is “Read the room.” In his case, this means posting many hours of content about nothing in particular. Stavros Halkias, a comedian and a friend of Piker’s, told me, “He’s built up enough trust with his audience that, if he’s being boring and academic for forty minutes, they’ll stick with it until he starts doing something more interesting, playing a Japanese dating simulator or whatever.” Some days, he puts on a Trump hat and streams as Hank Pecker, a “Colbert Report”-style satirical character updated for the MAGA era. In another room of his house, Piker records a weekly podcast with three buddies, an apolitical chat show on which one of the most heated topics of recent debate was proper manscaping technique, and another was whether one of them farted. Marche, the producer, was proud to tell me that the podcast’s audience is about sixty per cent male—“which sounds like a lot, but actually most shows in this space are eighty-twenty male, or eighty-five-fifteen.” One theory for this lopsidedness is that, given all the “End of Men” statistics, women have better things to do with their time, such as holding down meaningful jobs and cultivating lasting relationships, while men are stuck playing video games with their imaginary friends.

Recently, on a MAGA-bro podcast, Piker reached across the aisle, adapting “eight hours for what you will” to the current decadent moment. “Deep down inside, most people just wanna be comfortable,” he said. “They wanna have a roof over their heads, they want a fuckin’ nice meal, get some pussy . . . play Marvel Rivals.” In recent years, Piker has stopped using the word “retarded,” but he still uses the word “pussy,” even though it may sound misogynist, and “lame,” despite fans who consider the term ableist. “I don’t give a shit,” Piker said. “If you can’t handle it, then I guess I’m not for you.” When his commenters try to tone-police him, Piker will often single one of them out and say, “Congratulations, chatter, you’ve won Woke of the Day.” It’s not a compliment.

The day after Mangione’s arrest, Piker had back-to-back interviews with Lina Khan, then the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, whom Piker called “the LeBron James of regulators,” and with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, promoting his new book. In the chat, a user named PapiJohn36 wrote, “Not to be parasocial, but I love this man.” Piker’s mother stopped by during the Coates interview. “Hasan, check your messages!” she shouted from the kitchen. Piker, grudgingly but dutifully, read his mother’s message aloud: “I got his book for the content and fell in love with his writing.”

“Thank you, Hasan’s mom,” Coates said. In the living room, Piker’s father was sprawled on the couch watching “Love Actually.”

Halkias, the comedian, showed up later that afternoon, with a bag of dirty laundry and a calendar featuring photos of himself posing in the nude. While many of Halkias’s comedian friends have taken a reactionary turn, he has stuck to his progressive principles, but he has never been a hall monitor. (He got his start on a podcast called “Cum Town.”) “Ladies and gentlemen, boys, girls, and enbies,” Piker said, “we’ve got the left’s Joe Rogan here in the building!” In the “Rogan of the left” discourse, both Piker and Halkias are frequently mentioned as top prospects. Even if they were secretly flattered by the designation, the least alpha thing they could do—the least Roganesque thing they could do—would be to thirst for it. “Free Luigi,” Halkias said, taking a seat. “He’s too sexy to be behind bars.”

As a model for the future of progressive media, Piker checks only some of the requisite boxes. A while back, he was a guest on “Flagrant”; when I asked one of the show’s staffers about Piker’s performance, he gave it a middling review. “Good guy, clearly knows his shit, but he sort of comes off like he thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room.” Piker sometimes succumbs to the socialist bro’s cardinal sin of pedantry, and he can seem like a jejune know-it-all trying to reduce any societal problem to a one-word culprit, usually “capitalism” or “imperialism.” Some segments of the Democratic coalition would find Piker to be edgy, or crass, or even despicable. But, if “Rogan of the left” is to mean anything, it would surely mean a higher tolerance for controversy, even at the risk of alienating parts of the base.

