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musicfeedsmysoul12 · 2 years ago

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Names, News and Nominations

Summary: After the sports festival, things should be smooth sailing. Except, of course Izuku finds that it’s not true. The news of Sir Nighteye’s death is a hard one, but he’ll pull through as he and his classmates get ready for their internships! Even if they all seem eager to make him blush still!

ON AO3

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After school, Izuku headed to the principal’s office, where Nezu happily let him inside, the mammal’s eyes shining.

“I am eager to work with you later on,” Nezu said to Izuku cheerfully. “But ID here will be a good substitute for me.”

“You’re just saying that 'cause you taught me to,” snorted one of the people in the office.

Info Dropper, or Goblin Izuku supposed, did not draw the eye. They were average height and bulky with muscle but otherwise looked utterly plain. They wore a black face mask and circular glasses, which made their dark eyes seem wider. Their hero costume consisted of a dark jacket and a pair of blue jeans. Under the coat glinted a leather harness holding multiple items, a gun one of them. But only when you were close to them. Otherwise, they looked like any other person on the streets.

“Nice to meet you, kid,” Info Dropper said, bowing their head. “I’m Info Dropper or ID. Goblin while on duty in Otheon, but ID otherwise.” They motioned to the woman beside them. She wore all black, a turtleneck bodysuit, a trench coat and boots though some iridescent decals were on them. A visor with the same colouring as the decals covered her face.

“Hi! I’m Statistica or Elric Aria!” said the woman, bowing her head too. “ID here doesn’t use names or give theirs out due to their Quirk, so don’t be offended by any nickname.”

“Oh? I tried to search it up, but the Court doesn’t list Quirks for their members….” Izuku said slowly.

“It’s called Name Drop. I say someone’s name, chosen ones work too, and I know five random things about them I didn’t before.” ID explained. They closed their eyes with a shrug. “Doesn’t work on animals, so Nezu and I are friends.” Opening their eyes again, ID looked Izuku over. “Midoriya Izuku…” the words felt like a weight on his shoulders as their eyes glowed white. They blinked and hummed. “That’s interesting….”

“Stop messing with him!” Statstica said, smacking their shoulder.

“Bad sidekick.”

“You raised me for the past ten years. I ain’t scared of you!” Statstica sniffed. She turned to Izuku. “So we’re going to be leaving on Friday morning, so you know, with the agency plane. ID knows where your guardians live.”

“Oh, right! Aizawa-Sensei said you went to school together.” Izuku nodded.

“Yep. You’ll find that while most high school classes do end up drifting apart, it’s rarer for a hero class to do so.” ID remarked. “We bond deeper. I may not be too close with everyone, but we keep in touch.” They shrugged. “Plus, I dated Done for a few weeks before he figured out he was fully gay.” Izuku blinked at ID, who bulldozed on. “So we’re close along with BDSM. And I dated Sonic Man to…. Huh, did I date everyone but the Banana in that friend group…” ID stared at the wall as Nezu chuckled, stirring his tea.

“I believe you did,” he remarked.

“Eh.” ID shrugged. “Anyway, so we all bonded. So… we got off track. Right. You’ll be coming with us on Friday to Otheon, where I’ll be investigating some stuff. Kiddo here,” a pat on Statistica’s shoulder indicated whom they spoke about. “Will be doing physical training mostly with you. I’ll also be sparring with you, and we’ll sic you on Sonic Man’s brother to spar ten to one. I think… no, wait, Skeleton Muscles said he’d also talk to his old homeroom teacher. I spoke with my bosses, and they’re fine with another pair of hands given the cases he used to work.”

“…” Izuku turned to the only woman in the room helplessly.

“They mean that I’ll spar with you, and you’ll end up sparring with Inegnenium’s brother and then. Plus, All Might’s old teacher is probably coming. The Court doesn’t mind him along due to his own history of investigation.” Statistica chirped.

“...Skeleton Muscles?” Izuku asked.

“It’s impossible to keep a secret from me,” ID sniffed, sticking their nose in the air. “I know everything.”

“No, you don’t. They like to claim it, but they’re lying. No one is omnipotent… well, Nezu comes close.” joked Statistica. “But yeah. I think they say random names when bored.”

“Free entertainment,” ID shrugged. Izuku snickered, a little amused at least.

“So why have me come to the office?” Izuku asked.

“To update you. I’m busy the next few days helping track Stain,” ID explained. “Issue is my Quirk is random enough that it’s hard to track him with it, and he moves around quickly.”

“But Otheon is more important?” Izuku asked.

“A possible global terrorist organization is always more important than some serial killer,” ID said honestly. Izuku’s mouth dropped open. “I know, kid, I know. It’s essential and honestly personal for me to go at this.” ID shrugged. “I wanted to meet you and say your name to confirm you’re good before Friday.”

The door to the office opened suddenly, startling the group. Aizawa stepped in, Eri following him happily.

“Sup, Done!” ID said, sounding amused.

“Shut up, ID,” Aizawa said grumpily. “I’m here to ensure my ward is okay with you.”

“He’ll be fine. Casanova will have fun with us… Nah, that’s not a good one. Ah, Bait.” ID nodded.

“Bait?” Izuku asked, realizing what they were saying.

“It fits,” ID said. “Put you in a room, and your lovers will go crazy.” Izuku went red as Eri giggled.

“Hi, I’m Eri.” the little girl said softly, waving at ID, who blinked.

“Oh my god, she’s so cute!” Statistica said in a squeal.

“...Hi, kid,” ID said. Eri blinked, a pout forming.

“No! You call me… oh, it hasn’t happened.” Eri hummed. ID paused, tilting their head to the side.

“...Eri…” they said. Their eyes didn’t change. “...Aizawa Eri.” their eyes flashed then. They outright jerked their head back, eyes wide in shock. “Oh wow.”

“Wow, what?” Aizawa asked, glaring at the other hero.

“She’s got a temporal Quirk, right?” ID asked. Aizawa crossed his arms, waiting. Izuku looked at ID curiously. “Look, Bait here got hit by Cupid, whose Quirk is also temporal based. We saw the Unicorn in the future, meaning that the Quirk briefly touched her. It forced a bit of a Quirk evolution.”

“You got that just by saying her name?” Izuku asked in awe, going for his notebook to write it down. ID glanced at them and sighed.

“I’ll teach you coding later. But anyway, yes. It’s one of the bigger things I didn’t know about her before, so I got a dose of info about her Quirk and the knowledge it evolved recently. The rest I already know. I research everything before using my Quirk. Easier to narrow the margins. Unicorn here; I did get a dossier on. But temporal Quirks are rare enough that they get studied to hell and back. Superstrength is such a common thing that it’s not worth studying. So we know that temporal Quirks can react to one another in strange ways. Clock Eyes… Sir Nighteye reported a temporary increase in Quirk power after going against a villain who could see the future when they ate some sort of food. He could use his Quirk three times a day for two months.” ID said. Izuku wrote it all down, bouncing.

“I read about that. Wow, I didn’t think Matchmaker was temporal, but you’re right! It sees the future and shows us glimpses! So when Eri was shown, it attached to her?” Izuku asked. “What is happening now?”

“Well, apparently, she might know something from the future or at least can feel a timeline out.” ID said. “My Quirk said so… Aizawa Eri… oh wow, that’s cool.”

“Oh?” Nezu asked, leaning forward.

“She could already do it and knew she could, but it never stayed. Right Unicorn?”

“Uhuh,” Eri nodded. She hummed. “Will it stay? It kinda hurts….” Aizawa placed a hand on her head, frowning.

“Dunno. It’s possible the Quirk just woke up the paths in your brain so you can remember. Maybe you’ll go back to random bursts of information. Maybe you’ll end up only remembering each day. Temporal Quirks are weird.” ID said.

“Wouldn’t it make more sense if she could know something from the past rather than the future?” asked Izuku.

“Not necessarily.” Nezu voiced. “Time isn’t linear. As a great doctor once said: it’s more wibbly and wobbly than that. As well it’s a social concept. Eri may only be able to remove the years from something, but may be able to see parts of the future, experiencing it as memories.”

“... most of the class feel more protective of her than we should theoretically,” Izuku said. Eri winced, looking down upon hearing that. “Ah! Nothing bad about that!”

“My Quirk makes you,” Eri muttered.

“Nah, it’s just giving us the emotions we’d feel in the future,” Statistica said. “If I understand what the Quirk nuts are saying…” she looked between the group. Aizawa looked exhausted. He had already been dealing with Izuku and the many crushes on him. Adding a possible future seeing child who could rewind time did not make things easy for him, more so when she knew things about the future.

He made a mental note to stalk up on headache medication in the future.

-0-

“So… we have an omnipotent daughter now,” Yamada said as he glanced at Eri. They were back at the apartment, Yamada finishing some paperwork for his acceptance of Kaminari as an intern. According to Yamada, one of his sidekicks’ Quirks could let him direct electricity from an external source. The internship made sense with the reveal of Kaminari gathering electricity instead of producing it.

“A somewhat Omnipotent daughter,” Aizawa groaned from where he was going through some paperwork himself. He wouldn’t tell Izuku what it was. “It might not last.”

Eri shrugged at the looks she got, busy colouring at the coffee table where Izuku sat, working on some homework. “I dunno,” the little girl said calmly. “I know it makes me less nervous cause I remember being ten and tackling Dekiru and his wife during a game, but I know it hasn’t happened yet.”

“Which wife is that?” Yamada joked.

“Uravity,” Eri said, making Izuku groan. “Huh? Did I do something wrong?”

“Just embarrassed, Eri,” Izuku muttered. Eri reached out to pat his head. Izuku sighed. “Thank you.”

“Welcome, Dekiru!” Eri said happily. She went back to colouring. Izuku returned to his homework, finishing his math before pulling out his phone, which had been vibrating for a while.

Class 1-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Pichu: Okay if I’m gonna be the next Present Mic, Aoyama is gonna be the next Midnight… who is the next Aizawa?

Bass Boost: That Shinsou kid probably. Has the same vibe in the other chat.

Alien Queen: Hell yeah!

Office Supplies: I can see it. Also, should we have a chat with Midoriya in it and all of his potential spouses?

Dr. Dolittle: Adding them here?

YaoMomo: This is the class chat. I doubt sensei would be happy to add them here.

Rock HARD: plus like Bakugou and Mineta are in the chat.

Bass Boost: Mineta got removed like this afternoon and Bakugou has never, ever BEEN in this chat. Do they count?

Class Prez: I am willing to be in another chat with everyone.

Pichu: lol sorry but imagine like somehow Shigaraki managing to get into the chat

Alien Queen: that’s terrifying. Man might be able to go vigilante but right now he’s a villain o.0

Out of the Kitchen: I vote no. Unless the man goes through his redemption arch fast.

Frog: Would any of us actually be willing to be around him though? Redemption or not he tried to murder us.

Pichu: Ehhh… Grey area? Man apparently got manipulated by his overlord and can snap out of it.

Rock HARD: Forgiveness is MANLY.

Frog: even if forgiving people is good I don’t know if I can. Not unless he proves he changed you know? Like if he never attacks us ever again with intent to kill I mean.

Edgy Bird: If he truly wishes to change in the future and has shown he is willing to offer it then I would be willing to accept him as friend and not foe.

However if he perchance claims to change but goes right back to his normal behaviour then it is not change that drives him. Not out of habit but out of a true disregard for wishing to change.

Pichu: It probably is different for Tsu given she nearly got killed by him to.

Frog: True.

Gravity Queen: I just realized that we’re discussing an actual villain and not just some rando. And it’s getting heavy. So I vote we do make a chat for all of Midoriya’s potential lovers. If he’s okay with it.

Izuku blinked at the chat, surprised by the direction it took before texting back.

Small Might: I have no idea how to react to that. I mean… I guess it would be nice to talk to them. I didn’t see Shinsou or Monoma or Hatsume or anyone all day. We’re all so busy.

Small Might: though I only ask NO ONE FLIRT in the chat. I’m not near ready for that 😖

Pichu: No problem! I think Sensei would murk us if we did even if you’re terribly cute and we love your blush ❤️

Sensei: Extra classes seem to be just giving themselves out.

Pichu: Ha. I’m in danger.

Sensei: Make the chat but put an adult (not me) in it. So if anyone does make Midoriya uncomfortable we can know.

“Thanks, Aizawa,” Izuku said, glancing up at the man who snorted.

“The rat probably monitors the other chat. But I’d prefer an adult in this one,” he said.

“Chat?” Yamada asked.

“The hellions want to make a chat with Midoriya and everyone else he could end up with,” Aizawa explained as Izuku’s phone chimed with the announcement that he’d been added to a new chat called…

“Midoriya’s Harem and Adult Supervision?!?” Izuku squeaked. The adults looked at him before they began laughing.

It was pretty funny.

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He felt tired. So tired as he sat there in the room with the TV playing. The bodies of the previous owners of the apartment were king gone, destroyed so they couldn’t smell. After fleeing the doctor, he’d been trying to figure out how to continue his plans. Shigaraki no longer seemed reasonable to follow with the future, showing how he could abandon the goal of All for One.

He needed to find a new Quirk. One that could help him survive. A healing Quirk would work, one he could use himself. Recovery Girl was out. He had heard of a young boy on Nabu discussed in the doctor’s labs…

“Breaking news: Dr. Anders, former hero and skilled surgeon, has declared he will be staying in Japan for the next few months as part of a task force being created by All Might to deal with the villain who injured him,” the broadcaster said. “His Quirk, Spirit Healer, enables him to heal any wound while preventing things such as cell degeneration which has led to wonders in curing….”

He lifted his head, watching the news. He felt a smile cross his face.

It seemed as if fate had delivered his salvation.

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Notes:

-MERRY CHRISTMAS!! Hope you guys like this double update!

-Hope you guys liked it! This 100% was because I wanted to introduce everyone, lol.

-Eri’s power will degrade as time goes on. She’s still going to be able to say random things that are a little weird. But yeah… look, this was fun to think of, and also I love Eri. But the cute little girl whose so shy and timid gets boring compared to a mildly Eldritch being.

-Group chat was 100% me setting shit up.

-As an aside: Bakugou would never talk in group chats, and you can’t convince me otherwise.

-Look… I don’t know if I CAN add Shigaraki without it being weird. Sorry.

-I wonder who is talking…

#bnha #bnha au #videos of the future #photos and videos #boku no hero academia #izuku midoriya #aizawa shouta #yamada hizashi #eri #oc: info dropper

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illogicalnordictales · 3 months ago

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Ok so a few weeks ago I got a Nintendo Switch. And lemme tell ya something:

I only have 3 games on it, but it’s served for hours of entertainment, it’s awesome.

But one of these games is called West Of Loathing. It’s basically stick figure D&D. It’s great.

You get to pick a character class, pick a name, sidekick, it’s awesome.

Anyway, I just finished a round of it where my character’s name was:

Tony Trouble Ptoughneigh (pronounced “Tony”)

And I had this one horse from a little side quest, a horse with crazy eyes, ran funny, the lot of it, y’know.

And I’m like “What do I name this thing.”

Cocaine.

I named him Cocaine.

What a fitting name, a horse named Cocaine.

OH and it was be inhumane not to mention my companion in this: Gary. Gary the Goblin. He’s precious. Goofy. Amazing. And also can do Gary-Fu.

Anyway, so a few notable places on the map were:

the Circus, led by a cow hating killer;

the Daveyard—a graveyard solely for people named Dave;

and the Petting Cemetery, which was for animal skeletons, and you can pet them for an add to your…powers? I dunno what to call ‘em, ok.

Anyway, there’s this city that’s the primary destination of the game, and it’s called Frisco. And once you get there, you encounter a guy named Norton, who’s convinced that he’s the emperor. Anyway, you need to get past him to continue building the train tracks into Frisco. But since he’s convinced he’s the emperor of Frisco, he wants a crown.

Now, if you don’t give him a crown, you get this weird ant-eye virus, and you have to get a magic jelly bean to cure it. And then you have to fight him on the train, because oh yeah, he just casually up and stole it. Cause he’s the emperor. And I guess emperors can do that.

But if you do give him a crown, it saves a headache of tryna fight him and whatnot before you can get to the final cutscene.

Anyway so there are a number of ways you can get a crown for Norton. The way I did it? I literally gave him a turnip. See, in the very first town I got to, there was this hinky-dink little turnip covered in dust. So I pick it up, and shove it in my pocket. Then when I get to the main town on the main map where the whole quest thing takes place, I found this place called the “Silver Plater” (no, not “platter”, “plater”.)

“Ok so you got this turnip, went to this Plater guy, then what?”

Glad you asked. But I would’ve told you regardless. So don’t get too excited.

