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sheliesshattered · 1 year ago

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Sylki fic: When She Sings She Sings Come Home

Loki/Sylvie, 3200 words. Post s02e06 fix-it, angst with a happy ending. Also available on AO3 under the same title and username.

When She Sings She Sings Come Home

Sylvie wakes with Loki’s voice in her ears.

It’s been months since she last saw him, striding out to the Loom to save the timelines. Winter has come and gone, here in this little corner of a branch that she’s made her home. Every day that’s passed, she’s half expected to turn around and see him standing there, like that night he appeared in the parking lot next to her truck. But for months, there’s been nothing but the absence of him, growing larger and more crystalline every day.

She wakes with his voice in her ears, singing that ridiculous song from the train on Lamentis.

To Sylvie, everybody! he’d said, grinning at her, not drunk only too full. She would give anything to see him smile like that again. She would give anything to see him again.

And it isn’t that she hasn’t looked. Of course she had. She’d barely gotten through a single shift at McDonald’s after leaving Mobius standing outside his variant’s house before she’d used He Who Remain’s TemPad to try to find Loki.

He wasn’t dead. She knows he isn’t dead. But he also isn’t anywhere. There are an infinite number of branches now, layers of reality twisting around each other into something larger, a shape she can almost see, almost recognize. But Loki isn’t on any of them. No matter where she searches, he remains just outside her grasp.

Sylvie goes to work, she drives her truck home, she listens to music at the record store, she checks in on Mobius, she tries to sleep. But everywhere is marked by Loki’s absence, and every moment is overlaid with the sound of him singing.

She can’t find Loki, but that song is a thread she can pull at. Where did he learn it? The words were almost Asgardian, but not quite. Something similar, a branch of the original. A variant. Because of course it was.

It’s not until she thinks to quietly spy on the New Asgard settlement in Norway, forty years on from her quiet life in Oklahoma, that she hears the language again. Norwegian.

Remember this place, she hears Odin say, in a memory that is not hers, rippling through the interwoven timelines because it is what she needs in this moment. Home.

She turns her back on New Asgard, on the man who is almost but not quite her brother, on the Valkyrie who will come to lead their people like the hero out of a saga that Sylvie had once wished she could become. She turns her back, and walks into this strange, beautiful land. Norway. One tiny place on one tiny planet in one insignificant branch of the ever-growing tree of time, where the syllables are shaped into words that resonate with Loki’s voice from so long ago.

Sylvie wanders into pubs, into taverns, into bars, into concerts. She hums the few notes that never leave her head, and hopes to find someone who knows the song.

Until, miraculously, one day, she does.

“It’s an old drinking song,” the bearded man at the bar tells her, gesturing with his beer. “It’s about taking the long way home, but knowing you’ll get there in the end.”

“Can you teach it to me?” Sylvie asks, unblinking, gaze trained on the stranger’s face.

“For that, I will need a lot more beer.”

So she buys him beers. She coaxes the song out of him. She buys rounds for the whole bar, until they are all singing it. They teach her the words in Norwegian, teach her to shape the vowels as carefully as any incantation, and then teach her the meaning behind the words.

In storm-black mountains, I wander alone

Over the glacier I make my way

In the apple garden stands the maiden fair

and sings, “When will you come home?”

“You, I think,” her drunk bearded acquaintance says to her, “you are the maiden fair.”

“And what if I am?” Sylvie asks, raising her chin, still dead-sober despite the bourbon clutched in her hand.

“Then you must sing for him to come home!”

“From an apple orchard, if you can manage it,” leers his friend next to him.

“Will it work?” she hears herself say.

“Of course it will work! Music is magic. Galdr, they used to call it, in the old religion. The power of your voice to shape reality.” The man is drunk, but his words tug at something in Sylvie’s memory, long buried. “Sing, and he will come home.”

“As simple as that?”

The bearded man laughs uproariously. “When has love ever been simple?” he demands jovially. “When has magic ever been easy? But that does not mean it is not worth trying. There is beauty in the trying. There is love in the longing.” He’s slurring his words, barely managing to stay atop his barstool.

But he’s not wrong.

I know what kind of god I need to be, Loki had said, tears shining in his eyes. For you. For all of us.

But Sylvie is a god, too, she reminds herself, as she tosses back her bourbon and turns her back on the little Norwegian town, with the northern lights rippling over head. She’s not the goddess of chaos anymore, and she hasn’t felt mischievous since she was a child.

But the goddess of galdr, yes, that perhaps is something she could be.

She returns to her little Oklahoma town, cloud cover obliterating the stars, and drives her truck to the record store. There’s only one song she wants to hear, only one voice to sing it, but music has been her comfort since she came to this place, and she cannot simply become the goddess of music-turned-into-magic because she wishes it to be so. Music has been her shield, her cocoon, her comfort these long lonely months. Now she must learn to form it into other shapes, into weapons and tools. Into a lighthouse, shining out into the vast dark of the multiverse.

She taught herself enchantment, while running for her life from one apocalypse to the next. She can teach herself galdr in this quiet little record shop in this quiet little town.

Sylvie slides the headphones into place, and lets the music move through her.

Oh, sweet nothin'

She ain't got nothin' at all

Oh, sweet nothin'

She ain't got nothin' at all

But what if she had something? What if she had the one person who would make all of this worth it?

I know what kind of god I need to be, she tells herself. For you, Loki.

She murmurs the words along with the music, infusing them with intent, with magic.

And for one fraction of an instant, she can see him.

He’s alone, on the throne he never wanted, surrounded by the threads of the multiverse, pulsing green as they grow and twist. There is nothing, nothing else, only Loki alone in that vast emptiness, in that expanse of everything that ever was or ever could be.

His eyes are dull, unfocused, far away. And then— a flicker of recognition, a spark of life—

Sylvie loses the connection.

She’s alone on the sofa in the back of the record shop, with Lou Reed singing in her ears.

He ain’t got nothing at all

She drives home. She tries to sleep. She keeps hearing Loki’s voice, keeps seeing him alone in that emptiness. She murmurs into the darkness— not quite a song, not quite a spell—

But trees dance and waterfalls stop

When she sings, she sings “come home”

There is a shape to the enormity of what Loki has done. There is an order to the way the branches of the multiverse wrap around each other. It is just outside her grasp, but Sylvie feels that if she could just see the shape of it, she might understand.

She might be able to reach him.

In storm-black mountains, I wander alone she whispers to the emptiness of her tiny apartment, in this tiny town, in this little branch of a timeline, one miniscule part of a greater whole, and falls asleep dreaming of trees dancing, of waterfalls stopping, of Loki taking her outside the flow of time to tell her that there was no other way to keep her safe.

Sylvie wakes with her own voice in her ears.

The song is coursing through her, jeg saler min ganger, and she can feel the magic at her fingertips, on the tip of her tongue, pushing at the insides of her ribs, swelling her lungs and begging to be released.

I know what kind of god I need to be.

She gets into her truck and drives. North and east, away from everything she knows, vaguely towards those northern lights dancing over the fjords, too far away to reach on roads such as these.

But once upon a time, when she was very young, there was another road. A rainbow road, the Bifrost, that could take her anywhere just like magic.

Every bit of magic she has now she has taught herself. And this, too, this song swelling in her chest, is magic of her own making.

There is beauty in the trying. There is love in the longing.

She drives past fields of wheat and fields of corn, through days and nights, with the glare of the sun or the pattering of the rain against the windshield. Sylvie drives and drives and drives, and keeps the song tucked away inside her, growing in fury like a hurricane in a bottle, like the storm that had raged outside the night they met.

She drives until the scent of apples wafts through the open windows of the truck, and then she pulls over, knowing this was her destination all along.

Iðunn, a childhood memory whispers, too long ago now to have any meaning at all. The apples of eternity.

Home she thinks, and then hears, from a memory not her own:

Asgard’s not a place, it’s a people.

This could be Asgard. Asgard is where our people stand.

Her brother’s voice. The voice of the man who had once raised her as his daughter. The family she lost and can never regain, no matter what shape the multiverse twists itself into. Words reaching across time, across branching timelines, to reach her here and now, because it is what she needs to hear.

Sylvie climbs out of her truck and walks into the apple orchard and doesn’t look back.

She walks until she can no longer see the road from between the trunks and branches. She walks until there is nothing but the smell of apples, the soil under foot, and the sky over head. She walks until the song finally bursts out of her, all of her desperation and loneliness flooding out of her lungs to shake the very air around her, in the shape of words that are his but also hers, now.

But trees dance and waterfalls stop

When she sings, she sings “come home”

In storm-black mountains, I wander alone

Over the glacier I make my way

In the apple garden stands the maiden fair

and sings, “When will you come home?”

But trees dance and waterfalls stop

When she sings, she sings “come home”

When she sings, she sings “come home!”

And then he is there, standing beside her in the sunshine and the scent of the apple orchard. Loki glances around at the trees dancing in the wind, his eyes bright, before his gaze snaps to hers.

“You’re here,” Sylvie croaks, her voice burned through with the force of the magic that poured out of her, the magic that’s brought Loki to her.

“No, not really,” he says, his eyes never still as they trace over her face. “I’m still there too. I’m sort of everywhere, really. It’s hard to explain.”

“Help me to understand,” she says before the words even have the chance to fade away. “You said you knew what kind of god you needed to be. You saved us, you saved everything, and then you disappeared. Make me understand.”

“I can’t, Sylvie,” Loki says gently, and there is a sorrow in his eyes deeper than oceans, more boundless than the vastness of space. “It’s been centuries for me. Lifetimes. I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Enchant me, he had begged her once, standing in the McDonald’s parking lot in his ridiculous TVA uniform. You can see what I saw.

“You don’t have to say anything,” she tells him, raising her hands slowly towards his face, green magic flickering between her fingers. “Just let me see what you saw.”

“Sylvie,” he starts, and there are tears in his eyes again, like there were in that last moment before he turned his back on her to destroy the Loom.

“We’re the same, remember?” she says, and if her voice cracks it is only because of the abuse it’s suffered, only because of the magic that poured out through her vocal chords to shape reality to her desires. “You shouldn’t have to bear this burden alone, Loki,” she tells him, with as much tenderness as she can force into her ruined voice. “Let me understand.”

“It was the only way,” he says, as if in warning, but Sylvie cups his face in her hands before the tears can fall from his eyes.

Centuries. Lifetimes. The same day, over and over again. Reality unspooling, starting with Victor Timely and ending with her, again and again. Their fight in the Citadel at the end of time, relived hundreds of times, always with the same ending. Always the death of He Who Remains, and the unraveling of everything, failure after failure after failure.

And yet in all of them, she does not kiss him. And he cannot bring himself to kill her. Until only one choice remains.

I know what kind of god I need to be. For you.

Sylvie watches in Loki’s memory as the temporal radiation burns away his TVA uniform, as his magic replaces it with something older, something primal, something true. She watches as he grasps the decaying branches of the multiverse and breathes life into them, wills them to live, to be whole and part of a whole.

She watches as the branches twist around each other, each variation of the timeline finding support in its neighbors, building into something greater than the sum of every moment of every timeline that has ever existed.

She sees the shape of what Loki has done, the enormous, infinite tree dancing in the nothingness outside of time. Yggdrasil, the worldstree, green and glowing, alive and growing, all because Loki willed it so. To restore freewill and safeguard it forever. For all of us.

His hands cover hers and Loki gently pries her fingers away from his face. “Enough, Sylvie. Enough. I know what I’ve done.”

There are tears on her face, the apple-scented wind plucking at the wetness as she stands there, staring at Loki. Even without the enchantment, she can see him sitting on his throne, alone but for the infinite tree he tends.

“It was the only way?” she asks in the ruins of her voice. It is only when he folds his hands around hers that she realizes she is shaking, trembling like a leaf in the wind. Not like dancing. Like shattering, collapsing in on herself with the weight of what he’s done.

“No,” Loki admits. “There was one other way. I could have left He Who Remains in charge. I could have let the TVA go back to pruning the timelines. But I would have had to kill you. I would have had to kill you with my own hands, and watch as you died, and then betray everything you ever believed in. I lived every variation of every action I could possibly change, but not that one. Not that.”

“You don’t even know me,” Sylvie blurts out before the words have fully formed in her mind. All of this, to save her? She cannot, she cannot—

Loki’s expressive face twists, stung by her words, hurt in this moment even beyond the deep sorrow that he wears like a cloak. “Of course I know you,” he says, wounded, his gaze searching her face. “Like I’ve never known anyone. Sylvie, I lov—”

She surges up onto her toes and kisses him, there among the apple trees. She kisses him for what he’s done, for what he refused to do. She kisses him for the loneliness they have both known far too much of, she kisses him for coming when she sang for him to come home. She kisses him because there is nothing else she can do, because there was never any other way for her, either.

And Loki kisses her in return, with a desperation borne of years, centuries, lifetimes of facing this alone. He kisses her in the apple garden, as the trees dance and the waterfalls stand still. He is there, kissing her, but also somewhere else, far away and outside time, tending to the tree that he gave his life to save.

“I can’t stay,” he says when they finally part, pressing his forehead to hers, his hands cupping her jaw in an echo of how she had enchanted him moments before. “I want to stay, more than anything, Sylvie, but I can’t, I can’t.”

“I know,” she assures him, even as she clutches at his robes for fear he will disappear at any moment. “I know you can’t stay here with me,” she says, then takes a deep breath to steady her ragged voice, her thundering heart. “But you don’t have to be alone.”

Loki pulls away abruptly, only far enough to see her face, confusion pinching his features.

“We’re gods, you said,” Sylvie explains, tripping over her words, her voice trembling with the weight of what she has already done, the weight of what she plans to do. “We have a responsibility. That’s what you told me, in that ridiculous room full of pie. We can’t just give everyone freewill and then walk away.” She offers him a small smile, the best she can summon at the current moment. “You have to sustain Yggdrasil. But you don’t have to do it alone.”

“I did this for you,” he says, holding on to her as desperately as she is clutching at him. “So you could have a life. That’s what you said you wanted, to live.”

“It’s freewill, Loki,” she says, shaking her head. “You can’t just give it to everyone and then be surprised when I use it to choose to be with you. I know what kind of god I need to be. You taught me that. I won’t let you bear this burden alone. That’s the kind of god I choose to be.”

“I can’t let you sacrifice yourself for me—”

“The only sacrifice would be giving you up.”

He gazes at her for a long moment, his uncertainty slowly transforming, then sings softly, “I stormsvarte fjell, jeg vandrer alene,” and this time Sylvie understands the words. “Over isbreen tar jeg meg frem. I eplehagen står møyen den vene, og synger: ‘når kommer du hjem?’”

The apple orchard dissolves around them, replaced by the rippling greens and blues and purples of Yggdrasil, shimmering in the darkness outside of time.

“Home,” Sylvie says, and kisses him again.

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andymakesgames · 10 months ago

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Balatro-Inspired Spinning Card Tweetcart Breakdown

I recently made a tweetcart of a spinning playing card inspired by finally playing Balatro, the poker roguelike everybody is talking about.

If you don't know what a tweetcart is, it's a type of size-coding where people write programs for the Pico-8 fantasy console where the source code is 280 characters of less, the length of a tweet.

I'm actually not on twitter any more, but I still like 280 characters as a limitation. I posted it on my mastodon and my tumblr.

Here's the tweetcart I'm writing about today:

And here is the full 279 byte source code for this animation:

a=abs::_::cls()e=t()for r=0,46do for p=0,1,.025do j=sin(e)*20k=cos(e)*5f=1-p h=a(17-p*34)v=a(23-r)c=1+min(23-v,17-h)%5/3\1*6u=(r-1)/80z=a(p-.2)if(e%1<.5)c=a(r-5)<5and z<u+.03and(r==5or z>u)and 8or 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2 g=r+39pset((64+j)*p+(64-j)*f,(g+k)*p+(g-k)*f,c)end end flip()goto _

This post is available with much nicer formatting on the EMMA blog. You can read it here.

You can copy/paste that code into a blank Pico-8 file to try it yourself. I wrote it on Pico-8 version 0.2.6b.

I'm very pleased with this cart! From a strictly technical perspective I think it's my favorite that I've ever made. There is quite a bit going on to make the fake 3D as well as the design on the front and back of the card. In this post I'll be making the source code more readable as well as explaining some tools that are useful if you are making your own tweetcarts or just want some tricks for game dev and algorithmic art.

Expanding the Code

Tweetcarts tend to look completely impenetrable, but they are often less complex than they seem. The first thing to do when breaking down a tweetcart (which I highly recommend doing!) is to just add carriage returns after each command.

Removing these line breaks is a classic tweetcart method to save characters. Lua, the language used in Pico-8, often does not need a new line if a command does not end in a letter, so we can just remove them. Great for saving space, bad for readability. Here's that same code with some line breaks, spaces and indentation added:

a=abs ::_:: cls() e=t() for r=0,46 do for p=0,1,.025 do j=sin(e)*20 k=cos(e)*5 f=1-p h=a(17-p*34) v=a(23-r) c=1+min(23-v,17-h)%5/3\1*6 u=(r-1)/80 z=a(p-.2) if(e%1<.5) c= a(r-5) < 5 and z < u+.03 and (r==5 or z>u) and 8 or 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2 g=r+39 pset((64+j)*p+(64-j)*f,(g+k)*p+(g-k)*f,c) end end flip()goto _

Note: the card is 40 pixels wide and 46 pixels tall. Those number will come up a lot. As will 20 (half of 40) and 23 (half of 46).

Full Code with Variables and Comments

Finally, before I get into what each section is doing, here is an annotated version of the same code. In this code, variables have real names and I added comments:

[editor's note. this one came out terribly on tumblr. Please read the post on my other blog to see it]

This may be all you need to get a sense of how I made this animation, but the rest of this post will be looking at how each section of the code contributes to the final effect. Part of why I wanted to write this post is because I was happy with how many different tools I managed to use in such a small space.

flip() goto_

This pattern shows up in nearly every tweetcart:

::_:: MOST OF THE CODE flip()goto _

This has been written about in Pixienop's Tweetcart Basics which I highly recommend for anybody curious about the medium! The quick version is that using goto is shorter than declaring the full draw function that Pico-8 carts usually use.

Two Spinning Points

The card is drawn in rows starting from the top and going to the bottom. Each of these lines is defined by two points that move around a center point in an elliptical orbit.

The center of the top of the card is x=64 (dead center) and y=39 (a sort of arbitrary number that looked nice).

Then I get the distance away from that center that my two points will be using trigonometry.

x_dist = sin(time)*20 y_dist = cos(time)*5

Here are those points:

P1 adds x_dist and y_dist to the center point and P2 subtracts those same values.

Those are just the points for the very top row. The outer for loop is the vertical rows. The center x position will be the same each time, but the y position increases with each row like this: y_pos = row+39

Here's how it looks when I draw every 3rd row going down:

It is worth noting that Pico-8 handles sin() and cos() differently than most languages. Usually the input values for these functions are in radians (0 to two pi), but in Pico-8 it goes from 0 to 1. More info on that here. It takes a little getting used to but it is actually very handy. More info in a minute on why I like values between 0 and 1.

Time

In the shorter code, e is my time variable. I tend to use e for this. In my mind it stands for "elapsed time". In Pico-8 time() returns the current elapsed time in seconds. However, there is a shorter version, t(), which obviously is better for tweetcarts. But because I use the time value a lot, even the 3 characters for t() is often too much, so I store it in the single-letter variable e.

Because it is being used in sine and cosine for this tweetcart, every time e reaches 1, we've reached the end of a cycle. I would have liked to use t()/2 to slow this cart down to be a 2 second animation, but after a lot of fiddling I wound up being one character short. So it goes.

e is used in several places in the code, both to control the angle of the points and to determine which side of the card is facing the camera.

Here you can see how the sine value of e controls the rotation and how we go from showing the front of the card to showing the back when e%1 crosses the threshold of 0.5.