On the scale of “whether you’re calculated or whether you’re just free,” Piker is freer than most Democratic surrogates, Ivy League overachievers who sound like chatbots trained on stacks of campaign brochures. But he is less free than the average MAGA bro, who is unconstrained by the need for any consistent ideology. “He’s funny, but not that funny,” Halkias told me. “You can tell him I said that.” Halkias has his own podcast, on which he gives advice to callers. On the normier part of the spectrum are liberal influencers like Dean Withers and Harry Sisson, who have transferred the “debate me, bro” spirit of early YouTube to TikTok Live.

One afternoon, in L.A., I visited the office of Crooked Media, which was decorated with some Yes We Can iconography and had glass-walled conference rooms with cheeky names such as “Sedition” and “Conspiracy.” When the company began, in 2017, its three founders, former Obama staffers named Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor, and Jon Favreau, were treated as audacious upstarts challenging the media hierarchy. Now they are middle-aged bosses in Henleys and tapered jeans. We sat in “Legitimate Political Discourse.” A long table had been laid with LaCroix and PopCorners. “We have become the out-of-touch lib establishment,” Vietor said. Lovett added, “My, how time flies.”

Crooked now has more than a dozen podcasts, including its flagship show, “Pod Save America.” Vietor recounted a time, a few years back, when a friend invited him to appear on a show put out by Barstool Sports, a bro-y podcast network that leans right. Vietor, worried about guilt by association, turned it down. “Looking back, that was so stupid,” he said. “The ‘how dare you platform someone you disagree with’ era is over. Fuck that.” (He has since appeared on the show.) In 2018, Favreau was hosting a show called “The Wilderness,” about how the Democratic Party lost its way, and wanted to include a clip of Obama reaching out to the white working class. “A younger producer listened and went, ‘I’m not sure this plays well today,’ ” Favreau said. “And I went, ‘That’s part of the problem!’ ” After the 2024 election, Piker appeared on “Pod Save America.” Lovett got pushback from moderate fans, who objected to Piker’s anti-Zionism, and from progressive fans, who objected to Lovett’s next interview, with a Democrat who wants restrictions on trans women in sports—but he shrugged it off. “It’s a big tent,” Lovett said. “It’s got Dick Cheney in it. It’s got Hasan Piker in it.”

The “Rogan of the left” formulation isn’t entirely vacuous, but it’s easy to misinterpret. Rogan-like figures can’t be engineered; they have to develop organically. Their value lies in their idiosyncrasies—their passionate insistence on talking about chimps and ancient pyramids, say, rather than the budget ceiling—and in their authenticity, which entails an aversion to memorizing talking points. Many Democrats assume that what they have is a messaging problem—that voters don’t have a clear enough sense of what the Democrats are really like. But it’s possible that the problem is the opposite: that many swing voters, including Joe Rogan, got a sense of what the Democrats were like, then ran in the opposite direction.

The good news for Democrats is that the right does not have a monopoly on relatability. A week before his interview with Trump, Theo Von conducted an interview with Bernie Sanders while wearing a Grateful Dead shirt. “You ever see the Grateful Dead?” Von said, as an icebreaker. Sanders, apparently unfamiliar with the concept, frowned and said, “Um, no.” From any other politician, this would have been malpractice, but with Sanders the crankiness is part of the crossover charm. (“He literally just talks common sense,” one of the top YouTube comments read.) A few months later, Rogan interviewed Senator John Fetterman. “Trump is not polished, but you get a sense of who he is as a human being,” Rogan said. Fetterman agreed, alluding to a line from “Scarface”: “All I have in this world is my balls and my word.”

Reeves, the social scientist, told me, “There is a strong correlation between which Democratic lawmakers are in my inbox and which ones have the year 2028 circled on their calendar.” Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, read Reeves’s book in 2023 and praised it on X; many of Murphy’s constituents, including his fourteen-year-old son, took issue with his post. Nevertheless, he persisted, writing a follow-up on Substack: “We should try to do two things at once—fight for the equality of women and gay people, while also trying hard to figure out why so many boys are struggling and why so many men are feeling shitty.” Sanders and Fetterman share what could be described as populist instincts, but ideologically they are leagues apart. On the level of pure affect, though, they may represent elements of a style that other politicians could crib from. “Personally, I find the performance of masculinity to be totally boring,” Hanna Rosin told me. “But if that’s what fifty-one per cent of Americans need—someone who reads as some version of ‘gruff, manly dude,’ but whose heart is still in the right place—then I’m willing to go along with it.”