I had to pay to get this turnip plated in silver.

How much did I pay?

Not 50.

Not 500.

5,000.

5,000 MEAT.

Because they…they use meat as a currency in this game…don’t ask me why, it’s probably because of all the cows they people don’t like. They can kill you for no reason, no wonder the literal killer clown wanted to kill them all.

The sheer amount of gambling I had to do. The amount of cows I had to kill. Bones and bone fragments I had to sell.

JUST TO BE ABLE TO GET ENOUGH MEAT TO PLATE THIS SINGLE TURNIP.

But hey I got it plated so all’s well that ends well, I guess.

Anyway it’s a really fun game, 10/10 would recommend, super cheap, hours of fun.

It’s like a good quality heap of dirt; given the right conditions, it’s a blast. You can do the same thing over and over, and each game is different. It’s awesome.

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eppysboys · 4 years ago

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Why does Pauline Sutcliffe hate Paul? I know you’ve read her book so obviously you would know better than anyone else.

Hi anon! Yep, I definitely combed through her book for every morsel of Stuart information I could get my little hands on. Her memories of him are gems, I appreciate them a lot. Her bias does get in the way at times, and makes it a frustrating to read.

As for why she's not Paul's biggest fan... I can only give my own take on the matter, and it seems to be a combination of things:

Obviously, Paul wasn't particularly nice to her brother. She clearly is baffled by ALL the beatles' treatment of her brother (barring Ringo, of course), but because of the clear closeness and deeper friendship John + Stuart shared and plus the fact he was no longer around, her judgement slightly eases on John, so that when she brings attention to how both Paul and George made jabs at Stu at various points in history, it does seem a bit harsher.

She saw The Beatles at a particular point in history where John seemed the most dominant and tough (because he was trying very hard to be that way) and Paul as a little on the outside. That's certainly coloured her perception of the dynamics in the band and has fed into a 'sidekick Paul' kind of storytelling. George was always very nice to her mother and got along well with the family at the start of things, whereas Paul seemed quite cold and didn't interact with them. He would sit at their piano or read a magazine without talking to them, whereas John and George did make effort to be more friendl with the family.

Business + Legacy: This is probably the most sore point for Pauline, at least from what I gathered. When your brilliant brother who was destined for great things dies suddenly and tragically and the friends (who were not always good friends to him) become cultural icon megastars, it obviously would bring up mixed feelings. (See: Stuart being one of Paolozzi's best students and years later going to Paul McCartney's office to see Paolozzi artwork he now owns on display). Furthermore, when those stars develop a giant brand and tell their story a particular way that involves trashing your brother's skills as a musician and undermines his closeness with the boys and not exactly pay tribute to the numerous ways he influenced the band and contributed to their image...that'd be a little grating.

The Sutcliffe's were close with the Epstein's who also had their beloved son die tragically young and have his image and legacy torn to shreds with seemingly no effort from the band to salvage it or at least pay proper tribute to the guy that would have done anything for them and played a huge role in their success. In the late 90s when Paul appeared in a Brian Epstein documentary that focused primarily on the tragic side of Brian's story, rather than the triumphs or literally any of the positives, and informed the audience that the beatles didn't pay mind to Brian's sexuality when we know they could be quite cruel about it quite often (amongst other things)....well, that's something that could leave a bad taste in your mouth (as Andrew put it so eloquently here). Basically, The Beatles have closets full of skeletons and people they've left behind who weren't treated the best. It's an unfortunate reality of big business. Pauline was good friends with Cynthia as well. So obviously Pauline has seen some shit, and knows exactly what it's like to be left behind and discarded by The Beatles' brand.

An example of how Business has soured Pauline's perception of The Beatles, and ultimately Paul, is the anthology credits. Stuart was credited on the anthology album as playing bass in the background, but lawyers informed Pauline the Stuart Sutcliffe estate would not recieve royalties because they couldn't techinically prove Stuart was actually on the tracks. But obviously Stuart's name added value, so they chose to still list it. Essentially = more money for The Beatles because they don't have to pay roaylities to the estate, just a one off 'fee'. Pauline didn't have the money and resources to go up against Beatle Lawyers to pursue engineers that could prove Stuart was playing bass, and she was warned that she would definitely lose to Beatle Lawyers, and so that was that. She's also had troubles with Yoko's lawyers over work John and Stuart had done collaboratively.

Pauline has obviously been an unreliable source, incredibly biased and has outright lied in print to draw negative attention to John in particular. I don't read her book for insights into Lennon/McCartney, I read her book for insights into Stuart, and what he was like growing up and so on. I think it's unfair and awful that she told her brother's story in some of the ways that she did, and how she handled his estate itself. I think her views on Astrid in particular are quite unfairly bitter. I don't appreciate the way she twists some of the story when it comes to that. And I don't appreciate her publishing information about Astrid clearly without her permission or without proper sources. I still value bits and pieces of her perspective, but I do keep in mind that clearly there's hurt feelings and bitterness, and though she does give Paul credit for lots of things (including his kindness), I can't imagine that her dealings with The Beatles have left her feeling that positively about them at all, and by 2001 Paul and Yoko were the only ones to answer for those things.

I don't think she even hated Paul, tbh, my read of it is that she had a particular view of each Beatle she developed as a teenager + negative experiences with the business side of things.

#asks #Pauline Sutcliffe #The Beatles #hope that helps anon

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keelywolfe · 4 years ago

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FIC: Welcome to Backwater ch.19 (spicyhoney)

Summary: Stretch has been through a lot in his short time in Backwater, but there's always the Dorothy option.

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Read ‘The Dorothy Option’ on AO3

Read it here!

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As much as things changed, they also stayed the same. But they still changed and there wasn’t a damn thing Stretch could do about it. He never could.

After Red cut him loose from the shop for the day, walking across the main street to the movie theater was the same, but the breeze cutting through the sweltering heat was different. A couple days ago, Stretch would have eagerly lifted his face into it, let it dry the sweat rolling from his skull and basked in the cooling effect.

Today it was a reminder that summer was actually ending, and autumn was creeping in one slow step at a time. He’d always liked the fall season since they came to the surface, there was no such thing in the Underground. But now that he knew what was coming with the end of the harvest season, it only made him a little sad. It wouldn’t be too long until the scarecrow pole in all the fields was empty.

Stretch paused outside the theater, looking back towards the shop and past it, to the forest behind it. He was too far away to hear the rustling leaves, still green and vibrant, untouched thus far by the changing season. He could still hear it somehow, like a leftover echo, the memory of that sound loud in his head as he turned back to the theater, the constant chatter of leaves scratching inside his skull.

The sound cut off like a stopped tape recorder as the door swung shut behind him. Igor was right inside, looking a lot like an out of work funeral director in his threadbare suit. He looked up from where he was sweeping dandruffy bits of popcorn into a pile and wordlessly went behind the counter to scoop out two cartons of fresher stuff. The dilapidated marquee over the concession stand had only one title on it. ‘The Wizard of Oz’.

“weren’t you playing this flick just a couple weeks ago?” Stretch asked curiously, handing over a fiver.

“Popular movie around here,” Igor told him, tonelessly. Yeah, okay, movies about Kansas and great farming fields, and wonderous unknown worlds where danger lurked. Wasn’t hard to see how people around Backwater could form a parallel to that, hell, there was probably a shrine to Judy Garland in every house on the street, set up with offerings of corn and tiny water buckets.

He looked down at the popcorn cartons that were sitting on the counter, the smell of fresh melted butter rising, and asked abruptly, “can i get a box of raisinets, too?”

Igor nodded and took back the single bill he’d laid down, the box of candy rattling loudly as he set it on the countertop.

Stretch took it and the popcorn and headed into the theater. What was that about, he wondered. He didn’t even like raisins. Maybe he’d take them back for Red.

The theater was empty, without so much as an abandoned soda cup in the aisles and the floor still swept entirely clean. So much for people loving this movie. Stretch sat down in the far back row with his popcorn and candy to wait.

Right on schedule, the lights went low, the MGM logo came up, and then with a swell of music Kansas appeared in a grainy sepia.

He’d seen the Wizard of Oz before coming to Backwater. The first time he’d seen it, they were still in the Underground and it was hard not to make the odd mental comparisons when they came to the surface. Now that he was here in this town, Stretch related to Dorothy more than ever. A stranger in a strange land, sure, but the scarecrow sidekick was pretty damn specific. Would Edgar Allen even know what the yellow brick road was? He was pretty sure the scarecrow in his life didn’t get out of his fields much, if ever.

Never going anywhere, never really living. He sat out there in fields with corn and crows for company, guardian and prison as one. Stretch wondered if that was as sad as his mind kept trying to make it or was he putting his own pathos on an anthropomorphic personification of a scarecrow. Maybe Edgar Allen was perfectly happy with his lot in life. Hell, maybe he was looking forward to the harvest season and a chance to rest without the corn chattering to him all the time, it was possible.

Thinking that made him feel a little better about the situation and Stretch sank back into his chair and munched on another buttery handful of popcorn.

He was so absorbed in the movie that at first, he didn’t notice the seat next to him was no longer empty. A blood-streaked hand reaching towards the other carton of popcorn was his first clue and Stretch bit back a yelp, soul hammering in his ribcage as he inwardly cursed himself for being so jumpy. Wasn’t like he hadn’t seen this before, loads of times now, it was what he bought the second carton for.

“hey, there,” Stretch said softly to his ghostly companion. “sorry it’s been a few days.”

“That’s all right,” Doris told him, her faint voice barely audible over the strains of ‘We’re off to see the Wizard.

The Tin Man was lamenting his lack of heart by the time Doris spoke again, tentatively and filled with quiet apology. “I’m very sorry, I feel as if I should know your name, but…”

Oh. Stretch closed his sockets briefly. Damn it, Red warned him about this, to not be surprised if she didn’t remember him. He didn’t allow the faint sting of hurt to show. It wasn’t her fault, it was entirely the fault of whoever had blown away part of her head and left her here to haunt a lonely, dilapidated old theater until it was time for her to go wherever ghosts did when they moved on.

Whoever it was that did this to her, stole her life and left her mostly alone in death, Stretch hoped they felt that sin clawing its way up their back long after they went to the hereafter.

“it’s okay, doris,” he said as gently as he could while Judy Garland danced across the screen, “it’s stretch, like a rubber band.”

“Yes! Stretch!” she laughed delightedly. She clapped her gloved hands together like a child. “Yes, that’s it. It was on the tip of my tongue when I saw you brought me popcorn, but I couldn’t quite shake it loose.”

No surprise there, half the time she didn’t have much tongue left.

She leaned in over her carton to take a deep, ghostly breath and twin streamers of blood ran from her nostrils. His appetite for popcorn faded and Stretch fumbled out the box of raisinets. The cheap milk chocolate barely masked the taste of the raisins and he grimaced, chewing gamely even though the texture always made him think of eating bugs. Dirt-flavored bugs in chocolate, who the hell came up with this so-called treat and were they appropriately punished for it. He could only hope.

They sat together in silence, watching the movie, and by the time the trio made it to the Emerald City, Stretch was squirming in his seat. Doris’s appearance broke the distracting spell of the movie and now his thoughts were wandering back to that morning and Edge’s sudden appearance in the store with so much worry on his pale face. Then there was that soft, unexpected kiss, so sweet against his cheekbone, a punctuation mark on the end of a silent paragraph and maybe he needed someone else to give it a read.

“doris, can i ask you something?”

She turned to him, the ruin of her head solidifying into a pretty young woman as she tilted it curiously. “Of course.”

“it’s kinda a long story.”

She folded her gloved hands primly into her lap. “I don’t have anywhere else to be.”

And that was her real tragedy, wasn’t it. She was tied to this crumbling old theater, unable to go where she needed to. He didn’t know what happened to ghosts once the building they were tied to was gone. But this place was on its last legs and if it closed, the cushions of empty seats rotting away and the silver screen silent, where did she go? He hoped it was someplace nice, a place where she could rest and always be beautiful, without bringing along the gory remains of her last minutes of life.

But they were working on his issues right now. “it’s about a guy.”

Doris brightened visibly and literally, going briefly more solid. “That Edge person you were speaking of before? The other skeleton.”

“yeah,” Stretch said, relieved. He hadn’t been sure how to bring up what they’d talked about before without making her feel bad for not remembering. “see, it’s like this—"

Doris sat and listened as he talked, as enthralled as she’d been when watching the movie. It was like last time when he’d came to ask her about Edgar Allen; she never flickered when she gave him the full weight of her attention.

It might be bad for the theater to have so many empty seats in the house, but it was good for people with the bad manners to talk over the movie. Stretch told her everything, didn’t hold back a thing. About meeting Edge in Red’s living room and his attempted lamp-ocide, about their impromptu lunch at Mama’s. About his brief starring role as little orange biking hood when he ventured to their cabin in the woods, about Frisk. The only thing he didn’t mention was the whole ‘me from another universe’ thing. That was a lot for even him to bend his mind around and his was still in one piece. Doris never interrupted, listened all the way to the end, until Stretch was nearly hoarse as he said, "…so what do you think?"

"Hmm. He certainly sounds charming, in a rude sort of way. My, it makes me think of Pride and Prejudice," she laughed softly. "Although your Mister Darcy showed his true nature far sooner in your tale.”

Thinking of Edge’s hips in a pair of those tight old-school trousers while he danced a waltz was not at all helping the situation and Stretch shoved that thought deep into a mental closet for later.

“but what should i do? he confuses me so much i don’t know whether to scratch my watch or wind my butt around him.” He slid down in the chair until his skull was resting on the back. “and then there’s red to think about, he’s done so much for me. he says he’s not worried about his brother, but…” Stretch trailed off and held up his empty hands.

She nodded thoughtfully. “But you don’t want to stir up trouble in their family, especially since it seems they already have some rough waters.”

“yeah,” Stretch agreed, tiredly. He knew something about stormy weather in a sibling relationship. The last thing he wanted to do to Red and Edge was bring in rainclouds of his own.

“I think you should talk to him,” she said at last. “Tell him what you’re feeling. It seems to me he’d listen to you and he wouldn’t…” Doris’s mouth moved but her words faded. Her pretty visage changed gruesomely, a full show of her shattered face and skull, the fragile bits of bone littered across one shoulder while blood filled the ruin of her eye socket.

Stretch swallowed hard and didn’t look away, waiting until she slowly returned to appearance of a lovely young woman who was finishing triumphantly, “…and who knows what will come of it after that!”

Okay, well, half an advice was better than none and he sure wasn’t gonna ask her to repeat herself.

So. Talk to him. Right. Not bad advice, maybe a little generic, but then, Doris didn’t know about his past history when it came to relationships. She also didn’t know that Backwater wasn’t a permanent assignment for him. He wasn’t too sure about bringing that up, not when it affected her, too. Maybe it would be better to let her forget him when he was gone; with her memory, she might not even realize what she was missing aside from the occasional wistful thought about a spare carton of popcorn.

But she wasn’t wrong, either. Much as he wanted to continue skipping through his life of avoidance, there was only one way he was going to get any real answers. Maybe it was time to figure out exactly where he and Edge stood. His sense of balance in life was pretty damn shaky as it was, and Backwater seemed to treat the laws of reality as more like suggestions. Why would the laws of gravity be any different?

Plus, there was another mystery Stretch was looking to unravel and he was already working on a plan for that. He owed some gratitude to a bony skeleton dragon in the woods and Stretch wasn’t keen on owing debts.

Doris folded her hands into her lap primly. “So? What are you going to do?”

“eh,” Stretch let out a little laugh, “something stupid.”

“Oh.” Doris pursed her lips. “Is it safe?”

“nope,” Stretch said cheerfully and poured himself out another handful of chocolate pseudo-bugs. “but i’ve stayed alive so far. may as well press my luck.”

On the screen, Dorothy was repeating her most famous line and he had to agree, there was no place like home. His only problem with it was that he was starting to get a little fuzzy on where exactly that was.

~~*~~

tbc

#spicyhoney #papcest #keelywolfe #underfell #underswap #underfell papyrus #underswap papyrus #welcome to backwater

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starkeaton · 4 years ago

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the adventure zone: graduation character list

Well, i accidentally deleted the original graduation character list post, so here i am making another one. Oops. And as always, if anyone has important details i should add then feel free to suggest them!

Here are all the characters introduced in episodes 1-25. Named characters only!

Also i can’t hide spoilers! So, um..... I can’t put spoilers on this one. If you need the version with spoilers try this version of the post that i made on the adventure zone subreddit but youre not missing out on much.