Drawing and Distorting the Lines

Near the top and bottom of the loop we'll find the code that determines the shape of the card and draws the horizontal lines that make up the card. Here is the loop for drawing a single individual line using the code with expanded variable names:

for prc = 0,1,.025 do x_dist = sin(time)*20 y_dist = cos(time)*5 ... y_pos = row+39 pset( (64+x_dist)*prc + (64-x_dist)*(1-prc), (y_pos+y_dist)*prc + (y_pos-y_dist)*(1-prc), color) end

You might notice that I don't use Pico-8's line function! That's because each line is drawn pixel by pixel.

This tweetcart simulates a 3D object by treating each vertical row of the card as a line of pixels. I generate the points on either side of the card(p1 and p2 in this gif), and then interpolate between those two points. That's why the inner for loop creates a percentage from 0 to 1 instead of pixel positions. The entire card is drawn as individual pixels. I draw them in a line, but the color may change with each one, so they each get their own pset() call.

Here's a gif where I slow down this process to give you a peek at how these lines are being drawn every frame. For each row, I draw many pixels moving across the card between the two endpoints in the row.

Here's the loop condition again: for prc = 0,1,.025 do

A step of 0.025 means there are 40 steps (0.025 * 40 = 1.0). That's the exact width of the card! When the card is completely facing the camera head-on, I will need 40 steps to make it across without leaving a gap in the pixels. When the card is skinnier, I'm still drawing all 40 pixels, but many of them will be in the same place. That's fine. The most recently drawn one will take priority.

Getting the actual X and Y position

I said that the position of each pixel is interpolated between the two points, but this line of code may be confusing:

y_pos = row+39 pset( (64+x_dist)*prc + (64-x_dist)*(1-prc), (y_pos+y_dist)*prc + (y_pos-y_dist)*(1-prc), color)

So let's unpack it a little bit. If you've ever used a Lerp() function in something like Unity you've used this sort of math. The idea is that we get two values (P1 and P2 in the above example), and we move between them such that a value of 0.0 gives us P1 and 1.0 gives us P2.

Here's a full cart that breaks down exactly what this math is doing:

::_:: cls() time = t()/8 for row = 0,46 do for prc = 0,1,.025 do x_dist = sin(time)*20 y_dist = cos(time)*5 color = 9 + row % 3 p1x = 64 + x_dist p1y = row+39 + y_dist p2x = 64 - x_dist p2y = row+39 - y_dist x = p2x*prc + p1x*(1-prc) y = p2y*prc + p1y*(1-prc) pset( x, y, color) end end flip()goto _

I'm defining P1 and P2 very explicitly (getting an x and y for both), then I get the actual x and y position that I use by multiplying P2 by prc and P1 by (1-prc) and adding the results together.

This is easiest to understand when prc is 0.5, because then we're just taking an average. In school we learn that to average a set of numbers you add them up and then divide by how many you had. We can think of that as (p1+p2) / 2. This is the same as saying p1*0.5 + p2*0.5.

But the second way of writing it lets us take a weighted average if we want. We could say p1*0.75 + p2*0.25. Now the resulting value will be 75% of p1 and 25% of p2. If you laid the two values out on a number line, the result would be just 25% of the way to p2. As long as the two values being multiplied add up to exactly 1.0 you will get a weighted average between P1 and P2.

I can count on prc being a value between 0 and 1, so the inverse is 1.0 - prc. If prc is 0.8 then 1.0-prc is 0.2. Together they add up to 1!

I use this math everywhere in my work. It's a really easy way to move smoothly between values that might otherwise be tricky to work with.

Compressing

I'm using a little over 400 characters in the above example. But in the real cart, the relevant code inside the loops is this:

j=sin(e)*20 k=cos(e)*5 g=r+39 pset((64+j)*p+(64-j)*f,(g+k)*p+(g-k)*f,c)

which can be further condensed by removing the line breaks:

j=sin(e)*20k=cos(e)*5g=r+39pset((64+j)*p+(64-j)*f,(g+k)*p+(g-k)*f,c)

Because P1, P2 and the resulting interpolated positions x and y are never used again, there is no reason to waste chars by storing them in variables. So all of the interpolation is done in the call to pset().

There are a few parts of the calculation that are used more than once and are four characters or more. Those are stored as variables (j, k & g in this code). These variables tend to have the least helpful names because I usually do them right at the end to save a few chars so they wind up with whatever letters I have not used elsewhere.

Spinning & Drawing

Here's that same example, but with a checker pattern and the card spinning. (Keep in mind, in the real tweetcart the card is fully draw every frame and would not spin mid-draw)

This technique allows me to distort the lines because I can specify two points and draw my lines between them. Great for fake 3D! Kind of annoying for actually drawing shapes, because now instead of using the normal Pico-8 drawing tools, I have to calculate the color I want based on the row (a whole number between0 and 46) and the x-prc (a float between 0 and 1).

Drawing the Back

Here's the code that handles drawing the back of the card:

h=a(17-p*34) v=a(23-r) c=1+min(23-v,17-h)%5/3\1*6

This is inside the nested for loops, so r is the row and p is a percentage of the way across the horizontal line.

c is the color that we will eventually draw in pset().

h and v are the approximate distance from the center of the card. a was previously assigned as a shorthand for abs() so you can think of those lines like this:

h=abs(17-p*34) v=abs(23-r)

v is the vertical distance. The card is 46 pixels tall so taking the absolute value of 23-r will give us the distance from the vertical center of the card. (ex: if r is 25, abs(23-r) = 2. and if r is 21, abs(23-r) still equals 2 )

As you can probably guess, h is the horizontal distance from the center. The card is 40 pixels wide, but I opted to shrink it a bit by multiplying p by 34 and subtracting that from half of 34 (17). The cardback just looks better with these lower values, and the diamond looks fine.

The next line, where I define c, is where things get confusing. It's a long line doing some clunky math. The critical thing is that when this line is done, I need c to equal 1 (dark blue) or 7 (white) on the Pico-8 color pallette.

Here's the whole thing: c=1+min(23-v,17-h)%5/3\1*6

Here is that line broken down into much more discrete steps.

c = 1 --start with a color of 1 low_dist = min(23-v,17-h) --get the lower inverted distance from center val = low_dist % 5 --mod 5 to bring it to a repeating range of 0 to 5 val = val / 3 --divide by 3. value is now 0 to 1.66 val = flr(val) --round it down. value is now 0 or 1 val = val * 6 --multiply by 6. value is now 0 or 6 c += val --add value to c, making it 1 or 7

The first thing I do is c=1. That means the entire rest of the line will either add 0 or 6 (bumping the value up to 7). No other outcome is acceptable. min(23-v,17-h)%5/3\1*6 will always evaluate to 0 or 6.

I only want the lower value of h and v. This is what will give it the nice box shape. If you color the points inside a rectangle so that ones that are closer to the center on their X are one color and ones that are closer to the center on their Y are a different color you'll get a pattern with clean diagonal lines running from the center towards the corners like this:

You might think I would just use min(v,h) instead of the longer min(23-v,17-h) in the actual code. I would love to do that, but it results in a pattern that is cool, but doesn't really look like a card back.

I take the inverted value. Instead of having a v that runs from 0 to 23, I flip it so it runs from 23 to 0. I do the same for h. I take the lower of those two values using min().

Then I use modulo (%) to bring the value to a repeating range of 0 to 5. Then I divide that result by 3 so it is 0 to ~1.66. The exact value doens't matter too much because I am going round it down anyway. What is critical is that it will become 0 or 1 after rounding because then I can multiply it by a specific number without getting any values in between.

Wait? If I'm rounding down, where is flr() in this line: c=1+min(23-v,17-h)%5/3\1*6?

It's not there! That's because there is a sneaky tool in Pico-8. You can use \1 to do the same thing as flr(). This is integer division and it generally saves a 3 characters.

Finally, I multiply the result by 6. If it is 0, we get 0. If it is 1 we get 6. Add it to 1 and we get the color we want!

Here's how it looks with each step in that process turned on or off:

A Note About Parentheses

When I write tweetcarts I would typically start by writing this type of line like this: c=1+ (((min(23-v,17-h)%5)/3) \1) *6

This way I can figure out if my math makes sense by using parentheses to ensure that my order of operations works. But then I just start deleting them willy nilly to see what I can get away with. Sometimes I'm surprised and I'm able to shave off 2 characters by removing a set of parentheses.

The Face Side

The face side with the diamond and the "A" is a little more complex, but basically works the same way as the back. Each pixel needs to either be white (7) or red (8). When the card is on this side, I'll be overwriting the c value that got defined earlier.

Here's the code that does it (with added white space). This uses the h and v values defined earlier as well as the r and p values from the nested loops.

u=(r-1)/80 z=a(p-.2) if(e%1<.5) c= a(r-5) < 5 and z < u+.03 and (r==5 or z>u) and 8 or 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2

Before we piece out what this is doing, we need to talk about the structure for conditional logic in tweetcarts.

The Problem with If Statements

The lone line with the if statement is doing a lot of conditional logic in a very cumbersome way designed to avoid writing out a full if statement.

One of the tricky things with Pico-8 tweetcarts is that the loop and conditional logic of Lua is very character intensive. While most programming language might write an if statement like this:

if (SOMETHING){ CODE }

Lua does it like this:

if SOMETHING then CODE end

Using "then" and "end" instead of brackets means we often want to bend over backwards to avoid them when we're trying to save characters.

Luckily, Lua lets you drop "then" and "end" if there is a single command being executed inside the if.

This means we can write

if(e%1 < 0.5) c=5

instead of

if e%1 < 0.5 then c=5 end

This is a huge savings! To take advantage of this, it is often worth doing something in a slightly (or massively) convoluted way if it means we can reduce it to a single line inside the if. This brings us to:

Lua's Weird Ternary Operator

In most programming language there is an inline syntax to return one of two values based on a conditional. It's called the Ternary Operator and in most languages I use it looks like this:

myVar = a>b ? 5 : 10

The value of myVar will be 5 if a is greater than b. Otherwise is will be 10.

Lua has a ternary operator... sort of. You can read more about it here but it looks something like this:

myVar = a>b and 5 or 10

Frankly, I don't understand why this works, but I can confirm that it does.

In this specific instance, I am essentially using it to put another conditional inside my if statement, but by doing it as a single line ternary operation, I'm keeping the whole thing to a single line and saving precious chars.

The Face Broken Out

The conditional for the diamond and the A is a mess to look at. The weird syntax for the ternary operator doesn't help. Neither does the fact that I took out any parentheses that could make sense of it.

Here is the same code rewritten with a cleaner logic flow.

--check time to see if we're on the front half if e%1 < .5 then --this if checks if we're in the A u=(r-1)/80 z=a(p-.2) if a(r-5) < 5 and z < u+.03 and (r==5 or z>u) then c = 8 --if we're not in the A, set c based on if we're in the diamond else c = 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2 end end

The first thing being checked is the time. As I explained further up, because the input value for sin() in Pico-8 goes from 0 to 1, the midpoint is 0.5. We only draw the front of the card if e%1 is less than 0.5.

After that, we check if this pixel is inside the A on the corner of the card or the diamond. Either way, our color value c gets set to either 7 (white) or 8 (red).

Let's start with diamond because it is easier.

The Diamond

This uses the same h and v values from the back of the card. The reason I chose diamonds for my suit is that they are very easy to calculate if you know the vertical and horizontal distance from a point! In fact, I sometimes use this diamond shape instead of proper circular hit detection in size-coded games.

Let's look at the line: c = 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2

This starts with 8, the red color. Since the only other acceptable color is 7 (white), tha means that sgn(h+v-9)/2 has to evaluate to either 1 or 0.

sgn() returns the sign of a number, meaning -1 if the number is negative or 1 if the number is positive. This is often a convenient way to cut large values down to easy-to-work-with values based on a threshold. That's exactly what I'm doing here!

h+v-9 takes the height from the center plus the horizontal distance from the center and checks if the sum is greater than 9. If it is, sgn(h+v-9) will return 1, otherwise -1. In this formula, 9 is the size of the diamond. A smaller number would result in a smaller diamond since that's the threshold for the distance being used. (note: h+v is NOT the actual distance. It's an approximation that happens to make a nice diamond shape.)

OK, but adding -1 or 1 to 8 gives us 7 or 9 and I need 7 or 8.

That's where /2 comes in. Pico-8 defaults to floating point math, so dividing by 2 will turn my -1 or 1 into -0.5 or 0.5. So this line c = 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2 actually sets c to 7.5 or 8.5. Pico-8 always rounds down when setting colors so a value of 7.5 becomes 7 and 8.5 becomes 8. And now we have white for most of the card, and red in the space inside the diamond!

The A

The A on the top corner of the card was the last thing I added. I finished the spinning card with the card back and the diamond and realized that when I condensed the whole thing, I actually had about 50 characters to spare. Putting a letter on the ace seemed like an obvious choice. I struggled for an evening trying to make it happen before deciding that I just couldn't do it. The next day I took another crack at it and managed to get it in, although a lot of it is pretty ugly! Luckily, in the final version the card is spinning pretty fast and it is harder to notice how lopsided it is.

I mentioned earlier that my method of placing pixels in a line between points is great for deforming planes, but makes a lot of drawing harder. Here's a great example. Instead of just being able to call print("a") or even using 3 calls to line() I had to make a convoluted conditional to check if each pixel is "inside" the A and set it to red if it is.

I'll do my best to explain this code, but it was hammered together with a lot of trial and error. I kept messing with it until I found an acceptable balance between how it looked and how many character it ate up.

Here are the relevant bits again:

u=(r-1)/80 z=a(p-.2) if a(r-5) < 5 and z < u+.03 and (r==5 or z>u) then c = 8

The two variables above the if are just values that get used multiple times. Let's give them slightly better names. While I'm making edits, I'll expand a too since that was just a replacement for abs().

slope = (r-1)/80 dist_from_center = abs(p-.2) if abs(r-5) < 5 and dist_from_center < slope+.03 and (r==5 or dist_from_center>slope) then c = 8

Remember that r is the current row and p is the percentage of the way between the two sides where this pixel falls.

u/slope here is basically how far from the center line of the A the legs are at this row. As r increases, so does slope (but at a much smaller rate). The top of the A is very close to the center, the bottom is further out. I'm subtracting 1 so that when r is 0, slope is negative and will not be drawn. Without this, the A starts on the very topmost line of the card and looks bad.

z/dist_from_center is how far this particular p value is from the center of the A (not the center of the card), measured in percentage (not pixels). The center of the A is 20% of the way across the card. This side of the card starts on the right (0% is all the way right, 100% is all the way left), which is why you see the A 20% away from the right side of the card.

These values are important because the two legs of the A are basically tiny distance checks where the slope for a given r is compared against the dist_from_center. There are 3 checks used to determine if the pixel is part of the A.

if a(r-5) < 5 and z < u+.03 and (r==5 or z>u) then

The first is abs(r-5) < 5. This checks if r is between 1 and 9, the height of my A.

The second is dist_from_center < slope+.03. This is checking if this pixel's x distance from the center of the A is no more than .03 bigger than the current slope value. This is the maximum distance that will be considered "inside" the A. All of this is a percentage, so the center of the A is 0.20 and the slope value will be larger the further down the A we get.

Because I am checking the distance from the center point (the grey line in the image above), this works on either leg of the A. On either side, the pixel can be less than slope+.03 away.

Finally, it checks (r==5 or dist_from_center>slope). If the row is exactly 5, that is the crossbar across the A and should be red. Otherwise, the distance value must be greater than slope (this is the minimum value it can have to be "inside" the A). This also works on both sides thanks to using distance.

Although I am trying to capture 1-pixel-wide lines to draw the shape of the A, I could not think of a cleaner way than doing this bounding check. Ignoring the crossbar on row 5, you can think about the 2nd and 3rd parts of the if statement essentially making sure that dist_from_center fits between slope and a number slightly larger than slope. Something like this:

slope < dist_from_center < slope+0.03

Putting it Together

All of this logic needed to be on a single line to get away with using the short form of the if statement so it got slammed into a single ternary operator. Then I tried removing parentheses one at a time to see what was structurally significant. I wish I could say I was more thoughtful than that but I wasn't. The end result is this beefy line of code:

if(e%1<.5)c=a(r-5)<5and z<u+.03and(r==5or z>u)and 8or 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2

Once we've checked that e (our time value) is in the phase where we show the face, the ternary operator checks if the pixel is inside the A. If it is, c is set to 8 (red). If it isn't, then we set c = 8-sgn(h+v-9)/2, which is the diamond shape described above.

That's It!

Once we've set c the tweetcart uses pset to draw the pixel as described in the section on drawing the lines.

Here's the full code and what it looks like when it runs again. Hopefully now you can pick out more of what's going on!

I hope this was helpful! I had a lot of fun writing this cart and it was fun to break it down. Maybe you can shave off the one additional character needed to slow it down by using e=t()/2 a bit. If you do, please drop me a line on my mastodon or tumblr!

And if you want to try your hand at something like this, consider submitting something to TweetTweetJam which just started! You'll get a luxurious 500 characters to work with!

Links and Resources

There are some very useful posts of tools and tricks for getting into tweetcarts. I'm sure I'm missing many but here are a few that I refer to regularly.

Pixienop's tweetcart basics and tweetcart studies are probably the single best thing to read if you want to learn more.

Trasevol_Dog's Doodle Insights are fascinating, and some of them demonstrate very cool tweetcart techniques.

Optimizing Character Count for Tweetcarts by Eli Piilonen / @2DArray

Guide for Making Tweetcarts by PrincessChooChoo

The official documentation for the hidden P8SCII Control Codes is worth a read. It will let you do wild things like play sound using the print() command.

I have released several size-coded Pico-8 games that have links to heavily annotated code:

Pico-Mace

Cold Sun Surf

1k Jump

Hand Cram

And if you want to read more Pico-8 weirdness from me, I wrote a whole post on creating a networked Pico-8 tribute to Frog Chorus.

#pico8 #sizecoding #tweetcart #pico 8 #balatro #long reads

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theemeraldwings · 4 months ago

Text

Reblogging because my response has become too long to put in the replies:

I don't think many people view the traitor primarchs as irredeemable, and I think the number among people who are well-versed in Horus Heresy lore is even smaller. They are, from the beginning, tragic characters. They certainly have their damning characteristics (namely hypocrisy), but they aren't really presented as irredeemable--we even have explicit statements regarding redemption for two of them (Big E says Mortarion can be redeemed in Godblight, and he outright forgives Horus in The End and the Death Vol III). I don't entirely agree with your interpretations, however. I don't think any of them are irredeemable (at least, not due to their own actions), but I think they miss some key details.

For all Angron claimed to be standing against oppression, he spent over a century expanding the Emperor's (extremely oppressive) regime. There's no moral purity shit here, either--Angron is pretty open about how he hates serving the Emperor even as he reduces worlds to ash in his name. What you said about Mortarion also applies to Angron, because of the Butcher's Nails. He was denied the chance to die with his family on Nuceria, and for the remainder of his life before daemonhood, the one thing he wants to do is die. And then Lorgar takes that away from him.

Mortarion's fall is because, first and foremost, he cared about his sons. Typhus brought the legion to Nurgle's garden, and infected them with the Destroyer Plague. Mortarion fell to Nurgle because he wanted to end their pain. Mortion is also a hypocrite. Like Angron, for all his claims of hating tyranny, he still expanded a tyrant's domain for a century and a half. (Corvus Corax is also on this list, but this is about traitor primarchs, not loyalist)

Magnus' guilt is very hotly debated among the community, and both sides have a point. On the one hand, he did the best thing he could with the information he had available. On the other hand, he was incredibly cocky, and did not have a concept of restraint. He believed he was in control, and he was too confident in that belief. (Side note: I despise the troupe of super powers being a stand-in for being queer (or any minority of any kind, for that matter)).

Fulgrim never said "fuck it, I'll have fun". His fall to Slaanesh was driven by his belief that, after killing Ferrus Manus, he was irredeemable. He's an addict; he isn't trying to have fun, he's trying to forget reality.