Twitch stars often appear on one another’s streams, hoping to pick up some new fans. One afternoon, Piker headed to Zoo Culture, a gym in Encino owned by a streamer and fitness influencer named Bradley Martyn, to do a “collab.” It would also feature Jason Nguyen, a twenty-year-old Twitch star from Texas who goes by JasonTheWeen. “Bradley’s a big Trump guy, and we talk politics sometimes, but mostly we just talk about gym-bro shit,” Piker told me. “Jason probably leans Trump, if I had to guess, but his content isn’t really political at all.” (“I dont lean towards anyone,” Nguyen wrote when reached for comment. “I dont want anything to do with politics 😭.”)

By the time we got to the gym, Nguyen was already there, performing for the camera by flirting with a woman on a weight bench. “Is Jason rizzing right now?” Piker asked Martyn, who nodded. “Is it working?” Piker asked the woman. She replied, “A little bit.” Before she left, she gave Nguyen her Discord handle.

“Bradley, I’ve got something for you,” Piker said, removing his long-sleeved shirt. Underneath, he was wearing a tank top with a Rambo-style cartoon of Trump and the words “LET���S GO BRANDON.” “I was coming into hostile territory, so I had to fit in,” Piker said.

“It’s perfect,” Martyn said.

Martyn, who is six feet three and two hundred and sixty pounds, looks vaguely like Bradley Cooper on steroids. (Martyn has taken testosterone supplements, which Piker once brought up in a jocular debate about trans rights: You do hormone-replacement therapy, so why can’t they?) Nguyen is much smaller. “My chat just said, ‘There’s three muscleheads in the gym right now,’ ” Nguyen joked, not even pretending to look at his phone. Piker roasted Nguyen with a fake comment from his own chat: “Jason looks like a twink.” They wandered from station to station—first bench-pressing, then deadlifting—as their cameramen followed. “We’re just here to have fun,” Piker said. Then, dropping into a mock P.S.A. voice: “And also reach out to the young men out there who are lost—who feel anchorless, rudderless—by lifting some heavy weights.”

One flat-screen TV showed Joe Rogan interviewing Elon Musk, on mute, with no captions. Two shirtless guys, between reps, compared crypto wallets. “During Covid, they let liquor stores and strip clubs open, but they shut us down,” Martyn told me. “And then all the inflation, all the wars—it’s not like I trust any politician, Trump or Kamala or anyone, to be a perfect person. It’s just—if we never try anything new, how can we get a different result?” Last fall, when Martyn interviewed Trump, he brought up “the deep state” and asked, “How would you actually make an effective change there?” It wasn’t a specific question, and Trump didn’t have a specific answer. “We’re changing that whole thing around,” he said. Apparently, this was good enough for Martyn.

The day after the 2024 election, Martyn appeared on Piker’s stream to explain his support for Trump. They started with small talk. “Why do you have so many Zyn containers behind you?” Martyn said.

“I fucking slam those bad boys daily,” Piker said.

“Look at us relating, bro,” Martyn said.

When they got around to politics, Piker said, “One side at least acknowledges that people are angry—the Republicans.” The Democrats’ proposed solutions were inadequate, he said, but Trump would only make things worse. Martyn smiled and replied, “You’re gonna have to say sorry when he does what he says he’s gonna do.”

They ended the gym session by daring each other to take turns sitting in Martyn’s cold plunge. Piker resisted at first—“I didn’t bring a towel, a bathing suit, nothing”—but he went in anyway, in his gym shorts, and his commenters went wild. “Hey, Hasan’s chat, I hope y’all are happy he took his shirt off,” Nguyen said, facing Piker’s camera. Then he checked his phone: the woman from the weight bench had already sent him a message.

“Wait, she did?” Piker said, with a grin. “You’re about to lose your virginity, I think.”