# -EPISODE 1- (19 characters)

Hieronymous Wiggenstaff (he/him): Head of the Hero/Villain school. at least 400 years old. wears shining blue armor with gold accents. also an elf. according to Tomas, he led the charge at the "battle of blood valley", brought the Kingdoms of Rickart and Dawnbreak to a peace treaty, and founded the school. a little boastful, a little prideful, [SPOILERS OMITTED], and overall a pretty good dude.

Higglemas Wiggenstaff (he/him): Head of the Sidekick/Henchperson annex, cranky old elf. has a dog named hero who shows no signs of anything strange at all, ever.

Gary (he/him): friendly room gargoyle. pseudo-hivemind.

Groundsy (he/him): the groundskeeper. a pretty nice fellow. don't go in his shed.

Hernandez (he/him): beautiful centaur professor of animal handling.

Jimson (he/him): human battlegrounds trainer for sidekicks/henchpeople, world famous featherweight champion, wields a staff. married to crushman.

Crushman (he/him): silver dragonborn with a sickle, and self-described beefy boy! heavyweight blood champion married to jimson. never lost a match for 8 years. full name Frostus Crushman.

Rolandus Fontaine (he/him): former prince, son of deposed king, kind of an asshole, maybe. wears a cape (important detail)

Zana (she/her): "terrifying" tiefling villain sorcerer, friend of rolandus. barkept the test tavern in ep2

Rhodes (she/her): hero ranger, friend of rolandus.

Buckminster Eden (he/him): hero guy. son of "The Iron Lord". their dad is stronger than rolandus's dad. his wiki page says rogue so i think hes a rogue? i never caught that and ive listened more times than i wish i did

Leon (he/him): softspoken buff, bald "fighter" (although i dont remember any clarification on how exactly he fights), sidekick of buckminster, around 28. anyone else keep forgetting he's bald? i keep forgetting it. >!gets sorta-drafted into becoming a falcon for higglemas and so far hasn't done much else.!<

Rainer Michelle (she/her): cheerful villainous necromancer with a floating chair. also, her name is pronounced "rainier" despite not being confirmed as such? travis ships her with fitzroy.

Tomas (he/him): human man with "kind eyes" and a good (psychic???) memory. guidance counselor.

Stewart LeBoeuf (he/him): brawny human man. serves food. there is no joke here, i promise

Mulligan (he/him): teaches potions. mentioned but doesn't appear yet. and we're like 25 episodes in. maybe we'll see him someday

Germaine, Victoria, Rattles (he/him,she/her,???/???): Skeleton crew. They live in the training room i guess, and as a result can never die, because "no one dies in the training room!" (note: someone now HAS to die in the training room). also their races are never explicitly stated but i guess they're probably human? in episode 3 travis brings up something about how many bones are in "the human body" and at this point i think i'm looking too deep into this so i'll just forget about it and you probably should too.

# -EPISODE 2- (9 characters)

Riveau (he/him): halfling, blame-taking teacher.

Mimi (they/them): gnome sidekick who builds cool robot prosthetics

Bartholemus (he/him): owl aarakocra accountant teacher, known for being the best accountant in the land and having a face some might describe as "smoochable". very pro capitalist :’( hope he gets better

Ramos (she/her): goliath teacher of shieldwork. *

Dip (she/her): sidekick, half-orc twin of pip

Pip (she/her): hero, half-orc twin of dip

Festo (they/them): fairy with "beautiful gossamer wings", independent study teacher of magic, loves to party

Snippers (he/him?): Let me tell you my story about Snippers the magic crab. When Travis gave the list of animals that Griffin could choose as Fitzroy's familiar's current form, he listed crab near the start, and this gave me excitement. Now i knew that crab was pretty unlikely but god i hoped that he would choose it. When the list went on- Bat, Cat, Crab, Frog, Hawk, Lizard, Owl, Poisonous Snake, Fish, Rat, Raven, Seahorse, Spider or Weasel- I nearly lost hope. I was hoping so hard that Griffin would choose the crab, but i was ready to accept a non-crab familiar. It was just buried in that list. It wasn't the most useful animal and it was an obscure pick. And as Travis informed him that it didn't have to keep the form for the whole campaign, Griffin said those five words i wanted to hear so, so badly. "Well then it's a crab." Folks, I do not often react physically when something happens in media. But in that moment, i remember very clearly, i fist-pumped and yelled, "YES!!!!!!"

so anyway, Fitzroy has a crab.

Jackle (he/him): kenku teacher of sneakery. creepy dude. apparently knows something about argo? also his name is not spelled "jackal" for some reason. Also in later episodes theyve started calling him "The Jackle" for some reason??? *

# -EPISODE 3- (1 character)

Dakota (they/them): tavern instructor, clad in black/red leather. no race stated? probably human. *

# -EPISODE 4- (6 characters)

Gerry & Tom (she/her, he/him): shopkeepers at barns and nobles who seem to have very bad names. also constantly competing for customers? these guys got dropped faster than the heathcliff quests, which is honestly just sad.

Barb (she/her): the bartender. runs Springs Eternal in Last Hope. has a sweet seeing-eye hawk familiar.

Jaryd Reginald (he/him): owner of Reginald Ore. Wants the workers to be held responsible for the damage caused by the xorn. (fun fact: originally i wrote down "Jerrod" because i wanted it to sound like a fantasy name, then realized it was probably "Jared" because theyre named after listeners, but i was pleased to find it confirmed that it's actually "Jaryd")

Candice (she/her): A Miner. thought those werent allowed in bars but, i guess not. Wants the mine owner to be held responsible for the xorn's damage.

Jade Johnson Esq. (she/her): lawyer.

# -EPISODE 5- (1 character)

Xorn: a big hungry gem eating guy from the plane of earth Low-Down Deep with 3 arms and 3 legs. why did travis just say "multi-armed" instead of specifying it was 3? who knows! Anyway it leaves

# -EPISODE 6- (3 characters)

Osric (he/him): the man, the myth, the bursar. finally shows up after being mentioned in episodes 2 and 4. he's an elf.

breeze through the willows (she/her): Pegasus attacked by demons, lost her parents. introduced in ep1 but gets a name here so fuck it. also in ep>!16!< we find out shes a "white arabian pegasus" and i dont think thats a spoiler bc we shouldve really known it from the beginning

Sabor (he/him): Librarian/research teacher. also a TORTLE. Really good at recalling stuff, i guess. kinda reminds me of Tomas's memory thing but i'm sure that's just a coincidence... *

# -EPISODE 7- (1 character)

Mosh (he/him): The goliath blacksmith who welcomes argo into the unbroken chain. Also, and this is specific to the tumblr version of this post, all the characters with an * at the end of their descriptions are also members of the unbroken chain. if someone knows how to do spoilers on tumblr please tell me

# -EPISODE 8-

# -EPISODE 9- (2 characters)

Eeiïäá#æ&éñn (pronounced like "Ian") (he/him?): an imp but without a shitty voice. also happens to not be violent. what a coincidence?

Terence (he/him): a chain devil with a real demonic name. minor boss of the imps. very convincing and very threatening. has the frightening ability to make you zone out during his fight

# -EPISODE 10- (2 characters)

Althea Song (she/her): elf with autumn-orange hair. representative from heroic oversight guild. i'd like to personally thank travis for spelling her name out.

Crabtree (she/her): Artificing teacher. Long gray hair with a long grey beard. no mentioned race, one might guess dwarf but that would be an assumption i suppose. also unbroken chain member, presumably the dwarf argo didn't recognize in episode 7.

# -EPISODE 11- (3 characters)

Marie (she/her): Grey-haired elf woman. She's the school's physician, i guess. Member of the unbroken chain.

Dendra Maplecourt (she/her): Fitzroy's mom. Has hot mint gum, i guess. She was mentioned earlier but i wasn't convinced she was a real person until this episode

Cool Gary (he/him): AYY ITS ME GARYR

# -EPISODE 12-

no new characters again!

# -EPISODE 13- (7 characters hhhyyyuu)

Kale (???/???): Head of the Placement Department, in charge of real world assignments. First mentioned in Ep4 but i missed that the last few times bc it is so brief. Gives exposition about missions i guess????? is that the only reason this chara cter exists

satyr thief (unnamed) (he/him): tries to rob thundermen, dies instantly

Ogre (he/him): teamed up with the satyr. his name is ogre.

Moon (he/him): A Sidekick. small pale sullen guy. no mentioned race. Why is there another FUCKING sidekick WE HAD ENOUGH hhhyuuuuuu

Deanna (she/her): A bigoted centaur with an obnoxious voice. Malwin the Strong's second in command.

Malwin the Strong (she/her): Leader of the centaurs of the scarlet woods. Wants to appease the spirit of the scarlet woods so that thecentaurs of the scarlet woods will be protected in the scarlet woods. Had a relationship with Arturas in the past but their clashes are currently known to get pretty heated.

Arturas (he/him): Leader of the Centaurs of the Valley, i guess. Had a relationship with Malwin. Centaur. Did i mention centaur? i cant think of anything else about this character

# -EPISODE 14- (2 characters)

Calhain (he/him): Human wizard, Malwin's magical advisor. Kind of an amateur wizard in a job high above his skill level. Graduated Wigginstaff's as a hero.

Spirit of the Scarlet Woods: A spirit who requires sacrifice in order to keep Malwin's herd safe and prosperous. Not keen on dubiously canonical combos, i guess. i wouldnt be either. also apparently the sacrifice depends on personal value, not how much value it has to the spirit.

# -EPISODE 15- (2 characters)

Sylvia Nite (she/her): Fitzroy's magic theory teacher at knight night school, who he turned into a catfish by accident. oops!

Chaos (they/them, maybe more): Presumably a deity, gave Fitz his powers and wants him to give in to his chaotic desires. (physical desc: 9 foot tall, iridescent 'mother of pearl' skin, pure white eyes, fine burgundy cloak with gold/onyx lining. their physical form beyond that seems to change every time they show up.)

# -EPISODE 16-

none -w-

# -EPISODE 17-

some demins happened. the big dudes are called "Pit Fiends" and the armored demon ladies are called "Erinyes", by the way. that was incredibly hard for me to figure out the first time, especially without headphones, i thought travis was saying "pig feet" and i just could not discern what the other things were

# -EPISODE 18- (6 characters)

snow on the mountain: shire horse pegasus

storm at sea: peruvian paso pegasus, vehement defender of The Guardian. doesn't have a goofy voice.. but he could have....

thaw of the spring: a winged horse

night of no clouds: a winged hhorse

The Guardian: "An ancient and powerful being that guards the unknown forest." Has protected the flock from demons for many many years. apparently is the voice that was talking to our firbolg in episode 1?

Grey, the Demon Prince (he/him): wants to cause a war, originally wanted to kill hiero and higgs, forces the heroes to build an army to fight his. As "Fauxronimous", he has skin the *color and pattern of* (but not necessarily made of) slate splashed with liquid, pointed ears, sharp teeth, shining eyes, horns of unspecified shape. 12 fucking feet tall. wonder if the slate-looking skin is related to garys. plot twist detected? Also i recently looked at the episode descriptions and found out his name is spelled "Gray", but really does it truly matter?

# -EPISODE 19- (2 characters)

Shabree Keene (she/her): Argo's mom, killed on the Mariah, possibly by the Commodore. Long auburn hair, green eyes. Mentioned earlier but described here, so fuck it.

**Thomas** (he/him): Argo's first mate on the Mariah, as the Kraken, in his chaos-dream. may or may not actually exist.

# -EPISODE 20- (1 character)

The Commodore (he/him): Reknowned hero of the seas, military regalia, great naval hero, presumably responsible for the death of Shabree Keene. No mentioned race. Seriously, they never mention this guy's race. The only thing described about him is how he's dressed and his evil smile. Does that mean he's human? Elf? Dwarf??? Who knows! maybe it just doesnt matter.

# -EPISODE 21-

none

# -EPISODE 22-

not any of them. not any.

# -EPISODE 23- (1 character)

Ozymondelius (sp???) (it/its): A warforged teacher who just so happens to like war or something? i guess its in the name. only mentioned in this episode, doesnt show up yet.

# -EPISODE 24-

they have a fight in the training room but nobody dies :\\ maybe next time. also no new characters. pog

# -EPISODE 25- (4 characters)

Gherkin (he/him): Tall lankier skeleton, has a scimitar and a merkin, which is a pubic wig... and he wears a jerkin? which i guess is a kind of coat? also i think hes mute

Tibia (she/her?) : Shorter skeleton with gold teeth, and long canines. i think both of the skeletons are mute actually.

The Lich King aka Gordy (he/him): Rainer's dad. Commands armies of the undead. lives in The Crypt. described as a hooded, skull-faced man with intricate black lines on his face, but changes to a shaved-head man with dark skin and vetiligo. Abandoned as a babby, raised by traveling parents, had necromancy powers, took Rainier in. Not actually very scary at all i don't know why he did the creepy laugh. Kind of a warm fatherly figure actually. hm. also people are speculating Gordy might be short for Gordita and his parents are maybe supposed to be lup and barry but THAT S JUST A THEORY.

our firbolg's father (he/him): A firbolg who lived by the code and was there when our firbolg was banished. Came to respect our firbolg's interest in a new way of life, in his final moments.

TOTAL: 72 NPCS! (well, including 2 extra PCs, i guess.)

Average: 2.88 NPCs per episode.

i was gonna not include the bone-PCs and have it be 69 but our firbolg's dad was just too important to not respect with a spot on the list.

anyway as always make sure to smack me with a blunt object if i forgot any characters!!!!!

#the adventure zone #taz #taz: graduation #taz g #sir fitzroy maplecourt #argonaut keene #taz firbolg #i dunno what else to tag this with #text post #keatposting

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ohsweetflips · 5 years ago

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maybe i’m my own greatest fear (a taz grad/fitzrain fic)

A/N: i'm still trying to get the grasp of writing taz grad fic, but after episode 6 i couldn't not fic this. also my brain just keeps bouncing back and forth between loving fitzroy/argo and fitzroy/rainer so i guess i multiship now!!! reblogs are greatly appreciated!!!

also title from sorority noise’s “art school wannabe”

summary:

“This promotion? Great, wonderful! A villain? Not so good.”

“And… why?”

“Because I’m not one of the bad guys?”

(Fitzroy goes to Rainer's dorm to talk about his "new assignment" and instead realizes that he can't avoid talking about his feelings and fears any longer.)

read on ao3!!!

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

Rainer’s dorm was charmingly her. It was in the space between messy and tidy; the floor was spotless and the bed made, but stacks of books and jewelry and papers (and maybe a small skeleton or two, though he was never actively looking for those) covered the surface of every desk and dresser. The door off to the side, which was to remain locked until Rainer chose her permanent hench, was covered in posters and drawings tactfully placed, and a lone calendar filled to the brim in a quill she charmed to write in whatever glittery color she desired.

Very charmingly her.

Fitzroy had rarely been here long enough to actually pay her decorum any mind. Most of the time they had alone was spent on the outskirts of campus, or in the minutes they had between classes; more often than not, them “hanging out” involved at least three other people venturing to a much more crowded place.

Still, though, he couldn’t quite stop his feet from walking to her dorm. Rainer had no roommate, no hench, and, well… Hieronymous told him to keep his program change a secret, but when has he ever been able to keep a secret, anyway?

“I half expected you to already be at the tavern,” Rainer was saying, her back to him as she sorted through one of her notebooks (probably looking for the report she’d have to write on their field experience, or more so a report on how promising the kicks and henches seemed). “Maybe even bickering with Argo over who’s paying for drinks.”

She looked around the high-back of her chair and shot him a smile.

“Please, Rainer,” he said, hoping that his smirk and posture maintained his poise and not the thoughts that were racing through his head. “I’m enough of a gentleman to know to pay for my friends’ drinks.”

“I know you are,” Rainer said, softly, and Fitzroy was thankful that it was then that she turned back to her desk so she wouldn’t have to see the red rising in his face.

Of all he expected to find at Wiggenstaff, he didn’t expect Rainer.

Or, more so, of how much he expected to detest Wiggenstaff, he didn’t expect to find someone who gave him a reason to consider sticking around. He had Argo and the Firbolg, of course, and he appreciated his friends (perhaps even best friends, though Fitzroy hadn’t had any prior experience with that level of friendship), but what he had with Rainer was… different.

Which only made everything more complicated, because of course it did.

“I actually came here to talk to you,” he continued, looking up at the small lights she had hanging with the tapestry around her bed.

Rainer snorted. “No, really? I thought you came to talk to Gary.”

Fitzroy rolled his eyes, barely trying to hold back a smile, and was about to make some witty quip about Rainer’s own when he was interrupted with a, “Hey! Rainer! See you’ve got guests up ‘ere!”