Everybody agrees that Big E mishandled Lorgar, and that's the most favorable interpretation for him. His argument on why he isn't a god is literal abuser language ("If I was a god, I'd use my psychic powers to force you all to kneel before me, like this" before using his psychic powers to force all of the Word Bearers to kneel before him). And all this ignores the shit Kor Phaeron did to him.

Horus is the spoiled rich white boy of the primarchs. He didn't fall because he was lost because dad was doing everything for him beforehand, he fell because he saw a vision of the future where he wasn't given the credit he thought he deserved. And then, like anybody else who grew up being told the world would be at their feet, he lost it. There's other issues as well, such as taxes (Terra wanted to impose heavy tithes on newly conquered worlds, which Horus opposed because it would cause them to rebel), but "gee, maybe I'm not ready" was never an issue.

Alpharius and Omegon believed that they knew the Emperor's plans better than he did, and threw in their lot with the traitors because they thought that if the traitors won, it would mean the end for Chaos.

Perturabo is someone who chose to suffer in silence and hope things would magically change. He never complains, and then is shocked when things don't go his way. I'm fairly sure he's also the primarch that people find the most relatable.

Konrad Curze was certainly mentally ill, and he was certainly denied the help and support that he needed, but I don't think he was abused because of it. He's also the kind of person who thought that if you publicly lynched enough jaywalkers, crime would go down, and that the Emperor sending an assassin to kill him because he committed treason and genocide was vindication for his belief that any crime warrants being skinned alive as a punishment.

They may not be irredeemable, but their hands are fare from clean.

I love how much of warhammer 40k is clearly a bunch of white dudes sitting around, thinking up the worst shit imaginable and going "thank god that could never happen to me, the cishet white guy"

angron is a one for one depiction of slavery, yet is painted as the bad guy for wanting to stand against oppression

mortarion is disabled and constantly has his decisions taken away from him by able bodied people only to be seen as moody and uncooperative

magnus is gay or trans or both. literally a guy blamed for something he was born with that he cannot control and told you're bad if you explore this part of yourself. also you're illegal now

fulgrim was actively encouraged to pursue perfection, despite never being good enough for others. he pushed any personal pleasure aside for an uncaring crusade and then is demonized for saying "fuck it, I'll have fun"

lorgar. also known as "this is why you don't abuse your kids"

horus is the golden child who's sent out into the world by himself only to find out Gee, Maybe I'm Not Ready because good ol dad did everything for him then told him "figure it out lol"

alpharius omegon are the autistic kids who don't understand why pops is doing this, maybe we should do things a little different than "blood soaked crusade"

perturabo is the burnout middle kid who did everything to impress his father only to be told "that's what's expected of you" who then got mad since acting out was the only way he got attention

konrad curze has a mental disorder. and is abused because of it

all of these characters were so close to being some of the best representation for minorities we could get in media only for gw to eat shit right at the finish line because they can't commit to an actual story. and it's amazing just how little these writers understand that the things they depict are all real things that people suffer through every day, and are demonized for every single day, especially when we are told these characters are irredeemable and should be destroyed, no questions asked

#warhammer 40000 #warhammer 30k #primarch #angron #mortarion #magnus the red #fulgrim #lorgar aurelian #horus lupercal #alpharius #alpharius omegon #perturabo #konrad curze

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topioswords · 3 months ago

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Self Reflection

Noir pulls the hood further down, digging his finger joints into the matted fake fur, trusting that everybody will be too busy avoiding the sludge to pay much attention to the conspicuous metal sheen. The fingerless gloves help, but it isn’t ideal. Not that the biting cold bothers him, other than everything being soggy seemingly all the time and the occasional stutter in his functions when an exposed wire or two gets a little too chilled it’s fine. But it makes people look in a way he doesn’t care for.

The face is worse though. At least fingers you can make a halfhearted excuse for prosthetics and you don’t want to talk about it. You can’t do that with an entire head. At least this place has air that’s clogged enough that breathing is at most times difficult, so everybody’s used to paying more attention to body language than expressions because of the masks.

Noir has been here 4 days and one thing is clear.

He has got to get a mask that isn’t cracked, semi-transparent and fished out of a dumpster. That’d solve so many problems for him.

It’s a nice shop, relatively speaking. A little scruffy, a little hidden away, but less grimy than the surrounding buildings. Noir pulls back to a side street and runs his fingers along the edge of the mask. He hates doing this, but he can’t think of any other ways.

The look of bemused interest doesn’t surprise Noir, not really, it’s not that this place has less robots than usual, it’s the way they tend towards more robust builds. He stands out. The clothes don't help, probably, but for all it’d make the look more convincing he just couldn’t stand the thought of exposing himself entirely. The wrinkled inner shirt and pants will have to do, some people are into dressing up their bots anyway so not like it’s unheard of.

Just a little weird.

He can run with that.

“Good afternoon Sir,” he greets, falling back on that old cheerful customer service voice he’s worked so hard to get rid of. The ‘smile’ is there too, and the posture. It’s awful how easy it feels, doing all that again. Easy and false. This isn’t him, not really.. “My Master is interested in the local mask craftsmanship, I’ve been tasked with collecting data, might I have a look at your inventory?”

The guy looks amused, judging by the expression behind the relatively open faced mask, which is better than annoyed at least. “Must be some rich jerkass, bringing out fancy toys to do the shopping,” he says and Noir isn’t sure he should be pleased or worried.

“Only collecting data for now Sir,” he says, all fake cheerful. “Though an exchange of money for goods is a future possibility.”

This would be so much easier, if people weren’t assholes about selling directly to robots.

“S’a free country, s’fine to look” the guy says, and Noir wants very badly to tell him how it really isn’t, but he has a role to play so he shuts up instead.

It was the full faced masks that had drawn his attention outside. They seem to be good quality up close, based on what tips he’s been able to gather of info from the local community boards and some basic materials analysis, but the price tags aren’t exactly agreeable with his current amount of available funds. Granted, the likelihood of being able to buy anything now is low enough he doesn’t want to waste energy calculating it.

He just likes knowing, he tells himself. He hadn’t really thought there’d be a variety of animal shaped ones, but they’re interesting. Something about them feels appealing in a way the more utilitarian ones don’t.

They feel a bit like home.

Noir’s false smile flickers for a second.

The amber glass in the bright fox mask mirrors his blank face back at him and he knows it’s not sensible, but it’s right.

If he has to play a role, that’s the one he wants.

Noir always liked foxes, for all that he’s never seen a live one. The stories though. Those were good.

After a couple of minutes idle watching Noir leaves with a polite bow, chewing on the number listed by the fox mask. So far he’s been getting by, mostly by scrounging, he isn’t really in a position where having an account is doable so most of the jobs he could do he can’t actually get paid for. Forgery of that magnitude isn’t his strong suit, and even if it was, he wouldn’t like doing it.

The humans standing by the spot he’d tucked his neatly folded clothes away really should have registered sooner, he thinks in the frozen second when they spot him and he spots them.

“Oh, shit,” Noir says, because his threat assessment just had a fit and he didn’t actually ever prepare for a situation like this. He isn’t programmed for confrontations, damn it.

At least they look about as baffled at the situation as he feels.

“Is that a robot wearing shoes,” one of them asks the others after an awkward moment of silence, and Noir wishes he was capable of rolling his eyes at them because yes, obviously. Why do humans have to be like that? It’s not like he wants wet feet either. Sludge seeping into his foot-wiring is a more pressing concern than wet socks damn it, that shit is delicate.

“That’s my clothes,” he says, because what else is there to do? “Give them back.”

“It’s a mouthy robot wearing shoes,” one of the others says. Rude, he’s right there.

They’re young, late teens, the exact kind of guys Noir would keep an extra eye on back home when there were more than two of them. Three is trouble. He swears he can see those little gears turn from ‘mildly bored’ to ‘here’s something nobody will care if we mess with’.

“Hey,” the stupid questions guy says in a tone Noir doesn’t care for. “Aren’t things like you supposed to talk nice to people,” he’s stepping closer, a hand raised out.

He’s not sure when, exactly, he got that alert but it’s flashing at him in an obnoxious red as he hisses “Don’t. Touch.” His face is so close to the teen his cameras can focus past the reflection in the mask’s glass. That face is priceless, but something’s nagging him still. He brushes the warning aside, it’s not like he’s gonna use more force on that fragile arm, he knows exactly how much force it’ll take to break bone and this is barely gonna leave a bruise.

Not that the old restrictions care, he can tell it’s ticking down to freeze him for ‘manhandling’ a visitor. Something in the kids' expressions changes.

Uh-uh, he thinks in that split second before things go black. Bad move.

There’s a 10 minute lapse in data when he gets back enough processing power to actually check. A quick scan doesn’t show any grievous error messages since the last log, so that’s something. A couple of minor ones he should probably check out. Noir gets up.

One of them must’ve kicked his head or… something. The near seamless joint of his face isn’t so seamless anymore. His right eye feels a little loose, but it’s running fine. Which is good, cause it’s one of those components that run at a pretty high price here. Short supply he guesses. Not that he really needs two, but people tend to be freaked out if one’s missing. Something about that hole…

Noir tilts his head, picking up the soggy remains of what the teens didn’t manage to wreck before they ran off.

He runs those numbers again.

Hmm.

“I will be buying from you today,” Noir says, his automated cheerful tone ringing in the silence of the store. He doesn’t stumble, his spatial sensors are too good at corrections for that, but his movements are a little off now. He hadn’t taken that into account. That doesn’t matter, it doesn’t hurt, that’d be silly. It’s just that the absence is weird

He can fix that, later.

The store owner looks a little troubled, but to his credit he doesn’t make any stupid remarks.Just blinks, shakes his head and straightens out. “Which one,” he asks. Noir points, and the human makes a sound he doesn’t know how to interpret. He’s staring at Noir’s eye socket and he hates that feeling. Not mirroring that stupid smile to make a frown takes measurable effort.

“Transfer?” the question rattles Noir, even though it shouldn’t.

“I have been given cash,” he says, placing the crumbled notes on the counter. Exact change. He wants this over with so he can get people to stop staring at the stupid hole. That isn’t his face.

“Hm,” the human goes and grabs the fox mask from its spot, placing it in a rag-fabric bag without asking, along with the filtration system. “Thank you,” Noir says and takes the bag. He very nearly means it.

He doesn’t wait to hear if there’s an answer to that. He’s done with playing servant.

It feels right, adjusting the mask so it fits snugly. He looks at his reflection in a grimy window and sure, he needs some better clothes to make him stand out a little less but… it’s him, not some blank faced shell. Noir runs his fingers against the edge of the glass.

He can always replace that eye. That was never really important, as long as the important parts are him he can manage.

#Noir Needs Friends #Made Machine AU #robots #robot oc #robot writing #scifi #scifi writing #identity and treating your mask as your face #literally in this case #Noir has some issues

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omgotheromens · 6 months ago

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One of the important elements to succeed and achieve productivity is managing tasks efficiently in today’s fast-paced work culture. Yet, the challenging fact is that it can be difficult to find a software solution amidst the abundance of task management tools available and budget concerns. Here comes Vabro—a free task management software with advanced features built specifically for modern teams. Vabro is an easy, open, and affordable user story mapping tool to organize your project management process, whether you are a small or large team.

Seamless Task Organization

Vabro is very good at organizing the tasks of your team in a way that makes it easy for everyone to see what needs to be done. This is a user-friendly tool to create, assign, and manage tasks easily. It organizes tasks by projects, deadlines, or priority levels—ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks. Drag-and-drop functionality makes it easy for users to reorder tasks or move them through different stages of a project. The software often uses a visual style that allows teams to easily understand what needs to be done, by whom; this can remove ambiguity and increase overall clarity.

The software also provides extensive filtering and grouping capabilities, so tasks can be arranged by due date or priority if needed. This means that team members can work on their highest priority items without getting bogged down by the sheer number of tasks on everyone’s to-do lists. Its simple and clean design allows people to keep everything organized, either individually or as a team, so you clearly know who’s responsible for what.

Collaboration Made Simple

A standout quality in Vabro, among equal—if not superior—virtues, is its stance on collaboration. Team collaboration is crucial to success in the modern interconnected workspace, and Vabro facilitates effective collaboration among team members. You can comment on tasks, share files, and instantly add updates, alongside real-time collaboration by multiple users. This creates an environment of transparency, ensuring everybody is speaking the same language.

Vabro also provides team-wide notifications and alerts, ensuring that all new changes or updates are easily communicated to each member. Whether it’s a deadline change, a new task assignment, or any update on the project, Vabro ensures that no one ever lacks much-needed information. This is particularly beneficial for remote teams where communication is not as instantaneous. Comprehensive communication on the platform for centralization reduces endless email chains and scattered messages, ensuring team collaboration is always more efficient and focused.

Customization and Flexibility

Every team has its specific workflow, and Vabro is built to support many work styles. With a focus on customization, the tool gives teams the flexibility to adapt it according to their requirements. Users can customize task categories, set tasks to recur, and define workflows that align with their processes. This flexibility makes it possible to use Vabro for everything from simple checklists to comprehensive project management.

Other tools like Google Workspace, Slack, and Microsoft Teams are easy to integrate as well. Users can seamlessly plug in Vabro using its integration capabilities, which assist this end-to-end solution in naturally blending with your existing work cycle, helping to drive overall team productivity without deviating from older systems. Vabro connects to a variety of other solutions so that the team can bring their entire workflow together and cut out the hours spent constantly switching between multiple platforms.

No Cost, No Compromise

This is perhaps the unique selling point of Vabro—that it comes at zero cost. Vabro offers a range of sophisticated tools, unlike many task management apps that are not free. This makes it perfect for startups, small businesses, and budget-conscious teams who require a solid task management solution without cost interruption.

Vabro does not sacrifice quality and performance, despite being free. The software works reliably, running without downtimes or performance issues for its users. The fact that Vabro is free and gives you exactly what it promises—great task management done right, with a no-nonsense interface—easily makes it one of the best choices amidst countless others in its competitive field.

Conclusion

Vabro is much more than just a free competitor to all the task management tools; Vabro empowers teams to work smarter, rather than harder. Vabro is streamlined for modern teams that want a simple and customizable way to organize their tasks collaboratively. No other free task management software on the market matches Vabro in price or feature set, so it is often chosen by teams who want to level up productivity and workflow consistency all at once. Start engaging and empowering your team today, whether you are managing a small project or coordinating large teams—without the costs.

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reasoningdaily · 1 year ago

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https://www.fastcompany.com/3061482/one-googlers-insider-guide-to-using-google-docs-at-work

One Googler’s Insider Guide To Using Google Docs At Work

When Google Docs launched back in 2007, it was a scrappy, lightweight document editor. Today, it’s a full-blown workplace powerhouse, with all the features you need to create, collaborate, and share your ideas quickly.

As a product manager at Google, I’ve not only helped the team build and develop these tools, but I’ve used them every single day, often to write product requirements docs for our next feature. So here’s an insider look at five ways to incorporate Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides into your own work that you might not know about.

1. Design Professional-Grade Documents In Google Docs

You probably just use Arial out of habit, but there are actually over 600 fonts available in Google Docs, not to mention lots of professionally designed templates that do much of the work for you. There are built-in themes, and a large suite of formatting features you may not even know exist.

Our goal in adding these features has been to make creating beautiful, polished documents and presentations a breeze. For instance, easily organize the ideas from your next team brainstorm by choosing a meeting notes template from the carousel at the top of the Docs home screen.

2. Turbocharge Google Sheets With Powerful Functions And Pivot Tables

Sheets is way more than just a way to throw a quick table or list together. It has over 340 powerful functions, including dozens that other spreadsheets don’t offer, such as Google Translate, which lets you automatically translate one language to another.

We’ve also designed Sheets to offer advanced pivot table functionality, including the ability to define custom Calculated Fields. And Docs and Sheets both support custom scripting and advanced API functionality via Apps Script, which is Google’s equivalent of macros. Basically, if your job entails a lot of number crunching, Sheets can handle it. Related Video: Are Work Habits Spoiling Your Productivity?

3. Present Painlessly To Groups With Google Slides

We’re big fans of the “show up, don’t set up” philosophy when it comes to presenting to groups. Giving a great presentation can be a big enough challenge on its own, so we’ve added a few tricks to make the A/V side as easy as possible.

With just a couple taps on your phone or tablet, you can use the iOS or Android Slides apps to present on any screen equipped with Chromecast or AirPlay. And if you’re on a Hangouts video call, the mobile apps let you present directly to everybody in the call–no more wires and set-up stress.

We also added a feature called Slides Q&A to help you talk with your audience, not at them. Q&A allows participants to submit questions and weigh in on them from their phones, laptops, and tablets using a shared link, which also lets the speaker collect real-time feedback.

Tired of trying to get feedback over the annoying, unreliable, audio-only conference line you’ve been dialing into for your remote meetings? Here’s how to use the Q&A Slides feature instead:

4. Use Google Docs While You’re Offline

We’re moving toward a world of constant Internet connectivity, but the real world doesn’t work that way yet. That’s why Docs, Sheets, and Slides work offline in the Chrome browser on your laptop as well as in the Android and iOS apps.

Chrome will even preemptively sync your recent files so you can keep working if you go offline unplanned. Whether you’re holed up in a Wi-Fi-less cafe writing the most epic report your boss has ever seen, or just dealing with a spotty in-flight Wi-Fi connection as you scramble to wrap up a project before takeoff, Docs has you covered.

5. Hook Google Docs Up With Loads Of Other Apps

Today’s digital workflows are complicated, and people rely on lots of apps and services to get their jobs done. That’s why both Google Sheets and Slides announced new feature-rich APIs at Google I/O this year. And Salesforce, SAP Anywhere, Sage, Anaplan, Asana, Trello, Prosperworks, and others will soon all be launching rich integrations with Sheets or Slides over the next few months. Soon you’ll be able to access all the functionality, whichever app you’re using.

These are a few of the nifty things you can do with Docs, Sheets, and Slides to improve how you work, communicate, and interact. From the very start, we built these Apps with collaboration in mind so that it’s fast and easy to work together with your team.

But as someone on the front lines–building these tools as well as using them myself–it still sometimes seems to me that we’ve only scratched the surface. We’re now using machine learning to create new features for Google Apps, like super-accurate voice typing and one-click data analytics, that take you beyond basic productivity and help you stay focused on the highest-value tasks.

The way we work, of course, is always changing both because of technology and in response to it. And sometimes keeping up to date on that evolution can be a challenge. So hopefully these five tips will help. My job at Google, in one sense anyway, is to help you do yours better. Which means there’s always work to be done. Welcome to the future.

#One Googler’s Insider Guide To Using Google Docs At Work #google docs

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usadigitalmarketing · 2 years ago

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Everybody Should Know Web Development and SEO Company in New York Trick

If you're looking to gain online visibility, the best place to start is with the experts in New York City. We've compiled a list of the best web development and new york seo company in the city and highlighted their specialties so that you can see exactly what they can do for your business.

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Know your stuff! It's not enough to be knowledgeable, you also have to be honest and reliable—and this is where the web development and SEO gurus come in handy because they can help you develop a strategy that will help you meet all of those goals at once! You want people who are honest with their clients, but also professional enough not to take advantage of them or waste their time (or yours). A lot of people are looking for someone they can trust so they don't feel like they're being taken advantage of when it comes time for payment; this is why we recommend hiring only reputable companies who have been around long enough so there isn't any question about whether or not what's being sold works as promised."

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If you're looking for a place to live, work, learn and be, New York City is the place. It's one of the most vibrant cities in the world—and that's something you'll notice immediately when you step off your plane or train at JFK Airport. The skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan rise up into a beautiful sky like giant mountains; there are so many parks that they feel like they were created just for us humans (and dogs).

New York City has been around since 1624 but has changed dramatically over its long history: buildings have been destroyed by wars or natural disasters; entire neighborhoods have disappeared under water during floods; entire streets have been renamed after famous people who lived here long ago (like Franklin Delano Roosevelt Avenue). But despite all these changes over time, NYC still feels like home today because it's still full of life!