Both their eyes flashed to the now-animated gargoyle in the corner of Rainer’s room, and Fitzroy suddenly felt like he was trapped in a tank at the reminder that not only were the Garys listening, but also a hivemind . That shared information. Information that could be private.

“Yeah, Gary, it’s-”

“Is there a way that he could actually be turned off?” Fitzroy asked, thankful that his voice remained level. “Apologies for the interruption but this is, well-” He swallowed, forced a smile “-this is kind of important.”

Rainer, spinning around to face him, arched an eyebrow before, with a flick of her wrist, a small, nearly-translucent bubble formed around the Gary.

“Silence,” she explained. “My Gary isn’t a nark so it’s probably fine.”

“Perfect,” Fitzroy nodded, allowing himself a relaxed grin.

“And I’ll admit, Fitz-” and she tapped her fingers against the arm of her chair “-You’ve got me kinda nervous here.”

“Well, no, you see- it’s fine, really.��

“That’s a lot of filler words for fine.” Still, she smiled and cocked her head.

“A lot of filler words for great, actually!” Fitzroy assured, to her and himself. “I’ve actually moved up in the so-called hierarchy here! Our dear Headmaster wants to put me into the hero-villain tract!”

Rainer’s glee was almost enough to make Fitzroy think that perhaps this wasn’t the complete end of everything. “Fitz, that’s amazing!” she exclaimed, moving her chair closer in so that she could tightly grab his hands. “We can all have classes together! You and me and Buck and Rolandus and his crew—don’t worry, they’re really all super nice—it’ll be so much fun!” She then furrowed her brows, suddenly serious, and, if possible, she squeezed his hands tighter. “What about Bud and Argo, though? Where are they going?”

“Oh, they’ll be fine,” he said, smiling. “They’ll be coming with me! As my- well, we all have to talk soon, but I assume they’ll be by my side.”

“Oh, like sidekicks!”

Fitzroy then sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth, grimacing. “And that , my dear, is when things start to get a little complicated.”

“What do you mean?” Rainer asked, frowning. “Don’t tell me- they’re not leaving, are-”

“Oh, no!” Fitzroy shook his head quickly. “No, not at all. They’ll be coming with me, but as… Well, you see, when good ole’ Hieronymous bumped me up, he didn’t… bump me up to being a hero.”

“Oh, so you’re a villain!”

Fitzroy was proud of himself for holding back a flinch. “Apparently so.”

“Oh, Fitz! That’s so cool! It’s honestly really fun. A lot of the professors are actually super cool, which is nice because some of the content , oh boy, and-”

Fitzroy worried his bottom lip, trying to hold back the nerves and… aggravation that bubbled up in him. “But-” he interrupted “-but do you see the… issue… here?”

Rainer paused, studying him for a moment. “No?” she finally responded, equal parts confused and suspicious.

“This promotion? Great, wonderful! A villain? Not so good.”

“And… why?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Because I’m not one of the bad guys?”

Rainer froze for a moment and, while she gaped at him and then over at the stacks of textbooks and notebooks, it was then that Fitzroy realized that, perhaps, he fucked up.

Dropping his hands right back into his lap, she huffed and moved herself back. “Wow, Fitz, super cool.”

“Rainer, wait,” he sighed. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?” She asked, annoyance coloring her own voice. “Because, honestly, if you think I’m a bad guy-”

“No, it’s-” Fitzroy found himself fumbling for words as his eyes darted around Rainer’s dorm to focus on anything but the scowl on her face “-it’s not that.”

“Then what?”

“It’s just-” An exasperated sigh left him again and, in resignation, he threw his hands up “-the villains are the ones we fight against!”

She narrowed her eyes. “Who’s we? ”

“The Maplecourts!” he exclaimed. Once, simply stating the family name would make one think of knighthood. “We’re- we’re a long line of knights who are trained to fight evil and that is what I am meant to do!”

“Okay.” Rainer pinched the bridge of her nose, shutting her eyes tight. “You know equating villains with evil is pretty archaic, right? Like, there are heroes who are capital-E evil who just, I don’t know, fudged the budget, and then there are heroes who are capital-E evil because they actually did some really bad stuff. Like, I know that you know that.”

His head fell back as he huffed again. “You’re not getting it.”

“No, I’m really not!”

Looking back down at her, he shook his head. “I can’t be a villain!”

“Why? Villains aren’t automatically bad people!”

“I know! It’s just- the Maplecourts- we’re knights! ”

It was Rainer’s own turn now to throw her hands up. “You can still be a knight!”

“But not really! ” He snapped, his temper beginning to creep through as he struggled to restrain his volume.

“Why, Fitzroy? Why?”

“Because- because everyone expects me to be a knight so that’s what I need to do and-”

“Enough about everyone else!” Rainer snapped back. “I don’t care about everyone else! Only you! So, what do you think, Fitzroy? Why is this an issue for you? ”

“I’m terrified that this is all a mistake!” Fitzroy finally rushed out, unable to find it in him to care that he was near shouting. “I’m terrified that my time here is just derailing the future that I’m supposed to be taking! And- And this place isn’t the worst, okay? Argo and the Firbolg are my best friends and I love you but I am also so scared that I’m going to get out of here and there’s going to be nothing left for me! My family isn’t going to want a villain, Clyde’s Knight School isn’t going to want a knight who fought against the good that they strive to maintain, and- honestly, it felt like this school didn’t want me either! I just don’t want to keep going from nothing to nothing while everyone else gets to have the lives they all fucking hoped and dreamed for!”

Fitzroy, his breathing almost as shaky as his hands, looked pointedly away from Rainer. He blinked quickly, trying not to pay too much attention to how his eyes burned and, instead, tried to take down his anger—at Rainer for seeing through him, at himself for letting his temper burst out—before his magic decided to go wild.

He could already feel it thrumming through his veins, hot and chaotic, and the last thing he wanted was to destroy anything else.

He really didn’t like fighting with Rainer.

Suddenly exhausted, with every bone in his body weighing a ton, he let his head drop in his hands and roughly pressed his thumbs into his temples.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice much quieter now. “It’s just-”

He was interrupted by a hand rubbing gentle circles on his back, and he looked up to find Rainer sitting next to him. Quickly, he ducked his head back down. Rainer didn’t deserve to see him like this: a small, scared animal lashing out in a final act of defense.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, quiet and, in his knightly opinion, pathetically fragile.

“It’s okay to be scared,” Rainer said, her hand finding its place of rest on his shoulder. “It’s okay to feel lost, even. But also… don’t run away from opportunities just because they scare you. That’s not you.”

He let out a weak laugh and finally picked his head up, flashing her whatever he could muster of a smile. “It’s pathetic though, isn’t it? I’m trained to be at the front-line in battle and I’m- I’m losing my cool because of academics .”

“Don’t just dismiss yourself like that,” she sighed. “It’s not pathetic, and obviously you’re upset over more than just some classes.”

“I just…” He released a breath, shoulders sagging. “Not to be incredibly dramatic, but it feels like my life keeps falling to pieces.”

“And I wish there was something I could do.”

He smiled slightly and rested a hand on her knee. “You don’t have to go through that trouble for me.”

“Maybe not.” Rainer shrugged. “But I want to.”

Fitzroy swallowed around the sudden lump in his throat.

“I think… I think you’re going to be okay,” Rainer continued. “I think things are going to be normal again, and I think you’re gonna like the new program-” Her voice then quieted “-Plus, being a villain isn’t so bad.”

The heat of shame rushed to his face and, trying to find the right thing to say to make up for that , he shook his head.

“I shouldn’t have said any of that to you,” he whispered.

Rainer shrugged with a half-hearted smile. “It’s okay.”

“No-” Fitzroy shook his head again, taking her hands “-it really isn’t.”

Rainer looked away for a moment, worrying her bottom lip. “I… well, okay, yeah, the whole villain comment hurt, but it’s- it’s fine.”

“But it really, really wasn’t okay,” he said, catching Rainer’s eye. “That was a major asshole move of me. You… you are nowhere near a bad person, Rainer. Not only are you a great person, a good person, you… you’re one of the best.” She smiled, a true one this time, and Fitzroy gently cupped her cheek. “It was unfair of me to… to generalize and take my frustrations out on you. And I- I really am sorry.”

“It’s okay, really,” Rainer said, placing her hand over his. “You’re forgiven.”

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

A smirk dashed across her face. “You just might have to retake a class or two on chivalry.”

He gave her a smile. “A small price to pay.”

Rainer’s smirk turned into a smile as well and, for just a moment, she studied him. “Are you going to be happy here, Fitzroy?”

He faltered.

If he had been asked that at orientation, the answer would have been short and simple: absolutely not. Happy? At Wiggenstaff’s when he was just attending Clyde Nite’s Night Knight School? How could he be?

Now, though, the answer wasn’t so easy.

“I want to be,” he finally said, sighing. “And, push comes to shove, I really do like it here. I have you, and I have our friends. It’s just… I want to be happy. But-” he scratched the back of his neck “-I think it’s obvious I have some stuff I need to work on. Nothing the school can fix… Honestly, I should be grateful to have this offer. It’s just… me-stuff, you know?”

Rainer nodded. “And we’ll be here to help you out. We all want you here, love you being here. I love you, Fitz. And I think you should take this opportunity. I know it’s not what you expected, but it can still get you a foot in the door. And… I’m not gonna pry, and I don’t know what I can do to help with all the family stuff and the Clyde’s Knight school stuff but… I think they would all just want you to be happy. Want you to do what you want to do. And if that’s being a knight, great! But if you end up doing something else and loving it? Then they should love that for you.” She then leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “And… if anything, we’re your family, too. And we’ve got your back.”

Fitzroy smiled, and found himself very lucky to have Rainer in his corner. “I love you, too,” he said. “And I’ll do better next time at… actually talking instead of skirting around it.”

Rainer smiled, too. “I think you’ll be okay.”

“I’ll do it for you,” he said before leaning in and giving her a kiss. His hand rested gently at her hip, one of hers ghosting over the back of his neck and, when they pulled apart, he smiled. “You and a good grade, of course. As a villain, I probably have to do a lot of talking, right? Gotta freshen up on my monologuing.”

Rainer rolled her eyes with a laugh. “ So much monologuing. And you gotta do it with a hero, too. Buck’s the worst to do it with. He’ll do a monologue while you’re monologuing to try to out-monologue your monologue.”

“Well, I’ll just have to talk really loud, I guess,” he said, laughing, too.

“I think you’ll do fine.” Rainer smiled. “I think you’ll do good. Do well … and some good, too.”

Fitzroy took her hands back in his own. “Not as good as you.”

“Who would’ve known that you were such a sap?”

“Don’t tell anyone,” he said with a wink. “I have a reputation.”

Rainer smirked. “You once lost an arm-wrestling contest with a hologram.”

He scoffed. “That was supposed to be a secret .”

“That you told everyone!” Rainer laughed before leaning forward and kissing him again. “But I can actually keep a secret, so you’re fine.”

“Your confidence is greatly appreciated,” he said, “Oh, and! I was not supposed to tell anyone that I’m a villain now, either, so keep this on the DL as well.”

“Fitz!”

“But hey! Now that we’re gonna have classes together, we can pass fun, secret notes to each other! Dish the goss and share secrets!”

“We already do that!”

“Yeah but now we can be super sneaky about it!”

Rainer, shoving his shoulder, laughed. “I swear, if you make my GPA drop-”

“I would never!”

“I already have to deal with Buck trying to talk to me all the time! And sometimes Rolandus, too, when he’s feeling particularly fight-y… with Buck. So-” She jutted a finger at him “-I have my eye on you, Maplecourt.”

He winked at her. “I know you do.”

Rainer stared at him, shaking her head, though she was only able to hold off a smile for so long. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Love you, too,” Fitzroy said, pressing a kiss to her forehead before standing. “Well, I guess I have some roommates I need to, ah, break this news to.”

“Good luck,” she said, smiling up at him.

“Much appreciated,” he said.

With his hand on the doorknob, he gave Rainer one final smile over his shoulder. “See you around, my lovely partner in crime.”

Rainer grinned. “Try not to get into too much trouble,” she said, shooting him a wink.

“I’ll try my best,” he said with a soft laugh before stepping out of her dorm.

#taz graduation #fitzrain #sir fitzroy maplecourt #rainer michelle #taz rainer #i had a lot of fun w/ this fic but im also real nervous to post it lmao #stuff i write

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hermitcraftheadcanons · 5 years ago

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Hello Internet, welcome to GAME THEORY, where instead of putting a joke here I want to ask you a question. It's time to talk UNDERTALE.

Now I don't think I've ever gotten this many requests to cover a theory, (no requests times no requests is still no requests.) Anyway, across my tumblr dashboard, NO ONE has asked for this. And honestly, I'm disappointed. True loyal theorists will know that Undertale is my favorite game of all time.

Undertale is a game where every character, from goat mom to grind fodder has a sympathetic design and a unique personality, motivations, goals, fears. Whether you're saving or slaughtering them, the game makes you feel something every time you enter an encounter. But to me, one character stood out amongst all the rest. SANS. A skeleton named after the font, Comic Sans. ANYWAYS, Sans is, well, there's a lot of mystery around this guy. And before we get into it, let me put up a very special spoiler warning: UNDERTALE is a game best experienced blind. So if you haven't played it, pause your reading of this and come back after you've finished. I PROMISE YOU, I PROMISE you won't regret it. Alright, so everyone out of the pool and ready for the adult swim? Good. Because I'm feeling pretty determined to get to the bottom of Sans' mystery. So just to recap for those of you who haven't played the game and ignored the SPOILER WARNING, or just need a refresher, Sans is one of the two skeletal brothers who appears in the game. His partner is Papyrus, a loud, goofy trap lover also named after a font. But in the world of Undertale their origins are a big question mark. All you really know is what's given to us by a shopkeeper in Snowdin, who explains that Sans and Papyrus, quote, “just showed up one day and asserted themselves.” Weird, right? What's more is that, well, Papyrus is just kinda the goofy sidekick. Sans is much more complex.

He likes fart jokes, but he's also incredibly powerful and deadly serious. Not only is his boss battle the hardest in the game, he's one of the only characters who has knowledge and power over space and time. He can take shortcuts around the world through ridiculous routes. Even is walking through walls. He also acknowledges that he's only one of infinite versions of himself, making self-aware commentary of the various timelines that you've played through in the game. He can even count the number of times he's killed you. He acts like an arbiter of this world, passing out judgements on the player's actions in the game, even explaining the secrets of EXP and LOVE, or EXECUTION POINTS and LEVELS OF VIOLENCE, just to clarify. In short, he just doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the world of monsters. But then, what, or who, is he? Well, the idea that he doesn't belong in the underworld seems to be correct.

The evidence seems to point to the fact that he WAS, in fact, formerly a surface dweller. In the true pacifist ending of the game, as the group looks out onto the horizon, Papyrus asks Sans about the giant ball in the sky. Sans says, quote, “we call that the sun.” This is important because A, the usage of the word WE, and knowledge of the sun shows that Sans has a kinship or knowledge with other humans, and B, that despite he and Papyrus both being skeletons, or, supposedly, brothers, and apparently appeared in underworld at the same time, they CLEARLY have two very different histories. Why would Papyrus not know the name of the sun but Sans would?

We get further clues to Sans' origins as we hear him say multiple times he wants to "go home" or "go back." He says as much during his dinner date scene at the Mettaton hotel. He notices that the player wants to go home and says, quote, "I know the feeling." He then continues, "maybe sometimes it's better to take what's given to you." As though he ended up in the underworld by accident. AND in a genocide run during his boss fight he says, quote, "look, I gave up trying to go back a long time ago." End quote. And before you say he means going back to the surface world, that's clearly not the full story. His very next line of dialogue is, "and getting to the surface doesn't really appeal anymore either." Key word here is “EITHER.” Yes, he seems to hail from the surface and wants to go back, but based on his dialogue he no longer considers it his home. It's as though the surface world he once knew is gone, as though he's from a different time. It's pretty intriguing. So we're left with a being that appeared out of nowhere, presumably from being from the human surface, but from a different time period, who seemingly has the power to teleport. That's a lot of questions and not a lot of answers.

But here's where things get REALLY interesting. Sans has a hidden workshop that takes a fair amount of searching to find. You could say it takes a lot of DETERMINATION to unlock. Anyways, obligatory determination references aside, as you start to look for this easter egg Sans gives you a key to his room and says "it's time you learn the truth." After some searching you find the workshop which contains items that leave even more questions. A photo album featuring Sans and a bunch of smiling people you don't recognize, a badge, blueprints with illegible handwriting, and a broken machine hidden behind a curtain. In the latest update, one more detail was added. A hand-drawn picture of 3 smiling faces with the words “don't forget.”

So, what does it all mean? Well a lot of Undertale theorists have been linking these details to a feature to a character named W.D Gaster. A ghostly character who never truly appears in the game. Honestly, covering him is a theory all unto itself, and probably one best saved for another day. Even still, none of the Gaster theories I've seen have been able to explain all the details. In particular, the photo album, and the badge. And that's what kept nagging me as I researched Undertale. A badge? That one in particular really stuck out to me. Why would such an oddly specific item to be hidden in the huge easter egg of a room? Something that supposedly reveals the truth about Sans? Badges just aren't important in Undertale. Then it hit me. What if this badge isn't from Undertale? What if this badge is from a completely different series? And was, in fact, the most important badge in the history of gaming? One of the Iskall patreon badges.

Now, for those of you wondering what I'm talking about, the Iskall Patreon Badges are a pivotal item from Iskall’s patreon. You know, the one on Hermitcraft. Anyway, the Iskall Patreon Badges are a really important part of Iskall’s character. So I asked myself; what if the badge in Sans' drawer was ONE OF THOSE EXACT badges? Well first off, it made Undertale connected to my favorite youtuber, thereby making it even COOLER, but that's still a pretty big logical leap. I needed more. Let me tell you, as I started looking, more and more pieces started to fit into place.

In Hermitcraft Season 6, there are three Architechs. (This was before Stress joined in season 7.) These 3 were Iskall, Grian and MumboJumbo. And what does Sans happen to have in his other drawer? A photo album with pictures of Sans with people you don't recognize. Of course you don't know them, they're not characters present in Undertale. And note the word that's used here, PEOPLE you don't recognize. Not underworld monsters. So that's 2 items oddly linked to the Hermitcraft series.

But then, how do the blueprints and broken machine fit in? Well, in the final stretch of Hermitcraft, Iskall is the only one who hasn’t died since the Demise game, so he sells his own body to the highest bidder. Except, it comes with a cost. Everyone is poor. As a result, and with the help of ImpulseSV, the Architechs (minus Mumbo,) are forced to finally kill Iskall, ending his streak since the beginning of demise. I watched this episode in 2020 and I'm not ashamed to admit that when I first saw this scene, I cried. It's DEVASTATING.

Iskall says goodbye to his friends, his co-workers, this character you've grown to love and care about is suddenly promising to sacrifice his life. For all he knows, there is no possibility of him being able to come back after his Demise. It's this incredibly dark departure in the final moments of what was otherwise a fun, quirky, and colorful Season 6.

So what does all of this have to do with Undertale? A LOT, actually. But the first thing you need to know is that the hermits are known for their, let's say, unique written linguistic style.

That would explain the illegible handwriting on the blueprints. And the machine? I think a broken infinity portal is behind that curtain. Now that may seem like a stretch, but it actually explains a lot.

If Sans wound up in Undertale via whacky infinity portal hyjinx, it could provide a reason for why he's a skeleton. He used the machine as organic matter and suffered the consequences. Not killing him, but turning at least a part of him into a pile of bones. That could also explain why Sans has given up hope for going home. Remember the infinity portal is a time machine. By being in the underworld, he's not only in a different place, but based on how he talks, he's also in a different time, with no hope of travelling back to the time he came from. This could theoretically happen. It turned Scar into a wizard and completely disintegrated Welsknight, so the rules are… Flimsy at best.

But the crossovers between Hermitcraft and Undertale continue. In Grian’s episode, (EDIT IN TIMESTAMP) he mentions he’s amazed that Iskall only escaped his demise with a lost arm. He says Iskall had “a lot of determination to not die for real,” and that he’s going to continue to study this. Seems awfully similar to the same experiments happening in Undertale around the trait of determination, no? Especially since so much has shown that Sans was a key player in those experiments.

But I'm sure you also want physical evidence right? Well don't worry, because I have plenty. Take a look at Iskall and Sans side by side. Iskall’s left eye is replaced with a diamond loupe. Sans’ left eye glows blue when he’s mad. Both have extremely chill yet are known for their jokes and, dare I say, laugh.

In short, we have some incredibly strong proof that the Hermitcraft Cinematic Universe, (HCU) is somehow connected to the Undertale world, which brings us back to our initial question, WHO IS SANS?

Well, what if we took it one final step and said that Sans happened to be Iskall from Hermitcraft? Sent through the Infinity Portal at the end of season 6 to go to Season 7, carrying an Iskall Patreon Badge and his photo album. Not only do all the items in the workshop suddenly fit, but so does Sans’ behavior.

Remember, Sans can seemingly travel extremely quickly. And Iskall just happens to have an elytra, a device that allows people to travel hundreds of metres extremely quickly. This even explains why Sans bleeds when you finally hit him. He is, or at least, WAS, a human.

Oh and finally, Sans shares two out of five letters with the name Iskall. That's just a fun one. I thought it was worth mentioning.

But if there was any doubt, we have to look no further than the creator's previous work. Toby Fox, the man behind Undertale is actually DocM77, the creator of every hermit (besides Scar.) Now, if Toby Fox, the creator of Undertale, is also DocM77, creator of Iskall, we know they will most definitely share a universe. Which brings us back to Undertale. 2 faces, with “don't forget” written on it? It's Iskall, trying to remember his 2 friends. In short, Undertale is a continuation of Toby’s version of Hermitcraft Season 6, with Iskall never being able to get home, adopting the name Sans. The pieces all just seem to fit. Now all we need is an appearance from Ethoslab and we’ve got ourselves a true sequel.

But hey, that's just a theory. A GAME THEORY! THANKS FOR WATCHING!

#hcraft #hermitcraftheadcanons #iskall85 #iskall #TheScience!#posted 11.05.20 #long post #please note this is literally a copy paste of the actual script #with some changes #but yeah actual cred to Matt on this one

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frasier-crane-style · 4 years ago

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Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters

You ever watch a movie just because it’s fun to see a few million dollars go to recreating Greek myths and because Alexandra Daddario is a cutie? Meh.

- I guess they can’t call it Percy Jackson And The Sea of Monsters because this is cooler and more American than Harry Potter. It has a colon, like a Marvel movie!

-It’s probably a good sign when a movie starts with a bunch of characters running away from a threat and they’re a little ways away from safety, so one of them goes “I’ll hold them off!” or “I’ll lead them away!” And then they all stop to have a debate about it. Like, if you just kept going, then you all could get away. I mean, I’m not the son of even one of the crappy gods from the later God of War games, and I could figure that out.

-We go from the prologue to a war game between the various demigods, which Percy is about to win when he sees a classmate is trouble, so he just has to give up the W to help him out. Only the classmate didn’t seem to be in any real danger, he was just inconvenienced by hanging upside down for a while in a game that was about to end anyway, so Percy looks like a real dumbass for pulling a Harry Potter there.

-The fact that he only technically lost does not keep him from having a crisis of confidence and the rest of the camp from treating him like shit. Even though it’s pointed out that he saved the world in the last movie--who cares about that, he lost at flag football! I guess all that Greek god inbreeding catches up to you after a while.

-These things can only have one hypercompetent female sidekick per ensemble, so Annabeth gets demoted to being a chick (signature fighting move: getting shoved to the ground) and someone who looks a lot like Mackenzie Davis, but isn’t, gets the job, getting me all excited to make a crack about Terminator: Dark Fate but then preventing me from doing so. Thanks a lot, Leven Rambin! Enjoy your Star Wars name.

Notkenzie Davis is basically playing a female Draco Malfoy, and I’m sorry, but there’s only room for one of those in my heart.

-Now, conventional wisdom is that if one of your main characters is a cyclops, you should probably have enough of a budget to make them a cyclops all the time, but this jigga Tyson spends half the movie either with sunglasses on or with a magic spell that makes him look like he has two eyes.

-What’s also weird is that everyone seems cool with satyrs and centaurs, but they’re racist against cyclops, particularly Annabeth--that’s her whole character arc here. On the one hand, prejudice is bad, but on the other, Alexandra Daddario is super cute and has big mommy milkers, so fuck those cyclopses. Go back to your own country!

-Anyway, they play it like Tyson’s whole thing is people being prejudiced against him, but he also seems mildly... well, there’s a word for it, but let’s put it this way... he seems less than untarded. This conveniently ambiguous disorder varies dramatically from scene to scene--at one point, he mistakes the Capitol Building for Olympus, but at another, he has encyclopedic knowledge of Greek mythology. In the end, it comes off a bit like he’s just stoned throughout the whole movie. Which probably makes him the smartest guy in the room.

-The Graeae show up to give Percy a somewhat meaningless plot coupon (I know he’s the Son of Poseidon, but he can see map coordinates? Like, literally latitude and longitude? And has there even been a character given a seemingly random string of numbers who doesn’t later figure out that they’re coordinates?). They also make an “oh no you dinnit” joke and I think it should count as a hate crime to force Yvette Nicole Brown to be in the presence of dialogue that unfunny.

-This is probably a problem with the source material, but why conflate the Golden Fleece quest with the Odyssey? They’re going after the Fleece, but they run into Charybdis, the Cyclops, Circe is name-dropped. No harpies, no skeleton armies, no Talos, no hydra. That’s just going to bug people who get anal retentive about this stuff and who else is Greek mythology for????

-You know, these things never have Greek accents, but I think I should make bingo cards of all the non-Greek accents they do have. I mean, British is a gimme, that would have to be the center spot, but in Wrath of the Titans, they have Edgar Ramirez as a Spanish-accented Ares (!) and here, Shohreh Aghdashloo voices an Oracle with an Indian accent. Man, talk about rubbing it in. (Some Southern accents also show up courtesy of some Confederate zombies, so expect riots if Disney doesn’t edit them out.)

-Said zombies also come with an ironclad/submarine, which I know was a thing, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t have recoilless rifles installed on them.

-Nathan Fillion shows up, once again typecast as the One Good Thing In This Mess. And man, if you thought Kylo Ren was a whiner for complaining about having Han Solo for a dad, the villain here is bitching about Mal Reynolds being his pop.

-In case poor Alexandra Daddario and her milkers haven’t suffered enough from being portrayed as a candyass and a racist, she gets a Disney death in the climax. The narrative has already had one with Tyson and they have a magical blanket that can heal all injuries right there, but the movie still has the audacity to milk this for a tearjerker. Like, maybe if the movie were aimed at small children, but they aged everyone up to sexy teenagers, so who’s going to fall for this? Shut up.

#percy jackson

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kimpossibooty · 5 years ago

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Hi friend, I literally just finished the latest episode of TAZ:G when I saw your post. What's not working for you about this one? Did you like their other arcs?

Okay so I have a lot of thoughts BUT first I want to talk about things that I do like!

1) I love TAZ! I’ve loved every season and every mini arc, I love the boys, I would listen to them play monopoly for ninety minutes every other week!

2) The premise is amazing! A magical school for heroes and villains is ingenious, but adding on the extra layer of an annex for sidekicks and henchmen and having the story based there? Amazing! There could not be a better setting for a story or a concept more directly up my alley!

3) The characters are great! I love all of the PCs and most of the NPCs! Plus, it’s fantastic that Travis is working so hard to include diverse characters in a way that doesn’t feel forced or poorly handled! As a disabled person who uses a mobility aid due to a chronic pain issue, having Rainer be introduced in the way that she was and having her be so badass and funny without her disability being framed as a punchline or a liability has been AMAZING for me!

Buuuuuut there are definitely things that are falling flat for me.

I really want to couch this in positivity though! I listen to every episode and enjoy it, and I plan to listen to the whole season still! Just there are aspects that make it really hard for me to get into, so I really can’t immerse myself in Graduation the way that I’ve been able to in basically every other story they’ve done.

That said though, there are problems I’ve had that have already been improved! I had a lot of trouble keeping track of what was happening in the first few episodes, mostly due to the characters. A ton of NPCs were introduced at once, they didn’t have very distinct voices, they weren’t given enough defining characteristics that I could easily match a name to a character, and the way Travis told the story didn’t really include much in the way of telling which character was speaking. Instead, he mostly just spoke in the character voice, but with the voices not being very different and there not being enough background with the characters to just know who would be speaking in the moment or what character would most make sense to be saying a given line, it was VERY difficult for me to keep track. I had to listen to the first several episodes three times just to actually track the story.

BUT that’s gotten much better! Travis has really developed a lot of the voices used in the story, and he points out who’s speaking most of the time! Whether he got feedback on that or just got more into the role of a storyteller that he picked up the habit naturally, it’s made the show so much better to me!

But there are some other things that haven’t really improved/don’t seem likely to change. But that’s okay! I want to be super explicit that this is ME talking about MY feelings, and not me trying to pass judgement on the show or say that it’s objectively bad. These are just my feelings and they don’t impact or reflect the general quality of the show or the ability for other people to enjoy the show fully or not be bothered by my complaints or anything like that.

1) I feel like there’s not a lot of respect for character backstories? This is a very very specific complaint, but the choice to have Fitzroy’s family not actually be royalty really sits weird with me. Of course, we’re just the listeners at home, it’s very possible this was discussed off air for the sake of the narrative, but it felt really, really weird that it was such a big part of Fitzroy’s character and then Travis just turned his dad into a trucker. I know that [BALANCE SPOILERS] Griffin gave all of the player characters FORGOTTEN LIVES AND LOVED ONES, but it was done in a way that didn’t invalidate a single thing about the stories the others had already told. It feels less “yes, and” and more “no, instead” and it’s just really kind of thrown me off. As a player, I would be less than stoked if a DM made that choice for my character. But again, very possible they discussed this! Or even that it was Griffin’s choice! But there was zero build up (at least that I caught) in the narrative, so it really felt off.

2) The pacing can be... rough. There are some beats that Travis tries to set up that would probably work well for a normal game, but they don’t always offer a lot for a story with an audience. For example, in episode 160, the guys kind of recap everything they know, then go talk to the wizard in the camp. The wizard offers nothing in the way of information, but then asks them to recap everything they know AGAIN, solely for Travis to justify an NPC being up to speed. It didn’t offer anything to the players or to the narrative. The guys pretty much vetoed that in character, so there wasn’t a lot of lost time there or anything, but there have been encounters like this a lot. I just feel like every couple episodes there are conversations or meetings or encounters that Travis sets up that definitely would flesh out a story in a book but really don’t work as a piece of entertainment. In a book, it can be written off as “they caught the wizard up on everything”, but to do it all in character would be very boring and take a lot of time, and it seems like there are points where Travis focuses more on justifying things in-world rather than thinking about the end product. Again, would totally work in a normal game or in a book, but I just don’t enjoy that sort of thing when I’m listening to a podcast, and it seems like the other guys might be aware of it sometimes, too.

3) This one’s my biggest problem, but the inconsistency I feel in the tone really makes it hard for me to take it seriously. I feel like Travis leans into silliness in a fun way, but not enough. He sets up a lot of serious beats, but then there’s a lot of “the spirit of the Scarlet WoOOOODS” followed by some pretty heavy silences. He wants to deliver a serious, meaningful story, which is great, and he wants to do it in a funny way, which is great, but he really hasn’t found a balance in my eyes. The seriousness makes the jokes feel out of place, and the jokes make it difficult to take the serious parts... seriously. The goofiness itself is great, I love it, and a lot of the humor lands and lands well! The dancing squirrel skeletons are arguably the best thing TAZ has ever made! But I feel like if he wants to really play with the humor, he has to lean into it more, and he really hasn’t yet, and when a joke doesn’t land, like the repeated “SpIrIt Of ThE sCaRlEt WoOoOoOoOoDs”, it really stops things up and makes me almost uncomfortable listening to it.

I think also a part of it is that it’s hard to tell what’s supposed to be funny IN the story vs what’s funny ABOUT the story. Like, again, the scarlet woods bit could be objectively funny in its own. Centaurs insisting on pronouncing the name of a deity-adjacent spirit in a dramatic and ridiculous way? That’s great. But it’s hard to tell if the characters in the world are supposed to take it seriously or not. Like, if I was a player, I wouldn’t know if my character thought that it was funny, or if the DM was only doing it for the amusement of the players and not the characters. I feel like as an audience member, it’s a weird place to be.

But all that said, I really want to emphasize that I love what Travis is doing! It’s definitely not about his DM style, because I LOVED Dust! Just there are a lot of things in Graduation that aren’t sticking for me.

Ultimately, I love the show, I will keep listening, I’m very invested and very positive, I just really, really, really hope some changes get made for things like this.