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NY is a city that has a rich history and culture, but it's also a place where you can find some of the best developers in the country. This makes sense, considering that most of our residents are from New York or have been here for years. You might think about moving here if you're a web developer yourself—or even just someone who wants to learn more about their profession!

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sundarika · 4 years ago

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headcanon in two parts, sorry. Ask does not miss it. 1.1 Oh, you know the insecticons from the tfp? Can I have a headcanon where a S/O person is on friendly terms with insecticons?

[TF PRIME] S/O Is Friends With The Insecticons

———————————————————————

* [S/O] meets them by accident quite a bit before the events of the Energon Eaters. Arachnid is still “leader” of the Insecticons by technicality as the only available ‘Queen’ for the hive-mind, however she never really patrols the area or takes care of the hive as she should, rather choosing to wander as a free mind, disobeying orders from everybody.

* You had stumbled upon the hive while taking a short walk along the side of the Jasper highway, leading out of town and to an old coal mine you liked to inhabit on your days off work. A home-away-from-home of sorts, it brought you peace of mind to have a quiet place.

* At least you thought it was a quiet, desolate area until you broke through a thinning in the rock floor of the entry shaft and ended up crashing an Insecticon tea-party.

*It was a rather awkward fall, and it had injured your hip joint on the way down, leaving you temporarily paralyzed in throbbing pains and nerve damage.

* The giant bug-like robots and their shiny, metal wingspans immediately armed themselves and aimed at the shifting dust and rockfall, growling and chittering in a language of some sort, unknown to you.

* “Is it one of those ugly-faced Decepticons ploys again?”

* “It’s too small and squishy, much sooner to be a predacons’ chew toy than any weapon.”

* You looked super confused, absolutely stupefied, completely duped, utterly incomprehensible, awkwardly awed, amazingly idiotic, a-

* Their manner of speech and vocal patterns was practically lost on you. You could pick up remnants of a language similar to broken [language], but really nothing else. In an attempt to make contact with the metallic giants to gain help, you enabled your parroting capabilities.

* Humans have the stunning ability to mimic sounds and specific noise frequencies, at levels other earthen animals, especially mammals, cannot. Using this ability, you managed to copycat the grinding and chattering noises coming from the vocal mass of bug-bots.

* [S/O]: “¿Krrt-grrut vvurrr chechch?”

* Hardshell: “¿Buzzzz vert-tet-brrrz, Erreech?”

* [S/O]: “¿Erreech?”

* Hardshell: “¡VRREE BUZZZ-EECH CLICKLICKIK!”

* The contact went well, unbeknownst to you, and the successful communication meant that you might actually have a chance at escape, or finding a hospital!

* Congrats! You are now [Tiny Bug Child]! You have no idea what they were speaking about, unaware that they were contemplating how to execute you, but you successfully managed to evade death by being cute and cuddly! People say curiosity killed the cat, but it evidently saves the naive human-who-fell-into-an-insect-cult-meeting!

* Hardshell, the Insecticon you nearly landed on top of, begins to lift you out of the rubble, and place you down upon a makeshift stone table, partially destroyed by the collapse. The others—including Wingflap, Bombshell, Shrapnel, Blockhead, and Kickback—gather closely around you, cooing and chirping in their weird language again.

* This was, evidently, how you became the new Queen of the hive, though you didn’t know it, and managed to befriend your way through the entire enclosed community and worm into the spark of every Insecticon, though they were very few in number.

* You made easy friends with Bombshell, and remained close with him up until his untimely death by Bulkheads hammer fist. He would often lay atop the Jasper cliffside with you, and make out shapes in the clouds, constellations in the stars—regaling to you tales of the Old Cybertron, when his own kind weren’t so despised, and were respected as viable assets and allies amongst those with forms like and unlike their own—until the Autobot Elitists ensured they were seen as ugly and malformed, made to hide away in the shadows and step away from society for ‘the greater good’.

* It’s how you came to hate the Autobots—and Decepticons—for all they had done, to their planet and yours, and to your friends as well.

* Your mimicry slowly turned into actual speech patterns and recognition. Repetitive sound signals were a key portion of Archaic Insecticon speech, which made it easy to recognize simple words or phrases, each indicated by a set of whirs, clicks, or beeps.

* Now that you could actively communicate with most of the hive, it was far easier to make friends with even the hardiest of bots.

* Hardshell, of course, was tough to crack. At your constant insistance, he spoke with you once or twice, and made sure to acknowledge your presence when in the room, as well as save you a seat at the underground pub every other weekend. It wasn’t actually a pub per-say, rather a dugout chamber with smooth walls and some stone slabs insert for seating, where the cons enjoyed engex they could sneak off the Nemesis from time-to-time.

* After awhile, he warms up to you, welcoming you back to the hive every day after work, standing alongside his multiple siblings, and pushing others aside to get to hold you first.

* Meanwhile this all happens, they still don’t know what a human is. Their simple understanding of earth comes only from what they’ve seen on the highway from the cliffside, or from video footage of the Autobot pests on the Nemesis. Due to their bulky size and noisiness, they’re banned from most human-inhabited areas.

* Don’t doubt that some of them have attempted to follow their [S/O] home. They have. And some of them won’t stop trying. It’s been more than one awkward encounter between you and some teens to get them to realize they could get you in trouble.

* You all eat [dessert] together sometimes, made with energon supplements for ‘The Boys™️’, with some good ol’ 25-something-kg of sugar mixed in.

* The boys were worried when you didn’t show up for a week due to hospitalization via severe food poisoning medical coma.

* When Arachnid finally returned to Earth, and her fight against Arcee had proceeded about as well as expected, she located the hive and proceeded to force them to engage in business with Megatron. She believed that by implementing her own soldiers amongst the ranks, she’d be better equipped to backstab Megatron when the time came.

* She was undoubtably surprised when Hardshell and some others adamantly refused to take part in her plans at first, until she enforced their compliance through the hive-mind.

*When she learned of your existence, and the very gauge of your importance to her former hive, she came at you with full force.

*The Insecticons were fully unprepared to deal with a fight between their small [S/O] and an extremely angry ex-Queen. In refute, they returned you to the surface without so much as a goodbye, and begged you to escape before Arachnid scented you out.

* It was soon after these events that you learned of Breakdown’s death, Bulkhead’s coma, and Bombshell’s demise due to the combined effects of a substance called Tox-En and injuries sustained during his battle with Bulkhead. It broke you inside to learn there was nothing you could have done to help, but you refused to disobey their pleas to stay away for awhile.

* At the hive, Arachnid rules supreme. Being able to control the hive-mind was a feat a human was incapable of achieving, only Cybertronians able to easily access the imbedded chain of command.

* Hardshell mourned the loss of a true friend—a small, squishy human—but a friend nonetheless.

* Wingflap and Kickback went through a collection of memories you’d left behind with them. Pictures and small objects gifted over the years, a small treasure trove of important parts of their lives, now without you in them.

* Shrapnel stims a lot more now, and has nervous tics that he believes are the result of the loss of his dear friend. He knows you aren’t dead, least not yet, but he knows that you’ll likely never come back.

* Blockhead, as dumb as everybody thinks he is, is actually very emotionally intelligent. He has a way with words he barely understands, and [S/O] acted as a big support for someone like him. Without them now, he can no longer function like normal, and now has nobody left to talk to.

* Arachnid could care less. She absolutely despises [S/O], and would smite them for all she cares. You matter little to her, and only worry her for the loyalty and capacity of her troops.

* It isn’t until the Energon Eaters appear that everything turns completely south.

* [S/O] finally builds up enough courage to march themselves back down to the mine, and demand to meet Arachnid face-to-faceplate.

* The desert is hot, Nevada is hotter, and the trek down the highway seems endless and tedious. You pass by 5 interstate signs on your way to the hive, and count the steps it takes to reach the entrance, parched by the time you make it there.

* In all your sweaty glory, you, [S/O], make your way down the carved pathway into the mineshaft, dark and cramped—just as you left it.

* But everything is exactly as it was left, not an item out of place. The entire hive was empty, including of those you cared about. Their rooms are full of memories, and their energon cubes still lie in a corner, collecting dust and grime.

* The search seems profitable, yet it leaves you with nothing, and the emptiness of the hive echoes around you, and in all the chambers, through the cavern walls of every room.

* You know they’re gone, that they have left without you, and without so much as a simple passing note.

* Perhaps someday you’d find them, hiding away in another Jasper mine, but you never would.

* In their haze of a hive mind, they barely even remember the face of the human they left behind. A long line across the moon—stretching on for miles—and a vampire on a false throne, draining the lifeblood from their veins, and the image of [S/O] from their minds.

———————————————————————

✨ Hope you enjoyed ✨

#writing #transformers x reader #transformers imagine #transformers headcanon #tfp insecticons #transformers #transformers prime #tfp decepticons #x reader #tfp #insecticons #platonic reader

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consumeconstantly · 5 years ago

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Innocence, avoidance

Summary: Jason Todd cracks crass jokes and dirty comments like they’re his lifeblood. It turns out, he’s just getting it out of his system before he sees his little sister again. (Or: Marinette gloms onto Red Hood after her parent’s death, and there’s no way anyone can stop her from being with her older brother.)

___________________________________________________

Jason Todd, AKA Red Hood, is not the kind of man people go to when they want to complain about their life problems. They go to him when they want a quick, oftentimes violent solution; Red Hood isn’t exactly a renowned empath. In comparison to his other Bat Family counterparts, he is at least 10 times more crass and almost 15 times more violent.

It is accepted that although Red Hood makes situations turn out for the better, he is no shining paragon of human virtue and kindness. People trust him to watch their backs and not to fuck them over so long as they’re working within his very clearly defined set of values, but he’s just not the kind per person that anyone would entrust their kid to during their Friday date night.

Until somebody does.

The door to the warehouse is already open, and he has a gun in his hand, ready to threaten the little crowd he’s gathered today when a woman hops out of her car and shoves a pig-tailed girl with wide blue eyes and an almost blindingly neon pink outfit towards him.

“There you are, you weren’t at the drop site!” says the woman, who instantly begins to back away from the two of them once the little girl picks herself up off the ground that she landed on. Red Hood notes the license of the getaway car, making a mental reminder to deal with them later, but the car makes tracks. The little girl frowns at the disappearing car, eyes the gun in his hand, then decides that she’s going to stay put.

Red Hood looks at the rabble that has convened in the warehouse, down at the little girl, then back again. There are at least five people in the room that are eyeing the little girl greedily, and he’s sure that if he just lets her go, she’ll be captured by one of them faster than he can bat an eye. He doesn’t exactly have time to put the girl in a safe place, not when it’s taken him months and a good number of heads in order to draw these people here.

She looks wary of the gun and of him, but not scared. Everyone else? Half of them look like they’re about to burst out laughing, and the other half have looks that he’s eager to wipe off their faces.

“Aww, look at that! Hood has finally found his way into the dark side of the business. What’s next, prostitution?”

Without hesitation, he shoots with deadly accuracy at the man’s hand. The man keels, bending over and clenching his bloodied appendage. Other than the man’s screams, the room goes completely silent.

Red Hood casts another glance at the little girl, who has, slowly but surely managed to inch away from him and into a safer position. She’s holding onto her sparkly purple plastic backpack like it’s the only thing that’s keeping her alive. Smart kid, not to run. Or was it dumb? He wouldn’t shoot her, and he’d take out anyone else who tried to, but the girl didn’t know that. She probably just assumed that she was going to his next target.

“All of you shut up while I deal with this.” He inhales deeply and kneels down to get on eye level with the girl. Not that she can see much of his eyes, given his helmet, but still.

He has half a mind to go after the woman, but he’s not about to leave the little girl amongst the group of criminals that are gathered in the warehouse with him. Briefly, he wonders how the hell that couple even knew that he was going to be here tonight. He also wonders what he’s going to do with the kid. “What’s your name, kiddo?”

She looks up at him, hands clenched around a plastic pink backpack with some kid’s cartoon on the back, then looks out at the people that have gathered. There’s a moment of silence, and Red Hood is sure that she’s weighing her current options. Smart kid. Eventually, she shifts her body weight closer to him, apparently drawing the conclusion that he is the safer option than the other people who are here tonight. Smart kid.

“It’s Marinette, sir.”

No last name. Not sure if that’s a pointed decision to keep her identity at least partially concealed, or just because she doesn’t have one.

“And those weren’t your parents?” It stands to reason that the people in that care aren’t her parents, but he needs to make sure.

Marinette clenches her backpack tighter. “No, sir.”

“Where are they?” He has a sinking suspicion if those weren’t her parents, and she’s not up in tears, asking for a phone to call them, that--

“They’re dead, sir.”

Sometimes, Jason wishes he could be wrong on things like this.

“Then who were they? And don’t call me sir. Too formal.”

“My mom’s... second cousin, I think? I never met her before, but I got sent here anyway.”

One of the men shifts. He’s one of the men who Red Hood pegged as a possible child trafficker. Underneath his helmet, Jason’s eyes narrow. He now has a fairly good idea of how the couple figured out that he was going to be here tonight.

“Do you know how to get back home?”

At that, Marinette's mouth almost twitches up into a smile. “No sir. I don’t think there’s a home to go back to, anymore.”

Red Hood sighs. Putting the information presented to him together, he quickly comes to the conclusion that Marinette’s parents have died recently and that nobody in her immediate family has found out about their passing, or they don’t want her. Somehow, the couple picked her up-- possibly when she was going to a friend’s house, judging by the whole school girl look she has going on-- and thought she would fulfill the trafficking requirements laid out to them.

That means that there aren’t a lot of options available to her. He can redirect her to the foster care system, but everybody knows foster care messes up kids permanently. Even though she looks to be pretty street smart, he couldn’t just let her live out on the streets in good conscience. Her outfit looks too clean for her to ever have lived in poverty, and she definitely checks the box for a lot of the trafficking rings that have been popping up recently. Mixed descent, the possibility to be pretty when older, and very, very pure. She’d get picked up off the streets within hours if she just let her be.

He decided that he’s let her have the final say. “What do you think I should do in this situation?”

She shuffled her pink ballet clad shoes, eyes darting to the sides. He had to give the girl this much at least; even though she had the whole innocent look going for her, she was very aware of her surroundings. Her body language implied that she didn’t believe him to be that much of a threat— and in any other case, he’d fault her for that, but given that let their surroundings were a drug den he’d let it go— and tilted herself so she could have as many people in her sights as possible. “Sir, I think as long as you could get me out of here safely, I’ll figure out how to take care of myself.”

The man Jason was watching, the possible trafficker, tensed. Yeah, Jason is definitely going to have to take care of him later. This kind of a reaction as good as cements the suspicions he’s had.

“Tell you what, princess. Do you mind waiting outside for me? I’ll help you out once I’m done here.”

Marinette eyed the rest of the room. “How long will you take?”

She’s asking all the right questions. Maybe it will be easy for her to fit into the slums of Gotham.

“Not long,” Red Hood promised. “Ten minutes at most.”

The collection of people who have gathered in the warehouse all swallowed uncomfortably. Everybody knew that when Red Hood dealt with things quickly, it typically ended in copious amounts of bloodshed and shock.

“Okay,” Marinette paused, grip loosening on her backpack. “Ten minutes.

Red Hood doesn’t particularly want to have Marinette around for the violence that’s about to occur, but she’s already seen him shoot one person, so it’s too late to shield her innocence. And violence? It’s a slippery slope.

He makes quick work of the room; half of the people he brought out here, he kills off directly. The other half are made to watch as the people they’ve associated with for years die in front of their eyes. This is a power play. A way to… persuade them to reform. Because the people he’s left alive? Red Hood has left them alive for two reasons. One. They’re not nearly as bad as most of the higher ups in Gotham. Two. If he kills all of the people who have dabbled in anything bad, the chain will be completely messed up, and there will be too much room for unknown variables to make their way up the ranks. He wants people he can control. And the people he’s left alive? He can keep all of them in line.

Marinette is not waiting outside for him. They’re right next to Crime Alley. This is not going to end well.

He’ll give the little girl props for somehow managing to avoid his detection.

To be more precise, he’s hoping that she’s simply avoiding his detection, and hasn’t gotten swept up in something bad.

It takes Jason three hours-- three hours-- to find the girl who can’t be much older than ten. Probably not even ten, judging by her size.

“You’re lucky it’s me finding you, and not someone else, Pixie.” He finally catches a glance of her glaringly sparkly backpack, complete with fairies and unicorns covered in some sort of holographic overlay.

Marinette immediately backs up, looking definitively worse for the wear. She’s gained rips in her clothes and a nasty looking scraped knee. Her face loses all color when she sees him. “S- sorry, sir. I swear I wasn’t running away, it’s just that there was someone outside who tried to grab me, and--”

If Jason didn’t know better, he’d believe the girl.

However, he does have a decent number of connections, and those connections ensured that nobody was going to be able to come near the warehouse once his ‘meeting’ started. Though, he’ll have to have a talk with them, given that someone tried to pass the goods right before it started. Jason is fairly sure that the couple has been apprehended by now, but checking later tonight won’t hurt.

Which means Marinette made the decision to run.

Again, that would have been a very, very smart decision had she not found herself in Crime Alley of all places. It looks like she’s learned a little bit about why she should stay away from places like this.

“It’s fine, Pixie. Like I said earlier, just call me Red Hood, or Hood. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Marinette balks.

Jason sighs. “Look, I know it’s hard to believe, but you can trust me. I’m not going to force you to do anything you don’t want to do. All I want is to see you safe.”

“But,” Marinette bites her lip. Her eyes drop to the guns at his side. That’s… that’s a good reason not to trust him, to be honest. If he were in her position, he’d already be running.

“Do you have anyone you can contact? Anyone you trust? I can take you to them.”

She’s starting to tear up, and god, Jason cannot deal with crying children. Marinette’s big, blue eyes and pigtails and her general smallness. He just can’t. “Please don’t cry. Please don’t cry. What, do you-- do you want a cookie or something? I can bring you to a bakery before we talk? Sweets are supposed to cheer kids up, right?”

Marinette lets out a watery laugh.

“I like macaroons,” she offers.

“So, how old are you?”

In the warmth of the bakery, Marinette looks markedly more relaxed. She went to the bathroom to clean her face and cut off, and now she looks like the poster child of one of those band aid ads. Lively, a little mischievous, and, you know, a child.

She takes a delicate bite of the shortbread cookie-- not a macaroon, there aren’t many reputable bakeries in Gotham that are close and have French pastries. “Nine and a half.”

Oh man, she’s younger than Replacement.

“You’ve really got no family here? None at all? No friends you can call?”

“No, I’m from France.”

Well, that certainly answers a lot of questions. But brings up additional ones. “You speak English very well.”

“Maman and Papa ran a very popular bakery. We got a lot of foreigners. Before we moved to Paris, we lived in New York.” She takes a sip of her drink, whipped cream stuck on her nose. “And I don’t remember anyone from New York. We moved to Paris when I was three.”

Jason sighs. “What do you want to do?”

“Maman said that if I were ever left on my own, my only job was to survive by any means.”

“That’s…” He tries to find the right words. “Interesting advice.”

In what parallel universe do parents of a bakery in Paris-- one of the major cities in the world with the lowest crime rates--tell their children to survive by any means?

“Did she tell you how?”

Marinette tilts her head, pigtails bouncing. “She told me to trust my instincts and never to trust the police.”

Great. That explains why she didn’t ask for someone’s phone to call the police. Not that the police in Gotham are the best people to go to for a case like Marinette’s, but then again, there’s not really anybody good to go to for a case like hers.

Vague advice is the best way to get a kid killed. But since Marinette isn’t already dead, it stands to reason that her instincts haven’t failed her yet, and he really does have no clue what to do with her.