#please don't cancel me

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obeymematches · 4 years ago

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Hi there, I saw your tumblr and thought it is really cool ! So I wanted to know if I can request a matchup ? 😳👉🏽👈🏽

My name means the laughter in spanish but I’m not very good at making jokes even though I love to laugh and I take pride in putting a smile on people faces. I try to live up to my name haha. People always think I’m intimidating at first because I have been cursed with “resting bitch face”. But really I’m kind at heart and very empathetic. I can cry at movies, I’m always here if someone needs to vent, I feel bad if I see someone or an animal suffering and I hate injustice. When meeting new people I’m a little observant at first because I need to feel with whom I can feel the most comfortable. Im an introvert leo thus I suck at communication, I’m a bit sarcastic and sometimes I roast people unintentionally. I don’t know why I have a hard time saying ’ I love you ’ even with my family. I’m not a physical person either, the only person I let touch me is my partner or my pets. I show my love through actions and support, my love language is quality time. I become a bit silly around my loved ones and I loooove to prank them. I have siblings and I’m the oldest, I have always been the mediator when it comes to resolve fights between them. I never considered myself clever and I lack self esteem because of this, but when I’m doing a job, I need to do it right and I work hard so I can feel the satisfaction of my boss or clients, I’m not scared of responsibilities.

On my own, I have a world to myself, I love fantasy, mystery and horror stuffs, my space needs to be cozy at all times. I’m sensitive to loud noises so I like it when its silent, at best I can tolerate music like classic, lofi, or ost from movies/video games. I love digital painting, and clean/organized stuffs. I love beautiful things, and learning about animals, humans and its psychology. I love taking care of myself, like I’m always searching for the best skin/hair products and I need to look good everytime I go outside haha.

When in relationship I need someone with a lot of patience, I’m slow to open up. And when something troubles me I tend to go silent. I don’t want to ruin the good mood so I keep my struggles to myself. I do not tolerate humiliation, or disrespect, it’s a huge turn off. I’m usually calm and would hate to “go crazy” at them. As an introvert I need my alone time so I need my partner to be understanding about this. When completely in love I tend to put my partner on a pedestal and take pride on showing them off. Also expects lots of gifts and surprises, bc nothing is ever good enough for my partner.

Thank you for reading this far 🥺

———

hiiii! sorry for my late answer!

okay so i’ve had a few of the brothers on my mind so it was not an easy decision. i think you’d be a very nice match for Satan, Belphie and possibly Lucifer too. But Simeon would also be a decent option! (like you’re into digital painting and he’s the opposite of digital so that’d be a fun learning experience)

OK after reading your request over a couple of times i decided that you and Lucifer would totally work out!

Okay so you making people smile without shame is something that catches the attention of the 3 demons I mentioned (2 of them is good at observing and Belphie hardly ever smiles so once you get him to he’s in)

You say you have a rbf but later you mention that you like to be pretty and Lucifer definitely appreciates that in a partner. I mean someitmes you go to places where you just gotta dress nicely and neat.

He also appreciates someone with a soft side like you as that balances things out a bit, but also because he has some soft spots as well - you being a new one!

I don’ think he would open up to anyone easily, so quite some time would pass before he actually vents to you but he makes sure to make it up to you!

Well I think Lucifer is good at communicating so regarding that he would probably help you learn a bit as communication is supper important in a relationship.

Later you mention that you are responsible just like him and honestly he deeply appreciates that you are not someone to cause much trouble.

However! We all know how he likes troublemakers like Mammon, so the fact that you prank him and/or his brothers just makes him grow even fonder of you! (i think Belphie would be quick to join in as a pranking sidekick)

You also mention how you have the skills to end fights and in the HOL that’s super important for survival without losing your mind. I think you’d do a great job at fixing the bonds between Belphie and him, or maybe even Satan and him! (i mean not fixing it instead of them, but like... they could get on the healthier path thanks to you! character development)

I think he likes touching, even if his brothers are around - in fact maybe especially when they are around, so it’s nice that you’re OK with your partner being touchy. However you being there for him and running errands for him to show your love is just perfect. Quality time is also something you have in common, as I mentioned earlier expect to go to quite fancy places relatively often. Or just spending time in his room, i mean he wants alone time with you from time to time is there something wrong with that-

You working hard is also something he values a lot! and if you have similar values thats a good start.

I think you lack of self esteem would be risky if you were on his bad side but that’s not happening. Lucifer is definitely strong and capable of lifting you up a bit, I mean you are literally dating him and he knows how to recognize someone smart so really you’d have no choice but to gain some more self esteem! (not because you are dating him because it’s not healthy to have self esteem only because of your partner, but I meant it in a way that he lowkey guides you to actually start believing in yourself. )

Hmm so you liking cozy places is nice because that skeleton in his room has no business staying there like wtf-

You two have similar likes when it comes to music so thats also good. So when you two are recharging there’s never going to be any arguments about that. I think he is open to lsiten to whatever music his partner likes but tbh if you like very similar stuff as him that just can’t go wrong, right?

In case he does something you don’t like you’ll absolutely have to tell him though! He will notice when you aren’t feeling yourself and it’s better to confront him about it than wait for him to bring this up.

It’s also nice that you have your standards high like that especially when it comes to your partner as he is a demon with high standards! though he appreciates literally anything you give him, this man is just so in love.

So this relationship includes two responsible adults and he helps you develop better communication skills & self esteem! the two of you can rely on the other at all times emotianlly and responsibility-wise as well. (though he might have a bit hard time to actually ask you for help, but once you get to know him and his capability. You’d help his relation with above mentioned brothers and him being family oriented he’d really love that and would never forget about how much he owes you for that.

#obey me #obey me lucifer #om! lucifer #obey me shall we date #obey me matchup #obey me swd #swd obey me #lucifer obey me #om!#submission

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alexcrespo4 · 5 years ago

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For those of you who already know, Batman was in Smallville: Season 11, but who also made an appearance was his sidekick Nightwing aka Barbara Gordon?!?!?!. (Wonder Woman was also in Season 11). I mean TBH, I was surprised because not only is Nightwing not usually a sidekick character, but because Barbara is supposed to be Batgirl/Oracle, but the in-reality answer for that is Barbara hates the name, Batgirl. Now, Dick Grayson also known as the Real Nightwing, doesn't get mentioned until Barbara tells Batman that she was late for a mission because she's dating an Acrobat, which means she's either talking about Dick Grayson or Pre-Crisis Jason Todd (Spoiler Alert, It's "Richie"). Not much is known about this version of Dick Grayson, he seems like any other version of Dick Grayson because he's an Acrobat who's dating "Babs", but unlike the other Dick Graysons, He was never adopted by Bruce Wayne. Eventually, Barbara joins the Blue Lantern Corps, and gets an almost accurate Nightwing suit, from Purple and Gold like in 1966 to Black and Blue like the actual Nightwing. After she joins the Blue Lantern Corps, Barbara sets up a meeting for Bruce Wayne to meet her replacement, who is also her boyfriend who I've mentioned a hundred times already, but I'm not sure if he became Nightwing or Robin, because in a vision of Lex Luthor's future, a bunch of barely noticeable heroes are skeletons while Lex Luthor is the President of the United States, and those heroes are Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Green Lantern (John Stewart), The Flash (Barry Allen), Hawkman (Katar Hol), Martian Manhunter, and finally ROBIN, but does this future actually happen, especially since Clark Kent gave up his superpowers to start a family with Lois Lane, honestly I wish there could've been more to tell about the Smallville universe, as in the other heroes from their universe, like the one question I keep asking, Did Dick Grayson become Bruce's partner as Nightwing or Robin? That's the question I asked Bryan Q. Miller (writer of Smallville: Season 11) on Twitter, but he still didn't answer me, and it's really stressing me out too, it actually brings me back to a time where I thought that the Smallville universe wouldn't be complete without Robin (Dick Grayson), unless they made him Red Hood instead because they already turned Barbara into Nightwing, although originally it was supposed to be Stephanie Brown (Spoiler/Robin/Batgirl), which probably meant that Tim Drake would be her replacement after she becomes a Blue Lantern. Wait, do you think HE'S the Robin in the vision, of course now I'm probably getting off topic, If Dick Grayson was Red Hood, then his relationship with Barbara would be like Batman/Catwoman. If Dick Grayson became Nightwing, I would like to imagine his suit looked like the one in Nightwing The Series, which I recommend that whoever's reading this should watch, but if Dick chose to be Robin over Nightwing, then I recommend you read GRAYSON, not the comic series about Dick being a secret agent at Spyral, but the one where Batman's dead, and Dick comes out of retirement as Robin, it's a 100 page script on a website called Untamed Cinema, it's a really great script and I recommend you read it. If you're wondering why I made this blog, it's because of this other Fan Made Series called "Nightwing Escalation", which I don't recommend you to watch. Well that's all I have to say, but my question still remains to this day.

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cheriesjubiles · 4 years ago

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please don’t look under the read more i’m just testing

Can you imagine a world where we're all represented by a font? Huh, I wonder which one I would be? sees Arial Too straight. No! Not in that way! Just, straight, as in unexciting. sees Badaboom Too.. uh... Deadpool.... BROADWAY! Now that's the one! Now THAT'S the one! Hello Internet, welcome to GAME THEORY, where instead of putting a joke here I want to ask you a question. If your personality were represented by a font, what font would you be? Take a moment and put your font in the comments. I'm really curious to see what everyone has to say. Maybe find a couple new cool fonts to use. I'm getting bored with ol' Calibri 11. And with that out of the way, it's time to talk UNDERTALE. Now I don't think I've ever gotten this many requests to cover a game. Well, except for FNAF. And I suppose FNAF 2. OH and there was FNAF 3. Wait a minute, should I be worried about something here? Anyway, across the board on YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, you all have wanted Undertale. And honestly, I'm glad you brought it to my attention. True loyal theorists will know that Earthbound is my favorite game of all time. So a self aware RPG in a similar style, WHOA MAN, it's like a gift from the indie gaming heavens. Undertale is a game where every character, from goat mom to grind fodder has a sympathetic design and a unique personality, motivations, goals, fears. Whether you're saving or slaughtering them, the game makes you feel something every time you enter an encounter. But to me, one character stood out amongst all the rest. SANS. A skeleton named after the font, Comic Sans, hence all the font references at the beginning of the episode. If you haven't played Undertale I'm sure that was a really weird opening. ANYWAYS, Sans is, well, there's a lot of mystery around this guy. And before we get into it, let me put up a very special spoiler warning: UNDERTALE is a game best experienced blind. So if you haven't played it, pause the video and come back after you've finished. I PROMISE YOU, I PROMISE you won't regret it. Alright, so everyone out of the pool and ready for the adult swim? Good. Because I'm feeling pretty determined to get to the bottom of Sans' mystery. So just to recap for those of you who haven't played the game and ignored the SPOILER WARNING, or just need a refresher, Sans is one of the two skeletal brothers who appears in the game. His partner is Papyrus, a loud, goofy trap lover also named after a font. But in the world of Undertale their origins are a big question mark. All you really know is what's given to us by a shopkeeper in Snowdin, who explains that Sans and Papyrus, quote, “just showed up one day and asserted themselves.” Weird, right? What's more is that, well, Papyrus is just kinda the goofy sidekick. Sans is much more complex. He likes fart jokes, but he's also incredibly powerful and deadly serious. Not only is his boss battle the hardest in the game, he's one of the only characters who has knowledge and power over space and time. He can take shortcuts around the world through ridiculous routes. Even is walking through walls. He also acknowledges that he's only one of infinite versions of himself, making self-aware commentary of the various timelines that you've played through in the game. He can even count the number of times he's killed you. He acts like an arbiter of this world, passing out judgements on the player's actions in the game, even explaining the secrets of EXP and LOVE, or EXECUTION POINTS and LEVELS OF VIOLENCE, just to clarify. In short, he just doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the world of monsters. But then, what, or who, is he? Well, the idea that he doesn't belong in underworld seems to be correct. The evidence seems to point the fact that he WAS, in fact, formerly a surface dweller. In the true pacifist ending of the game, as the group looks out onto the horizon, Papyrus asks Sans about the giant ball in the sky. Sans says, quote, “we call that the sun.”

This is important because A, the usage of the word WE, and knowledge of the sun shows that Sans has a kinship or knowledge with other humans, and B, that despite he and Papyrus both being skeletons, or, supposedly, brothers, and apparently appeared in underworld at the same time, they clearly-- uuuGGHH take two CLEARLY have two very different histories. Why would Papyrus not know the name of the sun but Sans would? We get further clues to Sans' origins as we hear him say multiple times he wants to "go home" or "go back." He says as much during his dinner date scene at the Mettaton hotel. He notices that the player wants to go home and says, quote, "i know the feeling." He then continues, "maybe sometimes it's better to take what's given to you." As though he ended up in the underworld by accident. AND in a genocide run during his boss fight he says, quote, "look, i gave up trying to go back a long time ago." End quote. And before you say he means going back to the surface world, that's clearly not the full story. His very next line of dialogue is, "and getting to the surface doesn't really appeal anymore either." Key word here, is EITHER. Yes, he seems to hail from the surface and wants to go back, but based on his dialogue he no longer considers it his home. It's as though the surface world he once knew is gone, as though he's from a different time. It's pretty intriguing. So we're left with a being that appeared out of nowhere, presumably from being from the human surface, but from a different time period, who seemingly has the power to teleport. That's a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. But here's where things get REALLY interesting. Sans has a hidden workshop that takes a fair amount of searching to find. You could say it takes a lot of DETERMINATION to unlock. Anyways, obligatory determination references aside, as you start to look for this easter egg Sans gives you a key to his room and says "it's time you learn the truth." After some searching you find the workshop which contains items that leave even more questions. A photo album featuring Sans and a bunch of smiling people you don't recognize, a badge, blueprints with illegible handwriting, and a broken machine hidden behind a curtain. In the latest update, one more detail was added. A handdrawn picture of 3 smiling faces with the words “don't forget.” so what does it all mean? Well a lot of Undertale theorists have been linking these details to a feature to a character named W.D Gaster. A ghostly character who never truly appears in the game. Honestly, covering him is a theory all unto itself, and probably one best saved for another day. Even still, none of the Gaster theories I've seen have been able to explain all the details. In particular, the photo album, and the badge. And that's what kept nagging me as I researched Undertale. A badge? That one in particular really stuck out to me. Why would such an oddly specific item to be hidden in the huge easter egg of a room? Something that supposedly reveals the truth about Sans? Badges just aren't important in Undertale. Then it hit me. What if this badge isn't from Undertale? What if this badge is from a completely different game? And was, in fact, the most important badge in the history of gaming? The Franklin badge. Now, for those of you wondering what I'm talking about, the Franklin badge is a pivotal item from the Mother series. You know, the one with Earthbound. Or, maybe you don't know that one either. Uh, you know, the one with Ness from Super Smash Bros? Yeah well, Ness is from Earthbound, and Earthbound is the second part in this larger Mother trilogy. Alright? Good. Anyway, the Franklin badge is a really important part of that series. It gets its start in the very first game and carries through the whole trilogy, saving your life multiple times in the process. It's SO important that nintendo has made it a staple item in the Smash Brothers series. So I asked myself; what if the badge in Sans' drawer was THAT EXACT badge?

Well first off, it made Undertale connected to my favorite game, thereby making it even COOLER, but that's still a pretty big logical leap. I needed more. Let me tell you, as I started looking, more and more pieces started to fit into place. At the end of Earthbound you're given a photo album, covering your adventures throughout the game. To me it's one of the best, most satisfying endings in gaming to look back on your journey in picture form. And what does Sans happen to have in his other drawer? A photo album with pictures of Sans with people you don't recognize. Of course you don't know them, they're not characters present in Undertale. And note the word that's used here, PEOPLE you don't recognize. Not underworld monsters. So that's 2 items oddly linked to the Mother series. But then, how do the blueprints and broken machine fit in? Well, in the final stretch of Earthbound, Ness and his 3 friends must travel to the past in order to have their final battle against the evil alien Giygas. To do that, Dr. Andonuts (remember him, by the way, he's going to be important later) with the help of the science geniuses Apple Kid and Mr. Saturn, create what's known as the Phase Distorter, a machine that allows people to travel through time and space. Except, it comes with a cost. It can't transport organic material. As a result, the young heroes must put their souls into robotic bodies to use the machine, and thus, save the world. I played this game back in 1997 and I'm not ashamed to admit that when I first saw this scene, I cried. It's DEVASTATING. Doctor Andonuts says goodbye to his son, these characters you've grown to love and care about are suddenly promising to sacrifice their lives. For all they know, there is no possibility of them being able to come back home. It's this incredibly dark departure in the final moments of what was otherwise a fun, quirky, and colorful RPG. So what does all of this have to do with Undertale? A LOT, actually. But the first thing you need to know is that Mr. Saturns are known for their, let's say, unique linguistic style. That would explain the illegible handwriting on the blueprints. And the machine? I think a broken Phase Distorter is behind that curtain. Now that may seem like a stretch, but it actually explains a lot. If Sans wound up in Undertale via Phase Distorter, it could provide a reason for why he's a skeleton. He used the machine as organic matter and suffered the consequences. Not killing him, but turning at least a part of him into a pile of bones. That could also explain why Sans has given up hope for going home. Remember the Phase Distorter is a time machine. By being in underworld, he's not only in a different place, but based on how he talks, he's also in a different time, with no hope of travelling back to the time he came from. But the crossovers between Earthbound and Undertale continue. When you speak to Apple Kid at the end of Earthbound, he's blown away by the astronomical odds of Ness overcoming Giygas, saying that he's going to continue studying the trait called courage, in order to harness its power. Seems awfully similar to the same experiments happening in Undertale around the trait of determination, no? Especially since so much has shown that Sans was a key player in those experiments. But I'm sure you also want physical evidence right? Well don't worry, because I have plenty. During one of the endings of Undertale, we see Undyne and Alphys hanging out on the beach on the surface world. A beach that bears a lot of similarities to the tropical resort location named Summers that you play through in Earthbound. In fact, the geographic layout of the surface bears some striking similarities to the world of Mother. When Undertale's crew of monsters are finally able to reach the surface and look out over the earth, they're met with a beautiful sunset falling across the landscape of a tall mountain, a large city, and a sandy area adjacent to water. Notice the sun's reflection to indicate water, and a lack of trees in this middle section here, hence the sand.

Well, in Earthbound you have the big city of Fourside, complete with skyscrapers, which you reach via a desert that just so happens to be adjacent to some water, and to the east, the mountain in Onett where a meteorite lands on Earth. I always called it Aw-nett. But if that's not clear enough for you, Mother 1, Earthbound Zero, Earthbound Beginnings, whatever you want to call it, it's had a lot of names, had a map laying out the same geographic landscape. A tall mountain to the east of a large city, separated by a desert, with all of it up against a coast. I don't know about you, but to me it seems like there's a definite connection between the world of Eagleland (Eagleland? Again, unclear how its pronounced.) between the world of Eagleland and the surface world of Undertale. But the strongest physical connection, one that definitely unites these two franchises, comes from none other than Papyrus himself. He wears a custom-made costume known as his “battle body”. But if you look really closely at the design on the armor, you'll notice some markings on the chest. Is it just a throwaway detail? Ohoh NO, that right there is an exact match to the ones that appear on the chests of Starmen, the most iconic enemy of Earthbound. And look at the way he stands! I always thought it was awkward until i saw the two characters side by side. Papyrus’ curved arm and hand is a DIRECT match to the curved arms of the Starmen in the Mother series! In short, we have some incredibly strong proof that the Earthbound universe is somehow connected to the Undertale world, which brings us back to our initial question, WHO IS SANS? Well, what if we took it one final step and said that Sans happened to be Ness from Earthbound? Sent through the Phase Distorter during a test of courage, carrying the Franklin badge and his photo album and his trusty backpack. Not only do all the items in the workshop suddenly fit, but so does Sans’ behavior. Remember, Sans can seemingly teleport. And Ness just happens to have the PSI ability to teleport. Now look the way Sans always stands, hands in his pockets, directly facing the camera. It's a very similar stance to how Ness is depicted standing in most marketing for the game. It even explains why Sans bleeds when you finally hit him. He is, or at least, WAS, a human. Oh and finally, Sans is only one letter removed from being an anagram of Ness. That's just a fun one. I thought it was worth mentioning. But if there was any doubt, we have to look no further than the creator's previous work. Toby Fox, the man behind Undertale, had previously worked on a Halloween hack for Earthbound. But this just wasn't a simple reskin. The Halloween hack tells the tale of Dr. Andonuts after the events of Earthbound. Remember, I pointed him out? He's the one who made the Phase Distorter. In Toby Fox’s version of the story, we see that after Giygas' defeat, the souls of the kids never return home. Instead, by going to the past to defeat Giygas, they create a new timeline that they're stuck in. As a result, Jeff never reunites with his father Dr. Andonuts. And Dr. Andonuts goes crazy with guilt, because HE’S the one responsible for creating the time machine, and extracting the souls of his son and his son's friends to send them back to what he assumes was their death. In his mind, he's killed 4 kids. And in Toby Fox's game, he's lost his mind trying to deal with that guilt. I'm telling you, this hack is DARK. that said, you see a lot of Undertale in this game. The appearance of Amalgamates, the first use of the awesome song Megalovania, the prototypes for Flowey? And the theme of having the choice to be nonviolent in an RPG, SPARING your enemies. But then why's all this matter to the theory? Well, remember, in Toby Fox's version of the story, the kids don't come back. They're stuck in the past, with no hopes of getting home. Just like Sans. And, in the hack, one character is oddly missing, with no explanation as to why. NESS. Presumably in this timeline his soul is in a different place than his 3 friends.

In short, Undertale is a continuation of Toby’s version of Earthbound, with Ness never being able to get home, adopting the name Sans, and accompanied by Papyrus, a former Starman, an alien force able to speak English and still equipped with his armor, and signature posture, but without any knowledge of earthly things... like the Sun. The pieces all just seem to fit. Now all we need is an appearance from Pokey/Porky and we’ve got ourselves a true sequel. But hey, that's just a theory. A GAME THEORY! THANKS FOR WATCHING!

#it’s the sans is ness game theory video copypasta

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s-j-ace · 5 years ago

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That’s the Thing About Airplanes

Characters: Shuichi Saihara, Ouma Kokichi

Words: 5,644

Summary:

Detective Shuichi Saihara gets on a plane to Paris tracking the flight of a notorious phantom thief from the country. While he had hoped to get some well deserved rest on the 8 hour flight, Shuichi is unfortunately seated next to an extremely chatty stranger. He lies incessantly, is extremely rude to everyone on the plane, and, worst of all, he seems to be a fan of Shuichi's work.

Read on AO3

Shuichi Saihara shuffled into his economy class window seat and sank into it like it was the softest mattress he had ever felt. It was two am and Shuichi was fortunate in regards to the fact that there were very few people traveling to France in the middle of the night. He was used to odd hours because of his profession and had become a master of sleeping practically everywhere except his own bed. If all went well he could sleep through the whole eight hour flight and arrive just in time to stop DICE's heist on the Louvre.

See, along with being a professional insomniac, Shuichi Saihara was also kind of a famous detective. Which was, by the way, extremely annoying. How was he supposed to detect stuff when his name and face were in the newspaper for finding the stupid mammoth skeleton that was stolen from the Smithsonian? DICE probably knew who he was at this point, but Shuichi couldn't see the lone villain/possible organization caring about what he was doing. The mammoth thing had been a fluke that came out of a months long investigation into a string of extremely petty thefts. What was the first one again? Oh yeah, Kaede's shoes were stolen after a performance at Carnegie Hall that Shuichi had been invited to. They were the sneakers she was going to swap for her heels after the performance… they didn't notice the curtains were gone too until an hour later...

Shuichi was thinking about some of the case details hazily as he started to drift off.

He was jilted out of his daze by the beep of the in flight announcement system.

"Will all passengers please be seated. We'll be taking off in about ten minutes. Thanks for choosing …"

Shuichi's focus on the Captain's words faded as a few more people shuffled by his row. There was plenty of space behind and in front of him, so he wasn't too worried about anyone sitting next to him.

The last person to board was a short guy wearing a gray hoodie and weird black and white checkered jeans along with long purple hair. At first Shuichi had assumed he was with the gaggle of nine chattering people that were thankfully moving to the back of the plane, but he stopped a couple rows before Shuichi's and stood there for a bit.

Shuichi looked up at him, knowing that his own eyes were bleary with sleep deprivation and confusion. The man was giving him this weird, blank stare. It made Shuichi uncomfortable, but he couldn't process what it meant through the buzz of sleepiness that clouded his mind. Then-

Oh no.

He walked forward to Shuichi's row.

Oh god no.

The man’s blank face shifted into the most malicious grin Shuichi had ever laid eyes on, which was saying something since he used to be a homicide detective.

Anything but this.

The guy practically skipped into the seat right next to Shuichi. Not the one in front of him, or one of the ones in his completely empty row, or even the aisle seat, literally the one right next to him. He put his elbow on the armrest.

This was the worst possible outcome.

The grin suddenly became congenial in a way that made it no less menacing to Shuichi's sanity.

"Hey, aren't you Shuichi Saihara?"

Please no.

A hand extended towards his own. Shuichi stared at it blankly.

"I'm your biiiggest fan."

Shuichi shook the hand as if it were his death sentence.

A million questions surged through his brain. Why did this man decide to sit right next to him? Why would he be a fan? Was Shuichi that famous? Could he be an escaped convict he didn't recall or the family member of one who wanted revenge? … Or was he just sleep deprived and this actually wasn't that big of a deal.

The stranger kept talking.

"I read aaall about that thing with the hairy elephant and the stupid ugly criminal you've been tracking."

Shuichi's head spun. Why had he let that photographer get a shot of him? Why had he stayed for the interview?

The grinning face of his long time friend Kaito Momota came back to him.

"That's my sidekick!"

Oh yeah…

"Hey are you like deaf or something?"

Shuichi blinked at him, still befuddled by this turn of events. Shouldn't he be asleep by now? Was this a dream?

"Hey. Heyyyy. Earth to Shuichi Saihara. Geez I didn't expect you to be this boring in person…"

Shuichi shook his head, "I-I-I'm sorry, what?"

The stranger huffed, seemingly upset. "Have you been ignoring me? Not a very nice way to treat your biggest fans." He crossed his arms. "I, like, totally hate when heroes don't live up to your expectations."

What? Heroes? Shuichi was not a hero. People like his long time friends Kaito Momota, an astronaut, or Kaede Akamatsu, a famous pianist, were heroes. Shuichi was kind of a greasy nobody… as much as both of said heroes would hate to hear him say that.

The stranger didn't stop talking. "-but you can make it up to me."

Suddenly the stranger was even more in Shuichi's personal space. He seemed to be reaching over him for something and Shuichi did not like it one bit.

"H-hey! What are you-"

Shuichi's seat suddenly gave out beneath him, the back slamming down onto the seat behind him and taking him with it.

"Ow!" He exclaimed rubbing his throbbing head.

"Oh no!" Exclaimed the man responsible. "How could this happen?"

A flight attendant just happened to be walking by.

"What happens to be the problem here gentlemen?" He asked as if he couldn't obviously see it.

Gentlemen? Shuichi repeated in his head doubtfully as the stranger responded.

"What's the problem? You're asking me what the problem is?" The stranger's voice took on an angered affectation. "The problem, good sir, is that this Rusty bucket of bolts you call an airplane just tried to give my husband a concussion! I could sue for this, you know."

Husband? What? What was happening? Shuichi felt like he was a step behind everything that was happening. Could the present just pause for a second and let him process.

"I'm so, so sorry sir." The flight attendant quibbled. "Here, we'll make it up to you. It's a long flight and we don't have many guests so I can upgrade you both to first class with no additional charge."

The stranger, Shuichi's "husband," harrumphed. "You better. Or my lawyer will be hearing about this."

The flight attendant started to lead the stranger to his, or Shuichi supposed their, new seating arrangement. The stranger grabbed Shuichi's arm from where it was gripping the arm rest and dragged him up off his feet. He followed the shorter man, still a little baffled as his sleep deprived brain caught up to what was happening. He shuffled into the window seat as directed. Whereas the seats in economy had rows of three on each side of the isle, the first class seats were two seats on each side.

Thus, the seats were much bigger than the ones in economy class, but felt a lot less comfortable than they had when Shuichi was alone and getting ready to sleep through the flight. All hope of that, however, had been dashed as the stranger settled into the seat next to him.

"Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help you."

"Of course. Ah, I'm sorry for causing so much trouble, it's just the honeymoon you see and everything just has to be perfect, you know?"

"No, it's quite alright, I understand completely." The flight attendant made a placating gesture and Shuichi noticed he was wearing a wedding ring himself. "I went through the same trouble with my husband. Really let me know if I can help you at all."

"Thanks sooo much!" He turned to Shuichi as the flight attendant turned to head to the back for take off. "Wasn't he just the nicest Shuichi?"

"... If you had enough money to hire a lawyer that could sue an airline so frivolously then you would've already been in first class."

"I'm just stingy."

"... Did you sit next to me so you could convince that gay flight attendant to put you in first class?"

The man made a shocked expression. "I can't believe you figured it out!" He turned away, making a dramatic expression Shuichi just didn't have words for. "It's true…Detective Saihara I was lying about being married to you the whole time. I thought you knew..."

"Wha- of course I knew that!"

"Oh! How can you ever forgive me?" Were those tears welling in the other man's eyes? "Waah!" He suddenly started bawling and Shuichi felt like he was getting whiplash from this social interaction.

"H-hey! Stop that." The stranger just kept bawling. Shuichi fumbled for the handkerchief he kept in his front pocket. When he found it, he offered it to the other man.

He suddenly stopped crying. "Oh wow! What a gentlemanly thing to do!" He grabbed the handkerchief out of Shuichi's hand and blew his nose into it in possibly the loudest, most grotesque way possible.

Shuichi blinked at him, still utterly confused. "A-are you alright?"

"Hmm?" The man looked up at him with an innocent expression. "Perfectly fine." He flipped over the handkerchief and Shuichi noticed it was completely dry. The guy tucked the kerchief in his hoodie pocket and Shuichi sort of got the impression he had just been stolen from. "Just a liar is all."

"A-a liar?" Shuichi had met a lot of liars in his career and usually they were not so honest about it.

"No, where did you hear that?" The stranger stuck his tongue out. "Ick, I hate liars after all." He shifted suddenly to a starry eyed expression. "That's why I'm such a big fan of yours, Shuichi."

"I-is that so?" Was he lying about this too? It was practically impossible to tell. Then again he might just be being anxious for no good reason again. This stranger may be a little… odd, but he had gotten Shuichi bumped up to first class. Maybe he should be greatful? What would Kaito do?

He hesitated before saying, "Um." Wow great start Shuichi. "Y-you seem to know my name, but, uh, what's yours?"

The stranger had a shit eating grin on. "Kaito Momota."

What.

"What?"

"Kaito" waved his hands dismissively. "I know, I know, isn't that the name of your friend who was in the paper? That's why I read it, by the way," he said matter of factly. "Because we have the same name."

"... I-is that another lie?"

"Neeheehee… ya caught me." The stranger had a very distinctive laugh. "If you guess my real name by the end of the flight I'll give you a prize!"

"Like Rumplestiltskin?"

Not-actually-Kaito pouted. "Aww man. You guessed it the first try. That's no fun." He rolled his eyes. "I guess now you'll just have to guess my second, less cool, real name instead."

"... Honestly I'd much rather be sleeping through this flight."

Not-Rumplestultskin-either scoffed. "Why would anyone get on a flight to Paris at 2 AM if they weren't prepared to be up all night?" His expression became excited, "Oh! Oh! Oh! I bet you've got another case you're hot on the trail of, huh Mr. Detective?"

Shuichi hesitated, "Uh, sort of."

Honestly the lead on the Louvre was kind of a stretch. They had just gotten renovated both the security systems and the bathrooms. Shuichi suspected it was in DICE's MO to nab the new toilets. Again the mammoth thing was a bit of a fluke in more ways than one. The clever thing about DICE is that they usually broke into high profile, maximum security areas only to steal the most mundane items. Items that could be sold more easily for a profit than fine art or prized possessions. Like brand new plumbing parts…

When he had told Kaito and their mutual friend Maki Harukawa about his theory the two of them had exchanged a worried glance. Maki, who often accompanied Shuichi into even the most dangerous situations in his career, had put her hand on his shoulder and told him he should go to France. Not to track down DICE, but to take a fucking vacation.

"What kind of answer is that?" The stranger's question shook Shuichi out of his memories. "How can you only sort of be solving a mystery?" The man's chest puffed up seemingly with pride. "You know, I just so happen to also be a world class detective."

Shuichi raised his eyebrows, a little skeptical. "Really?"

"Yes, really!" The stranger exclaimed, sounding exaggeratedly offended. "And as a real life detective I just so happen to know that when you're working a case you work it with 100% of yourself!"

Shuichi laughed a little at that. "I guess you're kind of right about that… There's, uh, this case that I've been looking into for a long time now and I guess I have really been putting 100% of myself into it. My friends think I'm going a little crazy…"

The stranger looked interested. "Your friends? Like that purple haired guy who was in the paper? The one with the dumb name?"