He briefly contemplates taking her to Bruce, but strikes the idea down almost instantly. Marinette fits all of the requirements to become a Robin. Tragic backstory, black hair, blue eyes. He’s not going to put another child into Bruce’s hands just so he can ruin their life by not doing his job. Besides, Bruce doesn’t know he’s alive yet, and he wants to keep it that way for now.

“Then what do your instincts tell you to do?”

Does he feel like an idiot for asking a nine year old that? Yes, but what else is he supposed to do? Taking care of kids was never part of the job description when he signed up to be Red Hood. (Then again, it wasn’t like there was a job description to begin with.)

Marinette takes another bite of one of the cookies on her plate. “They tell me to stick close to you.”

Even better. She’s imprinted on him.

@jasonette-july-2k20

#you bet your ass marinette grows up to kick ass and take names #does the summary fit the fic? not really but none of my summaries do #jasonette july #jasonette #how do you tag platonic ships #platonic!jasonette #jason todd #marinette dupain cheng #maribat #miraculous ladybug #dcu #innocence #child!marinette

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do-a-reference-properly · 5 years ago

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AO3′s users alert! Unauthorised fanworks copying

26/09/2019. Important update on this mess: we found a way to delete fanworks via take down request to the hosting provider. Please check it here https://do-a-reference-properly.tumblr.com/post/187926459079/finally-some-good-news

Dear AO3 users,

We would like to bring your attention to an ugly situation with unauthorized copying of works posted on AO3.

A lot of works from AO3 have been copied to fanfics.me (we’ll call this site FFM for brevity’s sake) and are still being copied right now, either:

— automatically by a code specifically created by FFM’s owner for this purpose, or

— by unaware or unscrupulous FFM’s users via semi-automatic method (by inserting a link to a work from AO3 into a web-worm on FFM).

All works from AO3 — with a few exceptions (I’ll elaborate on this below) — can end up on FFM without authors even noticing. Even fanarts or podfics.

FFM doesn't comply with DMCA which means that such reposts endanger fanworks' creators in case the copyright holder demands to delete the fanwork.

Authors of the copied works do not have any control over them; if the work is edited it won’t be updated on FFM until someone manually updates it.

Additionally FFM’s owner makes money out of reposted free fanworks from numerous Google and Yandex ads on each and every FFM’s page by having people go to this site when searching for fics on Google etc. So we recommend using an Ads Blocker when visiting this site in order to prevent the owner from earning more. Ghostery or Adblock Plus work just fine, but you can use any other Ads Blocker that is convenient to you.

Oftentimes FFM even shows up before the original post with the work on Google search results.

The owner’s e-mail: [email protected].

The owner at AO3.

We are trying to bring AO3’s users attention to this situation and help authors with taking their works down from FFM.

Briefly about the website and its owner

Let me start from the very beginning as it will bring into the light the nature of FFM and give a good example of its owner characteristic behavior.

At first, some person with nickname Refery created FFM as a web archive where authors — mostly from Harry Potter fandom — could publish their fanworks.

Time passed, the site grew and added some features (blogs, pre-moderation and etc.), and all was good and well up till the moment when Refery decided that it would be a great idea to copy to FFM fanworks published on other Russian fanfiction archives — among them from the biggest and most known site ficbook — without asking authors for permission. Even those works that had “Ask me before posting the story somewhere else” mentioned in its text or summary were copied.

For some time nobody noticed, but when finally and inevitably this came out the authors were outraged. It took a lot of time to finally persuade Refery to at least not to copy fanworks bearing a special tag “Уточнять у автора” (Ask the author first).

But after some time Refery — without giving any notice — violated his own promise and resumed copying to FFM fanworks that had the agreed upon tag. The authors complained again, so very reluctantly and after many painful discussions this feature was reinstalled.

So FFM has been notoriously known, mostly amongst Russian fandom, for claims on re-posting fanworks without the consent of the authors.

We're mentioning this situation just to give you a detailed portrait of a person we are dealing with here.

Not only fanworks are copied to this website, but original works, too. Even those which were already published. There were all 7 of Harry Potter novels (both original text and translation), The Hobbit: There and Back Again (translation) and Vorkosigan Saga (translation) available for everybody to read and download. They were taken down only recently due to the attention this whole situation had drawn, but nothing ever goes away once it’s posted online and you can access the proof via Internet Wayback machine. We know for a fact there are other books on FFM and some actions have been taken in this regard, but still it takes time to find published books on this site.

Recently Refery decided that Russian archives are not enough for him and started copying all fanworks into FFM without any permission from the authors from numerous sites, like AO3, fanfiction.net, fictionpress.com, fanfiktion.de and likely other web-archives.

Moreover, the authors of these works can not delete their works from FFM and/or manage them. The site is in Russian only and, hence, we strongly believe that non-Russian speaking authors even do not know that their works are reposted somewhere else.

As a Russian fan-community, we have tried to stop such activity of FFM many times; however, we have not been successful in achieving our goal completely. Our most recent achievement is that the FFM’s owner implemented the "Don't copy to another site" tag created specifically for AO3 (here is the link to FFM’s owner post on his personal blog regarding this tag. Please use Ads Blocker!). This tag should be added to each work presented on AO3 in case the author does not want their works to be copied to FFM.

We are of the opinion that no work should be taken without permission in the first place, but this tag is all we’ve got.

Please note that it seems that some time ago there was similar case of unauthorized copying with other site. Please check this link, they give useful advice.

How to prevent copying from AO3

If you check AO3 you may notice that "Don't copy to another site" tag has hugely emerged in the recent weeks, but mostly amongst Russian users and there is a good reason for this: the owner of FFM announced this tag only in Russian and only on his private blog, so naturally there is no way for non-Russian speaking AO3 users to know about this — albeit non-satisfactory — solution.

There are no guaranties that the FFM’s owner won’t change the rules again as has already happened numerous times before (few examples we described above) and that works with this tag won’t be reposted in the future, but for now it’s the only quick and working solution besides making your works visible only to registered users, which is not ideal.

This situation is highly unpleasant, but we ask you not to delete your works from AO3, because if the work is deleted from AO3 it will be nearly impossible to delete it from FFM: we won't be able to refresh it manually and remove the text.

Please note that adding this tag won’t work for texts that have already been copied. Only users who have accounts at FFM will be able to delete them. Each work needs to be deleted manually.

However, the Russian fandom — except for the owner of FFM — strongly condemns reposts without the consent of the author, so feel free to contact our volunteers (through DM or Ask on our tumblr page) providing the links to the works stolen from AO3, so we could delete them for you.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to cover all authors and works manually. So, we contacted AO3’ Technical Team with the aim to bring their attention to this situation and inform about it all AO3 users, and hope that AO3 team will find a general solution to resolve this problem, possibly, in collaboration with the AO3 lawyers.

We are trying to warn as many authors as possible and recently started spreading this information via comments on AO3; but considering the number of works copied to FFM informing all authors will take considerable time, and we can easily miss someone, especially since the copying is still in progress and new works from AO3 are appearing on FFM every day.

Please help us spread the word!

We tried to make a comprehensive FAQ about this. Feel free to ask if anything is unclear!

FAQ

Q: Can I check if my work was copied to FFM?

A: Yes, you can.

FFM makes money on Google and Yandex ads, so we recommend turning on the Ads Blocker of your choice before visiting this site.

Please follow this link, insert the title of your work or your AO3/other web-archive nickname into the field containing the words "insert-title-nickname" and hit "Искать" (Search).

For works rated Mature or Explicit you will be able to see only the caption "Текст произведения доступен только зарегистрированным пользователям старше 18 лет" ("The text of the work is available only to registered users over 18 years old"), but FFM users are able to read and download the story.

Q: My work from AO3 was copied. How can I take it down?

A: First of all add the tag "Don't copy to another site" (without “ “) to the stories you want to be taken down.

Actually we would recommend adding this tag to all the works you don't want to be copied.

Contact one of our volunteers (through DM or Ask on our tumblr page) providing links to your works or send an e-mail with your deletion request directly to the FFM owner at [email protected] or at AO3.

There is a third option: to register on FFM and delete the work yourself by hitting the refresh button, but considering that the site is in Russian we do not think it will be very convenient to those who do not speak Russian language.

Q: I got the message that my work has been deleted. How can I check if it is true?

A: You can go to FFM, search for you work, click on its title and scroll down.

After the summary there is a field that should look like this for those fics that have been deleted.

Basically it says that the author of this particular work has forbidden its copying and that only the information on its title, author’s nickname, rating, pairings, summary and the link to original post on AO3 are available.

For works that are still available on FFM this field looks like this (if the work is open for non-registered users).

Q: My work copied from AO3 was deleted, but FFM still shows some information on it. Can it be deleted?

A: Even though the text of the fic is not going to be on FFM anymore after it has been deleted, the fic's title, author's name, rating, pairings, summary and link to original post on AO3 will remain there.

The deletion of this leftover information can be done only by the site owner himself.

Some Russian authors tried to make him to delete it, but in most cases the FFM’s owner refused them mentioning that publication of such information is in line with fair use concept and doesn’t violate authors’ rights.

We are yet unsure how to delete this leftover information. In case you need it as well, try contacting the FFM owner at [email protected] or at AO3. Maybe e-mails of a large number of authors will work, but unfortunately we can’t guarantee anything. In case you need it, we can provide Russian text for you to send by e-mail (please contact our volunteers through DM or Ask on our tumblr page).

Q: My work from fanfiction.net/fictionpress.com/fanfiktion.de/other web-archives was copied to FFM. How can I take it down?

A: Unfortunately, there is no possible way for us to delete from FFM the fanworks that are copied from web-archives other then AO3. Only FFM’s owner can delete these works, please try contacting him at [email protected] or at AO3. In case you need it, we can provide Russian text for you to send by e-mail (please contact our volunteers through DM or Ask on our tumblr page).

Please do not delete your works from the web-archive it was stolen from, because if the work is deleted it will be nearly impossible to delete it from FFM.

Also it seems that some time ago there was similar case of unauthorized copying with other site. Please check this link, they give useful advice.

#ao3 #archive of our own #alert #fanfiction #fanworks #fanart #please reblog

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fitzrove · 4 years ago

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Endeavour Episode Titles & Obscurity

As I briefly outlined in a previous post, it has really seemed that with every new series of Endeavour, the single words making up episode titles have become less understandable - at least from my second-language English speaker perspective. And it certainly seems so at first glance - I think most everyone knows what Girl means, but what about Deguello or Zenana? :D Granted, it’s a Morse show, so some mythological and musical references are to be expected, but it really seems like things have been getting out of hand lately. Or have they really?

So, I thought I’d do some super-scientific research into this. After a brief survey, which 22 people responded to (thank you!!), I’ve come to the conclusion that reality isn’t quite as simple as “Russ Lewis got more confident to pick increasingly random big words as the series went on, and understandability steadily dropped as a result”. Have a look at this graph I made (and decided to call the Endeavour Episode Title Understandability Average Quotient, or EETUAQ):

The hypothesis does seem to be right on the fact that early series (1, 2) included very understandable words, bringing the average up to over 90% understandability. S3 marks the start of a decline, but the graph jumps back up at S5 (thanks to easy titles like Colours and Passenger, as well as well-known myths and music terms like Icarus) before the descent into non-understandability resumes. That is, if we disregard S8...

More details (such as how the graph came to be) under the cut, since I want this post to be rebloggable XD

So, as I first approached my hypothesis of title understandability dropping as Endeavour went on, I ran into a problem - how to group words into “understandable” and “not understandable”? I first looked into word frequency lists, but that data isn’t available for free for all words, and it also doesn’t take into account how understandable words seem to viewers of the show. Therefore I decided to pick a survey approach instead, asking fans of the show to check-mark all episode titles they understood out of a list. I’d trimmed down the list a little, omitting words I thought everybody would certainly know, such as Prey and Game. This is the result:

After obtaining a “understandability score” ranging from 0 to 100 for each word from these results, I calculated the self-titled “understandability quotient average” (I have no idea what quotient actually means, but I like the word) for each series separately. That is, each series’ “average understandability”: adding up that series’ episode scores and dividing them by the number of episodes. This allowed me to give each series an average understandability value, ranging from 90.9 for S1 and S2 to 42.4 for S7, and draw a graph based on those values. As S8 wasn’t included in the original questionnaire (because I forgot), I roughly extrapolated its values and therefore the average from other words’ understandabilities, considering Flowers and Octave understandable to all (100) and Lazarus as an average between Apollo and Lazaretto’s scores (65.9). Hence the dashed line in the graph XD

Naturally, native speakers (77.3% of respondents) and non-native speakers (22.7% of respondents) of English would have different ideas about what constitutes an understandable title. I found that “Pylon” especially was a point of contention in this regard, as I did not know this word before watching the episode, whereas many native speakers argued it was easy.

Out of interest and desire for “depth” in the survey, I included other “demographic questions” that inquired whether participants had any special knowledge about music, ancient history or mythology, which the show often draws its episode titles from. I also provided an opportunity to explain where else they knew some of the obscurer words from. I thought these insights would be interesting in general, so I’m sharing them here:

I think it’s charming that many people in the fandom are, in some ways, secretly (or not-so secretly) actually Morse. XD The percentage of people with “obscure degrees” (I say this with all the love as a political history student) was especially high in comparison to the general public (40.9%) and I bet that classical music as a hobby isn’t something 60% out of everyone in the world enjoys.

In the free space, many people cited other media (reading the dictionary for fun; science fiction like Stargate SG-1; the game The Arcana; the band Bastille; a love of literature in general, most exemplified by someone who wrote “I just read a lot like a gigantic nerd lol” XDD) and a love of music and mythology for knowing of the more obscure titles. All in all, I think it would be safe to assume that not everyone watching the show has these specific interests that seem to be somewhat disproportionately common in the active, online Endeavour fandom. Therefore, the title understandability scores should be seen as being on the high end, given that the sample consists of word nerds and classical music & mythology aficionados.

I guess I should put some final conclusions here... idk, mostly I really love that the fandom is so nerdy, feels like I’m right at home - and I bet many of the fic writers around have such insight into Morse for a reason ;D

Let me know what you think about these findings! Is Russ Lewis being pretentious with his titles? Does anyone know whether the episodes/episode titles he wrote for Lewis stood out from the rest? Any other stuff to say or add?

#endeavour #endeavour morse #itv endeavour #tv series #analysis #this is hard to tag lmao #fandom #my stuff

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wiypt-writes · 4 years ago

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Stark Spangled Banner

Ch51: Captain America Homecoming

Intro: The team at the compound begin their experiment with the Quantum Tunnel, but it doesn’t all go according to plan. But just as everything seems lost, Tony appears having rethought his initial stance. And he has a little surprise for Steve.

Warnings: Bad Language words.

Pairing: Steve Rogers x OFC Katie Stark

A/N: I can’t give @angrybirdcr enough credit…she makes my images into, well, erm, images…

Disclaimer: This is a pure work of fiction and classified as 18+. Please respect this and do not read if you are underage. I do not own any characters in this series bar Katie Stark and the other OCs. By reading beyond this point you understand and accept the terms of this disclaimer.

Chapter 50

Stark Spangled Banner Masterlist // Main Masterlist

Bruce needed a day to calibrate the computer and systems to the right configuration to use with Scott’s Quantum Tunnel (which was, amusingly yet completely unsurprisingly, in the back of his ugly brown van). Katie took the chance to head into the office to catch up and then inform Soraya she didn’t know how much she would be available in person over the coming week.

They had another day before they were due to collect Emmy from the train station, her five day trip to Philly was drawing to a close and when they had spoken to her last night she had been equal parts excited to come home and fed up that it was ending. But she would be back at school soon, and she had an important few weeks coming up as she was studying for her end of year exams. Neither of them were particularly concerned about that, however, as Emmy was a complete brainbox. Although she was only a freshman, she was taking APs in Human Geography and Psychology (having told her parents she wanted to be a Therapist) and was already being touted by her tutors as Harvard potential. Steve wasn’t overly keen about his daughter being in a different state, but all things considered, Boston wasn’t too far. And he knew he had to let her make her own decision so they’d cross that bridge when they got there.

For the time being, the only bridge Steve wanted to cross was the one he and Natasha were currently planning on making to reach out to the remaining original Avengers, Thor and Clint.

“Thor should be easy, surely?” Nat asked, swinging her feet up onto the table as she sat back in her seat. She looked to Steve for confirmation, but instead he sighed and shook his head.

“Has Katie not told you?”

“Told me what?”

Steve scratched at his chin. “He had a disagreement with one of the Elders about three months back. From what Valkyrie told Katie, there was a bit of an argument over the rebuilding of their army and the elder took a shot at Thor, saying he wasn’t fit to lead any kind of battalion as he had failed to keep them safe from Thanos.”

“That’s harsh.” Nat frowned.

“Yeah, I know.” Steve bit his lip. “I think it was more anger speaking than the guy actually thinking that, but it sent Thor into another downwards spiral and he’s ignored Katie’s attempts to reach out to him again so she’s given in.” “Okay, so, maybe a little harder than we anticipated.” “Least we know where he is. Any luck on Barton?”

“Rhodey thinks he’s targeting a gang in Hong Kong.” Nat sighed. “But I won’t know for sure until he arrives.”

Steve, nodded. “Well when we find out where he is we can scramble a jet and…” “No.” Nat shook her head “Not we, me. I’ll go alone.” “Nat.” Steve frowned “Clint, he’s been leaving a trail of utter carnage behind him, I don’t think you-“

“He wouldn’t hurt me.”

“It’s not him I’m concerned about, more the people he’s taking on.” “I can handle myself.” Nat replied, firmly as she looked at him. Her eyes were sparkling with that Black Widow venom Steve had to admit he had missed over the past few years. He took a deep breath and against his better judgement conceded.

“Alright. We’ll do it your way.”

Natasha frowned, and smirked. “Really? That’s it, no argument?”

Steve raised an eyebrow. “You want an argument?” “Not really.” She shook her head, smiling.

Steve gave a chuckle and then they were cut off by an incoming call springing up in front of Natasha. She swiped to her right and the hologram form of Rocket appeared on the desk.

“Hey Nat.” He nodded, turning to Steve, “Cap.We’re wrapping things up on that latest lead, then we have to nip to Contraxia as I need a few things,” he Raccoon explained, looking at them both, “should be with you day after tomorrow lunchtime, ish” “Rocket, you were close to Thor right?” Steve spoke, an idea coming to him.

“Kinda, why?” “We need him.” Steve stated simply. “He knows about the stones, but convincing him could be a bit of a task. So I was thinking maybe you could help and go with Katie to New Asgard.” The animal pondered for a while before he shrugged. “I can try.”

“That’s all any of us can do.”

The raccoon nodded again “Alright.” He turned to Nat. “We’ll see you soon.” And with that he disappeared.

Steve stayed at the compound until late afternoon, popping in to see how Bruce and Scott were getting on, before he made his way home. Katie and Jamie were already back and he could hear the two of them in the living room.

“Who’s that?” Jamie asked as he pointed to the photo in the album that his Mom had open on her lap.

“That’s your Uncle Sam.” She smiled at the photo of Steve and his best man at the reception of their wedding “You know you get your name from him, well one of them anyway.”

“Where is he now?” Jamie asked.

“He err…he went away” Katie said slowly as she tried to figure out how to explain this to a three year old. “You know how daddy has told you about his friend, Uncle Bucky?” “Yeah.” “Well, a few years ago, before you were born, The Avengers, well they had a fight, with a nasty man, and your Uncle Bucky and Uncle Sam, and one of our other friends, a lady called Wanda…they had to go away afterwards.”

“Was Uncle Tony in the fight?”

“Yeah, he was.”

“And Auntie Nat-Nat?”

“Yeah. And Thor. There were a lot of people involved?”

“Did you and daddy fight with the Avengers?” Jamie asked, his eyes wide.

At that point Katie looked up and saw Steve hovering in the door way. He swallowed and walked into the room.

“A long time ago buddy, yeah.” He nodded.

“Did you know Captain America?” Jamie’s eyes were now almost the size of dinner plates.