"Um. Kaito?" Not-Kaito seemed to have dropped all pretense about the same name thing, "Yeah I guess him and one other friend think I'm making this thing about the Louvre up… and maybe I am a little crazy."

The stranger kept with the blank look. "The Louvre?" He asked. "Like, someone's gonna steal the Mona Lisa?"

"Uh, no." Shuichi looked away, knowing how stupid his theory sounded. "I think, uh, someone's going to take the plumbing from the renovated bathrooms…"

The other man squinted at him and Shuichi cringed, preparing for criticism.

"Wow. You must be really smart to have figured that out." His expression shifted to conspiratorial. "You know…" he started, leaning in and lowering his voice to a whisper. "I just so happen to be the leader of a secret organization with about 10,000 members. We rule the world from the shadows. I think we could use a detective like you."

Now it was Shuichi's turn to squint at him. "That- that has to be a lie. There is no possible way for such an organization to exist."

The stranger tutted in mock disappointment. "And here I was thinking you were particularly clever." That was probably part of the lie too… this was just a long way to go to make fun of him wasn't it? "Seeing as you've refused to join my organization… it seems I'll have to kill you."

Shuichi blanched at that. The phrase itself wasn't uncommon. If Shuichi had a dime for every time a killer had told him that when he was working as a homicide detective, he'd have at the very least two dollars. Which maybe wasn't that much but essentially what he was saying here was that he received more death threats than the average human being. What horrified him about this interaction was the casualness of everything leading up to it and also the fact that he was on an airplane. He usually asked Harukawa or Momota to accompany him when he was confronting a killer, mostly because they insisted and also he had to admit that Maki had the muscle mass of a bull and Kaito had the confidence to pretend he did. There were no exit routes on a plane and Shuichi's head span with all the possible ways he could be murdered.

"But," the stranger went on, "I'll let you leave this flight with your life if you can beat me in a game."

Shuichi instantly shut down his off the rails train of thought. Okay he was probably freaking out over nothing again. It seemed like his self designated seatmate was just lying to get a reaction out of him.

"Uh. What kind of game?"

"How about Russian Roulette with a full barrel?"

Shuichi sputtered, "This is a plane, you don't have a gun!" If there was an air marshal around this guy could get arrested for even mentioning a gun.

"Oh that's right, left it on my tchotchke shelf, silly me. Well I guess if you just want to beg like a dog and then split your guts open that would be acceptable."

"Um, no that would kill me."

"Damn, nothing gets past you… Hmm… Ok, how about…" the man reached into the pocket Shuichi's kerchief had disappeared into and pulled out a deck of cards. "A shadow game!"

A what.

"It's time to du-du-du-du-du-du-du-duel!"

Shuichi blinked. "A...duel? Shadow Game...?"

"Hmhmhm... Yes, the loser's soul will get sent to the Shadow Realm…" he shuffled the cards expertly, "We each pull one card from this deck, and whoever has the largest number wins!"

Is that how that show worked? The one with that kid with the crazy hair? Shuichi remembered that being on at the same time as some of the true crime shows he was into as a kid.

"It's my turn! I draw a card!" The man went on, "...Hehehe, the power of the Heart of the Cards is strong within me. I drew the number 7! It is neither high nor low! The possibility of you winning drops to 50%!"

Hhh okay. This was happening now.

"Huhuhu... I end my turn. Now, it's your turn! Draw your card, and unleash your attack!"

"Ah, okay…" Shuichi picked a card. Huh, fancy that. "A seven."

The stranger's face shifted to one of exaggerated shock. "Wh-What!? How can this be!? You drew the Monster Reborn card!?"

Yeah it was pretty statistically improbable. Kaito would probably know how improbable. He was surprisingly good at math.

"Nee-heeheehee…" the stranger issued out another distinct laugh. "You truly are an amazing duelist, Shuichi. You aimed for a tie instead... You intrigue me."

Shuichi shrugged. "I wouldn't say I did that intentionally…" Shuichi was vaguely familiar with how card tricks worked from one kind of nasty murder that happened in a bar. Cards had been really important for some reason. But anyway if anyone had forced the outcome here it probably would've been the dealer, in this case the stranger.

Said man went on unphased, "But, this is the end for you! I'd let you live *only* if you had beaten me! You only have three trials left in your life, so you better entertain me until then!"

Shuichi squinted, a little bit, no actually a lot but, confused. "Wait so you're going to kill me if I can't draw a card higher than yours again?"

"Nah, I'm bored of this game" the stranger shoved the apparently just loose deck of cards he had back in his pocket. He turned back, suddenly excited."Oh! I know. We should play rock paper scissors instead."

Shuichi blinked at him. What was the purpose of this? Why threaten to kill him for this? It wasn't like rock paper scissors was even a particularly fun game…

"Rock, paper scissors…" they said together as they both hit their hands against their palms.

"Shoot!"

… It was a tie.

"Hmmm. Let's try again." Said the stranger.

"Rock, paper, scissors, shoot!"

...Another tie.

"Rock, paper, scissors, shoot!"

Tie.

"Rock, paper, scissors, shoot!"

Tie.

They kept going and Shuichi lost track of time as a statistical marvel unfolded before them. They tied every single time. They just… kept going.

It began to occur to Shuichi how strange this situation was. This guy had read his name in a newspaper, introduced himself, got them both bumped up to first class and now they were playing rock paper scissors… or was it just odd because Shuichi himself would never have the self confidence to pull that off? If Shuichi saw someone in the paper he found impressive on the plane, maybe like detective Kirigiri from his local precinct, how would he react? Or maybe he shouldn't compare seeing himself on an airplane to seeing her. She had a lot more cases under her belt after all…

"Rock paper scissors shoot."

Tie.

"Rock paper scissors shoot."

Tie.

… okay if he was comparing himself unfavorably to her even without seeing her on a plane in this hypothetical situation it only further served to prove the point that maybe he only thought this was weird because he was a socially awkward piece of gum stuck to a chair who would really rather be sleeping right now.

"Rock paper scissors shoot."

Tie.

"Rock paper scissors shoot."

Tie.

"Rock paper sci-"

"Oh my God shut up already." The man sitting in front of Shuichi hit the back of his seat. Shuichi flinched out of the repetitive motion.

"Uh. S-s-sorry." He mumbled suddenly longing for his hat. He used to have a hat he would pull over his eyes when he was embarrassed. Kaede convinced him to get rid of it a little after they first met and Shuichi still found himself missing it during particularly embarrassing chapters in his life. Such as right now…

The man beside him shook his head. "Gosh Shuichi you really were being just too loud. You're like the loudest person I've ever met."

More often than not Shuichi was accused of mumbling and asked to speak up, so purple hair's criticism seemed inaccurate. That wasn't going to keep Shuichi from being self conscious about it though. Haha, thanks brain.

"Ugh that game was getting boring though, and no one won so it's probably time for something else." He leaned over looking into the aisle "Hey when's drink service?"

"Coming right up~" came the voice of a flight attendant far too chipper for… whatever time of night it was by now.

A brown haired woman with her hair in twin tails was pushing a drink cart from the back of the plane to the first row of seats. Shuichi and his strange seat neighbor were in the last row of the first class seats, so they wouldn't get their drinks right away.

Said strange guy turned to Shuichi, apparent excitement written on his features. "Hey, Shuichi! We should have a tea party!"

Shuichi squinted at him. "A tea party? I don't think they have hot-"

The other man scoffed and leaned back in his seat. "Well oooobviously you wouldn't know anything about it. I'm the leader of a super secret organization after all, so of course I know about the super secret drink menu available on all air planes."

Shuichi frowned. "But they couldn't bring anything to make the hot water with on an airplane…"

The guy shook his head dismissively. "Just watch."

The drink cart eventually made its way over. Shuichi noticed the flight attendant was wearing a lot of makeup.

"And what would you fine sirs like to drink?" She asked in the same chipper tone.

"A cup of hot green tea." The stranger requested.

To Shuichi's complete and utter surprise the flight attendant said "Sure thing!" Before pulling a steaming pot of tea out of one of the drink service card compartments. She grabbed a hot drink cup that looked like the kind of paper cups you get at Starbucks. She poured out the tea for him and then turned to Shuichi. "And what about you?" She asked

Before Shuichi could process even the faint hope that they might have espresso on this planet the stranger ordered for him. "Shuichi here will have the same thing."

She smiled at him. "Of course. Anything added in like sugar or cream?"

Shuichi was cut off from answering again. "No, we're both taking it plain today."

"Oh, really?" She asked, reaching for another cup. "Alright then." She poured one out for Shuichi the same as she had for him.

She smiled congenially. "I hear you two are on a honeymoon? That's so lovely. Can I see the rings?"

Shuichi was about to flubber something out but his neighbor beat him to it yet again.

"You know what I hear? That lonely flight attendants should realize they're sad and nosey losers who should keep their noses out of happy people's business."

Shuichi was shocked at his sudden rudeness, but the flight attendant seemed unphased.

"Teehee~" she giggled, her smile gaining a mischievous quality Shuichi didn't have the mental capacity to decipher right now. "Yes sir! Enjoy the flight." She pushed the drink cars on past the first class divider.

Shuichi's befuddlement must have shown on his face because the stranger was quick to explain, "That was all code you know. Super secret organization stuff. You probably wouldn't understand."

Shuichi cleared his throat. "Uh, yeah." He said, "I probably wouldn't." Did people just? Talk like this?

"Neeheehee… drink the tea Shuichi, I've got to pull you into a false sense of security before your final trial."

Shuichi frowned. "I feel like by pointing out that you're trying to lull me into a false sense of security you have essentially not done so."

"See, but because you feel that way it means I have succeeded in lulling you."

Shuichi frowned, supposing that was fair. How much longer was the flight.

The answer was long. It was a very long flight.

Shuichi wanted to be asleep for most of it but his seat neighbor was still incessantly chatty, even after drinking hot tea. The only calming effect of the tea came a couple of hours and discussions about Shuichi's old murder cases later, when Shuichi had to get up to use the bathroom and got a few minutes to himself. He considered just sitting back down in economy class after he was done but he made eye contact with the flight attendant from earlier and his brain didn't have a program for trying to show mlm solidarity and also that he had been complicit in fake gay marriage so he went back to first class. When he got back the stranger he was accomplice to was doing a Sudoku on an in-flight magazine in purple pen. He folded it up and stuck it back in the seat pouch before standing up and bowing ceremoniously as Shuichi shuffled awkwardly back into his seat.

"Welcome, combatants." The stranger said real dignified, "Take your seat and prepare for the final trial."

"What is it this time?" Shuichi asked, a little unamused at this point.

The stranger tsked at him, "You could stand to be a little more concerned mister detective, it’s your life on the line after all."

What were they going to do, play go fish?

The guy reached into his hoodie and Shuichi saw the flash of metal as he pulled his hand out of his pocket.

Shuichi flinched away from the blade instinctively. "Is that a knife? How did you get a knife on the plane?"

"Oh, a villain's got his ways." He winked at Shuichi as he pulled down his tray table.

Was there an air marshal on board?

Shuichi looked around frantically, but there wasn't even a flight attendant in sight. To make matters worse, all of the people sitting around them were clearly fast asleep.

"Now this game's pretty easy to understand, but you gotta be skilled. I'll go first to show you how it's done."

Shuichi watched helplessly as the guy began to furiously jab the table between his fingers, going in a row from left to right then reversing and picking up the pace.

"H-hey!" Shuichi exclaimed, hoping that someone, anyone, would overhear. "You're gonna hurt yourself doing that!

"Pff, as if I would. Here it's really easy." The man kept going faster and faster. It was pretty impressive until-

*Schlick*

He suddenly stopped. Shuichi watched in horror as red bloomed from the man's pale index finger, dripping dark onto the beige airplane tray table.

"Agh!" Shuichi exclaimed, "You're bleeding!"

The other man didn't respond, looking at his finger blankly as his blood dribbled out of the knick in it.

Shuichi, however, was quick to act. He grabbed the other man's hand in his own without thinking and put it in his lap as he shuffled around in his coat pockets for the Band-Aids he always kept on hand. He finally found them, and unwrapped one. He gently held the stupid guy's hand up while he carefully wrapped his index finger with the bandage. "You really ought to be more careful." He muttered as he finished wrapping it up.

The other man was still giving him that blank look.

Shuichi looked up at him. "What is it? Are you alright?"

The man seemed to regain his composure, whipping his hand away and putting his arms behind his head nonchalantly. "Geez," he said in a petulant tone of voice, "I can't believe you actually beat me."

Shuichi blinked at him in confusion. "Beat you? But I didn't even play…"

"Doesn't matter." He moved to lean his arm on the rest in between them and propped his head up. "The rules were if I cut myself I lose, and I lost."

His expression turned from disappointed to mischievous. "Although, it doesn't matter if you join my organization or not anymore, Shuichi."

"Uh, it doesn't?" Shuichi had been under the impression that this was some sort of prank and it hadn't mattered the whole time."

"Nope." He leaned in closer. "Because I've already done something much more important than winning."

His face was suddenly very close to Shuichi's. Had his eyes always been this dark? "W-what's that?"

"I've stolen your heart." He said smugly and Shuichi felt his face go red. The man whose name he didn't even know leaned in even closer to say. "Because I'm a thief you know?"

Before Shuichi could process that at all, he heard the distinctive sound of a seat belt unbuckling. The man he had just spent the last 8 hours sitting next to practically flipped out of his seat. He landed light footedly on the tray table of the sleeping man who had been sitting across from them. A half drunken Sprite spilled into the aisle. Drugged. The word flashed through Shuichi's mind as he noticed everyone who was a sleep had half drunken beverages laid out on their tables. Shuichi tried to unbuckle and stand up, beginning to catch on, but he looked down to realize his seatbelt had been tied into knots while he wasn't looking.

"Hmmm, I really should kill you, now that you've seen my face," the thief said, hopping lightly down from the tray table to grab his carry-on from beneath the seat. He pulled out of it a distinctive smirking clown mask.

DICE. Shuichi's brain screamed with the realization.

"... But I think that'd be a waste, don't you?" He slipped on some white gloves and tossed a piece of paper towards Shuichi. It fluttered to the ground at his feet. The distinctive logo of the DICE calling card glared up at him. The thief began to casually walk back down the aisle.

"Somebody! Stop him!" Shuichi yelled, straining to lean over the seat and peer into the aisle.

He saw the twin tails of the brunette flight attendant that had served the drinks at the end of the aisle. The woman turned around and to Shuichi's horror she turned around to reveal a white mask with painted eyebrows and a big red nose. Lying next to her on the ground sat the tied up body of the male flight attendant who had switched their seats earlier. Eight more people stood up, all with similar masks. Shuichi realized they had congregated around his old seat, which just so happened to be…

The emergency exits???

A large man with a big red clown wig wrenched open the windows and Shuichi felt the change in air pressure instantly and fear filled his gut with doomsday possibilities. His flight companion, on the other hand, practically fucking waltzed down the aisle.

"So long, Mr. Detective!" He yelled, coming to the aisle. "Better luck next time."

He jumped back first out of the plane and the rest of DICE followed. Shuichi realized bleakly that they were probably dropping over the Louvre right now, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Someone finally woke up with a yell, jumping up and closing the hatch. Too late to stop any of them. People started to wake up all over the plane as mutterings of confusion broke out.

The pilot, who was apparently none the wiser of what just occured, piped up over the com.

"Alright folks, it's been a long flight, but we're just about ready to land. Keep those cellphones in airplane mode and buckle up."

Shuichi groaned, giving up the struggle with the knot in his seatbelt. By the time they had landed and he could use his phone to call the cops, the Louvre would be toiletless. He sat back in his seat, utterly stunned by this turn of events. He suddenly felt like he had lost everything.

Although… if that were the case…

Why was his heart beating so loud?

He leaned over to pick up the card that had been dropped at his feet.

While a similar calling card had been found at every scene of a DICE crime, most of the messages found on then we're vague and hidden with layers of meaning. This one, however, was incredibly simply worded, even if no more trustworthy than any other.

It was written in that purple pen the thief had been doing a Sudoku with earlier, or perhaps so Shuichi had thought.

It read the following:

You know, you're not quite as smart or dashing as I thought you'd be Mr. Detective, but you aren't so boring either, so I'm going to give you a hint.

Love,

-K.O.

P.S. Hope the honeymoon is just as nice for you <3

---

Read from Kokichi’s perspective HERE

#saiouma #oumasai #shuichi saihara #kokichi ouma #fanfiction #phantom thief au #im a little bit silly sorry #I have a lot more anxiety posting fics on tumblr than on ao3 #i know i only have one follower right now but like still its scary #my writing confidence took a real hit last year #and ive kind of been writing fanfic to recover from that #so idk we'll see how it goes #writing

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