“I did yeah.” Steve nodded, kneeling down in front of his son. “But he gave up fighting.” Jamie pondered something as Katie looked at her husband. “Not for much longer though.” She locked eyes with him.

Steve took a deep breath and swallowed once more. He wasn’t sure he’d ever hold that shield again.

“Maybe.” he said, shrugging, before he stood up and settled on the couch at the other side of his son.

Jamie made to turn the page in the album and the next photo was one of Steve’s favourites and one they had a large framed version of on the mantel piece. It showed him and Katie at their first dance, heads pressed together, huge smiles on their faces as he held her close.

“Momma you look real pretty!” Jamie smiled and Katie dropped a kiss to his head.

“Thanks, Baby.” “Your momma always looks pretty.” Steve smiled “She’s the most beautiful girl on the planet.” “Charmer.” Katie looked at him as he stretched his arm over the back of his son and pulled her in closer.

“Only for you.” He winked, dropping a kiss to her cheek.

****** Tony stood at the sink, rinsing down the dishes from dinner whilst Pepper settled Morgan down for the night. He’d spoken to Kiddo earlier, she’d told him they were running the first Time Travel trial tomorrow. He’d managed to push it out of his mind for most of the afternoon but now, as he stood alone, he kept thinking about it over and over again. He knew Bruce was clever, but this really wasn’t his area…

What if something went wrong? Not his problem.

Tony’s grip on the attachment to the tap slipped and it jerked out of his hand, spraying water all over the place. With a sigh he turned it off and grabbed the tea towel, mopping up the water from around the sink and then the shelf which it had squirted all over. He glanced at the photos, and paused for a moment at the frame that was placed just to the right of the one which held a picture of his dad. He took a deep breath as he wiped the water off the faces- him and Peter Parker holding the fake Stark Internship Certificate upside down, each one pulling peace signs behind the other’s head. He swallowed.

“We can snap our own fingers. We can bring everybody back.”

Tony looked around his kitchen, his stomach turning slightly. Yes, he had something to fight for, something personal, the kid. They all had something personal right? Natasha had Clint’s family, Rogers and Kiddo had Barnes, Wilson and Wanda… Scott had his girlfriend, or whatever. But he couldn’t risk it. He shouldn’t risk it….

But they were going to risk it. He knew that. And they could, probably would, fuck it up without him.

“Damned it, Rogers.” He mumbled, placing the photo down and heading into the dining room.

Two hours later, Pepper was out in the greenhouse as she often was later at night and Tony was talking to FRIDAY, with whom he had been brainstorming a number of ideas for the past hour and a half. He looked the holographic model in front of him and tapped at the pad on the table.

“Look at a mod inspiration, let’s see if it checks out.” He instructed, watching as the image changed in front of his eyes. “So…” he pressed a few keys again, “run one last sim before we pack it in for the night,” he clapped his hands together and paced round the side of the table, “this time, in the shape of a mobius strip, inverted, please.”

“Processing.“ FRIDAY replied as Tony crossed his arms and watched.

“Give me that Eigen value,” he reached out to spin the image with his hand, “that, particle factoring, and a spectral decomp,” he grabbed the bottle on the side of the table to take a drink of the smoothie he had made, “that will take a second.”

“Just a moment.”

“And don’t worry if it doesn’t pan out,” he replaced the top on his drink and grabbing a blueberry from the packet he had been eating, “I’m just kinda…” he trailed off chewing the fruit, as he watched FRIDAY do her business.

“Model rendered.”

The red words ‘Model Successful’ with a rating of ‘99.987%’ flashed in front of his eyes and Tony felt his mouth drop open, utterly bewildered by his discover. He fell back into his chair, looking up at it and his mouth flew to his hand. He, Tony Stark, had figured out how to do exactly what Lang had proposed, how to safely travel time.

Despite himself, he felt a certain level of pride and smugness, and he threw his arms out to his side. “Shit!” He laughed out.

“Shit.” A voice spoke from behind him, followed by a giggle. He paused, and turned to see his daughter was sat on the bottom stair, grinning at him.

He held his finger to his lips and shook his head. “What are you doing up, little miss?”

“Shit.” She repeated again.

“No, we don’t say that. Only Mommy says that word. She coined it, it belongs to her.”

“Why you up?” Morgan looked at him.

“Cause I got some important shit going on here,” Tony jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the hologram, “what do you think?”

Morgan shot him a frown and he took a deep breath, when she pulled that face she looked ridiculously like her Auntie. ”No, I got something on my mind,” he explained in a softer tone.

“Was it Juice Pops?” Morgan asked, hopefully.

“Sure was.” Tony looked at the other side of the room before he turned back to his daughter, “extortion. That’s a word.” He stood up and looked down at her. “What kind you want?” He asked, taking her hand and she stood up. “Great minds think alike. Juice Pops, exactly was on-” he looked back to the model then turned towards the kitchen “-my mind.”

A little while and a juice pop later Morgan was back in bed, demanding a story.

“Once upon a time, Morgoona went to bed. The end.” Tony grinned.

“That is a horrible story.” Morgan looked at him with a glare.

“Come on, that’s your favorite story.” He grinned and as she rolled her eyes he smiled. “I love you tons.” He made it clear that was the end of the conversation by standing up, kissing her on the forehead.

“I love you three thousand.” Morgan looked at him and Tony smiled.

“Wow.” he said, quietly. His daughter had an ability, very like Kiddo, to say things that sideswiped him, and made his chest burst with love, and this was one of those moments. He contemplated that for a moment before he stood up and turned off her lamp. “Three thousand, that’s crazy.”

He walked to the door, and closing it behind him, still grinning he told her “Go to bed, or I’ll sell all your toys, night night.”

By the time he reached the living room Pepper was back inside, sat on the couch reading a book.

“Not that it’s a competition-” Tony spoke and Pepper looked up at him “-but she loves me three thousand.”

“Oh does she now?” Pepper smiled.

“You were somewhere on the low six to nine-hundred range.” Pepper laughed and turned back to her book. Tony, still chewing on the juice pop stick looked back to where the model was still projecting over his table.

“What you reading?” He asked, although he wasn’t particularly interested. His mind was racing once more.

“Oh, it’s just a book on composting”.

“What’s new with composting?” His eyes were still on the image. “Interesting science…” she began, but he cut her off.

“I figured it out, by the way.” Tony looked back at her, removing the juice pop stick from his mouth.”

“And, you know, just so we’re talking about the same thing –“

“Time travel.”

“What?” Pepper whispered as Tony glanced back at the hologram, arms folded. “Wow,” her gaze dropped down slightly, “that’s amazing, and terrifying.”

“That’s right.” He dropped down beside her, his left arm hanging over the back of the sofa.

“We got really lucky.” Pepper said, stroking his arm.

“Yeah, I know.”

“A lot of people didn’t.”

“No, but I can’t help everybody.”

“Well, it sorta seems like you can.” Pepper pressed again.

“Not if I stop.” Tony shrugged, and Pepper gave a small huff of a laugh. “I can put a pin in it right now, and stop.”

“Tony, trying to get you to stop has been one of the few failures of my entire life.”

Tony gave a soft laugh and his right arm gently rubbed the hand that was laid over his left arm.

“Something tells me I should put it in a locked box and drop it at the bottom of the lake, go to bed.”

There was a pause, before Pepper looked at him again, her eyes soft and her face rearranged into a knowing expression.

“But would you be able to rest?”

Tony didn’t reply, he didn’t need to. They both knew the answer was no. *******

“Alright, Emmy, remember what I said?” Katie looked at her daughter who was sat on the couch in the living room of their old quarters.

“Yeah, I can’t leave here until someone comes to get us.” Emmy nodded

“No matter what.”

“Yeah mom, I got it. We’ll be fine, wont we Jamie?”

Jamie nodded, grinning up at his mother “Yeah, fine.”

“Okay, love you both.”

With one last glance over her shoulder at her kids, Katie made her way back to the hanger.

“Breakers are set. Emergency generators are on standby.” She heard Steve call out as he strode back towards the computer. Katie couldn’t help but admire his ass, he looked pretty good in a pair of black denims, light blue shirt as always tucked in, belt circling his toned waist. He looked at her, raising an eyebrow with a smug smirk as he caught the expression on her face and she shrugged.

“Good, ‘coz if we blow the grid, I don’t wanna lose Tiny here in the 1950s,” Bruce said through gritted teeth, jerking his thumb at Scott, only his comment wasn’t quite as quiet as he thought. Scott, who was stood in his suit, fiddling with something on his helmet heard perfectly.

“Excuse me?” Scott glared at Banner as Katie and Steve exchanged a glance. .

“He’s kidding!” Natasha said in a playful voice, shaking her head as she tapped on the tablet she was holding which would be used to track Scott. She looked up with a smile, which Katie knew perfectly to be false and laughed. “You can’t say things like that.” Natasha looked at Bruce.

“Yeah, sorry, it was…just a bad joke.” He smiled as he looked at Scott. Scott nodded once as he walked back to the van.

“You were kidding right?” Katie looked at Bruce.

“I have no idea!” Bruce hissed. “We’re talking about time travel here, either it’s all a joke or none of it is!” He looked away from Katie and flashed Scott the thumbs up. “We’re good.”

Steve crossed his arms and let out a breath as Scott pulled his helmet on. He gave Bruce a double thumbs up and Katie smiled in what she hoped was a reassuring way.

“Alright Scott, we’re gonna send you back a week, let you walk around for an hour, then bring you back in ten seconds. Make sense?” Bruce asked as he tapped at the keys on his desk with a pencil

“Perfectly not confusing.” Scott shrugged.

Okay, so now Steve was nervous. He took a deep breath and looked at the man stood by the back of the van, his hands dropping to his hips.

“Good luck Scott. You’ve got this.” He refrained from adding I hope.

“You’re right. I do Captain America.” Scott grinned, proudly, as Bruce hit a button, sucking him into the tunnel.

“On the count of three-“ Bruce called, and Steve dropped his hands, his fists clenching, mouth open slightly as he watched . At the other side of Bruce, Katie and Nat shared a nervous glance. “Three… two…one…” Steve breathed a sigh of relief as someone appeared but it was short lived as he realised the person in front of them could be no older than Emmy. Katie frowned as did Natasha, confusion etched across her face and next to them, Bruce adjusted his glasses.

"Guys, something doesn’t feel right.” The boy informed them nervously.

“What’s going on?” Steve asked, as Bruce set about pressing a load more buttons. “Hang on…”

“Is that Scott?” Katie’s eyes grew wide as she looked at Bruce, who ducked down to hit something on the console, her eyes locking with Steve who looked as utterly perplexed as she felt.

“Yes, it’s Scott!” The boy exclaimed.

Teenage Scott was sucked back into the tunnel, Natasha watching Bruce as he straightened up and the four of them looked back to the tunnel to see another person thrown out, this time an elderly man.

“Ow, my back!”

“What is this?” Steve asked

“Can I…I need a little space!” Bruce demanded as he moved to his right.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Steve hastily moved out of the way and going to stand in between his wife and Natasha. “Can you bring him back?”

“I’m working on it.” Bruce hit one of the screens. Katie, Steve and Nat shared another panicked look as Old Scott was yanked back in only to this time reappear as…

"That’s a baby.” Steve deadpanned.

“It’s Scott!” Bruce defended.

“As a baby!” Steve snapped as the infant looked up at them wide eyed.

“He’ll grow!” Bruce said, attempting a joke.

“Bring Scott back!” Steve instructed sharply.

“Nat, when I say kill the power, kill the power!” Bruce called and Natasha ran off to the breaker at the side of the hanger.

Katie and Steve watched as Bruce jabbed more buttons, before he yelled out “Kill it!”

Natasha pulled the lever down and Bruce slapped a large red button. This time Scott Lang returned exactly as he had been before he left.

“Somebody peed my pants.” He called out loudly, standing stiffly still. “I don’t know if it was baby me, or old me. Or, just… me-me.”

“Time travel!” Bruce beamed excitedly, throwing his hands out to the side as Katie, Steve and Natasha looked at him. “What? I, I see this as an absolute win.”

Steve simply stared at Bruce in silence for a moment, before he shook his head, placing his hands on his hips. He looked down at the floor before he walked off, Katie watching him as he left the hangar and stepped outside.

“I think we should take a break.” Katie took a deep breath. “Nat can you check the kids, I’m gonna…” She jerked her thumb after Steve and Nat nodded.

Steve stood outside by the large metal pillar at the side of the building, hands still on his hips as he stared at the floor. What was the point of being able to time travel if you couldn’t control it? The worse thing being that he wasn’t even sure if they would be able to perfect it with practice, and was he willing to keep risking Scott to do that? They had been so close, but Tony was right, it had clearly been a pipe dream.

“Hey.” Katie’s hand fell gently to his elbow. “Honey, we knew it was a long shot.” “I know.” He sighed, looking at her. “But I thought it might have worked, you know. That we might have had a chance to…”

He was cut off as a loud engine growled in the distance. They both looked out over the compound to see a familiar Audi R8 speeding down the drive towards the hangar. Katie and Steve exchanged a glance as the car pulled up to where they were stood, but overshot their position slightly. Steve followed the car with his eyes as it backed up and Tony rolled down the window and looked at them both. Steve raised his eyebrows, looking away.

“Why the long face?” Tony asked, directing his question to Steve. “Let me guess: He turned into a baby”

“Among other things, yeah.” Steve replied, an edge of frustration in his voice as he looked back at Tony. “What are you doing here?”

Tony opened the car door and climbed out, walking to the back, completely ignoring Steve’s question as he spoke.

“That’s the EPR Paradox. Instead of pushing Lang through time, you might’ve wound up pushing time through Lang.” Tony looked at Steve “It’s tricky. Dangerous. Somebody shoulda cautioned you against it.”

“You did.” Steve deadpanned, not in the mood for a lecture.

“Oh, did I?” Tony asked, raising an eyebrow and Katie felt a grin cross her face at her brother’s sarcasm “Thank God I’m here. Regardless, I fixed it” Steve raised his eyebrows as he glanced at his brother in law who held up his right hand which bore what looked like a watch of some description. “A fully functioning Time-Space GPS.

At this Steve let out a genuine smile as he realised Tony was here to help. Tony returned it with one of his own

“I just want peace.” He made the sign with his fingers. “Turns out, being angry and bitter is corrosive, and I hate it.

“Me too.” Steve nodded softly, recognizing this for what it was. An apology for the other day, and he was happy to provide his own.

“Guys, we got a shot at getting these stones, but I gotta tell you my priorities.” Tony urged softly, looking from Steve to Katie and back again “Bring back what we lost? I hope, yes. Keep what I got? I have to, at all costs”.

“So do we, Tony.” Katie implored. “Our Kids, they’re the most important thing to us.”

“Nothing we do can jeopardise them.” Steve dropped his left arm round Katie. “Any of them.”

“And maybe if we could manage to not die trying, that would be nice.” Tony shrugged.

Steve smiled and held out his right hand. “Sounds like a deal.”

Tony shook it, before he smiled, cheekily, and headed to the trunk. Steve looked at his wife and she shrugged, before the two of them followed him, Steve watching curiously. Tony lifted something out, turned it upside down to dislodge the teddy bear sat on it and Katie’s hand flew to her mouth as she saw it was Steve’s shield.

Steve hesitated, taking a deep breath. “Tony… I don’t know..” He swallowed, the nerve twitching in his jaw. He wasn’t worthy of that shield, not anymore.

“Why? He made it for you.” Tony held Steve’s gaze. “Plus, honestly, I have to get it out of the garage before Morgan takes it sledding.” Steve looked over his shoulder at Katie, who was fighting back her tears and she gave him an encouraging nod. He lifted his arm and Tony slid the shield straps over his shirt and Steve looked down at it, taking a shaky breath. It felt like slipping into a familiar pair of sneakers.

“Thank you, Tony.” Steve looked up at his brother-in-law, his voice choked as behind him, Katie dropped a hand to his shoulder, pressing a soft kiss to the spot between his shoulder blades, her face resting on his shirt.

“Will you keep that a little quiet? Didn’t bring one for the whole team.” Tony hesitated for a moment. “We are getting the whole team, yeah?

“We’re working on that right now.” Katie moved so she could see Tony, before she heard a yell behind her.

“Uncle Nee!” Jamie shot straight by her and launched at his Uncle.

“Hey, Sport!” Tony grinned, picking him up. “What you been up to?” “Me and Emmy were colouring and making dinosaur models.” “Wow!” Tony nodded, turning to Emmy who was walking towards them.

“Mom?” Her voice was a whisper as she spotted what Steve was holding. “Dad’s…” “Yeah.” Katie smiled at her, dropping an arm round the teenager’s shoulders as she continued to glance at his shield. Never one to miss anything, Jamie glanced at his Sister, then his dad and his eyes widened.

“Why you have shield like Captain America?” Jamie frowned as Steve ran his fingers over the edge of the Vibranium before looking at his son as Tony placed him on the floor, struggling to find the words to explain.

Tony clapped Steve on the shoulder “Alright, I’ll leave that one with you. Time to go see what a mess of my compound Brucie has made. ”He walked passed Emmy, dropping an arm round her shoulders. “Walk with me kid, tell me about Philly.” He shot a glance at Katie who smiled as he steered the teenager back to the compound whilst she began excitedly telling him about her trip.

Steve turned to look Katie, his eyes glistening with emotion.

“Still suits you.” She smiled to him and he gave a little chuckle.

“Daddy!” Jamie insisted, tugging on his trousers, annoyed at his question being ignored.

“Sorry Pal,” Steve crouched down, shield still on his arm. “I have a shield like Captain America because I was Captain America.”

Jamie frowned before his eyes grew wide. An older kid might have laughed and told his dad to stop being silly, but Steve had never lied to Jamie before and it would never have occurred to the three year old to ever think he would.

“You were Captain America?” Jamie frowned. “When you fighted with the Avengers?”

“Yeah” Steve sighed, running his hand through Jamie’s golden hair. “I was.”

“Are you still Cap now?”

“I dunno.” Steve glanced back at his shield before he looked at Jamie, smiling gently.

“I think you are.” Jamie cocked his head to one side as his hand reached out to touch the shield. “Because Cap’s a hero and you’re my hero”

Katie saw Steve’s eyes water instantly as he pulled Jamie closer to him, dropping a kiss to the side of his head as the boy’s arms wound around his dad’s neck. He glanced up at Katie and she swallowed, leaning against the column to her left, wiping her eyes. It had been a long time since anyone had called any of the Avengers that, and to hear it from his son meant more to Steve than anything.

“Daddy?” Jamie mumbled against his dad’s shoulder, where his head lay.

“Yeah?” Steve cleared his throat.

“You got a helmet too?” Jamie pulled back to study his father’s face as Steve gave out a soft laugh

“Yeah buddy. I do.”

“And a uniform?”

“I have a few.” Steve nodded.

“Can I see?” Jamie’s face lit up and Steve glanced at Katie who smiled, nodding encouragingly.

“Sure… come on.” Steve stood up, Jamie easily lifted in his free arm. “You coming?” He stopped at his wife’s side as she reached up a hand to smooth down Jamie’s jumper which had ridden up slightly.

“I think this is a hero to son moment, don’t you?” She smiled, standing on her toes so she could give his lips a peck. “Besides, someone’s gotta stop Tony creating havoc in there.” “Good luck with that.” He muttered, giving her another kiss before he carried Jamie into the compound, striding through the hangar doors and across to the corridor. Katie waited for a moment, composing herself before she headed back inside.

**** True to their word, Nebula and Rocket arrived the following lunch and it wasn’t long after that Katie and Rocket headed off to New Asgard, along with Banner. Banner and Thor had shared a lot during the events leading up to Thanos’ attacking the Asgardian ship and Katie was hoping that together they stood a better chance of convincing the God to help. Katie sat in the passenger seat of the truck belonging to one of the Asgardians who had come to greet them. She couldn’t help but smile as they rolled past the sign at the side of the road WELCOME TO NEW ASGARD, PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY. They stopped at the small port, and Katie hopped out of the truck, thanking the man, whilst Bruce and Rocket climbed out of the back.

“Kind of a step down from a golden palace for an Avenger highness and whatnot.” Rocket mused, looking around.

“Hey, have a little compassion, pal.” Bruce said gently. “First they’ve lost Asgard, then half the people. They’re probably just happy to have a home.”

Katie spotted Valkyrie who smiled at her, and then her face rearranged into surprise as she saw Bruce.

“You shouldn’t have come!” She warned as they approached her.

“Ah, Valkyrie! Great to see you, Angry Girl.” Bruce smiled.

“I think I liked you better either of the other ways.” She almost chuckled, taking in his appearance.

“This is Rocket.” Katie gestured to the raccoon.

“How you doin’?” He greeted her.

Valkyrie nodded at him before she turned to Katie. “He won’t see you.

“Still that bad, huh?” Katie folded her arms.

“We only see him once a month, when he comes for-“ she looked over to the pile of kegs on the side of the port, “-supplies.

“It’s that bad?” Bruce mumbled.

“Yeah.”

“We have to try.” Katie bit her lip, looking round before she turned to Bruce and Rocket. “Come on.” She led them down the side of the harbour and they walked up the small, cobbled street towards the fishing hut Thor was living in. Katie paused, and tried the handle. It opened and Rocket stepped in first. Instantly, Katie was hit with a smell that made her nose wrinkle. It was a combination of dirty clothes, stale beer and old take-outs.

“What the… woo!” Rocket grimaced, waving his paw in front of his nose. “Something died in here.”

“Hello? Thor?” Bruce called.

Thor’s voice rumbled through to them from another room. “Are you here about the cable?”

They made their way into the main room and Thor, who was shirtless, having definitely put on more than a couple of pounds since Katie had last seen him, was walking across the room gesturing to the TV.

“The Cinemax ran out about two weeks ago, and the sports are all kind of fuzzy.” He grabbed a beer from the ice bucket and Katie looked at Bruce who was frowning.

“Thor?” He asked, his voice disbelieving.

Thor turned and took a moment to look at the three of them, before his face cracked into a smile

“Boys!” He laughed out. “Little Stark! Oh my God! It’s so good to see you!” He crossed towards Rocket, trying to hug him, his knuckles rubbing the raccoons head. “Come here, you little rascal!”

“No, I’m good. I’m good. That’s not necessary.” Rocket groaned, wriggling away.

“Hulk, Little Stark, you know my friends, Miek, Korg, right?”

Miek and Korg were sat on a couch, the Rock creature in a Hawaiian shirt, play station controller in his hand playing what looked to Katie like Fortnite- one of Emmy’s favourites.

“Hey guys!” Korg raised his hand in greeting.

“Hey!” Bruce smiled. “Long time no see.”

“Beers in the bucket. Feel free to log on to the Wi-Fi. No password, obviously.” Korg said cheerfully as he turned back to his game, growing suddenly serious. “Thor, he’s back. The kid on the TV that called me a dickhead again.”

“Noobmaster.” Thor growled out as he spun round. Miek threw a piece of pizza towards the TV in disgust, giving a little click.

“Yeah, Noobmaster69. Called me a dickhead.”

Thor stomped over to Korg, took his headphones and spoke loudly into the mic.

“Noobmaster? Yeah, it’s Thor again. You know, the God of Thunder? Listen, buddy. If you don’t log off this game immediately, I am gonna fly over to your house, come down to that basement you’re hiding in, rip off your arms and shove them up your butt! Oh, that’s right. Yes, go cry to your father, you little weasel!”

Katie and Rocket exchanged a look as Thor returned Korg’s head set, before she glanced up at Banner who was watching, a look of disbelief on his face and Katie couldn’t help but echo his feelings. Seeing their friend, their once mighty Avenger partner, in such a state made her beyond sad.

“So you guys want a drink? What are you drinking? We have beer, tequila, all sorts of things.” Thor asked, using Stormbreaker to open a bottle of beer. Bruce walked over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Buddy, you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine! Why, don’t I look all right?” Thor frowned.

“You look like melted ice cream.” Rocket crossed his arms, but despite his joke Katie could tell he was concerned.

Thor simply laughed and looked at them all. “So, what’s up?

“We need your help” Katie spoke gently “There might be a chance we could fix everything.”

“What, like the cable?” Thor burped. “Cause that’s been driving me bananas for weeks.”

“Like Thanos.” Bruce spoke and Katie saw Thor’s smile slowly disappear. He put a shaky hand on Bruce’s shoulder and pointed at him.

“Don’t you say that name.”

Behind Thor, Korg stood up, taking off his headphones. “Um, yeah. We don’t actually say that name in here.”

“Please take your hand off me” Bruce’s tone was quiet as he brushed away Thor’s grip on his shoulder. “Now, I know that… guy might scare you…”

“Why would, why would I be scared of that guy?” Thor scoffed, turning away. “I’m the one who killed that guy, remember? Anyone else here killed that guy? Nope. Didn’t think so. Korg, why don’t you, tell everybody who chopped Thanos’ big head off.”

“Umm… Stormbreaker?” Korg offered.

“No, who was swinging Stormbreaker?” Thor shot back.

“Thor.” Katie started gently. “I get it, we all get it. You’re in a rough spot right now-”

“I’ve been there myself.” Bruce picked up from her “You wanna know who helped me out of it?”

“I don’t know…Natasha?” Thor snorted and Katie rolled her eyes.

“It was you. You helped me”.

Thor walked back over to Bruce and pointed out of the window with the hand holding his beer. “Why don’t you ask the Asgardians down there, how much my help was worth?” he dropped onto the chair “The ones that are left, anyway.”

“We think we can bring them back.” Katie looked at him.

“Little Stark, please stop. Stop, okay?” Thor pleaded, opening a packet of M&Ms. “I know you think I’m down here wallowing in my own self-pity, waiting to be rescued and saved. But I’m fine, okay? We’re fine, aren’t we?”

He looked at Korg and Miek eating pizza and playing once more on the Playstation.

“Nah, all good here, mate!” Korg nodded.

Katie looked back at Thor as he stared up at her. “So, whatever it is that you’re offering, we’re not into it, don’t care, couldn’t care less. Goodbye.”

“We need you Thunder God.” Katie swallowed as she shook her head sadly. ”Please.”

Thor shook his head and ignored her.

“There’s beer on the ship.” Rocket broke the silence, crossing his arms.

Thor paused, and without looking up he spoke again, this time his words softer. “What kind?”

**** Chapter 52

**Original Posting**

#stark spangled banner #steve rogers #Katie Stark #steve rogers fanfiction #steve rogers x ofc #steve rogers x original female character #steve rogers fic #mcu #mcu fanfic #chris evans #chris evans characters

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lingthusiasm · 4 years ago

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Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 56: Not NOT a negation episode

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 56: Not NOT a negation episode. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 56 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today we’re getting enthusiastic about negation!

Gretchen: Or “We’re not getting unenthusiastic about negation,” if you will.

Lauren: “We’re not NOT getting enthusiastic about negation.” But first, we just want to say thanks to everyone who became a patron or was already a patron and came to our April liveshow that was part of LingFest.

Gretchen: It was really fun to get to see and hear from you all in the chat and on social media. This show has been edited and put up on our Patreon bonus feed. If you want to listen to it in audio only like a normal podcast, you can listen to it on Patreon if you didn’t catch it live. We’d also like to thank everybody who came to LingFest in general. All of the great events that people put on were really fun! It was really great to see all of the community around that.

Lauren: LingFest came on the back of LingComm21, which was our conference for people doing LingComm, which was also a lovely experience. Thanks to everyone who participated in one or both of those events.

[Music]

Gretchen: “There is nothing to be suspicious about here.”

Lauren: “That’s good because I absolutely did not eat the whole secret stash of chocolate while you weren’t looking.”

Gretchen: “And I definitely didn’t spill water everywhere.”

Lauren: “I totally have not adopted a pet dinosaur.”

Gretchen: “The moon is absolutely in its usual position. No one has blown it up – especially not me.”

Lauren: I am quite dubious, and I’m just gonna wait until I can definitely check that by looking at the moon.

Gretchen: I am also a little bit worried about the status of your dinosaur or dinosaur-free lifestyle.

Lauren: I don’t have a pet dinosaur. I was very clear. No dinosaur.

Gretchen: But if you haven’t had a pet dinosaur the entire time I’ve known you, why are you bringing it up today?

Lauren: Every day I have not had a pet dinosaur, and yet, bringing it up today somehow makes it feel relevant in a way a bit like we talked about in our episode on Gricean maxims where you only talk about things because they are relevant.

Gretchen: Just like I have not been blowing up the moon every single day of my life –

Lauren: Thankfully.

Gretchen: – yet somehow, when I start saying it like that, it also reminds me of a feature of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, which is a delightfully surreal podcast. There’s this bit in Episode 8 that I wrote about back in 2013 when I was first listening to Welcome to Night Vale that also uses negation in a very similar sort of way. Here’s the quote, “We’re receiving word from the City Council that there was absolutely not a Pink Floyd Multimedia Laser Spectacular this weekend at Radon Canyon – there never was a Pink Floyd Multimedia Laser Spectacular ever near Night Vale. ‘Pink Floyd is not even a thing,’ said the Council in a statement,” and at the same time, you’re left with this impression that –

Lauren: That’s a lot of denying.

Gretchen: Yeah. It’s sort of “Methinks thou dost protest too much,” like, “Why are you protesting so much?” Surely, every day, near my house, there is not a Pink Floyd Multimedia Laser Spectacular, and yet no one has felt obliged to inform me of this.

Lauren: It’s because the only times we talk about something not happening is because the absence of something is relevant. Language takes a default positive talking about things that are here or do exist. It’s the lack of something that gets overtly marked in the grammar of languages.

Gretchen: Right. It’s also the lack of something brings in this presupposition that the lack of something is a relevant thing to talk about or that it could have been expected but hasn’t happened. If I say something like, “I haven’t eaten dinner yet today,” that’s not ontologically weird, philosophically weird, in the same way “I don’t have a pet dinosaur” is weird. Because it is still an open question on any given day whether or not I’ve had dinner. Or if I say, “I don’t have a cat,” that is an open question that reasonable people sometimes do have cats, and so it could be reasonably relevant that I might or might not have a cat in the way that it’s not reasonably relevant that I might or might not have a pet dinosaur.

Lauren: This shows up in the grammar where the default is positive. You don’t add anything to a sentence, usually, to indicate that something’s positive. You have to add something to the grammar to show that it’s negative.

Gretchen: If you look at the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures, which is a great set of maps that is available on the internet for free for you to look at, they have over 1,000 languages on their negation map. They have a bunch of different ways that languages can indicate negation, whether you add a different word or whether you change something about the verb or whether you add two things or other things like that. In over 1,000 languages, all of them have something you add to make the sentence negative – not, for example, something you take away.

Lauren: You get to this point with language as a consistent feature of language where the absence of something or the negation of something is indicated by adding something to the grammar whether that’s a word or a morpheme that affixes to a word.

Gretchen: Which is philosophically weird when you think about it, right, because why is the presence of something indicated with the version of the sentence that has less in it, and the absence of something is indicated by the version of the sentence that has more in it.

Lauren: I think it definitely goes back to the initial examples we used where actually talking about the absence of something only happens when absence is relevant because there is not a dinosaur in my house every day, but I absolutely don’t need to point out every day all the things that are not in my house.

Gretchen: You don’t have any zebras either?

Lauren: I just start the day by rattling them off.

Gretchen: Listing every single animal that’s not in my house every day before I do anything else.

Lauren: We tend to only talk about the absence of something when it’s relevant. This is part of why negation is an additive thing to the grammar. We think about the positive version of the utterance as somehow being more default.

Gretchen: It’s actually kind of similar to how we think about numbers. Like, “one” and “two” and “three” were invented a long time before the number “zero” was invented. Even though before you have one of something, you have zero of it, but it wasn’t being commented on in a numerical way. It might’ve been being commented on in a negative way because languages do have negation, but it wasn’t being commented on as “I have zero dinosaurs.”

Lauren: Why negation is something that’s kept mathematicians and philosophers and people doing logic and linguists entertained, and many other people entertained, for such a long time and why we’re giving it its own whole episode.

Gretchen: “We’re not NOT doing a negation episode.”

Lauren: Alongside the strong consistency of having some kind of additional marking to indicate negation, the use of particular gestures to indicate negation seems to be one of the more consistent things that languages do across families.

Gretchen: I love it when you have a gesture tie-in.

Lauren: For a couple of centuries, people have grappled with the fact that shaking the head to indicate “no” is incredibly prevalent across languages – and way more prevalent and consistent than nodding is to indicate “yes.”

Gretchen: Oh! That’s interesting.

Lauren: The generally agreed-upon theory is that shaking your head to indicate “no” starts really early when infants are refusing food because it’s something you have an imperative to do.

Gretchen: “No, don’t want this food. No!”

Lauren: Even Charles Darwin wrote a book that, I think, it was just gonna be a chapter of On the Origin of Species, and he just got way into it looking at gestures looking across humans and other animals and different languages and was like, “The head shake for ‘no’ is really consistent.” How people indicate “yes” is less consistent, and it just seems to be “do something that isn’t ‘no’,” whereas “no” seems to be the starting point.

Gretchen: Hmm. That’s interesting.

Lauren: You have this really consistent pattern with head shaking, and you also have these families of gestural tendencies across languages where people use some kind of away motion for negation with their hands.

Gretchen: Like, “Oh, no, I can’t.” I’m doing some sort of sweeping away from my shoulders.

Lauren: A pushing away or a sweeping away or a throwing away are all part of this family that have been looked at across languages. I’ve just published a paper in a journal, Semiotica, about this flicking away, rolling away, gesture that you get in Syuba narratives when people are talking about the absence or the lack of something in a story. All of these types of away negation seem to also tap into this human conceptualisation of negation as something pushed away from or held away from the body – “away” and negation seems to fit together in our –

Gretchen: “It’s not near me.” That actually ties into this idea that the affirmative, the positive, the non-negative form is the default because if you’re pushing it away from your body that implies that it was near your body in the first place.

Lauren: We have a very bodily lived experience of existing and things being here or not being here. Although, that is a good point. I’ve been just talking about the positive, but there is a technical linguist term for “not negative” which is “affirmative” – probably should mention that.

Gretchen: I feel like people have encountered “affirmative” in a very robot voice, you know, [imitates computer voice] “Affirmative. Destroy all the humans” – or something like that.

Lauren: It’s one of those times where you’re like, “Oh, good. A technical term that’s already part of my vocabulary.” That’s a win.

Gretchen: It’s interesting because you could imagine a language where the default beginning is actually negative and, instead, you add something to make it affirmative.

Lauren: This is a hard-to-wrap-your-head-around constructed language experiment.

Gretchen: None of the languages in WALS do this, apparently, but you have English, which has “I don’t have a pet dino,” which is the negative, and “I have a pet dino,” which is the affirmative. English Prime, which is what linguists do when they’re trying to make up a language that is very similar to English but different except one thing so we don’t have to make up new words the whole way through, where you could say something like, “I have a pet dino,” meaning “I don’t have one” because that’s the default form of the sentence, and then if you have like, “I AFF have a pet dino,” which means “I do have one,” where the “AFF” is a fake word that means “affirmative.” That’s just not a thing you see grammatically.

Lauren: I have learnt many languages, I have encountered complex grammars of many languages, and this actually hurts my brain to conceptualise as a way of speaking. In English we have a variety of ways of expressing negation in the grammar. We have separate words like “no” or “not” that we can use to make a whole sentence negative, or we also have affixes that we can use to make a particular word negative. “Unenthusiastic” would be an example from the top of the show – or “unhappy,” “unexciting,” “uninteresting,” “hopeless.” There’re a variety of strategies that English has to do negating; it’s not just one particular thing.

Gretchen: The word formation side of negation often brings up the question of the fossilised words that English has in its vocabulary that look like they have a negative part to them, but we don’t have the positive version of them anymore. You have things like, “ruthless” or “feckless” or “unkempt,” but we don’t have like, “ruthful” or “feckful” or “kempt.”

Lauren: “Kempt.” Yes.

Gretchen: There’s a great poem about this which we can link to. What’s interesting is that I’ve actually been – this is a shameless bragging moment here – I was reading an advance copy of Arika Okrent’s upcoming book.

Lauren: I will be jealous of this on behalf of everyone because Arika Okrent wrote an amazing book about conlanging called In the Land of Invented Languages probably a decade ago now and has a new book about English grammar and its wonderful weirdnesses coming out in the middle of 2021.

Gretchen: Her book is called Highly Irregular. It’s coming out on July 1st, 2021. She makes this really interesting point in the advance copy which is, “We joke about the missing flipsides of ‘hapless,’ ‘ruthless,’ and ‘feckless,’ but not what we should be able to form but don’t from ‘bashful,’ ‘grateful,’ and ‘wistful.’”

Lauren: Huh! I feel like this is a reaction I have when I read Arika’s work a lot. I’m just like, “Ah, yeah. I hadn’t thought about that before.

Gretchen: There’s no “bashless,” “grateless,” or “wistless,” even though it feels natural that there should be a missing positive form of forms that have a negative. We don’t have the same reaction of the missing negative form of things that have a positive, which also gets into that positive-as-default form.

Lauren: These things always seem so consistent on the surface. Then you look at how people actually use them and what gets actively used and what becomes fossils, and you realise that applying negation is a little more complicated.

Gretchen: Then on the flipside of affirmative is no negation at all. There’s also this thing of like, “What if you have extra negation? What if you wanna make something even more emphatically negated?” “I absolutely did not get a baby dinosaur. Nope. No siree. Nah-uh. Didn’t happen.”

Lauren: Some languages can put in more than one negating word to really emphasise that something is negated, which is a strategy you might be familiar with as “double negation,” which occurs in about 10% of the world’s languages.

Gretchen: This is the strategy that I’m really familiar with in French because that’s the default way of doing negation. In formal, written French you have at least two negative words. Sometimes, you can put in more. The default way of doing that is a “ne” before the verb and a “pas” after the verb. Sometimes the “pas” can change into something else. So, “ne VERB pas” is “not,” but if you have “ne VERB personne,” that’s “no one,” or “ne VERB rien,” that’s “nothing.” Even if I just want to say, like, “I did not receive a baby dinosaur,” it would be, “Je n'ai pas reçu un dinosaure,” which is “dinosaur” in French, in case that wasn’t clear. You have the “ne” and the “pas” there. Although, in spoken French, a lot of times the “ne” gets dropped, and so you just have the “pas” indicating negation.

Lauren: The “ne” is the older part, right?

Gretchen: Yeah. English actually, historically, had a second negative particle that was before the verb. If you have “I cannot,” it was more something like, “I ne cannot.” They were both there and then the earlier one gets dropped. This happens sometimes you get negatives reinforcing each other and then “Oh, now we don’t need this one.”

Lauren: If we revisited those 120 languages with double negation in the WALS map in a century – because languages are constantly changing and moving around in their grammar some of them might’ve dropped one of those negative elements and gone back to being a single negation language, and some languages might add a second one and become a language that has double negation. French is kind of in the middle of doing that at the moment.

Gretchen: This process in linguistic research is called “negative concord” rather than “double negation” because it’s not just two of them necessarily. A language that has negative concord can continue stacking negative elements like “nothing” and “no one” and all of these on top. Like, “I didn’t give nothing to no one,” that’s totally the expected way of saying it in French.

Lauren: It’s interesting that that gloss works as the expected form in French because it is totally grammatically viable for some dialects of English, but it’s often stigmatised as being not acceptable or not part of standard English.

Gretchen: The thing that drives me up the wall about the logic for doing that is that the logic for stigmatising it is quote-unquote “two negatives form a positive,” but what this logic doesn’t realise is that it’s extremely spurious logic. It’s a misuse of how logic works.

Lauren: Do you wanna unpack that for us? Because I personally find joy in the fact that language is more interesting than logic, but if people have encountered this argument, where does it fall down for you?

Gretchen: First of all, languages like French exist.

Lauren: I do wonder how much more milage double negation or negative concord in English would get if we called it the “French negation.”

Gretchen: Right! “Oh, it’s like French toast!” Everyone likes things that are French. The “French toast” negation style. There were plenty of early logicians who were French who were surely not making this argument that doesn’t even work for their language in the only way that they were doing things in Descartes’s time.

Lauren: Language is not just numbers.

Gretchen: Also, in English, nobody is confused about the difference between “I didn’t give nothing to nobody” and “I’m not NOT excited.” Those both use multiple negations. In one of them, the negation is trying cancel out the negation, and in the other one, it’s reinforcing the negation. We do know what people mean. It’s not actually confusing.

Lauren: In fact, we can throw even more negation into the way that we speak, and people cope with it really fine.

Gretchen: The other thing is, is that – I don’t wanna get completely linguist on the logicians, but languages have been around for a lot longer than logic has.

Lauren: True.

Gretchen: Formal logic has existed for, I dunno, what, Aristotle? So, a couple thousand years, if we’re gonna be generous. Language has been around for somewhere in the tens of thousands of years. We’re not even sure whether it’s tens or hundreds of thousands because we literally don’t have records. Just several orders of magnitude longer than logic has existed, language has been around. If we think that roughly 10% of languages have negative concord now, probably some fraction of languages have always had negative concord because it’s a thing that people could do. It’s a bit rich for logic, this young interloper, to come into language, which has been doing just fine this entire time, and be like, “Sorry, you need to redo your entire system because I don’t like it.” Who are you? It’s so young.

Lauren: With that in mind, should we try squeezing even more negation into a sentence? Because we can do better than just double negatives for negative concord.

Gretchen: Yes. This is where we can do one of my favourite examples which is the Mean Girls approach to negation.

Lauren: Okay, not what I expected to be your favourite example, but let’s go.

Gretchen: I mean, look, any excuse to have a Mean Girls reference. That’s the “She doesn’t even go here” type of negation. When you have several bits in a sentence that are actually negative, you could still take one out, and that’s what makes the logical argument superficially appealing because you could get rid of someone, they’re just reinforcing each other. But in this case, you have “She doesn’t even go here,” and if you try to make that positive – “She does even go here.”

Lauren: “She even goes here.” I’m taking out the “n’t” – “She does even go here.” It doesn’t work for me.

Gretchen: Or you could do it with a different stress like, “She EVEN goes here.”

Lauren: Or I guess the affirmative form of this would just be “She goes here.” The “even” doesn’t turn up at all.

Gretchen: The “even” there is doing something interesting. It’s reinforcing the negation without itself being negative per se in isolation – just sort of not being around at all – without the negative there to help it.

Lauren: I guess it would be like a sentence like, “I don’t like ice cream at all,” which apart from being a fake fact –

Gretchen: [Laughs] Would you say, “I like ice cream at all”?

Lauren: I would just say, “I like ice cream.” The “at all” doesn’t need to be there at all.

Gretchen: Or the “I didn’t eat a crumb of cake,” which you can say, “I ate a crumb of cake,” but it’s not quite the opposite of “I didn’t eat a crumb of cake.”

Lauren: It’s a little bit too literal in the affirmative version.

Gretchen: Or something like, “I didn’t touch a drop of water.”

Lauren: “I touched a drop of water,” I just boop it with my ear.

Gretchen: Just going through the rain booping rain drops.

Lauren: That one absolutely does not work when you keep “a drop of water” in there. That construction only works for me in the negative even though a lot of the words in it that are adding to the negation aren’t necessarily negative in their structure.

Gretchen: Exactly. It’s saying, “I didn’t touch even the smallest amount of water” is what that’s doing there. And there’s that “even” again. Coincidentally, this is also something that Arika Okrent talks about in her book Highly Irregular, which is coming out. It’s not only a book about negation, I promise. I was just thinking about negation because I knew we were doing this episode when I was reading it.

Lauren: Also, as you can tell from the examples, negation is where grammar starts to get particularly interesting, so it’s unsurprisingly that a book like Highly Irregular would have a couple of stories about negation in it.

Gretchen: Yeah, because there’re interesting things to say there. Arika Okrent has this great section which talks about things like “even” and “any” and “at all” and “a drop of” which are called “negative polarity items,” if you want a technical term for it.

Lauren: This is a technical term that I know but hadn’t really thought about until we started putting the show together. I guess that by “items” they just mean things that are words or multiple words because “a crumb of” isn’t a word. We can’t just call them “negative polarity words.”

Gretchen: Some of them are individual words like “any” or “yet” or “even” or “either.” Some of them are longer phrases like “at all” or “a thing” or “an iota,” “a drop.” You can get verbs like “budge.”

Lauren: In a sentence like?

Gretchen: Like, “The boulder won’t budge.” You don’t say, “The bolder will budge.”

Lauren: Hmm. I guess some of these are like, “Huh.” Sorry. I’m just gonna take a moment to consult my intuitions there because, yeah, I guess not.

Gretchen: I might be able to say, “budge over,” or something to a person. Then you have whole phrases like, “breathe a word,” “hold a candle,” “sleep a wink,” “lift a finger.”

Lauren: “I couldn’t sleep a wink.”

Gretchen: “Couldn’t sleep a wink.” “I could sleep a wink.” [Laughter] “I could lift a finger.”

Lauren: When you put them into the affirmative, they don’t work. It also shows why they’re just called “negative polarity” rather than “negation” because they bring this negative sense with them, but they are not doing grammatical negating themselves. There’s no “no” or “not” or “un-” in there.

Gretchen: That’s what distinguishes them from something like, “no one,” “nowhere,” “nothing,” which are themselves already negative words. If you think about the polarity of a phrase as like, I guess, if you go away from the equator – let’s say you go north for negation because they both begin with N. As you head towards the North Pole, your negative polarity gets higher.

Lauren: As someone who lives on a continent that is often called the “antipodes” because we are on the opposite side of the world from the Northern Hemisphere, I appreciate that you’re putting north as your deficit for negation. Thank you.

Gretchen: It just, I dunno, acronyms – they’re nice.

Lauren: N for “north,” N for “negation.” Negative polarity items are just sending you in that direction without necessarily being negative themselves.

Gretchen: What’s interesting about them is that although they’re called “negative polarity items” because of this canonical contrast where you say, “There aren’t any here,” versus “There are any here,” which is weird because it doesn’t have the negation, there are also some other contexts where you can say stuff like this. You can say negative polarity items in questions often. “Do you see any?” Or in if-clauses.

Lauren: And if-clauses are famous for not existing quite in our reality. That’s one of the things they’re doing.

Gretchen: “If you make a peep, you’ll get in trouble.” The “if” part of that, you know, somehow that works for negative polarity. And also contexts with words like “without” or “doubt” or “surprise” or “regret.” That’s something like, “I regret lifting a finger to help.” You’re not gonna say, “I lifted a finger to help,” because that one’s weird, but as soon as you regret lifting a finger, somehow that one works fairly well.

Lauren: So, they’re not just doing straight up negating, there’s something more complicated happening there.

Gretchen: This is something that’s still an active area of research to figure out exactly what all the contexts are because some of the negative polarity items work better in some contexts than others, so there can be a bit of fuzziness around the borders for which ones work when. The theories for the reasons behind those conditions can get fairly complicated. It’s interesting to have this observation of like, here’s this whole class of words. You knew about nouns and verbs, but negative polarity items, they’ve been there this whole time, and yet you didn’t realise they had this unifying characteristic of them.

Lauren: There might be some times when something that’s listed as a negative polarity item actually works in the affirmative for some people and why intuition checking becomes a big part of thinking about this because I’ve definitely met some people who can use “anymore,” which I can only use in negative like, “I don’t have a dinosaur anymore.”

Gretchen: Oh no! What happened to it?

Lauren: But there are some English speakers who can use “anymore” in a positive sentence. Whenever I hear it, I’m like, “Oh, that works for you,” but I literally can’t even come up with an example in my head because it doesn’t work in my variety of English.

Gretchen: I have a fun story about positive “anymore,” which is, I didn’t have it growing up. I encountered it in grad school in this very like, “Did you know that in some varieties of English people have positive ‘anymore’?” I was reading the examples and being told these examples. It’s something like, “Cake is expensive anymore.”

Lauren: Alas.

Gretchen: Where it means “nowadays.”

Lauren: I can totally understand it functioning when you use it in a sentence like that. It’s not like my brain can’t process the meaning at all. It’s just not something I would say.

Gretchen: I actually went to a linguistics conference, and I went to a workshop by a linguist who had positive “anymore.” The first time I heard him say it in the wild, I was like, “Oh, this is this thing that I read about in the books.” Three days later, I’d heard this linguist on enough occasions say enough tokens of positive “anymore” that I’m like, “Yeah, it’s grammatical for me now.” I acquired it in this week in 2012.

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: Sometimes, the only reason you don’t have positive “anymore” is because you only have negative evidence to suggest that it doesn’t exist.

Lauren: I just haven’t been exposed to it.

Gretchen: Then I have probably, I dunno, probably less than a dozen tokens of positive evidence in this naturalistic setting from this linguist who didn’t realise that he was grammatically teaching me to use positive “anymore.” He thought he was doing a workshop on a perfectly unrelated topic, and yet I walked out of that being like, “Yeah, it’s grammatical for me,” and it has been ever since.

Lauren: You are an inspiration for lifelong grammatical acquisition.

Gretchen: Right! Because I was an adult. It was great.

Lauren: You called it “positive anymore.” So, the fact that we have negative polarity items, can I intuit that there are also positive polarity items?

Gretchen: Yeah. There aren’t as many, but one of them is–

Lauren: Interesting. Again, this obsession with marking negation.

Gretchen: We mark negation a lot more. But one of them is “somewhat.” You can say, “I liked that cake somewhat.”

Lauren: We’re definitely not moving as close to the positive pole with the “somewhat” there.

Gretchen: “I didn’t like that cake somewhat” is just kind of ugh for a lot of people.

Lauren: That doesn’t work for me.

Gretchen: There’re a few positive polarity items as well that move people further towards the South Pole, if you will.

Lauren: I like that talking about positive polarity items has moved us full circle through negation and back into thinking about negation and thinking about negative structures and affirmative structures as all part of this larger, more complicated system of ways that we have of expressing that things exist or they don’t exist and how we go about talking about that.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, esoteric symbol socks, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

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[Music]

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nosferatvpussy · 5 years ago

Text

distorted lullabies [chapter I]

Word count: 2,134 Warnings: none but please keep in mind this story will eventually delve into mature themes so go away if you’re not 18+ Pairing: Dracula x female reader

I’ll try posting a chapter per week. Any constructive criticism and feedback is very welcome (really, english is not my first language so I’ll take any help I can get). I’m waiting for ao3 to e-mail me an invitation so I can post it there, too.

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He heard her footsteps long before she knocked on his door.

He stood sat on his armchair with a book on his lap, waiting. A loud song reached his ears, making him tilt his head. Hm. Interesting how humans could go around now with a tiny appliance that played music directly in their ears. The gramophone had lost its appeal and the wealth associated with it. Now everybody on the street carried one of those metal and glass slabs with strings attached to it, bobbing their head to their song of choice.

She was humming along with the song as she walked down the corridor to his building. Shifting in his seat, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. A hint of perfume, coffee, strawberries and honey. Curious. Not a scent of her blood yet.

The clicking heels stopped as she paused the music and he rose. He took his time on the way to the door so she could adjust her belongings. Another deep intake of breath and he came to a halt, a sigh escaping his lips.

Oh, intoxicating.

He found that this new era had brought exquisite new flavours to his taste, but this one… ah, she was a mix of old european blood, found only in the hidden depths of the Carpathian Forest, and the lovely nuance of modernity. That old saying, you are what you eat applied to her as well. Whatever she was in habit of eating or drinking heavily influenced her scent. A nice, well preserved and safely kept bottle of wine, just for him. It quickly overpowered all the other scents surrounding her.

Knock, knock.

Throwing his head back to try and regain his composure, he opened the door. The door handle dented beneath his hand upon laying eyes on her. He expected her to pretty but he was met with far more than that.

“Yes?”, was all he could manage.

“I’m Y/N L/N,” she said as if it were explanatory. He stared at her blankly. “Renfield sent me, I’m from the lawyer firm? I brought you some documents to review.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” he stepped aside, opening one arm to invite her in and putting a smile on display.

She peered at him from the corner of her eyes as she passed him, quickening her pace as he took another whiff. He would have to be more cautious so as to not scare her away. But if she did flee that would only make him chase her and he would drink her down too quickly, without any appreciation whatsoever. And what a crime that would be.

“I brought you a cell phone, as well. Renfield mentioned you were stripped of yours when you were taken to the Foundation.” She placed her bag on a chair and her briefcase on top of large center table of his flat. She had her back to him, giving an opportunity to analyse her.

The tight clothes and missing fabric was still something he had to get accustomed with but he wasn’t complaining. If anything, he quite liked the fashion of this century.

The fact that he could see her stockings was outrageous, black with a seam running down the center of her legs. In his time, she would have been lynched for having her undergarments on display like that. The black high heels were a nice touch. And then the tight pencil skirt outlining her curves… It left just enough for his imagination.

She turned around to see him standing there like a statue, the door still open. Ah, pity. How unfortunate that those shirts were still in fashion. He couldn’t recall the name humans gave it in this era and suddenly he hated it. The collar covered her neck entirely. In fact, now that he realized it the only skin showing on her body was on her face and hands.

“Count? Are you alright?”

“Perfectly fine, my darling,” he replied, closing the door at last and swallowing down the saliva that had welled up in his mouth. He strode over to her, placing his hands on the chair closest to her. “I apologise for my manners. It has been awhile since I had a guest over, you must think me a terrible host. Please, take a seat. Unfortunately I have only water and wine to offer you.”

She looked derisively to the chair offered to her. Her lips fought a smile and he encouraged it by smiling in return, but, no, she refused to give it to him.

“Renfield was right,” she whispered under her breath but he caught it. Louder, she said “Thank you but I’ll stand. I’m in a hurry today. Don’t you worry about me,” she extended a white box with a picture of that metal slab on the front. A cell phone, she had said. “Here you go, there’s already a simcard in it, your new number is written in the back. I’ve taken the liberty to set it up for you. I placed Renfield’s number on speed dial should you need it, he’s registered as 6. You do know how to handle one of these, right?”

“I catch on fairly fast,” opening the box and retrieving the phone. “And if I need to contact you?”

“You have no need to contact me. I’m simply running an errand for my boss,” she stated dryly, averting her eyes. “Here, if you could sign these for me to release the rest of your assets,” a pen was offered to him. He plucked it from her small fingers automatically.

It was not often that he met someone that resisted his charms. He could count on one hand, in fact. The Van Helsings, Johnny and now her. At the very least Agatha and Zoe held some interest in him and Johnny had made himself a hero waging vengeance against him - especially now with the Jonathan Harker Foundation.

But not her. Not one sliver of interest.

“Are you signing them or should I come back another da- evening?” she corrected herself, one hand on her hip and another raising to push her hair back. He caught a glimpse of the skin beneath her ear, paler than the rest of her.

He took his time signing each of the documents. When he was done, he gathered the papers in his hands, holding them flush against his chest so she wouldn’t get them and leave. She bit the insides of her cheeks, meeting his eyes with clear annoyance on them. Oh, fiesty. She was an impatient one. Maybe he had caught her on a bad day but he had a feeling she was always like this. He could not stop his smirk, which only made her heart beat faster in anger.

“And if I want to contact you? I promise you I will make it worth your while.”

“I don’t do dates with clients.”

“I’m not your client.”

That made her scoff.

“Right. You’re Renfield’s,” her eyes traveled up and down him, granting him a little satisfaction. “Still, I don’t do dates.”

“What if it’s not a date? I am new to London and I would appreciate if someone could show me the sights.”

“I’m not a tour guide,” she replied, her expression hardening.

“No, you’re a lawyer.”

“I’m well aware. Can I have those back?”, one hand out to him with a raised eyebrow.

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

Both of her hands went on her hips and she huffed, trying to make herself bigger as if she was demanding respect. The movement made her breasts press through her shirt, giving him a delightful sight. She grabbed her purse, swung it over her shoulder and proceeded to close her briefcase.

“Fine. Keep them. I’m late to an appointment at court. I’m sure Renfield can send someone else to get those papers. In the meanwhile, enjoy life without all your money.”

“How insolent of you,” he shot back but he was smiling. He doubted she would address him like that if she knew just what he was.

“Yes I am. I don’t have time for games.”

“This is isn’t a game.”

“Isn’t it? I see right through you. God, and you must think you’re so innovative with all the european sophistication. I bet you’re used to having women throwing themselves at you as soon as you mention you’re a Count.”

“Usually, I don’t have to mention it at all, in fact,” he intervened. She was about to continue but he carried on. “What was Renfield right about?”

Her eyes widened and her lips parted in surprise. He cocked an eyebrow, shaking the papers as if to say he would give them to her if she answered.

“That you are not from here and that you are old fashioned.”

Listening attentively to her heart and how it skipped a beat, he shook his head to the sides.

“That’s not all. What else?”

“He said that you would try and gain my affections.”

The Count offered her the papers.

“Perhaps I ought to change lawyers. He clearly speaks more about his own clients than he should. Would you be available?”

And with that she chuckled. Ah, so the façade could be broken… at least for a second.

“I’m afraid I have a long list of clients at the moment, Count Dracula. If you commit a serious offense you may call on me to represent you,” she took the papers, her fingers briefly brushing against his cold skin. Her eyebrows furrowed but she was quick to conceal her startlement at his temperature.

She was walking to the door as she stuffed the papers inside her bag and he accompanied her.

“I might just murder someone to take you up on your offer,” he said from behind her, in a tone much more serious than he intended. Still, she laughed at that, the sound ringing through the room.

He courteously opened the door for her and she turned on her heels, extending a hand for him.

“I apologise for being rude before but I will not apologise for setting boundaries. I hope you understand that, Count. And if you do decide to murder someone make sure to hide the evidence so it will be a good case for us.”

“I will keep that in mind.”

He grinned at her and she smiled back but without the warmth he presented her. A large hand slipped into hers and she shuddered. Gazing down unto her eyes he shook her hand which made her smile grow more confident. She had started to loosen her grip but he held her firmly. He bent forward and his lips caressed the back of her hand. She stared at him the whole time as if hypnotized and for a moment he thought he had gotten her in the palm of his hand but then she blinked and cleared her throat.

“Boundaries, Count Dracula, you should remember them if we meet again. Goodbye.”

“Bye now, my darling,” he called when she turned her back to him and started marching down the corridor, swaying her hips.

“Boundaries!” she repeated as she entered the elevator.

Before the doors closed he could swear he saw an amused glint in her eyes.

The Count sat on his armchair again, the book now forgotten as he thought about Y/N. He was still indecisive about what to do with her. Simply draining her would not only be a waste of good blood but as well of character.

She demanded respect with every step of her heels. He would bet that she could cower many men with that stare of hers. Dracula had never met many lawyers and those that he did meet were fascinating in different ways. Johnny was determined although slightly stupid. Renfield was a slave to his every wish. Should Dracula ask him to retrieve the fattest fish in the sea, the poor man would probably drown trying to get it. But she was an entirely different breed.

So strong-willed that it was a charm all on its own, without even striving for it to be as such. He had heard an expression on the television the other day that he thought might apply well to her - “my way or the highway”.

And such amazing beauty. Make up was far more popular in this century, he could tell, and he was quickly learning it could disguise many unwanted flaws but she used in such a way that it added to her beauty instead of covering it.

Beautiful, impetuous, resolute… and a sense of humour that was surprisingly dark.

Ah… She would make quite the bride if she could withstand the change. And if she did not, he would make sure to savour every curve and every last drop of blood in her body.

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